Such Wicked Intent

CHAPTER 20

Konrad and I stab at the nearest butterflies, severing and impaling, cutting short their writhing rope, but even as they fall away, new ones take their place.

The pit demon climbs, claw over claw, and with fewer butterflies upon the creature, I glimpse flashes of flesh, pockmarked with burst pustules, a knee that looks as though it’s jointed backward. And then there’s no more time for looking, for it’s nearing the hatch, no matter how fast Konrad and I slash at the butterfly rope.

I drop my sword, and Konrad and I take up our crossbows once more and fire all our remaining bolts into the monster. But the demon seems completely unharmed.

“Should’ve. Killed this thing. Before it woke,” Konrad gasps.

The demon hangs from its rope with one clawed hand, shoots up the other, and nearly catches me in its talons. Konrad stabs it with his saber, and a shriek rises from the creature’s hidden maw.

Closer he climbs. I look at Konrad, wanting to say something-to tell him I love him, to apologize again-but my mouth is so dry that it’s all I can do to swallow. I tighten my left hand on my saber, my right on my dagger.

A low howl fills our secret chamber, making my ears vibrate painfully. At first I think the noise comes from the demon, but then I realize it’s from outside the house altogether. With a great rattling, I hear, and feel, the windows of the chapel shake.

The pit demon must have heard it too, for I see its seething black skull jerk toward the windows. And even though I can discern no expression on its pullulating face, the tilt of its neck, the hunch of his shoulders, conveys emotion.

“He’s frightened,” I say to Konrad, who nods.

Is the spirit outside more powerful? The evil spirit-and only at this instant do I realize that everything Wilhelm Frankenstein, in the guise of Analiese, has told us might be a lie.

The pit demon’s head turns back to us. Again I see a flash of its serrated teeth, and above them a featureless expanse of skull that has no eyes but for the eyeholes of a huge black butterfly, wings spread. The monster climbs higher, and this time an entire forearm flails into our tiny chamber, rearing and striking like an alligator. Time and time again Konrad and I throw ourselves clear, stabbing with our blades.

My frenzied mind carves out a splinter of time, and I remember how once, in a play, we pretended to fight a monster side by side just so.

And then the demon’s claw catches Konrad across the right arm, tearing his shirt and opening a long gash in his flesh. No blood issues forth, only a dreadful line of darkness. My twin cries out, and I realize that all during his illness I never once heard him make such a heartrending noise.

I turn on the pit demon’s arm with such hatred that my vision contracts, and with my saber I chop at its thickest part, like a hatchet into wood. Amputated butterflies scatter and swirl, and I feel the blade bite deep. There’s an outraged howl, and the arm pulls back.

“If you feel pain,” I bellow down at it, “there’s more to come!”

I rush to my brother. “Are you all right?”

He nods weakly, looking at the strange dark gash on his arm. This thing can cut. It can wound, and in a way that makes my blood run cold.

Part of me has clung foolishly to the hope that this spirit world monster cannot truly harm us. But I’m wrong. If it can cut, surely it can destroy us altogether.

The demon’s head suddenly twists on its writhing neck, looking back toward the chapel entrance. The butterflies’ wings contract and tighten with anticipation.

“Dear God!” I hear a familiar voice exclaim.

“Henry?” I shout.

“Victor? Konrad?” Elizabeth calls out, her voice constricted with fear.

“Up here!” I yell.

The pit demon drops from his butterfly rope and hits the floor with a thunderclap. He turns to face my friends, shoulders hunched, knees bent backward in a freakish hunter’s posture.

I risk sticking my head out the hatchway and see Henry and Elizabeth just as Konrad first saw us, as creatures enveloped in light. With their swords raised before them, they might be archangels.

“Henry’s ablaze,” I tell Konrad.

He grunts in pain as he moves beside me. “But Elizabeth’s light is greatly faded.”

The demon takes a tentative step toward them, then stops, one freakishly long arm outstretched as though testing the heat from a fire.

“You’re powerful!” I shout to Henry. “Remember that! You’re both alive with light and heat!”

“We have your talisman, Victor!” Elizabeth cries. “Get out of there!”

“How?” I shout back, for the pit demon is still almost directly below, and his skull jerks up at us once more.

With a roar Henry is running at the pit demon, a streak of light, his flashing sword lifted over his shoulder. Frozen, I watch, my breath stoppered in my throat, as the pit demon takes a backward step, shrieking, one arm thrust forward to ward off Henry’s light and heat. As its talons sweep toward Henry’s head, Henry strikes with his sword, severing two of the monster’s claws. Howling, the pit demon staggers back, stunned, foul vapors pluming into the air.

Gagging, Henry peers up at us. “Now!”

The infernal rope disintegrates into individual butterflies as they rush to their master, but I can see that the chandelier rope still hangs from its pulley in the ceiling. “Go!” I shout at Konrad, who is wincing even as he nods.

We don’t hesitate. I let him jump first and grab hold of the rope. Then I quickly follow as the rope starts to swing outward with the momentum. We lower ourselves quickly, and when we let go, we hit the floor hard and stumble. Konrad cries out as he pushes himself up with his wounded arm.

I take hold of him and we run. From the corner of my eye, I see the pit demon clutching its severed fingers to their stumps, and butterflies crawling over them, excreting a black gossamer that seems to be fusing them back together.

With Henry and Elizabeth blazing the trail, we bolt from the chapel.

“Where are our bodies?” I gasp as we rush down the hallway.

“Your bedchamber,” Elizabeth says.

“The spirit clock, you brought it?” I ask.

“I have it!” Henry shouts back to me.

The pit demon’s hooves crack behind us. I glance back and see it stooping through the chapel doorway. Its skull turns left and right, searching for us, and then a torrent of butterflies issues from it in all directions.

“It’s blind,” I say. “It needs the butterflies to see.”

That fact will buy us a little time. Elizabeth turns and holds my ring in the air. I know she cannot hand it to me; her heat is a barrier between us now.

“Catch,” she says, and throws it. I clasp it gratefully in my hand, and the moment I push it onto my finger, I feel a surge. My spirit is reconnected with my body. We race for the staircase.

“I quite enjoyed knocking you out,” Henry says, completely unwinded as we take the stairs two at a time. “But when we put a drop of elixir into your mouth, and arrived in the spirit world, it was quite a shock to see you were Wilhelm Frankenstein.”

“I thought it was Analiese,” says Elizabeth.

“There was never an Analiese,” I reply. “You were right. Where’s Wilhelm?”

“We tied him up and dragged him into the library,” Henry says. “He was still out cold.”

When we’re halfway up the stairs, a swarm of black butterflies strafes us, then circles back to tell the demon.

“It’ll come for us soon,” I pant.

Almost at once the sound of clopping hoofs, getting louder, shakes the foundations of the chateau.

“We can’t leave Konrad behind with that thing!” I cry.

“I’m not sure we can destroy it,” says Henry. “But I’m willing to fight it to the end.”

“No. It heals itself,” says Konrad, wincing with pain. “We can’t kill it.”

I look at his arm and see that the eerie black line has spread in a series of spider veins.

“Then, we need to open the house!” I say impulsively. “A door! A window!”

“What about the evil spirit outside?” Henry asks, startled.

“It might help us. Whatever it is, it’s no friend of the pit demon’s,” I say.

“Or Wilhelm Frankenstein’s,” Elizabeth adds. “I think that mist might be the gatherers, trying to get inside all along.”

“Are you sure?” Henry asks.

“I’m sure of nothing,” she says. “But going out may be Konrad’s only chance of escape.”

“And I’m not leaving,” I say, “until I’m sure he’s safe from that thing.”

We reach the top of the stairs, and Henry suddenly falters, putting a hand to his chest.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“The spirit clock,” he says in shock, pulling it from his breast pocket. “So soon?”

I can see it vibrating as the fetal sparrow limb beats urgently at the glass, and then I whirl to see the reeking, churning shape of the pit demon at the base of the staircase. Its claws are completely intact. It takes the steps three at a time on its hoofed feet.

Down the hallway toward my bedchamber we charge.

“We’ll throw open the balcony window in my room,” I say. “Let in whatever wants to come in!”

We burst through the doorway. I know instantly where my body lies in the real world, and I want more than anything to lie down, to return. But not before we open the window. I stride toward it and hear Elizabeth give a shriek of surprise, and From behind the door Wilhelm Frankenstein lunges, knocking me over. My saber and dagger fly from my hands. We crash to the floor, him atop me. I punch and kick to drive him off, but he is single-minded, crazed by his three hundred years of captivity, and he swiftly seizes my hand and wrenches the ring from my finger.

“Give it to me!” shouts Henry, striding toward Wilhelm. My friend’s face is fiercely ablaze, and his arms are spread to radiate his light and heat.

Wilhelm staggers back, and just as Henry is about to lay his searing hand upon him and grasp my ring, Wilhelm throws it. It sails high over all our heads and out the door of the bedchamber. I hear its clink as it hits the stone, and the thin metallic sound of it rolling farther down the hallway.

I don’t think. I run madly after it, see its sparkle as it comes to a halt, and then see the pit demon’s insect-infested hoof stamp down before it. I slowly look up. The demon towers above me. With one clawed hand it reaches down and picks up my ring.

I feel Henry’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me back.

“Henry-” I begin to say.

But he is already advancing on the giant, crying, “Get back, get back!” But he never reaches it, for a torrent of butterflies comes at Henry, and even as he struggles against it, slashing with his sword, I see the butterflies flaring with color as they drain him. With every valiant step Henry weakens.

But Elizabeth rushes forward, and before the pit demon can fall back, she swings her sword with both hands at its leg. Her blow has such force that she can’t wrench the sword free from the demon’s churning flesh. It roars from the vast serrated gash of its mouth, and more noxious fumes boil from its wound.

Suddenly Konrad is at my side, pressing my sword back into my hand, and we strike at the thing’s torso, as high as we can reach, again and again. I can see my ring glinting in its clawed fist, and I try to sever its hand, but it keeps it out of my reach.

I give a cry of triumph as the pit demon’s wounded leg buckles and cracks at the point of its wound, the two halves of its leg held together with only ghastly sinew and the efforts of writhing butterfly wings.

Once again hope swells within me. Maybe we truly can destroy this foul thing. I look over to see Elizabeth and Henry both trying to fight off the black butterflies that now cover them, bleeding them of their lives.

“Your light!” Konrad calls in anguish to Elizabeth over his shoulder.

And then I can no longer see her light, nor Henry’s, for the butterflies have done their devilish work and return to their master with bloated colorful bodies. They fly to his wounded leg, and as their own bodies become black once more, new energy seeps into the pit demon. He stands tall, his leg freakishly refused.

With one claw the pit demon slashes a black gash across Konrad’s chest, and before I can rush to his aid, the monster swats at me as though I were no more than a dog. I fly back and hit the ground.

“Konrad!” I cry out.

Elizabeth and Henry are helping drag Konrad’s limp form back as the pit demon advances slowly down the hallway. He is a nightmare drawn with black lightning.

We have no more light, no heat left to fight this thing.

And precious little life. As I stagger to my feet to help the others, I feel dizzy with weakness. I hear my pulse in my ears, tapping like the faltering alarm of the spirit clock. In the real world our bodies are dying.

“We need to return,” Henry gasps when I reach him.

“I can’t return without my talisman,” I wheeze. “Get to the bedchamber! Open the windows!”

With a roar I rush at the pit demon, eyes locked on the clawed hand that clutches my ring. I aim for its wrist but never even get to swing my sword, for once more the monster swats me and I sail back, my sword spinning from my hand and clattering along the floor.

At that moment Wilhelm Frankenstein bursts from my room, pushing past Henry, and snatches up my sword.

“Where’s your talisman?” he roars, running at me.

“I don’t have it!” I shout back.

For a moment I think he is about to impale me, but a torrent of butterflies intercepts him and drives him back against the wall, pinning him, helpless. He turns to look at the pit demon, and on Wilhelm’s face now-that fine, smug face that gazed down at me from its portrait-is pure terror. He stares at the pit demon, and to my amazement the pit demon stares back, suddenly motionless.

And I understand instinctively that there is a history between these two that goes back centuries. Wilhelm was the one to first wake it, to suckle its butterflies and use their bounteous powers, to promise the pit demon in some perhaps unspoken way that it would rise again.

Terrible noises emerge from the pit demon’s throat, that same brutal language I heard earlier. I turn to look at Wilhelm, and see a black butterfly crawl into each of his ears-not to stopper them, I realize, but to translate.

“I had no intention of abandoning you!” Wilhelm cries. “I was going to return!”

At this, a violent gale of noise explodes from the pit demon.

Wilhelm persists. “I was going to bring back a new body for you, one made from your very own flesh. They have found your bones!”

For a moment the pit demon is silent, as though considering, its body a quivering mass of insect limbs and antennae and pointy wing tips. Then it lunges. I throw myself from its path, as do Elizabeth and Henry, dragging Konrad’s limp body with them. The monster lands in front of Wilhelm Frankenstein. It takes him in its two clawed hands and lifts him off the floor.

For the first time the butterflies around the pit demon’s head disperse completely, and I can see it truly has no other features but a diagonal gash that spans its jutting, low-browed skull. It opens wide, and its teeth sink into Wilhelm’s head, biting it clear in half even as he screams. It then proceeds with terrifying speed to cram the flailing body into its enormous serrated mouth, devouring Wilhelm utterly.

All my resolve fails me.

It consumed Wilhelm. Can it consume Konrad-perhaps all of us without our light and heat?

“Hurry!” I bellow to the others. “Open the windows!”

Instantly the demon’s head turns to Elizabeth and Henry as they wearily drag Konrad into my bedchamber. Immediately twin torrents of butterflies leave its body and swirl about Elizabeth and Henry, dragging all three of them back.

The pit demon turns to me briefly, and then ignores me as it thumps toward my bedchamber. It crouches low to fold its massive frame through the doorway. I see my ring in its hand and realize it has only one intent now-to unite itself with my body in the real world.

I manage to stagger up and lurch after it. Great swirls of mist pound their fists against the windows. Henry and Elizabeth are fighting to reach them, but the butterflies create a riptide they cannot defeat.

The pit demon’s head locks on to the place on the floor where my body must rest in the real world. As though I’m already dying, I feel a dreadful numbness seep through me-from my feet, through my legs, up my torso.

The pit demon begins to lower itself to the floor, folding itself into a grotesque facsimile of my body’s shape in the real world.

With a final surge of strength I rush toward the windows. But with a flick of its arm, the pit demon flings a noose of butterflies around me, tightening and tightening so I can scarcely move. The window is no more than ten feet away, but it might as well be ten miles.

We will all die.

I hear a cry and look over to Konrad, hunched in pain over the pit demon, his sword raised high. He brings the sword down on the pit god’s hand, cutting it clean off. My ring springs onto the floor and rolls.

As the demon shrieks in dismay, the butterflies around me seem to lose their strength, and I pitch forward, hurling myself at the balcony doors. I grasp the handle and throw the windows wide.

Mist roars in, making a maelstrom of the room. As I cower, I watch butterflies being sucked out of the house in vast black swaths, the mist all the while coalescing into something huge and powerful.

What have I done?

The mist surges across the room toward the pit demon with the ferocity of a cobra. As the demon rises to its feet, the mist slams against it, scouring away the last of the butterflies until, finally, the pit monster is stripped bare, revealing something so ghastly that my mind cannot quite comprehend it.

The great column of mist wraps itself around the pit demon and splits into multiple heads, like those of a Hydra. Viciously the pit demon fights back, slashing one head with its claws, clamping its serrated teeth into another head until it goes limp and disintegrates to vapor.

In the whirl of the spectral storm, I’m only dimly aware of Henry and Elizabeth and Konrad watching, stunned, like me, as these two supernatural creatures roar and shriek and battle, and I’m not sure which is the stronger.

The pit demon crushes yet another of the mist’s many heads, and in horror I watch as the other heads wither. The single column of mist seems to loosen its grip around the creature, and the demon rears to its full height and gives a shriek of triumph.

At that moment the mist flexes and, with a surge, plunges into the demon’s open mouth, pouring more and more of itself inside. The demon flails about, gagging, clawing uselessly at the seemingly endless torrent.

A gaping hole bursts in the demon’s belly, and mist streams out. Then its thigh erupts with mist, and next its shoulder. The monster buckles over, collapsing onto the floor as yet another column of mist bursts out through the top of its ghastly head. Its entire body explodes then, mist swirling, as the demon’s remains are sucked out through the window.

The storm calms, but the mist thickens once more and seeps through the air toward me. It swirls around and around me, as if sniffing, and I feel its tremendous strength. Does it remember how I butchered one of its tentacles? Does it see some dark seam in me worthy of annihilation? Reluctantly it leaves me, eddying around Henry and Elizabeth very briefly before flowing over Konrad.

It envelops him utterly for a moment, and then gathers itself and retreats in a great rush through the open window.

An impossible silence fills the room.

I rush over to Konrad. His eyes are closed. “Konrad,” I whisper, shaking him. He stirs and looks at me, then at his own body. The frightening black rents in his arms and chest are healed.

“Your bodies,” he says anxiously, and I suddenly remember the ticking of the spirit clock.

With a shaking hand Henry drags it from his pocket and frowns. A residue of mist wafts up from the clock, and its glass face is frosted over. Henry scrapes away the ice and holds the clock to his ear.

“It’s not ticking at all,” he says, “but-”

“I don’t feel any weakness,” says Elizabeth.

I come for a closer look. “The little claw’s flexed, like it’s about to tap, but it’s not pointing quite straight up.”

“Surely our time has run out,” says Elizabeth.

“Or paused,” I say, for there is the strangest feeling of time suspended, a breath calmly taken but not yet exhaled. The mist seems to have frozen time for us.

Konrad stands, and Elizabeth rushes to him and throws herself into his arms.

“How good it is to hold you,” she says, pressing her face into his neck.

I watch as they hold each other, and touch each other’s faces. He kisses her mouth, brushes the water that spills from her eyes, and what they whisper to each other I cannot hear.

“I’ll come back,” she says.

Konrad shakes his head.

“I’ll come back,” she repeats.

“You mustn’t,” he says. He looks at me. “You especially, Victor. Let this be an end of it. There’s no true way to bring me back.”

I walk to him and hold out my ring. I hear Elizabeth draw in her breath.

“Take it,” I tell my twin.

Very slowly he takes my hand and closes my fingers around the ring.

“This isn’t how it’s meant to end,” I say. “I had a dream, of you and me, having an adventure, and-”

“We’ve had our adventures,” he says. “Enough for two lives.”

He takes my right hand. “Does it hurt even in here?” he asks.

I nod.

“Be done with it now. You’ve no reason to blame yourself for my death.”

I look away.

“Victor? Do you hear me? It was never your duty to save me. Or bring me back from the dead.”

“Perhaps.”

“Henry,” he says. “I’ve never seen more valor. I don’t think I could’ve charged that thing the way you did in the chapel.”

Henry smiles, his old smile.

“But how can we leave you here alone?” Elizabeth says miserably.

“Oh, I’m not staying here,” Konrad says. “I am going for a walk. It was what I first wanted to do when I arrived. Only, Analiese-I mean Wilhelm-stopped me.”

He gives Elizabeth one last, long kiss. Then he hugs Henry warmly. Last he opens his arms to me. He doesn’t feel cold. He’s the same as me.

“No more of this,” he whispers into my ear.

I try to laugh.

“Promise me you’ll hatch no more mad schemes.”

I hold on to him tightly just a moment longer.

“I knew I’d get no promise from my little brother,” he says.

Then he turns to the open balcony and steps outside into the mist. The moment he does so, the mist closes around him, not ferociously but gently, like a traveling cloak, and he is gone.

The house was bustling, things being packed, things being cloaked with dust sheets. We were to leave the next morning, first toward Venice and then, after several weeks, farther south, to where the healing sun would wait for us.

In the privacy of my room, I packed a valise for the things I wanted with me on the coach.

I looked at my notebook, the one I’d kept when I’d had the spirit butterflies upon me and was reading like a madman. I scarcely recognized my scribbling now. There were some passages I was simply unable to read, and those I could read didn’t make a jot of sense to me. There seemed to be information not just about turning lead to gold, but about many other things too, including the mysteries of the human body. Numbers and notations and equations that might as well have been the hieroglyphs of a lost civilization.

Nothing good had come out of the spirit world with me. Nothing.

It was just gibberish all along, a mockery of knowledge spun like a cocoon about me by those butterflies.

I ripped out the pages from the notebook and held them close to the candle flame.

And yet I couldn’t burn them.

What if the knowledge was real but I wasn’t clever enough yet to understand it?

Quietly, as though I were keeping a secret from myself, I folded the pages and locked them away in my drawer.

Later.

That evening came on stormy, and Henry, Elizabeth, and I stood under the awning of the great balcony and looked over the rain-pelted lake. Mist obscured the mountains, and I couldn’t help wondering if Konrad were somehow in it.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said to Henry. “Your talisman. You never did tell us what it was.”

“Oh,” he said, a little sheepishly. “It was just some inspiring words. I don’t mind showing you now.”

He reached into his pocket and drew out the bit of paper for me.

I unfolded it and read, “‘I will drink life to the lees/ To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’ You wrote these?”

He nodded.

“They’re very fine,” said Elizabeth.

“It suits you well,” I said.

“We’ll miss you on your journey,” Elizabeth told him.

“And I’ll miss you on yours,” he replied. “I wish my father and I were going to Italy and not Holland. I’ve heard the winters can be quite dismal.”

“I wish you were coming with us,” she said.

He blushed. “Do you?”

“Of course she does,” I said, wondering if he still harbored ambitions to win her heart. And then I added, “You’re practically a brother to her.”

I clapped him on the shoulder, and he looked at me wryly. Then we both smiled, as two friends do before a fencing match.

The rain came harder, pockmarking the lake. The wind picked up, and I felt the great cool drops against my skin. Light flickered behind the clouds.

“You should come in now,” Father said, joining us on the balcony. “You’ll be soaked in a minute.”

“That lightning,” I asked him, “what form of matter is it?”

“Electricity,” he said. “A discharge of energy between oppositely charged particles. It’s a relatively new science, a potent and promising one.”

A great fork suddenly impaled the lake. From the sky came a deafening crack, like someone taking a chisel to the very heavens. There was another flash, and about fifty yards along our shoreline a massive oak erupted in a stream of blinding fire. When the light vanished, the tree was nothing more than a blasted stump.

“Come inside, Victor,” Elizabeth said from the doorway, and held out her hand to me. But I hesitated.

“Yes,” I said, “in just a moment.” And I turned back to the storm and thought: Such astonishing power.