“Waxworks” (Weird Tales, January 1939)

Bloch, Robert. “Waxworks.” Weird Tales, January 1939, pp. 9-24
https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV33N01193901/page/n9/mode/2up

Bertrand is a poet of the most lugubrious type. He pretends to attend university while moping around Paris through the mist composing his epic. He is drawn to a sign advertising a wax museum. The exhibit is not what he expected. Instead, it is filled with images of murderers and grisly scenes: beheadings, executions, and murders. he moved from repulsion, to grudging admiration to appreciation for the skilled renderings. “Then he saw her. She was standing statue-still, straight and poised and lovely. She was girl, woman, goddess; imperially slender, with the delicious curves of a succubus fashioned in dreams (12).” She is Slome, the biblical figure who ordered that the head of John the Baptist be delivered to her on a platter. The wax statue—complete with severed head—is unlike anything Bertrand has ever seen. 

His heart leaps at the mix of evil and allure. He stares at her unconsciously for hours. He comes back the next day and the next and the next; he was hopelessly lost in love for this wax figure. Mr. Jacquelin, the owner of the museum, tells him that the model for the figure was his late wife, an infamous murderer whom he loved dearly. Bertrand hates him with a mix of jealousy, disdain, and pity. Colonel Bertoux, an old family friend, arrives to implore Bertrand to abandon his wasteful life and return to his family’s butcher shop. He accompanies Bertrand to the wax museum, and he, too, is smitten by the figure. He tells Bertrand that he now understands and will trouble him no more. Bertrand assumes that Bertoux will return home, but instead he finds him at the wax museum, too. Bertoux attempts to discover the nature of the attraction, but he is unable with his knowledge of science to account for it. He cannot pull himself away. He finds out that there was a murderer who was married to Mr. Jacquelin and that she was executed thirty years previous. Since then, there has been a mysterious traveling wax museum that operates under a variety of names. everywhere the show goes, people die. Bertoux plans a joint effort to discover the source of the strange attraction. he tells Bertrand he will meet him at noon so that they can join forces. Bertrand being Bertrand, he sleeps until three o’clock. He rushes to the museum and finds that the head on the platter has been changed: it is now Bertoux’s head! Jacquelin attempts hypnosis, saying that all men who come here to fall in love with the figure gladly offer themselves to her. Won’t Bertrand consent to join them? They struggle, and Jacqueline is killed. In a panic, Bertrand sets fire to his epic poem and throws it at the wax figure. As it burns and melts, Bertrand sees that it is not simply a wax statue. It has been molded over the skeleton of the witch!

This story has been often reprinted and adapted over the years. It appears in both Thriller and The House That Dripped Blood. For me, the main draw is the character or Bertrand, a poet that I, of course, have no resemblance to. No, not at all. No way.
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“He found a morose enjoyment in the feel of the stinging sleet upon his face; liked, too, the sensation of semi-blindness induced by the nebulosity of outline conjured up with the fog. […] Bertrand was a poet—a very bad poet, with the sentimentally esoteric nature such beings affect. He lived in a garret in the dock district, ate crusts of bread, and fancied himself very much put upon by the world. […] Bertrand was just a very honorable young man whom people had not yet learned to appreciate, and if he starved now, posterity would spread him a pretty feast. […] Yes, the garret was a fine refuge on such a dismal afternoon, and Bertrand could have been hard at work on one of those noble sonnets he was always intending to produce. But no, he must wander about in the fog and think things out for himself.” (9-10)

Even though I love the character of Bertrand in the original story, Bloch’s revision of it for The House that Dripped Blood resonates better with me now that I am older. The short story was published when Bloch was twenty-one years old. Bertrand is an idealistic writer of morose tales looking for a place in the world. It is not a long walk to see it as at least partially autobiographical, in a self-deprecating sense, at least. When Bloch was revising the story for the film in 1971, he was in his early fifties—plenty of time to create the character played by Peter Cushing. Bertrand is now an older gentleman who carries with him regrets, one especially painful regret personified in the photo a young woman. In the 1962 Thriller adaptation, the story operates as a police procedural and is, for me, less effective, although with impressive visuals and a haunting final scene. I still keep coming back to Bertrand. There is always something that occupies our minds, the missed opportunity, the big regret. That is at the heart of the original and the House adaptations, and that is what draws me to this story again and again.