by Andrew Pyper
She tries the front doors. They give a half-inch but no more, chained shut from the inside.
By the looks of it, this place hasn’t been a functioning hospital for decades. According to Michael’s story, one of the long-ago inmates was Peter Farkas. But Farkas only became Michael in Dr. Eszes’s residence, not here.
She carries on to the right and along the front of the main building and spots the house facing the hospital from a level rise. Made of the same yellow stone, but with an arched colonnade along the front that gives it the look of a stern mouth.
Lily climbs up the hill, its deceptive steepness forcing her hands as well as her feet to grab and push at the soft earth. At the top she has to fight the temptation to lie down. Whether it’s nerves or a change in altitude, breathing requires a conscious effort.
She wants to go.
You want to know.
The cellar.
That’s why she’s here. It’s not enough to be on the ground where Michael’s fiction is set. She has to go inside.
Unlike the main building, the front doors of the doctor’s residence are chained from the outside. The windows along the colonnade are mostly smashed, with bars on the interior. Lily makes her way around the side, looking for a way in.
At the rear, there’s a single door, three brick steps leading into the ground. The door almost certainly locked too, but she knows her inner voice will call her chicken shit if she doesn’t at least try it.
It gives at the touch of her hand.
The air reeks of mildew and cat urine and something chemical like formaldehyde. It makes her cough as she enters. The sound of it is still reverberating off the walls when it’s followed by a shuffling she tells herself is only the retreat of a rat or some other vermin.
She stands at one end of a hallway with doorways opening onto different rooms on either side. The floor is littered with empty cigarette packs, dead leaves, food wrappers. An inch from the toe of her foot is a used syringe.
Lily remembers the flashlight function on the pay-as-you-go cell phone she bought when she landed, pulls it out of her back pocket, and turns it on.
For a second, it captures movement at the end of the hall.
The shuffling again. This time clearer, like someone balling up newspaper in their hands. But when she holds the phone steady there’s just the confirmation of her first impression: a hall with rooms she can’t see inside unless she takes a step into them.
What now, psycho?
Her foot is rising over the syringe and planting its first step on the floor before she realizes she’s made any decision to go forward. The smell grows stronger. It makes her think of traveling down into the stomach of a sleeping beast, the reek of its breath blowing into her face.
She shines the cell phone’s light into the first room and finds a random collection of rusted chairs in a semicircle, as if a group therapy session abruptly ended fifty years ago. The next room houses the boiler. Vents growing out of it and reaching through the ceiling into the floors above.
The third room is the largest. Lily can feel the size of it before she looks inside, the cold distance between herself and the walls expanding into starless space. This is where the odor is coming from. It occurs to her now that the smell is that of a morgue.
She steps into the widening darkness. Her legs sinking, pulling her down through the house’s foundation into the soil below.
The cell phone’s light is cast at her feet. Lily moves the beam across the far brick wall.
Legs. Blue eyes. Dark curly hair. Naked skin.
Lily extends her arms and locks her elbows in place. Forces the light to shine on the thing in the corner.
An infant doll. Propped so that its legs are stretched in front of it, its eyes bright marbles of surprise. A girl.
Run.
But something prevents her. The doll’s arms are wrapped around an envelope. She steps closer and squints at the partly obscured writing on the outside. An L at the beginning and Y at the end. Her name.
The doll is meant for her. The doll is her.
She swings the cell phone’s light around. Broken furniture assembled in a mound as if in readiness to be ignited in a pyre. A winking spray of broken glass on the floor. A wheelchair with green water pooled in its seat.
The circle of light narrows and at first Lily thinks her vision is failing, that she’s blacking out as she did in Dr. Edmundston’s apartment. But soon the light casts only a sepia circle on the floor directly in front of her. The battery. Already drained of whatever power came with it upon purchase.
She moves toward the doll, picks it up. Then the light on her phone goes out.
Lily freezes, listening. Much closer than before, the shuffling again.
She turns the cell phone off and on. As it reboots, the light returns in a momentary flash. One that reveals a man in the opposite corner of the room. His silver teeth a line of ice in his mouth.
The light dies.
She slams into the far wall, scrambling away. Her hands frantically slap at the wood of a door.
“Please, God. Please . . .”
She finds the handle and pulls it open, scrambles up the steps and trips on the raised edge of brick at the top, rolling a few feet over the gravel.
Her eyes stay on the darkness beyond the open cellar door. She lies there, the air whistling in and out of her lungs, waiting for something to emerge. Yet when she senses movement it’s not from the cellar, but the far corner of the building.
The dog stops at the same time Lily sets her eyes on it. A German shepherd mixed with something else, one of the breeds with oversized heads, the jaws meant to clamp shut and never open. It doesn’t growl. Just shows its teeth like the man in the cellar had done, its pink jowls trembling.
Stay still.
“Get up.”
Her body obeys her spoken voice. She doesn’t take her eyes from the motionless dog. On her second step, it lowers its ears against its head.
On her third step, it comes at her.
Lily runs. Not through the tunnel of branches this time but straight for the road.
The dog catches up to her before she makes it to the laneway down to the road. With every stride it jumps forward so that it comes up alongside her and she see its tartar-coated teeth, the eyes jellied with rage.
She drops the doll but not the envelope. It’s not intentional, it just slips free from her hand. But once it’s falling, Lily hopes it will distract the dog. Maybe it will stop to tear its limbs off and not hers. Instead the doll bounces harmlessly off the animal’s back.
The gatehouse is a hundred yards away. Across the road a mother pushes a stroller along the opposite sidewalk, watching Lily with an expression that could be either alarm or amusement.
You’re safe, lady, Lily thinks. I should be over there with you.
Just when Lily begins to entertain the hope that the dog is trained only to bark and not bite, its teeth find the back of her leg.
Her arms spinning like rotor blades. The dog spins with her. Round to the front and then kicked behind again, the motion so intricately balanced between the two of them it might appear to be rehearsed, an interspecies dance.
With one heaving turn she throws the dog off. Lily takes a breath. The pain screams from her ankle and up her throat.
The noise triggers the dog to come at her again. This time, instead of running, she kicks at it with her good foot. The toe of her shoe clips its jaw.
The impact knocks the animal back onto its haunches, its mouth opening and closing as if checking to see if anything’s broken. It gives Lily a chance to go for the gatehouse.
She hurdles over the chain across the entrance, her bad foot coming down first, the ankle buckling, sending her to the pavement. The dog could have her now. Lily readies herself for it, holding the crinkled envelope uselessly against her face.
Nothing happens.
When Lily looks, the dog remains on the other side of the chain, panting.
“You
’re not allowed off your property, that it?” Lily says to the animal as she gets to her feet again. “It’s all yours.”
She makes her way to the sidewalk, the mother with the stroller now openly staring at her. The voice inside her wants to shout across the road and tell the woman where she can stick it, but Lily resists and limps on, not even looking for a cab to hail, and starts down the hill into the city.
Cornwall, England
November 22, 1812
“You are my secret.”
These were the first words I remember Eszes saying to me, as if announcing me as such bound me to remain so.
For a long time I saw no one but the doctor. I was kept to the laboratory, slept on a pallet he’d left on the floor, stared with disgust at the food he would place at the small table I was meant to dine at.
Even if I had been capable of love I wouldn’t have loved the doctor. I considered him a jailer more than a companion. My repeated request was to leave the house and see what lay beyond its walls. For many days the doctor would reply that such freedoms would follow after a period of observation. When I protested that it was beyond his power to treat me as a farmer would his livestock, he corrected me.
“You are my creation,” he said. “If you were to leave this place without my consent, I would be forced to destroy you, because it cannot be known you exist. In time, we will be celebrated. But for now, we are criminals. Original sinners.”
I tried to see this commonality as friendship, but felt only that the doctor’s analogy failed to apply to me. He committed a blasphemy by giving me life, but I was merely alive, faultless. In any case, how would the laws of man apply to a being who was not a man?
The doctor never spoke of me by name. He never gave me one.
Whether in his absence or presence, I soon wished to kill him. In part because this was an aspect of my emerging nature, in part because I was tired of the bottles of horse blood he brought me for nourishment. Like an eaglet, I was no longer content to open my mouth and have my parent fill it, but longed to feed myself.
The smell of the doctor’s skin brought it on, the pumping of his heart audible to me before he opened the door. I would look at him and think of the ways I would open him up to expose the warm life within. It would have happened there, in that lightless cellar, if there weren’t things I needed to learn from him.
It was quickly discovered that the experiment had yielded at least one unexpected result. Although I inhabited the body of a dead man, in his resuscitation his old mind had been left behind and the new one open to be its own thing. Mine. This seemed to be a mystery even to the doctor. He anticipated that his process would produce a brain of greater capacity but would remain in character more or less the same as Peter Farkas’s, the one whose neck the doctor had wrapped a chain around and choked the life out of. For this is what Eszes decided was necessary. Not to wait until a patient died of natural causes, as he had been doing up until then, but the freshness of new death, of murder.
Yet there was little of Farkas left in me. A handful of memories. Some excited recollection of the faces of those he murdered in their final moments. Playing hide-and-seek with his younger sister when they were children. His mother’s voice. It was, to me, distant in the way of a story one has been told long ago and forgotten the ending to.
The alienist in the doctor was fascinated by this. I could see it in his eyes when he looked upon me. Who was this man who sat at the table with him, his manners refined, his hunger not for the food laid before him but for knowledge, for books? I cannot explain it myself, though I have my theories. A personality is a different thing from a mind. It is experience. You take that away and you become something with the capacity for thought but without the programming imposed by parents, school, social interaction. I am a man liberated from the rules of humanity.
I was a child with the faculties of an adult, free to create my own inclinations. But there were other ingredients within me now too. Animal blood. Specifically, the blood of horses. The Lipizzaner breed that the doctor kept in his stables in Szilvásvárad. Their hides a brilliant white, their proud stock going back to the warrior Huns. The Lipizzans’ blood lent me strength and endurance and speed, attributes the doctor so admired.
And it worked, up to a point. But the combination of these chemicals and memories and the spiritual parasite that clung to my soul and a hunger for blood to sustain me resulted in a whole new man, and not merely an improved version of Peter Farkas.
“Do you look at me and see me as a child might see his father?” the doctor once asked, and as I record the words of his query on this page it returns our conversation so clearly it is as if it occurred this morning.
“No.”
“Tell me then.” He held a mirror before my face. “What do you see?”
“A mask.”
“But it is your face. You mean a mask in the metaphorical sense.”
“I suppose, yes.”
“What would be revealed if I were to remove it?”
“That I couldn’t say.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know myself yet. Whatever it is, it grows closer to what I wish to become.”
“And what is it you wish to become?”
“There is no name for it. I suppose the closest thing would be a god.”
“A god of benevolence, or a god of war?”
“Those are human terms on a human spectrum. They don’t define me.”
The doctor laughed at that. An unpleasant, mocking laugh. “Perhaps you require your own language!”
“I believe you’re right, Doctor. To understand me is to speak a new language. One I will have to invent.”
“Oh, very fine,” the old sadist said. “But who would you speak it with? Who would comprehend your meaning?”
“There will soon be others like me. This is your intention, is it not?”
“That will depend upon your success.”
“Success?”
“At keeping your mask on.”
He was wrong in so many ways, and though I hated him for it, in this Dr. Eszes would prove correct.
He promised I would not be alone.
It was not merely a bride I longed for, but the society of others like myself. A family. The only way to know myself was through the reflections in my fellow creatures’ eyes, a vision no looking glass could provide. To be a “mate,” a “friend,” a “father”: What would such performances require to be convincing?
I yearned to be tested on the field of passions. It was unclear if I had the capacity to duplicate what the poets celebrated. Could I self-sacrifice, woo, inspire? Could I see another’s life as something more than an invitation to destruction? Could I love?
Instead of keeping his word, the doctor’s visits grew less frequent. His attitude toward me changed from thrilled triumph, to scientific scrutiny, to an unshakeable gloom.
“Put this on,” he said finally. From his coat pocket he produced a wool hood. “Nobody can see your face until we arrive at our destination.”
The hood felt thick, and it would be airless and hot inside. Was I being taken to freedom, or to my execution?
I put it on. Even through the black wool I could smell his skin, his blood.
I asked where he was taking me as he nudged me up the stairs. He answered that we were to journey into the country, and when I suggested it was there he planned on releasing me he said nothing. He didn’t have to.
It was as if his mind were speaking directly to my own. He would never let me go. I had been brought back from the dead, but now that I was alive, he was confronting the meaning of his accomplishment. He would never present me to his superiors, never propose an army of the undead to the Hungarian parliament. It was absurd to even think it.
A dragon may be wondrous to behold, but that same wonder demands it be slain.
When Dr. Eszes removed the hood several hours later in the carriage we rode in, the world exploded in color. Green, mostly. Forests that r
olled out on either side of us. The road followed a creek, its gray water turned white as it passed over the rocks that poked through like partly buried skulls.
I asked the doctor again where he was taking me.
“To my country house. You will be presented as a hired servant. To work with the groomsman.”
“Is this where your family resides? Will I meet them?”
If the doctor had appeared uneasy before, his complexion now whitened to match the hair of the horses he so treasured.
“You are married, Doctor? Children?”
He didn’t want to answer. But he answered nevertheless.
“A wife. A twelve-year-old son.”
“And you haven’t told them how I came to be, have you?”
“No.”
“Tell me, Doctor. What was the chemical you devised that brought me to life?”
He closed his eyes. Then he grabbed the hood and placed it once again over my head.
“That is something you will never learn,” he said.
The poor man’s voice came out in a boyish squeak that told us both where we now stood.
We arrived at the doctor’s house in the night. He removed my hood, the world a chalky layering of shadows. Candles burned in the window of the main house, a beacon left for the doctor by his wife. But I was not to sleep there. Instead, he showed me to the servants’ dwelling up the slope next to the stables.
My room was little more than a cell with a single mattress of straw, a water jug, and a bedpan.
I asked Eszes through the door if he really believed the chain he looped around the handle and key he turned in its lock would contain me.
“Goodnight,” he said, ignoring my question.
“Goodnight, father.”
I listened to him shuffle down the hall and start back to the house where his family slept, oblivious in their dreaming.
12
* * *
Lily makes it back to her hotel and reads the journal pages before she takes a better look at the bite on her leg. Not as bad as it feels. She judges the wound to be minor enough to get away without stitches, but it will need some antiseptic and bandages.