The Feast of All Souls

by Simon Bestwick

  “The visible world is only a layer, a crust. Surely you understand that, Mary?”

  “I believe that I have an immortal soul that will survive my body’s destruction, if that is what you mean.”

  He shook his head. “No. No. That’s not what I mean. Not quite. There is something that we might call a God, Mary. But He neither created us nor watches our every move. Heaven and Hell, Jesus, the Virgin Mary – these are no more than fairy tales we tell ourselves to make the vastness of Creation a less frightening place. The same with the Jews and their Torahs, the Mohammedans and their Koran. The truth is simpler, and very different. And, to the weak and frightened, terrifying. To Him, we are less than insects. Tiny motes. We exist, and then we don’t. Nothing more. And yet – and yet – if we are wise, and seek for knowledge – seek it no matter what bars the path to it – we might know Him. Might claim the tiniest morsel of His power. Knowledge of the past, or the future. Healing. Even life eternal. That is the only immortality a human being can claim. When you die, Mary, you are but dust in the wind.”

  He cupped a hand under the flowing stream. The water shone and glimmered. He opened his fingers, and it fell like a rain of diamonds. “People came here to worship, Mary,” he said, “and to sacrifice – yes, to sacrifice. Not to the spring itself, but to what it symbolised, what lay beyond it. They called it the Fire Beyond.”

  He crouched before the bowl-shaped pool. “There would always be a seer,” he said. “A priest would work himself into an ecstatic trance through meditation. That, or a sacrifice would make the Fire manifest itself. Through my researches, I have concluded that a certain mental state is necessary to perceive the Fire Beyond. Either the priest’s trance, or the sacrifice’s suffering, reaching a pitch where he or she is beyond pain. Then they see the Fire Beyond, and in seeing it, they reveal it to others...”

  He trailed off. By now, I was staring at him. He chuckled. “You think I’m mad, don’t you?” He wagged a finger at me. “You think I’m insane.”

  As you will, I’m sure, be completely unsurprised to hear, Mr Muddock and Mrs Rhodes, that is exactly what I thought, but given my situation I considered discretion the better part of valour.

  “That is no surprise,” he said. “But no matter. No matter. I have a demonstration all arranged. Kellett!”

  “Sir.” The butler’s voice came out of the darkness beyond the lantern-light, from the opposite side of the chamber.

  “You have one?”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Then bring him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Moloch Device

  The Confession of Mary Carson

  KELLETT MARCHED INTO the light, his lantern in one hand; the other restrained a gaunt, pale thing, naked but for a few tatters of soiled cloth, that was, or had been, a boy.

  He was very pale and thin – his eyes, I remember, seemed enormous in his poor starved face. I remember this, Mrs Rhodes: every maternal impulse that I had tried and failed to feel for the child I carried seemed now to wake, directing itself at this other victim of Arodias Thorne.

  “Thank you, Kellett,” Arodias said, taking the lantern from the butler’s hand. “Now if you’ll put him in place, please.”

  “No!” shrieked the boy. Thin and famished as he was, his voice rang clear, for all the good it did in that place. “Please, sir, not that. Please just kill me. Please! Just cut my throat, sir, please!” I cannot forget that, Mrs Rhodes: I cannot forget how I heard a child beg for death.

  “Quiet.” Kellett cuffed the boy on the side of the head. He slumped, dazed.

  “Careful, Kellett,” Arodias said. “Don’t damage him.”

  “Sir.”

  Arodias nodded. Kellett dragged the boy to the chair.

  “Arodias, no!” I caught at his arm, but he threw me off and I stumbled away, losing the blanket in the process.

  “Never,” he said through his gritted teeth, “never put your hands on me again. Not without my express permission. And never tell me what I can or cannot do. Remember where you are, Mary, and where you will go at a word from me.” At a nod from him, Kellett, having stripped the boy of his few remaining rags, shoved him into the chair and secured his limbs with the cuffs and straps.

  “You can’t change his fate,” Arodias told me. “Or that of the other wretches down here. They’re like you, Mary. I bought them, I own them, they belong to me. I decide – I and no-one else. You can either learn from what I show you, or die as a madwoman. Is he ready, Kellett?”

  “He is, sir.”

  Arodias waved the butler away. “As I’ve told you, Mary, the Fire Beyond could only be seen by the priest in his trance – or through the sacrifice, in his suffering. A human sacrifice, of course. In olden days, they had to create the necessary mental state manually: a messy business and a clumsy one, and not particularly efficient. With luck, through such methods, they might see the Fire Beyond for the blinking of an eye. But as with so much else, the right machine can do the job faster, more neatly, and far more effectively.”

  “Please!” The boy in the chair began screaming again. “Please, Mr Thorne, please – I’ll do anything – I’ll be good – I’ll –”

  Arodias reached down, and the boy’s screams were stifled. When Arodias stepped aside I saw a rubber ball, secured on each side by a leather strap, had been forced into the boy’s mouth. “There’s a risk of the subject choking on its tongue,” Arodias said, “but the noise is distracting. Now, come here.” He glanced at my nakedness and scowled. “And cover yourself up, for God’s sake.”

  I wrapped the blanket around myself. I hated jumping so easily to his commands – but I was, after all, at his capricious mercy and bitterly cold to boot. The only reason I had not reached for the blanket before was fear of how he might react to my making another movement without his permission.

  I approached. “Closer, please,” he said. “Closer than that, Miss Carson. Now. See. Observe the intricacy of the mechanism. I designed it myself. I am far more than just another businessman, Miss Carson. Far, far more.”

  He stroked the chair; the boy whimpered through the gag. “I call this mechanism the Moloch Device. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the relevance of the name. But now, watch – and learn.”

  He pushed the brass lever forward. The boy’s cries and whimpers rose to a crescendo – then ceased as the lever moved, with a dull clunking sound, into position.

  The first cogs stirred and shifted, grinding against their neighbours. Then these, too, began to turn, until the whole mass of cogs and gears, wheels and levers, was in motion, like a morass of brightly-shelled insects swarming over a corpse to pick it clean. Through all of this the boy in the chair stared out at me, with wide, pleading eyes.

  And then the other parts of the machine began to move.

  A hook sank into flesh, before rising upwards, lifting a tent of skin in its wake. A blade pierced, cut, then cut again. A little blue flame flicked into life, and the three-inch length of stiffened wire above it glowed first red, then white, before sliding home with horrid precision. The boy shrieked and bellowed against the gag, face scarlet, his screwed-shut eyes seeping tears.

  “Watch!” barked Arodias as I turned away. I forced myself to obey. If I could do nothing else, I vowed, I would be a witness, I would testify and record. Although as you and Mrs Rhodes are no doubt thinking, Mr Muddock, I have been all too tardy in keeping my vow.

  I could not say how long that dreadful process took, for there was no way to reckon time. It seemed to last for hours upon hours, and no doubt it seemed so to the boy. Arodias’ machine was indeed ingenious, I will grant him that. Ingenious, and an abomination. Over that period of time, however long it was, I watched it cut, tear, flense and burn until the boy’s ghost-white skin was a horror of red and black – fresh blood and dried, raw flesh and charred skin. And still the Moloch Device worked, until white bone gleamed through the carnage, and all the while the boy shrieked and shrieked against the gag –

/>   “There. There!” Arodias seized my arm. “Look. Look there. Now!”

  He was pointing, of course, towards the spring. I tore my gaze at last from the atrocity in the chair; looked, and saw.

  The waters of the spring were burning. Not an ordinary fire; cold, blue, lambent flames that danced on the surface of the pool and the water streaming from the rock, and lit the glistening walls of the cave.

  “That,” said Arodias, “comes from the Fire Beyond, and gives those waters the power they possess. But it isn’t the Fire Beyond itself. Keep looking, Mary – keep looking and you may see.”

  I obeyed; it freed me, at least, from witnessing the Moloch Device’s bloody work. The only distractions were the muffled, fading screams of the boy in the chair. The blue flames danced brighter, brighter – and then the rock and water themselves disappeared, almost completely: they became shadows of themselves, ghosts. The bowl-shaped pool remained, but now it was empty of water; in its place was a column of pale blue fire that brushed the chamber roof.

  I saw it only for a moment, but... I do not think I could ever fully describe the nature of the experience. If you ever looked into a fire as a child and saw shapes in it – faces, figures – it was a little like that, except there were so many shapes, so many things. If I looked long enough, I thought I might fully understand what I was looking at, and I thought I might see... everything, Mrs Rhodes, Mr Muddock. What had been, what was to come. Perhaps even the face of God Himself. To do so, of course, might kill me or drive me mad, but it might be a price worth paying.

  And then it was gone, and there was only the water trickling from the cave, no longer afire, and the chamber was silent but for the churning of the Moloch Device’s gears and cogs.

  “There,” said Arodias. “There we are. You saw?”

  “Yes,” I said, and turned. I rather wish I had not done so, for then I saw what the machine had left of that poor boy. But, having seen, I forced myself to record every detail, as penance for having looked away at all.

  Arodias pulled the lever back to its ‘off’ position; the Moloch Device wound down into silence, and those bloodied hooks and blades fell still. The boy lay still, his torment at least at an end, his dissected corpse steaming in the chamber’s chill air.

  “WHAT YOU SAW in that final moment, Mary,was the Fire Beyond.”

  Arodias Thorne said this to me on the morning of the 1st day of February, 1838. Up until that point I had almost convinced myself that the previous night’s events had been a nightmare. Almost, but not quite – not enough to dare venture from my room and face any member of Arodias’ staff, much less Kellett or Arodias himself.

  After the Device had ceased its work, Arodias had summoned Kellett once more, and the two of them had taken me out of that chamber. I went without demur, for I was almost numb from what I had seen; the beauty and rapture of the Fire Beyond on the one hand, and on the other the obscenity that was the Moloch Device.

  On returning to my rooms, two maids took charge of me. I heard Arodias instruct Kellett to ‘dispose of the used specimen’ and clean the Device before closing off the chamber once more. A bath was drawn. I was washed and dressed in a clean nightgown, then led back to my bed and tucked in like a child. I knew both maids for hard, coarse, slatternly women, but they were almost gentle with me then. Did they know what went on in that secret chamber? Or was my condition such that they pitied me, no matter how they’d despised me before? I shall never know.

  One of them put a cup to my lips. There was a drink, warm and sweet – hot milk with honey, I think. And after that, nothing, until I woke the following morning, with bright clear light filtering through the curtains.

  “You’re awake.” Another maid – not one of those that had tended me – stood beside the bed. “I’ll let Master know.” She was gone before I could speak. I lay there, trying to decide whether the previous night’s events had been real, or a fevered dream. In my warm bed, in clean linen, they seemed impossible.

  “Ah, Mary,” Arodias said. “You’re awake.” He planted a chaste kiss on my forehead and sat beside the bed. “And how are you today?”

  He was smiling, but his eyes were fixed and cold. It was the Arodias I’d seen for the first time last night. And so then I knew; had I not been lying down I would have fallen. As if from a distance, I heard Arodias chuckle.

  “Yes,” he said, “you remember, Mary, do you not? Good, very good. You saw the Fire Beyond – that is what matters most of all.”

  “I saw everything,” I told him – my tone, I hoped, conveying the full extent of my loathing.

  “I’m sure you did, but who can you tell? It would be the work of moments to have you committed. You can’t have forgotten that part of our conversation.”

  “I have not,” I said at last.

  “Good. But the Fire Beyond is the important part. Why, you ask? I shall tell you.”

  Arodias linked his fingers together, and strangely, this was when, for the first time, I felt a glimmer of hope that I might escape the asylum after all. I was his audience, the witness to his genius. Better that I live, free but ever in his power, rather than the doomed and broken inmate of a madhouse.

  “I spoke of the spring’s properties,” he said. “The waters could heal, grant knowledge of the past or the future. Whether they did or did not do so, by the way, had nothing to do with the any divine whim, or still less the deserts of any individual supplicant. It is far simpler. Have you ever seen a child use a burning glass – perhaps used one yourself?”

  “Of course,” I told him.

  “Two things are needed to produce the required result,” he said. “On the one hand, the light of the sun; on the other, a magnifying lens to focus them in a single point of intense heat. Yes? Well, then. Imagine that the spring is the lens. That remains present throughout. The source of the Fire Beyond, though – that comes and goes, as the sun rises and sets.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that there are times when the spring is only a spring, and nothing more?”

  “Precisely. Now, the Moloch Device works, if you will, as another lens – or a set of lenses – each focusing the sun’s rays with greater and greater intensity. The spring waters, at the right time and place, can do much, but are only a shadow of the source itself, as the heat of a stone lying beside a fire is as nothing to that of the fire itself. What you saw last night, although only for a moment, was that source.”

  “The Fire Beyond,” I said.

  “Which,” said Arodias, “can do far more than heal a few bodily ills. Hence those ancient ceremonies, to make it appear. When you saw the Fire Beyond, Mary, a doorway was open – just for a moment – through which a man might pass. You see, Mary, if a man can enter the Fire Beyond itself, all that power will be his. All knowledge of the past and the future – and life eternal.”

  Insanity, you might well think. And so might I, had I not seen what I had.

  “But it wasn’t open long enough,” Arodias continued. “In addition, the connection between the Fire Beyond and this world of ours is too tenuous at this time. It is a matter of proximity, like the cycles of the planets and stars. Thirteen years from now, by my calculations, the Fire Beyond will be at its greatest strength. Like the perihelion – the longest day of the year, when the Earth draws closest to the Sun. Meanwhile I continually refine the Moloch Device’s operation to prolong the effect, in order to open the doorway for a sufficient period when the time comes. All I need, Mary” – he looked at my belly then and smiled – “is the right subject.”

  At last, I understood, and my hands went to my womb. For the first time, I felt as a mother should feel towards my child.

  “If you attempt to run,” Arodias said, “you will be found, and I will, still,take your child. Understand that, Mary. You cannot prevent it, and you will end your days in the madhouse.”

  Unless I ended my own life, cheating him of his prize. But still he smiled, and I knew he knew my thought. It was as though I ran through a maze where each
exit was blocked even as it came in sight. Arodias had planned this from the first, before I even set foot in Springcross House; he held all the cards. Within the house his power was absolute, and outside it I would be only an impoverished fornicator whose every utterance would condemn her – even before he made good on his threats.

  “You are not the stuff that Christian martyrs are made of, Mary,” he said. “But then, I would not have chosen you had I thought otherwise. No further unpleasantness is required between us, only a few months’ submission on your part, after which – so long as you have pleased me – you will be free to go, and well provided for.” He stood. “So long as you have pleased me.”

  He went, and I was left alone. And so my wait began.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Inheritance

  The Confession of Mary Carson

  YOU HAVE BEEN both patient and forbearing, Mr Muddock, Mrs Rhodes, and for that you have an old woman’s gratitude. You’ll be glad to hear my ramblings are almost at an end. There is little more to tell, and in most respects we are past the worst.

  In most.

  I had discovered my maternal condition, you will recall, in the autumn of 1837. It was later established that my pregnancy was by then some two months advanced, meaning that the child was due in May the following year. And so I spent the next four months – four lonely months of fearful speculation – quite literally confined to my rooms at Springcross House. The doors were locked, my meals brought by servants. Otherwise, I was almost entirely alone – except, of course, for the occasional visit by the child’s father.

  I had my books, which I read and reread to distraction, and could look from my window at the gardens, even open them to take the air. There was no-one to see or hear me shout for help. Besides, the one time I tried, Arodias had the windows shuttered for a week and denied me lamp or candlelight for the duration. He relented for the sake of the baby’s health, but assured me that next time, the room would be shuttered permanently. Privately, I thought that if the child had survived the cruelties heaped on me over Christmas – and where had his concern for it been then? – a little darkness could do no harm, but I dared not say so.