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“Then give me the TV-pitch version.”
He smiles, but he still looks tired. Not tired. More like deflated. He was high on Liliane and the past and now they’re both gone.
“She murdered me,” he says finally. “In the spring of—if memory serves—1857.”
I look at him, waiting for him to go on. But he doesn’t.
“That’s it? She murdered you and now you’re best friends. What the hell happened back then?”
“It’s not something I’m proud of,” he says. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“I’ve killed pretty much everything in this world and the next that can be killed. I’m all out of judgment.”
He sits up with a wan smile on his face.
“Liliane and I lived and worked together for many years and were happy. But in the end, she suspected me of an infidelity.”
“Was she right?”
He nods.
“With the wife of a police official. She was lovely. And I didn’t much care for the police of that time. You must understand that.”
“I do. So, what happened?”
“I was old. I felt the years acutely. People died early and often badly back then. There were dozens of patent medicines at the time that promised revivification. But they were all frauds. I experimented with mesmerism. Electricity was all the rage. I experimented with animals. Old ones. Sick ones. To see if I could reenergize them. I experimented on myself with repeated shocks of different voltages to different parts of my body.”
“Did any of it help?”
“A few things. In small ways and not for very long. Finally I came across a formula in an obscure British pamphlet on folk medicine. I recognized some of the formulae as coming from ancient alchemical texts. They had been disguised to appear as simple nostrums. One in particular caught my eye. I’d never seen anything like it before, but I recognized most of the ingredients and thought it might make the ba
sis of what I was looking for.”
“And here you are. I guess it worked.”
He wags a finger at me.
“No. It didn’t. But I kept working with it. Modifying it to increase its potency. One particular batch demonstrated a dramatic effect. Overnight, the spots on my hands disappeared. My vision improved and I felt my old strength restored. But, as with my other successes, the effects wore off quickly.”
“Something like that could drive a person a little crazy.”
“It did. I think that’s what prompted my affair. The fear of death. The scent of the grave.”
“But you obviously came up with something that worked.”
“Never. I was a complete failure. Nothing I tried worked for more than a few hours. A day at most. I was despondent. And the more despondent I became, the more the affair intensified.”
“So, who figured out the secret?”
“Liliane. Just before she poisoned me.”
He leaves that floating in the air while he pours more wine.
“I had prepared a new potion from my most promising experiments. But it wasn’t a fast process. The potion had to age for a few days in a cool, darkened cabinet. I believe it was during those few days that Liliane learned of the affair.”
I try to picture him old and dying. I don’t like it.
“She spiked your formula, didn’t she?”
