Fantômas

“ Monsieur Havard and Fandor made no answer to this.
To have held Fantômas at their mercy, if only for a minute; to have believed that they were going to lay hands on the atrocious criminal, at last; to have seen him slip through their fingers—the thought of this almost brought tears to their eyes: they were in a state of the deepest despondency.
"There's a curse on us!" cried Fandor. "This time, at any rate, we have nothing to reproach ourselves with! ”

“ This extraordinary studio revealed a blood-freezing spectacle.
Facing him, immobile, rigid, was stationed a being whom Fandor had had a fleeting glimpse of two or three times in his life. He had seen this enigmatic and formidable being under circumstances so tragic, on occasions so phenomenal, that this being's outline was graven on his memory for ever!
There was the cloak of many folds, dense black; the hooded mask, the large soft hat shading the eyes; the strange inimitable outline!... Fandor was facing Fantômas! ”

“ You are a magistrate and I am only a humble detective inspector, but you have three or four years' experience, perhaps less, while I have fifteen years' work behind me. I know that Fantômas does exist, and I do anything but laugh when I suspect his intervention in a case."
M. de Presles could hardly conceal his surprise, and Juve went on:
"No one has ever said of me, sir, that I was a coward. I have looked death in the eyes; I have often hunted and arrested criminals who would not have had the least hesitation in doing away with me. There are whole gangs of rascals who have vowed my death. ”

“ Life seemed a melancholy thing: how gloomy, how helpless her outlook!
More than ever before she felt in every fibre of her being that she was not the daughter of the baron de Naarboveck, that she was indeed Thérèse Auvernois. But what a fatal destiny must be hers! An existence open to the attacks of misfortune, at the mercy of a being, enigmatic, indefatigable, who, time and again, had thrown his horrible influence across her destiny, was throwing it now—the sinister Fantômas! ”

“ From the lining of the bodice he drew out a thin roll of paper, crumpled, stained with blood, torn unfortunately.
"Goodness of God in whom I trust—I do not wish to die with this remorse—I do not wish to risk his killing me to destroy this secret—I write this confession, I will tell him it is deposited in a safe place—yes, I was the cause of the death of that hapless actor! Yes, Valgrand paid for the crime which Gurn committed.... Yes, I sent Valgrand to the scaffold by making him pass for [Pg 138] Gurn—Gurn who killed Lord Beltham, Gurn, who I sometimes think must be Fantômas!" ”

“ Like a hideous and implacable engine of death the eyes of the unknown Horror swelled and expanded until they were close before me, enormous, terrible, and I felt a slow, cold, wet breath propelled with mechanical regularity against my face, enveloping me in its fetid mist, in its charnel-house deadliness.
With ordinary fear goes always a physical terror, but with me in the presence of this unspeakable Thing was only the utter and awful terror of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare. ”

“ I had become a thing apart from mankind—a faun—a reversion to the near soulless type, but with the germ of spirit budding in me.
It was a desire to avoid a certain horror dangling over a track that had at first driven me into the thickets, and so lost me my way. The memory of a blot of shadow, on the sunny grass underneath that same horror, that swayed sluggishly, like the disc of a pendulum, as the body swayed above, got into my waking thoughts and haunted them. I wished to put a world-wide interval between myself and the blot—though I had seen monstrosities enough of late, God knows. ”

“ But ghosts will rise at night, and they were rising now on every side—impalpable, shadowy creatures, less tangible than the brooding mists which floated over the desolate lande before him, like the fleeing spirits of a phantom army.—Ghosts of memories, ghost of honour, ghost of his better self, ghost of little Gabrielle, whom he loved well enough in his crooked, careless way,—all ready to taunt him and upbraid him as he rode onwards to Varenac. ”

“ Do ye hear them still?—it was long ago!—
But here in the shadows I wait, and wait!
145 Spirits there be that pass in peace;
Mine passed in a whirl of wrath and dole;
And the hour that your choking breath shall cease
I will get my grip on your naked soul—
Nor pity may stay nor prayer cajole—
I would drag ye whining from Hell's own gate:
To me, to me, ye must pay the toll!
And here in the shadows I wait, I wait!
The dead they are dead, they are out of the way?
And the ghost is a whim of an ailing mind? ”

“ No other ghost has haunted the boy's room, my friends, since I have occupied it than the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief. Many a time have I pursued the phantom—never with this man's stride of mine to come up with it, never with these man's hands of mine to touch it, never more to this man's heart of mine to hold it in its purity. ”

“ The Ghost, as sudden in its motion, passed to before the chair, and stared on him.
The living man, and the animated image of himself dead, might so have looked, the one upon the other. An awful survey, in a lonely and remote part of an empty old pile of building, on a winter night, with the loud wind going by upon its journey of mystery - whence or whither, no man knowing since the world began - and the stars, in unimaginable millions, glittering through it, from eternal space, where the world’s bulk is as a grain, and its hoary age is infancy. ”

“ So, ever this truth runs through all legends of ghost and demon—through the uniform records of what wonder accredits and science rejects as the supernatural—lo! the dread machinery whose wheels roll through Hades! What need such awful engines for such mean results? The first blockhead we meet in our walk to our grocer's can tell us more than the ghost tells us; the poorest envy we ever aroused hurts us more than the demon. How true an interpreter is Genius to Hell as to Earth! ”

“ For there are living apparitions that affect men more deeply than fancied visits from the world of ghosts;—numbing respiration momentarily, making the blood to gather about the heart like a great weight, hushing the voice to a murmur, creating an indescribable oppression in the throat,—until nature seeks relief in a strong sigh that fills the lungs with air again and cools for a brief moment the sudden fever of the veins. The vision may endure but an instant—seen under a gleam of sunshine, or through the antiquated gateway one passes from time to time on his way to the serious part of the city ”

“ Still less do I; but in all the idle or extravagant stories I have read of ghosts—stories once my sport and ridicule, as the result of vulgar superstition or ignorance—the so-called supernatural visitor was visible to the eye, or heard by the ear; but the ghost, the fiend, the invisible Thing that is ever by the side of Carl Holberg, is only sensible to the touch—it is the unseen but tangible substance of an apparition! ”

“ It was a ghost! One night, when all was still and dark, and the ship rolling at sea before the wind, a man sprung suddenly upon deck in his shirt, his hair erect, his eyes starting from their sockets, and loudly vociferating he had seen a ghost. After his horror had a little subsided, we asked him what he had seen?—he said, the figure of a woman dressed in white, with eyes of flaming fire; that she came to his hammock, and stared him in the face. This we treated as an idle dream, and sent the frantic fellow to his bed. The story became the subject of every one ”

“ If I sought to peer through the veil as formerly—to witness her pathetic attempts to resume the old life with Louis—again those eyes!
It may perhaps sound strange for a disembodied creature—one whom you would call a ghost—to wail of being haunted. Yet haunting is of the spirit, and we of the spirit world are immeasurably more subject to its conditions than those whose consciousness is centered in the material sphere. ”

“ Now I freely offer, to the manufacturers of ghosts, the privilege of raising them, in as great numbers, and in as horrible a guise as they may think fit, without offending against true philosophy, and even without violating probability. The highest flights of imagination may now be indulged, on this subject, although no loop-hole should be left for mortifying explanations, and for those modifications of terror, which completely baulk the reader’s curiosity, and disgust him with a second reading. ”

“ The comic stories invariably terminate with sprightly puns, the tragic in a spectacular representation of ghosts and spirits. An awful tale of murder, let us suppose, has been told in an impressive manner; and while the imaginary murderer and the actual listeners are seeing strange sights in fancy, the narrator unobserved turns down the lights and tumbles off the platform. In the following darkness the ghosts stalk in a ray of pale light; they are the story-tellers themselves in masks, and they sometimes walk down the aisles to the terror of those that believe in them. ”

“ I lay for a few moments simply imbruted with terror; when another cloud, obscuring the moon, delivered me from the immediately paralysing effects of the presence to the vision of the object of horror, while it added the force of imagination to the power of fear within me ”

“ Riding through this nightmare landscape, a whirr of wings, and a harsh cry disturb you from time to time, hideous and mocking laughter peals above and about you, and huge grey ghosts with little red eyes hop away in gigantic but noiseless bounds. ”

“ Admitting, therefore, as an undoubted fact, that, with few exceptions, ghosts are no longer believed in, and that the species of fear we have just mentioned arises from a natural horror of darkness incident to man,—a horror which he cannot account for rationally,—yet it is well known that he listens with much pleasure to stories of ghosts, spectres, and phantoms. The wonderful ever excites a degree of interest, and gains an attentive ear ”

“ What a lasting effect and what a melancholy gloom this fear of ghosts and of unclean spirits of the bottomless pit produced on this young life may be judged from the following facts: When the patient was about eleven years old, a young girl, a friend of hers, having noticed the patient's fear of ghosts, played on her one of those silly, practical jokes, the effect of which on sensitive natures is often disastrous and lasting. ”

“ It may be that only on this one night of all the year you can show yourselves to him who can see you, but that the place where you were wicked is the Hades to which you are doomed for ages.’ I thought and thought till I began to feel the air alive about me, and was enveloped in the vapours that dim the eyes of those who strain them for one peep through the dull mica windows that will not open on the world of ghosts. ”

“ And she peered into the frowning shadow, which quivered with dancing black ghosts and with the flickering of the candle. It was a dance of ghosts, hovering silently round the room, and they seemed to have come from the distant past to haunt her, to have come out of the things of long ago, of very long ago: far-off, forgotten years of childhood and girlhood; the young man whom she had married; their long life together; their children, young around them. ”

“ He fears the rock and the fen. He fears the ghost of night. The old tree groans to the blast; the falling branch resounds. The wind drives the withered burrs, clung together, along the grass. It is the light tread of a ghost! ”

“ In any case we hope to see some ghosts—they abound in the interior. They come to you by night, and as you watch them their bellies burst, and their entrails fall to the ground, and their eyes—unpupilled balls of white—fall out too, and they stink and shine. ”

“ I seated myself by the candle that stood on a table at one end of the room; and, pretending to read a book that I took out of my pocket, heard several dreadful stories of ghosts as pale as ashes, that stood at the feet of a bed, or walked over a church-yard by moonlight; and of others that had been conjured into the Red Sea, for disturbing people's rest, and drawing their curtains at midnight; with many other old women's fables of the like nature. As one spirit raised another, I observed that at the end of every story the whole [24] company closed their ranks, and crowded about the fire. ”

“ Men believed, or were willing to believe, that spirits were yet hovering around, who brought with them airs from heaven, or blasts from hell; that the ghost was duly relieved from his prison of torment at the sound of the curfew, and that fairies imprinted mysterious circles on the turf by moonlight. ”

“ There are ghosts whom I tremble to meet, and cannot think of without a shudder. One has the guilt of blood upon him. The soul which he thrust untimely forth has long since been summoned from our gloomy graveyard, and dwells among the stars of heaven, too far and too high for even the recollection of mortal anguish to ascend thither. Not so the murderer’s ghost! ”

“ Clasped it close, and it died at the withering touch.
There's the ghost of a Love,
Born with joy, reared with hope, died in pain and unrest,
But he towers above
All the others--this ghost: yet a ghost at the best. ”

“ Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present ”