Mask of the Verdoy (44 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Harley returned from the kitchen with a steaming kettle and two small glasses from Uncle Blake’s Russian tea set. He took his seat at the bureau again and, after a moment’s hesitation, carefully shook out one of the desiccated insects from the small jade bottle.

‘There ain’t many of these babies left, Moloch … and God knows where Uncle Blake got ’em from; his instructions don’t say.’

He dropped the dry husk—resembling an oversized woodlouse—into one of the glasses and brushed the black dust from his hands.

‘I suppose I should take one along to the Natural History museum before they’re all gone—see if they can identify them. Although, maybe that ain’t such a clever idea—seeing as what they can do.’

As the hot water from the kettle covered the dried crustacean it began to swell in the glass, turning the water a deep emerald green. The room was immediately filled with its sickly-sweet aroma and on the pouffe beneath the bookshelves Moloch raised his head and probed the air with twitching nostrils.

‘This ain’t for pussy cats, my old pal!’ said Harley, pulling the second jade bottle from its niche inside the book. ‘Now for the antidote …’ he muttered, shaking out two dried flower heads. He placed these into the other glass, topped it up with hot water, and gave it a stir with a pencil, the flowers giving a deep magenta hue to the water.

Now Harley plucked the drawing of the Green Man mask from the blackboard. He returned to the bureau, took a sheet of paper from one of the drawers, wrote the words ‘Rye Wolf’ on it and placed this alongside the Green Man image on the desktop in front of him. Using a pair of scissors he fished out the now engorged, slippery bug from its green ichor and dropped it into the waste paper basket. He raised the glass to the light and took a deep breath.

‘Well, here goes nothing!’ he said, pinching his nose and downing the potion in one.

He slammed the empty glass down on the bureau and gave a deep shudder. The next minute or so was spent fighting the urge to vomit, rocking in his chair and taking great lungfuls of air. But after a while the nausea passed, leaving behind it a dull throbbing sensation at the base of his skull.

He reached for his cigarettes, cursing when he realised that the packet was empty. He had another twenty downstairs, in his coat pocket—but he could already feel the first rushes of the hallucinogen stroking his brain and didn’t trust himself on the stairs.

With a shaking hand he held up the picture of the Green Man mask and concentrated on its leaf-engulfed features, the page soon beginning to pulse and throb before his eyes.

‘
Rye wolf
,’ he murmured, ‘
Green Man
…’ His voice sounded like that of a stranger’s, coming to him from somewhere far off in the distance.

He closed his eyes and was immediately swallowed up in a kaleidoscope of emerald and purple shapes, spinning and interweaving, dividing and merging, over and over. On opening his eyes the patterns leapt out to fly around the room, taking on different hues as they rebounded off the pictures and the intricate design of the wallpaper.

Now Harley became aware of the music beginning to fill the air: the rhythmic heartbeat of the grandfather clock; the subtle, high-pitched whistle of Moloch’s snoring; the creak of the settling timbers; the crack and pop of the fire in the grate … The kaleidoscope began to dance to this domestic symphony, sound and vision melding into a fugue of man and cat and room … he felt a sudden rush of elation as he realized he could smell-and-taste-and-touch-and-see-and-hear the
nowness
of it all.

Harley staggered to his feet, clutching at his breast, tears streaming down his cheeks as he lifted his head and closed his eyes to yell his affirmation of—

And then, all was quiet … blackness … still …

***

He was somewhere cold, wet … Tentatively moving his fingers, he felt them drag across the slimy clay of the shell crater … He opened his eyes and hauled himself to a sitting position, checking arms, legs … still in working order
.

A thunderous roar ripped the sky as the howitzers began a second barrage of covering fire to support the advance. He cursed and scrambled around in the filthy pool of stagnant water for his Lee-Enfield. Just as his hand struck against the cold metal of the rifle’s bolt a magnesium flare exploded above his head, flooding the gloom of the crater with its stark, blinding light, revealing … the headless torso of Cynthia
.

The flare died, plunging the crater into a darkness more profound than before. Another explosion from above, another corpse illuminated—this time it was Corporal Jimmy Miller’s ruined carcass, the symbol of his
baptism in the horrors of war, all those years ago … darkness again … blinding light … and now before him was the body of Lady Euphemia Daubeney, her pale beauty enhanced by the hand of Death
.

Private Harley closed his eyes and screamed …

***

He awoke in his library, sprawled on the Persian rug, a line of cold spittle on his chin.

‘Effie?’ he murmured, then sat up and shivered; the fire had died and the room had a dead-of-night chill about it.

He took a moment to gather his thoughts.
Was that it? Had the hallucinogenic episode really been so short, so unfruitful?
He struggled to his feet and worked his hand, which had been trapped under him and was now buzzing with pins and needles.

‘About fucking time, an’ all!’

Harley span around to face the wing chair.

It was Moloch
.

As his heart began to pump with adrenalin he fought hard to stop his mind racing with the madness of what he saw before him, holding fast to the thin lifeline that tethered him to the knowledge that this apparition was of his own making—merely the effects of the mind-altering chemicals lying dormant in the dried husks of Uncle Blake’s mysterious dreambugs. He took a step closer, prepared for the vision to melt into the air. But the transformation endured.

There in the chair, with a feline grin revealing an incomplete set of vicious teeth, sat Moloch as a cat-man—a hybrid of his ragged tom and Mordecai Jankel, an old sea dog of a ship’s cook that Harley had bunked down with once whilst working his ticket to Singapore.

‘Alright, Georgie boy! Had a good kip?’

‘Mordecai?’

‘No—
Moloch!
S’truth! You oughta know me by now, son!’

Moloch’s missing eye was covered by a worn leather patch and a thick band of gold pierced his tattered ear. Through the coarse hair on his cat-man forearms Harley could just make out the tattooed effigies of mermaids, daggers and sea snakes. The powerful fur-covered hands ended in cruel talons of ivory, embellished with intricately patterned scrimshaw. Moloch now tapped these yellow talons on the arm of the chair.

‘Come on, George! Take a pew—I’ve been hanging around here for ages waiting for you to surface.’

Harley steeled himself, dragged the chair from the bureau and sat down to face this drug-induced chimera.

‘’Atta boy!’ said Moloch, scratching violently behind his ear. ‘
Fucking fleas!
The little buggers are murder to live with, George, I can tell yer.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘You certainly can … after all, that’s all I am, ain’t it? Just a little figment of your imagination.’

‘Not so little,’ said Harley, starting to recover from his initial shock.

‘No,’ said Moloch, with a sly grin, ‘maybe not.’ He sat up now, his claws digging into the leather of the chair. ‘Hear that?’ he said, sniffing at the air.

‘What?’

‘
That!
No? Sorry—I was forgetting about your pathetic human senses. I mean, you lot go around deaf and blind to most of what’s going on in the world, don’tcha?’

‘Well, we haven’t done too bad on it, have we?’

‘Alright, Mr. Opposable Thumbs—don’t get cocky! There it is again!’

‘What is it? What can you hear?’ asked Harley, turning to look at the door, starting to feel a little trepidation.

Moloch sniffed at the air again. ‘Oooh! It’s one of my dear little mollies—calling for me … that cute little tabby two doors down. And by the smell of it, she’s on heat again!’ He let out a little trilled purr of sexual excitement.

‘Anyway, George—let’s get on with it, shall we? Some of us have got some caterwauling to do. What’ll it be?’

‘Well, the thing is, Moloch … I need some answers.’

Harley got up to retrieve the pieces of paper from the bureau, handing them to the cat-man.

‘Don’t take the piss! You know I can’t hold on to ’em. Put them on me lap, won’tcha?’

Moloch bent down to scrutinize the clues now resting on his lap, scratching furiously behind his ear again.

‘Well, the first one’s easy—that’s yer Green Man, ain’t it? But what’s all this bollocks on here? More of your human black magic, I s’pose—capturing sounds and trapping them in ink?’

‘Sorry, of course, you can’t read—it says ‘Rye Wolf’.’

‘Ah, well, why didn’t you say?
Rye Wolf
, eh?’

Moloch sat thinking for a while, repeatedly licking a small patch of fur on his upper arm.

‘You do realize, George, that anything I can tell you, you already know? I mean, I’m just part of your subconscious, ain’t I?’

‘I think Freud would have it as my unconscious mind, actually.’

‘Well,
excuse me
, Mr. Fucking Pedantic! All I’m saying is, the answer’s already there—in that knowledge box of yours.’

‘Yeah, but it’s buried under a load of old tut, ain’t it? I just need you to help me do a little housekeeping, that’s all.’

Moloch twitched his whiskers and flared his nostrils.

‘Alright. But let’s get on with it—the smell of that molly’s hard to ignore. Go on, then—ask the question!’

Harley picked up the picture of the Green Man mask from Moloch’s lap and held it up.

‘This image—why do I think I have a memory of it from somewhere? Something that might link it to the Blackshirts?’

Moloch grinned and twitched his tattered ear.

‘You don’t have to look far for that one, George. The answer’s in this room—up there in your files.’

‘Really?’ said Harley, getting up to go over to the bookshelves.

‘No, no, no! We ain’t got time for you to trawl through all that now. Just listen to what I’ve got to say and make your little marks on the paper to trap it for when you wake up.’

Harley took a pencil from the bureau and retuned to his seat, turning the Green Man image over to write on the back.

‘Go on then.’

‘Well, yer Green Man—what’s his face covered in?’

‘Leaves, foliage.’

‘Right! And where do leaves grow normally?’

‘On trees.’

‘Clever boy! Now, do you remember that day that Cynthia—’ Moloch paused to flip a vivid pink tongue across his cat stubble. ‘’Ere, George, talking of Cynthia—has it ever occurred to you that if you hadn’t have wound up that nutcase Morkens quite so much, she might still be with us?’

‘You bastard!’ said Harley, overcome with a sudden wave of emotion, his breathing beginning to judder as the tears flooded his eyes.

Tears also now fell from Moloch’s one Chartreuse-coloured eye and as he brushed them from the silky black fur of his face he let out a tuneless feline howl.

‘Sorry mate! But I miss her summit rotten!’

‘You and me both,’ said Harley, stifling the urge to sob whilst he dried his cheeks on the back of his hand. ‘Come on … we’re getting sidetracked … carry on … carry on with what you were saying.’

‘Hmmm? … What
was
I saying? … Oh yeah! … Remember that day dear little Cynthia came back from an evening with that slimy conductor bloke—what was his name? You know—that stuck up berk with the waxed ’tache and an overinflated opinion of ’imself? Always a little too interested in her bowing technique, if you catch my drift.’

‘Whatley—Cecil Whatley.’

‘That’s the mug. Yeah—Cecil Whatley. Anyway, remember when she came back from the date—’

‘It weren’t a date! They just went to some meeting, or something.’

‘There’s a good boy—now you’re remembering. Well, when she came back from the meeting, George, she brought you back a pamphlet—remember?’

Harley held a hand to his forehead.

‘Vaguely … she was upset, livid about something. She’d hated the meeting. What was it? I just can’t pull the memory out!’

‘No need—I’m doing it for you; just trust me. Look for that pamphlet, George. Look at the tree on its cover. You filed it with the other papers, didn’t you? All to do with the same thing—all filed under ‘E’.’

‘Hold on! I thought you didn’t know what letters were?’

Moloch shrugged his furry shoulders.

‘Search me—I don’t make the rules up round here. Just put it down so’s you don’t forget.’

Harley scribbled on the paper—
pamphlet from C, filed under E
. ‘Right,’ he said; but when he looked up again, Moloch was flickering in and out of existence, like the stuttering image from a broken magic lantern.

‘Moloch?’

‘
George?
You alright?’

‘Me? You’re the one doing the disappearing act.’

Moloch stopped flickering, appearing solid again in the chair. He leant forward and peered at Harley, the thin slither of his one pupil widening a little in its sea of green, so black it was like a glimpse of infinity.

‘Either someone’s cutting up didoes, George, or we ain’t got much longer at this. Come on—
pronterino
! What the next question? What’s the word on the paper?’

‘Rye Wolf—what is a
Rye Wolf
?’

‘One you don’t wanna get a bite from, I can tell yer.’

‘Enough with the riddles—we’re running out of time!’

‘Sorry mate—but this is how your brain works.’

‘Come on, Moloch!’

But the cat-man’s mood had suddenly changed. He now stood up, towering above Harley, hunching his shoulders as the coarse hair on his back stood on end.

‘
The answer’s there, you idiot!
’ he roared, pointing a curved talon at the bookshelf. ‘
All the answers are there!
’

‘But I’ve looked! I can’t find a reference to it.’

‘Come on—think!
The Holy Joe!
’