THE CITY
I
In the course of the long, strange year which had passed since the fall of the City and its reconstruction under the command of the Beast Folk, time had become for Mr Vaughan a slippery and treacherous thing. Past and present seemed mingled together in ways which were to him almost impossible to disentangle.
He received many visitors – some human, there to check that he was being well and fairly treated, but mostly creatures (a combination of gaolers, the merely curious and those who wished to make a record of his words). The most frequent visitor of all was a great, shambling creature whom many would have thought grotesque, half-bear and half-man, furred and sinister. He was, Mr Vaughan came gradually to realise, intended as some sort of advocate on his behalf for the trial which, he dimly apprehended was approaching.
The prisoner had to admit that the bear-man had showed exemplary patience, respectful in his questions and courteous in how he talked about the case, displaying a level of decency which Mr Vaughan was not certain that he deserved. Certainly, he thought in his more lucid moments, he would never have given the same respect to Brunor (that was his name) had their situations somehow been reversed.
Brunor spoke often to him of strategies and lines of arguments. He did his utmost to tie him down to dates and times, places and people, the exact order of events which led up to the founding of the City and the precise means of its operation. He also (for reasons which Mr Vaughan found opaque, being, as he had ever been, a person of thought and conceit rather than of practicality) was interested to the point of fixation on exactly how the place had been funded, the complex streams of donors and investors, the web of interested parties, all the dodges and sleights of hand, the hidden wellsprings of income and profit.
Somewhat to his surprise, Mr Vaughan found that he answered these questions as honestly as he was able. But, more and more as the weeks went by, he found it increasingly difficult to remember very much at all, the parade of financiers and eager capitalists starting to coalesce in his mind until he found it impossible to separate one from the other.
Although Brunor kept well hidden his frustration at the increasing frictionlessness of the old man’s recall, Vaughan could sense it. There were times when his questioning grew more urgent, as though the creature feared that the memories would run out altogether, trickling away until they were irrecoverable. Still, Brunor never showed any sign of doubting the alienist’s worsening condition and never once suggested, even in anger, that the forgetfulness and imprecision might be any sort of ruse or abdication. On his good days, Mr Vaughan realised that he respected the bear-man a great deal for this.
Sometimes, as he received his visitors in his little house by the sea like a ruined king in exile, Mr Vaughan noticed that the guests seemed to shift their appearance altogether. Their features and voices were altered and he seemed not to be conversing with some human functionary or messenger from the Beast Folk but people he had known, long ago and in a different place.
There were days when he saw before him Edward Prendick, the man who had first brought him news of the Island and of what had become of the doctor. He seemed much as he had in life, outwardly robust but inwardly fragile. His expression seemed more sorrowful than angry. “Do you know,” he would say, sitting opposite Mr Vaughan on an uncomfortable chair as the waves seethed outside, “I think you may be even worse than him. He at least had the excuse of madness. But you’re not, are you? Till now, at least, I think you’ve always been entirely sane.”
At other times he saw before him poor Mr Berry, he who, with his wrecked face and flexible morality, had last been heard of in rural France, having failed to kill the Reverend Woodgrove. The valet said nothing at all but only glared at his old employer with eyes that spoke of a deep, ill-focused resentment. The fire in the boarding house, Mr Vaughan reflected, had somehow rearranged his nose and eyes, making him resemble, a child’s scribble come to unhappy life.
Once he was even visited by a little girl, not more than ten, dressed in the fashions of the old century. Through the mists that were afflicting his consciousness it took him some minutes even to recognise her. They had been, he realised, playmates together once, at school in a village far from here in a time before any of this had been thought of. Her name danced at the edges of his thoughts.
“Louisa,” he said. “Louie.”
He spoke both names back to her, remembering them as he did so. With this came a rush of memories, long repressed, glimpses of happiness in the summer of '47. Laughter in the sunshine.
At the recollection that she had died in an accident, a tragedy, Vaughan felt briefly like some credulous character in an old tale, though he felt not shock or fear but only a warming sense of recognition.
“Not long now,” Louisa said, though she surely had not drawn breath for more than half a century and was by now just dust and bones. “Not long now till we’ll walk together again.”
Vaughan smiled at the thought of it and, to lull and comfort himself, rocked to and fro in his chair. When he looked again at his visitor, the girl had gone and it was only the bear-man, frowning at him, a pad of paper open on his lap, a piece of charcoal held like an ink pen in his ungainly paw.
Months had gone by in this fashion and each day Mr Vaughan had sunk a little lower, his occasional outbreaks of panic becoming more and more infrequent as his dream-world came slowly to dominate his waking hours.
Until, at last, and with no particular fanfare that Vaughan was able to recall, Brunor walked into his cell one morning and declared, with a business-like sort of gravity: “It’s time now. Your trial is about to begin.”
The weeks that had followed had succeeded only in worsening Mr Vaughan’s confusion. Often, he felt almost detached from his own body, as though he were floating some feet from the ground.
Brought into a great spherical room with dozens (hundreds?) of chairs and placed in a dock before a panel of judges (all Beast Folk), he was hauled out of his state of quiet isolation and thrust firmly in the public gaze. There were human spectators there too, either emissaries from various governments or gentlemen of the press, but they were outnumbered by far by the peoples of the City. The atmosphere was furious, febrile. The judges had to ask often for silence, attention and respect.
On the second day, it occurred to Mr Vaughan that the room in which they were all sitting had once been a restaurant, thought it was now greatly expanded. Dimly, he remembered having seen the plans.
On the third day, he tried counting all of the different species of Beast Folk which seemed to be present but he kept losing count after fifty-four.
On the fourth day, he became convinced that there were dead people sitting amongst the crowd, grinning and beckoning to him.
By the end of the first week, he had become all but oblivious to the pageant that was being played out before him, to the long line of those who arrived to give evidence against him and who pushed their own guilt onto him, the questions from the prosecution (a scholarly creature with the look about her of the water rat) and the objections of his own counsel, the bear-man. He hardly seemed to notice the glowering looks of the judges nor the gawping faces of the newspapermen.
For a time, he drifted, almost contentedly, through the waters of the past. When it was the turn of the Beast Folk to give their evidence against him, he kept forgetting why they were so angry with him, why they snarled and spat and shouted their accusations across the courtroom. He merely smiled benignly and struggled to remember their names.
Once, before he remembered, he grew concerned: would Mr Berry be giving evidence against him? Would Mr Bufford? Or Dr Bright? How curious, he thought, how very curious: he seemed to have spent a great deal of time with men whose names began with B. He giggled at the thought, only to see Brunor looking down at him, a realisation which very nearly sent him spiralling into full laughter. It had been only with some considerable effort that he had contained himself.
And so the dance went on around him, the trial of this new century, with a man at the heart of it who could feel himself (and the sensation was by no means exclusively an unpleasant one) fading, simply fading away.
III
It ended too soon, a week before the verdict, while Brunor was still presenting the case for the defence.
On the day in question, the court had adjourned early due to the oppressive heat and Mr Vaughan had been returned to his cell, Brunor by his side as usual.
There was a strong sense in the mind of the alienist that the events which they had witnessed had some great personal significance, though he found he could not identify them easily. He was sitting back in his little room, on his bed, his feet rocking to and fro, as though he were a child again.
Brunor stood at the door, stern and with arms folded, like a visitor from a fairy story. “I’m doing the best I can,” he said, in answer to a question which Mr Vaughan had already forgotten having asked. “I think our best hope now is to ask for a sentence which takes into account your illness. Perhaps you could even stay here?”
Mr Vaughan spoke then the most lucid sentence he had managed for weeks. “They’ll want the death penalty, don’t you think?” He smiled.
Brunor rocked back upon his paws. “That does seem likely. But, you know, the City authorities will wish to show the world we’re capable of mercy. That we’re not animals.”
Vaughan looked vaguely at the creature before him. “Should’ve got me a human, then,” he said. “Not a bear.”
Brunor, sighing, rubbed his snout. “You ought to get some rest if you can. I’ll see you tomorrow. Another day.”
Mr Vaughan sank back onto his bed. “Another day,” he echoed. He closed his eyes and listened as the bear-man stamped from the room. The slam of the door, the sliding across of bolt and chain, and he was caged again, like an animal. The notion of irony had by this point rather trickled from the consciousness of Mr Vaughan but something of it must still have remained because at this stray thought he loosed a single peal of laughter.
This done, he lay quietly and waited for sleep to come. Instead, he became gradually aware that there was someone else in the room. Someone standing beside him.
“Bear-man?” he said, though no answer came. “Is that you?”
He heard footsteps as the person approached his bed. He had the sudden conviction then that the visitor was human and also that they were dead. In fact, he was almost certain who it must be. For who was the one person, from all of his life, not to have visited him yet?
Mr Vaughan opened his eyes and looked up into the face of Dr Moreau. He looked just as he had on that afternoon, long ago, in the East of London, standing outside his laboratory in his white suit, like a ringmaster pacing before the lion cage. Vaughan blinked and the dead man smiled back.
“Quite a set of liberties you’ve taken, don’t you think?” he said.
Mr Vaughan struggled to speak. His lips were dry and his throat was sore. “Aren’t you proud of me? I went so much further than you ever dreamed of.”
Moreau’s mouth was set in a firm, unyielding line. “I wanted to create a new race,” he said. “All you have succeeded in doing is creating a playground for rich men. You’re nothing more than a common tyrant. A tyrant and a pimp.”
Vaughan swallowed hard. “I wanted… to honour you. Your image. I put it everywhere.”
“Blasphemy!” Moreau said and, even in his reduced state, Vaughan saw then what he ought always to have known: that the man was irreparably insane and, most likely, always had been.
“Please,” he said. “What do you want from me?”
Moreau rolled his eyes. “I think they’ll let you off. I think they’ll take one look at you and decide they can’t put this old wreck upon the gallows. So I think they’ll let you moulder away here. And there’s no justice in that.”
“Then what…” Vaughan began but these two unremarkable words were to be his last as the hands of the doctor were already around his throat, squeezing and squeezing.
In the end, Mr Vaughan did not struggle. Some deep part of him knew what he had done. And so he simply succumbed and gave himself up to the inevitable.
IV
The guards found him later that night. Brunor was called at once. He examined the body with little surprise but with a degree of sorrow which surprised him.
His conclusions reached, he went directly to Anta’Nar who only nodded when he heard the news, as stoical as ever.
“It does solve several problems at once,” he said to Brunor. “The world has seen the trial. They can see it was just and fair and open. And now Mr Vaughan has been removed from the board.”
“But, sir, do you think there’s any justice in what’s happened?”
Anta’Nar considered. “It’s all we have,” he said. “You wanted something crueller?”
“I am on that question, sir, in a state of some conflict.”
“Aren’t we all?” Anta’Nar replied and, to Brunor’s surprise, he actually winked, a very human gesture which both amused the bear-man and made him feel oddly ill at ease.
Brunor said as much when he finally returned home and crawled into bed beside his wife.
“That I can understand,” she said.
“Sorry. You should go back to sleep. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t. As if I could sleep on a night like tonight. But just tell me one thing…”
Brunor yawned, stretched. “Of course.”
“How did he die, that devil Vaughan?”
“Suicide,” said Brunor. “To be honest, I was surprised he was capable of it. He’s seemed so frail lately and so confused. But somehow he must have found the strength.”
“How…”
“He hanged himself,” Brunor said. “In the end, I had to cut him down.”
His mate stroked Brunor’s fur, a gesture of tender solidarity. “He was a wicked man,” she said. “It’s good for us all that he’s gone.”
Brunor sighed.
“My love? What troubles you?”
“You’re right, he was an evil man,” Brunor said. “Or at least a man who did evil things out of greed and a kind of venal curiosity. But I’m worried… the next time evil visits the City, might it not have a more smiling face? Might it not even come from a place of good intentions?”