Kenneth Oppel - Such Wicked Intent

I didn’t like to look upon her, for my beautiful mother’s cheeks were hollowed, and her normally lively eyes dulled.

“Let me help you back to your bedchamber,” I said.

“Your father thinks it only makes me worse to come here, but I need to. I still need to. And you do too, clearly.”

She took my maimed hand and placed it between hers. Her skin had a papery feel to it, her bones and tendons more prominent than I recalled. I was terribly worried about her but dared not say anything. Voicing my fears aloud would, somehow, make them far too real and frightening.

“Does it still pain you, your hand?” she asked.

“Not very much at all,” I lied.

She looked about the darkened room. “Almost every night I dream of him. And sometimes we talk. What I would give for just one more real conversation.”

Before I could stop myself, I said, “If I could bring him back for you, I would.”

“I know, Victor. You try so hard.”

“Father thinks-”

“Your father thinks you’re rash and headstrong, but he told me he’d never known anyone show such love and devotion to a sibling.”

“He said that to you?”

She nodded. “Every day I’m thankful for you, and Elizabeth, and William and Ernest, and one day I won’t wear this grief so heavily, but that day… seems a very long way away.”

I kissed her on both cheeks and hugged her. “You should rest,” I said.

“All I do is rest,” she replied wearily, and then formed her face into a brave smile. “Are you taking Konrad’s hairbrush as a keepsake?”

I swallowed uneasily. “Yes. I want it for my own.”

And I need it, to bring him back, for all of us.

The work cottage stood on the farthest reach of our property, at the edge of an unused pasture that bordered forest. Beyond the crude door was a dirt floor, plank walls, no windows-a place to give laborers shelter in bad weather, a place for unused stone and fence posts, shovels and rusting saws.

On the crude wooden table we placed the lanterns we’d lit, and closed the door. Carefully I set down the jar containing the butterfly spirit. It had spent a day and night in my room, carefully hidden, like some strange insect a guilty boy keeps from his mother. It swam along the inside of the glass, then grew legs and scuttled about, then sprouted black wings and fluttered, batting itself against the lid, its entire being bent on escape. Soon enough, I thought. Soon enough you can come out and start your work.

From my breast pocket I took the vial of Konrad’s hair and set it on the table.

I looked at Henry and Elizabeth. “We will do this,” I said.

Henry nodded. “Yes.”

I saw Elizabeth take a deep breath, but her gaze was steady as she nodded. In the church that day, before the painting of Jesus and Lazarus, she’d made her decision, and she’d never been one to back down. “What do we do first?”

“Well, it’s… fairly straightforward,” I said. “First the hole.”

I passed Henry a shovel, and plunged mine into the dirt floor behind the table. Working together it was a quick enough job. The hole was shallow, no more than a foot deep, and six in length. A crib, I thought.

But it looked more like a grave.

At its bottom the earth was moist and claylike. Elizabeth pushed back her sleeves and knelt. She took several handfuls of thick mud and started working away, fashioning a torso, pinching off a head, then arms, then shaping the lower half into two legs. She used the tip of her little finger to make indentations for the eyes and then traced a mouth. Watching, I had a sudden memory of her as a little girl, sitting in the courtyard garden, making shapes in the soil with a stick, her brow furrowed with concentration.

I couldn’t help laughing. “I can’t see you taking such care over me,” I said. “Two splats of mud, and away we go.”

When she looked up at me, her eyes were wet.

“You’ve done a fine job,” I told her, my voice softening. I knelt down beside her. “Here.” I helped her smooth the outlines of the little mud creature, as though this would give it a greater chance of becoming perfect, of becoming Konrad. Our fingers touched and, for just a split second, lingered, as though remembering something. Then she pulled back her hand to continue her work alone. I stood and watched.

“How long will it take, before it grows to its proper size?” Henry asked.

I conjured up the stone book’s searing chain of images-the sun chasing the darkness across the twitching body of the mud man. “I’m not sure. It was a good number of days. Six, perhaps?”

“And then?”

“We’ll give the body a drop of the elixir and enter the spirit world.”

“But wouldn’t the body appear in the spirit world too?” asked Henry. “And then we’d have two Konrads?”

From the floor Elizabeth shook her head, frowning. “The body won’t enter. It has no spirit, and it’s our spirits that inhabit the land of the dead.”

“Precisely,” I said, though it had taken me some time to puzzle this out myself. “The body will wait in the real world for Konrad’s spirit to claim it.”

“But how will Konrad find his body without a talisman?” Henry asked.

This I’d already considered. “Before we enter, we’ll put some talisman in the creature’s fist, and when we enter the spirit world, the body won’t be there but the talisman will be. I’ll need your help now, Henry.”

We returned to the table.

“We need our butterfly spirit to bind with Konrad’s hair,” I said.

Henry took up the jar with the spirit and peered inside. “The moment we unscrew this lid…”

I nodded. “It’ll try to escape onto one of us, me most likely. It seems to prefer me.”

“Your irresistible charm,” said Henry.

I chuckled nervously. Everything suddenly seemed unreal. Were we really doing this?

“Is our mud creation complete?” I asked Elizabeth.

She nodded and came to the table.

I handed Henry the vial of Konrad’s hair and took hold of the jar with the butterfly spirit. “I’ll slide open the lid just a touch, and you jam the end of your vial inside and shake out the hair-quickly, mind.”

“I’m ready,” he said, removing the small cork from the vial.

The moment I put my hand atop the lid, the spirit became still at the bottom of the jar, attentive, coiled. I unscrewed the lid and held it firmly in place for a moment, while Henry positioned the vial. He nodded, and I slid the lid an inch to the side.

Henry darted the vial into the gap but didn’t even have time to shake out the hair. In the blink of an eye the spirit sprang into the vial, where it stretched itself long and spiraled in a frenzy round and round the strands of Konrad’s hair.

“What do I do?” whispered Henry.

“Stay still, stay still,” I hissed. “Elizabeth, the cork!”

She snatched it up from the table. I pulled back the jar’s lid so she could reach inside with her slim hands and jam the cork hard into the inverted top of the vial.

“Thank goodness,” I breathed. Trapped inside, the spirit hungrily twined with Konrad’s hair until it was difficult to tell them apart. Henry’s hands were shaking slightly.

“What’s the best way to put this inside the mud creature?” he asked.

“Let’s do it now while it’s occupied,” I said. The spirit was still ecstatically entangled with Konrad’s hair.

Swiftly we moved to the hole, where Elizabeth knelt and pressed her thumb deep into the center of the little mud creature’s torso.

I seized a small handful of clay, ready. Henry held the stoppered vial against the cavity in the mud man’s chest.

“Look at it,” Elizabeth said, pointing. The spirit had bundled itself and Konrad’s hair into a small compact ball. It pulsed darkly.