by Andrew Pyper
He lies in front of the filing cabinet he took the photo albums out of.
It’s foolish to stay any longer. But she has to be certain.
Lily steps around Green’s body, careful not to let any part of her foot touch the still spreading perimeter of blood. The drawers have been left open. She looks inside. The album containing the Bachmeier photos is gone.
* * *
BEFORE TODAY, EITHER MICHAEL HAD found her, or he’d given her explicit instructions where he could be found. Now it’s up to her. He said it was a path they were on, but Lily recognizes it now as something closer to a course of study, an escalating series of lessons and tests. All having to do with coming to think as he thinks, and feel as he feels.
If she’s right, why submit to it? What’s in it for her to think and feel as he does?
Because it’s the only way to know what he knows.
It’s why she’s in the Geneva airport booking a ticket to London. Every remaining direction of his story that she knows of leads there. The city where Bram Stoker lived most of his life.
But that’s not the only reason she’s chosen the English capital. There’s a silent communication between Michael and her now that confirms it. Is he reading her mind or is she reading his? All she’s certain of is that she can feel him inside her, the presence of his thoughts commingling with her own.
She’s seeing how far this connection between them goes, legs crossed on a leather bench in the departure lounge with her eyes closed, feeling for him, when she’s aware of someone sitting directly across from her. There was ample room on either side a moment ago. Which keeps Lily’s eyes closed.
“Dr. Dominick?”
Lily recognizes the voice. The crank call she got in New York. You’re not safe. The voice she imagined belonging to someone well-built, handsome. Then she opens her eyes and sees a monster.
It’s his face. The nose not quite where it ought to be. One of his cheeks—on the same side as the other damaged parts, so that a rough line separates the before and after of his features—mapped by scars.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man says, then raises a hand to point at his face. “Not much I can do about it.”
“You called me. In New York.”
“Correct. I guess, in your line of work—”
“Who are you?”
Lily looks past him, searching for a policeman to wave down, her legs rigid.
“Please don’t try to run. It’ll only—”
“Stay away from me.”
“There’s no need to be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you. In fact I’m here to make sure—”
“Tell me who you are or I’ll scream.”
“My name is Will,” he says. “Will Muldover.”
“How do you know who I am?”
“I work for a government agency. A special operation.”
“What government?”
“The US government, of course. Who else hires goons like me to do this kind of shit?”
Lily looks over his shoulder and reminds herself to be comforted by the presence of fellow travelers, the phone gazers and luggage pullers all close by yet out of earshot.
“You’re CIA?”
“I suppose so, sure.” He shrugs. “You wouldn’t believe how complicated the lines between these things can get. Officially, I’m a consultant. Totally off the books.”
“Like an assassin. They pay you to take people out? Someone like me?”
“If I was here to take you out you’d be dead by now.” He draws his hand over the stubble of the unscarred side of his face, a Where do I begin? gesture. If he’s concerned she’s going to dash down the terminal’s hall, he doesn’t show it.
“We’re looking for someone,” he begins. “He goes by various aliases, but you would’ve known him by his client number when you interviewed him at the Kirby. After his escape, you traveled to Hungary either under his instruction or in search of him yourself. Am I right so far?”
Should she admit to knowing what he’s talking about or deny it? She can’t decide, so says nothing at all.
He leans forward, propping his elbows on his knees. It’s meant to shrink his size, to relax her, and while it works, Lily tells herself to fight it. This is the moment she’s been warned about. Will Muldover—if that’s his real name—may or may not kill her here and now, but what’s certain is if she mishandles this, Michael definitely will.
“I’m guessing you’ve recognized some of his extraordinary capacities and you’re curious. Who wouldn’t be?” he says. “My predecessors have been tracking him for some time. As far as we know, he’s the only one in the world of his kind.”
“What kind is that?”
“I’m not sure it has a name. I guess ‘immortal’ will have to do.”
Lily makes a series of instant mental notes. First, this man is apparently confirming Michael’s claims to be over two hundred years old, which either makes it true (which is impossible) or shows she’s being played with (which is entirely possible). Second, he hasn’t mentioned her mother or Michael’s beliefs about her parentage, which means he’s either holding on to that or doesn’t know.
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she says.
“But you should tell me.”
“Why?”
“I work for the good guys,” he says, as if it’s as simple as that. “This individual has brutally killed thousands of people. Because he isn’t human and because he’s been alive three times as long as people usually live, he doesn’t exist in any official sense. No national or international police organization is looking for him. There’s only me and the other guys.”
“What other guys?”
“The ones tracking you. Maybe you’ve noticed them? They’re on the opposite team. But they want the same thing I do.”
“Which is?”
“Him.”
Lily thinks of Cal’s drained body in the bed they shared in Budapest. The man in the black parka who’d chased her from the square.
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lily attempts.
“You’re lying.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. See, I’m trained in recognizing the tells in people.”
“How’s that?”
“For one thing you look like you’re about to puke.”
He’s right. She fights to bring in a breath and hold it down until her stomach settles.
“The person you interviewed at the Kirby was briefly incarcerated some years ago,” Will continues. “Caught by a pair of highway patrolmen ditching a body off a bridge in Louisiana. Once we became aware of his capture, we told the prison doctor to take a blood sample before we flew down to pick him up. It’s a good thing we did. Because as the sample was being taken, he extracted considerably more blood from the doctor than was extracted from him. And then he was gone.”
“But you still had his blood.”
“That’s right. And our lab ran every test there is on it. The results were mostly normal. But some of it demonstrated extraordinary characteristics. I’m not a scientist, but from what I understand it’s like a superpowered antioxidant, cells that demonstrated resilience to all manner of disease. The reversal of advanced cancers in rats. A medical game changer, to say the very fucking least.”
Three weeks ago—three days ago—Lily would have found this stranger’s account preposterous, the sort of claim she’d hear babbled by a lunatic in one of the Kirby’s interview rooms. Yet whether it’s the more fantastical tales she’s entertained since, or how it would explain so much of what she couldn’t explain before, either way it enters her with the solid weight of the truth.
“So why not make the medicines and save the world?” she asks.
“We’d like to. But we need him.”
“You mean his blood.”
“Yes. His blood.”
Lily thinks of Michael outside somewhere in the night, hunting. But if Will is right, if he’s telling the truth, the one
who’s brought so much suffering to so many has the capacity of ending the suffering for millions more. She struggles to hold these competing possibilities straight in her head.
“What about the others? Are they after the same thing?”
“We’re not exactly sure. But it’s not to help anybody other than themselves. We know they have considerable resources, possibly even greater than ours. And we know they’ve killed many innocent people in their pursuit of him. They’re a collection of soldiers, torturers, hit men. The best at their particular skills.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Listen to me, Lily. This individual—he’s good at many things, lying being one of them,” Will says. “He can get into your head. I don’t know how he does it, but he can. Maybe you think he’s your friend. Maybe you’re even a little in love with him. But he will eventually rip you open the same as everyone else he comes across. It may be that he thinks he can stop himself. Except he can’t.”
He slides to the very edge of the seat so that Lily can smell the soap he showered with. While she recognizes that she should be repulsed by him, she finds herself resisting the urge to bring her fingers up to his ruined face. Sympathy can lead to attraction too, Lily realizes. It aroused something other than passion but something related nevertheless, the desire to connect, to show someone they aren’t alone and in so doing, show that you aren’t either.
“He’s killed children,” the man says. “Hundreds of them. And he’ll never give up.”
Lily expects him to wait for a revision of her refusal to assist him but instead he stands. He’s taller than she would have guessed. He searches in his jacket and hands her a card. Lily glances at it. A number with a New York area code.
“That’s a call-me-anytime offer. Don’t wait too long to use it, because here’s the truth: I’m your only chance of getting through this alive.”
His hand comes up and for a moment she expects him to put it to her skin, to squeeze the top of her exposed shoulder or stroke a stray lick of hair behind her ear, but he only slips it into his pocket. He moves away from her and joins the flow of passengers heading to their gates.
When he’s completely out of view Lily studies the number on the card before ripping it up and letting the bits of paper fall on the carpet at her feet like snow.
21
* * *
At Heathrow she takes the tube into the city, emerging at the Russell Square station to look for a hotel. It has to be a good one, because she figures only those places could arrange for a DVD player to be brought to her room. She goes on for a block before deciding on the Montague, where the concierge says he’ll have one sent up within the hour.
Instead of waiting, Lily heads out to buy some clean underwear and socks. Once she finds Oxford Street she gets swept along by the crowds, the pounding club music from souvenir shops, and the roar of buses pushing the traffic along next to her. On a wall of TVs in a store’s window display the news is reporting the disappearance of a twelve-year-old boy on his way to school, his photo that of a cherry-cheeked kid with jug ears wearing a Spurs jersey. It supplies Lily with almost enough everyday noise and horror to stop her from thinking about being followed. Not just by Michael now, but by the twisted-faced Will, as well as the unnamed ones who will use her before killing her. So far as she knows, all of them bad guys.
When Lily returns to Russell Square it’s dark. Despite the cold, men and women stand outside the pubs drinking, and part of her wants to be with them. One of the men, good-looking and tipsy, steps away from the others and waves. “C’mon! One on me, luv!” he calls to her, and he clownishly frowns when she shakes her head and walks on.
Once in her room she sees that the disc player has been set up as she asked. Lily opens the DVD case and, along with the disc, pulls out a tightly folded square of delicate paper, yellowed with age, their surfaces spiderwebbed by Michael’s handwriting.
Lily decides to watch the DVD first. Takes a shuddering breath. Presses play.
It’s her mother.
Judging by the saturated colors and slightly flickering frame, the footage was shot on film, a Super 8 or something like it, then later transferred to video. The effect is to authenticate that it’s her, unquestionably the past. She sits on a tartan sofa in what, judging from the faded print of flowers in a vase on the paneled wall behind her, is a cheap motel room. Her hair wet, clothed in a ratty white bathrobe. She looks tired, but summons a smile.
“Let’s see the little worm,” a man’s voice says from behind the camera. “The little Worm Princess.”
Michael’s voice.
The camera comes in closer and, for the first time, Lily notices that what she took to be bath towels used to dry herself from a shower are actually a roll of bundled bedsheets held in her mother’s arms. Her hair not wet from bathing, but from the sweat of recent exertion. The birth of her child.
As she watches these images, Lily’s body fills with a blood-driving warmth, as if she had stopped for a couple of whisky shots at the pub outside. But in her mind, she’s the opposite of drunk. Her consciousness is sharpened in anticipation of what she’s about to see next.
Lily’s mother spreads the sheets wider at one end to reveal a pink newborn. Eyes tightly closed, the tiny hands reaching and clenching. On the sheets the mucus and blood that show the child had arrived only moments earlier.
Michael’s hand enters the frame and gently taps the baby’s nose, strokes its forehead. When he tickles its hands the infant’s fingers grip around his and don’t let go.
“What a strong worm!” he says, and laughs. A real, human sound.
Who is this man? How can he be there, with the infant version of herself? But Lily is so mesmerized by what she’s seeing, she can’t focus on these thoughts for long. Her mother is there, right there, on the screen in front of her. As shocking as Michael’s presence on the tape is, her mother’s is even more miraculous.
“Stop calling her that!” her mother says, laughing herself. “Her name is Lily.”
“Why Lily?”
“Because she’s pretty, that’s why.”
Then it’s her mother’s turn to let the baby hold her finger.
It goes on like this for several seconds. A mother looking down at her newborn child, whispering her name.
Lily. Pretty little Lily.
But then a new sound comes over the TV speakers that startles the grown-up Lily so much she actually lurches back from the screen.
The man starts singing words she can’t understand but that she recognizes as Hungarian. The tune she remembers her mother humming to her at bedtime when she was a child.
Lily’s mother watches him. “What’s that?” she asks.
“A lullaby.”
“Will you teach it to me?”
“You won’t understand the words.”
“It’s not about the words. Teach me the melody.”
Michael starts to sing again, slower this time, and Lily’s mother sings with him, turning the words into a sweet humming. Before she knows she’s doing it, Lily is humming along to it too.
There was fear in her only a moment ago, but something more powerful has entered her, something enveloping, supple, elemental. Hidden in a London hotel room watching her parents on a recording of her first moments of life. A family divided by time, by death, now singing the same song.
Edinburgh
December 10, 1878
Another writer.
Given the decades since my meetings with Mary Shelley, this shows how well I can restrain myself. As much as I admired Frankenstein, Mary had gilded her fiction to such a degree that while I knew I was the creature behind the Creature, it could never be seen as a true account. What I seek now is something different. A journalist who can render my life in words—the facts instead of metaphors, reporting instead of poetry.
Over the past few months in London I spent the days reading all the magazines where such a talent might be found. Macmillan’s, the Illustrated London News
. It was in one of those that I first came across Robert Louis Stevenson.
I have traveled to Edinburgh where Stevenson lives in his parents’ row house on a distinguished street in New Town. Yesterday evening I walked round to the place and, when I knocked, the door was opened by a man of comical appearance. Tall, thin as a stick, his hair greasy and long, the posture of a cricket. Even his clothes were eccentric: buttoned pajamas covered by a velvet smoking jacket. Most amusing of all was his face. An oval of ever-changing expressions, the eyes bulging with mock alarm.
“Robert Stevenson?” I asked.
“If you are a bill collector, please return when my father is at home.”
“I’m not here about any debt. I believe you possess something I need.”
“And what is that?”
“Talent.”
He giggled. A schoolboy titter that brought on a round of coughing so violent I thought he might perish right there on the doorstep.
I asked him if I might take him into town for a drink to discuss the commission I had in mind.
He stepped out and closed the door behind him. “You may take me anywhere for a drink, good sir,” he said. “But while you know my name, I have yet to learn yours.”
“Michael Eszes.”
“Well, Michael,” the cricket said, throwing an arm across my shoulders. “I know a place where commissions are best discussed.”
He directed me to a club where his attire drew attention but, after ordering oysters and two bottles of good champagne, not enough for us to be asked to leave. As we ate (or he ate, and I drank), I grew increasingly impressed by the amount of wine and then gin he put down his throat, his Adam’s apple leaping up and down like the rest of him. He corrected me when I called him by his given name.
“Call me Skivvy. My friends do.”
“Is that what we are now? Friends?”
“Aye. If you’re paying for all this? The very best of friends.” He sat back in his chair, swept his long hair behind his ears with his finger, and said he was now ready for the presentation.