Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  A fetid stench filled my throat. Exhausted, I leaned on my filthy pick in the middle of the charnel-house.

  The sweat streaming down my forehead pricked my eyes. I was panting hard.

  At that moment, my gaze chanced to fall on the skull of a cat. I picked it up immediately. It was a veritable pipe-bowl—which is to say that there was a large circular hole where the top had been taken off. I picked up another—a rabbit’s, if I remember rightly—and found the same singularity. Four, six, fifteen others: all the skulls displayed their gaping holes, with some diversity in their position. Here and there, osseous lids strewed the clearing with their large or small, deep or flat bowls. One would have thought that all these creatures had been killed in the same way, in a precise hecatomb, a reasoned sacrifice….

  And suddenly, an idea struck me: an atrocious idea!

  I knelt down by the dead man, and I finished clearing the mud from his head. Nothing abnormal in front: close-cropped hair; but behind, enveloping the occiput from one temple to the other—like MacBell’s scar—a horrid incision exposed the split skull…

  Lerne had killed Klotz! He had murdered him, because of Emma, in the same fashion that he destroyed the lives of birds and beasts, when he had exhausted their strength to endure his experiments! It was a surgical crime. I reckoned that the mystery was pierced from top to bottom.

  In my judgment, I thought, MacBell’s madness originates from the fact that Lerne did not complete his work, and from the fact that the poor fellow, at the sight of the frightful death awaiting him, lost his mind. But why did my uncle not complete his work? Doubtless, in the course of the funereal labor—which he had started thoughtlessly, guided by his blind fury and lust-clouded mind—he suddenly saw more clearly, and became fearful of the reprisals of MacBell’s family. According to Emma, Klotz was an orphan and a bachelor—so here he is! And it’s the same fate that waits me—and perhaps awaits her, if he catches us together! Oh, we must flee, no matter what the cost, she and I! Flee, that’s the only reasonable thing to do! Right now, circumstances are in our favor. Will the opportunity ever arise again? We have to leave and go through the forest to the station, in order to avoid Lerne and Karl as they come back along the direct road. But what about the labyrinth? Would it be preferable to use the automobile and run them over? I don’t know…we’ll see…shall I arrive in time? Quickly, for God’s sake, quickly!

  I ran, losing my breath, racing against rapid, nimble, invisible Death. I ran, falling down twice and getting up twice, gasping with the terror of being overtaken….

  The château! No Lerne yet—his felt hat wasn’t hanging on its usual peg in the vestibule. I’d won the first leg. The second consisted of our escaping before his return…

  Having climbed the staircase, crossed the landing and bounded through the dressing-room, I irrupted into Emma’s bedroom.

  “Let’s go!” I stammered. “Come, my love! Come on! I’ll explain. There’s been murder at Fonval. What’s the matter? What?”

  She remained rooted to the spot in the face of my agitation, quite rigid.

  “How pale you are! You’re frightening me…”

  Then, and only then, I perceived that terror possessed her, and that her poor corpse-like face was signaling to me with terrified eyes and a bloodless mouth to be silent, betraying the imminence of great peril close at hand…too close for her to be able to warn me with her voice or a gesture without the enemy on watch exacting vengeance upon her.

  Nothing happened, though. With a glance I scanned the placid room. Everything there seemed mysterious to me; the very air was a hostile fluid, an unbreathable sea in which I was shipwrecked. The thought of what might be happening behind me terrified me.

  I expected some legendary apparition—and the sight of Lerne sauntering out of a cupboard was more terrible than the appearance of Mephistopheles in a lightning-flash. “You’ve kept us waiting, Nicolas,” he said.

  I was dumbfounded. Emma collapsed, foaming at the mouth and writhing, knocking over items of furniture as her fit continued.

  “Jetzt!”29 cried the professor.

  There was a noise of rustling fabric in the next room. I heard mannequins falling over. Wilhelm and Johann threw themselves upon me.

  Tied up. Captured. Doomed. And the fear of torture rendered me cowardly.

  “Uncle,” I begged, “kill me straight away! I implore you. No torments! A revolver-bullet, say, or poison! Anything you want, my dear uncle, but no torments!”

  Lerne sniggered, and slapped Emma’s cheeks with a wet napkin.

  I felt myself going mad. Who could tell whether MacBell’s sanity had given way in a similar situation? MacBell…Klotz…the animals…hallucination caused me to experience a cutting pain, which sliced my skull from one temple to the other…

  The assistants took me downstairs, Johann taking my head and Wilhelm my feet. Perhaps they’re merely going to put me away in a locked room. A nephew, damn it, can’t have his throat slit like a chicken…

  They took the path leading to the laboratory.

  In a faint, my entire life flashed before me in the space of a heartbeat, one day at a time.

  The professor rejoined us. We went past the Germans’ block and along the courtyard wall. Lerne opened a cart-door on the ground floor of the left-hand block and I was deposited underneath the operating theater, in a sort of laundry-room, as bare as a tomb and covered from top to bottom in white tiles. A curtain of thick canvas, suspended on rings from a rod, divided it into two sections of similar dimension. The atmosphere was pharmaceutical. It was well-lit.

  A little camp-bed had been set up against the wall, which Lerne pointed out to me saying: “Your bed has been made for a long time, Nicolas…”

  Then my uncle gave instructions in German. The two assistants untied me and undressed me. Resistance was futile.

  A few minutes later, I was lying down comfortably, with sheets up to my chin and the edges tucked in. Johann was watching me, alone, sitting with his legs apart on a stool, the only ornament in the place, the austerity of which I examined.

  The curtain, drawn to one side, disclosed another door with two battens, opening into the courtyard. Facing me, through the bay window, I could see the branches of my friend the bay-tree.

  My depression increased. I had a bad taste in my mouth, as if it could already sense its own impending decomposition. Oh, to think of the disgusting chemistry that would probably soon be a prelude to that!

  Johann was toying with a revolver, aiming it at me periodically, delighted with the excellent joke. I turned to the wall, which enabled me to discover an inscription engraved in coarse letters in the varnish of the tiles with the aid—at least, I thought so—of a stone mounted in a ring.

  GOODBYE FOREVER, DEAR FATHER. DONOVAN

  I understood the meaning of the English words. Poor fellow! He too had been laid on this bed…and Klotz as well…and what proof was there that my uncle had only murdered those two before me? But I cared little about that…very little….

  Dusk fell.

  There were hurried comings and goings above us. The darkness caused them to slow down and cease. Then Karl, having come back from Grey-l’Abbaye, relieved Johann at his post.

  Almost immediately, Lerne had me plunged into a bath and forced me to drink a bitter beverage. I recognized magnesium sulfate. There was no more doubt; they were going to butcher me. These were the preliminaries of an operation; no one is unaware of that any longer, in this century of appendicitis. It would take place the following morning. What would they try out on my body before finishing it off?

  Alone with Karl.

  I was hungry. The murmur of the wretched farmyard, not far away, was audible: a susurrus of shifted straw, fearful clucking, hushed barking. The cattle were lowing.

  Darkness.

  Lerne came in. I was extremely agitated. He took my pulse. “Are you sleepy?” he asked me.

  “Brute!” I replied.

  “Good. I’ll give you a sedative
.”

  He offered it to me. I drank it. It reeked of chloral.

  Alone with Karl again.

  The croaking of toads. The twinkling of stars. Moonrise. The elevation of its ruddy disk. Mystical assumption of the heavenly body, from star to star… All the beauty of the night…. A forgotten prayer, a small child’s orison, rose from my distress toward Paradise, the myth of yesterday, the present’s certainty. How could I have doubted its existence?

  And the Moon wandered through the firmament like a halo in search of a head.

  It was a long while since my eyelids had not closed on tears…

  I became drowsy, prey to delirium. A buzzing sound took on the proportions of a din. Almost imperceptible sounds sometimes seem to be the thunder of very distant cataclysms. Straw was being scattered. That farmyard was deafening! The bull was bellowing. I even had the illusion that it was bellowing more and more loudly. Was it brought in every evening, along with the cows, to some byre in that strange farm? Bah! Good God, what a racket!

  It was while my mind was wandering in that fashion under the influence of the narcotic, irremissibly condemned to death or doomed to madness, that I drifted off into a crushing artificial sleep that lasted until morning.

  Someone touched my shoulder.

  Lerne, clad in a white smock, was standing next to the bed.

  The sensation of having my throat cut was instantaneously reborn, clear and complete.

  “What time is it? Am I about to die? Or is your work done?”

  “Patience, nephew! It hasn’t even started.”

  “What are you going to do to me? Are you going to inject me with the plague? Tuberculosis? Cholera? Tell me, uncle. No? What, then?”

  “Come on,” he said, “no childishness!”

  Having stepped aside, he revealed an operating table, which, perched on narrow trestles fashioned like a lattice, looked like an inquisitorial rack. Sets of instruments and bottles glistened in the light of the rising sun. A cloudy bundle of absorbent cotton-wool was set on a side-table. Two nickel-plated spheres, on the tips of their supports, swelled out like the helmets of diving-suits; a sprit-lamp was burning beneath one of them.

  My stupor prevented me from fainting.

  To one side, someone was busy behind the curtain, which was now extended and quivering. A penetrating odor of ether came from it. Secrets! Secrets until the very end!

  “What’s behind that?” I exclaimed.

  Karl and Wilhelm came through between the curtain and the wall, leaving the space thus isolated in the other half of the room empty. They too had put on white smocks. They were only assistants, then…

  But Lerne had taken hold of something, and I felt the cold touch of steel on the back of my neck. I uttered a scream.

  “Imbecile!” said my uncle. “It’s just hair-clippers.”

  He cut my hair, then shaved off the remaining fuzz. At every stroke of the razor I thought I felt the edge cutting into my flesh.

  Afterwards, my skull was soaped gain, then rinsed, and the professor covered my bald head with cabalistic lines, drawn in soft pencil with the aid of dividers.

  “Take off your shirt,” he told me. “Be careful—don’t smudge my reference-marks.”

  They helped me up on to the table. I was attached to it securely, with my arms beneath the tabletop.

  Where was Johann, then?

  Without any warning, Karl put a sort of muzzle on me. A flow of ether penetrated my lungs. Why not chloroform? I thought.

  “Breathe deeply and regularly,” Lerne recommended. “It’s for your own good. Breathe in!”

  I obeyed.

  A pointed syringe in my uncle’s fingers…aieee! He had pricked me with it, in the neck. I bit down; my tongue and lips were leaden. “Wait! I’m not asleep yet! What’s that…virus? Syphilis?”

  “Merely morphine,” said the professor.

  The anesthesia was taking effect.

  Another prick, very sharp, in the shoulder.

  “I’m not asleep! Wait, for God’s sake! I’m not asleep!”

  “That’s what I wanted to know,” muttered my executioner.

  For some moments, a consolation had been ameliorating my torture. Didn’t the cranial preparations demonstrate that they were about to kill me without further delay? MacBell had survived the trepanning, though…

  I withdrew into myself. Silvery bells were merrily tinkling a celestial chorus, which I have never been able to recall, although it seemed to me to be unforgettable.

  Another prick on the shoulder, hardly perceptible. I wanted to repeat that I wasn’t asleep, but the effort was in vain; my words resonated dully, submerged in the utmost depths of an invasive sea. They were already dead; I alone could still distinguish them.

  The rings clicked along the curtain-road.

  And without any pain, on the threshold of the artificial nirvana, this is what I seemed to intuit:

  Lerne makes a long incision from the right temple to the left, via the occiput—an incomplete scalping—and he pulls down the excised flap over my face in one piece, the skin of my forehead making a hinge. From in front, my head must be seen as the bloody mess that I remarked on the chimpanzee…

  “Help! I’m not asleep!”

  But the silver bells prevent me from hearing my appeals. Firstly, they’re too far under the sea, and secondly, the bells are ringing with full force now, like church bells pealing mightily. And it’s me who is sinking, in my turn, into the ocean of ether…

  Am I or am I not? I am…I’m a dead man conscious of being dead…. More than that…

  Oblivion.

  X. The Circean Operation

  I opened my eyes again upon hermetic darkness, in which a silence of odors also reigned over a desert of sound. I wanted to repeat: “Don’t start! I’m still awake!”—but no speech resonated. The delirium of the previous night was extended; it seemed to me that the bellowing had drawn even closer, to the point of being audible within me. Impotent to master the riot of my senses, I kept quiet.

  And then the certainty grew that the mysterious operation was complete.

  Little by little, the darkness dissipated. The ataraxia came to an end. As my blindness was cured, ever-more-numerous odors and sounds emerged like a joyous host. Bliss! Oh, to remain, to remain thus…!

  But that death-agony in reverse proceeded regardless, and life took hold of me again.

  Objects, though now distinct, nevertheless remained shapeless, two-dimensional, and bizarrely colored. My vision took in a wide space, a vaster field than before. I recalled the influence of certain anesthetics on the dilatation of the pupil, a phenomenon that was doubtless responsible for these visual perturbations.

  I observed, however, without overmuch difficulty that I had been lifted off the table and laid on the ground on the other side of the room, and in spite of my eyes, which were functioning in the manner of distorting lenses, I succeeded in surveying the situation.

  The curtain was no longer extended. Lerne had his assistants, grouped around the operating table, were devoting themselves to some task that their juxtaposed bodies hid from me—probably cleaning the instruments. The grounds were visible through the wide open door. Scarcely 20 meters away, there was a corner of the pasture, where the cows were gazing at us, ruminating and lowing.

  Except that I could have imagined that I had been transported into the most revolutionary painting of the Impressionist school. The blue of the sky, without losing its lucid profundity, had been transformed into a beautiful orange tint; instead of being green, the pasture and the trees seemed to me to be red; the buttercups in the meadow strewed the vermilion grass with violets. Everything had changed color, save for things that were black or white. The four men’s black trousers remained obstinately as before; it was the same with their smocks—but those smocks were soiled with stains…green ones! There were pools, similarly green, gleaming on the floor—but what could that liquid be, if not blood? And why should it be surprising that it appeared to me
to be green, since verdure gave me a sensation of red? That liquid exhaled a violent aroma, which would have made me run far away if I had been capable of movement—and yet its scent was not the one that I was accustomed to attribute to blood…I had never breathed it in before…any more than any of the other perfumes…any more than my ears remembered having welcomed sonorities such as those….

  And the phantasmagoria persisted, the aberration of my senses not dissipating at all with the etheric vapors!

  I tried to fight the numbness. Impossible.

  I had been laid out on a litter of straw…obviously straw….but mauve straw.

  The operators had their backs to me, except for Johann. From time to time, Lerne threw cotton wool soaked in green blood into a basin.

  Johann was the first to notice that I was awake, and he told the professor. There was a movement of general curiosity in my direction then, which, by breaking up the group, permitted me to see a naked man tied to the table, his hands beneath the tabletop, lying motionless, white, waxen and cadaverous, a black moustache further exaggerating his pallor, with his head enveloped by a bandage spotted with…well, with green smears. His breast was rising and falling rhythmically; he was breathing air by the lungful, his nostrils twitching at each inhalation.

  I took some time to accept that THE MAN WAS ME.

  When I was certain that no mirror was sending back my own image—easily checked—it crossed my mind that Lerne had duplicated my being, and that there were now two of me…

  Or was it not more probable that I was dreaming?

  No, certainly not. Up to this point, however, the adventure had not surpassed the bizarre; I was neither dead nor mad—and that realization cheered me up no end. Protest if you will against the certainty I had that I was in full possession of my sanity—the future was to confirm that rash judgment.