The Dream Killer of Paris (7 page)

‘Well, at last!’ cried James, spinning round at the sound of my voice.

Then, noticing the superintendent, his constable and the
journalist, who had followed me out of the car, he continued in the language of Molière: ‘How are you, Superintendent? I’ve been wandering around this area for two hours, waiting for you to get here. I had time to devour a plate of leg of lamb and two helpings of a succulent strawberry charlotte. Actually, I was wondering if I should go back for more.’

We had joined my friend on the other side of the avenue and formed a small group in the circle of light cast by a streetlamp, close to the park railings. Above our heads, a three-quarter moon shone over the statue of Saint Jacques le Majeur.

It was eight o’clock in the evening according to my pocket watch. We were standing at almost exactly the spot where Rue de la
Vieille-Lanterne
had begun eighty years earlier.

James seemed to be in a good mood, as he always was when he picked up the scent of a sensational case.

‘Just one question. The case you referred to in your telegram hasn’t been solved yet, has it?’

‘Of course not, far from it, my friend,’ said the superintendent.

‘Good. I wouldn’t want to miss it for the world! When I received your message, Andrew, I rushed over to the reading room of the British Museum to find a copy of
Paris-Soir
.’

‘About that,’ I said, gesturing towards Jacques Lacroix, ‘you have before you the brilliant author of the article.’

‘Better and better! And, gentlemen, I think I’ve brought you something new!’

With a flourish, he produced from his pocket a page neatly clipped from a newspaper and began to unfold it slowly in order to prolong the pleasure.

‘This is an extract from the
Daily Gazette
from 7 June. The news only merited a small paragraph but it’s worth its weight in gold. Listen to this:

‘Queen Square hospital is a stone’s throw from our rooms in Montague Street,’ continued James, folding up the article. ‘Yesterday evening, after leaving the British Museum where I had consulted the copy of
Paris-Soir
, I went to have a drink at McInnes’s and filled him in on this case of Deadly Sleep. It was he who alerted me to the death of the doctor from Queen Square in the spring. He remembered because nurses from the neurological hospital drink in his pub and they had talked about it a lot at the time. This morning, before catching the train, I returned to the reading room and got hold of this article from June. So, what do you say?’

‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Fourier. ‘It’s a veritable epidemic!’

‘I’m going to Rue du Louvre straight away,’ declared the journalist. ‘If need be, I’ll spend the whole night in the archives combing through the international press. We must find out if there have been other cases in the past few months. Can I drop you off somewhere, Superintendent?’

‘No, get off to your archives! I’ll take a taxi to Place Blanche. With luck, my men at the Surrealists’ brasserie will have good news. Then I’ll go back to headquarters to contact the Viennese police. This Öberlin (or Eberlin) may be known to them. I suggest we meet tomorrow at Hôtel Saint-Merri, Rue de la Verrerie, to take stock of the situation. Eleven o’clock sharp!’

The journalist shook our hands and ran to his car.

‘One more thing!’ cried Fourier. ‘Please don’t say anything about all this in your damned paper, Lacroix! We must be as discreet as possible. Understood?’

‘Don’t worry, Superintendent. My lips are sealed.’

Then he leapt into the Torpedo.

‘And I thought I’d arrived after the battle,’ James congratulated himself. ‘But someone must explain it all to me – the Surrealists, Vienna, Öberlin …’

‘Come on,’ I said, taking him by the shoulder. ‘I’ll explain everything.’

We spent most of the evening sitting outside a brasserie on Rue
Saint-Martin
, sipping glasses of Dubonnet. As promised, I brought James up to date with the details of Superintendent Fourier’s investigation.

‘What’s your feeling about this case, Andrew?’ he asked when I’d finished. ‘Do you really think this Öberlin fellow had anything to do with those deaths?’

‘It’s just supposition at the moment. The fact that this strange Austrian professor—’

‘But is he a professor? Is he even Austrian?’ James interrupted.

‘We don’t know anything for certain. Anyway, the fact that this person met both victims—’

‘Because you’re convinced that the men who visited the Marquis and the poet a few days before they died were one and the same person?’

‘It’s one of the few leads we’ve got. We have no choice but to follow it up.’

‘What about Jacques Lacroix? As the superintendent said, he was in touch with Ducros and the Marquis as well. Do you think he’s in the clear?’

‘If he had had anything to do with the Austrian, why would he have written that article in
Paris-Soir?
After all, it’s thanks to him that we know the two cases are connected.’

‘Hmm! If it were the same visitor and if we can show that he also tried to see Percival Crowles, the doctor from Queen Square
hospital, that really would change things. It’s a pity I’m not in London to investigate.’

‘A pity indeed,’ I agreed, drawing greedily on my Turkish cigarette.

‘This fellow may also simply have wanted to meet them to warn them of danger. If that’s the case, then he’s a good Samaritan!’

‘But remember that neither the Marquis de Brindillac nor Pierre Ducros seemed to be thrilled to see him.’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean he’s guilty, does it? And, of course, they might have died of natural causes. There’s still everything to prove in that respect.’

‘True, frightening someone to death in their sleep isn’t yet on the statute book.’

‘Fine, so to sum up: on the one hand, we have two victims (three now), and possibly more in the future, with no actual proof of foul play, and the only thing the victims share is their interest in sleep and dreams. On the other hand, we have an untraceable suspect whose guilt has yet to be proved.’

‘Exactly, James! An excellent summary!’

‘You said earlier that the Austrian was one of the few leads we’ve got. As far as I can see, it’s the only one. We must find this fellow.’

‘There is a second lead which you just mentioned.’

‘What?’

‘The victims’ interest in sleep and dreams, be it scientific or artistic. I’m convinced it plays a crucial role in this case.’

‘Maybe Fourier was right to talk in terms of an epidemic. Could it be a new form of bacteria which has suddenly appeared and has a fatal effect while you’re dreaming? Great sleepers like me and vivid dreamers like you, Andrew, should beware.’

‘The
Bacillus somnii
!’ I added, amused by this theory.

My partner stretched his arms above his head, yawning, and drained his glass of Dubonnet in one gulp.

‘I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted. Tomorrow will be a long and fascinating day. I think I’ll defy our
Bacillus
now and get my strength back.’

‘I have absolutely no desire to go to bed myself,’ I replied, lighting another cigarette. ‘I think I’ll go for a walk. See you tomorrow, James.’

I went to bed very late that night. Wishing to clear my head from the effects of alcohol and lack of sleep, I strolled leisurely past the Louvre, Place Vendôme and up to the area around Opéra, where I caught the last omnibus back.

I wanted to delay the moment of sleep for as long as possible. All evening we had speculated about the inexplicable deaths of the Marquis de Brindillac, Pierre Ducros and Percival Crowles. Such a gloomy discussion about so-called Deadly Sleep certainly did not encourage one to slip into the arms of Morpheus.

But that was not the only reason. I had not thought about the previous night’s dream since recording it in my notebook that morning before joining Fourier at the Gare d’Orsay. It had completely slipped my mind. As I returned to my room it suddenly came flooding back.

In all my life I had never had a dream that was so vivid or so acutely realistic, leaving me so confused upon waking. I had been too busy to think about it during the day. Yet there was much to ponder. During the dream I had had a feeling of singularly intense emotion, of sexual excitement towards the unknown young woman, and part of me wanted to feel that emotion and that excitement again. Another part vigorously rejected it. If she truly existed (something I was beginning to doubt; my memory of our meeting on the steamer had taken on the quality of a dream), I felt guilty about entertaining such feelings.

Was I not unwillingly a bit like the incubi Lacroix and I had
discussed earlier? And did this not indicate that those tales of immaterial unions were nothing more than vague repressed desires?

A bottomless chasm was opening beneath me, filled with my frustrations, obsessions and weaknesses.

The hotel was relatively quiet at that time of year so James had been given the room next to mine. I could hear him snoring as I passed his door.

Despite my tiredness, I found it very difficult to fall asleep. I had brushed aside the memory of my dream but reason would not surrender so easily. I kept going over the events of the day in my head. One point in particular continued to intrigue me. I was convinced that I had recently come across a reference to
Le Comte de Gabalis
or its author. And at that moment I thought I remembered where.

Impatient to settle the matter, I turned the bedside light on again and picked up one of the volumes of the complete works of Gérard de Nerval which included
Les Illuminés
. This was a collection of disparate texts in which the writer outlined his favourite eccentrics, characters both impassioned and inclined to dreaming. The fifth was dedicated to Jacques Cazotte, an author from the eighteenth century who was remembered for a delightful novel,
Le Diable amoureux
, which had been inspired (as Nerval noted) by a book written a hundred years before by a certain Abbé Montfaucon de Villars:
Le Comte de Gabalis
. What is more, I found the anecdote Jacques Lacroix had mentioned about Villars’s death.

I now remembered reading
Le Diable amoureux
a few years earlier. It was a half-mischievous, half-serious book about the adventures of a young officer in the king’s guard in Naples who, after a bet with his regimental comrades about the alleged powers of the cabbala, tried to invoke the occult forces of nature one evening in the ruins at Portici. A terrifying ghost that looked like a camel’s
head appeared and then revealed itself to be a gracious sylph-like creature prepared to grant all his wishes. At the end of the tale the author, lapsing into tragedy, intimated that it was the devil in person who had taken on female form the better to trick the young officer.

Later in the article, there was a brief digression on the nature of these elemental spirits. Eusèbe, Saint Augustine, Cazotte and Abbé de Villars were convinced they existed in a state of perfect innocence from the Christian point of view.

I closed the book and, wanting to find out more about
Le Comte de Gabalis
, picked up the 1921 edition I had found at Château B—. I read all five discourses (it was only about a hundred pages long) and flicked through the commentary which accompanied them as well.

Jacques Lacroix had summarised the book accurately. The discourses of Gabalis, a German lord and famous occultist, reported by one of his French disciples, covered the existence of ‘elementals’ and the means of contacting them.

According to the Count of Gabalis, many races, whose women and girls are formidably beautiful, inhabit the four elements which make up the universe: sylphs and sylphids fill the air, fire teems with salamanders, the rivers and the seas are home to water sprites and nymphs, and the centre of the earth contains male and female gnomes. When the world was created, Adam, made from what was purest in the elements, was the natural king of these creatures, who appeared proud but were actually docile and devoted to their master. However, after his sin deprived him of his throne and corrupted the principles from which he had been created, he lost sovereignty over the invisible peoples. Only a philosopher, whose bodily form had been regenerated and exalted through the assiduous study of the secret sciences, would be able to establish communication with them again.

That being so, the Count of Gabalis did not conceal the fact that
he had renounced the charms of human females in order to devote himself exclusively to his invisible mistresses and their delectable embraces.

Cazotte, Abbé de Villars, the Count of Gabalis, elemental spirits, sensual cabbalistic pleasures … After more than two hours of attentive reading, a feeling of mellow drowsiness eventually stole over me. I put the book on the chair and drifted off almost immediately.

In the confusion of my initial nocturnal visions – the ones which appear as soon as the brain gently succumbs to sleep – it crossed my mind that I had left my dream notebook in my jacket. I didn’t have the energy to get up though, so the book remained where it was.

As I expected, as I both hoped and feared with the same intensity, I woke up in the middle of the night, shaken by a new dream.

I am stretched out on my bed in my room at the Hôtel Saint-Merri and I am dreaming that I am asleep. Like last night, I dream while fully aware that I am dreaming.

I know that the stranger from the steamer will join me soon. She promised; it’s inevitable. In the meantime, I sleep peacefully. My dreams are connected to events of the day, the visit to Château B— with Superintendent Fourier, the investigation into the death of the Marquis, James’s arrival in Paris. While dreaming, I hear myself telling myself that these are just memories from my daytime existence because, in reality, I am dreaming.

Suddenly, I sense that the door has just opened and someone has entered the room. It is her, I’m sure of it. I open my eyes slowly, without experiencing the slightly dazed feeling one normally has on waking, as if there were no difference between sleep and the reality before me.

It is her, the young woman from the steamer, wearing a fine red satin dress which shows off the delicate outline of her hips and chest perfectly. Her blond hair floats in the air as she approaches the bed, smiling. She gives off a sort of phosphorescence which glows all around her.

She sits on the edge of my bed and, in the same movement, her alluring lips touch mine. Her skin is soft, like the softest silk.

Then I hear her whisper, ‘Do you remember
Fata Morgana
? You must remember.’

Before I can answer, she moves her face away and looks at me intensely as if feeling sudden anxiety.

‘Dark forces are preparing to turn the world upside down. I am afraid for you, Andrew. You must believe in me – your life depends on it.’

‘What forces? What are you talking about?’

Her expression hardens suddenly.

I want to keep hold of her because I feel that she is going to escape again. I would like her to stay so much! While raising her hand to tell me to be quiet, she rises and glides towards the chair, takes my dream notebook out of my jacket and, seeming to float above the floor, places it at the foot of the bed.

Then, just like the day before and despite my desire, despite my disappointment, she moves away towards the door, pointing at the book.

When the door closes, I wake up with a start.

1. When I opened my eyes I only had to reach out my arm to pick up my notebook at the end of the bed. What am I to make of it? Could it be
knowing I would need it, I had placed it there automatically before going to bed? Was everything else just my mind playing tricks on me?

2. I feel feverish and nervous. I still have the taste of her lips on mine. I can smell the fragrance of her skin, feel the softness of her caresses on my body. How can a simple dream seem so real? I fear that sleep has abandoned me for the rest of the night.