by James Carnac
We emerged at last in a large cellar, feebly lit by several braziers of glowing coals; the atmosphere was misty with smoke and insufferably hot. The confines of the apartment were lost in the murky shadows, but in the centre was an oasis of reddish light in which stood a singular apparatus which necessarily riveted my attention immediately I entered the chamber. It was a large, vertical wheel of wood and iron; almost, I might say, a double wheel for the rim was perhaps a foot wide and was supported by two sets of spokes. It was held between a pair of strong uprights and from the hub on either side projected an iron handle. Upon the upper circumference of the wheel and occupying roughly a third of that circumference was a still, white figure bound down with blackened cords.
Obeying as much my own feeling of curiosity as my guide’s pressure upon my elbow, I approached the wheel and its burden. The figure was that of a woman twisted and, apparently, unconscious. Several gaping wounds upon her person slowly oozed blood which ran and dropped down her sides on to the framework of the wheel. And then I perceived that upon the floor beneath was clamped a kind of adjustable slide bearing upon its upper face a set of blood-stained triangular spikes.
My guide went to the wheel and, grasping the woman’s hair, pulled the head sideways towards him; I uttered a quick gasp as I caught sight of the expression upon the face thus brought into view. The man in black released the hair and, putting out a finger, tentatively poked the flesh of the shoulder. He turned away with a shrug and, following the direction of his eyes, I perceived another figure.
Upon a low stool just within the circle of light cast by a brazier sat a man in a black gown, his head covered by a flat, black cap terminating in a long scarf-like appendage which was wrapped about his throat. Before him, upon a grotesquely low desk, was an ink-horn and several sheets of parchment, and he was slowly and deliberately sharpening a quill pen. He looked up at my companion and me, and his mouth stretched into a grin which revealed toothless gums. Almost instantly the grin faded and his face assumed an expression of sanctimonious solemnity. That rapid change suggested to my mind a man who has recalled a joke in church and then suddenly recollected his position.
Attracted by a repetition of the moaning sounds which had reached my ears when descending the stairs, I now looked around the vault, trying to penetrate the darkness with eyes rendered more susceptible to it. I could perceive dimly several contorted forms and curious appliances around which moved gnomish figures; but I had no time to examine these things further, for my guide took my elbow and led me back up the stairs.
We passed into the cold freshness of the night and I took a deep breath of the moist air. It was still raining heavily but, far off on an unfamiliar skyline, I could see a dim streak of light suggestive of a clearing dawn. My companion grasped me affectionately by the arm and led me, at a rapid pace, across muddy fields.
The sound of breathing at my other elbow drew my attention and, looking sideways, I perceived a second man. He too was clothed in black, but his dress was of a different fashion. He wore a black shirt with wide sleeves and a black waistcoat descending nearly to his knees. His head was close cropped and the face was that of the first man. I turned my eyes from one to the other, examining each attentively, and then I realized the cause of that sense of familiarity of which I had previously been conscious when approached by the first man. Both faces were my own. It is true that both were thinner and older, but the likeness was, when once observed, unmistakable.
I had barely remarked this phenomenon when a third figure joined our party and, a few seconds later, a fourth. Then a fifth materialized from the darkness and I found myself walking in the midst of a group; and all those nightmare figures bore my own countenance.
The fashion of each man’s dress varied, but all were black with the exception of that of the last comer. He was clothed in dingy red. His coat was cut away sharply to long tails, and its collar was absurdly large and high. Round his neck was a high stock of dirty white, and upon his long, greasy hair was set rakishly a triangular hat bearing a filthy tricolour cockade. I fixed the period of his costume immediately from recollections of David’s paintings which I had seen in the Louvre.
So, surrounded by these solid and yet ghost-like forms, I tramped on and on towards that brightening ragged cleft of light on the horizon. We encountered, and paused a few seconds to examine, in the course of that walk almost every device for inflicting mutilation and death which relatively modern mankind has had the ingenuity to construct. That which I first supposed to be a line of telegraph poles resolved itself, as I looked upwards, into a row of almost incredibly tall gibbets from which hung ragged forms which swayed in the wind creakily. A loathsome smell was borne to my nostrils, and vast, black flapping shapes rose from the gallows’ heads and vanished, croaking, into the darkness above. At the foot of one of the gibbets squatted and crooned a bundle of wet rags; it raised its head as we passed and I saw the face of my old acquaintance Mrs. Mahon.
We passed wheels raised upon high poles from which hung tatters of flesh and flapping rags; bones projected from them and large birds wheeled above or settled upon the remains, pecking with quick digging jerks of their bills. Many other things we saw and then came, at last, to a ghostly square in which stood a tall erection painted or stained a dirty red. It looked like the elongated lintel of a door which has been separated from its surrounding walls, and between the uprights a triangular silhouette rose and fell with the unfailing regularity of an engine’s piston. To my ears came an alternate swish, thump; swish, thump; and underlying the rhythm the low, scarcely perceptible sound of singing.
—
I was suddenly alone. The guillotine had vanished, as well as my companions. It was growing light and I stood, soaked and shivering, in the middle of a field. In my ears still rang the echo of a low, guttural chuckling.
I looked around me, and there, but a short distance away, was evidence of a roadway—telegraph-poles, lamp-posts and, further on, a group of houses. But I did not immediately move towards these signs of civilization; I was muzzily revisualizing the things which I had seen, and groping for their import. As my brain cleared to something like its normal coherence, I perceived, in a flash of insight, who and what I was. I was not the descendant of hang-men and torturers; I had been, in my own person, each of those hang-men and torturers. I knew now, for a certainty, that life—as we call it—does not begin with birth and end with death; it goes on endlessly. There is no Heaven and no hell; no cessation from a long sequence of one existence after another, pre-ordained and inexorably directed. The fate of every man has, indeed, been hung about his neck, but in the dim remoteness of a past beyond our reckoning. And as this truth (as I then supposed it to be) came home to me I understood fully for the first time that which I had before dimly suspected. Mankind was, indeed, in the grip of a Power, but not a benevolent one; rather was it devilish and remorseless. The horrors and sufferings of humanity were now made plain; it was fathered not by a benevolent Deity susceptible to prayers, praise, tips of shrines and candles, and the smell of incense; but by the Powers of Darkness, implacable and probably satyric.
I raised my fists to the grey sky and cursed the Powers with every foul expression I could call to mind. And in that moment my experience moved from the plane of grotesque horror and despair to the realms of pure pantomime.
“’Ere, you mustn’t use that sort of language ’ere, sir,” said a voice. A policeman was standing beside me, and near him was a lamp-post. How I had reached the road I do not know. The appearance of this solid harlequinade-like constable arrested my rhetoric and I burst into a peal of laughter.
“I should get along ’ome if I was you, sir,” the officer continued, eyeing me unemotionally.
I took his advice and got along home; at least I set about that enterprise, for I had no idea of my whereabouts and did not think it discreet to enquire. The constable had already misinterpreted my emotion, I had no doubt.
/> I reached my lodgings at five that morning to the surprise of my landlady who assisted my dripping and staggering form up to bed.
Chapter 15
I am well aware that nowadays my associates at the club regard me as a cynical old man with a perverse and almost malevolent sense of humour; they are too polite knowingly to betray this, but I am not deceived. And I am equally aware that they attribute my cynicism to my physical infirmity, and tolerate it largely on that account—and because I happen to play a good hand at bridge.
But although I was never of a sunny disposition, I can date a definite change in my outlook on life from that evening on which I realized that some warp or kink in my nature set me apart from my fellows or, if not entirely from my fellows, at least from certain amenities of life. To say that I was embittered would, perhaps, be hardly correct; for embitterment, as I understand the term, implies a certain misanthropy and possibly despondency. Perhaps embitterment is as good a term as any, but it was a cynical and devil-may-care bitterness, and once I had overcome my first access of horror I was able to leaven my attitude of mind with a certain spice of grim humour.
However, I had to look this fact in the face: that for a reason presumably due to hereditary influence I felt, on occasion, an almost overpowering urge to cut human flesh and to shed blood. What a penny-dreadful phrase that seems and how contemptuously it would be regarded by the gentle reader if encountered in a work of fiction!
I looked the fact in the face, as I say, examining it with cold calculation, and I arrived at the following conclusions:
That sooner or later I should yield to my obsession and cut a throat. I had already had one narrow escape in connection with my uncle; the incident with my fiancée would have been a second had a knife been then available. I must make it clear, however, that the actual deed to which I was tempted was not, in itself, unpleasant to contemplate. It did not fill me with revulsion even when looked back upon after the temporary feeling had passed. Nor did the result which my yielding to temptation would entail to my protagonist appeal to me as the stronger motive for the effort of withstanding temptation. I was not thinking so much of the effect upon my victim as the effect upon myself. For if I yielded to my urge in ordinary circumstances it was in the highest degree probable that I should be taken and hanged.
The foregoing being admitted, the question arose: could I overcome my craving by deliberately yielding to it in circumstances which would insure the minimum amount of risk to myself? Could I keep it in abeyance by “blowing off steam”? And would one indulgence still my craving? Having once experienced the sensation of cutting a throat, would my craving be satisfied? In other words, could I insure a higher degree of safety for myself and, incidentally, for other reasonably useful members of the community, by cutting the throat of a person who could well be spared in carefully arranged circumstances of secrecy?
This may seem a cold-blooded and callous speculation, but it was a logical method of dealing with a situation in which I had to think out things for myself. And I rather pride myself on my ability to grapple with personal problems uninfluenced by feeling, as opposed to pure reason. I like to worry out details, to exercise my foresight, to look at a thing from all sides. But in dealing with this particular problem, I was conscious of, but tried to keep down, the fact that I wanted to reach the decision that the solution lay in yielding to my urge in circumstances of secrecy. I craved for the experience of cutting a throat.
When I speak of secrecy in connection with the enterprise which I contemplated I mean, of course, that the circumstances of time and place must be so planned as to render detection improbable. For I was not so abstracted as to be unaware that what I had in mind—no matter what the status of my “subject”—amounted to the punishable offence of murder. For the community as a whole has for long professed to labour under the belief that all human life is sacred.
People refer occasionally to the sacredness of human life and appear to believe in it, but I see no reason to regard human life as any more sacred than animal life. A man is permitted to kill an amiable and inoffensive animal, such as a dog, because the dog’s life is not “sacred,” but he may not kill a man who, by his disposition and habits, may be obviously far less fitted to live than is the dog. The life of the drunken, dissolute and dishonest scoundrel is “sacred.”
Apropos of this matter of life-taking: I remember that, quite recently, a fellow-member of my club mentioned to me the fact that a man with whom he had some slight acquaintance had been killed by an elephant in the “course” of the “sport” of big-game hunting. He referred to the accident with sorrow. I agreed that it was unfortunate for his acquaintance, but pointed out that had the latter succeeded in his enterprise of shooting the elephant it would have been equally unfortunate for the animal. (Not that an elephant is necessarily amiable and inoffensive, nor hunters necessarily scoundrels.) My fellow-member looked at me askance and moved away. Being quite unable to think for himself, he was obsessed with that idea: the sacredness of human life.
In order to demonstrate the hypocrisy and cant behind this “sacredness of human life” plea it is only necessary to refer to one fact—the persistence of war through the whole history of civilization. It is true that at the time of writing a genuine attempt to “outlaw” war is being made in enlightened circles; but that there is no real belief in the wickedness of war is shown by the continued respect in which the professional killer is held. The army is still considered a respectable career. And not only do we respect these warriors, we also honour those ingenious fellows who add to the killing efficiency of their active confreres. Inventors of killing devices to be used in war are not boiled in oil; they are rewarded with riches (unless they are unbusinesslike enough to get exploited by a capitalist, in which case the exploiter is rewarded with riches).
Let it be understood that I am trying to indicate the impossibility of squaring the existence of war with a belief in the sanctity of human life; I am not stating that war is any sillier than the belief. For war, after all, is a result of the instinct to kill implanted by Nature in the human breast as a co-operator with pestilence, earthquake and so forth, for the limitation of the world’s population.
Touching the “sacredness of human life” idea, I will produce another fact, though this is not necessary—the development of the motor-car.
Nobody will deny (and if anybody does there are statistics to confute him) that the motor-car is a dangerous device. In the hands of the unskilled—and, to a lesser degree, in those of the skilled—driver, the motor-car is a menace to human life. Every motor-driver is a potential homicide. In a community which really believed in the sanctity of human life, a man in a motor-car, driving at the speed at present permitted, would be regarded with as little favour as would a boy playing in Ludgate Circus with a loaded shot-gun.
I must admit to a strong prejudice against the automobile; not because it assists to thin the population, however, but because it has ruined our previously peaceful countryside. Where now in all England can I be free from this noisy, stinking and dust-raising contraption and from the horrible advertisements and petrol pumps which arise by its spoor?
—
However, I must not ramble from my point.
I was beginning to state, when my testiness led me afield, that I was under no misapprehension as to the lawlessness of the enterprise which I contemplated; I have no great respect for the lunatic laws of our civilization but I recognize that they exist. I knew that if I was convicted of killing even the most degraded outcast I should be hanged. This did not deter me from working out my plans; in fact, it added a sporting touch. Although I am no gambler in the accepted sense of the term—inasmuch as I never bet and am quite indifferent to the stakes when I am playing cards—I felt rather excited at the thought that I was contemplating an enterprise in which every man’s hand would be against me, one in which my stake was the highest I could wager and an enterprise, the
refore, which must be planned with every atom of foresight I could muster.
And in the early days of August 1888 I sat down and deliberately thought out the adventure to which I now felt practically committed.
Chapter 16
In the days of which I write there was no supply of popular “detective” literature; the flood of studies in criminology disguised as novels which now cover our bookstalls had not then begun. Edgar Allan Poe was the only writer of note—or, at least, the only writer with whose work I was familiar—who had dealt with crime and its detection in the form of fiction. I do not include De Quincey with Poe because his “Murder as a Fine Art” has little bearing on the detection of crime.
In common with my contemporaries, therefore, I had received no priming in the technique of murder, such as is nowadays automatically acquired in the course of novel reading. In pitting my wits against the professional crime detectors I had nothing but my common sense to guide me; and being, as I have said, unprimed in police procedure I could only estimate the methods employed, though I had, of course, assimilated a few hints from my reading of criminal trials in the newspapers.
I could perceive, however, that the police, not being gifted with supernatural powers, could only arrest a criminal—let us say a murderer—in certain definite circumstances which could, I thought, be brought under three headings. First, they could catch their man red-handed; that is, in the actual commission of the murder or in an environment closely connected with it. Secondly, they could establish his identity by following up a clue to that identity such as a personal article left on the scene of the murder. Thirdly, they could reach an assumption of identity by establishing the motive of the murder, ultimately confirming the assumption by ascertaining the movements of the suspect at the time of the murder and examining any apparently suspicious circumstances connected with him.