That Is Not Dead

by Неизвестный

  “And your father discovered all this?”

  “He found the diary of the count while researching Galvani and the other vitalists. It was the Shelly connection, as you had guessed. Mary Shelly had read Count Cagliostro’s diary before she wrote her novel, Frankenstein. My father had found some of her notes, but they could not be verified, and I am sure that you understand, given the rather strange notions that the diary must have contained. You can see why he left out certain things.”

  “But I don’t understand the link between Aldini and Cagliostro,” said Dr. West.

  “By the time Aldini had found the count, the latter wanted a way to escape from the Figli. And Aldini promised him a way out. Cagliostro had done the brotherhood’s dirty work by opening lodges of Egyptian freemasonry in Russia, France, and England. It was part of the brotherhood’s mad scheme. You see, they believed that they had access to the master plan of the world—a series of paintings under the tomb of a certain pharaoh. At that time, they thought they could gain great temporal power by making sure that all of the events depicted in the paintings came to pass. They would initiate young men who had an unhealthy interest in the black arts and have them carry schemes to move the pawns of history across the chessboard of time. Have you never noticed how many magicians, such as Dr. John Dee, are spies? It was not a matter of coincidence.”

  “At that time? You think this brotherhood still exists?”

  “They had knowledge of the future. Eventually, they learned that they need do little and the horrid scenes painted by the slaves of the Black Pharaoh would simply unfurl. They grew tired of making money because of foreknowledge, and they simply became slaves to the onrushing future—or so my father believed.”

  “He didn’t tell you to contact these men, I suppose?”

  “Good lord, man. Why would anyone want to know men mad with fatalism?”

  “The Egyptians knew many things about restoring life. I have heard that even some of their composite mummies actually walked.”

  “You have heard correctly. Cagliostro mentions this in his diary. He has a horrific account of seeing a truly huge monster. I imagine it still lives imprisoned with the pharaohs. I have no doubt, Dr. West, that if you journeyed to Cairo, you could meet the Brothers of the Black Pharaoh. Its Italian branch no longer remains. But I am wandering from my story. Aldini had a foolproof plan. If Cagliostro would provide him with the elixir the brotherhood used to make the mummies speak and the incantation called Coming Forth by Night, he would fake the count’s death. The count had grown fearful of the demon the brotherhood wanted him to summon. His diary mentioned the terrible sounds of twin pipers of no human sort, and his fear of the terrible eye of the creature. He was grasping at straws and a confidence man like Aldini had him—as you Americans say—by the short hairs. He gave the recipe to Aldini. It was composed of lunar kyphi, an incense made of twenty-eight herbs, and a heavy metal that caused flesh to wither—I suspect uranium—dissolved in wine from the Oasis of Kharga. It was ridiculously expensive to compound, but Aldini told the count no potion, no escape. After Aldini had made his first batch, he told his plan to the count. He would give the count a drug that produced a deathlike slumber. The count’s servants would call him as a physician. He would arrive, revive the count, and take him to Barbados. It seems that Signor Aldini was an admirer of Shakespeare in that his little plot had equal parts from Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest. The count was a bit of a showman himself. He arranged for a huge dinner in Naples. He wanted his demise to be witnessed by several dozen nobles, priests, wealthy townsfolk, artists, and musicians. The British ambassador came—a cardinal from Rome, a mathematician visiting from Greece. It was a gala affair with music, wine, and feasting. We Italians know how to throw a party. That was why we conquered the world, you know—so we could have the best of everything for our tables.”

  “I never made it to Italy when I was in the army, but the restaurants in Paris were a great contrast to New England boiled dinners!” laughed Dr. West.

  “The count placed the poison in his wine glass. He toasted the pope’s health and fell forward, dead. But the count had not counted on one thing. He had not realized that Aldini had planned to make his death so real. Aldini had simply killed him. When he arrived at the residence, Cagliostro’s body was cold. There was no pulse. A mirror held to the nostrils provided no telltale sign of life. He loaded the body in a wagon and ran to a secret villa. He knew he had to keep the body from the hands of the brotherhood. There, he drained half of the Count’s blood and restored it with the elixir, attached his electrodes to the pale flesh, and read the fateful words. He hit the switch, as he called on Nyarlathotep. The count’s limbs twitched, the eyes fluttered, and the mix of ancient sorcery and modern science awakened him.”

  “How can you know these things? The count couldn’t have recorded them in his diary.”

  “The count didn’t record his own reanimation; that is true. But he helped Aldini over the months that followed. At first, he was unwilling. But he was afraid that the brotherhood might track him down and that he would eventually be one of their undead slaves working beneath the Egyptian necropolises. Besides, he was attracted to the unknown. When he was alive, he had borne the fearful initiations of the brotherhood. He wasn’t exactly the same sort of being as before. His body breathed. His heart pumped the strange mixture through his limbs but with a slow beat. He was much cooler to the touch, and the inner fires of emotion had cooled a great deal.”

  “Did hatred leave him? Did he hold grudges?”

  “That’s an odd question. He recorded in his diary that he could be moved by three things. The first was fear. He would act in self-interest. He assumed that his undying state would not cling to his pseudo-life, but he found the elixir made him very protective of his false life. Secondly, he was moved by love. We Italians, after all, are the race of Casanova. Lastly, hatred moved him. His hatred for the brotherhood coursed in his veins—an undying fire of equal parts venom and pain.”

  “Did he hate Aldini for what he had done to him?”

  “At first he did. But he came to realize that by Aldini’s machinations he had escaped the brotherhood and that perhaps he would have a long existence.”

  “So there is hope then.”

  “What do you mean, hope?”

  “That the reanimated might come to forgive, even love, the doctor who called them back to life.” Dr. West trembled as he spoke. Dr. Balsamo regarded him with awe and with a certain rising suspicion.

  “I may have bad news for you, Dr. West. The count knew about the process, and he longed to escape a dreadful fate. If Aldini had not intervened, the brotherhood was going to use the count in a horrible way. He was destined to become the living vehicle of Nyarlathotep. Whatever strange fate Aldini had given him, it was preferable to the horrors that awaited him. Aldini was his savior—maybe not a truthful savior, but a savior.”

  “So the others, the other reanimated men—what became of them?

  “For the most part, they did not return to life in as conscious a form as the count had. Perhaps his occult training made his will stronger, more coherent. They were ruled by fear and anger. Aldini simply dispatched most of them. Fire, acid, dismemberment were effective.”

  “Most of them?”

  “You must understand that he and the count were working by themselves. Some of the reanimated men were very strong. Like the reaction that fear causes.”

  “Adrenalin. Yes, I’ve observed it.”

  “They broke free from the doctor’s laboratory. They raged into the countryside. There is much Italian folk-belief in such things, so the country people feared the walking dead.”

  “And the sophisticated city dwellers laughed at their country cousins,” finished Dr. West. “So, did the monsters win?’

  “It is odd that you would call Aldini’s creations monsters. Were they not his victims?”

  “He gave them life, the one thing men have fought to have since they came up from the ape. He
was like a god. If he hadn’t been fighting the cancer of superstition, he could have discovered how the count’s mind had endured. He could have replicated the experiment. The count’s sanity is the sign I am looking for.”

  “The sign you are looking for? What do you mean, Dr. West?”

  The light had left the window. The cold New Haven winds of October were rattling the pane. Well-muffled students hurried across the quad, chased by fallen leaves. The professor’s office was lit by two dim bulbs. He never spent his nights here, and he wished he were well away from the dreadful American. He had come to recognize the gleam in his eyes.

  “Yes. The sign of hope that I am looking for,” said Dr. West.

  “It couldn’t happen. You don’t understand the rage of the dead.”

  “Tell me about the rage of the dead.”

  “The count records that the reanimated don’t dream. Strictly speaking, they need no rest, but at night they feel the hostility of certain forces in the universe. The universe is not a happy place, Dr. West. Matter does not like being constrained by form. The bending of light that you mentioned Eddington observing is a painful process. The universe is full of hatred, and dead men are the perfect empty vessels for that rage. The monsters, as you call them, found each other in the dark. It took some years, but they had one great and unending hatred to kill the man who had killed their deaths. You speak of humans fighting for life, but I tell you, Dr. West, they will fight for death also. They raided Aldini’s villa one night, breaking down the doors with rakes and shovels and other tools stolen from farmsteads. They cut him into pieces.”

  “And the count? He had aided Aldini. What of him? Did he once again escape a monstrous brotherhood?”

  “They seemed to not notice him. Their dull eyes only looked for Aldini. Maybe they couldn’t hate him since he was truly their brother. He fled the villa.”

  “And made his way to England. Moved by love, weren’t you Joseph?”

  Balsamo scarcely paused at this revelation. He sighed, perhaps grateful to tell someone after the centuries.

  “I knew you must have figured out my identity. I am careless after so many years. I even took my family name again, Balsamo. I am ruled by nostalgia. So, what do you plan to do, Dr. West? Go to the regents of Yale and complain that one of their professors should have been entombed two hundred years ago?”

  “I have no desire to expose you. I had heard of the great longevity of Count Cagliostro. I had seen portraits of you from the time of your known life and one painted in London scarcely fifty years ago. I just wanted to know how Aldini had succeeded. How do you cling to a sane life?”

  “I have found what is slow and beautiful. I can easily spend another eighty years studying Dante. I will spend a hundred with Ovid, perhaps two hundred with Virgil. Read the papers, Dr. West. Mankind will destroy itself long before I will wear out. Once I found out how to fall in love with art, I knew I would have a perfect existence. Aldini did succeed. He made an undimming eye, but I had to learn what to look at. How many monsters chase you, Dr. West?”

  “They are many shapes seen in the shadows, but you have given me hope. Maybe they do not all have to hate me. Maybe some can love me.”

  “So you will be a successful god after all?”

  “All I wanted was to kill death.”

  “The Egyptians had a god that killed death. Set killed his brother Osiris, who was Death himself, yet Set was the most hated god of their pantheon. He threatened their hope for peace. That is what your monsters have lost. Even I want what I remember from my few hours of lying dead in my home in Naples.”

  “So, my monsters will never love me.”

  “It is a waste of time to love a human. I had a brief affair with Mary Shelly when she was eighteen. Stole her from her poet husband, told her everything, offered to make her as I am. She refused and told my story in the way she needed to get its poison from her soul. She was my Beatrice.”

  “Thank you for letting me know what awaits me.”

  “You knew long before you tracked me down. You knew the first night when saw any of them following you.”

  “Yes, I knew. But I fought for hope. I still think I am right. Medicine will push death back and back. Humans will live longer and longer. In the fullness of time, I will be a god.”

  “If that fullness comes, Dr. West, I shall write a long poem about you in the style of Dante. I shall write it slowly with great beauty.”

  Massachusetts, USA, and Spain, Late Nineteenth Century:

  The Salamanca Encounter

  Richard A. Lupoff

  One could feel the tension in the president’s office located in Blackstone Hall, the newly constructed administration building of Miskatonic University. The walls were lined with heavy volumes bound in dark leather, interspersed with portraits of former presidents of the university dating back to its founding in 1751. The institution’s sesquicentennial loomed a mere half decade in the future, but the individuals gathered today were concerned with more immediate and less happy matters.

  The Reverend Langton Boniface sat primly on the edge of his chair, his ecclesiastical collar standing in bright contrast to the overall dark aspect of the room. Seated beside him, his wife Isabelle maintained a noncommittal stare, her eyes seemingly fixed on the painted visage of the founding president of the university.

  Another woman, far younger than the wife of the minister, sat rigidly in a carven wood chair facing the huge desk behind which stood the president’s vacant seat—a luxuriant device whose black leather covering was studded with well-polished brass buttons.

  The silence of the moment was broken by the creak of springs and the crunch of gravel as the president’s carriage drew up to the pillared entrance of the hall. Turning their heads to peer out between the heavy maroon drapes that covered the windows of the president’s office, the three persons awaiting his arrival could see Zumbo, the president’s personal coachman, dismount from the box, open the carriage door, and lower its folding steps to ease the descent of his employer.

  Levi Marcus Josephus Flint, the ninth president of Miskatonic University, with an ivory-headed ebony walking stick in hand and a silk hat set squarely on his bulbous cranium, climbed the steps of Blackstone Hall. A graduate student, properly attired in swallow-tail coat, striped trousers, and spats, held the outer door for President Flint, then ran ahead to open the heavy, elaborately carven door to the president’s office and to close it carefully behind him.

  The three people anticipating the president’s arrival rose to their feet and waited while President Flint, for the moment ignoring their presence, carefully placed his silk hat and walking stick in their accustomed places. He stood behind his desk, nodded in turn to each visitor, and gestured for them to be seated.

  He filled a cut-glass goblet with water from a carafe awaiting on his desk, sipped, lowered the glass, cleared his throat, nodded, and locked eyes with each of the three of them, then broke the silence.

  “Reverend Boniface, Mrs. Boniface, Miss Prentice—”

  “Doctor Prentice, if you please, sir,” the young woman sitting opposite President Flint interrupted.

  “Miss—”

  “Doctor.”

  The president’s eye widened in surprised annoyance. “I am not accustomed to being challenged in my own office, Miss Prentice.”

  “President Flint, I hold the degree of doctor of philosophy granted by this institution, and I will no more settle for miss than you or the Reverend Boniface would settle for mister.”

  Flint’s face reddened. He extended a carefully manicured hand and tapped carefully manicured fingernails upon his desk. “Miss Prentice, you are aware that it is the policy of Miskatonic University to open its gates to a male student population only. You enrolled here under false pretenses, using a male pseudonym and attending classes in disguise.”

  Clutching an oddly heavy-appearing velvet reticule in her lap, the young woman spoke. “On the contrary, President Flint, I enrolled under my true name. A
nd my attire and grooming practices, save for the absence of facial hair, did not differ from those of my fellow scholars.”

  President Flint drew a deep breath. He drew open a brass-handled drawer in his desk and removed from the drawer a substantial folder of documents. He laid it upon his desk, folded back its cover, and for several minutes studied its contents as if he had never seen them before. At length, he closed the folder and peered into the visage of the woman facing him.

  “You enrolled as L. C. Prentice of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. Our admissions committee assumed that the letters ‘L. C.’ represented masculine appellations. I suppose now they may have been a clever but wholly inappropriate play upon the phonetic pronunciation, Elsie. May I, then, call you Elsie, inasmuch as you find Miss Prentice so objectionable?”

  “Clever perhaps, President Flint, but inaccurate. My full name, which I would not have concealed had the committee asked me it, is Loretta Claire Prentice. Loretta Claire, hence L. C.” She paused and drew a deep breath. Her garb today was that of a young woman of the day, featuring a tight bodice, a long skirt, and sleeves ending in ruffles.

  “But we are not here today to argue about names and titles,” the young woman resumed. “I matriculated at this institution for the requisite number of years. The transcript of my course work, I am certain, lies before you at this moment, President Flint. I submitted my thesis, defended it before an academic committee, saw it accepted, and participated in the commencement exercise, during which I received the degree of doctor of philosophy, magna cum laude. Surely you can imagine the shock and dismay with which I received notification that my degree had been revoked, allegedly because of my having obtained it under fraudulent conditions. Surely, President Flint, my female gender is not regarded as a fraudulent condition.”