The Beetle

Setting

Victorian London.

Main Characters

The Beetle: An ancient Egyptian entity with hypnotic and shapeshifting powers.
Robert Holt: An unemployed clerk forced into servitude of the Beetle through hypnosis.
Paul Lessingham: A Member of Parliament, engaged to Marjorie Lindon.
Sydney Atherton: An inventor who specialises in chemical warfare, in love with Lindon.
Marjorie Lindon: Paul Lessingham’s fiancée, and friend of Sydney Atherton.

Summary

Robert Holt, homeless and looking for shelter, enters an abandoned house and finds someone lying in a bed: the Beetle, a “supernaturally ugly” creature whose age and gender are hard to guess. The Beetle uses his hypnotic powers to command Holt to steal letters from the home of the politician Paul Lessingham. The Beetle kisses Holt, who feels that “the soul of something evil entered into me”. Lessingham catches Holt stealing, but Holt says “The Beetle” in “a voice not his own”, causing Lessingham to shiver in a corner while Holt escapes. The letters are love letters from Marjorie Lindon.

The narrative switches to the inventor Sydney Atherton, proposing to Lindon at a ball. She refuses as she is already secretly engaged to Lessingham, her father’s political rival. The Beetle approaches Atherton and convinces him to help seek revenge on Lessingham.

After Lessingham makes an impressive speech in Parliament, Marjorie Linton openly shows her love for him, defying her father and Atherton. Enraged, Atherton returns to his chemical warfare laboratory where he accidentally poisons his friend Percy Woodville. He brings Percy to the Beetle, agreeing to help the Beetle if he ensures Percy’s survival. The Beetle tells him that Lessingham killed a woman that the Beetle was close to in Egypt. He then shapeshifts into a scarab beetle and flees when Atherton attempts to capture him.

Marjorie Lindon visits Atherton to tell him about a man she rescued, who turns out to be Holt. She describes how she was attacked by a force that sounded like a beetle. Atherton, Lindon, and Holt go in search of the Beetle and find the Beetle’s house deserted. Holt succumbs to hypnosis again and runs away. Atherton follows him, and Lindon stays in the house, soon being captured by the Beetle.

Lessingham finds a detective, Champnell, and tells him of his connection to the Beetle. Twenty years earlier, Lessingham visited Cairo, where he fell under the spell of a young woman belonging to “the cult of Isis”, who took him to a temple where he witnessed human sacrifices. Once the woman’s hypnotic control weakened, he attacked her, strangling her until she turned into a scarab. As Lessingham relates this story, Atherton bursts into the room telling them he has lost the hypnotised Holt and Lindon, and asks Champnell for help.

The three men deduce that the Beetle plans to return to Egypt and chase the Beetle to Waterloo, where they discover Holt, barely alive. Before he collapses, Holt asks Atherton to save Lindon. A train chase ensues, and they find Lindon, unconscious but alive, in a derailed train. All that is left of the Beetle are burnt and bloodied rags.