“Just hold on to yourself,” he said, “we’re almost there. Driver, pull into that alley behind those houses.”
The taxi joggled as we made our way through the narrow passage. On either side of us were high wooden fences beyond which rose so many houses of such impressive height and bulk, though of course they were still monuments to decay.
The cab’s headlights were barely up to the task of illuminating the cramped little alley, which seemed to become ever narrower the further we proceeded.
Suddenly the driver jerked us to a stop to avoid running over an old man slouched against the fence, an empty bottle lying at his side.
“This is where we get out,” said Dr. Dublanc. “Wait here for us, driver.”
As we emerged from the taxi I pulled at the doctor’s sleeve, whispering about the expense of the fare. He replied in a loud voice, “You should worry more about getting a taxi to take us back home. They keep their distance from this neighborhood and rarely answer the calls they receive to come in here. Isn’t that true, driver?” But the man had returned to that dormant state in which I first saw him. “Come on,” said the doctor. “He’ll wait for us. This way.”
Dr. Dublanc pushed back a section of the fence that formed a kind of loosely hinged gate, closing it carefully behind us after we passed through the opening. On the other side was a small backyard, actually a miniature dumping ground where shadows bulged with refuse. And before us, I assumed, stood the house of Mr. Catch. It seemed very large, with an incredible number of bony peaks and dormers outlined against the sky, and even a weathervane in some vague animal-shape that stood atop a ruined turret grazed by moonlight. But although the moon was as bright as before, it appeared to be considerably thinner, as if it had been worn down just like everything else in that neighborhood.
“It hasn’t altered in the least,” the doctor assured me. He was holding open the back door of the house and gesturing for me to approach.
“Perhaps no one’s home,” I suggested.
“Not at all—the door’s unlocked. You see how he’s expecting us?”
“There don’t appear to be any lights in use.”
“Mr. Catch likes to conserve on certain expenses. A minor mania of his. But in other ways he’s quite extravagant. And by no means is he a poor man. Watch yourself on the porch—some of these boards are not what they once were.”
As soon as I was standing by the doctor’s side he removed a flashlight from the pocket of his overcoat, shining a path into the dark interior of the house. Once inside, that yellowish swatch of illumination began flitting around in the blackness. It settled briefly in a cobwebbed corner of the ceiling, then ran down a blank battered wall and jittered along warped floor moldings. For a moment it revealed two suitcases, quite well used, at the bottom of a stairway.
It slid smoothly up the stairway banister and flew straight to the floors above, where we heard some scraping sounds, as if an animal with long-nailed paws was moving about.
“Does Mr. Catch keep a pet?” I asked in a low voice.
“Why shouldn’t he? But I don’t think we’ll find him up there.”
We went deeper into the house, passing through many rooms which fortunately were unobstructed by furniture. Sometimes we crushed bits of broken glass underfoot; once I inadvertently kicked an empty bottle and sent it clanging across a bare floor. Reaching the far side of the house, we entered a long hallway flanked by several doors. All of them were closed and behind some of them we heard sounds similar to those being made on the second floor. We also heard footsteps slowly ascending a stairway. Then the last door at the end of the hallway opened, and a watery light pushed back some of the shadows ahead of us.
A round-bodied little man was standing in the light, lazily beckoning to us.
“You’re late, you’re very late,” he chided while leading us down into the cellar. His voice was highpitched yet also quite raspy. “I was just about to leave.”
“My apologies,” said Dr. Dublanc, who sounded entirely sincere on this occasion.
“Mr. Catch, allow me to introduce—”
“Never mind that Mr. Catch nonsense. You know well enough what things are like for me, don’t you, doctor? So let’s get started, I’m on a schedule now.”
In the cellar we paused amid the quivering light of candles, dozens of them positioned high and low, melting upon a shelf or an old crate or right on the filth-covered floor. Even so, there was a certain lack of definition among the surrounding objects, but I could see that an old-fashioned film projector had been set up on a table toward the center of the room, and a portable movie screen stood by the opposite wall. The projector was plugged into what appeared to be a small electrical generator humming on the floor.
“I think there are some stools or whatnot you can sit on,” said Mr. Catch as he threaded the film around the spools of the projector. Then for the first time he spoke to me directly. “I’m not sure how much the doctor has explained about what I’m going to show you. Probably very little.”
“Yes, and deliberately so,” interrupted Dr. Dublanc. “If you just roll the film I think my purpose will be served, with or without explanations. What harm can it do?”
Mr. Catch made no reply. After blowing out some of the candles to darken the room sufficiently, he switched on the projector, which was a rather noisy mechanism. I worried that whatever dialogue or narration the film might contain would be drowned out between the whirring of the projector and the humming of the generator. But I soon realized that this was a silent film, a cinematic document that in every aspect of its production was thoroughly primitive, from its harsh light and coarse photographic texture to its nearly unintelligible scenario.
It seemed to serve as a visual record of scientific experiment, a laboratory demonstration in fact. The setting, nevertheless, was anything but clinical—a bare wall in a cellar which in some ways resembled, yet was not identical to, the one where I was viewing this film. And the subject was human: a shabby, unshaven, and unconscious derelict who had been propped up against a crude grayish wall. Not too many moments passed before the man began to stir. But his movements were not those of awakening from a deep stupor; they were only spasmodic twitchings of some energy which appeared to inhabit the old tramp. A torn pant leg wiggled for a second, then his chest heaved, as if with an incredible sigh. His left arm, no his right arm, flewup in the air and immediately collapsed. Soon his head began to wobble and it kept on wobbling, even though its owner remained in a state of profound obliviousness.
Something was making its way through the derelict’s scalp, rustling among the long greasy locks of an unsightly head. Part of it finally poked upwards—a thin sticklike thing. More of them emerged, dark wiry appendages that were bristling and bending and reaching for the outer world. At the end of each was a pair of slender snapping pincers. What ultimately broke through that shattered skull, pulling itself out with a wriggling motion of its many newborn arms, was approximately the size and proportions of a spider monkey. It had tiny translucent wings which fluttered a few times, glistening but useless, and was quite black, as if charred. Actually the creature seemed to be in an emaciated condition. When it turned its head toward the camera, it stared into the lens with malicious eyes and seemed to be chattering with its beaked mouth.
I whispered to Dr. Dublanc: “Please, I’m afraid that—”
“Exactly,” he hissed back at me. “You are always afraid of the least upset in the order of things. You need to face certain realities so that you may free yourself of them.”
Now it was my turn to give the doctor a skeptical glance. Yet I certainly realized that he was practicing something other than facile therapeutics. And even then our presence in that cellar—that cold swamp of shadows in which candles flickered like fireflies—seemed to be as much for Dr. Dublanc’s benefit as it was for mine, if “benefit” is the proper word in this case.
“Those pills you gave me …”
“Shhh. Watch the film.”
It was almost finished. After the creature had hatched from its strange egg, it proceeded very rapidly to consume the grubby derelict, leaving only a collection of bones attired in cast-off clothes. Picked perfectly clean, the skull leaned wearily to one side. And the creature, which earlier had been so emaciated, had grown rather plump with its feast, becoming bloated and meaty like an overfed dog. In the final sequence, a net was tossed into the scene, capturing the gigantic vermin and dragging it off camera. Then whiteness filled the screen and the film was flapping on its reel.
“Apparently Mr. Catch has left us,” said the doctor, noticing that I remained under the spell of what I had just
