by Andrew Pyper
Then it all comes back.
It’s the color of the lampshade from the room’s only light that triggers her memory. The beige-softened bulb that revealed Lionel’s face before the man stepped out of the kitchen and placed the hooked claws on his shoulder. The light that allowed her to see the horror in Edmundston’s eyes, the knowledge that he was about to die and had delivered her to the same fate for no other reason than the man had asked him to.
But the man hadn’t killed Lily. He’d put her to sleep.
Some kind of instant hypnosis that dropped her to the floor and left her dreamless and still for—how long? She checks her purse for her phone to see what time it is but it’s gone. Which means she can’t call 911. Edmundston, she knows, doesn’t have a landline. And she guesses the man took Edmundston’s cell just like he’d taken hers. She could check to make sure, but a combination of revulsion and the cautions of her interior voice prevents her.
Everything around you is wet paint. Touch it and you leave a mark behind.
She tries not to, but can’t leave without looking at the body. She needs to know. A part of her still clings to the possibility that what she thinks she’s recalling is only something she’d dreamed. So she turns once she’s on her feet. Edmundston is there, a shrunken, desiccated version of the living man. Then she sees the dark spill of blood around his head and remembers that half of him, the liquid insides, had been stolen by the man with the silver teeth.
When she opens the door onto the street Lily stands there wondering what should be done first. The police should be involved, she knows this. But she’s not sure if pay phones exist anymore and instinct tells her it would be a bad decision to stop a stranger or hail a cab.
Go home, her voice tells her. You’ll be able to think there.
It isn’t far. Once she finds Second Avenue she starts walking uptown. Then she pulls the shoes from her feet and runs.
In times of trouble, Lily makes lists. She’s still writing one in her head—call police, take one of her pills before hiding them, check e-mail to see if anyone has sent news of how the man got out of the Kirby—when she arrives at her apartment and makes sure all three of her locks are secure once she gets inside.
Later, she’ll wonder why it never occurred to her that the man might be inside waiting for her.
It may have been that the door showed no sign of being tampered with, and as she lives on the sixth floor, there is no other way he could have gotten in. It may be the sense that he wouldn’t have had the time—though when she passed a clock in a corner store window on her way home it showed 5:42 A.M., which meant she hadn’t just fainted, but had been out at least two hours. It may have been that she didn’t think the man would come here to kill her when he could have done that at Dr. Edmundston’s.
Whichever it was, it made finding the blood on her kitchen counter a surprise.
A snaking smear at the base of her knife block, as if a hand had found something there and pulled casually away, leaving its mark behind. That’s when she sees that the block’s largest slot is empty. Her knife. The big Henckel she only used to tackle the tough stuff, the plastic packaging and pineapples.
That’s where she finds the letter telling her not to go to the police. Hastily written on a memo pad using a bloodstained ballpoint pulled from a kitchen drawer.
Lily rushes to the bathroom to be sick but nothing comes up.
No good would come from looking in the mirror over the sink but she does it anyway. It’s a need to know this is really her seeing these things. If this was a particularly convincing nightmare, looking at her reflection would be the moment when she would instead see a goat’s head, or her dead mother’s face, or the man’s—something that would be shocking and horrible but reveal the past hours for the unreal narrative she hoped it was. Instead, she’s met by herself. Unfamiliar makeup applied for her date, now smeared from sex and tears. She turns on the water to wash it off and finds blood on her hands.
This time when she retches everything comes up.
She slouches out of the bathroom and sees what she hadn’t the first time through the apartment. Pages. The first couple written in ink relatively new in appearance, the rest on stock so old and gray it looks like the peeled-away layers of a wasps’ nest. Sheets roughly torn from a journal, a stack of them on her tiny dining room table against the wall outside the kitchen, the only thing on its surface other than her ceramic rooster-and-chicken salt and pepper shakers.
The handwriting is his. She’s sure of it. The formal cursive, faded by time, the exposure to sun and redryings from the occasions rain found the paper, leaving craters of blurred ink behind.
Before she decides whether she should or not, she reads the first page.
And stops.
She searches every room of the apartment again, as if his words in her head are capable of materializing him out of thin air. In the kitchen, she wipes the counter with a sponge until it can hold no more before squeezing the blood out into the sink. She drops it as if only now recognizing its scalding heat, pours dish detergent over it, and turns on the tap. The water pinkening and swirling down the drain.
She goes to her bedroom and opens the jewelry box where her pills are. Over the months—has it been longer?—she’s talked herself into seeing her relationship to them as essentially harmless, no more worrying than an after-work glass of wine or secret cigarette on a tough day. She takes them so occasionally and in such low doses they work as a placebo more than anything else. Still, she never opens the box that keeps her few sets of earrings and necklaces and pulls out the prescription bottle without a thrill of shame.
Every time Lily holds a tablet in her palm she thinks of her mother. This was her drug too.
It’s all in the coroner’s report. Her history of turnstiling in and out of psych wards across the country for vaguely described “episodes,” the refusal of extended treatment, the resistance to any naming of her condition. And Haloperidol. The antipsychotic she stuck with the longest, though only God knows whether it helped or not.
Lily opens the bottle, shakes out a white tab. Swallows it dry.
He was here.
She looks around her bedroom as if it was lit by a blinding new light.
The psycho was in your apartment. You get that?
She feels the drug dissolving, spreading out through her blood. Silencing. Soon her head will be muffled. But not before one last declaration of fact.
He. Was. Here.
Who is he?
A man who sees himself in supernatural terms. She has had clients who’ve believed themselves superheroes, demons, time travelers. This one’s claims are relatively conservative by comparison.
It would be easy to diagnose him—humanize him completely in her mind—if not for the fact that Lily has seen a real monster once.
And now, in a bolt of memory, she sees it again. The hulking, bent shape of it in the cabin’s open doorway. The billows of hot breath exploding from its nostrils. The eyes yellow and sticky as if weeping an infectious discharge.
The man who killed Dr. Edmundston wasn’t the monster. The creature the six-year-old Lily Dominick saw standing over her mother was bigger, stronger, inhuman. Yet hadn’t the man clenched Dr. Edmundston’s shoulder with a steel claw? Hadn’t he placed a set of needle-sharp dentures into his mouth before tearing into the skin of her mentor’s throat?
It’s true that the man who murdered Lionel Edmundston has a most extraordinary mental disorder, one who takes his delusion of monstrosity so seriously he has fashioned tools to transform himself, a killing costume. But anyone with a glove of blades and syringes for incisors and a sufficiently diseased mind could have pulled off the same trick. You don’t have to be immortal to be sick.
Otherwise, his connection to her is coincidental. Some research on her parents’ names. An escape. He must have gone to a place where he knew Edmundston would be, a bar where men meet other men perhaps, and the two went back to his apartment together. Which is where L
ionel’s nightmare began.
He hadn’t hypnotized her. He’d stepped toward her, a woman who had just witnessed a horrific attack, and she blacked out. Then he daubed incriminating blood on her, took their phones, and proceeded to her apartment where he found a way in and addressed his insane confession to her.
A confession she could show to the police. But who would believe it? She was there, saw all of it happen, and she can barely believe it herself.
And he has her knife.
Which means what, Doctor? Which means you do what?
Lily drifts over to the apartment’s living room window that looks down onto 111th Street. Either he’s an expert locksmith or he came in this way. There’s a fire escape screwed into the brick fifteen feet to the left and a narrow ledge running the length of the exterior wall. It’s possible he climbed up by that route and shimmied along to her window, pulling it open. All you’d need is good balance and the absence of fear.
Here.
This is what brings the vertigo, sends her back to sit at the table, her hands clenching the sides as if she is reaching the top of a roller coaster and beginning the descent. He was here. The man she’d recognized as different from the rest got out of the Kirby and came to sit in the chair she sits in now. Which makes everything he’s done all about her.
She looks at her landline phone on the sofa, resting there like a cat in a pale band of dawn sunlight. The police would take her out of this. They would know what to do next.
But she doesn’t move. Not yet.
Soon, the phone will ring. Someone from the Kirby will tell her one of her clients broke out. She will be advised to be cautious—a warning the hospital is required to give employees in situations of this kind. Later, someone will find Dr. Edmundston’s body. In the morgue they will discover the strange puncture wounds in the neck along with the larger wounds to the body. But before that, minutes from now, when the sun is high enough it can’t hide behind the building across the street anymore and her apartment brightens, she will tell the police everything she saw, everything she knows.
Or she won’t.
There’s still time to decide.
Still time to read the pages he left for her.
New York
June 16, 2016
I am not a myth. Not a story, fairy tale, or legend.
I am not a human being, though I am almost always mistaken for one, and am composed of human parts, among other things, some I understand and others that remain uncanny, even to me.
A name.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s better that I don’t have one. There’s a power in that which is only occasionally glimpsed, tiny pieces of witnessed reality that force one into imagining the whole. Over the centuries it has been different things: gods, dragons, witches. It’s one of the reasons I have elected to carry on.
For now, the world can call me by my preferred alias. The warrior angel.
Michael.
There are books about me. Classics of their kind. I am Michael in none of them, but it is me who stands behind their fabrications nonetheless. It is my life’s work, though I have gone unacknowledged for my part in it.
Victor F.’s unnamed creature. Dr. Jekyll’s other self. The Transylvanian Count.
Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker.
They have their fame, though it cannot reach them where they are now, down in the cold dirt of their graves. Unlike them, I am alive.
And unlike the monsters they are credited with creating, I am real.
London
October 12, 1812
How to begin, when one was made and not born?
Everything is in question, I see now, when it comes to telling a story. What to include and omit, where to linger, the moments to pronounce as turning points. Who to deem the hero and the villain.
Not least, in what language ought this strange document be written? Though it will remain forever private, I nevertheless see this record as belonging to the world, so I am inclined to dictate in the speech of the land where I now find myself. The first books I read were what the doctor happened to bring me from the floors of the house above my prison: anatomical texts, the poems of Berzsenyi, the Bible. But also a selection of Shakespeare’s plays in English. He couldn’t read it, and must have viewed his giving it to me as an empty gesture, or perhaps a joke at my expense. But I learned the language of the Bard through repeated study, and since modified it to match the talk of the high street, pub, and bawdy house over these past weeks wandering the lengths of England.
So, to begin. Begin at the beginning.
I was made in the cellar of the Chief Physician’s residence on the grounds of the Lipótmezei Sanatorium on the outskirts of Budapest sometime in the fall of 1811.
Every other human being understands their Creator to be an all-powerful abstraction, caring and in possession of a plan for your existence. I, on the other hand, was created by a man, one with a dark beard and whose breath smelled of onions.
What I know of my making is limited to what the doctor—Dr. Tivadar Eszes—told me, which, while I have no reason to believe untrue, is certainly incomplete. Given the authority he had over the operation in the hills off Huvösvölgyi Road, he had unquestioned access to every building, every ward, every room. Every patient.
For some years Dr. Eszes had been conducting experiments in the basement of his residence, a handsome yellow structure in the baroque style directly overlooking the main hospital. To be a doctor in that country—and especially the head of the national madhouse—was to conduct ad hoc trials of all types. Some of the procedures I witnessed would not be out of place in the torture rooms of the medieval past. Brain surgeries conducted by way of sinus or ear canal. Mercury and lead given as medicine. To say nothing of the more casual degradations of the asylum: starvation, castration, rape.
But Dr. Eszes was a man of unique inventiveness. His prescriptions went a good deal further than the ingestion of this oil over that beetle, or recommending hysterectomy here over a bloodletting there. He was ambitious in the truest sense, which is to say he may have been insane himself.
Outside of his official responsibilities of housing and treating the most damaged minds of Hungary, his prevailing obsession was to return life to the dead. And more than this: to invest this reanimated creature with features of superhuman enhancement. Greater strength, intelligence. Hypnotic powers of persuasion. The most acute animal reflexes and instincts. Immortality too. His thinking was that if he could assemble such a being, a working prototype he could parade before the leadership in government, he would be given the resources to make an army of them. Refined Magyar blood emanating from the Hungarian capital and spreading over the map of Europe! Dr. Eszes was nothing if not a patriot. A sadist too. A genius. For isn’t genius defined by the capacity to create something without precedent?
The good doctor would use his patients for raw material. This gave him the advantage of access, as each new corpse could be delivered to his home within minutes of their final breaths. The disadvantage was that drawing bodies from this pool meant he was working from faulty parts from the outset.
Yet even in this he was confident he had a solution. He required only the body to be human. The skin, bones, face. To this he would add the blood of what he considered to be the perfect animal, along with a serum of his own devising injected via the orbit of the eye. The result was intended to be much more than the parlor trick of bringing a dead lunatic back to life. It was an altogether new and better creature he foresaw rising from the gore-slick slab! It was Hungary itself—ever divided, ever claimed and abandoned by outsiders—united in a man-that-is-better-than-man!
I was, one year ago, that creature who rose from the slab.
Needless to say, the result was not exactly as the doctor had envisioned.
Of all the things that could have prevented his success it wasn’t the biological or chemical or surgical processes that failed him. It was a disease of the spirit.
Just as science’s greatest a
chievement stood before him, Dr. Eszes looked into my eyes and instantly saw a wrongness. Not the soul of a superman, but the dead stare of a devil.
My creator was an alienist. An expert on diseases of the mind. He was also an alchemist, perhaps the last of them, and in creating me, the greatest of them.
Dr. Eszes stood on the line that marked the end of primitive sorcery and the beginning of modern science. We are alike in this, the doctor and me. “Father” and “son.” For as much as I am a creature of chemistry, I am also the embodiment of the demonic, a presence that is older than Earth itself.
The one patient of Dr. Eszes’s who was used in my assembly—the donor body—was a young murderer who was said to have been possessed. Even after a rite of exorcism was performed on Peter Farkas by the priest in the town of Csány where he’d been born to a good family, the demon mocked the priest and the witnesses assembled. The spirit told them it would never release the child no matter what prayers they might chant, because it had a plan for him, one whose fruits they would all come to see for themselves. And I believe it can be said that they did.
Peter Farkas had never gone to school. His parents provided the boy with sustenance but kept him mostly in his room. The townsfolk were co-conspirators in his neglect. When he howled and cursed through his open window, they walked past without looking, as if they heard only birdsong.
Eventually, the boy grew into a man. Reasoning that he was no longer their responsibility, Farkas’s father transported him to the farming village of Szarvas on the southern plains and left him there to find employment. And, indeed, Peter soon discovered his true vocation.
Moving from place to place, sleeping in thickets and in paddock corners, killing and feeding on the fruits of the hunt. An acceptable way to survive if what he hunted wasn’t human.
Dr. Eszes owned a country house outside Budapest in the Bükk Hills, in the village of Szilvásvárad. There he kept
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