Yorkshire, 1874
DO NOT THINK THAT A YOUNG boy cannot go mad. Bourgeois perceptions of childhood innocence frequently interfere with the harshness of reality.
The boy was already a genius of ill temperament—a very different breed from the other boys his age, whose thoughts and ambitions were of a far less dangerous nature. Everyone who knew him regarded him as strange and kept their distance. A dark-minded youth who struggled to find a balance between the expectations of moral society and his own transgressive imaginations. A gothic double of his brighter-dispositioned grandfather, his mother would say with a smile upon her face.
Alas, that smile had become a rather rare sight after the murder of his siblings. His mother had then hanged herself quite efficiently.
The boy had nothing but stories. Stories of fire and brimstone and the wrath of an angry god. Stories of an absentee father, whose travels mattered more to him than his family. As the boy aged, his imagination grew more evil and more desperate.
Out of pure boredom, he began to pore over his father’s research. The work that had become more important to his father than his own dead family and his one living son, practically now orphaned. Soon this research, the source of his misfortune, had become the single preoccupation of the boy’s greatest fantasies and nightmares.
Maybe it was not madness at all but an obsession. Yes, an obsession. Locking himself in his room, refusing the company of boys his own age, his singular purpose was to learn the terrible secrets his father had discovered during his travels. His father had hidden his greatest secrets inside that blasted journal of his, which he always kept on his person. But the research locked in his safe was a good start. Deducing his father’s codes had taken many months; his father and grandfather, both great minds, tended to use different ciphers for different research works. But with tenacity the boy managed to interpret portions, cross-referencing his own translations against his father’s notes. There was one word, however, that gripped his imagination.
Hiva.
It seemed to be the only word that was not some kind of code, nor some other earthly language. Next to the first appearance of the word, his father had drawn a symbol the boy recognized: the Ouroboros. The chaos serpent, whose breadth stretched so long, it could embrace the earth and still swallow its own tail. And swallow the earth too, perhaps.
Swallow the earth. Yes, the earth was at stake in this great and dangerous game. The earth itself was at the center of this mystery, the boy was sure of it. And this Hiva was the key to everything. After learning what he could from the writing he’d deciphered, the boy could feel that one single truth in his bones.
Now the true test of his theory would be the broken white crystal in his red-flushed hand.
It was a heart. That was what the research had said. A heart ripped from the body of a goddess. Broken. Mending.
It was 1874. Dark clouds howled behind the high windows of his father’s study. The moonlight, slipping between the drawn ivory curtains, pooled over the grand chestnut desk behind him. The clear crystal stone, no bigger than his fist, emitted a soft aquamarine glow, indents carved around its length like deep trenches. That old man had been in Paris for the year, coming back home so irregularly that he had no idea his son had already discovered the combination to his safe. There the boy found other treasures, but none like this crystal heart.
And so one cloudy day, the boy put on his frock jacket, slipping the crystal into one of its hidden underside pockets, and went out of his manor to central London.
It was the last day of the international fair, you see.
The crystal heart was the key. The boy’s hypothesis was correct. His father’s writings had already made clear the existence of the supernatural. But not even his father could have predicted what would come next. Here, inside the exhibit, a miracle would soon take place.
He’d needed her skeleton. The crystal heart had been dormant for so long. Even now that it seemed whole again, healed from its damages, it needed a spark—a push. Perhaps she needed her bones to build her flesh again. It was a wild guess, born from desperation.
This gallery, one of several in the colonial exhibition hall, was filled with clothing, raw materials, machinery, and fine art from Calabar and other surrounding regions in West Africa. They were in display cases lined around the room beneath a vaulted wooden ceiling; a stream of midday light leaked through the window. Flora and fauna surrounded maps and pictures of the region and its peoples, frozen in time for the education of South Kensington’s spectators.
But even the boy had found it gaudy that they had included a human skeleton among the animal bones, front and center in a glass case as if in competition with that macabre display of human organs in Paris’s Museum of Man.
The boy’s father had once told him that international expositions were nothing more than a spectacle showcasing a country’s power: scientific invention and machinery, art, commercial goods, and treasures stolen from the colonies. The annual show in South Kensington, inspired by the universal expositions in Paris, was meant to display English material culture to the world, their art and industry. But with its paltry exhibits—pottery and jewelry; instruments and machinery both ancient and new; textiles and ivory taken from India; plants and flowers from Australia; paintings from France—the boy had regarded each of the galleries in disdain because he knew the truth: it was not industry, its new discoveries and inventions that would advance civilization.
It was this girl. This golem. She was the discovery that would bring about revolution.
With tiny, shaking hands, the boy brought the crystal up to the girl’s skeleton. His plan was to place it within the rib cage.
But wondrous fate would have other plans. For elsewhere on the exhibition grounds, a secret experiment was brewing. He was right. The crystal heart needed a push. It would only be years later that the boy would learn the push’s name: the Helios.
Before he could get near the skeleton, a wave of energy blasted him back, knocking him down to the floor. The crystal heart flew out of his hands. The earth rumbled. It seemed like the ground would shatter. An earthquake? An explosion? The boy shut his eyes and covered his ears, waiting for the worst of the tremors to subside.
And when it did, when he dared to look again, he saw something wondrous.
The girl had been reborn in front of him.
Not a girl. A goddess. A Titan. That was what the boy remarked to himself as he stared upon the sight of her resurrection, both horrid and wondrous. In front of her skeleton, still hanging inside a shattered cage, she looked at her own hands and body, almost fearful.
It was as his father had feared from his research.
Once her small mouth had finished taking shape, harsh-sounding breaths shuddered up her newly formed throat, escaping from the tips of her raw, bloody, heart-shaped lips, but she didn’t scream. Her wordless gasp may have been more of a test—a test of her lungs ballooning in her ribs for the first time, perhaps, in decades. Air passing through her small, rounded nose, released in slower and slower intervals. One test, one breath after another, after another.
She was Galatea, stunning in beauty. A doll come to life.
She sat naked and shaking on the ground. The boy stared, his face flushed, having never seen a young woman in such a state. His scientific mind was already drawing conclusions and writing out his next steps from the perfect results of his experiment. But this was soon drowned out by the cooing captivation of the weaker, mortal part of his brain.
This woman. She was of average height, but not nearly so mundane. Dark brown eyes, wide and round like a deer’s, swallowed him up.
The boy stared up at her, not with fear, but with adoration.
The forbidden knowledge of eternal life was the bane of alchemists of the previous centuries. His grandfather had written in one of his published works that the pursuit of the secrets of the world was nothing more and nothing less than a celebration of a scientist’s unquestioning trust in the exactness of his theories. Like Frankenstein and Coppelius from his favorite childhood stories—each possessed a kind of arrogance that flew in the face of society’s moral laws and even the very will of the heavens.
But the boy no longer believed in that will. Now it was this demon he believed in.
“Are you a goddess?”
Had she heard him? Or had he only asked the question in his own mind? There were so many things he wished to tell this girl. First, his name: Adam Temple. Second, the misfortune of his life: that he had no one. That he believed their meeting was fate.
But beyond his name, how should he introduce himself to her? As her master? Her creator? Her savior? Her partner? Her friend? Her servant?
Confusing feelings mixed as he stared at this woman newly born into the world, innocent as a babe. Feelings that had never quite sorted themselves out, even as she disappeared from his presence. Even as he’d aged and began to search for her. Even as he’d joined the Enlightenment Committee with the intention of returning her to her true purpose.
It wasn’t until he saw her on the London Bridge eleven years later. Finally, her true self. Finally, the goddess she was meant to be, her body wrapped in the sunset sky, her hands freshly stained with the ashes from her kills. It wasn’t until she left him broken and screaming for her in the night that he realized what he would have told her in the exhibit that day.
“My name is Adam Temple. And I need you. Please… need me too….”
Some might accuse him of being in love with death, and they would be correct. But death and Hiva were synonymous. Iris and Hiva were one. He loved Iris. He needed her as much as he needed this wicked world that had taken his family from him to end in a bloody haze of fire.
It was all one and the same.
This fact became clear when he ordered his carriage driver to take him to Westminster Hospital to see a boy he’d only glimpsed for a short time months ago. A boy who had arrived in London inside Van der Ven’s home along with the other Hiva. His utter devotion and concern for Hiva: Adam had never forgotten it. He thought about it during quiet nights, and each time it disturbed him. The fanatical glee and torment warring in the boy’s eyes. It haunted him at strange moments.
He’d learned what had happened to the boy after Bellerose’s gruesome costume ball. And so he went to him in the dead of night. No visitors were allowed, but he was Lord Adam Temple. He was allowed anywhere. The doctor opened the door to his room.
The boy, Tom Fables, was paralyzed. He would never be able to walk again, the doctors told him. It mattered not to Fables. All that mattered was that his Hiva would soon come for him.
“He can’t do anything without me,” Fables told him, once the door was closed and he and Adam were alone. “He’s mine, and I’m his. We were born to be together, Hiva and me.”
The American’s smile drooped to the side. Saliva began to drip from his lips. Adam recoiled. His right arm still pained him from when Iris had broken it. It was in a sling strapped to his chest. Fables looked at the bandage for a while until his eyes became unfocused.
“Where is he?” Fables asked, like a child at Christmastime asking for his presents. “Where’s my Hiva? He hasn’t left me. I know he hasn’t. He’ll come for me!”
“Why do you love him so?” Adam asked quietly, his hands clenched around his bowler hat. When the American’s eyes widened with frenzy, he dreaded the answer.
“Why do I love him? He’s the answer to all my dreams. He’s going to save me from my terrible life. He’s going to punish all my enemies. He’s proof that there’s a God out there who cares. Proof that I’m not alone. I love him. I love him. I love him….”
He repeated it again and again, each time a hammer against Adam’s skull, until Adam couldn’t take it anymore.
He and I are not the same. Adam turned from him and rushed out the door, clenching his teeth as Fables’s mad cries echoed through the hospital hallways. I am not him. My love is different.
Yes. He loved Iris. Her tenacity. Her courage. Her beauty. The curve of her body. The mischievous glint in her big brown eyes when she was about to do something daring. None of these things he loved remained, not in this Hiva who’d returned so suddenly with the trumpet wail of an eclipse.
But Iris was Hiva. Hiva was Iris. He needed her to remember her power. To respond to his wishes. To love him so that they could burn down this world together.
Every Adam needed his Eve. Under his direction, she would destroy the world and rebuild it in the image he desired.
His love was not madness, and he would soon prove it.