The City of Dr Moreau, page 2
The building was located in a region which was at that time filled with warehouses and places of storage. The nearest pub – The Lion’s Maw – was ten minutes walk away and the nearest church – St George in the East – almost fifteen. It had been selected, of course, for precisely these reasons: for its isolation and insignificance.
The area was at its busiest in the morning, around the dawn, and by now seemed almost as deserted as had been the Strand. The laboratory itself was located beyond an archway, taking up the bulk of a large, rather drab courtyard. It should be stressed that there was nothing in the least bit alarming or minatory about its exterior. It was plain, ordinary and drab and was in many ways as wholly an unremarkable structure as one can imagine – a long, broad building formed of a single storey which any ignorant pedestrian would assume to be a warehouse of some kind, another receptacle there to serve the shipping trade.
No signs or notices of any kind had been placed outside and there were no obvious clues as to what might take place within its walls. Yet there was something somehow rather sly about the place (an odd adjective to use about a building but an apt one nonetheless) as though it had been set up to appear inconspicuous, designed to be overlooked.
There was no sign of life within (no lamps were lit, no windows illuminated) nor was there anything on the road immediately beyond. This, at least, was how the five gentlemen discovered it when, at long last, the pair of hansom cabs clattered into the courtyard and ejected their passengers. All were already complaining about the continued inhospitality of the elements as they stepped down, shivering at the intransigence of the downpour.
“So this is it?” said Mr Bufford in perhaps rather too declamatory a manner.
While Kelman, looking about him nervously, confirmed that this was indeed the laboratory of Moreau, Mr Vaughan dealt deftly with the two cabmen, promising them a good deal of money to stay precisely where they were and to wait in a state of preparedness for departure. There was some talk of substantial bonuses as well as a pledge of future employment.
“It’s very quiet,” said Dr Bright, peering suspiciously through the rain at the warehouse. “Do you think he might already have flown?”
“No.” Kelman was emphatic. “He wouldn’t just leave his work. His subjects. His specimens.”
“You speak as though he has some sense of morality,” said the vicar, not without a note of optimism.
“Oh, I think he does,” Kelman said. “In his way.”
“Then perhaps it’s possible…” Woodgrove began, doubtless about to start a new speech about the capacity of man for ethical growth or the rejoicing in Heaven over the late arrival of a lifelong sinner, when Mr Vaughan interrupted.
“Wait,” he said. “Did you hear that?”
They all fell silent and strained to hear above the sounds of precipitation. Five brave Englishmen – Bufford, Woodgrove, Kelman, Bright and Vaughan – standing, listening in the storm.
For a moment there was nothing.
And then, undeniably, they all of them heard a new sound, an odd, arresting noise which could be heard quite distinctly even above the fierce hissing of the rain.
It sounded like something between a sob and a cry of pain, an elongated whimper, altogether unlike any which this quintet had ever heard before.
No-one spoke, not even Mr Vaughan, so chilling and incongruous was the sound. It went on, too long, before, miserably, tailing away into silence.
In the quiet that followed, Mr Bufford was seen to step back three paces, seemingly without noticing that he had done so. Dr Bright turned pale, blanching more than ever he had in the course of any surgery. The Reverend Woodgrove made some complicated, involuntary gesture before his breast in a manner which seemed most unprotestant.
Mr Vaughan, meanwhile, simply turned to Kelman and enquired in a tone which betokened no more than curiosity: “What was that?”
Young Kelman was ashen. “I’m not sure I could say.”
Then the sound came again, high-pitched and desperate, and also (it seemed) closer than before.
“Good God,” said Dr Bright. “What is it? Animal or… human?”
“It’s possible,” Kelman said rather timidly, “that there’s somebody here who needs our help.”
Beyond the archway, behind the party of gentlemen, the two horses and the drivers of the two cabs were seen to shuffle and pace.
“Gentlemen,” said Bufford, the prosecutor, “before we make too rapid a decision we ought first, in light of this new evidence, discuss the wisdom of any action which we mean now to take. Indeed… given the elements and our isolation here, might it not be judicious of us to retreat to a place of safety?”
Words had always been Mr Bufford’s greatest strength and his livelihood; these sentences, grave enough if not especially distinguished, were to be his last.
Later, the survivors could never concur on how the creature had crept up on them without any of them realising its approach. It had great guile, they agreed, and the instincts of a hunter.
Out of the driving rain it sprang, a great black dog, dripping with water and loosing a ferocious growl.
It went for Mr Bufford, latching its vast jaws about him and sinking its teeth into the meat of the man’s neck, puncturing with ghastly instinct an artery. Blood was immediate and came in great and vivid quantity.
One of the most renowned and well-respected barristers in the land tried to scream but could barely do so; the sound was emerging as a grotesque, elongated gurgle.
“My God!” yelled the Reverend Woodgrove.
“Bufford, Bufford! Get it off you!” This was Dr Bright who, in spite of this injunction, was seen to keep his distance.
Kelman turned to Mr Vaughan. “Your gun…” he said but Vaughan did not reply. The alienist seemed glassily fascinated (almost mesmerised) by what was occurring: this sudden, intrusion of horror into the long day.
Poor Mr Bufford flailed desperately with his hands but to no avail.
As the rain beat down, the beast held firm. Its claws found purchase about the prosecutor’s shoulders and head. It half-squatted there as it fed.
Bufford gave another wet cry of outrage and agony. He staggered forwards. With a final rip at the flesh of its victim, the dog dropped down and wheeled about with inhuman speed and turned to face the others.
“Shoot it!” Kelman shouted to Vaughan. “Shoot the damn thing!”
Mr Vaughan only watched, unmoving.
“Vaughan!”
Bufford fell onto his knees then pitched forward, his blood pooling in the rainwater, crimson in the gathering dark.
In the drumbeat of the downpour, his last breaths could not be heard but they were feeble, ragged things. A look of absolute disbelief settled about his features and his eyes clouded with terror. His final breath came, his body stopped and that was the end of Mr Bufford – he who had once been at the heart of the most famous criminal cases in London – face down in the filth of a Ratcliffe alley.
For a long moment, that homicidal animal seemed to glare at the four survivors.
So engrossed with the atrocity were Bright, Woodgrove, Kelman and Vaughan that they did not notice as, with sundry curses and protestations of disbelief, the two drivers of the cabs urged on their panicked steeds and drove at pace from the courtyard. Following this departure there was a dread silence. Then they heard something else, a high, terrible, altogether unexpected sound.
It was, quite unmistakably, for all that the juxtaposition was thoroughly grotesque in that deserted, blood-sodden place, the hysterical cry of an angry baby – the sound of an infant who has been woken abruptly or left too long without food. It seemed, impossibly, to emanate from somewhere nearby.
The dog barked loudly, at which the sobbing increased in volume and tenor.
Dr Bright and Reverend Woodgrove looked about them in a state of horrified bewilderment. Mr Vaughan touched Kelman lightly on his left arm and, speaking with an imperturbable calm which struck the young journalist as almost inhuman, said: “See there?”
The murderous beast had turned a little and was now moving to and fro beside the fallen Bufford, as if patrolling its territory or protecting its kill. A shadow in the rain.
Yet there was something to be seen about it which all had missed before in the furious violence of the moment.
“Dear Lord,” said Kelman when he realised. “Dear Lord, no!”
At this, the others turned. Now they saw it too.
The beast roared and the sound of the crying intensified as the animal strode towards them, picking its way around the cadaver, on thick and powerful legs.
The Reverend Woodgrove said later that he could not have imagined the sight in the worst, most delirious nightmare. Yet the truth of the thing was undeniable.
There it was, like some detail from a medieval vision of the underworld, an impossible sight – the face of a bawling human baby, not more than a few months old, staring out from the left flank of the creature, transplanted by some hideous feat of surgery.
The mite screamed in outrage as its host ran forwards, towards the horror-struck quartet. The dog seemed about to leap, its tiny, unwilling passenger, peering forth like some grisly remnant of a Siamese twin. The cry of the animal and the wailing of the face combined into a ghastly threnody of despair.
“Shoot it!” Kelman shouted to Mr Vaughan. “In the name of Christ, shoot that accursed thing!”
Vaughan only watched, his eyes wide and unblinking.
“Shoot it, man!”
The hybrid monstrosity leapt into the air, coming to claim its second victim. At last a single shot rang out.
The bullet caught the animal mid-air and it dropped, twisting, to the earth, wounded but still living. It snarled and whimpered in shock and the pitiful wail of the baby could still be heard. Another shot followed. Blood burst from the body of the creature before, at last, it all went very quiet.
The rain started to slacken, the heavens having exhausted themselves at last.
Kelman turned to Mr Vaughan, expecting to see the revolver in his hand yet when he did so he found that the little man had not moved and that his hands were empty.
A new voice was heard. “Thank you so much for coming, gentlemen. I only wish that you might have given me more notice so that I might have had the opportunity to have been a better host.”
Vaughan was at Kelman’s left-hand side now and Dr Bright and the Reverend Woodgrove upon his right. Four men stood in the street, the bodies of Bufford and the dog-baby creature before them.
Opposing them stood the newcomer, who held outstretched a gun of his own.
He was a man in his middle years, rather sallow-faced and already inclined to fleshiness. He was clean-shaven to an impeccable degree. His hair, which had been fashioned into a style which was some decades out of date, glistened with unguent.
His face was assuredly not a kind one. Yet you might pass him daily without guessing for an instant from his composure the deeds of which he was capable. The only feature about him which was in the least remarkable was his manner of dress: a white suit and tie in a design which might have appealed to some missionary or explorer unusually interested in matters of aesthetics.
“Dr Moreau.” It was Vaughan who spoke first. “I think it would behove you now to offer us something in the way of an explanation.”
Moreau seemed surprised by his opponent’s speech and manner.
“You’re Vaughan, aren’t you?” he asked, his tone even and pleasant as though they were meeting at some scientific soiree. “I’ve heard of you.”
Mr Vaughan murmured something in response. It was lost due to the words that were shouted simultaneously by Dr Bright, though the Reverend Woodgrove swore later that the alienist had said these two words: “I’m flattered.”
It was obscured by the furious exclamation of Bright. “How dare you, sir? How dare you?”
Moreau turned to look at him, with a moderately quizzical expression.
Bright thundered on. “This monstrosity! This obscenity!”
The Reverend Woodgrove fixed the white-clad man with his sternest gaze of disapproval. “What you have done here, sir, is against nature and against God.”
Moreau looked at these two speakers with the air of an elephant, troubled momentarily by flies. “I wanted to meet you,” he said with a drawl, “you men who thought to set yourselves against me. I am bound to say that, having done so, I rather wish that I had spared myself the effort. Pygmies, all of you.”
With the hand that did not grasp the revolver, Moreau reached into his waistcoat and withdrew a gleaming pocket watch. He glanced down at it in the manner of a weary commuter. “As for you, young Master Kelman…”
The journalist had by this time (no doubt quite unconsciously) moved several paces back from the others and stood now half-obscured by the slim form of Mr Vaughan.
“I suppose I ought to cheer your courage,” Moreau went on, “in bringing them to me. Yet I cannot abide disloyalty. You’ve always known how it is here: to do my will is the whole of the law.”
Kelman started to speak then, perhaps to protest or else to attempt to bargain. Exactly what he would have said none is in a position now to say, for the gun in Moreau’s hand barked once more and the young man crumpled to the ground, narrowly missing Mr Vaughan, his arms splayed out in the dirt.
Moreau looked down at his handiwork as if quietly pleased. He hurried away, back in the direction of the warehouse.
Dr Bright seemed struck dumb by the horror of the afternoon but the Reverend Woodgrove called out in righteous fury, not to the murderous doctor but to Mr Vaughan: “You! You have a gun! Strike him down! Strike down that man!”
Vaughan did now reach for his gun and draw it out but he did so with a sluggish thoughtfulness like a dreamer being woken only gradually in the night.
By the time that the thing looked ready to fire, the swiftly moving figure of Dr Moreau had already vanished.
“Good God,” said Dr Bright. Although he had recovered the power of speech, his voice sounded numb and very faraway. Two human bodies lay on the ground before them beside the corpse of something, which once had been an animal.
“Good God,” said Bright again, helplessly. “What happened here?”
“We’ve been beaten,” said Vaughan, “and jolly easily too. He barely had to lift a finger.”
“What do we do now?”
Vaughan shrugged. Given the context, there was something almost grotesquely callous in the gesture. “You gentlemen should do as you please. There are matters to be arranged, surely, with poor Bufford and with the unfortunate Mr Kelman. But I do believe I’ll take a closer look in there.” He gestured towards the warehouse.
“Vaughan, no!”
“I thought you would say as much, Woodgrove.”
“It’s not safe. Who knows what else he has in there? Who can guess at the dangers?”
“Oh I think I can guess,” Vaughan said lightly. “But I would very much like it to see for myself. Wouldn’t you?”
He did not wait for a reply but merely walked away, passing the bodies without sparing them a glance. Woodgrove and Bright stood still and watched as the fellow stepped first into the shadow of the warehouse and, afterwards, into the building itself.
Then they were left alone, surrounded by the dead.
V
Two hours later and Dr Bright and the Reverend Woodgrove were seated side by side in the office of a police inspector (whose name is not important) trying their utmost to explain themselves. The detective, a lean-faced, beleaguered-looking fellow, was examining the visitors with a look of considerable scepticism. For this we ought not to judge him too harshly; both Woodgrove and Bright looked sodden and dilapidated from their ordeals in Ratcliffe and their subsequent tortuous efforts to reach what they thought of as civilisation.
Neither looked very much at all like the prosperous, well-fed gentlemen who had not long before been sitting, quaffing and debating, in the tavern on the Strand.
“I am still not entirely certain,” said the police officer, “exactly what you thought you were doing in confronting this gent in the first place. I mean why not go to the authorities from the start?”
“We thought,” said Woodgrove with more patience than many in his position might have mustered, “that we might be able to avoid a scandal. We thought that if we could only talk to the fellow that we could persuade him to desist and seek a quiet retirement.”
At this, the policeman gave the priest a look that suggested that he would have been unlikely, in such circumstances, to find grounds for such optimism.
“But we didn’t realise,” interjected Dr Bright, “how far the man was gone. How deep in his insanity.”
Woodgrove nodded in solemn agreement. The policeman examined them studiously, weighing up the matter which had been set before him.
“And you swear to me that this is the truth? That you saw what you say you saw? I shall take a dim view indeed if you’re gulling me in some way. I do not approve of pranks played by grown men who ought to know better.”
“I assure you, Inspector,” said Woodgrove, “everything happened just as we’ve told you it did. Even now it grieves me to admit that the bodies of two fine people are lying in the filth of a Ratcliffe alley.”
“In which case,” said the detective, “we need to go back straightaway. I need to see it all for myself.”
“Not just us,” said Dr Bright in a weak, falling voice. “Not just the three of us. We must have… reinforcements.”
The policemen gave him an interrogative look, then nodded briskly, mind made up. “I’ll attend to the arrangements. You two wait here.”
“How long–” the Reverend Woodgrove began.
The policeman, all business now, cut him off. “Ten minutes. No longer. Then we’ll all go together. See if we can’t smoke out the truth. And if there’s been true devilry done… why then, we’ll bring the fellow to justice.”
