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Charles sees that there are at least a dozen other waxen figures ringed about the walls, and all of them female. Women stretched languorously on silken couches, their eyes closed, offering their naked bodies to the spectator’s gaze; women in openly erotic postures, golden-haired and blue-eyed, their legs spread and their genitalia monstrous and unnaturally distended, either hairless or covered with what looks like animal fur; young girls smiling serenely with their bellies hollowed out to show the foetus in the womb, or their breasts peeled back to expose the organs beneath. Some mere torsos, others headless, and one, knees bent and open, whose heart has been emptied from her bones and laid, glistening, on her own belly.
    However impressed he had become, these last few hours, with his host’s achievements, there is nothing that can justify what Charles has discovered here—no scientific objective, however high-minded, that can make this chamber of horror anything but pornographic and obscene. Charles is no
ingénue
, he’s been present when living women were cut open to free an unborn child, or the dead dissected in the interests of instruction, but it has never occurred to him that someone would want to mimic such things for the sake of a private and perverted gratification. For that is surely what this is. Because he noticesnow as he did not at first that the glass case surrounding the sleeping girl has a door with a little silver lock. And since she cannot get out, there is only one other purpose it can possibly fulfil.
    “I see that I was wrong. Your curiosity, Mr Maddox, has out-run your courtesy.”
    Charles spins round to see his host standing at the door, his antique lamp once again in his hand.
    “I did not give you permission to enter this room.”
    “The door was unlocked—I thought, that is to say, I assumed—”
    He stops, his face red. There is no word for what he is doing that does not give him away. And the Baron might well counter that even if he has been invited here to verify, he has certainly not been licensed to spy.
    The Baron watches him a moment, then pulls his coat about him as if he feels the cold. And it is indeed chill in this high unheated room. Then he walks slowly towards the waxwork of the sleeping girl. “One of the glories of my collection,” he whispers, placing his hand briefly on the glass, where it leaves no mark. “Her name is Minette. One of the great
chef d’oeuvres
of the master ceroplast Philippe Curtius. Crafted in France in 1766, and fashioned—so they say—in the likeness of a mistress of Louis the Fifteenth. There is another—not so fine—in the exhibition of Madame Tussaud, in London, which employs, likewise, a hidden clockwork heart. I had assumed a man such as yourself would have seen it.”
    “I have no taste for the grotesque,” replies Charles, a little sharply.
    “No more have I,” says the Baron in an even tone, watching Charles all the while. “I can assure you I have not acquired and displayed these things for that reason, but for what they illustrate—what they ape.”
    “I do not understand you.” Charles’s voice is cold now, his revulsion near the surface.
    And something of this the Baron clearly senses, but when he speaks again it is in tones not of self-justification, but of self-possession. “You may have noticed, earlier, that the sequence of my chemical discoveries ceased some fifteen years ago. It was then that I turned my attention to other fields of science. And most especially, to the science of the human mind.”
    Charles remembers the journals upstairs. But he says only, “It is not a subject I have studied.”
    “Have you not?” replies the Baron. “I should have thought that, in our age, there is no higher and more compelling field for any man who wishes to be considered a
true
scientist.”
    If he intended it as condescension, it has its effect, for there are two spots of colour now, in Charles’s cheeks. Yet the Baron