A fetid stench choked me. Exhausted, I leaned over my filthy pick, in the midst of the charnel-house. The sweat which poured from me, stung my eyes. I was gasping for breath.
At that moment, my eyes lighted, by chance, on a skull—that of a cat. Immediately I picked it up. It was a regular pipe’s bowl! That is to say, a great circular hole took the place of the crown.
I then took up another—a rabbit’s, if I remember rightly. Here too, was the same peculiarity.
Four—sixteen other skulls, each showing its gaping hole, but with some differences in its position.
Here and there the bony tops of skulls strewed the clearing with their large or tiny cups—some deep—some flat.
One would have said that all those creatures had been massacred in a scientific hecatomb—a carefully reasoned-out sacrifice.
Suddenly, an atrocious idea seized me. I bent down over the dead man, and succeeded in getting the mud off his head. Nothing abnormal in front. His hair was closely cropped, but behind, encircling the whole occiput, like Macbeth’s scar, from one temple to the other, a horrible cut laid bare the broken brain.
Lerne had killed Klotz! He had suppressed him because of Emma, in the same way that he knocked the life out of animals and fowls, when he had exhausted their power of enduring his experiments. It was a surgical crime. I now imagined I had probed the mystery to the bottom.
I thought to myself, “Macbeth’s madness comes from this, that Lerne missed his blow. The poor doomed creature saw a dreadful death coming on him. But why should my uncle have missed him? Perhaps in his blind fury, he suddenly saw clear, and feared reprisals from the Macbeth family.”