The Revolutions (26 page)

Chapter Nineteen

I: The Rite of Jupiter

Atwood called a meeting of the Company on a Wednesday night in August. By his calculations, the hour—an unsociably late one—was governed by the Sphere of Jupiter. Their meeting was in an upper room of Atwood’s house, which he called his
scriptorium
. Martin Atwood, Jupiter, Sun, Thérèse Didot, Sergeant Samuel Jessop, and Arthur Shaw were present. They sat around a long table, with Atwood at one end and Jupiter at the other—all of them except Sun, who orbited the table at a steady pace, counter-clockwise. The tablecloth was violet satin, embroidered in silver with the symbols of Jupiter (the sphere, not the woman). Each person around the table held their left hand out, palm up. Jupiter uttered certain phrases over and over:
Nitrae, Radou, Sunandam; Noctar, Raiban, Zorami; et cetera
. On the table, in the middle of a pentagram, was a human skull; and between the skull and Jupiter was a six-and-one-half-inch lens in a circular gold frame. The lens and the skull had been positioned and polished with as much care and attention as the finest implements of a surgeon or an astronomer. Between the skull and Atwood was a candle.

Arthur’s role was to hold up his hand without trembling—which was harder to do than it was to say—and to think of the dead. Any dead would do. He thought of his father and mother; his friend Waugh’s brother, who’d died of an infection of the lung two years ago; patriotically, he thought of dead British soldiers in far-flung places; he thought of Mrs Wright, a neighbour who’d died last winter of pneumonia. Images of Josephine lying still in her bed came into his mind, and he struggled to push them out.

He worried that this was all terribly blasphemous. The Bible said nothing about trespassing on Mars, so far as he could recall, but it was very clear about leaving the dead alone. He’d never been all that devout—to his foster-father’s endless and bitter disappointment, religion had always been something of a matter of convention to him, a fact that didn’t require his immediate attention, like gravity, or the post-office, or America—but now he was starting to fear for the state of his soul.

He kept his misgivings to himself. The ritual continued. At each pass around the end of the table, Sun struck Jupiter gently on the back of her head. It was on the twentieth or thirtieth such blow that she suddenly stopped chanting, and began to speak.

~
I’m dead.

Her voice was both deeper and frailer than usual, and rather more Northern. She sounded a little like Arnold Leggum—the man who’d gone by
Neptune
.

“Yes,” Sun said, still pacing.

~
Bloody hell. No escape, then, is there? No bloody escape.

“You are but a shadow, Neptune, and you will be gone again in but a moment.”

~
Bloody hell. Oh God. Oh God, help me.

“Where did you die?”

~
Hospital.

“Which Hospital?”

~
Bart’s, I think.

“How came you there?”

~
I remember I was at the Oxford. The music hall, I mean. Chinese acrobats and a lady escape-artist. The things that woman could do! She could—

“And afterwards?”

~
Very nice if you like that sort of thing. Odd, I thought.

“And afterwards?”

~
Let me have my last happy memories, Sun, you miserable bugger.

Sun scowled.

~
All right! All right. Wheel came off the cab. Tipped out and head over arse on road. Cracked my skull. I remember a bloody great horse coming down on top of me, great big shining hooves like moons, loud as thunder. Crack, crack, crack. It hurts, dying does. Bloody broken teeth spilled out on the cobbles. Let you down in the end, don’t they?

Leggum had had a very fine set of false teeth, of which he’d been very proud.

Sun leaned forward. “An accident?”

~
There was a black dog.

“A black dog?”

~
Or a wolf, or something like it. Big bastard, and loud, and bold as you please, runs out into the road. Frightened the horse. Rears up and bolts and the wheel comes off and out I spill.

“And then?”

~
Someone lifts me up and then everyone’s talking about what to do with me. What’s to be done. Awful, that is. No one can look at you. Let me go, I say, let me go, but they don’t hear. Bloody driver’s run off, mind. Moving again. In a bed. Someone poking at me. Women. Nurses. I’m screaming my head off, mind.

“Describe these women.”

~
Hurts like bloody hell. Listen, Mr Sun, do you want to hear about what it’s like to break your skull?

“Describe these women.”

~
Do you want to hear what it’s like breathing when your ribs are—

“Describe these women.”

~
Just nurses. Gone now. There’s a doctor.

“What does he want with you?”

~
He wants to know how I got here. Bloody nosy questions, same as you. I tell him go away, I’m dead. He says, no you’re not, not quite yet. He wants to know about the Company.

“What did you tell him?”

~
Don’t know. Can’t think, can’t stop myself talking. Bit of my bloody skull’s broken—last words—oh, hell, my last bloody words. Stars. The thing, that thing we brought back. Atwood—where’s Atwood? Listen, Atwood—

“How long had you been in that hospital before he came to you?”

~
Don’t know.

“How long?”

~
Twenty-two minutes!

“Describe him.”

~
Sitting down. Leaning close. Spectacles, tortoiseshell, round and clean. Black frock coat, don’t know the tailor. Grey hair. No jaw to speak of. Four deep lines on his forehead, six when he’s impatient, five when he smiles. Long beard, like the poet—what’s his name, always in the newspapers? Green eyes …

While she spoke, Jupiter stared at the lens, skull, and candle. Jessop slid a piece of paper in front of her, and put a pencil in her hand. Blindly she scratched out a series of sketches of the mysterious doctor of St. Bart’s, in a number of different poses; precise but exaggerated, like faces seen in a fever or a fairground mirror.

Arthur shivered. The room had grown cold. The thing that possessed Jupiter wasn’t a ghost, Atwood had said; only a shadow, a memory, a flicker of consciousness not quite extinguished … But it was ghostly enough to chill Arthur’s spine.

~
That’s all
.
Then darkness.

Very well. Sun rapped the table nine times.

Jupiter closed her eyes. She breathed in deeply and shuddered. Atwood tenderly took her hand and kissed it.

“Magnificent, my dear. Magnificent.”

“Never again, Atwood. Never again.”

II: The Rite of Mercury

T
he next suitable hour of Mercury was shortly after dawn on Friday. The Company took a train out of town together to a farm. The farmer was a tenant of Atwood’s, a strapping sunburned rustic type who treated His Lordship with great deference, and asked no questions about the odd party he brought with him or the paraphernalia they carried out into his cornfield.

Jessop and Arthur rolled up their sleeves and got to work. They each carried a short plank, which they used to press down a wide circle in the corn. It was the last hot day of the summer, and before long they were both sweat-soaked and thirsty, red and itching.

The rite itself involved the slaughter of a dove. Atwood—who’d changed into a white surplice back at his tenant’s house—cut the bird’s throat and splashed blood at the circle’s edge. Then he placed its body into a small black cabinet. The cabinet also contained a crown, a Jew’s harp, a glass phial filled with spring water, a sheet of parchment six inches square, some matches, and a glass bowl containing a pinch of saffron. Atwood lit a match, burned the saffron, drank the water, wrote his own name upon the parchment forward and backwards, and then walked away without a glance back, out into the golden field and away over the horizon.

The rest of the Company waited. After a while they began to make small talk, mostly about the weather. Jupiter and Miss Didot had brought parasols.

The ritual didn’t require six—Atwood alone sufficed. But he was anxious about exposing himself to his enemies, and so the rest of the Company were there to protect him in the event of—well, Arthur wasn’t altogether sure what. He didn’t know what form the attack of the Company’s enemies might take, but he knew what they would say if he asked:
Watch for everything. Overlook nothing. Nothing is without meaning.
That was always their answer. He’d resented it at first, but had come to see it as good advice. While he talked to Jessop he listened for every shift of the wind, every insect that buzzed over the fields, every whisper of the corn; the footsteps of mice, the motions of birds overhead, the slowly inclining angle of the sun. His own increasing hunger. The itch on the back of his neck, and the tickle of sweat. The pretty ladybird that settled on Jessop’s sleeve like a bright garnet cufflink. A stray grey hair on Jupiter’s head. The constant shimmering glare of sunlight. In the middle distance there were haystacks. Everything was golden, fields and clouds both, the Earth indistinguishable at the horizon from the Sun, like one of those French paintings Josephine liked. Everything dissolved into points of light. There was a thousand times more in one single field than one could ever see and understand in a lifetime. Who needed other worlds?

Arthur laughed. Jupiter glared at him, and Miss Didot raised an eyebrow.

“Airy spirits,” Sun said, waving a hand as if swatting at a fly. “Mercury is close, and you may find your thoughts are not wholly your own.”

After a long while, a figure approached on the horizon. Arthur tensed, and started to get to his feet; but it was only Atwood. He’d been gone for perhaps two hours. When he came closer, Arthur saw that he was smiling, and he had a boyish spring in his step. He sat down cross-legged beside the cabinet.

Jupiter lowered her parasol, and said, “What is your name?”

Atwood grinned. Not his ordinary smile—it was wider and toothier. He didn’t look himself at all, and when he spoke, his voice was high and breathy.

~
I have no name.

“What manner of thing are you?”

~
Air and light.

“Will you serve us, and go when we command?”

~
I will. I will!

“Do you know who we seek?”

~
I know many things!

“We seek the man who heard Arnold Leggum’s last words. Will you find him for us?”

~
I will!

Atwood closed his eyes, and rocked back and forth. Everyone waited for perhaps forty minutes. When Atwood next opened his eyes, he was himself again, and he had learned the killer’s name—one Dr William Thorold—and his address, just off Harley Street.

III: The Rite of Mars

M
idnight, and the hour of Mars. The Company met at Atwood’s house, in his library. In preparation for the ritual, none of them had eaten all day, or drunk anything but water, or committed any sin if they could avoid it.

They were joined by an aristocratic young fellow of Atwood’s acquaintance, whom Arthur had never met before, and who seemed to be under the impression that the whole thing was a lark. Atwood seemed to be scraping the barrel a bit. Miss Didot sealed the door and the four corners of the library with water and salt. Jessop and Arthur and Sun and Jupiter and Miss Didot and Atwood and the new fellow each cut their left palm and intoned
Adonay, Elohim, Ariel.
They cut their right, intoning
Amon, Barbatos, Baal.
With blood and sand they marked out a hexagram on the table. Miss Thérèse Didot slaughtered a black crow, then quartered it, placing its parts at the points of that ugly star. She looked quite devilish as she did this, streaked with blood. Sun chanted. Sergeant Jessop brought in a brass bowl of water and placed it on the table. Miss Didot placed the eyes of the crow into the water, and then six hot coals. Lastly she screamed the name of Dr William Thorold and struck the water’s surface with a knife.

Nothing appeared to happen. Afterwards the members of the Company stood around making small talk and congratulating one another on an impeccable performance of what was apparently a very difficult ritual. Atwood’s footman Lewis came in with a bucket to dispose of clumps of bloody sand and bits of crow.

*   *   *

Arthur cornered Atwood in the hall after the others had left.

“What is all this supposed to accomplish, Atwood?”

“The consternation of our enemies. The erosion of their strength. Did you think it would be quick?”

“This is no use to Josephine! Muttering curses and cutting up crows–damn it, Atwood, we know who our enemy is.”