The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  “Nor, indeed,” McKnight observed charitably as he examined the soles of some watertight boots, “were the members of the Mirror Society. But their ambitions—their very quest for purity—made them obsessive and irrational. Their extremism made them the servants of their enemies, and with the abandonment of all their credibility they became fanatics, justifying anything in the name of survival.”

  Canavan sighed, too distracted to find words as anything more than decorative now, and he listened to the Professor as he might to a bishop from outside a crowded cathedral.

  “The devil, very much like the Mirror Society, must have spent years pondering what was to become of him. If the pitiless march of science meant that he would be transformed permanently into some lifeless symbol. So imagine his dismay when, having decided to take refuge in Evelyn’s bounteous imagination, he found the fabulous vistas and fauna of her dreams shrivel and disappear, to be replaced by a reality reproduced with mathematical exactitude. Imagine him there, mutated by the Mirror Society and scalded by Evelyn’s corrosive guilt, desperately nurturing in his host the need to return to Edinburgh before it is too late. Imagine him compelling her to roam the streets at night and print every facet of the city on her memory, so that through her dreams he might burst into reality and consummate his indignation. Imagine him realizing that each murder will have to be effected with unnatural speed—because their very gruesomeness will rip her from sleep—planning all the attacks in advance, and planting cryptic messages, and through all the mayhem summoning us, as he always intended, to mount a fearless expedition to save him.” McKnight smiled. “Imagine that…”

  “And if we don’t succeed even now?”

  “We have to succeed.” The Professor took up a spring-loaded rifle. “We were born for this moment.”

  “For martyrdom?”

  “It need not look so bleak. I cannot see her abandoning us entirely. Indeed, if you’ll forgive me, I’d say it defies all logic.” He handed to Canavan a percussion revolver.

  “Is this really necessary?”

  “It might be difficult, lad, but you know it’s right.”

  “I’ve no doubt it’s right,” the Irishman replied. “But I pray we’re equal to the task. To the Adversary.”

  “The Adversary himself is not the problem. It’s the traps laid in our path, and the demons that do not recognize us, which will be our bane.”

  Canavan looked at the gun and sighed. “I’ve never used one,” he admitted.

  “It’s an action to which one quickly adapts.”

  “You’ve fired one yourself?”

  “Of course not.” McKnight smirked. “I’ve no idea what I’m talking about. But I’ve never let that obstruct me.”

  Armored in hunting jackets and moleskin trousers, festooned with ammunition and supplies, they headed briskly into the deepening darkness and by the time they reached the Cowgate, having made one last detour to Candlemaker Row, they were marching in formation. They parted a pack of snarling dogs, crunched over leaves of rotting cabbage, waved away clouds of fish-oil smoke, and entered Shand’s Wynd without a flicker of hesitation. Kindled with purpose, they sidled down the alley’s dark depths to the newly opened orifice in the wall and for one last time paused to marvel at the intricacy of Evelyn’s composition: the gurgle of a broken soil pipe, the odors of disturbed ash buckets, the very trickle of snowflakes melting in midair over the gateway to hell.

  Standing near the tenement entrance, Pringle was alarmed by the notion that the Inspector had deliberately retreated to allow a murder attempt to proceed according to his own sinister expectations. Abraham Lindsay’s message would prove compelling evidence if reinforced with an attack, after all, and would almost certainly secure the arrest warrant Groves had long sought. As to how Evelyn might try to effect the punishment—through the mind devil, as the Lessels woman had indicated, or through some other means—Pringle felt not sufficiently informed to speculate. But he was deeply troubled by the multiplying signals that Groves was taking the case far too personally—something the Wax Man never did—and that his fascination with the Evelyn woman was verging on the vengeful.

  He was staring at the Inspector pensively, trying to come to terms with his feelings, when they heard the creak of a stair above. Groves slid deeper into the darkness.

  Moments later Evelyn swept past them as though sleepwalking. Her face was blank, her eyes fixed ahead, and in her hands she held a felt purse just ample enough to conceal a weapon. She glided into the street.

  Having received Lindsay’s message, it seemed she was to make the move herself. Or direct it personally. It could not have been more perfect, and Groves’s excitement was conspicuous.

  The two men fell in behind her, one eager, the other irresolute, and at a wary distance they followed her down Candlemaker Row and into the drizzling snow.

  Chapter XXIII

  FOR ALL THEIR RESOLVE, their righteousness, and even McKnight’s insurmountable confidence in the outcome, they could not help but tremble at the magnitude of the undertaking. With the portcullis gate reduced to flinders, they peered into the no longer impregnable realms with a sense of dread, and McKnight was cautionary.

  “Hell is a place without comfort or justice, where all reason is transient, and we can rely on few certainties except the threat of challenge.”

  Notwithstanding his words, however, their first faltering penetration was into a chamber little different from any in the Edinburgh catacombs: a low-vaulted cellar with Italianate arches, needlelike stalactites, and centuries of piled brick dust. They angled their lantern beams around but found no evidence of recent habitation, or any sign of recent passage at all but for some scoring around a doorway in the rear wall, the surrounding bricks blackened as though by some great heat. Lowering their heads they entered into a similarly sized and empty chamber, and then another, and finally a fourth, in the rear of which there was not one doorway but five. Breathing the stale air, they shone their beams at each individually, judging none especially promising, and not sure which to select.

  Hell is a surfeit of choices.

  They chose the middle one for no reason, and passed into a seemingly endless series of subdivided chambers and progressively narrower corridors, heading lower with each new door, striking their heads against projections and shuffling onward with cramped backs and sore legs and not convinced they were heading into any hell but that of futility.

  So when they encountered an impassable wall they were, if anything, relieved. They rested, their backs to the cool brick, and indulged in a few sips of water before returning through the string of vaults to the crossroads.

  “What do you think?” McKnight asked, eyeing the four remaining doorways.

  “It’s not a region I know especially well.”

  McKnight smiled. “It’s always best to follow your heart.”

  Canavan chose the leftmost door, for no particular reason, but their initial hope quickly surrendered to further despair as they negotiated another endless series of airless cellars and sloping passages carpeted with fragments of stone.

  Hell is monotony; the complete absence of promise.

  By mutual consent they paused to recuperate on a ruptured platform, and here Canavan felt an intrusive breeze on his cheek and smelled a rogue waft of incense. Briefly departing McKnight’s side, he ventured into an adjoining gallery and was soon calling the Professor to join him.

  He was directing his lantern beam into a deep pit, where a marble staircase swept down into what looked like the vestibule of a Romanesque cathedral.

  On her initial return to her city of birth Evelyn had wasted little time before reacquainting herself with the route out of town and up the Old Dalkeith Road to the lodge where she had first met Leerie. She had never seen the building from the outside, or any length of the road leading up to it, but the journey was imprinted on her remaining senses more deeply than an instinct. She only had to sublimate her eyesight to be drawn to the place by wood smoke and foxglo
ves, by creaking branches and twittering hedge sparrows, by the play of shadows and contesting breezes.

  Even now ferocious gusts and snowflakes could not overwhelm the memories. She was a girl again, naive enough to be trusting, and on the road to liberation. She was barely aware of the streets she negotiated in her relentless march: Bristo Street, Chapel Street, Nicolson Street, Lutton Place, Dalkeith Road. At Newington Terrace a man in a flapping scarf stepped out to caution her.

  “It’s no’ safe, lass, out in the streets at this hour. There’s all manner of evil about.”

  But she barely noticed him. Her eyes were dimmed, focused internally, and she forged on, thinking of the wise Professor and the compassionate Irishman, dressed as though to hunt tigers, who had materialized in her room to advise her that she would need to mount an expedition of her own.

  “What am I supposed to do with it?” she asked hoarsely when the Professor pressed a weapon into her hand.

  “I believe you will know what to do,” McKnight said, “when the time arrives.”

  She looked for assurance to Canavan, who nodded obligingly. “You may trust us,” he whispered tenderly, “just as surely as we trust you.”

  And then, in a blink—a correction of the vision or the emergence from a reverie—they were gone, so quickly she had questioned if they were ever actually there. But if not, then where had she procured the weapon? Had she been storing it in her room for just such a moment?

  She shivered and marched on, drawn as though by a current, and inside her mind the odyssey continued.

  It was groin-vaulted and narrow, on its floors a pattern of geometric marble, in its walls a succession of clerestory windows depicting a haloed Christ in a series of beatific scenes. Emanating from some indeterminate source, radiant light sprayed the two of them with shafts of muted violet, emerald, and rose—an incongruously peaceful gallery, undisturbed by the faintest sound or suggestion of discomfort.

  Hell is deception.

  As they continued downward a cauldronlike heat introduced itself in waves, the air slowly thickened with stinging smoke, and the walls trembled with cathedral-organ bleats. The vaults became ribbed in the Gothic style, the lancet windows more flamboyantly decorated with jewels and hallucinatory designs, and Christ’s blood sprayed over them in infinite gradations of red. The stained-glass skies became gradually more oppressive and the Redeemer’s tormentors more sinister, until it was difficult to distinguish a Roman centurion from a cackling demon and impossible to separate oppression from victory. Serpents and gargoyles started to emerge in bas-reliefs and statuary, coiling with increasing confidence around pillars and weeping saints. The gallery itself, to this point uniform in all but style, became warped and unpredictable—the steps fractured and irregular, the windows blossoming into distorted shards stained with appalling visions—and soon it began to turn obscenely, dipping and escalating and looping in on itself in odd permutations, so that McKnight and Canavan had to forsake the stairs and walk first on the side walls, stepping over the windows, and then hobble over the Gothic ribs themselves. And finally there was no recognizable church at all, the path dissolving into something like a jungle track swathed in unyielding vines and creepers carved as though by French stonemasons. Mounted overhead on intricate scaffolding, an immense palpitating heart, wrapped tight in thorns, was swarming with agile gargoyles methodically clawing away its membranes and replacing them with panes of stained glass. Great lines of blood leaked through the cracks and splattered in dollops on the path.

  “If you can’t go through,” said McKnight, “you circumvent.”

  They toiled along a precarious path ringing the jungle, ripping pockets and sleeves on the bluestone spurs. Departing the oppressive forest through a doorway of hammer-rigged stone, they entered a doomladen court where ranks and ranks of faces glowered at them from figures part magistrate, part constable, part field marshal, and part bishop. They moved at a God-fearing pace, never certain when they would be challenged, accosted, or even obliterated by a punitive verdict. But the deeper they traveled the more the judges mutated into massive centipede forms with eyes multiplying into glimmering discs and gowns that became carapaces held in place by cobwebs. But no gavel was struck, no judgment delivered, and no punishment executed.

  “They do not even recognize us,” the Professor marveled, and they descended into Pandemonium.

  They watched Evelyn stagger and almost swoon—she might have lost her footing on a drift of snow, or perhaps it was something else—and Pringle had to resist the urge to spring to her assistance. They had drawn steadily closer since leaving Candlemaker Row, for it was quickly apparent that she had no intention of looking around, and now that she had passed Peffermill Road they were in a sparsely populated region bare of streetlamps, and they could ill afford to lose her in the dark and the storm.

  They waited patiently, not uttering a word, until she collected her senses, straightened, and forced herself on.

  “She returns to her maker,” Groves said, warming the air with a snarl. “Piper McNab put it best. ‘The statue answers first to the sculptor’…”

  He cared not if Pringle had understood him. He could not remember the last time he had enjoyed an uninterrupted sleep or a substantial meal, repelling the twin demons of fatigue and hunger with an overriding sense of predestination. He was convinced that these were his last hours at the head of the investigation and that the night would furnish him with a resolution. But he no longer dared to dream ahead to the words he might immortalize in his nightly gospel, or indeed the biblical flourish with which he might tie it all in a knot, because all his hard work and confidence had yet to avail him of a conviction.

  His head was guttering like a faulty lamp. He was unable to think obliquely, engage in any complex speculation, or see into any future more distant than his immediate steps. He focused instead on Evelyn, his nemesis, his salvation, the Wax Man’s unacknowledged spawn, and he tracked her into the wooded areas with the single-mindedness of a foxhound.

  For McKnight and Canavan it was a suspicion verified by the very act of recognition: that at some stage Evelyn must have been exposed to the flamboyant Old Testament artwork of John Martin.

  The city represented the worst excesses of Babylon, Rome, and Nineveh, an immense row of palaces and ziggurats under a sky of undulating sackcloth and spearing lightning bolts. In the portico of the largest temple they glimpsed a Dionysian orgy amid golden calves and burning braziers. The swirl of fabrics was Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman: a blur of biblical decadence. There were lawless squeals and laughter, shuddering tambourines and braying animals.

  In the shadow of the temple buttresses—constructed either to hold the building in place or keep it at bay, it was difficult to determine—McKnight and Canavan now perceived a horde of protesting supplicants with eyes of stained glass and knees bare and bloody from incessant praying. Repulsing the horror of the debauchery with all their energy, they bowed, wept, fired volleys of castigation, and beseeched the storm clouds to coalesce and smite the unholy Gomorrah. From within the temple came a sudden cannon blast, and a great projectile of claws, gizzards, and marinated flesh scattered across the marble floor in front of the supplicants, who now dispensed with their invective and rose up to fight for the morsels like hungry gulls, stuffing them into their mouths and swallowing them without a single chew—feasting on their own indignation.

  McKnight and Canavan threaded their way through the madness without being noticed by a single eye. They heard a high priest exhorting his congregation to don the breastplate of righteousness, to stand resilient to the great corruption, and to fight to the death, if necessary, with the monstrous heathens. The priest himself had blistered flesh, a missing eye, and a mouth unable to contain lines of drool and speckled froth, but no one seemed to care, so profound was the fervor.

  The clouds enmeshed and pelted McKnight and Canavan with a rain of frogs and beetles as they hustled through the fantastically gilded doors of the great temple, im
mediately coming in sight of a veritable circus of depravity: men in silk and scarlet gobbling pigs’ trotters and grapes and hallucinogenic spices, women with reverse digestive systems wolfing food with their anuses, rhinoceroses fornicating with antelopes, peacocks with hyenas, horse-size locusts hovering overhead with wings thrumming like chariots heading into battle, and everywhere shameless parasites sucking blood from any titillated organ or barest inch of exposed flesh. This was the realm of perversity, Bacchanalianism, profligacy, wantonness, and extravagant furnishings: the cannibalistic terminus of affluence without self-discipline. The supplicants were here mocked in processions of withering virulence and boiled in great cauldrons of stinking fat, the revelers likewise drawing succor from their enemies, engorged on their own derision—this hell a place of unchecked extremes and improper balances.

  Cloaked in impunity, the Professor and the Irishman ventured through a flock of flesh-eating birds and located a descending stairway behind a raised altar awash with discarded bones, drifts of cinnamon, and all the fruits of despair. They took one last look at the circus as an enemy incendiary pierced the purple awnings and exploded in a cloud of frankincense and myrrh.

  “The Last Battle,” McKnight said.

  “No,” Canavan corrected sadly. “A meaningless skirmish.”

  To this point they had discharged not one bullet or raised a blade in self-defense, and they were fully aware of their good fortune, and equally aware that it could not possibly last.

  She tilted into the wind, undaunted by any gust. The snow thrashed at her face, but she would not be repelled. She knew every dip and rise, every sweep and curve, though she gave no thought to her destination, the man she was due to meet there, or indeed the weapon in her purse.

  She moved into an area of open fields, billowing grey grasses like witches’ hair, copses of yew trees flailing at the sky, and whistling winds unhindered by hedges, fences, or habitation. But rather than seeing any of this she was deeply engrossed in sporadic and incomprehensible visions of two men pitting their lives against great obstacles to save her. It was deeply absurd and yet strangely comforting.