A Drop of Night

by Stefan Bachmann

  “You are indeed Aurélie’s descendant,” he says. “Her own mother would not know the difference.”

  “We’re not part of this,” I whisper. “None of us are, just leave us alone—”

  He’s too close. The buzzing noise is back and it’s deafening, and that shudder in the air hurts. My lips are cracking. I can’t hold Will up anymore. He slumps out of my grasp. I’m falling, too, dropping to the cavern floor.

  “You are a part of this,” the butterfly man says. “You are my long-lost comrades. Forsaken children of this wicked, greedy family. I have waited long for one of you to come so far. For you to slip their nets and fight with me.”

  I look up at him. He is standing over me, but all I can see now is a blurry oval, two black holes where his eyes should be.

  “We have much to do,” the butterfly man says. “We will return to the surface, you and Lilly and Jules and William. Together we shall end this once and for all.”

  What is he talking about? I push myself up onto my knees, gasping.

  “End what?” I whisper. “What are you saying?”

  “The cycle. The Bessancourts. This empire of suffering and pain. There is no end to it. There cannot be. When we are poor we wish to be rich, when we are rich we wish to be loved, when we are loved we wish for freedom from pain and endless life and unchanging happiness. It is a great, unstoppable conundrum. There is some sickness deep in our minds, a darkness that causes all ills. It cannot be helped. It can only be eradicated.”

  Eradicate. I remember Rabbit Gallery, the stolen artwork, the massive warheads, the weapons used in all the wars of the last two centuries.

  “You did that?” I say. My voice takes forever to reach my ears. “You invented the weapons, and Havriel and the marquis got rich and took the credit, but you wanted it, you wanted them to kill people.”

  “You speak as though you do not approve,” the butterfly man says. “But what reason have you to love the world when it has treated you so harshly? Do you not crave revenge? Do you not crave justice?”

  Uh-oh.

  The butterfly spreads his hands over my eyes. I feel the scream ripping out of me, but I can’t hear it—

  And everything’s gone.

  I see a billion people crowding a busy street, dirty faces, ragged clothing, an endless swarm under neon signs. I see troops trudging off to a war, mothers sending off their sons with flowers in their plumed helmets, boots shined, faces grim. I see smoke rising from roofs and spires. Streaks of flame raining down on low wooden houses and walled gardens, the sky between the power lines staining hot, ugly red. I see bombs tumbling like heavy birds onto a city, and I see the little mark on their rivets, a butterfly with human eyes in its wings. Péronne—the Bessancourts’ own town—blown to smithereens, bodies lying along the roadside.

  “This is what I have done,” the butterfly man says. “I gave them the tools and they gladly used them. There is no hope for such a people.”

  The images keep rolling, wave after wave. My skull is being filled up, synapses crackling, nerves overheating. I see things from my life, from other people’s lives: a beggar being beaten on a roadside by two men in elegant clothing. Mom smiling—bright lights—a neon frosted birthday cake—bodies leaping from the sides of a huge gray aircraft carrier as it burns. I see Mom turning slowly to face me in the kitchen, a horrible look of determination on her face.

  The images speed up, burning snapshots, and I see Lilly, Will, Jules, and me on the floor in the library, laughing even though there was nothing to laugh about. Us helping each other after Jellyfish Hall, holding each other up. Lilly coming back for me, and running, running into the light—

  “You are unable to understand,” the butterfly man whispers. “We are all follies, hopeless and doomed to repeat our mistakes forever. Every organism will fight against its own demise. Even a virus. And in the end that is what mankind is: an endless, stubborn blight.”

  The pain is all there is now. It’s enveloping me, flapping in my ears like feathery gray wings. “We’re not all bad. We’re not, we—”

  It hurts to talk. To breathe.

  “We’ve got something else, something you can’t see, but . . . it’s there, it’s just . . .”

  I can’t do this. Can’t talk anymore.

  “. . . one little drop of . . .”

  Of everything.

  Starlight, darkness, divinity, love. And it makes all this worthwhile.

  Somewhere far away, I hear Lilly crying. Maybe laughing.

  “They’re awake!” she wails. “Jules is awake.”

  Something cracks.

  I’m in the cavern again, hunched on the floor. The butterfly man is arching over me, his face so close I can see the muscles under his skin, layers of bone and sinew, exposed to the air. I wriggle onto my back. Lilly’s sabre is embedded in the butterfly man’s calf. Lilly is hunched at his feet. She looks at the sabre, looks up at the butterfly man. Whirls and runs full speed away.

  “Anouk?” she shouts over her shoulder. “Get up!”

  The butterfly man pivots. I watch the darkness gathering around him. Brace myself for the explosion, the shock wave that will knock me out for good. It never comes. Havriel is crawling toward us out of the shadows like a huge bleeding slug. The butterfly man is watching him.

  “Stop this,” Havriel rasps. “I will give you freedom if that is what you want. I will let you have the children, the palace, anything, but do not let me die. You must be reasonable!”

  “I am nothing if not reasonable. That is how you made me.”

  “I did everything you asked!” Havriel shrieks. He’s nearly reached us, and I can smell him, a vile, ancient stench, metal and death and rot. I see threads of black in the red dripping along his face, and they’re slithering, squirming like they’re alive. “What more do you wish for? I will give you a billion corpses!”

  “You already have.”

  Havriel stares at the butterfly man, heaving. His face is a mask of fear and hate and pain. He gasps and spits between his teeth. One hand goes to his chest, fingers wriggling into his waistcoat. They emerge holding a black cylinder. A red light is sliding up its length, blinking frantically.

  A detonator.

  He raises his fist.

  “You will not command me,” he growls, and he smiles through the blood, the red teeth, the ashen lips. “There is no escaping the palace.”

  55

  “Come ON!” Lilly screams. My skin feels cracked, scaly. I’m half blind. I push myself up anyway, start dragging myself across the cavern floor. Will is a few feet in front of me. He’s standing unsteadily, cradling his bruised head in his hand. Farther back in the darkness, I see Lilly. She’s got Jules by the shoulders. They’re limping toward the metal stairs as fast as they can.

  I haul myself upright. The sabre is still stuck in the butterfly man’s leg, reflecting the darkness flowing off his body. He’s starting to twitch. Will looks over at me, confused. I grab his good arm, and together we stagger after Lilly and Jules.

  We reach the bottom of the stairs. Lilly and Jules have already started up them, and Lilly leans over the railing. “Hurry,” she gasps. “You guys, run!”

  And now we’re clattering up the metal corkscrew, on and on. All I can hear is our breathing, the ring of the grating under our feet. Maybe the butterfly man is still talking to Havriel, maybe they’re arguing, but I can’t hear them. We come to the tunnel. Hurry down the walkway, lights blinking on as we pass.

  Just keep running, Ooky. Just keep running.

  We’re at the pool of black water. We start up a second staircase cut into the stone, the ones Havriel and his henchmen probably took, so that they wouldn’t have to plunge forty feet into pitch-black water.

  We burst out into the salle d’opéra, gasping.

  Lilly and I skid to a halt. The boys stop behind us. The woman in the red dress is standing on the stage, right at the center. But she doesn’t turn to us, doesn’t even seem to hear us. She’s facing t
he theater, her arms spread wide. Her face is tipped up toward the ceiling, like a singer basking in her applause.

  Everything is so silent. Deathly still—

  I feel the first detonation in my fingertips: somewhere faraway in the palace, a long, pulsating rumble. Dust sifts down from the ceiling high above.

  “Who’s that?” Jules mumbles, and we shush him, start running along the orchestra pit toward the pillar with its gold-encrusted shield.

  Lilly drags open the panel. Behind it is the mirrored passageway. We start up it. I look back, see the woman on the stage, the curtains wrenching from their moorings and falling, swirling around her tiny form like swaths of deep blue clouds.

  Another explosion nearly throws me off my feet. The walls of the passageway are shaking, the glass ringing. Up ahead is a circle of blue metal—a door like a bank vault. A ladder. We start up it. A third explosion, closer this time. Smoke billows up after us, enveloping us. The air is becoming hot. Too hot. The shaft shakes.

  “We’re going to make it!” Lilly’s yelling. “We’re going to make it!”

  We climb faster. Jules, Will, me, Lilly. Below, the explosions keep coming, endless and teeth jarring. I imagine the ceilings cracking, the chandeliers tinkling and falling into Jellyfish Hall, Razor Hall, Rabbit Gallery. The earth burying everything, swallowing crystal and brocade, the blood and death and secrets.

  We keep climbing, keep climbing, and listen to it all fall away.

  Palais du Papillon—112 feet below, ten seconds before the detonations

  Jacques lies against the wall of the empty panic room. His blood is a red-black mirror beneath him, still as glass. The light buzzes. The distant sound of running feet reaches his ears, but it is echoing away, leaving him behind.

  A shivering jolt reverberates in the walls of the capsule. He thinks of the girl with the black hair, a steel girl with a tiny wounded heart. He thought she was Aurélie at first. But what a foolish dream that was. Aurélie is gone. Aurélie is free.

  The jolt comes again, closer. The entire capsule shakes. Jacques’s thoughts turn to home. The dry clack of his mother’s knitting needles. The smell of drying herbs and tallow candles and damp wood. It has been so many years. He hears the creak of a hinge and looks up. A face is peering in at him through the hatch. At first he does not recognize it. But now she smiles. . . .

  “Jacques,” Aurélie says, and hurries for him. She kneels beside him. “Come, Jacques, we must go! Can you not hear them? They are waiting to see you!”

  And suddenly the stuttering light, the cold metal and the blood, all of it twists away and fades. He can hear the waterwheel, Madame Desjardin’s voice calling across the fields. Aurélie is pulling him to his feet, and he is in the woods outside Péronne. In the distance he can see his brothers and sisters just as they were when he last looked back at them in the road, not yet wizened and old, but young and ruddy faced, their hands raised to him, and he cannot say if they wave in welcome or farewell.

  He feels Aurélie’s fingers in his, and he feels the sunlight breaking and falling through a million leaves . . .

  Palais du Papillon—96 feet below—1790

  “Careful,” I whisper, one hand on Charlotte’s back as she grips the iron rungs and begins to climb. “Quick and careful.”

  Bernadette goes next, then Delphine; I make my way up the ladder last, now and then giving Delphine’s heel an encouraging squeeze. Our feet tap up, up.

  “There is a door here!” Charlotte calls down.

  “Open it!” I shout. “Open it!”

  The shaft has become wider, blooming into a small chamber, a tulip atop a long stem. We all reach up, hands grasping. We slide back the door, a square of iron into the stone.

  And there is sunlight. Fields and wind and the smell of grass and the scratch of insects. And sunlight . . .

  Delphine laughs and wriggles out into the brightness. Charlotte follows. Even Bernadette cannot help herself and laughs with the rest of them, her sour little face twisting, her hands shading her eyes against the sudden, painful light. I climb out last. The sun tickles my cheeks. I listen to my sisters’ joyful shrieks, and I feel the darkness squirming beneath my skin, the sting of the deep red wound.

  My fingers reach for the daisy in my apron pocket, and I twist it like a charm. “I will come back for you, Jacques,” I whisper, and the breeze takes my words and folds them away. “I will find you.”

  It is a vain promise. Perhaps I will die tomorrow. Perhaps Father will send guards after us and drag us back into the depths, or we will be captured by révolutionnaires, and I will never see Jacques again. But in this moment, there are no truer words. I will find him. I will try.

  We start off across the field. The wheat is a soft new green, waving in the breeze. The air is hazy with pollen. Trees border the field like a hunched gathering of giants. In the distance I see smoke rising from the chimneys of a farmhouse. I hear the splash and babble of water, the gentle creak-creak of a waterwheel, rolling tirelessly nowhere.

  And I decide then that I dare not think of tomorrow. I dare not think of hours or days or years at all. I will think of Mama, smiling at me from under the apple tree. I will think of the wind and the wheat and the sound of the birds, and how, if I could, I would take my sisters by their hands and we would leap into the air like little starlings and let the breeze wheel us away. I will think of a tall boy and a tall girl, far underground.

  I have this moment in the sun. I have had many before it. Come what may, they will be mine forever.

  Epilogue—217 feet above sea level, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris

  We crawled up somewhere near the outskirts of Péronne, in a freezing green field. We dragged ourselves about three hundred feet to a little farmhouse. Nearly gave the elderly couple living there a heart attack when we asked to use their phone. The police came, ambulances bleeding swirling lights onto the snow.

  I’m lying in a hospital now. Lilly is one bed over. Across from me are Will and Jules. They kept us together, probably for security reasons. Four teenagers purported dead in a plane crash emerging alive from a series of unexplained subterranean explosions is a bit of a sensation, apparently. Journalists, the gendarmerie, folks from the U.S. embassy; they’re all waiting to talk to us. Our room’s been quarantined, a guard from the special police stationed right outside. We’re being spared for now.

  Bright winter sun streams through the blinds, and I feel heavy and weightless, sad and happy. But more happy than sad. A lot more happy. Happier than I’ve ever felt in my life, which is ironic because there’s a drip stuck into my arm, and Hayden’s dead, and we’re going to be explaining this for a long, long time.

  I look across the room at Will. He’s sleeping, his face bruised, one arm slung across his forehead. Jules is awake. He catches my eye and starts making winky faces at me until I grin.

  “Anouk?” I glance over. Lilly’s propped up on her side, peering across the gap between our beds. She looks hollowed out and tired. Her head is bandaged; both fists, too, like a boxer. But now she grins, and there she is again.

  “Yeah?” I say.

  “We made it.”

  “We did.”

  “Parts of us.” Will’s awake now, too. His hand has gotten a real bandage, and I think he looks great, all things considered. Who needs ten fingers anyway? We sit up in our beds in our white, sterile hospital room, and we stare at each other like Well, that was crazy. Down in the street journalists are screaming, cars are passing, pigeons are warbling, but in here it’s just us. And I smile at the others. Really smile, a bright, warm smile that I feel in my chest.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  I doubt they have any clue what I’m thanking them for. But I know, and they smile back, and that’s all I wanted anyway. I think of flying back across the ocean, talking to my parents, hugging Penny. Technically this whole thing was a massive failure. But I don’t feel like a failure. I feel like I’ve done something great. Something awesome. I see a black Merced
es, speeding toward a pale château and an underground palace full of monsters. A girl with her head against the cold glass, thinking, There’s this special talent humans have that they can be unhappy no matter where they are. But humans have another special talent: We can be happy almost anywhere, too. We can be happy because we’re not alone.

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  About the Author

  STEFAN BACHMANN is the author of the internationally bestselling novel The Peculiar and its acclaimed sequel, The Whatnot. He was born in Colorado, spent most of his childhood in Switzerland, and is now studying modern music at the Zürich University of the Arts. When he’s not writing, he can be found traveling to some place chilly, or holed up beneath his college in the dimly lit labyrinth of practice rooms, which may have inspired the subterranean scenes in A Drop of Night. That . . . and the Paris catacombs, a weird dream about a golden corridor, and a general interest in history.

  www.stefanbachmann.com

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  Books by Stefan Bachmann

  The Peculiar

  The Whatnot

  A Drop of Night

  Credits

  Cover art copyright © 2016 by Silas Manhood

  Cover design by Paul Zakris

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.