The girl’s body was still damp, and rather glutinously so, by virtue of having been immersed in a special solution for some time, but it was rapidly wired up to a complex electrical apparatus including a series of Voltaic piles. Before switching on the electric current, however, Frankenstein carefully introduced two fluids into the corpse, one red and one clear, using a clyster.
The hush of expectation that had descended seemed to stretch as the anticipation as prolonged, but Frankenstein was finally ready for the administration of the crucial shock. The day was bright now that the morning mist had cleared, and the room’s windows faced south, so the sunlight streamed into the room in full measure, adding a suggestion of everyday normality to events that might have looked far more sinister if carried out in a gloomy cellar or an eerie attic.
The first shock only caused the corpse to shudder convulsively; when it was over, the body gave no more sign of life than before. The second was more effective, but not in any particularly striking sense. The shudder died away, but only to give way to movements of a less abrupt kind, like the stirring of a sleeping body in the grip of a bad dream. A third administration was necessary, however, and even then the reanimated corpse could not sit up unaided; Crosse had to lift her up, and he continued to support her.
When she had first been laid down, the girl had seemed more off-white than grey, in spite of a certain discoloration of her skin, but she was noticeably darker in complexion now. Her eyes were open, and the whites stood out quite clearly to the sides of the near-black iris and jet black pupil, within the shadowed orbits.
She stared at the assembled crowd, and seemed to be able to see them, although her waxen features registered no flicker of surprise, delight or anxiety. A tremor ran through the assembly regardless; some, at least, had already seen more than they expected.
Frankenstein had stepped back, his work done, and Faraday was also content to stand by, watching and waiting. It was George Singer who stepped forward to examine the girl closely, picking up her limp hands one by one and staring into her face. His eyes met hers, and interrogated them. His voice it was, too, that began to ask her questions.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked her—although that did not seem to Temple to be the logical place to start.
The dead girl hesitated, as if unsure how to move her mouth or activate her vocal cords—but in the end, her lips parted, and she whispered: “No.”
“Can you tell us your name?”
There was a further hesitation. Temple realized that Crosse and his associates had made no attempt to introduce the girl to the crowd, and that even he had not been told her name—the name, that is, with which she had been baptized when alive. It hardly mattered; the word that was eventually formed, seemingly with some difficulty, by the grey lips was: “No.”
George Singer seemed oddly pleased with that reply, although Temple heard several members of the audience emit sighs of disappointment.
“Do you remember anything at all?” the vampire continued.
This time, the hesitation was extended, but Temple thought that the grey girl was undergoing a manifest change as the crowd watched with bated breath, almost as if she were recovering herself…or entering into herself. Her gaze became keener and more intelligent, her stance surer and more self-composed. She drew back from the arms that had been holding her up, standing of her own accord—and she looked into George Singer’s eyes, as if she recognized something within them.
“You too have died,” she said, “but you have mastered the art of appearance.”
Singer seemed severely discomfited by this remark, and Temple knew that he would never have made her say any such thing by means of dictation. Temple also knew, however, that the statement would sound like perfect nonsense to almost all the members of the audience.
“What do you remember?” Singer persisted.
“I remember darkness,” the girl replied. “I remember the water—the cold, cloying water. I remember death’s embrace—but I am glad to be back in the world of space and time. Is that what you want me to say? Are those the words you are trying to put into my mouth? Am I your slave, to do your bidding?”
Temple had tensed all his muscles, ready to act. He knew that the vampire’s plan was going awry—that the mesmeric authority that he was trying to impose upon the dead girl was meeting a determined rebellion, and not merely rebellion, but a measure of resentment and contempt. Whatever spirit had come to take possession of the corpse was stronger than anyone, including the vampire, could have expected. The detective could see, however, that George Singer was intrigued as well as anxious, eager to know what this unexpected newcomer might have to tell him, even though the script that he had written had been torn up and thrown away.
“No, my dear,” Singer said, with the utmost tenderness, “you are not my slave, and are not required to do my bidding. You are a free agent, like any other sentient being, with the power of choice—but you’re a stranger here, for all that you have lived before. I beg you to be patient, and docile, until you understand what is happening around you.”
Again, there was hesitation—and then the grey girl laughed. It was a sardonic laugh, with as much mockery as amusement in it.
That was too much for the Bishop of Salisbury. He leapt to his feet, brandishing a crucifix in his right hand and a Bible in his left, and began to intone a rapid formula of exorcism, in the Latin of the Roman church rather than the English of his own. Temple reckoned that he might be lacking a bell and a candle, if the rite were to be performed to perfection, but he assumed that it would not be utterly lacking in efficacy, if exorcisms had any efficacy at all.
The latter question was difficult to determine. The grey girl certainly reacted to the Bishop’s intervention, but not as any demon, resentful but cravenly intimidated by the power of God, might have been expected to react. “Why should I begone?” she asked him, quietly but firmly. “Can you believe that the world is yours, and that you alone have the privilege of determining what it can and shall contain? Do you not understand that you are nothing more than a mere larva, bearing within you the seed of something strange? Begone yourself, you poor pathetic fool!”
Perhaps, Temple thought, if the grey girl had had a weapon to hand, she might have used it in conjunction with her final dismissal, but she was bare-handed, and possessed of no more strength than the frail body she inhabited. All she could muster was a gesture, half-contemptuous and half-bellicose: a mere symbol of aggression.
To at least one of the members of her terrified audience, however, that symbolic gesture was sufficient to warrant a violent reply.
Temple’s own men, disciplined by long training, merely reached for their cudgels without taking them out—but Stephen Southborne had brought a dagger to the séance, in case of need, and he drew it. With a single fluid motion, which spoke of practice, he hurled it, aiming for the grey girl’s breast.
The vampire would not tolerate that; with a lightning movement, he snatched her out of the path of the flying blade. It missed the resurrected girl by a foot—but Singer was not the only one who had obeyed a protective impulse. Victor Frankenstein had leapt forward, intending to snatch her out of harm’s way himself, but had found her already gone, and he stumbled, leaning forward with his arms outstretched.
The dagger struck him in the neck, and buried itself deeply, while red arterial blood spurted forth to either side of the embedded blade.
Southborne went as pale as a ghost, and Hastings had to prop him up to prevent him falling in a swoon. The ladies present were not the only ones who gasped or screamed. Even the vampire seemed stunned; the hands that had reached out so forcefully to pluck the intended victim out of the way relaxed their grip and fell nervelessly to his sides.
The grey girl’s mocking contempt changed to raging wrath upon the instant. She leapt away from Singer, shoved Michael Faraday aside, and hurled herself from the stage as if to attack the audience. Few of the crowd’s members were still seated, but cha
irs tumbled in every direction as some moved to their left and others to their right, desperate to get out of her way.
Temple was by no means calm, but he had sufficient self-control to take note of the absurdity of the situation. The girl was no more than five feet tall, slender and weak, while there were many in the crowd who stood nearly a foot higher, with well-toned muscles and the vigor of sportsmen—and yet, not one of the men in the assembly had the courage to take a stand. What they saw coming at them, with their educated eyes, was no mere creature of flesh and blood but a monster, perhaps released from Hell.
Again, Temple wondered whether the girl might have struck out with lethal force had she had a club or a sword, but, as things were, she merely attempted to strike those within reach with the flat of her hand, as if to slap their faces as a punishment for impertinence. None of the attempted blows landed; her intended victims were too quick in their evasions.
The Bishop of Salisbury fell over bruisingly, and so did Peter Barlow, among others, but all of them were tumbled by the jostling elbows or flailing arms of their fellow living men, victims of mere confusion. The grey girl did not lay a hand on anyone as she moved through the four rows of scattered chairs—and once she was through the crowd, she headed straight for the door.
One of Temple’s men was guarding the door, and now he did draw his cudgel, spreading his arms and bracing his knees in a street-fighter’s crouch.
“Don’t hurt her!” Temple howled.
He only meant to instruct the man to handle her gently when he seized her, but the man construed the order differently, and stood aside. The door was standing ajar; there must have been servants gathered beyond it, eavesdropping on the momentous affair—but they were already fleeing. When the girl snatched at the door-knob and drew the batten wide, there was no one visible in the corridor beyond.
Within a second, the girl had disappeared.
In the meantime, Faraday had picked himself up and had joined Andrew Crosse and George Singer, crouching over Frankenstein’s fallen body.
“Follow the girl, but don’t hurt her!” Temple cried to the guardian of the door, as he ran to Frankenstein’s side. He knew as soon as he arrived beside the fallen man that there was no hope for him—or, at least, no hope for his life.
“Pick him up!” Faraday instructed Crosse and Singer. “Take him to the laboratory! We must immerse him as soon as possible, even before we draw the dagger from his neck.”
Temple did not hesitate; while Crosse and the vampire did as they were told, he turned to the crowd, and posed himself in such a fashion as to forbid any interference. The Bishop of Salisbury was still down, nursing his bruises, but Robert Hastings made as if to protest. “Hold hard!” Temple told him. “You came for a demonstration, and you shall have more than you bargained for, if you consent to wait. Those of you who still suspect trickery will have your final doubts dispelled.”
“You must catch and destroy that demon, Mr. Temple!” was Hastings’ only reply.
“She has done no harm,” Temple said. “I’d rather arrest Mr. Southborne, and commit him to the assizes on a charge of manslaughter, but I dare say that he will claim privileged immunity, since he is on parliamentary business here—and besides, the crime of manslaughter might need to be redefined by parliament, if the Necromancers of London can bring Frankenstein back from the dead.”
The Bishop was on his feet by this time, and seemed to be on the point of preaching an angry sermon to Temple and anyone else who would listen, but the room was already emptying as the crowd dispersed.
Having satisfied himself that there was nothing more to be done in the drawing-room, Temple hurried after Faraday and his companions, and reached the laboratory in time to see Frankenstein’s body being immersed in the same bath of fluid from which the girl’s body had been removed. There were two other tanks nearby, each containing a male corpse, but neither body had been as fresh as Frankenstein’s by the time the treatment had begun, and they seemed very somber by comparison.
“Have you learned his technique well enough to bring him back?” Temple demanded of Faraday.
“I believe so,” Faraday replied. “We can but try.”
The false George Singer took Temple’s arm and drew him aside. “That did not go as well as I had hoped,” he said, when they were out of earshot of Faraday and Crosse. “I had not expected to meet with such resistance, and had a very different performance planned. Who would have thought that a corpse could be revived so swiftly, with a seemingly-mature intelligence? We must interrogate her together, when your men bring her back; there’s much to be learned here.”
“If they bring her back,” Temple said, grimly. “They’ll not be the only ones searching for her, and if she falls into the hands of the Germans or the Churchmen, they’ll want to keep her for themselves—unless, of course, you can exert your mesmeric authority over them.”
“I’ll do what I can,” the vampire said, “but we’ll need to keep an eye on Frankenstein too—if he can be revived, with his mind relatively unimpaired, he might be the most valuable witness of all to the mysteries of his own condition.”
“The Commission of Inquiry is spoiled, though,” Temple observed. “For one of its members to kill the man under investigation, even by accident, is fatal to its pretentions. The Bishop’s antics can be set aside, but not Southborne’s. He could not have done more had he been secretly commissioned to wreck the investigation.”
“Perhaps that’s so, in a purely technical sense—but if the members can be persuaded to extend their stay here long enough to watch three more revivals instead of two, imagine what an impact the testimony of Frankenstein might have, delivered from beyond the grave! Imagine what a tale they’d carry back to Canning and the King!”
“If theatricality is what you want,” Temple told him, a trifle bitterly, “you might do worse than reveal yourself, and regale the audience with anecdotes of your checkered past.”
Singer shook his head. “More than human I might be,” he said, “but I’m greatly outnumbered here, without my lovely counterpart to charm my adversaries. I do hope the girl will come to no harm—there are people here, more lethally armed than the idiot Bishop and the headstrong parliamentarian, who might prefer to kill her rather than question her.”
“Whatever you might think of the Bishop,” Temple said, “there will be many members of that audience who believe that he proved his case—that the girl really was possessed by a malevolent demon. Southborne was probably not the only one who felt a reflexive urge to destroy her. Are you quite sure yourself that the intelligence which took such rapid control of her, in spite of your own efforts, was not a demon?”
“As sure as I am that I’m not a demon myself,” Singer replied, wryly. “I dare say, though, that this is not the first time such a mistake has been made. Find the girl, Mr. Temple, if you can—I must play my part here.”
Temple did not care for the implication that he was under the vampire’s orders now, but he was eager to discover what progress the search was making, so he went out in search of his men.
There was no shortage of witnesses to tell him which way the chase had gone, at least while he was still in the house and its shadow, but once he reached the wooded part of the estate he had to use his talents as a tracker.
Recently dead though she was, the grey girl was evidently agile, for she had crossed the boundary wall of Fyne Court’s grounds and disappeared into thicker woods, with at least half a dozen men in her wake.
Five minutes after clambering over the wall himself, Temple met someone coming the other way, apparently having abandoned the chase. It was not one of his own men, but one who had traveled with the expedition as Southborne’s valet.
“I apologize for my master’s hot-headedness, sir,” the man said, as he approached the detective. “It was recklessness, not malice. He is exactly what he seems to be.”
“Unlike you, I presume,” Temple said, looking the man up and down.
“I
wondered whether you had identified me when I gave you the piece of paper,” the other replied. “We’ve met before, alas—but Tom was pressed for time, and had to take what opportunity he could to intrude a spy into the party. The others did no better, I think—you’ve doubtless spotted the German by now, and you must have known already that Snow Harris is in the pocket of Civitas Solis.”
All of this was news to Temple, but he did his utmost not to show a flicker of surprise, while he tried to figure out where he might have seen the valet before. Sharper’s seemed by far the likeliest venue, and the memory eventually clicked into place.
“I’ve seen you playing the villain to Sam Hopkey’s hero,” Temple said, trying to sound as if he had never been in doubt about it, “and you’re doubtless another veteran of the Old Bailey. How did you know that Singer is an impostor?” He was careful not to say vampire in case he, too, might give away far too much.
“Tom knew witnesses to his death who had not been suborned. When he heard of his alleged return, he knew that Szandor must be involved, and that Crosse must have been hypnotized into forgetfulness. You will not seek to have me arrested, I hope, Mr. Temple—I’ve done nothing against the law, and have done you a good turn. Tom’s orders were to protect you, and to trust you if alliances had to be made. The foreigners are the real enemy.”
“I don’t doubt that the vehmgerichte and Balsamo’s followers are Tom Brown’s enemies just now,” Temple retorted, “but I’m not so sure that they’re mine, even though one or other of them may well have taken Sévérin by stealth. Why have you given up chasing the grey girl?”
Frankenstein in London Page 17
