The father of Macbeth came to fetch him without delay, accompanied by his other son. Since Lerne had written to him, nothing new had taken place at Fonval. The mystery went on, and more arrangements were made against my person.

Emma no longer came downstairs; from the little drawing room I heard her busy with her futile amusements in the lay-figure room. Her little sharp heels went tap, tap, tap on the floor above. My nights were sleepless. The harassing idea of Lerne and Emma together kept me awake.

I tried to go out once, to take a walk in the cool of the night, and so weary out my body. All the doors down below were locked.

Ah! Lerne was keeping a good watch on me.

However, the imprudence I had committed in revealing my discovery of Macbeth had no other apparent result than a renewal of his friendship. In our walks which had now become more frequent, he seemed to take more and more pleasure in my society, endeavoring to mitigate the rigor of my spy-haunted life, and thus to keep me at Fonval, whether it was really to train an associate for himself, or merely to guard against the risk of an escape. His attentions annoyed me.

This was the period when, without it seeming to be so, I was more carefully watched than before. My days were filled in a way which I disliked. I was eaten up with impatience, between love on the one hand, and mystery on the other—both forbidden ground for me. Though love for a pretty woman, who was inaccessible, called me in one direction, the mystery also attracted me as imperiously in the other—that mystery which was represented by an old boot.

This filthy elastic-sided boot served as a basis for all the theories which I built up at night, in the hope of calming my jealousy by curiosity. It constituted, indeed, the one clear goal to which my indiscretions could tend.

I had noted that the tool-house stood near the clearing, and that was convenient for any attempt to unearth the boot—and whatever else there might be—but Lerne’s displays of affection kept me pitilessly away from the hothouse, the laboratory, Emma, and everything else.

So I ardently longed for something or other new to happen, which should revolutionize our relations, and give me a chance of escaping from the vigilance of my guardians,—a sudden journey of Lerne to Nanthel—an accident, anything from which I could derive some advantage.

This windfall was the arrival of the two Macbeths—father and son.

My uncle having been informed of their arrival by telegram, announced it to me with an outburst of delight.

Why was he so pleased? Had I really enlightened him on the danger of keeping Donovan, ill, away from his family? I found it devilish hard to believe that. And then, that laugh of Lerne’s, even though sincere, seemed to have a nasty quality. It could only be caused by his having a chance of playing some dirty trick.

But, whatever the reason was, I showed the same delight as the Professor, and that without any guile, for I had every good ground for it.

They arrived one morning in a trap, hired at Grey, and driven by Karl. They resembled one another, and both resembled Donovan of the photograph. They were tall, pale and impassive.

Lerne introduced me with perfect ease of manner. They shook hands with me coldly, with the same glove-clad gesture. One would have said that they had put gloves over their souls.

Having been ushered into the little drawing room, they sat down without a word.

With his three assistants present, Lerne began a long speech in English, full of movement, illustrated by mimic gestures, and very emotional.

At a certain point in his story, he pretended to tumble back like somebody who had slipped. Then, taking the two men by the arm, he led them to the central door of the chÂteau, near the park.

There he pointed out to them the scraper, shaped like a sickle and then, once more went through the tumbling farce. No doubt he was explaining to them that Donovan had been wounded by the curved blade which cut his head when he fell backwards.

Good Lord! this was something new!

We went back to the drawing room. My uncle finished his speech with wiping his eyes, and the three Germans tried to do a little sniffling to indicate a need for weeping violently suppressed.

The Macbeths, father and son, never budged; they gave no sign either of grief or impatience.

At length, Karl, Johann and Wilhelm went out of the room on an order from Lerne, and brought in Donovan, clean-shaven, with his hair greased and parted at the side, and the appearance of a very fashionable young blade, although his traveling suit, somewhat worn, dragged on the buttons at the all-too narrow collar, sending the blood into his big good-natured face. His hair almost hid the scar.

At the sight of his father and brother the madman’s eye gleamed with genuine happiness, and a smile lit up that face which had seemed so apathetic, with affectionate kindness.

I thought that he was restored to reason—but he knelt down at the feet of his relations and began to lick their hands, barking inarticulately!

His brother could not get anything else out of him. His father failed also, whereupon the Macbeths prepared to take leave of Lerne.

My uncle spoke to them. I grasped that they were declining some invitation or other to lunch. The other did not insist, and everybody went out.

Wilhelm put Donovan’s trunk on the box of the carriage.

“Nicolas,” said Lerne to me, “I am taking these gentlemen as far as the train. You will remain here with Johann and Wilhelm. Karl will come with me. I leave the house in your charge,” said he, in a jovial tone, and he gave me a frank handshake.

Was my uncle making a fool of me? Not much chance of being master of a house when there were two such watchers there.

They got into the trap, Karl and the trunk in front, Lerne, the madman and the two Macbeths behind.

No sooner had the door slammed, than Donovan rose all at once, with a face of terror, as if he had heard Death sharpening his scythe.A long howl, quite distinct from all others rose from the laboratory. The madman pointed in that direction, and replied to Nell with a long-drawn bestial cry, the horror of which made us all turn pale.

We awaited the end of it, as if for a deliverance.

Lerne, with his imperious eye, and harsh speech, gave orders, “VorwÄrts, Karl, vorwÄrts,” and without any consideration, he thrust down his pupil, with a blow, on the seat.

The carriage moved off.

The madman, sitting close to his brother, looked at him wildly, as if he were the victim of some misfortune he could not understand.

The dreadful mystery was on me again. It was around me, coming nearer and nearer. This time I had felt the touch of its wings.

Far away, the howlings were redoubled, then the elder Macbeth exclaimed, “Nell, where is Nell?” And my uncle replied, “Alas, Nell is dead.”

“Poor Nell!” said Mr. Macbeth.

Duffer as I was, I knew enough English to translate this school-book dialogue. Lerne’s lie made me indignant. To think of his daring to say that Nell was dead, and that that was not her voice! What a piece of villainy! Ah! why did I not shout out to this phlegmatic couple, “Stop, you are being fooled! There is something strange and terrible here!”

Yes, but I did not know what it was, and the Macbeths would have taken me for another madman.

Meanwhile, the hired horse trotted along towards the gate, where Barbe stood ready to shut it.

Donovan had sat down again, in front of them. The Macbeths, father and son, maintained their stiff dignity, but as the carriage turned at the gate, I saw the father’s back suddenly bend and quiver more than could have been explained by the jolting over the stones.

Then the old cracking halves of the gate closed again.

I am sure that the brother Macbeth broke into sobs not much later.

Johann and Wilhelm departed. Were they going to relieve me of their company? I tracked them along the park as far as the laboratory. Nell was continuing her lamentations. They probably wanted to silence her, and, in fact, her howls ceased as soon as the assistants got into the yard.

But my fears were groundless. Instead of going up to the chÂteau to lock me in, the black-guards, having lighted cigars coolly sat down for an obvious siesta.

Through an open window of their block, I could see them in their shirt sleeves, smoking like chimneys, and rocking in their rocking-chairs.

When I had assured myself of their intentions, without asking myself whether they were acting thus against Lerne’s orders, or with his consent, and a thousand miles from thinking that, as they puffed away at the open window, they were carrying out his instructions point by point, I betook myself to the tool-house.

Soon I was digging at the ground round the old shoe. I may now say, “round the foot.”

With its point upwards, it stood up at the bottom of a hole where Donovan’s nails still showed their marks, among less recent scratches. When one examined these latter, which had been made by strong and powerful paws, the only possible conclusion was that the first digger must have been a dog of large size—apparently Nell, at the time when she wandered about the park in complete freedom.

A leg was attached to this foot, and only lightly covered with earth. I clung to the possibility of some anatomical dÉbris, but without much conviction. A hairy body followed the leg—a whole corpse, hardly clothed, and far advanced in decomposition!It had been buried aslant—the head, lower down than the feet, still remained buried. It was with a trembling spade that I uncovered the chin, whiskers that were almost blue, then a thick mustache—finally a face.

I now knew what fate had overtaken all the personages who were grouped in the photograph.... Otto Klotz, half unburied, with his head in the earth, was lying there before me!

I identified him without any hesitation. It was quite unnecessary to uncover him completely—on the contrary, it was best to fill in the hole, so as to leave no traces of my escapade.

However, all of a sudden, I seized the pick in frenzy, and began digging away by the side of the dead man. Here rose up a bone like a white and spongy mushroom. Were there other things buried there? Oh!!

I dug and dug. I was in a fever. White spots flickered before my eyes, and it seemed to me that tongues of fire were raining on my maddened eye like a pentecostal deluge.

I dug and dug, and uncovered a whole cemetery, but thank God! a cemetery of animals—some, mere skeletons, others, with their feathers or fur—dry or oozy! Guinea-pigs, rabbits, dogs, cats—sometimes whole, sometimes in bits, the rest of which had gone to feed the pack. The leg of a horse! Ah, dear Biribi, it was yours; and under a layer of earth which had been recently stirred, bits of butcher’s meat wrapped up in a dappled skin—the remains of PasiphaË!

A fetid stench choked me. Exhausted, I leaned over my filthy pick, in the midst of the charnel-house. The sweat which poured from me, stung my eyes. I was gasping for breath.

At that moment, my eyes lighted, by chance, on a skull—that of a cat. Immediately I picked it up. It was a regular pipe’s bowl! That is to say, a great circular hole took the place of the crown.

I then took up another—a rabbit’s, if I remember rightly. Here too, was the same peculiarity.

Four—sixteen other skulls, each showing its gaping hole, but with some differences in its position.

Here and there the bony tops of skulls strewed the clearing with their large or tiny cups—some deep—some flat.

One would have said that all those creatures had been massacred in a scientific hecatomb—a carefully reasoned-out sacrifice.

Suddenly, an atrocious idea seized me. I bent down over the dead man, and succeeded in getting the mud off his head. Nothing abnormal in front. His hair was closely cropped, but behind, encircling the whole occiput, like Macbeth’s scar, from one temple to the other, a horrible cut laid bare the broken brain.

Lerne had killed Klotz! He had suppressed him because of Emma, in the same way that he knocked the life out of animals and fowls, when he had exhausted their power of enduring his experiments. It was a surgical crime. I now imagined I had probed the mystery to the bottom.

I thought to myself, “Macbeth’s madness comes from this, that Lerne missed his blow. The poor doomed creature saw a dreadful death coming on him. But why should my uncle have missed him? Perhaps in his blind fury, he suddenly saw clear, and feared reprisals from the Macbeth family.”

As for Klotz, he was an orphan and a bachelor, as Emma assured me, so there he is! and the same fate awaits me—awaits her, perhaps, if we are found together!

“Oh, to flee, to flee, she and I together, to flee, it’s the only reasonable plan, and opportunity favors us! Will it ever occur again?”

We must make for the station, through the forest, in order to avoid Lerne and Karl, who are coming by the road. But the labyrinth!—Perhaps it would be better to use the motor-car and pass over their bodies. I do not know, we shall see!Shall I be in time? Quick, for God’s sake, quick!

I ran panting, striving to outstrip the light, swift, unseen feet of Death.

I ran, twice falling and twice picking myself up, and gasping with the fear of that Pursuer.

The chÂteau! No Lerne yet! His felt hat was not hanging on its usual peg in the hall. I had won the first lap. The second was to get us away, without return. I dashed up the staircase, crossed the landing, went through the dressing-room at a bound, and burst into Emma’s room.

“Let us begone,” I blurted out. “Come, sweetheart, come, I will explain all. There is murder being done at Fonval!”

“What’s the matter? What is it?”

She remained rigid in the presence of my excitement, standing stiffly up.

“How white you are. Don’t be afraid.”

Then, and then only, I perceived that terror possessed her, and that with frightened eyes, and bloodless lips, her poor dead face was signing to me to be silent, and announcing the imminence of a great danger, close at hand, too close for her to be able to warn me of it with a gesture or a sound, without the watchful enemy taking revenge upon her.

And yet, nothing happened. I took in the whole peaceful chamber at a glance. Everything in it seemed to me mysterious. The air itself was a hostile fluid—an unbreathable ocean in which I was sinking.

I felt a terror of what might happen behind me. I waited some legendary apparition.

And it was more terrible, this apparition, than the sudden appearance of Mephistopheles. For it was Lerne calmly coming out of a wardrobe!

“You have kept us waiting, Nicolas,” he said. I was thunder-struck. Emma sank on the ground foaming at the mouth, and twisting about under the furniture.

“Jetzt!” cried the professor.

A rustle of dresses in the next room—I heard the lay-figures fall. Wilhelm and Johann flung themselves on me.

Bound! Caught! Lost! And the terror of torture made me a coward.

“Uncle,” I entreated, “kill me at once, I beg you. No torture! A revolver; the dagger—poison! Anything you like, uncle, but no torture!”

Lerne sniggered, as he flipped Emma’s cheeks with a wet towel.

I felt myself going mad. Who knows if Macbeth’s reason had not gone in a moment like this! Macbeth! Klotz!

The hallucination made me feel a sharp pain, which pierced my skull from temple to temple.The assistants took me downstairs, Johann at my head—Wilhelm at my feet.

Were they simply going to put me away in a locked room!

A nephew, damn it all, is not to be slaughtered like a chicken!

They took their way to the laboratory.

In my fainting condition, my whole life, day by day, passed before me in the moment of a heart’s beat.

The Professor joined us. We went past the Germans’ block, and along beside the courtyard wall. Lerne opened a door on the ground floor of the left wing, and I was laid out under the operating theater, in a sort of wash-house that was as bare as a sepulcher, and all inlaid with white tiles.

A curtain of thick cloth hanging from a rod on rings, separated it into two compartments of equal size.

Its atmosphere was that of a chemist’s shop. There was plenty of light in it.

They had set up against the wall a little truckle-bed, which Lerne pointed out to me saying, “Your bed has been ready for you for some time, Nicolas.”

Then my uncle gave some instructions to the Germans, in their native language. The two assistants having unbound me, undressed me. Resistance was useless.

A few minutes later I was comfortably lying in bed, with sheets up to my chin, and tucked in. Johann alone watched over me, sitting astride on a stool, the only ornament of this austere place.

The curtain drawn aside let me see another folding door—the door into the courtyard.

In front of me,—through the bay window, I saw my old friend the fir tree.

My sadness increased. My mouth had a bad flavor in it, as if it had already tasted its approaching decomposition.

“Oh, to think that in a short time some filthy chemistry would be a prelude to that!”

Johann toyed with a revolver, and aimed it at me every now and again, much pleased with his excellent joke.

I turned round towards the wall, and that caused me to discover an inscription engraved in uncouth letters on the varnish of the tiling, made by the help, at least so I thought, of the jewel in a ring:

“Good-by, for ever, my dear father; Donovan.”

The unhappy man. He also had been laid on this bed—Klotz also, and who could prove that my uncle had made only those two his victims before me; but I cared very little.

The day sank into night. There was a rapid coming and going above us. At night this slackened and ceased. Then Karl, who had come back from Grey-l’Abbaye, relieved Johann of his post.

Almost immediately afterwards, Lerne had me plunged into a bath, and forced a bitter liquid down my throat. I recognized sulphate of magnesia. No doubt they were going to cut me up. These were forerunners of an operation. No one is ignorant of that now, in this age of appendicitis. It would be on the next day.

What were they going to try on my body before killing it!

I was alone with Karl!

I was hungry!

Not far from me a murmur arose from the wretched poultry-yard. There was a faint sound of stirred straw; timid cackling, strange barks. The beasts began to moan.

Night!

Lerne came in. I was in a state of wild agitation. He felt my pulse. “Are you happy?” he asked me.

“Brute!” I replied.

“Very well, I shall administer a sedative.” He offered it to me, and I drank it. It stank of chloral.

Once more I am alone with Karl.

Songs of toads, light of stars, dawning of the moon, uprising of its red disc. Mystic assumption of the luminary from star to star. All the beauty of night....

Then a forgotten prayer—the petition of a little child—went up from my distress towards the paradise which yesterday seemed a myth, and now was a certainty. How had I ever doubted its existence?

And the moon wandered in the firmament like an aureole in search of a brow.

It was long since my eyelids had closed on tears. I fell into drowsy delirium. The buzzing in my ears became a hubbub. (There are certain noises almost imperceptible, which seem like the thunder of cataclysms far away.)

They were heaping up straw. That poultry-yard is exasperating. The bull was bellowing. I even had an illusion that it was bellowing louder and louder.

Did they bring it in every evening, along with the cows, into the stall of that strange farm?

Good Lord, what a row!

It was while my mind was wandering in that way, under the influence of the drug, that, condemned to death, or destined for madness, I fell into a heavy and artificial sleep, which lasted till the morning.

Some one touched me on the shoulder. Lerne, in a white overall was standing near the bed. The murder idea had sprung up again instantaneously and clearly in me.

“What o’clock is it? Am I to die, or is your business over?”

“Patience, nephew. Nothing has begun yet.”

“What are you going to do with me? Are you going to inoculate me with plague, tuberculosis, cholera? Tell me, uncle.”

“No!”

“What then?”

“Come, come, no nonsense,” he said.

He withdrew, and revealed an operating table, which, lying on narrow supports like an open bier, had the appearance of a rack.

All the sets of instruments and the crowd of bottles shone in the light of the rising sun. Antiseptic dressings lay on a little table in a woolly cloud.

The two nickel-plated spheres on their supports, showed round, like divers’ helmets. A spirit lamp was burning under them. I nearly fainted with horror. At the side behind the curtain something was going on. A penetrating odor of ether came from it.

The secret, the secret always!

“What’s behind that?” I cried.

From between the wall and the curtain Karl and Wilhelm appeared, leaving the room which had thus been contrived on the other side of the compartment. They also had put on white overalls, though they were only assistants, but Lerne had seized something, and I felt, on the back of my neck, the chill touch of steel.

I uttered a cry.

“Idiot!” said my uncle, “it’s a clipper.”

He cut my hair, and shaved my hairy scalp close. At every touch of the razor I thought I felt the edge in my flesh.

After that, they soaked my skull again, dried it, and the Professor, by means of a soft pencil and calipers, covered my baldness with cabalistic lines.

“Take off your shirt,” he said to me. “Take care, do not spoil my diagrams.”

“Stretch yourself out on that, now.”

They helped me to haul myself up on the table, to which they bound me fast, with my arms under the bier.

Where was Johann?

Karl, without any warning, put a sort of muzzle over me. An odor of ether penetrated my lungs.

“Why not chloroform?” I said to myself.

Lerne recommended as follows:

“Breathe deeply and regularly—it is for your own good. Breathe!”

I obeyed.

There is a syringe with a sharp-pointed nozzle in my uncle’s hand.

Hallo! he has pricked my neck with it!I moved my jaws, my tongue and lips feeling like lead.

“Wait, I am not sleeping yet. What is this virus?”

“Morphia,” said the Professor simply.

The anesthetic was gaining on me. Another prick, on the shoulder—this time very sharp.

“I am not sleeping! Good heavens, wait! I am not sleeping.”

“That is what I wanted to know,” growled my executioner.

For some moments a consolation had been assuaging my torture. Did not the cranial preparations seem to show that they were going to slaughter me without delay? And yet Macbeth had survived his trepanning.

I seemed to get far away inside myself. Silvery bells gayly rang a celestial chime, which I have never been able to remember, though it seemed to me unforgettable.

Another prick on the shoulder, which I hardly felt. I wished to say again that I was not sleeping. Vain effort! My words sounded dully submerged in the depths of an invading sea. They were held lifeless, and I alone could make them out.

The rings glide along the curtain rod, and without suffering, on the threshold of this artificial Nirvana, this is what I seemed to perceive.Lerne makes a long incision from the right temple to the left, round the occiput—an incomplete scalping, and he brings down all the strips of flesh in front of my face, making my forehead like a shambles. From in front, one must see me with the bleeding and jumbled head which I remembered on the monkey.

“Help, I am not sleeping!”

But I cannot hear my cries for the jangling of the silver bells. To begin with, they are too far down under the sea, and now the sound of the bells is deafening, like great church bells chiming with a formidable din, and it is now I who plunge into the ocean of ether.

Am I living, or am I not? I am a dead man who is conscious of being dead....

Even more so....

Nothingness!——