by Andrew Pyper
It stops there.
Lily goes to the window and pulls it open, sticks her head out, and scans the block in both directions. She half expects him to still be down there, waiting on the corner so he can wave up at her before slipping away.
Psycho.
A two-hundred-year-old man who believes he personally inspired Frankenstein, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula.
If not human, what are you?
A psychopath like all the others. More imaginative than most, but this remains the only answer. What prevents Lily from wholly believing it is how he knows her secret. The one so veiled it remained hidden even from herself.
I am not a myth.
Lily starts to shake and can’t stop. This is shock, she tells herself. The last twenty-four hours fracturing into voices, phrases written on ancient paper. A horrific collage.
I am a singular case.
The man stepping out of Lionel’s kitchen.
I’m here to give you a gift.
The silver teeth.
If it’s a secret, it’s been sitting right under mankind’s nose for a very long time.
Lily looks down at the handwritten note—the one drafted in her apartment, warning her not to call the police—and notices for the first time something written on the back.
Budapest
The phone rings behind her.
She looks out at her corner of the city, the new sun yellowing the brick and concrete, and cars beetling in the buttery light. The faint smell of roasted chestnuts and sewage she thinks of as New York’s unique cologne. Along with something else she tells herself she’s only imagining. Something animal. The wet straw and horses’ breath of a stable.
PART 2
* * *
The Old World
10
* * *
Lily keeps expecting to spot him among the mourners at Dr. Edmundston’s funeral. She knows it would be an incredible risk for him to show up given the ongoing police manhunt for him, just five days after the murder. On the other hand, he’s insane.
The fact is, Lily has been looking for him since the morning she’d finished reading the pages from his journal. Starting from her walk to the Kirby to endure several hours of going about her work, pretending she didn’t know Dr. Edmundston had been killed until, at day’s end, Denise burst into her office in tears to repeat the e-mail that had been distributed among the staff. Found dead in his apartment. Evidence of foul play. Police investigating. Coworkers with any information urged to come forward.
“Sounds like something bad happened,” Denise said. “Like bad bad.”
“Oh my God.”
“That sweet man.”
“It’s awful.”
“You okay? You look like—”
“I think I have to go home.”
“Sure.”
“Can you cover my appointments? I just—”
“Absolutely.”
She gave Denise a hug on the way out. That’s when Lily wept—not in horror, but grief alone.
“I’ll call you,” Lily said, willing herself to pull away and walk out into the hall.
It was the last time she would ever see Denise or her office again.
* * *
SHE LOOKED FOR HIM ON the walk home. Then from her window through the rest of the afternoon. And later too, on her night run to the store to buy juice, bread, and Kleenex. Even as she lay down on her bed, not expecting sleep but wanting to be ready for it if she got lucky, she opened her eyes from time to time to see if the man who called himself Michael emerged from the shadows of her room.
Find him, her voice urged.
He has the knife. So long as he held on to it, she was his.
Then get it back.
“How?” she says aloud. “I’d be better off calling a lawyer.”
A lawyer won’t help if the knife ends up with the police. And a lawyer can’t tell you what Michael says he can about who you are. Who your mother was.
“He doesn’t know me.”
The only way you’ll be sure of that is to go to him.
“Why should I do what he wants?”
Because it’s what you want too.
* * *
WHEN A DETECTIVE LEFT HIS number she called back straight away.
It was harder than she would have guessed to separate what she actually knew from what was safe to tell him. It should have been easy to pronounce a lie as simple as “I don’t know anything.” But once she deviated from the truth and told the detective how she left her date’s apartment in the middle of the night and had gone home to sleep in her own bed (“You do that a lot?” he asked, and she’d answered, “I like my bed.”) the words sounded awkward as a foreign language she’d only begun to learn.
Two days after Edmundston’s funeral, she called the Kirby’s personnel director and asked for a leave of absence. Lily imagined the pitying look on the woman’s face. It was the look she always wore. Lily figured it came with all the firing she had to do.
“As you know, Doctor,” the woman started, “bereavement leave is available only in case of loss of immediate family.”
“I’m not expecting to be paid,” Lily said.
“I see.”
“And I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
A long sigh blew down the line and into Lily’s ear. “That puts us in something of a situation, doesn’t it? Dr. Edmundston is of course gone, and now you—I mean, the department—”
“I just need some time.”
“Is this about what happened? To Dr. Edmundston? Should we be making a claim—insurance, there’s a process. Are you suffering from feelings of fear? Anxiety?”
“Do I have to tell you if I am?”
“I suppose not. No.”
“Then let’s just call this an indefinite unpaid leave.”
Lily hung up before she could say something regrettable.
* * *
SHE REREADS MICHAEL’S JOURNAL PAGES so many times she finds herself switching between two points of view. As a psychiatrist, she sees it as the articulation of a highly developed personality disorder, one that has devised an identity with its own impossible origin story. But then she reads it again and sees how at least some of it might be true.
I am not a human being, though I am almost always mistaken for one.
Lily doesn’t think for a second that Michael came to life in 1811. But perhaps he is Hungarian. And perhaps his psychosis was thought to be demonic possession by his family in his youth (it wouldn’t be the first time she’s dealt with a client and their spouses or parents who believe their condition has a supernatural basis).
Perhaps, after coming to America, Michael somehow met Lily’s mother.
Maybe they came across each other in a hospital or halfway house somewhere. Given his age, he would probably have been the child of a fellow patient, but old enough to talk to her, remember her. She herself knows little about her mother other than, after Lily was born, the two of them moved from trailer park to motel room to the cabin up north. It was a nomadic existence that came from being poor. But there was more to it than just that. The medications, for one thing. Off and on, on and off. Most likely a paranoid, like Michael. In her case, it was the belief that there were people after her. Lily has the vaguest memory of asking what people they were.
“The ones who know,” her mother said.
For Lily, her mother’s mental illness has a taste: the bitter tea and, even worse, the soups she was made to eat as a child. They were concoctions her mother must have made from things she collected from the forest floor, because Lily has no memory of them ever visiting a health food store, and the cabin in Alaska was nowhere near such a place anyway. The taste of the food, recalled decades later, sickens Lily, but it also makes her angry, as if her mother’s broths were meant to do more than nourish her. Were they a New Age, anti-vaxer medicine of some kind? Were they a punishment?
Lily reads the pages all over again.
Made, not born
.
Michael isn’t two hundred and five years old. He’s not the inspiration for the three most regarded gothic novels of the nineteenth century. He was not created by an alienist, but came into the world the same as everyone else. He’s not her father.
But it’s possible that he knows something about her mother that she doesn’t know herself.
* * *
DENISE IS THE ONLY PERSON Lily calls to say she’s going away for a while. She felt someone ought to know. But as soon as she’s telling her that the loss of Dr. Edmundston has hit her hard and that she’s decided to take some time off, it all feels wrong.
“Where will you go?” Denise asks, her voice camouflaging her alarm.
“I don’t know yet. I figured I’d just head to the airport and pick somewhere off the departures board.”
“That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I think that’s why I want to do it.”
“Is this about Lionel?” Denise asks. “Or is there something else going on?”
“What do you mean, something else?”
“You just—you sound scared. And it’s not like you to be scared.”
“My friend just died. Was murdered. Probably by someone I met with. Don’t you think I should be scared?”
“You think I ought to be too?”
“He won’t come back to the Kirby,” Lily says, and as soon as she does, believes it to be true.
“Why not?”
“I do profiles for a living.”
“So what? That make you a mind reader?”
Depends on the mind, she thinks but doesn’t say.
“I’ll see you when I get back,” Lily says.
“You be careful.”
“Always.”
* * *
SHE’S ZIPPING UP HER SUITCASE when she gets the crank call.
That’s how Lily tries to think of it afterward, working to convince herself that there’s no connection between the events of the past several days that have pulled her clear of her normal life and the stranger on the phone, asking if she is Dr. Lily Dominick without offering his own name.
“Who is this?”
“We need to meet.”
“Did that dating site give you my number? If they—”
“I want to protect you.”
“—this is illegal solicitation. I was told my privacy would—”
“You’re not safe.”
The man’s voice is deep, exuding professional authority. Lily imagines the man such a voice would belong to and sees him as physically commanding, handsome. It’s almost enough to distract her from the frightening thing he’s just said.
“That’s a threat,” she says. “Also illegal.”
“Listen to me. There isn’t much time. What’s going on—it’s not anything like what you think it is. But I can’t—others could already be listening. Just name a location and go straight there. I’ll meet you. What I—”
“Who is this?”
“My name is Will,” the voice says. “We have something in common. Someone. Just give me a—”
She hangs up. After she sees that the incoming caller’s number was blocked, she pulls the phone’s cord from the wall before he can call again.
A scam artist. Her personal info hacked from a website account. A prankster making a couple broad guesses that would hit a target with virtually anyone. We have something in common. Someone. Lily dismisses the caller as any one of these but doesn’t quite believe it.
She can feel him trying to call her back and considers plugging the phone back in if only to hear his at once urgent and comforting voice again, but in the end she leaves to avoid giving it any more thought and goes downstairs to hail a cab to the airport.
* * *
AT JFK SHE FINDS A bookstore and heads straight to the Classics section. Picks out Frankenstein, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula.
“Guess you don’t plan on sleeping through your flight,” the cashier says.
At her gate Lily waits to board and opens Frankenstein.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. . . .
No disaster yet, maybe, her inner voice says. But no shortage of evil forebodings.
A moment later they’re calling her flight to Frankfurt. She’s never been there. She’s never been anywhere in Europe before. But Frankfurt isn’t her final destination. It’s there that she’ll get her connecting flight to Budapest.
11
* * *
She finishes the first book halfway over the Atlantic. In Frankfurt her connecting flight is delayed four hours, which gives her time to read the other two. Given the jet lag and subject matter, she arrives in Budapest frightened and wired.
There’s the feeling that she’s not only traveling east but back in time. Her first glimpses of Eastern Europe support this impression: the bare trees plumped with the pom-poms of squirrels’ nests, the Soviet-era factories and fields of clumped soil. All of it viewed through a haze of rain, the dawn fogged and colorless.
The spell is only half-broken when she checks in to her hotel on the Pest side of the river. Once in her room she showers, takes one of her pills, and slips under the comforter with a wish for dreamless sleep, though she dreams nonetheless.
* * *
“PUT THE BUTT AGAINST YOUR shoulder. Hard, like that.”
Her mother’s voice is so clear Lily is sure she’s dead. They’re both dead. Which makes this her first step into eternity.
She is six years old again and being taught how to hold a gun.
“Press it to your cheek so you can see straight down to the end. Close that eye and keep that one open. See?”
Lily feels the cool wood of the stock against her face. The rifle is heavy but it’s a weight she can manage, the length of it steady in her hands. She aims it into the darkness. Is it night? Are they outside? She can hear her mother, feel her close, but she’s just behind her and to the side so she can’t see her.
“Mama?”
“Yes, muffin?”
“How do I shoot?”
“Your finger through there. Feel that? But you only pull if you’re sure that everything’s right.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t take it back.”
She can’t see anything but finds a target in the dark all the same. The rifle goes still. Something inside her holds the aim, absorbs all her fear.
“You’re ready,” her mother says.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER ROOM service fried eggs, she walks out to a taxi stand and gives the driver an address. He replies in Hungarian, which sounds to Lily like a combination of Chinese, Portuguese, and Russian. She can’t help hearing odd English words and phrases randomly repeated in it. Catfish, for one. Along with sequence and told you and, more than anything else, hashtag.
“Hospital,” she clarifies. “The old asylum. Where they put the crazy people?”
He looks at her as if she herself is crazy before shrugging and driving off.
Michael told her to come to Budapest and now that she’s here, she’s going to the only place he mentioned in the pages he left for her. Where it started. In his mind, anyway. To get the knife back she has to think like he does.
And to ask him about your mother you have to find him.
The taxi crosses the Chain Bridge over the Danube and heads north up the long slope of the Huvösvölgyi Road. After a mile or two the city yields to larger properties that Lily guesses may be private schools or embassies. It’s uphill the whole way and yet, when she looks back through the rear window, the elevation affords her no view.
The driver pulls into a small parking lot and stops. All Lily can see that would suggest arrival at her destination is a bus shelter by the road and a stucco gatehouse with a chain blocking any vehicle’s way up a lane that’s soon consumed by untamed shrubs.
“Catfish hashtag,” the driver s
eems to say.
Lily checks the fare on the meter, the numbers in forints making no sense to her. She offers him fifty euros and he shakes his head at her excess, but offers no change.
Once she’s out of the car and the driver has started back down the road Lily finds herself alone. While the occasional car still roars past there is no one on the sidewalk or in the bus shelter. There are curtains in the gatehouse’s grimy window and an empty can of beer by the door, but nobody comes out.
“Hello?” she says, this single word of English sounding foolish in the gray air.
She decides to keep going until somebody stops her. And if that happens, she’ll play dumb. Pretend she’s a tourist with a thing for old madhouses. She hopes there’s enough euros in her pocket to work as a bribe if she’s charged with trespassing.
She steps over the chain and starts up the cracked entry lane. A funny security system, if that’s what this is, because she sees now a high fence heading off in both directions around the grounds, its top garlanded with razor wire.
Soon the lane splits in two and Lily goes up a walkway through what was likely once a garden. She keeps waiting to hear a voice demanding to know where she thinks she’s going, but proceeds up the first set of steps without interruption before being swallowed by the tunnel of interlocked branches an arm’s length over her head.
The thought that nobody knows she’s here crosses her mind. Someone could attack or imprison or kill her without a living soul on this side of the Atlantic wondering what happened to her, her existence erased so easily because she’s half erased it herself. This worry almost turns her around. But then the main hospital building appears and she decides, having come this far, to take a closer look.
It would have been stately in the past. A distinguished, imposing architecture for what, a couple centuries ago, was designed to accommodate all of Hungary’s most severely mentally ill. Lily guesses that from the gate you could barely hear the howls and cries even when the windows were opened in the summer.