This Dark endeavor taovf-1

by Kenneth Oppel

I stopped before I reached the doorway, for I could tell from Maria’s hushed tones they were talking about something terribly serious.

  “… might be of some help,” Maria was saying, “for many say there is great power in it.”

  “You love him, as we all do, Maria,” Mother replied. “But you know that Alphonse cannot bear talk of alchemy. He thinks it primitive nonsense, and I am inclined to agree with him. Please do not speak of this to him.”

  “Very well, ma’am,” said Maria.

  “I know you mean well, Maria. Do not think me angry.”

  “No, ma’am. It’s just, I overheard what the doctor said about… not knowing how to treat him, and how, if he continues to weaken…”

  My blood congealed in my veins, and I strained to listen. What had the doctor said? But there were no more words spoken, only sniffing, and little sobs, and I sensed the two of them were embracing and comforting each other. Then came my mother’s voice, a little shaky.

  “You are a dear, dear member of our family, Maria,” she said.

  “I could not love him more were he my own son.”

  “We are doing all we can. Alphonse has heard of another doctor, a Dr. Murnau, who’s a specialist in rare diseases at the university in Ingolstadt. We’ve sent a messenger to make inquiries.”

  “I will keep praying, then, ma’am,” said Maria, “if that does not offend you.”

  “Of course not, Maria, certainly not. I must confess, I have found myself praying too of late. I doubt anyone hears but myself, though.”

  “With respect, ma’am, someone is listening. You mustn’t despair so.”

  I turned and silently walked away down the corridor, for I did not want them to know I’d been eavesdropping.

  I desperately wished I knew what Maria had said earlier, about alchemy.

  Did she know of some treatment that might help Konrad?

  That night as I slept, my mind took me to Father’s library, and there I sat, surrounded by medical books, struggling with Latin and Greek, striving to cure Konrad.

  I turned a page and there, embedded in the thick paper, was a seed. With great excitement I plucked it out and cradled it in my cupped hands, for I knew I had to plant it immediately or it would perish. But the door to the great hallway was locked, and though I rattled it and shouted, no one came to open it.

  My panic grew, for the seed was already starting to decay.

  There was a stirring of air, though no windows were open, and I looked up across the library to see the secret door ajar.

  I’d promised Father, but what else could I do? The seed had to be planted, and I knew there was a well, and water, and earth down there.

  The seed gripped in my hand, I hurried through the door to find no splintered planks but a swirling marble staircase. At the bottom, bathed in impossible sunlight, was the well, surrounded by fragrant and fertile soil.

  I dug a small hole with my hands and planted the seed. Almost at once a green tendril shot up, thickening and sending out slender branches-and from the branches dangled little white bones.

  I was frightened by this and stepped backward, but I could see that, growing among the bones, there was also fruit-red and luscious. And from the highest branch-for the tree was already taller than me-blossomed a book.

  I started to climb up, but the tree kept growing, taking the book higher still.

  I climbed faster, and with increasing desperation and rage, knowing that I must have that book.

  But I could not reach it.

  “We must return to the Dark Library,” I said fiercely.

  It was the morning after my dream, and we were hiking in the hills behind Bellerive-Elizabeth, Henry, and me. The day could not have been more beautiful. An unblemished blue sky spanned the white-capped mountain ranges encircling the lake. Everywhere things were growing: Wildflowers sprang from the fields, trees bloomed, new leaves unfolded from branches. Life everywhere-and Konrad trapped at home in his sickbed.

  “For what purpose, Victor?” Elizabeth asked.

  “So we can heal Konrad,” I said simply.

  “Isn’t that best left to the doctors?” said Henry.

  “Damn the doctors!” I said. “They’re little more than barbers with pills. I wouldn’t trust them to groom my dog! Konrad’s getting weaker by the day. We must take action.”

  “Action?” said Henry. “What manner of action?”

  “For someone whose imagination is so ripe, you can be a bit dim sometimes, Henry,” I said. “We must seek our own cure.”

  Elizabeth looked genuinely shocked. “Victor, we made your father a promise-,” began Elizabeth.

  “That he would never find us in the library again. Yes. Those were his exact words. I don’t intend to break that promise. He will not find us in it.”

  “That is not what he meant, and you know it!”

  I waved my hand impatiently. “There is learning in there that has not been tried.”

  Henry nervously rubbed at his blond hair. “Your father said it was all rubbish.”

  I snorted. “Think, you two. Those books were kept hidden because they scared people. Why? There must be something to them, some kind of power. Silly, harmless things do not scare people.”

  “But what if they are harm ful?” Elizabeth asked.

  “What options do we have left to us?” I demanded. “Shall we watch Dr. Bartonne apply leeches once more? Or dead doves? Or perhaps we can ask dear Dr. Lesage to scratch at his wig and mix the dust with another vial of Frau Eisner’s invigorating tinctures.”

  “Your father-,” Elizabeth began, but I cut her off.

  “My father is a brilliant man, but he cannot know everything. You yourself said he can be wrong.”

  I felt as though a door had been cut into the air before me, and I had passed through it, never to turn back. All my life I had assumed that Father knew everything. I had wanted him to know everything. It had made me feel safe. But he’d been confident the doctors would heal Konrad-and they had not.

  “We must try other means,” I said. “Extreme times call for extreme measures. We must be willing to take risks if we want to save Konrad’s life.”

  “You truly think it a matter of life and death?” said Elizabeth, and I felt a stab of guilt, for I could see that she had not thought of it in such terms before-or she’d avoided doing so by sheer will. She looked scared.

  “All I know is that the doctors are baffled. They are worried.”

  Henry looked away uneasily toward the Jura Mountains, but Elizabeth met my gaze with grave determination.

  “The Church condemned those books,” she said.

  “The Church condemned Galileo for saying the sun did not revolve around the Earth. They can be wrong too.”

  “The place frightens me,” she said.

  Henry swallowed and looked uneasily from Elizabeth to me. “Are you so sure these forbidden books hold an answer?”

  “All I know is this: If I don’t at least try, I will go mad. I can’t bear it a day longer. And I need the both of you,” I said. “Your knowledge of Latin and Greek is better than mine.”

  I could see Elizabeth hesitate, and then something changed in her eyes.

  “When?” she said.

  “Tonight.”

  “Good,” she said. “Let us meet at an hour past midnight.”

  Not long after the church bells of Bellerive had tolled the hour of one, the three of us met in the hallway and made our way toward the library. Henry kept glancing about with nervous, birdlike movements, peering beyond the flickering light of our candles as though expecting something to swoop down on him. Whenever he stayed at the chateau, he complained of strange rustlings at night. And despite our constant assurances, he still believed the place to be haunted.

  “I sense something,” he whispered. “I’m telling you, there’s some presence up there, I think.”

  “We should tell him the truth,” Elizabeth said to me with a sidelong, mischievous wink.

  “Truth a
bout what?” squeaked Henry.

  I sighed. “Cousin Theodore.”

  Henry’s eyes snapped to me. “You never told me about Cousin Theodore.”

  I shrugged. “He died young, and this was his favorite place to play.”

  “So you’ve seen him?” demanded Henry.

  “Well, part of him,” I replied. “He was, well…”

  “It was a dreadful accident,” said Elizabeth solemnly, and then giggled.

  “You scoundrels,” said Henry, narrowing his eyes. “You know my imagination’s excitable, but go ahead, torment me.”

  “I’m sorry, Henry,” said Elizabeth, squeezing his arm affectionately.

  We all fell silent as we neared and passed Konrad’s room, for we did not want to disturb him, or wake Mother, who we knew was sleeping at his bedside tonight. There was scarcely a moment of the day when my brother’s illness did not inhabit my thoughts. Passing his bedroom, I imagined him sleeping in his bed, his body fighting and fighting. A great sorrow welled up in me. I was glad of the shadows, for my eyes were moist.

  We were all of us in our nightclothes, swathed in robes, for nights on the lake were sometimes cold when a northern wind brought with it a glacial chill.

  “Have you ever realized,” said Henry nervously to me, gazing at the flickering portraits in the grand hallway, “what a grim bunch your ancestors were? Look at that fellow there! Have you ever seen such a grimace?”

  “That’s the Frankenstein smile,” whispered Elizabeth.

  “And who’s this fellow here?” Henry asked, pointing.

  Looking up at the oldest of all the portraits, I felt a sudden chill. “That,” I said, “is Wilhelm Frankenstein.”

  “The alchemist?” Henry whispered.

  I nodded, studying the oil painting. Strange that you could pass a certain thing every day of your life and never once look properly at it. In the candlelight the portrait glowed warmly. Wilhelm still looked like a young man, and he stared just past us with a small, slightly disdainful smile on his lips. He had a secret and would not share it. He wore a black doublet with a white ruffled collar, and a black cap in the Spanish style. He stood, one slim hand upon his hip, the other holding a book upon a table, one finger keeping his place within the pages…

  “We should go,” Elizabeth said, tugging at my arm.

  “Yes,” I murmured, pulling my eyes away.

  As we entered the moonlit library, my heart gave a terrified lurch. Father sat in a leather armchair by the window, glaring at us. But no-I exhaled. It was only shadows, shaped no doubt by my guilt, for I knew I was defying him.

  Elizabeth found the shelf and once more triggered the secret latch. There was a dull thunk — louder than I remembered-and the bookcase swung inward.

  “Remarkable,” breathed Henry.

  “Just wait,” I told him as we all slipped inside. His reaction was satisfying indeed.

  “Good Lord,” he said. “You didn’t mention the steps were quite so flimsy.”

  “They’re perfectly safe,” I assured him, leading the way.

  At the door, as I prepared to put my hand through the hole, I felt some of my confidence abandon me.

  “Do you want me to do it this time?” Elizabeth asked.

  That spurred me on. “No, no,” I said, and thrust in my arm. At once the eerie hand seized me. I battled against instinctive revulsion and this time did not fight but merely pumped the hand up and down.

  Our greeting done, the door opened itself.

  “And in we go,” I said with a smile.

  Truly the Dark Library was well named, for it seemed to suck at our candle flames, making them pucker and smoke. I felt something new, something I had not noticed during our first visit in the middle of the day. Mingled with the mildew and mustiness, there was fear, excitement-and an unshakable sense of hungry expectation.

  “Let’s get to work,” I said, bringing my light to the shelves of cracked leather tomes. “We are looking for anything on the subject of healing.”

  “What a place,” Henry murmured.

  We cleared space on one of the dusty tables. After gathering books, we perched on stools, spreading books all around us and passing them to and fro if we needed help translating or reading a script so spidery that it was all but invisible in the half-light of our candles.

  “Here is something,” said Henry, and I eagerly looked up. “It is in Occulta Philosophia. ”

  “That’s the book I pulled out on our first visit!” I said to Elizabeth. “The one by Cornelius Agrippa.”

  “What have you found?” she asked Henry.

  His eyes skimmed over the page, and he began to read, slowly translating from the Latin. “‘From the grand scholarship of ages past, and my own modern learning, I have created a formulation… that has great power to remedy all human suffering. And not only to remedy, but to prolong life… so that he who imbibes it will avoid all deaths but those of a violent nature, and will enjoy a multitude of years such as Methuselah.’”

  “Methuselah?” I said, frowning. “I do not know the fellow.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “Have you never read a Bible, Victor?”

  “I can’t keep all the names straight.”

  “Methuselah,” Elizabeth said, “lived a very, very long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Nine hundred and sixty-nine years,” Henry answered, still looking at the tome before him.

  “Read on,” I said impatiently.

  “‘And so,’” Henry continued, “‘after many years of failed attempts have I at last this Elixir of Life perfected, and herewith have transcribed it, in the manner of Paracelsus, for all the ages.’”

  I lunged across the table and snatched the book from Henry. “Elixir of Life! This is just the thing we seek. Where is the recipe?”

  I had the book before me now, my eyes trying to find the right place. I saw the Latin text, found the words “ Vita Elixir,” but afterward came such a language that I had never set eyes upon.

  “What is this?” I demanded, jabbing at the vellum page.

  Henry stood and leaned over the tome. “If you hadn’t snatched it away, I might have had a better look. As it is, I do not know.”

  “Elizabeth?” I said. “Can you make sense of this?”

  She moved her stool closer. “It is not Aramaic,” she said. “Nor Sanskrit.”

  It was a strange-looking thing, to be sure, all curves and angles and sudden flourishes. It went on for ten pages.

  “Gibberish,” I muttered, and flipped ahead, trying to find some kind of glossary or key to its translation.

  “You are too hasty, Victor,” said Elizabeth. “As always.”

  She sounded just like Konrad then, and I shot her a resentful scowl.

  “Go back,” she said. “Is there not a clue in what came before?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Carefully she turned back the pages. “Here. He wrote, ‘I have transcribed it in the manner of Paracelsus.’ What is Paracelsus?”

  “Or who?” I said.

  I was almost sure I’d seen that word on the spine of a book. I stood and hurried back to the shelves, my eyes scouring the bindings.

  If not for the sharp shadow cast by my candle, I would have missed it, for the gold of the tooled letters had flaked away altogether, leaving only a series of indentations.

  Paracelsus.

  And then, farther down on the spine, again almost without color, the title in German, The Archidoxes of Magic.

  “Paracelsus,” I said, dragging the volume from the shelf and giving it a triumphant shake above my head. Immediately I wished I hadn’t, for a shower of sooty fragments rained down upon me.

  “Carefully, Victor!” Elizabeth said, rushing over and taking the book in her own hands. Sheepishly, I let her have it.

  She carried it back to the table, and now I could see that this book had obviously been burned. A big triangular section of the cover was charred and crumbling.

  “You t
hink Agrippa’s strange letters were invented by Paracelsus?” I asked Elizabeth.

  “Let us hope,” she said.

  “Why would it be burned?” Henry asked.

  “Father said it was all thought witchcraft,” I said. “No doubt it was gathered up by the Church or the townspeople and thrown into a bonfire.”

  “But Wilhelm Frankenstein rescued it,” said Elizabeth.

  “You Frankensteins are so enlightened,” said Henry with a nervous chuckle, and we glanced about, as though that long-dead person might still be here in the Dark Library with us, watching.

  Very gently Elizabeth opened the cover. The frontispiece was a portrait of a man, but his features were hard to make out, for the page was half burned. Only a skeletal trace of his stout face remained. Either he was wearing a strange, angled hat, or his skull was of a most bizarre and deformed shape. His eyes, strangely, were still clear. They were shrewd and confiding, and seemed to be looking out at us, intensely.

  I watched Elizabeth, and could see that the disturbing image had the same effect on her, for her lips trembled a bit.

  “It’s like a man who’s been terribly burned, and only a ghost of his former self survives,” she whispered.

  “It is Paracelsus, though, no question,” said Henry, pointing to the bottom of the portrait, where, like words painted upon a wooden sign, it read:

  FAMOSO DOCTOR PARACELSVS

  The doctor’s body had not been so damaged by the fire. With a shudder I saw that one of Paracelsus’s hands rested over the edge of his own portrait, his fingers curled over the top of the little sign bearing his name. It was just part of the painting, of course, but it made it seem like he could simply step out of the picture.

  If he so wanted.

  I swallowed back my unease.

  “He was a German physician,” said Elizabeth, reading the tiny print beneath the portrait. “Also an astrologer and alchemist.”

  I began, with great care, turning pages. It was an agonizing, heartbreaking business, for many of them had been fused together by the flames, and just the action of turning them tore them free and sent silky bits of ash floating up.

  On many pages it was really only the lower half, near the binding, that was even legible.

  “We are destroying the book even as we examine it,” said Henry miserably.