蜡像馆惊魂（The Horror in the Museum）第一部分
作者：H. P. Lovecraft
译者：九四白灵
本文仅是个人翻译，与同行交流和制作我自己的有声书为主，如果有什么不对的欢迎指出。
It was languid curiosity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers’ Museum. Someone had told him about the queer underground place in Southwark Street across the river, where waxen things so much more horrible than the worst effigies at Madame Tussaud’s were shewn, and he had strolled in one April day to see how disappointing he would find it. Oddly, he was not disappointed. There was something different and distinctive here, after all. Of course, the usual gory commonplaces were present—Landru, Dr. Crippen, Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey, endless maimed victims of war and revolution, and monsters like Gilles de Rais and Marquis de Sade—but there were other things which had made him breathe faster and stay till the ringing of the closing bell. The man who had fashioned this collection could be no ordinary mountebank. There was imagination—even a kind of diseased genius—in some of this stuff.
起初是慵懒的好奇心引着斯蒂芬·琼斯（Stephen Jones）来到罗杰斯蜡像馆。有人向他透露过河对面的南华克街有个奇怪的地下场所，那里展出的蜡像比杜莎夫人蜡像馆里最可怕的蜡像还要惊悚得多。奇怪的是，他并没有感到失望。毕竟，这里有一些与众不同的独特的东西。当然,这里也展现了一些庸俗的血腥场景（人物）-拉杜朗（Landru），克里平医师（Dr. Crippen），德孟斯女士（德孟斯夫人-Madame Demers）, 拉齐奥（Rizzio），简·格雷小姐（Lady Jane Grey）【1】，无尽的因为战争和革命的原因导致残废的受害者，和像吉尔斯·德·莱斯（Gilles de Rais）和德.萨德侯爵那样的怪物-还有其他的能让他呼吸急促并待到闭馆的钟声响起的事。制作出这些收藏品的人绝不是一个普通的江湖骗子。其中有些（收藏品）是充满了想象——甚至是一种病态的才华（天才）。
Later he had learned about George Rogers. The man had been on the Tussaud staff, but some trouble had developed which led to his discharge. There were aspersions on his sanity and tales of his crazy forms of secret worship—though latterly his success with his own basement museum had dulled the edge of some criticisms while sharpening the insidious point of others. Teratology and the iconography of nightmare were his hobbies, and even he had had the prudence to screen off some of his worst effigies in a special alcove for adults only. It was this alcove which had fascinated Jones so much. There were lumpish hybrid things which only fantasy could spawn, moulded with devilish skill, and coloured in a horribly life-like fashion.
后来他得知了乔治·罗杰斯（George Rogers）的事。那人曾是杜莎夫人蜡像馆的职员，但后来发生了某些事件，使他被解雇了。人们对他的精神状况（理智）进行了诽谤，也有关于他某些疯狂的崇拜行为的故事——尽管他后来成功地建立了自己的地下博物馆，这削弱了一些批评的锋芒，同时也尖锐了另一些隐晦的批评。畸形学和噩梦一般的肖像都是他的爱好，甚至他也很谨慎地把他的一些最可怕的肖像放在一个专门为成年人准备的凹室里。正是这间凹室使得琼斯感到着迷。那里有一些只有在幻想中才能产生的笨拙的混血产物，以魔鬼般的技巧铸成，并拥有逼真的可怕的着色。
Some were the figures of well-known myth—gorgons, chimaeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend—black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt. But the worst were wholly original with Rogers, and represented shapes which no tale of antiquity had ever dared to suggest. Several were hideous parodies on forms of organic life we know, while others seemed taken from feverish dreams of other planets and other galaxies. The wilder paintings of Clark Ashton Smith might suggest a few—but nothing could suggest the effect of poignant, loathsome terror created by their great size and fiendishly cunning workmanship, and by the diabolically clever lighting conditions under which they were exhibited.
其中有些是神话中著名的肖像-（诸如）蛇发女怪（戈尔贡）、奇美拉、巨龙、独眼巨人，以及所有的他们的令人（感到）毛骨悚然的同类。其他的则来自于更黑暗而隐晦的地下传说中——（例如）黑色而不可名状的扎特瓜（或撒托古亚-Tsathoggua【2】）、触手众多的克苏鲁（Cthulhu）、长鼻状的昌格纳·方庚（proboscicidian Chaugnar Faugn【3】），以及其他来自诸如《死灵之书》、《伊伯恩之书》或冯·容兹特（von Junzt）的《不可名状的教团之书（Unaussprechlichen Kulten）》等禁书中的亵渎神明之物。但最糟糕的是那些罗杰斯完全原创的作品，代表了古代传说中从来不敢想象的人物形象。其中的一些是对我们所知的有机生命形式进行的拙劣而可怕的模仿，而另一些则像是从其他行星和星系的狂热梦魇中截取的事物。克拉克·阿什顿·史密斯(Clark Ashton Smith)的更为狂野的画作可能会让人联想到一些事物——但没有任何东西能让人联想到在那些非常恼人的照明之下，它们巨大的尺寸和恶魔般狡诈的技艺制造出的尖锐而令人厌恶的恐怖效果。
Stephen Jones, as a leisurely connoisseur of the bizarre in art, had sought out Rogers himself in the dingy office and workroom behind the vaulted museum chamber—an evil-looking crypt lighted dimly by dusty windows set slit-like and horizontal in the brick wall on a level with the ancient cobblestones of a hidden courtyard. It was here that the images were repaired—here, too, where some of them had been made. Waxen arms, legs, heads, and torsos lay in grotesque array on various benches, while on high tiers of shelves matted wigs, ravenous-looking teeth, and glassy, staring eyes were indiscriminately scattered. Costumes of all sorts hung from hooks, and in one alcove were great piles of flesh-coloured wax-cakes and shelves filled with paint-cans and brushes of every description. In the centre of the room was a large melting-furnace used to prepare the wax for moulding, its fire-box topped by a huge iron container on hinges, with a spout which permitted the pouring of melted wax with the merest touch of a finger.
作为一个悠闲的怪诞艺术鉴赏家，斯蒂芬·琼斯（Stephen Jones）在罗杰斯的蜡像馆后的昏暗肮脏的办公室兼工作间内找到了他本人，那间颇为邪异的工作室内昏暗的灯光透过积满灰尘的与隐藏的庭院的古老鹅卵石小路平齐的窗户照在砖墙上。这些雕像就是在这里修理的，也有一些雕像就是在这里制作的。蜡人的胳膊、腿部、头部和躯干怪异地排列在各种各样的长凳上，而在架子的高处，凌乱的假发，肉食动物的牙齿，大睁着的玻璃眼珠子随意的散落着。各种各样的服装悬挂在钩子上，在一个 壁龛里有一大堆肉色的蜡饼和装满各种颜料罐和色刷的架子。在工作间的中央是一个用来给准备好的蜡块成型的大熔炉，它的火箱顶部是一个巨大的铁铰链链接的容器，其上有一个喷口，只需要用手指轻轻触碰就可以倒出熔化的蜡。
Other things in the dismal crypt were less describable—isolated parts of problematical entities whose assembled forms were the phantoms of delirium. At one end was a door of heavy plank, fastened by an unusually large padlock and with a very peculiar symbol painted over it. Jones, who had once had access to the dreaded Necronomicon, shivered involuntarily as he recognised that symbol. This showman, he reflected, must indeed be a person of disconcertingly wide scholarship in dark and dubious fields.
在那阴森的地窖里，还有一些难以形容的孤立的未知物体的部分，是由精神错乱的幻影构成的。（工作室的）一侧是一扇厚木板门扉，用一把大得出奇的挂锁锁住，其上涂绘着异常奇特的符号。作为曾经有机会看到那恐怖的《死灵之书（Necronomicon）》的人，当琼斯认出这个符号时，他不自觉地颤抖了一下。他反应过来，这人一定是一个在黑暗而阴疑的领域里学识渊博得令人不安的人。
Nor did the conversation of Rogers disappoint him. The man was tall, lean, and rather unkempt, with large black eyes which gazed combustively from a pallid and usually stubble-covered face. He did not resent Jones’s intrusion, but seemed to welcome the chance of unburdening himself to an interested person. His voice was of singular depth and resonance, and harboured a sort of repressed intensity bordering on the feverish. Jones did not wonder that many had thought him mad.
和罗杰斯的交谈也没有使他失望。那是个高大瘦削，有点蓬头垢面，苍白的、由发茬遮掩的脸上一双仿若燃烧着的乌黑的大眼睛急切地瞪着的男子。他对琼斯的闯入并不反感，似乎也很高兴能有机会向感兴趣的人吐露心事。他的声音具有独特的低沉和共鸣的感觉，也带有一种近乎狂热而压抑的紧张感。琼斯并不对许多人都认为他疯了感到疑惑。
With every successive call—and such calls became a habit as the weeks went by—Jones had found Rogers more communicative and confidential. From the first there had been hints of strange faiths and practices on the showman’s part, and later on these hints expanded into tales—despite a few odd corroborative photographs—whose extravagance was almost comic. It was some time in June, on a night when Jones had brought a bottle of good whiskey and plied his host somewhat freely, that the really demented talk first appeared. Before that there had been wild enough stories—accounts of mysterious trips to Thibet, the African interior, the Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska, and certain little-known islands of the South Pacific, plus claims of having read such monstrous and half-fabulous books as the prehistoric Pnakotic fragments and the Dhol chants attributed to malign and non-human Leng—but nothing in all this had been so unmistakably insane as what had cropped out that June evening under the spell of the whiskey.
随着接二连三的拜访——时间一周周的过去，这样的拜访已成为一种嗜好——琼斯发现罗杰斯变得更加健谈，他也获得了（罗杰斯的）信任。从一开始，（罗杰斯）就做了一些奇怪的信仰和行为的暗示，后来这些暗示逐渐扩展成了传奇故事——尽管有着少数的古怪的照片（作为）证明——但这些故事仍是滑稽怪诞的。在六月的一个晚上，琼斯带了一瓶上等的威士忌酒拜访并无节制的劝（蜡像馆的主人）喝酒时，他才第一次听到了那些癫狂的呓语。在此之前，他已经听到了足够多的离奇故事——关于去西藏、非洲内陆、阿拉伯沙漠、亚马逊流域、阿拉斯加和某些南太平洋鲜为人知的岛屿的神秘之旅的叙述，加上（他）声称自己读过一些荒谬的、仿若神话的经典，比如史前的《纳克特断章群（Pnakotic fragments）》和归于恶意和非人类的《巨噬蠕虫赞歌》——但在这一切中都没有什么比六月的那个晚上，在威士忌的魔力下突显出的东西（事物）更清楚而疯狂。
To be plain, Rogers began making vague boasts of having found certain things in Nature that no one had found before, and of having brought back tangible evidences of such discoveries. According to his bibulous harangue, he had gone farther than anyone else in interpreting the obscure and primal books he studied, and had been directed by them to certain remote places where strange survivals are hidden—survivals of aeons and life-cycles earlier than mankind, and in some cases connected with other dimensions and other worlds, communication with which was frequent in the forgotten pre-human days. Jones marvelled at the fancy which could conjure up such notions, and wondered just what Rogers’ mental history had been. Had his work amidst the morbid grotesqueries of Madame Tussaud’s been the start of his imaginative flights, or was the tendency innate, so that his choice of occupation was merely one of its manifestations? At any rate, the man’s work was very closely linked with his notions. Even now there was no mistaking the trend of his blackest hints about the nightmare monstrosities in the screened-off “Adults only” alcove. Heedless of ridicule, he was trying to imply that not all of these daemoniac abnormalities were artificial.
简单来说，罗杰斯开始含糊其辞地吹嘘说，他在自然界中发现了某些之前没有人发现过的东西，并带回了这些发现的确凿证据。根据他嗜酒后的长篇大论，他已经远比任何人都了解他自己研究的书卷了，被其指引的他前往了某些偏远的有幸存的遥远遗民藏匿的地区，那些幸存者来自远古之前和人类之前的生态体系中，在某些情况下甚至与其他维度和其他世界有关，那些年代和地外世界频繁的联系在人类出现之前的年代已被遗忘。琼斯对这种能使人产生幻象的观念感到惊奇，他对罗杰斯的心理历程感到好奇。杜莎夫人蜡像馆的那些病态和怪诞之物是否是他的想象之旅的开端，亦或是与生俱来的癖好，而他选择的职业只是这形态的一种表现形式？无论如何，这个人的职业与他的思想观念密不可分。即使是现在，在他可怕的梦魇中的暗示驱使（他做出）“仅供成人进入”的凹室里的那些可怕怪物也并不是什么问题。他不理会人们的嘲讽，试图指出并非所有恶魔般的异常都是人类制造（或臆想）出的。
It was Jones’s frank scepticism and amusement at these irresponsible claims which broke up the growing cordiality. Rogers, it was clear, took himself very seriously; for he now became morose and resentful, continuing to tolerate Jones only through a dogged urge to break down his wall of urbane and complacent incredulity. Wild tales and suggestions of rites and sacrifices to nameless elder gods continued, and now and then Rogers would lead his guest to one of the hideous blasphemies in the screened-off alcove and point out features difficult to reconcile with even the finest human craftsmanship. Jones continued his visits through sheer fascination, though he knew he had forfeited his host’s regard. At times he would try to humour Rogers with pretended assent to some mad hint or assertion, but the gaunt showman was seldom to be deceived by such tactics.
正是琼斯对这些不可靠的说法所表现出的直率的怀疑态度和嘲笑破坏了他们日益增长的友谊。很明显，罗杰斯极为认真的看待自己。因此他变得郁闷而愤怒，只是因为想要打破他那彬彬有礼而又自鸣得意的怀疑态度，才会继续容忍琼斯。关于举行仪式和祭祀无名的旧神的荒诞不经的故事和指示仍在继续，罗杰斯有时也会把他的客人带到被屏风隔开的凹室里的一个丑陋的亵渎神灵之物的地方，并指出那些即使是最好的人类工艺也难以协调构筑的特征。尽管他知道他已经失去了（蜡像馆）主人的尊敬好感，琼斯仍极有兴致的继续他的访问。有时，他会试图假装赞同罗杰斯的一些疯狂的暗示或断言来使其满足，但这个瘦削苍白的人很少会被这种伎俩欺骗。
【未完】
注释：
【1】那些名字都是著名的杀人犯或者被杀死的人
【2】扎特瓜（或撒托古亚）是洛夫克拉夫特笔下的旧日支配者之一，另名“恩盖伊之沉睡者”，“蟾之神”
【3】昌格纳·方庚是弗兰克. 贝克纳普.朗创作的旧日支配者之一，另名“高峰之上的恐怖”，“象之神”
