The Beetle (32 page)

'If the one on the forehead of the goddess was the only live
beetle which the place contained, it was not the only
representation. It was modelled in the solid stone of the roof,
and depicted in flaming colours on hangings which here and there
were hung against the walls. Wherever the eye turned it rested on
a scarab. The effect was bewildering. It was as though one saw
things through the distorted glamour of a nightmare. I asked
myself if I were not still dreaming; if my appearance of
consciousness were not after all a mere delusion; if I had really
regained my senses.

'And, here, Mr Champnell, I wish to point out, and to emphasise
the fact, that I am not prepared to positively affirm what portion
of my adventures in that extraordinary, and horrible place, was
actuality, and what the product of a feverish imagination. Had I
been persuaded that all I thought I saw, I really did see, I
should have opened my lips long ago, let the consequences to
myself have been what they might. But there is the crux. The
happenings were of such an incredible character, and my condition
was such an abnormal one,—I was never really myself from the
first moment to the last—that I have hesitated, and still do
hesitate, to assert where, precisely, fiction ended and fact
began.

'With some misty notion of testing my actual condition I
endeavoured to get off the heap of rugs on which I reclined. As I
did so the woman at my side laid her hand against my chest,
lightly. But, had her gentle pressure been the equivalent of a ton
of iron, it could not have been more effectual. I collapsed, sank
back upon the rugs, and lay there, panting for breath, wondering
if I had crossed the border line which divides madness from
sanity.

'"Let me get up!—let me go!" I gasped.

'"Nay," she murmured, "stay with me yet awhile, O my beloved."

'And again she kissed me.'

Once more Mr Lessingham paused. An involuntary shudder went all
over him. In spite of the evidently great effort which he was
making to retain his self-control his features were contorted by
an anguished spasm. For some seconds he seemed at a loss to find
words to enable him to continue.

When he did go on, his voice was harsh and strained.

'I am altogether incapable of even hinting to you the nauseous
nature of that woman's kisses. They filled me with an
indescribable repulsion. I look back at them with a feeling of
physical, mental, and moral horror, across an interval of twenty
years. The most dreadful part of it was that I was wholly
incapable of offering even the faintest resistance to her
caresses. I lay there like a log. She did with me as she would,
and in dumb agony I endured.'

He took his handkerchief from his pocket, and, although the day
was cool, with it he wiped the perspiration from his brow.

'To dwell in detail on what occurred during my involuntary sojourn
in that fearful place is beyond my power. I cannot even venture to
attempt it. The attempt, were it made, would be futile, and, to
me, painful beyond measure. I seem to have seen all that happened
as in a glass darkly,—with about it all an element of unreality.
As I have already remarked, the things which revealed themselves,
dimly, to my perception, seemed too bizarre, too hideous, to be
true.

'It was only afterwards, when I was in a position to compare
dates, that I was enabled to determine what had been the length of
my imprisonment. It appears that I was in that horrible den more
than two months,—two unspeakable months. And the whole time there
were comings and goings, a phantasmagoric array of eerie figures
continually passed to and fro before my hazy eyes. What I judge to
have been religious services took place; in which the altar, the
bronze image, and the beetle on its brow, figure largely. Not only
were they conducted with a bewildering confusion of mysterious
rites, but, if my memory is in the least degree trustworthy, they
were orgies of nameless horrors. I seem to have seen things take
place at them at the mere thought of which the brain reels and
trembles.

'Indeed it is in connection with the cult of the obscene deity to
whom these wretched creatures paid their scandalous vows that my
most awful memories seem to have been associated. It may have
been—I hope it was, a mirage born of my half delirious state, but
it seemed to me that they offered human sacrifices.'

When Mr Lessingham said this, I pricked up my ears. For reasons of
my own, which will immediately transpire, I had been wondering if
he would make any reference to a human sacrifice. He noted my
display of interest,—but misapprehended the cause.

'I see you start, I do not wonder. But I repeat that unless I was
the victim of some extraordinary species of double sight—in which
case the whole business would resolve itself into the fabric of a
dream, and I should indeed thank God!—I saw, on more than one
occasion, a human sacrifice offered on that stone altar,
presumably to the grim image which looked down on it. And, unless
I err, in each case the sacrificial object was a woman, stripped
to the skin, as white as you or I,—and before they burned her
they subjected her to every variety of outrage of which even the
minds of demons could conceive. More than once since then I have
seemed to hear the shrieks of the victims ringing through the air,
mingled with the triumphant cries of her frenzied murderers, and
the music of their harps.

'It was the cumulative horrors of such a scene which gave me the
strength, or the courage, or the madness, I know not which it was,
to burst the bonds which bound me, and which, even in the
bursting, made of me, even to this hour, a haunted man.

'There had been a sacrifice,—unless, as I have repeatedly
observed, the whole was nothing but a dream. A woman—a young and
lovely Englishwoman, if I could believe the evidence of my own
eyes, had been outraged, and burnt alive, while I lay there
helpless, looking on. The business was concluded. The ashes of the
victim had been consumed by the participants. The worshippers had
departed. I was left alone with the woman of the songs, who
apparently acted as the guardian of that worse than
slaughterhouse. She was, as usual after such an orgie, rather a
devil than a human being, drunk with an insensate frenzy,
delirious with inhuman longings. As she approached to offer to me
her loathed caresses, I was on a sudden conscious of something
which I had not felt before when in her company. It was as though
something had slipped away from me,—some weight which had
oppressed me, some bond by which I had been bound. I was aroused,
all at once, to a sense of freedom; to a knowledge that the blood
which coursed through my veins was after all my own, that I was
master of my own honour.

'I can only suppose that through all those weeks she had kept me
there in a state of mesmeric stupor. That, taking advantage of the
weakness which the fever had left behind, by the exercise of her
diabolical arts, she had not allowed me to pass out of a condition
of hypnotic trance. Now, for some reason, the cord was loosed.
Possibly her absorption in her religious duties had caused her to
forget to tighten it. Anyhow, as she approached me, she approached
a man, and one who, for the first time for many a day, was his own
man. She herself seemed wholly unconscious of anything of the
kind. As she drew nearer to me, and nearer, she appeared to be
entirely oblivious of the fact that I was anything but the
fibreless, emasculated creature which, up to that moment, she had
made of me.

'But she knew it when she touched me,—when she stooped to press
her lips to mine. At that instant the accumulating rage which had
been smouldering in my breast through all those leaden torturing
hours, sprang into flame. Leaping off my couch of rugs, I flung my
hands about her throat,—and then she knew I was awake. Then she
strove to tighten the cord which she had suffered to become unduly
loose. Her baleful eyes were fixed on mine. I knew that she was
putting out her utmost force to trick me of my manhood. But I
fought with her like one possessed, and I conquered—in a fashion.
I compressed her throat with my two hands as with an iron vice. I
knew that I was struggling for more than life, that the odds were
all against me, that I was staking my all upon the casting of a
die,—I stuck at nothing which could make me victor.

'Tighter and tighter my pressure grew,—I did not stay to think if
I was killing her—till on a sudden—'

Mr Lessingham stopped. He stared with fixed, glassy eyes, as if
the whole was being re-enacted in front of him. His voice
faltered. I thought he would break down. But, with an effort, he
continued.

'On a sudden, I felt her slipping from between my fingers. Without
the slightest warning, in an instant she had vanished, and where,
not a moment before, she herself had been, I found myself
confronting a monstrous beetle,—a huge, writhing creation of some
wild nightmare.

'At first the creature stood as high as I did. But, as I stared at
it, in stupefied amazement,—as you may easily imagine,—the thing
dwindled while I gazed. I did not stop to see how far the process
of dwindling continued,—a stark raving madman for the nonce, I
fled as if all the fiends in hell were at my heels.'

'How I reached the open air I cannot tell you,—I do not know. I
have a confused recollection of rushing through vaulted passages,
through endless corridors, of trampling over people who tried to
arrest my passage,—and the rest is blank.

'When I again came to myself I was lying in the house of an
American missionary named Clements. I had been found, at early
dawn, stark naked, in a Cairo street, and picked up for dead.
Judging from appearances I must have wandered for miles, all
through the night. Whence I had come, or whither I was going, none
could tell,—I could not tell myself. For weeks I hovered between
life and death. The kindness of Mr and Mrs Clements was not to be
measured by words. I was brought to their house a penniless,
helpless, battered stranger, and they gave me all they had to
offer, without money and without price,—with no expectation of an
earthly reward. Let no one pretend that there is no Christian
charity under the sun. The debt I owed that man and woman I was
never able to repay. Before I was properly myself again, and in a
position to offer some adequate testimony of the gratitude I felt,
Mrs Clements was dead, drowned during an excursion on the Nile'
and her husband had departed on a missionary expedition into
Central Africa, from which he never returned.

'Although, in a measure, my physical health returned, for months
after I had left the roof of my hospitable hosts, I was in a state
of semi-imbecility. I suffered from a species of aphasia. For days
together I was speechless, and could remember nothing,—not even
my own name. And, when that stage had passed, and I began to move
more freely among my fellows, for years I was but a wreck of my
former self. I was visited, at all hours of the day and night, by
frightful—I know not whether to call them visions, they were real
enough to me, but since they were visible to no one but myself,
perhaps that is the word which best describes them. Their presence
invariably plunged me into a state of abject terror, against which
I was unable to even make a show of fighting. To such an extent
did they embitter my existence, that I voluntarily placed myself
under the treatment of an expert in mental pathology. For a
considerable period of time I was under his constant supervision,
but the visitations were as inexplicable to him as they were to
me.

'By degrees, however, they became rarer and rarer, until at last I
flattered myself that I had once more become as other men. After
an interval, to make sure, I devoted myself to politics.
Thenceforward I have lived, as they phrase it, in the public eye.
Private life, in any peculiar sense of the term, I have had none.'

Mr Lessingham ceased. His tale was not uninteresting, and, to say
the least of it, was curious. But I still was at a loss to
understand what it had to do with me, or what was the purport of
his presence in my room. Since he remained silent, as if the
matter, so far as he was concerned, was at an end, I told him so.

'I presume, Mr Lessingham, that all this is but a prelude to the
play. At present I do not see where it is that I come in.'

Still for some seconds he was silent. When he spoke his voice was
grave and sombre, as if he were burdened by a weight of woe.

'Unfortunately, as you put it, all this has been but a prelude to
the play. Were it not so I should not now stand in such pressing
want of the services of a confidential agent,—that is, of an
experienced man of the world, who has been endowed by nature with
phenomenal perceptive faculties, and in whose capacity and honour
I can place the completest confidence.'

I smiled,—the compliment was a pointed one.

'I hope your estimate of me is not too high.'

'I hope not,—for my sake, as well as for your own. I have heard
great things of you. If ever man stood in need of all that human
skill and acumen can do for him, I certainly am he.'

His words aroused my curiosity. I was conscious of feeling more
interested than heretofore.

'I will do my best for you. Man can do no more. Only give my best
a trial.'

'I will. At once.'

He looked at me long and earnestly. Then, leaning forward, he
said, lowering his voice perhaps unconsciously,

'The fact is, Mr Champnell, that quite recently events have
happened which threaten to bridge the chasm of twenty years, and
to place me face to face with that plague spot of the past. At
this moment I stand in imminent peril of becoming again the
wretched thing I was when I fled from that den of all the devils.
It is to guard me against this that I have come to you. I want you
to unravel the tangled thread which threatens to drag me to my
doom,—and, when unravelled to sunder it—for ever, if God wills!
—in twain.'