The Dark Palace

He was hunched over something, a bundle in a knotted handkerchief, through which dark stains had seeped. The shape of the bundle, the suggestion of a double rotundity, left little doubt to its contents.

The film showed the killer decant the eyes into a jar, which he topped up with a clear liquid before sealing. By chance, the dead eyes were looking out, suspended midway in the preserving fluid. He held up the jar so that the eyes were level with his own. He then addressed a bitter soliloquy to them, the gist of which was represented on a series of inter-titles. In short, he blamed the eyes for all the misfortunes that had befallen him. They had haunted him, given him no peace, driven him to murder. And worse. It was to rid himself of the spectre of those eyes that he had been forced to remove the eyes from the women he had killed. Women in whose faces he had seen her eyes.

The camera then showed a close-up of the killer placing the jar on a shelf, the eyes still looking out into the room, and towards the audience. A wider shot revealed it was not the only such jar on that shelf. And that that was not the only shelf. In fact, the wall was lined with jar after jar, each containing a pair of eyes looking out.

In the final frames of the film, as the killer moved out of shot, all the eyes in the jars swivelled to watch him go. The violins produced a suitably chilling glissando. The audience went wild, delighted and terrified in equal degree.

SEVENTEEN

The lights came up.

The audience was wrenched away from another man’s shimmering dreams back into their own duller, if more solid, realities. But though the glow of the projector had died on the screen, its silver cast lingered in their minds. The glamour as well as the horror of what they had just witnessed enlivened them. They sprang to their feet and filed out of the auditorium in a state of heightened excitement, almost shouting their pleasure, laughing nervously at the memory of their earlier disturbed emotions. The horror they had felt had now abated. It was safe to make a joke of it.

Their own attempts at lustre, the sheen on the top hats of the men and the cosmetic gloss of the women’s lips, struck Qui

In contrast, the weightless entities spun out of the criss-crossing of light and darkness – Eloise and the mournful-eyed actor who played the cavalry officer – embraced the great unspeakable and in so doing transformed and transcended it. It was a kind of alchemy.

Like every other mortal lumbering to his feet, Qui

The audience was streaming out through two exits. He had them both covered, so he should not have been overly concerned. But he had just seen a film in which a man managed to pass himself off as a series of different individuals. Admittedly, that was fiction. But still it mooted a possibility. If Hartma

No, it was preposterous. Hartma

Qui

As Qui

Inchball was an experienced officer. He contrived to acknowledge Qui

The crowd was still voluble, communicating largely in shouts. No doubt this was due in large part to the emotional agitation caused by the film. But perhaps, also, it was a reaction to their enforced silence of the last hour or so.

As a police officer, Qui

Even more worrying for Qui

Perhaps it was because his mind was alert to these potential risks that Qui

‘Police! Quick! For God’s sake, someone fetch a doctor! There has been an horrific crime committed!’

EIGHTEEN

Qui

He was led at a half-run – ‘Please, hurry!’ – out of Leicester Square, across Charing Cross Road and into a dimly lit alleyway, one of the two passages through to St Martin’s Lane. Qui

There were voices ahead of him, and a horrible, high-pitched wailing. It was the sound of shredded flesh. The cries of a tortured animal. Although there was something in it that enabled him to identify its source as human, and probably female.

Qui

His escort cried out for them to be let through. The handful of men rose and parted as one, turning towards Qui

A young woman lay on the ground, writhing and gasping for air so that she could keep up her savage keening. She held both hands to her right eye. Blood seeped out through her fingers and was smeared across her face. Her hair appeared to be matted with it too and there were bloodstains on the pavement.