He himself was a composite figure, he claimed, a mixture of living lecturers and dead philosophers. Physically, who was to say? A miasma of appealing elements glued together by an extraordinarily disciplined memory. His history? A fabrication that even all her energy could not prevent from fading behind him. His wife? A mirage. His students? Mirror images of real young men. His purpose? Well…
“I am the archetype of logic,” he announced, “and the frontal lobes are my home. I am the personification of intelligence in the same way the devil is the face of evil. You, on the other hand, I gather, come from an even more tender organ….”
And Canavan, his own heart pounding sickeningly—he could actually hear it (surely it could not be a dream?)—heard himself say, as though from a great distance, “And who am I?”
To which McKnight, with a familiar look of mock admonishment, slapped him on the arm and said affectionately, “My boy, I fear you would think me blasphemous to say it.”
Intuition leads us to God. And not wanting to accept that which he had always suspected, Canavan had fled the cottage to find the skies yawning in revelation.
For it was a responsibility too great to contemplate and a loss too overpowering to bear. The communion he had felt with Evelyn had been more deeply felt than anything he had ever experienced, and it had the potential to become more than that: a material union. But the consummation could never be, because there was only one spirit, one God, and he was already part of Her.
“All deities reside in the human breast,” McKnight had reminded him later in front of the hearth.
His face in his hands, Canavan had spared the time to nod in recognition. “William Blake…” he said hoarsely.
But McKnight only grunted. “Is that where she found it?” he asked, genuinely disappointed. “Pity. I thought it was one of my own.”
Snowflakes now swirled around Canavan like a blizzard of fragmented Eucharists. Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi. As much as he had always known that he was not destined to live on earth for eternity, he now balked at the idea of separation from the world he so dearly loved. This when McKnight, at the other extreme, seemed quite happy to have all his questions answered, his doubts leveled, and all his debts reduced to illusions. Canavan was the one who was supposed to be more disposed to martyrdom, and yet it was he who now, with a great sense of shame, wondered if the chalice could possibly be passed from him.
Bent over on a park bench with the snow gathering on the nape of his neck, he tried to imagine the magnitude of what was to come. It was the Professor’s belief that Evelyn had constructed a genuine hellish underworld that they would need to breach through the agency of hypnotism. Here they would work to exhume her deeply buried past, present it to her, and in so doing allow her to hurdle and vanquish it. But what if even that did not work? What then?
“What would be required in that instance, I fear,” McKnight said solemnly, “is almost too grand to contemplate.”
“And if we do succeed? Will we dissolve even in her imagination?”
“Our world will only collapse if we do not save her.”
“But there’s no world to collapse,” Canavan pointed out. “It has no substance greater than dreams.”
“And who is to say that any world is made of more?” McKnight said, and chortled. “Be grateful, lad, that we are at least constructs of a truly superior imagination—one with a continuity that is beyond practical measure—and that we have been able to experience an existence as rich as any living being. Be happy that we are not true creatures of fiction, leading cramped and cluttered lives and perishing with the last page of a disposable book. She has given us independent thoughts, this God of ours, and hopes, and aspirations, and we have acted of our own accord, and we have been permitted to stumble, to make mistakes, to question Her in person, and now even to offer our own lives to Her. And all of our own volition.”
The Professor was exhilarated: he had become the subject of one of his own lectures. What did it mean to exist in the imagination? Was it anyinferior to reality, simply because the imagination inevitably has to surrender to reality? Does reality in turn not have to surrender to the imagination? And which truly has sovereignty? The questions were generating whole networks of further questions right before his eyes, but rather than feeling lost in some futile maze, McKnight found philosophy the key to existence—his own existence—and as tangible and relevant as any experiment in the Faculty of Medicine.
Canavan now raised his head and watched a squirrel scamper across the powdered grass. He felt the windows of the city stare down on him. He felt the oppressive weight of destiny. He looked at the Castle, glowing with light on its implacable rock, and sensed the city’s atmosphere of burgeoning tension, the expanding ripples of tightly woven whispers: Did you hear…? The Lord Provost…Torn apart in the street…No one knows…No one understands…The devil walks among us…
Then, lowering his gaze with a sigh, he saw a familiar figure wrapped in coat and gloves negotiating the park’s winding paths, looking one way and the other, and, spotting him, pause for verification before coming briskly forward.
“I suspected I might find you here,” McKnight said, drawing up at his side. “Are you ready?”
“I’m not sure my presence is necessary.”
“On the contrary, your presence is essential. Without you beside me she will never be accessible. She will see me as pitiless logic, working not entirely in her own interests, and the barriers will be insurmountable. With you offering support, however…”
Canavan shook his head. “This is…absurd.”
“This is our duty.”
“I’ve never avoided a duty.”
“Then why do you question it now?”
Canavan struggled. “Because I need a say in the matter…I need to feel that I have exerted…free will.”
“And this free will…this would give you the feeling that you truly existed?”
“It is the very basis of existence.”
McKnight sighed. “Then perhaps,” he said, with an aspect of dismay, “it is best that you do not come after all.”
And then Canavan experienced it: an overpowering sense of shame and thwarted responsibility. And he understood that he had always had free will. He had as much as any man. The forces that directed his actions had simply been filtered through another mind, but they burned on him with the heat of a concentrated sunbeam.
“No,” he said, and exhaled fatalistically. “No…”
McKnight waited patiently, with a creeping smile, and eventually he put out his hand to assist his friend to his feet.
Canavan accepted the offer, and the two men were finally as one.
It was midnight when they headed for Candlemaker Row, the time when the lamplighters normally began their second nightly circuit, selectively snuffing out those lamps considered not integral to public safety. But in a hasty muster the Town Council had relieved the leeries of this duty until further notice, because the city’s mounting fear had now been consummated with historic audacity—the murder of the Lord Provost—and the darkness had become more palpable and threatening, even, than the specter of increased expenditure.
Clutching a chipped cup of coffee, which he had accepted absently, the liquid long since tepid and untouched by his lips, Groves stood at the window of Hettie Lessels’s Marchmont villa, staring over the railed fence that she claimed the Beast had rattled and into the street where a lamp blazed boldly beyond the midnight curfew. The window was frosted with condensation, there was a rim of dust on the sill, and the sash was cracked from overuse. It was odd that a man could notice such insignificant details—become fixated on them—when by rights he should have been in a state of insensibility.
He heard the door of the adjoining room creak open and turned to see the Sheriff—a dour man called Fleming—emerge with the Sheriff-clerk. They had come to Lessels’s home to conduct a precognition, not under oath, wasting no time after the murder of the city’s most eminen
t citizen. But to their frustration they had found the woman virtually impossible to take seriously. It was not that her sentences lacked meaning. They just seemed demented.
“Preposterous,” Fleming now sniffed. He went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands like a surgeon performing postoperative ablutions.
“Do you want me to have her taken away, sir?” asked the clerk.
“Not yet.” Fleming sighed. “We’re not leaving until we get some sense out of her.”
“More coffee, then, sir?”
“Aye. We could do with some of that.” Fleming dried his hands and looked across the room at Groves. “Has she said anything to you? Anything that made the slightest bit of sense?”
And now Groves, questioned directly, was forced to find refuge, like so many others before him, in the security of ambiguity. “It has been a case,” he said carefully, “of little sense from the start.”
It was a case, he wrote later, that the Sheriff himself could scarce credit, and though there was no message left at the scene of Bolan’s murder, as there had been in the past, what I had seen with my own two eyes was message enough, and now I was ready for anything. For all the new developments, indeed, Groves felt remarkably serene. No one had said anything directly, but the death of the Lord Provost would lead inevitably to that which he had always feared: the Procurator Fiscal assuming complete command of the case and, ultimately, the forced reappointment of the Wax Man. The Prime Minister would write letters; perhaps the Queen herself would register interest. The pressure applied to Central Office through the frigid Yuletide season would heat the rooms more efficiently than any furnace.
All of which might have been cause for concern, except that Groves had moved to an elevated plane. Having been with the investigation from the start, he was confident he was still the one who knew it most intimately, whatever intrigue might have been conducted beyond his knowledge and influence. Further, while Pringle and a couple of constables had glimpsed an indistinguishable shape bolting down Atholl Crescent Lane, he was the only one who had seen the Beast’s face directly, and from a distance that left little doubt as to its identity. So he had been accorded a special status far beyond anything he would dare explain, and Fleming’s manifest incredulity only made that clearer. It was his fate to be there at the end, he was suddenly and irrationally convinced of it, and the machinations whirling around him seemed as insignificant as the buzzing of jungle insects.
“Have you met this Todd lass she speaks of?” Fleming asked.
“I have.”
“And what was your impression?”
“A troubled woman,” Groves admitted.
“But diabolical?”
Groves smiled enigmatically.
Fleming looked at the stove, where the coffeepot was beginning to bubble, and sighed heartily. “It will need to be a powerful brew,” he said to the Sheriff-clerk. “This could well take all night.”
The lamps fluttered, the whispers spun, and in her little room on Candlemaker Row, Evelyn unfastened the muslin sealing her window and, craning her head, looked down into the starkly lit street, where at least two sentinels were visible, staring up at her tenement.
She withdrew, feeling a wave of revulsion on top of the nausea she already experienced since the Lord Provost’s murder in the nightmare she knew was real. Since the departure of Inspector Groves and the unpleasant gleam she had discerned in his eyes.
She had not slept. She doubted she would ever sleep again. She knew they would be coming after her now. They had been planted outside for days, occasionally even knocking on her door to verify her presence. Soon they would find no option but to come and claim her. They would not know what they were doing, but they would need to do something. She was resigned to it. She wanted it. There was an enormous congestion in her heart, and a great turmoil in her head.
She heard the rat resuming its busy scratching in the roof and she rose stiffly, filling a glass with buttermilk and setting it on her tiny table. She lit a candle and fixed it in the middle of a saucer, then returned to her little bed and sat primly on its edge, staring into the candle flame until the brightness filled every corner of her vision. It was something she did occasionally, when she needed to block out all distractions, but she did it now with a particular urgency, drawn to the process by a need beyond her conscious understanding. Was she escaping? Or driving herself deep into danger? She knew only that the answer lay in the brightness of revelation.
She stared at the mesmerizing flame.
Her head was radiant with light and she felt herself plunging when, as on previous evenings when she had attempted the procedure, she heard a pounding on the door.
The brightness faded rudely.
Another knock, and she heard a voice. “Evelyn…”
She swallowed her despair.
“Evelyn…will you open the door?”
It was too late.
“Evelyn…”
She pushed herself from the bed and paused, her hand on the latch.
“Evelyn…I believe you have been expecting us.”
She frowned, puzzled by the familiarity of the voice, and opened the door, not sure why she was surprised.
Professor McKnight smiled at her from the hall, his hat in his hands, and behind him Canavan looked at her with his customary warmth. “May we come in, Evelyn?” the latter asked, in little more than a whisper, and of course she could not refuse.
Chapter XXI
THEY ARE HALFWAY to Kumasi when they stop to rest on a fallen cottonwood trunk amid trees the size of Big Ben. They are gasping from heat and exertion: the humidity is unforgiving, and the path has become progressively more entangled with cordlike creepers and shrouds of leathery leaves. Corporal Ainslie is the fittest of the three—always alert, always scheming; never pays to turn your back on Ainslie—and it is now the canny Scotsman who recovers first, after a ration of water and biscuit, and as though personally challenged by the environment to announce his origins or to herald his conquering of it, he lodges his Highland pipes against his shoulder, applies the blowpipe to his freshly moistened lips, and begins sounding off some experimental bass drones before launching into a spirited strathspey.
It is a music unlike anything the jungle has previously heard. It hums through the ribbed trunks, unsettles columns of industrious ants, and vibrates through the rigginglike mass of corkscrew creepers to the vast canopies of leaves. Here sparrow-size parrots pause in their chattering to listen to the wheezing of this unfamiliar beast, and, cocking their heads, they eye with some trepidation a white stalker-man, far below, being assailed by some monstrous arachnid, while his two companions look on with no visible concern. The parrots, too, eventually determine no reason for alarm, and return with renewed vigor to their discordant song, raising the pitch to account for the pervasive new intonations.
But when Ainslie stops, a good five minutes later, it is most abruptly, as though he has been struck by a spear. The parrots tilt their heads. The pipes whine to silence. Ainslie’s companions turn to look at him in surprise and follow his gaze to the far end of the fallen tree, where a native boy is staring at them.
There is no sound at all but for the drip of sweating leaves, the gurgle of rising sap, and the disquiet of the birds shifting in the branches.
The boy is perched on his haunches and is completely naked. As young as he is, he seems as old as eternity. He smiles at Ainslie with glimmering black eyes.
“Pray continue,” he says.
“From the start, madam,” Fleming said impatiently. Lessels was anchored in an oxhide armchair in a room that stank of starch and vinegar. She was forever declaring her innocence and bursting into tears.
“I was only there to assist, I tell ye.”
“You’ve said as much, madam. Now—”
“I attended to the lass, and that was all.”
“Aye, you have said that a dozen times. Now please take us to the beginning. How did you first meet the Lord Provost?”
Les
sels shook her head. “He was no Lord Provost back then. It were twenty years ago or more.”
Groves, having been invited to take part in an unofficial capacity, now interrupted. “At that stage,” he suggested, “Henry Bolan would have been only a medical doctor.”
“Aye,” Lessels agreed, “a doctor. But to me, he was just another face in the Mirror Society.”
“The what?” Fleming asked.
“The Mirror Society,” Groves answered, as though in a dream. “The official name of the club that convened tonight in Atholl Crescent Lane. The previous victims were all members, and as of tonight there are only two remaining.”
He was focused on Lessels, who refused to look up at him as he spoke.
“Munnoch and Smeaton were part of it. A society dedicated to rigid principles and the suppression of dangerous ideas…”
“The Mirror Society,” Fleming said dubiously.
“But that,” Groves said to Lessels, “is not really where the story begins, is it? There was another point, wasn’t there?”
Her face seemed to tense.
“Involving some devilish scheme…”
In the subsequent silence Lessels at last seemed to gulp the first morsel of responsibility. She glanced up at Groves with a guilty expression.
“Aye,” she agreed at last. “I suppose that is true.”
“Go on, madam,” Fleming ordered as the Sheriff-clerk prepared his pen.
“I suppose it begins with Ainslie…”
“Your unconscious is a delicate device,” McKnight said, “and you can be assured that we will treat it respectfully. We will gingerly remove it, Evelyn, with your full cooperation, and we will blow away its dust, scrape out its rust and algae, and return it to its case as a polished and newly oiled mechanism. It is what I believe you have called us to do.”
The Lamplighter Page 27
