Hell's Actor-Chapter 245: One Man

Reflecting neon pink, waterdrops clashed against the glistening roads.

To the eyes of many, this rain seemed like a miracle, the water molecules suspended.

But it was just an illusion.

Yet they chose to believe it.

On the large screen in the middle of a busy street, their eyes gathered.

An official broadcast was being made.

Mademoiselle Marianne de Roschillian was dead, murdered by an outsider in gruesome fashion.

The public was advised to report any and all suspicious movements.

But everyone knew that it was no advice. It was an order.

Nobody in The City cared about the death of a woman. But Marianne was not just any woman.

An outsider keeping company with a noble woman was scandal enough, and now, more fuel for hate was provided.

Every rich man in The City jumped at this chance to remind the lower class of their station.

For misbehaving canines, death was imminent.

But as hours passed, the event left an indelible mark on the history of The City.

Photos.

And photos.

And more photos.

Scattered through the back alleys, the usually indifferent officers discovered pictures of The Photographer’s new definition of ’body art.’

The pictures were gruesome enough to induce trauma. But the true pieces of ingeniously horrific imagination—the inspirations and subjects of the photographs—were found standing straight like totem poles or effigies.

Such arrangements were both real and otherworldly.

People were afraid to walk through the streets at night. Unfortunately, night never ended in The City.

"Here! On me!"

"Quick! On your feet!"

"Chase him!"

Shouts echoed throughout the back alleys as uniformed men scoured the premises.

Everything had gone downhill once they found a dachshund after tracking down the signal from The Photographer’s chip.

Their boots splashed into water puddles that reflected anxious faces.

Meanwhile, the top floor of The City was dark. The artificial sun hadn’t yet been lit.

In such a night, Jacquet strode into the room. The wailings of his mother subsided as the door closed behind him.

In the middle of the room, his father just as peacefully slept.

With a cigar lit between his lips, he walked up to the painting of the sun on the wall.

"The pretender has fallen into slumber," he murmured, his apathetic eyes scanning the streaks of color. "But this one is timeless."

He turned to look at his unconscious father, a finger still pointed at the painting.

"This—" He let out a cloud of smoke. "—is the true tragedy."

He kneeled by his bed, lowering his voice to a whisper.

"For you painted it."

He giggled with a closed mouth, as if he were cleansing his palate with cigar smoke as one would with wine.

"She is dead," he declared. "Marianne, your daughter, has been cut into pieces."

The old man’s lips twitched but for a moment.

"Ecstatic though I am, I will have to miss this hunt." He recalled Charles’s face. "That beast will be hunted, too. But today, I’ll have to behave."

He closed his eyelids.

"A brother must weep."

What images he saw behind the veil of his closed eyelids, even his co-stars could not tell. But, for that moment alone, he was more than a malicious antagonist.

A sequence of nightly chases through the city’s darkened alleys prompted the hearts of the audience to blossom like wildflowers of summer.

The entire city might have been in a state of alarm, but its neon lights painted a beautiful picture nonetheless.

Through the flashes of pink and purple, the sequence progressed.

Les Vigne was regaling his customers with the tales of his many encounters with The Photographer, claiming he always knew something was wrong with him.

Only a moniker previously used in the script, he had truly been dubbed ’The Photographer.’ It only hardened the belief that the masses loved serial killers with distinctive styles. Such a morose hobby couldn’t be limited to one particular group after all.

Mr. Luca was a prime example of that. Despite claiming that he was above such crude pastimes, he was the first to wave his family photographs in the air, announcing to the high society that he had survived an encounter with The Photographer.

Perhaps no one heard his boisterous tales, for his wife’s energetic voice—twice louder—undermined his.

For this boring society that moved like clockwork, The Photographer was the respite that broke the mundane luxuries of the rich.

He was a... topic.

He was the conversation, the teatime gossip.

He was the boogeyman, the monster that visited children who stayed up late.

"Clutch your pearls, darling. The Photographer might strangle you with them."

"Oh, you!"

Even though more than a couple of days had passed, he remained elusive. So where was this boogeyman, this artist of offal and arteries? 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

"Hello, Monsieur Charlamagne."

The Photographer blinked his eyes and naturally swept a gaze over his surroundings.

Château du péril. That’s where he was.

The man in front of him was Baptiste, and he seemed to have expected this visit.

With a polite gesture, he ushered his soaking wet guest inside.

A smile was plastered over both of their faces. It was the kind of expression one naturally made out of habit. There was no awareness to it, no intent.

They smiled because something inside compelled them to, because some long-standing question had been solved.

The well-dressed man led him through a maze of corridors, and the camera captured one of the paintings on a wall they passed.

It depicted The Photographer—not the reticent one of long ago, but the eerie one of now.

"You were right to come to us," Baptiste said from behind his mask. "Even Anselme de Roschillian succumbed."

He hummed as if those solemn words were but a poem.

"He burned all his attempts to draw her in the hopes of ridding himself of this obsession. Those, one may establish, were the last strokes of a drowning swimmer."

He clasped his hands behind the small of his back.

"Her influence on his psyche was anything but a natural disease. I had warned him not to continue pursuing her. Whatever she is, she only leads to misery."

His steps came to a halt.

"May you never have to resort to the flames."

He turned around, his mask in hand. For the first time, he showed his face. Half-black and half-white beneath the nose, the skin was unrecognizably burned above it.

He lowered his head slightly, indicating the door at the end of the corridor.

As The Photographer walked past him, the mask slipped through Baptiste’s fingers and clattered onto the carpeted floor.

Inscribed in a gentlemanly black, the inside of the brow ridge of the mask bore tall letters.

Baptiste

The footsteps echoed.

Averie Quinn Auclair

Only one man continued forward.