The Dead Assassin: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (15 page)

“Sounds like our friend with the steam car is returning,” Wilde noted. “No doubt he is as lost as we are.”

But the sound was quieter this time, and Conan Doyle noticed something missing. “If it’s the steam car driver, I see no coach lights.”

Up ahead, a wispy filament of fog calved from the gray mass, shifting shape until it coalesced as the tenuous shadow of a walking human form.

Slouching fast toward them.

The walking figure crashed from light back into darkness as it passed by the glow of each streetlamp, accumulating solidity with every step.

Wisssshthump … wisssssshthump … wissssssshthump …

It reached the glow of a nearby gas lamp that peeled the shadows from it and revealed a man in tattered clothing. A gray cloak fluttered about his shoulders like ragged bat wings—no, not a cloak, but a wispy veil of steam that wreathed about his head and shoulders. He lurched toward them with a faltering, foot-dragging gait.

“Remember what I said about Mephistopheles?” Wilde muttered in a despairing voice. “I wish to retract it.”

Wisssshthump … wisssssshthump … wissssssshthump …

By now, the shambling figure loomed large. It seemed ready to pass them on the far side of the street when, suddenly … it stopped. The eyes remained fixed ahead while the whole head turned to look their way, as if noticing the carriage for the first time. The figure was a large man with a bull’s chest. His clothes hung from him in rags. A greasy tangle of lank hair fell over both eyes. Thick arms hung leaden at his side. In the ghastly light, he looked like something that had stepped through a portal and arrived hot and smoking from hell. A charnel house reek of corruption shivered in the air.

The two friends stood transfixed, aware of being in the presence of something uncanny and utterly inhuman.

“G-good Lord…!” Conan Doyle breathed in a low whisper.

As if it heard, the head tilted back, the greasy fringe parted, and the white marble of a single eye fixed them with its glaucous gaze.

Time elasticated. The moment stretched to a trembling breaking point ready to snap. Wilde snatched aside the scarf wrapped about his mouth, unable to draw a breath. For long, silent moments, the thing studied them as they studied it. Finally, it seemed to lose interest. The lurid face turned away. Abruptly, the thing resumed its shambling walk and slouched away up Piccadilly, dragging a pall of wispy steam with it.

Wisssshthump … wisssssshthump … wissssssshthump …

Its crippled stride carried it beyond the glow of the streetlamps and the fog smothered it up. The
wisssshthump … wisssssshthump …
grew fainter until it dropped from hearing.

Shaken to the quivering core of his being, Conan Doyle turned to look first at Wilde and then up at Gibson.

“You both saw it, too?”

The driver sat mouth agape, eyes wide. Too stunned to speak, he nodded dumbly.

“I have seen that face before,” Wilde said in a quavering voice.

“The man called Charlie Higginbotham?”

Wilde nodded manically. “Not a man … a monster.”

CHAPTER   13

THE ASSASSIN KILLS AGAIN

“I have flirted with Catholicism in the past,” Wilde remarked. “If I were of the persuasion right now I would be worrying my rosary beads to dust.”

Conan Doyle regarded his friend archly. “Catholic, indeed? Oscar, you are a skein of contradictions.”

“I cultivate my contradictions, Arthur. It is how I remain fascinating to the world.”

He and Conan Doyle had decamped to the lobby of the Albemarle Club—a public space chosen because, at that hour in the morning, it was the only room that enjoyed a generous fire of cedar logs crackling in the fireplace. The two friends had paused only to sponge the smuts from their faces and collars, and now sat in adjacent chairs drawn up within pants-singeing proximity to the flames. Despite the heat, their clothes retained the chill of the evening air and the lingering tang of brimstone fog.

“Could we have witnessed a walking ghost?” Conan Doyle asked. “I have read tales of such things.”

“It seemed offensively corporeal to me. The thing stank like a dead dog dredged from the Thames.”

“Good evening, Mister Wilde.”

Both men jumped at the voice. Cranford had silently materialized at Wilde’s side. As usual, he had a white towel draped over one arm. “Will you be requiring me to open the kitchens, sir?”

“Not tonight, Cranford. The only thing I shall require you to open is a large bottle of brandy … oh and two glasses.”

Cranford nodded a bow and looked up at Conan Doyle. “And ice, sir? Is that how you take it?”

“Large chunk—” Conan Doyle grunted.

“Big enough to sink a ship,” Wilde finished the thought. “Just go lasso an iceberg, Cranford.”

The waiter failed to conceal a smirk. “Very good, sir.” And with that, he vanished.

“There was something supernatural about what we witnessed.”

“There’s something supernatural about that waiter.”

“It was dark … and foggy … but the figure bore an uncanny resemblance to the dead assassin we saw the other night … the Charlie Higginbotham character.”

“Uncanny is the word of the hour. Anarchist bombs detonating all over London. Hanged men walking abroad. And this accursed fog.”

“You don’t think—” Conan Doyle started to say.

“Think what?”

The Scotsman shifted in his seat. “You don’t think our friend, Charlie Higginbotham—if indeed it was him—was on his way—”

But Wilde was already aboard his friend’s train of thought and flourishing his ticket. “To assassinate another victim?”

“Dear God,” Conan Doyle said. “I am not a religious man either, but let us pray not!”

*   *   *

A moonless night starved of its shadows.

Outside fine residences guarded by spike-topped railings, a line of streetlamps receded dimly into the miasma, so that the farthest lamps showed as little more than smudges of titanium white on a palette painted in every hue of silence. From somewhere beyond the visible came the telltale sound:
wisssshthump … wisssssshthump … wissssssshthump …

Silvery tissues of fog swirled as a shambling form tore loose of them. Guided by some internal compass, it slogged along the road in its wounded but indefatigable stride, the grizzled head looking neither left nor right.

Wisssshthump … wisssssshthump … wissssssshthump …

Suddenly the hoary man broke stride. Stumbled to a halt in front of a handsome Georgian house of six storeys. It was an area normally well policed of the poor, the indigent, of beggars and idle vandals. But tonight, someone had chalked a message on the low garden wall of the handsome house:

For a long moment, the horrid yellow eyes fixed upon the graffiti, as if in recognition. Then the head tilted on its muscular stump of a neck, and the glaucous gaze raked up the brickwork to a second story window that pulsed with the telltale flicker of a coal fire burning in the grate. The mouth slackened, releasing a rumbling, feral growl. The nostrils jetted plumes of steam. The figure stirred itself, and limped to the marble front step where it stood looking up. The bedroom boasted an iron-railed balcony, but the building’s fa
ç
ade was smooth limestone with few handholds. Impossible for a man to scale.

For a
living
man.

*   *   *

Conan Doyle rattled the ice chunk melting in his brandy. He looked up to thank the waiter, but Cranford had vanished, leaving only a stir in the air currents. He and Wilde lounged in a bubble of thoughtful silence as his thoughts boomeranged back, for the thousandth time, to Jean Leckie. Quite unconsciously, he fingered his breast pocket for her calling card, withdrew it from his pocket, and gave it a casual glance.

Only to stiffen with shock. Instead of the feminine script and the address in Blackheath, he held a rectangle of card scribbled with a cryptic message:
Stay sharp! The young lady is a distraction. Cypher.

Wilde noticed his reaction. “Is something amiss?”

Flummoxed, Conan Doyle grappled for an answer. He had carefully secured Jean’s calling card in his breast pocket. But then he remembered Cypher’s bowler-hatted bruisers outside the theater. The “accidental” collision. The sharp punch in the kidney. Suddenly the truth broke upon him—they had picked his pocket. He felt a gull, a fool, a dupe. The brazen impudence of the man raised Conan Doyle’s dander. Immediately, he scorned his half promise to keep the matter secret. Leaning forward in his chair, he snatched the poker from the fire stand and rammed it into the logs, lifting and heaving until the fire roared up, popping and crackling and spitting hot sparks onto the hearth rug. He only settled back into his chair when the press of heat against his face forced him to retreat.

“You certainly gave the fire a damned good thrashing, Arthur. I take it something has greatly perturbed you.”

“I have something to confess.”

“We are hardly in a confessional box, but at least we now have the purgatorial flames dancing before us.”

“I had hoped to keep you out of this, but the world is out-of-kilter more than you know. Or could begin to guess.”

“Do not kill me with suspense, Arthur. Ennui is the only death appropriate for a poet.”

“This morning I had the most extraordinary meeting…”

And then Conan Doyle spent twenty minutes relating his abduction from Waterloo Station, his meeting with Cypher, and finally his audience with Victoria herself. When he had finished, Wilde sat staring at the fire through the refracting lens of his brandy glass before tossing back the dregs and wryly remarking, “After a tale such as that, I will not regale you with the story of
my
morning, which began with a rather amusing incident concerning a misplaced egg cup.” He leaned forward and set his glass down on the rug. “So our assassin is involved in these anarchist plots that threaten to bring down England, the Commonwealth, and the Empire?”

“Assassin or
assassins
.”

“And who do you think is likely to be the next victim?”

“I am not sure. I cannot help but speculate there is some link to the members of an organization you and I are already familiar with.”

Wilde asked the question by raising his extravagant eyebrows.

“Yes, Oscar, the so-called
Fog Committee
.”

*   *   *

The bedroom was large and expensively furnished. An enormous four-poster hung with heavy curtains occupied one half of the room. Seated in a leather tub chair before the throbbing coal fire, his heels resting upon the emaciated form of a tiger-skin rug, was a man who was the living antonym of emaciated: Tarquin Hogg, banker. Aptly named, for with his porcine girth, piggy eyes, pug nose, and dimply assemblage of chins, the banker could have easily ribboned as best of breed in any county fair. As he gripped the newspaper spread across his generous lap with one hand, the other fleshy trotter groped a plate stacked with mince pies. He crammed one into his salivating mouth and chewed juicily. The large man had draped his bulk in a quilted silk dressing gown of peacock blue; a red fez capped his silvery hair. But despite the comfort of his dress and the luxury of his surroundings, Hogg looked decidedly ill at ease. For once, he was griped with more than just gas pains. He gave the paper a vexed rattle and glared at a front-page headline that screamed: “Lord Howell Assassinated” while below an equally menacing subtitle muttered ominously: “Another public figure murdered.” The fleshy pillows of his brow knitted in consternation. He snatched the pince-nez from his nose. Chewed his lower lip. A gentle knock at the bedroom door dragged him from his brooding reverie. He crumpled the newspaper double, hiding the story, and called out thickly around a mouthful of masticated pastry, “Come.”

A maid slid quickly into the room. Young. White. Starched. Comely. She bobbed a curtsey and said, “Sir, there’s someone at the door.”

Hogg glared at her with bemusement. No honest person would venture abroad on such a vile night.

“Who the devil is it?”

The young maid shook her head helplessly. “A gentleman. I don’t know who, sir.” And then she held out something in her hand. “He sends you his card.”

The fat banker levered himself up from the chair, tightened the sash of his dressing gown, and snatched the card from the maid’s hand.

When he read the name on the calling card, the color drained from his face. “Where…?”

“Waiting outside, sir.”

“Very good,” he said, handing the card back. He made to leave the room but then paused a moment. “Myrtle, I want you to turn down my bed and close the bed curtains. Then fetch a warming pan.” He caressed a downy cheek with the back of his chubby hand. “When I return I shall have you warm my bed.”

The young woman dropped her eyes. Her lips quivered as she answered meekly, “Very good, sir.”

When Tarquin Hogg stepped out of his front door, a strange vision waited at the curbside. Whooshing and hissing, it sat vibrating on its hard rubber tires, a pall of steam wreathing about it: one of the new horseless carriages. A human form skulked in the shadows beneath the fabric hood: a figure indistinguishable apart from a tall top hat. The glass window let down and a hand beckoned from the gloomy interior. With a grunt of umbrage, Hogg cinched tight the belt of his robe against the bitter chill of the night and waddled down the marble steps in his slippered feet.