The Monster's Wife(29)

He did not answer and she did not wish him too. She watched him pick up a pin and poke it into the bird’s back, feeling a familiar tingle, remembering the frog on the board, its golden eyes flickering to life. This was what he did: bring things back to life.

He joined the pin to a fine tube, the end of which he poked into the neck of a bottle of green liquid. To the cockerel’s throat, he fastened one of the delicate ceiling wires. All the while, pictures flickered through her mind’s eye - her own neck, stitched and prone, poked with a pin, the fluid dripping in from a bottle; the dead girl, sunken eyes flicking suddenly open, gold and huge as a frog’s.

Her head swam. She’d thought she was lucid, but everything was still laudanum-bright, loud and confusing. Scrubbing her face with her hands, she tried not to hear the crackle of energy filling the room with unspoken anger. Her eyes flew open just as Victor picked up a syringe and poised the needle over the rooster’s heart. He plunged the point in hard.

The cock’s eyes fluttered open and swivelled in Oona’s direction. He puffed up his feathers, raised one wing and blinked his eyes. The actions were discombobulated and oddly mechanical, like the keys that plunged up and down on the little harpsichord outside the music room.

He stretched his legs, flapped and struggled up awkwardly. It was like watching the puppet show at the Hamnavoe Fair, when the wooden limbs became tangled in strings that jerked and twitched uselessly. All at once he righted himself and flapped down to the floor. He strutted, a living cockerel once more.

Her taut limbs loosened and her fizzing anger melted at the sight. She smiled to herself. And death hath no more dominion.

“Zu sehen!” cried Victor. “I am not so bad as you are thinking.”

Oona sat on a wobbly chaise longue with a paint-flecked dust sheet flung over it. Orpheus slept on her lap and Victor poured liquids together into bowls with long noses that pointed downwards, stirring them with a long rod. He wrote notes in his journal, held glass rectangles to the light. She watched him work.

She no longer knew whether she wanted to stop him. Nestling close to the warm body Orpheus, she was content to watch him. He was so intent and at the same time abstracted. At times he poked his tongue between his lips in concentration. At times he hummed to himself. Always, whatever he was working on, he left beakers, bottles of chemicals and specimens on the edges of tables so that they seemed certain to topple off and break.

She had never seen anyone like him. His knowledge alone was fascinating. She rested her head on the arm of the chaise longue and closed her eyes, wondering whether he had brought the dead girl to pace the cobwebbed attic. Would it be wonderful to wake into such an afterlife after long and dreamless sleep? Would it be like Heaven? She imagined herself rising from the damp of the earth, breaking the grave soil from below, risen as Lazarus to a new beginning.

She woke to the muted cry of a clock chiming nine. Victor was gone. The room was dark except for a single candle stump casting weak light onto the billiard table. Orpheus lay on her lap.

When she lifted him down, the cold rushed in to the damp space where he’d slept. Her left foot was all pins and needles. She stood, clay-footed, stretched and yawned. Papers lousy with inked words and diagrams cloaked the desk and escritoire and floor. Now was her chance. She could pry, spy, neb to her heart’s content. Why didn’t she want to?

Because Christ has come back from the dead.

She tiptoed to the door, calm spreading through her as if, after long illness, she had woken refreshed, as if this strange house was her real home.

And death hath no more dominion.

She was almost at the door when she saw a dark paw print on the floor, a dry leaf shimmering in the candle’s dying light. She bent to look at the small, fallen thing that straddled a gap between floorboards.

It was the frog from a few days before. She knew it at once from the brown mask framing its golden eyes and the ink-splatter patterning the fine bones of its back. Quite dead, it lay in a pool of its own thin blood, its soft tongue bulging. A fly sat on the frog’s head, its feet running over its red eyes again and again in a ritual of ablution.





25


Oona hurried into the light of a yellow moon, perfidious as a goat’s eye. Her calm mood was shattered so utterly, she couldn’t recall it. Waves of fever broke on her skin as unwanted images rushed in: the fly rubbing its hands on the frog’s head, black-hearted as a graverobber hunched over a corpse; her own face, sunken and motionless, shadowed by the candles of a wake.

Whatever good Victor meant to do was still subject to rot. She was certain now that he did mean good to come of his work, but to give life back only for it to be snatched away again seemed worse than death itself.

Without thinking, she began to run through the scattering of crofts towards the beach. She was halfway down the path when she saw tendrils of smoke rising up and heard the tinkle of girls’ laughter.

She slowed and listened, scuffing her feet on the dirt as she went. Something was happening, something nobody had told her about. Blood knocked at her eardrums, wild with that fear that rushed in on her sometimes – that everyone laughed at her in secret.

She could see the red tongues of a bonfire now and smell roast meat and cider. They hadn’t seen her yet, the ghost at the feast. Loud talk drifted towards her, foolish talk that grew from drink.

Two boys fenced with driftwood sticks. “Tis how we’ll fight those Frenchies! Death to ‘em all!”