A FAMILY SKELETON (1885) – This short story was written by one of Balladeer’s Blog’s favorite neglected sci-fi authors – Robert Duncan Milne. This time around, Milne’s tale deals with a French nobleman and his wife, who has proven to be sterile.
Experimental fertility treatments at last result in the wife becoming pregnant. On the day that she gives birth, she and her husband are horrified by the resulting offspring.
They are a form of conjoined male twins, but with two faces – one on each side of the head. Two necks were also present and two brains in the cranium. The doctors manage to keep the odd children alive but the nobleman keeps them concealed from the public. Years go by, and at length the father entrusts his long-time valet with the secret about the “ailment” his sons suffer from.
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The valet works virtual miracles with the mutant twins, educating them and tutoring them on the deportment expected of noble family members. The quasi-twins make their public debut separately, with elaborate – sometimes absurd – measures taken to keep the public at a distance so that the twins can be presented as two separate people, since the nobleman does not want them treated like freaks.
The two-in-one men happen to fall in love with the same woman, even though marriage is out of the question. The pair awkwardly fight with each other over her and wind up choking each other to death in a grotesque spectacle.
The traumatized valet moves to San Francisco and opens a French restaurant.
A Family Skeleton has its effective moments but they are undermined by the sitcom-level antics employed to make the conjoined twins seem like two separate people who never appear in public at the same time. Think of the 2021 horror film Malignant if you read this story.
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