“Follow him?” Wilde whispered. “The fellow cannot see where he is going. We could wind up walking off a balcony into thin air!”
As they reached the base of the grand staircase, Mister Greaves paused and indicated a long gallery to their left. “That is the portrait gallery. It leads to the ballroom and the west wing, which, I’m afraid, is in a state of disrepair and extremely dangerous. Guests are encouraged not to stray there.”
They plodded up the staircase, which creaked, squeaked, and squealed with every step. As they neared the landing, the teetering structure shimmied violently beneath their feet, threatening imminent collapse and forcing both men to death-grip the banister.
“Do not be alarmed, gents,” Mister Greaves said, never faltering in his plodding ascent, “the staircase has done that for the last twenty years.”
Thankfully, they reached the second-floor landing safely, and turned right, following a long, open gallery.
Wilde’s misgivings about Mister Greaves soon proved to be wrong. The two friends silently followed the cadaverous butler as he effortlessly navigated a maze of gloomy hallways. Along open landings. Up and down creaking stairways. The other servants, although burdened with luggage, shambled silently behind like shades of the dead condemned to wander the labyrinthine passageways of Thraxton Hall for eternity.
“I should explain why the house is so dark,” Conan Doyle muttered to his companion. “Lady Thraxton has an ailment. A sensitivity to the light.”
Wilde glanced at him. “Hence the reason for screwing down the shutters?”
“Precisely.”
“And a staff of domestics,” Conan Doyle continued, “most of whom lack sight, and therefore do not object to working in a house in perpetual darkness.”
“I noticed that the corridors have a raised runner on each side.” Wilde indicated with a nod.
“So that the blind servants may navigate by feel?” Conan Doyle speculated.
“Clever,” Wilde agreed, “if somewhat grotesque.”
* * *
As they reached the third floor, the workers atop the ladders were just cracking open the window shutters. Shades were unscrewed and flung back from the glass for the first time in decades, spilling in shafts of golden light swirling with galaxies of dust motes.
They turned a sharp left and trooped along a gloomy corridor until Mister Greaves stopped at an unmarked door. “This will be your room, Mister Wilde.” He produced a key, groped the door with one hand and, finding the lock, turned the key in it.
“The room, sir,” Wilde said, addressing the butler. “May I enquire, is it haunted?”
“Haunted?” the butler repeated, his frown deepening. “I’m afraid there are stories about nearly every room in this house.”
“Excellent!” Wilde beamed. “I must always have an audience—even if it’s a spectral one.” He turned to Conan Doyle. “I shall be unpacking and choosing my wardrobe for the evening. I may be some time.”
Having dropped off Wilde and a portion of his baggage, Mister Greaves continued on to the next room. They had gone barely twelve feet when Wilde’s piercing scream made Conan Doyle turn and run back. When he dashed into the bedroom, Wilde was biting the back of his hand, a look of utter distraction on his face.
“Oscar!” he cried. “What is it?”
“This room…” Wilde said in a wretched voice, turning to his friend with an almost deranged look, “… is quite ghastly!”
Conan Doyle exhaled a heavy sigh. “You gave me quite a turn. I thought you’d seen something horrible.”
“But I have seen something horrible—the bed, the rug, the furniture, the wallpaper … the wallpaper…,” he repeated, pointing to each in turn. “It is all horrible. Who on earth was their decorator, Hieronymus Bosch? I’m sorry Arthur, but I fear I must leave at once.”
“But we’ve just arrived, Oscar!”
“I know, but this place is gloomy, dull, and unspeakably ugly. And you know how much I cannot abide ugliness in any form. I live for beauty. I must always be surrounded with pulchritude and the perfume of fresh-cut flowers, or I simply wither.”
Conan Doyle swallowed his frustration and fought to keep his expression neutral. “I see. Very well. We shall arrange for you to leave in the morning.”
Wilde clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re a good friend, Arthur. Always understanding. But you must admit, I did get you this far.”
“Yes,” Conan Doyle muttered between clenched teeth. “However would I have managed without you?”
He left Wilde to fret about his accommodations and followed Mister Greaves along the corridor to the next room. The butler produced an enormous jailer’s key and groped the door with his free hand. As he fitted the key into the lock, he paused a moment and turned his blank gaze toward Conan Doyle. “May I enquire, sir are you a sound sleeper?”
“Why, yes,” Conan Doyle replied. “Very sound.”
“And are you troubled by excessive dreaming?”
It was an odd question, but then everything about Thraxton Hall was odd. “No, not unusually so.”
Something approximating a smile formed on the old man’s face. “Then this room should serve your needs.”
Mister Greaves entered, walked directly to a suitcase stand, and set the bag upon it. As he followed the butler into the room, Conan Doyle’s mouth bittered with a film of must and mildew. Despite the fact that the windows had been left open in an attempt to air out the space, the room had the feeling of an ancient tomb that had only recently been broken into. Having deposited the suitcase, Mister Greaves shrugged a barely perceptible bow and ambled toward the door, his feet scuffing the worn rug.
“I say,” Conan Doyle said, “do you have any idea when the other guests will be arriving?”
The tall butler paused and spoke without turning. “They are already here, save for one. A sherry reception is planned at three, followed by dinner in the formal dining room. I shall come to fetch you and Mister Wilde at the appropriate time. Anything else, sir?”
Conan Doyle shook his head, and then realized his mistake. “No … no thank you, Mister Greaves.”
The butler bowed his head and shuffled toward the door.
“Oh, yes. Wait. One final thing.”
The butler stopped and turned to face Conan Doyle, his aged face molded in an expression of infinite patience.
“Mister Greaves, might I inquire how long you have worked for the family?”
“I have served the Thraxton family since I was a boy, as my father before me.”
“So you knew Lord Thraxton intimately?”
“Which Lord Thraxton sir? I have served under three. The youngest, Lord Alphonse Thraxton, left the house when he reached the age of majority. He fell into a crevasse whilst mountain climbing in Switzerland. The body was never recovered.”
“Did he get along well with his father?”
A grimace tightened the net of wrinkles. “No, sir. There was no love lost betwixt the two. The elder blamed his son for his first wife’s death—she died in childbirth.”
“Ah, I see. Not a happy story.”
A grimace tightened the net of wrinkles. “There are no happy stories in this house,” the butler said matter-of-factly.
“So you are the longest served?”
“Yes, as you might imagine, sir. Mrs. Kragan has been with the family for thirty years. The next longest serving retainer is Toby, the gardener.”
“I see.”
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Indeed. Thank you, Mister Greaves.”
The butler nodded and then turned and limped toward the door. But for the fact that he dragged one hand along the poor jamb as he left, it was impossible to tell that he lacked sight. When the door had closed on his tall frame, Conan Doyle looked around at the accommodations he had been given.
The room was situated on the front of the house, and the windows, now that the shutters had been pried open, looked out on the pleasant valley fields and the cop
pice with the stone circle. But even with three tall windows facing a southern aspect, the room seemed drenched in darkness. Almost everything was constructed from the same kind of wood: an aged walnut so dark it was almost obsidian—the wall paneling, the wardrobe, the armchairs, and the old-fashioned four-poster. Together they sponged up the light. Something made him look again at the wall paneling. It was all ornately carved: an immense, complex foliate design that did not repeat itself. It appeared like a forest of winding vines and oak boughs, three-dimensional. And then his eye began to resolve figures peering out from the vines as they crawled, clambered, or slithered through them. They were not human, although several had quasi-human features. Conan Doyle felt a moment of heart-stopping déjà vu when he realized he had seen something very similar before. His father had been a painter by profession and a drinker by predilection. During his brief periods of sobriety, before the drink irrevocably robbed him of his mind, Charles Altamont Doyle had made an income as an illustrator. He had continued to paint as part of his therapy in a mental institution. When these paintings were mailed to the family upon his death, Conan Doyle found them deeply disturbing and burned them in the fireplace. The paintings were filled with weird, elfish creatures; part-animal, part-human, as if his father’s madness had been a lens that allowed his vision to pierce the veil of normal existence and glimpse a strange and unsettling world that lurked unseen around us.
Conan Doyle pulled his eyes away from the wall paneling with some difficulty. He was still clutching the rubber grip of Thunderer, his favorite cricket bat, and now he set it down beside the bed. He went to his suitcase and unfastened the leather straps. Upon release, the tightly compressed contents sprang up several inches. As Wilde had predicted, the suitcase contained three tweed suits; however, they were not precisely identical: one was oatmeal, one was beige, and one was muffin-colored. Conan Doyle lifted them out and set them aside. His hand rummaged beneath layers of socks and cotton drawers until it closed upon a small leather bag: a miniature version of his full-sized Gladstone; it contained a stethoscope, a suture kit, and a few vials of drugs. He set aside his sharply pressed suits and rummaged once again. This time he pulled out a bulky object trussed in a black cloth. He unwrapped it to reveal his trusty service revolver. He had hesitated about bringing it. But the medium’s description of her murder—two bullets in the chest, fired at close range—meant that he was facing an armed adversary. Conan Doyle did not intend to enter the fray at a disadvantage. He regarded the Webley .455 for a moment, slipped his hand onto the grip, and hefted its weight. Then he rewrapped the pistol in its black cloth. He peered around the room, searching for potential hiding places, then stepped to the bed and slipped it beneath the mattress. It was perhaps an obvious place, but he suspected that the domestic staff of Thraxton Hall would not be changing the linens for a few days.
Finished with his unpacking for now, he dropped into a chair, kicked off his shoes, and peeled the wet socks from his feet. He got up wearily, crossed to the bed, swept aside the bed curtains, and lay down. The pillows were hard and lumpy. The sheets felt damp. He looked up at the once-white four-poster canopy, which was sagging, yellowed with age, and holed in places—a dozen small shadows marked the corpses of moths that had eaten their final meal and died there. Then his eyes traced down the nearest of the four bedposts. It, too, was made of the same dark walnut as the wall paneling and was carved in the same gothic style: a menagerie of ghastly leering faces and hideous chimeras ripped from a nightmare. Nothing about the bed or the room was comfortable or seemed conducive to rest, but it had been a long day and he was exhausted. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling a sense of vertigo as if he were sinking into the mattress. There was a clock somewhere in the room; he could hear its tick, tick, tick.
The metallic heartbeat of Time.
He thought to look for it, to see what the hour was, but could not bring himself to open his eyes or lift his head from the pillow. And then he heard the sound of weeping, as if from a long way away, and felt the heart-clutching sensation of being utterly suffused with despair. It was his last conscious thought before he slipped into a sleep so horribly deep it felt more like drowning.
He was awakened by the thunderous crash of the building falling down about him.
CHAPTER 9
THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
Conan Doyle’s eyes flew open. The canopy above glowed with a shivering, supernal light. The bed he lay upon shook violently as a Doom Crack roar rumbled on and on and on. Then the light seemed to be sucked back, like a retreating tide, out through the open windows. A moment later he heard the rain. It began as a gentle hiss that quickly rose to a pounding tumult. An icy gale gusted in through the open windows and whipped the long curtains into a frenzy. He rolled from the bed and rushed to wrestle the windows shut as icy raindrops spattered his face. Outside, day had turned to impenetrable night—the storm clouds he had seen earlier had finally tracked him to ground and a deluge was bouncing off the stone paths. It was only when he slammed the last window shut, muting the storm, that he noticed an insistent knocking at the bedroom door.
He opened it to find Oscar Wilde lurking outside. He had changed attire yet again: black velvet knickers and silk stockings with buckled shoes, a velvet waistcoat, white shirt, and a puce cravat. Pinned to his lapel was a sunflower he had carefully transported all the way from London, kept safe in a moist handkerchief. Atop his head he wore a tasseled red fez tilted at a jaunty angle.
“Arthur,” he said, breezing into the room, “do you have a mirror in here? My room is fully appointed when it comes to mold, mildew, must, dust, rust, fungus, rising damp, and deathwatch beetle, but for some inexplicable reason it is completely devoid of mirrors. Can you fathom it? Oscar Wilde in a room without mirrors! The mind recoils. How is a gentleman to dress? How is he to shave?” Wilde’s gaze ricocheted around the room and finally came to rest on Conan Doyle’s face. “I see no mirror in here, either.” His expression soured. “Am I in purgatory?”
Mister Greaves tottered into the room in time to overhear Wilde’s comments. “I’m afraid, sir, there are no mirrors anywhere in the house.”
“No mirrors?” Wilde said, a note of panic creeping into his voice. “Surely you jest?”
The aged head tremored a no. “The late Lord Thraxton had all the mirrors removed following the death of his wife.”
“Removed?” Conan Doyle said. “Whatever for?”
“He said that mirrors encouraged vanity.”
Wilde flinched, momentarily taken aback. “He says that as if it were a bad thing.”
“I would be happy to shave you, sir,” Mister Greaves said. “I am an excellent barber. I shaved Lord Thraxton every morning … before his, ah, unfortunate demise.”
At the offer, Wilde clapped a hand reflexively to his throat, his eyes widening with horror. The fact that Mister Greaves was facing in quite the wrong direction as he spoke did nothing to engender confidence in the blind butler’s dexterity with a razor.
“Please tell me Lord Thraxton did not die in a shaving-related accident.”
The ghost of a smile haunted Mister Greaves’ chapped lips. “You may rest easy on that point, sir. Lord Thraxton vanished while walking on the moors and was never seen again.”
Wilde was unable to suppress a shudder. “Strangely, I remain unreassured.”
Mister Greaves coughed dryly. “If you gentlemen are finished with your dress, the other guests are waiting in the parlor. I’ve been sent to fetch you.”
“Come, Arthur,” Wilde said. “If we leave now we shall be fashionably late. If we dally further, we will be boorishly tardy.”
* * *
The two friends followed Mister Greaves’ halting perambulation down flights of stairs and along shadowy corridors. They seemed to be taking a different route back downstairs. Conan Doyle tried to take notice of key features: the location of landings, staircases, marble busts, scowling portraits, and giant urns, so he could navigate the return j
ourney, but the house was a shadowy maze, and he soon gave up. “I’m lost,” he muttered. “I don’t know how we shall ever find our way back to our rooms.”
“I should have fetched a ball of twine,” Wilde moaned. “Or left a trail of bread crumbs. I fear we may wander these hallways until our clothes wear to rags. Where exactly are we going?”
“To meet the other guests … in the parlor. Take note. We are solving a murder in reverse order: meeting the perpetrator before the murder is committed.”
“What I am supposed to be looking for?”
“I have no idea,” Conan Doyle admitted. “An individual of questionable character? A devious mind? A personality capable of murder?”
“You have just described most of my critics.”
They reached the ground floor, where Mister Greaves eventually led them into a large formal room brightly lit by a pair of giant gasoliers suspended from the ceiling. A suit of armor, ominous and threatening, stood on guard to one side of a fireplace made of huge fieldstones. The room was furnished in a mismatch of armchairs, love seats, fainting couches, chaise longues, cane chairs, and sofas of varying styles and eras, dragged in from different rooms to provide adequate seating for the guests, ten in number, who stood in knots, making conversation. Heads turned as the pair entered. As usual, Wilde drew the most attention, thanks to his greater stature and outlandish style of dress. The enormous yellow sunflower pinned to his lapel helped a good deal.
“Ah, here is our famous author!” announced a man who broke from the clutch of guests he was chatting with and stepped forward to greet the two, his hand extended for a handshake. He was a man of advanced years with a mane of graying hair and a frizzy salt-and-pepper beard spilling down upon his chest. “You are Arthur Conan Doyle,” the man said, vigorously pumping the author’s arm. “I am very glad to meet you. I am Henry Sidgwick, current president of the Society.” He turned to Wilde, his face lighting up with recognition “And you are Oscar Wilde, the playwright!”
The Revenant of Thraxton Hall: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Page 8
