Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [7]
The thing gave no sign of having heard Bytes’ voice or the rattling of the curtain rings, but remained silent and immobile, with the settled look of one who had been so for many weary hours. To Treves the hunched figure, locked eternally in the freezing solitude of this cellar, seemed the embodiment of loneliness. He did not normally consider himself an imaginative man, but there was something about the terrible despairing silence of this creature that made him think of a captive in a cavern, or a wizard, waiting thousands of years for some unholy manifestation. In the street above the air was cool and fresh. Treves could hear a tune whistled by an errand boy, the companionable hum of traffic in the road, and the footsteps of a world going about its business, unconscious of this dank, smelly cellar and the figure that waited in dreadful isolation.
He stepped closer, unpleasantly aware that Bytes was watching his every move and leering at him in a disgusting conspiratorial manner. Suddenly Bytes banged his riding whip against the wall and yelled at the crouched thing as if speaking to a dog.
“Stand up!”
“Stand up!” shrieked Tony in nervous imitation, dancing about just behind Bytes.
Like a dog, the creature obeyed the tone of command, rising to its feet and letting the blanket fall to the ground as it turned to face Treves.
Accustomed as he was to all kinds of deformities from both disease and mutilation, Treves could not repress an appalled gasp. Nor, for the life of him, could he have prevented himself from stepping backward in an instinctive movement of self-preservation. Never in all his days had he seen anything so hideous, so monstrous, so piteous.
The Elephant Man was naked to the waist, below which he wore a pair of shabby trousers that had been cut from the dress suit of a very fat man. His rootlike, knobby feet were bare. From the picture outside Treves had imagined him to be of gigantic size, but this was a smallish man, of below average height, and made to seem more so by the bowing of his back.
His head was enormous and misshapen, its circumference as big as a man’s waist. From the brow there projected a huge bony mass, almost obscuring the right eye, and the nose was a lump of flesh, recognizable only from its position.
From the upper jaw projected another mass of bone that protruded from the mouth like a stump, turning the upper lip inside out, making the mouth little but a slobbering aperture. It was this that had been exaggerated in the painting to make it appear to be a rudimentary trunk.
The head was almost bald, except for a handful of lank, black hair at the top. At the back of the head hung a bag of spongy skin, resembling cauliflower.
His right arm was enormous and shapeless, the hand like a knot of tuberous roots. Indeed it could barely be called a hand; it was more like a fin or a paddle, with the back and palm being exactly alike. The left arm was not only normal, but delicately shaped with fine skin. It was a hand that a woman might have envied.
From the chest hung another bag of flesh, like the dewlap of a lizard, and the whole body gave off a stench that made Treves gag.
Bytes had made some effort to trick his exhibit out Behind it were two crudely constructed palm trees. As Treves stood there, speechless with horror and disbelief, Bytes rapped the wall again and yelled, “Turn around.”
“Turn around, turn around,” Tony echoed in malicious glee.
Slowly the Elephant Man turned, revealing other loathsome cauliflower growths on his back, some of which hung down to the middle of his thighs. He came to rest in his original position. His head was turned toward Treves, who found himself unwillingly searching the eyes for the accusation that should have been there. All was blank. The face was devoid of expression and incapable of