Such Wicked Intent

by Kenneth Oppel

  Fatigue slowed my steps as I hurried through the forest. How had I become so feeble when I’d once felt so strong? When I reached the little hill, I was out of breath and labored up to the top, kneading the cramp in my side.

  Through the trees I could see the glade spread below me. On a picnic blanket sat Elizabeth and… Konrad. For several breaths I could only stare in confusion, for it was exactly like looking at my brother. Indeed, the creature even seemed to be wearing Konrad’s shoes and trousers, shirt and jacket. His abundant hair, quite long now, was stylishly tied back. Elizabeth poured a cup of tea and held it out to him; he took it and drank.

  Where was Henry? My eyes swept the glade, and there at the far end I made him out near some bushes, picking blackberries.

  The scene was so serene, I felt some of my panic ebb.

  It was Konrad, and all I had to do was walk down to see him. My brother. Elizabeth was pointing things out to him, as she would a child, no doubt naming them. A tree. A cloud. A patch of flowers that grew near their blanket.

  Konrad stood and looked at them more closely, then grabbed them and ripped them up. He tasted them and spat them out. I heard a trill of Elizabeth’s laughter, and she came and gathered up one of the flowers, and smelled it, then held it out to Konrad, tickling his nose. He leaned into the flower, then took it from her hand and held it under her nose.

  And then he kissed her on the mouth.

  I watched, frozen. For what seemed like a very long moment, she let him kiss her—or perhaps she was not merely allowing but participating. Then she put her hands on his shoulders and gently pushed him back, saying something. He gazed at her for a moment. Then he seized her arms and kissed her again, roughly on the neck.

  I shouted, but my voice was hoarse, and I didn’t think either of them heard me. I lurched headlong down the hill. Elizabeth pushed against him, but he overpowered her, forcing her to the earth. He lay on top of her, pinning her arms flat even as he continued to ravish her, his mouth on her throat and lips.

  Elizabeth cried out, and I saw one of Konrad’s hands dragging her dress up, revealing her stockinged legs.

  Henry was running across the glade now, but I reached them first.

  “Get off her!” I bellowed, my shovel raised.

  Konrad and Elizabeth both looked at me in surprise.

  “Victor, no!” I heard Elizabeth shout.

  Konrad began to stand, and I struck him hard on the shoulder with the flat of the shovel, knocking him over. He looked at me, and those empty eyes were no longer empty. They were filled with anger, and his jaw jutted—his brow furrowed and compressed.

  But then, just as suddenly, he looked like a slightly younger Konrad, clutching at his shoulder. There was blood on his fingers.

  “Victor, you’ve hurt him!” Elizabeth cried.

  “He attacked you!” I felt Henry’s hand on my shoulder and turned to him. “You saw it, Henry!”

  My oldest friend was pale, eyes flicking nervously from Konrad to Elizabeth. “I saw it too. He was forcing you against your wishes.”

  “He doesn’t know!” Elizabeth protested.

  “What doesn’t it know!” I bellowed back, not taking my eyes from the creature. “It knew enough to try to rape you!”

  “No. He has a man’s appetites but no conscience yet,” she said.

  The creature stood up, and for a moment its face darkened and I thought it might lunge at me, so I struck it again with the shovel on its leg. With a wail it turned and pelted across the glade and into the trees, making a sound like a thrashed dog.

  “Look what you’ve done!” Elizabeth screamed, kicking off her shoes and chasing after him. “Konrad, come back!”

  I ran after her, still clutching my shovel, Henry at my heels.

  “Listen to me!” I grabbed her wrist and tried to pull her to a standstill, but she wrenched herself free and kept going. Through the trees I saw Konrad. He was fast, a bundle of will and energy, hurtling through the undergrowth, snapping branches. Even barefoot Elizabeth had no hope of keeping up with him—none of us did—and in less than a minute we’d lost sight of him.

  “He’ll get lost!” she panted, staggering on, refusing to stop. “He might come to harm!”

  “Slow down! Listen to me! The professor found something monstrous in the burial pit.”

  “What of it?” she gasped, refusing to look at me.

  “It’s some massive thing, not human. But there was a jawbone, and on it teeth, one that looked exactly like that sharp one on Konrad!”

  She laughed in my face. “Is this another of your hallucinations, Victor?”

  “What are you saying, Victor?” Henry demanded at my side.

  I grabbed at Elizabeth and this time stopped her. “Don’t you see! It’s not just Konrad’s body we grew. It’s someone else’s, too!”

  Henry frowned. “How can this be? We used Konrad’s own hair—”

  “Konrad’s hair blended with the butterfly spirit! And those spirits come from the creature in the pit. And what that creature wants is a new body! Konrad’s body!”

  “You can’t know this,” said Henry.

  A hostile silence emanated from Elizabeth.

  “If you don’t believe me, come back to the château and see for yourselves! You’ll see the size of the thing. The professor said its own people were frightened of it. Maybe they were meant to resurrect it, but instead they dug it up and massacred its body. It was a monster, maybe some kind of demon!”

  “There’s no time for this!” Elizabeth cried. “We have to find Konrad now!”

  “Stop calling it that! I’m Konrad’s twin, and I can promise you, what we created is not my twin!”

  “He needs to be found,” said Henry with surprising calm. “Imagine if he wanders into a town, looking like you…”

  “And he’ll outgrow his clothes soon,” Elizabeth said. “He’ll take them off.”

  I dragged a hand across my brow. They were right. The idea of having a naked facsimile of myself running rampant through the countryside, eating dogs and cats—and who knew what else the thing was capable of. It was too horrific to comprehend.

  “All right,” I said grudgingly. “But surely it’ll just come back to the cottage. Or the château. Those are the places it knows.”

  “And he knows you’ll be there too, waiting for him with your shovel,” Elizabeth said.

  “It’s dangerous!” I said. “How can you not see this? What would you have done if I hadn’t appeared?”

  She laughed disdainfully. “Do you always need to be the hero? I would’ve stopped him, calmed him, and he wouldn’t have run off.”

  “You’re mistaken,” I said.

  “It’s you who’s mistaken,” she countered. “And inconsistent. At first you trumpeted your praises of these spirit butterflies! ‘They give intelligence, power, life!’ You kept them on you. You probably have them on you still! But now you expect us to believe they’re evil.”

  “That body,” I insisted again, “is made for something else.”

  “So, what do you propose we do?” she demanded. “Destroy it?”

  I said nothing, though the idea spread through my head like a bloodstain.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know yet. Right now we just need to find it and get it out of sight.”

  “Put your shovel down if you mean to come with us.”

  Our eyes locked. I held tight to the shovel. Murderous thoughts filled my head—hacking at the creature that so resembled Konrad, bludgeoning it to death—and my stomach curdled. We needed to get it back to the cottage. It needed to come willingly. Then, once we’d locked it inside, I could decide what must come next. The shovel would only frighten it away. I dropped it.

  “Good.” Elizabeth set off at once, leading us deeper into the forest, in the direction we’d last seen the creature. It seemed a poor plan, but I could think of no other, so I followed along with Henry. Strangely, Elizabeth seemed to know exactly where she was going, her face
intent, eyes focused on some inevitable destination.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to a pair of discarded shoes in the grass. They were indeed Konrad’s.

  “How do you know the way?” I asked, and remembered how she’d known, even in her sleep, that the creature had been waiting outside the door of the château.

  “I’m taking the easiest path through the forest,” she said. “Wouldn’t anyone do the same?”

  I didn’t believe her. After half an hour we found a jacket caught on a branch, and not much farther on, a shirt, its buttons ripped. I hoped the creature was merely hot, ridding itself of restraints, and not bursting through its clothing because of a monstrous growth spurt. I regretted leaving the shovel behind.

  Our route was uphill, and after an hour we came upon the creature on the shore of a small kettle lake, fed by a cataract of water running from the mountains. It was completely naked now, my size exactly, if not a bit bigger. On one of its shoulders was an ugly cut, dark with congealed blood, where I’d struck with the shovel. The Konrad creature was crouched by the water’s edge, its back to us, staring. At first I thought it was slaking its thirst, but it was gazing fiercely into the glassy water, and I realized it must be looking at its own reflection. Before this moment had it ever beheld itself?

  “Konrad,” Elizabeth said gently, walking up to him.

  It startled and turned to her, and the look of utter relief and joy on its face was so sincere and innocent that I felt my brutal resolve falter. It stood and shuffled toward Elizabeth with its head lowered, as if in shame. At once Henry took his jacket and tied it swiftly around the creature’s midriff to hide its nakedness.

  Elizabeth placed a hand on the creature’s uninjured shoulder. “We’re going home now.”

  It looked at her, surely understanding nothing but her face and the tone of her voice. Then its gaze settled on me. I’d expected wariness, but its eyes widened in amazement. Once more the creature turned to glance at itself in the still water. Wonderingly it touched its own face. Then the creature turned and pointed at me.

  “He knows you’re twins,” Elizabeth said quietly.

  And suddenly I knew it too. Impelled by a force I couldn’t control, I walked closer. So like Konrad. So like my twin. Very gently it touched my face. I exhaled. Its fingertips lingered on my cheek and then stroked my hair, then its own.

  Elizabeth smiled. “It’s like a reunion.”

  Maybe it would work, I thought. Maybe, once Konrad’s spirit was inside this body, it would be Konrad, regardless of how the body itself had been formed. The body was just a vessel, after all. Once inhabited by my brother, wouldn’t it truly become my brother?

  The creature reached out once more and took my good hand, shaking it again and again, like some comic greeting, so that I almost laughed. I remembered Ernest doing something similar when he was little.

  Then it pressed the wound on its shoulder, wincing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  With a disconcertingly blank expression it lifted its bloodied fingers and placed them on my shoulder, gripping tight. I put my left hand on the creature’s and tried to move it, but its fingers were locked. I was suddenly aware of a great dormant power in its limbs. I looked at the impassive face.

  “Let go,” I said quietly, feeling the first flutter of panic.

  With its other hand the creature gripped my maimed one and squeezed, sending a spasm of pain through it.

  “That’s enough!” I shouted, and shoved my full weight against the creature. Without releasing its grip on my hand, the Konrad creature staggered back and fell into the lake, dragging me in too.

  The water was surprisingly deep, even right against the bank, and locked together as we were, we both went under. I came up spluttering and splashed toward the bank, mere inches away, but the creature was behind me and grabbed hold, pulling me back and down.

  Choking, I thrashed up and about to face the creature. I wasn’t sure if its face was filled with malice or pure terror.

  “He can’t swim, Victor!” cried Elizabeth. “Help him!”

  I caught a glimpse of her preparing to jump, and just had time to shout, “Stay away!” before the creature was upon me, flailing and seizing hold of me in a cold iron grip. I went under again. A murderer could not have been more single-minded.

  I came up briefly, enough to glimpse that all our thrashing had actually moved us much farther from the bank. From the corner of my frenzied eye, I saw that Henry had found a long branch and was stretching it out to us. Elizabeth was shrieking, “Help him grab the branch, Victor!”

  But its face was livid with panic, and it clawed its way atop me once more. Down we went again, for too long. A great cold contracted round my heart, tunneling my vision. I kicked and hit sluggishly, and managed to knee the creature in its privates so that its grip loosened. Fighting my way up, I broke the surface, gagging for air.

  The creature came up, head barely cresting, a terrible bawling coming from its throat.

  “He’s drowning!” I heard Elizabeth scream, and saw she was in the water, swimming for us.

  “Stay aw—”

  And the creature pulled me close again, its panicked face sputtering against me. It wrapped its legs around me, trying to haul itself up onto my shoulders. I punched it in the face, and then again harder, my numb fist like a hammer. The creature recoiled, and I would never forget its expression—a kind of bleak incomprehension, and then panic once more—before it sank below the surface.

  “Konrad!” Elizabeth screamed.

  I hurled myself at her, intercepting her, gripping her with my arms and legs and trying to drag her back to the bank.

  She cried and clawed and bit.

  “Give me the branch!” I hollered at Henry, and he threw it to me. The water was murky, and I could not see the creature beneath the surface. My great fear was that it was under me and would drag me down for good.

  “Dive for him, you coward!” Elizabeth screamed at me.

  “You can’t drag a drowning man from the depths!” I shouted back at her.

  The creature did not reappear. Not in ten seconds, twenty, or thirty. When a full minute had passed, I said, “It’s gone.”

  “You killed him!” Elizabeth gasped.

  “It would’ve killed us both!”

  “He… he wanted you to help him….”

  “Victor’s right, Elizabeth,” said Henry quietly. “There was nothing he could’ve done.”

  “And where were you, Henry?” she cried.

  “I found a branch as quickly as I—”

  “Cowards, the both of you!”

  We hauled ourselves out, cold and exhausted, and sat hunched on the grassy bank, shivering for some time, staring at the water. The silence was like a dreadful prison, entrapping me in my own bloodstained thoughts. Might I have saved it? But it needed to be killed, surely it did.

  Then we stood and started the long walk toward home.

  CHAPTER 17

  A GROWING FURY

  THE WALK HOME WAS INTERMINABLE, SILENT APART FROM THE sporadic sounds of Elizabeth’s sobbing. She wouldn’t meet my eye, wouldn’t even let Henry place a consoling hand on her shoulder. We stopped only briefly at the glade to gather our things and dry off with the picnic blankets, working like automatons.

  It was like losing Konrad all over again. I had killed him twice.

  Only last night I’d dreamed we were to be reunited. The dream had had such substance, such certainty.

  When we entered the château, Elizabeth immediately started up the stairs toward the library.

  “I want to see them,” she said. “These monster bones.”

  Henry and I followed. We found no sign of workers in the library, and as we made our way into the caverns, we found them empty too, though a few lanterns still flickered.

  “Professor Neumeyer?” I called out, but heard no reply.

  We ventured down the steep passageway to the burial chamber and walked to the edge of the pit. Th
e ladder was still in place, but at the bottom all the skeletal fragments I’d seen earlier were gone.

  I turned desperately to a tarpaulin where a few small bits of bone were laid out. I hurried over and knelt down, but these pieces were all so nondescript that they might have been from any creature.

  “Is this all there is?” Elizabeth exclaimed, snatching up a shard of bone. “This is your monster?”

  “They must’ve taken away the other pieces,” I murmured, feeling suddenly light-headed.

  “If they were here at all.”

  “They were here,” I said. “A bit of the giant skull, a clubbed foot. And the jawbone that bore the exact same teeth as Konrad’s!”

  “A tooth!” She was shaking with anger now. “Is that all the proof you can muster? Admit it, Victor. From the moment you saw him growing as a baby, you didn’t want him back!”

  My voice was hoarse with grief. “That’s a lie! You think you’re the only one who suffered today? I saw the hope of getting back my brother, my twin, sink! I want him back, Elizabeth, even more than you!”

  She shook her head. “You were more interested in your stolen spirits and the power they gave you!”

  “How can you say that, after all I’ve done—”

  “With you, Victor, it’s never clear why you do things!”

  I held up my maimed hand and shook it in her face. “I—gave—my—fingers!”

  Dismissively she batted away my hand, and before I could check my rage, I smacked her face.

  She flew at me, her fists battering my chest. I pushed her away so hard that she fell down.

  “Victor!” Henry said sharply, his hand tightening around my arm.

  “Take that hand off me,” I growled.

  We held each other’s eyes for a moment before he released his grip.

  There was a shuffling sound behind us, and I turned to see Gerard, one of the professor’s colleagues, emerge from the steep passageway.

  “What’re you doing down here?” he asked.

  “The pit remains, where have they gone?” I demanded.

  “The professor’s taken them into Geneva not an hour ago,” he said.