This Dark Endeavour (with Bonus Material) (9 page)

We were not five paces into the room when something leapt at Polidori from the shadows. Elizabeth and I both gave cries of surprise, and Henry shrieked outright.

Polidori swivelled around in his chair to face us, and we all stared at the extraordinary creature curled up on his lap.

“That,” said Henry, his voice more highly pitched than usual, “is a very large cat!”

It was a magnificent creature to be sure. Its body was lithe and long and short tailed. Its tawny coat was marked with dark spots. Beneath its neck was a ruff of white and black striped fur that looked rather like a bow tie. And from the tips of the creature’s tall triangular ears rose tufts of stiff black hair.

I looked at Elizabeth, and she returned my curious gaze.

“It isn’t by any chance,” she began uncertainly, “a—”

“A lynx, yes,” said Polidori with a smile, clearly enjoying our surprise.

“Ah,” said Henry a bit weakly.

Many wild animals inhabited the forests around our lake:
bears and wolves, chamois, and lynx who could live almost at the height of the highest Alps.

“I did not know they could be trained as … pets,” I confessed.

Polidori raised an eyebrow, as if questioning my use of words. “He is quite tame. He came to me as a mere kitten and is as amiable as any house cat. Aren’t you, Krake?”

Polidori’s fingers vigorously kneaded the fur between Krake’s ears, and the lynx gave a luxuriant yawn, revealing wickedly sharp teeth. He hopped off his master’s lap and padded toward me. He gave me a sniff, and then rubbed against my legs with such force that he nearly knocked me off balance.

“He likes you, Victor,” said Henry.

“And I like Krake,” I said with forced joviality, hesitantly patting the creature on the head. He looked up at me with a green-eyed gaze that was just a touch unsettling, it was so intent. Then, to my relief, the lynx jumped back up onto Polidori’s lap.

Polidori invited us to sit down, then extended his hand. “May I?”

I passed him the volume of Paracelsus, and he took it gently. Silently he inspected the spine and binding before even opening the cover. For a long time he gazed at the portrait of the author, and then proceeded more deeply into the book’s burned pages, his careful fingers breaking off scarcely a fragment of ash.

When he came to the page that bore the beginnings of the Alphabet of the Magi, he stopped. I realized I’d been holding my breath, and exhaled noisily. Krake turned and looked at me severely.

“It is unreadable,” I said.

“We had hoped,” said Elizabeth quietly, “that you might know of some other book that holds a translation.”

Polidori shook his head. “There is none, I can assure you. But this …” He prodded delicately at the fused pages. “I think there may be some hope for this.”

“You do?” said Henry, his voice echoing the delight and surprise I felt.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I have some experience in restoring texts that have been … damaged, shall we say. Let us go to my workshop.”

I expected him to lead us back to the storefront, but he wheeled his chair in the opposite direction, through another doorway and along a short corridor. I glimpsed a tiny kitchen and, down a second short passage, a bedchamber, and a small water closet that released a faint but unpleasant whiff of sewage.

At the end of the corridor was a narrow doorway, scarcely wide enough to admit Polidori’s wheelchair. He went through first, and right away swivelled his chair around to face us. By the light of his candle I could see he was inside a room that was really nothing but a large cupboard.

“I think we will all fit,” he said. “Come inside.”

“This is your workshop?” I asked, confused.

“This is the
way
to the workshop,” he said. “It is a kind of dumbwaiter. I call it an elevator. I had it constructed after my accident.”

“How ingenious,” said Elizabeth, stepping into the compartment.

“Is it … structurally sound?” Henry asked uncertainly.

“I have used it for more than a decade.”

“And it will bear all our weight?”

“Yes, young sir, it will.”

I entered the elevator, followed by Henry, and the three of us crowded around the wheelchair. The floor groaned ominously beneath my feet.

“Krake, I fear you will have to wait upstairs,” Polidori told his lynx.

Without hesitation the cat leapt from his lap and sat down beyond the portal, licking his paws meditatively.

Twin doors hung at the entrance, one on either side, and Polidori pulled these snugly shut, enclosing us in the conveyance.

“From the hallway, it looks like a dead end,” he said. He passed me his candle. “If you would hold this, please.” With both hands he grasped one of the ropes that dangled from the ceiling of the elevator.

“A simple system of pulleys,” said Polidori, and as he tugged, the elevator gave a downward jerk.

Polidori’s strength must have been considerable to lower the weight of all four of us. As we descended, a dank smell wafted up to us. I glanced at Elizabeth and saw her eyes, dancing and lively in the candlelight.

“This descends to the cellar, does it?” Henry inquired, looking quite pale.

“A cellar beneath the cellar,” Polidori said. “I had it dug specially after my accident. This elevator is the only way to reach it.”

We dropped slowly past the timbers of the floor, and then a stone foundation, then brick, and rougher stone still, until the wall finally gave way.

A cellar opened before us, and soon the elevator came to a halt.

Polidori rolled himself out. With his flame he lit more candles. The cellar seemed as big as all his upstairs rooms combined. I noticed that, unlike in his storefront, all the shelves had been built at a level that allowed Polidori to reach them from his wheelchair. I caught sight of worktables and more flasks and jars and apparatus than I had ever before seen.

Polidori must have guessed my thoughts, for he said, “Any work I do, I prefer to do down here, rather than upstairs. After being accused of witchcraft and threatened with hanging, one becomes more cautious. Now, let us go over here.”

He led us to a long narrow table on which rested several trays that might have been made of tin or zinc.

“Young sir,” he said to me, pointing, “could you please fetch those three green jars. And you, sir,” he said to Henry, “gather the candles and bring them to the table.”

His voice and manner had become suddenly more authoritative, and we hurried to do as he bid us. Over each candle he placed a special lantern of red glass. The cellar was suddenly bathed in a lurid red glow.

Carefully he opened the green jars one at a time, pouring a measure into a flask and then into one of the metal trays before him. When he was done, there was a shallow film of liquid at the bottom of the tray, red in the lantern light.

It might easily have been blood.

“We will need this later,” Polidori said, pushing the tray to the back of the table. From a drawer he took a thick cloth wallet and opened it beside the volume of Paracelsus. Arranged within the wallet was a startling array of instruments that, at first glance, looked like those of a surgeon. There were all manner of tweezers
and forceps, and minute scalpels. I glanced at Henry and saw him shiver.

“You would all like to assist, I assume,” Polidori stated. To Henry he said, “You shall be timekeeper. There is a clock there, and you must watch seconds when I ask later.” To Elizabeth and me he said, “I trust you will be able to help me in the surgery.”

“Surgery?” said Elizabeth in surprise.

“Of course,” said Polidori. “This is as precise as any medical procedure.”

He proceeded to name all the instruments for us, and then took a diffuser filled with some liquid and misted the book with it. He then turned to me. “If you might hold the specimen steady, please, we will begin. The Gutenburg scalpel, there.”

Promptly Elizabeth handed it to him, and he set to work.

Several months ago, Father had taken us to the dissecting room of the celebrated physician Dr. Bullman. In the sloped theatre, filled to the ceiling with eager anatomy students, we’d watched as Bullman had opened up the corpse of a newly hanged convict. We saw its heart and lungs, the spleen and stomach. Henry had had to leave. But Konrad and I—and Elizabeth, too—had stayed to the very end. It was dreadful and fascinating both, to see the body’s innermost secrets laid open.

I felt exactly the same enthrallment as Polidori’s hands hovered over the tome, and then cut. Perhaps it was the noxious smell of the chemicals in the tray, or the mustiness of the room, but I thought the book flinched and exhaled.

Polidori’s goal was to separate the burned, fused pages, and it was a delicate task. He used a bewildering array of instruments to tease apart the sickly parchments. Sometimes it went
well. Sometimes a tiny piece tore loose, and Polidori muttered an oath.

The heat in the room grew more intense, as if a great furnace burned nearby. Sweat slithered into my eyes, and I blinked to clear my vision. My gaze never wavered from Polidori’s steady hands and the tips of his instruments. And for a moment the book seemed not a book at all but a living body, and instead of paper, I glimpsed pulsing viscera and blood and organs. I blinked again, not trusting my vision. But—and this was most strange and repulsive—the book seemed to emanate the smell of a slaughterhouse, of entrails and offal.

Wondering if it was just the wanderings of my mind, I looked to Elizabeth, and saw her nose wrinkle. She steadied herself with a hand, but her gaze did not flinch as she watched this strange surgery upon Paracelsus’s tome.

“I have done as much as I can,” Polidori said finally, and with one sure stroke he slit from the book’s binding the pages he’d been working on. With padded tweezers he grasped them and held them above the tray of liquid.

“Young sir,” he said to Henry. “Set the clock for sixty seconds. Be precise, now!”

Henry reached for the ornate timepiece and turned back the slender hand, holding it in place.

“Release it … now!” cried Polidori, and he immersed the charred pieces of paper into the bloody liquid, swishing them gently back and forth. At first they stuck together, but within moments they floated apart.

“They are free!” Elizabeth cried in excitement.

Polidori arranged the charred pages side by side in the tray. “Time is critical now.”

“What does this liquid do?” I asked.

“Brings back what was lost. A second too long, though, and we will lose it all forever.”

We stared, riveted, at the tray. Twenty seconds, thirty … Nothing was happening. In the red light the blackened paper hovered in the liquid, as unreadable as ever. Forty seconds …

“Look!” breathed Elizabeth.

Something was happening. Within the darkness of the pages appeared faint scratchings—completely illegible, but something.

“It comes …” said Polidori in a hoarse voice. “It comes …”

“Fifty seconds,” said Henry.

On all the pages the scratchings grew thicker, released shoots like strange seedlings growing with freakish speed. I recognized the bizarre characters from the Alphabet of the Magi, and then some familiar letters beneath them: the translations!

“Fifty-five seconds,” said Henry.

“We must have more time!” said Elizabeth, for parts of the pages were still unreadable.

“We dare not,” snapped Polidori, readying his tweezers. “Look!”

The edges of the pages were beginning to curl and dissolve, as if in acid. And the parts of the text that had once been plain to see were starting to blur dangerously.

The clock chimed, and instantly Polidori drew the pages out and placed them flat on a special drying rack.

“This will have to do,” he said.

“Is there enough, though?” I asked, squinting in the lurid half-light.

“It is a good start,” he said. “A beginning. Return in two days, and I will tell you what I have found.”

I took my purse from my pocket and tried to offer him money, but he shook his head.

“Let us wait for that, young sir. This may all come to naught. Let us wait.”

“That is very kind of you, sir,” said Elizabeth. “Thank you.”

For the first time Polidori smiled, as though genuinely surprised at these gentle words. He looked at me.

“I hope your brother improves,” he said, “and makes all this toil needless.”

We left Polidori’s shop, each of us silent. I felt I’d witnessed something incredible, something dangerous, even. The streets beyond the alley appeared strange to my eyes. All the people and horses and carriages and bustle had nothing to do with me. My eyes were still focused on the pages of Paracelsus’s tome, the ancient words swimming into view after long centuries of oblivion.

“It’s like we’ve brought something back to life,” Elizabeth murmured.

I looked at her, startled. “Yes. That is just how I feel. There was something about that volume … it seemed no mere book.”

“It lived,” said Elizabeth simply.

“Indeed it did!” I exclaimed. “I felt it move in my hands, like a patient writhing.”

“Was there not the smell of blood?” she said.

“Is it possible it was our fevered emotions tricking us?” said Henry. “That we all imagined such phantasmagorical things because we wanted to see them?”

“You are very sensible, Henry,” said Elizabeth tartly, “for someone whose pen makes such flights of passion.”

“Yet they are inventions only,” Henry persisted. “Not reality. If we truly believe that book moved, we are believing in … magic.” He lowered his voice. “Witchery.”

“There is no such thing,” I said. “Just things we do not yet understand. Father would say the same.”

“Your father would condemn what we’ve done,” said Henry.

I swallowed. “He will not know.”

“Are we fools?” said Henry nervously. “Deceiving your father is one thing, but even if Polidori can translate the recipe, is the elixir something that should be made?”

“If it is Konrad’s only chance at life, yes,” I said. “And damn the consequences!”

“Polidori himself said there were no end of magical elixirs—and their effect could be dangerous,” Henry persisted.

I said nothing.