A Drop of Night(77)

We’re in a long hallway. It’s blazingly bright, and it only seems to get brighter up ahead. Wild, crazy elation bubbles up inside me. I feel weightless. I’m gripping Lilly’s hand, and she’s got mine, and we’re running so fast. We’re flying.

“Where are we going?” I shout.

“The boys!” Lilly shouts back. “I found the boys!”








Palais du Papillon, Chambres du Morelle Noir–112 feet below, 1790


I watch from the ceiling, my gown drifting about me like a pulsing black stain. A girl lies below me. Her body is fetal, her knees drawn up to her chin. A younger girl darts around her, trying desperately to drag the dead girl upright. I see her tears, watch her mouth open in a wail, but I do not hear that sound she makes. Everything is silent. Calm and warm, like floating on a pond, in a boat, in summer.

A small, pale man drifts into the scene below, his crimson coattails like twin fangs, or a dark cloven hoof. He is circling the girl on the floor, drawing nearer, nearer.

Aurélie!

It is Delphine. I hear her now. She turns her tear-streaked face and looks up at me, hovering just under the ceiling.

Aurélie, wake up!

The butterfly man leans down over the girl on the floor. His satchel lies open against the wall. He is lifting something out of it, a glass bottle tipped with a long, silvered needle. The bottle’s contents pool at its base, black and oozing.

Pain explodes in my arm. I am on the floor again, in the cage of my body, and something is buried in my wrist. White fingers are pressing, pressing a vile serum into my veins, and I see it wriggling below my skin like dark snakes, crawling into me.

A wretched burning sickness rises in my chest. Images flash before my eyes, nightmarish concoctions, empty faces and roiling skies, snippets of sound and color—


I return to consciousness with a gasp. I am lying on the floor of the boudoir, four empty glass bottles lined up beside me, and Bernadette, Charlotte, and Delphine huddled close by, their faces stricken, peering at me through their tears.

I see their arms. I see my own. We all bear the same marks: four red entrance wounds and something spreading away from them, stretching up through our veins like dark trees, branches and tendrils reaching toward our shoulders, our necks, our hearts.

“What has he done?” I whisper. I prop myself onto my elbows, fear rippling through me. “Where is Jacques? Where is he?”

“There are garments here for you to wear. Rise quickly, and change.”

I gasp, turning in the direction of the voice. The butterfly man stands by the door to the hall, statue still, crow-eyes fixed on me.

“They will help you go undiscovered.”

He gestures, and I see a stack of striped cotton, aprons and bonnets, spotted with age, folded neatly against the skirting board. Servants’ clothes, well-worn.

“Bring him back!” I cry out, and my voice is a savage, broken wail. “Where is he? What have you done?”

“Do not think of Jacques. Listen to me: you will return to the surface. You will leave France behind you. My masters have been given what they most desire. They will live twenty years longer, perhaps thirty. Then they will die. My discoveries shall be safe from them.”

I drag myself to my knees and raise my head. The pain in my arm is fading, but the veins are still darkened, purplish threads swollen grotesquely.

“What have you done to us?” I say to the creature. “What is this?”

Bernadette is beside me, crying and picking at her arm, as if she might somehow pull the veins from her flesh and fling them away.

“I have made you a vessel,” the butterfly man says. “A carrier. Were my masters to possess the secretion that I have created, they would wish to live a hundred years and a hundred more. I would be held captive to their foolishness, their greedy whims. They would live forever. They could never be sated.”

I stand and stagger toward him.

“And so I have put it inside your veins. You and your sisters shall be my strongboxes. You will take it far from here. The wondrous potion shall be passed down through generations, locked away in safety—”

“No . . .” I want to scream the word, but my throat closes. “We do not want your vile discoveries. You cannot do this! Take them yourself and leave!”

“Aurélie,” the butterfly man says softly,and his hands go to his face, to the cuts, his fingers moving quickly and nervously across the carved-open skin, as though he is trying to close them. “Were you not listening? I cannot escape. They build traps to keep me contained. They hang mirrors in every chamber to repel me, to remind of me of my place in this world. I know what would become of me were I to walk among your kind: I would be detested. I would be hurt and imprisoned, some curious wretched specimen, wrapped in chains and bound to a flaming pyre, or sunk to the bottom of the sea. They would call me a demon. I would have nowhere to turn. Here, at least, I am safe. They protect me . . .”

He trails off, his fingertips hovering over his throat, a sliver of white skin visible above his collar. He drops his hand abruptly, as if only now realizing what he doing.

“Do you know, they made me hideous so that I would be meek? Knowledge and power and eternal life I could have, but they would not give me beauty. They would not give me love or kindness. For then I would have everything. I would be perfect, cruel, a god among insects. I would grind my father to dust between my fingers and I would not care a farthing’s worth, because I would not understand suffering or longing or pain. And yet still I desire perfection. It takes but one glimpse of something to crave it forever. You will languish until you die or possess it, whichever day shall come first. Such is the folly of man. And such is my folly, too.”