LONDON
I
Four gentlemen, all at the very top of their professions, sat in the upper room of a certain public house upon the Strand and waited for the storm to pass. Outside, the sky was dark and thunderous. Rain pelted down, densely, swiftly, and without showing the slightest indication of respite. The street itself, usually so populous and active, was all but empty, save for the occasional scurrying, waterlogged pedestrian, a handful of cabs with their miserable drivers, and a single beggar who moved with excruciating slowness through the deluge, turning his head from time to time to peer at the road behind, as if he believed himself to be pursued.
It was not, in short, an afternoon upon which anyone who was not compelled by circumstance to do so should wish to venture out of doors. Not when, in the room where the gentlemen sat, there was a fire banked high, the remains of a fine luncheon still spread out before them and a seemingly inexhaustible array of ales to be borne up by the taciturn, eternally discreet landlord. Indeed, had the times been happier ones, the occasion could most naturally have led to the breaking out both of cigars and of discursive conversation. The remainder of the day might then have been passed in an agreeable fug of tobacco smoke and tale-telling, in the flow of confidences exchanged and in the consumption of fine drink.
Yet this particular afternoon was not to be concluded in such a manner. Instead, events were to tend in quite other, less predictable, directions, ones which would lead first to violence and then to horror before culminating eventually in despair.
II
“Well, I say we call the whole business off,” said Mr Bufford, the oldest and by nature the most cautious of the quartet, a lean, silver-haired man who was amongst the most successful prosecutors of his day. “This blasted rain won’t cease and, if I’m not mistaken, the tempest’s only going to get worse. These are no conditions in which to be doing our work. There’s too great a possibility of his making a run for it and getting clean away. Far better that we wait for a clear day when we stand a chance of seeing our hands in front of our faces.”
“Bufford,” said the plump, rubicund gentleman who sat to the prosecutor’s right, “you know as well as I that we simply do not possess the luxury of time. Every day is darker than its predecessor. I say we cleave to our original scheme and make our move as planned.”
“My dear Dr Bright,” replied the prosecutor (for his companion was a physician of some considerable renown), “might I be permitted to make the case for inaction at greater length?”
Bright, who, from decades of experience, sensed the onset of a monologue, rolled his eyes theatrically.
The threatened speech never came for both Bufford and Bright were overruled at once by the third gentleman, a gaunt, thoughtful-looking priest by the name of the Reverend Douglas Woodgrove. Generally to be seen in the garb of his vocation, today, like all of the gentlemen, he was dressed in sombre, civilian browns and blacks, as though in search of anonymity.
“I am not so sure,” said Woodgrove evenly, “that we can set too much store by the weather. Our opponent is bound in any case to have established numerous escape routes. We shall have to keep our wits about us if we mean to get his attention.”
“It may even be the case,” opined Dr Bright, “that the conditions might make our quarry too confident and therefore more likely to make a mistake. Don’t you think? Remember, gentlemen: he needs to make but a single error, and then, most assuredly, we have him.”
Bufford arranged his features into an expression of querulous scepticism. He took a breath and appeared again to be upon the cusp of indignant soliloquy only to be interrupted once more.
This time, it was the fourth man who spoke up, a pale, quiet, cherubic-faced fellow named Vaughan who, while not yet forty, was nonetheless the most inventive and far-seeing scholar of the human mind resident at that time in the metropolis.
“I wonder…” he began and, although his tone was very soft and very low, and although one had to strain to hear it over the clatter and hiss of the rain, the three senior men ceased at once their conversation and turned to face him. “I wonder if he knows that we have set our plans against him. Does he see, do you think, that we mean to track him down?”
The Reverend Woodgrove frowned at this terminology. “Track him down only to ask some robust and necessary questions, surely? Why, you make it sound as though we are some hunting party and he the poor doomed stag.”
Vaughan smiled tightly. “Is the comparison so very inapt? Upon this occasion, Reverend, I doubt greatly whether mere conversation shall be sufficient.”
As Mr Vaughan had been speaking, the sound of heavy footsteps upon the staircase became increasingly loud. Almost at the final syllable, the door to the little room was wrenched open and a fifth man entered, moustachioed, dressed in damp tweed, dripping from head to toe and exhibiting every sign of extreme anxiety and distress.
“Gentlemen,” he said, and his voice was rather high and quavering for the individual was very young (not quite four and twenty) and still distinctly green. “We are discovered!”
If this entrance should strike you as being in any way theatrical in nature the assessment may be a just one; the individual was none other than that promising journalist Mr J. G. Kelman who was in his spare time a keen and talented amateur actor.
The others turned as one to face the newcomer, around whom puddles and rivulets of rainwater were forming upon the floor. Naturally enough, it was Bufford who spoke first. “What do you mean, ‘discovered’?”
“Moreau,” said the youngest man, “has found me out. Found us out at last.”
“Are you sure?” asked Woodgrove.
“He knows I’m not a scientist. He knows I’m not who I pretended to be. He used the word ‘spy’ to my face.”
“That is unfortunate,” Bufford said, “yet we ought not to be too hasty.”
Dr Bright saw an opportunity to disagree with his learned friend. “On the contrary, speed is essential. If what Mr Kelman says is true – and I have not the slightest reason to doubt him – our enemy will even now be making plans to fly.”
The Reverend Woodgrove ignored the men who were seated and asked young Kelman directly: “You’re certain he said ‘spy’? You’re sure he’s seen through you?”
“Oh, he had no proof,” Kelman said and a tinge of exasperation crept into his voice, “but he knew I’ve been lying to him all the same.”
“Did you make a mistake?” Woodgrove asked, not unkindly.
“No! At least, not that I can think of. I can’t imagine what gave me away in the end. It’s as though he has some sort of… extra perception.”
At this, there came more expressions of concern, more questions as to how it had come to this together with much in the way of disputatious indecision.
Then the one person who had not spoken since the journalist’s arrival – clever, watchful Mr Vaughan – spoke up. “We’re wasting time, gentlemen.” He had to raise his voice only very slightly for the others to fall silent as suddenly and as completely as if a stage curtain had dropped.
“Moreau is nothing if not a practical man. He will even now be preparing his defence. I say that we make our move and that we do so at once. Anyone who wishes to stay here in the warm and the dry may do so without fear of comment or judgement from me.”
All glanced towards Bufford who shifted his bulk for a moment in his chair. “I concur,” he said, apparently with as much conviction as that which he had employed to argue the opposing view scant minutes before.
Vaughan rose to his feet. “Come along, then. If we hurry we still stand a chance to catch him before he makes some desperate move. We’ll take a cab. No, two cabs! You’re with me?”
The others all agreed that they were and, following Vaughan, the party of five proceeded through the door and down the steep and rickety staircase that led first to the saloon bar and then to the street outside.
“Reverend Woodgrove!” This was young Kelman to the priest who had somehow found himself at the rear of the procession.
“Yes, my boy? What is it?”
The young man’s nerves were plain upon his face. “Why do you think he let me go? Moreau. I mean, he could have made me stay. He could have injured me or worse.”
Woodgrove did not at first reply. Then he said: “Perhaps there’s hope for him yet. Perhaps some sunken part of him realises the nature of his transgressions. Perhaps the doctor can still be saved.”
Kelman found himself unable to respond to what seemed to him to be the most wild and ill-founded optimism for then they were out through the snug warmth of the bar, and into the rain again, into the street where Vaughan was making arrangements with two cab drivers. They all clambered aboard, already sodden, and the vehicles moved away, the horses shivering and whinnying at the misery of it. They were off, away from the heart of the city and towards its wilder, uncivilised edge.
Into which of those two speeding cabs ought we now to glimpse?
The first, its horse bent and wretched against the downpour, its driver cursing obstinately at the elements, contained within it Mr Bufford, Dr Bright and the Reverend Woodgrove. In spite of the gravity of their mission, these three gentlemen set at once to the revivification of numerous old arguments and disputes which, being of a circular, repetitive and (at least to the participants) an oddly comforting nature, we can probably leave safely to one side.
It is into the second, then, that we should peer. This followed hastily after the first in a quick, slipshod manner as though both horse and rider were closer than they knew to an absolute loss of control. Inside, buffeted and jolted, sat Kelman, the newspaper man. Opposite him sat Mr Vaughan.
For a long while, as the vehicle careered and swayed through the streets, and as the rain beat its mad tattoo upon the roof, these two disparate personages said nothing to one another at all. The little convoy hugged the road by the river, moving first towards Temple, then to Blackfriars and then to the very rim of the financial district. On and on they went, heading ever eastwards.
No doubt the mind of Mr Kelman was still in some uproar given his adventures that day for he fidgeted constantly in his seat and was forever running one finger around the circumference of his grimy shirt collar, presenting the very picture of nervous discomfort.
Mr Vaughan, on the other hand, sat very quietly and very still. His body did not seem to jump or jitter as did Mr Kelman’s at the indignities of the journey. He sat straight-backed and pensive, his eyes half-closed at times in a posture that seemed to hint at the monastic.
It was only once they had passed Tower Hill and edged into Smithfield, that Mr Vaughan finally spoke.
He did not seem in any wise to raise his voice yet somehow every syllable of it was entirely audible to his companion.
“Mr Kelman?” he began, his tone conversational and cordial enough if not especially friendly. “Might I ask you something about the man we’re to meet tonight?”
“You may meet him,” Kelman said, speaking too quickly and with an odd levity, which he surely cannot have felt. “Then again you may not. He is a slippery fellow, you know. Slippery as an eel. No, more than that – a shifter of shapes. Like quicksilver. Like Mercury.”
Mr Vaughan smiled. “A colourful description but I rather think you do him too much credit. He’s just a man. An eccentric one certainly. And one possessed of uncommon ambition. But when all’s said and done he’s just flesh and blood and every bit as fallible as the rest of us.”
Mr Kelman looked as if he meant to contradict the fellow who sat opposite him only, at the last minute, to think better of it.
“So my question,” went on Mr Vaughan, “has to do with what one might call Moreau’s… persuadability. And, since you have spent so much time at his side, since you’ve been able to witness his working practices at such close quarters, tell me honestly: do you think it possible that we can change his mind? I mean, the five of us? If we sit him down and warn him of the consequences of taking the path upon which he’s embarked?”
The younger man looked somewhat aghast. “I don’t… That is… even if you say that I overstate the case, Moreau’s a uniquely determined man. I’ve no doubt he’s quite set now on the path he’s chosen.”
“Well, that is a decided pity, for I should so much prefer to avoid any unpleasantness.”
Kelman cleared his throat. “Mr Vaughan, honestly. I really don’t believe that a scandal is at all to be avoided now. Nor, quite frankly, would my editor wish for it to be. Why, by the time we’re finished it will be a very unjust world indeed if the very name of Moreau doesn’t become a byword for infamy.”
Mr Vaughan smiled a small, tight smile. “Oh, but I did not mean unpleasantness of that kind. For I am quite certain that what is left of his reputation will have to be torn apart.”
“Then what did you mean?”
The smile of Mr Vaughan did not dim as he reached into the right hand pocket of his dark jacket and withdrew a slim, polished silver revolver.
The younger man leaned forward to see the thing and gaped. “You really think it might come to that?”
“If everything you’ve told us and all that I suspect of this man is true then, yes, it may very well do.”
“But we’re not authorised… I mean, we’re amateurs, surely. We’re not professional men.”
“Hush now.” Vaughan slid back the revolver into the place. “All will yet be well. At least, that is, if we only hurry!”
And with this, in an unheralded burst of impatient energy, Vaughan reached up one hand and struck the roof of the cab three times.
“Hurry up!” he shouted. “In the name of England!”
The driver shouted down several curses, the details of which, mercifully, were lost to the storm.
“Can’t be much further,” said Kelman once the shouting had stopped.
Vaughan, now as still again as he had been before, seemed to have recovered his composure. “Almost there.” One hand fluttered to the weapon in his jacket again and touched its outline as if for comfort. This done, he folded his hands in his lap and smiled a flicker of a smile which was finished an instant after it had begun.
Outside, the tempest was growing in pace and ferocity as the cab passed further into the East, past Whitechapel and Shadwell, on and on, as the contents of the heavens were hurled down to earth.
IV
In the wake of the resultant scandal, many descriptions were circulated of the laboratory which was owned and operated by Dr Moreau in the part of the old city known then as Ratcliffe. The popular press were most exercised upon the subject and strikingly vivid in their treatment of it. “Hovel of Horrors” was one such description, “Basement of the Bizarre” another. All of the reporting at the time made it sound like some gothic extrusion, some far-flung medieval castle. In truth, such accounts were grossly exaggerated.
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.”
Apparently pleased at this little speech, he nodded again, superfluously, at the survivors then turned and all but strutted from the room. The door clicked shut. Woodgrove and Bright were left in silence save for the hum and chatter of police-work in the room beyond.
The Reverend Woodgrove took a breath, thought how very damp his clothes were and was about to try something in the way of a whispered, desperate prayer for success when he felt a hand tugging at his right shoulder, the force of which all but spun him around.
“Woodgrove…” Bright’s face was pale and pained. His eyes were bloodshot and he seemed to be beset by a slight tremor – his hands were visibly shaking – which Woodgrove did not think was attributable entirely to the cold. “I don’t think I can do it.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t think I can go back. Not to find them just lying there. And that… thing too.” He looked up at the priest with fearful, pleading eyes.
“I understand.”
“You don’t think me a coward?”
“Not at all, my dear fellow. We were simply so very unprepared for what we found. We hadn’t guessed – we hadn’t dared to guess – the dreadful scale of the thing.”
“Yes, yes,” said the physician eagerly, grasping at this explanation with almost pathetic gratitude.
“Still you don’t think…” Woodgrove began, gently, as though addressing a nervy parishioner, “that it might not be better for you to go back? To see it all? To face up to it and see if we can’t bring that scoundrel down.”
“Oh he’ll have fled by now. He’ll be long gone. You and I both know it.”
“Nevertheless… for the sake of settling your own account in this business…”
Bright shook his head almost truculently, like a child. “No,” he said. “No, I’m never going back. I can’t bring myself to look on what he did. Surely you of all men should understand that. For it’s blasphemy, don’t you think? Pure blasphemy. And Moreau himself is the very devil.”
VI
And so it was that the Reverend Woodgrove went back to the laboratory without Dr Bright but in the company of the police inspector and two dozen of the metropolis’ brawniest and most implacable constables. It made, in the end, for quite the procession. The rain had cleared the streets and, even though it had finally stopped, the roads were still mostly empty.
It was a real spectacle to see three great police wagons go speeding along, out of the Yard and into the East, seemingly heedless of the possible perils of flooding as the sewers and drains, unaccustomed to such a deluge, disgorged their contents into the open. No doubt there were more than a few of those pedestrians who had ventured out once again who watched this small but ominous convoy go by and wondered where it was headed and to whom, thinking themselves lucky that it was not in search of them for which the vehicles had been despatched.
The Reverend Woodgrove sat in the first of the wagons, nestled between the inspector and one of his subordinates, a large, squarely-built man who was in immediate want of both a shave and a bath. As they swayed through the streets, retracing the route into Ratcliffe, Woodgrove tried to distract himself by thinking of various inspiring verses from the book of Proverbs only to find his powers of recollection to be most lacking. He tried instead to find a still point within himself, one in which he might hear the voice of his Creator. Yet there was too much noise and the anxiety that he felt was too great to be able to achieve tranquillity. He tried then to think of nothing at all and simply surrender to the dreadful sensation of the journey yet he found even this impossible to manage.
Instead he kept coming back to a memory – not, in fact, a recent one but something from his childhood (which had been spent in comfortable, if rather bohemian, affluence in Cheshire), to an occasion when he had been left alone with his baby brother (now, sadly, long since gone, killed in some distant territory in defence of the empire). He remembered how he had felt an odd sense of power when he gazed down into the cot and watched that pink face look up at him with uncomprehending eyes. He remembered how he had reached in, meaning to tickle the little fellow or to squeeze a plump and tiny hand, only for the infant to set up at once a terrific wail, his features screwed up in outrage, his cheeks damp with tears, the sound of his furious weeping terrifying to hear. Of course, the young Woodgrove had turned at once and fetched his mother, who chided him for bothering the baby, blaming him unthinkingly for the uproar, but who had also soothed the babe within mere moments as the lad glared mutinously out at his older brother from their mother’s arms.
At first, Woodgrove wasn’t altogether certain why he should think of this now. Then he realised that when he saw that abominable hybrid, the obscenity which had been enacted upon the body of the dog, it had been his brother’s face that he had seen there – or, to be more accurate, that the strange processes of human memory had imposed this upon the scene. Now, he found himself murmuring a prayer at last. His lips moved to form the name of the brother who had left him.
An elbow in his ribs brought him back to the present. “I said, is this the place, Reverend?” The inspector was looking at him with irritation. “Are we almost there?”
Woodgrove looked out at the streets. They had come back sooner than he had expected. This was the place all right: the abandoned alleyway, the courtyard beyond, flanked on one side by what seemed to be a warehouse.
“Yes,” he said. “This is it.”
“Need to stop here then,” the inspector said. “Won’t get the trucks through the archway.”
He shouted instructions and the convoy was brought to a halt. Woodgrove wondered at the wisdom of so unstealthy an approach. He did not believe it to be his place to protest, however, or to offer any advice (the late Mr Bufford, he reflected, would have been very much more forthright in such a position) and so he simply did as he was told. When the time came, he stepped out of the vehicle and walked behind the inspector at the forefront of that miniature army as they went toward the doors of the laboratory.
The way was sodden. They splashed through puddles. It was gloomy and oppressive. The elderly gas-lamp which stood there still showed no signs of having been lit (Woodgrove wondered later if Moreau had somehow made certain of this) and the only available illumination was the light which emanated from the laboratory itself, spilling out on the courtyard beyond.
“Tread carefully,” the inspector said to Woodgrove as they moved gingerly forwards, quite needlessly in the priest’s opinion since he had never walked with greater care in all his life. “You can turn back if you like,” the policeman added. “We can go on from here. You can wait in the wagon till the worst is over.”
“Certainly not,” said Woodgrove stoutly. “I have to go on.”
The place was as quiet as before, if not quieter now that the rain had ceased. Aside from the light, there was no sign of life from within the warehouse itself. Two shapes, however – long and dark – were immediately apparent on the ground. Woodgrove approached them with mournful determination.
“These are your friends?” the inspector asked as he came to stand beside the priest and as the two of them peered through the mirk at the two dead bodies.
“Mr Bufford was my friend,” Woodgrove said. “Kelman I did not know so well. But they were both good men, I can tell you that. They deserved better than to be gored in the street and left like carrion.”
“We’ll take good care of them,” the inspector said. “But didn’t you say that there was an animal here? A dog, possibly rabid?”
“Yes,” said the priest, without further elaboration.
“I can’t see it. You said the beast was shot.”
There was no denying it. Even in the dim light of the courtyard it was plain that there were two human bodies before them but nothing animal, nothing like the hell-hound that the five men had encountered hours before.
“Someone’s moved it,” Woodgrove said, and even to his ears the explanation sounded feeble. “Someone must have moved the body of that creature. Buried it somewhere. Or burned it.”
“You think it was Moreau?” The policeman was kind enough to keep any suggestion of scepticism out of his voice but the Reverend Woodgrove knew that he must feel it all the same.
“Possibly… I don’t know. I feel certain somehow that he meant to flee. He was, after all, discovered, so I really don’t know how he would do… something like this.”
At this, unexpectedly, a new voice rang out.
“It wasn’t Moreau!”
The voice came from the direction of the laboratory itself and Woodgrove saw now that there was somebody waiting there, in the shadows, leaning, it seemed, against the wall of the building.
The voice was a familiar one.
“Mr Vaughan?”
Woodgrove moved towards him, the inspector hurrying in his wake. As he approached, the priest saw that it was Vaughan all right. The alienist had propped himself up in a leisurely manner and was engaged in eating an apple. Woodgrove heard the moist crunch of it, a sound that seemed to him almost obscene in such a context.
“Hello, Woodgrove.” Strange indeed: there seemed to be a note of extreme but suppressed excitement in Vaughan’s voice. “You took your time, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Woodgrove said, inwardly cross at himself for the apologetic nature of his tone. “It’s taken us a good long while… as you see… to bring the authorities here…”
The inspector stepped forward. “You’d be Mr Vaughan, would you, sir? The fifth member of this little club.”
“Scarcely a club, Inspector. More a loose consortium of like-minded individuals with a common goal.” He took another insouciant bite of his apple. “Or so we thought.”
“Way I hear it, sir, is that you were last seen going into this building at a time when the murderer had yet to leave the premises. Now we find you here, leaning and chomping for all the world as if you’ve witnessed nothing less agreeable than a day at the races.”
“Inspector, please.” The alienist rearranged his features into an expression of something like solemnity. “You must not mistake my current demeanour for any lack of gravity as to what has taken place here today. My reactions are only, perhaps, a little idiosyncratic.”
“Vaughan,” Woodgrove said. “What’s happened here?”
“Moreau’s long gone,” said Vaughan. “He must have made his escape minutes after shooting poor Kelman in cold blood. But his laboratory I think you will find most interesting. Most interesting indeed. Some of it, I’m sure, he took with him. But a good deal he would not have had time to pack. And from this alone, I can assure you that our worst fears were not only realised but exceeded.” With another defiant crunch, Vaughan gnawed away at a further segment of fruit.
“I think we’d better go inside, don’t you?” said the inspector. “Vaughan, you stay right where you are.”
“Of course, of course.”
The policeman turned to address the phalanx of his men. “You there – stand watch over the bodies, I’ll be examining them in a moment. Wilkins – stand in the thoroughfare and make sure no-one wanders in, eager to see what the commotion’s about.” More orders followed, all acted upon by the constables with commendable alacrity.
As this was taking place, Woodgrove turned back to Vaughan. “What happened,” he said very softly but firmly, “to that abominable dog?”
Vaughan gazed at him, unblinking, took a final bite of his apple, tossed the core to the ground and said: “I’ve really no idea. Why does it trouble you so much?”
“Because that thing killed our friend. And without it we look like fantasists.”
“Oh, hardly that. It’s been a very long night, Woodgrove, so I’ll ignore your rather overheated tone. Besides, you may take it from me that after you’ve seen what’s inside this building, people will not only think us very far indeed from fantasists or dreamers of any sort, they will wonder why we did not act much sooner and with considerably more determination.”
Before Vaughan could reply, the inspector was back at his side again.
“We’re going in,” he said. “Do you want to join us?”
“Yes,” said Woodgrove, averting his gaze from Mr Vaughan. “Yes, I do believe I have to see this for myself.”
VII
The details of what they found in the laboratory of Dr Moreau were at one time well known. The press got hold of it and ran with the story for weeks after the discovery. The little buff-coloured pamphlet known as “The Moreau Horrors” had perhaps the fullest account (amongst a good deal of omissions for the sake of the morale of the British public).
Certainly, the sights which he saw there followed the Reverend Woodgrove for the rest of his life. He was never to be entirely free of them and he had many a sleepless night that was interrupted by some vision, unwillingly recalled – the twisted face of an experimental subject; the remnants of a failed vivisection; the octopoid things in tanks which spoke of a deep interest in the most monstrous creatures of the sea. The smell of the place came back to him often too, as of something halfway between a chemical lab and a fairground, or the sawdust scent of a circus tent with an abattoir reek. There were even nights in the early weeks following the raid when Woodgrove would wake screaming in his bed.
Later, after Woodgrove and Mr Vaughan had departed, after the police had done their necessary work, after the caravan of journalists and ghoul-seekers and the idle had been and gone, it was decided by some authority or other to have the laboratory first cleared and then demolished. Much that was inside was burned. All that was still living there was euthanised.
For years afterwards there were stories told about that particular patch of ground. Londoners knew to steer clear of it and newcomers soon found reasons to stay away. A generation passed before anything was built atop it. There remained widespread, persistent and very similar accounts of some spectral creature glimpsed in the shadows and of the chilling, wretched wail of a long-dead infant.
Indeed, it is not a place that is visited often even now, when London has changed so completely, out of all recognition.