Juve's cry rent the stillness of the night, loud and compelling. The journalist leaped from his wicker-basket so abruptly that he knocked against the lamp stand and the lamp fell to the floor. Fandor searched for his matches in vain. "Light up, Fandor!" shouted Juve. The noise of a struggle, the dull thud of a fall on the floor, maddened the journalist. In the darkness he heard Juve groaning, scraping the floor with his boots, making violent efforts to resist some mysterious assailant. "Be quick, in God's name," implored the pain-wrung voice of the detective. Fandor trod on the glass of the lamp, which broke. He tripped, knocked his head against a press, rebounded, then suddenly uttered a terrible cry. His hands, outstretched apart, in the gloom, had brushed a cold, shiny body which slid under his palms. "Fandor! Help, Fandor!" Desperate, Fandor plunged haphazard about the disordered chamber, wrapped in darkness. Suddenly, he rushed into the study hard by, found there another lamp which he lit in haste, and hurried back with it. A fearful sight wrung a cry of terror from him. Juve, on his knees on the floor, was covered with blood. "Juve!" "It's all right, Fandor. Some one has bled, but not I." The detective rushed to the open window and leaned out into the dark night. "Listen!" he cried. "Do you hear that low hissing, that dull rustling?" "Yes. I heard it just now." "It was the 'executioner.'" The detective drew back into the room, shut the window, pulled down the blinds, and then took off his armour. Curiously he examined the stains of blood, the tiny shreds of flesh that had remained on the points. "We have no more to fear now," he said, "the stroke has been tried--and has failed." "Juve! tell me what has just happened? I may be an idiot, but I don't understand at all!" "You are no fool, Fandor; far from it, but if in many circumstances you reason and argue with considerable aptness, I grant you far less deductive faculty. That does not seem to be your forte." Fandor seated himself before the detective, and the latter held forth. "When we found ourselves faced with the first crime, that of the Cité Frochot, and our notice was drawn to the elusive Fantômas, we were unable to decide in what manner that hapless Mme. Raymond, whom we then took for Lady Beltham, had been done to death. Now, remember, Fandor, that during that night of mystery, hidden behind the curtains in Chaleck's study we heard weird rustlings and faint sort of hissings, didn't we?" "We did," admitted Fandor, at a loss, "but go on, Juve."