The Bloody Doll Page 16

  My dear Christine, I resume my story at the point where I left it last night... I felt that I had been bitten by the monster, by the monster who was somewhere behind me!

  Ah, that horrible sensation... I knew it! At the moment when I least expect it... always at the moment when I least expect it, I feel his sharp teeth pierce my veins, and then withdraw after injecting the venom!

  Yes, the venom! I imagine that vampires, like vipers, have a hollow tooth full of venom... a certain poison that spreads through your body with great rapidity, bringing a torpor that is impossible to resist... immediately you feel your strength depart as if it has escaped through an open door...which is the little hole left by the bite... then, it is a sense of numbness that overcomes the pain...which is all the more terrible when you know, as I do, the result!

  The result is that, after this, the monster himself arrives! For vampires have this peculiarity that vipers have not: they can bite from a distance..!

  I knew he was there...

  I did not even turn around... I tried, with a supreme effort, to struggle against the annihilation that was already overcoming me.

  I managed to crawl to the fence that enclosed the garden... and then, defeated, I turned around. There, in the window of the room, I saw the Marquis... he was laughing...

  Fourth Letter. – Are they uncertain of something? Drouine, the sacristan, the guardian of the corpses of whom I have spoken to you, a good man in every sense of the word, told me to beware of them all. If they found out about his devotion to me, he would lose his position and his livelihood; but that is not enough to stop him, his fears are all for me.

  What a good servant, I shall repay him for that! In the meantime, we take a thousand precautions; I feign a great devotion (you know that I am a Catholic) and, under pretext of offering alms for the upkeep of the chapel, I slip my scraps of paper into the collection box... Even Sing-Sing, who follows in the trail of my coat like a malign hobgoblin, sees only an act of faith... Then Drouine opens the box and sends all these papers to you...

  As a result of my last escapade, they threw me into the car like a sack and I was not let out again until we arrived in the courtyard of the chateau...

  Coulteray is a real prison... the moats, the walls date back to the middle ages; the chapel is in the courtyard, as well as what remains of the dungeons. They allow me to walk in this courtyard, that they still call ‘the Lock-up,’ as in days of old, which has been partly turned into an orchard.

  The chapel has an ossuary, a small cemetery that surrounds it with flower beds.

  This season, all of these stones, that belong to the past and to death, have nothing particularly lugubrious about them – they are masked by springtime verdure. This verdure triumphs everywhere, swallowing the walls, filling all the cracks. Life overflows on all sides, but she flees from me!

  From my window, situated on the first floor, I can see, through a gap in the wall, an enchanted landscape that mirrors itself in the calm waters of the river that empties into the Loire down there. As for me – I am dying! I came here to die! I feel, I know, that they will not leave this place until after I am dead!

  They have brought me there so that I can draw my last breath in peace!

  The Marquis has never been gentler, kinder, or more affectionate over little things! He is almost my servant! He wants to be the only one who serves me! He has never said such sweet things to me! He swears that he has never loved anyone else but me! Ah, how he loves me, how he loves me!

  Then he offers me his arm, but only in order to feel my weakness. His love has taken all of me away...

  He is the Grand Vampire... the world is full of little vampires.

  There are scarcely any couples out there who do not devour each other. One feels the need to eat the other! One profits to the detriment of the other! Sometimes it is the male, sometimes it is the female... the strongest egoism reduces, little by little, the being that exists in its shadow to nothingness... it is not even necessary for one of them to pierce the veins of the other in order to suck their blood... this is the story of most ordinary households – but ours is another thing!...

  It is the history of a great vampire, who has risen from his grave, who is more than two hundred years old, and who has forgotten the number of his victims... I have invented nothing, I will never be able to repeat this too many times! This is not a story, this is history! And Drouine is not ignorant of this.

  Drouine believes it, as many do: there are those, in the village, who flee when the great vampire passes...

  We confessed as much to one another outside the empty tomb, and I told him everything!

  But he can do nothing for me, nothing before my death! But you, Christine, and you, Benedict Masson, you can save me before I am dead! I wait for you!

  Fifth Letter. – Tonight he accompanied me to my door like a submissive lover... and he retired, looking very sad. Then, quickly, I closed the door... fastened the bolt… and ran to the window. I closed my window... for, as long as the window is open, he can bite me at a distance!

  At the moment, I am feeling calmer... I feel that I will have a quiet night...

  What peace on earth... at last, at last! A dazzling moon appears through a breach in the ramparts... a landscape in silver surrounds me. I feel as if I were as light as an angel. I have wings. If I opened the window, I imagine that I could balance myself on the sparkling waters of the Loire.

  I would look at my terrestrial image for the last time, then fly up to the stars, forever detached from the bloodlines that have fettered me to this cursed earth.

  But I dare not open the window, it is too dangerous.

  The wound can enter through the window!

  Horror, oh, horror! I am cut!

  I am cut!

  But from where did the cutter enter? Who will ever tell?

  My God, have pity on me!

  Sixth Letter. – Can you conceive of it? Yes, everywhere was closed... now he bites me through the walls! And yet still you do not come running…

  Seventh Letter. – I am going to prove to you that I am not mad! No book in the world has ever claimed that a vampire can bite through walls...and yet, I have been bitten. I searched the room... I looked everywhere... and, in the end, I discovered a little hole, as wide as a finger, in the wall opposite my prie-Dieu...it was through this little hole that the monster bit me while I was saying my prayers!

  Eighth Letter. – Ah, I want to know! I want to know how he bites from a distance... I will know, if he leaves me enough time! No, I am not mad... I am not mad!

  Ninth Letter. – Horror of his insatiable, blooded mouth when it leaves my vein and he raises the face of an Indian demon to me and tells me: “I love you...”

  Tenth Letter. – That is how the Indian demons love, the Assuras, that have been domesticated by Said Khan... the first vampires known to the world! Not far from Benares, on a small island in the Ganges, there is a cemetery full of their sacrificial victims. The great European vampire returned to pay a visit to his ancestors... and there, he met Saib Khan. Even though he is, in every way, a modern doctor (out there, in the English colony, they were enchanted by him… literally!) he is undoubtedly in direct communication with the Assuras... in India, no-one is in any doubt about this and it enhances his reputation.

  I used to laugh at it!

  I treated him as a charlatan... I did not believe in vampires at the time... I was wrong! Since then I have had time to educate myself, and I would like to teach others who still doubt!

  But I feel that the evidence will come!

  I am as lucid as a Sherlock Holmes, believe you me! And he should be employed for an inquiry like this! I still want to know how he bites from a distance...

  Eleventh Letter. – Yesterday I nearly touched the proof... the proof that I am not mad...

  Twelfth and Final Letter. – I have the proof... I’m sending it to you! Now hurry! He will kill me... if I don’t die quickly enough...

  To this last piec
e of scribbling, that arrived by post, a small registered parcel was attached. Christine cut its seals in anguish, in a state of inquietude against which she could no longer defend herself.

  XIX

  The Proof

  Old Mother Langlois, the housekeeper – whom, for political reasons, the Norberts had accepted back into their service – told, and even swore to the truth of, this tale:

  “It was about ten in the morning when the postman who brings special deliveries brought the little box to Mam’selle Christine, who signed for it.

  Mam’selle Christine was alone in the shop. I’ve got to tell you that I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days. She stayed there to serve whatever customers happened in there if, by chance, they presented themselves, but that was a pretty rare thing...

  She seemed very agitated… tormented, you might say... she tried very hard with me, to take it all on the chin as they say, but you can’t deceive Mother Langlois!

  Her grand airs were no use to her with me. I could see very well that something wasn’t going well for her. And it wasn’t hard for me to guess that it all had something to do with cousin Gabriel! ‘Cause now they’re all related in the house... cousin Jacques... cousin Gabriel...

  They didn’t hide it from me any more that cousin Gabriel was living in the house, neither, and that he was very sick and that he needed to have a most urgent operation, after which they weren’t sure of what the outcome might be, in spite of all the science and learning of the sawbones who spent all his days and nights with him.

  My God, they gave me so many details about cousin Gabriel! He was the son of old Norbert’s older sister, and he had been written-off by all the doctors, but they were attempting the impossible to save his life, and all that...

  When it comes down to it, I didn’t give a damn if they had cousin Gabriel in the house or not! I didn’t have any more jobs to do, and that was the main thing... the sick man was left in the apartment on the ground floor at the bottom of the garden where I never went... From time to time, they went in there and opened the shutters and the windows a little way, just to give him a little air... One day, I noticed the body of a man laid out under a sheet, with his face turned towards me and a look that said that he wasn’t having much of what you’d call a good time... He looked at me with those eyes, that didn’t move, as if I owed him something... though it didn’t come to much!

  As for him being sick, well: that man looks sick, all right! That’s what I told myself! But who had beaten him up like that? I’d seen him just the once: bright-eyed, good looking lad, he was... at the time when none of them talked about him... at the time when they kept him hidden away from everyone!

  Just between you and me, I thought there must’ve been some kind of tragedy behind it all... to each their own miseries... that’s the way the poor earn their crust in this world... mum’s the word, that’s what I always say to myself... they could just as easily throw me out onto the street! So off I went, back to work, as if nothing had happened.

  When Christine said anything to me, I’d just give her a stupid look and take it all in.... but it didn’t stop me from thinking: ‘you, my beauty, ain’t got a clear conscience!’

  To return to the affair with the box, I told you that Miss Christine was all alone in the shop when she opened it... me, I was in the dining room, I had a good view of what was going on in the shop ‘cause the door was ajar; but I couldn’t see inside the box... but she already had her eyes on whatever it was that was in there!

  What she was looking at, I couldn’t rightly say! Then she walks over towards the window. She lifts up an object that’s all wrapped in silver wire and which has the shape of a small pistol!

  She didn’t seem to understand what was going on; she put it back in the box; after a moment’s hesitation, she opened the door to the garden and went off towards the building at the bottom that old Norbert and Jacques Cotentin hardly ever leave!

  Then she knocks on the door of the laboratory.

  Old Norbert comes to the door.

  His hair was all messy like I’d never seen it... his eyes were bulging out of his head :

  “What? What do you want this time? You know very well that we don’t want you in here! You are too nervous for it!

  Leave us alone!”

  He had a furious expression.

  “Papa, listen,” she said, “I’ve received another letter from that poor, unfortunate woman...”

  “Ah, you and that madwoman – leave us in peace!” But she insisted:

  “I have a registered parcel that I would like to show Jacques!”

  “Surely, you don’t want to disturb Jacques with this?”

  “Tell him that she has sent me the proof, or ‘the evidence,’ or whatever you want to call it, I don’t really know...” But Old Norbert shrugged his shoulders, impatiently, and shut the door in her face.

  I didn’t understand what was going on, but I knew that there was something less than fun and games going on in that house. I was walking on burning coals.

  The Mademoiselle, still looking into her little box, allowed herself to slump into one of the garden chairs.

  She had not been sitting there for any more than five minutes before the sawbones came out to join her.

  “What’s all this about, Christine?” he asked straight away.

  “Very well,” she said, “look at what she has sent me.” She passed him the box.

  They had turned their backs on me, they looked into the box, and I saw nothing! The doctor must have taken the object in his hand... he stretched out his arms, then folded them again, repeating:

  “This is curious... this is most curious!”

  “But what on earth is it?” demanded Christine.

  “Well, my dear, it’s a trocar!”

  Yes, that’s just what he said: trocar – and he even repeated it:

  “It’s a kind of trocar!”

  “And just what is a trocar?”

  But he didn’t answer straight away. He examined the object once more, he seemed to be thinking, and then suddenly he cried out:

  “Oh, no! The poor woman... the poor woman... the poor woman... no, she’s not the one who’s mad... she’s the one who was right!”

  Then he added:

  “That vile criminal!”

  Christine stood up, looking completely pale:

  “Tell me,” she begged him, “what is a trocar?”

  “A trocar is a hollow needle, and a pistol trocar is a kind of surgical instrument that resembles a small pistol... actually, it functions just like a pistol... and we use it to send a hollow needle through the flesh of the abdomen, when we want to know...”

  “I understand, I understand!” cried Christine...

  “You understand,” he continued, “that this instrument works on exactly the same principle... he sends this hollow needle... that previously has been filled with a narcotic liquid.” He said ‘narcotic.’ I can still hear the word in my ears…

  “Yes, yes, I understand!” said Christine, who seemed to be in mortal terror...

  “But he sends it from a distance,” he explained, “even from a very great distance... look at this spring... and this other mechanism that accompanies the hollow needle and retrieves it after it has hit her and left its venom...”

  “I understand, I understand!”

  “It is this last spring mechanism that returns the needle to the weapon that projects it.”

  “Go on, go on!”

  “You see how the needle is restrained by this metal wire? Do you understand?”

  Of course she understood! Besides which, it wasn’t very difficult; even I could understand how the instrument worked, without even seeing it! Anyway, I must say that when it came to explaining, the sawbones explained well... she just stood there with her deathly pale head held in her hands:

  “But we’ve got to save her... we’ve got to save her!”

  “Without a doubt, we must!” agreed Cotentin, who had gone really quiet, “w
e must save her! It’s just that I can’t leave here at the moment. No... I can’t leave Gabriel, even though things are going much better at the moment, I can’t leave my work while it is still warm!”

  “Then when, when, when?”

  “It will be a matter of five or six days.”