The Best of Jules de Grandin

by Seabury Quinn

  “Nightmare sculpture, hewn from dreams of madness …” the quotation flashed across my mind as I followed the tall man in livery down the hallway.

  My guide rapped at a door set at the rear of the corridor, waited for a moment, then stood aside to let me enter. Facing me across a flat-topped desk sat a small, stoop-shouldered man, reading from a large book through a pair of Crookes’-lens spectacles.

  “Doctor,” my conductor introduced in perfect English, “this gentleman came knocking at our door a few moments ago, going through some most extraordinary antics and mumbling something about a motor car sunk in our brook.”

  I looked from one of them to the other in utter, stupefied amazement, but my astonishment increased tenfold at the seated man’s reply. “Stravinsky,” he said sternly, looking at me through the purplish-black of his thick glasses, “how dare you leave your quarters without permission? Go upstairs with Mishkin at once.”

  “I beg your pardon,” I stammered, “my name’s not Stravinsky. I’m Doctor Samuel Trowbridge of Harrisonville, and some friends of mine and I need help in raising a sunken motor car from the brook that runs between the highway and your place. If you’ll be kind enough to tell your chauffeur to—”

  “That will do,” he broke in sharply. “We’ve heard all that before. Go to your room at once, or I shall have to order you into a strait-waistcoat again.”

  “See here,” I began in a rage, “I don’t know what this nonsense means, but if you think for one moment—”

  My protest died half uttered. A pair of sinewy hands seized me by the elbows, drawing my arms sharply to my sides, a wide strap of woven webbing was thrown about my body, like a lasso, pinioning both elbows, drawn tightly through a buckle and snapped into position. I was securely bound and helpless as ever captive was.

  “Confound you!” I cried. “Take this devilish harness off me! What d’ye mean—”

  Something smooth and soft and smothering, like a piece of wadded silk, was thrust against my face, shutting out the light, covering mouth and nose; a sickly-sweet, pungent odor assailed my nostrils, the floor seemed suddenly to heave and billow like a sea lashed by the wind, and I felt my knees give way beneath me slowly.

  “FEELING BETTER, NOW, STRAVINSKY?” the suave, low voice of the round-shouldered man woke me from a troubled sleep.

  I sat up, staring round me stupidly. I lay upon a narrow iron cot of the sort used in the free wards of hospitals, uncovered except for a thin cotton blanket. The bed stood in a little cubbyhole not more than six feet square, and was the only article of furniture in the apartment. A small window, heavily barred, let in a little light and a great quantity of cold air together with occasional spatterings of rain. Directly facing me was a stout wooden door made without panels but fitted with a barred wicket through which my captor looked at me with a rather gentle, pitying smile. Close behind him, grinning with what seemed to be sadistic malice, was the liveried man who’d let me in.

  “You’ll be sorry for this!” I threatened, leaping from the cot. “I don’t know who you are, but you’ll know who I am before you’re done with me—”

  “Oh, yes, I know perfectly who you are,” he corrected in a gentle, soothing voice. “You are Abraham Stravinsky, sixty-five years old, once in business as a cotton converter but adjudged a lunatic by the orphans’ court three weeks ago and placed in my care by your relatives. Poor fellow”—he turned sorrowfully to his companion—“he still thinks he’s a physician, Mishkin. Sad case, isn’t it?”

  He regarded me again, and I thought I saw a glimmer of amusement in his solicitous expression as he asked: “Wouldn’t you like some breakfast? You’ve been sleeping here since we had to use harsh measures day before yesterday. You must be hungry, now. A little toast, some eggs, a cup of coffee—”

  “I’m not hungry,” I cut in, “and you know I’m not Stravinsky. Let me out of here at once, or—”

  “Now, isn’t that too bad?” he asked, again addressing his companion. “He doesn’t want his breakfast. Never mind, he will, in time.” To me:

  “The treatment we pursue in cases such as yours is an unique one, Stravinsky. It inhibits the administration of food, or even water, for considerable periods of time. Indeed, I often find it necessary to withhold nourishment indefinitely. Sometimes the patient succumbs under treatment, to be sure; but then his insanity is cured, and we can’t have everything, can we? After all, Stravinsky, the mission of the sanitarium is to cure the disease from which the patient suffers, isn’t it, Stravinsky?

  “Make yourself comfortable, Stravinsky. Your trouble will be over in a little while. If it were only food you are required to forgo your period of waiting might be longer, but prohibition of water shortens it materially—Stravinsky.”

  The constant repetition of the name he’d forced upon me was like caustic rubbed in a raw wound. “Damn you,” I screamed, as I dashed myself against the door, “my name’s not Stravinsky, and you know it! You know it—you know it!”

  “Dear, dear, Stravinsky,” he reproved, smiling gently at my futile rage. “You mustn’t overtax yourself. You can’t last long if you permit yourself to fly into such frenzies. Of course, your name’s Stravinsky. Isn’t it, Mishkin?” He turned for confirmation to the other.

  “Of course,” his partner echoed. “Shall we look in on the others?”

  They turned away, chuckling delightedly, and I heard their footsteps clatter down the bare floor toward the other end of the corridor on which my room faced.

  In a few minutes I heard voices raised in heated argument, seemingly from a room almost directly underneath my cell. Then a door slammed and there came the sound of dully, rhythmically repeated blows, as if a strap were being struck across a bed’s footboard. Finally, a wail, hopeless and agonized as if wrung from tortured flesh against the protest of an undefeated spirit: “Yes, yes, anything—anything!”

  The commotion ceased abruptly, and in a little while I heard the clack of boot heels as they went upon their rounds.

  THE HOURS PASSED LIKE eons clipped from Hell’s eternity. There was absolutely no way to amuse myself, for the room—cell would be a better term for it—contained no furniture except the bed. The window, unglazed, small and high-set, faced an L of the house; so there was neither sky nor scenery to be looked at, and the February wind drove gusts of gelid rain into the place until I cowered in the corner to escape its chilling wetness as though it were a live, malignant thing. I had been stripped to shirt and trousers, even shoes and stockings taken from me, and in a little while my teeth were chattering with cold. The anesthetic they had used to render me unconscious still stung the mucous membranes of my mouth and nose, and my tongue was roughened by a searing thirst. I wrenched a metal button from my trousers, thrust it in my mouth and sucked at it, gaining some slight measure of relief, and so, huddled in the sleazy blanket, shivering with cold and almost mad with thirst, I huddled on the bed for hour after endless hour till I finally fell into a doze.

  How long I crouched there trembling I have no idea, nor could I guess how long I’d slept when a hand fell on my shoulder and a light flashed blindingly into my face.

  “Get up!” I recognized the voice as coming from the man called Mishkin, and as I struggled to a sitting posture, still blinking from the powerful flashlight’s glare, I felt a broad web strap, similar to the one with which I had at first been pinioned, dropped deftly on my arms and drawn taut with a jerk.

  “Come,” my jailer seized the loose end of my bond and half dragged, half led me from my cell, down the stairs and through a lower hall until we paused before a door which had been lacquered brilliant red. He thrust the panels back with one hand, seized me by the shoulder with the other, and shoved me through the opening so violently that, bound as I was, I almost sprawled upon my face.

  The apartment into which I stumbled was in strong contrast to the cell in which I’d lain. It was a large room, dimly lighted and luxurious. The walls were gumwood, unvarnished but rubbed down with oil unt
il their surface gleamed like satin. The floor of polished yellow pine was scattered with bright Cossack rugs, barbarian with primary colors. A sofa and deep easy-chairs were done in brick-red crushed leather. A log fire blazed and hissed beneath the gumwood over-mantel and the blood-orange of its light washed out across the varnished floor and ebbed and flowed like rising and receding wavelets on the dark-red walls. A parchment-shaded lamp was on the table at the center of the room, making it a sort of island in the shadows, and by its light I looked into the face of the presiding genius of this house of mystery.

  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: