The Lamplighter (38 page)

In the shadow of the temple buttresses—constructed either to hold the building in place or keep it at bay, it was difficult to determine—McKnight and Canavan now perceived a horde of protesting supplicants with eyes of stained glass and knees bare and bloody from incessant praying. Repulsing the horror of the debauchery with all their energy, they bowed, wept, fired volleys of castigation, and beseeched the storm clouds to coalesce and smite the unholy Gomorrah. From within the temple came a sudden cannon blast, and a great projectile of claws, gizzards, and marinated flesh scattered across the marble floor in front of the supplicants, who now dispensed with their invective and rose up to fight for the morsels like hungry gulls, stuffing them into their mouths and swallowing them without a single chew—feasting on their own indignation.

McKnight and Canavan threaded their way through the madness without being noticed by a single eye. They heard a high priest exhorting his congregation to don the breastplate of righteousness, to stand resilient to the great corruption, and to fight to the death, if necessary, with the monstrous heathens. The priest himself had blistered flesh, a missing eye, and a mouth unable to contain lines of drool and speckled froth, but no one seemed to care, so profound was the fervor.

The clouds enmeshed and pelted McKnight and Canavan with a rain of frogs and beetles as they hustled through the fantastically gilded doors of the great temple, immediately coming in sight of a veritable circus of depravity: men in silk and scarlet gobbling pigs' trotters and grapes and hallucinogenic spices, women with reverse digestive systems wolfing food with their anuses, rhinoceroses fornicating with antelopes, peacocks with hyenas, horse-size locusts hovering overhead with wings thrumming like chariots heading into battle, and everywhere shameless parasites sucking blood from any titillated organ or barest inch of exposed flesh. This was the realm of perversity, Bacchanalianism, profligacy, wantonness, and extravagant furnishings: the cannibalistic terminus of affluence without self-discipline. The supplicants were here mocked in processions of withering virulence and boiled in great cauldrons of stinking fat, the revelers likewise drawing succor from their enemies, engorged on their own derision—this hell a place of unchecked extremes and improper balances.

Cloaked in impunity, the Professor and the Irishman ventured through a flock of flesh-eating birds and located a descending stairway behind a raised altar awash with discarded bones, drifts of cinnamon, and all the fruits of despair. They took one last look at the circus as an enemy incendiary pierced the purple awnings and exploded in a cloud of frankincense and myrrh.

“The Last Battle,” McKnight said.

“No,” Canavan corrected sadly. “A meaningless skirmish.”

To this point they had discharged not one bullet or raised a blade in self-defense, and they were fully aware of their good fortune, and equally aware that it could not possibly last.

She tilted into the wind, undaunted by any gust. The snow thrashed at her face, but she would not be repelled. She knew every dip and rise, every sweep and curve, though she gave no thought to her destination, the man she was due to meet there, or indeed the weapon in her purse.

She moved into an area of open fields, billowing grey grasses like witches' hair, copses of yew trees flailing at the sky, and whistling winds unhindered by hedges, fences, or habitation. But rather than seeing any of this she was deeply engrossed in sporadic and incomprehensible visions of two men pitting their lives against great obstacles to save her. It was deeply absurd and yet strangely comforting.

Ahead on the left Drumgate Cemetery came in sight, perched awkwardly on its hill. And beyond it, glowering over a substantial forecourt overgrown with weeds and thistle, lay the gutted hulk of Colonel Munnoch's hunting lodge—the house, as she knew it better, of Mr. James Ainslie, the home of the Great Deceiver, and her introduction to hell.

The skies flashed and grumbled and marshaled their redoubtable energies. But the new path was more a gentle gradient through a terrain of almost lunar desolation: parched earth, smoking craters, distant mountains like the peaks in a child's drawings.

But as they progressed they noticed leafless white trees crowded with strangely familiar, harpylike creatures glaring at them with red eyes. The harpies scratched their naked haunches, stroked their drooping breasts, and hissed and clicked their tongues, communicating in some alien code.

“Have your gun ready,” McKnight warned, but Canavan already had drawn his revolver, sensing they would no longer travel unnoticed.

They were in sight of a glowing cleft in a looming cliff face when there was a bansheelike battle cry, and a flock of the creatures launched from the trees and took to the air with a frightful flapping, merging overhead and spearing down at them with raucous shrieks.

The first assailant had no sooner laid a claw on Canavan than he wheeled around and aimed the revolver at its head. But his finger froze on the trigger when he noticed, with a shudder of horror, that the face of the creature—the face of all the harpies—was that of Evelyn.

There is no hell quite like self-loathing.

Appalled, Canavan could not bring himself to fire. But McKnight had no hesitation.

“It's not her, lad!” he cried, thrusting the rifle into the harpy's mouth. “It's only what she sees in herself!” He squeezed the trigger and the head exploded in chunks of flesh and pus.

Two more harpies, sensing the Irishman's hesitation, wrapped themselves around him and dragged him to the ground, dislodging his gun. It took all McKnight's strength to reach through the wings, pry one loose, and cleave its head with a well-aimed machete. The other he shot at point-blank range, and was sprayed with a backwash of oily blood and writhing tissue. Trembling with disgust, Canavan himself dispatched a fourth assailant with his retrieved revolver.

The remaining harpies hovered above them warily, snarling and spitting but strangely unwilling to attack. Pointing their firearms threateningly and backing through clouds of gun smoke, McKnight and Canavan, dripping with effluent and entrails, made it through the fissure and rolled a boulder across the entrance, having one last glimpse of a hundred disfigured Evelyn faces staring at them delightedly.

They turned to find themselves in a cavernous nest of harpies.

From a distance, with her black dress bellied by the wind, she looked crowlike and sinister. She drifted into the forecourt and halted in front of the lodge, staring fixedly at the blackened unicorn rebus in the facade as though emerging from a dream, and behind her Groves and Pringle for the first time thought it prudent to conceal themselves behind a withered hedge.

The old building's doors were missing, its windows like gaping wounds, the roof a mixture of fallen arches and surviving beams. But there was light glowing dimly from somewhere within.

“Abraham Lindsay…” Pringle whispered, but Groves said nothing.

They watched Evelyn fondle her purse, as though to reassure herself of the weapon's presence, and then raise her head and march, not without hesitation, into the building's impious maw.

Pringle moved at once to follow her but was surprised to find his forearm clasped tightly.

“No,” Groves breathed through clenched teeth, and Pringle looked back at him with dismay.

A vile grin was tugging at the Inspector's lips, and his eyes were set like glaciers.

The legion of harpies slept and snored, clinging to the roof upside down amid huge stalactites. The cavern was choking with superheated air and sulfurous fumes of lava. Bridging the chasm below was a single nail-studded arch barely the breadth of a hand.

“I have a feeling,” McKnight said tightly, “that we are not welcome here.”

“Perhaps we should reconsider,” Canavan whispered. “The damage…it might already be too late.”

“That's not you talking,” McKnight assured him, “but the voice of self-destruction.”

They forced themselves onto the bridge, dizzied by the bending waves of heat and blooming gases, and almost immediately mosquitoes the size of stag beetles materialized to alight on their faces. Brushed off, the insects wheeled around and attacked with even greater ferocity. The two men fought frantically for balance as the disturbed harpies jostled and squealed in their sleep.

Their bodies dripping with perspiration and their thick-soled boots repeatedly pierced by wicked barbs, McKnight and Canavan soldiered across the bridge, batting continuously at the mosquitoes, gasping at the scorching air, and fighting the attraction of the glowing swirls of lava. They were halfway across when an eerie silence alerted them to the fact that the harpies had awoken.

They no longer had time for diligence. Without turning they pounded down the last length of bridge, balanced by momentum alone, and it was only the immensity of Evelyn's self-hatred that allowed them to escape, the thousand pursuing harpies colliding and tangling in midair, rendered useless by numbers and haste, and watching in vain as the Professor and Canavan slipped breathlessly through a door into the land of malfunctioning mechanisms.