Ellen Datlow - Tails of Wonder and Imagination

“A what?’ I wondered what Mrs. Pertwee meant by a lady, exactly. Perhaps one of the female parishioners who lived in the village that surrounded the stone church, with its post office, pub, and collection of six or seven houses, coming to solicit for some missionary society to help our savage brethren.

“A lady, Mr. Prendick. She—” Mrs. Pertwee hesitated. “She calls herself Mrs. Prendick.”

I tripped over the chair. The next day, Mrs. Pertwee had to wash the spot where my fountain pen had sputtered on the carpet with strong soap.

She was waiting for me in the parlor, a sanctuary that Mrs. Pertwee only entered to do whatever housekeepers customarily do to horsehair sofas and china ornaments. I had not used the room since renting the cottage, and had seen no need to alter it.

She was heavily veiled.

“Edward,” she said. “How nice to see you again.”

We are divided beings. One half of me had known that it could not logically be she. The other half had known that no one else in the wide world could claim to be my wife. That other half had been right. I could not mistake her voice, almost too deep for a woman, with a resonance to it, as though she were speaking from the depth of her throat. Like a viol.

“You look better than when I last saw you, on the island.”

“Catherine.”

“So I have a name now. Did you forget it when you wrote this?” She held up a copy of my book. The book I should never have written, that my alienist had urged me to write. “Did you forget that we all had names? What a terrible liar you are, Edward.”

“Let me see your face,” I said. The veil was disconcerting. I needed to know, for certain, that she really was speaking to me, that this was not some sort of hallucination.

She laughed, like an ordinary woman, and lifted her veil.

When I had last seen her, her face had been seamed with scars, the remnants of Moreau’s work. Now, her face was perfectly smooth. The high cheekbones were still there, the nose aquiline, the best I think that Moreau ever created. The eyes yellow and brown together, like Baltic amber. The tops of her ears were hidden by her hair. Were they still pointed? She noticed me looking, laughed again, and pulled her hair back. They looked completely human. I am a scientist, and no judge of female beauty. But she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

“How did you…”

“Walk with me, Edward.” She indicated the French doors, which opened onto the garden. Her gestures were unnaturally graceful. “Let’s reminisce, like old friends. Eventually, I’ll have a favor to ask of you. But first, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing with myself for the last few years. Since, that is, you left me to die on the island.”

“I didn’t leave you to die.”

“Didn’t you?”

I followed her into the garden. It was an ordinary autumn day, the sky gray above us, with clouds blowing across it, and a herd of sheep like clouds in the valley below. I could see a dog driving them, first from one side of the herd and then the other. Somewhere, there was a man, and it was at his whistle that the dog ran to and fro. What dogs had done, and men had done, and sheep had done, for a hundred years. A quintessentially English scene.

“To what fate, exactly, did you intend to leave me?”

Her voice took me back to another scene, an entirely different scene. The southern sunlight on Moreau, lying in the mud, flies crawling over his shirt where the linen was stained red.

“The Puma,” said Montgomery. “We have to find her.”

“How did she do this?” I felt sick, mostly I think with shock. I had never, somehow, imagined that Moreau could die. Certainly not like this.

He pointed to Moreau’s head. “She struck him. Look, the back of his skull is smashed in. Probably with her own fetters. She must have torn them out of the wall. Damn.”

As a word, it seemed completely inadequate.

We followed her trail easily enough. She was heading, not toward the village of the Beast Men, but toward the sea. I wondered for a moment if she might try to drown herself, as I had tried to drown myself, my first few days on the island. But Beast Men did not do such things. They killed others, not themselves. It took a man to do that.

“There she is.” Montgomery gestured with his gun.

She stood, up to her hips in the water. She looked at us, then shook herself, flinging spray from her wet hair. She walked toward us. So might Aphrodite have walked when she rose from the sea. But this was an Aphrodite with skin like gold rather than ivory, and the eyes of a beast. Everywhere, her body was covered with fresh scars.

“My God,” said Montgomery. “So that’s what he’s been hiding from me.”

“Hiding?”

“For a month, he wouldn’t let me into the laboratory. He said the process was working at last. And look at her. She’s his masterpiece. Poor bastard.”

“I killed the one with the whip,” she said. Her voice reverberated, like waves in a cavern beneath the sea. “Will you kill me for what I have done?”

“We will not kill you,” said Montgomery. “It was not right to kill him, but we will not punish you for it.”

“Have you gone mad?” I whispered to Montgomery. I aimed, but Montgomery caught hold of my arm.

“Can’t you see what he did to her?” he whispered. “The man was a brute.”

“It was right to kill him, and it gave me pleasure,” she said. She walked out of the sea, like a statue of burnished gold.

With that unprepossessing statement began our time with the Puma Woman.

Her scars faded, but they remained visible all over her face and body. She looked like a South Sea islander, marked with cicatrices.

Montgomery took her to live with us, in the enclosure. He gave her his bedroom and slept in mine. We cleaned out the laboratory, releasing whatever still had its own form, killing the results of Moreau’s experiments. We had food, guns, and M’Ling, Montgomery’s favorite Beast Man, to guard us at night. We planned to wait until the next supply ship came, and then—what? I assumed that we would leave the island, leave Moreau’s abominations to their own fate. But what about her? Montgomery seemed to have become particularly attached to her. She walked around the enclosure in one of his shirts, tucked into a pair of his trousers tied at the waist with rope. She looked like a gypsy boy.

She walked so quietly that I never knew, until she spoke, that she was beside me. When I launched one of the boats to go fishing, she would suddenly appear, help me push off, and leap into the boat. Montgomery would stare at us from the shore, with one hand on his gun belt. I didn’t want her with me, but what was I supposed to do, push her into the water? She would sit, silent, and stare at me with her golden brown eyes—a woman, and not a woman. No woman could have sat so still.

It was Montgomery who named her Catherine. “Catherine, get it?” he said. “Cat-in-here. There’s a cat in here!” He had been drinking. He watched her cross the enclosure, so lightly, so silently, that she seemed to walk on her toes. I did not like the way he looked at her. Perhaps he had initially been disgusted by the Beast Men, as I had been when I landed on the island, but he had long ago grown accustomed to them. They seemed to him human, and natural. I suspect that if you had set him down in the middle of London, he would have exclaimed at the deformity of the men and women who passed. She was Moreau’s finest creation. Montgomery had always had his favorites among the Beast Men: M’Ling, Septimus, Adolphus. What did he think of her?