‘We’ll all be going there soon enough’, Fanny said, ‘if they don’t keep those candles from setting fire to this whole place.’
Undeterred, Symonds continued by pointing out that among the ancient rituals there had been one where the village girls danced in a magic circle around the tree, imprisoning its imp inside, and only allowing it to go free when it had promised to give them their heart’s desire. ‘It is perhaps from that custom that the giving of gifts derives.’
Fanny, losing interest in Symonds’s disquisition (the man is a walking encyclopaedia, but one that never closes), went to her son, who was standing close to the tree, seemingly transfixed by its gaudy lights and ornaments. In addition to the candles, a host of gilt cones and gaily-wrapped candies had been attached to its boughs. At its top, which grazed the very ceiling of the salon, a star had been wrought from holly berries and golden braid.
Watching mother and son together, I was struck again by both the similarities and incongruities. From Fanny, Lloyd had inherited a growing stockiness, along with a forthright temperament, but none of her dark colouring. In his features—his pale eyes and light hair—he most resembled his father, a man whom I had seen only in a faded sepia photograph taken in some mining camp where, once again, he had failed to strike gold. As a Christmas gift, I had given Lloyd a volume of tales by E. A. Poe, which, as it happened, I had reviewed for the Academy five or six years before. It was ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, when I had first read it to him one wintry night, that had been his favourite, though Fanny had discouraged me from sharing such stories with him in future without her prior assent. ‘I don’t need him waking from any more nightmares, thank you kindly.’ As he was older now, I felt Poe’s grim fantasies could do no great harm.
Indeed, as I considered it, there was something of the masque about the scene before me that night. At dinner, the guests of the hotel had worn their finest clothes; dinner jackets with velvet collars and scarlet cummerbunds on the men, silken gowns complemented by glittering baubles on the throats and wrists of all the women. My own old black suit hung loosely from my shoulders. Paper hats had been issued, too—tiaras for the ladies, crowns for their companions. The mood was meant to be one of gaiety, and all conspired to further the illusion, but in the hectic flush of their cheeks, the antic gleam of their eyes, one could not help but note among the good doctor’s invalids the underlying sense of apprehension. Would their next Christmas be spent with family, gathered round the table at their ancestral home, or would they still be here, assailed by fevers, coughs, and infection? Worse yet (among those privy to the secret), would they have been dispatched by toboggan in the gloom of night?
‘Oh, I see your friends have arrived,’ Symonds said, gliding away before he could be subjected to what he regarded as their inane banter, ‘and so I will leave you to them. I doubt they have come to hear the lieder.’
Turning, I saw Desmond pushing Constance Wooldridge in her wheelchair—a rattan-seated affair running on two great hoops—with her ankle wrapped and elevated on a sort of stirrup. ‘A fall on the ice,’ Desmond had explained over the roast lamb at dinner. She had also bruised her cheek, and most mortifying of all, chipped a tiny fragment from a front tooth. She had barely looked up from her plate all through the meal, and even at the best jokes had covered her smile in embarrassment.
‘We’re here for the dancing!’ Desmond exclaimed, whirling her chair in a circle that left the poor girl clutching her stomach.
‘Put me down for the mazurka,’ I said.
‘Done.’ Surveying the room, Desmond said, ‘I shan’t be sorry to leave this sad bunch behind. The Sunday coach can’t come soon enough for me.’
I had not known of his imminent departure, and was sorry to hear it. Noticing my surprise, he said, ‘Didn’t Lloyd tell you?’
‘No.’
‘The lad can’t keep a thought in his head when our Constance is around.’ He reached down to pinch her cheek, but, her bruised face no doubt sensitive to the touch, she shrank from his fingertips.
‘When will you be making your own escape?’ he inquired, a question I had been asking myself for some time.
‘Soon, I hope. There’s a bit of reconstruction to be done, on one lung in particular, but I hope to catch a Sunday coach myself.’
‘Do look me up when you get to London.’
‘I shall be happy to see you both,’ I said, as a means of including Constance in the conversation, and in acknowledgement, she turned her face upward. Her lips still sealed to conceal the damage, she gave me a look designed to convey encouragement, but something else, too, that I could not readily determine.
There was the clap of a piano keyboard being uncovered, and as the accompanist drew his bench towards the pedals, a bony spinster approached the front of the salon, a real tiara somewhat askew on her head, clutching a sheaf of sheet music in one hand. Dr Rüedi himself, removing his pince-nez with a flourish, introduced the lady to the audience now taking its seats.
‘Good Lord,’ Desmond muttered, ‘when does the band begin?’
‘After the bel canto.’
The songs—fittingly, given the locale—were chiefly Franz Schubert, rather than the Italians, and the singer, though well past her prime, gave of her utmost. Never one to become lost in a legato, I found my thoughts wandering, addressing themselves to everything from the narrative difficulties in the manuscript that lay on my desk, to the storm pummelling the hotel on all sides with all the ferocity of the cannon batteries at Sebastopol. But beneath the shrieking of the wind and the expressive wailing of the soprano, I gradually became attuned to something else, something whose origins were not in the room. It was a low and prolonged moaning, a sigh so plaintive that, once heard, it could not be ignored. My ears virtually pricked up at the sound.
Lord Grey.
It came to me, impossible though it be, that I was hearing the laboured breathing of the wolf . . . the creature whose blood even now coursed through my veins . . . as it lay, in extremis, in its frigid cell below.
I looked around for any sign that the sound had come to others, but everyone around was attending to the concert, undistracted and undismayed. I alone was in perfect harmony with the suffering beast below.
When an opportune moment struck, I unobtrusively absented myself from the salon, stopping in the kitchen to grab some scraps of lamb, which the chef obligingly wrapped in a napkin (‘Your Woggin should have a Christmas dinner, too!’ he said), and then quickly descending the dimly lit staircase, where the gas lamps flickered on every landing, and into the cellars. The sound only grew louder.
Passing the recovery room where I had lain so many a night after the surgery and other treatments, I went straight to the wolf’s cell, only to find the latch down and the door ajar. Wet footprints—human, and large—smudged the stone floor. I had no doubt who had made them.
Glancing into the examination room, I was greeted by no one but the grinning skeleton hanging from the wall. The doctor’s fur coat hung beside it, and snatching it from the rack, I pulled it on while following the footprints around a corner, down another hall, and finally to an arched wooden doorway bolstered by iron slats. Judging from the rattle of its hinges, beyond it lay the vacant yard behind the hotel.
Bracing myself for the blast, I threw the door open, though even then I was not prepared for the strength of the gale. The footprints were nearly invisible, but a path had plainly been cut through the snow. A narrow track led into the maelstrom and towards what I surmised was the smokehouse. No other refuge could be found out here, and there could be no better place for Yannick to conduct the deadly business he undoubtedly had in mind.
Finding it, however, was another matter. Although the distance was small, no more than a couple of hundred yards, it was an easy thing to lose all sense of direction. As part of the holiday décor, every window in the hotel had been outfitted with a lantern or candle, and by the light of them, I was able to orient myself until they, too, became a blur, and I was
guided more by the preternatural auditory sense than anything else. With one hand out in front of me and the other clutching the collar of the coat closed against the wind, I ploughed slowly ahead until my frozen fingers grazed the planks of the smokehouse door. I fumbled for the latch, lifted it, and ducked inside.
Slabs of meat and dead fowl dangled from the rafters. A low fire smouldered in the grate, and Yannick himself was crouched beside it, poking at the glowing embers. Lord Grey, torn bandages trailing from his limbs, the muzzle still holding his jaws fast, was now chained to the bottom bars of a rack used for stretching pelts. Though wobbling with fear and fury, he was on all four paws.
‘What,’ Yannick said, ‘the party, it is over already?’
I shivered, not from the cold, but from the sudden warmth of the room. On the long refectory-style table, several knives and cleavers were arrayed for the task at hand.
‘You look an idiot in that,’ Yannick said, sneering at the paper crown that I’d altogether forgotten and that the storm had miraculously stuck to my forehead.
There being no fit rejoinder to his remark—no words indeed necessary to explain my purpose there—I brushed the hat aside and went straight to the wolf.
‘You’ll want to keep clear of him. He knows what’s coming.’
Kneeling, I looked straight into Lord Grey’s eyes, and he into mine, and in that moment, something passed between us that I felt as viscerally as I might the kick from a horse. Something stirred in my heart, something surged in my bloodstream, my limbs ached, and my skin prickled.
‘Do you want to go and get that son of yours, that Lloyd?’
‘Why on earth would I do that?’
‘He loves to watch the doctor go about his operations, the autopsies best of all.’
This was news to me, though it explained his unaccounted-for absences of late.
‘Perhaps he would like to watch me go about my own operation,’ he said with a guffaw. ‘He could lend me a hand, too.’
I reached towards the muzzle and unfastened the leather strap.
‘That’s a good way to lose your fingers,’ Yannick warned, rising now and gripping, conspicuously, the handle of a gleaming cleaver.
But the jaws did not snap. Reaching into my pocket, I took out the napkin filled with lamb and laid it on the hard-packed dirt floor. Lord Grey looked at it dubiously—had his food until now been laced with some sedating agent?—then, as it had come from my trusted hand, gobbled it down.
‘That won’t be halfway through his gullet before it’s spilled out onto this table.’
Paying no heed, I stood up and methodically unwound the chain from the rack.
‘Are you mad?’
Again, I made no reply.
‘Stop that!’
When the wolf realized that he was free from constraint, his eyes shifted rapidly from mine towards the door, then back again, as if begging for one further act of assistance.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ Yannick shouted, raising the cleaver. But I had already turned to the door and lifted the latch.
The gust of wind and snow that blew into the smokehouse stirred the fire and threw a cloud of orange sparks and black ash into the air. Bandages still dangling from his fur, and staggering like a drunken sailor, Lord Grey made for the open door. The whistle of the cleaver shot past my ear and thunked into the wooden wall.
‘I’ll kill you!’ Yannick raged. ‘I’ll kill you both!’
I ducked out the door and into a storm that, if anything, had only gained in fury. Even the candles and lanterns in the windows of the Belvédère were utterly obscured, and after only a few steps, I had tumbled into the snow and, scrambling to my feet again, lost all sense of direction. Whirling around, I saw nothing but a veil of white, heard nothing but my own gasping breath, but felt—and this was an astonishment to myself—a rising tide of strength welling up from some heretofore secret source.
A moment later, I was struck by a blunt force so overwhelming I was knocked halfway down the slope, rolling over and over again like a barrel. I felt hands tearing at my coat and grasping at my throat, and Yannick’s angry breath swearing my destruction.
But if wolves had failed to kill me on this bleak mountaintop, no man, I vowed, would do the deed.
As I struggled to fight back, I conceded myself—a chronic invalid, a man with but one lung—overmatched. At the same time, I felt the burst of a strange energy, like lightning, crackling in every vein, and in my fingers a prehensile strength, as if they had become an eagle’s talons.
‘I’ll kill you!’ I heard again, hot spittle spraying my face.
I greeted the threat not with fear, but with a kind of mad vigour, a lust for engagement, for combat . . . for blood.
What should have been a hopeless contest became a pitched and even match, the two of us on the icy ground, ripping at each other’s limbs and skin. Even my teeth ached with the desire to bite and savage his flesh, and when they found their mark and tore a shred from his cheek, he shrieked and leaned back on his knees, his hand pressed to the bloody wound.
God forgive me for saying so, but the taste of his blood was as sweet as nectar on my lips. I might have laughed at his agony were it not for the glint of a knife I now saw he had fished from the back of his belt and raised like Abraham about to sacrifice his son.
I fended off the first blow, and the second, the blade slicing through the thick sleeve of the coat, but as the knife came up again, a dark force hurtled out of the snowstorm, catching Yannick unawares and, like Ganymede suddenly swept aloft by Zeus, he was carried off. I heard a prolonged scream, descending in both its hold on life and in the sheer distance from which it came. Whatever savagery Lord Grey was inflicting—and it could be no other agent—it was being rendered on the slope of the hill, then down towards the fringe of the forest, and finally into the dense ravine that plummeted another thousand feet towards the valley floor. Several seconds more elapsed before its echoes were swallowed up altogether by the night and the storm and the driving snow.
To my own astonishment, I raised myself to my feet, lifted my face into the stinging spray of ice and sleet, and, with no shame or hesitation, howled in triumph.
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA
Present Day
The roar and sputter of Seth’s truck had barely dissipated down the canyon when Miranda turned to Rafe and said, “What do we do with all this stuff now?” Even in a store as eclectic as hers, she knew there was no way she could sell these things. The smell alone would kill the sale.
“The strongbox I can take to the firehouse on Kanan Road. They’re used to picking locks on abandoned cars and campers.”
“And the rest?” she said, surveying the musty clothes.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “Halloween?”
“You’re no help,” she said. “Go get some sleep. You look wiped.”
“I am.”
Once he’d gone, Miranda started to pile the clothes back into the trunk, then thought better of it. What they needed first was a good airing out. And even sorting through them now, she could see that these had once belonged to a gentleman; a tattered label in the tailcoat read Henry Poole & Co. The gloves were kid, and the opera cape had a black velvet collar with a silver clasp at the throat; the brocade vest was lined with silk; the trouser buttons were bone. The top hat was lopsided, even when she had punched it completely out, but made of beaver, and its brim was encircled by what had once probably been a deep crimson ribbon.
The stink was pretty unbearable, though, and it was to the smell that she attributed the goose bumps she felt erupt on her skin as she gathered the clothes into a bundle. Turning her head, she carried them at arm’s length out to the yard, where she dropped them onto the ground beneath the clothesline. Trip came over for a quick sniff, but even he backed away.
“That bad, huh?”
The light in Rafe’s trailer was out—he must have gone right to bed—but the moonlight was enough to work by. Taking the dried sheet off
the line and draping it over her shoulder, she pinned the old clothes up one by one—even the hat—until she had the pieces of what looked like a whole Victorian gent on the line. In the Santa Ana breeze that was blowing through the mountains that night, it looked like he was dancing a silent, eerie jig, and despite the warmth of the wind, she found herself wrapping the sheet around both shoulders . . . and her eyes shifting to the door of Rafe’s trailer.
She hadn’t wanted that dinner to end—much less with a visit from the canyon’s two most scurvy characters. Not for the first time, she wondered how she’d wound up in just such a place as this, living the life she was living. Sure, she’d had plenty to run from—classes and cotillions, privilege and possessions, encumbrances and expectations, all of them things that only made her feel more unworthy and fake—but maybe, just maybe, she’d run long enough, and far enough, to stop. If she’d had some point to make, hadn’t she made it by now? Was it time to wave the white flag at her forebears, declare a truce, and come to some middle ground? Or was it too late for that?
The answer arrived on a grumbling green Vespa that Laszlo nearly crash-landed beside the porch. Climbing off, he plopped onto the ground, laughing. He was stoned, drunk, or some combination of both. Laszlo had been her single greatest act of defiance; she’d picked him up, or maybe he’d picked her up, at a naked hot springs resort in Baja. He’d told tales of life on the wild side, wooed her with the stories of Carlos Castaneda, and introduced her to everything from magic mushrooms to coke. Although he’d also used a needle on occasion, she’d stopped short of that, like a horse rearing up at a snake in its path. But that was about all she’d stopped short of. In bed (or out of it, for that matter), he’d made her feel things she could never have imagined, things that those prep school boys from Pasadena and San Marino could never have dreamed of. She’d felt like a pile of dry kindling, and he had been the match.
The Jekyll Revelation Page 11
