The Reckoning

by Alma Katsu

  Pendleton shook his head. “I need something more to go on . . . a name, a location. . . . If you could get anything from”—he blanched at the thought of the creature he’d seen, the one in the room next door—“that man, it would be a big help.”

  “I’ll try. One more thing: the money you owe me. How is that coming along? There have been no problems with the transfer, I trust.”

  “No, it’s proceeding.” There was another hesitation, a tentative look. “I’m grateful for what you did for me, don’t get me wrong . . . but . . . do you really need to take so much? If it’s left for my estate, it will do so much good. I made provisions in my will for my estate to go to charity.” He winced reflexively, expecting an outburst from Adair.

  But there was none. “So these institutions can name a building after you, ensure that your memory lives on? I have no interest in appeasing your vanity. I gave you a miracle,” Adair pointed out calmly. “A miracle you could get from no one else. I named my price; you accepted.”

  “I know I did. . . . What I meant to say is . . . it took me a lifetime to earn that amount of money, and you wouldn’t believe how hard I had to work. . . .”

  “Really? Do you think I have never worked in my life?” His calm was broken by a thin crack of anger.

  “That’s not what I meant. . . . I’m not criticizing. . . . It’s just that you don’t seem to need that kind of money. You’re not running a corporation, so I don’t get it. What’s the purpose of taking all my money away from me?”

  The expression of suffering on Pendleton’s face almost prompted a smile from Adair. In some ways, it felt as though Pendleton were a child; had no one taught him these things when he was a boy? “Why, to teach you humility, of course. What is money, when it can be so easily lost? A reputation, ruined in an instant, made worthless? Knowledge and experience, the stuff you keep in your head, is your true fortune. Knowledge is the only thing that can’t be taken away from you. Reflect on that, Pendleton,” he said as he took his leave.

  And now, with nothing else to keep him from dealing with Jonathan, Adair stood outside the door to gather his strength for what would certainly be a difficult confrontation. Jonathan was unlikely to agree to betray Lanny, and Adair wasn’t sure what leverage he had over him.

  He found Jonathan sitting on the edge of the bed. It was difficult to tell, given the dimness, but he appeared to be continuing his metamorphosis, the primordial goo setting into strands of muscle fibers, the fibers knitting together into flesh. His muscular shape was returning, the swelling under his jaw had gone away, the bruises had faded. Adair reminded himself not to let his impatience for progress keep him from marveling at the miracle of Jonathan’s transformation. Men disintegrated into dust every day, but how many times in history had one reversed the process?

  Adair dropped some clothing on the bed next to Jonathan. The things he had on were disgusting, stiff with dried fluids and smelling of the grave. “Something for you to change into. . . . It won’t fit very well, but it will have to do for now. You need a bath, too; that might bring you a way toward feeling human again,” Adair remarked as he dragged a chair closer to the bed. “How are you?”

  “Little different from the last time you saw me. In my mind, I know I’m Jonathan. Everything is the same. And then I look in the mirror, and I know that isn’t true. I was dead, for God’s sake. You should’ve left me alone,” he said bitingly.

  “So hostile, Jonathan. I should be the angry one, don’t you think? At least you were dead when they buried you: you buried me alive.” His anger began to rise like mercury in a thermometer, but he tamped it down before proceeding. “Look—we were friends for a while, weren’t we, Jonathan? When you lived in my house, I treated you well. It pains me to think I might have to hurt you now. Just tell me where to find her and what name she goes by. That’s all I need from you.”

  “Or what? You’ll torture me? Kill me? By all means, go ahead,” Jonathan said. “You’ve no idea how little those threats mean to me.”

  “You should not take me so lightly. I could break you easily, Jonathan. I sense that you’ve never really been hurt. Pain can make a man do things that he never thought he’d do.”

  Jonathan stared at Adair coldly. “I never did understand you, Adair. That’s the only way you know how to get what you want, to threaten and hurt. You are strangely inhuman.”

  “Inhuman? That only goes to show how little you know your fellow man. I am not unlike many of our brothers.” Adair pulled his chair uncomfortably close. “We are a brutal lot, we humans, always fighting and clawing for what we want. But you wouldn’t know about that, would you? Raised as a little prince, always coddled, especially by the fairer sex. You were not exposed to violence much, I think, whereas the period in which I was raised would be considered very violent by your standards. You could be punished for anything: for displeasing your master, for thinking the wrong thoughts. For taking a crust of bread that didn’t belong to you, you might have a hand or foot cut off, or a brand seared into the side of your face, so everyone would know you were a thief. You could even be killed over such a trifle. There was no law, no appeal. And the church was the worst offender: they perfected the practice of torture, you know, trained their own cadre of torturers to assist the inquisitors. I lived through such times, through the epoch age of cruelty. So you may think me inhuman, but I am only applying what I know.

  “Did you know that I had invented the perfect device for punishment? I called it the Reformer.” Adair brought his face to Jonathan’s, their cheeks brushing so he could speak softly and deliberately into his ear. “It was a harness for keeping the body, head, and limbs in the perfect position for the application of certain sexual torments. Like a bridle and saddle, it was used for breaking a beast. Only in this case, the beast was a man, not a horse. It was a most effective device for breaking rebellious spirits.” He leaned back in his chair and fixed his eyes on Jonathan. “Lanore was put in the Reformer once, did she tell you?”

  “No. She never mentioned it.”

  “I’m not surprised. It’s not something you want others to know about you: that men performed every sexual act imaginable with you while you were bound and helpless. But she did endure it, right before I sent her to St. Andrew to bring you to join me in Boston.” He felt a sharp pang of regret at revealing this to Jonathan, for shaming Lanore this way. It was a most regrettable incident, and he would take back every hurtful thing he had done to her if he could. But he felt he had to tell Jonathan to impress upon him the seriousness of his predicament and induce him to cooperate.

  “Had I known that, I would’ve come to Boston expressly to hunt you down and torn you apart with my own hands.”

  Adair let Jonathan’s threat hang in the air. He pushed the chair back as he got to his feet. “As I said, I don’t want to hurt you, Jonathan. I don’t like threatening you, but I want you to understand that there are ways I can hurt you. For instance, I could wait until Lanore’s return to humiliate you, if you follow my meaning. To do to you what I have done to her. She should witness what happens to you as part of her punishment. After all, she is responsible for it.”

  Jonathan would not be rattled. “I don’t see how you could hold her responsible for your actions. It’s clearly your choice if you decide to torture me.”

  “Don’t pretend that you don’t hold her responsible for what’s happened to you. You should be cursing her, too, for you have been her puppet the same as I.”

  “I’ve hardly been a puppet of Lanny’s, unless you think her a very poor puppeteer,” Jonathan said. “All she’s ever wanted is for me to love her, and as much as she’s tried, it’s the one thing I’ve been unable to do.”

  It was maddening talking to this man. Adair could understand Lanore’s frustration in trying to get him to surrender to her. He was as elusive as a snake; it didn’t matter how many times you struck, he would always weave between the tines of your pitchfork. Nor had Jonathan risen to the bait. No, Lanny had not bee
n able to make Jonathan her puppet, any more than he had been able to get Lanore to return his affection. We are all humbled by love, he thought.

  This talk with Jonathan wasn’t going at all as he’d hoped. It should’ve gone easily enough; most people he’d threatened in the past had always done as he asked, eager to avoid pain. Frustrated, Adair felt his anger flare up and threaten to engulf him entirely, and he had to hold fast against the urge to snap Jonathan’s neck. “I see what you are up to, Jonathan, with your damned passivity, and it won’t work. You make yourself like water, slipping through a man’s fingers, impossible to pin down. But you will not goad me into killing you.”

  Jonathan only gave him an enigmatic smile. “Face facts, Adair: there’s nothing you can do to persuade me to help you. You have no power over me, none at all. But there is a woman with extraordinary powers—powers much stronger and more absolute than yours—and I must think that once she’s gotten over her surprise at my disappearance, she will come looking for me. Have you thought about that?”

  TWENTY

  BARCELONA

  I wandered the city while I waited to hear from Alejandro. My audience with him had not exactly been warm, and his silence left me with the suspicion that he might be buying time in order to act against me. I was too agitated to sit still, so instead of remaining in my suite, where I’d be at the mercy of my fears alone, I walked up and down the streets of Parc du Montjuïc and assessed my situation.

  When I told Alejandro that I wanted to be made mortal again, I’d surprised myself. The realization that, like Savva, I might wish to end my life brought me up short. There had certainly been times in my long existence when I’d wished the spell could be lifted or, better still, had never been cast. Usually I’d felt this way when there was a person in my life whom I didn’t wish to leave, a man I loved who was growing old and had started to wonder why I wasn’t aging with him. That usually triggered an episode of impotent rage against my condition and I would be sad and upset, but eventually the will to live would come back and I would move on. This time, however, I was motivated by fear. I felt profound hopelessness over my situation, and fighting it was exhausting. It left me desperate for release—as desperate as Jonathan had been. I hadn’t been able to refuse Jonathan his release; I hoped Alejandro would not be able to deny me, either.

  I walked along the waterfront in an effort to still my mind. I found a bench overlooking the harbor and concentrated on chasing away the fearful thoughts. Think of something else, I told myself. The strong Catalan sun reminded me of Pisa, the first place Jonathan and I settled after fleeing Boston. Our new life together started out grandly, but could anything withstand the complications that seemed to follow Jonathan wherever he went? I’d prayed that the unwelcome attention and temptations he’d known in Boston would ease—we were in the Old World, surely more sophisticated than the one we knew—and we’d become the couple I’d hoped we’d be. This is what I wanted and expected, the start of a long and happy life together, but it turned out to be the beginning of our end.

  PISA, ITALY, 1822

  It wasn’t easy to convince Jonathan to flee to Europe after we’d imprisoned Adair. He came at me twenty times a day with arguments as to why we should return to our homes and families in St. Andrew. Even after we bought tickets for the European passage, the date of departure set, and our trunks packed, he brought it up again and again, whether we were at the theater for a night’s distraction from our troubles or at the window of our hotel room, envying the moon its peace.

  “Why not return, at least for a few years?” he’d ask each time. “If nothing else, it will give us the chance to make things right with our families, to see that they’ll be able to get by without us. For their sakes, Lanny, not ours. Please.”

  And so I had to be the hard-hearted one, the one to insist that we could not go back to St. Andrew after we’d left under such damning circumstances. Jonathan and I had disappeared from town the same night, so people likely assumed we’d run off together, though the truth was that I’d used Adair’s potion to bring Jonathan back to life after he’d been shot and then whisked him off to Boston as Adair had ordered. Jonathan undoubtedly still felt guilty about leaving his wife, Evangeline, and his daughter, but Evangeline’s heart was already broken and our reputations already blackened: returning would only bring the whole mess to the surface again, giving rise to questions we could only answer with lies.

  Besides, I knew it would be hard to leave home again once we’d returned, for I’d done it myself. Being with your loving family is no small comfort when you believe you are a monster, and it is terribly hard to leave your home, a place where you belong, to face the unknown. It would be impossible to get Jonathan to leave St. Andrew a second time, even if we were on the verge of being tried as witches.

  In the end, Jonathan’s arguments didn’t matter; they were all trumped by the fear that Adair might follow us to St. Andrew. Jonathan asked me every day if I felt a glimmer of Adair’s presence in my mind, but it had decisively disappeared when we’d cast him behind layers of rock and brick.

  Our ship landed at Genoa, but we’d decided to press on and ended up in Pisa. Since we knew nothing of the town, we took a room at the first inn we saw, a rustic place that was below our station but convenient enough. The proprietor gave us his best room—best, despite grimy walls and coarse blankets, and feathers working out of the mattress—and bid us good night.

  The next day we went into town in search of an English-speaking banker or barrister who could handle the transfer of funds from one of Jonathan’s accounts and help get our affairs in order. We returned to the little inn to find an invitation from an English lord to have dinner with him later in the week. We didn’t recognize his name, and the only people we knew in Europe had been the other passengers we’d met on the ship. We debated whether to accept the invitation, distrustful of anyone who would invite complete strangers to dinner the minute they set foot in town, and put it aside for the day.

  In the morning we found a barrister who spoke English, though he had as difficult a time with our American accents as we had with his Italian one, and at the conclusion of our dealing I thought of the invitation and asked if he knew the host. The barrister wrinkled his nose and called the English lord “a bad man,” and gave the impression that we might be thought disreputable if we dined with him. We didn’t know what to make of the lawyer’s reaction, but by now were desperate for the company of people with whom we could converse. We decided to accept the invitation; at least we’d learn about the town and its inhabitants and then judge for ourselves what company we chose to keep.

  On the appointed evening we went to the address on the invitation. From the outside, the house seemed beyond reproach: it was a small palace, beautifully kept, with rosebushes forming a frothy pink border down one flank. As a footman led us to an unlit parlor, I noticed that the house was not as well kept inside as it was outside, as though the occupants didn’t care—or had little need—to impress visitors. Books were piled high on tables and even on the floor in wobbling towers. Flowers stood neglected in their vases, dropping petals. A pair of small pug-faced dogs circled excitedly at our heels, and from the cool, darkened parlor a woman’s voice called out in heavily accented English to pay the dogs no mind.

  She stepped out of the shadows to greet us. The mistress of the house was even younger than I and small, white, and delicate like a camellia. While it was clear that she was a member of the upper class, she gave an impression of sullen indifference, as though her life was forever spoiled and nothing could make it right ever again. “I am the countess Guccioli. Welcome to our home. Please, won’t you have a seat?” After her initial wide-eyed surprise at Jonathan’s unexpected handsomeness, she did an admirable job of disguising her interest. “Lord Byron will join us in a moment,” she said as she fanned herself against the heat. We rustled in our chairs, impressed by our hosts’ royal titles and still curious as to why they thought to summon us here.

&nbs
p; “How fortunate that you are able to join us this evening,” she said. With her strong accent, I couldn’t tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic. It was plain that we were of no interest to her: if anything, she seemed mildly annoyed that we’d accepted the invitation from the lord of the manor, as though we were imposing.

  In the awkward silence that followed, we all watched as the footman returned with a tray, glasses and pale golden liquid sparkling inside a tall decanter, and the countess was about to force herself to come up with a remark to entertain us when a man rushed into the room.

  “Ah, you made it, I see,” he observed, stopping for a moment to kiss the countess on her cheek, and I got the impression that there’d be hell to pay if he hadn’t. After he introduced himself, he instructed us not to worry about using his title and that we were to call him by his given name, George, or Byron if we preferred.

  I was immediately enchanted by Lord Byron. Neither painting nor words could ever truly capture his magnetism. While he might not have been classically handsome—and it was hard to judge any man fairly with Jonathan standing beside him—there was a sensuous interplay between his features that was impossible to ignore. His eyes burned with dangerous intellect, but what was truly mesmerizing was the dissonance between his cool, aristocratic gaze and his almost savage, lush mouth. Even his nose, with a slight patrician’s bump, made him more exotic than the average pasty Englishman. I detected a slight limp, but Byron made no acknowledgment of this, and it was only later that we learned he had a clubfoot.

  “So good of you to come, despite the mysterious circumstances,” Byron said, flashing a twinkling, sly grin first at the countess—who returned it with a grimace—and then at us. “You don’t know who we are, we don’t know you. . . . Four strangers in a town that’s mother to none of us. . . . It’s bound to make for an interesting evening, don’t you agree?” he asked, reclining on a divan in a striped banyan, which he wore over his shirtsleeves, his fingers stained with ink. “Did you know you’re the first Americans to come to Pisa since my arrival? As the city is obviously of little interest to your countrymen, might I ask what has brought you here?”