He had taken off his dark-lensed glasses, and I saw his eyes full on me. As I met their level, changeless stare I felt as if the last attachments of my viscera had broken. Everything inside me had come loose, and I was weak to sickness with swift-flooding, nameless terror.
In a lifetime’s practice as physician one sees many kinds of eyes, eyes of health and eyes diseased, the heaven-lighted eyes of the young mother with her first-born at her breast, the vacant eye of fever, the stricken eye of one with sure foreknowledge of impending death upon him, the criminal’s eye, the idiot’s lack-luster eye, the blazing eye of madness. But never had I seen a pair of eyes like these in a human face. Beast’s eyes they were, unwinking, topaz, gleaming, the kind of eye you see in a house cat’s round, smug face, or staring at you speculatively through the bars that barricade the carnivores’ dens at the zoo. As I looked, fascinated, in these bestial eyes set so incongruously in a human countenance, I felt—I knew—that there was nothing this man would not do if he were minded to it. There was nothing in those yellow, ebony-pupiled eyes to which one could appeal; no plea addressed to pity, decency or morals would affect the owner of these eyes; he was as callous to such things as is the cat that plays so cunningly and gently with a ball one moment, and pounces on a hapless bird or mouse so savagely the next. Feline ferocity, and feline fickleness, looked at me from those round, bright, yellow eyes.
“Forgive the lack of light, please, Doctor Trowbridge,” he begged in his soft, almost purring voice. “The fact is I am sensitive to it, highly photophobic. That has its compensations, though,” he added with a smile. “I am also noctiloptic and have a supernormal acuity of vision in darkness, like a cat—or a tiger.”
As he spoke he snapped the switch of the desk lamp, plunging the apartment into shadow relieved only by the variable fire-glow. Abruptly as a pair of miniature motor lights switched on, the twin disks of his eyes glowed at me through the dimness with a shining phosphorescent gleam of green.
“That is why I wear the Crookes’-lensed glasses in the daytime,” he added with an almost soundless laugh. “You won’t mind if we continue in the darkness for a little while.” The vivid glow of his eyes seemed to brighten as he spoke, and I felt fresh chills of horror ripple up my spine.
Silence fell, and lengthened. Somewhere in the darkness at my back a clock ticked slowly, measuring off the seconds, minutes. . . . I caught myself remembering a passage from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
. . . and Faustus must be damn’d!
The shadowed room seemed full to overflowing with manifested, personalized evil as the magician’s cell had been that night so long ago in Wurtemberg when Mephistopheles appeared to drag his screaming soul to everlasting torment. Had the floor opened at my feet and the red reflection of the infernal pit shone on us, I do not think I should have been surprised.
I almost screamed when he spoke. “Do you remember—have you heard of—Friedrich Friedrichsohn, Doctor Trowbridge?”
The name evoked no memories. “No,” I answered.
“You lie. Everyone—even you half-trained American physicians—knows of the great Friedrichsohn!”
His taunt stung a mnemonic chord. Dimly, but with increasing clarity, recollection came. Friedrich Friedrichsohn, brilliant anatomist, authority on organic evolution . . . colonel-surgeon in the army which Franz Josef sent to meet its doom on the Piave . . . shellshocked . . . invalided home to take charge of a hospital at Innsbruck—now memory came in a swift gush. The doctors in Vienna didn’t talk about it, only whispered rumors went the rounds of schools and clinics, but the fragmentary stories told about the work they’d found him at, matching bits of shattered bodies, grafting amputated limbs from some to others’ blood-fresh amputation-wounds, making monsters hideous as Hindoo idols or the dreadful thing that Frankenstein concocted out of sweepings from dissecting-rooms. . . . “He died in an insane asylum at Korneusburg,” I replied.
“Wrong! Wrong as your diagnoses are in most instances, mein lieber Doktor. I am Friedrich Friedrichsohn, and I am very far from dead. They had many things to think of when the empire fell to pieces, and they forgot me. I did not find it difficult to leave the prison where they’d penned me like a beast, nor have I found it difficult to impose on your credulous authorities. I am duly licensed by your state board as a doctor. A few forged documents were all I needed to secure my permit. I am also the proprietor of a duly licensed sanitarium for the treatment of the insane. I have even taken a few patients. Abraham Stravinsky, suffering from dementia præcox is—was—one of them. He died shortly after you arrived, but his family have not yet been notified. They will be in due course, and you—but let us save that for a later time.
“The work in which I was engaged when I was interrupted was most fascinating, Doctor. Until you try it you cannot imagine how many utterly delightful and surprising combinations can be made from the comparatively few parts offered by the human body. I have continued my researches here, and while some of my experiments have unfortunately failed, I have succeeded almost past my expectations in some others. I should like to show you them before—I’m sure you’ll find them interesting, Doctor.”
“You’re mad!” I gasped, struggling at the strap that bound my arms.
I could feel him smiling at me through the dark. “So I have been told. I’m not mad, really, but the general belief in my insanity has its compensations. For example, if through some deplorable occurrence now unforeseen I should be interrupted at my work here, your ignorant police might not feel I was justified in all I’ve done. The fact that certain subjects have unfortunately expired in the process of being remodeled by me might be considered grounds for prosecuting me for murder. That is where the entirely erroneous belief that I am mad would have advantages. Restrained I might be, but in a hospital, not a tomb. I have never found it difficult to escape from hospitals. After a few months’ rest I should escape again if I were ever apprehended. Is not that an advantage? How many so-called sane men have carte blanche to do exactly as they please, to kill as many people as they choose, and in such manner as seems most amusing, knowing all the while they are immune to the electric chair or the gallows? I am literally above the law, mein lieber Kollege.
“Mishkin,” he ordered the attendant who stood at my elbow, “go tell Pedro we should like some music while we make our tour of inspection.
“Mishkin was confined with me at Korneusburg,” he explained, as the clatter of the other’s boot heels died away beyond the door. “When I left there I brought him with me. They said he was a homicidal maniac, but I have cured his mania—as much as I desired. He is a faithful servant and quite an efficient helper, Doctor Trowbridge. In other circumstances I might find it difficult to handle him, but his work with me provides sufficient outlets for his—shall we call it eccentricity? Between experiments he is as tractable as a well-trained beast. Of course, he has to be reminded that the whip is always handy—but that is the technique of good beast-training, nicht wahr?
“Ah, our accompaniment has commenced. Shall we go?”
Seizing the end of my tether, he assisted me to rise, held the door for me, and led me out into the hall.
Somewhere upstairs a violin was playing softly, Di Provenza il Mar, from Traviata. Its plaintive notes were fairly liquid with nostalgic longing:
From land and wave of dear Provence
What hath caused thy heart to roam?
From the love that met thee there,
From thy father and thy home? ...
“He plays well, nicht wahr?” Friedrichsohn’s soft voice whispered. “Music must have been instinctive with him, otherwise he would not remember—but I forget, you do not know about him, do you?” In the darkness of the corridor his glowing eyes burned into mine.
“Do you remember Viki Boehm, Herr Doktor?”
“The Viennese coloratura? Yes. She and her husband Pedro
Attavanta were lost when the Oro Castle burned—”
His almost silent laughter stopped me. “Lost, lieber Kollege, but not as you suppose. They are both here beneath this roof, guests of their loving Landsmann. Oh, they are both well, I assure you; you need have no fears on that score. All my skill and science arc completely at their service, night and day. I would not have one of them die for anything!”
We had halted at a narrow lacquered door with a small design like a coronet stenciled on it. In the dim light of a small lamp set high against the wall I saw his face, studious, arrogant, unsmiling. Then a frigid grimace, the mere parody of a smile, congealed upon his lips.
“When I was at the university before the war”—his voice had the hard brittleness of an icicle—“I did Viki Boehm the honor to fall in love with her. I, the foremost scientist of my time, greater in my day than Darwin and Galileo in theirs, offered her my hand and name; she might have shared some measure of my fame. But she refused. Can you imagine it? She rebuffed my condescension. When I told her of the things I had accomplished, using animals for subjects, and, of what I knew I could do later when the war put human subjects in my hands, she shrank from me in horror. She had no scientific vision. She was so naïve she thought the only office of the doctor was to treat the sick and heal the injured. She could not vision the long vistas of pure science, learning and experimenting for their own sakes. For all her winsomeness and beauty she was nothing but a woman. Pfui!” He spat the exclamation of contempt at me. Then:
“Ah, but she was beautiful! As lovely as the sunrise after rain, sweet as springtime in the Tyrol, fragile as a—”
“I have seen her,” I cut in. “I heard her sing.”
“So? You shall see her once again, Herr Doktor. You shall look at her and hear her voice. You recall her fragile loveliness, the contours of her arms, her slender waist, her perfect bosom—see!”
He snatched the handle of the door and wrenched it open. Behind the first door was a second, formed of upright bars like those of a jail cell, and behind that was a little cubicle not more than six feet square. A light flashed on as he shoved back the door, and by its glow I saw the place was lined with mirrors, looking-glasses on the walls and ceiling, bright-lacquered composition on the floor; so that from every angle shone reflections, multiplied in endless vistas, of the monstrous thing that squatted in the center of the cell.
In general outline it was like one of those child’s toys called a humpty-dumpty, a weighted pear-shaped figure which no matter how it may be laid springs upright automatically. It was some three feet high and more than that in girth, wrinkled, edematous, knobbed and bloated like a toad, with a hide like that of a rhinoceros. If it had feet or legs they were invisible; near its upper end two arm-like stubs extended, but they bore no resemblance to human pectoral limbs. Of human contours it had no trace; rather, it was like a toad enlarged five hundred times, denuded of its rear limbs and—fitted with a human face!
Above the pachydermous mass of shapelessness there poised a visage, a human countenance, a woman’s features, finely chiseled, delicate, exquisite in every line and contour with a loveliness so ethereal and unearthly that she seemed more like a fairy being than a woman made of flesh and blood and bone. The cheeks were delicately petal-like, the lips were full and sensitive, the eyes deep blue, the long, fair hair which swept down in a cloven tide of brightness rippled with a charming natural wave. Matched by a body of ethereal charm the face would have been lovely as a poet’s dream; attached to that huge tumorous mass of bloated horror it was a thousand times more shocking than if it too had been deformed past resemblance to humanity.
The creature seemed incapable of voluntary locomotion, but it was faced toward us, and as we looked at it, it threw its lovely head back with a sort of slow contortion such as might be made by a half-frozen snake. There was neither horror nor hatred, not even reproach, in the deep-blue eyes that looked at Friedrichsohn. There was instead, it seemed to me, a look of awful resignation, of sorrow which had burned itself to ashes and now could burn no more, of patience which endures past all endurance and now waits calmly for whatever is to be, knowing that the worst is past and nothing which can come can match that which is already accomplished.
“Her case was relatively simple,” I heard Friedrichsohn whisper. “Mishkin and I were cruising in a motorboat off shore when the Oro Castle burned. We picked her and her husband up, gave them a little drink which rendered them unconscious and brought them here. She gave us very little trouble. First we immobilized her by amputating both legs at the hip; then, in order to make sure that she would not destroy herself or mar her beauty, I took off both arms midway between shoulder and elbow. That left a lovely torso and an even lovelier face to work with.
“You’re wondering about her beautifully swollen trunk? Nothing could be simpler, herr Kollege. Artificially induced elephantiasis resulted in enormous hypertrophy of the derma and subcutaneous tissue, and we infected and reinfected her until we had succeeded in producing the highly interesting result you observe. It was a little difficult to prevent the hypertrophy spreading to her neck and face, but I am not the greatest doctor in the world for nothing. She suffers nothing now, for the progress of her condition has brought a permanent insensitiveness, but there were several times during the progress of our work when we had to keep her drugged. Elephantiasis begins as an erysipelatous inflammation, you know, and the accompanying lymphangitis and fever are uncomfortable.
“Internally she’s quite healthy, and Mishkin makes her face up every day with loving care—too loving, sometimes. I caught him kissing her one day and beat him for an hour with the knout.
“That put a chill upon her ardor. I do not let him feed her. That is my own delightful duty. She bit me once—the lovely little vixen!—but that was long ago. Now she’s as tame and gentle as a kitten.
“Ingenious, having her room lined with mirrors, isn’t it? No matter which way she may look—up, down or sidewise—she cannot fail to contemplate herself, and compare her present state of loveliness with what she once possessed.
“Viki!” he rattled the bars of her cage. “Sing for our guest, Viki!”
She regarded him a moment with incurious, thoughtful eyes, but there was no recognition in her glance, no sign that she had heard his command.
“Viki!” Again he spoke sharply. “Will you sing, or must we get the branding-iron out?”
I saw a spasm of quick pain and apprehension flash across her face, and: “That is always effective,” he told me, with another soft laugh. “You see, we altered Pedro Attavanti, too. Not very much. We only blinded him and moved his scalp down to his face—a very simple little grafting operation—but he went mad while we were working on him. Unfortunately, we were short of anesthetics, and non-Aryans lack the fortitude of the superior races. Once a day we let him have his violin, and he seems quite happy while he plays. When Viki is intractable we have an excellent use for him. She can’t bear to see him suffer; so when we bring him to her door and let her watch us burn him with hot irons she does whatever we ask her.
“Shall we get the irons, Viki,” he turned to the monstrous woman-headed thing in the cell, “or will you sing?”
The hideous creature threw its lovely head back, breathing deeply. I could see the wattled skin beneath the throat swell like a puffing toad as it filled its lungs with breath; then, clear and sweet and true as ever Viki Boehm had sung upon the concert stage, I heard her voice raised in the final aria of Faust:
Holy angels, in heaven blest,
My spirit longs with thee to rest . . .
Surely, the ecstatic melody of that prison scene was never more appropriately sung than by that toad-thing with a lovely woman’s head.
The song still mounted poignantly with an almost piercing clarity as Friedrichsohn slammed the door and with a jerk that almost pulled me off my feet dragged me down the hall.
“You’ll be interested in my heart experiment, Herr Doktor,” he assured me. “This is a
more ambitious scheme, a far more complicated—”
I jerked against the harness that confined me. “Stop it!” I demanded. “I don’t want to see your fiend’s work, you sadistic devil. Why don’t you kill me and have done with—”
“Kill you?” The mild, surprised reproach in his voice was almost pathetic. “Why, Doctor Trowbridge, I would not kill anyone, intentionally. Sometimes my patients die, unfortunately, but, believe me, I feel worse about it than they do. It’s terribly annoying, really, to carry an experiment almost to completion, then have your work entirely nullified by the patient’s inconsiderate death. I assure you it upsets me dreadfully. A little while ago I had almost finished grafting arms and legs and half the pelt from a gorilla to an almost perfect human specimen, a truck driver whose capture caused me no end of trouble, and would you believe it, the inconsiderate fellow died and robbed me of a major triumph. That sort of thing is very disconcerting. Shall we proceed?”
“No, damn you!” I blazed back. “I’ll see myself in Hell before—”
“Surely, you’re not serious, Doctor?” He dropped his hand upon my shoulder, feeling with quick-kneading fingers for the middle cervical ganglion. “You really mean you will not come with me?” With a finger hard and pitiless as a steel bolt he thrust downward on my spine, and everything went red before me in a sudden blaze of torment. It was as if my head and neck and throat were an enormous exposed nerve on which he bore with fiendish pressure. I felt myself reel drunkenly, heard myself groan piteously.
Black Moon Page 21
