like that of a human child, except that it was patched strangely with red and grey.  But the terror of it was that at the neck it branched hideously, and there were two distinct heads, monstrously large, but duly provided with all their features.  The features were a caricature of humanity so shameful that one could hardly bear to look.  And as the light fell on it, the eyes of each head opened slowly.  They had no pigment in them, but were pink, like the eyes of white rabbits; and they stared for a moment with an odd, unseeing glance.  Then they were shut again, and what was curiously terrifying was that the movements were not quite simultaneous; the eyelids of one head fell slowly just before those of the other.  And in another place was a ghastly monster in which it seemed that two bodies had been dreadfully entangled with one another.  It was a creature of nightmare, with four arms and four legs, and this one actually moved.  With a peculiar motion it crawled along the bottom of the great receptacle in which it was kept, towards the three persons who looked at it.  It seemed to wonder what they did.  Susie started back with fright, as it raised itself on its four legs and tried to reach up to them.

Susie turned away and hid her face.  She could not look at those ghastly counterfeits of humanity.  She was terrified and ashamed.

‘Do you understand what this means?’ said Dr Porhoet to Arthur, in an awed voice.  ‘It means that he has discovered the secret of life.’

’Was it for these vile monstrosities that Margaret was sacrificed in all her loveliness?’

The two men looked at one another with sad, wondering eyes.

’Don’t you remember that he talked of the manufacture of human beings?  It’s these misshapen things that he’s succeeding in producing,’ said the doctor.

‘There is one more that we haven’t seen,’ said Arthur.

He pointed to the covering which still hid the largest of the vases.  He had a feeling that it contained the most fearful of all these monsters; and it was not without an effort that he drew the cloth away.  But no sooner had he done this than something sprang up, so that instinctively he started back, and it began to gibber in piercing tones.  These were the unearthly sounds that they had heard.  It was not a voice, it was a kind of raucous crying, hoarse yet shrill, uneven like the barking of a dog, and appalling.  The sounds came forth in rapid succession, angrily, as though the being that uttered them sought to express itself in furious words.  It was mad with passion and beat against the glass walls of its prison with clenched fists.  For the hands were human hands, and the body, though much larger, was of the shape of a new-born child.  The creature must have stood about four feet high.  The head was horribly misshapen.  The skull was enormous, smooth and distended like that of a hydrocephalic, and the forehead protruded over the face hideously.  The features were almost unformed, preternaturally small under the great, overhanging brow; and they had an expression of fiendish malignity.