Haunted Castles (11 page)

T
he dining room of the Century Club was now almost deserted. Lord Terry was sipping a brandy with his coffee. He had refused dessert, but Hunt had not, and he was dispatching the last forkful of a particularly rich
baba au rhum
. His host produced from his pocket a massive, ornate case—of the same design as his pill box—and offered Hunt a cigar. It was deep brown, slender, fragrant, marvelously fresh. “The wizard has his wand,” said Lord Terry, “the priest his censer, the king his sceptre, the soldier his sword, the policeman his nightstick, the orchestra conductor his baton. I have these. I suppose your generation would speak of phallic symbolism.”

“We might,” Hunt answered, smiling; “but we would also accept a cigar.” He did, and a waiter appeared from nowhere to light them for the two men.

Through the first festoons of smoke, Hunt said, “You tell a grand story, sir.”

“Story,” the Earl repeated. “By that, you imply I have told a—whopper?”

“An extremely entertaining whopper.”

He shrugged. “Very well. Let it stand as that and nothing more.” He drew reflectively on his cigar.

“Come, Lord Terry,” Hunt said. “Laval and Sellig were one man? The son of Edward Hyde? Starring at the Guignol in his evil personality and then, after a drink of his father's famous potion in that little laboratory, transforming himself into the blameless classicist of the Théâtre Français?”

“Exactly, my boy. And a murderer, besides, at least the Laval part of him; a murderer who felt I was drawing too close to the truth, and so fled Paris, never to be heard from again.”

“Fled where?”

“Who knows? To New York, perhaps, where he still lives the double life of a respectable man in constant fear of involuntarily becoming a monster in public (Jekyll came to that pass in the story), and who must periodically imbibe his father's formula simply to remain a man . . . and who sometimes fails. Think of it! Even now, somewhere, in this very city, this very
club,
the inhuman Man-Beast, blood still steaming on his hands, may be drinking off the draught that will transform him into a gentleman of spotless reputation! A gentleman who, when dominant, loathes the dormant evil half of his personality—just as that evil half, when
it
is dominant, loathes the respectable gentleman! I am not insisting he is still alive, you understand, but that is precisely the way it was in Paris, back in the early Nineteen Hundreds.”

Hunt smiled. “You don't expect me to believe you, sir, surely?”

“If I have given you a pleasant hour,” Lord Terry replied, “I am content. I do not ask you to accept my story as truth. But I do inquire of you: why
not
accept it? Why couldn't it be the truth?”

“He is teasing me, of course,” Hunt told himself, “luring me on to another precipice of the plot, like any seasoned storyteller. And part of his art is the dead seriousness of his tone and face.”

“Why couldn't it?” Lord Terry repeated.

Hunt was determined not to be led into pitfalls, so he did not trot out lengthy rebuttals and protestations about the fantastic and antinatural “facts” of the tale—he was sure the Earl had arguments woven of the best casuistry to meet and vanquish anything he might have said. So he simply conceded: “It could be true, I suppose.”

But a second later, not able to resist, he added, “The—story—does have one very large flaw.”

“Flaw? Rubbish. What flaw?”

“It seems to me you've tried to have the best of both worlds, sir, tried to tell two stories in one, and they don't really meld. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I am prepared to accept as fact the notion that Gilles de Rais was not burned at the stake, that he not only escaped death but managed to live for centuries, thanks to his unholy experiments. All well and good. Let's say that he was indeed the Guignol actor known as Laval. Still well, still good. But you've made him something else—something he could not possibly be. The son of Dr. Henry Jekyll, or rather, of Jekyll's alter ego, Edward Hyde. In my trade, we would say your story ‘needs work.' We would ask you to make up your mind—was Laval the son of Edward Hyde, or was he a person centuries older than his own father? He could not be both.”

Lord Terry nodded. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Yes, I should have made myself clearer. No, I do not doubt for a moment that Laval and Sellig were one and the same person and that person the natural son of Edward Hyde. I think the facts support that. The Bluebeard business is, as you say, quite impossible. It was a figment of my disturbed mind, nothing more. Sellig could not have been Gilles.”

“Then—”

“You or I might take a saint as our idol, might we not, or a great statesman—Churchill, Roosevelt—or possibly a literary or musical or scientific genius. At any rate, some lofty benefactor of immaculate prestige. But the son of Hyde? Would he not be drawn to and fascinated by history's great figures of evil? Might he not liken himself to Bluebeard? Might he not assume his name? Might he not envelop himself in symbolic blue draperies? Might he not delight in portraying his idol upon the Guignol stage? Might it not please his fiendish irony to saddle even his ‘good' self with a disguised form of Gilles's name, and to exert such influence over that good self that even as the noble Sellig he could wallow in the personality of, say, a Nero? Of
course
he was not actually Bluebeard. It was adulation and aping, my dear sir, identification and a touch of madness. In short, it was hero worship, pure and simple.”

He had led Hunt to the precipice, after all, and the younger man had neatly tumbled over the edge.

“There is something else,” Lord Terry said presently. “Something I have been saving for the last. I did not wish to inundate you with too much all at once. You say I've tried to tell two stories. But it may be—it just possibly may be—that I have not two but three stories here.”

“Three?”

“Yes, in a way. It's just supposition, of course, a theory, and I have no evidence at all, other than circumstantial evidence, a certain remarkable juxtaposition of time and events that is a bit too pat to be coincidence . . .”

He treated himself to an abnormally long draw on his cigar, letting Hunt and the syntax hang in the air; then he started a new sentence: “Laval's father, Edward Hyde, may have left his mark on history in a manner much more real than the pages of a supposedly fictional work by Stevenson. Certain criminal deeds that are matters of police record may have been his doing. I think they were. Killings that took place between 1885 and 1891 in London, Paris, Moscow, Texas, New York, Nicaragua, and perhaps a few other places, by an unknown, unapprehended monster about whom speculation varies greatly but generally agrees on one point: the high probability that he was a medical man. Hyde, of course, was a medical man; or rather, Jekyll was; the same thing, really.

“What I'm suggesting, you see, is that Laval was—is?—not only the son of Hyde but the son of a fiend who has been supposed an Englishman, a Frenchman, an Algerian, a Polish Jew, a Russian, and an American; whose supposed true names include George Chapman, Severin Klosowski, Neill Cream, Sir William Gull, Aleksandr Pedachenko, Ameer Ben Ali, and even Queen Victoria's grandson, Eddy, Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward. His sobriquets are also legion: Frenchy, El Destripador, L'Éventreur, The Whitechapel Butcher, and, most popularly—”

Hunt snatched the words from his mouth: “Jack the Ripper.”

E
xactly,” said Lord Terry. “The Ripper's killings, without exception, resembled the later Paris murders, and also the earlier massacres of Bluebeard's, in that they were obsessively sexual and resulted in ‘wounds of a nature too shocking to be described,' as the London
Times
put it. The Bluebeard comparison is not exclusive with me—a Chicago doctor named Kiernan arrived at it independently and put it forth at the time of the Whitechapel murders. And the current series of perverted butcheries here in New York are, of course, of that same stripe. Incidentally, may I call your attention to the sound of Jekyll's name? Trivial, of course, but it would have been characteristic of that scoundrel Hyde to tell one of his victims his name was Jekyll, which she might have taken as ‘jackal' and later gasped out in her last throes to a passerby, who mistook it for ‘Jack.' And the date fits, you know. We've placed Hyde's ‘birth' at 1886 for no better reason than because the Stevenson story was published in that year . . . but if the story is based in truth, then it is a telling of events that took place before the publication date, perhaps very shortly before. Yes, there is a distinct possibility that Jack the Ripper was Mr. Hyde.”

Hunt toyed with the dregs of his coffee. “Excuse me, Lord Terry,” he said, “but another flaw has opened up.”

“Truth cannot be flawed, my boy.”

“Truth cannot, no.” This time, it was Hunt who stalled. He signalled the waiter for hot coffee, elaborately added sugar and cream, stirred longly and thoughtfully. Then he said, “Jack the Ripper's crimes were committed, you say, between the years 1885 and 1891?”

“According to the best authorities, yes.”

“But sir,” Hunt said, smiling deferentially all the while, “in Stevenson's story, published in 1886, Hyde
died
. He therefore could not have committed those crimes that took place after 1886.”

Lord Terry spread his arms expansively. “Oh, my dear boy,” he said, “when I suggest that the story was based in truth, I do not mean to imply that it was a newspaper report, a dreary list of dates and statistics. For one thing, many small items, such as names and addresses, were surely changed for obvious reasons (Soho for Whitechapel, perhaps). For another thing, Stevenson was a consummate craftsman, not a police blotter. The unfinished, so-called realistic story is stylish today, but in Stevenson's time a teller of tales had to bring a story to a satisfying and definite conclusion, like a symphony. No, no, I'm afraid I can't allow you even a technical point.”

“If names were fabricated, what about that Jekyll-jackal business?”

“Quite right—I retract the Jekyll-jackal business. Trivial anyway.”

Hunt persisted. “Was Hyde's nationality a fabrication of Stevenson's, too, then?”

“No, I'm inclined to believe he was actually English . . .”

“Ah! But Laval and Sellig—”

“Were French? Oh, I rather think not. Both spoke English like natives, you know. And Laval drank Scotch whisky like water—which I've never seen a Frenchman do. Also, he mistook my name for Pendragon—a grand old English name out of Arthurian legend, not the sort of name that would spring readily to French lips, I shouldn't think. No, I'm sure they—he—were compatriots of mine.”

“What was he—they—doing in France?”

“For the matter of that, what was I? But if you really need reasons over and above the mundane, you might consider the remote possibility that he was using an assumed nationality as a disguise, a shield from the police. That's not
too
fanciful for you, I hope? Although this may be: might not a man obsessed with worship of Gilles de Rais, a man who tried to emulate his evil idol in all things, also put on his idol's nation and language, like a magic cloak? But I shan't defend the story any further.” He looked at his gold pocket watch, the size of a small potato and nearly as thick. “Too late, for one thing. Time for long-winded old codgers to be in their beds.”

It was dismissal. He was, after all, an earl, and accustomed to calling the tune. Hunt hoped, however, that he hadn't offended him. As they walked slowly to the cloakroom to redeem Hunt's hat, the Earl's guest thought about truth and fiction and Byron's remark that the first was stranger than the second. He thought, too, about that element so essential to the reception of a strange tale whether it be true or false—the element of believability; or, if not believability, at least the suspension of disbelief. Lord Terry had held him spellbound with his story, then had covered his tracks and filled in the chinks in his armor pretty well. If Hunt were disposed to be indulgent and generous, he could believe—or suspend disbelief—in the notion that Hyde was an actual person, that he was the maniac killer known as Jack the Ripper, even that he had sired a son who'd lived and died under the names of Laval and Sellig around the turn of the century, in a glamorous Paris that exists now only in memories and stories. All that was comfortably remote. But it was the other idea of Lord Terry's—that Hyde's son might still be alive today—that strained Hunt's credulity, shattered the pleasant spell, and somewhat spoiled the story for him. By any logical standard, it was the easiest of all to believe, granted the other premise; but belief does not depend upon logic, it is a delicate and fragile flower that draws nourishment from intuition and instinct and hunch. There was something about this latter half of the Twentieth Century—with its sports cars and television and nuclear bombs and cold wars—that just did not jibe with the flamboyant alchemy, the mysterious powders, the exotic elixirs, the bubbling, old-fashioned retorts and demijohns of Dr. Jekyll's and Mr. Hyde's. The thought of Laval, a monster “three-quarters pure evil, with only a single thin flickering quarter of good in him,” alive now, perhaps in New York, perhaps the perpetrator of the current revolting crimes; the thought of him rushing desperately through crowded Manhattan streets to some secret laboratory, mixing his arcane chemicals and drinking off the churning, smoking draught that would transform him into the eminently acceptable Sellig—no, that was the last straw. It was the one silly thing that destroyed the whole story for Hunt. He expressed these feelings, cordially and respectfully, to Lord Terry.

The Earl chuckled good naturedly. “My story still—needs work?”

Hunt's hat was on and he stood at the door, ready to leave his host and allow him to go upstairs to bed. “Yes,” he said, “just a little.”

“I will take that under advisement,” Lord Terry said. Then, his eyes glinting with mischief, he added, “As for those old-fashioned demijohns and other outmoded paraphernalia, however—modern science has made many bulky pieces of apparatus remarkably compact. The transistor radio and whatnot, you know. To keep my amateur standing as a raconteur, I must continue to insist that my story is true—except for one necessary alteration. Good night, my boy. It was pleasant to see you.”

“Good night, sir. And thanks again for your kindness.”

Outside, the humidity had been dispelled, and the air, though warm, was dry and clear. The sky was cloudless, and dense with the stars of summer. From among them, Hunt picked out the eleven stars that form the constellation Sagittarius. The newspapers were announcing the appearance of another mutilated corpse, discovered in an alley only a few hours before. Reading the headlines, Hunt recalled a certain utterance—
“This
 . . . is the Grandest Guignol of all.” And another—
“La vie est un corridor noir / D'impuissance et de désespoir.”
He bought a paper and hailed a taxi.

It was in the taxi, three blocks away from the club, that he suddenly “saw” the trivial, habitual action that had accompanied Lord Terry's closing remark about modern compactness. The old man had reached into his pocket for that little gold case and had casually taken a pill.