The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(68)

Her whole life had been a pretty fiction, a story the doctor spun. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She felt the tears thick against her eyelids, and her voice wavered. “The treatments you give me each week, you say they no longer work. What shall happen to me?”

“Without them you seem to express certain animal traits. It happens when you are agitated, which is why I’ve sought to provide a soothing environment for you.”

“Then I’ll always change. As I did now.”

“No, no, my girl,” her father said, and he placed his cane aside, resting it against the table, and caught her hands with his own, pressing them against his lips. “I’ll perfect the dose. It’s a tiny detail.”

She wanted her father to embrace her and tell her everything would be fine, but she also wanted to run out of the room and far from him.

“What about the others? I need to know the formula for their medication,” she murmured.

“They are not important.”

“How can they not be important?” she asked, stepping back and pulling her hands away. “You hold them in thrall. They can go nowhere without their treatment.”

“Where would they go? To the circus? To show themselves in a freak show?”

“A freak show? That is what you think of us?”

“You are not like them,” her father said. “You’ve never been like them. That’s the whole point. They are beasts.”

She felt such rage then that for a moment she was unable to see. The world went crimson. She had been scared and angry in the sitting room. But this was pure fury, and while before she had been trying to control herself, to calm down as her father demanded, she now let this fury flow and opened her mouth wide to a roar. She stretched out a hand, and her fingers dug into her father’s neck. With one quick motion she was slamming him against a glass cabinet.

He was tall and big and powerful, but she pinned him against the furniture, and the glass shattered against his back. She felt her teeth large in her mouth and sharp like knives.

“I want that formula!” she yelled.

“I…there isn’t…” her father muttered.

“I want it!”

“Carlota, let go of him,” Montgomery said, and he was trying to pull her away, holding her arm, then grabbing her by the back of the neck. Somehow he managed to drag her from her father.

She tried to bite him, but her teeth snapped in the air rather than sinking into flesh. He turned her around, grabbed her by the shoulders and stared into her eyes until she hissed at him. But as unlikely as it seemed, he did not appear to be frightened. She remembered he was a hunter, used to dealing with wild animals, and it made her wish to throw her head back and laugh.

“You need to take a deep breath,” he said, his voice low. “Can you take a deep breath for me?”

She had no idea if this was possible. She felt as though she had forgotten how to breathe, but somehow she nodded and opened her mouth. Her lungs were burning. She took a shaky breath, and a wave of exhaustion and terror hit her. What was she doing?

“Good girl,” Montgomery whispered.

“Carlota,” her father muttered.

They both turned their heads. Moreau was lifting himself up, clasping his arm. She had held him so hard there would be bruises on his pale throat.

“There is no formula, Carlota,” he mumbled, wincing and wiping the sweat dripping down his brow. “I made it up. It’s the same lithium or morphine I use to treat my gout. It’s been employed in cases of acute mania, and it seems to keep them soothed. It helped you, too…when you were younger.”

She did laugh then: she pressed her fingers against her lips and erupted in laughter. No formula! And she was one of his creations, something inhuman, something that could fling a grown man across the room.

“I always…I always wanted a daughter. And you were mine.” Her father straightened himself up, and then he stumbled back, glass crunching under his feet. “My heart,” he said, clutching at his chest.

Then he collapsed, and the giant that was Dr. Moreau was sprawled upon the floor of his laboratory.





Chapter 22


    Montgomery


They’d been sitting by the doctor’s bed for hours now. Dr. Moreau slept and they waited. Ramona brought tea and handed Montgomery a cup. He thanked her, and she nodded, going around the room and handing the others their coffee and their tea, depending on their choice. When she was done, Ramona left her tray on a table.

He’d seldom been in this room and felt uncomfortable sitting there, among Moreau’s things, with the oval portrait of his dead wife guarding the wall and his clothes hanging in the armoire, with the doctor on the great mahogany bed and the curtains around it open. It reminded him of his mother’s final days, when he and Elizabeth had to remain still, quiet, while the fire burned.

Carlota clutched a handkerchief between her hands. She was by the head of the bed. At turns, she wept. Cachito and Lupe did not cry. Their faces were masks of frightful calmness and their voices were whispers when they spoke, sitting side by side. Montgomery shifted from one spot to another. He didn’t want to sit, afraid he’d fall asleep in a chair and wake up in the morning with his back a mess.

He wondered what would happen if the doctor died during the night, and then he wondered what would happen if he lived. He’d seen men who’d been afflicted with apoplexy and could hardly move their body or speak. What would Carlota do, left to fend for herself and perhaps also for her father?