The Madame

Once, we called for blood. The Madame provides.

The Madame

The members of the audience are exquisite in their finery.

Lace falls gently, and silk clings with softness. Pearls shimmer, though they are worthless here. Rubies glisten at the throats, as incipient globules of blood.

“It’s quite awful, isn’t it?” Mme. Laurent murmurs to Lisette, though there is unsettled calm in her voice. “It is all quite hideous, really.” She casts her eyes downward to her sewing kit, and begins to fiddle. “I am certain that the English have something to do with this.”

Lisette frowns, and shifts in discomfort. Her silk, alien to her, shifts with her like a remnant of skin. “But there are no English. Not anymore. How could it be so?”

Mme. Laurent sniffs peremptorily at the observation, and continues to fiddle absently with the sewing kit. Mme. Laurent is scared to look.

She might be careful: in many ways it is dangerous to not look.

The gentleman to Lisette’s other flank, similarly over-refined in dress, is unknown to her. He too shifts with discomfort and has taken on a ghastly pallor. “Are you feeling unwell?” Lisette ventures.

The man shakes his head at her. “It’s just so bloody hot, don’t you think?” He fingers his collar in desperation, attempting to pry loose its chokehold. “Never liked a stiff collar. I don’t think I did, anyway.”

“When will it begin again?” a histrionic voice calls from somewhere behind Lisette. Lisette shifts and twists but cannot identify the source. She is bound tight in her raiment, swallowed by her gown of deep emerald. It is consuming her. She begins to feel faint as well, expecting her pallor to reflect that of her immediate neighbour. Fingers scratch the choker around her neck with increasing desperation.

“I can see the Madame,” the gentleman whispers. The whisper is laced with anguish. Lisette feels it too, but she cannot show it. Her eyes must remain forward. The painted facsimile of a smile begins to blossom across her pale face. Yes, the show must be enjoyed. The audience must participate.

But she does see it, too: beyond the mass of cravats and hats and fascias and bouffant hair. There is a crack in the agglomeration of people through which she can see the Madame emerging upon the stage.

The Madame is beauty too, but of a different sort. A beauty that is transformed: so sumptuous as to be beastly. Her red gown flows like heated liquid. But her face…even at this distance, Lisette’s breath staggers at the sight of that face. The Madame’s flesh is sallow and grey, as though fresh from the grave. That is the first observation, and the deepest. The Madame is not human. She cannot be. She is something old, and dead, and horrid. Something partially encased in the cold touch of metal.

Though the red gown flows and billows beautifully like an evening sun, the Madame’s gait is erratic. The creature – the machine – creaks and squeaks and puffs with infernal internality. Around her steam wafts and roils like a rising stormcloud.

What a creation. What an awful creation.

The Madame curtsies to the hundreds in attendance, and her voice rings out hollow and aberrant. Lisette flinches at it, but does not allow her smile to waver. “The Committee of Public Safety has determined further moral failings. Please do enjoy.”

Enjoy. Lisette had never remembered enjoyment of this spectacle.

She did not recall any enjoyment at all. In this prison.

The old theatre building beyond the square is blackened with a glut of crows, like seeping tar. They are silent haunts, as they always are: they are clever enough to know not to interrupt the Madame.

After all: she will feed them.

“Monsieur Lamontagne,” the Madame purrs. A susurration of silence ripples near-violently through the expectant crowd. Lisette shudders at it. She wants to clasp her mouth in terror, but she can’t.

The choker prevents her from doing anything at all. Instead, she smiles wide. She smiles so wide that the strain of it burrows into her flesh and snaps at her jaw.

Monsieur Lamontagne has stood, and begins to amble toward the stage. His gait is awkward and seems to be that of the sleepless, and Lisette knows that the good man is not fully in control of his own actions. The choker – his choker – has penetrated his flesh, and strange and dark potions even now surge through the man’s vessels. Potions which have caged any semblance of his free-will.

Another dark and terrible creation.

At last, Lamontagne arrives at the stage, and the robotic woman cradles his face gleefully, with sharp and silvery talons. Her own grin, of iron, is wide. Inhuman. She – it – purrs monstrously once more, this time directed at her captive. Though the whisper is low, it inexplicably resonates across the crowd. “It is treason, is it now? Moral failings. You have been most wicked, Monsieur Lamontagne. Wicked to the Republic, and to all assembled.”

The Madame would not elaborate, Lisette knew. This is performance, not prosecution.

With the sparking sound of metal rubbing against metal – bone rubbing against bone – that great billowing dress seems to unfold, and a mechanism emerges, whirring, from within. Sharp teeth glint, each one more predatory and expectant than the talons of those observant crows.

The guillotine.

The final and most heinous of the creations.

Lisette cringes though her smile endures, painfully. She cannot bear that sound. The crunch and the snapping and the screaming motorized whirl…and the plop of a deed done. It is too much. It is always too much. She shivers with it all, and she feels Mme. Laurent writhing in bundled terror beside her.

A choked scream rises from the back of the assembly. There rises, in its wake, a general shock and confusion. The clarion call is familiar to Lisette: it is Mme. Lamontagne. She speaks and yells in terror and plight at the fate unfolding to her poor husband, her words nonetheless barely decipherable as she tries to burst through the entrapment of the choker and its terrible injected tinctures.

Lisette does not turn. She cannot bear to see this either.

The Madame does not observe, herself. It is M. Lamontagne who is the target of her deathly affection.

M. Lamontagne’s incoherent yells cease suddenly, with a pop.

Lisette wishes to close her eyes, but she cannot. If she does, or if her smile lowers, she knows that the dark tonics will flush throughout her and she will no longer be herself.

A spatter of blood flicks across the audience. Lisette can feel the wet and mulch landing upon her finery. Smearing her hair.

They are all dressed in red now, and Mme. Lamontagne is no more.

It is the choker. It cannot be fought. It cannot…

The Madame has not noticed. It is unclear whether M. Lamontagne is even aware, in his stupor, of the fate of his beloved wife. That she has, for her bravery, gone before him. His bulging eyes lock with the hideous machine visage of the Madame. She is all there is to him now, for as long as he is.

That devilish motor begins to whir, and the guillotine heats and screams for blood.

Lisette feels the pooling of liquid at her eyes, through her wide smile, and wonders if it is her own tears, or the blood of the once-brave Mme. Lamontagne. It doesn’t matter now: they are all tears, and blood, both.

Yes, the guillotine screams for blood. It always had. It was not always quite like this, but it was to the same effect. She did not know when the sport itself changed, exactly – when it had been taken over by soulless machine and cold potions and devious charms. But that didn’t matter, did it?

They had once, as a people, demanded blood.

And now they would have it. The Madame would never tire, would she? Each day, through frozen, pained smiles. For eternity. All the blood they could drink.

They had asked for this. And there was no going back.

The guillotine rings sharp and high as it tears jaggedly at bone, and the expectant crows call back in gratitude.

Note: This piece is a ‘spiritual successor’ to a previous Susurrant Horror original story, ‘Story-maker’ - which you can find here: