It was done. The curé accepted, and it was a joyful and intellectual feast.
At about 11 p.m., when the two champions had exhausted all their arguments and a few old bottles, Abbé Ridel got up to take his leave. Then I saw Gambertin change color as he escorted him. My host opened the door; one might have thought he was opening it into a cellar, so dark was the night outside.
“Monsieur le Curé,” he said, resuming his habitual expression, “you’re unlucky, and can’t dine with us without attracting a storm to the locality. It’s impossible for you to go.”
“To be sure!” the other replied. “I’ll reach the presbytery before it starts raining, as I did before, but I’ll have to hurry…”
“No, Monsieur le Curé, you shan’t leave,” said Gambertin, firmly. “That would be tempting the Devil; I don’t want you to go.”
“But…”
“You’ll sleep at the château, between Dupont at me, in a guestroom that’s already made up. Tomorrow morning, you can still get down to the village in time to say mass.”
It was necessary to leave it at that.
In any case, we had scarcely reached our rooms when the storm burst, sending hail rattling against the window-panes. The good curé had no suspicion of our secret fears. I soon heard him snoring on the other side of the partition wall.
Although Gambertin’s abrupt decision had disconcerted me, I could only approve of it; I too was more tranquil for knowing that the abbé was nearby, surrounded by sturdy walls, rather than in the forest in the darkness. I couldn’t sleep, though; my friend’s unexpected alarm renewed my own anxieties with respect to him.
Then the storm began to make a frightful racket. At every instant, lightning illuminated the sky with its violet light, and the curé woke up. I heard the scrape of his matchbox. The downpour became furious.
Finally, the hurricane calmed down. The lightning-flashes became more widely-spaced and the rain became a soft murmur, like a lullaby, with sudden resurgences of intensity.
My eyes closed…
“Pssst! Pssst!”
I thought it was a nightmare.
“Pssst! Pssst!”
“What was it, then? Sitting up in bed, I listened.
Another “Pssst! Pssst!” resonated, outside, in the direction of the plain. I bounded to my window. The opaque night hid everything, although two pale glimmering patches were visible—but there was a flash of lightning.
Something monumental was standing up in front of the plain. I shivered. Another lightning flash showed me the iguanodon, which had grown as tall as the château and was staring at it intently.
“Pssst! Pssst!”
Oh, Gambertin! I thought.
By the light of the lightning-flashes I was able to take intermittent account of what was happening. Without making any noise, I succeeded in opening my window and I peered out in the direction of Gambertin’s.
The wretch! He was leaning on the sill. I could see him clearly, for he had his bedroom light on. He was leaning out and calling the monster like a cat!
I was frozen by fear. I called out to him, as softly as was possible: “Take care, Gambertin!”
“There’s no danger, you know! It’s a species of cow: a ruminant; a herbivore. I’ve seen many others in the jungle! Besides, I can’t…Pssst! Hey, gargoyle-head! Hey, gutter-brain! Pssst!”
At that moment, a less abrupt lightning flash illuminated the dinosaur. A frisson like an electric shock bowled me over. I had not recognized the iguanodon’s hands—the thumbs had no daggers!
A host of thoughts jostled in my head: all those vanished pigs…Gambertin’s false reasoning regarding the impossibility of there being several animals…and even the absence of the iguanodon—the Abel of Cain, the megalosaur…
“Look out, Gambertin!” I cried. “It’s a megalosaur!” And I tore myself away from the window to run to my poor friend.
As I came out of my room, a sharp clicking sound—like that of a shutter thrust back against a wall—was audible outside. I attributed it to thunder—a sudden return of the storm.
“Gambertin! Gambertin!”
I passed in front of the curé’s door. Good God, what was he about to learn? Without pausing for reflection, the key being already in the lock, I turned it. Now I was at the threshold of the other bedroom, and I opened the door. Retained by an invincible feeling, though, I didn’t go in.
“Gambertin!”
He was there, still leaning his elbows on the large bay, turning a deaf ear.
“Gambertin!” I begged. Then I commanded: “Come here! Come here! I’m ordering you, Gambertin—come here!”
Damnation! The stubborn fool wasn’t listening to me. He leaned out further and seemed to be looking at the ground, in the darkness. All I could see was his narrow back.
“Oh, don’t lean out like that, my friend! It’s a megalosaur, I tell you! What are you looking at on the ground?”
Suddenly, I recoiled from the open door, all the way to the corridor wall. The gigantic head of the dinosaur brushed the unfortunate—and he didn’t budge!
With a thrust of its greenish muzzle, the megalosaur tipped Gambertin back on to the parquet. I understood the cause of the sharp click then; the powerful jaws had already decapitated him.
The megalosaur’s head, the bleak head of an enormous tortoise, filled the bay, entering in its entirety. Amid a racket of overturned furniture, it set about awkwardly rolling the cadaver in every direction, and finally succeeded in grabbing it by one of the flaps of its jacket. Its horny, non-prehensile lips had rendered the operation difficult, but once it had hold of the garment it engulfed the poor little body with an abrupt jerk. There was a horrible crackle of broken bones, the sound of a mighty gulp…and a lump descended into the monster’s flaccid gullet.
And it saw me.
Until that moment I had stayed there under the influence of curiosity and—most of all—because fear that robbed me of the use of my legs; but it was something else entirely that held me in place now.
The megalosaur’s green eyes—ignoble octopus-like eyes, glaucous and phosphorescent—which were aimed directly at me, held me fascinated, like a little bird. It might have been hurling steel darts and I could not have been more solidly nailed to the wall.
The head approached. Immobile, I heard my pulse beating and felt my nerves quivering…
Suddenly, the frantic joy of hope overwhelmed me. The head had just bumped against the doorway, too small to let it pass. The animal tried to introduce it sideways—vain attempts. It wasn’t discouraged, though, and we remained face to face, with me plastered against the wall, a meter and a half from its jaws, braced against the door-frame to the right and the left.
It began to pant, as if breathless from effort, and the separating wall groaned dully. I felt my face become livid.
Soon, though—thank Heaven!—the monster, doubtless ill at ease, stopped trying to demolish the obstacle…and I wondered whether that really was a favor of Providence. A single sideways step—nothing at all—would have saved me, but I was devoid of will, cold…frozen, so to speak, like a man of ice…my eyes fatally drawn toward an imperious eye.
I was sensing that I would be obliged, in an instant, to follow my eyes and march toward that maw, into the darkness, when a sudden, enveloping contact, rough and sticky—the touch of a kind of soft grater—ran over me from head to foot. The megalosaur was licking me.
With its wiry tongue, whose agile tip, broad or pointed, yielding or penetrating, altered its form in a thousand ways, it strove ingeniously to draw me closer—and I plastered myself against the wall with all my might, to prevent that damned tongue from sliding between it and me.
The frightful caress succeeded, however, in insinuating itself behind my neck, and I had the sensation of a pillow suddenly coiling up to enclose my head. With brutal traction, the abject morsel of meat forced me to bow down.
That was my salvation. My eyes had escaped its gaze; the charm was broken.
&
nbsp; I precipitated myself sideways, into the darkness of the corridor, collapsing rather than fleeing, and I fell down, while the megalosaur released its terrible cry—which, blasted into the château, broke all its windows.
I didn’t lose consciousness, but I was exhausted by such an enormous fatigue that I was scarcely any better off for that.
I understood, indistinctly, that Abbé Ridel broke through the panel of his door with blows of some unknown object, and that he carried me to my bed. I also recall the entrance of the bewildered Thomas, who, on the curé’s advice, sat down in a corner.
The abbé went to the window, circumspectly, and closed it; the fact of it having been open at the moment of the cry had preserved its panes. Then he came back to me.
“Has it gone?” I stammered.
“What?”
“The…the animal.”
“Yes, but get some rest.”
“Has Gambertin gone too?” I went on. My thoughts resumed their train, however, and I wondered what aberration had led us not to suspect the truth. Many clues should have made us fearful of it.
First of all, Gambertin’s famous reasoning did not hold up. Of all the prodigies necessary for the conversation and the subsequent hatching of an antediluvian egg, only two needed to be duplicated to explain the birth of another saurian: the circumstance of it being laid immediately before the avalanche, and the absence of a destructive shock. These two conditions being fulfilled with regard to each individual egg did, indeed, constitute doublings of the improbability. Once admitted, though, all the other obligations of temperature, dryness, darkness, aeration, then of augmentation of heat and hygrometric tension, remained common to both germ-cells—and if there had been 40 eggs preserved from the landslide immediately after laying, they would all, inevitably, have hatched out.
Then, the disappearance of the pigs ought to have proved to us the presence of a carnivore—and only one, their number not surpassing the provision of a single giant animal.
Finally, the eclipse of the iguanodon—a comestible commensurate with the eater—was a third reason.
I thought of all that without any great precision, the ideas being confused with others. Through a flood of successive images, one indelible object remained with ridiculous persistence: my barometer in the Boulevard de Sebastopol. I saw its needle—the only movement in the deserted lodgings—turning in little jerks, marking the probable weather, like the hours, around the glaucous and phosphorescent dial.13
My ears were still buzzing, my ocular muscles—and perhaps also the optical nerve—remaining dolorously worn out. But those were trifles. The curé gave me something to drink, and I didn’t take long to recover all my lucidity.
When daybreak lit up the room, Thomas his wife and the curé were still by my bedside and I finished telling them this story, with all the ups and downs you already know.
Abbé Ridel broke the silence. “It’s imperative that these monsters should be destroyed,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, “the iguanodon no longer exists, in my opinion.”
“That’s what we shall find out. In any case, the megalosaur knows the taste of human flesh now. Imagine it descending every night to…that isn’t tolerable, especially if one takes into account the superstition of the villagers. It’s necessary to destroy it…this very day.”
“We can organize a hunt,” I said, “with numbers…”
“Numbers—never! If the peasants find out what has happened, the region will be empty within a day. They’ll believe that it’s the Devil and refuse to fight!” Incontinently, the curé swore Thomas and his wife to silence. “What can we do?” he went on. “There are only three of us…”
“Three?” said Thomas, going pale.
“All right, so be it. There are only two of us.”
The suffering of my ears and my painful eyeballs suddenly increased. I was making every effort to discover a plan of battle that would be effective and—above all—free of danger.
“Monsieur le Curé,” I said, “once an incident has taken place, the beast continually returns to the cavern to take its diurnal rest. It can still only go out by night, when the light is dimmed. It is, therefore a matter of setting a nocturnal ambush. The day belongs to us, in all security. This is what I suggest. You know that the cavern opens up in a wall, which terminates the steep slope of the mountain. That wall extends very broadly and does not recover the altitude of the wooded ground for several kilometers to the east and west. Now, it’s taller than the megalosaur. I don’t think it’s gigantic enough to reach the top—where, if you’re agreeable, we’ll install our ambush. We’ll wait for the animal there, and fire as it comes out! If we miss, it will take more time—if it even thinks of it—to go around the cliff through the undergrowth than we’ll need to get away in the other direction.”
“That’s perfect!” cried the curé. “But what about rifles?”
“There are Monsieur’s,” stammered Thomas. “His traveling rifles…”
“Go fetch them,” I said.
“They’re…in Monsieur’s bedroom…”
At these words, we looked at one another. Finally, the priest took the decision, and returned with two rifles and cartridges with explosive bullets. “These will serve us as well as we could wish,” he said. “They’re fine weapons.”
Indeed, I’ve read up on the subject since; they were an American rifle for big-game hunting and a Winchester repeating carbine.
“What time shall we leave?” asked the curé.
“Four o’clock—that seems reasonable to me. It’s necessary not to miss the emergence, isn’t it?”
“Good. I’ll go down to the village to say mass. Get a little sleep, Monsieur Dupont. I admit to you that I’m impatient to get under way.”
“Ah, Monsieur le Curé. God knows what you’d say if you’d been licked…”
At about half past five, after making the long detour necessitated by the position, Abbé Ridel and I, similarly clad in hunting costume, with knives in our belts, were following the arid slope of the mountain in a direction parallel to the crown of the wall—or, to put it better, the edge of the precipice. We had a view over the woods, Les Ormes and the plain, but, in order to avoid any surprises, we kept quite a long way from the forest.
I soon recognized, by the darker streak indicating the course of the path through the trees, that we had reached the level of the cavern. The megalosaur was there, beneath my feet…
Then we started marching straight toward the ravine, and the clearing appeared progressively far below,
A fetid exhalation rose up toward us.
The curé lay down on the ground and I did the same. We crept up to the edge; I reached it first.
“Halt!” I said. “There it is!”
“Our enemy was extended on the grass, every close to the fissure, motionless.
“It’s asleep,” said the curé.
I could see that the glaucous eye was wide open, though. “It’s dead,” I replied. “Let’s put two bullets in it anyway, just to be sure. Ready….fire!”
The projectiles struck home, but the target remained inert. A cloud of sonorous flies rose up and settled back again. Death had passed that way.
Near to the cadaver, in the midst of the bones of pigs, lay the giant skeleton of the iguanodon. All peril had thus been dissipated. We resumed the route that would take us to the funereal clearing.
“Anyway, I was right,” I said, in a detached tone, with a singular joy. “The iguanodon has been killed by its colleague. That incensed roar I mentioned to you, which surprised Gambertin, advertised the combat. The megalosaur had posted itself in front of the grotto to wait for the other’s return. That was a Homeric duel, Monsieur le Curé.” I laughed stupidly. “Tee hee…perhaps the megalosaur turned up its toes as a result of its wounds?”
“Doubtful,” retorted the curé, lengthening his stride. “Too long a time…scars…”
We reached our goal. Abbé Ridel took off his jacket, took out his
hunting-knife, and dutifully set about cutting up the monster. “This is no sarcophagus for a Christian,” he said. “Help me.”
I took out my knife too, but, before attacking the bloated belly, I plunged the blade into the dull eyes, furiously and blindly, without daring to look at what I was doing.
We recovered Gambertin. Here, a description would be sacrilege. Death deprived of its majesty resembles a beautiful woman whose magnificent and serene hair, as chaste as a mantle of gold, has been shorn; it’s necessary to hide it.
Abbé Ridel studied the beast’s internal organs, though, uttering exclamations as he did so. “Where’s the stomach, then?” he said. “That’s extraordinary. Mucus membranes with so little elasticity, Come on, where’s the stomach? I can only find a fragment, half-eaten away at the pylorus—corroded, even…”
Everything was explained. Our megalosaur nourished itself on pigs. It ate them whole, stomachs included. Now, the gastric juice of the pig is especially rich in pepsins of the most active sort. That violent principle had reinforced the indolent gastric secretions of our subject and given it such an intensity that the tissues, not very solid by nature and further exhausted by centuries of dormancy and poor conditions of existence, had been unable to resist its chemical action. The animal had died of an uncommon dyspepsia; it had digested itself.
Two days later, I accompanied Gambertin to the miserable village cemetery.
The tombstone of the family sepulcher was crumbling. I resolved to replace it and remembered having seen broken columns among the necropolises. As Gambertin and I were the same age, it seemed to me that he had died prematurely and that one of those symbolic monuments would therefore be appropriate for his tomb—but the curé adopted a contrary stance.
“Monsieur de Gambertin,” he said, “had the rare privilege of achieving the special task that was assigned to him. He even died on the battlefield of Science. In your place, I would erect upon his remains, not one of these broken stumps, but a tall cylinder of fluted metal, and, in imitation of the palm—the model of the perfect column—its summit would spread out in the florid and definitive splendor of a Corinthian chapter. Architects stuffed with scruples would doubtless object that a column ought to support something, and that this one would have the silly appearance of wanting to support the sky… but you can answer that perhaps that circumstance, too, has its allegorical justification, and that, in sum, the image is not without beauty…”
Doctor Lerne Page 8
