Such Wicked Intent aovf-2

by Kenneth Oppel

  The pit demon’s head locks on to the place on the floor where my body must rest in the real world. As though I’m already dying, I feel a dreadful numbness seep through me-from my feet, through my legs, up my torso.

  The pit demon begins to lower itself to the floor, folding itself into a grotesque facsimile of my body’s shape in the real world.

  With a final surge of strength I rush toward the windows. But with a flick of its arm, the pit demon flings a noose of butterflies around me, tightening and tightening so I can scarcely move. The window is no more than ten feet away, but it might as well be ten miles.

  We will all die.

  I hear a cry and look over to Konrad, hunched in pain over the pit demon, his sword raised high. He brings the sword down on the pit god’s hand, cutting it clean off. My ring springs onto the floor and rolls.

  As the demon shrieks in dismay, the butterflies around me seem to lose their strength, and I pitch forward, hurling myself at the balcony doors. I grasp the handle and throw the windows wide.

  Mist roars in, making a maelstrom of the room. As I cower, I watch butterflies being sucked out of the house in vast black swaths, the mist all the while coalescing into something huge and powerful.

  What have I done?

  The mist surges across the room toward the pit demon with the ferocity of a cobra. As the demon rises to its feet, the mist slams against it, scouring away the last of the butterflies until, finally, the pit monster is stripped bare, revealing something so ghastly that my mind cannot quite comprehend it.

  The great column of mist wraps itself around the pit demon and splits into multiple heads, like those of a Hydra. Viciously the pit demon fights back, slashing one head with its claws, clamping its serrated teeth into another head until it goes limp and disintegrates to vapor.

  In the whirl of the spectral storm, I’m only dimly aware of Henry and Elizabeth and Konrad watching, stunned, like me, as these two supernatural creatures roar and shriek and battle, and I’m not sure which is the stronger.

  The pit demon crushes yet another of the mist’s many heads, and in horror I watch as the other heads wither. The single column of mist seems to loosen its grip around the creature, and the demon rears to its full height and gives a shriek of triumph.

  At that moment the mist flexes and, with a surge, plunges into the demon’s open mouth, pouring more and more of itself inside. The demon flails about, gagging, clawing uselessly at the seemingly endless torrent.

  A gaping hole bursts in the demon’s belly, and mist streams out. Then its thigh erupts with mist, and next its shoulder. The monster buckles over, collapsing onto the floor as yet another column of mist bursts out through the top of its ghastly head. Its entire body explodes then, mist swirling, as the demon’s remains are sucked out through the window.

  The storm calms, but the mist thickens once more and seeps through the air toward me. It swirls around and around me, as if sniffing, and I feel its tremendous strength. Does it remember how I butchered one of its tentacles? Does it see some dark seam in me worthy of annihilation? Reluctantly it leaves me, eddying around Henry and Elizabeth very briefly before flowing over Konrad.

  It envelops him utterly for a moment, and then gathers itself and retreats in a great rush through the open window.

  An impossible silence fills the room.

  I rush over to Konrad. His eyes are closed. “Konrad,” I whisper, shaking him. He stirs and looks at me, then at his own body. The frightening black rents in his arms and chest are healed.

  “Your bodies,” he says anxiously, and I suddenly remember the ticking of the spirit clock.

  With a shaking hand Henry drags it from his pocket and frowns. A residue of mist wafts up from the clock, and its glass face is frosted over. Henry scrapes away the ice and holds the clock to his ear.

  “It’s not ticking at all,” he says, “but-”

  “I don’t feel any weakness,” says Elizabeth.

  I come for a closer look. “The little claw’s flexed, like it’s about to tap, but it’s not pointing quite straight up.”

  “Surely our time has run out,” says Elizabeth.

  “Or paused,” I say, for there is the strangest feeling of time suspended, a breath calmly taken but not yet exhaled. The mist seems to have frozen time for us.

  Konrad stands, and Elizabeth rushes to him and throws herself into his arms.

  “How good it is to hold you,” she says, pressing her face into his neck.

  I watch as they hold each other, and touch each other’s faces. He kisses her mouth, brushes the water that spills from her eyes, and what they whisper to each other I cannot hear.

  “I’ll come back,” she says.

  Konrad shakes his head.

  “I’ll come back,” she repeats.

  “You mustn’t,” he says. He looks at me. “You especially, Victor. Let this be an end of it. There’s no true way to bring me back.”

  I walk to him and hold out my ring. I hear Elizabeth draw in her breath.

  “Take it,” I tell my twin.

  Very slowly he takes my hand and closes my fingers around the ring.

  “This isn’t how it’s meant to end,” I say. “I had a dream, of you and me, having an adventure, and-”

  “We’ve had our adventures,” he says. “Enough for two lives.”

  He takes my right hand. “Does it hurt even in here?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Be done with it now. You’ve no reason to blame yourself for my death.”

  I look away.

  “Victor? Do you hear me? It was never your duty to save me. Or bring me back from the dead.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Henry,” he says. “I’ve never seen more valor. I don’t think I could’ve charged that thing the way you did in the chapel.”

  Henry smiles, his old smile.

  “But how can we leave you here alone?” Elizabeth says miserably.

  “Oh, I’m not staying here,” Konrad says. “I am going for a walk. It was what I first wanted to do when I arrived. Only, Analiese-I mean Wilhelm-stopped me.”

  He gives Elizabeth one last, long kiss. Then he hugs Henry warmly. Last he opens his arms to me. He doesn’t feel cold. He’s the same as me.

  “No more of this,” he whispers into my ear.

  I try to laugh.

  “Promise me you’ll hatch no more mad schemes.”

  I hold on to him tightly just a moment longer.

  “I knew I’d get no promise from my little brother,” he says.

  Then he turns to the open balcony and steps outside into the mist. The moment he does so, the mist closes around him, not ferociously but gently, like a traveling cloak, and he is gone.

  The house was bustling, things being packed, things being cloaked with dust sheets. We were to leave the next morning, first toward Venice and then, after several weeks, farther south, to where the healing sun would wait for us.

  In the privacy of my room, I packed a valise for the things I wanted with me on the coach.

  I looked at my notebook, the one I’d kept when I’d had the spirit butterflies upon me and was reading like a madman. I scarcely recognized my scribbling now. There were some passages I was simply unable to read, and those I could read didn’t make a jot of sense to me. There seemed to be information not just about turning lead to gold, but about many other things too, including the mysteries of the human body. Numbers and notations and equations that might as well have been the hieroglyphs of a lost civilization.

  Nothing good had come out of the spirit world with me. Nothing.

  It was just gibberish all along, a mockery of knowledge spun like a cocoon about me by those butterflies.

  I ripped out the pages from the notebook and held them close to the candle flame.

  And yet I couldn’t burn them.

  What if the knowledge was real but I wasn’t clever enough yet to understand it?

  Quietly, as though I were keeping a secret from myself,
I folded the pages and locked them away in my drawer.

  Later.

  That evening came on stormy, and Henry, Elizabeth, and I stood under the awning of the great balcony and looked over the rain-pelted lake. Mist obscured the mountains, and I couldn’t help wondering if Konrad were somehow in it.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I said to Henry. “Your talisman. You never did tell us what it was.”

  “Oh,” he said, a little sheepishly. “It was just some inspiring words. I don’t mind showing you now.”

  He reached into his pocket and drew out the bit of paper for me.

  I unfolded it and read, “‘I will drink life to the lees/ To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’ You wrote these?”

  He nodded.

  “They’re very fine,” said Elizabeth.

  “It suits you well,” I said.

  “We’ll miss you on your journey,” Elizabeth told him.

  “And I’ll miss you on yours,” he replied. “I wish my father and I were going to Italy and not Holland. I’ve heard the winters can be quite dismal.”

  “I wish you were coming with us,” she said.

  He blushed. “Do you?”

  “Of course she does,” I said, wondering if he still harbored ambitions to win her heart. And then I added, “You’re practically a brother to her.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder, and he looked at me wryly. Then we both smiled, as two friends do before a fencing match.

  The rain came harder, pockmarking the lake. The wind picked up, and I felt the great cool drops against my skin. Light flickered behind the clouds.

  “You should come in now,” Father said, joining us on the balcony. “You’ll be soaked in a minute.”

  “That lightning,” I asked him, “what form of matter is it?”

  “Electricity,” he said. “A discharge of energy between oppositely charged particles. It’s a relatively new science, a potent and promising one.”

  A great fork suddenly impaled the lake. From the sky came a deafening crack, like someone taking a chisel to the very heavens. There was another flash, and about fifty yards along our shoreline a massive oak erupted in a stream of blinding fire. When the light vanished, the tree was nothing more than a blasted stump.

  “Come inside, Victor,” Elizabeth said from the doorway, and held out her hand to me. But I hesitated.

  “Yes,” I said, “in just a moment.” And I turned back to the storm and thought: Such astonishing power.

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