A Drop of Night

by Stefan Bachmann

  He wheels around again. “Anouk. Where are your friends?”

  Well, that answers my first question. They don’t know where the others are. They think I do. That’s why I’m still alive.

  “Dorf—” I start.

  “I am not Dorf,” he snaps. “Dorf does not exist. I am Havriel du Bessancourt.”

  “Who?”

  “And this . . .” he says, motioning to the other man, “is the Marquis Frédéric du Bessancourt. My brother.”

  I stare at them. At their centuries-old clothing, their weird hair and stockings.

  “There are no Bessancourts anymore,” I mumble. “It’s an obsolete title, and Frédéric du Bessancourt is dead. He’s been dead for centuries.”

  “Has he? Did you hear that, brother? You are dead. Anouk has spoken, and she knows all.”

  What is going on? I see the shattered displays in Rabbit Gallery again, the white chunks of glass covering the floor. The brass plaques, gleaming.

  H. B.

  Death by H. B.

  Bombs by H. B.

  Poison by H. B.

  And the lists of names in the cracked, leather-bound volume in the study. That’s what was bugging me: the handwriting was the same. From 1760 up until now. More than two hundred fifty years, and the handwriting never changed.

  This is impossible.

  Dorf, Havriel, whoever he is, breathes in deeply. “Now, my dear . . .”

  He goes to a panel in the wall and folds out a glossy metal case, dark sharp corners incongruous with the décor of the room. He snaps it open. A barbed nozzle slides into view, the sharp tip glinting silver. “Won’t you sit down? I think it’s time we had a little chat.”

  Palais du Papillon—Chambres du Morelle Noir—112 feet below, 1790

  The figure stands in the doorway, motionless. He is small as a child, but his skin is pale and hard, as if he wears a mask of marble veneer. He is dressed in a frock coat, sharply cleaved at the back into two crimson prongs, a velvet swallow’s tale. His hands are at his sides, tiny like a doll’s hands, and in one of them he carries a little case, dark wood with many locks.

  “Jacques?” The word escapes me in a strangled whisper.

  Jacques remains stock-still. “All will be well,” he says, but I hear the tremble in his voice, the coursing fear. “He is our ally. He knows of our predicament. He has promised to help you escape.”

  The whine in the air becomes deafening, wave after wave crashing over me. It seems to be peeling apart the strands of my brain, sifting through my thoughts and fears like they are berries in a basket. It comes from the figure in the doorway. Slowly, long red slits open down his cheeks and across his neck. They are not wounds. They are surgically precise, as if he was made this way, as if the human head was too foolish and this is better.

  “It was the only way,” Jacques says. “The only way I knew—”

  The figure is still in the doorway, watching us, and I seem to detect amusement in those bottomless black eyes, a spark of malice.

  “Who are you?” I say to him, and I turn Delphine’s head away, shielding her with my arms. “What are you?”

  50

  “I’m not telling.” The smell from the tiny bottle is still in my nose, rich and oily, like blood oranges and musk. We’re sitting across from each other, me in a wing chair, him perched on a hard wooden stool, languid but somehow tense at the same time, like a cat waiting to pounce. “I’m not telling you where the others are. You can kill me if you want to, but I’m not snitching.”

  Havriel turns the nozzle over in his hands. His rain-cloud eyes are fixed on me, measuring me up, tallying every twitch and sign of weakness in my face. “You may not know where they are.”

  “Oh, I know.” I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.

  “Have they been captured?”

  “Nope. Still running free.”

  Havriel turns on the stool, pressing a finger to his ear and gesturing to the marquis, who is still standing, hovering nervously. “Trois,” he whispers.

  Three. So they don’t have Lilly yet. They don’t have anyone, except that one genius who climbed into a chandelier. But this doesn’t at all guarantee that the others are still alive.

  “Let’s make a deal,” he says. “You tell me exactly where the others are, and I will tell you everything you wish to know.”

  “I won’t,” I say. “What’s the point of knowing everything and then dying two seconds later?”

  Havriel turns again to his brother. Says something I don’t catch. They titter. They’re laughing at me, heads together, like a couple of freakish, waistcoated clowns.

  “You still hope to escape,” Havriel says, and his eyes dance. He taps the nozzle thoughtfully against his knee.

  I stare at its needlelike tip and try to swallow. “Yes?” I say.

  “Very well,” he says. “I will answer all your questions and I will let you go, and you can run away back to New York City and live happily ever after.”

  He flips a small switch on the nozzle’s handle. A red light blinks on. He’s going to kill me. He knows it, and I know it, and he’s grinning at me like: You’re not this stupid, Anouk. We don’t need to play this game.

  But I can play stupid as well as anyone if it buys me time. I don’t know where the others are. I have nothing to lose by agreeing, except for maybe some metaphorical points in selfless nobility, but I’m not super attached to those anyway. If he talks long enough, maybe I can think up a way to get out of this room.

  “Okay,” I say. “You first.”

  He blinks at me. Studies the instrument in his hand as if he’s considering using it right this very instant. When he looks back at me, his expression is infinitely less sympathetic. “You say you wish to know the truth. The reasons behind everything. But you will not understand. You will find it difficult.”

  “You think?” Fury, blistering hot, scalds my throat. “Yes, I find it hard to understand why you think you can drag us down here and kill us, yes, that’s HARD TO UNDERSTAND.”

  Dorf clicks his tongue. “So angry,” he says. “Whenever people fail to understand things they always become so livid. You must realize that just because you are too foolish to understand something does not mean it makes no sense. You are not here for nothing. And you are not dying for nothing. You are dying so we can live.”

  “What are you, the Countess of Báthory, bathing in the blood of virgins for eternal youth? I hate to break it to you, but that’s not—”

  “Anouk, be quiet,” Havriel snaps, and there’s a razor edge to his voice. “Listen for once, and keep your clever bits of skepticism to yourself. All five of you carry in your veins a priceless genetic code. It has no outward effects on you. If not extracted and activated, it will pass into dormancy between the eighteenth and twentieth years of your life. These genes have the ability to regenerate human cells. In essence, biological immortality.”

  Okay, that was a lot. I don’t have any clever bits of skepticism. At all.

  Havriel isn’t finished. “The genes were stolen from us. Injected into the bloodstreams of your ancestors and allowed to escape. The one who invented it refuses to cooperate. Entire labs of scientists cannot replicate the genes. So we find the carriers still in existence, just a few at a time, and we harvest them. Every fifty to seventy years, we require more. Fresh blood. We, the brothers du Bessancourt, have lived nearly five hundred years combined, and I’m afraid the only way we can keep living is by carving up your pretty young bodies and extracting every drop of the precious cargo inside you.”

  I stand perfectly still. I feel like the room is tipping around me, or maybe I’m tipping, falling. “Who?” I say. “Who allowed the carriers to escape?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know.” Dorf’s eyes pin me to the chair. “The same one who cut the camera feed, helped you escape the trap rooms, holed you up somewhere we couldn’t find, massacred our teams. He has been helping you from the moment he realized you had breached the palace.”
/>   The butterfly man. He’s talking about the butterfly man. “We haven’t seen him,” I say. “I swear, we never met him once.”

  “No?” Havriel seems to calm down again. His gaze softens. “He was always a shy creature. Self-conscious. He hates us, you know. He is our crowning achievement, and yet he is a great danger. A liability and a blessing, in one. My brother became obsessed with immortality long ago. He was terrified of disease and revolted by death and dying. And when he realized it was beyond his grasp to find a cure for this most human ailment, that eighteenth-century science could never hope to unlock life’s secrets, he created something that could. An artificial human. Perfect and logical, unfettered by the physical and mental limitations of man.”

  Perfect? The thing that clawed the walls outside the library, killed the trackers in complete silence, burned Perdu’s arm open? That was perfection?

  Havriel keeps talking: “Our butterfly man, we called him. We grew him in a glass cocoon, killed to make him. His skin is as delicate as an insect’s wing, fragile as paper, but he is more powerful than any man. He can calculate possibilities and variables into infinity, invent technological wonders. He made us rich beyond measure.

  “When the Lady Célestine was killed, he began to develop this serum for eternal life. But the serum was not ready, and even if it had been, its effects on those already dead was incalculable. Lady Célestine became something else, neither living nor dead. And now the butterfly man keeps her—to taunt Frédéric, and he keeps his other pet alive, too, but he shares not a drop of his serum with us. So you see, he is the reason for this great ruse and the cause of this bloodshed. If you are angry at your fate, blame him.”

  “None of this works.” I feel pathetic, but I say it anyway. “Artificial people, fine, whatever, but you can’t live that long, okay? The body breaks down; it’s called cellular senescence. The second law of thermodynamics. It doesn’t work, and even if it did, you can’t just kill other people so you can live. You can’t go around kidnapping and murdering just because you feel like it—” I’m rubbing frantically at the side of my nightgown, my skin burning. “None of this is possible, okay? Scientifically it’s not possible.”

  “Everything you dream of is possible, Anouk. Sometimes you have simply dreamed too soon.”

  I watch him lift the nozzle and step toward me.

  “What are the greatest mysteries, do you think?” he asks. “Life, of course. And death. We have solved them.” He smiles, quick and pointed, his lips curling back from his teeth with a wet sound. “But for everything there is a price. You.”

  Palais du Papillon—Chambres du Morelle Noir—112 feet below, 1790

  The creature speaks, the cuts in his face flaring wide, glistening like the sliced bellies of eels.

  “Bonjour,” he says, and his voice is thin, sharp, almost pitiful: a childish whimper that only adds to the wrongness of him. He makes me think of a bird spliced with a man, an insect dressed in a coat of human skin.

  I look at Jacques pleadingly. He stands no more than four steps away, but in this dead, electric space it feels like an ocean. We cannot reach each other. He is not on our side, I want to scream. You said so yourself; he is evil!

  “Who are you?” I say again, louder. “Answer me!”

  “They call me their butterfly man,” the creature says. He sounds shy, and as he speaks he lifts one of his small hands to his face, as if to hide it. His eyes glimmer from between his fingers, black pools without pupil and without iris. “They said if I helped them, they would make me whole. They would love me, fix my ruined flesh. I could leave this place, be free.” His voice slips up, high and piercing. “They lied.”

  I begin edging over the floor toward the door to the hallway. Jacques shakes his head, his face crumpled in agony.

  “Jacques,” I whisper. “We cannot trust him. Bernadette, take your sister. Run, run, all of you, GET AWAY!”

  I clutch Delphine and dash toward the door.

  Jacques is yelling. Charlotte screams. The butterfly man hardly moves, only turns his hands, palms outward, and there is a flash of blinding white light, unfurling toward me. Something immensely hot strikes me, and I stumble, Delphine slipping from my grasp. The air is forced from my lungs.

  “Aurélie,” the butterfly man says. “Why do you run from me?”

  Jacques is bounding toward me, but he approaches so slowly, as if through water or a dream. I am gasping in pain, vivid clouds of colored ink blossoming across my vision.

  “Do you fear me?” the butterfly man says, and I see he is smiling at me, a false, studied smile, as horrible to behold as the splits in his skin. “The others fear me, too. Frédéric cannot bear the sight of me, though he is my father. Havriel is disgusted by me. They want me only as a tool for their own wicked schemes. Even the servants, when I strap them to my table, shriek and cover their eyes.”

  “Please let us go,” I whisper. “We want nothing from you. We—”

  “But you do want something from me.” The butterfly man is standing directly before me, the force of his presence like a horrid iron weight. One hand drifts toward me. When it touches my cheek, my skin aches as if I have been pricked. I bring my fingertips up. They come away bloody. “Jacques Renaud has made a bargain. His service in return for your freedom.”

  “You’re lying,” I say, but in the same sick moment, I realize he is not.

  Jacques has reached me. He takes my arm, whispers in my ear: “I will find another way, Aurélie. Go to the inn, ask for Madame Desjardin, and tell her Margeaux’s son sent you, tell her you are a friend—”

  The butterfly man’s dark glow intensifies. Pain opens like a white-hot rose inside my skull. “Do not speak,” he says, his voice like a spike. “Listen to me. You will be my comrades.” He smiles again, his expression unreadable. “All of you.”

  Jacques moves in front of me. “I will kill you if you lay a finger on them. The deal was for me. I would serve you, and the Bessancourt sisters would go free; that was your promise!”

  “Promises are like bones,” the butterfly man says. “Easily broken.”

  Somewhere I hear Delphine crying, my sisters calling out. I feel the flutter of my heartbeat, wild through my bodice. And suddenly Jacques goes flying to the side, as if glancing off an invisible wall.

  “No,” says the butterfly man. “You will not.”

  I stumble backward, my hands finding Bernadette’s, Charlotte’s. I gather my sisters behind me, lifting weeping Delphine again to my hip. Jacques stands and pushes in front of us. But he has begun to bleed, tiny cuts forming on his head and neck.

  “You must get away. I will find you—I’m sorry, Aurélie,” he says through clenched teeth.

  “Jacques!” I scream. I push Delphine into Bernadette’s arms and lunge. The pain strikes me like a savage headwind, but I grit my teeth against it, pressing into this strange darkness, one foot, then another. My hand finds Jacques. “Leave him!” I beg the butterfly man. “Please, what are you doing? Let him be!”

  But the butterfly man does not hear me, or else he does not care to listen. I pull at Jacques with all my strength. He will not move, and with a start, I see his feet no longer touch the floor. He is hanging in the air, the toes of his boots inches above the carpet. His muscles are straining, but he cannot move. Only his eyes stir. And his lips.

  And even though he is bleeding, he smiles, and I see him sitting on a stool in a grimy cottage, his sisters and brothers hanging from his shoulders and bouncing on his knees. His mother sits by a little stove, her knitting needles going clack-clack, and sage and lavender are drying in the rafters, and a cat stretches in the sunlight from the window, and Jacques is smiling, just like that. But as I watch, his smile breaks. His skin drains of life and color, freezing gray and blue like a field in deepest winter.

  I grasp his fingers, try to pull him down, crying and screaming.

  “Aurélie,” the butterfly man says, close to my ear. “You will be my ally in this long, slow game. And
you.” He nods toward Jacques. A deep, rumbling cloud seems to strike me, strike us all, and I am drifting backward, my hair floating around my face. I watch as the butterfly man folds Jacques into his horrible embrace and draws him away from me. “You are nameless. You are lost.”

  Vous êtes perdu.

  51

  “You were very difficult to track down, you know.” Havriel is seated casually, his shoe buckles gleaming, artifacts from a different time. I hear the metallic glide of the nozzle’s tube, dragging over the floor as he fiddles with the head, passing it from hand to hand. “Adopted.”

  I ignore the bait. I’m not discussing my parents with him. “You didn’t have to do all this,” I say quietly. “You didn’t have to go through all this trouble if we’re just bodies for you to harvest.”

  He looks up at the ceiling. “But you are not simply bodies. Haven’t you realized that yet? There were no other candidates. No elimination rounds. We have been hunting you, and others like you, all these years. From France to Mumbai to Wellington to San Diego. All this time you have been asking: Why me? Why me? Because you are a Bessancourt, Anouk. You are a part of the family.”

  “I’m not related to you,” I spit. “I’m not a friggin’ Bessancourt—”

  But I’m seeing it now: Tall kids. Blue eyes. Maybe we have something else in common? Something we don’t even know about . . . I feel the pieces grinding together, meshing in place.

  Havriel laughs. “You don’t know who you are, so why be upset? Now you know exactly where you belong. You know exactly what your purpose is.”

  It feels like my entrails are sliding through me, pooling around my bare feet. “My purpose?” I say. “My purpose is to die miserably so you can keep existing forever?”

  Havriel doesn’t answer. It’s like he blanked me out right there. I need to stall. Once he stops talking to me, he’s going to kill me.