Stay
Victor checked the calling card for the address one last time.
It was late, and the air was chilly. He glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was watching him.
“How may I help you?”
A butler, graying and severe, was waiting for him when he jerked back around.
“I—I received an invitation? There’s supposed to be a party?” Victor stammered.
He held out the card, and the man snatched it from his hand. The butler looked it over, then scrutinized Victor suspiciously. Taking in his greased-down blond curls, round youthful face, ironed cloak, and shiny shoes.
“Did you find this or was this handed to you?” he asked.
“Handed to me,” Victor said quickly. “A man in a tavern heard me having an argument with a friend and invited me. He said I had to come alone. . . . He had red hair, brown beard. . . .” Victor couldn’t remember his name. It hadn’t been on the card.
The butler narrowed his eyes but stepped aside.
“Come in. Quickly, quickly.”
Victor stumbled into the foyer, and the butler closed the door sharply behind him. Victor had his cloak stripped from him and hung in a closet by the door.
“Shoes off. Mr. Sauer doesn’t want damage to the wood.”
It was an odd request. But the black wood floors did gleam brightly, so Victor removed his shoes.
His sock had a small hole in the toe. Victor covered it with his other foot, but the butler noticed it in an instant and sneered.
The butler dug in the coat closet and produced a pair of plain black house slippers.
“Mind your first impression,” he hissed, and Victor’s cheeks burned.
There was the sound of talking and light music up ahead, but this was a mansion, and he was bound to end up anywhere if he followed noise instead of instruction.
“Where do I go?”
“Down the hall, to the left, and then a little farther, and the study is to the right. Do you need a chaperone?”
Victor shook his head. This certainly didn’t make him feel any less anxious and uncomfortable. His pulse thumped in his sweaty palms, and he wiped them on his trousers as he walked.
The Sauer Mansion was dimly lit and strangely decorated. Bright colors were preferable, if one could afford them. But Mr. Sauer’s home was a masterpiece of black, ivory, and steel. There was a coldness about it that made Victor uncomfortable but also excited him.
The music swelled as Victor approached the room, and he clenched his fists anxiously.
There were no less than twenty men in here. It was a comfortable study, red carpets, red walls, red chairs and couches. There were two servers with food on trays, a violinist and pianist in the corner by the window, and a large bar with a barman. His face was as severe as the butler’s.
The moment Victor stepped over the threshold, a small shout from the back of the room pierced the air.
“The Young Aesthete!” The man from the tavern swanned across the room, quickly clasping Victor’s shoulder.
His eyes were bright and wet, cheeks ruddy with drink.
“I wasn’t sure you’d gather up the courage, though I’m quite glad you did. Come, meet the others,” he said, blowing breath scented strongly of port directly into Victor’s face.
The man guided Victor across the room and right to a small gathering of three others, heedless of the curious glances.
There was a blond, bearded man dressed all in pale yellow; a stout balding man in gray tweed; and a tall, long-haired man in black boiled wool. They all looked amused but slightly annoyed by this man’s histrionics.
“Mr. Burghart, Mr. Smidt, and Mr. Sauer,” he said, pointing at each guest, before pressing a hand to his chest. “And you can call me Fitz!”
Victor shook everyone’s hand and felt quite small and quite young. “Victor Frankenstein.”
“Frankenstein? Of the great Alphonse Frankenstein?! God, I should have known. Greatness can only beget greatness in its own way,” Fitz said.
He turned to Mr. Sauer. “I found this one in a tavern talking about suspended life states with the veracity of Bradley King or that American John Forthright. Sitting among a gaggle of students who didn’t seem to understand or care much about his theory, and I just couldn’t leave well enough alone. You know me—”
“Yes, we know you,” Mr. Smidt muttered in kind reproach.
“Anyway.” Fitz rolled his eyes. “They were talking him away from some serious revelations, and I figured it would be prudent to save a good mind from dying among the rabble, so it were.”
“You mean the age-appropriate peers from which you removed him?” Mr. Sauer remarked.
“And that’s just the thing!” Fitz exclaimed. “He looks like a child, but this Victor Frankenstein is in graduate school. He’ll be employable within the year!”
He tightened his grip on Victor’s shoulder, then pushed him forward a bit, like he was doing show-and-tell.
“Go on, explain to them your theory and invention.”
The room was suddenly very quiet and very warm. Victor could tell everyone was listening; even the servers had stopped moving around the space.
“I . . . I have found a way to preserve a body without the brain, via electrical pulse and bellow, holding it in a comatose state for a few seconds after natural expiration. Not . . . human, of course, and it’s not very long, but it’s a promising start.
I do believe that with sufficient electrical stimulation and alchemical filtration of post-death blood impurities, I may be able to reverse . . .”
The music had ceased playing. Victor, anxious, also stopped talking.
“You see—” Fitz began, but Mr. Sauer held up a hand.
“That’s enough, Fitz,” he said. “You, come with me.”
Mr. Sauer swept through the room, walking quickly.
Victor glanced back at Fitz, and Fitz excitedly waved him off. “Go! Go! I’m sure it’s something interesting. Seize the moment!”
Victor stumbled after Mr. Sauer before he lost track of him. As they left the room, the music started up again, and he could hear the voices of renewed conversation.
Mr. Sauer drifted before him like a specter; he had to be at least 195 cm and his long dark hair was so out of fashion that it reminded Victor of medieval royalty or something like it.
Mr. Sauer gazed back just the once to make sure Victor was following him, then he picked up the pace. Leading them both to a dark library.
Mr. Sauer stood at the entrance, ushering Victor inside, then closed the door sharply behind him.
“Please forgive Fitz,” he started. “In his enthusiasm, he forgets himself.”
Victor nodded, but he didn’t know quite what to say.
Mr. Sauer led Victor to a small set of chairs with a table between them. The only place to sit between the rows of shelves.
“Your invention far outweighs the worth of your potential discovery,” Mr. Sauer said. “You shouldn’t speak about it so loudly or boldly in the company of inventors, doctors, and alchemists.”
“I didn’t know I was in the company of such,” Victor replied, crossing his legs to get his bearings. “I wasn’t informed of much at all.”
Mr. Sauer smiled. “Then I shall apologize for that, too. This, Victor Frankenstein, is a meeting of the Collectivists of the Unknown and Uncanny. We study and admire works on the fringes of our fields. I myself am a primary archivist for works, literature, and instruments. Fritz himself is an archivist of people, contacts you could say. He truly can’t help himself from finding them. ”
“And he found me,” Victor said.
“And he found you,” Mr. Sauer echoed.
Silence grew between them as Mr. Sauer observed him. Victor refused to shrink beneath his gaze.
“Victor, to what end do you work on this endeavor? Are you looking to save a dying loved one? Many dark alchemists are.”
Victor frowned. This was the second time someone had called him that, and it made his stomach turn uncomfortably. He tried not to think of his many small graves.
“I’m not a dark alchemist.”
“You are,” Mr. Sauer replied quietly. “You’ve drunk the elixir of curiosity and put hands to its making. A machine now exists that did not before . . . and you mentioned bodies. To remove the choice of sacrifice is dark indeed.”
“They’re only rats and they had to be dying first: I didn’t just choose randomly. Besides, I could destroy my work, my research, my lab, and myself if I needed to,” Victor insisted. “There is nothing that can’t be undone.”
Mr. Sauer looked at him hard under his dark eyebrows, with his dark eyes. “A thought or invention, once conceptualized never dies. It just appears again and again in time and place until it lives a proper lifetime and either evolves or falls from fashion.”
He stood and began pacing. “Your machine . . . it could be repurposed for the sake of medicine. It could be used to keep hearts of the living pumping, keep their lungs breathing, but that wasn’t why it was built.
Victor, some inventors build for the greatness of humanity, and some inventors—like you—build for the thrill of building itself. ”
Victor disagreed. This man didn’t understand him at all, but he held his tongue.
Mr. Sauer stopped and smiled. “Fitz is a strange man, a brilliant one. And the rest of us, we are inventors and collectors, all. But we build our identities and collections as the sentinels of progress, detritus of learned men guarded and enshrined by the curious. You, dark alchemist, can choose your path. To follow the requirements of your teachers and peers, land your apprenticeship in surgery or engineering. Or you can follow the charge that spurred your invention in the first place, join the ranks of men who believe in more.”
“More?” Victor asked.
Mr. Sauer opened his arms. “More can be anything you wish it to be.”
Victor took a moment to gaze around the room. “Is this library a part of your collection?”
Mr. Sauer grinned. “For what other reason would I bring you here?”
Victor stood. He was bold enough to walk past Mr. Sauer and to a bookcase to pull a volume from its shelves. “Chimera and the History of Organic Grafting. Is this real?”
Mr. Sauer shrugged. “Some of it. I’m a glorified librarian and aficionado. I don’t question my pieces; I simply enjoy them. Here: this other section might be more to your liking.”
Victor followed him across the library to an area of half-filled shelves by a window. This collection was meager, drenched in moonlight, sparse and pathetic in comparison to the rest.
“There isn’t much in your area of study. Much of this library is mystery of physics and exploration of the stars, creatures of God and their uses, illusions and psychology of hypnotism and influence, fantasy and the uncanny. Manipulation of the human form is . . . dark arts indeed.”
“Do you have that same opinion on blood transfusions, a thing that would have been considered obscene last century, that has since saved thousands of lives?” Victor chanced a snide remark.
Mr. Sauer didn’t reply to that. He just made a curious face.
Victor picked up a book and flipped it open. “This just looks like magic tricks. Witchcraft.”
Mr. Sauer shrugged. “I was informed it was notable, so I collected it. I don’t practice or create.
If it interests you, you can take it, but it must be brought back.
It’s a part of this library and belongs with the rest of it.
To be used for study only, of course. Practical application can be explored after graduation and placement with appropriate apprenticeship. ”
Victor put that book back on the shelf and pulled another. “If I borrow this, when would you need it back by?”
“Before I die, hopefully?” Mr. Sauer joked. “You can take only one book at a time so choose wisely. Mr. Smidt hasn’t returned a text on tree signal communication and hasn’t been allowed to borrow anything new in fifteen years.”
Victor scanned the twenty texts and settled on a slim book titled Brain, Spirit, Body: The Forbidden Arts.
“Do you by chance know any other . . . alchemists that I can speak to?”
Mr. Sauer surprised Victor with a laugh. “Now that’s the forte of Fitz, my friend. I can borrow an address book from him. When you’ve finished this volume, you can come by and make an exchange.”
“Thank you.” Victor tucked the book under his arm and looked up into Mr. Sauer’s eyes, crinkled and kind.
“Truly, thank you. You didn’t have to accept me in this place, and I understand it is a privilege. When do you think you’ll be available for guests again? I’d love to come back.”
“Anytime. I never leave these walls,” Mr. Sauer admitted. “You wouldn’t either if you were familiar with the powers that lay beyond them.”