“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 pit
eously.
“You will come with me now, won’t you, lieber Kollege?” he asked as he released the pressure momentarily, then bore down on my spine again until it seemed to me my heart had quite stopped beating, then started up again with a cold, nauseating lurch. I could see his eyes blaze at me through the dark, feel his fingers fumbling at my skull-base.
“Don’t—don’t!” I panted, sick with pain. “I’ll—”
“Ist gut. Of course you will. I knew that you would not be stubborn. As I was saying, this next experiment I propose making is more ambitious than any I have tried before. It involves the psyche quite as much as the body. Tell me, Doctor, is it your opinion that the physical attraction we call love springs more from contemplation of the loved one’s face or figure?”
He tapped me on the shoulder with a rigid forefinger, and I shrank from the contact as from a heated iron. Sick revulsion flooded through me. What atrocity was hatching in the diseased mind of this completely irresponsible mad genius?
“Why—I—what do you mean?” I stammered stupidly. My head and neck still pained me so that I could hardly think.
“Precisely what I say, mein lieber Kollege,” he snapped back acidly. “Every day we see cases which make us wonder. Men love and marry women with faces which might put Medusa to shame, but with bodies which might make a Venus jealous. Or, by contrast, they fall in love with pretty faces set on bodies which lack every element of beauty, or which may even be deformed. Women marry men with similar attributes. Can you explain these vagaries?”
“Of course not,” I returned. “Human beings aren’t mere animals. Physical attraction plays its part, naturally, but intellectual affinity, the soul—”
“The psyche, if you please, mein Kollege. Let us not be mediæval in our terminology.”
“All right, the psyche, then. We see beneath the surface, find spiritual qualities that attract us, and base our love on them. A love with nothing but the outward-seeming of the body for foundation is unworthy of the name. It couldn’t last—”
“Fool!” he half laughed and half snarled. “You believe in idealistic love—in the love that casteth out fear and endureth all things?”
“Absolutely”
“So do those two down there—”
He had halted at a turning of the hallway; as he spoke he pressed a lever, sliding back a silent panel in the floor. Immediately beneath us was a small room, comfortably furnished and well lighted. On a couch before the open fire a boy and girl were seated, hand in hand, fear written on their faces.
He was a lad of twenty-two or so, slightly made, with sleek, fair hair and a ruddy, fresh complexion. I did not need to hear him speak to know that he was English, or that I had the answer to the disappearance of the British consul’s messenger.
The girl was younger by a year or so, and dark as her companion was blond.
Their costumes and positions were reminiscent of domestic bliss as portrayed in the more elaborate motion pictures; he wore a suit of violet pajamas beneath a lounging-robe of purple silk brocade, and a pair of purple kid house-boots. She was clothed in an elaborate hostess coat of Persian pattern, all-enveloping from throat to insteps, but so tight from neck to hips that it hid her lissome form no more than the apple’s skin conceals the fruit’s contours. From hips to hem it flared out like a ballerina’s skirt. Laced to her feet with narrow strips of braided scarlet leather were brightly gilded sandals with cork soles at least four inches thick, and the nails of her exquisitely formed hands and feet were lacquered brilliant red to match the sandal straps.
“No,” she was saying as Friedrichsohn slid back the panel, “it isn’t hopeless, dear. They’re sure to find us sometime—why, you were a king’s messenger; the consulate will turn the country inside out—”
His bitter laugh broke in. “No chance! I’ve stultified myself, blasted my name past all redemption. They’ll let me rot, and never turn a hand—”
“Neville! What do you mean?”
He put his elbows on his knees and hid his face in his cupped hands. “I should have let ’em kill me first,” he sobbed, “but—oh, my dear, you can’t imagine how they hurt me! First they beat me with a strap, and when that didn’t break my spirit the little man with the black glasses did something to my neck—I don’t know what—that made me feel as if I had a dentist’s drill in every tooth at once. I couldn’t stand the dreadful pain, and—and so I signed it, Lord, forgive me!”
“Signed what, dearest?”
“A letter to the consul tellin’ him I’d sold the papers that he’d trusted with me to the Germans, and that I’d hooked it with the money. I shouldn’t have found it hard to die, dear, but the pain—the awful pain—”
“Of course, my dear, my poor, sweet dear”—she took his head against her bosom and rocked it back and forth as if he were a fretful child and she his mother—“I understand. Rita understands, dear, and so will they when we get out of here. No one’s responsible for things he’s done when he’s been tortured. Think of the people who denied their faith when they were on the rack—”
“And of the ones who had the stuff to stick it!” he sobbed miserably.
“Honey, listen. I don’t love you ’cause you’re strong and masterful and heroic; I love you ’cause you’re you.” She stopped his wild self-accusation with a kiss. Then back again to her first theme:
“They’re sure to find us, dear. This is Twentieth Century America. Two people can’t just disappear and stay that way. The police, the G-men—”
“How long have we been here?” he interrupted.
“I—I don’t quite know. Not being able to look out and see the sun, I can’t form estimates of time. We don’t know even when it’s night and when it’s day, do we? All I remember is that I was late in leaving Philadelphia and I was hurrying to avoid the evening traffic from New York when, just outside of Cranberry, something flew against my face and stung me. I thought at first that it was a mosquito, but that was silly. Even Jersey skeeters don’t come around in February. The next thing I knew I was awfully dizzy and the car was rocking crazily from one side of the road to the other; then—here I was. I found myself in a soft bed, and my clothes were gone, but these sandals and this house-coat were laid out for me. There was a bathroom letting off my chamber, and when I’d finished showering I found breakfast—or maybe it was luncheon or dinner—waiting for me on a tray beside the bed. They don’t intend to starve us, sugar, that’s a sure thing. Haven’t you been well fed, too?”
“Yes, I have. My experience was about the same as yours, except that I’ve seen them, the tall, thin man who looks like a walkin’ corpse, and the little pipsqueak with black glasses. But I didn’t see ’em till today—or was it yesterday? I can’t seem to remember.”
The girl knit her smooth brows. “Neither can I. I’ve tried to keep count of the meals they’ve served, allowing three meals to a day, so I could form some estimate of the time I’ve been here, and I’ve tried so hard to lie in wait and catch the one who serves ’em; but somehow I always seem to fall asleep, no matter how I strive to keep awake, and—it’s funny about sleeping, isn’t it? When you wake up you can’t say if you’ve just dozed for five minutes or slept around the clock—”
The boy sat forward suddenly, gripping both her hands in his. “That’s it! I’m sure of it! No wonder time seems to stand still in this place! They drug us—dope us some way, so that we go to sleep whenever they desire it. We don’t know how long these drugged sleeps last. We may have been here weeks, months—”
“No, dear,” she shook her head. “It isn’t summer, yet. We haven’t been here months.”
“We may have been.” Wild panic had him in its grip, his voice was rising, growing thin, hysterical. “How can you tell?”
“Silly!” She bent and kissed him. “Call it woman’s intuition if you like, but I am sure we haven’t been cooped up here for a month.”
They sat in silence a few minutes, hand interlaced in hand; then:
“Rita?�
��
“Yes, dear?”
“When we get out—if we get out, and if I square myself with the Chief—will you marry me?”
“Try to keep me from it, Mister Southerby, and you’ll find yourself right in the middle of the tidiest breach-of-promise suit you ever saw! D’ye think that you can compromise me like this, sit here with me, dressed as we are, and without a chaperon, then ride off gayly? You’ll make an honest woman of me, young feller me lad, or—” Her mask of badinage fell away, leaving her young face as ravaged as a garden after a hail storm. “Oh, Neville, you do think they’ll find us, don’t you?”
It was his turn to comfort her. “Of course, of course, my darling!” he whispered. “They’ll find us. They can’t help but find us. Then—”
“Yes, honey, then”—She snuggled sleepily into his arms—“then we’ll always be together, dear, close—so close that your dear face will be the first thing that I see when I awake, the last I see before I go to sleep. Oh, it will be heaven … heaven.”
“I shall be interested to find out if it will. Time will tell, and I think time will side with me.” Friedrichsohn pressed the spring that slipped the silent panel back in place, and rose, helping me up from my knees. “It will be an interesting experiment to observe, nicht wahr, mein Kollege?”
“Wha—what d’ye mean?” I stammered, my voice almost beyond control. What dreadful plan had taken form behind that high, white brow? Would he subject this boy and girl to dreadful transformation? I had seen the remnant of the lovely Viki Boehm. Did he dare …
His soft, suave voice broke through my terrified imaginings. “Why, simply this, mein lieber Kollege: They are ideal subjects for my test; better, even, than I had dared hope. I caught the girl by the simple device of waiting by the roadside with an airgun loaded with impregnated darts. The slightest puncture of the epidermis with one of my medicated missiles paralyzes the sensory-motor nerves instantly, and as she told the young man, when she woke up she was in bed in one of my guest rooms.
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 76
