another bloody business. By his estimate of Moreau's character, it seemed unlikely the man harboured a patriotic or philanthropic impulse in his breast. Yet here he was, in the worst place in the world, ostensibly risking his own skin to ease appalling suffering.
In consideration of Gertrud Zelle's narrative, he wished to consult Dr Moreau. If anyone this side of the lines could shed light on the darkness of the Chateau du Malinbois, he was the man.
Towards the front, the trench narrowed. More sandbags were exploded. Major earthworks showed where breaches had been shored up. Templar whistled a little tune, a strange chirrup. Beauregard had heard the new-born was a good officer, concerned for the men under him.
Three Tommies sat at a wonky table, smoking and playing cards. A hand stuck out of the packed-earth wall, cards fanned in a frozen white grip. After a few visits to the front, Beauregard was not shocked by the grim humour. The unknown soldier was too well embedded to be dug free without causing a collapse. His release would have to wait till after the war.
Beauregard remembered a cartoon of two British soldiers chatting in a shell-hole. 'I'm enlisted for twenty-five more years,' one says. 'You're lucky,' replies his comrade, 'I'm duration.'
Two men threw in their cards and the third consulted the hand dealt the dead man. If able to bet, he would have won. Aces and eights.
'Moreau's show is down here, sir,' Templar said, lifting a stiff canvas flap.
It was like the entrance to a mine. A tunnel sloped down, shored up with bags, floored with boards, roofed with corrugated iron. An electric light was strung up about twenty feet in, but there was darkness beyond. Treacly mud ran slowly from the trench into the tunnel, but was diverted into sluices. Beauregard could not imagine where the liquid filth ended up.
A high-pitched scream came from the tunnel, followed by lesser yelps and groans. The cries sounded more animal than human.
'It's always like that,' said Templar, eyebrow raised. 'Dr Moreau says pain is healthy. A person in pain can still feel. It's when you can't feel anything that you have to worry.'
Another shriek was cut through by a rasp like the downstroke of a saw.
'It's unusual to have a clinic this close to the line, isn't it?'
Templar nodded, it's practical, I suppose. But not good for morale. The situation is fearful enough without all this. Some of the men are spooked by the confounded din. They're more scared of being taken into the hole than of being wounded in the first place. Silly stories go around about the doctor using the wounded as experimental subjects.'
Beauregard could imagine. Given Moreau's reputation, the stories might not be all silliness.
'As if there were anything to be learned from torturing wounded men. It's absurd.'
Templar was a decent sort, for a vampire; perhaps too decent. Such saintliness often overlooked man's capacity for pointless cruelty.
Beauregard stepped into the tunnel. A curious miasma filled the enclosed space, a strong sulphurous smell. Wavering electric light made the walls reddish.
The lieutenant stayed outside, like an old-world vampire at the edge of consecrated ground.
'You can go on without me, sir. You can't miss it.'
Beauregard wondered if Templar were as immune from superstition as he claimed. He shook the young man's firm hand and walked past the light into the dark.
The tunnel ended at a solid iron door. Getting it down here and set into stony earth must have been a herculean task. An extraordinary soldier stood guard. Stooped almost double, he barely came up to Beauregard's waist. His arms were six inches longer than his sleeves, most of his brown face was matted with hair, large teeth pushed lips out in an apish grin and red marks, like healed wounds, showed in loose folds of skin around neck and wrists. His uniform bagged in some places and stretched in others.
Beauregard took the guard for a savage, perhaps indigenous to a South Sea corner of Empire. He might be a pygmy afflicted with gigantism. The war called upon all manner of King Victor's subjects.
At Beauregard's approach, the guard wrapped long fingers around a rifle and did his best to stand straight. He bared remarkable teeth, yellow bone-spurs in an acre of bright- pink gum.
'I'm here to see Dr Moreau,' Beauregard said.
The guard's tiny eyes glittered. He snorted, nose moving as if free of his skull. More screams sounded from behind the door. The guard, who might be expected to be used to the noise, shrank in terror, cowering into an alcove.
'Dr Moreau,' Beauregard said, again.
The guard's furry brows knit with extreme concentration. He unwound his fingers from the rifle and took hold of a ring set in the door. He hauled the iron portal open in a succession of creaking lurches.
A draught of bloody stink belched out. Beauregard stepped into a chamber hewn out of earth and rock. A row of cots took up fully half the space. On most were patients with terrible wounds, strapped to bloody mattresses. Some stared silently through bandage masks, others keened in idiot pain. A bin overflowed with cut-up uniforms and sawn-through boots. Electric lights pulsed in time with an unreliable generator grumbling in another room. The walls glistened with fresh blood. Everything was speckled. Even the light-bulbs were spotted, blood drops cooked to brown moles.
He saw Dr Moreau at once, a powerfully built old man in a vilely streaked tunic, with a leonine mane of white hair. The doctor bent over the living remains of a soldier, prising apart exposed ribs with a steel implement. The patient was a skeleton clad in wet scraps of muscle and meat. Hurt eyes shone in the red wreck of a face. Exposed fangs clashed in a devil's grin. Beside Moreau, holding down the patient's shoulders, was a smaller man. Moreau gave a cry of triumph as bones parted. A squirt of purple blood shot into the assistant's face, smearing his thick spectacles.
'There, West,' Moreau said. 'The heart still beats.'
West, the assistant, tried to find a clean stretch of sleeve to wipe off his glasses.
'I am right again and you owe me half-a-crown.'
'Certainly, doctor,' West said. He had a flat accent, American or Canadian. 'I'll add it to the tally.'
'You are a witness,' Moreau said to Beauregard, the first time he had acknowledged the intrusion. 'Mr West wagered it was impossible for the heart to continue to function under such conditions, yet the resilient organ beats still.'
Moreau lifted his arm to give Beauregard a view of the heart. It pumped like a squeezing fist, though most of its tubes were severed.
'This man could live,' Moreau declared.
'Surely not,' West countered.
'Your debt will mount, my man. Observe, how tenacious these little snakes prove.'
The cut tubes writhed swiftly. An artery probed like a blind worm and reattached itself, blood flowing through it, the break healing. Layers of tissue clustered, swarming over the heart, burying it. The pulled-back ribs closed like a trap, assuming their normal formation. A wash of musculature flowed over the bones.
'The resilience of the vampire
The patient's head was severely pulped at the back. Flesh swarmed strangely around the eyes. Every scrap of the soldier lived tenaciously. Beauregard remembered Isolde's sad performance. In thirty years' research, Moreau and his like had not set a limit on the vampire power of regeneration.
'But without the brain,' West said, tapping the area of activity, 'the creature has no purpose, no coherence . .
Muscle strands hungrily lapped West's fingertip. He pulled his hand away and watched smugly as a cheeklike slab of flesh formed
'This is not a living man,' said West, 'just a collection of disparate, individually mobile, parts and functions. The template of human form is held in the brain. Without that template, this senseless creature can only flow in a random search for freakish shape.'
Skin formed over the patient's mouth, ripping on teeth and healing again.
Moreau's huge face reddened with anger. 'This man is guilty of a failure of will. He has surrendered his grip
