Eleanor

by RA Williams

  ‘You are quite all right, Cubby?’

  ‘Horrible cave spiders. Give me the frights,’ Cubby groused, turning his torch on the broken ceiling, dozens of the creepy-crawlies scattering. ‘Get yer torch up in there. Them bastards don’t like the light.’

  ‘We ought not linger,’ said the Belgian. ‘We risk having the entire passage down upon us if we do not stop them digging.’

  ‘Pain in me arse, interfering with business,’ Cubby jawed on. ‘What’s wrong with them Royal Navy engineers?’

  They turned, making their way into the maze of passageways. Elle waited until their footsteps faded and she heard the distant door creak shut. The thumping continued, unabated. It was the engineers she had seen digging into the hillside along the Road of Remembrance. They must have been getting close to the smugglers’ passages.

  Clicking her cigarette lighter, she retreated as she had come, returning to the vault and raising the lantern’s flame for a better look inside. There were dozens of sturdy brick columns supporting a cavernous ceiling. What lay below surprised even her.

  She had expected to find sarcophagi containing Crimen. Instead, there were row upon row of piled-up trunks. It looked like the baggage holding room at a port. No two trunks were the same. Some were wardrobes, others steamers. Still others looked like motoring trunks. None were large enough to contain anything like the beast she had witnessed in Titanic’s hold.

  Cautiously making her way through the rows, Elle began examining the names stamped into them. On a dome-lidded half-trunk: B. Ambrose. A wood and leather flat-topped steamer: Major B. Hadley. There were hundreds of them.

  Stopping before a barrel-stave chest, its oak slats worm-worn and metal banding rusted, she found the name she sought: B. Toule.

  ‘Balthasar Toule,’ she said quietly, resting a hand on the rotting trunk’s lid. ‘You were here.’

  One man in his time plays many parts. Dougie Beedham’s voice resonated in her head strongly. She looked around at the piled trunks. ‘Balthasar,’ she murmured, as if whispering to him. ‘You have played all these many parts.’ Resting her lantern on an adjoining trunk, she undid the barrel-stave chest’s clasps, keen to see what skeletons were kept within. ‘These are all yours.’

  Slowly, she lifted the lid, its contents bathing her in sombre light. The trunk was tightly packed with rough-hewn ingots of a most peculiar golden aubergine, each stamped with Toule’s death symbol. Moving to the next trunk, she opened its lid too. It was also full to the brim with ingots. And the next trunk. And the next.

  She looked down the length of the vault at hundreds of trunks. ‘Is this the haul of cwicseolfor Dr Harvey mined and brought back from the Externsteine?’ she asked herself. ‘Maybe this is what thirteen thousand bushels of Jungfräu looks like?’ Without thought, she reached in to pick up an ingot.

  Suddenly, she somersaulted into darkness, her body striking a pillar with such force it crumbled the mortar. As she sank to the floor amid loosened bricks, her head wound began pouring blood anew.

  A towering shadow moved in on her.

  ‘What you doin’ muckin’ about in me business?’ Cubby moved into the light of her lantern. He was even more massive up close. She was lifted from the floor by the scruff of her collar, the toes of her boots just scraping along. ‘You picked the wrong fuckin’ time to trespass, luv.’

  Elle reached for his throat, but he had no discernible neck, just shoulders of thick muscle and a head like a bulldog chewing a wasp. ‘Wait, wait!’ she pleaded. ‘I’m looking for Balthasar Toule.’

  The name gave the brute pause. But instead of granting her reprieve, it seemed only to enrage him all the more.

  ‘Why you lookin’ for him?’ Lifting her clear of the floor, he drew her close. He stank of fried tripe and tobacco. Squirming, she sank her teeth into his earlobe. He pulled her away roughly, howling in pain. She tasted blood, spitting out a gristly chunk of his ear. He heaved her against an iron anvil – Elle felt her ribs crack as she caught its edge.

  Blood rolled down his neck as he approached.

  ‘You’re a spry one, I’ll grant you that, but you ain’t gonna find him here.’ He rolled back his shirtsleeves, revealing strong tattooed forearms.

  She tried to crawl away as he reached down to grasp her. As she turned, her hand fell upon an iron poker. She swung at him with all her worldly might. Blocking it with one huge fist, he belted her in her ribs with the other. She doubled over on the stone floor, unable to breathe.

  ‘Sorry, luv. I don’t fancy slottin’ a bird.’

  Brandishing a shiv from the small of his back, he moved towards her. She tried to make it to her feet but was defeated. Closing her eyes, she awaited her end.

  Instead, she heard a loud thud, and then silence. She cautiously opened her eyes and watched in surprise as Cubby lurched forward and collapsed.

  Another figure arose from the darkness.

  ‘You do find the trouble, mijn schatje,’ said the Belgian as he stepped into the light of her lantern, a benign grin on his face. He gazed at his colleague on the floor, tossing aside the coal shovel he’d just used to brain him. ‘Forgive me, my friend.’

  There was no reply from the huge, unconscious form.

  ‘I simply cannot have you killing Dr Annenberg. No, no. That would be most inopportune.’

  ‘I’ll have your bollocks for conkers, you cheeky foreign bastard.’

  Elle’s eyes slowly focused on Cubby. He rested on a stool against a long bar, tea towel to his ear, a second one held to the back of his head by the plump woman Elle had seen earlier, pulling weeds in the churchyard.

  ‘There, there, you big oaf, enough with your moaning,’ the woman said, stitching his head with needle and thread. ‘Impossible to stave your head in with that thick skull of yours.’

  Elle leaned over a wooden table, bundled towels tucked under her head, hair sticky with coagulating blood. Groggily, she looked about. She was in a public house’s taproom. When she breathed in, her ribs pressed against a dressing. Someone had trussed her up tight. Sitting up, she felt a stabbing pain.

  ‘Don’t mess it about, darling,’ said the woman in the apron. Putting Cubby’s hand to the reddening towel on the back of his head, she patted his shoulder. ‘Hang on to that, dopey.’

  Cubby turned, giving Elle a glare as if he were about to put her arse on the kerb selling apples. ‘Let her whinge, Mabel. She bit half me ear off.’

  ‘There now.’ Mabel stood over her, gently rubbing her back. ‘You just be still. He didn’t know who you was.’

  ‘I did know who she bloody was.’ He scowled.

  ‘You’ll forgive Cubby. I’ll sort him out.’

  ‘He tried to kill me,’ said Elle.

  ‘Actually…’

  Turning, she saw the Belgian sitting in a chair, half-pint glass and an open bottle of Redbreast whiskey on a table next to him. She closed her eyes, wincing at the pain shooting through her ribs with every breath. When she opened them again, the Belgian was standing beside her, lambent blue eyes twinkling.

  ‘He quite possibly saved your life. Had you touched one of those ingots of cinnabar, you would be dead by now, instead of enjoying a twelve-year-old single pot whiskey.’

  Putting another glass on the table, he poured her a drink.

  ‘I’m hacked off enough and you’re fuckin’ giving her drinks? You wants to be giving her the pillow from me bed next. Look at what she done!’ Cubby complained to the Belgian, lowering the tea towel covering his damaged earlobe.

  ‘I must apologise – I found it necessary to bludgeon you. I could not permit you to do harm to the good doctor.’

  ‘She’s a doctor? Have her over here and look at me head, then.’

  ‘Oi,’ Mabel scolded. ‘Enough of your talking twenty to the dozen. You’ve had worse from me.’

  Sulking over a pint, Cubby shrugged his consent.

  ‘I’m not that sort of a doctor,’ said Elle.

  ‘Cubby Smyth is not that sort of a
publican. This pub, the Priory Arms, is his,’ the Belgian explained. ‘He is a smuggler of some note.’

  ‘Redbreast,’ she said, after emptying her glass. ‘This rotgut is from the vaults.’ She looked up at the Belgian. ‘Oh dear. I left the vicar down there.’

  ‘That flinty old geezer,’ said Cubby.

  ‘Sleeping comfortably as we speak,’ said Mabel. ‘Back in his bed at the vicarage.’

  Elle winced again as she breathed. The Belgian poured her another glass. ‘I find whiskey to be an ideal sedative. You have cracked your ribs. You will find if you breathe shallow, the pain will subside. Cubby’s wife – Mabel – has done a very fine job of stitching your head.’

  Elle managed a nod of gratitude, despite the pain. ‘Thank you, Mabel.’

  ‘You are welcome, luv. Dunno who done them stitches before. They was dodgy.’

  ‘A German fellow with shaking hands.’

  ‘I ain’t surprised they come loose.’

  The Belgian held his hand out to Elle, introducing himself properly at last. ‘I am Jean-René Gaele.’

  Elle nodded. ‘Yes. We met on Twickenham Ferry.’

  ‘We met the first time on Titanic.’

  She stared at him. Through waves of grey hair and weathered skin from hard living, she remembered him. ‘It was you?’

  He nodded.

  Her injuries forgotten, she smiled. ‘You carried me up to the Boat Deck from Scotland Road.’

  ‘Ja,’ he replied, tipping back his glass. ‘I was a young, idealistic man then. A Great War and too many hard years in the Belgian Congo have left what you see now.’

  Inhaling gently, she looked away from him, her mind taking her beyond the walls of the pub. ‘I was convinced everything leads back to Titanic,’ she muttered.

  Gaele nodded, suggesting he’d heard her.

  Returning her gaze to him, she continued, ‘I realise now I was wrong. All roads lead me to Folkestone. There are no coincidences.’

  ‘Hardly, if ever.’

  Dr Mauss had replied in precisely the same way.

  ‘I’m pleased you discovered St Emiliana’s secret. Even I did not expect you in Balthasar’s vault.’

  ‘You know him?’

  Holding a cigarette to his lips, Gaele searched his pockets for a lighter. Elle fished out the one he had given her from her dungarees.

  ‘You were right. I did need it,’ she said, returning his lighter.

  ‘As I knew we would meet again.’ He tucked it away and then nodded. ‘Yes, I know him.’

  ‘Shut your gob, you dopey foreigner,’ Cubby bristled, his face reddening. ‘Ours ain’t no social club.’

  Gaele smiled. ‘Mabel, is it not Cubby’s bedtime?’

  ‘Upstairs to bed, you.’ Although not half his size, his wife handled Cubby like a naughty boy sent to bed without his pudding. ‘The all of us will be better come the morning.’

  ‘Hang on, Mabel, I ain’t finished me pint.’

  ‘You can take your beer with you, my love,’ she said, helping him to his feet. ‘Chop, chop.’

  Wobbling as he stood, Cubby tossed a displeased look in Elle’s direction.

  ‘You’re in trouble,’ he blustered, as he was guided to stairs at the back of the pub. ‘Both of you.’

  Gaele sniggered imperturbably. ‘He is not a bad sort, our Cubby. He does not know you.’

  ‘And you do?’

  ‘Ja. I know you, Eleanor.’

  Sitting back in his chair, he fired up a cigarette.

  ‘Buster Hadley. He spoke of you at length.’

  ‘I know nobody by that name.’

  ‘You do know him. But as Balthasar Toule.’

  Elle’s whole countenance changed upon hearing his name spoken.

  She looked at Gaele, eyes pleading.

  ‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Tell me. Tell me everything.’

  ❖❖❖

  10 APRIL 1921

  KINUWAI, BELGIAN CONGO

  ‘Gift’ and ‘food’ are not mutually exclusive,

  since, at least in theory, the essential form

  of the ‘total service’ relates to nourishment.

  —Notes, ‘The Gift’

  Rainwater streamed off the back of Gaele’s pith helmet, draining down the inside of his collar. Using the brim to shield his eyes from the deluge, he looked to the riverbank.

  Swamped canoes were strewn about the trading station’s landing stage. Beyond, a river steamer had run aground, stern submerged. The zinc roof of the station annexe had collapsed, and the eaves over the director’s villa were severely damaged.

  Whatever had occurred at the last station on the Ituri River must have been sudden and violent. Shouldering the Winchester rifle he’d nicknamed Henry, Gaele climbed from Margoux’s deck to the narrow aft platform, beside the steamer’s steadily turning paddles.

  ‘Private?’ he shouted to a grenadier from the platoon, already disembarked from the steamer.

  ‘Aye, Mssr Gaele?’ the British soldier shouted above the rain’s din.

  ‘Do you see a name on the hull of that beached steamer?’

  Moving closer to the ship, the soldier squinted in the pelting rain. ‘Clémentine.’

  The mystery was revealed. Chartered by a mapping expedition from the Royal Geographical Society, Clémentine had ventured up the Ituri to the last trading station on the river months before. There had been no word from either the expedition or Kinuwai Station since.

  Taking up the port-side mooring line, Gaele cast it towards the grenadier with a ‘ready, steady, go’. As the soldier lifted his hands to catch the hawser, a peculiar whomp of wings filled the air. Before the private could catch the mooring line, he was hoisted into the air and heaved against a grouping of oil palms, the small of his back striking a spiny trunk with a sickening crack. An otherworldly shadow, obscured by the downpour, chased after the mortally wounded soldier as he crashed to the ground.

  It bit into the grenadier’s torso, savagely pulling him open.

  Drawing Henry off his shoulder, Gaele quickly dropped the trigger guard and prepared a round. He fired. Recycling the guard, he ejected the spent cartridge and slid a fresh round into the chamber from the tubular magazine below the barrel. Despite the rain still pouring off his helmet, he managed to group three .44 rounds into the wraith’s torso.

  Unleashing a hyena-like howl, it dropped the gored soldier and rushed at Gaele. Bipedal in form, and unpleasantly anaemic, the beast’s brindle-coloured skin was devoid of hair. Membranous wings poking from its stickleback spine pounded the air. Face gaunt, its jawbone oddly distended, serrated carnassials protruded from swollen gums.

  Gaele had never witnessed such a beast. Not in the Congo or anywhere else. Not even in his nightmares – and he had many.

  Toggling the trigger guard, he chambered another round, raising the repeater. With the coolness of a hunter who’d earned his chops staring down the muzzle at charging predators, he sighted Henry just left of the beast’s sternum. The Winchester squealed. A hot rimfire bullet zipped through the teeming rain, tearing through its chest. Striking bone, the bullet’s trajectory changed, spinning out of the demon’s back at a forty-five-degree angle before splashing into the water. As if hitting a brick wall, the beast twisted sideways, its wings flopping limply as it skidded into the river in front of Margoux’s churning paddles.

  A single .44 round from his Winchester could drop a charging rhino. He’d pumped four into the demon and still it wasn’t finished. Drawn into the suction of the steamer’s paddles, it brayed once before being torn to bits, the river’s green shallows becoming inky black.

  Turning towards the bow, Gaele felt the steamer drawn from the protection of the station’s landing towards rough, impassable cataracts upriver.

  ‘Bordel de merde,’ he muttered, realising he had left the wheelhouse unmanned for too long.

  Running along the port-side deck towards the wheelhouse stairs, he heard a crackle of rifle fire from shore, and the unmistakable br
um-brum-brum from a thirty-aught-six Lewis gun.

  Continuing amidships, he interrupted more of the fiends. Hunched on the deck in the belting rain, their sticky, webbed wings batting furiously as they butchered the regimental surgeon, his face crumpling like a wet cloak, stony eyes staring indifferently.

  A beast looked up from its messing, hissing a spittle of human meat from its mouth. Abandoning the surgeon’s corpse, the runty beast began to creep menacingly towards Gaele. Raising Henry again, he fired into it, momentarily slowing the fiend down. It was then he realised with horror that he needed to reload.

  The beast rushed him, wings buffeting the rain as it negotiated the confines of the deck, long, bloodstained talons steadying it on the riverboat’s railings. It was naked save for the remnants of a pagne loincloth. Gaele was struck with a shocking realisation: the fiends were once human.

  Scurrying behind the steamer’s funnel, the Belgian made for his berth. Throwing back the door, he took hold of a pair of leather bandoliers containing his extra cartridges and pulled them over his head. Quickly, he chambered fifteen .44 rounds into his repeater. As he grasped the belt containing his holstered Colt revolvers, he heard a ruckus coming from the berth opposite.

  Major Balthasar Hadley’s quarters. ‘Buster? Is it you there?’

  No sooner had he buckled the pistol belt about his waist than a powerful crash caused the wall dividing the berths to tremble, followed by a shuddering shriek like nothing he’d heard before.

  As he was about to leave his berth, gun freshly loaded, the drifting steamer came to a jarring halt, the room pitching to starboard. Struggling through the doorway, he stumbled along the deck. Unmanned, the steamer had been drawn out into unprotected waters by the circular eddies boiling up from the cataracts that prevented further navigation upriver. Gaele gritted his teeth as Margoux was sucked towards the swirling cauldron. He had moments to make another decision: attempt to reach the pilothouse and increase steam in the hope of keeping the riverboat from being torn apart in the cataracts, or abandon ship altogether. The latter would spell certain death for anyone remaining on board. His only real option was to try saving her.