Tales of the Shadowmen 4: Lords of Terror

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

  “We’d have to hire horses,” Walton said, “and carriages too, if we intend to save any of this apparatus. If we can defend ourselves until daylight...”

  “We’ll get no help from the authorities,” Taaffe said. “They sent Masi to deliver that message in brutal fashion. They had no idea what we were planning to do, but they simply didn’t want us here. If we fight the banditti we’ll do it alone, and if anyone’s to pay the law for the blood that’s shed, it’s likely to be us.”

  “Patou might have been wise to set sail for some remote island,” Frankenstein muttered. “I tried to do the same myself, once, but Scotland was not remote enough.”

  “It’s your decision, Victor,” Trelawny said. “If you say the word, we’ll fight.”

  “Going inland wouldn’t save us,” Walton said. “Pisa is full of Churchmen. This one may be a rogue element, but...”

  “There’s not a man in Italy whose hand would not be raised against you if he knew what you were about,” Malo de Treguern shouted, insistently. “The Church has its reasons for discretion, but if you force its hand, anathema will be declared against you.”

  “What about Shelley?” Ned put in, although he knew that his intervention might be far from welcome. “Do you propose to abandon him?”

  “Byron’s bringing the Bolivar,” Walton said. “He and Williams can take ship if they wish, with their wives and servants. If not, they’ll still have the Don Juan.”

  “Setting to sea too soon might be the death of Shelley and his wife,” Ned objected. “What hope will there be for them, if Frankenstein is not on hand to intervene?”

  The man of science turned to look at Ned then, his tearful and bloodshot eyes full of anguish. “I am not ready!” he said, hoarsely. “I wish to God that I were, but I am not ready.”

  “He’s talking about his state of mind, not his apparatus,” Lazarus put in. “We could get that ready in a matter of hours–except that we don’t seem to have hours to spare. I am ready, though, Mr. Knob–will you follow my lead, no matter what these men decide to do?”

  Ned was astonished by this, but he tried not to show it. “If Shelley grows worse,” he said, “and there’s a chance of saving him, then I’ll seize it–no matter what the risks might be.”

  “Even a man with no religion ought not ally himself with the Devil,” said Malo de Treguern, sententiously.

  “It might be General Mortdieu who had the right of it, after all,” Ned murmured, distinctly enough to be heard. In a louder voice, he added: “But we are here, and must make our stand in Spezia or San Terenzo. I’ll gladly follow Lazarus, if he has a plan, and I’m sure that the vampire’s minion will do likewise. With four more men to support us, with or without a hostage, I’ll wager that we can put the banditti to flight–and we can certainly defend Casa Magni thereafter, even if the Bolivar takes several days to come to our aid. If the worst comes to the worst, we’d still have the Don Juan. I say that we should make a stand, win the fight, and then take the equipment down to Casa Magni–if we can.”

  Trelawny snorted at the mention of Shelley’s boat, suggesting that his opinion of the Don Juan’s seaworthiness was no higher than Guido’s, but he did not protest against the whole of Ned’s speech, despite having been the proponent of the opposite plan. It was Frankenstein who took exception to the notion of following his creature’s lead.

  “Am I cursed to be haunted forever?” the man of science demanded. “I’m for Pisa, and thence to God knows where–the East, perhaps. India, or the Ile de France.”

  “You’ll never replace and replenish your apparatus there,” Walton objected. “We are bound to civilization, if only by technical necessity. Best to head north, don’t you think? To Protestant lands where warrior monks will find no sympathy at all. The most important thing is not to be divided. The dwarf’s right about one thing–together, we might force the bandits to retreat. If we split up, we’ll surely play into their hands.”

  “To Casa Magni, then!” Ned said. “Lock up the laboratory, so that we can recover the equipment later, but let’s be on our way, while we still have a chance of taking the enemy unawares and driving them down the hill into the sea.” Lazarus made no objection to Ned voicing this plan, having presumably recognized that his own voice roused reflexive opposition.

  “Victor?” said Trelawny, again deferring to the scientist, but with an edge in his voice that testified to his change of mind.

  Frankenstein looked at Lazarus, with an eerie dread in his eyes–but in the end, he said: “Very well. We should not desert Shelley, however meager the help might be that we can offer him...”

  He would certainly have said more, but the door to the laboratory opened at that moment to reveal John Hay, in a state of high anxiety. “You’d best come immediately,” he said. “We’re surrounded–and they seem to be demanding a parley.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Power of Desire

  When John Hay declared that the house was “surrounded,” Ned took the inference–as everyone else presumably did–that the remainder of Malo de Treguern’s hirelings had returned from the shore. The Hospitaller certainly jumped to that conclusion, for he was seized by a visible thrill of excitement and triumph. It was he who led the charge to the main door, and no one sought to hold him back, preferring to shelter behind him for the moment–but when he arrived at the door and flung it wide open, Treguern stopped in confusion just beyond the threshold, utterly nonplussed by the sight that met his eyes.

  Frankenstein and Walton hung back warily, while Lazarus maintained his usual careful discretion, but Hay had already stepped outdoors and Ned had to step out too in order to see what was happening–with the result that he and Malo de Treguern ended up side by side, while Trelawny moved tentatively out on one flank and Hay on the other.

  The house did, indeed, appear to be literally surrounded–but not by any mere dozen bandits strung out along the hedge and lurking in the olive grove. Ned could not count the crowd, but it looked to be at least a hundred strong. Many, but not all, of its members were armed with guns or blades, but there were women and children there as well as men, and the attitude of the whole did not seem to be menacing. In the immediate instance, at least, they seemed quite content to watch and wait.

  The townspeople of Spezia, Ned realized–or a substantial fraction of their number–had abandoned their habitual reserve, and had stopped pretending that they and their English guests were living in parallel worlds. For a moment or two, he assumed that they had simply become impatient with the armed banditti running through their streets, and wanted to put an end to the private battle that had flared up on the edge of their town–but then he realized that he was quite mistaken, and that the truth was far more complicated.

  There was a moment’s pause before Malo de Treguern seized the initiative, and began haranguing the crowd in what seemed to Ned to be very fluent Italian. Ned could not understand that language well enough to follow every detail of what the warrior monk was saying, but he knew that Treguern was calling them to action, appealing to them as loyal Catholics. The former Knight of Malta demanded that the people of Spezia should seize the demon, the necromancer and their English lackeys, and deliver them, bound and helpless, into the care of the Church’s designated representatives.

  It took at least three minutes for the rant to falter, but Treguern finally realized that he was not getting any response.

  Someone stepped forward then from the group clustered about the gate. He spoke too rapidly for Ned to be able to grasp all of what he was saying, but there were others in Walton’s party who knew even less Italian than he, and they looked at one another in anxious bewilderment until Trelawny took it upon himself to translate.

  “They’re demanding to see the man who has been raised from the dead,” Trelawny said, uncertainly. “I don’t understand...”

  “I believe that I do,” said Lazarus, mildly. He had to step past Walton and Frankenstein as well as the advance party, but no one attempt
ed to interrupt him as he moved forward. “Bring me a lantern,” he ordered.

  Ned ran back into the house in search of the brightest lantern he could find, and hurried back with it. The Grey Man was now standing three paces ahead of Malo de Treguern, and Ned went to stand beside him, holding the lantern as high as he could.

  Lazarus did not say anything, at first, but merely removed his hat. He was no longer wearing his scarf over the lower part of his face, but he unwound it from his neck, and opened his shirt to display his torso. He held up his gloveless hands, fingers widespread. After displaying himself for a few seconds, he began to speak, in a calm and measured fashion. His Italian seemed to be almost as fluent as Treguern’s.

  Ned understood that the Grey Man was telling the crowd something of his history, and that he was referring repeatedly to Victor Frankenstein as a great man: not a necromancer but a miracle-worker. He understood, too, that the principal reason for the speech was to assure the crowd that a man returned from the dead could, in fact, speak, with all the intelligence that might be expected of a cultured person. The Grey Man did, however, take the trouble to warn them that he was not representative of those who had so far returned from the dead, and that many of the others were stupid and confused.

  It was at that moment that Malo de Treguern realized, belatedly, what was happening. The Churchman began shouting again, but Ned knew that the argument was already lost. At first, that seemed astounding–but he immediately began to see the logic of the situation. In the gloom, he picked out the three men beside the gate who were carrying dead bodies in their arms–three banditti, who had been struck down in the ferocious struggle that had take place half an hour before. Bandits, he realized, were no different from other men in having mothers and grandmothers, brothers and cousins. Outlaws the dead men might have become, unable to return wholly to the bosom of society following the years they had spent as guerillas, but they had been born in the neighborhood and it was not simply their reputation as heroes that kept them safe when they came into town. Few of their former neighbors returned their salutes nowadays, but everyone who had known them as children felt entitled to take an interest in their deaths–and Malo de Treguern had made certain when he first employed them that everyone would come to know the cause for which they had recklessly given their lives.

  Ned did not doubt for a moment that the people in the crowd were good Catholics–as good, in their own quiet fashion, as Malo de Treguern–but they were also veterans, again in their own quiet fashion, of the war into which Napoleon Bonaparte had plunged the whole of Europe. Although Spezia bore no obvious cannon-scars, the order of these people’s lives had been rudely overturned, and peace had not restored it to its former clarity. They were, as Ned had earlier observed, still stunned by the experience, uncertain as to what the future might hold, and what they ought to expect or demand of it.

  In simple terms, the people of Spezia–or those among them who has taken the trouble to put a stop to the latest battle waged by foreigners on their soil–had withheld the judgment that Malo de Treguern found so easy to make. They believed in God, in the Devil, and in necromancy and miracles too, but the idea that there was a man in their midst who had raised the dead, and was eager to repeat the experiment, had not aroused in them the kind of reflexive horror that it struck into men like Treguern. They had dead men of their own on hand, and they wanted to put Frankenstein to the test. They were not about to descend upon his house like a mad mob, to put its inhabitants to the sword and its furniture to the torch. They were in a very different mood. They wanted to know whether Victor Frankenstein really could do what was claimed–and, if so, they wanted him to do it for them.

  “We have all been too fearful,” Ned murmured, addressing himself primarily to Lazarus, although the others were able to hear him now that Treguern’s tirade was dissolving into inarticulate confusion for a second time. “The world is already changed. Whatever people in authority might dread, common people are not so foolish.

  “I am not ready,” Frankenstein said, fretfully. “I cannot do as they ask.”

  “You certainly cannot refuse them,” Lazarus said. “They will be patient if they see that we are making what effort we can, but we must certainly make what effort we can. Ready or not, we must attempt to resurrect those three men. The crowd may well be tolerant if we are not wholly successful, but they will not brook cowardice and will be direly disappointed by total failure. We must all work together, as hard as we can, and our many hands must make swift progress. These people will protect us while we work from any further interference–and that is a security to be treasured, however brief it might prove to be.”

  Frankenstein opened his mouth again, but did not speak. After a pause, he nodded his head. He knew that he had no alternative.

  Lazarus spoke to the crowd again. He asked them to bring the three dead men into the house, and he went on to ask a great deal more than that. Ned did not even try to follow the details. Instead, he confronted Malo de Treguern, and said to him, in French: “You must not waste time in further protest, my friend. You must seize this chance, even if you cannot yet see it as anything more than a chance to see necromancy in action. You need not help us, and cannot hinder us, but you have an opportunity now that has not been granted to any man since the first Lazarus rose and walked.”

  The Churchman looked at him bleakly. “I have spent more time in the company of revenants than you can know,” he said.

  “Perhaps you have,” Ned said, “but even you, aged and wizened as you are, might live long enough to see a world in which revenants are familiar to everyone, and death has lost its dominion on Earth, as well as in Heaven.”

  Malo de Treguern stared at the crowd again, as if he were now beginning to absorb the implications of its gathering and its attitude. All of humankind was there, in microcosm, and the understanding seemed for a moment to be dawning in him that the mass of men, faced by a real possibility, would welcome a new way to defy death. Then his expression changed, though. “This is the Devil’s work,” he told Ned, stubbornly. “No good can come of it, and much evil must. You have no notion of what you are doing, boy. Had you a religion, and a mind unperverted by silly lies, you would have recognized this Victor Frankenstein as the prophesied Antichrist, and you would have shielded your eyes against his seductions.”

  “Be that as it may,” Ned said, with a sigh, “you would do well to observe what happens. Now, I have work to do and no time to waste. In the past, I have only witnessed a resurrection; now I must help to contrive a whole series on them. I am very glad to have the opportunity.”

  “Imp of Satan!” was the warrior monk’s reply to that. “Hell shall claim you all!”

  Given that the bulk of the equipment that Frankenstein had gathered was not even unpacked, there was a great deal of work to be done, and it had to be admitted that the many hands available to help him did not make such light work as Lazarus has hoped. Indeed, the presence of so many inexperienced hands in a restricted space led to a good deal of clumsiness and confusion. The lack of clear and efficient leadership made the problem worse.

  Initially, everyone looked to Frankenstein to take the lead in imposing order upon the chaos, determining what had to be done, by whom, and according to what timetable, but Frankenstein was too distracted to play the general. When Lazarus took it upon himself to assume command, Frankenstein was not the only one who seemed unready to obey him, but Ned weighed in again, taking the Grey Man’s orders and relaying them. The Englishmen, at least, seemed willing to do as he said, perhaps telling themselves that he was, after all, an agent of their King.

  Once the work was well underway, in a reasonably disciplined fashion, Frankenstein began to lose his hectic manner and warm to the task in hand. Gradually, and without opposition, he took back his stolen authority. He had to send the townspeople scurrying to their homes and workplaces to bring him tin baths and various household implements, and to plunder more electrical cells from the ships in dock, bu
t they were ready enough to help. The laboratory gradually filled up with apparatus that was carefully assembled into intricate networks. The assemblies looked untidy and rather precarious, but there was a stern order within the makeshift, and Ned felt confident that the delicately-poised towers of acid-filled batteries were fit for purpose.

  For the first few hours, everyone involved in the project toiled together, but Walton eventually had to devise a shift pattern that prevented Frankenstein’s helpers from getting in one another’s way and allowed them time to rest. For the whole of the night and most of the morning the breaks, they took were short, but as the siesta hour approached it became obvious that everyone was in need of sleep. Taaffe, Hay, Walton and Trelawny were dispatched by turns to the villa’s bedrooms, and in mid-afternoon Ned finally consented to be sent back to the hotel, with instructions not to return for at least four hours. Ned was quite ready by then to obey this command in letter and spirit alike, and he was not best pleased to find Guido waiting for him in his room.

  “This,” Guido said, shaking is head slowly to signify his incredulity, “is not a situation that my master could ever have anticipated. Had it really been the case, I suppose, that a vampire’s bite could confer a kind of conditional immortality, his kind might not have been forced by idiot superstition to lurk in the shadows, but the Age of Enlightenment has not yet begun to penetrate the mysteries surrounding them. If only you could have persuaded Frankenstein to come with me...”

  “You would have had to persuade me first,” Ned said, grimly. “Your master does not seem to lack friends and loyal servants, who do not seem to fear him any more than servants usually fear an exacting master.”