The Dulwich Horror & Others

by David Hambling

  “Too clever for his own good,” I said. “The man with the shell was King Minos in disguise, who wanted to kill Daedalus for betraying him. He knew that the only one who could solve the puzzle was Daedalus, who was hiding in exile. But Daedalus gave himself away because he could not resist the challenge.”

  “Daedalus was clever,” said Daniel. “And we need to do the same. We need to find the ant, something that can get through that opening into the other world—then we can put through a thread and a string and a rope, and pull Daisy back. I’m not speaking literally, of course.”

  Daniel seemed pleased that he was now able to put things so easily into terms I could understand. Heaven knows it took enough rounds of question-and-answer for him to understand the problem.

  I passed him the corkscrew and a bottle of wine to tackle.

  The kettle boiled, and I did my best to turn a block of instant soup into something resembling actual potage du jour. Cookery is not my métier.

  Daniel was still gazing fixedly at the spiral corkscrew when he noticed me holding out the wineglasses expectantly.

  “It goes down to a point,” he said. “A spiral ends in a mathematical point—”

  “Just open the Chablis, Daniel darling,” I said.

  We poured two glasses and toasted Daisy, as always. The princess in the tower, waiting to be rescued by her gawky prince.

  As I cleared away the things on the table to make space for supper, I noticed a small brown volume, definitely antique, in a peculiar alphabet. I had never seen it before.

  “Is that a new book?”

  “A very old one,” said Daniel, literal-minded as ever. “It’s about the Qabala. Jewish number mysticism.”

  “You read Hebrew?”

  “I had to in my family,” he said, making a face. Daniel had never mentioned his family before. I don’t think I realised he had one. I think someone said he was an orphan.

  “As a matter of fact, this book got me into mathematics. When I was ten, I found it in my grandfather’s library, and he let me have it. The idea is that God made the world out of words. If you turn the letters of those words into numbers you can transform them with mathematical operations, ‘turn them back into the words that are the world.”

  “The magic of words,” I said. “Like the old Greek logos.”

  “Sort of,” he said. “But these words don’t mean, they are. There’s no understanding them, any more than you understand rocks or trees. It doesn’t matter if it’s said by a human, or a parrot, or just carved on a stone. The words are reality.”

  There was a prickling at the back of my neck. Daniel was getting into dangerous territory.

  “I tried some of the formulae, and of course they didn’t work. I didn’t become invisible or fly. My grandfather was impressed by how hard I worked at it, though; he started to show me some real mathematics—making magic squares—and I was hooked.”

  “Why are you reading it now?”

  “Something I remembered…Yosher-Sephiroth, a gateway between universes.”

  “Yother-soff-what?”

  “Numbers and consciousness meeting in eternal light, everywhere at once,” he said. “It’s a sign of madness, isn’t it, when nonsense starts to make sense? Madness or genius. The Qabala is supposed to be a short-cut to cosmic illumination—”

  “Pour another glass, will you, O Illuminated one? And do have some soup.”

  He poured, but he was nettled by being brought back to the everyday. “I don’t like it that you come here out of pity,” he said.

  “I come here because I like you,” I said, leaning over to plant a kiss on his cheek. He coloured instantly, as I knew he would.

  “I’m a freak,” he said. “All I know is maths. I can’t make witty conversation like George and Will and Tom. I’m not handsome or athletic or rich. I can’t even dress smartly.”

  “Oh, Daniel,” I said, dismayed. He had never said anything like this before. “What you’re suffering from is a lack of perspective. You’re comparing your weaknesses to their strengths. You’re cleverer than George and as athletic as Tom. Everybody feels insecure about themselves, Daniel, but what they don’t realise is that everyone else is too busy with their own insecurities to notice yours.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he said. “You’re beautiful, and clever, and—”

  “—and overweight. And as for freakishness—Daniel dear, you’re a perfectly normal mathematician. You look just like one. But me, I’m a woman with a first-class degree. I know nothing about dress-making or flower arranging or babies or any of the other things other ladies talk about. I might as well have two heads. Which of us is the freak?”

  Daniel smiled ruefully.

  “To Daisy,” I said, raising my glass again, and we clinked. We ate a little and then he went on, as I knew he would.

  “We know too much, you and me,” said Daniel. “Either we try to forget it, or use it for our own ends.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you could—wouldn’t you try to bring Daisy back?”

  “Of course,” I said. I hoped he did not notice the hesitation. I had my doubts, even then.

  “I’ll take you up on that,” he added cryptically, patting the book. “I want to try you out with a bit of cabbalism later.”

  After we had eaten I did the washing up and cleared things away. Daniel started tossing a coin, then several coins together, which tinkled and clattered on the table top and threatened to roll off.

  “You’ll lose money that way,” I warned. “What are you doing that for?”

  “Generating random numbers,” he said.

  “I thought you told George that there was no such thing as random,” I said. “Everything is caused by something else, like clockwork or billiard balls.”

  “To all intents and purposes, tossing coins does generate random patterns. The question is whether it’s possible to influence the pattern.”

  I filled the percolator for coffee. I can’t cook, but I can brew wonderfully.

  “Have you ever heard of Maxwell’s demon?” I shook my head. “The ant in the shell, the smallest possible effect. The water in the percolator is a mixture of hot and cold molecules mixed up together. Suppose you had a tiny being—Maxwell’s demon—working a tiny gate between the two halves of the percolator. He would open it only for hot molecules going one way and cold ones going the other. Eventually you’d get one half of boiling and one half of freezing water.”

  “That sounds like magic,” I said.

  “People have been arguing whether it’s real for a long time. It’s all about entropy. The Demon seems to defy physics because it doesn’t expend energy, it’s just pure information, do you see?”

  “Of course not. In the meantime,” I said, lighting the gas burner again with a match, “I’ll do it this way.”

  “If you control information, energy is your slave. You could make nebulae collapse into a point, or explode stars into supernovas …”

  He tossed the coins again and made a note.

  “Coin tosses are random,” said Daniel. “Like the movement of water molecules. Unless something—Maxwell’s demon, call it—influences them.”

  “You think your demon can give the coins a nudge—”

  “No!” he said. “No nudging! No physical force, just the transfer of information.”

  “You’ve lost me,” I said. “As usual.”

  Daniel tossed coins and made notes. After the percolator bubbled without demonic assistance, I brought the cups over.

  “Now,” he said, “look at this: it’s the number of heads I get out of tossing six coins. Random, no?”

  He showed me a row of numbers: a string of fives and threes and fours and twos and the occasional one and one six.

  “If you say so,” I said. I fitted a cigarette into a holder and lit it, and wondered about a glass of brandy. Being with Daniel was so wearying sometimes.

  “I’ve been trying a charm for the last couple of days,” he sa
id. “I’ve not had much luck—so to speak. I want you to try it.”

  My scalp prickled. I had a sense of déjà vu, of something terrible about to happen. The two of us had been here before, talking like this, and then something ghastly—

  “It’s all about the transfer of information,” Daniel said. “From a pattern in your head to a pattern in random coin tosses. If you can do that you can do anything. You only get those dreams when you’re just dropping off to sleep, when your brain is in that neutral phase, like radio static. That’s when the pattern comes across from R’lyeh.”

  He tossed the coins and made another note. Three heads.

  “Or with Ouija boards. You could transfer thoughts from anywhere to anywhere else, send an encyclopaedia across the solar system, across dimensions. Transmit your mind through space—through time, if Einstein is right. ‘Spukhafte fernwirkung,’ he called it, ‘spooky action at a distance.’”

  He tossed again. Four heads.

  “Modern science is full of funny ideas,” I said.

  “Mutation—that’s a random process. What if you could influence it, produce specific mutations or changes …”

  “You mean like Flora Whatley’s child,” I said.

  “That thing in the church, it probably needed Maxwell’s demon to keep it stable.”

  I laughed and was about to say something about the biology of dragons and angels dancing on pinheads when Daniel abruptly took my hand, pressed the sixpences into my palm, and closed my fingers around them.

  “You try. Just shake them and drop them on the table,” he said. Light gleamed from his glasses. He read out some strange words from a slip of paper and looked expectantly at me.

  I felt the weight of the coins in my hand. If I refused, I would lose Daniel. He was making such a small request. If I turned him down he would know I did not wish him to succeed, and that would tear open a rift between us. I would lose a precious friend. And, if I stopped seeing him, I would not be able to keep an eye on his progress.

  I wanted to stall, but the insistence in that gaze was powerful. I was thinking of how to forestall him next time as I shook up the coins like dice and slapped them down on the table.

  The six coins all showed heads.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Daniel. “It works. Ha! You do have the power.”

  “You always tell me not to read anything into isolated statistical thingummies,” I protested, even as he scooped up the coins and pressed them into my hand again.

  Slowly I shook and tossed again.

  Six heads.

  Daniel beamed as though he had discovered a new planet. I held up my hands so he could not make me toss a third time.

  “Daniel, that’s enough. Stop this now.”

  “Just one more,” he pleaded. “One more thing. Then I’ll never ask you to do anything again.”

  He was going through his notes and found a slip of paper with some words written out in big block capitals.

  “I don’t think it’s wise to be doing this,” I said. “I don’t understand this, and I’m not sure if you do.”

  “Sophie,” he said, holding up the paper, “all I’m asking you to do is to read out a few words. For Daisy. For me. Just this one time. You can do it.”

  I hesitated.

  “If you don’t help me,” Daniel said suddenly, “I swear I’ll never see you again. I swear it.”

  That was a low blow. I would not have expected it from Daniel. I had never thought of him as ruthless, but he meant what he said. I took the proffered slip and looked at the string of meaningless syllables. They might have been transcribed from Hebrew for my benefit, but I think perhaps it was some other language.

  “What are these words?”

  “It took me an age to calculate it,” said Daniel, not without pride. “The shortest path to cosmic illumination. To open the way to understanding.”

  He sat facing me, arranged six coins in front of him, and placed his hands palm-upwards on the table.

  I could have deliberately mispronounced the incantation or left out one syllable. But that would be dangerous. And perhaps Daniel did know what he was doing; I had never known him to be wrong. Perhaps this was the only way I could help him.

  I read out the words slowly and carefully. It was a tongue-twister, but I managed it without any mistakes.

  I once saw a newsreel of a novelty act, a sword swallower who swallowed a lit neon tube. The effect was most peculiar: you could see the glow from inside him outline his whole ribcage. That was what I was reminded of when I saw the light coming from Daniel, spilling from his eyes, his open mouth, as though a ball of light had exploded inside his head. His lips moved again, but there was a tremendous flash and I felt the heat. I must have stepped back then, dazzled and blinded.

  My vision was full of a dark after-image, a human-shaped form suddenly transmuted into light. Daniel was burning like a hundred torches, a human bonfire, still sitting there. His clothes were blazing, and I could not see him for flame and smoke. It never occurred to me for an instant that I might have saved him then.

  I screamed and backed away, half feeling my way out of his room and into the corridor. I was out of the building before I looked up and saw, through the dark blobs of after-image, his window lit up with writhing flames.

  There were shouts of “Fire!” from somewhere in the building. Cold night air brushed my ankles, my face. I leaned against a wall, breathing in gasps. People were coming out of the building and the adjacent houses. Everybody was looking up to the burning house.

  Daniel had his illumination all right, but it was too much, far, far too much for him. I did not know whether it was a miscalculation or whether it had succeeded and the light was too great for the unprepared human brain to tolerate. Perhaps he over-estimated his own ability to withstand what he invoked. Perhaps he was not ready for it. After all, it was a work that others had spent lifetimes preparing themselves for, and he had made the entire journey in a few weeks.

  Of course I had heard of spontaneous human combustion—who can forget Krook’s fiery end in Bleak House? But these days science has dismissed it as something of a myth. They say it’s caused by drunks dropping cigarettes on themselves, or falling on to gas fires. They say that the laws of thermodynamics mean a person cannot just burst into flames. And in a sane world, perhaps it could not happen.

  Perhaps Daniel had achieved the understanding he sought; but I was reminded again of how Daedalus had been tricked into revealing himself by the puzzle of the shell. A being who could makes stars explode could probably do the same with people.

  I was dazed, looking up at the smoke and the flames, but that did not matter because everybody else was as well. Nobody was looking at me. Nobody would connect me with Daniel’s death. I had never met his neighbours and did not think they even knew me by sight.

  “Miss Hetherington! Excuse me, may I have a minute of your time?”

  A taxi glided to the kerb a few feet away, and an unfamiliar voice was calling me, a woman with an American accent.

  The taxi door was opened. I was confused and any exit would do; I sat down in the jump seat. Opposite me was a vision straight out of the movies: a blonde bob that shone like burnished gold, and the sort of dress you don’t see in this country. Make-up by Coco Chanel, handbag from New York. Seeing her, I understood what was meant by the phrase ‘looking like a million a dollars.’ She was all that and more. She could have been the moll of a successful Chicago gangster or a Hollywood starlet—or a Hollywood starlet playing a gangster’s moll.

  “I’m Estelle,” she said. Offering a silver case, “Cigarette?”

  Estelle instructed the driver to take us back to my house. His crewcut told me he was not a real taxi driver at all, but another American. Estelle lit my cigarette with a lighter which flashed with jewels in the half-darkness.

  “Did you see what happened?” I asked. I was still in shock, running on instinct.

  “The fire? We saw a bright light, and then you came o
ut. That’s all. Do you want to tell me about it?”

  As she put her lighter away, I had a glimpse into her handbag and saw an ivory handle nestling among comb, lipsticks, and perfume bottle. That handle was not a hairbrush; it was a double-barrelled pistol. I had been meant to see it. Next to the gun was a big silver pendant in the shape of a swastika on a chain.

  “About that fire,” she said.

  “Daniel,” I said. “He was trying to do something, I don’t know what happened …”

  I choked. The only reason I did not crack up entirely was that Daniel’s death was still so unreal. The uncontrollable weeping would come later. I could not believe I would not find Daniel still in his flat tomorrow, transcribing pages of numbers and symbols. Estelle nodded as though it were the most natural thing in the world that Daniel should have gone up in flames.

  “It figures,” she said. “It’s the right night for it. We were wondering if we’d see something tonight.”

  “See something?” I repeated dully.

  “I work for a certain organisation,” she said. “I’m sorry if that sounds mysterious. We work against certain outside interests, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not exactly,” I parried.

  “I think you do,” she said. “You’ve had experiences. What happened in that church in Dulwich was not—it wasn’t an accident, was it? It was outside interests.” She looked to see if I understood.

  “You mean outside interests like—” I started boldly, but I choked on the next word. “Like—Cthulhu?” I croaked.

  “Sister,” she said with the ghost of a smile, “Cthulhu is the bellhop. He runs errands for the big boys.”

  “Oh,” was all I could say.

  “There’s a war on,” she said. “There has been for a long, long time. Between people like us and people like the Whatleys. It’s bigger than you think. Sometimes it’s just individuals, sometimes it’s whole secret societies, cults, front organisations. Sometimes they infiltrate governments.”

  “And what about you—are you a secret society too?” I asked.

  “We fight fire with fire,” she said.