The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (44 page)

“What – what do you mean?”

“Shouldn’t have fitted a glass window to your outsize coffin, should you? Serge! Why haven’t you found us anything to drink yet, you lazy bastard?”

The marquis’s face turned literally grey, as though he had divined the import of Paul’s words. In a strained voice Poltenaire said, “I must advise my client to refrain from any further statement on this subject –”

From outside came a clatter of horses’ hooves. Bewildered, all save
the marquis, they turned as the front door swung open to reveal Jules, followed by a scowling man in a wet cloak, and he in turn by another bearing a large leather portfolio.

“This is our distinguished neighbour Monsieur Vautrian,” announced Jules. “He is a
juge d’instruction
, an examining magistrate. As Monsieur le Marquis took the precaution of advising me I should in such a case, when you marched in without a by-your-leave I betook myself to his house and swore out a complaint for trespass and false accusation.”

“But –!” Paul stammered.

“No buts,” Vautrian ordered. “Let’s get this nonsense out of the way. Anton” – to his companion, clearly his own
huissier
, approximately bailiff or legal clerk – “there’s the dining-room. We can sit round the table.”

“Just a moment.”

The marquis’s voice was as dry as the rustle of a beetle’s wingcases.

“Is it true that . . .?” He had to break off and swallow. “Is it true, Paul, that you – you broke the window of Sibylle’s resting-place?”

“Hah!” – defiantly. “I didn’t mean to. I just ran out of brandy on the way up your front steps, and what use is an empty bottle? I chucked it away, that’s all.”

The marquis’s tone became dull, resigned. He said, “Jules?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did his bottle –? Don’t bother to reply. I can tell from your face.”

Vautrian said impatiently, “What’s this about?”

“As well he knew it would, his action” – the marquis’s words took on a tone like a great bell tolling for a funeral – “broke the seal ensuring my wife’s chance to live again.”

“Did you ever hear such nonsense?” roared Paul. “Still, at least he’s finally admitting that she’s dead. He has no more claim on my rightful inheritance!”

“Is that the way of it?” Vautrian demanded.

“Why, it must be!” Poltenaire supplied hastily. “It’s all turned out exactly as Monsieur Serrouiller claimed. For seven years the marquis has been deranged by the loss of his wife. He has refused to admit she is dead. Even on his own terms, though . . . Doctor, do you wish to say something?”

The alienist was looking grave and sympathetic.

“Yes, the situation is indeed as we were warned. But one need not despair. There has been progress. Even in what appears an intractable case one may still hope for a remission.”

“Be quiet!” snapped the marquis. “I have long feared that Paul, as
full of greed and evil as his sister of goodness and beauty, would find a way to destroy my years of work. I was so close . . . Yet what does it matter? Would Sibylle have wanted to return to a world where on his own admission her nearest blood relative had spent years trying to deprive her of her second lease of life?”

Largot said, “One is aware your reputation as a scientist –”

“Oh, I believe I’ve earned it. There are natural philosophers in ten countries who will say as much. But what boots it now? My life has lost all purpose . . . Speaking of purposes, I take it that it’s yours to strip me of my estates and indeed my freedom, on the grounds that I am and have long been deranged. Very well. As I say, my life has lost all reason and all meaning. Do not, though, be so hardhearted as to deny me one last glimpse of my beloved.”

The others exchanged glances. Paul broke the silence with a snort.

“Go if you wish! Take your neighbour with you! It will be fine to have a
juge d’instruction
certify how far your sickness has progressed! Take his
huissier
as well, if you like. The more witnesses the merrier! Meantime my friends and I can celebrate our victory. Serge – Schaefer – why the hell have you not found the brandy yet? Jules, show them where to look!”

The second, the third, glassful sufficed to put them all in a good humour again: the heir presumptive who had been fuming at the way his brother-in-law was spending what he felt to be his portion on a doomed and lunatic attempt to bring his wife back; the impoverished lawyer who stood to gain fees enough to live on for a year from the conclusion of this case, and his
huissier
who would be correspondingly better off; the alienist whose practice had formerly been lucrative but whose private asylum sorely lacked just such patients as a titled member of the Old Nobility would attract, for there were many old rich families looking for places to conceal the products of generations of inbreeding and over-indulgence, and his authorized bully Serge who was so skilled at cowing even nobles into doing as they were told . . . They were in the dining-room relaxing into laughter at the speed and completeness of their victory when there came a scream from the hallway. Before they could more than react, the room’s door was flung wide by Jules. Headlong through the opening fell the marquis – it had been he who screamed, they realized – in a dead faint.

Scrambling to their feet in astonishment, they found themselves confronting Vautrian, his face like thunder.

“Your name Schaefer?” he barked.

“Ah – yes!”

“You’re a certified
huissier
?”

“Yes!”

“I am a duly appointed
juge d’instruction
. I invoke your assistance in the name of the law.”

Slowly, confusedly, lowering his third glass of brandy – except that it wasn’t his third, not of the day, but more like his tenth or twelfth – Paul Serrouiller cancelled the joke he had planned to make concerning disposal of that nude painting of his sister to the Moulin Rouge where it would look perfect in the entrance
foyer
.

Vautrian did not have the air of a man inclined for jokes.

He continued, “You are Paul Serrouiller, brother of the late Marquise de Vergonde?”

“What the hell are you going on about?”

His face eloquent of something between disgust and terror, the magistrate drew a deep breath.

“I arrest you for the culpable homicide of your sister.”

“What?” Paul overturned his glass in the act of trying to set it down. “Are you crazy? My sister has been dead for seven years!”

His brother-in-law the marquis roused, scrabbling at the dirty floor with equally dirty fingernails, apparently in search of his spectacles. Jules hastened to his side.

“I was so close to success,” he whispered. “I was so much closer than I knew . . .”

Vautrian ignored the distraction, continuing to address Paul.

“Did you throw a brandy-bottle at the tomb in which she was sealed up, thereby breaking its window and admitting air?”

“What?” Paul licked his lips, casting around for support. But his cronies had sensed something amiss and were withholding it.

“You had been told, had you not, that your sister stood a chance of being resuscitated if the seal could be maintained until a cure was found for her disease?”

“Who pays attention to that sort of rubbish?” Paul exclaimed hysterically. “My sister had been dead for seven years! How can you claim I killed her?”

The marquis moaned, still writhing on the floor.

“But she cannot have been dead for seven years,” said the magistrate. Again he filled his lungs to maximum, as though afraid he might otherwise run out of oxygen.

“On entering the mausoleum, we found your sister not on her catafalque but on the floor, and in the dust around such marks as make it clear that she had risen, taken three clear steps, and collapsed.”

Paul stared, mind bludgeoned into incredulity.

“Moreover . . . Anton?”

The bailiff had been keeping one hand behind his back. Now he revealed what was in it: a swatch of bright blonde hair.

Sibylle’s hair.

“She can have had strength only for a moment. On contact with the full force of fresh air, all that was left of her – save those golden locks . . .” He had to pause and swallow.

“Dissolved,” grated Jules.

“But she had lived!” the marquis cried, striving to raise himself.

Vautrian nodded heavily. “Yes, long enough. Monsieur Serrouiller, I repeat my charge. You had been told that breaching the seal that protected your sister would be tantamount to murdering her –”

“But I didn’t know she was alive!” shrieked Paul.

“You mean you didn’t believe she was,” corrected the magistrate. “That she was, however, has been proved.”

“I – I . . .”

Wherever Paul looked, though, he read no pity in the others’ eyes. It was as though they were all wordlessly concluding:

The marquis really had found out a way to raise the dead. This bastard insisted that he couldn’t have because he wanted to get his hands on the money that was needed to perfect it
.

To waste on brandy, more than like!

The marquis uttered a stifled groan, rolled on his back and lay still. Jules checked his wrist for a pulse. He found none.

“Now there truly is no chance of knowing what my master invented,” he said in a gravelly voice, and crossed himself.

“Thanks to this greedy fool,” Largot snapped, adding to Vautrian, “You need assistance in arresting him, monsieur? Serge!”

Expert hands clamped on Paul’s windpipe, dispatching him to limp oblivion. Not before, however, he had heard:

“To cheat humanity of resurrection? Has there ever been a fouler traitor?”

Conscious or not, Paul would have had no answer.

Since the publication of his first novel
, Werewolf By Moonlight,
in 1974, the prolific Guy N. Smith has written almost sixty horror novels, plus thrillers, film novelizations, children’s books and non-fiction guides aimed at farmers, sportsmen and gamekeepers
.

His recent horror titles include
The Resurrected, The Knighton Vampires, The Plague Chronicles
and
Witch Spell,
while under the alias Gavin Newman he has published a new thriller
, The Hangman,
and as Jonathan Guy he is the author of the animal books
Badger Island
and
Rak.

The writer also runs a mail-order business, Black Hill Books (established in 1972), specialising in crime and horror fiction with a separate catalogue devoted to his own books and collectables. In 1992 the Guy N. Smith Fan Club was formed
.

J
EREMY WAS FRIGHTENED
. Very frightened. For a number of reasons.

The last time he’d been to the city was when he was twelve, he could not remember much about it except that his parents had been with him. He hadn’t been anywhere without them since, except on those rare occasions when they let him go into town on the bus on his own, and then Mother was waiting at the bus stop for his return. Once he’d missed the bus home, come on the next one, and she’d been nearly hysterical. That
was when he was sixteen; he was twenty now and nothing had changed much.

Jeremy was still paying the price for his misfortune in being the only child of farmers who had sheltered him from infancy to adolescence and beyond. His mother was turned forty when he was born; it had been a difficult birth, both mother and offspring only survived with a struggle. His father was sixteen years older than Jeremy’s mother, and even now they did not trust their son to run the 100-acre spread on his own. Even the simplest chore had to be referred to them before it was attempted, and it was usually criticized heavily after its completion.

“You’m lucky, Jerry,” his father repeatedly reminded him, spittle stringing from his toothless mouth, his chest wheezing beneath his old brown smock even though he had never smoked. “You could be livin’ close to a town with all kinds o’ things to lead you astray. Out here you’m safe, and after we’ve gone the place’ll be your’n. That’s the time to get married, when you’ve nobody to cook and clean for you. But you’ve got your mother, God willing for a number o’ years to come, so you won’t need a wife yet.”

Jeremy had worked on the farm all his life, six days a week and chapel twice on Sundays, the routine never altered. The farm was situated down a rough track, two miles from the public road, and the only person, apart from his parents, whom Jeremy saw regularly was the postman. And mostly that was a distant glimpse of a red van.

Jeremy became a reluctant recluse. Taking sheep to market with the tractor and trailer on Fridays was no social excursion. Naturally, his father came along and the gathering in the stockyard was invariably that of an older generation. Jeremy became extremely lonely.

Bingo in the village hall was taboo to a true chapelman, his father was aghast that his son had even
thought
of going. The monthly dance was a waste of time and, anyway, how would Jeremy get home afterwards because there were no buses at that time of night and taxis were too expensive; another thing, a young man needed to be abed early if he was to be up and about at daylight the next morning.