“What do you fear?”
“Have you forgotten the corpse you showed me just now?”
Fandor started back in sudden agitation.
“What!” he gasped, “if I am to believe you, you already think you know ...”
“The name of the dead man? Yes, by my faith! I do. Come with me.”
The two men re-entered the ill-omened ruin where they had spent such tragic, such hopeless hours of agony. It was not without a shudder Juve gazed round the damp, confined cellar where, but for Fandor’s quite unlooked for intervention, he would inevitably have met an appalling death.
“Fandor!” began his friend, “it is a hideous job we have to do. It is the grave there must give us up its secret. The unhappy man who lies in it, Fantômas’ unsuspected victim, must rise up to accuse his murderer!”
The journalist was livid. A gruesome task indeed, this work of justice Juve proposed to undertake! For one who had so lately borne such torments of fear and suspense, it called for nerves of steel, an extraordinary strength of will, to confront afresh the dismal horrors of the exhumation he was bent on. The intrepid officer stepped up to the grim hiding-place, which a few hours before the hideous hag, Mère Toulouche, had not feared to ransack in search of gold—gold Fantômas had buried there, and of which she claimed her share, boasting she had a better right to it than anyone.
Then, in the gloom of the cellar, Juve and Fandor bent over the gaping hole. A blast of pestilential gases struck them full in the face, the ignoble horror of what they saw forced them to recoil. Instinctively the two took hands, panic-stricken, yet resolved to prove their courage, to manifest at all costs that they had the right, the duty to break once again the repose of the dead man, who lay there in his unhallowed grave. The spectacle was appalling. The fleshless face, in which the eye orbits were two hideous holes, and the hanging jaw mimicked a dreadful grin, seemed to stare up at them with sightless orbs.
Bending low, Juve and Fandor, speechless, motionless, shuddering, anxiously scrutinized the unrecognizable features. Who was the unknown, this victim of Fantômas’ villainy? After what grim drama had the corpse been laid in this secret grave, where once again his rest was to be disturbed, where Fantômas had not feared to deposit his treasure for safe keeping.