The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling

  ‘Waring, you say.’

  ‘The ship’s quack.’

  ‘Where would I find him?’

  The mountain range of Blue’s shoulders lifted and fell. ‘No idea,’ he said, picking up his glass. But he paused before drinking. ‘Though it was him the Captain was raving about when I discovered him stumbling about the raggedy quarter of town. And if he’s on the Captain’s mind, I bet he’ll know of the bastard’s whereabouts.’

  ‘You think he’ll tell me?’

  ‘There’s no love lost between them.’

  A pause followed this statement. With the songbird silent, and the labourers gone, the pub felt oddly quiet. Yet – I realised – there was nothing awkward about not speaking to this man. We finished our drinks. Finally, Blue offered to show me to Addison’s lodgings south of the river. This generosity seemed so natural that I made no protest before accepting it.

  Twenty-eight

  The man took Abeni away too. The poor girl screamed when he took her, a quick high hopeless squawk, like a chicken in the instant before its head is snapped back, though he didn’t snap anything back at all. He was quite gentle with her. He undid the chain and led her out through the open door talking in a low whisper all the while. He talked like you talk to an ox, a cow, a horse.

  This means Oni is alone.

  You would think that the aloneness would make it worse, and it does for the first few moments, the moments after the door shuts, after the sound of his boots, dull on the hard earth, and echoing up the stairs fades. There’s a new kind of panic then. It is water sucked into lungs. It is a knife slid hard under the skin. Oni wonders: will the aloneness be the thing to bring an end? Will it press down into her lungs hard enough to drive out the last air? Will it slice in far enough to let out the final drops of blood?

  No.

  Oni thinks: ever since they came and took us and put us all together, so many together that I couldn’t feel where I ended and the next person began, I have really been alone.

  On the ship there were those who tried to reach their own ends through the simple means of keeping their mouths shut to food and water. But the men had thought of that. They have the thumb thing, which twists until you eat. Oni once saw them use it on a woman who refused the pain. She would not cry out. So they tore her thumb off. But still she did not win. They shook their heads and sent for the mouth thing, which broke the woman’s teeth as they fitted it, then forced her jaws apart, opened her up to the food. The first thing they made her swallow was her own thumb.

  So Oni takes the bread when it is given and drinks water from the wooden cup. She does not wonder where they took Abeni, or where the girl is now.

  Twenty-nine

  Buttoning my greatcoat, I followed the sailor to the door, and through it on to the quay. The rush of air and street noise hit me a fraction of a second before the first fist did. I saw Blue turn around in front of me. A shape slammed into the sailor and sheered away out of reach. Then something else slashed down. I ducked instinctively. The blow glanced off my head, shutting out all sound and striking a white-hot match before my eyes. I was still half ducking and half stumbling, beset by an absurd distraction: I must get rid of the birdcage, which was still clasped to my chest. Something hard broke across my upper back. My face was between my knees and my breath exploded wet on to the cobbles. The wicker case clattered away, the bird tumbling inside it, a flash of yellow, and my hands came up to shield my face just in time to prevent a further blow hitting home. Instead it bounced off my raised forearm.

  Where the other knocks had stunned me, this one hurt. The pain was blade sharp and sparked rage.

  Rocking backwards and upwards, I threw all my weight behind my left elbow, and felt it jar into something soft. I pivoted through the blow in time to see grey teeth knocked open in surprise, the black cave of a mouth behind them, a face dropping sideways. I drove my right fist into the falling face. Somebody grabbed my wrist and somebody else leaped upon my shoulders. In panic, I lunged sideways into the latticed window of the pub, crushing the man on my back into the panes. The man slid to the floor and sounds broke in again: a garbled yell, a crunch of glass. I looked down and drove the heel of my boot into the open mouth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Blue clinched to a man in a long coat, apparently dancing with him, but the man’s feet weren’t touching the ground. Blue had him by the throat. The breath exploded from my chest again, and again, half gasp – half laughter. Somebody was running away and somebody else – the man with the iron-filing beard – still had me by the wrist. I allowed myself to be yanked clear of the broken pub-front and then I threw myself forward, my own momentum combining with the workman’s, who was woefully slow, drunk and stumbling backwards. I swatted him into the road with an open palm and he went down and I kicked him hard in the chest. To my left I saw Blue hurl his assailant upwards and away, coat-tails split around his backside, and for a second they were a swallow’s wings, and then they folded him, too, into the pavement. The way the man did nothing to break his fall drew me up short. I stood over iron-filings, poised to kick him again as he crawled away on his elbows and knees, but held back. My blood was slowing in my chest, beating to the same pulse as the stripe across my back. My arm was also throbbing and heavy with pain. The rest of the drunken gang had scattered, and iron-filings now staggered upright and began to lurch away. Only the broken-winged overcoat remained where he was, arms splayed awkwardly, cheek pressed into the slick cobbles, a wedge of tongue visible between his parted lips.

  I looked from Blue to the fallen man and back again. Blue was stretching his neck as if to break an invisible yoke, and clutching his own shoulder. He caught my eye. Something passed between us. I felt it and was alarmed by it, then blotted it out.

  The canary!

  I twisted to find and pick up the bird, still twittering with panic in its cage, and was not surprised to feel my arm grabbed by the sailor as I stood up. I let myself be dragged away. My better instincts, to attend to the fallen man, and to confess to my part in smashing the pub’s cobweb window, were as nothing compared to the urge to distance myself from the consequences. Together with Blue, I broke past the bystanders and quickened away down the quay.

  Thirty

  We did not slow down or speak until we had crossed the bridge again and left the main thoroughfare of Victoria Street. Further south, with the lanes tightening around us, I drew Blue to a halt. The Negro’s eyes were gleaming. Though the dull stripe across my back was blooming into a proper hurt, and my left ear and temple had also begun to burn painfully, these things were inconsequential as compared with the deeper euphoria coursing through my veins. It wasn’t the drink. As after my earlier escape from the stallholders, the near miss with the falling cask, and the moments held in the window-casement high above the city, I felt relief as a sort of reckless joy. This time, I’d not only been set upon, but had had the chance to fight back. I felt horribly pleased with the result.

  And yet.

  And yet, as Blue dusted himself down and growled his head clear, rueing the fight and making light of it in the same breath, I heard myself asking, ‘Why did they wait for us?’

  ‘Why? I suspected they might. Our route to the bar was too easy.’

  ‘But it was just drunken posturing I walked in upon, nothing to justify such an attack.’

  ‘They determined to try for revenge at leisure.’

  ‘You think so? You’re sure the quarrel didn’t pre-date your entering the Trow?’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s just that they must have waited outside for more than fifteen minutes. Were they in fact waiting for you before you arrived?’

  Blue shook his head, and asked, ‘Why would they be waiting for me?’ He went on to suggest that I was perhaps suffering a delusion brought about by one of the blows I’d taken to the head.

  But I had stopped listening after ‘me’. Though I knew it could not be true, because Blue had been first into the pub, and the
man with the broken boots had taken objection to him even before I showed up at the sailor’s side, it suddenly seemed possible that the men had been lying in wait for me. Upon leaving the pub I had taken the first punch. My ear was still ringing. I dug a finger deep into its softness and the whining tone dropped an octave: it sounded like the moan of wind through a ship’s rigging. Of course they hadn’t wanted me. I’d recognised none of them. Just workmen, too far gone in an afternoon without work. They’d come off a building site; their soiled boots and dirty coats evidenced as much. And after we had brushed them aside they had obviously decided, no doubt befogged by drink, to lie in wait in search of … innocent … revenge.

  The needling whine faltered, cut apart by the canary, still fast in its box, tucked under my arm, its twittering now a relief. There could be nothing sinister about such a botched attack. That was the point to hold on to. Whatever hurt had been intended, it had failed.

  I shook my head. ‘You’re right. They picked the wrong war! Two of us, and what, five of them? And they’re the ones scattering for cover, or laid out to cure on the cobbles!’

  Blue laughed at this, but his laughter petered out unconvincingly.

  ‘He’ll be all right, don’t worry,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Pinpricks of gauzy rain now found their way between the teetering house-fronts. I looked up. The sky above the rooftops was the colour of an old bruise, yellow-edged. Glimpsing even this hint of the sunset was destructive; when I looked back along the lane it appeared night had fallen that instant. I determined not to allow the fracas to divert me from my purpose in following Blue. The Captain’s willingness to hand over the books had a simple explanation: they could not contain the whole of the ship’s story. I would use the pretext of asking for Waring’s address to hint at that allegation, intimate that I had proof, drop Carthy’s name, and see how the Captain responded.

  Blue had re-buttoned his coat and appeared to be waiting for me to make up my mind.

  I obliged, asking, ‘Are your Captain’s lodgings close by?’

  Thirty-one

  The boarding house stood at the end of a narrow passageway. I heard trickling water as I turned into its mouth. A stream – comprised mostly of sewage, by the smell of it – worked its way around the stoops and off towards the Avon. I trod carefully so as not to splash my boots. Following Blue, I made my way towards the only one of the crooked, tumbledown house-fronts displaying a light in its parlour window. It stood at the very end of the alley, where the dirt path splayed into a miniature courtyard.

  The lamplight illuminated a bare, swept step, above which stood a front door. It shone as the owner of the house drew it inwards: fresh paint. The contrast with the surrounding dilapidation struck me as futile: a gold tooth in a mouth of blackened stumps. The landlady wore a tiny crucifix over her stained housecoat.

  Shoulder to shoulder, Blue and I took up most of the cramped hall. I explained our purpose, the canary incongruous under my arm. Upon determining that we were not prospective lodgers, the woman’s face fell. She had a strange hump of fat on the back of her neck, and kneaded at it while gesturing disconsolately at the stairs.

  ‘Second floor,’ she said, her tone implying a silent, ‘if you must.’

  We clumped to the top landing. The higher it rose, the less the house pretended to cleanliness. The upper stairs were strewn with sawdust; on the landing it was mixed with straw. We paused before the door. The silence took a moment to catch up with us, as if the stairs we’d come up were unwilling to end their creaking complaint. But finally a stillness descended, which I broke with a gentle knock.

  The quiet reasserted itself.

  I knocked again.

  This time the silence which followed became emphatic.

  ‘He can’t be here.’

  Blue said nothing, just stared at the door.

  I knocked a third time, harder now, and cleared my throat. ‘Captain Addison.’

  The canary clicked in its cage.

  Blue stepped forwards and gave the door a slap with an open palm.

  I said, ‘Not in,’ and turned around to see the landlady arriving at the head of the stairs. Her having made it all the way up without triggering the creaky floorboards testified to the many years she must have spent prying into the affairs of her guests.

  ‘He hasn’t left the house today,’ she said, uninvited, but authoritatively.

  ‘I can’t raise him,’ I shrugged.

  The landlady stepped to the door, rattling her keychain. When nothing stirred in response to her knocking, she slipped a key into the lock. One hand turned it, the other reached to knead the pad of flesh on the back of her neck. To interrupt a man in his late-afternoon nap boded ill: whenever I fall asleep during the day I come-to sluggish and angry. ‘It’s no bother,’ I began to tell the landlady. ‘I’ll leave a card and come back.’

  But the lock clacked open and the landlady turned the doorknob, calling out Addison’s name again.

  The door would not open. The landlady huffed and jerked at the handle ineffectually.

  ‘Has he bolted it from within?’ I asked.

  At this the landlady growled, ‘Bolts inside doors? You’ve obviously not run a boarding house.’ She continued rattling the doorknob, and pushed at the door with her spare hand, levering it open no more than a quarter of an inch. ‘Something’s –’

  I motioned for her to step aside, then knelt down and put an eye to the keyhole. As I suspected, there was no clear view through it. When I gave the door a bump with my shoulder the darkness through the hole wobbled.

  ‘There’s something’s blocking –’ the landlady began again.

  Blue now stepped to my side, set his shoulder against the door, and shoved violently. The door juddered open a hand-span, something – heavy – scraping the floorboards inside as it did. The second time Blue barged forwards I threw my own weight against the lower panels too, and it crashed open with a splintering bang. A chest of drawers – which had been set beneath the door handle – slammed over on to its back, upsetting the lamp placed on top of it. The light went out. Immediately the landlady bustled past me, muttering crossly about spilled oil.

  Without the lamp there wasn’t much light in the room.

  But the glow from the landing was sufficient to unveil the shape of a man strung from the end of a rope.

  Thirty-two

  The next seconds were a quick-slow blur. I moved forwards into the room as if through treacle. The Captain’s body – for it was definitely him, suspended from the rafters – seemed at once too small and yet somehow monumental, as if he were a scaled-down version of his former self, cut from wood or stone. In the half-light I fancied there was something unstill about the shape before me. It appeared to oscillate, shimmering disingenuously. And yet I knew this had to be an illusion: never had I seen anything so utterly in the thrall of the earth’s gravitational pull.

  Behind me, Blue: ‘How in the name of God?’

  I wheeled round. The sailor appeared more amazed than horrified.

  The landlady’s lamp was flickering; that was why the corpse had appeared unstill. She was edging along the wall towards an alcove housing a window, which stood open. She stuck her head out into the night air and began sobbing. I went towards her – as much to retrieve the light as to offer comfort – and found myself looking past her at a cat, not ten feet away, which lay curled amongst the chimney pots. It blinked at us, stood up and wandered off across the roof. I patted the woman’s shoulder ineffectually. She was bent heavily against the wooden sill, her chest heaving beneath the burden of that scoop of flesh between her shoulder blades.

  Why did it matter that the window was open?

  ‘Another lamp,’ I told her firmly, taking hold of the one she was carrying.

  The woman nodded and took a deep breath and held it as she scuttled out of the room. ‘Get him down, down!’ said Blue, his amazedness now apparently tinged with fear. I started towards him, but immediately stumbled
in the half-light, tripping over the legs of a fallen chair. My head, I realised as I steadied myself, was pounding, each beat of my heart seemingly delivering another punch to my temple.

  ‘Of course,’ I said to myself. ‘The chair … would have skittered out … from under … when he toppled.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘But why is it all the way over here?’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  I bent down and slid the chair back a foot or so, on to the spot it would have occupied before I clattered into it. That was important. I turned to Blue to tell him something equally crucial, though quite what it was I couldn’t yet articulate. There was a reflection of some sort beneath Blue’s boot. As I swayed, the wetness turned from grey to warm yellow and back again, marrying up with the night-soil smell of the room. Which made sense. He’d have fouled himself in the act of …

  Now Blue muttered, ‘We must get him down.’

  Not before I had made sense of the details. A pool of piss alive with reflected light, the slatted chair upended by the far window. The broken lamp and tumbled chest. A rope stretched taut, apparently searching for an escape through the rafters, but held back by the dead weight of Addison, his mouth a slack ‘O’, those silver daggers in his beard now angled towards his own chest.

  The landlady appeared again, galvanised. She raised her new lamp high and the shadows on the walls brightened. Not so Addison. Pallid hands poised indefinitely, grey sunken cheeks. Yet faced with this now irrefutable horror, the landlady quickly leapfrogged her shock to grapple instead with its ramifications for her business. She stood in the doorway, one hand pressing her crucifix into her chest, muttering: ‘Ruined. Ruined. Ruined.’