Flappers & Fiction

When chemist Baird unearths a decayed notebook in the depths of the Belle Marie mine, he drags his roommate Buchanan into a mystery that began years ago in Germany. As the two men piece together the fragments of a dark scientific experiment under the flickering oil lamps of Iron Mountain, a terrifying possibility emerges. The governess they both admire may be more than she seems. She might be the living proof of a miracle that defies death itself.

Dr. Zwingli Zschorer is a man who has conquered death itself, and the proof lies sleeping in the next room: his niece Babette, restored to life by an alkaloid called ichorine on the night of February 7, 1872. But when a Giessen newspaper brands him a quack, wounded pride drives him to prove his miracle a second time, before witnesses, using the same child. Will he achieve a second miracle or something far worse?

On a Sunday afternoon in 1886, a mining analyst named Baird found shattered Bohemian glassware on a cobwebbed shelf in a cabin near the abandoned Pennekawba mine. Scratched into the glass: “Z. Z. An. LXXI.” Months later, deep underground beside a rock pile that entombed dead miners, he pulled a moldy notebook from a buried jacket. The diary inside belonged to a German scientist who believed he could resurrect the dead. His final entry may surprise you.