“So this is where you’re hiding, you tiresome old woman! Open up!”
That spurred Clayton on, and with a supreme effort he managed to pull himself free of the bookcase and began crawling painfully along the floor like a newborn calf. Once he was clear, the inspector dragged himself to his feet, gave the Mechanical Servant an unceremonious kick, and hobbled into the corridor as though walking on stilts. Terribly dizzy, he started to descend the stairs laboriously, clinging to the banister rail, even as the intruder hurled himself at the old lady’s study, alternately punching and kicking the locked door. Clayton had scarcely managed to negotiate a couple of steps when he heard the sound of wood splintering as the door began to give way, followed by Mrs. Lansbury’s terrified screams. Realizing the intruder would finish breaking down the door before he had time to reach the bottom of the stairs, the inspector propped his elbows on the banister rail and aimed at the stranger.
“Stop!” he cried with as much authority as he could muster. “Place your hands above your head and turn around!”
But he was unable to make himself heard above the figure’s inhuman roars. He cocked his gun and fired at the ceiling. That brought the stranger up short. The inspector watched his body tense as he realized someone was aiming at him from the stairs. But instead of turning round with his hands up, as Clayton had hoped, the intruder bolted toward the front door. The hallway was wide and long enough to allow Clayton to take steady aim from his vantage point. As if this were a target practice, he placed the gun sight level with the intruder’s back and prepared to pull the trigger. Yet he did not want to kill the intruder, only to stop him from escaping, and so Clayton lowered his weapon before firing. The intruder came to an abrupt halt, reaching down to where Clayton’s bullet had lodged itself in the back of his left thigh. Then, as though possessed by a monstrous fury that seemed to reduce the wound to little more than a minor nuisance, he resumed his escape, staggering and cursing as he went. Clayton went down the stairs, managing not to trip over, and ran across the hallway after him. He stepped through the wide-open front door and lurched down the front steps.
He looked to left and right, but to his astonishment could see no trace of the stranger. How had he managed to run the length of the street and vanish so quickly, and with a wounded leg? Clayton spun round a few times, until he was facing the old lady’s house again. He gazed silently at the open door. Could the intruder still be inside the house? Then, on the top of the steps, a strange thing began to happen: a large bloodstain started to materialize out of nowhere, as though traced that very instant by an invisible hand. As if watching a magic trick, Clayton gazed in astonishment as it spread across the wooden threshold, finally taking on the shape of a squashed crab. Seconds later, another stain appeared on the second step, and then a third on the next, and suddenly a trail of red was moving toward him like a bloody fuse. It passed between his legs, forcing him to wheel round in order to follow the miraculous apparition. Then the phenomenon ceased as quickly as it had started, right in the middle of the street, a few yards from where Clayton was standing. He turned back to face the house and began to follow the bloody trail back to its source. A larger bloodstain in the hallway, together with some conspicuous spatters on a doorjamb, seemed to indicate the exact spot where the shot had hit him. Clayton could have sworn they were not there before. He shook his head and forced himself to forget the mystery for a few moments in order to concentrate on the old lady, who must be waiting in fear of her life on the other side of the half-demolished study door.
“Open up, Mrs. Lansbury,” he said in a reassuring voice when he reached the study. “It’s me, Inspector Clayton. The intruder has fled.”
But there was no reply from inside.
“Mrs. Lansbury?” he called out.
Silence. Clayton repeated her name several times, and when she didn’t answer, he demolished the rest of the door, which gave way easily. He burst into the room, afraid he was going to find the old woman’s limp body sprawled on the floor, but there was no one there. Dumbfounded, he glanced around, examining every corner of the tiny room. The desk, the pedestal table with the tea things, the supposedly mouthwatering Kemp’s biscuits—everything was in its place: only the old lady was missing. After checking that the key was still in the lock, and the windows fastened from the inside, Clayton strode desperately around the room in search of a hiding place where he might find her. To no avail. How had Mrs. Lansbury managed to leave the room? And who could have abducted her, if the door was locked from the inside?
Spinning slowly around, Clayton surveyed the room once more, certain he had missed something. Suddenly, the giddy feeling began to intensify and he realized it had nothing to do with the blow from the bookcase. No, this dizziness was different, although familiar. And he knew that it was happening to him again.
“No, not now . . . ,” he cursed.
But before he could finish his sentence, he fainted away, dragging the vase from the desk with him as he fell. He lay sprawled flat in the empty room, ripped from consciousness, just as the rest of the world prepared to face the mystery of a new day.
This time, the darkness smelled of freshly cut roses.
7
BUT THE SMELL HAD NOT always been as sweet. The first time darkness had descended on him he had been enveloped in an unpleasant stench of horse manure, having passed out in a pestilential alleyway, cracking his head against the dirty cobbles. The second time the smell had spread over him with the leisurely rhythm of an old curtain, a mixture of musty fabric, wood, and polished leather, as he had fainted in a theater, sliding almost voluptuously out of his seat and onto the soft carpet. Eight more fainting fits had followed, all impregnated with different smells, until the aroma of the white roses. This was the first time he had fainted while in the midst of an investigation.
The first of those journeys (that was what he called them: journeys, not fainting fits) had occurred the same day he was discharged from Guy’s Hospital, where he had been sent to recover from his terrible mutilation. Clayton had ignored the nurses’ advice and left without even waiting for Sinclair, who had offered to take him back to his own house, where he could finish his convalescence under his wife’s care. Once out of hospital, in a further act of revolt, Clayton had eschewed taking a carriage and insisted on walking back to his modest apartment on Milton Street. As he walked, he swung his truncated arm almost brazenly, oblivious to the compassionate looks of the passersby and the awful cold that froze his phantom fingers, fingers no glove could ever keep warm again. He needed to clear away the cobwebs clinging to his brain after thirty days of swallowing opiates, and also to stretch his stiff legs. But he soon regretted his decision: it was too cold outside, his legs ached, he had an excruciating itch where his severed hand had been, and he noticed he felt more and more giddy with each step. Then, as he cut down a side alley, he sensed someone following him. He knew this without needing to turn around or to hear a noise behind him. However, before he could do anything about it, he felt an icy hook pierce his stomach and jerk him upward. He wasn’t aware of falling or hitting the ground. Only of the darkness, and the smell of horse manure.
That was the first time he ever dreamt about Valerie.
When a few sharp slaps on his cheek brought him round, he found himself face-to-face with a well-dressed gentleman who was gazing at him with a concerned look. He was a middle-aged fellow, with a pleasant face that might have appeared anodyne were it not for a very black goatee that looked like it had been colored in with a piece of charcoal, and a pair of flamboyant gold spectacles. The man introduced himself as Doctor Clive Higgins and explained he had been following Clayton for a few streets, alarmed by his sickly pallor and unsteady gait. But Clayton had fainted just as he was about to catch up with him to ask if he was feeling ill. Clayton mumbled something about his recent stay in the hospital and asked the doctor to let him continue on his way, assuring him he was quite all right and that he lived close by. Clayton was lying because he wanted
to be left alone as soon as possible, the sooner to be able to relish the strange, beautiful images the dreams had left in his head before they vanished. Doctor Higgins let him go, but not without warning him, in an oddly serious tone, that he was in need of help that he, the doctor, could provide. Then he pressed a cream-colored card with gold edging into Clayton’s hand. Underneath his name was printed the address of his consulting rooms and the puzzling title Doctor of Neurology, Psychoanalysis, and Other Afflictions of the Soul.
After promising to pay him a visit, Clayton hurried home. When he arrived, he emptied a triple dose of the sleeping pills he had been given at the hospital into his good hand, swallowed them down with a mouthful of brandy, and lay on the bed with his heart pounding, not even bothering to take his coat off. He was so desperate to resume his beautiful dream exactly where he had left off that he didn’t care if the number of tablets he had taken meant that he never woke up again. But he didn’t manage to dream about her again. He woke up a few hours later with a pounding headache and a feeling of anxiety produced by the overdose of pills.
He had to wait another twelve days before he dreamt about Valerie again, this time in the theater. The same icy hook in the stomach, the same sudden feeling of being hoisted into the air, the same dizziness and precipitous darkness. But also the same dream, so wonderful and vivid that when he awoke, for a few hours at least, everything around him seemed more illusory than any dream. A week later the same thing happened again, this time while he was making a cup of tea, which had ended up in pieces on the kitchen floor beside his unconscious body. And yet, he never managed to dream about her when he slept any other way. He had tried taking pills, alcohol, a mixture of the two, lying in bed all day reciting from memory tedious police reports, or stretching out on the sofa until the early hours. But it was no use. He never dreamt about her during his normal sleep. No, those dreams came to him only during those fainting fits.
And yet there was no pattern, nothing he could control. They were liable to happen to him at any moment, in the most unexpected situations, regardless of what he was doing at the time. It made no difference whether he was nervous or relaxed, standing or sitting, alone or in a crowd. They just happened: a slight dizziness followed by that sharp pull in his stomach that caused him to collapse suddenly. Journeys, he called them. How else was he supposed to describe them? In the end, while his body remained sprawled on the floor where he fell, his mind soared far away from there, always toward the same place.
Although he never felt happier than when he was having those strange fainting fits, they soon became a source of concern. They happened so often that Clayton had to admit he could no longer treat them as occasional incidents, but rather as an unmistakable sign that something inside him had radically changed, that his soul was no longer the same. His most recent journey alarmed him the most, because he had fainted in the middle of an investigation. He, the highly acclaimed Inspector Cornelius Clayton, had collapsed at a crime scene. What would Sinclair say if he found out? What would his superiors think? And how long would he be able to conceal those incidents? This time he had miraculously avoided being discovered unconsious in the old lady’s study, enabling him to omit that shameful fact from his written report, but next time he might not be so fortunate. He dreaded to think what would happen if it were revealed that he suffered regularly from fainting fits. Doubtless they would put him on sick leave, send him to a doctor, and refuse to let him carry on working until they had discovered what ailed him. And what would become of him then, if he couldn’t occupy his mind with other things? He would go crazy, that was certain. Work was the only thing that brought calm to his brain. Only when he was immersed in an investigation, fixated on the details of some case, juggling theories and conjectures, was he able to stop thinking about her. Almost.
While he had been working on the Madame Amber case, for example, he had all but forgotten about the countess. A routine case of suspected fraud had all of a sudden turned into an extraordinary mystery, a true puzzle for a mind hungry for challenges. Not only had a murderous spirit materialized during a fraudulent séance, but that same spirit had pursued one of the participants home a few hours later, apparently with the aim of stealing a mysterious book that, according to the old lady, contained nothing less than the means of saving the world.
And now Clayton knew the reason why Mrs. Lansbury’s servant had never returned: poor Doris’s body had been discovered by Scotland Yard detectives the following day in a nearby street, so horribly mutilated that even the hardened officers had been appalled. No message was found on her. Clearly the murderer had intercepted the maid before she had been able to deliver it, and so the intended recipient never knew how anxiously the old lady had awaited him and Clayton had no way of finding out who the devil he was. Subsequent inquiries revealed that Mrs. Lansbury enjoyed no social life beyond her interest in spiritualism. The detectives had to limit themselves to interviewing the people who had bumped into her most frequently at séances, but none of them had any relationship with the eccentric old lady beyond the obligatory courtesies and were therefore unlikely to be the intended recipient of the message. Apart from that, she did not seem to have any family or friends. Catherine Lansbury had appeared out of nowhere in London society a few years before. She possessed a small fortune thanks to owning the patent for the Mechanical Servant, but no one had been able to discover anything more about her, except that she was a widow and came from a distant land, which seemed surprising given her impeccable English accent. Recent rumor had it that she had squandered her fortune on her obsession with the Hereafter and it was only a matter of time before her creditors caught up with her. Even so, the old lady did not seem to have relinquished her costly pastime, although, according to some of the statements, she never sought to make contact with anyone in particular during the séances, as was habitually the case. At no time had she asked to speak to her deceased husband, for example, and if some crafty medium declared joyously that he was in the room and wished to speak to her, Mrs. Lansbury would consistently refuse, waving her small, wrinkled hand in the air as though someone had paid her an inappropriate compliment before replying, “I don’t think so: my husband knows perfectly well I have no wish to speak to him. Besides, he isn’t the one I’m looking for. It is others I seek. I shall wait.”
After that she would remain silent, in expectation of those who it would seem never turned up. Could they be the same ones she herself had referred to as “those from the Other Side,” for whom the book was apparently intended? And who was the strange creature who had tried to steal it? How had he managed to appear during the séance, and how had he suddenly vanished in the middle of the street, leaving a trail of blood that had become visible only moments later? More important still, how had the old lady disappeared from a room that was locked on the inside? Too many questions without any answers.
Although they were frustrating questions, they distracted him, saving him from himself. He needed those questions because they were the barrier that kept at bay that other ferocious hoard of thoughts, which if they invaded his mind would end up destroying it. And so he had no other choice but to keep his fainting fits secret. None of his superiors must ever find out, not even Captain Sinclair. And if that also meant no more dreaming about Valerie, he would have to accept that, he told himself, as he fingered the gold-edged card that had been languishing in his coat pocket for the last six months like a treasure at the bottom of the ocean, until he had rescued it a week earlier.
The sound of a door clicking open and the gentle murmur of female voices announced that the session of the patient before him had ended. Clayton fixed his eyes apprehensively on the door of the waiting room. When he had arrived at Doctor Higgins’s consulting rooms an hour earlier, a plump nurse had guided him there along a corridor lined with doors, inviting him to leave his hat on the stand and to take a seat in one of the small armchairs. Noticing his ashen face, she had assured him that no one would disturb him while he was waiting,
as no two patients were ever asked to wait in the same room, thus guaranteeing absolute discretion. Afflictions of the soul were apparently very delicate matters, Clayton reflected when she had gone. After standing rigidly for a few moments in the center of the room, he finally took off his hat and ventured to sit down, wondering about his fellow patients in the adjoining cells, which seemed to stretch out forever, like a hall of mirrors: neurasthenic gentlemen overwhelmed by the intolerable pressures of business; ladies suffering from chlorosis, their skins a delicate greenish hue, like forest fairies in which some child had stopped believing; hysterical young girls in desperate need of a husband, or possibly a lover? What the devil was he doing among this display of deviant behavior? But now it seemed it was too late. The murmur of voices had taken on the habitual inflection of departures, and the sound of a door gently clicking shut told Clayton that Doctor Higgins was done healing that particular patient’s soul. The tap of approaching footsteps followed, and the waiting room door opened, framing the nurse.
“You may go in now, Mr. Sinclair!” Clayton silently cursed himself for his complete lack of imagination when it came to giving a false name. “Doctor Higgins is waiting for you.”
• • •
WHILE HE SPOKE, DOCTOR Higgins was in the habit of tugging his goatee between his thumb and forefinger, a gesture that possibly betrayed an incurable affliction of the soul, and which didn’t exactly help Clayton to feel at ease. Indeed, it had the opposite effect on him, and so he had to take his eyes off the doctor and cast them around his spacious office. He studied the volumes lining the bookshelves, so thick they seemed to hold all the wisdom in the world between their pages; the engravings of body parts covering the walls; the uncomfortable couch; and the display cabinet in a corner, containing a few human skulls with deranged smiles lying on a bed of scalpels, syringes, and other sinister-looking instruments.
The Map of Chaos Page 15
