“I saw someone in front of me lying in a bed. I could not at once decide if it was a man or a woman. Indeed at first I doubted if it was anything human… His age I could not guess; such a look of age I had never imagined. Had he asserted that he had been living through the ages, I should have been forced to admit that, at least, he looked it. And yet I felt that it was quite within the range of possibility that he was no older than myself,—there was a vitality in his eyes which was startling. It might have been that he had been afflicted by some terrible disease, and it was that which had made him so supernaturally ugly.

Marsh pg 53

Robert Holt is first introduced to us scrambling to find shelter in Victorian era London. He soon finds a presumably empty home and sneaks in through the window only to find he is not alone. Taking the form of a beetle, the creature quickly proves its hypnotic powers over him. This quote comes when Holt clearly sees the monster for the first time in one of its forms, an androgynous character that cannot be distinguished by sex or age and was of hideous nature. To see a creature like this would be frightening enough, however it is also able to completely control the actions of Holt, and soon other characters, in a terrifying way that they cannot understand. This power of the beetle is used to avenge the defilement of an Egyptian tomb by a politician named Paul Lessingham. This is the first task Holt completes- when the creature asks him to break into the home of Lessingham and steal letters from his desk. While there, Holt simply has to call the name of the beetle and he has control of the room.

The immense power of the creature is displayed quickly and thoroughly throughout the first chapters- why does the beetle/child of isis take the forms that it does? Does it know what we would expect when we think of a monster so it chooses what would frighten or hold the most power over us? The androgyny of the creature makes me think it has found what scares both men/women and young/old equally by being indistinguishable.