“And what is that? The impossibility, I mean.”
“Do you really want to know? To have it out in the open?” she asked gently.
“Yes. I think so.” Then Damien frowned. “Hell! I don’t know. Tell me anyway.”
Brice looked at him for a long moment, then sat up. She went to the desk. First she selected and opened a book that contained a copy of one of his handwritten letters, back from when he’d been George Gordon, Lord Byron. Then she leaned down and slid open the second desk drawer where the sherry had been. She pulled out a piece of folded paper. She closed the desk carefully and brought both to Damien, who had risen and was adding wood to the fire.
She compared the signatures before she handed the book and paper over.
“Are you a forger?” Her voice was slightly unsteady. “You could tell me that, and I would make myself believe you because my imagination is vivid and I have been wrong before. Once or twice.”
His heart stumbled. Of course she’d had indications of the truth—provocative ones. Yet nothing individually, or even collectively, should have been enough to lead her to this conclusion. Not so quickly. Yet, somehow, she had made this leap of intuition and faith, and arrived at the correct answer.
That was what he wanted, wasn’t it? he asked himself again. It was why he had kept her here, revealed Ninon’s letters, seduced her during a storm. He could have stayed quiet about these things, could have locked himself away for the night. But he hadn’t.
“No, I’m not a forger. Just careless, apparently.” Damien turned back from the fireplace and put up the tongs. He took the proffered tome and paper, but barely glanced at them. Instead he watched her face.
“Are you…well, are you?” she asked.
“Yes. I am.” He waited for her reaction.
“But how?” she asked, believing and yet clearly baffled. “How can this be? Is it connected to the…the lightning?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. Then, looking at the window where the wind still screamed, he added: “But, then, it seems that we shall have a long while for me to tell it. The city will be closed down by morning. I can’t recall the last time that happened. It rather reminds of another storm long, long ago.”
“Never mind the weather.” Brice knelt on the rug and reached for his hand, tugging him down beside her. There was still some current, some inner heat that made his skin tingle, but it was mild now, safe. For a while at least.
“I had epilepsy caused by a lesion in the brain,” Damien began, gaze and voice remote as he visited a past that he would have preferred to forget. “And every year it grew worse until I was certain that I would die or be made an idiot from the increasingly violent seizures. I worked feverishly at my poems, but…Fate slung ever shorter years at me like a volley of arrows, shooting them by too quickly for me to see, and yet leaving great damage in my body and brain. I needed more time for my work. For my life.”
Brice murmured encouragingly as he began his tale. His voice had changed, had become more…British. Her heart was beating a bit wildly. But then, these last few days her heart had beat faster and harder than ever before, pumping not just blood but expectation, desire, even hope into every fiber of her being. And it was all because of him—George Gordon. Lord Byron. Damien. It was confusing, because she thought of him now as both men. It was because of him that she felt alive. He’d done this for her—given her back the pulse of a living, vital person, reminded her that she could have a life that wasn’t as plain—as boring—as the stale soda crackers she crumbled into her canned soup every day at lunch.
And now she was taking a journey with him back in time, and she was about to learn something no other living person knew. Talk about getting off the tour bus! She wasn’t just seeing—she was finding. She was thrilled and terrified, and her heart jittered as it bounced between the two extremes of rare emotion.
“My wife was alarmed and repelled by my seizures, and she feared that the condition was hereditary and that we would have idiot children. She shunned my bed, and eventually her fear grew into hate. Few know this, but her increasing revulsion was one of the real reasons I left England.”
Brice strove to keep all traces of pity from her face, to not speak ill of his wife. She knew that not everyone was brave when it came to challenging Fate, which was so much bigger and meaner than mortal man or woman. And back then they hadn’t understood about epilepsy, nor had they known effective treatments for it. When the bully of illness had sneaked up on Byron’s wife, it was understandable that the woman had quailed and fled.
Yet Brice despised her anyway. It was just one more way in which the woman had been a coward. And that fear had made her into a liar who maligned her husband, hurting him even after his death.
“On my journey to Lake Geneva, I happened by a castle where I took shelter from an especially terrible storm—a notorious castle later visited by the Shelleys.” Brice couldn’t help but stiffen, and her movement made Damien smile slightly. “Yes, that’s the one. Understand, it was not a place I would have sought out voluntarily. It was an inhospitable and lonely situation, but night had fallen early. A cold white cloak of stinging mist that carried a strange clinging snow had settled on my hair and shoulders. It was periodically torn away by a raging wind when we emerged from the tract of woods, but always it returned, colder, deeper, more tenacious and smothering. I realize now that it stank of formaldehyde because we neared the castle and Dippel was hard at work.
“You have to imagine it. The air in the open was merciless and battered everything. Even the clouds were ragged and bruised, unable to hold their shape. I feared for my mount and also for the coachman and those horses that hauled the carriage.” Damien exhaled slowly. “Anyhow, we took shelter at the castle, and it was there that I met Johann Conrad Dippel. And it was in his presence that I had my most violent seizure. It was also that night that he made me an intriguing—but what I then took to be insane—proposition.”
Damien looked out into the night.
“You don’t mean…?”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. Of course, I did not accept his offer right away. And as soon as the storm passed, I continued on to Villa Diodoti—in the carriage, for I was very ill. I got on with life as well as I could. It was only later when the Shelleys visited and I again had a terrible seizure which nearly ended my life that I finally gave in to their entreaties and sent for Dippel. The seizures were coming hourly by then. I consented to his treatment.”
“And thus a legend was born,” Brice whispered. Her eyes felt enormous and probably were. “It involved some form of electroshock therapy?”
“A form of it, yes.”
Logs crashed in the grate, and the sound broke the worst of the spell of Damien’s strange tale.
“I don’t know why I’ve told you this now,” he said at last, focusing his dark eyes on her face, his voice returning to its present day intonation and accent. “Perhaps it is because I see in you many of the traits that existed in me when I was young—first and foremost, a hunger beyond the understanding of most men, a thirst for knowledge that reaches beyond the present and into the past where history was born. You also have a logical mind. This makes me believe that you can perhaps understand why I did what I did.”
Brice nodded—not in agreement, but simply in acknowledgment of his words. She was not certain that she did understand or agree. Perhaps she had been conditioned by too many horror films, but she found his story as appalling as it was fascinating.
As though guessing her conflicting thoughts, he added: “That intellectual hunger is an odd thing. At first it was satisfied with investigation, with the exploration of other great minds, with expressing my inner thoughts through poetry. Then one day I looked up and truly understood that the river of time only runs one way, and that it is always flowing, carrying us farther from our goals and closer to death. Every year we lose precious brain cells. Every year we grow weaker. Yet even then, armed with this knowledge, I probably would not have co
nsidered this sort of life had not my own been in danger of ending prematurely.” Damien got up and began to pace, his thoughts clearly causing some sort of agitation that required physical expression.
It was probably at least three parts regret for having confided his greatest secret in her. Brice remained still, not bothering to attempt reassurance. Not yet. He would know if she lied or spoke out of ignorance, or pity, or any heated emotion.
“I had very nearly made my peace with my early demise when this extraordinary coincidence happened. It was a gift, a dare from the gods! A chance to heal my brain, to extend my life—indefinitely, I suppose, though at the time I thought I was only reclaiming what would have been mine if disease had not plagued me.” Damien paused in front of his desk and touched the manuscripts piled there. “There are those who said—and perhaps will say if they ever know the truth—that I was wrong to accept the challenge Fate threw at me. That I am unnatural because of what I’ve done.”
“Mary Shelley?” Brice asked softly, speaking for the first time in a long while. “Was she one of those who did not accept?”
“Among others. Polidori left me soon after, you know. Dippel horrified him. He should have horrified me too. He knew what he was doing, after all. He knew.” Damien’s head turned in her direction and his dark eyes burned. “But I still count it as a gift. A dark one, to be sure. But it is not a bargain I too often regret.”
“A bargain? Then there is a price attached to this”—she hunted for a word as she tried to snuff out an image of Daniel Webster dealing with a devil in a lab coat—“this immortality? What did you have to pay Dippel? Your firstborn son?” The attempted joke came out flat.
“In a way, yes. There is always a price, you know. Can you possibly doubt that? Especially when one is purchasing his life?” He pushed up his sleeves, showing the fine network of scars. But they both knew there were higher costs than the marks on his body.
“And that sometimes-regretted cost is…?” she asked softly.
He spread his hands wide. “Where do I begin? Never writing poetry again for fear that someone would discover it and ferret out my identity.” Brice made a small involuntary sound of pain, but Damien went on relentlessly. “Re-creating myself every two or three decades because, even in this age of plastic surgery, people do notice when you fail to age. Living a life that has at its core a secret that leads to vast deception of the people around you. Never being able to have true, lifelong intimacy with another human—not with a friend, not a lover, not a wife. And certainly not children. For almost two hundred years, my best friends have been dogs.” He shook his head, for a moment his face lined with pain.
“But surely if you wanted—”
“No. I have buried children before—I will leave no other orphans behind wondering what became of their father, nor some woman wondering if her missing husband is truly dead. I see the question in your eyes, but think! Assuming they could survive the process of conversion, how could I ever bring them with me? It would be forcing them into an unnatural life of lies and secrets before they were old enough to truly understand. And what if any of them refused? Would they not be bitter if their mother and siblings aged and died and their father remained young? Would it not grow worse as they also aged and I did not?”
Brice swallowed all the questions and arguments that were welling up. It took a moment, but she asked calmly, “So, even with all this, you do not regret what you’ve done?”
“No.” He paused. “At least not often. Though sometimes I wonder if Tennyson had it wrong—is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?”
She thought of the losses he had known. Many were well documented. But how many more had the next centuries brought? How many lovers had he turned away? How many lives and offers of happiness had he rejected because of his secret? How bad could the cumulative losses be? she asked herself. How could she measure it, given her own brief life?
Then Brice remembered an incident from her childhood. When she was twelve, her father had been trapped in a building that collapsed in an earthquake in San Francisco. He had ultimately been found and rescued, and had not suffered any permanent harm, but in those dark hours while she and her mother awaited word from the rescue squads, she had known the agonies of the damned. A part of her had never felt entirely safe after that.
She’d had other losses too—but only one lifetime’s worth. Those losses had been hard to bear, the disappointment of loves that weren’t great loves after all, and the one great love that had ended in death—a pointless death caused by a drunk driver on an icy road. Then the loss of parents, both to cancer. For a time she had been so sad, so lonely, that it had hurt to breathe because every inhalation reminded her that she was alive and in pain. And she’d decided then not to love again, not to care—at least not to care about anyone who was still living.
But, of course, in the end she always did care. Not caring was too much like being dead. You marinated in your grief long enough and you became the very heartache you wanted to escape. Then you turned into a ghost, and then into nothing at all. Surely it was the same for him, only on a vaster scale because he’d had centuries, lifetimes, to love and then lose. She’d never lost a child, but could imagine the pain of it. How could she judge him, or question any decision he made in order to survive?
His dark, compassionate eyes watched her, perhaps guessing what she was thinking.
Brice cleared her throat. “Sometimes I’ve felt guilty for being alive when Mark isn’t. My parents too. They died so young. And though life has been good, I’ve wanted to go back and savor the lost time that I never realized was so precious,” she confessed. “Sometimes I’ve felt like I would give anything to have it all back so I could do it better.”
He shook his head. He wore the darkness well, and by the firelight he looked like he was one of the elements of the night—moon or star or even a dark angel. That was fanciful, of course, but the flickering gold light revealed the fantastical in him.
“There’s no going back except with thoughts and words,” he said. “Do not deceive yourself. I can’t give you that. No one can. This is not magic. Yesterdays—yours and mine—are gone forever. We can never go back to where we were, when we were, who we were. I did not realize until later just what I had gained, and lost, forever.”
Brice stared, unable at first to voice the new question that his words had given life. She was both fascinated and horrified.
“You can’t give me that? But you can…? Are you saying that you actually know how to…?”
“Yes, I am breaking my rule of silence and secrecy. I am telling you the truth.” He spread his hands wide. “It is just possible that I could give you many more tomorrows than you ever planned. Time to know all you wish to know about Ninon or myself or anyone. To achieve everything you want.” He added almost to himself, “And perhaps that would be enough for you.”
“You could give this to me?” she repeated. “Really?”
He backed off. “Perhaps. Theoretically. I’ve never attempted it before.”
“Perhaps? But how, exactly? You actually know what Dippel did? The process?”
“Yes, I believe so. The process was more elaborate and painful than the one I must go through now that I’ve changed, but I could probably duplicate it—if someone were mad enough to want me to.” He again turned on his heel and paced the length of the room. His gait was only slightly marred by the surgery he must have had to correct his club foot. Any scars he might have as a memento of the old birth defect were too fine to see by firelight.
“I almost can’t believe it.” In fact, she couldn’t.
“Understandable. You recall my mentioning that there was a price.”
She nodded, returning her gaze to his face. “Yes.” When he didn’t look her way, she added, “Something besides emotional isolation and all the rest of it?”
“Yes. There is also a physical risk and permanent bodily changes. I risked the peril because my epilepsy w
as worsening and I couldn’t bear the thought of it damaging my mind, killing off my intellect with every explosion in my brain.”
“What is it that you did then?” she asked, eyes a little wide, breathing a little fast. She’d seen too many Frankenstein movies, and the horrible images of stitched corpses stolen from looted graves buffeted her mind like a flock of evil black birds. She was repelled and desperately hoped that he wouldn’t tell her anything too awful to accept.
“I embraced death,” he said simply. “I went to the gods in an iron cage, by stopping my heart with lightning. And then, in the place of agony, I grabbed their fire, praying that though it killed me their power would again return me to life.” He stopped in front of her. “And it did.”
“But?”
“But there were many others who were not so fortunate. Dippel had many failures. Maybe they didn’t want life badly enough to fight through the pain.”
“I see.” In spite of the blaze in the fireplace, she felt a chill. A part of her wanted to make some sign—perhaps to cross herself, or to make some gesture to ward off the evil eye that must surely be watching.
“Read about it, if you want.” He went to the desk and took out the old journal she had seen earlier. He hesitated a moment and then offered it to her. “I’ve improved upon the method he used, but fundamentally it’s the same process—a mix of stimulants and electrocution by an iron plate clamped over the heart and charged with Saint Elmo’s fire.”
“You have been doing this to yourself?”
“I have to in order to keep the epilepsy at bay. Once in a while. It isn’t a yearly event.”
The paper of the journal had yellowed badly. She thought at first that it was age but then realized the paper had been exposed to intense heat. Some pages were even singed.
She squinted, reading the first few lines:
10 Dezember, 1731
Das Tagebuch
Johann Conrad Dippel.
She shivered again, her breath stopping as her heart constricted and then forgot for a moment to go on beating. This ghost would speak to her freely. He would be very real after this. If she took the apple from the serpent, would he always haunt her?
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