Such Wicked Intent (17 page)

“It’s pointless to argue about it now,” she said. “We have a
child
that’s growing very quickly, and he’s hungry.”

“I’ll bring some milk from the hamper,” said Henry. “He must be thirsty, too.”

I exhaled in exasperation, angry with Henry for playing such a perfect nursemaid—and angry with myself, too, for I hated being proved wrong. I’d been so certain the creature wouldn’t wake again. Nor would it have, if Elizabeth hadn’t meddled with it.

At the sight of the milk bottle, the creature greedily reached for it with both hands, seized it, and pulled it to its mouth. A good deal slopped over its face and body, and Elizabeth’s dress, but it drained the bottle in short order and then looked about pleadingly for more, making an anxious whine.

Henry spread our picnic rug and hamper on the dirt floor, and Elizabeth sat down with the child on her lap. She wrapped it in a blanket and began to set out the food. From her fingers Elizabeth fed it morsels of bread, cooked ham, salted fish—and it devoured them all.

I examined it carefully, this creature formed from mud, this being I’d helped create. In the space of a single day and night, it had transformed from a baby to a toddler. It was hard to comprehend the speed of such growth, the stretch of bone and flourishing of vein and sinew and muscle. Already this creature was much larger than our little William.

Most unnerving of all, it was getting more difficult for me to think of this creature as an
it
when I could now see myself and my brother in its features. Mother had had a portrait of Konrad and me painted when we were three, and the resemblance was striking.

The child gave a belch, spitting up some milk and food, and pushed away the bit of apple Elizabeth was offering. I winced at the sour odor, but Henry showed no distaste as he mopped up the child’s mouth.

“Apple,” said Elizabeth, bobbing one before it. “Apple.”

The mud child’s eyes followed the piece of fruit, but there was a curious blankness to its gaze.

“It’s nothing but appetite and impulse,” I said. “There’s no point trying to teach it anything.”

Elizabeth frowned at me, as though I might have hurt the creature’s feelings. “He has every part a person should have, except a soul. Learning will help him, surely. And I don’t see how it can hurt.”

She sang a silly nursery song to it, and its dark eyes widened slightly.

“This is a rather good one,” said Henry, and recited a nonsense poem I remembered from my own childhood.

The child seemed suddenly restless, and squirmed from Elizabeth’s lap. In a second it had crawled over to Henry and was reaching up for him. Henry laughed with undisguised pleasure.

“He appreciates fine verse,” he said.

“As do many of us,” Elizabeth said, and chuckled.

Henry took hold of the child’s hands, and it pulled itself up to standing.

“Its legs are strong,” I said, though it should have come as no surprise. This same strange child had chased down mice and rats and killed with its tiny fists.

“He’ll be walking soon,” Elizabeth said proudly.

“Very soon,” I agreed, wondering if it would occur to the mud child to try to escape the cottage.

“You still think it humane, or safe, to keep him here?” Elizabeth asked me, with her chin at a challenging tilt.

I looked at the child carefully, at the lack of expression in its eyes, and I truly thought it was an empty vessel. “It seems it wakes only to eat,” I said. “We’ll leave all the food and water beside the hole. If it wakes again, it’ll have more than enough to keep it until we visit tomorrow.”

As if to corroborate my claim, the child’s eyelids were already drooping with fatigue, and it crumpled asleep into Henry’s arms.

“I’ll settle him, then,” said Henry, placing the child’s naked body carefully back in the hole.

Elizabeth was ready with the blanket, and tucked it carefully all around. Then she went back to the hamper and returned with an old doll of Ernest’s, a uniformed man made of soft felt.

“It doesn’t need that,” I said.

She knelt at the edge of the hole and slipped the doll under the blanket, against its chest.

A small crease appeared in the mud child’s forehead as its nostrils twitched, then flared, inhaling deeply. Then it exhaled and slumbered blissfully beneath its blanket.

*   *   *

As we entered our house, our housekeeper Maria was scudding like a storm cloud through the hall.

“Is anything the matter?” I asked.

The corners of her mouth turned down. “It seems they’ve discovered something else beneath the house now. I heard one of the workers muttering something about bones. I don’t know why your father allows this, now of all times.”

“Where’s the professor?” I asked.

“Upstairs talking to your father, I believe,” she said.

We hurried to his study and knocked on the door.

“Ah,” said Father, admitting us, “your timing is uncanny. You’ll have an enthusiastic audience, Professor.”

The professor’s face was blanched with grit, but through the chalky dust I could see a brushstroke of high color in each cheek. He was pacing, and his bearlike chest swelled with barely restrained enthusiasm.

“What’s been discovered?” I asked.

“Something momentous,” he said. “I was just about to escort your father.”

My stomach was knotted with excitement as we made the descent into the caves. It was an altogether different world from our previous visit. The place was lit as brightly as a Geneva street. As we ventured through the wondrous galleries of horses, bulls, and stags, we passed artists at easels, sketching.

“They’re in heaven,” the professor said with a laugh. “They say they’ve never seen images so vital. Their work could fill the Louvre already.”

Farther along one young scholar tapped at the rock with a small hammer, collecting shards, while another stood upon a ladder, examining the soot marks upon the ceiling. We passed the bear and the sly tiger, and when the passage branched, I felt an eerie lack of surprise when the professor chose the same route I had taken in the spirit world. I noticed that a rope had been staked into the wall, guiding us, turning by turning, to the high-domed chamber in which towered the giant brushstroke man.

“Extraordinary!” my father exclaimed, and I made sure to make a gasp of amazement, to conceal the fact that I had visited this chamber before.

“A human figure at last,” the professor said proudly, “and what a colossus he is!”

The chamber was brightly illuminated, and yet when I glanced at Elizabeth, her expression was uneasy, and Henry’s eyes were fixed intently on the passageway that slanted steeply downward.

“Who was this fellow, do you think?” my father asked.

“Clearly someone held in great regard,” the professor replied. “Those markings underneath no doubt have a tale to tell.”

“Have you any better idea of their meaning?” I asked.

“Alas, no word yet from my colleague in France.”

From the slanting passageway echoed a moan, followed by the slow, gritty scrape of heavy footfalls. I swallowed and took a step back.

“Dear God!” Henry said in a choked voice.

All at once an enormous shadow unfolded itself from the
passageway, and Elizabeth stifled a scream. A large man stepped out into the chamber, rubbing his head.

“Very sorry to have startled you, miss,” he said apologetically. “Just banged my head on the way up. It’s wickedly steep.” He walked to Neumeyer and handed him a notebook. “The measurements you asked for, Professor.”

“Thank you, Gerard. You left some lanterns burning?”

“I did.”

“What’s down there?” Elizabeth asked hoarsely.

“Ah. Most wondrous of all,” said the professor. “Though, if you’re of a delicate sensibility, perhaps it’s best you wait here.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” said Elizabeth, and I could tell she struggled to keep the annoyance from her voice.

“Very well.” The professor took up his lantern and handed another to Father. “The way’s steep and dark, but there are crude steps cut into the floor. They’re slippery, though, so please be careful.”

In me was a ravenous curiosity. Since hearing that unearthly noise emanate from the passageway in the spirit world, I’d craved more knowledge of it. The way down was indeed perilous, the walls moist with dew, the shallow steps slick. Deeper into the earth the atmosphere grew decidedly more humid and carried an earthy hint of freshly turned soil.

“Are you all right?” I heard Henry ask Elizabeth.

She nodded, and I smiled to myself. I knew she was made of sterner stuff than Henry supposed.

From below I caught a faint flicker of light, but it was several long minutes before the passage leveled out abruptly
and we found ourselves in a long narrow chamber.

Skeletons were laid out on crude shelves cut deep into both sides. Our lantern light blazed off the bones, ghoulishly animating them. Near the ceiling some skeletons had become calcified, almost overwhelmed by a blanket of white mineral moss, their gaping jaws disgorging strange spiky blossoms.

“A burial chamber,” said my father quietly. His voice was subdued, and I couldn’t help wondering if the sight reminded him, as it did me, of our own family crypt, and the body we had recently left there.

“It’s quite a find,” said the professor. “I don’t think there’s been anything like this discovered on the continent.”

“How old are these bones?” I asked, and I touched one with my fingertips. Instantly I had in my mind a sense of immense age, too old to fathom.

“Very old indeed,” said the professor, “based on the strangeness of their skeletons.”

“How are they strange?” Elizabeth asked.

The professor stepped up to one of the best-preserved skeletons and held his lantern close. “Take special note of the knee joints, and here, the skull. The thickness of them. I have never seen the like on any human being.”

Coldness ghosted over my skin. “You’re saying this fellow here was a giant?”

“This fellow is actually a woman,” he said with a grin made eerie in the swinging lantern light. “And, no. Though brutishly built, they’re roughly the same height as us. But I wonder if those buried here were actually human.”

“What else could they be?” Elizabeth asked, startled.

“It’s very controversial,” the professor said somewhat uncomfortably, turning to my father, “but I know that you, Alphonse, are a man of wide and liberal beliefs.”

“Speak freely,” Father said.

“There are theories, unpopular still, that we were not always as we are. Some think that before man was man, he was something else. That over thousands, if not millions, of years we changed from one thing into another. These skeletons here may be what we once were. Before we became properly human.”

“The first Frankensteins, perhaps,” said Henry with a nervous attempt at laughter.

“Would this have been the tomb of an entire clan?” Father asked.

“Possibly,” said the professor. “But these skeletons here are merely a prelude to something else.”

“Why do you say that?” Elizabeth asked.

“You will see.”

He led us farther along the chamber until it opened into a much larger one. At its very center was a raised mound, encircled and entirely covered by a profusion of ornaments carved from stone and bone. As we drew closer, I saw that some were fist-size figurines of men or women. Others were carvings of animals—all the great beasts depicted on the walls. In wonder I knelt down to see them better.

“In many ancient cultures,” said the professor, “it is common for a chief or shaman or king to be buried with family members or dignitaries who were chosen to share the tomb.”

“Those skeletons in the passage?” Henry asked.

“Precisely.”

“But given their sheer number, and the profusion of ornaments here—and that wall image in the chamber above—I believe whoever was buried beneath this mound was considered a god.”

I
’
D MEANT TO WAIT TILL AFTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE MAKING MY
entrance to the spirit world, and must have fallen asleep while reading on my bed. I woke with a start. The candle had all but burned down. Quickly I stood, walked to my shelves, and opened my chess set. Nestled beside the queen was the key to the bottom drawer of my desk. As I crossed the room, I faltered. Lingering in the air, like the memory of some spectral perfume, was the sense that someone, not long ago, had just been here.

Uneasily I opened the drawer, and stared in panic. The spirit clock and the green flask of elixir were both gone. Had we been discovered? Had Father stolen into my room and seized these things?

I took several deep breaths. No. Not Father.

Silently I crept out into the hallway and made my way to Elizabeth’s bedchamber. What right did she have to confiscate my elixir, to try to
control
my actions? Inside my head angry words tumbled one over the other. Her door was locked, but I’d anticipated this and took from my pocket a slender two-pronged device I’d mastered at the age of twelve. In four seconds the door was open and I walked inside, my angry speech already rehearsed.

She was lying fully dressed on her bed. Her eyes were shut,
each of her hands holding something. In her right I caught sight of the outlines of the spirit clock.

She was inside!

After all her talk of never going in again, she’d gone inside—and without me!

On her night table was the green flask. Hurriedly I drew out the dropper and let it drip once upon my tongue. I replaced it and sat down in an armchair. I pulled off my family ring to grasp in my hand. I had only a few seconds to wait before—

*   *   *

—I open my eyes in Elizabeth’s empty bedchamber. At once I see a colorful butterfly launch itself from my body, and with a grunt of dismay I realize that this is the spirit,
my
spirit, that has been upon me all day, giving me such strength and mental agility. I stand and follow it out into the hallway, lifting my hand, but it flutters high out of reach.

“Come back,” I whisper, feeling a flicker of panic within me.