Summary
A destitute scribbler, Robert Sandell, ink-stained and hollow-eyed, staggers through fog-bloomed alleys while his mother’s lungs rattle like cracked porcelain; salvation arrives in the silhouette of Dr. Lamb—seraphic scalpel, Mephistophelian grin—who offers coin and cure in exchange for flesh. The bargain is scratched in candle-wax and shadow: Robert will submit his living body to nightly trespass inside a basement theater of rusted gurneys, copper tubes, and a single observation gallery where the doctor’s wife watches like a marble Madonna with guilt for blood. Lamb preaches transmutation, not of metals but of centuries—he dreams of peeling millennia from the spine until the upright creature remembers its knuckle-dragging past. Sutures become calendars; chloroform smells of prehistory. The hunchbacked orderly, half in love with the doomed author, smuggles whispers of vivisected dogs and vanished sailors, yet need proves louder than dread. Strapped beneath a skylight of cruciform moon, Robert discovers the experiment’s terminus: not longevity but regression, a forcible unmaking of the human story. Before the final trepanation can crown him with ancestral fur, the doctor’s earlier specimen—an ape-man stitched from circus cages and grave-robbing—bursts his iron pen, crushing Lamb into a red constellation on the laboratory tiles. The house of science becomes an abattoir; evolution howls in triplicate.
Synopsis
In return for money and medical aid for his invalid mother, struggling author Robert Sandell agrees to subject himself to experiments by Dr. Lamb, who claims he is trying to extend the human lifespan. Despite warnings from the doctor's wife and a hunchbacked assistant, Robert allows himself to be strapped to an operating table, whereupon he learns the true nature of the surgeon's experiments: To prove the theory of evolution by devolving his human subjects into an approximation of their simian ancestors. However, before Dr. Lamb can proceed, the hunchback un-cages another victim, an ape-man, who crushes Dr. Lamb to death.
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