A Fatal Likeness (10 page)

Byron then cast down his book with a theatrical gesture, declaring the thing to be contemptible trash. Surely, he said, our combined intellects could concoct a horror story worth the name? Better still, cried Shelley, Let us each devise our own tale, and contend with one another to harrow up our souls and set our eyeballs starting from their spheres! His own eyes were hardly less frenzied at that moment, and I could see Mary’s look of apprehension—she was concerned, always, to avoid any circumstance that might provoke a renewed attack, but Shelley was not to be gainsaid. He sought his notebook out at once, saying he had an idea for a story based on his own early life. Again I saw Mary’s look, again I saw the shadow of disquiet cross her face, but she said not a word. Polidori announced he would set aside the play he had been writing (which I was not alone in dismissing as utterly worthless), and that he already had an idea for a story concerning a woman with a skull instead of a face. Shelley squealed with laughter at this, saying that he could furnish him with the perfect model, an artful ugly hermaphroditical beast of a woman, who had once made his life an utter misery. And then his face darkened with thought, or memory, and he cast himself into a chair by the fire, declaring that the most profound horror was to be found not in the artificial apparatus of the macabre, but in the terrible depths of even the truest-intentioned human heart. I can recall moments, he continued, his voice dropping to a whisper, when I have looked upon my own being with unutterable abhorrence, and started from my own company as it were that of a fiend, seeking anything rather than a continued communion with
self.

Mary went to him then. She spoke to him softly, putting her hand to his forehead and looking into his eyes. I could see she was telling him that the idea was ill advised—that no good could come of it, but she could not dissuade him. Byron, meanwhile, had stretched himself full length on the
chaise longue
and was dictating at great speed to Polidori, who was endeavouring to capture it all in his leather-bound notebook. As for me, I had tried my hand at writing once before, and Shelley had been kind enough to encourage me and tell me I had a talent worth nurturing, and I saw no reason therefore why I should not make an attempt at a ghost tale of my own. Mary did her best to discourage me, but I had long since shaken off the conviction so studiously borne in upon me as a child—and not least by
her
—that it was fruitless, in our family, even to put pen to paper unless one could produce a work of such originality as would cast all other books into the shade. I could not refrain from an inward smile when I saw that she, indeed, seemed not a little fretful at having no immediate idea of her own to hand, but a question or two she subsequently asked Polidori about the discussion we had had of galvanism and electricity led me to believe that she was considering this as the basis of her tale. For though her tone appeared careless when she thanked him for his reply, I saw her go at once upstairs, to where she had stowed her writing-desk—the self-same desk she would later leave, so disastrously, in that odious Maddocks’ care.

• • •

But to return to my story. We slept at the Diodati that night, and when Byron made his appearance at luncheon the following day Shelley was already far advanced in his tale, his hair disordered and flecks of ink spattered on his hands. Mary sought to induce him to join us at table, but he shook her arm roughly away. For the rest of the afternoon he sat there, his desk placed to face down towards the water, writing with one hand and with the other conveying currants and pieces of stale bread to his mouth from the pocket of his long grey coat. As the hours wore on the weather worsened, and we felt in the air the sulphurous onset of thunder. We had seen storms in the region before, most especially in our journey across the Alps, when we cowered together against the cold through a desolate white landscape of overhanging precipices and huge menacing trees, but that night at the Diodati was the worst we had yet endured. With the descent of darkness the wind swelled to a roar, and the flashes of lightning leaping from peak to peak lit up streaks of clouds racing across the angry sky, and the bowl of the lake seething like an alchemical crucible. As hour after hour passed it was clear that this vast collision of the elements was stimulating Shelley’s nerves to an almost painful pitch, while Byron, by contrast, was evidently aroused in quite another manner. So much so, indeed, that he and I adjourned discreetly to his room after dinner, leaving the others variously preoccupied about their books.

When I descended again the clock in the hall was striking half after eleven, and the storm was at its very height. Byron was as always invigorated by the act of love, and had begun talking once more, and with renewed enthusiasm, of holding our own phantasmagoria. Let us extinguish all the lights, he declared, and demand the dead to appear and speak to us, for what do we have to fear? I am no murderer, he said, my wife’s family seem to think me capable of even blacker and more shameful transgressions. I dread no revenant come to punish
me.
Indeed? I replied, archly. No father of a ruined daughter, or shamed and cuckolded husband determined to seek you out? No
Commendatore
hell-bent on revenge? He eyed me oddly then, and throwing on his dressing-gown, resumed his desk. I bobbed a mocking curtsy to his turned back, and betook myself back down to the saloon, where I joined the rest as unobtrusively as I was able, though not of course without attracting the customary look of impudent scorn from Polidori. And then as the hour of twelve struck, the drawing-room doors were thrown open with a splintering crack and a figure stood in the blue-white glare of a bolt of lightning. Both arms outstretched, and draped in a black cloak and hood that reached down over his face. It was as if a monster from a Gothic novel had come that moment to life, or returned, a vampire glistering with the clammy dew of hell, from among the mouldering dead. I saw Shelley start aghast from his chair, even as a smile of ironic amusement slid across Polidori’s face. He knew, as I did, that this was exactly the sort of cruel jest Byron delighted most to play—had he not taunted me, only a few nights before, with dark insinuations that he was the father of his own sister’s child? My own nerves might withstand this latest prank, but I feared for Shelley, in his high-wrought state. And for a moment—the briefest moment—I wondered if Mary too had not believed it. For in the dazzle of the lightning I had glimpsed her face, and seen there not just horror but something that I should almost have called ecstacy.

But all this passed in an instant, for then Byron threw back his hood and laughed, declaring loudly that it was the night of all others for tales of the supernatural, and even if we had no spells at our command, we should be more than capable of reducing our audience to a cold sweat of terror merely with our words—those of us, at least, whose works could make any valid claim to lasting fame (this, no doubt, directed at Polidori). And so, he finished with a sweep of his black-swathed arm, we will now, at the midnight hour, read aloud what we have written. Mary began at once to protest, saying she had nothing to share, and I saw the doctor look quickly at her, as he made a few notes in that infernal pocketbook of his. Shelley, by contrast, seemed recovered from his alarm. Indeed, he appeared of all of us the most eager to begin. He went to close the shutters himself as the servants made up the fire and extinguished the lamps. I wondered what Byron could have to offer, knowing how little of his energy he had dedicated that day to his pen, but he had, it transpired quite other ideas. As the room darkened we took our seats again about the fire, and the flames threw grotesque dancing shadows across the walls, transforming each of us in our turn from mortal to monster. Polidori, attentive but detached, ever the observer; Mary folding her hands on her lap in seeming demureness, her real feelings betrayed only by the dead whiteness about her lips; and Shelley, passing strange, his eyelids drawn back as if in pain, and his breath coming fast and shallow. As I had seen him once before, on that other day of horrors which he and I endured. That day of which I have already spoken, and dread to speak of again.

Byron took his place in the centre of the circle, planted his feet apart and raised his arm, pointing slowly to each of us, one by one. All struggled to hold his stare but I—for what reason should I be abashed before him? And then he began, in sonorous tones, to recite. Not a piece of his own, but
Christabel.
Coleridge’s
Christabel.
And much as I have always hated it, I could not but agree that it was a fine choice for such a night, that gruesome tale of a serpent-witch taking the shape of a lost and innocent girl. We sat there, silent and motionless, as Byron’s voice mingled with the lashing of the rain against the glass and the boom of the thunder, close and far, and the room became by degrees ever more icy. The fire had risen to a blaze but seemed powerless to dispel the chill which felt, at that moment, and in that strange and heightened atmosphere, the very ice of death. On and on he intoned, and as he approached the moment when the enchantress begins to disrobe, I could see Shelley becoming painfully restless, his hand at his side and his chest heaving with the effort for calm.

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,

And slowly rolled her eyes around;

Then drawing in her breath aloud,

Like one that shuddered, she unbound

The cincture from beneath her breast:

Her silken robe, and inner vest,

Dropped to her feet, and full in view,

Behold! her bosom and half her side—

Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue—

At that moment one of the shutters crashed open against the wall and Shelley staggered to his feet with a shriek of such anguish one might have thought his living heart was being torn from his breast. No—no! he cried, and ran sobbing and stumbling from the room. Mary rose at once, but Polidori prevented her. Consigning her to Byron’s care, he seized the nearest candle and followed Shelley’s steps. Mary was by this time crying bitterly in His Lordship’s arms, and not wishing to play the role of spectator where I was accustomed to that of principal, I made my way out into the hall. I thought only at first of getting a little air and dispelling the poisonous atmosphere of the saloon, but I heard at once the low sound of voices and perceived that Shelley had taken refuge in the breakfast-room. There was a little closet next that chamber, and as the lightning flooded again through the windows and the thunder clove the air above me as if to sunder the very mountains, I pushed open the door and slid into the dark space.

I do not think, to this day, that they knew I was there. Neither ever said so, and both, now, are long dead—one by water, the other by his own hand. And certain it is that they gave no sign then. Silent still, I inched the connecting door open. I saw Shelley lying on a couch on the far side of the room, his face and shirt soaking wet. It was clear at once that Polidori had thrown water in his face to quiet him, and I could see now that he was holding a cloth to Shelley’s face and adjuring him to breathe deeply. I nearly gave myself away at that moment, so furious was I to see him administering ether to a man in such a febrile and nervous state. Did he not know what consequences it might have? His intention, no doubt, was to induce lethargy, but I had seen ether used before and knew it had the power to provoke a state of even greater agitation. I could scarce keep my place for the next few moments, but Shelley seemed to demonstrate none of the ill effects I apprehended. Indeed he appeared instead to slide slowly into a curious intermediate state; his body lulled to something like repose, but his tongue excited to a flood of bizarre and nonsensical chatter in which half memories merged with true fears, and long-told lies struggled towards the light. He owned the truth, for the first time in my hearing, of Harriet and all that dire affair, but the next instant he was jabbering incoherently of a demon with his own face, and a nameless persecutor who refused to come to blows, which matched with nothing I knew—then or since—of his history. And then my blood ran frozen as he described in heaving gasps how, as Byron was speaking, he had looked towards Mary and seen standing in her place the monstrous figure of a woman with her breasts uncovered, and eyes staring at him where her nipples should have been. He stammered that this horrifying vision had taken hold of his mind, and when Byron spoke then of the witch, and her deformed arm and bosom, the picture had come to his mind of a young girl he had known many years before, whose face still haunted his waking days, and would not let him rest. This, he whispered then, his eyes widening, was the story he was writing—this was the tale that would awaken those who read it to terror, and a sick fear of what lurked unseen in their own souls.

I heard the door to the drawing-room open then, and Byron calling my name, and I slipped away.

• • •

I was not the only one of us to sleep badly that night, and when I ventured downstairs in the grey light of daybreak, I found Mary alone. She started when she saw me, like a guilty thing surprised. She has said, since, that it was this very morning that she announced to the assembled company that she had
thought of a story.
It is a lie; no such declaration was ever made, then, or on any other day that summer. She was not at her desk writing that morning, when I discovered her, but on her hands and knees before the dying fire, feeding page after page into the flames—pages covered not with her own handwriting, but with Shelley’s. She answered, when pressed, and with some irritation, that the story he had begun was making him ill—that she had found him sleep-walking again, and he had complained to her that his senses had been brought to a state of such unnatural excitement that the very blades of grass and boughs of the trees had presented themselves to his eye with microscopical distinctiveness. Her
duty,
she said, with much emphasis on the word, was to prevent further such mischief, and thus it was that she had taken it upon herself to destroy what he had written and ensure that his Genius and his gift were spent on subjects worthy of them, and not on some childish make-believe fit only for the nursery. I looked at her somewhat scornfully at this, tempted to enquire whether it was
he
or
she
who would decide what would be deemed thus ‘worthy,’ but I refrained. Though I did wonder, afterwards, at her insistence that the tale was mere fabrication, and bore no relation to the truth. I myself had heard Shelley claim it was sprung from memory, but perhaps she knew, from her own intimate knowledge of his past, that he had once again been subject to one of those concatenations of fact and phantasy that plagued him, which left him so often doubtful of what was real, and what imagined.