by Ray Russell
“The medical arts will never cease earning my admiration,” said Sardonicus.
I filled the syringe. My patient said, “Wait.”
“Are you afraid?” I asked.
“Since that memorable night in my father’s grave,” he replied, “I have not known fear. I had a surfeit of it then; it will last out my lifetime. No: I simply wish to give instructions to one of my men.” He arose from the table, and, going to the door, told one of his helots to bring Madam Sardonicus to the laboratory.
“Why must she be here?” I asked.
“The sight of her,” he said, “may serve you as a remembrancer of what awaits her in the event of my death, or of that other punishment she may expect should your treatment prove ineffectual.”
Maude was brought into our presence. She looked upon my equipment—the bubbling retorts and tubes, the pointed syringe—with amazement and fright. I began to explain the principle of the treatment to her, but Sardonicus interrupted: “Madam is not one of your students, Sir Robert; it is not necessary she know these details. Delay no longer; begin at once!”
He stretched out upon the table again, fixing his eyes upon me. I proffered Maude a comforting look, and walked over to my patient. He did not wince as I drove the needle of the syringe into the left, and then the right, side of his face. “Now, sir,” I said—and the tremor in my voice surprised me—“we must wait a period of ten minutes.” I joined Maude, and talked to her in low tones, keeping my eyes always upon my patient. He stared at the ceiling; his face remained solidified in that unholy grin. Precisely ten minutes later, a short gasp escaped him; I rushed to his side, and Maude followed close behind me.
We watched with consuming fascination as that clenched face slowly softened, relaxed, changed; the lips drawing closer and closer to each other, gradually covering those naked teeth and gums, the graven creases unfolding and becoming smooth. Before a minute had passed, we were looking down upon the face of a serenely handsome man. His eyes flashed with pleasure, and he made as if to speak.
“No,” I said, “do not attempt speech yet. The muscles of your face are so slackened that it is beyond your power, at present, to move your lips. This condition will pass.” My voice rang with exultation, and for the moment our enmity was forgotten. He nodded, then leapt from the table and dashed to a mirror which hung on a wall nearby.
Though his face could not yet express his joy, his whole body seemed to unfurl in a great gesture of triumph and a muffled cry of happiness burst in his throat.
He turned and seized my hand; then he looked full into Maude’s face. After a moment, she said, “I am happy for you, sir,” and looked away. A rasping laugh sounded in his throat, and he walked to my work bench, tore a leaf from one of my notebooks, and scribbled upon it. This he handed to Maude, who read it and passed it to me. The writing said:
Fear not, lady. You will not be obliged to endure my embraces. I know full well that the restored beauty of my face will weigh not a jot in the balance of your attraction and repugnance. By this document, I dissolve our pristine marriage. You who have been a wife only in name are no longer even that. I give you your freedom.
I looked up from my reading. Sardonicus had been writing again. He ripped another leaf from the notebook and handed it directly to me. It read:
This paper is your safe conduct out of the castle and into the village. Gold is yours for the asking, but I doubt if your English scruples will countenance the accepting of my money. I will expect you to have quit these premises before morning, taking her with you.
“We will be gone within the hour,” I told him, and guided Maude towards the door. Before we left the room, I turned for the last time to Sardonicus.
“For your unclean threats,” I said; “for the indirect but no less vicious murder of this lady’s parents; for the defiling of your own father’s grave; for the greed and inhumanity that moved you even before your blighted face provided you with an excuse for your conduct; for these and for what crimes unknown to me blacken your ledger—accept this token of my censure and detestation.” I struck him forcibly on the face. He did not respond. He was standing there in the laboratory when I left the room with Maude.
IX
NOT GOD ABOVE NOR THE FIEND BELOW
This strange account should probably end here. No more can be said of its central character, for neither Maude nor I saw him or heard of him after that night. And of us two, nothing need be imparted other than the happy knowledge that we have been most contentedly married for the past twelve years and are the parents of a sturdy boy and two girls who are the lovely images of their mother.
However, I have mentioned my friend Lord Henry Stanton, the inveterate traveller and faithful letter writer, and I must copy out now a portion of a missive I received from him only a week since, and which, in point of fact, has been the agent that has prompted me to unfold this whole history of Mr. Sardonicus:
“. . . But, my dear Bobbie,” wrote Stanton, “in truth there is small pleasure to be found in this part of the world, and I shall be glad to see London again. The excitements and the drama have all departed (if, indeed, they ever existed) and one must content one’s self with the stories told at the hearthstones of inns, with the flames crackling and the mulled wine agreeably stinging one’s throat. The natives here are most fond of harrowing stories, tales of gore and grue, of ghosts and ghouls and ghastly events, and I must confess a partiality to such entertainments myself. They will show you a stain on a wall and tell you it is the blood of a murdered innocent who met her death there fifty years before: no amount of washing will ever remove the stain, they tell you in sepulchral tones, and indeed it deepens and darkens on a certain day of the year, the anniversary of her violent passing. One is expected to nod gravely, of course, and one does, if one wishes to encourage the telling of more stories. Back in the Eleventh Century, you will be apprised, a battalion of foreign invaders were vanquished by the skeletons of long-dead patriots who arose from their tombs to defend their homeland and then returned to the earth when the enemy had been driven from their borders. (And since they are able to show you the very graves of these lively bones, how can one disbelieve them, Bobbie?) Or they will point to a desolate skull of a castle (the country here abounds in such depressing piles) and tell you of the spectral tyrant who, a scant dozen years before, despaired and died alone there. Deserted by the minions who had always hated him, the frightening creature roamed the village, livid and emaciated, his mind shattered, mutely imploring the succour of even the lowliest beggars. I say mutely, and that is the best part of this tall tale: for, as they tell it around the fire, these inventive folk, this poor unfortunate could not speak, could not eat, and could not drink. You ask why? For the simple reason that, though he clawed most horribly at his own face, and though he enlisted the aid of strong men—he was absolutely unable to open his mouth. Cursed by Lucifer, they say, he thirsted and starved in the midst of plenty, surrounded by kegs of drink and tables full of the choicest viands, suffering the tortures of Tantalus, until he finally died. Ah, Bobbie! the efforts of our novelists are pale stuff compared to this! English litterateurs have not the shameless wild imaginations of these people! I will never again read Mrs. Radcliffe with pleasure, I assure you, and the ghost of King Hamlet will from this day hence, strike no terror to my soul, and will fill my heart with but paltry pity. Still, I have journeyed in foreign climes quite enough for one trip, and I long for England and that good English dullness which is relieved only by you and your dear lady (to whom you must commend me most warmly). Until next month, I remain,
Your wayward friend,
HARRY STANTON
Bohemia, March, 18 –
Now, it would not be a difficult feat for the mind to instantly assume that the unfortunate man in that last tale was Sardonicus—indeed, it is for that reason that I have not yet shown Stanton’s letter to Maude: for she, albeit she deeply loathed Sardonicu
s, is of such a compassionate and susceptible nature that she would grieve to hear of him suffering a death so horrible. But I am a man of science, and I do not form conclusions on such gossamer evidence. Harry did not mention the province of Bohemia that is supposed to have been the stage of that terrible drama; and his letter, though written in Bohemia, was not mailed by Harry until he reached Berlin, so the postmark tells me nothing. Castles like that of Sardonicus are not singular in Bohemia—Harry himself says the country “abounds in such depressing piles”—so I plan to suspend conclusive thoughts on the matter until I welcome Harry home and can elicit from him details of the precise locality.
For if that “desolate skull of a castle” is Castle Sardonicus, and if the story of the starving man is to be believed, then I will be struck by an awesome and curious thing:
Five days I occupied myself in extracting a liquor from the South American plants. During those days, dogs were carried dead from my laboratory. I had deliberately killed the poor creatures with the undiluted poison, in order to impress Sardonicus with its deadliness. I never intended to—and, in fact, never did—prepare a safe dilution of that lethal drug, for its properties were too unknown, its potentiality too dangerous. The liquid I injected into Sardonicus was pure, distilled water—nothing more. This had always been my plan. The ordering of materia medica from far-flung lands was but an elaborate façade designed to work not upon the physical part of Sardonicus, but upon his mind; for after Keller, Morignac, Buonagente and my own massaging techniques had failed, I was convinced that it was only through his mind that his body could be cured. It was necessary to persuade him, however, that he was receiving a powerful medicament. His mind, I had hoped, would provide the rest—as, in truth, it did.
If the tale of the “spectral tyrant” prove true, then we must look upon the human mind with wonderment and terror. For, in that case, there was nothing—nothing corporeal—to prevent the wretched creature from opening his mouth and eating his fill. Alone in that castle, food aplenty at his fingertips, he had suffered a dire punishment which came upon him—to paraphrase Sardonicus’ very words—not from God above or the Fiend below, but from within his own breast, his own brain, his own soul.
Sagittarius
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 t
ime.” 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 focussed 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.”