Post by oberonfrost on Mar 30, 2012 10:32:01 GMT -5
Ultimate Crimson Fox #6
Depraved: A Tale of Mademoiselle Marie
*Now*
Josephine twisted the spent cigarette under the toe of her boot. This wasn’t her crime scene; not yet anyway. She’d seen the file on her sergeant’s desk and had snuck a glance at the report when he’d turned to pour himself a snifter of brandy. There weren’t many details, but there was one that interested her instantly: dead chemist. She was already working on the attack at the bar and at the Revson building, one a chemical company and the other looked like the site of a chemical or biological attack. Now there was a dead chemist turning up, just a few days later. Josephine did not believe in coincidences, and so she had arrived at the apartment home of the now deceased Doctor Henri DeChampes.
The scene she found inside was grotesque enough that it threatened to turn her stomach. She noted the presence of vomit on the floor, but it had been smeared with blood, feathers and wood splinters. There were what looked to be bloody footprints going back and forth between the bedroom and the living room. Property damage hadn’t been a concern; most of the furniture was broken or overturned. The feather mattress has been split open and its contents strewn about the scene. Some careful questions to the beat cops at the scene revealed that the technicians had already bagged a set of bloody scissors as a possible murder weapon.
The real spectacle was the victim himself. Henri DeChampes had been skinned. There was nothing left of him to show her how the rest of the world had seen the man during his living years. Now he resembled nothing more than a medical student’s science project. DeChampes’ skin, Josephine learned from another officer, had not been recovered at the scene.
As she departed, walking down a dimly lit Parisian street, Josephine could see no real link between the death tonight and the crimes she was actually investigating. Nevertheless, she had a gut feeling that they were all connected, all part of something bigger. Something that was going on in her city.
Somewhere beyond her righteous indignation and desire to find the parties responsible to these heinous attacks, Josephine still remembered the first time that she had witnessed true horror, the real depths of human depravity. As she continued down the street Josephine lit another cigarette, wrapped her bomber jacked tighter around herself, and let those terrible memories wash over her once more.
*Six Years Ago*
“Missing child!” Sergeant Baudin said as he sprinted into the squad room, waving a brown folder above his head. “I said missing child!” he screamed again, cutting over the rumble of the many detectives and officers assembled inside. “Eyes front people.”
Like all the others, Josephine turned to look at the man just as he slapped a photograph of a young girl, blond hair braided on both sides of her head, green eyes shining, up on the whiteboard behind him. “Nora Tasse, fourteen years old,” he began the briefing. “Disappeared while walking home from mass with her parents. They say one minute she was there, walking just a step behind them, and the next she was nowhere in sight. We have officers canvassing the neighborhood where she vanished. Porcher and Poulin, I want you to sit on the Tasse home, in case the girl returns there. Everyone else, get out there and help with the canvass until you receive further orders.”
The squad room exploded into a flurry of activity. The doorways were clogged as detectives and cops surged to assist in locating young Nora Tasse. Josephine lingered a moment as the rest filed out. “Sergeant?” she said, catching up to Baudin.
“Tautin, get out there and find that girl!” Baudin bellowed at her, spinning on his heel.
“Where, sir? Where exactly did the girl disappear?” Josephine asked, as she pulled her mousey brown hair into a ponytail.
***
Josephine stood in the exact spot where Nora’s father had been when he’d dialed the police on his cellular telephone. There was a tall brick building to one side and a bustling street to the other. Across the traffic, she could see that there were no approaches there, building stood next to building with no alleyways between. She knew the kidnapper couldn’t have approached from the front, so she turned back, away from the route to the Tasse home, and back toward their neighborhood church. She kept careful watch as she travelled along the block, finding no alleys on this side of the street either.
‘The girl could have just run off,’ she thought. All the information they had pointed to Nora being a good student, responsible; not the type to run away from her parents on a Sunday afternoon. Josephine looked up, feeling the sunlight kiss her cheeks as she pondered. Then she saw it, a small balcony protruded from the side of one of the corner buildings. Josephine strolled to the end of the block and turned the corner. The ground floor of the two story building was a commercial space, a small café with a few tables scattered on the sidewalk outside. The second floor looked to be residential. Since the stairs to the living space were inside the café, Josephine determined that it must be the owner or a member of the staff who lived there.
She caught the arm of one of the wait staff, a slim blond teenage boy, and flashed her badge. “Have you worked here long?” she asked, as they stepped away from the tables.
“Not yet a year,” the youth replied, wringing his hands and glancing around nervously.
“What is your name, young man?”
“Zachariah,” he said, looking at the ground.
“Who lives upstairs, Zachariah?” Josephine asked, as she pulled her small notebook from her breast pocket.
“Mistress Serena,” he said quietly. “She owns the café.”
Josephine jotted the name down quickly. “Is Serena here today?”
Zachariah shook his head. “She was, but she wasn’t feeling well and went to… uh, take lay down I suppose.”
“Thank you Zachariah. I’ll let you get back to work,” Josephine said as she headed inside the building. She ignored the protestations from girl at the counter as she started up the narrow stairwell at the back of the space.
***
‘Cold.’ Josephine thought. ‘Dark.’ Her eyes were open but she couldn’t see anything. ‘Bound.’ She could feel her hands tied behind her back and the weight of the blindfold on her face. Likewise her ankles had been strapped together and what felt like a ball-gag had been placed in her mouth.
‘Naked,’ she realized that she could feel cold metal on her breasts and abdomen. She was lying on her stomach on some sort of metal table. ‘Water.’ There was a slow and steady dripping noise coming from across the room. ‘Underground.’ Josephine could smell damp earth and mold surrounding her.
“Bitch!” came a bellowing cry from across the room. A massive hand came down and swatted Josephine’s naked backside. She felt the burn and the sting of the slap, tried to cry out but the gag kept her silent. “Did you come looking for the little girl?”
Whoever this man was, Josephine could tell he was big. His voice made him sound like a giant, and the size of his hand, coming down on her backside again, agreed.
“You can’t have her!” he screamed, batting at Josephine’s head this time with his meaty fist.
Josephine tried her best to keep still. Struggling, fighting him would just give him what he wanted; what he expected.
“She’s mine, FOREVER!” another swat came down on Josephine’s arse. “She’ll be my filthy whore for all of infinity and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Josephine struggled against her bonds. She tried to squeeze the gag out with her teeth. “I’ll drink and drink and drink,” the hits to her backside weren’t as hard now, but they were more frequent keeping time with her captor’s cadence.
‘How did I get here?’ she wondered. The last thing she could remember was starting up the stairway at the café. Then she’d woken naked, bound and gagged, below ground with a giant spanking her. With great precision and skill, she flipped herself to her side between the hammer blows raining down on her bottom and then kicked her attacker square in the jaw. Josephine knew that her limited assault wouldn’t faze him much, but it was a start. As he stumbled back, caught off guard, Josephine rolled off the table onto the damp floor below.
‘Lucky.’ The blindfold had come loose when he shoulder had made impact with the dirt and fallen away from her left eye.
There was a growl nearby, followed by heavy footfalls. Josephine managed to catch sight of her assailant, all nine-feet, four hundred seventy five pounds of him, naked and covered in hair, before he effortlessly picked her up in one oversized hand. ‘Gonna hurt.’ Josephine snapped her head forward, angling it down and connecting her forehead with the giant’s nose. She felt bone and cartilage shatter on the impact, all of it his.
Josephine found herself, seconds later, at the giant’s feel. She was dazed, and could still only see out of her left eye. Even in such a desperate situation she couldn’t help but find her next action just a bit amusing. ‘Twig and berries.’ Josephine lashed out with her bound legs and connected to the giant’s most vulnerable area. He collapsed to his knees as he screamed in pain and rage.
‘Shit.’ Distressed at the sudden lack of options before, Josephine managed to twist her body in such a way that her legs flew upward, and impacted the giant at the base of the skull. She felt rocks and glass, embedded in the dirt, cut into her the shoulder she’d used as pivot point. ‘Tetanus shot.’ Her attacker was unconscious, but she didn’t know how long that would last. There was a rusty pipe across the room; it was the source of the dripping water she’d heard before. She scooted on her hands and knees toward the continuing “drip, drip, drip” of the water; cuts covered her palms and legs from the knees down. For just a second, Josephine was glad for the gag.
It had only taken a few minutes for her to free herself from her bonds. Once both eyes were unobstructed and no longer fighting for her life, Josephine was able to survey her surroundings more effectively. It was some kind of cellar, dug into rough earth and never finished. There was a staircase that led upward and a metal table, the one where she had woken. Against the far wall, she could make out the body of young Nora Tasse. The girl was naked and chained to the damp earthen walls. Nora was covered in blood, coming from a gash that crossed her neck and cascading down her adolescent frame.
***
Josephine woke with a start. She was dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing before her encounter with the giant and the discovery of Nora Tasse’s body. She was lying on the dirty floor of an alley, many blocks away from the café; the last place she remembered before her attack. Josephine’s head ached, and she felt clotted blood matting the hair at the top of her skull. Pushing the pain and disorientation to the back of her mind, Josephine climbed wearily to her feet. She wavered unsteadily for a moment, before finding her footing and taking off at top speed for the café.
When she arrived, the building was very different from how she remembered it. There were no black, cast-iron tables dotting the sidewalk. There were no ferns hanging in the glass windows. The windows were broken, the shattered glass long cleared away. By peering through the cracks in the boards that sealed with doors and windows, Josephine could make out a thick layer of gray dust and dirt covered the counters and floors inside.
*Now*
Josephine slid her key into the lock, felt the tumblers turn and walked into her apartment. Josephine recalled how the other detectives and her superiors had tried to convince her that she’d been attacked, that it was all just a dream or nightmare that played out as a side-effect of the concussion. She took a shot of bourbon and then filled the glass half-full, no ice and slouched into her easy chair. Josephine knew that it was no hallucination, though. She could still feel the giant spankings burning her hindquarters for days after it had happened. The cuts and gashes on her legs and hands were real too, and she’d gotten a tetanus shot as a precaution.
Even now, years later, Josephine still blamed herself. They’d never recovered Nora Tasse, alive or dead. It was as if she’d simply vanished off the face of the Earth. ‘Or under it,’ Josephine thought as she took a draw from her glass. If only she had known where the cellar was. She knew for sure it wasn’t in the abandoned building that used to be a café; she’d been all over that building from the roof to the ground floor- there was no basement. “Twisted motherfuckers,” Josephine said to herself, downing the rest of the bourbon, “One day, Nora,” she promised, not for the first time, “Mademoiselle Marie will find you.”
Depraved: A Tale of Mademoiselle Marie
*Now*
Josephine twisted the spent cigarette under the toe of her boot. This wasn’t her crime scene; not yet anyway. She’d seen the file on her sergeant’s desk and had snuck a glance at the report when he’d turned to pour himself a snifter of brandy. There weren’t many details, but there was one that interested her instantly: dead chemist. She was already working on the attack at the bar and at the Revson building, one a chemical company and the other looked like the site of a chemical or biological attack. Now there was a dead chemist turning up, just a few days later. Josephine did not believe in coincidences, and so she had arrived at the apartment home of the now deceased Doctor Henri DeChampes.
The scene she found inside was grotesque enough that it threatened to turn her stomach. She noted the presence of vomit on the floor, but it had been smeared with blood, feathers and wood splinters. There were what looked to be bloody footprints going back and forth between the bedroom and the living room. Property damage hadn’t been a concern; most of the furniture was broken or overturned. The feather mattress has been split open and its contents strewn about the scene. Some careful questions to the beat cops at the scene revealed that the technicians had already bagged a set of bloody scissors as a possible murder weapon.
The real spectacle was the victim himself. Henri DeChampes had been skinned. There was nothing left of him to show her how the rest of the world had seen the man during his living years. Now he resembled nothing more than a medical student’s science project. DeChampes’ skin, Josephine learned from another officer, had not been recovered at the scene.
As she departed, walking down a dimly lit Parisian street, Josephine could see no real link between the death tonight and the crimes she was actually investigating. Nevertheless, she had a gut feeling that they were all connected, all part of something bigger. Something that was going on in her city.
Somewhere beyond her righteous indignation and desire to find the parties responsible to these heinous attacks, Josephine still remembered the first time that she had witnessed true horror, the real depths of human depravity. As she continued down the street Josephine lit another cigarette, wrapped her bomber jacked tighter around herself, and let those terrible memories wash over her once more.
*Six Years Ago*
“Missing child!” Sergeant Baudin said as he sprinted into the squad room, waving a brown folder above his head. “I said missing child!” he screamed again, cutting over the rumble of the many detectives and officers assembled inside. “Eyes front people.”
Like all the others, Josephine turned to look at the man just as he slapped a photograph of a young girl, blond hair braided on both sides of her head, green eyes shining, up on the whiteboard behind him. “Nora Tasse, fourteen years old,” he began the briefing. “Disappeared while walking home from mass with her parents. They say one minute she was there, walking just a step behind them, and the next she was nowhere in sight. We have officers canvassing the neighborhood where she vanished. Porcher and Poulin, I want you to sit on the Tasse home, in case the girl returns there. Everyone else, get out there and help with the canvass until you receive further orders.”
The squad room exploded into a flurry of activity. The doorways were clogged as detectives and cops surged to assist in locating young Nora Tasse. Josephine lingered a moment as the rest filed out. “Sergeant?” she said, catching up to Baudin.
“Tautin, get out there and find that girl!” Baudin bellowed at her, spinning on his heel.
“Where, sir? Where exactly did the girl disappear?” Josephine asked, as she pulled her mousey brown hair into a ponytail.
***
Josephine stood in the exact spot where Nora’s father had been when he’d dialed the police on his cellular telephone. There was a tall brick building to one side and a bustling street to the other. Across the traffic, she could see that there were no approaches there, building stood next to building with no alleyways between. She knew the kidnapper couldn’t have approached from the front, so she turned back, away from the route to the Tasse home, and back toward their neighborhood church. She kept careful watch as she travelled along the block, finding no alleys on this side of the street either.
‘The girl could have just run off,’ she thought. All the information they had pointed to Nora being a good student, responsible; not the type to run away from her parents on a Sunday afternoon. Josephine looked up, feeling the sunlight kiss her cheeks as she pondered. Then she saw it, a small balcony protruded from the side of one of the corner buildings. Josephine strolled to the end of the block and turned the corner. The ground floor of the two story building was a commercial space, a small café with a few tables scattered on the sidewalk outside. The second floor looked to be residential. Since the stairs to the living space were inside the café, Josephine determined that it must be the owner or a member of the staff who lived there.
She caught the arm of one of the wait staff, a slim blond teenage boy, and flashed her badge. “Have you worked here long?” she asked, as they stepped away from the tables.
“Not yet a year,” the youth replied, wringing his hands and glancing around nervously.
“What is your name, young man?”
“Zachariah,” he said, looking at the ground.
“Who lives upstairs, Zachariah?” Josephine asked, as she pulled her small notebook from her breast pocket.
“Mistress Serena,” he said quietly. “She owns the café.”
Josephine jotted the name down quickly. “Is Serena here today?”
Zachariah shook his head. “She was, but she wasn’t feeling well and went to… uh, take lay down I suppose.”
“Thank you Zachariah. I’ll let you get back to work,” Josephine said as she headed inside the building. She ignored the protestations from girl at the counter as she started up the narrow stairwell at the back of the space.
***
‘Cold.’ Josephine thought. ‘Dark.’ Her eyes were open but she couldn’t see anything. ‘Bound.’ She could feel her hands tied behind her back and the weight of the blindfold on her face. Likewise her ankles had been strapped together and what felt like a ball-gag had been placed in her mouth.
‘Naked,’ she realized that she could feel cold metal on her breasts and abdomen. She was lying on her stomach on some sort of metal table. ‘Water.’ There was a slow and steady dripping noise coming from across the room. ‘Underground.’ Josephine could smell damp earth and mold surrounding her.
“Bitch!” came a bellowing cry from across the room. A massive hand came down and swatted Josephine’s naked backside. She felt the burn and the sting of the slap, tried to cry out but the gag kept her silent. “Did you come looking for the little girl?”
Whoever this man was, Josephine could tell he was big. His voice made him sound like a giant, and the size of his hand, coming down on her backside again, agreed.
“You can’t have her!” he screamed, batting at Josephine’s head this time with his meaty fist.
Josephine tried her best to keep still. Struggling, fighting him would just give him what he wanted; what he expected.
“She’s mine, FOREVER!” another swat came down on Josephine’s arse. “She’ll be my filthy whore for all of infinity and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Josephine struggled against her bonds. She tried to squeeze the gag out with her teeth. “I’ll drink and drink and drink,” the hits to her backside weren’t as hard now, but they were more frequent keeping time with her captor’s cadence.
‘How did I get here?’ she wondered. The last thing she could remember was starting up the stairway at the café. Then she’d woken naked, bound and gagged, below ground with a giant spanking her. With great precision and skill, she flipped herself to her side between the hammer blows raining down on her bottom and then kicked her attacker square in the jaw. Josephine knew that her limited assault wouldn’t faze him much, but it was a start. As he stumbled back, caught off guard, Josephine rolled off the table onto the damp floor below.
‘Lucky.’ The blindfold had come loose when he shoulder had made impact with the dirt and fallen away from her left eye.
There was a growl nearby, followed by heavy footfalls. Josephine managed to catch sight of her assailant, all nine-feet, four hundred seventy five pounds of him, naked and covered in hair, before he effortlessly picked her up in one oversized hand. ‘Gonna hurt.’ Josephine snapped her head forward, angling it down and connecting her forehead with the giant’s nose. She felt bone and cartilage shatter on the impact, all of it his.
Josephine found herself, seconds later, at the giant’s feel. She was dazed, and could still only see out of her left eye. Even in such a desperate situation she couldn’t help but find her next action just a bit amusing. ‘Twig and berries.’ Josephine lashed out with her bound legs and connected to the giant’s most vulnerable area. He collapsed to his knees as he screamed in pain and rage.
‘Shit.’ Distressed at the sudden lack of options before, Josephine managed to twist her body in such a way that her legs flew upward, and impacted the giant at the base of the skull. She felt rocks and glass, embedded in the dirt, cut into her the shoulder she’d used as pivot point. ‘Tetanus shot.’ Her attacker was unconscious, but she didn’t know how long that would last. There was a rusty pipe across the room; it was the source of the dripping water she’d heard before. She scooted on her hands and knees toward the continuing “drip, drip, drip” of the water; cuts covered her palms and legs from the knees down. For just a second, Josephine was glad for the gag.
It had only taken a few minutes for her to free herself from her bonds. Once both eyes were unobstructed and no longer fighting for her life, Josephine was able to survey her surroundings more effectively. It was some kind of cellar, dug into rough earth and never finished. There was a staircase that led upward and a metal table, the one where she had woken. Against the far wall, she could make out the body of young Nora Tasse. The girl was naked and chained to the damp earthen walls. Nora was covered in blood, coming from a gash that crossed her neck and cascading down her adolescent frame.
***
Josephine woke with a start. She was dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing before her encounter with the giant and the discovery of Nora Tasse’s body. She was lying on the dirty floor of an alley, many blocks away from the café; the last place she remembered before her attack. Josephine’s head ached, and she felt clotted blood matting the hair at the top of her skull. Pushing the pain and disorientation to the back of her mind, Josephine climbed wearily to her feet. She wavered unsteadily for a moment, before finding her footing and taking off at top speed for the café.
When she arrived, the building was very different from how she remembered it. There were no black, cast-iron tables dotting the sidewalk. There were no ferns hanging in the glass windows. The windows were broken, the shattered glass long cleared away. By peering through the cracks in the boards that sealed with doors and windows, Josephine could make out a thick layer of gray dust and dirt covered the counters and floors inside.
*Now*
Josephine slid her key into the lock, felt the tumblers turn and walked into her apartment. Josephine recalled how the other detectives and her superiors had tried to convince her that she’d been attacked, that it was all just a dream or nightmare that played out as a side-effect of the concussion. She took a shot of bourbon and then filled the glass half-full, no ice and slouched into her easy chair. Josephine knew that it was no hallucination, though. She could still feel the giant spankings burning her hindquarters for days after it had happened. The cuts and gashes on her legs and hands were real too, and she’d gotten a tetanus shot as a precaution.
Even now, years later, Josephine still blamed herself. They’d never recovered Nora Tasse, alive or dead. It was as if she’d simply vanished off the face of the Earth. ‘Or under it,’ Josephine thought as she took a draw from her glass. If only she had known where the cellar was. She knew for sure it wasn’t in the abandoned building that used to be a café; she’d been all over that building from the roof to the ground floor- there was no basement. “Twisted motherfuckers,” Josephine said to herself, downing the rest of the bourbon, “One day, Nora,” she promised, not for the first time, “Mademoiselle Marie will find you.”