Visualize the scene: intense darkness punctuated by bright flashes in a sort of chain reaction of electrical arcs and shorts—like lightning illuminating a dark landscape in fits and starts.

  I was looking into a dark, windowless cellar chamber with a low rough-hewn wooden ceiling. It appeared roughly thirty feet square, with the dust and cobwebs everywhere I would have expected. But what stunned me were its other contents: before me was a disheveled, but fully equipped, Victorian chemistry laboratory.

  Two broad, slate-topped lab tables held racks of test tubes, numerous glass-stoppered bottles of all manner and shapes, from thin and small to large and globular. Over a Bunsen burner was a retort with its long, downward-pointing neck used for distillation, as well as other paraphernalia a master chemist might employ for the separation or mixing and testing of various chemicals. Two of the larger bottles held strange black fish preserved in some liquid. Shelves on the wall above the tables and cabinets nearby held more such equipment, including peculiar items that appeared to date from the earliest days of electricity. There was also a fifty-gallon-drum-sized cast-iron cauldron with heavy iron screw handles tightly securing its lid. Atop this was a vintage hand-crank mechanism, perhaps for creating a vacuum within the cauldron.

  In med school I had seen photos of such places, with scientists like Marie Curie or Joseph Lister standing frozen forever in grainy black and white, caught amid valiant historic labors, surrounded by the cutting-edge equipment of their day. But of course it was completely unexpected to find such a laboratory hidden in the bowels of this unprepossessing country house.

  I found myself barely breathing. It was as though I had dropped back in time—or disturbed the dead. I imagined Dr. Victor Frankenstein stepping from the shadowy darkness amid these electrical flashes and shouting, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

  There was an unsettling air within this hidden laboratory, primarily inspired by the predominant object lying across the room. Easily three times the size of a traditional coffin, it looked like nothing less than a fantastic sarcophagus. It was not made of wood or stone but was an intricately fashioned copper chest with straps of a darker metal riveted around it. It was festooned with all manner of valves and gauges on its sides and top, with tubes and pipes connecting it to other Victorian scientific equipment nearby. It looked for all the world as if it had been designed by the wildly elaborate imagination of Jules Verne.

  Bear in mind that I absorbed all this in perhaps only four or five seconds. The impression was nonetheless riveting—accentuated by the electrical flashes, which abruptly ceased.

  The electricity went off, and I was plunged into darkness. Stumbling backward across the cellar and clambering up toward the top of the stairs, I experienced the irrational but visceral childhood terror of being certain that a horrifying nightmarish phantasm was right behind me and about to attack. Could I make it in time up to the dim light at the top of the stairs? Every fiber of my body strained toward it.

  I did, of course, arrive there. The lights were also out in the kitchen. I was breathless as I encountered a distressed Mrs. Hudson, who blurted out, “What happened?”

  “Some wires shorted out,” I gasped, trying to regain my composure, “But listen, Mrs.—”

  She was scurrying away, frightened and in a frenzy. “We must get the electricity back on!”

  I followed her out the back kitchen door to a porch where an old electrical circuit box was bolted to the wall. Cables ran from above it to the steam generators, which were still chugging away in their shed. The fog had grown thicker; the sky seemed very close upon us. The wind had also risen yet further and was whipping at our clothes and hair as Mrs. Hudson fussed to hurriedly replace a vintage fuse. I was still breathing hard from barely escaping the unseen monster of my fantasy.

  “Mrs. Hudson, what’s that chamber behind the wine racks?”

  The color drained from her face as though I had pulled a plug.

  “What?” she said, low and very distressed.

  “It looks like some kind of laboratory!”

  Was it just the wind or had the lady begun to tremble? She stammered, “I . . . I don’t know what you mean. Here—get the fuse in. We have to keep the electricity—”

  We both jumped when the new fuse immediately blew out. I understood the problem. “The wires must still be crossed down there. Get me a flashlight, and I’ll go back and—” I turned, but she caught my wrist in a startlingly strong grip. She pushed another fuse into my hands.

  “No! Try again here! The electricity’s never been out before! Hurry!” The wind continued to whip around us.

  I would soon discover that the circumstances I had unwittingly set into motion were now progressing with a life of their own. For at that moment, yet unknown to me, in the secret chamber below, the massive lid on the bizarre copper coffin had begun to open. There must have been a hiss of decompression and a gushing out of vapors as the heavy cover was pushed upward by a quivering, deathly blue-white, frost-covered hand.

  Outside on the porch, I was busy blowing yet another fuse. I could see this was going nowhere. I shouted over the rustling of leaves in the blowing wind, “It’s no good! I’ll go back down and uncross the wires.”

  But Mrs. Hudson was now nearing panic. She blew past me like a tornado through Kansas, saying, “No! I’ll do it.” I stood for a moment, blinking, befuddled by her strange behavior. Then I followed.

  She had grabbed a flashlight and was hurrying down the cellar steps by the time I caught up with her. Fortunately, my arrival was just in time to help her as she lost her footing near the bottom. She stumbled, twisting her ankle, and cried out.

  I shouted, “Mrs. Hudson! Wait! Let me—”

  “It’s okay, I’m alright,” she said, but when she tried to walk, her ankle failed. She collapsed backward, plopping down on the wooden steps.

  “Sure you are,” I said, as I lifted and ushered her to a decrepit wicker settee. Behind her on the wall I noticed an old-fashioned life preserver bearing the name SS Friesland. “Now, you sit right there, and I’ll—”

  I was startled by a scraping noise coming from the direction of the secret door. Next, there came the sound of a bottle breaking from within the chamber beyond, shocking us both. I grabbed Mrs. Hudson’s flashlight and moved toward the wine-rack entrance. I glanced back at her to be sure she was all right—and perhaps seeking a little moral support for myself. That glance proved to be a mistake, for when I looked forward again, I was staring into the totally white glaring eyes of a ghastly monstrosity.

  Imagine a gasping, sickly gray, corpse-like face with flakes of skin dropping from it into a long, scraggly, dark beard. Imagine that face covered with frost and violently shuddering, with brown mucus draining from its nose and over its blue, cracked lips onto its yellow teeth. Imagine it with long dark hair sprouting in all directions and flecked with dead skin.

  Imagine me screaming.

  2

  Indeed, I shrieked.

  I also quickly realized that this hideous creature, standing before me with his eyes rolled back into their sockets so that only the whites were showing, was convulsing in a grand mal seizure in his tattered, once white but now disgustingly stained robe.

  He had three-inch fingernails, curved like the talons of a great bird of prey, and his right hand was employing a huge 1890s syringe, such as I’d only ever seen in a medical museum, to inject something into his chest.

  Then he collapsed at my feet.

  Dead.

  Or so it seemed. In spite of my revulsion at his appearance, my medical training kicked in. I knelt beside him and pressed the tips of my index and middle fingers against his neck, feeling for a carotid pulse. I couldn’t find one. I pressed my left ear to the moldy, dingy garment over his foul-smelling chest. I heard no heartbeat. I shot a quick glance to Mrs. Hudson. She had risen shakily from the wicker settee and was staring wide-eyed with fear at this extraordinary figure, clutching her hands to her chest.

  I shouted to her, “His heart’s stopped! Help me!”

  Mrs. Hudson responded by exhaling a limp sigh, then she passed out and fell sideways onto the settee.

  “Oh, wonderful,” I grumbled to myself as I overlapped my hands on the grotesque man’s sternum and gave three sharp pumps. I was praying this would work. Fortunately, mouth-to-mouth CPR was no longer recommended. The notion of putting my lips to his drooling, mucous-covered mouth was beyond unappealing. I checked his carotid artery. Still no pulse. I pumped again, vigorously. This time he responded.

  He coughed wetly, wheezed, and—thank God—sucked in a breath.

  I saw that his tongue was still blue. His skin was icy cold to the touch. He was either in shock or headed that way fast. I turned an old trash can on its side and, lifting his legs, which I now saw were wrapped with gauze like an Egyptian mummy, elevated his feet onto it.

  He coughed, sneezed, gurgled, wheezed some more, and then struggled to reopen his sticky eyes. He blinked, trying to focus. His skin had a sallow, corpse-like pallor. I tried to gain an idea of his age, but given his sepulchral, crypt-keeper appearance, I could only guess that he was somewhere between 30 and 130. His eyes appeared gray, his nose was thin and hawklike. His lips were thin but looked firm, even as they were covered with brown, slimy mucous.

  Feeling that he was out of immediate danger, I grabbed a nearby stick and went back just inside the wine rack’s secret entrance. I used the stick to separate the crossed wires overhead. While there, I heard the faint sound of trickling liquid from the direction of the strange sarcophagus that I’d glimpsed earlier.

  I ran upstairs to replace the fuse. This time it didn’t blow. I grabbed my cell and dialed 911, but when I got their “due to unusually high call volume” computer voice, I decided not to wait and hurried back down to the cellar. Evidently, my fuse replacement had worked, because the single old-fashioned light bulb hanging from the ceiling was on.

  Mrs. Hudson was not—still out cold but breathing adequately. I grabbed a nearby tarp and spread it like a blanket over the bizarre quivering man on the floor. He had a peculiarly foul reek, far beyond the sourness of normal body odor. His eyes still struggled to focus; they crossed and uncrossed themselves in a manner that I might have thought humorous in other circumstances. He brought his long, shivering, taloned fingernails up near his face and was trying to focus on them with some amazement, like an infant discovering its hands for the first time.

  “Easy, just take it easy,” I counseled, adjusting the tarp over him.

  And then, with a rasping, unsteady voice and eyes wide and slightly crazed, he asked in what sounded like an elegant though inebriated British accent, “What . . . is . . . the year?”

  “2022.”

  “Ah!” he emitted in a small burst of jubilation, then coughed badly again. Gasping, he spoke with a drunken slur, “Mmmm . . . three years sooner than I’d imagined . . . but I shall adjust.”

  I glanced back in at the Victorian laboratory and the now open steampunk sarcophagus he’d emerged from. Vapors were still rising out of it. “How long have you been in there?”

  He smiled with a quirky smugness as he fingered and examined the length of his tangled beard, “Hmmm? . . . Since second November, 1899.”

  “Ah. Right,” I said, humoring him as I took his pulse. “Well, that’d make you the world’s greatest scientist.”

  He chuckled and coughed, still gasping. “Hardly. That honor . . . would likely still rest with my friend Louis.”

  “Louis?”

  “Pasteur of course.” He said it with a haughty flash, as though I were an idiot.

  I stared at him, deadpan. “Of course.” I nodded, continuing to indulge him. “So, you were friends with Louis Pasteur?”

  “Until his death . . . four years ago. No, wait . . . 1895 would be—”

  “One hundred twenty-seven years ago, yes.” I saw a shiver run through him and felt his pulse rate increase slightly.

  “Louis was a gifted man, although a fondness for garlic sometimes made his breath difficult to bear.”

  “Well, sure, naturally.” I was still trying to get a sense of exactly how insane this disgusting individual was.

  He was slowly regaining his breath. “Louis would have been . . .” (with his British accent he pronounced the word as bean) “. . . intrigued . . . by what I have accomplished.”

  “Oh, yes indeed, I certainly think he would have.”

  “Of course, he would have recognized that the biochemistry I created . . . was actually . . . very elementary.” He took a deep breath. His respiration was becoming almost regular. “I’d found a man nearly frozen solid in a drift of London snow . . . whom I realized had miraculously survived . . . because he had been thoroughly inebriated.” He wheezed and took in another long breath. “That gave me the idea . . . of lowering my body temperature and using brandy as an anti-freezing agent to keep my blood slowly flowing.”

  “Fascinating. Do go on,” I said. Ever more certain that I was dealing with a madman, I was determined to keep him passive.

  “I retarded my bodily processes through my long-developed skill at self-hypnosis,” he continued, with growing enthusiasm for his perceived triumph. “A mechanical device cooled and cleansed my blood and administered vitamin E”—he pronounced it vitt-a-min—“as an antitoxin.”

  “Vitamin E. Well, it seems to have worked.”

  “The key element, however,” he said with haughty pride, raising his taloned index finger to punctuate the importance, “is an extraordinary serum I derived from the blackfish of the Bering Sea, which every winter is frozen solid and then miraculously revives during the spring thaw. This serum also prevented my muscular system from withering by atrophy.”

  “Annnnnd why were you so sure this whole process would work on you?” I inquired.

  “Because I had meticulously researched it, experimented carefully—and primarily because it was all entirely logical.” Again his tone was gratingly derisive, as though he were casting pearls of “ob-vious” wisdom before swinish me. He pulled some long, mud-colored beard hair out of his mouth. “Ptoo! And of course I fitted the apparatus with a fail-safe device to inject a stimulant into my body if the electricity failed before the year 2025, when my carefully crafted, electrically powered chronometer was set to trigger my revival. But upon awakening I still felt weak and injected myself with more.”

  “You injected too much,” I said, picking up the large antique metal syringe and examining it. “You went into cardiac arrest. What, besides adrenaline, did you inject yourself with?”

  He smiled coyly; his eyes twinkled between their gummy lids. “With a formula of my own devising. I’m sure it’s all terribly antiquated by this modern age, but perhaps it might prove of some minor historical interest to the doctor for whom you nurse.”

  Still kneeling beside him, I leaned back onto my heels. “And just why do you think I’m a nurse?”

  “The professional manner with which you’ve been taking my pulse; your knowledge of adrenaline,” he rattled on with complete confidence, “the way you’ve elevated my feet to ward off shock; and the faint, but distinct, odor of medicinal alcohol on your clothing.”

  I frowned and tried to casually sniff the shoulder of my purple silk blouse. In doing so, I saw that Mrs. Hudson was just regaining consciousness. She struggled to pull herself into a sitting position. But when she saw the face of the man on the floor, her eyes went wide. She let out a small, fearful yelp, saying, “Oh dear God! It is him!” And she promptly fainted sideways onto the settee again.

  I stared at her, feeling a bit nonplussed by everything. I looked down at my snot-covered patient. “Um, would you mind telling me just who you are?”

  “Oh, come, come, my dear. No need to play games.” The smelly man struggled onto one elbow, facing away from me. I was grateful since his breath was like a cesspool. “By the dust on the hem of your skirt, I can see you’ve been in my laboratory, so it must’ve been you that took out the tin box which contains my identification.”

  “What are you talking about? I was only in there to fix the electrical wires. I never saw a—”

  He cut me off with a grumble, which, though gruff, also betrayed the first crack in his supremely confident demeanor. Getting unsteadily to his feet, he tottered past me on rubbery legs and went back into the secret lab.

  “Hey! Wait a minute!” I called out, but he ignored me.

  As I followed, his head snapped back toward me and he positively snarled, “Stop right where you are. Not another step!”

  I did as ordered. He also stood unmoving, except for his sharp, beady eyes, which first flashed toward the dark brick wall to my left, then scanned up, down, and all around the strange cellar. He asked, “Was that entrance to the laboratory already open or obvious to you?”

  “No. Not at all. I was getting a bottle of wine, saw the rack leaning forward due to an earthquake, and pushed it back until it slipped inward and—”

  “Enough!” he angrily cut me off. Scanning the chamber again, he muttered to himself, “This is not good.”

  I stood in the secret doorway and got my first thorough look at his full stature. He was slightly over six feet, though his narrow neck, wrists, and ankles were so excessively lean that he appeared even taller. His eyes, darting around the chamber, were piercing. His nose was decidedly hawklike. Overall, he had an intense air of alertness, but as he began to move one careful step at a time deeper into the laboratory, I saw that his concern had increased. Apparently, he seemed to sense something deeply amiss; something untoward had occurred in this bizarre chamber.