The city of dr moreau, p.12
The City of Dr Moreau, page 12
“Oh, we would be, officer, yes. Why, I think we’d be ideally placed, don’t you?”
The young policeman nodded a little uncertainly. “Go on.”
“Clearly, officer, you know the kind of place this boarding house is – better than we did, at any rate, when we secured rooms there. There’s a good deal of drunkenness and bad behaviour of every stripe.”
“Sundry misbehaviour,” said the second, less talkative man.
“Sundry misbehaviour, yes, and I, we, are very much afraid that this is what the girl must have witnessed.”
“Not,” added the second man dolefully, “that some can be exactly a stranger to such sights.”
“That’s certainly true,” said the policeman, fixing Coral in a gaze of theatrical pity. “But what did she see?”
“One of the other guests,” said the first man. “I fear he got himself dead drunk again last night. At Mrs Mayfield’s insistence, the two of us lifted him up to his bed and deposited him there. He was quite insensible. Doubtless this is what the girl discovered.”
“No!” Coral shouted. “No, he was dead, not just drunk and yes I do know the difference.”
“She said,” began the policeman, speaking now in a vaguely apologetic tone of voice, “that this gentleman had been stabbed.”
“Oh,” said the first man. “Goodness me.”
He started to laugh uproariously. His companion only smiled.
“You must forgive me,” said the first man once he had recovered his composure. “It’s just that the idea… the very idea of it!” He began to laugh once again.
“Can’t you see?” Coral cried out. “He’s playacting. He’s putting this on.”
The policeman put a finger to his lips to hush her. “Sir?” he said.
“Oh I am sorry, I really am. But you must understand – when we took the toper in question to his bedroom we saw that his clothes were in such a sorry condition. Torn and ripped all over. An imaginative child might very well believe…” He let his sentence tail delicately off.
“There was blood. There was blood!” Coral shouted.
“Sauces,” said the first man. “Relishes and condiments of every kind. Stippled and dotted all over his garments. I believe him to be a glutton as well as a lover of the bottle.”
The policeman thought for a moment. It seemed to Coral that the signs of doubt flickered upon his features.
“She’s a lively girl,” said the second man, “but, perhaps, and wholly forgivably, rather too fanciful for her age.”
Coral said nothing to this, though her hands were now screwed up into fists. For the second time that day she felt the onset of tears. Fiercely, she shook her head.
The first man spoke again. “Why don’t you let us escort her home? Even a mother like hers might have started to worry by now.”
The policeman sighed heavily. “Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “And I dare say you gentlemen are right in what you say but I really think this ought to be looked into. A tale like this, however wild and fantastical it may sound to the layman, must all the same be investigated.”
As he had done a few minutes earlier before the arrival of the men, the constable turned around and opened the door behind him.
He called out into the recesses of the building: “Harry!”
He spoke no more. For at the first sign of his action, the second man reached into a pocket of his ragged coat and drew out something gleaming and metal.
There was a very loud retort and the air was filled with smoke and the smell of burning. The constable fell, speechless, to the ground. There was a hole in his head, Coral saw, and there was blood.
The first man moved very fast towards her. “Where’s the baby?” he said and his voice sounded different. “Where’s the baby?”
Coral did not hesitate. She screamed as loudly as she could and she ran full pelt towards the legs of the stranger. He reached out to grab her but at the last moment, Coral swerved around him, dodged past and all but flung herself out of the station and back into the street.
Then she was running again, running as fast as she could, running, she knew now for a fact, for her life.
VIII
She ran towards home unthinkingly and unhesitatingly. Behind her she could hear one of the people who had been dressed (disguised, she realised) in the clothes of labouring men, giving chase. It was, she thought, the second of them, the one who had spoken a good deal less but who had, when it had come to it, shown not the slightest qualm about killing in cold blood. The whereabouts of the other man, the talker, did not for now concern her.
She ran on, faster than ever she had before, still hearing the rapid footfalls of the killer behind her. He must surely know where she was going. Would he dare, Coral wondered as she pelted through the streets of Stafford Rise, to try any further acts of violence in her mother’s boarding house in front of witnesses?
Yes, she decided – from all that she had seen of him, she doubted that he would even hesitate. She had to warn her mother and she felt certain that the little furred baby was somehow in danger. Yet she did not think it wise to lead a murderer right to their very door and, Coral realised, she must know this town very much better than the ghoul who now pursued her.
Her decision came easily enough.
They were two streets away from home and the murderer at her heels was gaining on her when Coral veered suddenly to the left, diving down a side alley, at the end of which she doubled back upon herself and started to pelt towards the centre of the town again.
She heard her pursuer swerve after her but she could hear that she was increasing the distance between them.
And so she went on, dodging and weaving her way through the backstreets of the town, circling, looping and taking nonsensical detours. What, you may very well be asking, of those sundry townspeople and citizens who surely witnessed this pursuit in their midst? There were those, of course, who saw and noticed. But many looked away, some at first sight, others upon recognising the quarry, the Mayfield girl. Those one or two who did appear to at least consider the possibility of intervention – one a newspaper seller, the other a disconsolate-looking lounger – went so far as to step forward into the path of the runners, only to step back again at the last moment, once they spied the set expression of implacable fury on the gentleman’s face.
At length, her limbs aching and her breath burning in her lungs, Coral heard the man behind her start to slacken his pace. Not long afterwards, she ran along a yew-lined pathway which went through the secondary graveyard of Stafford Rise.
Coral had never understood the reasons why the town had to have two separate grounds for burying the dead – the first beside the church in the middle of the place, the second here, almost in the outskirts – and had always assumed it to be history’s business. She was grateful for its existence now, however, as she left a path and went to the largest and most ornate headstones that she could find. Here she hid behind the stone (“In Loving Memory of Susannah Abel, wife of Robert,” read the epitaph and then: “Death is Sure”) and waited.
Coral stayed quiet and unmoving for as long as she could but no-one at all passed by the graveyard in the long minutes which followed. Certainly, there was no sign at all of her shadow. Had she truly lost him, she wondered, had she shaken him off in the depths of the town? Or, rather, had he allowed her to run on, absenting himself from the scene in order to take up some other strategy?
Fearing the worst, Coral got shakily to her feet. She looked around and saw that she was alone. Keeping a careful eye at all times on her surroundings, she made swiftly for home.
IX
Along the way, she stopped at a shop which sold tobacco, strong drink and an oddly comprehensive range of household implements. Here she asked for two items, to be put on her mother’s account. When she made her request, the proprietor, a spry, elderly fellow with half-moon glasses, who had known her vaguely since infancy, seemed at first surprised and then concerned.
“Are these for Mrs Mayfield?” he asked.
“They’re for one of our residents,” said Coral, and the lie came easily to her.
“Very well,” said the proprietor. “If you’re quite certain.”
“Oh most definitely I am,” said Coral as she took the two items and pocketed them. After that, she ran all the way home.
X
As she approached the boarding house she saw at once that it was quieter than she had ever known it to be in her life before. The front door was standing open and there seemed to be only silence inside. On the threshold she hesitated.
She touched both of the items from the shop which she had in the pockets of her apron, just once, lightly and as if for luck, and went inside.
As she walked down the corridor and towards the dining room (for the last time as things would turn out) she heard a mingling of two low voices, almost whispers. She recognised both of them: the talkative man from the police station and her mother. Then there was something else, the thin grizzling sound of a baby settling into an exhausted nap.
Coral strained to hear the conversation but could make out nothing at all.
When she entered the room the scene appeared to her as a parody of family.
Her mother was settled beside the first man, appearing curiously relaxed in his company. In her arms was the little furred baby. On the trestle table before them was a revolver, abandoned there almost casually.
Mrs Mayfield smiled at the sight of her daughter. “Darling! There you are. We were getting so worried. This is Mr Berry. He’s told me what happened.”
The infant in her arms turned his face towards Coral who believed that she saw in his features a slow wave of recognition.
In response, she felt within her a surge of protectiveness and anger. She ignored her mother and addressed the man (“Berry”), who had, she noted, taken off his jacket and sat now in her mother’s house with his shirtsleeves rolled up. He could scarcely have made himself more at home.
“Where’s your chum?” Coral asked.
The man managed a flat, unconvincing smile in response. “He had other duties to perform.”
“Reckon he’s still wandering about the town.”
Mrs Mayfield looked hurt. “Coral, we were worried for you. As you’ve been gone so long. I know today’s been a little surprising for you. And a little upsetting too.”
“What’s happening?” Coral asked. “Mother, what’s happening?”
The older woman sighed. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. That’s all. This… creature is the property of Mr Berry’s employer. They’ve just come to take him home again.”
“Ma, they killed the man upstairs. They killed a policeman right in front of me.”
The talkative man, Mr Berry, smiled without humour. He reached out his right hand and touched the hilt of the revolver. “Such an imagination she has…”
Coral protested. “Ma, I saw it!”
Her mother looked back at her, imploring with her eyes. She looked at the baby in her arms and at the man beside her.
“Coral,” she said sadly. “This man is going to take this creature back to where it belongs. We can’t stop it. So it’s best, don’t you think, to accept what’s going to happen and get on with the rest of our lives?”
“Has he paid you?” Coral asked and she saw by the look of shame that crossed her mother’s face that her assumption had been correct.
“Coral, darling… We’re not rich people. You’re old enough to have realised that.”
At these words, Coral felt for the first time a shiver of contempt for her mother. “Anyway,” Coral went on, determined to get out her speech before the tears came. “He’s not a creature. He’s a he, and I think he’s beautiful. And I think the man with the perambulator brought him here for a reason. I think he wanted us to look after him.”
The tears did come now and there was nothing that Coral could do to staunch them. She wiped frantically at her eyes. Mr Berry reached for his revolver and got sharply to his feet. He looked down at the woman beside her.
“How confident are you, Mrs Mayfield, that you can keep your child quiet?”
“I can,” said Coral’s mother. “I promise.” Tears were glistening in her eyes now.
“Give me the creature,” said the man.
With a sickening lurch, Coral saw the ease with which her mother passed up the baby to the stranger, her absolute absence of reluctance.
Berry held the baby beneath his arm, as though he were nothing more than a sack of flour or sugar. The infant, woken now, squealed in outrage.
“I know where you’re from,” Coral said. A phrase had flashed suddenly into her imagination. The dying words of the man upstairs. “You’re from the city.”
At this, the stranger looked briefly furious. Then an odd expression of relief settled over him. “Too much,” he said to Mrs Mayfield, as if in accusation. The baby squirmed and wailed. “Both of you over there. Against that wall right now.” To underscore his instruction, he flourished the revolver. Coral’s mother began to weep.
“No,” she said. “Please, please. I’ll help you. I’ll do anything you want.”
“I’m sorry,” said the man, and Coral thought he really was sad about it, as though there had been a time, not so long ago, when he wouldn’t have dreamt of taking such an action. “I promise you it’ll be quick.”
XI
What Coral remembered most about what happened next was the awful, sickening speed of it.
Berry gestured again with the gun. “Get up,” he insisted. “Get over there.” He repeated these commands several times more to no effect at all.
Coral’s mother remained motionless, frozen into place by fear. Her sobs grew louder and wilder. The cries of the baby did the same as he tried to wriggle free of the man’s grip, his arms windmilling in panic. At last, Mrs Mayfield found her voice.
“Run, Coral! Run!”
Berry lost patience now and directed the barrel of the revolver towards the crying woman. The baby turned his head frantically until his nose and lips were pressed up against the man’s exposed skin.
Coral had already decided not to do as her mother had asked. She would not abandon this baby. She reached, her hands trembling in fear, for what she had bought from the shop. It was too late. For the second time that day, Coral heard at close quarters the dreadful retort of a gun. There was a scream. Coral did not want to look but she could not bring herself to look away. Her mother was slumped against the table, silent, lifeless.
It was the man who was screaming. There was blood on his shirt and, Coral saw with a thrill of mingled horror and pride, that there was blood around the mouth of the baby.
The stranger had momentarily lost control and Coral took her chance. She ran to the side and wrenched the wriggling infant from him. He shouted again in anger now as well as shock.
“Give that disgusting thing to me.”
It was too late. Coral had the baby and she went quickly to the door. Berry lumbered towards her, blood dripping from him onto the floor.
Coral drew out the first of the items which she had purchased from the store – a bottle of the cheapest gin – and flung it onto the floor. It shattered and the liquid spread everywhere. The baby cried. Coral reached for the second purchase – a box of Lucifer matches – only to understand too late that she could not possibly light a match one-handed, not with the baby beneath her other arm. The man grinned at her naiveté and ran towards her. Coral dropped the matches in her panic and turned towards the door. As she did so, she caught sight of something – the figure of her mother lurching up again and reaching out. Impossible, Coral thought, surely impossible.
Yet it had been a day of impossible things. She remembered her mother’s final instruction and now she obeyed. She held the frantic baby close and went to the hallway beyond.
She heard a cry of shock from the dim room. She sped down the corridor, the furred infant giving great shrieks of fearful indignation.
And then they were outside, both of them, looking back at the house and the door through which no-one emerged. Then she glimpsed and smelled the smoke as that old boarding house began to burn. Did she hear her mother cry from within? Or two cries? She never could be certain.
She turned then and, without looking back, but with that extraordinary infant clasped to her chest, Coral Mayfield ran once more, as fast as she could, away from her home, away from the past and towards a future which she could scarcely begin to imagine.
2ND JANUARY, 1896
LA ROCHE, PICARDY, FRANCE
I
The old priest knew as he descended the stairs that morning and entered the modest room in which he generally ate his breakfast, that the day ahead of him promised, most unexpectedly, to be an unusual one. For his housekeeper, Madame Proulx, was waiting there for him with an expression of barely contained excitement.
A short woman who, at sixty, was almost two decades younger than the priest, Madame Proulx had experienced a life filled with difficulty, struggle and upset. Her smiles were not frequent. Yet this morning she was beaming, all but giddy with what looked like anticipation. The old man recognised the signs at once; she had some piece of delicious gossip to impart.
At his age, pleasures were relatively few, and so the priest decided to relish this moment, even to dance with it a little. Without showing the slightest sign of having noted the housekeeper’s eagerness to converse, he shuffled into the room before, in his tolerable, if hardly stylish, French, bidding her a good morning. At such moments, he took an odd, pawky delight in exaggerating his own antiquity.
“Good morning, monsieur,” said Madame Proulx.
The priest took his place at the table where warm bread and jams had been laid out for him and set to the buttering of it with gusto. He made several sounds of pleasure at the prospect of the food. It was not until he had devoured an entire slice, and had begun upon a second, that he looked over at his housekeeper and, asked, with a grin which might reasonably enough be described as boyish: “How are you today, madame?”
