"La Paix"

CASE FILE: INDIV-EV0725-PRIME

SUBJECT NAME: Apolinary Beaulys, aka “La Paix.”

STATUS: Deceased.

CLASSIFICATION: Homicide, Occult, Psionic, Xanthous_related

PRE-CONTACT SUMMARY: Apolinary Beaulys was born sometime in the tail end of the 19^th Century in Paris, France. Details about his early life remain elusive, but it appears that in his youth he pursued an education and career in engineering, which proved for him a modestly successful enterprise. In 1910 he founded his own lighting company, Électrique Française, to compete with Thomas Edison’s General Electric; this proved to be a startling failure that depleted Beaulys’ fortunes and left him suicidal. But due in part to encouragement from his brother Pierre, he started again by inventing a form of magnetic fluid which is still to this day used as a component in electronics. As his passion for engineering and invention returned, Beaulys became more and more experimental, seeking out ways to push the novel frontier of electrical application to its limits. It was during this time that he began to hear tell of scientific research into legends of psychic phenomena and so-called spirits of the dead—these concepts, once considered ignorant superstitions, were beginning to find scientific explanations within the growing Spiritualist movement, which reached its peak at the same time the world was reeling from devastation caused by the First World War.

While initially skeptical, Beaulys soon became a strong devotee of Spiritualism; this devotion only grew when it became clear that Beaulys himself possessed strong mediumistic abilities. In the present day we can reasonably conclude that the majority of self-proclaimed mediums who arose during the heyday of the Spiritualist movement were frauds, delusional, or both, but it seems that Beaulys did indeed possess certain telepathic, necropathic, and ectokinetic powers—powers that grew in strength proportionally to the number of attendees at his seances. He gained minor fame for his ability to conjure spirits physically through a pool of his magnetic fluid—spirits who could talk and move about. At a 1913 seance visited by over sixty guests, he summoned the images of a dozen spirits at once, who reenacted the tea party at which they had all been fatally poisoned. When the World War broke out, Beaulys dedicated himself to reuniting the spirits of dead soldiers with their grief-stricken families. He took a firm anti-war stance, thus calling himself La Paix, “Peace.”

In early 1915, La Paix made contact with the spirit of a young woman claiming to have been a nun. This young woman, Sylvia, had not fully committed to her vows at the time of her death, and so proved to be a very sensuous spirit. Indeed, due to her flirtatious nature, La Paix fell in love with Sylvia, and soon began a relationship with her, in spite of her deceased, noncorporeal state of being. In time, however, this relationship would turn abusive, as it transpired that Sylvia had ulterior motives for seducing the young psychic. After several months, she began demanding that he promote her name in famous newspapers, which necessitated him paying large amounts of money. She also demanded that he give money to a widow she had taken a liking to, withholding her affections when he refused to pay. Eventually La Paix was able to break contact with Sylvia with the aid of Algernon Mailey, a Christian Spiritualist, who told him that his error came in sculpting his powers without the input of religion. La Paix eventually joined his Spiritualism with Christianity, and from then onward was able to use his gift in a way that did not invite such negative presences as Sylvia. He continued to hold seances for at least ten years afterward.

La Paix last made public record in 1925, when newspapers wrote of his holding a private seance for an associate of his, Lord John Roxton. Roxton was an explorer most famous for being part of the infamous Challenger expedition of 1912, which generated reports of surviving dinosaurs in South America.

POST-CONTACT SUMMARY: When NOCTURNE was founded in 1934 in response to the Wayne Mansion Incident (see File EV-GENESIS), La Paix was placed on a list of Individuals of Interest by the organization’s first Director, Giuseppe Farnsbarnes. It did not take long for NOCTURNE to contact La Paix and offer him employment within the organization. La Paix gratefully declined, citing that he was entering middle age and did not seek adventure, only the comfort of the innocent. Director Farnsbarnes insisted on holding an interview about his experiences with the spirit Sylvia, to which Beaulys hesitantly consented. Farnsbarnes’ hope was to determine the true nature of the Sylvia entity—if she was truly once a living human, and if not, what sort of potential threat her kind posed to humanity.

Before this interview could be conducted, however, La Paix contacted Farnsbarnes to report a shocking development: he was once again receiving blackmail letters from Sylvia. He had been worried about this, that mentally revisiting his encounters with the spirit would allow her back into his life. The Director, with La Paix’s permission, handed the automatically-written letters over to NOCTURNE’s resident medium, Ameline Hacker. Ms. Hacker, operating through her spirit guide Malcolm, was able to produce automatic writing of her own. While in a trance she wrote down three names—presumably, the names of the true authors of the letters. These names appeared as Le Loi, L’Amour, and La Volonté: Law, Love, and Will. Shortly after the appearances of these names, the letters that composed them suddenly changed shape and rearranged themselves to form a trio of more elusive names: Mwass, Dagricho, and Xu-Xulgulura. After these names formed, a loud popping sound was heard and the lights went out; Ms. Hacker fell unconscious during this time, though she swiftly recovered.

Director Farnsbarnes eventually determined that both sets of names played a role in the texts of one Lucas Machado, an Azorean philosopher and occult scholar. Mr. Machado had passed away in 1892 but was rumored to have inspired a religion or cult that worshipped the concepts of Law, Love, and Will. His surname became something of a title for his students, with at least one such apprentice calling himself Machatan. Machatan was in truth a butterfly collector named Francis Trevec, also called the Purple Emperor for his achievement of capturing an extremely rare butterfly of the same name. (For more on the purple emperor butterfly, see File ENT-TILNORPUPILAE.) In last decade of the 19^th Century Trevec had gone insane from alcoholic psychosis and was committed to a mental hospital after murdering a butterfly collector rival of his. By 1934 he had since recovered and been released, taking on an Anglicized equivalent of his birthname to protect his identity.

NOCTURNE was able to discover that Trevec was currently residing in Paris, and that he had been seen in the company of two other men. The first of these was Oscar Clinton Slade, a British expat who had fled his native county after being accused of murder and debauchery. The other was Hugo Astley, a man of Caribbean origins who was rumored to be a cousin of the notorious killer and occultist “Murder” Legendre. Both of these men were known to have ties to the mystic arts, and as such NOCTURNE assigned agents to locate and interrogate them.

However, before agents could make contact with the three occultists, La Paix was found dead in his Paris home, having apparently suffocated to death. The word “SYLVIA” was found written on one of the walls in blood, later determined to be La Paix’s own, though curiously his body bore no wounds of any kind. There were no signs of a struggle anywhere in the apartment. It was as if La Paix had simply lost his ability to breathe.

The death of La Paix proved to be a shocking tragedy for the nascent NOCTURNE. Yet the medium had not perished without revealing the means of his death. Agents located a freshly recorded wax cylinder which La Paix had been using as a diary. The recording machine was still running when the agents arrived, and so it was assumed that the cylinder contained the sounds of the psychic’s demise. This assumption swiftly proved to be correct. The following is a translated transcript of La Paix’s final journal entry:

“...November 11^th. It is 9 o’ clock.

“When I saw that I walked with two shadows in the moonless night, and when I passed the alley and heard the slow, labored breathing, I knew that they had passed me the runes. Sure enough, upon my return home I found them sewn into my coat lining, with thread alternating red and yellow. Blood and rot. No hand touched the needle that sewed that thread; they did it, at a distance, mind-over-matter.

“It is too late, then—too late by far. But I hope to leave some warning nevertheless to those who find me. I have just returned from a secret library whose name I shall not speak, whose existence I first learned about when following my quest to locate a copy of the ‘lost’ opera, Don Juan Triumphant. In that library on this damned evening I read blasphemous fell tomes which spoke of the whispered dreams of distant gods, and in them, among the crazed, crab-handed prose, I found the true name of Sylvia. Long have I wondered why her accursed spirit appeared to me as an amorous nun. Since embracing Christ I have understood that this was perhaps a deliberately sacrilegious gesture, one which my ignorance at the time prevented me from comprehending. But now I understand—she is Mother and Maiden and Whore all at once, a Scarlet Woman, nurturer and mater of sin. A She-Goat, whose crimes have seen her birth a Thousand Young!

“Though her true face is hideous, it is known she comes among mortals in human guise, beautiful and beguiling—such is written by the priestesses of the Pyrenees witch-cults, descendants of the verdant sorceresses of the Ancient Wars. But those monstrous vestals are deluded, for they war mindlessly against those who service the Xanthous Monarch—the same who is the She-Goat’s own consort! Yes, even now the Sign of So-koth begins to luminesce before me, within the confines of my own home—forming the gate through which the son of the She-Goat and the Xanthous One shall hideously squiggle!!

“Indeed, those same warlock books told me of the significance of the three wizards’ names. Not their French names—those were chosen to mock my own title, my devotion to peace, just as they sought to mock me by using their Scarlet Woman’s image to bleed me of my money all those years ago. Their Secret Names are the names of the three slaves of the Shadowspawned Prince, Keeper of the Black Hole and Master of the Tubaton Tangle. Yes, it is the Veiled Lord of Yuzh who is intruding upon me now! I can see his yellow silken mask, hiding all save his unblinking gaze.

“Behind him, I can catch a glimpse of cold, dark Yuzh and the hideous black star around which it orbits—within its imperceptible night, the books assure me, stands the palace of the Xanthous King, whose masked gaze stretches over dead Carcosa and the gripping waters of Lake Hali. From this secret stronghold in the Hyades, called Yamilzakra, or else Yrimid, his shadow reaches out across infinity…

“There is—no air on Yrimid. No—atmosphere—for all dies within its grasp—even light itself—

“The wind is roaring—the black sun is shining—but I am not afraid. My soul is with God—and with his Son—”

The sound of rushing wind can indeed be heard at this point in the recording. As he ceases talking, La Paix can be heard straining for breath under the howling of the wind. It is then that a loud, deep rumbling noise interrupts the recording. In 1944, this rumbling was deciphered by Vice Director Rex Bennett, and found to be the speech of the primary intelligence that lives on the “black sun” of Yamilzakra, also called Yrimid or Yramid. Bennett was able to translate the pronouncement as such:

“I AM YOUR ONLY GOD. BEHOLD MY ONLY BEGOTTEN SON.”

The remainder of the recording consists only of the sounds of roaring wind, and of something wriggling underneath those sounds.

Vice Director Bennett suffered a nervous breakdown following his exposure to the recording, and subsequently destroyed the wax cylinder—it is no longer available for examination.

Oscar Slade, alias Le Loi / Mwass, remains at large as of this writing, and special attention is being given not only to his capture but to monitoring the plenitude of illegitimate children he fathered before his flight from England. Hugo Astley, alias L’Amour / Dagricho, seemingly perished in 1935 under mysterious circumstances involving a young woman named Ursula Brandwyn, but public sightings of him are still occasionally reported. Francis Trevec, alias La Volonté / Machatan / Xu-Xulgulura, also remains at large, having last been seen in Syracuse, where he was continuing his career as a butterfly-collector. At least two reality-negating individuals associated with Trevec through his mentorship by Lucas Machado have been identified and dispatched: one in England by our associate, the DXX dX RXXXXXXXX, and another in New York by Lieutenant Yog Kirk (though the New York individual seems to have fathered a son, AXXXXX MXXXXXX Jr.).

The “Sylvia” entity has not been encountered again since 1934—at least, not under that guise. Please see File ENT-SH’B-N’GURATH for more information pertaining to her suspected true identity.

~ ~ ~

Notes

The characters of La Paix, Sylvia, and Algernon Mailey were created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his 1926 novel The Land of Mist, the third book in his Professor Challenger series (whose first book, The Lost World, is the source of Lord John Roxton). La Paix is only briefly mentioned in the published edition of Land of Mist, but he was the central focus of a chapter cut from the book, entitled “The Darker Side.” In that chapter, we would have learned that La Paix was a medium who was blackmailed by a female spirit named Sylvia until he was saved by the Christian Spiritualist, Mailey. An endnote intended for “The Darker Side” still remains in the published version that clarifies that La Paix was based on the author of a book called Le Livre Pratique des Spirites. This book was written by a Frenchman, Achille Borgnis, and published in 1919. In the book, Borgnis details his Spiritualist adventures as a medium, and how, in his early days, he had a negative run-in with the spirit of a lustful nun named Soeur Amy. Like Sylvia, Amy ostensibly blackmailed Borgnis into paying to put her name in the newspapers. Borgnis was able to escape Amy eventually but was badly shaken by the experience.

As with my version of La Paix, little is known of Achille Borgnis’ life outside of his Spiritualist accounts. I was able to find sources indicating that he and his brother Paul were working on building airplanes as early as 1901, in the company of an engineer, Firmin Bousson. They built the Auto Aviateur aircraft in 1908 and supposedly made a short flight in it, but by 1910 the trio had discontinued their work following a crash that nearly killed them. Beyond that, I could find nothing on Borgnis—not even a birth or death date.

In The Land of Mist, Lord John Roxton describes La Paix as a “black magician.” When I first read this, I wondered if perhaps La Paix had been based on “the Wickedest Man in the World,” Aleister Crowley—however, upon learning more about Borgnis, and “The Darker Side,” I realized this couldn’t be the case. Nonetheless, I decided to incorporate Crowley into this story in the form of three of his fictional doppelgangers. Oscar Clinton Slade is based on Oscar Clinton from H.R. Wakefield’s “He Cometh and He Passeth By” and Oscar Slade from Warwick Deeping’s Exile. Hugo Astley is from Dion Fortune’s The Winged Bull. Francis Trevec is based on a non-Crowley character, the Purple Emperor from Robert W. Chambers’ story of the same name, as well as Machatan from Louis Golding’s The Camberwell Beauty. Lucas Machado (d. 1892) was a real person, though I’ve given him a fictional backstory; Machado’s gravestone was owned as a piece of décor by Satanist Anton LaVey, and can be seen in LaVey’s living room in the 1970 documentary Satanis, the Devil’s Mass. Besides these references I’ve also included nods to fiction by Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Gaston Leroux, and Clark Ashton Smith, among others. I also slipped in references to a few movies, including White Zombie (1932), Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970), and The Witches’ Mountain (1972).

Special thanks to Dr. Christine Ferguson for her vital information on La Paix and “The Darker Side.” Dr. Ferguson will be releasing a new critical edition of The Land of Mist in Summer 2026. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20250429145555/https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2022/10/the-darkerside-arthur-conan-doyle.html