The Eternal Guest

5.

The garden's topiary and hedges turned the curving paths into a maze. No matter how many times I attempted to retrace my steps, I could not find my way back to that stuffy little room with the fire. Nor did I discover any door that had been left unlocked. I could not fathom why Emrick (or Vernon, possibly) felt the need to secure such a remote and inaccessible estate, but they had been thorough.

The only chink in Foxcroft's armor was a window left ajar. Feeling somewhat like the mischievous child I'd once been, I climbed up to it, using the natural footholds the substantial stone bricks provided. It was only four or five feet from the ground, and I was soon able to grip the sill for support to push the window open all the way. I hauled myself in and landed hard, shoulder first, before rolling into an ungainly heap on the floor.

My eyes must have grown accustomed to the low light while in the garden because even though the room was dark, I found no difficulty in making out its features. The large round table in the center with chairs placed around it. The cold hearth. A baroque chandelier. And even the rectangular shapes of the pictures on the walls.

However, my vision proved to be poorer than I believed it to be when my hip struck and overturned a small table. It crashed against the wood floor and scattered objects about my feet. Among the clamber was the distinctive sound of paper sliding on the bare oak.

Not one to bumble around another's home and leave a mess for the servants, I found a nub of a candle on the mantle and set to work straightening the mess.

The oblong Queen Anne I'd stumbled into was quickly righted, and I proceeded to gather a leather-bound volume and a collection of pamphlets and flyers. On my hands and knees, I pulled the loose sheets toward me and collected them in a pile until a lurid image on a yellowed handbill stopped me.

The woodcut depicted a group of well-dressed people holding hands around a table. White wisps of phantasms floated all about them. In large print, it declared: "Mesmeric Seance," and in smaller lettering, "Talk to spirits through the wonders of mesmerism." A quick glance through the other sheets revealed more adverts for mediums and seances. There were announcements for shows performed in halls to large audiences as well as practitioners who would come to your house and conduct private sessions. The pamphlets contained a host of accounts proclaiming the miraculous powers of various spiritualists. They'd been written by gullible rubes only too eager to spread the tale of how they'd been duped but were too ignorant to realize it.

What on Earth was Dr. Emrick doing with these?

My curiosity stoked, I could not help myself and opened the cover of the leather volume, which turned out to be a photo album. The first page held a large print showing Emrick standing with a group of dour men and women in front of a fireplace. Front and center, a woman stood holding a flamboyant pose. She was younger than the others and draped in a fringed shawl and a loose, robe-like black dress. The writing below it read: "Miss Eliza De Maurier — April 12, 1896."

The next had several members of the same group sitting at a table holding hands much the same way as in the handbill's drawing. Most appear to be enrapt by the proceedings, but one woman with a needle-sharp nose smiled at the camera. This alone might have indicated that the photograph had been staged. But surely any camera of the time period would have required a stock-still audience and an abundance of light.

I held the candle up and surveyed my surroundings. It had been taken in this very room—they'd sat at the same table that still dominated the space.

The pictures go on, showing one charlatan after another, while Emrick's circle of sympathetic participants grow and shrink with the seasons. Eventually the group transforms into an entirely new set by the last page, dated November 1912.

This was no mere dalliance with the supernatural. This had been an obsession.

For years, I had always assumed Emrick to be a rigid man of science like myself. The articles he wrote (although I often disagreed with them) showed a keen mind. And they limited themselves to details of compounds, chemical reactions, and biological observations. There was no hint of this claptrap.

Certainly, I may have lambasted his paper on the revitalization of necrotic tissue for being too theoretical and for failing to put forth any practical solutions to the matter at hand. But I also admired it. For, in the ink of his words, we were one—brothers in arms in the war against Death. Two soldiers deep in the trenches, seeking to push back the advance and recover the enemy's territory foot by miserable foot.

Together, along with a handful of brave souls, we would extend life. Restore damaged flesh. Regenerate vitality in limbs and bodies made moribund by injury and disease. We would find a way to keep Death at bay, and yes, even steal back those He'd already claimed.

But this strange association with the spirit realm tainted this great man's work. It attached itself to his theories and hypotheses like a blood parasite and infected them with the impropriety of delusion.

The years the seances took place were not lost on me. These forays all took place before he'd bent his mind toward the science of immortality.

Was his study then nothing but an extension of his superstition? His last resort after exhausting the efforts of fortune-tellers and soothsayers?

I did not expect anyone to come to this calling without suffering from loss. Yet, going so far down such a path hinted at some failing in character.

My own grief had been...had been...

I slammed a fist against the floor in a vain attempt to extinguish the image of poor Owsley from my mind.

As always, the young man—a child it now seemed—lay dying in the dingy French field hospital. Pain pulled the skin on his face taut and streaked it with sweat. When he looked up at me, he no longer resembled the strikingly handsome figure I first met on the transport truck from Reims. (We had sat by the back, and autumn sunlight gleamed on his tanned face and clung like gilding to his neatly parted hair.) The tortured figure before me was no longer a man brimming with vitality, but a spector moving between our world and the next.

I'd already removed both legs at the knee, but the infection had spread. Dark spiderwebs of poison slithered up his withered thighs.

The only recourse was to cut again. Take more of this beautiful man away. Steal his flesh bit by bit, and offer it in sacrifice, hoping the Reaper would leave the rest of him alone.

This man, who I'd spent so many nights sharing cigarettes and other things, was vanishing from this world piecemeal, and my hands were complicit.

In a rasp of a voice, he begged me to save him. And I said I would. I vowed that to him and so much more. I promised he would live. Return home to his parents and siblings. I even told him I would join him once this blasted conflict was over.

Owsley! Owsley! Owsley!

How often have I screamed his name into the darkness?

But I never disrespected his loss by involving conmen and grafters. No, I forged forward using him as my beacon, determined that one day some other young man would not be claimed so easily.

This was the only way I could ever repay my debt to him.