Chapter 15 Bennet’s Brights
Bennet’s Brights
I ’ve got to be quick now, Holzmann. I’ve so much to tell you, and so little time to tell it in.
How foolish I was to spend so much time writing about my little dreams and petty sadnesses, instead of sticking to the facts at hand.
All I can say is that if I do not have time to conclude the story, I pray you will come here and we can discover the ending together.
Or perhaps you’ll have to do it on your own.
It is so long now since I have had an answer from you. Am I pinning my hopes on a fantasy? It seems increasingly likely. But you are all I have to pin my hopes to.
There I go again, wittering on. Let us return to the matter at hand.
That long, broken gasp will live forever in my memory. It sounded desperate, like an animal struggling for breath. The next breath was deeper and louder, more of a groan.
Then it—he—sat up.
It was still almost pitch dark in the room.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw the silhouette of his dark form rise to sitting on the table.
There was something odd about the way he moved, as though the wrong muscles were drawing him upright.
If I didn’t know better, I was not sure I would have recognized that form as human at all.
Through dry lips, I croaked, “Pike?” That hulking shape turned toward me.
I remembered how Papa had been after the Procedure—confused but biddable. I took a step toward him, one trembling hand outstretched. “It’s all right, Pike. You—you fell, but it’s all right now, it’s—”
He surged to his feet. The net of copper wires fell all around him with a discordant clatter.
He stepped into the square of dim moonlight under the skylight, and I gasped.
His face was deathly pale, but his irises had gone utterly black. Fine black veins traced at his temples and down his throat. Thicker ones traced down the powder-white insides of his wrists.
His expression was not blank, exactly. It was empty . As though it was not capable of human feeling at all.
Then he caught sight of the sheaf of papers in my hand.
Without thinking about it, I’d scooped up the formulae again. They were clutched in my right hand. When Pike saw them, he began to laugh.
The hairs on my arms stood up. “P-Pike? It’s all right…”
He started toward me, still laughing that awful laugh.
It was the same laugh I’d heard when he’d taunted me with the formulae—God, only half an hour earlier—exactly the same.
And I do mean exactly . Same emotion, same intonation, even the same little falsetto ha!
at the end. It was as though he was trapped in the frame of mind he’d been in just before his death.
And that was exactly right, I saw. For suddenly his jaw tightened and he lunged for the papers.
I threw my hand out of his reach and stepped back.
He stumbled a little but righted himself and came after me.
That eerie chuckle still issued from his throat.
His face was frozen in a version of his mocking sneer.
I did my best to stay out of his reach, but he was taller and stronger, and it was only a matter of seconds before he had me cornered. His hand shot out and gripped my wrist with brutal strength. I tried to shake him free, but he had a grip of iron.
“Pike, stop, please!”
He made no sign of hearing me. His grip only grew stronger, sending bolts of pain up my arm. Dear God, he was going to break my wrist. “You can have them,” I gasped. “You can have them, just stop!”
He did not seem to understand me. His grip only tightened until I thought I would faint with the pain of it. His other hand came up to grasp my neck. He was going to kill me.
With my left hand, I groped behind me on the shelf for anything to fend him off with.
My fingers closed around a small stoppered bottle.
My vision and hope fading, I tried to strike him with it, but it only slapped weakly against his face.
I felt the stopper come loose and liquid dribbled uselessly down his face.
With my last breath, I whispered, “Stop!”
And Pike let me go.
I bent double, my head swimming as I gasped for air. When I raised my eyes again, I discovered something remarkable.
Pike stood there, a few respectable steps back from me. His sneer was gone. He wore instead a look of sweet amiability that struck me as somehow familiar.
Across his face, from forehead down to his nose and dripping into his mouth, was a damp splotch of cyan dye.
I was swaying on my feet, and he held out a hand in apparent concern. “Get away from me,” I snapped, and he scrambled away to the far corner of the room.
I narrowed my eyes. “Sit down.” He sat.
“Stand up.” He stood.
I tossed him a rag. “Clean your face.” He scrubbed off the dye as best he could. “Hop on one foot.”
He hopped so vigorously I was afraid he would wake the household. “All right. Stop. Stop.”
He stopped, and once more gave me that sweet, biddable smile that looked so peculiar on his face, when it belonged on—
Yes. It was Jane’s smile.
Even as I watched, though, it was draining away, leaving that blankness behind. Soon, I supposed, Pike’s own rage against me would return.
“Go to sleep,” I said. “Right now. Do not wake until I say. Can you do that?”
Immediately he lay down, closed his eyes, and went still. A careful examination revealed he was still breathing, but all other signs of life were gone. I could even turn his head and peel his eyelids open without rousing him.
Right. To work.
Even in the dark, it was only a moment before I found the tinder and lit the lamp. After procuring a little tin bowl and a handful of bottles, I set to work.
It was all guesswork, of course. Somehow, though, I knew I was on the right track.
Father had recovered from the Procedure on his own, but he’d been far less dead than Pike.
It seemed that if the subject was really dead, the Procedure brought his body back, but not his personality—or only a tiny, terrible fraction of it.
But the dye had worked on him just as I’d long hoped. As a distilled facet of humanity. Perhaps if I gave him the right doses in the right proportions, he could find himself again.
A dim picture was growing in my mind: Cook, after Michaelmas, making us a cake.
Every cake has a unique recipe—particular ingredients in particular proportions.
Each human creature is made up of a unique “batter”—hence the unique color of each chromatic serum.
But ingredients are not enough. You need the heat of the oven.
Or, in this case, the heat of electrical fire.
And adding foreign serum to a living creature had little effect and generally made them sick—a mixing bowl overflowing.
As it happened, I had a chroma serum derived from Pike himself. It was a deep black in color. Not very useful as a dye, but if it was the final step in revivification, it would be worth it. I unstoppered the bottle and held it to his lips.
Then I hesitated.
Suppose I succeeded. Suppose this Essence of Pike brought back the man I knew, exactly as he was. What then?
No doubt he would continue with his plans exactly as they’d been.
He would exploit my formulae. He’d go on to success and fame, and humiliate me every chance he got.
I could see a long, cold life stretching out before me, living in houses where I was barely welcome, with relatives who would rather I was gone.
And all the while, he’d be getting rich off what was rightfully mine. Mine.
Why bring that man back at all? Why not bring back a better one? He’d wanted to steal my work.
Now, he was my work.
I stoppered the black bottle and set it aside. I fought the urge to dash things into the bowl haphazardly. The essence of science is precision. I forced myself to measure everything precisely, noting the quantities in my little notebook, under a heading marked Pike batch 1 .
A generous dash of the cyan, and a few drops of the green. A little orange, some magenta, and a single drop of his own black.
“Wake up,” I said. “Drink this.”
After the dyes flowed down his throat, the effect was instantaneous. His expression stayed mild, but a spark of humanity returned to his eyes. He looked about the room, then widened when his gaze lit on me.
“Do you know me, Pike?” I whispered. “Do you remember me?”
He shook his head and made me a slight bow, as though to say “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
I fought the mad urge to giggle. “Can you speak, sir?”
He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. He tried again—this time he gave a sort of strangled groan, which he cut off with an embarrassed cough.
Right. Manners but no speech. That would never do. Not for what I had in mind. “Sit down again, Pike. I’ll be with you presently.” He cocked his head for a moment and I thought he might refuse, but then he hopped back up on the table.
He was still naked, I realized. I’d have to do something about that soon. First, I turned back to my bowl.
What would bring back the power of speech? Cleverness, perhaps. And what had I extracted from someone clever?
This was no time for modesty. I tipped a generous spoonful of my own crimson dye into the bowl, passed it to him, and said, “Drink.” He did so.
This time, it seemed to hit him harder. He closed his eyes and winced, shaking his head as though to clear it. Then he opened his mouth and said, “Blimey.”
Triumph washed over me. “You can talk!”
He looked at me. “Who are you? Who am I ?”
He stood up. I guided him back down to sit again with a hand on his shoulder. “You are Mr. Septimus Pike,” I said. “You are a prosperous trader of dyes.”
“Dyes?”
“Yes. That is one of your duties. To trade and grow rich.”
“My… duties,” he said slowly. “Have I others?”
My heart was pounding in my throat. “You have three,” I said. “To love me, obey me, and marry me. You are to be my husband.”