Henry has forgotten to book seats at the music hall so in an attempt to pacify his disappointed wife suggests they visit a nearby wax museum. There is no one to take their admission fee but they go in anyway. The inevitable chamber of horrors with its vignettes of serial killers and their victims is impressively executed, but it doesn’t appeal to Ivy. ‘It was not only the sight of the blood coagulated on the white hair, it was something else, something unnameable. The art of the sculptor had gone too far; here was mere and abominable reality.’
The plot is too familiar to bear further elaboration and for sheer first-reading fright A M Burrage’s Waxwork is the definitive version. But W L George’s story contains some powerful descriptive writing which makes it well-worth reading.
From the posthumously published collection by Walter Lionel George (1882 – 1926), Selected Stories (1927); reprinted in Hugh Lamb’s Return From The Grave.
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