“Uh, never mind,” Crawford said. He turned back toward the window, for he thought he had caught a flicker of movement in the dusky road. “Look, I’m not all that curious about this fellow. What do—”
“You have to be,” des Loges interrupted. “He’s the man responsible for all our troubles. He wanted immortality, and he was in Switzerland, so he was very aware of the stories about the Alps being the stronghold of the old gods, being in fact the old gods themselves, frozen in stone by the changed sunlight but not killed. He climbed the mountains at night, young Faust that he was, and he managed to awaken the mountains enough to talk to them, and he learned about their people, the nephelim, the pre-Adamite vampires, whose petrified bodies could still be found here and there, dormant like seeds in the desert waiting for the right kind of rain.”
Des Loges held up his withered hands, the palms about a foot apart. “They looked like little statues,” he said. “Little petrified ribs of some pre-Adamite Adam, waiting for the breath of life once more. And Werner found one, and had it surgically and magically inserted into his body, so that it could wake up on his account, in a manner of speaking, using his psychic credit. He became a bridge that way, an unnatural overlap, a sort of representative of both races at once, and he—the fact of him—both diminished humanity and revived the nephelim.”
“A Christ from the old gods,” said Josephine softly in French. “A sort of artificial redeemer-in-reverse.” Her hands lay limp in her lap, as if even the multiplication tables had failed her.
Crawford was peripherally impressed that she’d understood the old man’s speech, but his attention had been caught by something else, and he turned away from the window to face des Loges again. “Surgically inserted,” he said. “Where did he have that done? Switzerland, right?”
“Yes,” the old man answered. “You know something about that?”
Crawford remembered the manuscript he’d described to Boyd six years ago, the description in The Menotti Miscellany of a procedure for inserting a statue into a man’s abdomen. As he’d told Boyd, the manuscript had only survived because it had been mistakenly catalogued as a procedure for caesarian birth. “I believe I’ve read the surgeon’s notes.” Des Loges started to say something, but Crawford waved for silence. “This Werner—from Aargau!—what does he look like? Does he look … young? Healthy?”
Des Loges stared at him. “You have seen him, haven’t you? No, he’s not young nor healthy, though his condition is notably stable now that he’s in Venice, near the Graiae pillars. He can’t move around, but he can project himself, in images tangible enough to pick up wine glasses or turn the pages of books or cast solid
shadows in not too bright light, and these images can be as youthful-looking as he wants them to be. He can’t project them very far, though—no more than a few hundred yards from where his horrible old body is. And since 1818 that’s been Venice, in the Doge’s Palace by the Piazza San Marco. I believe that’s the only reason he had the Austrians take Italy, so that he could own the Graiae pillars and live in their preserving aura.”
“I met what must have been him—one of his projections—in a café on the Grand Canal,” said Crawford thoughtfully. “He wasn’t very secretive—he told me his name was Werner von Aargau.”
“I guess he hasn’t got a lot of need to be secretive,” put in Josephine. “The only thing he kept from you was—what, the fact that you were specifically furthering the nephelim cause, rather than just the Austrian one.”
“And the fact that the medicine I was supposed to give you would have killed you,” said Crawford.
“Of course it would have,” said des Loges, nodding so vigorously that Crawford thought his driftwoody neck would break. “The Austrians have derived their power from the alliance Werner forged with the revived nephelim, and so they do whatever they can to keep the nephelim happy—and this young gentleman’s … ex-wife,” he said, pointing at Crawford, “would be very happy to have you dead. These creatures genuinely do love us, but they are powerfully jealous.”
There was torchlight visible down the road now, behind the trees, and Crawford wondered if he should warn Josephine; but he decided that Byron’s servants could surely handle any visitors. Byron’s pistol was still in his belt, and he touched it nervously.
“Who are you?” asked Josephine. “How do you know all this?”
The very old man smiled, and his face had such a look of detestable wisdom that Crawford had to force himself not to look away. “My real name is François des Loges, though I’m remembered under another. I was born in the year Joan of Arc was burned to death, and I was a student at the University of Paris when I fell in love.”
He chuckled softly. “Near the University,” he went on, “in front of the house of a certain Mademoiselle des Bruyeres, there was a large stone—you saw it, sir, when you took advantage of my hospitality. The students must have perceived something of its … strangeness, for among them it was known as Le Pet-au-Diable, the Devil’s Fart. I never called it that—I had seen the woman it became by night, and I worshipped her. You have both experienced this.”
He smiled reminiscently. “When I was thirty-two I left Paris and the attentions of men, and for many, many years I wandered with her, a happy pet of hers. I was in the bosom of my new family, and I met other in-laws like myself—including Werner himself, the man who had reintroduced the two species to each other. The fours and the twos, under the gaze of the eternal threes.”
Crawford frowned and looked away from the window. “That’s the riddle, isn’t it? The one the sphinx asked us on the peak of the Wengern. What does it mean?”
“You don’t know?” Des Loges shook his head in wonder. “What did you do, just guess the right answer? You can’t have used the answer that legend claims was given by Oedipus—legend has it close, but not nearly close enough.”
Crawford tried to remember the wording of the riddle. What was it that walked on four limbs when the sunlight had not yet changed, and now is supported by two, but will, when the sunlight is changed again and the light is gone, be supported by three? “I thought the riddle might be a … a ritualistic demand for diplomatic recognition. A citing of something the two species had in common. So, instead of ‘man,’ I gave an answer broad enough to include the nephelim too—I said, ‘sentient life on Earth.'”
The old man nodded sombrely. “That was a lucky guess. You were lucky, too, to have got by the phantom that guards the threshold, the one Goethe refers to in Faust—'She looks to every one like his first love,’ Mephistopheles tells Faust. Actually, the phantom looks to every intruder like the person the intruder loved and has most grossly betrayed.”
Josephine had reddened, but was smiling slightly too. “So what does it refer to?” she asked. “The riddle, I mean.”
“Skeletons,” des Loges told her. “Your friend Shelley knows about it. Read his Prometheus Unbound: ‘A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres …'” Des Loges’s English was even worse than his French, to which he now mercifully returned. “Matter, every bit of stuff that comprises the world and ourselves, is made up of what the old Greeks called atoms—they’re tiny spheres, animated by the same force that makes lightning jump from the sky to the ground, or makes St. Elmo’s Fire flicker on the spars of ships.”
Corbie’s Aunt, thought Crawford, animating the hulks.