The Pierced Heart: A Novel

by Shepherd, Lynn

  But it is not, it seems, his time. Scarce ten feet from the foot of the wall he comes to a gasping slithering stop in the thick tangle of the creeper trunk. His hands are scored and bleeding, but he is not dead yet. He clings there a moment, breathing so hard he can scarcely get oxygen into his lungs, before starting to clamber slowly, shaking, to the ground. The rain is coming down hard now, which is no doubt why Charles does not hear—does not even suspect until he has both feet on solid earth and turns in an illusion of relief to see—

  An enormous black-pelted hound. More wolf than dog, its neck ringed with a spiked iron collar, and hackles rigid all along its spine. It starts towards him, teeth bared, growling now, and Charles edges backwards, glancing about desperately for something he can use to fend the creature off—some stick or spade or a brick he could throw—but the dog merely presses closer, the whites of its eyes flaring. There is a frozen second of stillness and then the dog is upon him, leaping at his face, dragging him to the ground. Pure instinct takes over and he kicks and thrashes, but the beast’s too strong for him and he feels its hot mouth close about his leg, and knife teeth puncture cloth and skin and bite into bone—

  It lasts—what?—a minute? Maybe not even that. And then the vise about his leg is loosed and Charles is lying there, face-down in the dirt, retching, the rain running down his face and neck. He turns over slowly to see a mass of bloody mangled flesh running from his foot to his knee. He stares at it a moment, then doubles up in a rictus of pain, spewing acid vomit across the dark wet ground. But what he does not see, cannot see, is the man standing high above him on the roof, fingering something in the pocket of the long coat that billows about him in the wind. A man who watches quietly for the next half hour, seemingly unperturbed by the downpour, as Charles tries again and again to get up, but can put no weight on his bleeding leg. Watches, indeed, until Charles gives up altogether and crawls with pitiful slowness into the lee of the castle wall, and hunches up against the slashing rain. Whereupon the man above him turns and steps down out of our sight. But not before we glimpse what he has been holding in his hand all this time. It is of ivory, perhaps four inches long, and carved minutely and beautifully with the figure of Actaeon, in the very act of being torn to pieces by his own hounds. And its purpose? It is a hunting whistle. For the summoning of dogs.

  There is a knock on the door and Herr Bremmer shows in a man carrying a small leather bag. It is Jonas Sewerin. He bows as slightly as civility will allow.

  “Have you examined the patient?” asks the Baron from his seat behind the desk.

  “I have, and I must tell you I am most apprehensive. Herr Maddox is suffering from a dangerous fever of the brain. He seems to have no notion where he is and raved so wildly at the sight of me that I have instructed your servants to strap him to the bed to prevent him from harming himself.”

  He stares at the Baron, holding his cold gaze. “It is most regrettable that there was such an unaccountable delay in cleaning and treating the wound. I have done all I can but it may still be too late to prevent a putrid infection. And as to how Herr Maddox came to receive such an injury. His flesh has been ripped by what I can only deduce to be the teeth of some wild beast—”

  “Herr Maddox was warned,” interrupts the Baron, “on the day of his arrival, that I keep a mastiff for the protection of both my property and my privacy—a mastiff permitted to roam freely about the castle precincts at night. If he insists on taking his walks alone, and in the dark hours, then he must accept the consequences.”

  “I do not believe he was merely walking—”

  Sewerin stops, wary that he might have said too much. Because his patient was not quite as incoherent as he has led the Baron to believe: one or two words at least, he was well able to decipher. Words that have left the doctor deeply alarmed.

  “Indeed,” says the Baron, who has been watching him all this while. “And what leads you to such an improbable conclusion?”

  “It was my assumption merely,” says Sewerin eventually. “Based on the fact that no sane person would have willingly gone out in that storm.”

  The Baron raises an eyebrow. “I can only concur.”

  Then he picks up the pen from the desk in front of him and returns to the document he has been writing.

  “Thank you, Herr Sewerin. You may send your bill to my steward.”

  “But—”

  “That will be all,” he replies firmly, still intent on his papers. “If my guest requires further attention from a physician I will undertake to provide it. In the manner, and at the time, that I see fit. Good day to you.”

  When the door has closed the Baron addresses himself to Bremmer. “On reflection, I consider my duty to our rash young guest would be best discharged by placing him in the care of professional attendants. Have a carriage made ready for an immediate departure to Melk.”

  The librarian bows and turns to go, but his master’s voice calls him calmly back. “I have had a message from the coachman enquiring as to my own intentions. Pray tell him my own plans are unchanged. I will depart for England, as arranged, at first light tomorrow.”

  Bremmer bows low. “I will inform him so, Freiherr. And request that a carriage be made available to transport Herr Maddox to the hospital at Melk.”

  “Not the hospital,” says the Baron quietly, without looking up. “The asylum.”

  … I have never seen so forbidding an entrance, nor one so deserving of that terrifying inscription Dante places at the gates of Hell, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Above me the blank walls towered, pierced only by windows too narrow for a human hand. As I was drawn towards the crumbling doorway I saw surmounting it the stony figure of Death, bending to place a skeleton’s kiss on a swooning maiden’s dewy brow. And when the huge door swung closed behind us, I heard the key rasp in the lock, and then nothing but the sound of slow dripping, and the wind in the desolate turrets above. After what seemed many moments, the man ahead of me lit a candle and I was told to follow. A long dark passage opened in the guttering flame, and as our faltering steps progressed, I began to hear the cries of the imprisoned, the pitiful howlings of the mad, and the desperate lamentations of those kept always from the light. And then, as my heart misgave me and I turned, frantic to be gone, I felt myself impelled forwards and a second door opened before us, as if by its own volition, and we descended, down, and down, and down again, to a crypt rank with the stench of death, and lit only by the sickly blue glow of a single lamp.

  There was the sound of thunder now, and I could see the ranks of mouldering graves, and the walls lined with the dried and mummified remains of the dead of that horrific place, their heads bowed, bound to stand upright for all eternity in the ghastly windings of the tomb, denied even that rest the Lord allows the wicked and the lost. And then the lamp was extinguished and we were plunged into darkness. A strange and eerie music began now, one moment seeming close, the next high above my head, yearning like the very anguish of the soul. I seemed to feel the soft flutter of something against my cheek, and there was a rush of air so cold as to chill the very blood. As mist began to seep through the icy vault, a woman’s spectral voice began to intone in some ancient tongue, and I saw hovering above me in a sudden blaze of light the ghostly figure of a nun, clad from head to foot in robes of glowing white. She came floating slowly forwards, her hooded head bowed, until she was scarce a yard away, whereupon she lifted her face and I saw the blood streaming in torrents from her empty black-socketed eyes. I cried out, and heard others about me do the same, holding up their hands as if to fend the wraith away, and then the nun was gone as swiftly as she had come, her place taken by a hornèd laughing devil, its teeth glinting, and a horde of demons feeding on the flesh of the living damned, who rolled their eyes and tore their hair, and pointed their cadaverous fingers at the hapless audience huddled in terror below. Vision succeeded vision, each more terrifying than the last, and then there was an image I had seen before—that painting so notorious and reviled, o
f the woman flung on her virgin bed in the throes of cauchemar. Only this was no painted canvas—she writhed and moaned before our horrified gaze, as the monsters of her dreams loomed in the darkness above her, and the kneeling demon pressed his scaly hands to her breast, grinning in a hideous mockery of delight. I saw women faint at this, and men reduced to sobbing wretches, begging for relief.

  And then there was the clap of a thunderbolt and a man appeared in a column of glowing smoke, clad in a billowing cloak, with a mask of gold concealing his face.

  “Citizens of Vienna,” he cried. “For centuries, man has yearned to fathom the mystery of death, and plumb the secrets of that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns. Many have been the imposters who have claimed to communicate with the dead, but I stand before you now to make good that claim. Not by the wiles of necromancy will I achieve it, nor by the legerdemain of the magician, but by the genius of the scientist. I have created a machine which, for the first time in the history of mankind, may harness the hidden energy of the universe and breach the impermeable barrier of death.”

  He raised his arms then, as lightning suddenly illuminated the dank walls of the cavern. “Those of this company who desire to see again the faces of the departed, and hear the voices of those who were once dear, prepare yourselves, and hold fast to your courage, for you will see marvels to wring your hearts!”

  The room was plunged once more in darkness, and then, in a sudden ray of moonlight, we could see a young girl, clad—as I deduced—all in black, such that only her face was visible to us, afloat in a sea of utter dark. Before her there was mounted a brass apparatus of enormous complexity above which a glass ball appeared to be suspended in the air. The room fell silent then, as she lifted hands as white as her face and placed them, one by one, on either side of the ball, whereupon the globe began to spin and a ghastly greenish light to glow at its heart.

  “Behold!” cried the man in a booming cadence, “as my daughter raises the secret flame, and summons the souls of the long-departed!”

  I do not believe there was one of us, then, in all that thronged and silent assembly but held their breath, as the girl lifted her face and closed her eyes, and we saw sparks kindled on the surface of the glass. Then there came, softly at first, the sound of a young woman’s voice, rising and falling as if in lamentation, and the whimpering of a little child. And then the light of the globe seemed to gather in strength, twisting into a plume above the girl’s head, and we all of us present gasped in terror and wonder as a woman’s face became visible in the emerald fire.

  An old fellow with grey hair rose tremblingly to his feet in the midst of the assemblage and cried in the quavering accents of age, “It is she, it is my Katharina. It is thirty years and more since she was lost to me.”

  Then he cast his face in his hands, openly weeping.

  And as the globe spun, the rising flame formed the contours of ghostly yearning faces, sighing and whispering from beyond the grave, and those about me cried out, one by one, starting from their seats in recognition, as they called the names of those they had once loved, and held out their hands in an ecstasy of grief.

  In short it was, as I hope to have conveyed, the most accomplished phantasmagoria I have ever yet beheld, and I commend it to readers of this newspaper who have not thus far had the opportunity to witness it for themselves. Professor de Caus is indeed a worthy successor to his late lamented mentor Monsieur Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, and more than justifies his claim to be “Maker of Marvels, Worker of Wonders, and Conjuror of the Spirit Fire.” Moreover, the wild rumours that have been circulating about Vienna as to the extraordinary talents of his beautiful daughter will be amply vindicated by the sublimity of dread and wonder you will experience in her presence.

  But I counsel the utmost haste. The Professor will offer only a few last performances before returning, for a time, to his native England. We must hope his sojourn there will prove but short-lived.

  —Frederick Jager, “A Night at the Phantasmagoria,”

  Wiener Zeitung, 5 January 1851

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lucy’s journal

  VIENNA, 20 JANUARY 1851

  WE ARE GOING HOME.

  I sit back and look at what I have just written, and I wonder if I really know what “home” means. It is so long since we have been there, so long that we have been away, all those years in Paris and now here, that I can scarce remember that little house my father tells me is our home. On a starkly beautiful northern shore, Father says, with a view across the bay to the town and the ruined abbey standing high above it. I have a picture in my mind when he describes all this to me, a picture of louring skies, and huge crows thrown against the wind, and a girl in white seated alone, but I do not know if this is memory, or whether I have heard him talk of it so often that I have made his recollections my own. When I told him this his face darkened for a moment, and he would not say why, but I saw his eyes stray to the locket I wear always about my neck, the locket that holds a portrait of my mother, and I had a sudden conviction that the last time we returned it was to bury her.

  But this I did not say.

  He touched my cheek then, and said I was pale, and no doubt exhausted by the exertions of last night, and I must rest before we begin the task of packing for our journey. I smiled at him because I wished to reassure him, and because there was, after all, some truth in what he said. And what remained unspoken, I can scarcely understand myself, far less explain. When he was gone I went to my casement and looked down upon the street. The sun was sinking, and though the roofs and attics were aglow with gold, the pavements were sunk in shadow, and an old woman in a wool shawl and a threadbare bonnet was shuffling painfully along with her empty basket over one arm. Empty because she is going to the market, where there will be remnants now on sale at half the price of their morning freshness—I know, because when I was a little child I would accompany my mother through the streets at the same hour of the evening, and with the same aim in view. Though when I remember that part of my past now it is not in pictures but in perfumes—the wooden tables with their crates of bitter oranges, their coils of stinking sausage, and their slabs of oozy yellow cheese, mingled with the stale sweat of the tired and short-tempered stallholders. It is strange how strong these impressions are for me, how powerfully an aroma caught randomly in the air can draw me down and backwards, to that one scent I still yearn to recapture, which my mother always had about her, which I cannot ever convey in words, and have never encountered since.

  A few moments later, as I idled still at the window, I saw a playbill come slithering in the wind towards where the old woman had paused for a moment with a neighbour. It was splashed with mud and torn at the edges, but that did not matter. I could see the strip of paper pasted to its face, and I knew that it was one of ours. And then, as I watched, the sheet of paper lifted and folded itself for a moment about the old woman’s walking-stick, and when she shook it loose and saw what it was, I saw them both gasp and cross themselves, and I heard one whisper harshly, “Der Teufel tut sein Werk durch den Wahnsinn dieser Verrückten.” The devil does his work through the delusions of this lunatic.

  And then I turned and reached blindly for my chair, my breath coming hard at that word I fear so much, knowing that I will wake again tonight, in the midst of the dark, cold and shaking at the moonlit window with no recollection of how I got there, just as I awoke, once, barefoot in the street, being led into the shadows by a man I did not know.

  It was my father who saved me. My father who found me and beat the man away, and then carried me, trembling in his gentle arms, back to my bed. My father who has, every night all these years since, locked the door to my bedroom and taken away the key. But now, it is different. Now, when I catch him looking at me in the glass, there is something in his face I have not seen before.

  Fear.

  It is a paradox, and, perhaps, a punishment. For fear has been our lives, and our calling. We have fathomed it, we have
fashioned it, and we have sold it. How often have I heard my father boast that he is satisfied only when our spectators are rendered prostrate in their seats, moaning and shivering in delicious horror. Delicious, Father says, because fear is the very neighbour of ecstasy, even if it is rarely acknowledged to be so. And I had only to look at the women in our audiences to believe him, their bosoms heaving, their lips parted, and perspiration beading their brows. We have laboured, he and I, with the sole intent of intensifying that sensation, of finding new ways to chill the blood, and freeze the heart, and the fame we have gained, and the money we have earned, have stemmed in large part from that joint endeavour. I will not claim the credit is all my own—that would be an exaggeration, and unfair—but there are those in our profession who whisper that when he worked alone my father was nothing but a sorry imitation of the man who once apprenticed him, little more than the travelling showman he had been before he met my mother, with a crate of pretty puppetry, and a repertoire of tricks and mirrors and sleight of hand. But I know the truth of it—I know he had always dreamed of being a scientist and bitterly regretted that his family was not rich enough to permit him to pursue such a study; I know that Monsieur Robertson saw that desire in him, when he opened his door one morning and found my father slumped asleep on his step, having walked all the way to Paris to see the world’s most famous phantasmagoria, and beg its proprietor for a position, however lowly. It was Monsieur Roberston, in the years that followed, who taught my father all the intricate deceptions of our trade—the use of a gauze curtain dipped in wax, the mounting of the magic lantern on wheels, and the edging of the lantern slides in black, that our spectres might glimmer wraith-like as they loom and recede, and hover weightlessly in the empty air. It was Monsieur Robertson who first brought us to Vienna, and Monsieur Robertson, when he was a very old man, and I still a very young child, who saw me, one wet afternoon, playing with the apparatus, and trying to figure to myself how it worked. When my mother came in and saw what I was doing, she upbraided me sternly for touching the lantern slides, knowing how fragile they were and how long each took to paint, but he interrupted her hastily, saying that I might have an aptitude for the craft, and should be encouraged, and he smiled, saying that I had been christened well, for my name meant “light,” and I might bring illumination to the darkness, as he himself had always striven to do. And so it was that I became apprentice as my father had once been, learning not merely the science of our deceptions, but that far greater and more laudable science of optics. It was my father who taught me the use of the solar microscope, and the mathematics of Archimedes, and all the secrets of the patented fantoscope, which Monsieur Robertson had entrusted to no other but him.