“Are you all right?” Wells asked, tracing a finger tenderly along her upturned jaw.
“Better than that.”
“No regrets, then?”
“Should I have?” she replied, pressing a quick kiss to his lips.
Disentangling herself, she got up and crossed the hall into the bathroom, even then displaying a confidence he did not often see. She didn’t scurry off with head down, or wrap her naked body in a sheet, but moved unhurriedly. He heard her turn the faucets on the tub, heard the rush of the water in the pipes. When she closed the door, he stared up at the ceiling, asking himself what he had just done.
The searchlight beam sliced between the curtains again.
He had launched another of his passades—that much was undeniable. But this time it was with someone who, until that evening, had been a virgin, and with whom, he knew in his bones already, he would experience passion, and a welter of other emotions, utterly foreign to married men of his years. His life would be simpler without such escapades, but it would be immeasurably less interesting, too. Decades of fidelity, to one woman, in one bed, in one redundant embrace, was a fate he could not fathom. The very springs of his creativity would dry up without the occasional foray into new and forbidden territory. It was his way of priming the pump, stoking the engine. Eros was his inspiration, and without it he felt he would be utterly enervated.
When Rebecca slipped back under the sheets, they kissed again, and when he excused himself, he went to the sink and ran some warm water onto a hand cloth. He scrubbed the sticky patches of his skin—the water gave off a rusty odor—before turning on the cold water tap, bending his head to the basin and splashing his face.
Instantly, he regretted it.
The neuralgia, or whatever the hell it was, burst like a grenade in that spot between his eyes, and he again squeezed the skin firmly, with two fingers, to try to squelch the pain. He fumbled for a towel and wiped the water from his eyes, but his vision remained blurry. He swung open the medicine chest mirror, retrieved the aspirin bottle, and swallowed several pills with a handful of water. It was only when he swung the mirror closed again that he was so startled he dropped the bottle and stared into the glass as if he’d seen a ghost.
Or had he?
He whipped around, but the bathroom door was closed and he was quite alone.
He looked back at the mirror. It was empty, apart from his own reflection.
But the image was indelibly imprinted on his mind.
Just behind his shoulder he had caught a glimpse—as evanescent as it was shocking—of Corporal Norridge—and not as he was in life. The bullet hole that had been drilled like an awl straight through his right eye was as black and bloody as Wells, who had cradled the dying man against his overcoat, remembered it. Norridge’s remaining eye was open, and his lips were, too—he was saying something, but so softly Wells had not been sure of what it was.
Yanking his robe from the hook, he pulled it on, and threw open the bathroom door, dreading what he might see, but the hallway held only shadows. He went into the bedroom, where Rebecca was lying under the blanket, her back against the headboard, and looked around the room, before leaving again.
“H. G.?” she said.
He poked his head into his study—nothing and no one there—and then turned on the light in the front parlor. His eyes took a few seconds to adjust, but again the room was just as he had left it.
“What’s wrong?” Rebecca said.
Turning, he saw her standing in the archway, the quilt gathered around her.
“You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
When he didn’t answer, she said, “Did you?”
He pressed two fingers to his forehead—he felt as if all the energy had just been drained from his body—and she came to him, opening the quilt and wrapping it around the two of them.
“Come back to bed.”
“But I could have sworn . . .”
“Could have sworn what?”
How could he answer? That he’d seen a soldier—Eddie, he remembered now, was the man’s first name, Corporal Eddie Norridge—but as he was just after he’d been killed by machine gun fire?
“Bed,” she said, shuffling them both back toward the hallway. “You need rest,” adding, as encouragement, “Jaguar.”
He offered her a weak smile, though his mind still reeled, and his nostrils twitched with a faint scent of the trenches.
“Panther,” he replied.
They slipped back into the bed, and though Rebecca swiftly fell asleep, her head nestled on his chest, Wells lay awake, staring at the ceiling and trying to determine what the dead soldier had said. It wasn’t at all clear, but had he been mumbling something about a saint?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In the cellar of Crowley’s townhouse, where he had set up his laboratory, Dr. Anton Graf heard the sirens announcing another zeppelin incursion and wondered for a moment if he should postpone his mission that night. On the one hand, he had no more desire than the English did to be blown to bits by an incendiary bomb, but on the other, the attack might provide extra cover. Most people would be rushing into the tube stations for shelter, or cowering under a kitchen table in their homes. They wouldn’t be out in the open, on the streets, much less carrying a dangerous cargo in their leather satchel, as he would be.
He finished up what he had been doing—very carefully wrapping the glass vials, with their murky yellow and green contents, in swaths of cotton before fixing them into their slots in the velvet-lined sample case; the brass box had been given to him by Dr. Loeffler himself, in recognition of his work for the Imperial Colonial Office. He had just snapped it closed when he heard footsteps on the stairs and turned to see that strange, barefoot girl—the latest of Crowley’s many disciples—with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders.
“Haven’t I told you never to come down here, Sally?”
“Circe. The Master said that was my new name.”
Crowley redubbed them all, the gullible lost souls he inducted into his sect. “Why Circe?” he could not resist asking.
“Because he said that I was so beautiful he acted like a swine around me.” She shrugged, indicating that the classical allusion had been squandered on her.
How did he find them all? Graf had often wondered. Or did they somehow find him?
“There’s an air raid,” she implored. “It’s safer down here.”
“Look around you,” he said, waving a hand at the many beakers and flasks, the incubators and burners and bellows, the petri dishes and chemical bottles, cluttering the work tables. “Do these look safe to you?”
She seemed uncertain on that score. “You’re just making gold, aren’t you?”
Sometimes it was all he could do to contain his temper, even with Crowley himself. Yes, the story was that he was performing great feats of alchemy down here—turning lead into gold, discovering the philosopher’s stone, the universal alkahest—and he had to keep up that subterfuge, for his own good. But, Gott in Himmel, there were times, like this one, when he longed to dispatch them all, so he could get on with his work in peace. With great deliberation, he slipped the brass box into his satchel.
“Go and hide somewhere else,” he said.
“Where are you going to go?”
“Out.”
The sirens screamed more loudly.
He pulled on his hat and overcoat, scarf and gloves, and with the satchel in one hand, and the other hand pushing Circe up the stairs ahead of him, he emerged from the cellar. Despite the fact that he was Crowley’s guest here—and a secret guest at that, harbored in plain violation of the Alien Restrictions Act—he would have to put a strong lock on this door. Crowley forbade locks in his house, as they were an impediment to his goal of unfettered freedom and access, but now that his endeavor had reached its critical late stages, he simply could not risk exposure, intrusion, or meddling of any kind.
Outside, the streets were nearly deserted, with just a few stragglers
making for whatever protection they thought best, when, in fact, Graf knew it was all just the luck of the draw. Even if the zeppelins had wanted to drop a bomb on a specific target, they could seldom manage it. Winds and weather made precision too impractical for the gas-filled dirigibles. But they achieved, nonetheless, their major aim—which was to instill fear and uncertainty in the civilian population. Looking up at the sky, scissored by white search beams, Graf saw, a couple of miles to the east, the dull black silhouette of two of the behemoths and the glow of a fire below them. Fine, he thought, if the airships stayed over there, they would not impede his journey toward the Horse Guards Parade.
After securing his box in the wicker basket of the bicycle that he kept below the street stairs, he climbed on and set off. A trip like this would be hard enough on a night when the streetlamps were lit and the shop windows blazing, but in the dark it was especially difficult. He had made the journey many times before, so he knew which stretches of pavement were straighter and smoother, but several times he almost missed a street corner where he was meant to turn. Twice air-raid wardens shouted at him, warning him to seek shelter, but he simply tucked his face into his scarf, waved one hand, and pedaled harder.
As he approached the edges of St. James’s Park, bordering the parade grounds, he could smell the wet trees . . . and the horses. Thousands had been shipped here from all over the countryside, and plenty more all the way from America, to be checked by veterinarians and then transported to the battlefields of France. Without horses, an army could not function, and at the opening of the war, the British army had only twenty-six thousand on hand—a fraction of the number that would be needed. The British Remount Services had put out the call, and requisitions officers had scoured every farm and hamlet in the kingdom. There were so many horses assembled here now that there wasn’t room to stable them all, so the surplus was corralled on the parade grounds itself and others in a sequestered section of the park. The sirens and smell of distant smoke in the air would be sure to make the animals, nervous and scared to begin with, even more jittery than usual. But Graf was good at calming them; in Reims, he’d become famous for it.
He had visited the parade grounds enough times before the war had broken out that he knew his way around, and he counted on the over-saturation of animals, compounded by the chaos of the zeppelin attack, to afford him additional protection tonight. Stashing his bicycle in a clump of bushes, he slung his leather satchel over one shoulder, like a quiver, and crept toward what he knew was a low and rusty old gate at the eastern end of the grounds. Even here, he spotted a sentry marching back and forth, his rifle over his shoulder. But he had only to wait until the soldier had reached the far end of his circuit before scurrying out, and then scrambling over the old gate.
Entering the vast stables, in which the horses of the Life Guards were normally kept, would prove to be more difficult, but he was counting on old Silas to be minding the feedlots, and he was right. Before the war, Graf had occasionally acted as a consultant to the British veterinary corps, but had taken the precaution, even then, of giving the old man only a false name—Dr. Eulenspiegel, after the famed German trickster—rather than his own. Even then, he had foreseen this day might come.
When Silas looked up to see him, and Graf greeted him with a smile and a hearty hello, Silas gave him a gap-toothed smile in return and said, “What brings you out in an air raid, Doctor?”
“That’s why I’ve been sent,” he said, “to see to the horses’ agitation.”
“Good luck to you with that,” Silas said. “They been skittish all day, like they knew what was coming. Barely et a bite.”
“But you have filled the troughs and bins for the night?”
Silas nodded. “See for yourself.”
Dr. Graf passed by the huge storerooms, where bales of hay were stacked to the ceiling and barrels of bran and oats, each one the size of an automobile, were lined up as far as the eye could see. Another pair of sentries was patrolling the lots. But it was too risky to do his work in here, anyway, and besides, it was the horses and mules outside, the ones most likely to be shipped soon, that were his quarry.
He walked slowly, so as to call no attention to himself, down the wide, dirt-floored concourse, through the areas where the incoming livestock had been processed. The smell of seared flesh was in the air here, from the red-hot branding irons, with the broad arrow of the British army, which had been pressed into the animals’ flanks—it took half a dozen men to hold down each one—then he went on past the hogging stalls, where manes were trimmed and tails squared in the military fashion. Graf, an expert on equine care, knew that they routinely cut away too much of the horses’ natural coat, especially given the rigorous conditions the creatures would encounter at the battlefront. The horses could freeze, catch pneumonia . . . or, as no one knew better than he did, suffer even worse fates than that.
There was another guard at the archway leading to the parade grounds, but since Graf was already coming from inside the stables, he was able to saunter right under his nose unchallenged, with a salute and his leather veterinary bag now clutched in one hand. Stepping out into the open parade grounds, he saw that it had been partitioned off into at least a dozen vast corrals, separated by hastily constructed barriers of wood and wire. In some there were horses, in others mules, and in some a mix of the two. At one of these, he saw what were unmistakably Missouri mules, animals that might well have come all this way from the Guyton and Harrington Mule Company, centered in a little American town called Lathrop; G&H had been supplying animals to the British army since the Boer War years before. These American-bred mules were especially prized for wartime duty as they were strong and sturdy, and a good deal more easily managed than draft horses.
He continued along the outside fencing, to make sure he was as far from the stables as possible, before finding what he needed—a convenient tree stump that would serve as a table. Looking all around, he opened his satchel, removed the brass case, then replaced his leather gloves with a pair made out of thick, reinforced rubber; these, he pulled halfway up to his elbows, under his coat sleeves. Wearing them would make his work a bit more difficult—he would lose a fine sense of touch—but not wearing them could cost him his life. Unlatching the case and folding its lid all the way back, he surveyed the pair of syringes secured on top, and then the quartet of vials, two marked “A” and two marked “G.”
The “A” stood for anthrax, the “G” for glanders.
Where to start? All the horses and mules were shifting nervously in their pens, alarmed by the vagrant smoke in the air from the zeppelin raid, but they were crowded in so close it would not be hard to get at them. As delicately as he could, Graf lifted out the two syringes, each one about two inches long, and slipped off the cork stoppers protecting the steel needles. Opening two of the vials, he dipped the needles into the bile-colored broth—cultured in his own lab—and, laying one of them on the stump, approached the wooden perimeter fence with the other held tightly between two fingers.
“Come to me,” he said to the nearest animal, a chestnut-colored shire horse with shaggy white hooves. Its great dark eyes were fearful, but he crooned to it and held out his hand as if it held a lump of sugar. The horse bowed its head several times, and paced in place, before growing curious enough to extend its nose over the water trough that rested against the boards of the pen.
“That’s it,” Graf said, “das ist gut.”
As he stroked and petted its head, gaining its trust, he took aim and then plunged the needle into its neck. The horse whinnied in pain and reared back, kicking out and hitting another horse crammed in behind it. When that horse swiveled around to get out of the way, Graf jabbed it, too, in its flank.
Now the whole pen was in motion, ramming and butting each other, aware of some immediate danger, crying and braying and snorting in alarm. Graf recharged the syringes and when a pair of mules—sorrel males—came within reach, he stuck one in the haunch and another, a strong plow ani
mal, in its shoulder. That one twisted its neck back at the injection and snapped at his hand, nearly taking off his fingers, but Graf cursed it and reloaded again, methodically moving from corral to corral, luring animals close and then jabbing at them, wherever he could reach, with the dripping steel needles. Infecting every creature he could reach with the two deadly contagions.
He had almost run out of the bacteria when a guard, alerted by the whinnying and kicking of the injured beasts, appeared a couple dozen yards away. Graf just had time to dump the rest of the germs into the water and feed troughs before the sentry spotted him and shouted, “You there! Stop!”
Graf snapped his case shut, threw it into the satchel, and scrambled for the shadows.
“I said, hold!”
But Graf ran toward the shelter of the trees in St. James’s Park. A shot rang out and a branch snapped over his head. Glancing back, he collided with the end of a wooden bench, and tumbled over it, onto the hard ground. The open satchel flew out of his hand and the brass box clanged against a tree trunk. A shrill alarm whistle sounded, and on all fours Graf scuttled after the bag. He had it in hand when another shot splintered the bark of the tree where his empty case lay, glinting in the moonlight no more than a yard or two away. He darted out to retrieve it, but this time the shot spurted the dirt up around his feet, and he had no choice but to race in the other direction. He put as many trees as he could between himself and his pursuer, and by the time he reached the spot where his bicycle lay hidden, he heard no more shots, or any indication of close pursuit. His lungs were ragged, but he got on the bike, and with legs aching from the collision with the bench, pedaled away.
By the time he left the park grounds, the all-clear alerts were sounding—constables ringing hand bells, Boy Scouts on bicycles blowing their bugles—and civilians were starting to emerge from the shelters and tube stations. He was finally able to steer the bike into an alleyway and stop, his heart hammering in his chest. With one hand, still in its rubber glove, supporting himself against the redbrick wall, he vomited copiously from the sheer exertion of it all.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 17
