The Manticore

"Her edict that at all costs I was to be kept sober, for instance. Beesty was very good about that. Not hatefully tactful, you know, but he said plainly that I had to do a great many things that needed a level head and I'd better not drink much. He knew that for me not drinking much meant drinking what would be a good deal for him, but he gave me credit for some common sense. And Caroline was the same. 'Denyse is determined that you're going to get your paws in the sauce and disgrace us all. So for God's sake spite her and don't,' was the way she put it. Even Netty, after her first frightful outburst, behaved very well and didn't try to watch over me for my own good, though she lurked a good deal. Consequently, though I drank pretty steadily, I kept within my own appointed bounds. But I hated Denyse for her edict.

"Nor was that her only edict. On Wednesday, before lunch, she called Beesty to her and told him to get me to look over my father's will that afternoon, and see her after I had done so. This was unwarrantable interference. I knew I was my father's principal executor, and I knew, being a lawyer, what had to be done. But it isn't considered quite the thing to get down to business with the will before the funeral is over. There's nothing against it, particularly if there is suspicion of anything that might prove troublesome in the will, but in my father's case that was out of the question. I didn't know what was in the will, but I was certain it was all in perfect order. I thought Denyse was rushing things in an unseemly way.

"I suppose if you are to do anything for me, Doctor, I must be as frank as possible. I didn't want to look at the will until it became absolutely necessary. There have been difficulties about wills in our family. My father had a shock when he read his own father's will, and he had spoken to me about it more than once. And relations between my father and myself had been strained since his marriage to Denyse. I thought there might be a nasty surprise for me in the will. So I put my foot down and said nothing could be done until Thursday afternoon.

"I don't know why I went to my father's house so early on Thursday, except that I woke with an itching feeling that there was a great deal to be settled, and I would find out what it was when I was on the spot. And I wanted to take farewell of my father. You understand? During the last forty-eight hours it had been impossible to be alone in the room with his body, and I thought if I were early I could certainly manage it. So I went to the drawing-room as softly as possible, not to attract attention, and found the doors shut. It was half past seven, so there was nothing unusual about that.

"But from inside there were sounds of a man's voice and a woman's voice, apparently quarrelling, and I heard scuffling and thudding. I opened the door, and there was Denyse at the coffin, holding up my father's body by the shoulders, while a strange man appeared to be punching and slapping its face. You know what people say in books – 'I was thunderstruck… my senses reeled.' "

"Yes. It is a perfectly accurate description of the sensation. It is caused by a temporary failure of circulation to the head. Go on."

"I shouted something. Denyse dropped the body, and the man jumped backward as if he thought I might kill him. I knew him then. He was a friend of Denyse's, a dentist; I had met him once or twice and thought him a fool."

"The body had no face. It was entirely covered in some shiny pinkish material, so thickly that it was egglike in its featurelessness. It was this covering they were trying to remove.

"I didn't have to ask for an explanation. They were unnerved and altogether too anxious to talk. It was a story of unexampled idiocy.

"This dentist, like so many of Denyse's friends, was a dabbler in the arts. He had a tight, ill-developed little talent as a sculptor, and he had done a few heads of Chairmen of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University, and that sort of thing. Denyse had been visited by one of her dreadful inspirations, that this fellow should take a death-mask of my father, which could later be used as the basis for a bust or perhaps kept for itself. But he had never done a corpse before, and it is quite a different business from doing a living man. So, instead of using plaster, which is the proper thing if you know how to work it, he had the lunatic idea of trying some plastic mess used in his profession for taking moulds, because he thought he could get a greater amount of detail, and quicker. But the plastic wasn't for this sort of work, and he couldn't get it off!