by Cavan Scott
“Thought I was still down there, until we wandered through the front doors with old Goram.”
“You called him that before,” I said, puzzled by the name.
“My little joke, Doctor. Goram was one of the giants who created Bristol.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“According to the stories my Grampy used to tell when I was a nipper, anyhow.”
“His workmates claim our giant is called Aggie,” Holmes pointed out.
Tovey pulled a face. “Reckon he suits Goram better.”
“But what were you doing in Whitehall?” I asked.
Tovey turned a corner. “I wasn’t ready to announce my return just yet, so I headed for your place, only to find the two of you roaring off in that car of yours.”
“And so you followed us?” Holmes asked.
“For all I knew you were a part of all this, especially as I’d heard that a certain Mycroft Holmes had been behind shipping me off to Cornwall.”
“Trust me,” I muttered, “we were just as much in the dark as you.”
“Speak for yourself,” Holmes rumbled behind us.
“I decided to hold back, just to see what you were up to. Even if it was nothing dodgy, the last thing you needed was me sticking my beak in where it wasn’t wanted, but when I saw tall, dark and gruesome starting to run…”
“Inspector, I have never been so grateful for police interference in my life,” Holmes said, warmly.
“I wonder if our prisoner shares the same sentiment.” The inspector stopped in front of a solid wooden door and rapped three times. A tiny window in the door slid open, a pair of eyes peering out. Seconds later, the door opened. We entered another corridor, once again lined with heavy doors. Tovey led us to the third door on the right, and opened it to reveal a room containing a large, barren cell.
At least, it would have looked large, had the prisoner behind the bars been less imposing. Even sitting on the hard wooden bench that ran along the far wall, the monster of a man was intimidating, his long hair hanging across his blanched face.
Inspector Tovey had arranged for three chairs to be placed on our side of the bars. We chose to stand instead, waiting for Tovey to begin the interrogation.
The giant neglected even to acknowledge our presence.
“Playing dumb, are we?” Tovey said, breaking the silence. “And there was I wondering if you had a brain as big as your body. The thing is, we already have you for assault, not to mention breaking and entering. Wanting to add obstruction to the list, are you, Aggie?”
“Agares,” came the brute’s reply.
The inspector’s brow furrowed.
“Beg your pardon?”
“My name is Agares.”
“Interesting,” said Holmes, taking the middle seat so as to be positioned directly opposite the prisoner. “Agares was a demon as described in the Ars Goetia, was he not?”
The man finally looked up, fixing his yellow eyes on Holmes, although he remained tight-lipped.
“Ars Goetia?” I asked.
Tovey answered for Holmes. “A seventeenth-century grimoire, translated at the turn of the century by those swindlers Samuel Lidell MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley.”
“I am impressed, Inspector,” Holmes commented.
“You wouldn’t be if you read the translation. Bloody awful.”
Holmes laughed, although the giant made no sign that he shared the joke.
Holmes narrowed his eyes and continued. “According to the original text, the spirits of the Goetia are seventy-one demons summoned by King Solomon to do his bidding. Of the seventy-one, Agares was the devil who delighted in destroying man’s dignity.”
The prisoner’s eyes bore into Holmes and when he spoke it was but one word.
“Devil.”
The room fell quiet, neither Holmes nor the inspector choosing to fill the silence. Finally, the giant did so for them.
“That was the first word I ever heard my father speak. The first name he bestowed upon me. Names are powerful, Mr Sherlock Holmes. Mine has stayed with me ever since. If I had been painted a devil, then a devil’s title I would have. The destroyer of dignity?” Agares uttered a single mirthless laugh. “In all my long life, I have never been blessed with dignity. It seemed strangely appropriate, do you not agree?”
The man’s voice was extraordinary. So rich and deep, the voice of a poet in the body of a monster. Fascinated, I took a seat beside Holmes. Agares’s eyes now followed me.
“Dr Watson,” he said. “I must apologise to you and your wife. I meant her no harm.”
I bristled at the words. “Then why did you attack her?”
In response, the man rather piteously raised his hands. “Even after all this time, I find it hard to judge my own strength.”
“Which is why, I suppose, you nearly killed Holmes?”
“You should not have tried to entrap me.” He glanced up at the bars in front of him. “I do not appreciate being caged.”
“What were you doing in the hospital?” Tovey asked. Now those dead eyes swivelled to find him.
“The same as you, Inspector. I was searching for the truth.”
“Do you know what happened there?”
“In the operating theatre? I thought that would be clear.” He paused, before delivering his verdict. “Murder.”
“Perpetrated by you?”
The giant raised his hands so we could see them, the same perfect stitching around his wrists. “Do these look like the hands of a surgeon?”
“Then who was it?” asked Holmes. “Elsbeth Honegger?”
The man’s black lips drew back into a sneer. “Another name. Another lie.”
“And what name should she have?”
“The most accursed name on the face of all the earth,” Agares spat. “Frankenstein.”
“Ernest Balmer’s original surname.”
“Before shame overtook his family, yes. The shame my father bestowed upon them.”
“Your father?” Tovey asked.
“The man who christened you devil?”
The prisoner nodded. “Victor Frankenstein.”
I glanced at Holmes. “But that’s impossible. Victor Frankenstein was alive over a hundred years ago.”
“Unless another of the family took his name?” Holmes suggested.
Agares threw back his head and laughed. “They would rather die first.”
“Why? What was Victor Frankenstein’s crime?”
“Was he a murderer?” I asked.
“The opposite,” Agares answered. “He was a creator.”
“You’re not making much sense,” Tovey said, vocalising the confusion that he and I shared.
“You want me to tell my tale?”
“That is why we are here,” Holmes replied.
Agares smiled at the detective. “So you can pick holes in my story. The great detective.” Another laugh. “You have no idea what you ask.”
He paused, but when no one responded, he sat back against the wall and began to speak.
“It was November 1792. Victor Frankenstein was but twenty-two years old. A genius, able to see beyond the limitations of his peers. While attending university at Ingolstadt, he attempted to do what no man had been able to achieve. To create new life without a woman.”
“How?” I asked.
“Using human remains,” he replied, looking straight into my eyes. “Regenerated. Renewed.”
I squirmed in my seat. “Preposterous,” was all I could manage to say.
“Yes, I am,” came the reply.
“You are his creature,” Holmes stated.
“I am, for my sins. Or rather for the sins of my father.”
“But, as my friend pointed out, Victor Frankenstein lived over a century ago.”
“Yes,” the prisoner agreed. “And died on the eleventh of September 1799. The date is branded on my stolen heart. I saw his body with my own eyes, and wept.”
Holmes shook his head. “That is impossible. Despite y
our injuries, it is clear to see that you are no more than thirty years old yourself.”
The giant smiled once again. “Impossible. As impossible as building yourself a funeral pyre, setting it alight and finding that your flesh refuses to burn? As impossible as discovering that, as a final insult, your creator was able to pass into the beyond, but you could not follow?”
“You’re telling us that you cannot die?” scoffed Tovey. “Perhaps I should have tested the theory on the streets of Whitehall.”
“Perhaps you should still try.”
An uncomfortable silence descended once again, until Holmes spoke. “So, if we were to believe such an outrageous account—”
“Why am I searching for my kin?”
Holmes nodded.
“I have travelled the world for over a century, searching for an end to my torment.”
“For a way to die?”
“And then I hear of Elsbeth Honegger, following in Victor’s footsteps.”
I shifted in my chair, unable to keep still. “You’re saying that Elsbeth is conducting her own experiments on the dead?”
“You have seen the results with your own eyes. I assume you followed up the newspaper report I found in your study? The Hulme Giant.”
“He is like you?”
Agares spread his arms. “Surely you see the family resemblance? Seven years ago, Elsbeth was arrested.”
“For what crime?” asked Tovey.
Agares turned to face the policeman. “Grave robbing, to find fresh material for her immoral procedures.”
“Immoral?” commented Holmes. “You say that such experiments gave you life. Surely you would think them good.”
The yellow eyes swung back to Holmes. “Nothing about my existence is good, Mr Holmes. You have no idea of what it is like to know that you are an abomination, to know that you should not exist. Those men alongside whom I have toiled, building monuments to those fortunate enough to die, they have seen such terrors, witnessed atrocities that would have driven you or I mad, and yet they could hardly bring themselves to look at me on the worksite. They know, as much as I do, that I am… wrong. Unnatural. That is the gift my creator bestowed on me.”
“There’s a problem with your story,” cut in Inspector Tovey.
The prisoner smiled. “Only one?”
“Elsbeth Honegger was never arrested. I ran a check when we brought you in. She has no criminal record that we can find.”
Agares looked at the inspector in disgust. “And there I was wondering if you had a brain as big as your body.”
Tovey wrung his hands behind his back, trying not to show his displeasure at having his own words thrown back at him.
“You can be arrested, but never charged,” Agares said. “It did not reach that point before they found her. Now, which of you is going to ask me, who are they?”
We waited, reluctant to give the man any more ground.
His smile turned into a leer. “The powers and principalities. Tell me, Dr Watson, what would you do if you were sending men off to war, wave after wave, like cattle to the slaughterhouse?”
I shifted uncomfortably beneath that yellow gaze. “Work to bring the conflict to a close, I should think.”
“Would you really? Think of them, Doctor, all those boys on the front line. Fresh-faced, barely ready to shave. Terrified. And on the other side, more boys, more faces, more fear. What happens next?”
We let the question remain rhetorical. The monster looked at us, waiting for the moment, and then shouted: “Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat!”
I am ashamed to say I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“The bullets start firing,” Agares said, “the tanks start rolling. Mines. Guns. Disease – all working to the same end. Do you know what remains, when the sounds of battle fade?”
“Bodies,” said Holmes coldly.
Agares clapped slowly. “Well done, detective. Bodies. Thousands and thousands of bodies. The honoured war dead, cluttering up the trenches, spreading disease, doing the work of the enemy. What use are they?”
“Use?” Tovey spluttered. “They’ve given their lives, damn you.”
“But what if they could give their deaths,” Holmes said quietly.
I looked to my friend. “What do you mean?”
“Mr Agares,” said Holmes, “you implied that Miss Honegger was searching for bodies to recreate your creator’s experiments.”
“I did.”
“Where better to find bodies than a battlefield?”
“You cannot be serious!” I exclaimed.
“Raw materials,” Agares said. “That’s all they are to her.”
“But it wouldn’t be allowed.”
“Would it not? An army in desperate need of troops, fresh or otherwise. A body gets lost, in all the chaos. The telegram is still sent, sympathy expressed, but no body in the grave. No waste.”
“So she used the bodies to create new soldiers,” Holmes said, studying Agares’s face.
“Soldiers who cannot die,” he replied.
Not for the first time, I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. “Holmes, you cannot be giving credence to this macabre fantasy. It’s tommyrot, the lot of it.”
Holmes kept his eyes fixed on the giant. “Mr Agares believes it, wholeheartedly. Either that, or he has elevated deceit to an art form. You scratch your nose whenever you tell a lie, did you know that, Watson? You always have.”
“An increase of temperature in the face, brought on by stress,” the prisoner interjected, drawing a smile from Holmes. “Blood flows to the extremities, causing them to itch—”
“Hence the involuntary response. I see you are a learned man.”
“I like to read.”
Holmes turned his attention to Tovey. “The inspector has a similar tic. He taps his foot with every untruth. I’ve written a monograph on the subject, suggesting that the body shows more signs of deceit beneath the waist than above. Hand and eye movements are under conscious control, but the further the body part from the brain—”
“—the less aware you are that it is moving, especially during periods of stress,” Agares completed. “I should like to read it.”
“I’ll send you a copy. However, in this case, you have made not a single movement, Mr Agares. In all the time we have spoken, other than turning to look from one of us to the other, there have been no hidden signs. No twitches. No scratches. No gestures at all. Indeed, the fact that you have looked each of us in the eye tells us a great deal. Even the finest actor struggles to conceal deceit. You believe every word that you say.”
“I do.”
“Which proves nothing,” I insisted, unable to bite my tongue any longer. “A madman may believe he’s Henry the Eighth. It doesn’t mean that he is.”
“What if an inmate says that he has never been to France?” Agares said. “What of that, Doctor? What if I could prove that he had, that poor wretch in Manchester?”
Agares shifted on his bench, and Tovey took a step forward as if worried that the giant was about to throw himself against the bars. Instead the man reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a folded paper. He reached across, his arm span easily reaching the front of his cage, and offered the paper through the bars. Cautiously, Tovey took it, stepping away before opening it and passing it to Holmes.
It was a photograph, showing three soldiers in their uniforms, heads held high. Two were unknown to me, but the third…
Holmes had the same thought. “What do you say, Watson? That face, if it were scarred almost beyond recognition?”
There was no doubt. “It’s John. It has to be. So he was in France?”
“His name was Michael,” Agares informed us. He had folded his great hands in front of him again. “Michael Connick, although I think you will find the identity of the man next to him of interest. The fellow with the moustache.”
Holmes turned the photograph in the light, trying to make it out. “I don’t recognise him.”
“The
re is no reason you would, but you might know his name. Daniel Blake. Known to his friends as Danny.”
I looked at Holmes. “Ellie Grimshaw’s fiancé.”
“They died on the same day, in the same battle. Their bodies were reported lost. Telegrams sent. Sympathies expressed.”
“No bodies in the grave,” Holmes said.
My head was spinning. I took the photograph and examined it further. The soldier’s resemblance to John was extraordinary, even without the scarring. We had talked to the man, deranged though he was. He had been alive.
“She took those men,” Agares said, “and carved them apart, discarded the pieces that were of no use. And then, limb by limb, joint by joint, she made them anew. Michael Connick, I discovered, was shot in the head. Right here.” The prisoner tapped his left temple. “His brain would have been damaged beyond repair. Daniel, however, took a bullet to the face. His jaw was ripped clean off, but his brain, that was unharmed. Dead, yes, but intact, ready to be reanimated. Ready to be born again.”
I could hear no more of this. I rose to my feet. “I need to get some air. I’m sorry.”
Agares’s eyes never left me. “Difficult to accept, is it not? But I trust the person who gathered the bodies. He was French, or at least he thought he was. He was unable to remember. None of us can remember, not really. There are moments, random images that flash across the mind’s eye like pictures from a magic lantern, but you have no idea what they mean. And then there are the dreams.” Agares laughed humourlessly. “Your mind trying to process memories that should have died with the brain.
“The man who took Michael and Daniel’s remains to her, he was her firstborn, her greatest success to date. She called him Adam. The curious thing is that even though he spoke English, after a fashion, he could read French. Preferred it, in fact. When I last saw him, I gave him a book. A bribe if you will. Le Triangle d’or. He was so grateful. He kept turning it over and over in his hands. Before she removed them of course, his own mother, before she dumped his body parts into the Thames. All but one that she missed in her hurry. A hand.”
I felt the gorge rise in my throat.
“Is it all becoming clear to you, Doctor?” Agares sneered. “Are you beginning to understand?”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and rushed for the door. The man couldn’t be telling the truth. None of it was possible.