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 corpus may well be infinite,' Moreau said. 'Only human despair permits death and a man whose brain has been halved can know no despair. Instinct takes over the animal.'
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 over a startled eye.
'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 on human shape.'
Moreau stood away from the cot, disappointed and angry. The patient's jaw hinged open, fangs extending like poignards, rending the new skin. A croaking exhalation emerged from the bloody hole.
'The voice is entirely lost,' Moreau said. 'This is merely an animal. It cannot be saved.'
He took a scalpel from his tunic pocket. Its blade shone silver.
'Stand back, West. This could be messy.'
Moreau knelt on the patient's abdomen, thrusting his scalpel down, cutting warty skin that had already grown thick. He sliced between the knitting ribs and punctured the heart. The patient convulsed and died. Moreau's fist sank entirely into the chest cavity. He pulled his gory hand free and wiped it on the patient's bedding.
it was a mercy,' he said, perfunctorily. 'Now, sir, who might you be and why have you ventured into my domain?'
Beauregard forced himself to look away from the ragged corpse. It putrefied fast, settling liquidly on the cot, dripping over the edges. The very old ones turned to dust. The patient had been a vampire for less than the lifespan of a normal man.
'Dr Moreau, you will probably not remember me. My name is Charles Beauregard. We met once, many years ago, in the laboratory of Dr Henry Jekyll.'
Moreau did not care to be reminded of his late colleague. Irritation boiled in his deep-set eyes.
'I'm attached to military intelligence,' Beauregard said.
'Only "attached"?'
'Quite so.'
'Congratulations.'
West was sorting through the detritus on the cot, picking out bullets and shrapnel. He wore black rubber gloves.
'I'm not yet ready to present my findings,' said Moreau, gesturing to direct attention to his array of strapped-down patients. 'I have not had enough vampires to work with.' 'You mistake my purpose, doctor. I'm not here in connection with your current work ...'
(whatever that might be) . . but to solicit information which may be of service. It is with regard to another researcher in your field, Professor Ten Brincken.'
At the mention of the name, Moreau looked up, alert.
'A charlatan,' he spat. 'Practically an alchemist.'
According to Beauregard's sources, Moreau and Ten Brincken had come to blows at a congress held at the University of Ingolstadt in 1906. That suggested the professor was not a man of insignificant stature.
'We believe Ten Brincken is the director of a secret project given the highest priority by the enemy.'
'Too much mysticism in the German mind. The Gothic imagination perverts their brains. I don't deny Ten Brincken is a daring thinker. But none of his results are verifiable. He surrounds himself with Teuton blood ritual. No control group, no hygienic conditions, no proper records.'
Judging from this clinic, Moreau had a singular definition of 'hygienic conditions'.
'No,' Moreau said, definitely. 'Whatever Ten Brincken works on will prove worthless.'
The assistant fluttered around, getting his nerve up to interrupt the great man.
'What direction was he taking in his researches?' Beauregard asked.
'Before the war? Crackpot studies of lycanthropy. Arrant nonsense. The old wives' tale that werewolves have reversible skin, hairy on the inside. Twaddle about animal spirits mingling with those of men. He seemed to suggest shape-shifters are subject to a form of demonic possession. It was all tied to bloodlines. Germans are obsessed with blood, with racial purity, with the strength of ancient vampire lines.'
'Like that of Count Dracula?'
Moreau snarled. 'There's an elder who has done his worst to sow confusion. In his superstition, he encourages fools to think of vampires as supernatural creatures. That's a sure way to stay in the dark.'
West finished his probings and peeled off wet gloves.
'I heard Professor Ten Brincken lecture at Miskatonic University in '09,' he said. Behind his spectacles, he had watery, nervous eyes.