A Terribly Strange Bed (A Story from The Weird Circle)

This episode is a dramatization of the Wilkie Collins story “A Traveler’s Story of a Terribly Strange Bed“. In the main, it remains true to the original story, but The Weird Circle has added a few extra elements and characters to the plot.

In The Weird Circle version, the central character is a man named Burke Manning. He is writing a book about historical murder cases and his research has brought him to Paris. Burke’s best friend Jack Wescott has accompanied him and on their last evening in the city, they take a walk beside the Seine where they spot a crowd gathered around their old friend Inspector Duval who is busy fishing a body out of the river. The corpse is as thin as paper and looks like it has been squeezed flat in a gigantic press.

Burke thinks that the corpse is horrible, but Jack is fascinated by it. He’s not the only one because a mysterious and sinister fat man is also loitering around the crime scene. Duval asks the fat man why he is always around when they pull a corpse out of the river and he tells Duval that he enjoys murder. It appeals to his sense of the artistic and there is something fascinating about the strange corpses; something for a connoisseur to appreciate.

The fat man is one strange cookie and no mistake. Jack has a hunch about him and follows the big guy to a gambling den, where something nasty awaits him in room sixteen.

The Weird Circle: A Terribly Strange Bed

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