The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02]

by By Kim Newman

  He liked the theory. Hawkshaw would have found it sound.

  A pretty child with gloves in the shape of rabbit-heads approached, smiling slyly. She had ribbons in her hair and sewn to her clothes. She was overdecorated, as if awarded a fresh ribbon every time she said her prayers.

  “Little boy, my name is Becky d’Arbanvilliers,” said the girl, who was younger than him by a year or more. “When I gwow up and Papa cwoaks, I shall be Lady d’Arbanvilliers. If you do something for me, I’ll let you kiss my wabbits.”

  Maeve took the future Lady d’Arbanvilliers aside, lifted a curtain of ribbons, and whispered into her ear. Maeve was insistent but calm. The girl’s face crumpled, eyes expanding. Maeve finished whispering and stood back. Becky d’Arbanvilliers looked up at her, trembling. Maeve nodded and the girl ran away, exploding into screams and floods of tears.

  “Hey presto, Hawkshaw,” she told Dickie. “Magic.”

  Becky d’Arbanvilliers fled to the coven of governesses, too hysterical to explain, but pointing in the direction where Maeve had been.

  An odd thing was that two men dressed like governesses, not in long skirts but all in black with dark spectacles and curly hat-brims, were nearby. Dickie pegged them as sinister individuals. They paid attention to the noisy little girl.

  “How cwuel,” said Maeve, imitating perfectly. “To be named ‘Rebecca’ and yet pwevented by nature fwom pwonouncing it pwoperly.”

  Dickie laughed. No one else noticed that his aunt could be funny as well as frightening. It was a secret between them.

  Maeve led him towards the Gift.

  A barrier of trestles was set up all around the building, hung with notices warning the public not to trespass. A policeman stood by the front doors, firmly seeing away curiosity-seekers. Dickie and Maeve had visited while Uncle Davey was helping Mr. Bulge turn the Gift into the Færie Aerie, and knew other ways in and out. Special Detectives always had more information than the poor plods of the Yard.

  Maeve led Dickie round to the rear of the Gift. A door there supposedly only opened from the inside, so the used-up visitors could leave to make room for fresh ones. Unless you knew it was there, you wouldn’t see it. The wall was painted with a big, colour copy of one of Uncle Davey’s drawings, and the door hid in a waterfall, like goblins in a puzzle.

  They slipped under an unguarded trestle.

  Commotion rose in the park, among governesses. Becky d’Arbanvilliers had been able to explain. Though the governess instinct was to distrust anything a child told them, something had upset the girl. A hunt would have to be organised.

  The men dressed like governesses took an interest.

  Dickie was worried for his aunt.

  Maeve smiled at him.

  “I shall spirit us to safety, with more magic,” she announced. “Might I borrow your catapult?”

  He was reluctant to hand over such a formidable weapon.

  “I shall return it directly.”

  Dickie undid his secret pocket and produced the catapult.

  Maeve examined it, twanged the rubber appreciatively, and pronounced it a fine addition to a detective’s arsenal.

  She made a fold in the rubber and slipped it into the crack in the falling waters that showed those who knew what to look for where the door was. She worked with her fingers for a few moments.

  “This is where a conjurer chats to the audience, to take their minds off the trick being done in front of their eyes.”

  Dickie watched closely—he always did, but Maeve still managed tricks he could not work out.

  “I say, what are you children doing?”

  It was a governess, a skeleton in black.

  “Have you seen a horrid,horrid little girl...? Dipped in the very essence of wickedness?”

  Maeve did one of her best tricks. She put on a smile that fooled everyone but Dickie. She seemed like all the sunny girls in the world, brainless and cheerful.

  “I should not like to meet a wicked little girl,” she said, sounding a little like Becky d’Arbanvilliers. “No, thank you very much.”

  “Very wise,” said the governess, fooled entirely. “Well, if you see such a creature, stay well away from her.”

  The woman stalked off.

  Maeve shrugged and dropped the smile.

  “I swear, Hawkshaw, thesepeople. They’re so stupid. They deserve... ah!”

  There was a click inside the wall. Maeve pulled the catapult free and the door came open.

  She handed him back the catapult and tugged him inside, into the dark.

  The door shut behind them.

  “This is an adventure, isn’t it?”

  He agreed.

  * * * *

  vi: “intelligence reports”

  Sarah Riddle, over the first shock, slumped on a hall settee, numb, and cried out.

  Charles understood.

  The worst thing was that this was a familiar anxiety.

  Maeve and Dickie were missing.

  “It’s her,” said Sarah. “I always knew...”

  The house had been searched. Kate turned up Bitty, a maid who recalled noticing Dickie and his aunt, dressed as if to go out. That she had not actually seen them leave the house saved her position. Charles knew that even if Bitty had been there, she would not have been able to intervene. Maeve treated her family like servants; he could imagine how she treated servants.

  “It’s like before,” said Philip Riddle, standing by his wife. “Only then it were Hill Wood. Now, it’s a wholecity.”

  Charles reproached himself for not considering Dickie. He had given a lot of thought to Davey and Princess Cuckoo, but rarely recalled that this household harboured one proper child. When Charles was in Eye, Dickie had not been born, was not part of the story.

  Now, Charles saw where Dickie fit.

  Davey had escaped something. Dickie would do as replacement.

  “Charles,” said Kate, from the top of the stairs. “Would you come up?”

  He left Sarah and Philip, and joined Kate. She led him into the studio.

  Davey was still drawing.

  Kate showed him finished pictures in which the children ventured deeper into the woods. A smug bunny in a beribboned pinafore appeared in a clearing. The girl, more Maeve than ever, loomed over the small, terrified rabbit. In one picture, her head was inflated twice the size of her body, hair puffed like a lion’s mane. She showed angry, evil eyes and a toothy, dripping shark’s maw. The rabbit fled, understandably. In the next picture, Maeve was herself again, though it would be hard to forget her scary head. She was snatching the boy, Dickie, away from a clutch of old-womanish crows who sported veiled hats and reticules. Then the children came to a waterfall. Maeve used long-nailed fingers to unlock a door in the cascade—a door made of flowing water, not ice—to open a way into a wooded underworld.

  “What does this mean, Davey?”

  He drew faster than ever. Tears spotted his paper, blotching the pencilwork. His face shut tight, he rocked back and forth, crooning.

  “My mother said... I never should... play with the gypsies... in the wood.”

  Another picture was finished and put aside.

  The children were in a forested tunnel, passing a fallen tower. Goblins swarmed in the undergrowth, ears and tongues twitching, flat nostrils a-quiver.

  “I know that ruin,” said Kate. “It’s in the Gift. We were there when it collapsed.”

  “And I know the waterfall door.”

  Kate began searching the studio.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked her.

  “A sketch-pad. Something he can carry. We have to take him to the park. All this is happening now. The pictures are like intelligence reports.”

  Kate opened a cupboard in the workbench and found a package of notebooks. She took several and shoved one opened under Davey’s pencil, whispering to him, urging him to shift to a portable medium. After a beat of hesitation, he began again, drawing still faster, pencil scoring paper. Kate gathered the co
mpleted pictures into a sturdy artists’ folder.

  “Stay with him a moment,” Charles told her, leaving the study.

  Dickie’s parents were at the foot of the stairs, looking up.

  “Is this household on the telephone?” Charles asked.

  “Mr. Bulge insisted,” said Philip Riddle. “The apparatus is in the downstairs parlour.”

  “Ring up Scotland Yard and ask for Inspector Henry Mist. Tell him to meet us at the Gift.”

  Riddle, a solid man, didn’t waste time asking for explanations. He went directly to the parlour.

  Kate had Davey out of his studio and helped him downstairs. He still murmured and scribbled.

  “Bad things in the woods,” Kate reported. “Very bad.”

  Charles trusted her.

  “Have you called a cab?” she asked.

  “Quicker to walk.”

  Sarah reached out as Kate and Charles helped Davey past, pleading wordlessly. Her lip was bleeding.

  “There’s hope,” he told her.

  She accepted that as the best offer available.

  On the street, he and Kate must have seemed the abductors of a lunatic. When Davey finished a picture, Kate turned the page for him.

  From a window peered the fat face of a sad little boy. He alone took notice of the peculiar trio. People on the street evaded them without comment. Charles did his best to look like someone who would brook no interference.

  Every pause to allow a cart or carriage primacy was a heart-blow.

  The streets were uncommonly busy. People were mobile trees in these wilds, constantly shutting off and making new paths. London was more perilous than Hill Wood. Though it was a sunny afternoon and he walked on broad pavement, Charles recalled snow underfoot.

  “What’s in the pictures now?” he asked.

  “Hard to make out. Children, goblins, woods. The boy seems all right still.”

  Maeve and Dickie must have taken this route, perhaps half an hour earlier. This storm had blown up in minutes.

  If it weren’t for Kate’s leap of deduction, the absences might have gone unnoticed until teatime. Another reason to propose her for membership.

  In the park, there was the expected chaos. Children, idlers, governesses, dogs. A one-man band played something from The Mikado.

  “The crows,” said Kate.

  Charles saw what she meant. Some governesses gathered around a little girl, heads bobbing like birds, veiled hats like those in Davey’s illustration.

  “And that’s the frightened bunny,” he pointed out.

  He remembered Maeve’s temporary scary head. Davey’s drawings weren’t the literal truth, he hoped. They hinted at what really happened.

  “Ladies,” he began, “might I inquire whether you’ve seen two children, a girl of perhaps eleven and a slightly younger boy? You would take them for brother and sister.”

  The women reacted like Transylvanian peasants asked the most convenient route to Castle Dracula, with hisses and flutterings and clucks very like curses.

  “That horrid, horrid girl...” spat one.

  Even in the circumstances, he had to swallow a smirk.

  “That would be the miss. You have her exactly.”

  The governesses continued, yielding more editorial comment but no hard news.

  “Why is that man dwawing?” asked the ribboned girl.

  “He’s an artist,” Charles told her.

  “My name is Becky d’Arbanvilliers,” she said proudly. “When I gwow up and Papa cwoaks, I shall be Lady d’Arbanvilliers.”

  Few prospective heirs would be as honest, he supposed. At least, out loud. In cases of suspicious death, the police were wont to remember such offhand remarks.

  “Did you meet a bad girl, Becky?”

  She nodded her head, solemnly.

  “And where is she now?”

  Becky frowned, as angry as she was puzzled.

  “I told Miss Wodgers, but she didn’t believe me. The bad girl and the nasty boy went to the waterfall in that house.”

  She pointed to the Gift.

  “There was a girl,” said the governess, whose name he presumed was Miss Rodgers. “But not the one who so upset Becky. This was a nice, polite child.”

  Becky looked at Charles, frustrated by her governess’s gullibility.

  “It was her,” she insisted, stamping a tiny foot.

  Davey finished one notebook and started on the next. Kate took the filled book and leafed through, then found a picture.

  “This girl?” she asked. “And this boy.”

  “That’s them,” said Becky. “What a pwetty picture. Will the man dwaw me? I’m pwettier than the bad girl.”

  “Miss Rodgers,” Charles prompted.

  The governess looked stricken.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “But shesmiled so...”

  Recriminations flew around the group of governesses.

  “Will the man dwaw me?”

  Kate leafed through the folder and found a picture of the children meeting the ribboned rabbit, the one in which Maeve was not showing her scary head. She handed it over. Becky was transported with delight, terrors forgotten.

  Miss Rodgers saw the picture, puzzled and disturbed.

  “How did he do this? It was drawn before he set eyes on Rebecca...”

  They left the governesses wondering.

  From the corner of his eye, Charles glimpsed a couple in black who weren’t governesses. Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe. Since this morning, he had been aware of their floating presence. The Undertaking was playing its own game and had turned up here before he did. He would worry about that later, if he got the chance. Right now, he should be inside the Gift.

  By the time they found the door concealed in the waterfall design, Inspector Mist was on the scene.

  “Mr. Beauregard, what is all this about?”

  * * * *

  vii: “stage snow”

  Kate knew that Charles would make a token attempt to dissuade her from continuing. The argument, a variation on a theme with which she was bored, was conducted in shorthand.

  Yes, it might be dangerous.

  Yes, she was a woman.

  No, that wouldn’t make a difference.

  Settled.

  Mist of the Yard was distracted by Davey’s compulsive sketching.

  “Is this fellow some sort of psychic medium?”

  “He has a connection with this business,” Charles told Mist. “This is Davey Harvill.”

  “The boy from Eye.”

  The Inspector evidently knew about the Children of Eye. Kate was not surprised. Whisper had it that Mist was high up in the Bureau of Queer Complaints, an unpublicised Scotland Yard department constituted to deal with the “spook” cases.

  Mist posted constables to keep back this afternoon’s crowds. Rumours circulated. The Gift was about to be opened to the public. Or razed to the ground. No one was sure. Helmeted bobbies assumed their usual attitudes, bored resignation to indicate nothing out of the ordinary taking place behind the barriers and truncheon-tapping warning that no monkey business would be tolerated. Popular phrases were recited: “move along, now” and “there’s nothing to see ‘ere.”

  Two men in black clothes augmented by very black spectacles sauntered over. At the flash of a card, they were admitted to the inner circle.

  They chimed with another whisper, about funereal officials seen pottering about new-made meteor craters or the sites of unnatural vanishments. Another high-stakes player at this table, in competition or alliance with the Diogenes Club and the BQC. The poor plodders of the Society for Psychical Research must feel left out, stuck with only the least mysterious of eternal mysteries, trivial table-rappings and ghosts who did nothing but loom in sheets and say “boo!” to handy geese.

  Charles made rapid introductions. “Mr. Hay and Mr. Effe, of the Undertaking. Mist you know. Katharine Reed...”

  Mr. Effe bared poor teeth at her. Even without sight of his eyes, she could gauge his expression.<
br />
  “Do we need the press, Beauregard?” he asked.

  “I need her.”