Night Music (27 page)

Still, it was the most recent of his purchases that interested me and gave some clue as to his purpose in traveling to London. It appeared that he had begun dealing with two new suppliers of books in the months preceding his disappearance: Steaford's, the specialists in scientific literature in Bloomsbury; and an antiquarian establishment, of which I had previously been unaware, called Dunwidge & Daughter. I counted at least thirty receipts from Dunwidge, all acknowledging cash payments for books, the nature of which were detailed on the documents themselves. There was
The Hermetic Museum
, which appeared to relate to something called “the Philosopher's Stone,” a first English translation from 1893 of a work apparently originally published in Latin in 1678;
The Art of Drawing Spirits in Crystals
, undated, by Johannes Trithemius; the
Grimorium Imperium
, alleged to be a copy of a work originally owned by the alchemist Dr. John Dee, published in Rome in 1680;
The Theatre of Terrestrial Astronomy
by Edward Kelly, Hamburg, 1676; and assorted others in a similar vein. I could not claim to be an expert on such matters, but it seemed to me that Lionel Maulding had spent a great deal of time, effort, and money to begin acquiring a library of the occult, and Dunwidge & Daughter had been the principal beneficiaries of this new enthusiasm. Unlike the better-known Steaford's, though, Dunwidge & Daughter had not appended a contact address to their receipts, merely the name of their business.

I paused in my perusals. Something had been nagging at me ever since I had begun reading this list of esoteric volumes. Slowly, I retraced my steps through the house, examining shelves and taking note of the divisions and subdivisions of subjects. It took me some hours, and by the time I was done the light had begun to fade. My back ached and my eyes could barely focus, but I was certain of this: I could find no trace of a section devoted to occult literature in Maulding's amassment, the two volumes on the shelf above his bed excepted. Neither could I find any trace of the books that he had apparently purchased from Dunwidge & Daughter. Naturally, it was entirely possible that I might have missed them, or that they had been misfiled, but the former seemed to me more likely than the latter, for Maulding struck me as a meticulous cataloguer of his collection. I determined to make a second search the following day, just to be sure. Maulding had no telephone in his house, so I asked Mrs. Gissing to send a telegram to London on my behalf on her way home, asking Quayle's assistant Fawnsley to ascertain the location of the business known as Dunwidge & Daughter, and to reply by return of telegram the following morning, which Mrs. Gissing would collect and bring to the house.

It was by now well past six o'clock. Mrs. Gissing had prepared an eel pie, which I ate accompanied by the best part of a bottle of Bordeaux from Maulding's cellar. When I was done, Mrs. Gissing ran a bath for me before departing for the night. I thanked her for her kindness, and then I was alone in Bromdun Hall for the first time.

I checked the bath, but the water was still too hot to bear. I had no desire to boil myself like a lobster, so I returned to my room and poured the last of the red wine while I waited for the water to cool. I had taken some books from the shelves for my own amusement, among them McNeile's recently issued
Bulldog Drummond
, published under the pseudonym Sapper. McNeile had fought at Ypres, and I'd admired his stories for the
Daily Mail
and
The War Illustrated
, even if he had sugared the pill more than I liked. Then again, he was writing while the war was still ongoing, and had he dwelt upon the true horror of the fighting at the time, then none of his stories would have seen the light of day.

I had read about two pages of the novel when I heard the sound of splashing from the bathtub.

“Mrs. Gissing?” I called.

Perhaps she had returned to the house for some reason and felt compelled to check the water while she was there, but I had not heard the front door opening, and the stairs leading up to the bedrooms creaked and moaned like souls in torment. Neither did the sounds coming from the bathroom resemble those of a hand being briefly swished through water in an effort to gauge its temperature. Instead the splashing was intermittent, yet consistent with the noise a person might make while washing in a tub.

Mrs. Gissing had set a fire in my bedroom before her departure. I grabbed a poker from the fireplace and, gripping it tightly, made my way to the bathroom. The door was slightly farther ajar than I had left it, although that might simply have been my nerves playing tricks on me. The difference was marginal at best. As I drew nearer the door the splashing increased in tempo before ceasing altogether, as though someone inside had become aware of my approach and was now listening for me.

I used the poker to push the door open to its fullest extent. The bathtub was empty, and there appeared to be only the faintest hint of disturbance on the surface of the water. That water, though, had changed in color. When I had left the room it was relatively clear, with only the faintest hint of brown to it. Now it was a sickly, unpleasant yellow, like curdled milk, and held a faint scum upon it. There was a smell, too, as of fish on the turn.

I stood above the tub and, feeling faintly foolish, used the poker to probe the water, half expecting to feel soft flesh give beneath it, and a torrent of bubbles to rise to the surface as the force of the poker expelled the air from whomever might be hiding below. No such bubbles appeared, however, and the only obstacle the poker encountered was the porcelain of the tub itself. There was nowhere else in the bathroom where anyone might have hidden.

I called Mrs. Gissing's name again, the sound of it echoing from the bathroom tiles, but there was no reply. I wrinkled my nose at the smell from the water. Perhaps what I had heard was some emission from the taps, an expulsion of pollutants from the pipes that had tainted the water. I had no intention of bathing in it now, but I was still intent upon a bath. Mrs. Gissing had assured me that there was plenty of hot water to be had so, almost without thinking, I reached into the tub to pull the plug.

Something moved against my hand. It was hard and jointed, reminiscent of the carapace of a lobster. I withdrew my hand with a shout, the chain of the plug still grasped in my fist, and watched as the water began to drain. Down, down it went, leaving a layer of residue on the sides like foam on a beach after the tide has departed. When there was barely six inches of water left, there came a sudden flurry of movement from the vicinity of the plughole, and a form briefly broke the surface. I had a brief impression of an armored body, pinkish-black in color, with many, many legs. I caught a glimpse of pincers like those of an earwig, except larger and wickedly sharp, before the creature somehow forced itself into the small plughole and exited the tub, even though its body had seemed far too wide to be accommodated by such a small means of escape. There were noises from the pipes for a time, and then all was quiet.

Unsurprisingly, I did not take my bath after all. After immediately restoring the plug to the plughole, I did the same thing with every bath and sink I could find, more for some false peace of mind than out of any real hope that a plug of metal could stop such a creature from emerging again, should it have chosen to do so.

I sat up in my bed, wondering. What could it be, I thought: some crustacean of the Broads, unfamiliar to me but a commonplace sight to those who lived in these parts? Had I mentioned it in the Maidensmere Inn, might the landlord have tipped the wink once again to his customers and announced that what I had seen was merely
X
, or
Y
, and that fried with some cream sauce, or boiled in a pot with a little white wine vinegar, it was actually most palatable? Somehow, I suspected not. My fingers tingled unpleasantly where they had touched the thing, and they looked red and irritated in the lamplight.

Eventually I dozed. I dreamed of Pulteney's tanks rolling ineffectually toward High Wood, great rumbling silhouettes moving through the darkness until picked out by the light of flares and the explosion of shellfire. Then the shape of them began to change, and they were no longer constructions of metal but living, breathing entities. They did not roll on heavy tracks, but propelled themselves on short, jointed legs. Turrets became heads, and gun barrels were transformed into strange, elongated limbs that spat poison from orifices lined with curved teeth. The flares were bolts of lightning, and the landscape they illuminated was more terrible yet than the wasteland between the trenches, even as it seemed almost familiar to me. I picked out in the distance the ruins of a village and realized that I was looking at the Norfolk Broads, and what was left of Maidensmere, the steeple of its sixteenth-century chapel still somehow intact amid the rubble. But it was another town, too, a place not far from High Wood, where bodies lay broken in the ruins, killed by shellfire: old men, women, little children. We were told that everyone had fled, but they had not.

I woke with a start. It was still dark, and only the ticking of a clock disturbed the silence.

But there was no clock in the room.

I sat up. The sound was coming from the other side of the bedroom door, which I had closed—and, yes, I admit it, locked—before going to bed. As I listened, it became clear that it was more a clicking than a ticking. I lit my lamp and gripped the poker, kept close at hand for any such eventuality. I climbed from the bed and padded across the floor as softly as I could. The sound began to increase its tempo until, just as I reached the door, it stopped, and I heard what appeared to be footsteps moving swiftly away. I unlocked the door and pulled it open. Before me there was only the empty hallway, illuminated as far as the stairs by my lamp. Beyond was darkness. I squinted into the gloom, but could discern nothing.

I looked at the door. The wood around the lock had been picked away, leaving it splintered and white, as though someone had been trying to expose its workings. I reached down and rubbed a finger against it. A splinter caught in my flesh, causing me to gasp. I took it between my teeth and pulled it loose, then spat it on the floor. A tiny jewel of blood rose from the wound.

From the shadows there came the sound of sniffing.

“Who's there?” I said. “Who are you? Show yourself!”

There was no reply. I moved farther into the hallway. The darkness retreated a little with each step that I advanced, and I was reminded uncomfortably of the bathwater slowly disappearing from the tub until the creature in the water had no option but to expose itself before fleeing. Two steps, four, six, eight, the shadows before me giving way to light, the shadows behind me growing, until, when I reached the stairs, the darkness made its stand. It seemed to me that there was a deeper blackness apparent, and this did not move. It was much larger than a man and slightly hunched. I thought that I could discern the shape of its head, although the flickering of the lamp made it difficult to tell, and its form blurred into the shadows at its edges, so that it was at once a part of them and apart from them. Within it were the reflections of unseen stars. It turned, and where its face should have been I had an impression of many sharp angles, as though a plate of black glass had dropped and been frozen in the first moment of its disintegration. I felt blood trickle from the cut in my finger and drop to the floor, and the sniffing commenced again.

I backed away, and as I moved the shadows advanced once more, and the dark entity moved with them. Faster now they came, and my light grew increasingly ineffectual, the darkness encroaching upon its pool of illumination, slowly smothering it from without. Soon it would be but a glimmer behind the glass, and then it would be gone entirely.

I flung the poker. I acted without thinking, operating purely on instinct, aiming for that mass of shards and angles. The poker spun once in the air, and the heavy handle struck at the center of the black form. There was a sound like a million delicate crystals shattering in unison, and the shadows rippled in response to some concussive force. I was thrown backward and struck my head hard against the floor, but before I lost consciousness I thought I saw that deeper blackness collapse in on itself, and a hole was briefly ripped in the fabric of space and time. Through it I glimpsed unknown constellations, and a black sun and the remains of the dead world.

And the face of Lionel Maulding howling into the void.

Mrs. Gissing arrived shortly after seven, an older man behind her whom I took, correctly as it turned out, to be Mr. Willox. They found me awake and seated at a table in the library, a cup of tea steaming before me, and more in the pot nearby. Mrs. Gissing seemed rather put out by this, as though in venturing to provide for myself I had usurped her natural place in the universe and, more to the point, threatened her livelihood, for if men began to make cups of tea for themselves then soon they might well attempt to cook meals and do laundry, and next thing poor Mrs. Gissing and her kind would find themselves out on the streets begging for pennies. As if to ensure that this would not come to pass without a struggle, she prepared to bustle her way to the kitchen to make bacon, eggs, and toast, even though I assured her that I was not hungry.

“Did you not sleep well?” she asked.

“No, I did not,” I said, then ventured a question. “Have you ever spent the night in this house, Mrs. Gissing?”

I should, perhaps, have phrased the question a little more delicately, as Mrs. Gissing appeared to feel that her reputation as a widow of good standing was being impugned. After some awkward apologies on my part, she chose to take the question in the spirit in which it was asked and confessed that she had never spent a night under Mr. Maulding's roof.

“Did he ever complain of noises or disturbances?” I asked.

“I'm not sure what you mean, sir.”

I wasn't sure what I meant either. The mind plays odd tricks, often to protect itself from harm, and it had already begun the process of consigning the events of the previous night to that place between what we see and what we dream.