Kenneth Oppel - Such Wicked Intent

“It’s possible,” I tell him.

I feel suddenly bereft as the butterfly lifts from my hand and circles about the room.

“Is it safe, though?” Henry says. “Our bodies are waiting for us, and they need-”

“Our bodies will be fine!” I say dismissively. “I did it last time. Elizabeth saw it.”

“You were a second longer than the first,” Henry says. “I timed it exactly.”

“A second!” I scoff. “What does it matter? Time is completely different here, and I have mastered it! As long as we stay only one full revolution, we’re safe!”

Henry glances at Elizabeth.

“If you’re worried, Henry Clerval,” I say, “you can always go back.”

“No,” he says, rolling up his sleeves. “Let’s make use of all this time you’ve bought us.”

“Excellent!” I say.

Konrad catches the books I toss to him, and he sets to work as well, searching like us for any writings about raising the dead.

“There are many accounts of revenants,” says Henry, paging through a volume, “but they aren’t promising stories.”

“What’s a revenant?” Elizabeth asks.

“A mindless corpse that rises from its grave, stalks about town, eats livestock and people, and then gets hacked to pieces by the townsfolk.”

“Don’t waste your time on that,” I tell him. “That’s not what we want.”

“No,” he replies, “but we’ll not find what we want unless we read everything carefully.”

He’s right, and it irks me that he’s moving through the texts faster than I am, but this spirit world makes us more of what we are, and Henry has always been very clever with languages. I return to my own book, struggling with the Latin and the crude Gothic lettering.

A butterfly-is it the same one as earlier, or different? — suddenly alights on my hand. I look at its rainbow-hued wings and then past them to the text beneath my fingertips, and I feel a coursing of language through my head, the Latin translating itself with such speed that my breath catches and I cough, as though I’ve swallowed too much water.

The butterfly does not flutter away but remains poised upon my hand, wings folding and opening serenely.

I touch my hand to the page again, and once more a torrent of knowledge fills me. Hurriedly I turn the pages, sweeping my fingers across entire paragraphs at a time, my eyes scarcely focused on the book but rather on the chamber of my own mind, where all this arcane knowledge is presenting itself to me.

“You’re going too fast, Victor,” I hear Elizabeth say, as from another room. “You’ll miss something.”

“There’s nothing of use here,” I say, shoving the book from me and grabbing another. Greek, Latin, Aramaic, lost dialects, I surge through all of them one after another.

I look up briefly. Henry and Elizabeth are both watching me strangely.

“It’s the butterfly, isn’t it?” Henry says.

I nod in amazement. “It’s helping me read more quickly, like some new form of energy that speeds my mind.”

“How do you know you aren’t deceiving yourself?”

Yet he holds out his finger and clicks his tongue, as if summoning a cat. The butterfly, however, does not leave me.

“Well, we all want one now,” Elizabeth says with a laugh.

“It’s unbelievable,” I murmur, and with my empowered hand I inhale another book’s contents in a matter of seconds, and toss it to the floor.

“All nonsense,” I say. “I wouldn’t trust any of it.”

Across the room Konrad says, “How can you tell? All these books are filled with arcane spells and incantations. Why is one any less reliable than another?”

“The butterfly. It seems to know what I seek, and helps me sift the gold from the dross. But there’s no gold, not here. There’s something else,” I say, surprising myself.

“What do you mean?” Henry demands.

“Something I, we, should be looking for.”

“A different book?” Konrad wants to know.

“It’s hidden somewhere. I’ll know when I see it…”

The butterfly flies from my finger, and I give a cry of dismay. “Not yet!”

Henry immediately reaches out to lure it to him, but it avoids both our hands and settles instead on my temple, and in that same instant I see an arrangement of strange symbols in my head. I hardly dare breathe.

“I know these,” I mutter, closing my eyes, concentrating harder. They’re not symbols upon a page but cut into stone. Abruptly I stand.

“Where are you going?” Elizabeth demands.

The butterfly still rests on my temple, and I don’t want to lose it. “There’s writing in the caves.”

“What caves?” Konrad exclaims in frustration.

“Ah,” I say, “we forgot to tell you. We Frankensteins have the caves of an ancient culture under our chateau.”

“Are you mad?” I hear Konrad call out as I hurry down the stairs.

“No, it’s true,” says Elizabeth, following me. “Come see. It’s remarkable.”

“Anything else I should know about?” Konrad asks, exasperated. “In the few weeks I’ve been dead?”

I hurry to the bottom of the stairs and peer down into the fake well. I take hold of the ladder jutting up from the depths and swing myself onto its rungs.

“It was never a well?” Konrad asks in amazement as I climb down.

I reach bottom. The giant horses painted on the wall have an even greater force and dynamism, as if at any moment their muscular flanks will heave, their hooves kick up a cloud of grit. With my hand I reach up to make sure the butterfly is still poised on my head, but stop myself-I can sense it’s there, can feel the quiet, potent power it’s ready to bestow upon me.

Elizabeth is first to arrive. She looks about the cavern, but instead of wonder on her face, I see unease.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Don’t you feel it?”

I shake my head, bewildered.

“She’s right,” says Henry, stepping down and making room for Konrad to descend. “There’s a vile atmosphere it didn’t have before.”

“That sounds like the old Henry,” I say. “You can always wait in the library, if you like.”

“Don’t be an ass, Victor,” my brother says as he looks about the cavern. I notice his saber is in his belt. “There’s something not right about this place.”

Truly I feel no sense of foreboding, only a fierce impatience. “They’re just ancient, dank caves.”

“No. There’s something down here,” says Konrad.

“Yes, something we need.”

“That’s not what I meant,” my twin says, his hand on his hilt.

I think of the ominous sounds he’s heard from deep within the house. But fear does not touch me.

“All of you,” I say, “you have too much valor to hang back now! And we have nothing to fear.” I look at Henry and Elizabeth. “We’re the living! Light and heat pour off us. Nothing can harm us here! Trust me.”

With some reluctance they follow me through the high-vaulted galleries and chambers. This journey is a far cry from the first one we made in the real world, when we were giddy with the wondrous bestiary galloping across the walls. Now we proceed more warily. There are times when, from the corner of my eye, the luminous animals seem to move-a quick dip of the head, an eye flashing with predatory light.

When we reach the image of the saber-toothed tiger, Henry points to the nearby line of symbols we discovered before on the wall. “Are these the ones you mean?” he asks.

I swallow and, full of hope, put my hand to them. The pads of my fingers trace their sharp contours, and before my mind’s eye the dashes and circles swiftly, miraculously, shape themselves into language.

I exhale. “No. This isn’t what I want. It’s just an account of a hunt, a tally of kills. There must be more writing somewhere.”