The Dream Killer of Paris (14 page)

I am stretched out on my bed, my thoughts all over the place. I feel that I have been thrown on to the shores of sleep by a wave of dreams with neither beginning nor end, dreams which became entangled and whose memory is already fading.

I am not sure I am completely awake but I don’t think I am asleep either. I have the strange impression that I am floating in a sort of
in-between
place, an intermediate and worrying state. My eyes are wide open… at least I think they are.

The regular rocking movement reminds me that I am on a train. Although the compartment is cloaked in darkness, I recognise the panelling of the walls, the designs on the marquetry and the white enamel basin. The scents of metal, wood and velvet mingle in the air.

Suddenly, I detect a movement close to me and at the same time I have the very clear impression that someone is there. Is it my stranger come to visit me? No, I cannot see her opalescent aura. It is more like a diffused feeling of imminent danger. A lurking threat. Ready to pounce.

It is only at that moment that I become aware of my true situation. My arms, legs and all the muscles in my body are turned to stone. I am unable to move, totally paralysed. Only my eyelids still function.

Fear grabs me by the throat. At the same time, my head is filled with a high-pitched shrieking like a small animal. Is it the sound of the train screeching round a bend? Or the distorted echo of my pulse which is thumping like the beat of a drum? My hoarse breathing burning my lungs? But I am sure that it is not coming from me. So who from? Every passing second strengthens my conviction that there is a hostile presence near me.

Again, I feel that something is moving in the compartment. With all my energy I try to lift my head to determine where the danger is coming from but I cannot. Out of the corner of my eye I just manage to glimpse the outline of a stocky body, no more than three foot tall – a child? A monkey? It has extraordinary strength; it throws itself on me and crushes my chest.

After my aggressor has thrown me backwards with a violent blow, my head is crushed against the wall. In that position I cannot see it. I would have liked to look at it, to express my incomprehension, my hostility, my hatred. But even speaking or moaning is impossible; no sound comes out of my mouth.

The smell of its skin repulses me. A damp odour of decay and wet hair. I am certain that I am experiencing the last moments of my life. There is no hope. All I can do is wait. I am frightened.

With its full weight on me, the creature grabs my neck and begins to squeeze. A trickle of acrid bile rises in my throat. Despite the brutality of the attack, I do not feel any pain. My body is anaesthetised.

I am finding it increasingly hard to breathe. I close my eyes. While death takes hold of me with all its might, a vague image of the stranger from the steamer, in her red satin dress, forms in my mind.

I am intoxicated by the memory of her radiant face. A feeling of relief.

Fear releases its grip.

‘You must believe in me, Andrew. Your life depends on it.’

‘Yes,’ I hear myself reply. ‘More than in anything.’

Thanks to her, the strength to fight reawakens in me. I unclench my teeth, pull in my stomach and chest and, in a final burst of energy, manage to expel a powerful, guttural, primitive cry from the depths of my being.

Immediately, I hear noises in the corridor. There is a blinding light. I cover my eyes with my hands.

I am roughly shaken by the shoulders.

A voice.

‘Wake up, Andrew! Wake up!’

James’s face …

What would have happened if my friend had not come back then? If my stranger from the steamer had not appeared? Was that the fear the Marquis de Brindillac had felt before he died? And the others?

I had the ghastly feeling of having come back from the dead. My face, my neck, my chest bore no scars. All I had seen in the dream was only an illusion. And yet, that illusion had almost killed me.

The conductor of the sleeping car appeared a few seconds after James. When I had managed to convince him that I was as well as could be expected, the conductor went to reassure the passengers in the neighbouring compartments who had been unceremoniously woken by my cry.

Then I gave James a thorough account of my dream.

‘Do you really think that it’s Öberlin …or rather, Kessling, who’s doing this?’ he asked, sitting on the edge of my bed.

‘I am more convinced than ever.’

‘My word! How is he doing it?’

‘I don’t know. But I can assure you that we have been lucky. If you
had stayed in the compartment you would certainly have received the same treatment and neither of us would be here to tell the tale.’

James couldn’t help shuddering as he imagined the possibility.

The brakes of the Orient Express screeched as we pulled into a station. The blind was lowered so we couldn’t see its name. In any case, we were too shaken, both of us, to take anything in.

‘I couldn’t stop thinking about Kessling,’ confided my friend. ‘I was only afraid of one thing – that he might give us the slip at one of the stops. In Strasbourg and then Kehl I went to check that he hadn’t got out. But there was no sound from his compartment. Everything seemed quiet. I even thought for a moment that you might have been mistaken, Andrew, and that our man was not even on the Orient Express. After Kehl I stayed in the corridor chatting to the conductor. That was when I heard your cry.’

A whistle sounded on the platform.

‘At least we can be sure of one thing now,’ he muttered. ‘The Austrian is on the train!’

Suddenly, James ran to the window as if a snake had bitten him and he raised the blind.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Baden-Oos!’ he roared. ‘The train has stopped at the station of

Baden-Oos! What a fool I am!’

It was only then that the gravity of the situation dawned on me. Luckily, my friend had enough energy for both of us. He threw himself out of the compartment and ran as quickly as possible towards the other carriage.

I didn’t have the strength to follow him. I collapsed on the bed, my hands covering my face, praying that it was not too late, but James had barely left our carriage before the train began to move again.

A few minutes later he returned, looking shaken.

‘He got away, didn’t he?’

‘When I arrived the door was open and the compartment was empty. In the time it took me to leap on to the platform, he had already disappeared.’

‘Did anyone see him?’

‘The conductor.’

‘Did he say what he looked like?’

‘About fifty, five foot eight, short hair combed back, greying temples. Kessling had come flying out of his compartment, a suitcase in his hand. He was barely dressed. The conductor confirmed that he should have stayed on board until Vienna.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Yes. He had puffy eyes, a wild look, like someone who had just woken up.’

‘What? Kessling had just woken up?’

‘Apparently.’

It was only quarter past five in the morning but, for James and me, going back to sleep was out of the question. Until we had removed the threat of this sinister character, the gates of sleep would be barred; our lives were at risk if we ventured beyond them.

We had to keep going. We knew that Kessling was heading for Vienna and that was where we would catch him. That day, the next day or another day.

About twenty minutes later, the train stopped at Karlsruhe station.

When the Orient Express arrived at Westbahnhof in Vienna on Sunday 21 October 1934 it was half past six in the evening.

Beautiful Vienna! City of the Habsburgs. Capital of arts and music. City of Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and Schönberg. Klimt and Schiele. Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Zweig. Fritz Lang and Freud.

But sinister Vienna too. A gigantic metropolis where the new Führer had spent his youth and honed his racist doctrines. The centre of Pan-Germanism, nationalist leagues and sickening theories.

The previous July, with the support of the Third Reich, the local Nazis had attempted
a coup d’etat
. The Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had been murdered along with hundreds of other people, but it had ended in failure. Dollfuss himself, although opposed to the Nazis, was no better than them. Under his reign Austria had become an authoritarian regime, the right to strike and gather had been removed, and the leaders of opposition parties forced to seek exile. The Chancellor who replaced him was cut from the same cloth.

Dark forces preparing to turn the world upside down!

Outside the station the air was heavy, the sky black. It was pouring with rain. The street lamps had not been lit and in the distance, towards the Danube, monstrous shadows were lengthening over the old city. Immediately, I was seized with a premonition similar to the one I had had the day after I arrived in Paris when I had leant on the parapet of the Pont-au-Change, contemplating the river. This time the feeling was even stronger.

We needed to find a place to stay quickly and come up with a plan.

James hailed a taxi and we jumped in to escape the rain.

‘We’re looking for a hotel,’ explained my friend, miming to the driver. ‘Not ruinously expensive. Comfortable.’

‘
Bitte schön?’

‘Hotel! Sleep!
Schlaffen!’

‘
Ach, ja! Hotel Regina. Freiheit Platz
.’

And the taxi set off.

‘Well, sleeping is one way of putting it!’ I sighed.

The hotel was extremely comfortable but not exactly cheap. Located close to Ringstrasse, opposite the neogothic Votivkirche, it was popular with tourists.

It was still raining heavily in the Austrian capital. As we had no desire to wander through the city’s streets to find somewhere cheaper to stay, we went inside. The tickets for the Orient Express had not exhausted James’s reserves. We had enough to last a few days.

The receptionist seemed suspicious of us – foreigners without luggage asking for a double room – but finally decided to give us a key.

The room was pleasant and looked out over Votivkirche Square.

While James freshened up in the bathroom, I stretched out and, to avoid nodding off to sleep, got
Aurélia
out of my bag and skimmed the first paragraph. I knew every sentence by heart: ‘Our dreams are a second life. Never have I been able to pass without a shudder through those gates of ivory or horn which divide us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are the image of death: a hazy torpor overcomes our thoughts, and it is impossible for us to determine the precise instant when the I, in another form, resumes the creative work of existence. Little by little an obscure underground cavern grows lighter, and the pale, solemnly immobile figures that inhabit the realm of limbo emerge from shadows and darkness. Then the picture takes shape, a new light illumines and
sets in motion these odd apparitions: the world of Spirits opens before us.’

Raising my eyes to the only window, where the Viennese night could be seen between the thick yellow curtains of the hotel room, I ran through my memories of dreams. I, too, had seen one of those pale figures appear from the other side of the gates of sleep on several occasions. Who was she? What did she want with me? What was her name?

Nerval then began a patient description of what he called his long illness which he had spent entirely among the vagaries of the mind: ‘A lady of whom I had long been fond and whom I shall call Aurélia was lost to me,’ he wrote. ‘Condemned by the one I loved, guilty of a mistake for which I no longer hoped to be forgiven, it only remained for me to throw myself into vulgar intoxications. I affected joy and cheerfulness. I crossed the world, madly in love with variety and caprice. Above all, I loved the costumes and the strange morals of distant populations. It seemed that I could thereby shift the conditions of good and evil.’

The writer based his work on his own experience. I had discovered from reading Aristide Marie’s biography that the Aurélia in question was really called Jenny Colon, an actress with whom Nerval had been madly in love. But in 1838 she had married someone else and Nerval had come to Vienna to lick his wounds. He had lived in the Austrian capital from 19 November 1839 until 1 March 1840, staying at the Aigle Noir inn in the suburb of Leopoldstadt.

I looked up at the yellow curtains again and my thoughts swirled above the two spires of the Votivkirche which were suddenly illuminated.

Without my realising it, by leaving Paris for the banks of the Danube the link with Gérard de Nerval had not been broken. On the contrary, I was still following his path. Inexorably.

At about half past nine in the evening we came down from our room.

In the lobby I sent a short telegram to the French Sûreté, addressed to Superintendent Edmond Fourier, to tell him the name of our hotel. I then bought a map of the city and a few French newspapers:
Paris-Soir, L’Excelsior
and
Le Petit Parisien
.

Outside it had stopped raining but the air was much cooler than in Paris.

We walked down Herrengasse and then wandered through the old streets of the city centre to Graben and Stephansplatz.

The night promised to be long. The fact that we had no idea how the Austrian induced nightmares in his victims meant that we had to tread very carefully. Neither James nor I wanted to fall into the hands of Morpheus. We would have to kill time, hour after hour, until the sun came up.

Another consequence of the situation was that communication with my stranger was suspended until further notice. It was impossible to obtain new information through her.

Not far from the cathedral, we went into a smoky tavern on Bauernmarkt where a plump, blonde waitress wearing a strange Hungarian hat stuffed James with sausages and mutton chops while I just had a few
Knödel
and a meat soup.

After the meal I took a look at the newspapers I had bought at the hotel. They were from the day before and the news was not very up to date.
Paris-Soir
(whose report was not the work of a certain J.L.; Lacroix had apparently kept his promise to be discreet) and
Le Petit Parisien
discussed the
affaire
of Deadly Sleep in depth. The news of a second investigation into the death of Ducros had just been made public and journalists were focusing on the political repercussions of events. As Fourier had predicted, the attack on the leader of the Surrealists was mentioned, as were our own names.

At half past midnight we left the tavern and wandered through the city in a north-easterly direction. We crossed the Donaukanal, strolled around the Praterstern monument and the Augarten park area and then returned to the city centre via the long Taborstrasse (the street where Nerval had lived nearly a century earlier).

In the end, we began to feel terribly tired. Oh sleep! Sleep! It seemed a long time since I had had the luxury of an entire night’s rest (not since leaving London actually). At that moment, how I would have liked to fall into a deep sleep!

A crazy idea which would considerably improve our situation came to me when we were on Schwedenbrücke after crossing the Donaukanal again.

I remembered the words of Monsieur de Vallemont, the
vice-chairman
of the Institut Métapsychique, about one of the Marquis de Brindillac’s discoveries: ‘Dreams occupy a small part of the time devoted to sleep; they only appear about
an hour and a half
after we fall asleep and then return regularly in brief sequences.’

If the good Marquis was to be believed, the gates of sleep would only open intermittently and, moreover, regularly and predictably. When they were closed dreams could not develop. Nothing therefore prevented James and me from getting some rest as long as we took turns and, above all, shook the sleeper awake before he started dreaming.

Nonetheless, should Auguste de Brindillac’s theories be accepted without question? What had he based his ideas on?

From the jumble of memories from my reading, a passage from
De natura rerum
came to me in which Lucretius confirmed that while they slept domestic dogs and goats always gave little uncontrolled jolts, an unmistable sign of dream activity.

If the Latin philosopher had been right (and if the idea could be applied to humans) dreaming produced physical effects on people.
Maybe the Marquis de Brindillac had developed his audacious principle by observing these physical effects. To be certain, it should be enough to imitate the scientist and observe a sleeping person; if he demonstrated rapid and unconscious movements at one time or another, it must mean that he was actively dreaming.

I put my idea to James. He seemed very sceptical but, in the absence of anything else and wanting to have a rest as much as I did, he agreed to try the experiment.

At about half past one in the morning we returned to our room.

James lay down on his bed, fully dressed, and without further ado he fell asleep.

Sitting in an armchair next to him, I smoked cigarette after cigarette in an attempt to fight off drowsiness.

At three o’clock, an hour and a half after he had fallen asleep, his body was still just as serene. Apart from two or three changes in position and sustained snoring, there was nothing of note.

Clearly, the experiment was not conclusive. It would have been reckless to take it any further.

I was therefore preparing to wake him when his breathing suddenly accelerated, his fingers moved on the sheet as if he was playing the piano and his eyes, until then tightly shut, opened almost entirely and I noticed that they were rolling wildly. The effect was striking
¹⁶
. I immediately shook James roughly by the shoulder. He stared at me for a few seconds, stunned, and then, pulling himself together, confessed that he had just started having a dream which promised to be very amusing.

I was delighted. Not only did dreaming have an effect on the body of the sleeper but it was perfectly visible. We could recover from our exhaustion without any risk.

That night we swapped places on the bed several times for periods of ninety minutes each.

Just before the Votivkirche bell tolled seven times the following morning I shook my friend excitedly.

‘James! James! Wake up! I think I’ve discovered how Kessling kills his victims!’

‘Really?’ he groaned, his eyes half closed with sleep. ‘Would it be by tormenting people like you do?’

He sat on the edge of the bed and looked towards the window.

‘The sun isn’t even up yet! Couldn’t you have let me sleep a bit longer?’

‘It was my turn anyway. But listen to this!’

The books I had bought two days ago on Boulevard Saint-Michel were open on my lap and I had circled certain passages in pencil.

‘In here,’ I said, pointing to Jules Delassus’s essay, ‘it says that observers can interfere with the psyche of a sleeping subject from a distance. To do so, they fall asleep voluntarily and then leave their own bodies, creating a kind of ghost which can take any shape and any possible or imaginable face.’

‘Aha! A hallucination then.’

‘If you like, but not a hallucination as understood today, James. The nightmare which took hold of me in our compartment on the Orient Express was not just a dream. The horrible creature which tried to kill me had a tangible existence on another plane of reality, the one which provides access to the gates of sleep several times during the night. It was created in the mind of Herr Kessling.’

‘Very well, but how does he cause death? In principle, unless your heart is very weak, you do not die of fear.’

‘A sleeping person is naturally in a vulnerable mental state. All Kessling, or rather the creature created by him, has to do is break the thin invisible thread which connects the various planes of the personality in order to kill the sleeper in a few seconds. The look
of terror which all the victims displayed can be explained like this: a psychic entity had become master of their consciousness and all they could do was witness their own death with fear. As effective as a bullet straight through the heart.’

‘And it leaves no trace.’

‘Indeed. In so doing, Kessling has almost managed to perfect a new kind of crime in a locked room. When it has been established that all the exits from the scene of the tragedy are hermetically sealed, no police officer will think of the door to dreams.’

‘So he went after all those specialist dream researchers to prevent them discovering the secret?’

‘Probably. As long as it remained confined to obscure essays on the occult, to which no one
serious
has paid any attention in our time, there was no risk. On the other hand, if a famous scientist discovered the existence of the gates of sleep and decided to talk about it with anyone ready to listen it would become dangerous. I strongly suspect that, within the context of his work on lucid dreams, the Marquis de Brindillac was very close to solving the mystery. That is probably what he was preparing to reveal in his lecture.’

‘And your little Tinker Bell, what has she to do with all this?’ asked James, rubbing his face to wake himself up.

‘To tell you the truth, I don’t really know. These books say that elemental spirits rarely intervene in human affairs. That is why their existence inspires such caution. There must be a compelling reason for her to do so.’

‘It could be the death of the poor Marquis.’

‘Possibly. But it would seem that an even more terrible secret is hidden behind all these deaths.’

‘More terrible than the possibility of being bumped off by an invisible power while you sleep? I really don’t see what!’

James stood up and went to the bathroom. For a few minutes
I heard the gush of water from the tap. When he reappeared with a towel over his shoulder and his face and shirt collar wet, he no longer looked befuddled and was smiling broadly. The strength of character and cheerful temperament of my friend, who was always ready to see the lighter side of things, were a constant source admiration to me.