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“I know what they are, but it’s impossible. They look like the creatures my father made. Like Beast Men.” For a moment, memory took Catherine back to the island, to the menagerie of Dr. Moreau. Men whose legs were too short, arms too long. Who spoke in gruff voices and were hairy beneath their clothes. But all his creations had died on the island. Of them all, only she had survived.
“Why should they follow us?” said Diana. “They know where Mary lives. They can just go back there and wait.” “If they were smarter, they would have done that in the first place,” said Catherine. “But if they’re Wolf Men, it’s in their nature to hunt. They couldn’t help following us.”
The carpet had been pulled back, so he lay directly on the parquet in front of the fireplace. It
she got her hands around his neck and—she strangled him,
Catherine walked over to the dead man and removed the handkerchief from his face. It was strangely distorted: the eyes small and set close together, the nose upturned and flat, the chin almost nonexistent with a few prominent bristles. “I can tell you what to make of him, Dr. Watson. But Diana and I are tired and famished. If we could sit down and have something to eat, I believe I could provide you with an explanation—although it may deepen this mystery rather than elucidating it. But first I must see Justine. . . .”
MRS. POOLE: And a time I had of it, trying to scrub away that bloodstain! ALICE: It’s still there. Lye and carbolic couldn’t get rid of it. Good thing the carpet covers it, Mrs. Poole, or we’d have some explaining to do when visitors come!
JUSTINE: No, of course not. It’s just . . . different. As though it’s been stitched together of various parts. Like my father’s monsters. CATHERINE: Well, we’re different. I have to tell the story in a way that fits who we are. JUSTINE: You are the author, so I suppose you know best. CATHERINE: You could try to sound a little less doubtful!
“First,” said Catherine, “this is not a man. Justine, you did not kill a man. What you killed was an animal. Look at the disproportion of the limbs, look”—she drew back the handkerchief again—“at the scars, here and here and here. Look at the face. The nose resembles a snout, the eyes and ears are too small. What you have killed is a pig, specifically a boar pig, surgically transformed into a man.”
“Yes, my father was a Lamarckian. He believed that by introducing traits from plants into living men and women, he could pass those traits on to the next generation.
Dr. Moreau was not interested in plants: what interested him was the division between man and animal.”
If he could turn animals into men, could he not create men who were even higher, in whom the animal nature was entirely absent? Men who would have no base desires, no primitive instincts?
“I find it difficult to believe,” said Watson. “How could an animal be imbued with human reason?” “The proof stands before you,” said Catherine. She unbuttoned the collar of her dress—one of Mary’s day dresses that she had not worn for years because it was too tight, but Catherine was smaller than she was. She pulled the fabric back to expose her neck, then turned her head from side to side. Her face and neck were covered with a pattern of faint scars. “Am
Moreau himself, who was rarely satisfied with his creations, said I was his masterpiece. His previous attempts at creating Beast Women had been failures.
Because I was more human than animal, they chained me instead. One afternoon, during the hour when Moreau and Montgomery both slept, I pulled the iron staples out of the walls. And when Moreau came after me, calling to me as though I were a lost cat—‘Here, Catherine, where are you, Catherine’—I strangled him with my chains, which still hung from the manacles on my wrists.
Prendick tried to convince them that Moreau was still alive, although incorporeal—watching them from the sky. The Pig Men, who had developed a sort of religion, believed him. The others were still wary of the thunder sticks.
“You—ate them?” said Mary. “How could you . . .” She had been fascinated by the story—as they all had been, judging by their faces in the lamplight. Holmes was leaning forward, his fingers tented in a way she was coming to recognize. It meant he was turning something around and around in his mind, considering every angle. Even Diana had stayed quiet for all this time. But it was a gruesome story as well. Mary did not know whether to feel greater pity for Catherine’s suffering or horror at the cruelty of Moreau. Those Beast Men, doomed to die on their remote island . . .
MARY: Well, to be honest, I was mostly curious about how he had done it. Created you, I mean, as well as the other Beast Men. It was a quite a scientific accomplishment, although of course horrible from an ethical standpoint. CATHERINE: It would be much easier writing from your perspective if you admitted to feeling normal human emotions! MARY: I did! I felt horror and pity, really I did. At least, some. But I was curious too. Wouldn’t you be?
But Prendick—I think it made him sick, not in the stomach but in the head.
“Yes, there, I was sure. Listen: ‘I assume you will be traveling with Mr. Prendick? Poor man, I hope he may someday be ready to participate fully in our community again. I cannot tell you how I mourn the loss of Moreau. You and Prendick belong to a younger generation.
MARY: I didn’t understand your reaction that night. It was only later, when you told us about your . . . relations with him, that it made sense. CATHERINE: My relations . . . how delicately you put it! I didn’t want to say anything in front of Holmes and Watson. And why should I have? It was my story to tell—or not. MARY: No reason, I’m not questioning your judgment, Cat. But I’m glad you told us later.
Finding herself completely alone on an island where her only companions were beasts. Feeling as though she should lie down and die, and then deciding that she was going to survive. She did not know how, but somehow.
techniques? Unless . . .” She paused for a moment, but did not continue her train of thought. Mary wondered what she had meant to say. Instead, Catherine looked down at the Pig Man. “We’ll have to get rid of him.”
“Phew!” said Diana. “You would make a good criminal.” “Yes, I worry about that sometimes,” said Watson. “Holmes, can you and I lift the body between us?”
Am I developing a criminal mentality, like Hyde? she asked herself. Or like Mr. Holmes? That thought, at least, was more reassuring.
. Well. Miss Jekyll, Watson and I would have come this evening in any case, to tell you about a curious fact we discovered during our investigation. Four of the murdered women were at one time inmates of the Magdalen Society.”
And now we had six mouths to feed! Or five, as Beatrice did not count—what she did could scarcely be called eating. She seemed to live off sunlight, weeds, and the occasional insect. But Catherine ate only meat, Justine ate no meat at all, and Diana ate everything and a great deal of it.
If creations of the Société des Alchimistes kept showing up, I would have to start putting them on the third floor, in the servants’ rooms.
Catherine wishes to write about our adventures, to leave out the domestic details. “This is not a manual of household management,” she says. That would be something: a manual of household management for monsters!
“I’m going to check on Justine,” said Beatrice. “Before Mrs. Poole called me down for breakfast, she was running a fever, and she didn’t seem to know where she was. She kept turning her head on the pillow, calling for her father. I think all this has been too much for her.”
But the four others, including the most recent victim, Susanna Moore, had all been recent inmates of the Magdalen Society. Some only for a few days, one—Sally Hayward, the first victim—for several months.” “All four of them? That’s too many to be a coincidence,” said Mary.
“We weren’t implying that you ladies should participate in this investigation. I know you’re brave, but this is getting far too dangerous. Yesterday, you were attacked. Let the police handle it, or at least leave it to me and Holmes!” “But you can’t get in,” said Mary in her most reasonable voice. “Men aren’t allowed into the Magdalen Society, and by the time the police force their way into the building, the director could destroy any evidence she might have, anything that might connect her to these poor women, if indeed she is guilty of wrongdoing. I think we proved yesterday that we can take
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Were men always so obvious in their attentions? No, not all men. Mr. Holmes would certainly not be obvious—if, indeed, he paid attention to women at all, as women that is! He seemed to treat women as though they were men in skirts, either useful in his investigations or not.
“Dr. Watson is with Justine. She’s finally gone to sleep, thank goodness. He says to tell you that she is in no danger, although she must have absolute rest and quiet until the fever breaks. He mentioned your plans.
DIANA: Respectable my arse! Why would anyone want to wear girls’ clothes unless they had to? If you walk around the city as a boy, people don’t notice you or ask what you’re doing all by yourself, my pretty.
Mary was annoyed, sitting in the railway carriage on the way to Purfleet. She had wanted to discuss the case with Mr. Holmes, and instead he was engaged in a discussion with Mrs. Poole on the minutiae of
various stains set and were to be gotten out, the schedules of tradespeople and their deliveries. He seemed fascinated by these domestic details. “You never know when the most trivial information might help solve a case,” he said.
“Cum mulieribus non est disputandum, as Cicero says.”
DIANA: Translation, please, for those of us who didn’t go to Oxford. JUSTINE: “There is no arguing with women.” And I don’t believe Cicero ever said such a thing!
Renfield left no papers or other effects, except some notebooks containing what he called his accounts. Nothing but numbers. I’ll have Sam show them to you before you leave.”
This must be the Edward Prendick mentioned in Catherine’s story and Professor Van Helsing’s letter?” “Certainly,” said Holmes. “I don’t know if you saw his face as we passed, Miss Jekyll, but his hair was not gray from age. Whatever he has endured, it has marked him forever.” No, she had not noticed Prendick’s face. Mary felt a sense of consternation. She simply must become more observant, like Mr. Holmes.
Mary tried to imagine the respectable Mrs. Poole as Titania, queen of the fairies, but to this imagination would not stretch.
How to find Joe was the next question, but Holmes said, “Always ask at the pub, Miss Jekyll. Elementary investigation—the pub always knows. And there I see The Black Dog, so we shall step inside. . . .”
And now she was finding that as soon as one began moving around in the world, doing things, one ran up against a regular list of You Shan’ts.
What was the use of propriety when it kept one from getting things done?
our Mrs. Poole is proving invaluable. She is a mistress of the art of distraction.”
didn’t know he was a businessman. That must be why he kept writing numbers down, as though keeping accounts. Of the flies he was eating, you know, and how much life they were giving him. Although he called them his experiments. He would go on about those experiments of his, how each fly gave him so much life and no more. He wanted to know how much life he could get out of them, and then how much if he fed them to spiders and ate the spiders, and then how much if the spiders were eaten by birds—but we never let it get past spiders, which he could catch himself.
‘I’ll show them,’ he would say to me. ‘Someday, Joe, I’ll show them my notebooks, and then they’ll have to take me back. They can’t deny me the secret of life.’
“Ah, that Dr. Seward was lying through his teeth,” said Mrs. Poole. “You can always tell when people are lying. It’s when they look at you too straight, as though they were angels here on Earth. And indignant, as though they can’t believe you would doubt them.”
“So on the one hand,” said Mary, “we have my father, Dr. Rappaccini, and Dr. Moreau, who all knew each other, and who are all dead. And then we have Dr. Seward and his friend Professor Van Helsing, who knows Mr. Prendick, who knew Dr. Moreau! And then we have Renfield, and the implication that he may at one time have seen Hyde.
Are they friends? Enemies? In league with one another? And who among them would be murdering women?
