As he advanced toward the density of the shadow, he felt the ground becoming less steep beneath his feet. Soon, fine sand replaced the rock. A thick warmth, aggravated by electrical effluvia, revealed the proximity of the central fire. He headed toward a precise point, encountered a panel that he knew well, and without groping, in spite of the pitch darkness, turned the commutator controlling the lighting and ventilation.
Omnium revealed its effects; the lair lit up with a green glow; currents of fresh air dissipated the ambient heaviness. Then he looked, with a snigger of pride, at the natural room hollowed out but the cooling of the masses of lava, about fifty meters high and almost circular, with a radius of fifty feet. The last frissons of the liquid matter, as they died away, had described crazy anfractuosities, improbably balanced overhangs, stalactites with sharp ridges, some of which, reaching the ground, looked like columns designed to support the vault. In the middle of the vault, a monstrous chimney opened, the funnel of which was disposed as if to aspire the heart of the earth, disappearing into one of the flanks of the mountain in a sly, fleeting furrow.
In the side walls, crevasses yawned, allowing the filtration of limpid water, which channels hollowed out by the hands of engineers drained, in order to direct it meekly toward a nearby torrent, whose somersaults were inaudible. If the work of captation had not been completed, if the inferior orifice of the grotto had not been blocked, the cavern would doubtless have constituted a simple reservoir of water, which the ground would have heated up, and which would have escaped in a boiling stream from its sojourn in the location.
That was all that Caresco had permitted nature to leave. The rest had been modified, doctored by human genius. The burning floor—scarcely a hundred meters of masonry separated it from the central fire—had been covered with a refractory substance furrowed by refrigerant conduits. In order that the proximity of the volcano at that point would no longer be a danger, the Superman had warded it off, as he had chased away the darkness, by inundating the walls with omnial light, and the steam-bath heat was dissipated by bringing reserves of cold water into play.
The rest of the adaptation was consecrated to science. Display cases set against the walls of rock contained bizarre instruments and jars with strange contents: anatomical specimens; vague, hallucinatory forms; flesh stripped from life bathing in liquids favoring its conservation in spite of the temperature. There were even entire bodies—embryos, men and women—sacrificed to the surgeon’s passion for operation. Stuck to glass walls, they exposed their incoherent cadaveric attitudes, their masks with frightful or risible rictuses, their open bellies, their projecting viscera, their butchered limbs.
In one corner, the silhouette of a child was outlined by the green backcloth; leaning her shoulder against the transparent wall, she seemed to be trying to escape. A smile was fixed upon her livid lips; her candid blue eyes, having conserved their mirage of life, were also smiling, while the rest of her features, shrunk by astringent substances, had shriveled, offering the paradoxical contrast of extreme youth fused with extreme decrepitude.
Beneath the central chimney, like a formidable sacrificial altar, stood a metallic table with complicated mechanical attachments, catching every gleam in its gears, animated at every corner and every curve by as many cold, cutting and cruel reflections.
In one fissure there was an enormous metal box, hermetically sealed, with a twenty-square-meter screen on the front, the ensemble mounted on a pedestal; and beneath it, a little to one side, a sumptuous bed, in mother-of-pearl, emerging from the ground like the two great parted lips of a shell, draped with rare fabrics in crimson and gold. Not far away, a small red panel shone, with an omnial contact button at its center. Next to it, a shiny circular steel band emerged from the rock, movable on a hinge sealed in the rock, just large enough, on being closed by a spring, to secure the neck of a man.
Caresco took a deep breath of that fearful atmosphere. Here, there were no delicate aromas due to the research of chemists, but the warm odor of rock, the antiseptic emanations of jars, and the indescribable reek of fixed flesh abandoned by life, but which death had not consumed. A viscous disgust oozed from the surroundings. Those exhalations, divine perfumes of destruction, he had breathed impetuously throughout his life before he set foot on the island, and throughout his new life too, since the time when he had set himself outside the law, outside society, becoming the sole master of twenty thousand human beings.
And in communicating with those funereal atoms, in allowing them to penetrate him, through the nose, through the mouth and through every pore of his being; in impregnating himself with them, espousing death in the green glow, he reanimated the precision of his octogenarian memories, reclaimed their fecund joys, the emotions of delicate and ferocious butcheries, of impetuous deeds and inventions, acts of violence, death-rattles, survivals and agonies.
Oh, the bloody epics, the magnificent contests with Nature, the macabre holocausts to science, and to glory, that those infinitesimal particles of death reawakened! As he inhaled them, his breathing accelerated; his rejuvenated heart beat more precipitately; his long-fingered hands seemed to want to draw toward his bosom so many dissected cadavers, so much still-throbbing debris, so much confused pulp...
He took a few steps toward the display-cases, without feeling the pain of a bump he had just sustained on the corner of the table. The rictuses and the masks were calling to him, inviting him to the other side of their glass. He recognized them all; he knew exactly when, and with what objectives, he had provoked their deaths.
He talked to them.
“Ah, there you are, Fabienne,” he said to an open abdomen, of which a frightfully dislocated flap hung down toward the plump ivory of the buttocks, “there you are! How can you bear this long silence, O girl with the laughing mouth, scented by spring? I was still a surgeon in the other world then; I had a clinic for the poor. One day, you came to find me…I can still see your embarrassed smile, when you told me about your miseries, attributable to the impetuosity of one of your lovers. What was wrong with you? I don’t remember…perhaps nothing…but it was necessary, you understand, to learn about the opening of the bile duct into the intestine, and I also wanted to know whether the conduits of the kidney could empty there without inconvenience. I opened you up…you died three days later, still smiling! You were born too soon! Now, I would have succeeded in that petty masterstroke!”
He took a few steps toward another case, about two meters high. An entire body, arms and legs apart, greeted him, with a grimace on his gaping mouth, while the rest of the face was almost covered with sticky red hair, abundantly developed after death. The torso was dangling, sunken in the pelvis.
“It’s you, Druant! You, who had a cancer of the vertebral column! Was it really a cancer, in fact? At any rate, you begged me to rid you of an awkward tumor in that region. Oh, what a beautiful red orgy that was! Three hundred spectators were watching me. I broke your bones, I resected your sacrum and your coccyx! Didn’t they weep with admiration around me, while you were weeping in your soul? You said Aah! and passed on. You were born too soon as well. Now, I would have removed the entire vertebral axis.”
He continued his funereal review. After the immolated of the old world came those of the new continent, innumerable. They were, in general, better conserved; they retained slight traces of the happy life that they had led. To all of them he said a friendly word, calling them by their forenames, remembering some feature of their existence.
He also addressed himself to fragments of people still alive, speaking to them as if to entire beings. He recognized the pieces excised from the half-man, and saluted them. Bizarre subjects completely transformed or reduced, hermaphrodites and human monads, the results of recent attempts, completed the series. The evolution of his surgical conceptions was visible, all tending to bring an individual to the minimum of viscera and senses, after the suppression of the limbs.
Against those he got carried away, accusing them of being go
od for nothing, not even to operate on. His voice, magnified by the echo of the cavern, thundered, amplified by the growls that every anfractuosity repeated. But a hope exalted him. His latest human monad was not dead, and that idea filled him with an exultant joy.
“Reappear, my great deeds of glory!” he cried, going feverishly to put his finger on a button situated next to the nacreous bed, directly below the metal case—the phonographophone, whose screen immediately collected the intensity of an interior light.
He lay down on a fur made from the pelts of a hundred sables, among the gold-fringed crimson of cushions, his body slightly turned toward the spectacle he had just provoked. Immediately, individuals appeared in the transparency. One might have sworn that they were real, so evident were their color and movements, and so natural were the voices that the apparatus also repeated.
For a full hour, Caresco revisited his ardent communions, his violations of flesh, recorded on that surprising stage. The spectacle was always the same: there was always the décor of a round white room, the gleam of metal and implements, red linen, hasty attitudes, curious heads, around an altar raised above pallors splashed with blood, on which a naked body was panting. He was at the center, his arms outstretched, his head sweating, magnifying the Feat; Death or life emerged from his hands.
The cries that he heard ended in outbursts of victory, gasps of agony. Whether the soul persisted, or flew away, he saw himself magnificently conserving his imperturbable indifference. Whether he was operating on kings, emperors or popes, his hand never trembled anymore; the orders that he gave profited equally from his formidable calm. He admired himself, for all those powerful clients, he could now have made into slaves, had he wished.
Then, the interest changed. A click of the phonographophone separated his two lives. He abandoned ancient France, organized his people. Discoveries had progressed; his carescoclast simplified everything; his feats no longer responded to anything but social indications. The two acts of castration and fecundation leveled human harmony. His sole curiosity, revealed subsequently, was that of reducing human being, of finding his monad-individual—a simple dilettantism whose modest interest he did not hide from himself. But he castrated, he castrated! All the courtesans had been his lovers; all of them, appeasing his surgical sadism, gave an increasing voluptuousness to his attitudes, animated his loins with shudders of keen lust. Oh, the captivating intoxications of blood!
He would spend days like this, gazing at the Past with his devouring eye; but at the end of his effort, the screen went dark. Then, in spite of the lighting, he found that everything fell back into the shadow. A great distress followed. He got up, went to lean against the operating table and wept, for a long time. His face, momentarily brightened by triumphal memories, darkened suddenly, and resumed its expression of bleak disillusionment and exhausted age.
What was the point of saluting all those phantoms of past hours? What was the point of continuing to hope for an energy prolonged beyond human limits? He had put an entire people to sleep in enjoyment, and postponed the moment of the tomb; for that people, dying was no more than a painless formality, a brief moment of transmission before the fortunate metempsychosis. Among those twenty thousand servile subjects, stupefied by their pleasures and his doctrine, Caresco had only to reach out his hand, and choose the elements of his surgical sensualities by the handful. All of them sacrificed themselves delightedly, all those virgins offering their sacred viscera to their Supreme Lover. So why did he judge, at present, the inanity of his work? Why was he weeping, with long sobs that the chasm repeated? Why did he see, beyond his present thoughts, a great void, a nothingness, into which he felt that his reason was about to sink?
Suddenly, lucidly, the reason surged from his mind. A phantasm, looming up in front of him, led him to it. A woman, emerging from a halo, came into the impregnable lair. Prostrate on the table, he watched her advance, divinely beautiful in her nudity, her arms folded over her bosom, her long-lashed eyelids adorably veiling the purity of her dark eyes.
What virgin had ever been more desirable? What breasts had ever translated more splendidly the vigor of a race? What flesh had ever possessed such solar reflections, beneath the tumble of golden hair? The perfection of nature had never been more sincerely expressed.
She was still advancing toward him, magnificently serene and chaste.
“O virgin among virgins!” he stammered. “Here you are, at last, then! Look! I was waiting for you. I’m trembling on seeing you appear—for no courtesan in my realm, no fecund mother, has your regal gait, nor your heavenly smile! Yes, you really are the foremost virgin in the world, as I am the foremost Pasteur. I have chosen you above all, as distant from Passion as any creature of heart could be, and I have impregnated you with my bewitching inspirations of Voluptuousness! O magnificent enemy! In your flesh, rival nature triumphed over my magic; and I only ended up making you love a man, you whom I wanted unpolluted by a man but possessed by my courtesans, raised by them to the diapason of virginal erethism, which alone inspires my intoxication! Yes, nature rebelled in you. And now here you are, my slave, tamed by my science of Happiness, ready to surrender yourself to me!”
Gasping, his face filled with desire, he knelt down, and kissed the feet of the woman he had seen advancing, which he touched delightedly. Then, having stood up, with his two powerful arms disposed in arcs, he lifted her up and carried her like a trophy of love to his operating table.
He seized the hilt of a sharp scalpel, and he was about to plunge the steel into that divine pallor in order to deliver himself the supreme sensuality when an unknown force suddenly paralyzed his arm. At the same time, he heard a loud clamor made by a thousand distant voices, a thousand protests from beyond the grave, rise up behind him, in the enormous solitude of the lair...
Who, then, dared to infringe the law and cross the threshold of his cavern? Who, then, dared to protest?
Gripped by a vague anxiety he turned round, murmuring; “Me, Caresco! Me, the Superman! Me! Someone is permitting themselves...”
What he saw then nailed him to the spot with stupor. The cadavers contained in the jars had suddenly disengaged themselves from their flaccid immobility. They were advancing toward him, horrible and comical, causing their grimaces to move, their rictuses, their violet-tinted wounds, their caved-in skulls, their open bellies, their overflowing viscera, their dissected limbs. They were not walking; they seemed rather to be gliding, undulating, as if they had conserved, over the ground, the indecisive buoyancy of their submersion.
All of them were out, all those to whom he had been talking a few minutes ago, including Fabienne, a flap of whose abdomen fell back over the plump ivory of her buttocks, and Druant, whose gaping mouth was almost covered by sticky red hair. There were even portions of limbs and organs, detached shreds, hands and feet with jutting tendons, a toothless jaw, spongy spleens, polished and gleaming livers, extraordinarily interlaced and clicking bones, which were following the movement, also advancing, hopping along. One more adventurous heart, bouncing like a rubber ball, brushed the surgeon, whistling.
Stupefied, he gazed at that fantastic invasion, buzzing, grating and squeaking, whose circle was getting tighter and tighter, and swelling, piling up all the way to the vault, so many subjects were there, all the way to the shady flue of the central chimney.
“Indeed! Are you going mad?”
He laughed. But immediately, he shivered at the idea that perhaps he was sinking into madness. In any case, the interest of the macabre spectacle immediately gripped him again. Wanting to know whether these resuscitated individuals were enemies, or whether they were drawing closer in order to examine his magnificent rape at closer range, he winked at Fabienne to make her smile, for he had noticed the darkening of her expression.
But Fabienne, pointing at the virginal body lying on the sacrificial table, protested: “Do you dare to soil that abdomen too? You have no right to that foreigner! She is sacred to you! She is ennobled by the purest trans
ports of the soul, by an ideal that you do not know, that your cruelty prevents you even from conceiving. She is Good, Honesty, Heroism, Purity—all splendors of which you are ignorant, which you did not think it necessary to impose on your people, which you, yourself, have trodden underfoot throughout your life. She is impregnable! She is holy! I forbid you to touch her, disemboweler!”
Caresco shrugged his shoulders. That dissected whore was truly grotesque, wanting to preach morality and breach the omnipotence of a man like him! Impatient at being delayed so long, therefore, he was about to plunge his scalpel when Druant spoke in his turn. The sounds escaped lugubriously from his mouth, the lips of which did not move.
“All, then? You want them all? But that one defies you! She is inviolable, and our desire—that of your victims—is that you respect her! You shall not profane that virginal flesh, which your maleficia have been unable to trouble, but which is too white to retain the trace of soiling. You shall not touch her: we forbid it!”
A little sputum came to flow from the surgeon’s lips; their corners parted as the chops of a ferocious animal part to reveal the cruelty of pointed fangs prompt to rip. In sum, all those ridiculously resuscitated cadavers were annoying him. He pulled his head back between his shoulders, preparing to pounce on them and bowl them over. His propelled foot, aimed at Druant’s flaccidity, encountered nothing but emptiness, and its momentum nearly caused him to fall to the ground, under the laughter of all the gaping mouths, all the wounds, of all that violet flesh.
“Damn! I’ll kill! I’ll kill!”
He started whirling round, brandishing his scalpel, all the horrors of dementia engraved on his face, his eyes exorbitant, the sinews and veins of his neck stretching as if to snap. But a sideways glance at the virgin caused him to go pale, and he rediscovered, running from head to toe, the same frisson of terror that he had felt once before, at the beginning of his career, when he saw a patient die during the deed: a frisson that his indifference had not allowed to recur thereafter.
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