The Best New Horror 6 Read online

  “Someone in power believes Dr Pretorious’s claims, then.”

  “I wish I could say. Do you believe him?”

  “Of course not.”

  But it was not true, and Dr Stein immediately made his own enquiries. He wanted to know the truth, and not, he told himself, because he had mistaken the girl for his daughter. His interest was that of a doctor, for if death could be reversed, then surely that was the greatest gift a doctor could possess. He was not thinking of his daughter at all.

  His enquiries were first made amongst his colleagues at the city hospital, and then in the guild hospitals and the new hospital of the Arsenal. Only the director of the last was willing to say anything, and warned Dr Stein that the man he was seeking had powerful allies.

  “So I have heard,” Dr Stein said. He added recklessly, “I wish I knew who they were.”

  The director was a pompous man, placed in his position through politics rather than merit. Dr Stein could see that he was tempted to divulge what he knew, but in the end he merely said, “Knowledge is a dangerous thing. If you would know anything, start from a low rather than a high place. Don’t overreach yourself, Doctor.”

  Dr Stein bridled at this, but said nothing. He sat up through the night, thinking the matter over. This was a city of secrets, and he was a stranger, and a Jew from Prussia to boot. His actions could easily be mistaken for those of a spy, and he was not sure that Gorrall could help him if he was accused. Gorrall’s precipitous attempt to arrest Dr Pretorious had not endeared him to his superiors, after all.

  Yet Dr Stein could not get the drowned girl’s face from his mind, the way she had given a little start and her eyes had opened under the tangle of gold threads. Tormented by fantasies in which he found his daughter’s grave and raised her up, he paced the kitchen, and in the small hours of the night it came to him that the director of the Arsenal hospital had spoken the truth even if he had not known it.

  In the morning, Dr Stein set out again, saying nothing to his wife of what he was doing. He had realized that Dr Pretorious must need simples and other necessaries for his trade, and now he went from apothecary to apothecary with the mountebank’s description. Dr Stein found his man late in the afternoon, in a mean little shop in a calle that led off a square dominated by the brightly painted facade of the new church of Santa Maria di Miracoli.

  The apothecary was a young man with a handsome face but small, greedy eyes. He peered at Dr Stein from beneath a fringe of greasy black hair, and denied knowing Dr Pretorious with such vehemence that Dr Stein did not doubt he was lying.

  A soldi soon loosened his tongue. He admitted that he might have such a customer as Dr Stein described, and Dr Stein asked at once, “Does he buy alum and oil?”

  The apothecary expressed surprise. “He is a physician, not a tanner.”

  “Of course,” Dr Stein said, hope rising in him. A second soldi bought Dr Stein the privilege of delivering the mountebank’s latest order, a jar of sulphuric acid nested in a straw cradle.

  The directions given by the apothecary led Dr Stein through an intricate maze of calles and squares, ending in a courtyard no bigger than a closet, with tall buildings soaring on either side, and no way out but the narrow passage by which he had entered. Dr Stein knew he was lost, but before he could turn to begin to retrace his steps, someone seized him from behind. An arm clamped across his throat. He struggled and dropped the jar of acid, which by great good luck, and the straw padding, did not break. Then he was on his back, looking up at a patch of grey sky which seemed to rush away from him at great speed, dwindling to a speck no bigger than a star.

  Dr Stein was woken by the solemn tolling of the curfew bells. He was lying on a mouldering bed in a room muffled by dusty tapestries and lit by a tall tallow candle. His throat hurt and his head ached. There was a tender swelling above his right ear, but he had no double vision or dizziness. Whoever had hit him had known what they were about.

  The door was locked, and the windows were closed by wooden shutters nailed tightly shut. Dr Stein was prying at the shutters when the door was unlocked and an old man came in. He was a shrivelled gnome in a velvet tunic and doublet more suited to a young gallant. His creviced face was drenched with powder, and there were hectic spots of rouge on his sunken cheeks.

  “My master will talk with you,” this ridiculous creature said.

  Dr Stein asked where he was, and the old man said that it was his master’s house. “Once it was mine, but I gave it to him. It was his fee.”

  “Ah. You were sick, and he cured you.”

  “I was cured of life. He killed me and brought me back, so that I will live forever in the life beyond death. He’s a great man.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The old man laughed. He had only one tooth in his head, and that a blackened stump. “I’ve yet to be christened in this new life. Come with me.”

  They mounted a wide marble stair that wound through the middle of what must be a great palazzo. Two storeys below was a floor tiled black and white like a chessboard; they climbed past two more floors to the top.

  The long room had once been a library, but the shelves of the dark bays set off the main passage were empty now; only the chains which had secured the books were left. It was lit by a scattering of candles whose restless flames cast a confusion of flickering light that hid more than it revealed. One bay was penned off with a hurdle, and a pig moved in the shadows there. Dr Stein had enough of a glimpse of it to see that there was something on the pig’s back, but it was too dark to be sure quite what it was. Then something the size of a mouse scuttled straight in front of him – Dr Stein saw with a shock that it ran on its hind legs, with a stumbling, crooked gait.

  “One of my children,” Dr Pretorious said.

  He was seated at a plain table scattered with books and papers. Bits of glassware and jars of acids and salts cluttered the shelves that rose behind him. The drowned girl sat beside him in a highbacked chair. Her head was held up by a leather band around her forehead; her eyes were closed and seemed bruised and sunken. Behind the chair was the same apparatus that Dr Stein had seen used in the wine store. The smell of attar of roses was very strong.

  Dr Stein said, “It was only a mouse, or a small rat.”

  “You believe what you must, doctor,” Dr Pretorious said, “but I hope to open your eyes to the wonders I have performed.” He told the old man, “Fetch food.”

  The old man started to complain that he wanted to stay, and Dr Pretorious immediately jumped up in a sudden fit of anger and threw a pot of ink at his servant. The old man sputtered, smearing the black ink across his powdered face, and at once Dr Pretorious burst into laughter. “You’re a poor book,” he said. “Fetch our guest meat and wine. It’s the least I can do,” he told Dr Stein. “Did you come here of your own will, by the way?”

  “I suppose the apothecary told you that I asked for you. That is, if he was an apothecary.”

  Dr Pretorious said, with a quick smile, “You wanted to see the girl, I suppose, and here she is. I saw the tender look you gave her, before we were interrupted, and see that same look again.”

  “I knew nothing of my colleague’s plans.”

  Dr Pretorious made a steeple with his hands, touched the tip of the steeple to his bloodless lips. His fingers were long and white, and seemed to have an extra joint in them. He said, “Don’t hope he’ll find you.”

  “I’m not afraid. You brought me here because you wanted me here.”

  “But you should be afraid. I have power of life and death here.”

  “The old man said you gave him life everlasting.”

  Dr Pretorious said carelessly, “Oh, so he believes. Perhaps that’s enough.”

  “Did he die? Did you bring him back to life?”

  Dr Pretorious said, “That depends what you mean by life. The trick is not raising the dead, but making sure that death does not reclaim them.”

  Dr Stein had seen a panther two days after he had arrive
d in Venice, brought from the Friendly Isles along with a great number of parrots. So starved that the bones of its shoulders and pelvis were clearly visible under its sleek black pelt, the panther ceaselessly padded back and forth inside its little cage, its eyes like green lamps. It had been driven mad by the voyage, and Dr Stein thought that Dr Pretorious was as mad as that panther, his sensibility quite lost on the long voyage into the unknown regions which he claimed to have conquered. In truth, they had conquered him.

  “I have kept her on ice for much of the time,” Dr Pretorious said.

  “Even so, she is beginning to deteriorate.” He twitched the hem of the girl’s gown, and Dr Stein saw on her right foot a black mark as big as his hand, like a sunken bruise. Despite the attar of roses, the reek of gangrene was suddenly overpowering.

  He said, “The girl is dead. I saw it for myself, when she was pulled from the canal. No wonder she rots.”

  “It depends what you mean by death. Have you ever seen fish in a pond, under ice? They can become so sluggish that they no longer move, yet they live, and when warmed will move again. I was once in Gotland. In winter, the nights last all day, and your breath freezes in your beard. A man was found alive after two days lying in a drift of snow. He had drunk too much, and had passed out; the liquor had saved him from freezing to death, although he lost his ears and his fingers and toes. She was dead when she was pulled from the icy water, but she had drunk enough to prevent death from placing an irreversible claim on her body. I returned her to life. Would you like to see how it is done?”

  “Master?”

  It was the old man. With cringing deference, he offered a tray bearing a tarnished silver wine decanter, a plate of beef, heavily salted and greenish at the edges, and a loaf of black bread.

  Dr Pretorious was on him in an instant. The food and wine flew into the air; Dr Pretorious lifted the old man by his neck, dropped him to the floor. “We are busy,” he said, quite calmly.

  Dr Stein started to help the old man to gather the food together.

  Dr Pretorious aimed a kick at the old man, who scuttled away on all fours. Dr Pretorious said impatiently, “No need for that. I shall show you, doctor, that she lives.”

  The glass bowl sang under his long fingernails; he smoothed the belt of frayed red silk with tender care. He looked sidelong at Dr Stein and said, “There is a tribe in the far south of Egypt who have been metalworkers for three thousand years. They apply a fine coat of silver to ornaments of base metal by immersing the ornaments in a solution of nitrate of silver and connecting them to tanks containing plates of lead and zinc in salt water. Split by the two metals, the opposing essences of the salt water flow in different directions, and when they join in the ornaments draw the silver from solution. I have experimented with that process, and will experiment more, but even when I substitute salt water with acid, the flow of essences is as yet too weak for my purpose. This – ” he rapped the glass bowl, which rang like a bell – “is based on a toy that their children played with, harnessing that same essence to give each other little frights. I have greatly enlarged it, and developed a way of storing the essence it generates. For this essence lives within us, too, and is sympathetic to the flow from this apparatus. By its passage through the glass the silk generates that essence, which is stored here, in this jar. Look closely if you will. It is only ordinary glass, and ordinary water, sealed by a cork, but it contains the essence of life.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  “I have done much alone. But, doctor, we can do so much more together. Your reputation is great.”

  “I have the good fortune to be allowed to teach the physicians here some of the techniques I learned in Prussia. But no surgeon would operate on a corpse.”

  “You are too modest. I have heard the stories of the man of clay your people can make to defend themselves. I know it is based on truth. Clay cannot live, even if bathed in blood, but a champion buried in the clay of the earth might be made to live again, might he not?”

  Dr Stein understood that the mountebank believed his own legerdemain. He said, “I see that you have great need of money. A man of learning would only sell books in the most desperate circumstances, but all the books in this library have gone. Perhaps your sponsors are disappointed, and do not pay what they have promised, but it is no business of mine.”

  Dr Pretorious said sharply, “The fancies in those books were a thousand years old. I have no need of them. And it might be said that you owe me money. Interruption of my little demonstration cost me at least twenty ducats, for there were at least that many dowagers eager to taste the revitalizing essence of life. So I think that you are obliged to help me, eh? Now watch, and wonder.”

  Dr Pretorious began to work the treadles of his apparatus. The sound of his laboured breathing and the soft tearing sound made by the silk belt as it revolved around and around filled the long room. At last, Dr Pretorious twitched the gold wires from the top of the glass bowl so that they fell across the girl’s face. In the dim light, Dr Stein saw the snap of a fat blue flame that for a moment jumped amongst the ends of the wires. The girl’s whole body shuddered. Her eyes opened.

  “A marvel!” Dr Pretorious said, panting from his exercise. “Each day she dies. Each night I bring her to life.”

  The girl looked around at his voice. The pupils of her eyes were of different sizes. Dr Pretorious slapped her face until a faint bloom appeared on her cheeks.

  “You see! She lives! Ask her a question. Anything. She has returned from death, and there is more in her head than in yours or mine. Ask!”

  “I have nothing to ask,” Dr Stein said.

  “She knows the future. Tell him about the future,” he hissed into the girl’s ear.

  The girl’s mouth worked. Her chest heaved as if she was pumping up something inside herself, then she said in a low whisper, “It is the Jews that will be blamed.”

  Dr Stein said, “That’s always been true.”

  “But that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Dr Stein met Dr Pretorious’s black gaze. “How many have you killed, in your studies?”

  “Oh, most of them were already dead. They gave themselves for science, just as in the ancient days young girls were sacrificed for the pagan gods.”

  “Those days are gone.”

  “Greater days are to come. You will help. I know you will. Let me show you how we will save her. You will save her, won’t you?”

  The girl’s head was beside Dr Pretorious’s. They were both looking at Dr Stein. The girl’s lips moved, mumbling over two words. A cold mantle crept across Dr Stein’s skin. He had picked up a knife when he had stooped to help the old man, and now, if he could, he had a use for it.

  Dr Pretorious led Dr Stein to the pen where the pig snuffled in its straw. He held up a candle, and Dr Stein saw clearly, for an instant, the hand on the pig’s back. Then the creature bolted into shadow.

  It was a human hand, severed at the wrist, poking out of the pink skin of the pig’s back as if from a sleeve. It looked alive, the nails suffused, the skin as pink as the pig’s skin.

  “They don’t last long,” Dr Pretorious said. He seemed pleased by Dr Stein’s shock. “Either the pig dies, or the limb begins to rot. There is some incompatibility between the two kinds of blood. I have tried giving pigs human blood before the operation, but they die even more quickly. Perhaps with your help I can perfect the process. I will perform the operation on the girl, replace her rotten foot with a healthy one. I will not have her imperfect. I will do better. I will improve her, piece by piece. I will make her a true Bride of the Sea, a wonder that all the world will worship. Will you help me, doctor? It is difficult to get bodies. Your friend is causing me a great deal of nuisance . . . but you can bring me bodies, why, almost every day. So many die in winter. A piece here, a piece there. I do not need the whole corpse. What could be simpler?”

  He jumped back as Dr Stein grabbed his arm, but Dr Stein was quicker, and knocked the candle
into the pen. The straw was aflame in an instant, and the pig charged out as soon as Dr Stein pulled back the hurdle. It barged at Dr Pretorious as if it remembered the torments he had inflicted upon it, and knocked him down. The hand flopped to and fro on its back, as if waving.

  The girl could have been asleep, but her eyes opened as soon as Dr Stein touched her cold brow. She tried to speak, but she had very little strength now, and Dr Stein had to lay his head on her cold breast to hear her mumble the two words she had mouthed to him earlier.

  “Kill me.”

  Behind them, the fire had taken hold in the shelving and floor, casting a lurid light down the length of the room. Dr Pretorious ran to and fro, pursued by the pig. He was trying to capture the scampering mice-things which had been driven from their hiding places by the fire, but even with their staggering bipedal gait they were faster than he was. The old man ran into the room, and Dr Pretorious shouted, “Help me, you fool!”

  But the old man ran past him, ran through the wall of flames that now divided the room, and jumped onto Dr Stein as he bent over the drowned girl. He was as weak as a child, but when Dr Stein tried to push him away he bit into Dr Stein’s wrist and the knife fell to the floor. They reeled backwards and knocked over a jar of acid. Instantly, acrid white fumes rose up as the acid burnt into the wood floor. The old man rolled on the floor, beating at his smoking, acid-drenched costume.

  Dr Stein found the knife and drew its sharp point down the length of the blue veins of the drowned girl’s forearms. The blood flowed surprisingly quickly. Dr Stein stroked the girl’s hair, and her eyes focused on his. For a moment it seemed as if she might say something, but with the heat of the fire beating at his back he could not stay any longer.

  Dr Stein knocked out a shutter with a bench, hauled himself onto the window-ledge. As he had hoped, there was black water directly below: like all palazzos, this one rose straight up from the Grand Canal. Smoke rolled around him. He heard Dr Pretorious shout at him and he let himself go, and gave himself to air, and then water.