Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector Read online

  The surgeon hesitated.

  “Pray, sir, do,” urged my companion, ever eager to be instructed.

  “As to how they are made,” said the surgeon slowly, “you will learn little in my workroom. These effigies you see, that are the work of my predecessor, are but coarsely cast in wax, and the limbs tied together and so cloathed; and one mould serves for many faces, as you may see if you compare the ladies of the harem with the ladies of the English Court.”

  “How then is a likeness obtained?” asked Johnson, indicating the well-known piscine face of the late monarch.

  “This is my work,” replied the surgeon proudly, “for I model direct in the wax and colour it from the life. These faces—” he jerked his head at the Romans and the Turks—“are but masks, they have nothing under them; but my faces are built from within. Stay, you shall see. Pray step this way.”

  He led the way to the door, and stood aside to bow us through. Beside the door, propped on crutches, stood the famous image of Mother Shipton: a gnarled nutcracker countenance, coarse hair crowned with a hat like a steeple, a sombre cloak thrown over the shoulders.

  “After you, Mr. Boswell,” said my courteous friend with an inclination.

  “No, sir, after you.”

  The contest of courtesy prolonged itself, until, to end it, I bowed and stepped through the door. To my utter amazement, there was a creak and a clatter, and I felt my breech saluted by an unmistakable kick from behind. I turned dumbfounded, to realize that both the surgeon and my friend had burst into roars of laughter. I stared incredulously.

  “Alack, Mr. Boswell, this by itself repays my shilling,” declared my friend, wiping his eyes. I could not believe that it was he who had thus assaulted me; but it was surely not the surgeon? My perplexity was resolved when my friend, still laughing, bade me stand back.

  “I had taken precedence of you at first,” he remarked, “but I have been here before.”

  So saying, he stepped over the door-sill; when with a creak and a clatter the witch-like figure by the door lifted her jointless leg and delivered a well-placed kick. My cumbersome friend eluded its effect dexterously, and grinned back at me from the threshold.

  “How is this managed?” I asked the grinning surgeon.

  “’Tis done by clockwork,” replied Dr. Clarke. “As you step on this board on the threshold, a trip is actuated that sets the figure in motion; ’tis the very Devil to keep it oiled, but the results repay the exertion.”

  Speaking thus, he led us down the stair and through a backward passage into his workroom.

  It smelled of hot wax, with a musty effluvium. Long windows looked into a yard filled with miscellaneous lumber. In the room was a vat as long as a baker’s kneading-trough; a glowing brick oven big enough to roast an ox; and a long table, fit to carve an ox, in the center of the room.

  At the table stood a young man, a tall likely lad, fresh-faced, marked with the small-pox, wearing leather shoes without buckles and a dirty baize apron.

  On the table before him was a collection of limbs in wax, which he was colouring with a dilution of cochineal. Johnson bent to examine them more closely; but my eyes were rivetted on the waistcoat of the fresh-faced young man. Above the baize of the apron the buttons shewed, very particular buttons of copper, shaped like a joined serpent.

  The young man set down his brush and turned with anxious mien to his master.

  “What news of my brother?” he asked in a heavy voice, knitting his brows.

  “None, Micah,” replied Dr. Clarke. “I went down to Water Lane again this morning, but never a hair of him has your mother seen; the young runagate is off to Sadler’s Wells, as like as not.”

  The tall young man continued to frown; he shook his head slowly.

  “Jem never run off, and not told me,” he said heavily, “Jem never did a thing without he told me; by cause I’m his elder, d’ye see, and he does as I bid him. Three days he’s gone, sir, and never a word of him; ’tis not natural, and that’s flat.”

  “Be easy, Micah,” said the surgeon, “he’ll return when it suits him, I’ll be bound.”

  Micah Blount said no more. He took up his brush and went back to his cochineal. His broad hands were surprisingly deft.

  Dr. Clarke indicated the scattered limbs.

  “This is Earl Ferrers,” he remarked, shewing his white teeth in a grin.

  I regarded the fragments with interest.

  “Earl Ferrers was a fine figure of a man,” said the surgeon. “I saw him hanged; he died with great decency, with the aid of a trap which was mechanically depressed and so turned him off with the dignity becoming his high station.”

  He picked up a waxy arm.

  “This arm is moulded, not cast,” he remarked. “With a tall man, do you see, Mr. Boswell, the limb is longer in every proportion, every little bone of the hand is elongated; we cannot cast such limbs in the same moulds as served for Mother Shipton. They must be modelled as if the bones lay beneath. Look, here is the radius bone, here the wrist bone, you may see how the wax shapes around them. Would not you take this for an arm of flesh indeed?”

  “Where is the head?” enquired Johnson.

  For answer the surgeon took down a wax head where it hung on the wall.

  “Is it modelled also?” asked my friend.

  “No, sir, ’tis cast. I was at Surgeons’ Hall when Earl Ferrers was anatomized—”

  “How, anatomized!” I exclaimed in horror. “An Earl anatomized like an ordinary cadaver!”

  “Yes, sir; for if he was an Earl, he was also a murderer, and the blood of his murdered steward cried aloud for justice. I was present at the scene, and made a cast from the face; so the likeness is exact, although a cast is used. Here is the wig; Earl Ferrers died in his own brown hair.”

  “Will there be a pall?”

  “No, sir. The Earl died, and was buried, in his wedding-suit.”

  The surgeon called up the back stair. An answer came from above, and presently Mrs. Clarke descended, bearing a sumptuous white brocade garment with rich silver embroidery.

  “If this is not the very suit he died in,” said the surgeon proudly, “’tis its twin, for Mrs. Clarke is a very Arachne with her needle.”

  The plump little woman beamed and bobbed; her pale eyes went into slits as her fat cheeks lifted in a grin. She hung the garment carefully against the wall.

  Johnson was shaking his head over the table full of the disjecta membra of the dead Earl. I peered out a doorway into a dark passage, which seemed to lead into the cellars below. It smelled damp and decayed.

  “Come, gentlemen,” said Dr. Clarke at my elbow, “if you would see how a head is moulded, you must follow me. We shall examine,” he went on, mounting the stair, “the head of Maclaine the highwayman, for I have never done a better.”

  He tossed aside the flapped hat and stripped off the crape mask.

  “You may see, gentlemen,” he said, “how the face is, as it were, built up from within. Maclaine had a plump cheek, yet you may trace that there is a cheek-bone beneath.”

  My nearsighted friend peered at the feature indicated. The surgeon was alight with sombre enthusiasm; we had clearly struck on his ruling passion. He tipped the figure toward us.

  “Look,” he cried, “at the shape of the head. This is no bullet head or ball of wax. The skull is longer than it is wide, and so I have modelled it. The skull, gentlemen—”

  There was a clatter on the stair, and the apprentice burst into the hall. His broad face was full of consternation. In his hand he held a blue apron; it was marked with a dreadful splash of red. The surgeon looked at him impassively, still supporting the inclined figure of the highwayman.

  “What do you here?” he asked. “Get back to your work.”

  “The apron,” stammered the lad, “’tis Jem’s, I know it well. I found it but now, ’twas stuffed into the shed with the coals.”

  “Be easy, boy,” reiterated the surgeon, “I am perswaded that Jem has run off to Sad
ler’s Wells; and what ’prentice would be such a blockhead, as to run to Sadler’s Wells in his ’prentice garb?”

  As Micah stood irresolute, my bulky friend was seized with one of those convulsive movements, to which, alas, he was always subject; he lurched heavily against the wax figure, and it fell to the ground with a crash.

  The surgeon turned in a fury. His anger fell, not on my friend, but upon the lad who had interrupted us.

  “Dolt!” he rated the heavy-witted apprentice. “Blockhead! My masterpiece—a waxwork built upon new principles of natural philosophy—shattered! It was worth twenty Blounts! Be off with you! Back where you belong!”

  Johnson and I bent over the prone wax figure to assess the damage. At first glance it seemed slight. The outstretched pistol arm had broken the force of the fall, and sustained most of the damage. The pistol had flown wide. The index finger was broken clear off, and the rest of the hand was shattered. As Johnson picked up the severed wax finger, my first emotion was one of relief that the damage was no worse.

  Then a cold grue of incredulous horror went through me. Under the cracked wax of the highwayman’s shattered fingers were the bones of a human hand!

  My memory of the next five minutes is confused. I remember the face of the apprentice as he gave way before the fury of the surgeon, and backed down the stairs, with the red-stained apron still in his hand. I remember we came away quickly, saying nothing, my brain reeling with our hideous discovery.

  At Inner Temple Lane I would have stayed with my wise friend, but he sent me abruptly about my business. This piqued me; and although I knew him to be fully capable of bringing the affair to whatever conclusion prudence and right dictated, I resolved to take a hand in the game and see whether I did not hold a trump or two.

  The event justified me. It was with triumph that I called in Inner Temple Lane the next evening after supper. Johnson was from home; but I determined to await his return.

  The full moon was mounting the sky when he at last appeared, in high good humour.

  “Where have you been so long, sir?” I cried peevishly.

  “Where every good Christian should go; to church,” he replied, “and where you, in these villainous weeds?”

  “By Water Lane into Alsatia,” I replied, naming the lawless district that lay south of Fleet Street.

  “In what bousing-ken, with what morts and culls?” my companion questioned me in thieves’ cant.

  “With none,” I replied, “with one Mistress Blount, of whom I have learned much of her missing son; most notably I have learned wherein he differed from Maclaine the highwayman.”

  “Why, as for that,” my companion humoured me, “they were of a size, being tall likely fellows both; and had each a plump pudding face, if Jemmy may be judged by Micah.”

  “Ay,” I replied, “but they were not to be confused, none the less, for Jemmy Blount was lacking the forefinger of his right hand; but the gentleman highwayman had his five fingers all complete.”

  My companion started.

  “Did he so!” he cried, “now this is a lesson in false generalization!”

  He threw on the table before him two finger bones, grey and brittle; to one, fragments of the rosy wax still adhered.

  “Deceivers, lie there,” he cried; and seized his three-cornered hat.

  “Come, make haste, Mr. Boswell,” he cried.

  “Whither?”

  “To the WaxWork.”

  “At midnight?” I cried aghast.

  “’Tis not midnight,” replied my friend, “the bells of St. Dunstan’s have barely gone eleven; but if it were midnight or dawn, there is not a moment to lose.”

  “What must we do?” I panted, trotting up Fleet Street at my friend’s heels.

  “Look at the middle finger of Maclaine the highwayman,” replied my friend; and fairly ran along the footway.

  Soon he was thundering on the narrow door. The sound reverberated through the empty street for a long moment. Then the two-pair-of-stairs window was flung open, and a head came out in a night-cap.

  “I must see Dr. Clarke,” cried Johnson.

  “Alack, sir,” replied a woman’s voice, “he’s from home.”

  “Let me in!” shouted Johnson.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The narrow old house lay still as death. Next door the old grey stones of St. Dunstan’s gleamed in the moon and threw a deep shadow on the face of the WaxWork. The silence bemused my sensibilities. I seemed to hear movement in the old house, a board creaking, a door quietly pulled to. After an eternity of expectation, there came a step on the stair, and a white-faced serving-wench opened the heavy door.

  In the shadow a barrow of potatoes was waiting by the door to trip me; I cursed it, and hastened to follow my friend and the servant wench as they mounted the stair. In the two-pair-of-stairs sitting-room we found the mistress shivering in her bedgown by a dying fire. She shuddered as she bade the girl cloathe herself and fetch coals to mend the fire. Her fat face was the colour of dough.

  “Ma’am,” says Johnson civilly, “where’s your husband?”

  “He’s gone,” said the little woman, and quivered. “He’s left me.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. He only lingered till he’d done the dead Earl waxwork, and then he went. I saw him go. I was abed, and trying to sleep, when I heard the front door slam. I looked out at my window, and there he was below me on the door-step. I saw him very plain by the light of the moon. He’d his mulberry broadcloth on, and a scarf about his throat against the night air. His hat was flapped, and he carried his portmanteau. I called to him, and he made off down Fleet Street as if the Devil was after him. Alack, sir, he’s gone for good.” The woman began to cry. “I knew it, I knew it’d come to this, when he started in with his nasty bones and anatomies.”

  My friend looked very grave. He had no consolation to give her.

  “Pray, ma’am, admit us to the WaxWork.”

  “You have but to go down, Mr. Johnson; the door is not locked.”

  “You will accompany us, ma’am.”

  The woman shrank at this, but Johnson was adamant. She took up the candle and followed us.

  By the light of the single candle I liked the waxworks hall as little as she. It smelled to me of death. The highwayman lay where he had fallen. In the alcove beside him was extended the new waxwork, the hanged Earl in his white-and-silver. I admired, albeit with a shudder, the still face and the long aristocratic hands joined palm to palm upon the breast.

  Johnson went directly to the prone figure of the highwayman and took up the broken hand. He beckoned imperiously for the candle, and I was left beside the waxwork cadaver in the half-dark. To a man of my sensibility, the experience was harrowing. I am never free, at a waxworks, from the conviction that the figures behind me are stirring with inimical life. I seemed to hear stealthy breathing beyond the periphery of the candle’s glow. My spine crawled, and the palms of my hands felt wet.

  Suddenly the air was rent with scream upon scream of terror. My companion started to his feet; Mrs. Clarke almost dropped the candle.

  “Rouze up the apprentice!” cried Johnson. “Give me the candle! Come, Boswell!”

  Mrs. Clarke only lingered to lock the door behind her. My friend lingered not at all, but ran full tilt down the stair and through the lower passage towards the screams, which seemed to emanate from the yard.

  It was the wench who was screaming. She stood fully cloathed by the shed and distended her throat with scream after scream. The candle flickered in her hand. She found words as she pointed blindly towards the shed, where the sliding of the coals had laid bare a motionless, outflung hand.

  “’Tis Jem,” she wailed. “Jem said it, the vaults is full of dead men, and we’ll all be murdered in our beds.”

  I was by Johnson’s side as we flung the coals aside and uncovered a nude body. It had no head.

  “Quiet, girl,” said Johnson disgustedly as he laid hold of the still, slippery figure, “
have you never seen a waxwork before?”

  Another candle came through the workroom, and Mrs. Clarke stood in the doorway regarding the headless figure with horror.

  “O lack,” she cried, “is it Micah?”

  “Micah?”

  “Micah’s not in his bed,” she said from a dry throat, “he’s gone. Where is Micah?”

  My friend looked gravely at the headless figure, the long hands with fingers not spread, the swell of the radius bone and the wrist bone.

  “Come,” he said, “let us go back to the WaxWork.”

  The trembling women brought their candles. Passing through the workroom, Johnson paused. The smell of hot wax was gone, but the place smelled more musty than ever.

  The brick furnace was cold. Johnson opened the fire-door, and, taking a candle, held it within. I peered over his shoulder.

  “These are strange ashes,” said my friend, “they are the ashes neither of wood nor of coals, but of cloth. Pray, Mr. Boswell, reach me the poker.”

  He turned over the layers of blackened cloth. There was a tinkle, and he drew out of the mass a blackened thing about the size of a shilling. I held the candle as he wiped off the soot. It was a very particular button, like a joined serpent.

  “Jem Blount’s!” I cried.

  We mounted the dark stair. Mrs. Clarke turned the heavy key in the lock, and again my friend and I entered the WaxWork. The women hung back; if truth were told, I longed to hang back with them.

  My friend led me straight to the recumbent figure of the murderous Earl, lying with closed eyes and joined palms in the candlelight.

  I shuddered as he touched the wax of the face, then with a jerk pulled loose the wig of brown hair. I closed my eyes as I held the candle close, then opened them with loathing to behold the skull beneath.

  It was not a skull. It was not a battered head. It was a smooth expanse of uncoloured wax. My friend unsheathed his pen-knife; the blade slipped in easily to its full length. The head of the waxwork cadaver contained nothing but wax.

  “Tschah,” said Johnson disgustedly, “we waste time. This is the Earl’s own head, cast from his death-mask. Now the hands—”