Immediately after the bloodstained envelope and flower fell, the old man had attempted to pick them up from the ground. Now, he looked a good eighty years old and, for want of elasticity, was unable to stoop down far enough to reach them. So, pointing to the pavement with his finger, he stared at the page and uttered the romantic summons “Tiger.” The youth obediently went to pick up the two light objects and tried to return them to their owner.
But the latter had shuddered to hear the expression (obsolete in the usage in question) which the old man had employed, and now, beneath the sway of some hallucination, she made a series of frightened gestures and uttered disjointed sentences in which the three words “father,” “tiger” and “blood” constantly recurred.
Then she manifestly became quite insane, while the man in black clothes, who had followed the scene with emotion from the start, flew to her aid and left her with halting steps toward the interior of the hotel.
∗ ∗ ∗
Our group, which Canterel set moving once more in the customary direction, advanced for a few seconds, then stopped — near a man and woman of the working class — before a rectangular chamber without a ceiling, one of whose two longer walls was completely absent, being replaced by the glass partition through which we could easily observe the whole of it. Inside we saw the assistant, who, at the end of our previous halt, had crossed our field of vision in the distance, making his way toward it. Going to the wall on our right, he opened a door and went out, closing it behind him. Almost at once, by leaning slightly backward, we were able to catch a glimpse of him to the left, just as he was lost to view in the tiled hall of the hotel, having skirted the room, then, following an oblique course, dashed off in the wake of the young madwoman who had just disappeared.
The room open to our gaze had the appearance of a study. A large well-stocked bookcase was backed against the right-hand wall, while to the left were capacious black shelves each bearing a row of death’s heads. Over an empty fireplace situated between these two items of furniture was a glass globe that sheltered an additional death’s head wearing a kind of magistrate’s cape cut from some old newspaper.
In the wall to our left a wide window faced the door through which the assistant had passed. A man was seated at a large rectangular table with one of its two narrow sides pushed right up against the wall; very close to the glass partition, with his back toward it, he was sorting through some old papers. Soon, as though tiring of this occupation, he rose, bringing to his lips a cigarette taken from a leather case which he had removed momentarily from his pocket.
A few paces brought him to the mantelpiece, where a box partly covered with sandpaper lay open, displaying its contents to his present desire. A moment later, voluptuously wreathed in smoke, he extinguished a match by shaking it, and projected it into the grate with his fingers. However, his attitude, throughout these latter motions, indicated that some peculiarity of the curiously hatted skull had caught and held his eye.
Under the influence of a sudden curiosity, he lifted the glass globe, set it down further to the right and possessed himself of the gruesome object without disturbing its cap with his hands. Then he returned to the table — and, facing us for the first time, revealed himself as a man of about twenty-five.
The working-class man and woman who were mingled with our group — shown by their ages and resemblance to be a young man with his mother — watched him eagerly through the glass partition.
Settled again at the table, the smoker turned his back to us once more and made a lengthy examination of the skull, which he had placed full-face in front of him. Over the whole visible portion of the skeletal forehead, lightly cut into the bone itself with some metal point, was a kind of crisscross of thin lines which imitated, as though with childish clumsiness, the stitches in a piece of netting.
Canterel drew our attention to some handwritten runic letters copied in facsimile upon a vertical paper margin belonging to the magistrate’s cap which, he said, was made up from pieces of the Times. Then he showed us that a resemblance existed between them and the reticulated frontal marks which, as we found on careful examination, all formed runes of bizarre shape, joined to one another and sloping in many directions — except for the last ones at the bottom on the right; two words of the unspaced text thus created by the pseudo-stitches were each set between quotation marks engraved in the same way as the rest.
What the young man watched by us had suddenly noticed just before, was evidently nothing other than the mysterious relationship that connected the signs on the forehead with those on the margin of the hat.
Now he espied a small slate on the table, provided with a white-leaded pencil, and made use of this to transcribe the frontal text into letters of our alphabet, constantly touching it with his left index finger, which pinpointed each fragment to him in turn.
When he had finished, we were only just able to distinguish two words on the slate from our position: “BIS” and “RECTO” — more legible than the others as they were composed exclusively of capital letters; in view of the respective places they occupied in the whole they must have corresponded to the two terms distinguished in the original by quotation marks.
In obedience to some injunction contained in the lines he had just then written, the young man crossed the room and took down from the bookcase a heavy tome which, after its very lengthy title, displayed the following subtitle on its cover: Volume XXIV — Commonalty.
After returning to sit at the table opposite the skull, which he had pushed back with his hand so as to clear a space, he set the book before him and opened it at the first page. This consisted of several quite distinct paragraphs, printed on costly paper of a grayish tint. Next, he began to count the letters on one of them, touching them lightly one after another with the tip of his white pencil. From time to time, when he arrived at some particular number, he would copy down the last letter he had touched at the bottom of the slate — then continue the process, using the recently employed tip of his white pencil to point out some part of the frontal text’s transcription, as though drawing some necessary piece of information from it.
In one place, on the page that he had chosen in the book, we noticed the following fragment: “. . . cedilla representing an asp . . . ,” and in another place, “. . . bishop wearing the subtunicle . . .” — both printed in very heavy type, which made them stand out from the rest of the paragraph in question.
When the young man had finished his new task, a series of white letters at the foot of the slate, all of them very neat since they had been formed one by one, composed the three words “Star in Rubies,” which followed one other without the two spaces required between them.
On the table was an open casket containing a curious work of art — nothing other than the facsimile of a playbill, slightly taller than it was broad and about the same size as the more imposing type of visiting card. It consisted of a golden plaque encrusted with countless little precious stones which covered its whole surface. Pale emeralds formed the ground, while the text was composed of dark emeralds.
Twelve names of various sizes, in characters of sapphire, each stood out from a rectangular partial ground of diamonds, whose dimensions were proportional to theirs. Above these blazed a name made of many rubies, which dwarfed all the rest by its predominant height, and stood out against an appropriately wide strip of diamonds. One read, before reaching the title, that it concerned a one hundredth performance.
Soon, with the work of art in his left hand, the young man was minutely examining the star in rubies through a lens which he took from the table.
After a fairly long time he seemed to have noticed something, for he pressed his fingernail down with perilous force upon one of the rubies which, when released, at once sprang up again.
Retaining only the work of art between his fingers, he again pressed the sprung ruby and attempted to manipulate it in various ways — one of which s
uddenly resulted in the jeweled surface sliding toward the right; inside the plaque, which was quite hollow, the thin grooved lid disclosed several very insubstantial sheets of paper in the form of a wad folded in four.
He took these sheets, covered with a fine, handwritten text, and spread them out; then, without leaving his seat, he threw his finished cigarette into the fireplace and began to read them.
From the air which he soon assumed, we could tell that he was penetrating deeper into the heart of some hideous and unsuspected secret with every line. He trembled so much that it was hard for him to turn the pages, which he devoured with ever-increasing avidity.
On reaching the end of the document he became motionless, in a state of dazed oblivion.
Then a reaction set in: he wrung his hands and seemed to be assailed by a flood of terrible thoughts.
Recovering his calm at last, he began to reflect lengthily, with his elbows on the edge of the table and his forehead resting in his palms.
He emerged from his meditation with the bleak self-assurance that comes from the possession of an irrevocably fixed plan.
The back of the last sheet of manuscript bore the signature “François-Jules Cortier” in the center, written very heavily beneath the last line of the text and not followed by any postscript.
He dipped a pen in the ink and began to write closely on the blank half-page with which this verso provided him. After filling it almost entirely, he signed the name “François-Charles Cortier” — then, beneath the first c, which was as yet unprovided with its appendage, he quickly drew, with the ease of long habit, a curved serpent in the required position to serve as a cedilla.
Once the ink was dry, the young man bundled all the sheets together again and refolded them in four; then, stowing them away in their golden hiding place, he closed its jeweled lid, still fitted into its grooves, with a careful push of his thumb — up to the final convincing snap, which we just caught despite the absence of any fresh bull’s-eye. Soon the dainty, precious playbill had been correctly replaced, and glittered as before in its open casket.
After putting away the book he had used in the bookcase, the young man returned to the table and rubbed the whole surface of the slate with the tip of his forefinger, so that nothing would remain extant there – then carried back the death’s head which, through his care, still wore its cap; finally, under its glass globe, it once more constituted the chief ornament of the mantelpiece.
A moment later, his right hand, groping in one of his pockets, emerged armed with a revolver, while the other quickly undid all the buttons of his waistcoat.
He pressed the gun against his shirt, over the heart, and pulled the trigger; startled by the sound of the shot which at once rang out, we saw him fall stiffly on his back.
At that moment Canterel led us away, just as the assistant abruptly opened the door and entered the room.
The working-class woman and her son, who had not missed a single detail of the scene, were now embracing each other with emotion.
∗ ∗ ∗
We continued, in the usual direction, to follow the transparent wall behind which only open ground appeared, seeming to await fresh characters.
When we reached the end of the enormous cage, Canterel turned once to the left — then again, after going from one end to the other of the glass wall, which was about ten meters long here and formed a right angle with each of the two main walls; we were now walking slowly beside the professor, in the direction of the esplanade, along one of the latter two glass walls — the one still new to us.
Soon Canterel stopped, with his finger extended toward the interior of the cage, pointing to a large cylindrical object made of dark metal, which measured about two feet in diameter by five feet high. It stood about three paces from the glass that prevented our reaching it, and was provided with various levers. The professor informed us that this was an electrical apparatus of his own construction, the function of which was to radiate a very intense cold as soon as it began to work. There were six other apparatuses along the whole available length inside, identical with the first, with which they formed a perfectly symmetrical row parallel to the last fragile wall — whose center was marked by an immense glazed double door, presently closed, which displayed a construction completely analogous to that of the rest of the cage.
After revealing to us that the seven great apparatuses, working in conjunction, were sufficient to establish a constant low temperature throughout the cage, Canterel retraced his steps for a moment, leaving the last transparent corner that we had turned behind. Then, with our group, he continued along the path of yellow sand, which was strictly rectilinear as far as a certain, fairly distant, obtuse bend; where we were walking, the borders converged regularly toward each other to resume the normal width.
While every step was removing us further from the gigantic cage of glass and the esplanade, the professor’s words enlightened us about everything our eyes and ears had just taken in.
∗ ∗ ∗
When Canterel saw what excellent reflexes he obtained with Danton’s facial nerves, immobilized by death for over a century, he conceived the hope of producing a complete illusion of life by working with recent corpses protected by intense cold from the slightest corruption.
But the need for a low temperature prevented him from using the powerful electrifying force of the aqua-micans, which would have frozen rapidly, imprisoning each of the dead, who would then have been powerless to move.
At last, after a great deal of trial and error and long experimenting with corpses submitted in time to the required degree of cold, the professor prepared on the one hand vitalium and on the other resurrectine. The latter was a reddish substance based on erythrite, which, when injected as a liquid into the skull of some defunct person through a laterally pierced opening, solidified of its own accord around the brain, encompassing it on all sides. It was then only necessary to put some point of the internal envelope thus created into contact with vitalium (a brown metal easily introduced into the injection hole in the form of a short rod) for the two new substances, each of them inactive without the other, to release a powerful current of electricity at that moment, which penetrated the brain and overcame its cadaveric rigidity, endowing the subject with an impressive artificial life. As a consequence of a curious awakening of memory, the latter would at once reproduce, with strict exactitude, every slightest action performed by him during certain outstanding minutes of his life; then, without any break, he would indefinitely repeat the same unvarying series of deeds and gestures which he had chosen once and for all. The illusion of life was absolute: mobility of expression, the continual working of the lungs, speech, various actions, walking — nothing was missing.
When the discovery became known, Canterel received many letters from frightened families who, out of affection, wished to see one of their loved ones live again before their eyes after the fatal moment. Having widened part of a certain rectilinear walk so as to provide himself with a suitable site, the professor had an enormous rectangular hall built in his park, consisting simply of a metal framework supporting a ceiling and walls of glass. He provided it with electrical refrigerating apparatuses designed to create a constant low temperature inside, which, while sufficient to preserve the bodies from all putrefaction, at the same time ran no risk of hardening their tissues. Canterel and his assistants, warmly wrapped, were able to spend long periods there without difficulty.
Each dead person accepted by the professor was transferred to this enormous ice house and underwent a cranial injection of resurrectine. The substance was introduced by a narrow hole made above the right ear, which soon received a slender plug of vitalium.
Once the resurrectine and the vitalium were in contact the subject would perform — while beside him, well-muffled-up, was someone who had known him in life, employed in identifying, from his words and gestures, the scene reproduced — which might
consist of a cluster of several distinct episodes.
During this phase of investigation Canterel and his assistants closely surrounded the animated corpse, watching his every movement in order to assist him from time to time when necessary. Indeed the exact reproduction of some muscular effort made in life to raise some heavy object — now absent — entailed a loss of balance which would have caused a fall, but for their prompt intervention. Furthermore, whenever the legs, with only flat ground before them, began to ascend or descend some imaginary staircase, it was essential to prevent the body falling either forward or backward, as the case might be. A quick hand had to be held ready to replace some non-existent wall against which the subject might be about to lean his shoulder, and he would have tended to sit down on thin air from time to time if their arms had not received him.
After identifying the scene, Canterel did some careful research and constructed a faithful reproduction of the required setting somewhere within the glass hall, availing himself as often as possible of the original objects themselves. In the cases where there were words to be heard, the professor had very small bull’s-eyes made at suitable points in the glass, which were simply closed with glued-on discs of tissue paper.
Given a free rein, and dressed according to the character of his part, the corpse, finding furniture, supports, various resistances and things to lift all in their right places, performed without falls or false moves. After completing his cycle of operations, which he would repeat indefinitely without any variation at all, he was brought back to his starting point. He returned to the immobility of death when the plug of vitalium was withdrawn, grasped by a tiny non-conducting ring; reintroduced into his skull beneath the dissembling cover of his hair, it always caused him to resume his role at the beginning.
Locus Solus Page 12
