Séance Infernale

by Jonathan Skariton

  Whitman could hear the thugs behind him. How long could he keep this up? A stitch began to nag on his right side.

  “Come on, come on, get them, get them!”

  They entered the tunnel. Running frantically, Whitman felt his way along its wall, desperately trying to find a door, an exit, a way out of this mad chase.

  Behind them, the other goons had been joined by Unibrow; he didn’t seem happy.

  Whitman swung his arms level with his shoulders to keep his balance. His breath whooshed from his lungs in the chilly Edinburgh air, billowing and twirling before his face. His chest heaved as the oxygen supply shortened and the lactic acid ran in high concentration through his lower limbs.

  By far the most physically active of the three, McBride had broken into a full sprint and was yards ahead, turning her head and urging Charlie and Whitman to go faster, warning them that the bad guys were catching up.

  My legs are going to give out any minute, Whitman thought, and they’re going to catch us and kill us and it’s not going to make a difference because I have failed you again, Ellie.

  “Stop or we’ll shoot!”

  McBride heard one of them say her name, telling the others to watch it, in case “the bitch is strapped, too.”

  “Come on, come on, we’re safe,” she called to Whitman. “Don’t worry, they’ll never shoot.”

  The men started shooting.

  “You were saying?” Whitman said between his teeth, even though he knew McBride couldn’t hear him.

  One of the bullets flew past them and shattered a glass window. Charlie let out a whimper.

  “At least they’re crap at shooting,” Whitman said.

  He had thought that once they were inside the tunnel they would be safe, but it was a no-win situation.

  The men were right behind them; they had almost caught up.

  In a matter of seconds they’re going to get to Charlie, Whitman thought, and then you’re going to have to stay behind. Unless you’re too much of a chickenshit to help your friend. You didn’t even help your family—how the fuck do you call yourself a human being?

  He stumbled over a stone and fell to the ground, and his teeth sank into his tongue. He got up and kept running, tasting the blood in his mouth. A fragment of his trousers had been torn off at knee level.

  He had to go faster.

  He could hear them now. Their guns were out; they were within range. He heard Charlie crying out and urged him to go faster.

  As the bullets erupted behind him, Whitman dived again, sliding out of control across the cobbles and crashing in a heap against some railings in an alcove on the stone wall.

  Accompanying the roar of the gun, he felt a sensation he had never experienced in his life: the peculiar feeling of a bullet sweeping past his flesh. There was a hissing sound, like the backlash of a whip, and the bullet clanged deep in the cobbles with a flurry of dirt. Blood surging, Whitman heaved his body the rest of the way and got up. Aching and depleted, he broke into a loping run.

  He didn’t get to run for long.

  There was a gunshot and then a large thud on the ground.

  One less set of footsteps flapping on the cobbles.

  He turned around and saw Charlie lying on the ground.

  There was blood.

  Whitman stopped running. He was staring at his friend lying there; it was as if his brain was screaming at him inside his own head, screaming, “Run!” but the message wasn’t getting through—there was something else in the way, something else holding him back with Charlie inside that tunnel.

  He heard McBride cry out and could see her reaching toward him, trying to pull him away. But it was too late. The men were mere feet away. It was all over.

  They pointed their guns at Whitman and McBride. Other than Unibrow’s blood-painted face—that dirty grin spattered with russety spots—nothing registered with Whitman. One of the men began to say something, but Whitman couldn’t understand.

  He heard the sound before he saw it coming.

  The screeching of tires.

  Out of the corner of his eye, a brown car, tinted windows, sped inside the tunnel, colliding with one of the men, hauling him down to the ground, and spinning round to face the others.

  The two remaining thugs were at a loss; they clenched their guns tightly.

  The car revved its engine, roaring.

  Unibrow made a movement to raise his gun, and the car revved again, inching forward just a bit. The sound was hard, deep, guttural, as if inviting a game of chicken.

  The toughies dropped their guns slowly.

  McBride glared at the car. It seemed to be waiting for them to make a getaway.

  Seizing the opportunity, she grabbed Whitman by the arm and they both helped Charlie up. He had lost some blood, but he was miraculously hanging on to consciousness.

  McBride went to the car and tried the passenger door; it was locked. The back door was locked, too. The mysterious driver was keen on helping them, but not willing to take them out of there.

  Whitman looked at the driver’s window. A woman was sitting in it. Medium-length black hair. He recognized the blood-red nails gripping the steering wheel.

  With Charlie’s arms around their shoulders, they headed up Calton Road, the revving engine still blaring at the three thugs behind them. They kept going. Minutes passed.

  Looking back, they saw the standing goons tending to the fallen one. The car was still there, an insurmountable boundary, its engine warning.

  Once they reached the Royal Mile, they looked back again: there was no one on their trail. They entered one of the desolate closes and set Charlie down, his back against the stone wall.

  “Was there really a car?” Charlie asked, unsure. McBride nodded and told him to keep quiet.

  She tore off Charlie’s sleeve and examined the wound. Whitman lit a cigarette. He knelt down, ruffled his friend’s hair, and told him everything would be all right. But would it?

  He reached into Charlie’s pocket, searched for the decoded letter.

  Kneeling in the dimly lit alley, he held it up and read Sekuler’s words.

  Now that you have found your path to my second entry, faithful friend, you might begin to understand the essence of my secret. For centuries the alchemists have strived to procure the elixir vitae. I regret to say I have encountered it.

  Its messenger appeared to me on a tempestuous Edinburgh night. I remember that night with entire distinctness. I had concluded my moving picture experiments and was walking alone in the Gardens. Bells rang in the distance, distracting me. I paused to count the chimes. By the last toll, I had lost count.

  For a moment, all was still and silent, save the voice of the bell. The sound of the last toll was echoing in the air when at length there broke in upon my awareness a successive breathing, intermingled with many low moanings.

  At once I was vigilant. Its sounds were concurrently human and inhuman. In dismay, I saw a statue that I was certain I had never seen before. I looked into its mask of a face and at once I felt enshrouded in its shadow; its breathing pierced through me, coursing through my body. I shivered. For a moment I was one of those stiff-frozen statues of the city, too. This fiend before me was not of this world. I could hear it whispering, calling my name. I gasped and struggled at each call, I shrunk at its every whisper, such as I might had it arisen out of hell. Before the ringing of that last bell had utterly sunk into silence—a still present auditory mirror image—the fiend dragged me with it into the darkness. Deadly terror gripped my bones as I heard what it was whispering. When I saw his pipe burning in the dark, I already knew.

  I wanted to scream, but at that moment the dark silhouette took off the mask concealing its face. And then I knew what it looked like, even though evil always bears the same face.

  It was Carlyle Eistrowe; that fiend who had once been my family’s friend.

  “Your daughter,” he whispered. “Your daughter is mine now.”

  Mary Rex has lost her precious
jewel; descend to Walker’s to the place of the cold and cruel, ascend it once and twice again, behind the close where Allan once lived, look for the bells, the bells that never ring: ornate bells whose knells make the angels sing.

  —

  The close was deserted and narrow—a rusty nail in the city’s skin. The moonlight cast tapered glimmers of silver-gray on its dirt-ridden cobbles. A maze of small courts led off into the shadows, crossed by other closes equally uninviting in the dim light. Above them, the walls of the houses seemed to lean in, nearly touching one another.

  “You have to tell me who’s trying to kill you,” McBride said, still examining Charlie’s wound.

  “He knew,” Whitman said. “The bastard who hired me. He was watching me the whole time, making sure I didn’t screw with him.”

  “Is that what this is, Alex? Does he just want the film?”

  “He’s got the film. He killed one of our mutual acquaintances to get it.”

  “The Basque guy at the Archive?”

  “Catalan. He had the guy’s penis severed and stuck in his mouth.”

  “The good news,” McBride told Charlie, “is the bullet just grazed your arm. You’re going to be okay.”

  “Are you sure? It feels like I’m dying.”

  “You’re going to need stitches.”

  Charlie winced. “I was kind of hoping that was the bad news.”

  McBride shook her head. “The bad news is we have nowhere to go.” She turned to Whitman. “Any ideas?”

  Whitman gave her a blank stare. For a moment, they listened to the wind whispering its secrets to the close’s walls.

  “We can’t go to yours,” McBride said. “And those men knew my name. They’ll be watching my flat.”

  “I know a place,” Whitman said, helping Charlie up.

  “Are you sure this is going to be okay?” Charlie asked, pointing at the blood on his arm. “You’re not, like, hiding something from me, are you? Am I dying?”

  “If only you were a few hundred pounds lighter, Goodyear, this would never have happened,” Whitman said.

  “Where is this place?” McBride asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  29

  The air was cool, and there was a hint of a breeze. Around them, crowds were heading for the pubs on the Grassmarket, an alcoholic parade under an amber-colored sky.

  The three of them walked quickly until they sighted an arcade of shadows on the foot of the West Bow, opposite the well—the short, and sole, stretch of the Bow that remained. The bleak, imposing buildings seemed to curve in on themselves like briars of stone against the gloomy lights.

  Whitman went up to a wooden door. It had been red but was blackened by age; it looked as if it had been shut for centuries. It was considerably smaller than a modern door, suitable for a time when locals were of challenged dimension.

  The scarlet brass door knocker was shaped like Medusa’s head. Whitman knocked four times. In his daze, Charlie expected the ground to shift; it seemed more probable than the antediluvian door should open.

  As they waited, Whitman looked toward the top of the steep street. The glow from the streetlamps filtered through the mist in oblique streaks before settling down and licking the ground.

  Just when it seemed there would be no response, there was the jingling of keys. The door rattled as a tumult of padlocks and latches were unlocked, one after the other. The door creaked halfway open, as if muttering a curse, and air was sucked in and blown out from the inside. A tall, frail man with a stern gaze peered at them from within. His face was almost entirely hidden behind a thick cotton-candy beard hanging to his waist. He stared at them as if they weren’t there; he did not seem to recognize Whitman.

  “And our password will be?” the man asked.

  Whitman cleared his throat. “Llanfair​pwllgwy​ngyllgoge​rychwyr​ndrobwllll​antysiliogo​gogoch.”

  McBride glared at them, frowning.

  Charlie thought for a second. “Barbarella?” he asked Whitman.

  “The prodigal son is back,” the old man said. “But, lo and behold, he comes in the company of friends.” The man was like a ghost. He turned to face them slowly, his lips curled into a quivering grin. His eyes navigated the emptiness, his pupils faint dots of white. McBride gasped; he was blind.

  “I wouldn’t stretch the ‘friend’ bit too far. She’s police,” Whitman said, pointing at McBride.

  The old man’s face hardened for a second. “Even you know better than to bring the law into this establishment, Alex.”

  “I don’t have a choice, Henri. We need help.”

  No sooner had they stepped across the threshold than the old man swung the door shut. He engaged the bolts and fastened more latches than they could count. A heavy-duty deadbolt scraped into place, slamming against its holder. He rattled a steel chain, twisting it around the bolts. Finally, he grabbed a gas lamp from the wall and raised it to Whitman’s face. “You sound like shit.”

  “You should hear the other guy,” Whitman said, looking at McBride.

  They followed the man through a corridor leading into a round hall, some kind of reception room that couldn’t look less receptive. It was a dark, damp place that smelled of vinegar.

  Henri told them to watch their step. “Into the belly of the beast we go.”

  A grandiose stone staircase wound down into blackness, seemingly inviting them into the bowels of the earth. Shadows populated both sides of the balustrade: a terra-cotta army of statues was looking down on them.

  “I thought there was a hostel or a sandwich bar in here,” McBride said. “Where are we?”

  “Underneath that,” Whitman said in a whisper.

  “What is this place?” Charlie asked, and when Whitman didn’t answer: “Am I hallucinating or is that a statue of Sam Peckinpah?”

  The old man smiled behind his thick beard. His expression managed to look both cheerful and demented.

  They advanced further through the building’s innards until there appeared in front of them a brass entrance door.

  “Here we are, then,” Henri said, swinging it open, inviting them onto what looked like a balcony lined with rails.

  The mysterious keeper stopped and stepped aside. He raised the gas lamp in the air, put his chin up in theatrical fashion, and widened his eyes. “Welcome to the Keepers of the Frame.”

  They grabbed the rails, looking down at the sight before them.

  It was a series of immense, monumental labyrinths of film archives, each containing further labyrinths of smaller scope but rivaling complexity, labyrinths of rows and corridors and alleys outlined by shelving anchored in damp earth. Paths veered away onto other levels, following their own perilous course: hidden crevices, furtive corners, and fissures blacker than the night, where forsaken winters had gnawed at the sunless stone.

  “I love the smell of nitrate in the morning,” Whitman said.

  This behemoth of a structure was suspended over a sea of pale mist; it was as if they had been anchored on a veil of velvet. Gaslights were scattered like moths in the confusion, their rays glimmering into the Gothic. Amid the glow was movement, shadowy figures strewn throughout the corridors and walking the platforms.

  Henri, holding the lamp, led the climb down the balcony staircase to the labyrinth below; they followed, all the while staring at the sight, mouths agape. Above them, incredible towering ceilings stretched forever high—easily the tallest they had ever seen. A huge blue glass vault presided over all, but no shafts of light passed through it, being blocked by the foundations and floor of the edifices above them.

  They continued, immersing themselves in the depths of the labyrinthine structure, an omphalos of intersecting passages and bridges of mind-boggling proportions.

  Charlie still wasn’t certain of what he was seeing. Maybe it was the loss of blood that was messing with his head. Nevertheless, he found it difficult to keep his mouth closed. “Eat your heart out, Eastman House,” he mana
ged to whisper. He glanced toward the immensity of the maze, the pain from his injury gnawing at his mind.

  “How do you index such a thing?” McBride asked, helping Charlie along.

  “It has been a work in progress for many, many years. We are helped by the orphans,” Henri said, gesturing to the shadowy figures scattered in the labyrinth. Charlie squinted through the haze of the mist: he thought he saw children, somewhere between seven and twelve years old, browsing reels of endless wisdom.

  “How come you never…” Charlie began.

  Whitman gave a soft laugh.

  “A long time ago, he did try,” Henri said. “I could see through his tactics. I knew he wanted to relieve us of anything of value. He convinced a projectionist who frequented this place to show him around. When the others saw him stealing, his pockets packed with so much material that he looked like the Michelin Man, all hell broke loose. Film people are normally placid, unless you threaten that which they most treasure. Then God help you. My friend Lotte wanted to take his head.”

  They were approaching the other side of the labyrinth. Staring into the void, Henri said, “The projector, my dear, the projector.” A split second later, McBride had struck her foot on the lamp housing of the Elmo projector lying on the floor. She cursed at it, then at its mother.

  “How does he do it?” she asked Whitman. “Is he really blind or what?”

  Whitman broke into laughter.

  Charlie held his arm around McBride—the pain was still searing—and urged Henri to carry on with his story.

  “Several of my colleagues had been alerted to his behavior and had encircled him with threatening intentions. I approached the scene, and they explained the situation to me. I decided a Jean Valjean moment would be the best solution. I answered that I had granted Whitman the right to take any films he wanted for a brief period of time, provided he would return them. It was for a very serious purpose, I explained, one which was so personal I could not divulge it. ‘You forgot that Murnau picture,’ I told him in front of the lynch mob. Which one was it, now? Ah, yes, the one that people still think has only three minutes surviving, that’s the one. The next morning, every film was back in its place. After that he spent his time here in peace. He is a good kid. He has just been sidetracked, searching for substitutes for that which he cannot find.”