Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [98]
“Where is Mr. Merrick?”
“I—I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
Treves stalked over to him like a hunter sizing up the prey. Renshaw backed slightly.
“Don’t lie to me,” said Treves in a voice in which the savagery was barely suppressed. “I know all about it. You were seen. You’re in this with Bytes, aren’t you? Where did you take him?”
Renshaw wondered if he was going mad. He no longer understood anything that was being said to him.
“Take him?” he squealed. “Now wait—I didn’t take him anywhere. I don’t know no Bytes. We were just having some fun. We didn’t hurt him … just having a laugh, that’s all.”
“He’s gone.” Treves bawled into his face.
“When I left him he was in his bed, safe and sound,” Renshaw declared with a touch of conscious virtue.
Treves felt his last thread of control snap. “You bastard. You tortured him. You and Bytes tortured him, you bastard. Where is he?” But he knew he was raving helplessly. The true horror of the situation was filtering through to him. If Renshaw and Bytes had not acted together, the porter had no way of knowing where Bytes had taken his captive. Merrick might have vanished for ever.
Renshaw had recovered some of his confidence now as his own temper slipped away from him. He didn’t appreciate being bawled at when he had a hangover headache.
“You’re not listening to me,” he bawled back. “I don’t know no Bytes and I ain’t done nothing wrong. People pay to see your monster, Mr. Treves. I just take the money.”
“You’re the monster. You’re the freak! Get out. You’re finished!”
Hardly knowing what he was doing Treves seized Renshaw’s arm and began to drag him out of the operating theater. Renshaw was filth, Renshaw polluted the place just by being there. Treves acted on instinct, to dispose of him as he would have done any vermin.
But Renshaw threw him off and whirled round with his back to the door, seizing the poker from the stove. Neither man noticed Mothershead standing quietly just outside the door.
“Have a care, Mr. Treves,” Renshaw said in a low, intense voice. “I ain’t afraid of you. You and your bleedin’ Elephant Man. I’m glad of what I did. And you can’t do nothing. Only Mothershead can sack me.”
In another moment he would have been dead, as Treves, demented by rage, seized the poker from Renshaw’s hand and raised it with murderous intent. But before he could bring it down on Renshaw’s skull he found the porter had vanished. There had been a loud crack like a hand striking an ear with all the force of hatred, and Renshaw was on the ground clutching his head and barely conscious. Mothershead stood over him rubbing her hand, a look of grim satisfaction on her face.
“Done,” she said.
Treves’ visit to the shop where he had first found Bytes and Merrick was as unproductive as he had known it would be. He had not really imagined that Bytes would hang around to be followed. Such inquiries as he could make in the neighborhood elicited the information that Bytes and Tony had vanished, nobody knew where.
Carr-Gomm was sympathetic but firm.
“I’d like to think I felt no less for John than you, Treves, but face the facts. The man has disappeared. Very likely to the continent. There’s no question of your going after him; you’re desperately needed here by your patients. Remember Treves, you did everything in your power … everything in your power …”
Chapter 17
At the start he could tell one day from another. On the first day there was the long dreadful journey in the cart, with Tony driving and Bytes sitting with him in the back, unwilling to lose sight of his reclaimed “treasure.” He shuddered away into the furthest corner to escape Bytes’ evil presence, but it was always there, gloating over him.
About evening the cart changed to a train. He allowed himself to be hauled onto it unresisting, stunned by grief and hopelessness. Already it seemed as though he had always known that this life would one day engulf him again, and that the brief weeks in Treves’ care were nothing but a vision sent to torment him, a vision that