The City of Dr Moreau, page 7
“Thank you,” he murmured, “for everything. Do you know I have even started to believe… That is, I have begun to consider the possibility…”
“Yes?” Vaughan prompted after a long moment of hesitation from Prendick. He was, after all, almost certain of how that sentence was to be completed.
“I have started to wonder whether I ought not to tell my story to others apart from you.”
Vaughan feigned surprise. “But have you not spoken often in the past of your fears of public ridicule were you to present the facts of the matter? That you’d be branded a liar or a madman or worse? That there would be dire consequences?”
Prendick exhaled very slowly in an attempt, Vaughan suspected, to regulate his temper. “Yes, Mr Vaughan, I have said that. But I feel more confident now. So much more myself. Thanks, in large part, to you.”
“Have you told anyone else of this plan?”
“Not yet,” Prendick said, too quickly – with such speed, in fact, that the lie would have been obvious even had Mr Vaughan not known of it already. “No, no. I thought I had first to say it to you.”
“Then I thank you,” Vaughan said smoothly, “for your good graces and for your most excellent manners.” The smile slipped comfortably onto his lips, although, of course, it was false in every respect.
“And I’ve written it down too,” Prendick said.
Vaughan’s smile grew still more taut. “Indeed? You have not spoken of such a thing before today.”
“I thought I would do it for myself, you see. As a way of taking the story out of me, if you can understand. A kind of exorcism.”
“Oh, I understand that very well. And I hope that the no doubt painful process of composition has aided your recovery.”
“You’re not cross?”
“My dear fellow, why ever would I find myself in such a temper? I may be a little dismayed that you could not confide in me about this additional labour of yours. But in essence the idea is a capital one.”
“But it’s one you so often counselled me against.”
“Perhaps in that, my friend, I was rather too hasty. The taking of overly precipitate action is not traditionally a flaw of mine but, in this particular instance, I may have acted with too much speed.”
Prendick nodded with an odd sort of contentment (such as he might once have exhibited in the years before he found himself upon the island) as though he considered the matter settled, his complicated ledger with Mr Vaughan now altogether balanced and even.
“Well then,” Vaughan went on, “seeing as our professional relationship seems about to come to an end, I wonder if there’s one more thing that I might ask of you in this, our final session. A kind of favour if you will.”
“If it’s within my power to grant it,” Prendick said, with the confidence of someone who still had not wholly gauged the capacity of the man with whom he was alone, “then I shall do so.”
“Thank you, Mr Prendick. So what I wish to ask of you is this: will you let me mesmerise you?”
IV
Somewhat to Mr Vaughan’s surprise (and most certainly to his delight), Edward Prendick proved to be entirely susceptible to mesmerism.
The patient sunk easily into a different state as Vaughan crouched over him, swinging a highly polished gold watch and crooning instructions in a soft, low, persuasive voice. The mariner spoke, under the influence, almost eagerly of all manner of secret things. There was much that he had buried, though none of it very deeply. He was a man, Mr Vaughan considered, whose pain was ever close to the surface.
The alienist began by asking three questions to which he already knew the answers. These were of escalating difficulty, so as to test the honesty of the subject while in a hypnotic state.
“What are you called?”
The answer came swiftly, its delivery perhaps a little more leaden than was usual, though nothing which would have raised any alarm in a layman. “Edward Prendick.”
“What was the name of the ship which rescued you from almost certain death after the sinking of the Lady Vain?”
A momentary grappling with pronunciation, then: “The Ipecacuanha.”
“Have you ever been in love?”
No hesitation. “I have not.”
Mr Vaughan paused. Some might say that he was relishing his moment of power. I would argue that it was more likely a case of his enjoying the anticipation, a piece of pleasure which was for him peculiarly acute. His tongue darted out, very briefly, to dampen the corners of his mouth, like a hungry man spying the arrival of dinner.
“Now, Mr Prendick… I want you to search your mind for me. I want you to ransack your memory. I want you to turn over even the heaviest, dullest stones from your past and see what lurks underneath.”
“Naturally,” Prendick said, and his tone was almost agreeable. “Anything I can do to help. I like to make myself useful, you know, if I can.”
The alienist ignored these pleasantries. “You’ve told me of the island. Many times. I know now that you have told strangers of it also. Even that you have set down on paper an account of your adventures there. But Mr Prendick, is there anything you have not told me? Anything at all which does not feature in any of these testimonies?”
Nothing was said. The clock ticked on.
“Mr Prendick?” There was an oddly singsong cadence to Vaughan’s voice, like a father cajoling a child into good behaviour or a citizen coaxing a cat down from a tree. “Please hold nothing back from me.”
A thin moan now escaped Mr Prendick. He seemed to struggle in his chair, as though he were sleeping and in the grip of a nightmare.
“There’s something there, I think. Yes? Something hidden.”
“Please, no…” Prendick’s face was drained and white.
“I cannot force you to say anything which you are determined not to say,” said the mesmerist softly. “I can only ask you to speak as fully, freely and frankly as you can. Besides, to let go of one final secret may set you free. It might provide that exorcism.”
Silence then, and although nothing was said, a battle of wills between the two men all but crackled in that quiet room, until, at length, Prendick murmured, hesitatingly: “There was something.”
“I knew it.”
“Something so fantastic that I dare not speak a word of it. Something so strange I almost felt I dreamed it.”
“What was it?”
“Something… in the water…”
“Yes?”
“A shadow. Tendrils. A deep, strange voice.”
“You mean… Moreau?”
Prendick groaned. “No. One of his creations. But one which had evolved beyond his origins. Into something new.”
“You mean…” Once again, Vaughan’s tongue emerged to lick the corners of his mouth. “Are you saying that there were experiments which Moreau conducted of which we know nothing at all?”
“I… think so. Not even his assistant, Montgomery, knew of them…”
“Tell me.” Vaughan’s voice rose higher than before. In a slip of self-control that was most unlike him, he all but shouted: “Tell me now!”
It was too much. Prendick groaned again. He thrashed to and fro.
“Wait…” Vaughan said, as calmly as he could. “Wait and tell me more.”
Yet things had gone too far. The spell was broken. Like a man bursting out from beneath the ocean waves, Prendick’s eyes were flung open, he struggled, flailingly, to sit upright and took a noisy gulp of air. He looked around him wildly. “Did it work? Did you hear what you needed to hear?”
Vaughan looked at him, calculating the plausibility of the man’s response. Wasn’t this too neat, he wondered. Too close to formula? Weren’t these precisely the sorts of reaction which one might expect to see at the performance of any music hall mesmerist?
Prendick grinned back, seemingly guileless enough. Vaughan watched him, unspeaking, wondering whether he might not have underestimated the man.
The client yawned, stretched and clambered up from the chair. “Well, if there’s nothing else, I do believe I ought to be going. I thought I might take a walk this afternoon. I may even treat myself to a little light supper. Creedles, perhaps. It’s said to be very good. Do you know it?”
Mr Vaughan, who took very little interest in the vagaries of fashionable dining, said simply that he had heard of it but that he had not eaten there himself, a convenient lie in order to speed the conversation to its conclusion.
“Thank you again,” said Prendick, both men on their feet and shaking hands.
“It’s been my honour.” This was true enough, thought Mr Vaughan, though perhaps not quite in the way that the patient might have assumed.
At last, smiling nervously, as though he couldn’t quite believe that he was to be released so easily, Prendick backed away. As he approached the exit, the door opened and Mr Berry appeared, showing at last that breed of punctual discretion for which he had once been well known.
“My servant will show you out, Mr Prendick.”
“Thank you, Mr Vaughan.”
“This way, sir,” said his valet, leading the client away.
Vaughan returned to his chair and to his posture of absolute stillness, listening to the diminuendo of footsteps, the opening and closing of the front door and then the soft, creeping return of Mr Berry.
He stood upon the threshold, looking questioningly at his master.
Vaughan sighed. “Yes? What is it, Berry?”
“Don’t you want me to go after him?” Goodness, but the fellow was eager.
“Why ever would I want you to do such a thing?”
“To see where he goes. Who he speaks to. Surely you’ll want him to keep his account a secret?”
Vaughan sighed and stretched, languorously, in his chair. “It would seem that Mr Prendick has decided to tell his story to the world. I’m not sure that he’ll be listened to. Besides, I don’t think he’s as cured as he believes himself to be. I somehow think that he’ll be dead within the year.”
At this remark, Berry seemed exercised. He opened his mouth before, thinking better of it, saying nothing at all.
“Say what you want, Mr Berry.”
“Sir, have you done something?”
“Excuse me?”
“Something to Mr Prendick? Have you… I don’t know… placed some suggestion in his mind? Some instruction to suicide delivered in the mesmeric state?”
“Dear me, but you do have an imagination. I should never have believed you so fanciful, Mr Berry. Such a thing’s quite beyond me.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been most… exasperating of me.”
“Come now, Mr Berry. Don’t be truculent.”
Berry said nothing and only waited.
Vaughan sighed. “Yes, Mr Berry?”
“So how do you know? That Prendick will be dead and gone within the year?”
Vaughan sniffed. “Instinct. Nothing more. But, as I believe you know, my instincts have rarely led me down the wrong path before.”
“I see that, sir, yes. But Mr Prendick being on the loose… in the wild, so to speak, and happy to tell his story to anyone he meets…”
“Yes?”
“Well, won’t that damage your plans, sir?”
A long silence. The ticking of the clock. Mr Vaughan weighing up his options, considering the possibility, all but non-existent in his life to date (except perhaps, long ago, with a certain girl, named Louisa) for trust.
“And what do you know of my plans, Mr Berry?”
The valet winced. “I don’t know a great deal, sir. But there’s plenty I suspect.”
“Bold of you to say so.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And do you want to know, Mr Berry? Do you want, at long last, to know everything? Do you want to know what we’re planning? How all of this connects?”
No hesitation. “Yes, sir.”
Vaughan felt the urge for a cigarette and had to push away the thought. “I should warn you: Mr Prendick’s island constitutes only the beginning…”
“Yes, sir. I want to know, sir. I want to know everything.”
Vaughan grinned, his mind made up. A drink, perhaps, rather than tobacco. “Then be so good, would you, as to fetch me a brandy and soda? And one also for yourself.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Then you may draw up a chair. And you may sit with me awhile.” Mr Vaughan found that he was, against all expectation, enjoying himself now, that he relished the possibility of finally making a clean breast of it, of laying out every element to another human being. “And then, Mr Berry, I shall do what you have asked of me and I will tell you everything.”
25TH DECEMBER, 1890
SUSSEX, ENGLAND
I
Three times in her life Mrs Eliza Finn had cause to consider that she had made some more than usually severe error of judgement in the upbringing of a boy whom she had raised as her own, he who now walked about the world as Jacob Berry.
The first was when he was ten years old and had been returned from school along with a letter which suggested that it would be best for all concerned if he did not return (a situation which was eventually resolved only by the liberal application of both diplomacy and money). The second occurred five years later, not long after the death of her husband, Mr Thaddeus Berry, and her introduction of the boy to the man (Mr Walter Finn) whom she intended to take the place of the recently deceased around the matrimonial table. On this occasion, the juvenile had disappeared for two days and a night, returning home in a state of extreme sullenness, refusing to admit where he had been, looking as though he had engaged in fisticuffs and bearing upon his sleeves and collars a sequence of troubling discolorations. The third time was this very morning, in the small village church where Eliza had long worshipped, when, at a tender recitation of the nativity of the Christ-child, he had barked out a laugh so sardonic and so blasphemous that his adopted mother would, had it been uttered by any other than he, have considered him to be unequivocally of the Devil’s party.
“Jacob!” She spoke sharply but under her breath, so as not to draw attention to the pair of them from the other worshippers (of whom there were many, this service being still, in spite of the godlessness of the age, the most well-attended of the year). “You cannot make such noises.”
“Forgive me,” murmured her son, though in truth he looked very far indeed from penitence. “It’s just the sight of all this… mummery. Hypocrites everywhere.”
“Hush!” She glared and Jacob fell silent.
She was about to suggest that he was not too old to be put across her knee but something in his eyes – some new, unfamiliar intensity – made her hold her tongue. You’ve changed, she thought later as she knelt beside him as they prayed together at the end of the service and gave thanks for the miracle of which the day was a commemoration.
But what has changed you? And to what end?
II
After they had returned home from church, the remainder of the Christmas morning was passed in silence or else in vague, elusive chit-chat. Mrs Finn had a good deal of work to do in the kitchen in order to prepare the luncheon while her adopted son, though he offered his assistance, spent much of the time stalking through the sparse little rooms of the cottage or standing outside in that small patch of garden which Eliza had, in the long years of her second widowhood, worked at and nurtured until, in defiance of the unpromising clay of the ground, it had become a respectable, well-tended plot. Even today, overcast and chill, it looked orderly and patient, the neat rows of flowerbeds waiting for the rebirth of spring.
Not that Jacob saw any of this. Mrs Finn caught sight of him through the window, pacing with apparent nervousness up and down and then stopping, as though caught by a sudden thought.
He seemed to be muttering to himself. Once, when she was checking the progress of the roasting goose, she thought she heard her son laugh again, a high wild noise which didn’t sound much like him at all.
As they sat down to their food (which, although prepared by Mrs Finn herself had all been bought and paid for by Jacob), Eliza was surprised to find him on theatrically cheerful form, smiling, complimentary and attentive.
“I’m so sorry about this morning,” he said once their plates were laden high, just after he had taken his seat and, at his own instigation, said grace with a careful, earnest eloquence.
“It’s not for me to forgive,” said Mrs Finn, sniffing, although of course she had already done so. “It’s for the Lord to give you absolution.”
“Well, He does have a reputation for mercy,” said Jacob, slicing happily into the hot gooseflesh and adding to his forkful a hunk of roast potato.
Mrs Finn gave him a hard, old-fashioned look. Yet Jacob grinned back, just as he so often had as a little boy, and her heart was melted just as easily.
“Let’s not quarrel,” he said. “Not today on all days. And not when I’ve come so very far to see you.”
“And don’t think I don’t appreciate it,” Eliza said, somehow contriving to make a compliment sound accusatory. “Don’t think I don’t. You coming all this way to see your old mum and being so kind and generous to her.”
“Oh… well…” Berry spread wide his hands, in an indication of magnanimity. This, thought Mrs Finn, was not a gesture which she could recall her son ever having made before. “It really is my pleasure.”
The mood between them leavened now. A thaw was well under way. Mrs Finn even found herself able to remark, a fork halfway towards her mouth, the gravy dripping back onto her plate, “And so very good of your employer to give you these days of leave.”
Jacob seemed almost to flinch at the mention of the man who was, in a sense, the founder of the feast. “Yes, yes,” he said but he would not meet his mother’s gaze. “Mr Vaughan was very insistent that I take some time… away.” He paused and, his lips twisted in indignation, withdrew a piece of gristle from his mouth and placed it daintily before him. “He was very insistent about the significance of the season.”
“He sounds a most Christian gentleman.”
