The Waxworks Murder

elbow brushed the shade of the lamp, knocking it sideways so that a strong yellow light ran up the detective's face. It emphasized the high cheek bones, the moody eyes with the brows drawn down, glancing restlessily about the room....

'This neighbourhood!' he muttered. 'This neighbourhood ! Have you a telephone here. Monsieur Augustin ?' 'In my den. monsieur; my workroom. I will take you to it.'

'Yes, yes. I want it immediately. But one thing more. I think you told us, my friend, that when Mademoiselle Duchene first entered the museum yesterday she asked you a curious question - 'Where is the satyr?' What did she mean by that?'

Augustin looked slightly hurt.

'Monsieur has never heard,' he asked, 'of the Satyr of the Seine?' 'Never.'

'It is one of my finest efforts. A purely imaginative conception, you understand,' Augustin hastened to explain. 'It deals with one of the popular Parisian bogies, a sort of man-monster who lives in the river and draws down women to their death. I believe it has some foundation in fact. There are records here, if you care to examine them.'

‘I see. And where is the figure?'

'At the entrance to the Gallery of Horrors, near the foot of the stair. I have been highly complimented —'

'Show me the telephone. If you care to look round the museum,' he told the rest of us, 'I will join you there shortly. Now, if you please.'

Mlle Augustin sat down in an old rocking-chair beside the lamp and took a work-basket from the table. Her bright black eye fixed on a needle she was threading, she said coldly:

'You know the way, messieurs. Do not let me disturb you.'

She began to rock energetically and to work on a purple-striped shirt with the needle, after pushing the bobbed hair behind her ears, and settling herself with an expression of outraged domesticity. But she watched us.

Chaumont and I went out into the vestibule. He took out his case and offered me a cigarette; we studied each other while we were lighting thein. The place seemed to confine Chaumont like a coffin. He had pulled his hat down on his brows, and his eye roved nervously, seeking an enemy.

He said, suddenly. 'You are married ?'

'No.'

'Engaged?' 'Yes.'

'Ah! Then you can understand what this means. I am not myself. You must excuse me if I am upset. Ever since I saw that body... ! Let's go in.'

I felt a curious kinship with this repressed, vital, unimaginative young man, who floundered now out of his element. As we entered the glass doors of the museum he walked warily; by his very tread you knew that he had been fighting under fierce suns. But I saw on his face now an expression almost of awe....

The very quiet of the place made me shiver. It smelt damp; it smelt - I can only describe it this way - of clothes and hair. We were in an immense grotto, running back nearly eighty feet, and supported by pillars of grotesque fretwork in stone. It swam in a greenish twilight, emanating from some source I could not trace; like greenish water, it distorted and made spectral each outline, so that arches and pillars seemed to waver and change like the toy caverns inside a goldfish bowl. They appeared to trail green tentacles, and to be crusted with iridescent slime.

But it was the motionless assemblage here which filled one with dread. A policeman stood stiffly at my elbow; you would have sworn he was a real policeman until you spoke to him. Along the walls on either side, behind railings, figures looked out. They stared straight ahead as though (I could not help the fancy) as though they were aware of our presence and were deliberately keeping their eyes from us. A little yellowish light made them stand out in the green gloom. Doumergue, Mussolini, the Prince of Wales, King Alfonso, Hoover; then the idols of sport, of stage and screen, all familiar and fashioned with uncanny skill. But these, you felt, were only a reception committee - a sort of gesture at respectability and everyday life - to prepare you for what lay behind. I started a little at seeing, on a bench down the middle of the grotto, a woman sitting motionless, and near her a man huddled in a corner as though he were drunk; I started, with a knock at my heart, until I realized that these also were wax.

My footsteps echoed as I walked down the vault hesitantly. I passed within a foot of that figure slumped back against the bench, straw hat over its eyes, and I felt an almost overpowering impulse to touch it, for assurance that it could not speak. To be watched from behind by glas3 eyes is quite as bad as being watched from behind by real ones. I heard Chaumont wandering about; when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw him contemplating dubiously the drunken figure on the bench....

The grotto opened into a rotunda which was almost completely dark but for the faintest of glows round its models. Over the archway a hideous grinning face looked down at me. It was a jester leaning over as though to touch me with his bauble, and winking. My footsteps caused the bells of his motley to tremble, jingling, ever so slightly. Here in the dark rotunda echoes assumed a dead and empty heaviness; the smell of dust and clothes and hair was more pronounced; and the wax figures took on a more lurid unearthliness. D'Artagnan preened, hand on his rapier. A giant in black armour, axe uplifted, glimmered from the shadows. Then I saw another archway, dimly lighted in green, with a flight of stairs going down between stone walls to the Gallery of Horrors.., .

The mere inscription of it, above the archway, caused me to hesitate. The word was definite; you knew what to expect, and like all starkly definite things, I did not know whether I wanted to face it. That staircase suggested walls pressing you in with the terrors, so that you might not be able to escape. Here before the stairs, I remembered, old Augustin had seen Odette Duchene going down, and he thought he had seen moving after her that horrible phantom without a face, the woman with the fur neckpiece and the little brown hat. .., It was much colder, descending the steps, and the footfalls had flat, mocking reverberations which rushed ahead as though somebody were jumping down the treads ahead of you. Suddenly I felt alone. I wanted to turn back.

The staircase turned sharply. Against the rough and green-lit wall a shadow rose up, and my heart thumped in my chest. A man with humped shoulders, his face shaded by a medieval hood, but with a long jaw which carried a suggestion of a smile - this gaunt model crouched against the wall. In his arms, partly covered by the cloak, was the figure of a woman ; an ordinary man, except that in place of an out-thrust foot he had a cloven hoof. The Satyr! An ordinary man, except that the artisan had caught with subtle genius a suggestion of the foul and the unholy, of gaunt ribs and unsmiling jaw. It was as well that the eyes were shaded. ...

I hurried past the leprous thing, down the tortuous corridor to where it opened into another rotunda on a lower level. Here were groups of figures in scenes, each in its compartment, each a masterpiece of devilish artistry. The past drew breath. A pallor was on each, as though you saw it through veils, yet you saw behind it into its own time. Marat lay backwards out of his tin bath, his jaw fallen, the ribs starting through his bluish skin, a claw hand plucking at the knife in his bloody chest. You saw this; you saw the attendant woman seizing an impassive Charlotte Corday, and the red-capped soldiers, their mouths split with yelling, smash through the door; all the passion and terror cried soundlessly there. But behind this brown room you saw the yellow September sunlight falling through the window, and the vines on the wall outside. Old Paris lived again.

I heard the sound of something dripping. ...

Panic seized me. Staring round at all those other groups beneath their pallor - at the Inquisitors working with fire and pincers, at a king under the guillotine knife, and the fury of the soundless drums - I felt it as contrary to nature that they did not move. They were more ghastly, these shadowy people, than though they had stepped forth in their coloured coats to speak.

It was not my fancy. Something was falling, drop by drop, slowly. ...

I hurried up the stairs in a tumult of echoes. I wanted light, and the knowledge of human presence in this choking stuffiness of wax and wigs. When I had reached the last turn of the stairs I tried to recover composure; I would not be frightened out of my wits by a lot of dummies. It was ridiculous. Bencolin and I would have a good laugh at it, over brandy and cigarettes, when we had left this evil place.

There they were, Bencolin and Augustin and Chaumont, just coming into the upper rotunda as I ascended. I steadied myself and called out. But something must have shown itself in my face, for they noticed it even in that dim light.

'What the devil ails you, Jeff?' the detective asked.

'Nothing,' I said. My voice told them it was a he. 'I was -admiring the waxworks - down there. The Marat