The Pierced Heart: A Novel (8 page)

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, of 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
 

V
IENNA,
20 J
ANUARY
1851

W
E 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.