addition one of his neck muscles was shorter than the other and kept his head to one side, as if he had started out to look at his own hump but changed his mind in the middle. I say nothing new in asserting that intelligence rarely goes hand in hand with beauty, but he, the very image of deformity, arousing revulsion more than pity, should certainly have been a genius. Though even as a genius he would have frightened people by appearing in their midst. Now then, Zazul… His name was Zazul. I had heard about his horrible experiments a long time before. The issue was something of a cause celebre in its day, thanks to the press. The Antivivisection League brought an action against him, but nothing came of it. He wriggled out of it somehow. He was a professor, but in name only; he could not lecture because he stuttered. He would in fact lose his voice whenever he grew excited, which happened frequently. He did not come to me, no. He was not that sort. He would rather have died than turn to anyone. What happened was that I lost my way in the woods during an excursion outside of town. I had actually been enjoying this until suddenly it began to rain. I thought I’d wait it out under a tree, but the rain did not let up. The sky clouded over completely and I decided to look for shelter.
Running from tree to tree, and soaked to the skin, I came out onto a gravel path, which led to a road long unused and overgrown with weeds. The road went to an estate surrounded by a wall. On the gate, once painted green but now rusty, hung a wood sign with the barely legible inscription BEWARE OF THE DOG. I was not eager to encounter a vicious animal, but with the rain I had no choice; so, cutting a hefty stick from a nearby bush to arm myself, I tackled the gate. I say “tackled” because I had to strain every muscle before it opened, finally, with an infernal creaking. I found myself in a garden so choked with weeds that it was hard to tell where the paths were. Far in the rear, behind trees swaying in the rain, stood a high, dark house with a steep roof. Three upstairs windows, covered by white shades, were lit. It was still early, but darkening clouds scudded across the sky. At forty or fifty paces from the house I noticed two rows of trees flanking the approach to the veranda. White cedars, graveyard cedars. The occupant of this house, I thought, must have a gloomy disposition. I saw no dog, however, despite the warning on the gate. I went up the steps and, partly shielded from the rain by the lintel, rang the bell. The tinkle within was answered by a dead silence. After a long while I rang again, with the same result; so I began to knock, then pounded more and more vigorously. Only then did I hear shuffling steps come from the interior of the house and an unpleasant, raspy voice ask: “Who’s there?”
I gave my name, in the faint hope that it might not be unknown. The person seemed to deliberate. Finally, a chain rattled, heavy bolts were pushed aside, and there, in the light of a chandelier high above the hallway, stood a near-dwarf. I recognized him, although I had seen his picture only once — I forget where, but the picture would have been hard to forget. The man was almost bald. On the side of his skull, above the ear, ran a bright-red scar like a saber gash. Gold pince-nez sat crookedly on his nose. He blinked as if he had just emerged from the dark. I apologized, using the formulas customary in such circumstances, then fell silent. He remained in front of me, as if not intending to let me one step farther into that large, dark, silent house.
“You are Zazul, Professor Zazul, aren’t you?” I asked.
“How do you know me?” he growled.
I made some trite remark to the effect that it was hard not to know such an outstanding scientist.
He received this with a scornful sneer on his froglike lips.
“A storm?” he said, for I had mentioned it. “I hear it. So? Go somewhere else.”
I said that I understood perfectly and had no intention of disturbing him. A chair or a stool in the hall would do; I would wait out the worst of the storm and be on my way.
The rain had really started coming down in buckets. Standing in the high hall as if at the bottom of a huge shell, I heard it pelt the house on all sides. It made an alarming racket.
“A chair?” he said. I might have asked for a golden throne. “A chair, really! I have no chair for you, Mr. Tichy. No chair to spare. I think, yes, I think it would be best for both of us if you left.”
Looking over my shoulder into the garden — the door was still open — I saw that the trees, bushes, everything had merged into one mass that shook violently in the wind and the streams of water. My eyes returned to the hunchback. I had encountered rudeness in my life, but never anything like this. I began to lose my temper. Dispensing with the social amenities, I said:
“I’ll leave if you can throw me out. But I warn you, I am no weakling.”
“What?” he screeched. “The gall! How dare you, in my own house!”
“You have provoked me,” I replied icily. And added, in my anger and because of his grating voice, “There are some kinds of behavior, Zazul, for which a man can be thrashed even in his own house!”
“Scoundrel!” he shrieked, even louder.
I seized his arm, which felt as though it had been whittled from a rotten branch, and hissed: “I will not tolerate abuse. Understand? One more insult and you will remember me as long as you live!”
For a second or two it seemed that we really would come to blows, and I felt shame — how could I raise my hand against a hunchback? Then the unexpected happened. The professor stepped back, freed his arm from my grip, and, with his head twisted even lower, accentuating the hump, began to giggle in a revolting, high-pitched voice. As if I had regaled him with a rare joke.
“Well, well,” he said, taking off his pince-nez. “You are a tough one, Tichy.”
With the tip of a long, nicotine-stained finger he wiped a tear from his eye.
“Good,” he rasped. “I like that. Can’t stand manners, mealy-mouthed talk, but you said what you thought. I hate you, you hate me, fine, we’re even, everything’s clear. You can follow me. Yes, Tichy, you surprised me…”
And, chattering in this vein, he took me up a creaky wooden staircase dark with age. It went up around a huge square hall, paneled with bare wood. I remained silent, and when we reached the second floor Zazul said:
“Tichy, I can’t afford parlors and guest rooms; you can see that. I sleep among my specimens, yes, eat, live with them. Come in, and don’t talk too much.”
The room he ushered me into was the one whose three windows were shaded with sheets of paper, paper once white but now extremely dirty, spotted with grease and innumerable crushed flies. The windowsills were black with dead flies. When I closed the door, I noticed comma-shaped marks and dried, bloody insect fragments on it, as though Zazul had been under siege here by all the Hymenoptera. Before I had time to wonder at this, I noticed the other peculiarities of the room. In the middle stood a table, actually two sawhorses with ordinary, roughly planed boards between them; books, papers, and yellowed bones were piled there. But the strangest thing about the room was the walls. Large, crudely constructed shelves held rows of thick bottles and jars; opposite the window, in the space where the shelves broke off, was an enormous glass tank resembling an aquarium the size of a cabinet — resembling, rather, a transparent sarcophagus. The upper half of the tank was covered by a carelessly thrown dirty rag whose tattered ends hung halfway down the glass. But what I saw in the lower, uncovered half made me freeze.
All the jars and bottles contained a blue, cloudy liquid, as in an anatomical museum where various organs are preserved in embalming fluid. The tank was the same type of container, only of enormous size. In its murky depths, which glimmered with a bluish light, two shadows a few centimeters above the bottom rocked back and forth extremely slowly, with the motion of an infinitely patient pendulum. To my horror I recognized these shadows as human legs in alcohol-soaked trousers.
I stood petrified. Zazul did not move, did not make a sound. When my eyes went to his face, I saw that he was very pleased. My outrage, my revulsion delighted him. He held his hands clasped on his chest, as if in prayer, and chuckled with satisfaction.
“What’s the meaning of this, Zazul?” I said in a choking voice. “What is it?”
He turned his back to me, and his hump, so horrible and pointed (looking at it, I feared that the jacket stretched over it would tear), swayed in time with his steps. He sat down in a chair that had an open back (that piece of furniture made me shudder) and suddenly said, with apparent indifference, even weariness:
“It’s a long story, Tichy. You wanted to wait out the storm? Then have a seat and don’t disturb me. I see no reason why I should tell you anything.”
“But I do,” I replied. I had regained my composure to some extent. In the silence filled by the patter of the rain I went up to him and said, “If you don’t explain this, Zazul, I shall have to take steps that will cause you considerable trouble.”
I expected an outburst, but he did not turn a hair. He looked at me and sneered.
“Tell me, Tichy, how does this look? There’s a storm, it’s pouring, you pound on my door, barge in without
