The Shadow of Frankenstein Page 11

  Sawney’s grey lips twisted into a faint parody of a wry smile. “Best go, Sam,” he said, softly. “Don’t fear for me—I have my mind back now, and my feelings too. I have what I need, thanks to you, and what these others need in me. I can play the man, now, as the part deserves to be played.”

  “Sawney, old friend...” Ned began—but then the door that he had closed behind him burst open again, smashing into his back, and sent him tumbling upon the planks that formed the floor of the hold.

  Ned twisted as he fell to look back over his shoulder, and saw that it was John Devil who had come tumbling after him—but he had to wait a second more to see who had shoved John Devil, and was following closely behind, apparently intent on killing the man who seemed so very hard to kill.

  It was neither Gregory Temple not Mortdieu; it was the giant named John, wielding a club in one hand and a machete in the other.

  The giant had been meek when Ned had seen him last, but he was not meek now. The black dots in his strange eyes seemed unnaturally sharp, perhaps because the eyes were protruded slightly by wrath. His face was scored along one side where a bullet had ploughed through his exotic flesh, tearing a groove into which Jeanie Bird might have been able to insert a slender forefinger. The wound was leaking viscous fluid, which foamed as it bubbled out, as unlike blood as anything that could conceivably surge in any creature’s veins, driven by a human heart.

  John Devil’s pistol was empty now, and it made a very feeble club. Even so, the ci-devant Comte de Belcamp was determined to come to his feet and face his pursuer—to die hard, if he had to die at all.

  Sawney was the first to try to step between them, but the giant swatted him aside with a thrust of his left arm—the one that held the club. Sawney sprawled among his fellow grey men, whose alarm was increased by his flailing limbs. They began to rise to their feet.

  Ned was slightly glad that he was flat on his back, in no position to intervene even had he wanted to—but his gladness vanished when he saw Jeanie Bird step between the two fighters, with her back to the ci-devant Comte. She looked up into the giant’s crazed eyes.

  “No, John,” she said, speaking to him as a friend might. “That’s not your way. Leave him be.”

  For one awful moment, Ned thought that the dead-alive giant might sweep Jeanie aside as dismissively as Sawney—but with the other hand, perhaps slicing her head in two if she should happen to catch her with the blade. Instead, the giant stopped, as if frozen by the sound of her voice. He looked down at the tiny woman—who did not seem as tiny as she was, now that she had struck a pose that Ned had seen a hundred times before, on the stage at Jenny Paddock’s. She looked magnificent, even in the presence of such a colossal leading man.

  The giant slowly relaxed his pose, and let his head nod forward, becoming as meek as any of his peers—any, that is, except the one who stepped through the open door behind him, who held a pistol in each hand.

  These pistols, Ned had to suppose, were still loaded.

  “She’s right, John,” said General Mortdieu. “In life, that was never your way, and no good can come of finding a new identity while you have not yet recovered the old. I, on the other hand, know exactly what I was when I was alive, and this was my way—far more than it was ever yours, Monsieur de Belcamp.”

  John Devil had recovered his balance and his poise now. “I brought you back to life,” he said. “I made you what you are.”

  “So you did,” said the grey man. “But you do not own me. I am my own man, and these are my people. We are not your slaves, nor the instruments of your future glory. Our destiny is for us to discover and choose, mon ami—and if I must shoot my redeemer in order to achieve that end, I shall not hesitate. You have five seconds to decide.”

  “You were a better man that that in your former life, Mortdieu,” the ci-devant Comte replied, without letting a single second go by. “You were a man of pride and principle. Let us settle this like men of honor, up on deck. Single combat, with weapons of your choice. Let us settle it once and for all, each agreeing to accept the judgment of destiny.”

  “A generous offer, since I have two loaded guns and you have none.” Mortdieu replied. “Exactly what I would have expected from a gentleman of your sort. Destiny has already judged; the matter is already settled. It only remains for you to accept that judgment—or die.”

  Ned Knob had clambered to his feet while this exchange was taking place, deciding that his turn had come to take center-stage and play deus ex machina. He stood beside John Devil, and said: “A few minutes ago, this man put a pistol to the head of Gregory Temple, who would not back down. Temple told Monsieur le Comte to shoot him dead. If you knew this man, you would know that he cannot possibly show more weakness than his arch-adversary, his other half. He will invite you to shoot him, just as Temple invited him—but I beg you not to do it, no matter what kind of man you were in your first life. If you’re to be the founder of a new race, you must set a better example now than you were ever able to do as a mere man.”

  “Damn you, Ned!” John Devil murmured. “This is not your scene. How dare you try to steal it!”

  “No,” said a new voice, speaking from behind the emperor of the grey men and over his head. This scene is mine. Give me one of those pistols, sir, and I shall shoot him dead, if only to show that I can hate longer and harder than he.”

  Mortdieu had to change his position then, so that he could point the pistol in his left hand at Gregory Temple, and the one in his right at the ci-devant Comte Henri de Belcamp. Ned took note of the fact that the corridor through which all the new arrivals must have come seemed quiet now, and concluded that the fight for possession of the Outremort must have been suspended, if not concluded.

  “Who the Devil are you?” Mortdieu asked Gregory Temple.

  “I am English law and order,” Gregory Temple informed him. “Intolerant of grave-robbers and of brawling... although Master Knob informs me that I might soon have to change my opinion as to the ethics of grave-robbing. My forces will increase as the day wears on, and my men can have an army here by dusk if the need arises. If you shoot me, the necessity will be obvious—we’ll see then how the dead-alive will fare in the hangman’s noose.”

  “It would certainly be best,” Ned Knob observed, “if no one shot anyone, whatever our habits might formerly have been.”

  “Spoken like a true Republican, Ned,” said the ci-devant Comte. “Alas, you are forgetting the lessons of history. There are deep differences of opinion here, and they cannot be settled without violence.”

  “I cannot believe that,” Ned said, “any more than my darling Jeanie could believe that the giant would hurt her, wounded and wrathful as he was. Monsieur le Comte, you and your men must quit the Outremort, and retire with the only prizes that you really need, and which Monsieur Mortdieu cannot steal from you unless he shoots you—your knowledge and your intelligence. You must also give your word that any other persons you might raise from the dead in future will be free, not instruments of any of your schemes. Monsieur Mortdieu, you must allow Germain Patou to choose for himself where, and in whose company, he will pursue his own researches—and Sawney too. Mr. Temple, you must leave your army unsummoned and withdraw, allowing the Outremort to depart unhindered when she is fully provisioned. All this is obvious—no good can come of any other eventuality. Why should it require a fool like me to explain something so simple?”

  “There is nothing obvious about it,” said Gregory Temple and John Devil, speaking in unison, as if they really were two halves of the same paradoxical person.

  “I have won the battle,” General Mortdieu pointed out, “and I hold the loaded guns. It is for me to make the terms.”

  “We are not talking about a battle,” Ned insisted, “or even a war. There should never have been a battle, and there is nothing to be gained by a war. We are talking about how best to make progress, how best to move into the future with intelligent purpose and good heart. That is surely the one cause and
the one course to which we can all commit ourselves, and the only one that intelligent men need consider.”

  Mortdieu had already hesitated far longer than the five seconds he had originally conceded his adversary, and Ned no longer feared that he was about to blast anyone’s face away, but he went on regardless. “What you must see,” he said “is that things are different now. The future will unfold more rapidly if you do the sensible thing—which is to make a record of all your discoveries and experiments, sending copies to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday in England, and to the heirs of Benjamin Franklin in America and Antoine Lavoisier in France, so that a thousand men might take up your work of raising and educating the recently-dead—but it will not matter in the long run how long, or how successfully, you try to hoard your secret away for your use alone. The thing can be done, and will be done, even if the thousand have to labor long and hard to figure out the first steps for themselves. I have no idea what each of you hopes or plans to do, but I do know that your achievements will be dissolved soon enough by the tide of history, and that if you desire to be remembered fondly for what you have achieved so far, you will all put away your weapons, now and forever, and return to your real work.”

  He was speaking to everyone, but Mortdieu was the one who had the guns, at present, and it was into his remarkable eyes that Ned had looked while he delivered his speech. There, despite their alien quality, he read the record of his success.

  Mortdieu lowered his hands, and pointed both his pistols at the floor.

  “If we ever have occasion to play this scene on the stage, Ned,” Sam Hopkey put in, “I shall be proud to speak those lines.”

  Ned was still anxious lest anyone take advantage of Mortdieu’s inaction to start the fight all over again, but no one did.

  “It is a compromise I can accept,” the grey general said, “for the sake of peace—provided that you will both agree to it.”

  “I will if Temple will,” the ci-devant Comte was quick to say. “Ned’s right—if a fool like him can see it, so should we all.”

  “There is a matter of my duty to the Crown...” Gregory Temple began—but then he stopped, perhaps remembering the head on which the Crown of England was resting just at present, and what he had suffered at the whim of the former Prince Regent. “And England, I suppose,” he resumed, “will be grateful to me for helping to remove the grey men from its shores, at least for a little while. I’ll give you 24 hours. Go, all of you, and good riddance—but woe betide any of you who are still here on Wednesday.”

  Ned observed, though, that Temple shot a venomous glance at the ci-devant Comte, which said as clearly as if the words had been spoken aloud: especially you. It was impossible to tell whether the policeman was more regretful of not having had a pistol to shoot his arch-adversary dead, or of being contemptuously spared by his arch-adversary when the pistol had been in the other hand.

  Jeanie Bird took Ned’s left hand in hers, and squeezed it gratefully. Ned looked around—not at her, but at the restless dead-alive who were as yet unknown to themselves. Their agitation had calmed somewhat while everyone was standing still. Their black-pointed eyes were very intent, and their ears were pricked. Ned felt free to be hopeful that they were all a little closer to finding the power of intelligence and motive for a second time.

  Ned reached out to Sawney with his right hand, and Sawney clasped it. “Thank you for coming to see us, Sawney,” he said. “I wish I had been there when you came back last night, so that we could all have made a proper farewell—but Sam and Jeanie have a performance tonight, and you always told us that the audience must not be disappointed.” He remembered, as he said that, that Sawney had always told him something else—that if a playwright puts a gun into a scene, the gun must eventually go off—but he decided that it would be best to disregard that maxim at this particular juncture.

  He made as if to go, taking his protégés with him—for his first duty was, after all, to them. Someone had to set an example. The others seemed grateful for his lead, and he was confident that they would follow him into the wings.

  “We’ll meet again, mon ami,” said the ci-devant Comte, his posture suggesting that he was speaking to Ned, although his heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on Gregory Temple.

  That was yet another thing that Sawney had always said, Ned remembered, in the days when he had played the puppet judge in the mock tribunal. On the stage, where everything is pretense and everything is possible, old friends and old enemies alike must always meet again, until their differences were settled for good and all.

  PART TWO: THE CHILD-STEALERS

  Chapter One

  Gregory Temple’s Sleeplessness

  Gregory Temple had never been a sound sleeper, and his restlessness had not decreased with the years. There had been many a night when he had tossed and turned for hours on end without ever seeming to sleep at all, even without the excuse that he presently had for the return of his most disturbing obsession.

  It seemed to him now that he had not slept for a single minute in the previous 72 hours, since he had first renewed his acquaintance with that ridiculous little man, Ned Knob. Master Knob had brought his obsession back to life, by leading him to his nemesis, John Devil—who had come back from the dead without the seemingly-dire inconvenience of becoming a grey man.

  Master Knob had added vile insult to cruel injury by claiming that he was intimately acquainted with Suzanne and her new family, but that should have been a minor irritant by comparison with the news that Comte Henri de Belcamp had not, after all, splattered his brains all over the gloomy walls of the Château de Belcamp. Alas, once lack of sleep began to bring delirium into Temple’s waking life, even minor irritants could be temporarily blown up out of all proportion, augmenting his fundamental distress.

  It should have been the monstrous thought of John Devil’s continued freedom that was keeping Temple awake now, as it had for two nights before, but it was not. He should have been cudgelling his brain in the attempt to figure out a way of finding the bandit again, or at least berating himself for not having succeeded in capturing the bandit at Greenhithe when they had been forced to quit the Outremort. Instead, he was berating himself for something else entirely, and calling himself a monster worse than any mindless grey giant or any phantom in a Quaker hat. He was drowning in regret for his own foolishness in somehow having contrived to put it completely out of is mind that he had a daughter, and that his daughter had a husband and a son.

  He had been ill, of course, and mad too—but what kind of excuse was that, for a man like him? He was no more than slightly ill now, nor was he much more than slightly mad. He was a trusted agent in the King’s secret police, charged with maintaining the peace and security of the realm—but how could he trust himself to do that, when he had not even been able to maintain the peace and security of his own family?

  I am a man of great intellect, he told himself, repeatedly. I am a diehard enemy of evil. How can I be such a stupid wreck of a human being?

  He would have sworn on the Bible, sincerely, that he had not slept for an instant—but he had closed his eyes in the attempt to rest, and he must also have muffled his ears, else he would surely have heard the door of his room open and close. How else could he explain the fact that he had no inkling that anything was wrong until the point of a rapier actually touched his throat?

  “Be still, Mr. Temple,” a voice advised him. “I am very anxious not to hurt you.”

  A phosphorus match spluttered then, and a flame lit up. It was applied to the candle on his night-stand, which lit in its turn.”

  “A miracle of scientific enlightenment,” John Devil commented, as he blew out the match. “So much more effective than flint and German tinder. We are living in exciting times, Mr. Temple, when anything and everything seems possible.” He looked around the room as he spoke; although he said nothing, Temple knew what he must be thinking: that this was a direly shabby apartment for a man who had once lived in a good house, with a wife
and daughter and servants.

  Temple could not raise his head from his pillow without endangering his throat. “If you are so very anxious not to hurt me, John Devil,” he said, bitterly, “why do you come into my room with a naked blade?”

  “Because I am equally anxious to ensure that you do not hurt me, Mr. Temple. I did not shoot you when I held a gun to your head at Greenhithe, even when you refused to obey my instructions. I’m not so sure that you’d have done me the same courtesy, had the roles been reversed. I need you to sit quietly for a little while, so that I can explain to you why we must make a truce—and more than that, become allies for a little while.”

  “Because of the challenge of the dead-alive?” Temple said, with a sneer. “The protectors of His Majesty’s government do not need your advice to make policy on that issue.”

  “I am not even certain that this concerns the dead-alive, Mr. Temple—although it would be a bizarre coincidence if it did not. I am certain, however, that it does not concern your stupid secret police. This is personal, Mr. Temple. Will you read this letter, please?”

  John Devil, who was not wearing his Quaker hat, held out a single sheet of paper, folded in two. Temple took it. It was not until he had opened it and read the name of the addressee and the signature that the blond man withdrew the point of the rapier, allowing Temple to raise his head.

  Temple was able to look his persecutor in the face then—and was astonished to see that the handsome features were contorted by anxiety and dread. When John Devil had been James Davy, he had occasionally feigned anxiety, but dread had seemed to be beyond his emotional range, even then.