He Who Walks in Shadow Read Online Free PDF

has been uncovered in the city’s Latin Quarter. Early this morning, the gendarmes were called to the cellar of a house in La Cour du Dragon, between Rue de Rennes and Rue du Dragon. What they found inside is almost too horrible to describe within the pages of this publication.
    In the center of an otherwise empty cellar was a crude wooden platform, and on that platform lay the body of a woman, though the state of that poor creature was so horrible as to make ready identification difficult. She lay on her back and was entirely naked, her arms and legs bound and pulled apart in a sickening mockery of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man . Cause of death was impossible to ascertain, as any of the violations committed against her body may have been responsible for her final passing.
    Her throat was slashed from ear to ear, and the cut was so deep that she was all but decapitated. But the fiend or fiends did not end their mischief there. Her ears and nose were missing, having been cut clean off. Moreover, the murderer’s blade had gutted the woman from throat to gullet. Her organs were removed and spread about the room, apparently in some pattern which the authorities refused to reveal.
    In fact, the police have been tight-lipped about many aspects of the crime—one that rivals the worst of London’s White Chapel murders perpetrated by the infamous fiend known only as Jack the Ripper. But this paper has, through anonymous sources within the Prefecture of Police, uncovered details that should chill the blood of any Parisian.
    According to our sources, the victim—whose identity may never be known—was a part of what can only be described as a religious ritual of the darkest and foulest character. Her organs were placed at the five points of a great, uneven star. Her heart was missing, having been burnt in a primitive altar placed at the head of the table on which she lay. And perhaps worst of all, the walls, floors, and even ceilings were covered in arcane and indecipherable symbols—all of which were written in the victim’s own blood.
    Such stunning news will shake this city to its core, and it raises many questions. Is this the beginnings of a new and terrible religious movement in the Parisian underground? Who perpetrated this horrendous crime? And perhaps most importantly, was this an isolated event, or can we expect more horrors?
     
    Le Figaro , Paris (translated), 1 May 1933, Arts Page
     
    Sad news today from the Latin Quarter as it seems that Henri Leroux, the renowned artist and perhaps the Quarter’s most well-known denizen, has taken his own life. Famous the world over for his strikingly macabre and gothic style, Leroux produced such iconic paintings as L'abîme and Les Dieux Aînés. But lately he had spiraled into a deep depression culminating in his tragic death.
    According to witnesses, at around 11 P.M. last night, there was a grand commotion in the Latin Quarter, consisting of the frantic cries and unintelligible shouting of a man, the very same M. Leroux. He was observed running down the Rue Barrée—completely in the nude—and flailing his arms in an erratic manner. Those who tried to stop him described M. Leroux as violently mad and quite dangerous. Despite the efforts of various passersby, M. Leroux ran all the way to the Pont des Arts, where he was seen to utter one last horrible cry before throwing himself into the waters of the Seine. His body was recovered this morning.
    M. Leroux’s death ends what had been a rather unusual chapter in the life of the famously eccentric Latin Quarter. In the last two weeks alone, five different young artists were admitted to various hospitals around the city, two in a completely catatonic state and three who reported suicidal depression brought on by particularly vivid and lucid dreams. The content of those dreams remains a mystery, though an anonymous citizen who is close to one of the persons in question reports that they centered on the end of the