Shadow Conspiracy (5 page)

John Polidori announced that he intended to write about vampires—and waxed poetic about their wraithlike qualities: “Flitting down from above, dark and gossamer.” He gave me a sly look as he said it, and I feared he would reveal my espionage then, but he did not.

Still, I couldn’t meet his gaze, for my scattered thoughts focused on secret laboratories in which dark things were done. My pen was idle.

 When at last the weather was fine enough for me to return to my walks, I all but ran from the villa. I was no more informed of what was happening in the laboratory; Polidori had said nothing more to me of his work and when he did speak to me, it seemed to be in riddles as if we shared a fine secret—which I suppose, in a way, we did.

I went to the bookshop and lingered there the afternoon, even missing Tea. Immanuel did not come and M. Bardeau had not seen him. Still, I crossed the street and went into the little park to our bench and there I sat until sunset. I rose, then, dejected, and started for home. I had gone perhaps ten feet, when I saw a silhouetted figure move between two trees. Surely that was the very hat Immanuel had worn at our last meeting. I turned and pursued the figure, circling an elm to cut him off.

He stepped out from behind the tree and into a shaft of ruddy, dying sunlight just as I came around to confront him. His face was lit in lurid hues, which, to my mind, took on the aspect of the fires of hell. How can I describe that horrific visage? Twisted. Yes, that is the single word that best conveys it. The heavy brow that cowled the eyes, the wrenched mouth, the ape-like jaw. Oh, it was not Immanuel...but it was.

I cringed back, terrified, my hand to my throat. “What have you done?” I cried.

“I?” His expression was unreadable, inhuman. “Ask God, rather, what He has done to saddle me with this affliction.” His words were slurred—barely decipherable.

“What is it? What has happened to you?”

The grotesque mouth twisted further. “I don’t know. I’ve no name for’t. Nor has any doctor that’ll see me. Ought to turn myself over to the college for classes. What a fine cadaver I’d make, eh, Mary?”

I realized as he spoke, his voice strangled and garbled, that his face was very near the level of my own. His body was also bent and awry, his shoulders sloping.

“Don’t think it, Immanuel. Don’t ever say such things. Surely some doctor might help you.” I thought of Polidori. “I may even know one who—”

“No, you mustn’t try to help, Mary. Surely I’ve done something to deserve this. I must have done. I would die if my disease cast shadows on another life.” He ground his teeth and I knew he thought of Lucille.

“Does Lucille—?” I started to ask, but he shook his head spasmodically.

“Lucille and I are done. She cannot know of this.”

It took every ounce of courage I owned to put my hand on his sleeve, but I did it. And I leaned close to him and murmured, “I
will
help you. I must help you. Let me speak to my doctor friend. Meet me here tomorrow at this same hour. Please, Immanuel,” I begged when he shook his head again. “
Please.”

He relented, nodded, his head low. Then, pulling his hat down over his face, he shambled away into the twilight.

The doctor was at dinner that evening and I chafed all through the meal awaiting an opportunity to speak to him. I rose from table swiftly at the end of the meal and stopped him as he opened the front door of the house, intent on returning to his work. The others had gone through into the drawing room.

“Doctor, may I have word?”

“Now, Mary, I told you, I will confide in you only when I am ready.”

“It’s not about your work, doctor,” I assured him.

“The evening is fine—for once,” he observed. “Shall we walk?”

We took a turn around the front garden and I described to him all of Immanuel’s symptoms as nearly as I could catalogue them: the thickness of feature, the increasingly guttural quality of his voice, the twisting of his body. I had not quite reached the end of my recital when I knew that John Polidori was fascinated. He asked me a series of questions, his eyes intense and glittering in the light of the gas lamps.

“I know I’ve read of these symptoms, if I could but remember where,” he said when at last I had answered all to his satisfaction. He shook his head and smiled at me. “Mary, you are a demon in disguise. I have hours of work to do tonight and now I want only to consult my medical books.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, uncertain how to take the comment.

He laughed and raked his fingers through his hair, his eyes alight with strange zeal. “Don’t apologize, Mary, for bringing me a puzzle to solve. I thrive on puzzles.”

The next morning, Dr. Polidori came late to breakfast, dark circles beneath red eyes that took on an exultant gleam when he saw me. He sat down across from me, and snapped open his napkin. “I have found it, Mary,” he said, smiling at me.

Conversation around the table ceased as the others turned to stare at us. John Polidori and I rarely spoke two words to each other in company.

“Found what?” asked Percy, his gaze darting between me and the doctor.

“I had asked about a peculiar set of symptoms I had—” I started to say that I had
observed
, but the logical question would have been “where” and I did not wish to reveal poor Immanuel’s condition to all and sundry. “—come across in my research,” I concluded.

“Ah,” said George. “For your story. What symptoms are these?”

“Now, George,” said the doctor. “Would you have her reveal her plot aforetime? You might resolve to steal it for your own story.”

“Oh, very well. Be secretive.”

They returned to their breakfast conversation, though Percy gave us a final bemused look.

“Come to the lab later,” Dr. Polidori told me,
sotto voce
.

To the lab! Was this what it took to win his confidence—presenting him with a puzzle to solve? I nodded and finished my meal in child-like anticipation of that “later.”

“It’s called Noel’s Disease at present,” John Polidori told me as he let me into his lab. “For the French physician who first described it in
Le Journal de Médcin
almost eighty years ago. I knew I’d read of it.”

“It’s been known for sometime then,” I said, trying not to stare past him at the contents of the room. I needn’t have bothered. He’d covered everything of interest with drop cloths. “Then there’s a cure, surely.”

“None, I’m afraid. It’s extremely rare and not many cases have been studied.”

My heart fell. “Then nothing can be done for him?”

“Not by conventional medicine. His body, you see, is accumulating bone mass, and it will continue to do so until he can no longer function. Or so Dr. Noel writes. For your friend Immanuel, there is no going back.”

The tears stung my eyes as they fell. “Hopeless, then.”

“This means much to you.”

I nodded. “He is such a sweet soul. So gentle and kind. He had been destined for such happiness, I thought. He was to be married, and studies to be a doctor.”

“I said that conventional medicine could not help him. But I do not practice conventional medicine.”

Dr. Polidori moved further into the lab, beckoning me to follow. He led me past the shrouded Machine and over to a row of animal cages in which were several cats, a ferret and a rabbit. The rabbit slept, but the cats looked up at us expectantly, the ferret with some distrust.

“Do you notice anything peculiar about these animals?”

I looked at them. They seemed perfectly normal. One of the cats rose and came to rub itself against the wire of the cage. Polidori opened the cage door and lifted the animal out, putting it into my arms. It began, at once, to purr.

“They seem perfectly normal.
Is
there something peculiar about them?”

He smiled. “This cat, that seems so content to snuggle in your arms, was dead less than twelve hours ago.”

I stopped petting the cat. “What?”

“It was dead. I resurrected it.”

“What can you mean?”

“It drowned. I gave it a new spirit and now it lives. Well, rather, to be more accurate, the cat spirit that inhabited this body was in another. I transferred it from that body to this one.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Oh, but it is.” He lifted the cat from my arms and returned it to its cage, then moved to the Machine and uncovered it with a flourish. “With this.”

The Machine was twice as impressive at close quarters as it had been from the loft. It gleamed in the light of the lamps—all gears and oddly shaped bells and metal wire brushes and cables. I could only stare at it until its bright contours blurred, unable to quite grasp what he was telling me.

“Mary, this is how I will cure our mutual friend. This machine will enable me to place George’s spirit—his soul—in a new, healthy body.”

I was stunned beyond description. I felt as if my own body had rooted itself to the cobbled floor of Dr. Polidori’s laboratory, as if my soul was reaching down into the earth to maintain its hold on solid reality. “That isn’t possible,” I murmured. “It can’t be.”

“But it is. That cat—these animals—prove that it
is
possible.”

He told me the same tale Immanuel had told of an alchemist named Dippel who thought seizures were caused by a misalignment of a person’s soul and body, and that an electrical shock might possibly realign them.

“I have taken the idea further,” he explained. “I have theorized that it might also be used to drive a soul from one body to another. That it might cause a soul to align itself to a new vessel.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said, trying to read his face. “That’s...it’s—”

“What—blasphemy? Don’t tell me you believe that superstitious nonsense, Mary Shelley.”

My face suffused with sudden heat. “Yet, are you not playing at being a god?”

“What of it? If we can perform the acts of gods, then are we not gods? What is a body, after all, but a vehicle for the soul? If your carriage springs its frame, you simply acquire a new carriage, do you not?”

“But bodies are not built by men as carriages are. They are born. They have lives of their own.”