The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories

THE BLACK CREATOR by Vernon Routh

I saw the advertisement in that most conservative of professional journals, The Medico, and as I was at that moment looking for a chance to do some original research, I wrote to the box number given, and was by return of post invited to meet Doctor Diaz Volo at the Crasterby Hotel in Mount Street, London, W.1.

The Crasterby Hotel is a small but very exclusive and expensive place, and walking to the resident’s lounge was like treading on aerated foam rubber in an opulently perfumed and warmed stillness.

There was only one person in the lounge when I entered, and he rose to greet me, holding an evening paper in one hand and removing his spectacles with the other, a homely appearance with the suggestion of the hospitality of a good and safe club member about it.

“Sit down, Doctor James,” he said, with a courtesy a little too heavily ceremonious for modern taste. “You do use the title—or do you prefer the more distinguished ‘mister’?”

I shrugged my shoulders to suggest indifference, and sat down in the chair, deep and comfortable, which he made the needless motion of pushing towards me. He offered me a whisky and soda and a cigarette, and then seated himself.

“I use neither of these comforts,” he said, “so you will excuse me if I leave you to enjoy them without my support.”

In spite of all this civility, and of the fact that he was one of the most handsome and distinguished men I had ever seen, I did not like him at all. He must have been in his late fifties, but his manner—probably because of this smack of what is called ‘old-world courtesy’ made him seem much older, and suggested at least fifteen years more than he had.

“As you saw from my letter,” he said, “my name—Diaz Volo—is foreign, but I am as English as you are. I was born in Barnstaple—the fourth generation to be so. Beyond that lies a story common enough in those parts; and another branch of my family changed our surname to Voller. Yet another, more radically English, became Fuller, and you may see their name on fascia boards in a Midland county where they have for long been in business as coal-merchants.”

All this he told me, as if to gain my confidence in his Englishness and respectability, in a musical voice, occasionally pointing a remark with a long white hand, on one finger of which he wore a ring with a curious stone that looked like a human eye. His hair was thin and silvery: his complexion pink and white like a girl’s. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles, and the eyes behind them were blue. But it was those eyes that focused my dislike and unease. In spite of the innocence of his other features, and the associations of benevolence with silver hair and gentle voice, his eyes were hard and unsmiling. They were like expressionless blue windows in a mysterious house, full of hateful secrets—that was the simile that occurred to me as I looked at him.

“You are a specialist in plant life, I understand,” he said.

“I’ve done a good deal of work in that field,” I replied, and gave him some details of what I had been doing in the past few years.

“That sounds excellent,” he said, nodding his head. “Now, how soon can you join me?”

It was clear I had the appointment, and when he mentioned the salary, which, since the post was to be residential, was almost staggeringly munificent, I said:

“Can you give me some idea of what you are doing?”

“There’ll be plenty of time for us to go into that after you’ve settled in,” he replied. “Now, that’s all arranged. I do hope you’ll stay and dine with me.”

There seemed no rational consideration to make me hesitate further, so I allowed his words to set the seal on our bargain, and had an excellent meal with him; and when we parted, I promised to join him at his place a week from that day.

He was the owner of an old castle on an island off the south-west coast, and it was here that he carried on the researches in which I was to join him. As I had arranged, I set off from Waterloo in a fast train one week after my meeting with him, and after a four-hour journey, left the train at the little seaside town of Mantock. Following his directions, I took a cab from the station to the quay, where, swaying on the water, was a motor boat manned by a fellow dressed like a chauffeur.

The afternoon was merging into evening. A grey drizzle had been falling all day, and the distance was hazy with it—a world of sombre greys—the wet stones of the quay, the gently heaving sea, and the very air itself. The man in his peaked cap and black oilskin climbed up on the quay and touched his hat with one finger.

“Doctor James?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

I nodded, staring at him, not because he seemed to have laryngitis, but because his cheeks had long white scars on them, so that he seemed to be decorated like a Papuan, except that it was evident to me that each of the long white scars had been made by a skilful surgeon’s knife. The effect was sinister in the extreme. However, he was polite enough, and at his invitation, I stepped into the boat and he handed down my luggage. He started the engine, which clattered into life in the still grey afternoon, and we moved off smoothly out of the little harbour.

“How long before we reach Burfrey Island?” I asked.

The man looked at me with what may have been intended as a friendly smile, but appeared, owing to his disfigurement, as a fiendish grin.

“Twenty minutes—half an hour,” he replied. “What’s the difference? We get there sooner or later.” He glanced astern for a moment, towards the coast, which had already vanished from sight in the greyness. We were travelling in a damp, grey, silent void. “My name’s Porteous Malloway,” he added, turning towards me again.

The association was immediate. His was the same name as that of a famous operatic tenor who had disappeared in mysterious circumstances some years before.

“Unusual,” I said. He looked at me so oddly that I hastened to add: “Your name, I mean.”

“You’ve heard it before,” he said, in that hoarse whisper.

“Why, yes. It’s so odd. You have the name of a great singer . . .”

“I am he,” said the man, who now seemed to be either a lunatic or an aimless liar. And yet—when I looked closely at him—there was a ghastly resemblance to the great artiste who had combined a lovely voice with one of the most handsome faces ever seen on the stage or concert platform.

“You may have heard me sing,” he said. To hear those words said in that hoarse whisper, and in that lonely place, was horrible. I said nothing, and suddenly, there in the drizzling void, he opened his mouth as if to sing, and there emerged from those cracked and finished vocal chords the aria every audience of his had clamoured for in encore after encore. It was dreadful, and I went colder as I watched and listened. He stopped, and only the chug of the engine and the slap of the waves broke the stillness. Then he looked at me queerly.

“I had an accident,” he said sullenly.

In a few moments, the fading light revealed a more solid grey. We were near Burfrey Island. My companion switched off the engine and we slid smoothly up to a landing place of rock projecting into the sea. He rose and nodded landward.

“Get ashore,” he said. “I’ll bring your bags. We’ve a bit of a climb.”

I stepped ashore, and he secured the boat and followed me with my luggage.

The grey loneliness of our surroundings was emphasized by the wet mournful music of the waves, the cries of the sadly wheeling gulls, and above all by a row of houses, empty, desolate, and decaying, on the waterfront beyond the stony wave-glistening beach. Nothing could have been more dead and sinister than these houses, with their frameless window openings, the crumbling walls, the dusty rooms with piles of rubble in their corners, and their broken roofs: murdered houses where once men, women, and children had lived their lives and enjoyed sunny days. These ruins were a symbol of the crumbled past, grey, shiny wet in the rain, empty and useless, aching with the desolation of unhappy things.

I followed Porteous Malloway up a steep rocky path, and after a breathless climb of ten minutes, we reached an ancient doorway, stout, iron-bound, and tight shut, in a high wall of stone, along the top of which, I observed, was barbed wire.

Porteous put down my bags and rang a bell, whose push was set in the wall beside the door. Almost immediately the door was opened by the largest man I had ever seen. He stood inside the door, holding it open, and I could not see his head and shoulders till I stepped inside. He was fully seven feet tall, and of an enormous physique, with hands literally like hams. One of them held a large bunch of keys. At his heels was a dog which could have belonged, in proportions, to the same monstrous world as he, for it was the size of a pony, and of a breed I did not know, so suggestive of a leonine strain that for a moment I started back, thinking it indeed a lion.

“Go on,” said Porteous, “the dog won’t hurt you—unless Quilp says so. And you needn’t talk to him. He hasn’t got a tongue.”

To call this giant Quilp was a hideous joke that sorted well with all that was happening. I quelled a sudden urge to turn round and make a bolt for sanity: but it was clear that now I had come, I must stay. Besides, my curiosity was at least as strong as my growing fear.

I stepped inside and Quilp shut and locked the door behind me. I felt exactly all the sensations of being under arrest, and the full view of Quilp emphasized them. His huge head was entirely hairless, a horrible pinkish bald globe, and on his face was what I later found to be a perpetual grin, through which his huge inhuman teeth, yellow and fanged, were to be seen constantly bared like ah enraged animal. His back and shoulders were hunched, no doubt in the constant effort to adjust his height to normal-sized doors and structures.

But my attention was wrenched away from him to the gardens which lay around us as we moved towards the mouldering castle in front of us. It was like a garden in some hideous fantasy.

The trees, though they were of known species, looked alien and fearsome because they were twisted into wild and strainful shapes, as if they had been wrenched into horror by a cruel mocking hand. Some of them had trunks which lay almost touching the ground in a grotesque serpentine homage, while their branches reached out in tightly screwed agony outwards and upwards. Others leaned over at fantastic angles, and my fancy almost heard their sighs and groans at their stressful positions, as if they were beasts strapped down and racked into painful and unnatural postures. From this dreadful sight, without precedent or tolerable reason, my gaze went to what passed for flower-beds. They were placed as are those of loving gardeners who take pains to provide for their flowers geometrical shapes—diamonds, squares, circles. But the evil mockery of this planning had made these beds into monstrous shapes, patterns that mocked the very existence and sanctity of human ideas of beauty. As we walked along, I saw a group of beds in which the centre one was designed as a skull, with smaller plots around it in the form of huge bones, all filled or covered with some white substance like lime. Others bore the shape of vile creatures of the imagination, writhing snakes, prehistoric beasts, scorpions, a tortured human hand; and all these plots were planted with the ugliest of plant life, sinister, phallic, evil-smelling—the very encyclopaedia botanica must have been scoured for these horrifying species, some of which I recognized, while others were entirely strange to me: and the chilling suspicion seized my mind that these odd repulsive plant-creatures were the fruit of some obscene research, some unspeakable experiments in the cross-breeding of the ugly with the sinister to produce something more repulsive than Nature at her most cruel and mocking. But the thing that struck the greatest chill to my heart was this: the grass on the well-kept lawns was not green: it was pure white, as if some foul process had been discovered for making the living grass pale and bloodless.

We reached the great front door of the castle, passing over a drawbridge which spanned a shuddering ditch whose bottom was covered with green-scummed water, and I noticed with a spasm of nausea that the surface was broken and moving with some form of slothful crawling sub-aqueous life, which kept the scum softly bubbling. I shuddered involuntarily as Quilp rang the bell, his great hand on the chain.

Between me and the comfortable sanity of the mainland lay the grey drizzling evening and the stretch of water we had crossed. Go back I could not: go forward I must. I glanced fleetingly at my silent companions, the one a gigantic monster, the other with his murderous whisper and his ruined slashed face. A panel in the door opened briefly, and we were inspected, and then the door swung slowly open.

There stood a man attired conventionally as a butler, faultlessly groomed, not a hair out of place, but with the face and features of a dog. I could not believe my eyes, as he bowed to me and stood aside to let me enter the hall. He pointed to Porteous Malloway and to the floor, on which my bags were deposited, my two attendants shut out, and then the dog-faced butler beckoned to me to follow him. A great log fire burned in the open hearth. Small lights glowed in sconces, and as I entered, a grandfather clock struck seven. The butler crossed the hall, knocked at a heavy door, and then opened it to let me pass into the room beyond. This room was the first civilized thing I had seen since I left the mainland.

It was evidently the dining room, beautifully and tastefully lit and furnished, and dinner was laid for two. By the fire stood Doctor Volo in evening dress, and as I stood by the door, he came forward.

“My dear Doctor James,” he said, holding out his hand, “welcome indeed. I thought you would be hungry after your journey, so I ordered dinner for seven. But you’ll have a drink first. Sherry? Or do you favour whisky?”

He poured me a sherry at my request, and led me to a comfortable chair by the fire. The sherry was an excellent medium wine, Amontillado, I thought. Volo looked at me from his chair.

“I always dress for dinner,” he said, “and so may you . . . but don’t delay the meal by changing tonight. It’s a civilized usage, and cut off as I am, it would be easy to become slack. You recall Somerset Maugham’s story of the white man in the wilds who dressed for dinner by himself every night? Yes. Now if you’re ready, I think we’ll dine at once.”

He rang a bell by the fireplace, and through a door on the far side of the room came a maid with the soup. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and she wore a uniform of black frock and frilly cap which looked most provocative. When she had gone, Volo looked up at me from his soup as if he read my thoughts.

“Yes,” he said, “I agree with you. Beatrice is a lovely and desirable creature.”

As he said this, his blue eyes behind their spectacles shone with a light—not lascivious, not prurient, but in some spine-chilling way, threatening. My mind sought for words to crystallize my impressions, and I could only get the sense that he was a man to whom beauty was some sort of a challenge—yes—a challenge to destroy it wantonly. When Beatrice had served dinner and was about to give us coffee, Volo spoke to her.

“Beatrice,” he said, “this is Doctor James, who has come to assist me in my research.”

The girl bowed slightly, but did not speak. I looked at her and smiled. She certainly was a beauty, with her fair hair, her blue eyes, and her warm lips full of promise.

“Black or white?” asked Volo.

“White, please,” I replied.

“Beatrice, get some hot milk,” he said. “I’m sorry, James. I always take it black.”

When she returned after a while with the milk, she brought it to me, and—accidentally, it seemed—knocked my table napkin off the table. She and I stooped to pick it up, and as we did so, she pushed into my hand a scrap of paper. Volo watched all this with that hateful expression in his eyes. I crushed the paper in my hand and allowed Beatrice to put the table-napkin near me. When she had gone finally, leaving us to coffee and me to brandy and a cigar, comfortably by the fire, Volo said:

“Now, my dear chap, I have some work to do. Stay here as long as you like. But when you’re ready to go to your room, ring for Brady the butler to show you up. I’ve had a fire lit for you, and you’ll find books and writing materials there. Meanwhile, there’s the brandy. So . . . goodnight, and pleasant rest.”

So saying, he left me, and quite soon afterwards, I rang the bell. The dog-faced butler appeared and stood attentively till I rose. Then he led me to a room on the first floor, up the wide stairs, along an uneven corridor, through a door of which time had pulled the frame out of straight. I closed the door and surveyed my quarters.

The room was comfortable, carpeted to the walls, with a modern single bed, and shelves of books all round. There was whisky on a small table, an easy chair by the fire, and cigarettes in a green jade box. My bags had been unpacked, and my pyjamas and dressing-gown put out for me. There was a hot-water bottle in the bed. Nothing was lacking for my comfort. I took a cigarette and put my hand in my pocket for my lighter. My fingers encountered the scrap of paper Beatrice had passed to me. I unscrewed it and read the words she had written:

Three things were instantly clear to me. The girl was telling the truth. My boatman was indeed the great singer, Porteous Malloway. And I must get out. I walked softly to the door and turned the handle. The door was locked from the outside. I sat down in my chair and stared at the fire. It was not fear I felt now. It was resolve. I would discover the limits of the life and activities of Doctor Diaz Volo, and I would liberate myself and other victims of his practices, whatever they might be. I was quite calm. I was after all a scientist. This was England. Help was not far away. I thought of all I had already seen with repulsion and horror. I recalled the faces of the people I had met, and the nightmare garden, lying now outside my window, agonized, tortured, crying out in the anguish of twisted shape. After a while, I went to bed and turned off my light, determined to see this gruesome adventure to its end.

I woke early, and looking at my watch, found the time to be ten minutes past six. The room was dark and the house absolutely silent, except for a strange distant sound, faint but discordant, like faraway mill sirens. I lay still for a while, but then, as my mind was wide awake, I rose, washed and shaved, and dressed. Then I walked to and fro in my locked room, until at half past seven, my door opened and Beatrice came in with a breakfast tray. I took it from her and put it down on the table by the fireplace.

“Now,” I said. “Talk.”

I was going to shut the door, but she said fiercely:

“No. Leave it open.”

“Why was the door locked on me?”

“Because you’re a prisoner, like everyone else here.”

“Nonsense. I’m free to leave when I wish.”

“Are you? You’ll find you’re mistaken.”

“I saw everything when I came. I can find my way out.”

“With high walls? With electrified barbed wire on top? With monsters of his making guarding the place night and day?”

“Monsters? Of his making? What does that mean?”

“You saw Quilp? And the dog-lion? You saw Brady with his dog face?”

“Yes. I saw them.”

“They’re not the only ones. He bred them or made them. They’re his successes.” She shuddered and put her hands to her face. I pulled them away.

“You must tell me . . . everything,” I said.

“He has failures too,” she said. “You saw the garden . . . oh, that beautiful word isn’t right . . . you saw that field of torture . . . those twisted trees. . . .”

“Yes. I saw them.”

“In the soil there are his failures . . . buried, corrupt, crawling.”

She stared at me, her beautiful face wide-eyed and horror-stricken, and then said a terrible thing.

“My turn is coming. I know it is. I don’t know when . . . but soon . . .”

With a moan of terror, she threw herself into my arms, and I in turn clasped her, and we embraced as if we were two souls in mortal danger, with only each other for comfort. Suddenly she looked up at me and words poured from her.

“You don’t know yet. I know. I’ve been here two months. I met him in London, and he invited me here to work on a film. The other people he told me would be here were never asked. He only said they were. He’s diabolical . . . he made it look as if I’d killed myself, and don’t you see?—he only wants people who’ve got some beautiful thing—a voice, good looks, anything lovely, so that he can . . .” She paused and shivered.

“So that he can . . .?” I prompted.

“Turn it into ugliness. He hates beauty. He’s a kind of evil god . . . a black creator. He wants a world full of hellish ugliness. Brady was once a handsome young man. Surgery made his face look like that. He’s a success. The failures are under the ground, under those crippled trees. Don’t you know why he wants you?”

“Tell me.”

“He’s always trying to make new plants and flowers that will be hideous. It’s all a mockery of the beautiful world. When he succeeds he’s happy for days, and looks at his work and laughs. He’s got a white flower that looks like a skull. He has a plant with leaves like broken hands and fingers. Oh . . . listen . . .”

We stood close together, motionless. The strange sound I had heard had become louder. It was a dreadful discordant cacophony, like voices of people in pain.

“He says that silence is too beautiful and must be broken. That noise goes on for hours, electrically made, and then he suddenly stops it, to make it worse when it begins again.”

“Has he talked to you about these things?”

“Oh, yes. He calls it necessary teaching—the new gospel, the true light—all sorts of fine names. He makes a secret of nothing. And so I know what he’s going to do to me . . . change me into something horrible, ugly, some living horror . . . unless he fails.”

She hid her face on my shoulder, and I embraced her more closely, as if I would so save her. Over her head, standing at the door, I suddenly saw Volo, fully dressed, smiling, evil.

“I hoped you had breakfasted,” he said, as if he had noticed nothing between Beatrice and me. “I like to start work at eight and get a good morning in. Pray join me when you are ready. Beatrice will bring you to my study.”

When he had disappeared, I spoke to Beatrice.

“That’s upset things,” I said.

She replied with dreadful solemnity.

“Nothing upsets him,” she said. “He thinks as if he were God and we were his creatures.”

I poured and drank a cup of coffee.

“Take me to him now,” I said. “I’ll get you out of here if I have to murder him to do it.”

She came into my arms again, and we kissed as if the kiss were the seal of our liberation into the world of sanity and beauty outside these obscene walls.

Volo received me in his study which was book-lined and contained microscopes and other small apparatus such as might have been expected in the room of a scientist. He was putting on a white coat as I entered.

What I now have to tell has not even the crazy logic of the insane. It is only explicable on Beatrice’s theory that Volo, for some dark and vile reason, hated beauty and responded to it by wishing to destroy it, as normal men wish to preserve and enjoy it. He turned to me now, and with that eyeless smile, said without warning or preliminaries:

“James, I think you should marry Beatrice.”

Now that I had some sort of a key to this creature’s mentality; now that I was fully aware that not one word he said had its face value, but belonged to the dark evil plotting world that was his twisted mind, I had at least some hope of forestalling his designs by appearing to take him as normal while watching every word and move.

As if I had been the medical attendant in charge of a particularly cunning and dangerous maniac, I determined not to show him a single sign of my real feelings about him, but to seem to accept everything I observed as quite ordinary. So to this staggering and insane proposition, I made no reply, especially as the implied closeness to Beatrice might in ways yet unforeseen further my designs of liberation for her and myself and any other of Volo’s victims still saveable.

“She is lovely,” he went on, his eyes glittering with the unspeakably sinister light of his madness. “You are both young, and I saw last night and this morning that you are mutually attracted. Yes. You certainly should marry, especially as you are the only eligible and desirable male she sees, perhaps.”

This reference to the horrors in the castle was accompanied by a look that seemed to make his unsmiling blue eyes dilate for a moment—a sickening glance. It was so odious to me that for a wild moment of incaution, I longed to attack him, to strangle him, to shut those horrible eyes for ever, but I knew that any such overt move would bring Quilp and the dog-lion and Heaven knew what other monstrous defences to his aid. I was dealing with the most dangerous madman, and I must operate as craftily as he if I were to escape his plans for what I was now certain would be my destruction in body, mind, and soul.

“You say nothing,” he said, “and I take that for consent, in view of what I saw in your room. My chaplain will marry you, and I will arrange all the formalities. Say a week today for the ceremony, in my own chapel. Now, this will change my plans for you a little. We can hardly expect a bridegroom to do much work in the week before his marriage, can we? Besides, there will be preparations to make for Beatrice. But them you can leave to me.”

These last words chilled my spine, for they contained all the threat of which Beatrice had spoken in such fear. I did not know what to say that would not precipitate action from Volo while I was still unready, from uncertainty, to counter it.

“I’d rather start work this morning,” I said. “After all, that’s what I came for.”

It was essential to me to see more of the foul domain ruled over by this monster, and I could not but feel that he was working towards imprisoning me without, at first, the necessity of violence. His reply seemed at first to confirm my fears.

“No, no. I won’t hear of work,” he said, smiling evilly. “You shall have a holiday till your marriage takes place.”

I risked a move towards freedom of action for myself.

“Well . . . all right. But I’d like to look round the house.”

There was a long silence, while we held one another’s gaze; and then his answer told me how certainly he deemed me his prisoner.

“By all means, my dear chap,” he replied. “Go where you like. Everything is open. Make yourself familiar with the place.” He chuckled suddenly. “I think you’ll find it most interesting. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get along with my own work.”

I was indeed anxious to make a reconnoitre of the place, and if it were possible, to see Beatrice and acquaint her, if she did not already know, with Volo’s lunatic scheme to marry us. I left him in his study and went along the corridor, looking into every room, for as he had promised, they were all open. Why should they not be, I realized, for we were all, every living thing, imprisoned, and any discoveries would be potent with fear and horror, but not with escape. Besides, what had the Black Creator to hide from his creatures? Was it not part of his madness of egoism that all his works should be shown forth. He had not tried to hide a single horror from me as yet, nor to explain it. The most dreadful thing about this twisted kingdom was that it was as open as the lovely works of Nature in the world outside. He wanted his foul works to be seen, and so was entirely willing that I or anyone else should move freely about the castle . . . but never, never outside its walls again.

I wandered through the castle, followed its winding passages, opening doors and finding at first only normal living rooms, or wholly empty and obviously unused ones. Then, in a wing that looked as if it had been added at some fairly recent date, I found the works and black genius of Volo.

In one room, I saw a completely equipped operating theatre, empty and still. As I withdrew, my nerves jangled, for all round me, that terrible cacophony of sound suddenly began, and at these close quarters, it was like a hundred sirens of varying pitch and intensity. It was hateful, maddening, so that I wanted to shout and curse and blaspheme at it, roaring it into silence. It destroyed the power of attention and confused the mind. As suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, and left my whole frame and nervous system trembling. I felt that in some weird way, I was being watched, and the noise turned loose on me at a selected moment.

I opened a door on my left and stood transfixed with new horror. One side of the room was a cage of iron bars, and in the cage, hurrying nervously to and fro on feet and hands, was what seemed at first glance to be a white ape, but on closer view was a man in the semblance of an ape. When he saw me at the door, he stopped, his hands on the bars of his cage, and to my horror, silent tears rolled down his withered cheeks, and his great tragic eyes stared at me, beseeching me, it seemed, for help.

In another room—for I left the man-ape as I was obliged to do, powerless to help him, but shocked beyond measure at the injury, final and irreparable done him by Volo—in another room I met, as I opened the door, the hot humidity of a tropical plant house, and all around me were new monstrosities of the plant world. To my recoiling horror, a long tendril moved towards me, and touched my face as if by will and design, and I realized intuitively that Volo was trying to produce a hideous creature that should be both plant and conscious animal. The scent of these innumerable plants was one of corruption and death, a mockery of life and nature, and I closed the door with a bang of fear and horror, to find Volo beside me in the corridor, in his white coat, a flask in his hand containing a lethal-looking green fluid.

Nothing could have indicated his sense of power over me more than his calm acceptance of the knowledge that I had seen so much, and his iron assumption that it did not matter what I saw; it could not help me now.

“I hope your tour of inspection is proving of interest,” he said, as pleasantly as if we had been in the pathological laboratory of a great London hospital. He nodded and flashed his eyes at me in what looked like triumph. “Lunch in the dining room,” he added, “at one . . . sharp.”

He gave me no chance to make any remark to him, but moved away about whatever obscene business occupied him. As I watched him go, I had a renewed sense of his power, his conception of himself as a god, who needed to take no precautions and practise no secrecy in his hideous designs; on the contrary, I realized that he wanted his creatures to praise and worship him for his wonderful works, and the obscenity of this idea made me shudder in spite of my resolve to find a way out of my situation.

Just before lunch, I met Beatrice coming out of the dining room. I took her hands in mine.

“Listen,” I whispered urgently, “I must tell you . . .”

“I know,” she replied, also in a whisper. “He told me . . . as if I were going to be . . .” She shook her head and tears came into her eyes.

“We’re going through with this,” I said. “It may be our only chance of getting out of here.”

She nodded, and then said:

“Don’t worry about it binding you,” she said. “That’s not his idea at all. It’s some terrible plan of his own.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But we must go through with it as if we believed in it. I’ll keep in touch somehow . . .”

Suddenly I heard Volo’s voice behind me.

“Ah. The bridal couple. How nice. But let us be patient. A week is not long, compared with a whole lifetime of bliss. Meanwhile, lunch, I think. Eh?”

As we sat at table, we were in the oddest psychological situation. He knew that I was now aware of what was going on, and that my nerves were taut, and that I looked at him with hatred, fear, and disgust—a disgust the like of which I had never known, or thought possible in one human being towards another. That was my condition. His seemed to be a wicked delight in his knowledge, so that he conversed vivaciously—even normally—a fact so out of drawing with our surroundings that it was itself a fresh horror, as if a murderer, his hands dripping with his victim’s blood, should offer a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

In spite of some efforts, I did not see Beatrice again. It was as if she had entirely vanished from the castle. Meals were served by Brady, who took on all Beatrice’s former duties. The week passed, and I was beginning to think Volo had made some sinister changes in his plan, and thought of some even viler design. But on the eve of the eighth day, I was wakened from sleep at midnight by Volo himself, attended by Quilp. I sat sharply up in bed and blinked in the light so suddenly switched on.

“What do you want?” I demanded.

Volo looked more evil at that hour and in that light than I had ever seen him look.

“You must get up and dress, James,” he said. “It is the hour of your wedding.”

“Very well,” I said. When I heard my voice say these words, the nightmare incredibility of the position struck me like a blow. This could not, could not be happening. However, it might, if things turned out as I hoped, be the beginning of delivery. “But,” I said, with a sudden hatred of Quilp, “leave me alone to dress. I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

“Certainly, my dear chap,” replied Volo, his whole being seeming to ripple with some interior horrible delight. “Come down to the dining room when you’re ready. We’ll have a drink before the . . . ceremony.”

They went, leaving the door open, and when I was ready, I followed, my mind racing to find ways of using this macabre hour and occasion to my advantage. I had to pass the door of Volo’s study on my way to the dining room. It stood open, and there, quite visible to me, was Beatrice, dressed in all the white panoply of a bride. I was going to speak to her, but two things halted my purpose. One was a movement she was making as I saw her. She was bending over Volo’s desk, and seemed to be opening a drawer and turning over its contents. The other was that as I hesitated whether to go to her, I heard the dining room door open, and I immediately walked on towards it. As I did so, Volo looked out.

“Come along, James,” he said. “You’ve been an unconscionable time dressing. I don’t like to see tardiness in a bridegroom. Come and have a drink.”

I certainly needed one, and took a strong whisky. No sooner had I put my glass down, than Volo said impatiently:

“Now . . . let us go to the chapel.”

No words can describe the horrible and fantastic atmosphere as a grotesque procession formed up, headed by Quilp and ended by Volo, with me in the middle. The hour, the sense of being in another world, the lights in the corridor, the stillness all brought irresistibly to my mind the thought of a man going to the gallows. Suddenly, in the stillness of the night, a long scream tore its way through the castle, breaking into a sobbing laughter as it died away. I faltered, my blood curdling at the sound.

“I’m afraid Simeon isn’t sleeping very well,” said Volo’s voice with cold amusement, and I knew that he had given this name to the man-ape whose hopeless life I had seen in the cage. “Or perhaps he envies you, James. Eh?”

We walked through corridors I had never explored, and came at last to an arched door with a heavy key in its keyhole. Quilp opened it, and I saw before me an ancient chapel, dimly lit. As if for a wedding ceremony indeed, we walked slowly up the aisle, and there, on the chancel steps, was a completely hooded and gowned figure, black and motionless. I was pretty certain that all this was farcical, and that its real significance would appear later. How right I was, just as I also was in supposing the chapel to be now as secular as a picture house.

I heard the door creak open again, and turned to see Beatrice enter, on the arm of Brady, the dog-faced butler.

Still in her bridal dress of white lace, her face was heavily veiled. She came up the aisle and stood beside me. The ceremony began and Volo acted as best man, with a simmering evil joy like a lurid light.

“Now,” he said, at its end. “We will conduct the happy pair to the bridal chamber and leave them to their first night of bliss.”

The macabre procession formed up, and Beatrice on my arm, we were conducted to a huge room with a four-poster bed, which perhaps had been used in the past for such a purpose, but if so, with what a world of difference.

It was clear to me now, with a dreadful clarity, that Volo’s moment had arrived. It was for this, whatever horror it might be, that he had plotted. A vile excitement seemed to possess him. His movements were jerky, his words sounded thick.

“Now, James,” he said. “Come, my dear fellow. Let us see you kiss your lovely bride.”

“When you’ve gone,” I said, dying to be alone with the first ally I had made in this terrible place.

“Nonsense. Nonsense,” cried Volo. “We must see the kiss of peace and happiness. It’s traditional. Why, on this very island, in times past, the happy couples had the advantage of being accompanied during the whole night by their friends and relations. Think of that, my dear James. But we shall let you off with a token kiss, and then we shall decently withdraw. Go on, man. Kiss her. KISS HER!”

Seeing that the only way to be rid of this foul maniac was to comply, and knowing Beatrice’s beauty and friendliness, I went close to her and gently drew the bridal veil aside to kiss her. At this, Volo’s excitement rose to a nervous crescendo, as if he would faint with ecstasy. But in that moment, I tasted to the full the bestial and loathsome spirit of the man. The face I saw behind the veil was that of a woman once beautiful and attractive. But now, under Volo’s defacing surgical hand, it was an inhuman obscene revolting wreck. The face was lipless. The eyes lidless, red, bare, and without life. From the mouth, a shapeless hole, showed the gums and teeth, so that the power of speech, the capacity for love was ended for ever. The poor eyes, with their red glaring sockets, stared at me unwinking. They could never close in sleep or ecstasy again. I was struck dumb. My lips, brought near to kiss her, drew back tightly across my gums without my will. I started back. I think for a moment or two I died of horror. Through the mists of my pain, I heard Volo laughing.

“Go on, man,” he was saying. “Kiss her. What ails you? She expects your love. Kiss her and prepare her for the other delights which are her right.”

I stood as if turned to stone, staring at this monster, human no more in anything but bodily form. Then he played his last card, took his last delicious taste of his preordained pleasure. His face suddenly became grave. He spoke to Quilp.

“Ah,” he said, “I understand. They are, Quilp, an ill-matched pair. The bride’s reluctance is understandable. She needs a bridegroom worthy of her beauty.” He nodded. “This must be put right.” Then to me: “Come, James. You saw my operating theatre. It is all ready. I will arrange this matter to the complete satisfaction of yourself and your lovely bride.”

I clenched my fists. I understood perfectly. I was to be taken to the theatre, and turned into a monstrosity to feed Volo’s hellish greed for vileness, to thrill him with the idea of a marriage between two once-human beings. . . . I felt my very heart turn cold as Volo said:

“Quilp. Take him.”

Quilp was moving towards me when something happened to divert Volo for a moment. He saw it and raised his hand. The ruined bride began to move towards me with slow steps.

“Wait, Quilp. This is touching. The bride wishes to embrace her husband in prospect of delights to come when I have prepared him for her bed as she would wish.”

I took a step back in horror as the poor creature advanced towards me, her arms out to me as if to embrace and kiss me. Horror upon horror. Volo laughed again as I stepped back until I could move no more, pinned against the wall, my hands before me to hold the woman away, God forgive me.

She reached me and put one arm around my shoulders. I shuddered and put my head down. I felt her other hand and arm moving in the recesses of her dress. She passed something to me, hard and metallic. Then I understood what I had seen in Volo’s study earlier. She had sought and found his revolver, and was now pushing it into my hand.

“Splendid,” I heard Volo cry. “Take her in your arms, James. She is crying for you. You see, how tenderly she embraces you.”

I took the revolver firmly in my hand, under cover of the poor creature’s body, and then she stepped aside, so that I could face my enemies. I saw fear, like a black wave, come upon Volo’s face. He screamed an order to Quilp. The huge man advanced upon me.

“Get him, Quilp. Take him. Tear him to pieces,” Volo shouted.

I was dealing with a monster, not a man, and I pulled the trigger without compunction, once, twice, three times. Quilp staggered, threw up his arms, and fell to the floor without a sound. A lust of anger filled me now that I was alone with Volo.

“Now,” I said, “I’m going to kill you, and undo all of your filthy work that it’s possible to undo.”

Then the final horror happened. The diabolical powerful Volo collapsed and disappeared, leaving a slavering coward in the bedroom. He threw himself down on the floor, like Monmouth before James, and screamed to be spared, beating the floor with his fists. As if they heard his horrible cries, many of his victims lifted up their voices, and there came to my ears other screams, yells, discordant cries, and it seemed as if every living thing in the castle conspired to make the clangour of death audible for miles.

Then suddenly, as if someone had turned it on, there was added the wild hooting of the sirens. It was deafening, maddening, confusing, and for an almost fatal moment, my mind was off Volo. I might as well have taken my mind off a cobra in my hands. He had crawled towards me in his foul petitions for his life to be spared, and I did not see that he had taken from his clothes somewhere a small thin knife. But the poor woman in her bridal clothes had seen, and threw herself before me as he struck upwards at me. She stooped down to prevent him using the knife and I saw the blood flow from a tiny gash in her arm. With a fierce joy, I pulled the trigger of the revolver again, and Volo died instantly. I turned to the woman who had saved me, and whom I believed to be a mutilated Beatrice, but she too was dead, killed by the poison which I now realized had been on the blade of the knife and intended for me. As if the occupants of the castle knew that its evil spirit was dead, the noises all died down, and at that moment, someone appeared at the open door of the bridal chamber.

I could hardly believe my eyes. It was Beatrice, safe and sound and as lovely as ever.

She came to me and I took her in my arms. She buried her face on my shoulder, trembling and hiding the dead from her vision.

At last I said:

“My dear, I thought . . . she was indeed you.”

Beatrice looked up at me and replied:

“She was his wife. He couldn’t bear to go through with the idea of marrying you to me, even in his black fantasy, because he realized there was something between us . . . liking, friendship . . . that even he couldn’t destroy. So he chose this way. She hated him and he hated her, so this was just what he wanted . . . to deceive and hurt you . . .”

“And more than that, Beatrice,” I said. “But she saved my life.”

We went out of the room, and began the work of setting free the hopeless occupants of that dreadful house. What medical skill in its mercy could do for Volo’s victims was done. Nowadays, the castle stands empty on its island, unvisited, silent, and we should hope, forgetful: certainly forgotten, as far as we can ever forget, by my wife Beatrice and myself.