Section 24

“Tt would burn like tinder,’ he said.
They went through the rooms on the first floor, and they were as empty and as cheerless. Pres- ently they came to that which had been Margaret’s. In a bowl were dead flowers. Her brushes were still on the toilet table. But it was a gloomy cham- ber, with its dark oak, and so comfortless that Susie shuddered. Arthur stood for a time and looked at it, but he said nothing. They found themselves again on the stairs and they went to the second story. But here they seemed to be at the top of the house.
“How does one get up to the attics?” said Arthur, looking about him with surprise.
He paused for a while to think. Then he nodded his head.
“There must be some steps leading out of one of the rooms.”
They went on. And now the ceilings were much lower, with heavy beams, and there was no furniture at all. The emptiness seemed to make everything more terrifying. They felt that they were on the threshold of a great mystery, and Susie’s heart began to beat very fast. Arthur con- ducted his examination with the greatest method;
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he walked round each room carefully, looking for a door that might lead to a staircase; but there was no sign of one.
“What will you do if you can’t find the way up?” asked Susie.
“T shall find the way up,” he answered.
They came to the staircase once more and had discovered nothing. They looked at one another helplessly.
“Tt’s quite clear there is a way,” said Arthur, with impatience. “There must be something in the nature of a hidden door somewhere or other.”
He leaned against the balustrade and meditated. The light of his lantern threw a narrow ray upon the opposite wall.
“T feel certain it must be in one of the rooms at the end of the house. That seems the most natural place to put a means of ascent to the attics.”
They went back, and again he examined the pannelling of a small room that had outside walls on three sides of it. It was the only one that did not lead into another.
“Tt must be here,” he said.
Presently he gave a little laugh, for he saw that a small door was concealed by the woodwork. He pressed it where he thought there might be a spring, and it flew open. Their lantern showed them a narrow wooden staircase. They walked up and found themselves in front of a door. Arthur tried it, but it was locked. He smiled grimly.
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“Will you get back a little,” he said.
He lifted his axe and swung it down upon the latch. The handle was shattered, but the lock did not yield. He shook his head. As he paused for a moment, and there was complete silence, Susie distinctly heard a slight noise. She put her hand on Arthur’s arm to call his attention to it, and with strained ears they listened. There was something alive on the other side of that door. They heard a curious sound: it was not that of a human voice, it was not the crying of an animal, it was extraordi- nary.
It was a sort of gibber, hoarse and rapid, and it filled them with an icy terror because it was so weird and so unnatural.
“Come away, Arthur,’ said Susie. ‘ Come away.”
“There’s some living thing in there,’ he an- swered.
He did not know why the sound horrified him. The sweat broke out on his forehead.
“Something awful will happen to us,” whispered Susie, shaking with uncontrollable fear.
“The only thing is to break the door down.”
The horrid gibbering was drowned by the noise he made. Quickly, without pausing, he began to hack at the oak door with all his might. In rapid succession his heavy blows rained down, and the sound echoed through the empty house. There was a crash, and the door swung back. They had
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been so long in almost total darkness that they were blinded for an instant by the dazzling light. And then instinctively they started back, for, as the door opened, a wave of heat came out upon them so that they could hardly breathe. The place was like an oven.
They entered. It was lit by enormous lamps the light of which was increased by reflectors, and warmed by a great furnace. They could not un- derstand why so intense a heat was necessary. The narrow windows were closed. Dr. Porhoét caught sight of a thermometer and was astounded at the temperature it indicated. The room was used evi- dently as a laboratory. On broad tables were test- tubes, basins and baths of white porcelain, measur- ing-glasses, and utensils of all sorts; but the surpris- ing thing was the great scale upon which everything was. Neither Arthur nor Dr. Porhoét had ever seen such gigantic measures nor such large test- tubes. There were rows of bottles, like those in the dispensary of a hospital, each containing great quantities of a different chemical, The three friends stood in silence. The emptiness of the room contrasted so oddly with its appearance of be- ing in immediate use that it was uncanny. Susie felt that he who worked there was in the midst of his labours, and might return at any moment; he could only have gone for an instant into another chamber in order to see the progress of some experiment. It was quite silent. Whatever had
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made those vague, unearthly noises was hushed by their approach.
The door was closed between this room and the next. Arthur opened it, and they found themselves in a long, low attic, ceiled with great rafters, as brilliantly lit and as hot as the first. Here too were broad tables laden with retorts, instruments for heating, huge test-tubes, and all manner of ves- sels. The furnace that warmed it gave a very steady but extreme heat. Arthur’s gaze travelled slowly from table to table, and he wondered what Haddo’s experiments had really been. The air was heavy with an extraordinary odour: it was not musty like that of the closed rooms through which they had passed, but singularly pungent, disagree- able and sickly. He asked himself what it could spring from. Then his eyes fell upon a huge re- ceptacle that stood on the table nearest to the fur- nace. It was covered with a white cloth. He went up to it and took this off. The vessel was about four feet high, round, and shaped somewhat like a washing tub, but it was made of glass more than an inch thick. In it was a spherical mass, a little larger than a football, of a peculiar, livid col- our. The surface was smooth, but rather coarsely grained, and over it ran a dense system of blood- vessels. It reminded the two medical men of those huge tumours which are preserved in spirit in hhos- pital museums. Susie looked at it with an incom- prehensible disgust. Suddenly she gave a cry.
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“Good God, it’s moving!” Arthur put his hand on her quickly to quieten her and bent down with irresistible curiosity. They
- saw that it was a mass of flesh, but of some strange,
horrible flesh unlike that of any human being; and it pulsated regularly. The movement was quite distinct, up and down, like the delicate heaving of a woman’s breast when she is asleep. Arthur touched the thing with one finger and it shrank slightly.
“It’s quite warm,” he said.
He turned it over, and it remained in the posi- tion in which he had placed it, as if there were neither top nor bottom to it. But they could see now, irregularly placed on one side, a few short hairs. They were just like human hairs.
“Ts it alive?” whispered Susie, struck with hor- ror and amazement.
66 Yes! 9
Arthur seemed fascinated. He could not take his eyes off the loathsome thing. He watched it slowly heave with even motion.
“What can it mean?” he asked.
He looked at Dr. Porhoét with pale and startled face. A thought was coming to him, but a thought so unnatural, extravagant, and terrible, that he pushed it from him with a movement of both hands, as though it were a material thing. Then all three turned around abruptly with a start, for they heard again the wild gibbering which had first shocked
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their ears. In the wonder of this revolting object they had forgotten all the rest. The sound seemed — extraordinarily near and Susie drew back instinc- tively, for it appeared to come from her very side.
“ There’s nothing here,” said Arthur. “ It must be in the next room.”
“Oh, Arthur, let us go,” cried Susie. “I’m afraid to see what may be in store for us. It is nothing to us, and what we see may poison our sleep for ever.”
She looked appealingly at Dr. Porhoét. He was white and anxious. The heat of that place had made the sweat break out on his forehead.
“T have seen enough. I want to see no more,” he said.
“Then you may go, both of you,” answered Arthur. “TI do not wish to force you to see any- thing. But I shall go on. Whatever it is, I wish - to find out.” |
“But Haddo? Supposing he is there, wait- ing? Perhaps you are only walking into a trap that he has set for you.”
“IT am convinced that Haddo is dead.”
Again that unintelligible jargon, unhuman and shrill, fell upon their ears, and Arthur stepped for- ward. Susie did not hesitate. She was prepared to follow him anywhere. He opened the door, and there was a sudden quiet. Whatever made those sounds was there. It was a larger room than any of the others and much higher, for it ran along the
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whole front of the house. The powerful lamps showed every corner of it at once, but above, the beams of the open ceiling were dark with shadow. _And here the nauseous odour, which had struck them before, was so overpowering that for a while they could not go in. It was indescribably foul. Even Arthur thought it would make him ill, and he looked at the windows to see if it was possible to open them; but it seemed they were hermetically closed. The extreme warmth made the air more overpowering. There were four furnaces here, and they were all alight. In order to give out more heat and to burn slowly, the fronts of them were open, and one could see that they were filled with glowing coke.
The room was furnished no differently from the others, but to the various instruments for chemical operations on a large scale were added all manner of electrical appliancés. Several books were lying about, and one had been left open face downwards on the edge of a table. But what immediately at- tracted their attention was a row of those large glass vessels like that which they had seen in the adjoining room. Each was covered with a white cloth. They hesitated a moment, for they knew that here they were face to face with the great enigma. At last Arthur pulled away the cloth from one. None of them spoke. They stared with astonished eyes. For here, too, was a strange mass of flesh, almost as large as a new-born child, but
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there was in it the beginnings of something ghastly human. It was shaped vaguely like an infant, but the legs were joined together so that it looked like a mummy rolled up in its coverings. There were neither feet nor knees. The trunk was formless, but there was a curious thickening on each side; it was as if a modeller had meant to make a figure with the arms loosely bent, but had left the work unfinished so that they were still one with the body. There was something that resembled a human head, covered with long golden hair, but it was horrible; it was an uncouth mass, without eyes or nose or mouth. The colour was a kind of sickly pink, and it was almost transparent. There was a very slight movement in it, rhythmical and slow. It was liv- ing too.
Then quickly Arthur removed the covering from all the other jars but one; and in a flash of the eyes they saw abominations so awful that Susie had to clench her fists in order not to scream. There was one monstrous thing in which the limbs approached nearly to the human. It was extraordinarily heaped up, with fat tiny arms, little bloated legs, and an absurd squat body, so that it looked like a Chinese mandarin in porcelain. In another the trunk was almost like that of a human child, except that it was patched strangely with red and grey. But the terror of it was that at the neck it branched hideously, and there were two distinct heads, monstrously large, but duly provided with all their
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features. The features were a caricature of human-
- ity so shameful that one could hardly bear to look.
And as the light fell on it, the eyes of each head opened slowly. They had no pigment in them, but were pink like the eyes of white rabbits; and they stared for a moment with an odd, unseeing glance. Then they were shut again, and what was curiously terrifying was that the movements were not quite simultaneous; the eyelids of one head fell slowly just before those of the other. And in another place was a ghastly monster in which it seemed that two bodies had been dreadfully entangled with one another. It was a creature of nightmare, with four arms and four legs, and this one actually moved. With a peculiar motion it crawled along the bottom of the great receptacle in which it was kept, towards the three persons who looked at it. It seemed to wonder what they did. Susie started back with fright, as it raised itself on its four legs and tried to reach up to them.
Susie turned away and hid her face. She could not look at those ghastly counterfeits of humanity. She was terrified and ashamed.
“Do you understand what this means?” said Dr. Porhoét to Arthur, in an awed voice. “It means that he has discovered the secret of life.”
“Was it to make these vile monstrosities that Margaret was sacrificed in all her loveliness?”
The two men looked at one another with sad, wondering eyes.
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“Don’t you remember that he talked of the manufacture of human beings? It’s these mis- shapen things that he’s succeeded in producing,” said the doctor.
“There is one more that we haven't seen,’ Arthur.
He pointed to the covering which still hid the largest of the vases. He had a feeling that it con- tained the most fearful of all these monsters; and it was not without an effort that he drew the cloth away. But no sooner had he done this than some- thing sprang up, so that instinctively he started back, and it began to gibber in piercing tones. These were the unearthly sounds that they had heard. It was not a voice, it was a kind of rau- cous crying, hoarse yet shrill, uneven like the bark- ing of a dog, and appalling. The sounds came forth in rapid succession, angrily, as though the being that uttered them sought to express itself in furious words. It was mad with passion and beat against the glass walls of its prison with clenched fists. For the hands were human hands, and the body, though much larger, was of the shape of a new-born child. The creature must have stood about four feet high. The head was horribly mis- shapen. The skull was enormous, smooth and distended like that of a hydrocephalic, and the fore- head protruded over the face hideously. The fea- tures were almost unformed, preternaturally small under the great, overhanging brow; and they had
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said
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an expression of fiendish malignity. The tiny, mis- shapen countenance writhed with convulsive fury, and from the mouth poured out a foaming spume. It raised its voice higher and higher, shrieking senseless gibberish in its rage. Then it began to hurl its whole body madly against the glass walls and to beat its head. It appeared to have a sudden, incomprehensible hatred for the three strangers. It was trying to fly at them. The toothless gums moved spasmodically, and it threw its face into horrible grimaces. That nameless, loathsome abortion was the nearest that Oliver Haddo had come to the human form.
“Come away,” said Arthur. “We must. not look at this.”
He quickly flung the covering over the jar.
“Yes, for God’s sake let us go,” said Susie.
“We haven’t done yet,’ answered Arthur. “We haven’t found the author of all this.”
He looked at the room in which they were, but there was no door except that by which they had entered. Then he uttered a startled cry, and stepping forward fell on his knee.
On the other side of the long tables heaped up with instruments, hidden so that at first they had not seen him, Oliver Haddo lay on the floor, dead. His blue eyes were staring wide, and they seemed larger than they had ever been. They kept still the expression of terror which they had worn in the moment of his agony, and his heavy face
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was distorted with deadly fear. It was purple and _dark, and the eyes were injected with blood.