One of them—a foolish man—reached out to grasp Hudson’s shoulder and guide him on his way.
Hudson stopped short. Steam swirled from his nostrils. “If you want to keep that hand, you’ll drop it to your side.”
“We don’t have to take any shit from you,” another one said, and put the point of a rapier up under Hudson’s unshaven chin.
Hudson Greathouse laughed. It was as much a release of tension as it was a reaction to this incredible scene of—as Frederick Nash, the so-called mayor of this town had said—nonsense. Around Hudson was a village of small houses and well-kept streets that could have been any charming locale in the country, except for the structures that for some reason had been reduced to ruins. So far Hudson had been denied explanation of what had caused such wreckage. The smoke of kitchen and parlor hearths curled from chimneys, lanterns glowed cheerfully in the windows, people in their winter clothing strolled about as if advancing to dinner or the theater in the finest neighborhoods of London, and indeed last night in the village square there’d been a concert by a fiddle-player and an accordionist, attended by perhaps forty citizens and warmed by a generous bonfire. Yet here in this midst of weird civility Hudson thought it absolutely absurd that he stood on the street with a blade to his throat while Berry Grigsby was a mindless puppet to Frederick and Pamela Nash…and also, he had noted the abundance of bloodstains in spaces between the square’s stones, and whatever had recently taken place there had been gruesome indeed.
Hudson looked back toward Nash’s house and caught sight of a figure standing at the front window with a candlestick and burning taper in hand. He thought it might be Berry but he couldn’t tell because the glass had frosted over. Another figure—Nash? Or Nash’s wife?—came into view and with an arm around the shoulder pulled the first figure into the darker recesses of the house.
“Move,” said the man with the sword.
Hudson turned away from the house and began walking toward the cottage they’d afforded him, on Bluefish Lane. All the streets here were named after sea creatures…again, another ridiculous bow to the semblance of a real village, when in fact this was both a fort and a prison, as Hudson had determined in his walkabouts. Four strides further along Conger Street and the enormity—and tragedy—of what had befallen Berry hit Hudson like a ten-team lumber wagon. His broad-shouldered, six-foot-three-inch-tall frame trembled and staggered. His eyes burned with tears. He felt near fainting and devoid of strength, and when the man behind him gave him a shove he took it like a milksop. He had contained himself in Berry’s presence, but now the shock of the situation emerged in the presence of a crawling upon his arms and hands, and when he held his hands up into the torchlight upon them were dozens of large black spiders scurrying over and between his fingers.
Sweat burst forth on his face. He nearly cried out…and would have, if he hadn’t realized in a cooler part of his brain that this fearful hallucination was a remnant of the drug he’d been given on his arrival to this little corner of Hell. The torch flames themselves became horrors; like whips they flailed out at Hudson, and within them were the contorted and destroyed faces of the dead men he recalled on the field of battle, long ago when he was an English soldier in the last years of the Franco-Dutch war. The flames grew arms, as if to pluck him from this place and deposit him alongside the tormented souls on the shores from which no man returned.
Hudson squeezed his eyes shut and shouted “AWAY!” at the top of his lungs. The shout caused his guards to crash into each other as they retreated, their swords and pistols aimed for action but atremble so badly they couldn’t have hit a wild bull at six paces, which at the moment would’ve been a tamer target than the man himself.
“Hush,” said someone, in a quiet voice.
Hudson opened his eyes. There before him, as the fiery arms and the cinder-eyed faces crackled above and began to become simply torch flames again, was the wiry man who called himself Stalker.
“What’s all this commotion?” Stalker asked, still quietly. He was about half the size of Hudson but there was something about his sharp-jawed face, the coldly intelligent eyes and the smooth economy of his movements that told Hudson this man had experience in killing people in the dark; an assassin by nature, is what Hudson suspected. Stalker was bundled up in a sheepskin coat and wore a black cap upon his bald head. His hands were lodged in his pockets and he had the easy demeanor of a man out taking the evening’s air. “Ah!” he said, and then to the others: “He’s had an incident. Don’t be frightened, boys. He’s coming out of it.”
Hudson watched the last few spiders vanish from his hands like whirls of dark smoke. He ran a forearm across his sweating face. He said to Stalker, “Damn you.”
“I presume you had a pleasant visit with the girl.” It was a statement, not a question.
Hudson spat on the ground between Stalker’s lizard-skin boots.
“Your opinion means nothing to me,” Stalker said. “What becomes of you means nothing, either…but I’ve been told to find you and bring you to dinner.”
“To dinner? What?”
“He wants you to join him.”
Hudson knew exactly who was summoning him. “Tell the professor he can go to—”
“You have questions no one will answer,” Stalker interrupted. “They have been forbidden to do so. The professor has instructed me to tell you that it’s time you got your answers…from himself.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Not for the knowledge you’ve been seeking? Oh come now, Hudson! You want to know where Corbett is, correct?”
Hudson didn’t reply.
“It’s dinnertime,” said Stalker.
Hudson followed the man along Conger Street and was in turn followed by the other four. The wind had picked up, blowing in over the fort’s ramparts and bringing with it the briny scent of the sea. At the end of the street stood a stone construction that looked nearly like a small castle, with many windows of stained glass and a balcony encircling the upper floor. Hudson had previously seen this house and had no doubt to whom it must belong. Lamplights glowed behind the green, blue and red patterns of the windows. The house stood on a slight incline beyond an open iron gate, the gravel pathway leading up to the front steps ornamented by small trees that had been blown into contorted shapes by the seawind.
“Wait here,” Stalker told the other men, and then motioned Hudson on ahead.
In another few minutes Hudson and Stalker stood in a dining room with dark red wallpaper and heavy black drapes over the two windows. Hudson saw that the dining table had legs carved to resemble leaping dolphins, and suspended from the ceiling above it was a black wrought-iron wagonwheel chandelier holding six burning candles. On the table were four more burning tapers, two placed before the silver platter and utensils table setting at one end and two at the other. Hudson noted that both settings included knives, and both were very sharp-looking indeed. That particularly interested him, since he’d not been allowed a razor to shave with, and here were blades that could cut a man’s throat as quick as a wish.
“I’ll take your coat,” Stalker said, and waited as Hudson shrugged out of it. “Sit there.” Stalker tapped the high-backed chair that faced the other high-backed chair. Included with the setting at the other end was a small silver bell: the master’s voice. As Hudson obeyed, Stalker used that same tapping finger to touch the knife. “You’re already salivating over this. If I were you, I’d be a polite dinner guest. A blade won’t get you answers any faster, and besides…you might need it for your food. Professor?” he called toward the staircase they’d passed on the way in. “Shall I stay?”
“No.”
A shadow had moved not from the direction of the staircase, but from a far corner of the room draped in darkness.
As Hudson watched, the shadow became a man.
“Thank you, Stalker,” said Professor Fell, “but I’m sure Mr. Gr
eathouse will be a polite dinner guest. Just hang his coat in the hallway as you leave. And go get something to eat at the tavern, the catch was good today.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hudson didn’t bother to watch Stalker leave the room; he was fixed upon his first sight of the notorious, powerful and infamous Professor Fell…
…who today looked like nothing more than a frail, weary and completely harmless man of sixty or so who happened to be up past his bedtime.
“Greetings,” Fell said, with a slight nod. He wore a silk robe of purple trimmed in gold and a purple silk skullcap. “I am pleased to see you’ve recovered.”
“Were you pleased to put me in that condition?” Upon arriving here by coach and under armed guard—how long ago?—he and Berry were separated, half-a-dozen men had held him down while a bitter-smelling cloth was held over his face, he recalled coming out of the fog to feel a needle jabbing him in the prominent vein of his right arm, and after that came the nightmares of excruciating terror. Among them was the sense that venomous spiders were not only crawling over him but growing inside him, and the feeling that his body continually burst into flame, burned him to a skeleton, and then charred him again when his flesh grew back. In that state, he remembered that hearing someone speak his own name was like the sound of a death sentence from a vengeful God.
“Experimentation is one of my passions,” the professor replied. “Surely you won’t hold that too much against me?”
“If I had my way, I’d hold this against your throat.” Candlelight jumped off the blade as Hudson picked it up and aimed it in Fell’s direction.
“Your way,” said Fell, “has brought you and Miss Grigsby here. I think your way is not as successful as you would desire.” He sat down, carefully unfolded the red napkin at his setting and placed it in his lap, and by the light of the tapers Hudson had the opportunity to study this man who had caused such death and destruction to the New World as well as to the Old.
Professor Fell was a mulatto, light of skin. His long-jawed and high-cheekboned face could have been described as gaunt, but that word might put too much flesh upon it. Hudson considered that the professor looked like a man whose misdeeds had caught up with him, and the violence of the storms within were contorting his bones just as the wind off the sea had blown the trees outside into grotesque shapes. On either side of the purple skullcap tight white curls of hair bloomed out like the wings of a snowy owl. Blue veins laced his hands; perhaps they trembled just the slightest with palsy, or mayhap it was a trick of the light.
Professor Fell smiled, and thereupon Hudson caught the glint of teeth. He saw in the deep hollows of the strangely luminous amber orbs of the man’s eyes not a palsied and weary wisp but something of an animal—a king of beasts, as it were, who had gained his position of royalty with his intelligence and his cunning, and used the brute strength of lesser men for the jobs that involved blood and guts. It was in the way the professor was examining him, even as he examined the professor; Hudson had the impression that behind the lined face the wheels were turning so fast the friction might soon make Fell snort smoke, and it would drift slowly down the length of the table and wrap itself around Hudson’s head like an envelope of fine spider webbing.
Fell placed his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers. Hudson thought that whatever the professor had been thinking, a decision had been made.
“I understand,” said Fell, “that late last night you caused quite a scene by destroying most of the furnishings of your house and throwing the sticks into the street.”
“Correct.”
“Impatience does no one any good, Hudson. May I call you that?” He went on without waiting for a response. “You were going to be allowed to see Miss Grigsby today anyway. Now you’ll be sleeping on a cold floor for your efforts.”
“I’ve slept on cold floors before.”
“I’m sure.” The amber eyes were both piercing and entrancing. “You’re not fearful of me in the least, are you?”
“I’ve worn my fear shirt to shreds,” said Hudson. “Thanks to you, and whatever drug your people pricked me with.”
“Hm!” Fell’s head cocked slightly to one side. “Now wouldn’t that be interesting? If after recovering from a drug that intensifies fear, the subject becomes immune to it. You see, Hudson, you may have delivered a service to mankind.”
“What service is Berry supplying? How a young woman of intelligence can become a mindless doll?”
Fell gave no response. His face showed not a flicker of emotion. For a while he simply sat in silence and stared down the table into Hudson’s eyes. At last he picked up the silver bell and rang it. “Let’s get started, shall we?” he said.
A heavy-set woman with a tight bun of brown hair and wearing an apron entered through another door at the rear of the room. She carried a silver tray, and from it set down green ceramic bowls of cream-colored soup before first the professor and then Hudson. “Thank you, Noreen,” Fell said to her. “We’ll have the wine now, if you please.”
When the woman had departed the room, Fell picked up his soup spoon and said in a quieter voice, “I have to say, Noreen is proficient but not as good an attendant as my last one, and also the gentleman who used to be my cook was injured in a little incident we recently had here, so the new man is still under evaluation. But go ahead and eat up, Hudson; you can be sure it’s just cuttlefish chowder, and nothing more exotic.”
Hudson dipped his spoon into the chowder and smelled it. Fresh enough, and no scent of drugs, but what would that matter? Maybe the professor was correct, and his sense of fear had evaporated. Anyway, he was hungry, and that finished the internal debate. He ate the first spoonful and found it very good indeed.
“I expected Mother Deare to be joining us for dinner,” Hudson said.
“Two days ago Mother Deare was the dinner,” Fell answered. “The sharks that prowl our harbor at the bottom of the cliff appreciated her body being fed to them in pieces.”
Hudson paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. He said, “I think I’ve missed a lot.”
“Indeed you have. Oh good, here’s our wine. A nice soft white, to go with our baked halibut.” Noreen, carrying another tray, had emerged from what Hudson presumed was the kitchen; she placed a wine glass before Hudson and another before the professor, and then went about uncorking the bottle. She poured each of them about a half-glassful and left the bottle on the table as she returned to the kitchen. Fell took a drink and nodded. “Very fine, as always. Unfortunately it’s my last bottle of this, as recent vibrations to the house caused some breakage in my cellar.”
“All right,” Hudson said. He put his spoon into the soup and left it there. “I appreciate the dinner and the attempts at gentlemanly manners, but where the hell is Matthew Corbett?”
“Not here,” came the reply. “He left three days ago with one of my men, Julian Devane by name. Matthew volunteered for a mission to be undertaken, and I sincerely hope he has not been by this time killed in trying to carry it out.”
“Go on.” Hudson felt a tightening in his gut that was definitely caused not by the chowder, but by the misadventures of a chowderhead.
“My village,” said the professor as he continued to eat his soup, “was attacked from the sea by a ship armed with a mortar weapon. That would explain the destruction you obviously have seen. We were also attacked from within, by traitors under the command of Mother Deare, who was herself under the insane command of an individual who calls himself ‘Cardinal Black’. They came for the book of potions created by my ex-chemist, Dr. Jonathan Gentry. You may have known him in New York?”
“Yes, and I understood from Matthew that he lost his head at one of your dinner parties.”
“A more important thing has now been lost,” Fell said. “The book that Gentry’s head conceived. Without it—and without a chemist to decipher the formulas—there is no ho
pe for the recovery of Miss Grigsby. By my estimation—and it could be quite faulty, but I do have some idea of the power of that particular concoction—she will continue to decline until the Nashes have an infant daughter to care for…if the antidote is not given to her in several doses, and I believe the threshold of recovery is now in the realm of…I would say, to be safe…twenty-one days.”
Hudson sat very still. He didn’t move even when Noreen came out with their platters of baked halibut, fried corncakes, applesauce and candied yams.
At last, Hudson unclenched his teeth. “What was the point,” he said with an effort, “of giving her that drug? What had she done to you?”
“It was what Matthew has done. All that he has done, and all that he has cost me.” Fell swirled the wine around in his glass and watched it, the candlelight glinting off the glass and into his amber-colored eyes. “I intended him to watch her decline into imbecility…and to watch you perish from the very force of fear itself.” His gaze left the glass and aimed at Hudson. “I hope you intend to use that blade on the corncake,” he said softly, “because the halibut needs only a fork.”
Hudson realized he had picked up the knife and was holding it in a white-knuckled grip, the point upraised to stab not a fish but a foul.
“So,” Fell continued, with a slight shrug as if the weapon Hudson held were no more than an apparition, “Matthew and Julian have ridden off to find Cardinal Black and bring back the book and a chemist. They are beginning at a village called Adderlane, six or seven miles northwest along the coast. We learned that Black’s men were using it as their staging-point. We’re in Wales, about twenty miles from Swansea, if you’d care to know.”
Cardinal Black Page 3
