by Andrew Pyper
* * *
SHE MAKES HER WAY BACK to the hotel feeling unsettled and angry. At Michael, but mostly at herself. It distracts her enough that it takes a moment for Lily to notice the concierge rushing after her as she enters the lobby.
“Dr. Dominick?”
“Yes?”
“A message for you.”
He hands Lily a small, blank envelope and then slips away. She opens it. Inside a card, a single word, in handwriting she now knows better than her own.
Diodati
19
* * *
She remembers the name from the author biography in her edition of Frankenstein. The villa on the shore of Lake Geneva where Mary Shelley got her idea for the novel that would make her famous.
Strengthened by a hot shower, Lily gets into the backseat of a taxi outside the Hotel d’Angleterre with a renewed grasp on the rational. There was an article she remembers reading that argued how everyone has their own doppelgänger in the world, a result not of the uncanny but simply the limited variations that can be applied to the human face and form. She tries to convince herself that Green’s photos established nothing other than certain people can look alike if caught at the right angle.
You don’t believe that, her inner voice scolds. It was him. You know it was because you saw yourself in his face.
The taxi driver asks in French where she’d like to go.
“The Villa Diodati,” she says.
* * *
IT’S A SHORT DRIVE. WHAT may have taken an hour or more in the gloomy summer of 1816 when the Shelleys vacationed here requires only fifteen minutes by car. Lily asks the driver to wait for her and he takes a spot in a small parking lot down from the villa’s front gate.
She walks along the roadside past high shrubs and trees carefully planted to hide the mansions and consulate offices on the other side. Lily recognizes the building before confirming the address on the stone gatepost: Diodati 9. Her Internet search told her the place had been converted into apartments and that visitors could come no closer than the curb, but it’s enough for Lily to be here and see it for herself. Enough for what? To understand how someone like Michael imagined himself into being. Standing in a place where others were before you, a place where history was made, and inserting yourself as a direct link to that history. Mary, her poet husband Percy, the proto-celebrity Lord Byron were here. Just as she is now.
There’s a grass slope next to the property where a single stone bench faces the water. Lily makes her way down by a worn path that may have been the same that Mary used to reach the lake, except today the path is cut off by the fences and hedgerows of other properties. She can glimpse the choppy water of Lac Léman through the bare branches, but can’t get there from here.
When she turns to head back up, he’s there, sitting on the stone bench. Staring at neither the villa nor the lake, but at her.
Lily walks as calmly as she can up to him, taking her time in the hope that someone else—a tourist, a gardener, her taxi driver—will join them, but they remain alone.
“Sit with me, Lily.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Why would you?”
“You’re a fugitive. A violent criminal. Psychotic. There’s three reasons.”
“Now think of the reasons you are here. If you’re honest, you will see how they have little to do with my threats—not anymore. In any case, to deny me would trigger my anger, and you have already seen the outcome of that.”
He pats the spot next to him on the bench. Lily sits, the stone hard under her thighs.
“Green showed me the photos,” she says. “They don’t prove anything.”
“Do you hear yourself?”
Lily does hear herself. And it’s the sound of the last struggles of her mind against what she feels. What she knows.
He clasps his hand over hers. His touch is warm, the low hum of his energy, a sub-bass tingling. She can’t move her hand away. Not that she tries.
“How did you know my mother?”
“We’re almost there. Before her—my only wife—I need to speak of my first love.”
He squeezes her hand tighter and it relaxes her, pulling her into his words like a tidal current.
“From the moment I saw Mary Shelley I wanted her to love me,” he says. “Did she? Who can say? Authenticity of emotion is not my specialty. What is known is that I spared her life, and in return she took mine. For though she chose her anemic husband and an existence of inky struggle over me, she fashioned something from her betrayal. A book. A novel of gothic horror written in response to a contest proposed by Byron, a contest she decidedly won. The first masterpiece of the genre, one that is assumed to be about the dangers of science but will always for me be a kind of unrequited love letter.”
Lily tries to imagine what this place would have looked like then but instead she clearly detects what it felt like. To be Mary Shelley, a teenaged girl meeting the man she sits next to now. It’s ludicrous. Yet she feels the possibility of it in the grip of his hand.
“Later accounts describe her as beautiful, but this is inaccurate,” he goes on. “Better to say she was English. Physical awkwardness combined with a compensating pride. And intelligence. A mind that somehow announced itself in the pigeon-toed stride, the sharp nose raised to the air, smelling for fresh metaphors. To me, Mary Shelley was an irresistible portrait of England itself.”
“Is that why you came here? To see her?”
“Not at all. I came for a sighting of the celebrated Lord Byron, whose fame as a debauched monster I took a personal interest in. He was not difficult to find. Everyone in the cafés of Geneva was talking about his renting the Villa Diodati. I took a room at an inn across the lake, just there,” Michael says, pointing through the trees. “The innkeepers recognized the advantage of being in such close proximity to the poet, so they set out telescopes to be hired by the half hour. Through them, one could spy on Byron’s residence and wait to see the great man emerge, hopefully with a naked damsel or a scribbling quill in his hand. I first saw Mary Shelley through one of those lenses.”
He sighs. A confrontation with buried emotion that surprises him even more than it does Lily.
“So you ended up staying for her.”
“I stayed to find a purpose,” he says, shifting to look directly at her. “By that summer, I had finally perfected my habits of killing. I had also observed how I didn’t age the way men do, my face, my skin, everything the same as the day I was made. Such a gift! But one that brought new questions to mind: If I were to live forever, how would I spend the time? What of art, poetry, music? The answer lay across the lake. Through their genius, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron might be my brothers. Maybe they would be blind to the horrific in me and see the sublime. Yet if I was to be honest it was always the girl I thought of when I pictured the activities of the villa’s residents. It was her imagination summoning me. You see, I’m not alone in reading minds. Mary Shelley could sense I was close to her, just as you can sense me close to you now.”
Lily looks behind her to confirm they remain alone. It’s not only the grassy patch that is unoccupied, but no sounds from the road or surrounding buildings reach them either. It’s as if the world has been frozen for the time the two of them sit on the cold stone bench, their hands held.
“Over the next few days, I took to walking to the borders of the Diodati property, hiding in the vineyard rows you see there,” he continues. “Mary had an infant with her, a son, so I had to wait to see if there was a time when she could be met on her own. I became impatient, my initial desire for conversation escalating to a desire to feed. One evening I went to the villa with the intention of entering the residence and taking her. I was making my way across the property’s moonlit lawn”—he draws a finger through the air, showing his progress a hundred yards away—“when I felt a presence looking down at me from one of the second-floor windows.”
“It was her,” Lily says.
“She carried no can
dle but the moon was enough to color her outline, her hair down, the long English fingers clamped to the frame as if to hold her straight. I wore my steel teeth and hands, and wondered if she could see them in the dimness. She indulged her curiosity by staring. And I stared back. It was the first time I’d allowed anyone to observe me plainly in that way in the middle of the hunt. The exposure aroused me. You may think me foolish, but I thought it was romance.”
He’s getting this from research, a part of her old self tries to tell her. Biographies, criticism. He’s making it up.
Lily knows this is the conclusion she ought to be holding on to, but can’t help hearing something familiar about the story he tells that has nothing to do with its connection to a famous book. It’s as though she’s possessed a hazy, fragmented knowledge of it since birth, as they say it is with reincarnated souls who recall details from their previous lives.
“What did you do?” she asks.
“There was an interruption—a dog’s barking, as I recall—and I turned away, retreated into the darkness, feeling her eyes on my back with such an intensity it was as if I were a poem and she was memorizing me. Later, she would write of this moment in disguised terms.”
Michael tilts his head back and recites the written lines from memory.
“ ‘ . . . the artist . . . He sleeps, but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.’ ”
“Mary wrote that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember it from the novel.”
“It’s from her original introduction. A recounting of a dream in which she is the artist. And I am the ‘horrid thing.’ Of course I didn’t know about any of that as I slipped away and returned to my inn. All I knew is that I would never again let myself wish to feed upon the woman at the window. All I wanted was to woo her.”
Michael squints into trees down the slope in front of him, searching for a spot along the shoreline.
“There used to be a trail that followed the lake and I was there two mornings later, putting my clothes back on after a swim when she came upon me,” he says. “She introduced herself only as Mary. We spoke of what brought us to Lac Léman. I said I was a scholar of Hungarian folktales taking his sabbatical leave from the university. When I asked why she walked alone she said she liked to go for hikes ever since her parents sent her to a remote corner of Scotland when she was a girl. The solitude and closeness to nature assisted her in what she called her ‘waking dreams.’
“ ‘I can assure you I am no dream,’ I said, and immediately regretted the obvious flirtation. But either she didn’t notice, or she appreciated it, because it only seemed to warm her attentions. ‘Tell me about yourself. I like nothing more than stories,’ she said, and sat herself down a few feet off the trail in the grass. It may not seem remarkable to you, Lily, but it was a bold thing she did then—to sit a few feet away from a stranger and invite him to tell her a tale.”
“You volunteered everything to her?” Lily asks, surprised by the note of jealousy in her voice.
“Not at first. I told her my name was Michael. She spoke of the ‘men in the house’ who stayed up late, drinking and criticizing the latest literary works published in London, a subject she was capable of speaking to but couldn’t because she would be sent off to tend to the child in the nursery. I don’t recall much about what else we spoke of at that first meeting. My memory is more attached to the way she looked at me. It was impossible to tell if she suspected I was the figure she’d seen outside her window a couple of nights before, though she considered my face in a way that suggested she did. Maybe this was only her writerly self, capturing details to be recorded later on the page. Being a fool in such matters, I wanted to believe that she looked at me that way because she was falling in love.”
Lily is suddenly aware of how she is looking at him. Would it be love that Michael would see there too? If he did, would he be entirely mistaken?
“What did she do?” Lily asks, realizing she’s curious to know if she will do the same thing, whatever it is.
“Nothing. It is what I did that matters. Because before she could stand, I leaned over and kissed her. She neither reciprocated nor pulled away. If anything, she seemed to savor the taste of my lips. I asked if I could see her the next day. ‘Well you may, if you be here and I go walking again,’ she said, her cheeks colored by two perfect crimson circles. ‘I have the most remarkable story I’d like to tell you,’ I said. ‘Something I’ve never told anyone. Occurrences which are usually deemed marvelous.’ She nodded at this. And then, without another word, she got up and proceeded along the trail, around a corner of the shore, and disappeared.”
“You’ve told me why you’re sharing your story with me,” Lily says, pulling away from him in resistance to the urge to lean closer. “But why share it with her?”
“Because I wanted my lover—my imagined lover—to be the one to draw my portrait in words,” he replies after a moment of consideration. “Would she see a man or a monster? For all three of the writers I ended up revealing myself to it was never what I wished to see. It’s why I stopped pursuing them. And why I found you.”
Lily feels a heat in her throat, her cheeks, and realizes she’s blushing. She’d turn away but it would only highlight it more, so she holds herself still and waits for him to continue.
“There was another reason I shared myself with Mary Shelley,” he says. “The competition I wanted her to win. ‘Byron has presented us with a challenge,’ Mary told me the next morning when we met by the lake. By then I confessed that I knew who she was, and who lived in the villa. ‘We will each write a ghost story. But I am bereft of an idea,’ Mary said, and smiled at me. ‘Oh, Michael. What shall I write about?’ I said she ought to write about me. It was out before I could prevent it, though I have little doubt she would have used the details I had already related to her. She was educated, talented, and possessed of an uncanny imagination. But more than this, Mary was ambitious.
“We kissed again, there in the grass. It was to be for the second, and last, time, and I think part of me knew it. ‘You promised a story,’ she said once we had broken from our embrace. I told her I was not what I appeared to be. I told her I was not a man. Not a human being in any sense that mattered. She leaned away from me, but not in fear. Mary Shelley had traveled here in the name of discovering the strange and remarkable, the sort of things I called ‘occurrences which are usually deemed marvelous,’ and precisely how she would word it in the novel I was moments from giving life to, giving to her. ‘If not a man, then what are you?’ she asked.”
Michael shifts on the bench as if he’s about to rise, and Lily experiences a bubble of grief at the prospect of him releasing her hand. Instead, he stays seated, grips her hand even tighter.
“Isn’t it funny, Lily, how this phrasing echoes yours at our first meeting? And just as with you, I told Mary the truth. When I was finished I expected her to ask any number of questions. I supposed she took me for a madman. But though it may only be a lover’s hubris, I prefer to believe she accepted all of it as true. It’s why Mary’s book has such resonance. I said how I hoped she would now win her ghost story contest. ‘Oh, I think we can put all this to better purpose,’ she said. I remember that ‘we.’ Did she mean herself and her husband, whom critics would later assume had written the book? Or did she mean me?”
His grip on Lily’s hand comes close to hurting—then it is hurting—but she looks at his face, sees the new and disfiguring anger in him.
“There would be no Frankenstein without me,” he says. “Instead of me feeding on her blood, it was she who was fed. This girl devoured my life and created another monster, part of it made from me, and part of it her own gothic dreaming. Even her husband was surprised by the story and where it could have come from, ‘as every cuckold is surprised.’ ”
He releases her hand. The air is colder than
a moment ago, jetliners leaving criss-crossed contrails in the sky, the sound of a delivery truck struggling along the road behind them.
“You walk up the hill and I will walk down,” he says, already standing.
“Wait. I need to—”
“Don’t look back. Keep moving. And this,” he says, placing a DVD in a plastic sleeve next to her. “This is for you.”
He walks away. His gait unhurried, yet he covers the ground between the stone bench and the tree line in a quarter of the time it took Lily when she first arrived. Somehow he finds a way through the hedgerow, or a gap in the fence, because he’s there one moment and swallowed by shade the next.
She walks back toward the parking lot the same way she came. The taxi is where she left it, the driver turning the key in the ignition when he spots her.
“Did you see him?” the driver asks when she slides into the backseat.
“See who?”
“Frankenstein,” he says with a snort of laughter before pulling out of the lot.
20
* * *
The taxi drops her off in front of her hotel but she doesn’t go inside. Instead she carries on another block to Eric Green’s building. Lily knows that if she needs to convince anyone else of the impossible history that she’s contemplating about Michael—convince them that she’s not the crazy one for believing there may be some strand of truth sewn into his fabrications—she’ll need as much evidence as she can, and Green’s wartime photo is all there is.
This time, both the outer and inner security doors are open. As is the door to Green’s apartment. Lily nudges it wider with her elbow, careful not to touch any surface with her hands, and steps into the maze of stacked books and documents.
She finds him on the floor. Lying on his back, eyes closed behind his smudged lenses, arms outstretched, as if carried and placed there while asleep. The two puncture marks in his neck and the blood haloed around his head the only indications that he’ll never wake up.