Accursed (23 page)

He was stout of heart and of body, and excellent in a scuffle. Good with his fists. William had come to think of him as not just a servant, but also a comrade in this war he and Tamara had undertaken.

From time to time William heard the muffled sound of Farris’s voice as he coaxed the horses. In the distance, there came the tolling of church bells. The buildings they passed were gray shapes in the deeper darkness, looming up out of the fog. There were street lamps on the busier roads, but their illumination was broken into diffuse streamers of light that shot through the thick blanket of mist and accomplished little.

Without warning, he heard Farris call to the horses, and the rhythm of their clopping hooves began to slow, causing the carriage to roll to a stop. The coach shifted as Farris climbed down from his seat, and William saw him through the window. He waited while Farris lowered the step, then he swung the door open, descending from the elegant interior of that conveyance that had once belonged to his grandfather, and now was a part of his father’s estate.

“Master William?” Farris prompted.

He had been staring into the fog, distracted by the diffuse light of a nearby lamp. Another carriage clattered by, this one a newer, sleeker coach with only one horse, and he wondered idly where its occupant was off to. Some party or other, he was certain. A life that ought to have been his, had other duties not taken precedence.

“I’m sorry, Farris. I seem to have been lost in my head for a moment.” William took a long breath and then instantly regretted it, coughing out the stink of the London night. He tugged his coat more tightly around him, hating the damp, and nodded to his servant. “Well done.”

“Not at all, sir,” the man replied dutifully.

There were few others out on the street this evening. Other parts of the city might be busy, particularly the pubs and theaters, but thanks to the fog, there were no casual strollers here. It took William a moment to orient himself, gazing about at the façades around him.

They had stopped at the northwest corner of Red Lion Square, just in front of the last address on Orange Street. The windows would offer a view of the square, which likely explained why the building seemed in generally better repair than its neighbors.

William started toward the front door of No. 73 Orange Street.

“Sir, are you certain you wouldn’t like me to accompany you?” Farris asked, keeping his voice low. Despite the precaution, though, the fog seemed to cause his question to echo loudly.

“Thank you, Farris, but no. I’m certain I can deal with whatever I might encounter. And Her Majesty has promised to remain close at hand.”

“Very good, sir. Of course.” But his expression remained stern.

William smiled. Much as he had grown used to the presence of specters, Farris was still unsettled by Bodicea. William thought it the combination of her nudity and her royalty, in almost equal measure, and sometimes he thought the latter brought Farris more discomfort than the former.

Bodicea had begun the journey with them, but shortly before they had arrived she excused herself and disappeared into the ether. Nevertheless, he was sure she would return.

William strode up to the door and raised his fist to knock. There was only one door, but at least three separate flats lay within. He had been told that David Carstairs retained rooms on the second floor, but it occurred to him that if Carstairs was somehow involved in whatever had transformed Frederick Martin, the last thing he ought to do was announce his arrival.

So William glanced about to see if he was observed—almost an impossibility in the fog—and then, though it pained him to perform even the slightest criminal act, he whispered a simple spell. He ran his fingers over the doorknob, and it swung inward several inches.

The hallway inside the door was so dark that it gave him pause. He drew a long breath, then stepped inside. When he closed the door behind him, he was swallowed by the blackness. A shudder went through him as he strained to hear the movement of anyone who might be about the premises.

Perhaps a bit more caution is in order,
he thought.

Carstairs had given the Martins that strange Indian idol that had cursed Frederick. Twisted his soul, mind, and body. There was evil in him now, and there was no way to know if Carstairs’s excursions to India had produced other such figurines, or if he had known from the start what it would do to Frederick.

William disliked situations that presented so many questions, yet so few answers.

Closing his eyes, he focused his thoughts there in the dark, and took a moment to search his memory. A smile touched the corners of his mouth. The spell was one of the very first he and Tamara had learned in the days after their grandfather had been murdered. As such, it came to him easily.

His fingers contorted and he swept them from side to side, drawing odd geometric shapes upon the air. He opened his eyes even as a blue glow shimmered to life around him, dusting him with sparks of magic like a light snowfall. It was a protective ward, used to defend against magical attack. There was no way to know if it would keep him from being tainted by whatever dark power Carstairs had brought back from India, but without deeper knowledge of the evil he was facing, it was the best protection he could conceive.

Emboldened now, he moved forward. In that dim light, he passed the door to the first-floor flat and went to the stairs at the end of the hall. As he ascended, treading lightly, he listened again for any sound that might indicate that someone was at home, but the entire building seemed quiet. There wasn’t even the scratch of rats in the walls.

A tightness formed in William’s chest. A touch of excitement, mingled with fear.

He tried to keep his breathing steady as he arrived upon the second-floor landing. The door to 73B was closed, but an orange light gleamed in the crack underneath. Once again, William chose expediency and caution over propriety. In fact, it disturbed him how accustomed he was becoming to eschewing manners. But not so much that it stopped him from doing what was needed.

With a simple caress of his fingers, the door sprang open a fraction of an inch. He steadied himself, then pushed it wide, stepping into the archaeologist’s sitting room. William peered quickly about, noting the lamp that was burning on a desk in one corner and the documents that were scattered about the floor. A chair had been overturned. Alarmed at this sign of conflict, he raised his hands; the blue glow around him crackled as he channeled some of the energies into a form that could be used for offense.

He paused and waited.

After a few moments, he let out a long breath and frowned. Why had he not been challenged? With the lamp still burning, the flat was surely not empty, and his entrance couldn’t have gone unnoticed.

Closing the door softly behind him, William ventured farther into the flat. He noted several other rooms, but the mess in the sitting room drew his immediate attention. As he moved toward the desk, however, the lamplight flickered, and he became aware of the many artifacts on shelves and side tables around the room. It reminded him of his grandfather’s chambers, laden with souvenirs of his stage shows and his travels.

But the mementos in Carstairs’s sitting room were not so playful. They were, in fact, gruesome. Or at least they seemed so to William. There were statues and carved idols representing the various deities from Hindu mysticism. Though William knew little about the colony in India, he was aware that the gods worshiped there often looked terrible, but in fact represented more benevolent concepts.

Gazing upon these artifacts now, though, there seemed only to be death and cruelty. A hideous woman with many arms and massive, swollen breasts wore a garland of flowers and held a cleaver in one hand. Another statue showed a similar goddess, adorned with a wreath of snakes and bones, seated upon a corpse. She was clad in purple and yellow, and had three eyes.

Three eyes that seemed to glare at him with savage accusation.

William took a deep breath and a step backward. There were many others. Other deities. Some seemed less cruel. There were tiny carved things, many of which seemed to represent lesser demons, though none like the toad-thing Frederick Martin had.

The blue glow of William’s protective ward combined with the flickering lamplight as he bent over to retrieve some of the scattered papers.

William Swift was a businessman. He knew sales records when he saw them. There were references to Carstairs’s travels to India, as well as items he had brought back with him. Yet as William began to sift through the papers, gathering them up while he did so, he found no documentation for the importation of the sorts of items that decorated the flat. Rather, there seemed only bills of lading for the importation of tea, coffee, and other common goods.

Yet Carstairs had sold artifacts, as a glance around the room easily confirmed. So where the records referred to simple foodstuffs, the truth was that the scoundrel was smuggling archaeological treasures from Calcutta to London.

There were other papers as well. Things unrelated to Carstairs’s enterprises. Sketches done by a crude hand, of symbols, of gods and goddesses, of monsters, all of which appeared to be related to the archaeologist’s research into the Hindu tantra, the magic of that faith. Some of the designs were beautiful; some of the sketches were frightening. One depicted a goddess holding a severed head, crouched upon a pile of skulls with her knees splayed, as though about to give birth.

A shiver crept spiderlike up William’s spine.

A sound reached him, then, a wet sucking noise that came from behind him. Frowning deeply, almost afraid to turn his back on the effigies in the living room despite his protective ward, he tore himself away. There was a small dining area beyond one door, and a tiny kitchen adjacent to it. Both were wholly unremarkable. William glanced through the next door, which opened into the bath. He presumed the damp noise he had heard had originated there.

At least until he opened the final door, which led into the bedchamber.

Heavy curtains had been pulled across the windows. The stench of human waste befouled the air. Rows of candles had been set in odd patterns upon the floor, but most had burned down to nothing, and puddles of wax were cooling. A few had not completely melted, and their flames guttered and danced as the opening of the door disturbed the rank air.

David Carstairs lay naked on the bed, curled into a fetal position. He shuddered and wept softly, and clutched in his arms a broken statue not unlike the others in the sitting room, save that its face and body were both beautiful and elegant, its surface as black as night. The goddess’s hair was disheveled, and she held a trident in one hand. The other had been snapped off by the man’s clutching grip.

“Mr. Carstairs?” William ventured, voice low, as he stepped into the room. He raised his left arm and pressed his coat sleeve to his nose to block the stench. “David?”

The archaeologist flinched at the sound of his own name, and his face contorted as though he was in pain. Then he began to chant softly under his breath, and he rocked more forcefully.

“Om Hrim Krim Kapalini Maha-kapala-priye-manase kapalasiddhim me dehi Hum Phat Svaha,”
he murmured once, then began again.

William took another step nearer. The blue glow of his protection spell cast a strange hue upon the man’s flesh, or so William thought at first. Then he realized that it wasn’t only his magic. Carstairs’s flesh was tinted green.

He blinked, staring at the man. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at. The wet, sucking sound he had heard from the other room had not come from the bath, but from David Carstairs’s neck, where damp gill slits puckered and gasped at the air.

“Dear Lord,” William rasped as he backed away a step.

At the mention of the Christian God, the archaeologist opened his eyes. There was a thin membrane over them that retracted after a moment, revealing black, gleaming orbs. His lips peeled back from teeth that seemed to sharpen even as William looked on, and his tongue split, thrusting out in a forked hiss.

The idol shattered in the archaeologist’s hands, and now the fingers began to lengthen, claws curving into hooks. Connective tissue grew up between the fingers, pulling the flesh into amphibious webbing that had not been there only moments before.

Fragments of the Indian goddess showered onto the bare mattress, or onto the floor.

Oh, you idiot,
William chided himself, for he now saw what he had interrupted. Carstairs had been clutching the goddess, chanting some kind of mantra, doing his best to hold off this transformation, this magical curse. And William himself had broken the man’s concentration.

The man began to shudder violently on the bed, its frame squeaking, and in moments he was hardly a man at all anymore. So entranced was he by his own horror that William actually let out a small shout and took another step back when Carstairs abruptly sat up.

The movement was uncannily swift. His head twitched inhumanly and he turned those moist black eyes toward the intruder in his flat.

The creature hissed. That forked tongue thrust out again.

“I think not,” William muttered.

In that very same moment, Carstairs leaped from the bare mattress. The frame thumped against the wall. William cursed loudly and raised his hands, his entire body shimmering with blue light. The amphibian rushed forward and crashed into him, clammy, webbed hands wrapping around his throat.

The impact knocked William back against the open door and his head collided with the thick wood. He was disoriented for a moment, but then the claws of the creature began to dig into his flesh, and he felt the scrape of its scales on his throat. The sensations cleared his head in an instant.

The thing that had once been David Carstairs hissed. Smoke rose from its hands where it gripped him. The protective ward William had cast upon himself was meant to dispel curses, not shield him from physical harm, but still it seemed to burn the demon-beast. It would not keep the creature from murdering him, but it did cause the thing to hesitate, to flinch back a moment, loosening its hold.