Pelan isn’t fucking around with this one. No, this story is not only one of the best horror tales of the century, it should also rank among the top 10 EVER. It’s so wonderfully structured with memorable characters and a tantalizing plot, there isn’t a place where this story falters.
Sir Robert Cargrave is a preeminent surgeon, specializing in curing paralyzed patients. One day, he gets a letter from a former love interest innocuously inviting him out to meet her at her husband’s castle in an unnamed village in Bohemia. (Cargrave is actually willing to name names, but this one is actually censored from the story.)
He agrees, and shortly he is a guest of Mr. Sardonicus, Maude Randall’s husband. Cargrave is put off by the way the man lives, but it isn’t until he meets the man face to face that he is absolutely repulsed. Sardonicus, you see, has a deformity: his face bears a permanent smile, known as a risus sardonicus in the medical industry.
It turns out that Sardonicus used his wife’s friendship with Cargrave to lure the surgeon out to Bohemia in order to get him to cure him of this deformity. The good doctor is willing to help, but as he sticks around longer and longer, he realizes there is something deeply sinister about his host.
It isn’t until he hears how Sardonicus came by his deformity that he knows the depth of his depravity. A long time ago in Poland, there was a young man named Marek Boleslawski, whose father regularly played the lottery whenever he visited Warsaw on business. One day, the old man drops dead in his field, and he is buried. Shortly thereafter, visitors from Warsaw tell his family that the old man had the winning numbers. Only then do they realize that they’ve buried their father with the ticket. Marek decides to dig up his father and take back the ticket . . . but when he comes face to face with his rotting father, he is scared so badly by the deathly grin on the corpse that his face imitates his father’s . . . and so Sardonicus was born.
When Sardonicus met Maude, he went through the trouble of sabotaging her father’s finances, hoping that he could swoop in and offer a dowry big enough to allow her parents to marry him. Well, that led to Mr. Randall’s suicide and his wife’s subsequent death of a broken heart, but Sardonicus got what he wanted, a trophy wife who doesn’t even want to fuck him. That’s okay with him, as long as he owns her.
And now we find ourselves in the present, and Sardonicus is threatening to rape the shit out of Maude every day for the rest of her life if Cargrave doesn’t find a cure for the perpetual rictus.
Holy fuck. It should be noted that the general tone of the story is very much in the vein of polite horror, but when it comes down to a threat of ongoing rape, manners just go out the door. There is nothing polite about this vicious little tale. Russell isn’t here to play with us, he’s here to run us through the wringer. It’s actually kind of funny, considering a conversation Sardonicus and Cargrave have during dinner. Sardonicus believes that villains can’t be considered effective if they don’t have something humanizing about them, some nugget of goodness that makes them sympathetic. Cargrave disagrees, using Iago as an example of pure evil in a villain. Even though we get this story through Cargrave’s eyes, it is very clear that Sardonicus is evidence to the doctor’s way of thinking. There isn’t a more disgusting villain in any of the stories we’ve gone through so far in this volume.
There’s more. SPOILER ALERT: Cargrave is a cunning bastard. He knows that since this affliction is mental, the only way to solve it is by tricking Sardonicus. He pretends to labor away with a deadly poison, trying to distill it to the point where it might cure Sardonicus without killing him. He even goes as far as to kill a few dogs to show how deadly this poison is. Finally, after all is said and done, Cargrave gives Sardonicus an injection which finally slackens the smile. His mouth is numb, and he is warned to not try to talk yet. Gleeful that his grin is finally gone, he sets Cargrave free and lets him take Maude away with him. They get away, and he confesses that he didn’t inject Sardonicus with anything stronger than distilled water. This brings us back to a tiny seed Russell planted earlier in the story, in which he has Cargrave tell us how he thinks someday people will be cured of physical afflictions by doctors who diagnose mental problems. How’s that for fucking foreshadowing?
Cargrave and Maude go back to England, where they are married and have kids. Years later, Cargrave hears a Bohemian fairy tale from a traveling friend who describes a man who had once been wealthy, going through life with a face so slackened that he couldn’t even open his mouth to eat, and so he starved to death. Is this the fate of Sardonicus? Cargrave doubts it, as he wants more proof than gossip, but this sounds pretty certain. END OF SPOILERS.
“The Crawling Horror” has been named the closest horror story to perfection in this anthology so far in these reviews. While it is a fine story, one of the best, “Sardonicus” trumps it, making it still a formidable tale at a close second. Don’t deprive yourself. Read this story as soon as you can.
[This story first appeared in PLAYBOY, and FUUUUUUCK! It can't be read online at this time. However, it was made into an excellent movie, which I reviewed for Forced Viewing. Read it here.]
No comments:
Post a Comment