Canavan felt an unsettling in his stomach. “Such is not impossible,” he argued valiantly, “in two books that have been cut, so to speak, from the very same cloth. And torn, perhaps, by the very same person.”
“By the very same devil.”
Canavan remembered the face in the Cowgate wynd. “Possibly…” he said.
“The two books are exactly the same,” McKnight said, closing them together and putting one atop the other. “Identical in every respect. They are not just similar. They are the same. There is only one book. Not two. Only one.”
Canavan sighed, staring at the two books pointedly, as though to reiterate the evidence of his eyes.
McKnight smiled sympathetically. “Do you remember,” he asked, “the wynd into which we chased the Beast?”
Canavan coughed. “Of course.”
“Shand’s Wynd. I noticed the name on the way out. Have you heard of it before?”
Canavan thought about it. “No…”
“Would it surprise you to learn that, having scoured every survey map of the area in great detail, I can find no evidence of any such wynd? Any close, any street—anything with that name?”
Canavan was defensive. “Not all maps are complete. And most quickly become obsolete.”
“So you believe its omission proves nothing?”
“I believe it proves little.”
“And the Bibles?”
“Even less so.”
McKnight picked up an apple. “Then follow me,” he said, and turned for the library.
He knocked again.
In his pocket he had two letters. The first was from Head Constable Curran of the Monaghan Police, detailing some of Evelyn Todd’s previous brushes with the law. An incident involving a man who had escorted her home to her lodgings, only to be violently repulsed—“with animal force”—when he made some intimate advances. An unproven allegation that she had smuggled out the harried wolfhounds of a well-known lord. A childhood charge of stoning the stained-glass windows of the local church. As well, there was Curran’s full report of his visit to the St. Louis Convent and his interview with Mother Genevieve Berthollet. Very much like the clergymen Groves had recently encountered, the nun proved initially hesitant, but under pressure seemed relieved to divulge the incriminating details. Evelyn Todd, she claimed, had been a challenging girl, for the most part superior to her sisters in industry, humility, and commitment, but prone to erratic and inexplicable outbursts that were all the starker in contrast to her natural bearing. In the blink of an eye she could switch from piety to tormented grief, and occasionally to the most virulent invective. The last, though infrequent, seemed triggered chiefly in moments of the deepest devotion and was sometimes accompanied by paroxysmal blackouts. Her subsequent acts of contrition were sincere and self-punishing, and for a long time her behavior was tolerated and rebuked with only prayer.
But then the Mother Superior discovered an unsolicited “examination of conscience,” copied many times over in Evelyn’s own hand. Groves presently had a copy in his possession.
An impure attraction draws my heart to him and removes it from God. I delight in the prospect of being part of his Empire. It flatters me to think that he elects to be inside me, and protects me from those who might harm me. I know he wishes me no harm, and I remember that he was once an Angel, and his only misconstrued sin was Pride. There are moments when I cannot tolerate the harsh words raised against him, and in these moments I feel great difficulty in reconciling my Being between the Adversaries. I must choose to give my heart to the Redeemer, and divide my mind between my powers of reason and the Will of the Other. I wonder however if my Temple is large enough for all these inhabitants. It seems increasingly likely that a forced eviction will be required, but I am alone, as I always have been, and I fear I must act with my own secret armaments.
Curran had appended a note:
When confronted by Mother Berthollet, Miss Todd claimed to have no recollection of writing this letter, though she did not deny it was in her hand, and in a state of delirium later, she recanted, and she claimed that the one she spoke of in the letter was not some secret lover, as had been supposed, for such confessions are not uncommon—but the Lord Lucifer himself.
And now Groves knocked again, insistently, and in time with his heart.
RAT-TATTA-TATTA-TAT.
But there was still no response. He looked suspiciously at his companions, grateful for the opportunity to vacillate and wondering if he had done just enough to withdraw without losing face. He knocked just one more time, to be certain. Nothing.
He was about to turn when Pringle produced a stock of skeleton keys and, as the Inspector watched in alarm, methodically turned them out one after another and inserted them into the simple barrel lock. Groves was on the verge of delivering some note of protest, disguised as a warning, when the younger man released the bolt and pushed the door back on the awful gloom.
All three men stood tensed, half expecting some batlike monstrosity to spring out. The constable lit his lantern and directed the beam into the tiny room. Nothing. Groves summoned the courage to crane his head forward investigatively, but it was not bitten off. Pringle stepped all the way in, but was not swooped upon. The others, following his example, squeezed in behind him.
The room was meticulously neat and well dusted, its books primly lining the shelves, its utensils arranged like a surgeon’s blades. The only anomalies were a certain scorched-air smell, like that of lightning on a humid breeze, and the insistent scuttle of a rat in the roof. Pringle found a match and applied it to a slush lamp. Further brightened, the room could barely have appeared less threatening.
“She’s not home,” Groves breathed, as relieved as he was disappointed.
“Where could she be, sir?” Pringle asked.
“Who can say?” Groves tried to imagine her engaged in some sinister activity: stewing a potion in a vat, dancing at a sabbat, conspiring with her incubus. But the simple truth was she was just not there, and he resolved to make the most of the opportunity.
“You two go back downstairs,” he ordered. “And if she returns, hold her up at once, and one of you head up to warn me.”
Left alone, he stood in place for perhaps two minutes, slowly turning his head, listening to the rat gnaw at the ceiling, and trying to read the place with his nerve ends, his preternatural senses. But in truth it was difficult to perceive anything beyond the heat of his own blood.
He started with her bed linen, turning back the obsessively boiled sheets and hunting under the pillow for talismans, locks of hair, amulets. He searched around the floor for droplets of wax. He checked her eating area for signs of an unnatural appetite: baby livers, cat entrails, predigested hair. He examined the walls and ceilings for some sign of an aperture, a secret door, through which a visitor might enter. He picked up a rag doll and examined it for signs of voodoo manipulations. And finally, and with great reluctance, he turned his attention to the unavoidable centerpiece of the room, the bookshelves and their range of intimidating texts.
He could find no familiar titles, and his lips pursed in disdain. He ran a fingertip along the embossed spines, hoping to find something damning: a grimoire, a book of magic, a missal bound in wolfskin. A few of the volumes were marked with prices and stamped by Arthur Stark, and he wondered if she had stolen them. He inspected her damaged Holy Bible, and he levered from the end of the shelf a thin, untitled notebook like those purchased by students. Flipping it open, he found meticulous transcripts of speeches from the University, including a lecture attributed to Professor Hamilton, whom he remembered as having something to do with philosophy.
“Gentlemen, I want you to look at me now and ask yourselves if I exist. I want you to consider the possibility that I might be no more than a shadow, or something else of completely immaterial value. Not, I hasten to add, because I regard myself as a ghost, or indeed a shadow. In fact, I would be recognized as human in any number of venerable faculties…”
/> His nose recoiled, as though having inhaled some toxin, and he was about to slide the book back into place when he noticed the sliver of another book, hidden flat against the back of the shelf. Curious, he pushed aside the other titles and worked it from its hiding place into the light.
It was a ledger book, in appearance much like the one in which he recorded his own memoirs. He opened it distastefully.
He found numerous diagrams inside, most seemingly aborted or even scrubbed out with a sense of shame: grotesqueries such as resided in the margins of Gothic prayer books, gargoyles, strange birds, winged mammals, and increasingly bizarre hybrids. Repeatedly there were the hazy beginnings of a dragonlike creature—a head, or a sketchy outline, or a set of claws—but never more, as though she would not permit the beast to escape fully from her imagination. There were attempts at stories and poetry, all quickly abandoned, the handwriting invariably exhibiting an initial confidence but quickly fading to wavering lines and ultimately dissolution. Halfway through the book a page had been ripped out, and he remembered that the message Ce Grand Trompeur had been inscribed on similar paper. Chilled, he was about to snap the book shut when a soiled and folded page fell loose. He plucked it from the floor and unfurled it with instinctive trepidation.
The handwriting was vaguely innocent and the ink much faded, so he could not be certain when it was written, but he had little doubt as to the author’s identity. He read the text with mounting revulsion.
I swallowed a worm. I dropped it into my mouth, let it wrap around my tongue like a vine, then flipped it down my throat and let it creep and coil in my guts like a snake in a pit.
I ate a fly. I lured it through my lips and let it crash frantically around my mouth, then crushed it against my palate with the tip of my tongue, squeezed out its tiny pellets, rolled its legs like whiskers, drowned its carcass in saliva, and sent it on a swift journey to the pit with the screaming worm.
I ate a spider. I held it struggling in my pincers and then I snapped off its head with my two front teeth. I bit into its sac and tasted joyfully of its acrid cream, then ground its limbs to sugary fragments and digested the lot like some divine Turkish sweetmeat.
I ate a rat. I began with the tail—
But Groves could read no more. He could barely credit it, but it was as though he himself were tasting those vile creatures, as though they were churning and seething in his own stomach. Feeling a burst of sweat on his forehead, he shoved the letter back into the book, and the book into the shelf, and was so busy wiping his brow that he did not hear the door creak open behind him.
It was the shivering lamp flame that alerted him. And of course his own celebrated senses.
He wheeled around to find a chimney sweep standing at the open door, staring in at him. A shock that was compounded seconds later with the realization that it was not a sweep at all, but Evelyn.
Stepping into the library Canavan was seized with dread, for everything about McKnight’s manner suggested a true revelation—a final surrender to the Apocalypse.
Shelving his lamp, the Professor gestured to the bookcase facing them. “Observe the titles,” he said, and Canavan did so: The Republic, The Literature and Curiosities of Dreams, The World as Will and Idea, and three volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature—some of the very books in Evelyn’s possession.
“I’ve not moved them an inch in months,” McKnight said. “They appear before you conspicuously identical to their order on Evelyn’s own shelves.”
Canavan could not apprehend the meaning of it, and he shook his head indifferently.
“Have a look at one of them,” the Professor urged, and he selected one of the Human Nature volumes, pressing it into his friend’s hands.
The Irishman fanned through the pages absently. It was an imperfect edition. There were gaps on certain pages, the print haphazard and the ink frequently faded.
“Purchased at a discount, I hope,” he said.
The Professor smirked, retrieving the book and replacing it on the shelf. “Then try this one.” He handed to Canavan his Rituale Romanum. “From a more distant shelf, and not in Evelyn’s visible collection. Open it,” he suggested, “at the marked page.”
Canavan turned to the Rite of Exorcism, finding a woodcut of cowled monks gathered around a possessed man, a winged serpent fleeing through a window. The text was a mixture of vibrant red and black inks.
“Try the previous pages,” McKnight said. “The Last Rites. The Rite of Marriage…”
When Canavan turned to these pages he noticed what appeared to be more serious printing errors, though here in even greater abundance: whole pages blank or decorated with just a few strings of blurred sentences. He still could not comprehend it, though he was beginning to feel uneasy.
“I found it in the very depths of the labyrinth,” McKnight said. “In a bookcase I barely knew existed. Where there are whole books—entire shelves—filled with blank pages, isolated phrases, disappearing words. The diagrams remain in good shape, generally, but the text…” He smiled. “Mine is a library from which even the words have drained.”
Canavan shook his head protestingly. He turned the Rituale Romanum over and over in his hands, hoping to find some button, some note, that might reveal its secret.
McKnight finally pried the book from his grasp, but only to replace it with another.
“Leibniz’s Monadology,” he said quietly. “The book, you’ll recall, that Evelyn claimed she has not yet read…”
Canavan had little doubt what he would find, and indeed the book seemed to sigh with shame when he opened it. The pages shimmered, practically sparkled at him with their immaculate whiteness. First page, tenth page, hundredth page. All completely devoid of text. The words had never been read by Evelyn, and it was as though they had never existed.
In the elongated silence Groves found himself grappling for the wisdom of the good Piper McNab, but instead of inspiration he found only a savage irony. Because rather than feeling like the aggressor, he felt like the one who had an instant to decide if he was a tiger or a hare.
“What…what do we have here?” he asked, a stupid response, but all the words he had rehearsed for this moment had evaporated behind uncertainty as to which of the two Evelyns he now faced, or indeed what powers she had at her disposal. “Where have you been?”
She tugged the door shut and stepped sideways into the corner of the room, where the light was weakest. She did not look at him directly.
“I…I have been walking,” she replied, in a voice pitched somewhere between self-reproach and umbrage. “And what are you doing here?”
“Aye?” Groves raised his head, as though he had no right to be asked. “I am here,” he said, drawing himself to his full, defensive height, “with stout constables, who are posted outside.” But he spoke optimistically, because he could not be certain that she had not already accounted for Pringle and the plainclothes policeman.
She gave no indication either way. She removed her cap, and what there was of her hair fell free. “Has there been more tragedy?” she asked quietly.
“Tragedy?” He felt rooted to the floor. “And why…why do you ask? Have you dreamed of some tragedy?”
“I have dreamed of nothing.”
“Aye?” He made an effort to hold his gaze on her, but the nightmare image of her glistening fangs returned to him insistently, and he tasted bile in his mouth. He tried to distract himself with visions of his forthcoming diary notes: There was no telling what powers of darkness she had at her call, but I had as many powers of my own….
“But you are surely not here,” Evelyn added, “to wish me well.”
“Is that right?” He drew courage from the genuine note of regret. “You make it sound like you have been expecting me, lass.”
“I fear,” she said, “that you have sniffed my blood.”
“I am a predator, is that it?”
“I…I did not say that.”
“Then I target you unfairly? Or are you conf
essing to me?”
She dropped her cap on the table and seemed to drag the darkness around her. She was barely a couple of arm’s lengths away, but she seemed at the other end of a stadium. “I am no longer sure of anything,” she said.
With further effort Groves managed to roll on his heels. “I came here simply to clarify some matters,” he said. “I did not expect you to be absent.”
Nothing.
“Can you explain why you were out, woman? And why you are dressed in that manner?” He had always disliked sweeps—the only thing blacker than their faces was their souls—and on Evelyn the effect was especially disagreeable.
“When I walk…at night,” she said, “it is better not to be a woman.”
“It is a grand thing,” he returned, finding fortitude in scorn, “that a woman is ashamed of her sex.”
“I’m not ashamed….”
“Aye?”
“I’m simply wary of strangers.”
“Then why do you roam the streets at all?”
“I have already answered this to others.”
He frowned. “What others?”
She seemed protective.
“What others, I say?”
She did not deign to respond.
He saw an explicit reflection of the Wax Man in her—the same aspect of superiority—and he experienced a surge of resentment, which gave him extra strength. “You play the innocent lamb, don’t you,” he said, “but in secret you are quite deranged.”
Her gaze remained lowered.
“Aye, lass,” Groves said, his lips trembling, “you can hide behind what you call your dreams, but I cannot be fooled. If you have secrets to spill, they will come out.”
She seemed resigned. “It is what everyone tells me.”
It seemed a further suggestion that there were other investigators involved. “Who?” he demanded again. “Who tells you this?”
She hesitated.
“I asked a question, woman.”
“My…my visitors.”
“What visitors are these?” He wondered if she meant the Sheriff or the Procurator Fiscal, or even the Wax Man himself. The notion that these men already knew all about Evelyn and her potential powers, and had preceded him with an interrogation, was terrible in its implications.
The Lamplighter Page 25
