by Andrew Pyper
“I belong to this world and the other,” I told the skinny Scotsman. “I am a scholar and a monster in one man.”
Skivvy looked at me with what I took to be mock seriousness.
“Careful, my friend. There’s a book in that.”
“It is as though I am two persons, possessed of two faces, two characters. Put together, I am hardly human at all.”
“You say two faces. But I see only one.”
“Come then,” I said. “Let me show you the other.”
We left the club with Stevenson under the impression that we were going to proceed to some other, more ribald entertainment. Instead, we lurched along George Street until I spotted a man ahead of us. I proposed we follow him. No doubt Skivvy thought it was a game. It’s why he suppressed another fit of giggles and tiptoed along next to me. When we were no more than three strides behind the stranger, on a side street off Charlotte Square, our prey slowed. His head turned to us. He smiled at Stevenson. But when he took me in, he cowered.
“Oh Christ,” the man said.
“No need for worry, my good—” Stevenson began, but was interrupted when I stepped forward to spin the man around and put my boot to his knee, hard enough to rip the bone through the back of his leg. Once he was down, I kicked him again—the head this time. His skull snapped back so that he was left staring into the sky above as if counting the stars.
I turned to look at Stevenson and saw it in his face. Elongated when at rest, but now stretched farther still, the mouth agape. It wasn’t only shock from witnessing an unspeakable thing, but from its opportunity.
He saw a story.
Edinburgh
December 12, 1878
Today I returned to Heriot Row and sat on one of the benches in the park directly across from the Stevensons’ door. When Skivvy came out and noticed me he stopped, his face visibly gauging whether he should retreat or venture forward.
I waved at him, beckoning. He started across the street with the halting, head-swinging progress of a nervous cat.
“You can never write about me,” I told him when he took a seat next to me.
“Yet you approached me for that purpose.”
“I was mistaken. I was seeking objectivity, but I realize now that such a thing is impossible when it comes to storytelling.”
“Well, Michael,” he said, leaning away with a hand raised philosophically to his chin. “There’s writing about a thing and then there’s writing about a thing.”
“Either one. You can’t do it.”
“Or you’ll . . . do to me what you did to him?”
“No. I’ll do it to your mother and father first. Then I’ll do it to you.”
He leaned even farther back as if to situate himself at the greatest distance possible from me while still remaining seated.
“I tried to tell myself you were a dream,” he said. “But here you are. And I’m not asleep.”
I rose, casting him in shade.
“Not a word, written or spoken,” I said. “Do you understand?”
He nodded. Even as I walked off he kept his head going up and down like a pigeon’s, a motion that wasn’t acceptance but the labored swallowing that comes from trying not to be sick.
Edinburgh
May 11, 1887
Writers are a strange breed. Magpies, scavengers. So fearful of the world they would prefer to describe it than live in it, yet brave to the point of idiocy when in pursuit of inspiration. The real ones will slip their heads into the noose and pull the lever themselves if they think a hanging would make a good tale.
Take Skivvy.
Last year—eight years after our first meeting—I read his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shortly after its publication. It has caused me to pursue him over the last several months of his travels. A theft for which he will pay with his life.
I admit that the book’s primary offense is against my vanity. Hyde, the monster whom the physician Jekyll becomes when he drinks a potion of his devising, is described in the most hideous terms. “Something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable,” Stevenson has one character say. Another struggles to provide a concrete description. “There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? . . .”
This was the Scotsman being vague so as not to identify me. Yet his one inexcusable offense was Hyde’s most awful crime: beating a man to death in the street. This was me.
I will make him suffer for that.
Edinburgh
May 12, 1887
I came to kill Stevenson, yet as of this evening, he remains alive.
Why? I’m not sure I possess the answer. Perhaps it was sympathy. As it happened, I arrived two days before the poor man was to bury the father he loved. And then I saw him, walking alone in his mourning suit, and as I approached I must admit I could not wholly fend off pity for the chain-smoking wraith.
When he saw me he stopped, knowing it was pointless to shout, to run. I spoke to him in the simplest terms: his life might be spared, but only if he left Europe for exile in some far-off place where his chatter could not be heard. He would have to take his mother with him too, along with his wife, her daughter, and son. He would leave Scotland and London and the literary world behind or I would do things to all of them beyond his Mr. Hyde’s darkest fathoming.
I do believe he will not deny me this time.
22
* * *
She was awakened by the monster knocking at the door.
Not the one at the Alaskan cabin she shared with her mother. It’s the door to her room at the Montague Hotel, one she rises from the bed and goes to. Even on tiptoes the peephole is too high for her to look out of. If she wants to see what shape is on the other side she has no choice but to open the door. The same problem her mother would have faced at the cabin the day she died.
Lily opens the door.
Nothing but empty hallway. Flies buzzing around a tray of room service food left on the floor. Suddenly hungry, she squints to see what her neighbor had for dinner.
A glass of red wine too thick to be wine. Set in the center, in a nouvelle cuisine minimalist arrangement, twin pieces of oddly shaped meat, all hard ridges and curved ligament. She’s about to take a step out of her room to take a closer look when she sees it’s not meat at all but a set of human ears.
She jumps back inside and pushes the door shut.
“This isn’t happening,” she whispers.
Really? her inner voice answers. Do you smell that?
And now she does. Something humid and rank in the room’s darkness.
That’s as real as it gets.
The thought occurs to her that Michael awaits her in the bed, that the odor belongs to him.
Lily sidesteps into the bathroom and closes the door, pushing the lock button. She slides backward until she bumps against the toilet. There’s a stillness long enough that she starts to believe she was mistaken about the smell but then it’s back. Not coming from the bedroom but inside the bathroom where she now stands.
The shower curtain is pulled halfway shut. Did she leave it that way?
She yanks it open.
What lies in the tub is something she recognizes. The rolled bedsheet, mostly creamy and white except for an archipelago of blood at the one end. The shape of the body within it. The yellowish arms that had found their way out of the cracks. Cal’s face only half covered so that his eyes, round buttons of shock, look up at her with a puppet’s comical surprise.
She doesn’t remember wrapping the body in a bedsheet. But Michael would have.
Lily pulls the curtain closed all the way to the tiles and turns her back on it. She studies herself in the mirror over the sink and tries to see the doctor there, the reassuring face of professional competence and sanity. In her life before this, her own image was usually enough to set her right again. Now she looks at herself and sees the face of someone on
the edge of letting go.
She would stay where she is for the rest of the night but then the shower curtain moves behind her. In the mirror, she sees fingers graze the edge of the tub.
“Don’t,” Lily whispers.
In her mind she imagines her mother, not Cal, stepping out of the tub. Those fingers that stroked against the enamel—she sees them as familiar. Aren’t those a woman’s nails that now reach around the curtain’s edge and start to draw it back, the metal rings screeching along the rod?
The woman’s hand grips the curtain. The thing steps out of the tub and stops inches from her.
“You can look now, Lily.”
Were her eyes closed? She opens them.
With relief, Lily sees that it’s neither Cal nor her mother. Dr. Edmundston stands just behind her shoulder. Then she remembers that Dr. Edmundston is dead too.
“I’m so sorry, Lionel,” she starts through instant tears. “I didn’t know that he—”
He waves her apologies away with a hand the color of ash. “What’s done is done,” he says, and nearly chokes on a watery laugh. “Or should I say, what’s dead is dead.”
The comfort she felt at Dr. Edmundston’s appearance is instantly draining away. The dead smell is growing stronger. And even though Edmundston’s voice is as kindly as it was in life, there’s a malignant intensity to his stare.
“Why are you here?” she asks.
“Here?” he repeats, looking around the bathroom as if for the first time. “I’m here to help you.”
“Help me how?”
“We’re psychiatrists, Lily. And I feel compelled to intervene when a colleague is—how shall I put this?—negligent in her practice.”
“I don’t—”
“Come now. It’s all rather obvious, from a psychoanalytic point of view,” he says. “Three novels, each dramatizing an antagonist bearing a unique mental deformity. The Creature: a being made of dead parts, a soul tortured by solitude. Hyde: the psychotic with dissociative identity disorder, one half the responsible physician, the other an escaped patient beyond all control. And Dracula, a projection of insatiable lust darkened by sexual anxiety. Three texts, three psychological conditions. But in this case all combined into one subject.”
“You mean him. Michael.”
Edmundston takes a deep breath to hide his growing impatience. “Who is Michael?”
“The man I’m following.”
“Wrong.”
“How do you—”
“You’re following a set of symptoms. He exists only as that which you’ve worked to construct.”
“I didn’t make him, Lionel. He came to me.”
“That’s the thing about the human mind. All our dreams are answered one way or another.”
“I didn’t dream him up!” Her voice falls along with the last tethers of her certainty.
“Let me ask you something,” Lionel says, raising his chin in his most doctorly pose. “Have you ever considered that the thing you seek isn’t an unnatural being, isn’t your long-lost father, but yourself?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then let me make it clear for you, you stupid, stupid girl.”
Edmundston changes. The hatred—Lily sees now that that’s what it is—twists his features, his body stiffening as it floods through him. His calm physician’s voice replaced by a snarling threat as his skin dries and sucks against the bone.
“The one you call Michael isn’t a living thing. He’s a fucking diagnosis,” he hisses before gripping his cold hands around her throat. “The real monster, my dear, is you.”
23
* * *
Lily lies on the bathroom’s tiled floor. The door is open. It’s the first thing she sees when she opens her eyes.
The second thing is a Lyceum Theatre playbill for The Lion King that had been placed on her chest.
She doesn’t remember anything after the imagined Lionel—the rather more-than-imagined Lionel—set to choking the life out of her. Who made him go away and opened the door if it wasn’t her?
You know who. The same one who left the playbill behind. Another come hither. Know what you shouldn’t do? Take the bait. Take a pill instead. On second thought? Take two.
She does.
It allows her to look into the tub to confirm that no body lies there and then stand under the shower’s hot water long enough that she comes out pink and steaming. After getting dressed, she leaves the hotel. Once she’s out on Bloomsbury’s elegant, brick-faced streets, she can think more clearly.
At the first bank she comes to she ducks inside and withdraws as much cash as she can from her checking account. No more plastic from now on. She figures it’s at least one of the ways Will, Black Parka, and whoever else have been tracking her. It leaves her feeling lighter, almost ghostly.
After buying a bacon sandwich she eats as she goes, she consults a map and decides on a route that will take her to the Lyceum Theatre. She walks the whole way. For some reason she feels sure that no one is following her at the moment. It’s not only the casting off of credit cards that does it, but the sharpening of her intuition.
The Lyceum is one of the grander West End houses, with a wide façade of white plaster columns and towering signage. She doesn’t expect any of the doors to be unlocked but tries them anyway. The third one opens. It’s the box office mezzanine, which would explain the open door. Yet all the wickets are closed, the place quieter than it ought to be.
Lily crosses the carpeted lobby and steps into the auditorium’s Orchestra seating. The stage set is in some midpoint of rearrangement: a cliffside here, a grass field there, a hot African sun on a background screen. Yet no stagehands push any of it about, no techies in black T-shirts talking into headsets. That’s when she realizes it’s Monday. The only day of the week most of London’s theaters are dark.
“Over here.”
When she squints, his shadowed form can be seen sitting alone in the second-to-last row.
“Come,” Michael says.
Lily slides in from the aisle and takes the seat two over from him, leaving him slightly out of reach.
“I watched the video,” she says. “You weren’t lying. You really did know my mother. And me.”
“But you’ve known that all along, haven’t you?”
“A part of me did, I think. But it wasn’t until I heard you sing—”
“That you knew for certain I am your father.”
“Yes.” Lily nods, and keeps nodding as the cool lines of tears wet her lips.
He looks toward the stage, casts his eyes over the yellows and oranges of African savannah, but sees something else.
“Have you ever heard of Henry Irving?” he asks, and Lily is too puzzled by the question to ask one of her own.
“Was he a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson’s?”
“No, no. Not a writer! After Skivvy I wanted nothing more to do with that untrustworthy breed. Yet I still yearned for something more than the existence of a predator. I had sampled all manner of drink and drugs, but perhaps being immortal muted their danger. Sex provided momentary distraction, but for whatever reason my seed is incompatible with the human egg, so that all my couplings were only that. What remained?”
“The theater?”
Michael nods at her guess and Lily looks up at the stage. “Irving was an actor. This was where he worked,” he says. “I saw every play and cheap spectacle that London had to offer, from Shakespeare to silly illusionists, opera to pantomime. The only productions I avoided were those of Jekyll and Hyde, which plagued the West End at the time. But Irving’s shows were distinct. Flamboyant, sentimental. Enormous undertakings that required a great number of ‘supers,’ or extras, each paid two shillings a night. It was work that allowed one to share the stage with the great man, to look out at the audience through the haze of gas footlights and see the hundreds of faces stricken in amazement or sobbing with emotion. At least, that’s what I saw when I was among a hundred and fifty others who
trooped across the boards as a fully manned army in The Lady of Lyons.”
Michael turns to Lily and though she tries to keep her eyes on the stage, she can’t help but face him.
“Irving was the primary owner of the Lyceum as well as its star, but the day-to-day managing of the place was left to a broad bear of an Irishman,” he says. “His name was Bram Stoker. And for the better part of the year 1890, he was my friend.”
Lily hears the creak of his seat and knows that Michael has bent closer to her.
“It was Stoker who hired me,” he says, his voice a tremor through the metal frame she sits on, moving through her. “When I sat before his desk wild with papers and open bottles of ink, he asked where I was from, and when I said Hungary he called it the last place where people still believed in fairies. I replied that I would have thought Ireland would still be a candidate for belief in such nonsense, and just when I thought I’d said too much, he roared with laughter. ‘Quite so, Mr. Eszes!’ he bellowed. ‘Though our Irish fairies lack the menace of your gypsy versions!’ ”
“Menacing fairies. A gypsy,” Lily says. “He saw you as research.”
“A possibility I failed to consider when he invited me to the Beefsteak Room, the club located upstairs here. Of course you are thinking I should have known better. And you would be right. That initial interest in gypsies and Eastern European folktales was a signal of writerly strategies. But over our first dinner Stoker was so affable, so full of backstage gossip, I took him as the contented company manager he appeared to be. In fact I thought I recognized in him what I had discovered in myself: the satisfaction of being around artists that came free of longing to be one. It was far from the only night Bram and I stayed up late in the Beefsteak Room. And it was far from the only room we stayed up late in.”
Michael rises and takes the seat directly next to Lily. He doesn’t touch her, but she can feel him now just the same. The outline of him, the shadowed creases of his features like a sheet enfolding her in darkness.