“Deduction tells us,” he continued after a puff, “that the farmers who thought the machine stolen had not properly extinguished the boiler fires. They only banked them. Something in the valves failed, probably due to humidity in the fogs. The steam combine trundled itself away. It followed the lowest courses into London. The valve must have closed in the evening, banking the fires once more. At nightfall, the return of the fog opened the valve once more. The unfortunate woman happened in its way. She was either too drunk or too frightened to move, and was caught up in the rakes.”
“How dreadful,” said Lestrade.
“Eventually,” said Mr. Sherlock Holmes, “the steam machine would have run into the Thames. And this Jack Leatherapron, at least, would disappear from the face of London.”
“But what of the real Ripper?” asked Lestrade.
“Your superintendent has already engaged the services of Doctor Doyle, Lestrade,” said Holmes. “I sha’n’t be needed.
“Jenkins,” said Holmes, turning to us. “Your Irregulars behaved admirably, especially young Malone, there.” He winked at me with his bright eyes like glass. “I wouldn’t mind having to depend upon him in a fight.” Holmes handed Jenkins coins. “Your usual pay, plus a bonus. Now, perhaps you’d better get out of Lestrade’s way.”
We took off then, back to Baker Street, hollering. There Jenkins divided up the money. Then I had to tell them how it was a dozen times or more. By morning, we were laughing. Near dawn, the whole thing seemed miles away, and comical, and already we were calling it Jack the Reaper.
They never did notice my pants.
Sagittarius
RAY RUSSELL
Although a notably literary writer of gothic horror fiction, Ray Russell (1924–1999) has had involvement with some rather cheesy motion pictures. His most famous literary work is the short story “Sardonicus,” described by Stephen King as “perhaps the finest example of the modern gothic ever written.” The story was first published in Playboy in January 1961 and collected in Sardonicus and Other Stories later in the same year. It is about a man whose face is frozen in a perpetually sardonic grin due to a traumatic psychological episode. Also in 1961, Russell adapted it as a screenplay for William Castle; the film was released as Mr. Sardonicus (1961). It anchored the trilogy Unholy Trinity (1967), which also included “Sagittarius” and “Sanguinarius,” a fictionalized version of the life of the “Blood Countess,” Elizabeth Bathory.
Russell also cowrote (with Robert Dillon) the screenplay for Roger Corman’s X (1963), later titled X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, about a scientist who develops eye drops that give him X-ray vision but with horrific consequences. It starred Ray Milland, who also starred in Premature Burial (1962), a film written by Charles Beaumont and Russell, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Premature Burial.” Russell was the solo screenwriter for William Castle’s Zotz! (1962), about a professor who acquires an ancient coin that gives him three powers: to inflict pain, to slow down time, and to kill. Russell was the fiction editor of Playboy in the 1960s and received the World Fantasy Award in 1991 for lifetime achievement.
“Sagittarius” was originally published in Playboy in March 1962. It was first collected in book form in its expanded version in Unholy Trinity (New York, Bantam, 1967).
SAGITTARIUS
Ray Russell
I
The Century Club
“If Mr. Hyde had sired a son,” said Lord Terry, “do you realize that the loathsome child could be alive at this moment?”
It was a humid summer evening, but he and his guest, Rolfe Hunt, were cool and crisp. They were sitting in the quiet sanctuary of the Century Club (so named, say wags, because its members all appear to be close to that age) and, over their drinks, had been talking about vampires and related monsters, about ghost stories and other dark tales of happenings real and imagined, and had been recounting some of their favorites. Hunt had been drinking martinis, but Lord Terry—The Earl Terrence Glencannon, rather—was a courtly old gentleman who considered the martini one of the major barbarities of the Twentieth Century. He would take only the finest, driest sherry before dinner, and he was now sipping his third glass. The conversation had touched upon the series of mutilation-killings that were currently shocking the city, and then upon such classic mutilators as Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper, and then upon murder and evil in general; upon certain works of fiction, such as The Turn of the Screw and its alleged ambiguities, Dracula, the short play A Night at an Inn, the German silent film Nosferatu, some stories of Blackwood, Coppard, Machen, Montague James, Le Fanu, Poe, and finally upon The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which had led the Earl to make his remark about Hyde’s hypothetical son.
“How do you arrive at that, sir?” Hunt asked, with perhaps too much deference, but after all, to old Lord Terry, Hunt must have seemed a damp fledgling for all his thirty-five years, and the younger man could not presume too much heartiness simply because the Earl had known Hunt’s father in the old days back in London. Lord Terry entertained few guests now, and it was a keen privilege to be sitting with him in his club—“The closest thing to an English club I could find in this beastly New York of yours,” he once had granted, grudgingly.
Now, he was deftly evading Hunt’s question by tearing a long, narrow ribbon from the evening paper and twisting it into that topological curiosity, the Möbius strip. “Fascinating,” he smiled, running his finger along the little toy. “A surface with only one side. We speak of ‘split personalities’—schizophrenes, Jekyll-and-Hyde, and whatnot—as if such persons were cleanly divided, marked off, with lines running down their centers. Actually, they’re more like this Möbius strip—they appear to have two sides, but you soon discover that what you thought was the upper side turns out to be the under side as well. The two sides are one, strangely twisting and merging. You can never be sure which side you’re looking at, or exactly where one side becomes the other…I’m sorry, did you ask me something?”
“I merely wondered,” said Hunt, “how you happened to arrive at that interesting notion of yours: that Mr. Hyde’s son—if Hyde had been a real person and if he had fathered a son—might be alive today?”
“Ah,” Lord Terry said, putting aside the strip of paper. “Yes. Well, it’s simple, really. We must first make a great leap of concession and, for sake of argument, look upon Bobbie Stevenson’s story not as a story but as though it were firmly based in fact.”
It certainly was a great leap, but Hunt nodded.
“So much for that. Now, the story makes no reference to specific years—it uses that eighteen-followed-by-a-dash business which writers were so fond of in those days, I’ve never understood why—but we do know it was published in 1886. So, still making concessions for sake of argument, mind you, we might say Edward Hyde was ‘born’ in that year—but born a full-grown man, a creature capable of reproducing himself. We know, from the story, that Hyde spent his time in pursuit of carnal pleasures so gross that the good Dr. Jekyll was pale with shame at the remembrance of them. Surely one result of those pleasures might have been a child, born to some poor Soho wretch, and thrust nameless upon the world? Such a child, born in ’86 or ’87, would be in his seventies today. So you see it’s quite possible.”
He drained his glass. “And think of this now: whereas all other human creatures are compounded of both good and evil, Edward Hyde stood alone in the roster of mankind. For he was the first—and, let us hope, the last—human being who was totally evil. Consider his son. He is the offspring of one parent who, like all of us, was part good and part evil (the mother) and of one parent who was all evil (the father, Hyde). The son, then (to work it out arithmetically, if that is possible in a question of human factors), is three-quarters pure evil, with only a single thin flickering quarter of good in him. We might even weight the dice, as it were, and suggest that his mother, being most likely a drunken drab of extreme moral looseness, was hardly a person to bequeath upon her heir a strong full quarter of good
—perhaps only an eighth, or a sixteenth. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hyde’s son—if he is alive—is the second-most evil person who has ever lived; and—since his father is dead—the most evil person on the face of the earth today!” Lord Terry stood up. “Shall we go in to dinner?” he said.
The dining room was inhabited by men in several stages of advanced decrepitude, and still-handsome Lord Terry seemed, in contrast, rather young. His bearing, his tall, straight body, clear eye, ruddy face, and unruly shock of thick white hair made him a vital figure among a room full of near-ghosts. The heavy concentration of senility acted as a depressant on Hunt’s spirits, and Lord Terry seemed to sense this, for he said, as they sat down, “Waiting room. The whole place is one vast waiting room, full of played-out chaps waiting for the last train. They tell you age has its compensations. Don’t believe it. It’s ghastly.”
Lord Terry recommended the red snapper soup with sherry, the Dover sole, the Green Goddess salad. “Named after a play, you know, The Green Goddess, George Arliss made quite a success in it, long before your time.” He scribbled their choices on the card and handed it to the hovering waiter, also ordering another martini for Hunt and a fourth sherry for himself. “Yes,” he said, his eye fixed on some long-ago stage, “used to go to the theatre quite a lot in the old days. They put on jolly good shows then. Not all this rot…” He focused on Hunt. “But I mustn’t be boorish—you’re somehow involved in the theatre yourself, I believe you said?”
Hunt told him he was writing a series of theatrical histories, that his histories of the English and Italian theatres had already been published and that currently he was working on the French.
“Ah,” the old man said. “Splendid. Will you mention Sellig?”
Hunt confessed that the name was new to him.
Lord Terry sighed. “Such is fame. A French actor. All the rage in Paris at one time. His name was spoken in the same breath with Mounet-Sully’s, and some even considered him the new Lemaître. Bernhardt nagged Sardou into writing a play for him, they say, though I don’t know if he ever did. Rostand left an unfinished play, Don Juan’s Last Night, La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan, which some say was written expressly for Sellig, but Sellig never played it.”
“Why not?”
Lord Terry shrugged. “Curious fellow. Very—what would you say—pristine, very dedicated to the highest theatrical art, classic stuff like Corneille and Racine, you know. The very highest. Wouldn’t even do Hugo or Dumas. And yet he became a name not even a theatrical historian is familiar with.”
“You must make me familiar with it,” Hunt said, as the drinks arrived.
Lord Terry swallowed a white lozenge he took from a slim gold box. “Pills,” he said. “In our youth we sow wild oats; in our dotage we reap pills.” He replaced the box in his weskit pocket. “Yes, I’ll tell you about Sellig, if you like. I knew him very well.”
II
The Dangers of Charm
We were both of an age (said Lord Terry), very young, twenty-three or four, and Paris in those days was a grand place to be young in. The Eiffel Tower was a youngster then, too, our age exactly, for this was still the first decade of the century, you see. Gauguin had been dead only six years, Lautrec only eight, and although that Parisian Orpheus, Jacques Offenbach, had died almost thirty years before, his music and his gay spirit still ruled the city, and jolly parisiennes still danced the can-can with bare derrières to the rhythm of his Galop Infernal. The air was heady with a wonderful mixture of ancien régime elegance (the days of which were numbered and which would soon be dispelled forever by the War) combined with a forward-looking curiosity and excitement about the new century. Best of both worlds, you might say. The year, to be exact about it, was 1909.
It’s easy to remember because in that very year both Coquelin brothers—the actors, you know—died. The elder, more famous brother, Constant-Benoît, who created the role of Cyrano, died first, and the younger, Alexandre Honoré, died scarcely a fortnight later. Here’s a curious tidbit about Coquelin’s Cyrano which you may want to use in your book: he played the first act wearing a long false nose, the second act with a shorter nose, and at the end of the play, wore no false nose at all—the really odd thing being that the audience never noticed it! Sir Cedric told me that just before he died. Hardwicke, you know. Where was I? Oh, yes. It was through a friend of the Coquelin family—a minor comédien named César Baudouin—that I first came to know Paris and, consequently, Sébastien Sellig.
He was appearing at the Théâtre Français, in Racine’s Britannicus. He played the young Nero. And he played him with such style and fervor and godlike grace that one could feel the audience’s sympathies being drawn toward Nero as to a magnet. I saw him afterward, in his dressing room, where he was removing his make-up. César introduced us.
He was a man of surpassing beauty: a face like the Apollo Belvedere, with classic features, a tumble of black curls, large brown eyes, and sensuous lips. I did not compliment him on his good looks, of course, for the world had only recently become unsafe for even the most innocent admiration between men, Oscar Wilde having died in Paris just nine years before. I did compliment him on his performance, and on the rush of sympathy which I’ve already remarked.
“Thank you,” he said, in English, which he spoke very well. “It was unfortunate.”
“Unfortunate?”
“The audience’s sympathies should have remained with Britannicus. By drawing them to myself—quite inadvertently, I assure you—I upset the balance, reversed Racine’s intentions, and thoroughly destroyed the play.”
“But,” observed César lightly, “you achieved a personal triumph.”
“Yes,” said Sellig. “At irreparable cost. It will not happen again, dear César, you may be sure of that. Next time I play Nero, I shall do so without violating Racine.”
César, being a professional, took exception. “You can’t be blamed for your charm, Sébastien,” he insisted.
Sellig wiped off the last streak of paint from his face and began to draw on his street clothes. “An actor who cannot control his charm,” he said, “is like an actor who cannot control his voice or his limbs. He is worthless.” Then he smiled, charmingly. “But we mustn’t talk shop in front of your friend. So very rude. Come, I shall take you to an enchanting little place for supper.”
It was a small, dark place called L’Oubliette. The three of us ate an enormous and very good omelette, with crusty bread and a bottle of white wine. Sellig talked of the differences between France’s classic poetic dramatist, Racine, and England’s, Shakespeare. “Racine is like”—he lifted the bottle and refilled our glasses—“well, he is like a very fine vintage white. Delicate, serene, cool, subtle. So subtle that the excellence is not immediately enjoyed by uninitiated palates. Time is required, familiarity, a return and another return and yet another.”
As an Englishman, I was prepared to defend our bard, so I asked, a little belligerently: “And Shakespeare?”
“Ah, Shakespeare!” smiled Sellig. “Passionel, tumultueux! He is like a mulled red, hot and bubbling from the fire, dark and rich with biting spices and sweet honey! The senses are smitten, one is overwhelmed, one becomes drunk, one reels, one spins…it can be a most agreeable sensation.”
He drank from his glass. “Think of tonight’s play. It depicts the first atrocity in a life of atrocities. It ends as Nero murders his brother. Later, he was to murder his mother, two wives, a trusted tutor, close friends, and untold thousands of Christians who died horribly in his arenas. But we see none of this. If Shakespeare had written the play, it would have begun with the death of Britannicus. It would then have shown us each new outrage, the entire chronicle of Nero’s decline and fall and ignoble end. Enfin, it would have been Macbeth.”
I had heard of a little club where the girls danced in shockingly indecorous costumes, and I was eager to go. César allowed himself to be persuaded to take me there, and I invited Sellig to accompany us. He declined, pleading fatigu
e and a heavy day ahead of him. “Then perhaps,” I said, “you will come with us tomorrow evening? It may not tempt a gentleman of your lofty theatrical tastes, but I’m determined to see a show at this Grand Guignol which César has told me of. Quite bloody and outrageous, I understand—rather like Shakespeare.” Sellig laughed at my little joke. “Will you come? Or perhaps you have a performance…”
“I do have a performance,” he said, “so I cannot join you until later. Suppose we plan to meet there, in the foyer, directly after the last curtain?”
“Will you be there in time?” I asked. “The Guignol shows are short, I hear.”
“I will be there,” said Sellig, and we parted.
III
Stage of Torture
Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol, as you probably know, had been established just a dozen or so years before, in 1896, on the Rue Chaptal, in a tiny building that had once been a chapel. Father Didon, a Dominican, had preached there, and in the many incarnations the building was to go through in later years it was to retain its churchly appearance. Right up to the date of its demolition in 1962, I’m told, it remained exactly as it had always been: quaint, small, huddled inconspicuously in a cobble-stone nook at the end of a Montmartre alley; inside, black-raftered, with gothic tracery writhing along the portals and fleurs-de-lis on the walls, with carved cherubs and a pair of seven-foot angels—dim with the patina of a century—smiling benignly down on the less than three hundred seats and loges…which, you know, looked not like conventional seats and loges but like church pews and confessionals. After the good Father Didon was no longer active, his chapel became the shop of a dealer specializing in religious art; still later, it was transformed into a studio for the academic painter, Rochegrosse; and so on, until, in ’96, a man named Méténier—who had formerly been secretary to a commissaire de police—rechristened it the Théâtre du Grand Guignol and made of it the famous carnival of horror. Méténier died the following year, aptly enough, and Max Maurey took it over. I met Maurey briefly—he was still operating the theatre in 1909, the year of my little story.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 140