* * * *
VII: “a gift from færie”
Catriona had been given to understand that Rose did not speak, but she was becoming quite chatty. Sir Arthur quizzed her about “the Little People,” who were beginning to sound more like fairies than cherubs. She wondered if Rose were not one of those children who cut her personality to suit the adult or adults she was with, mischievous with one uncle, modest with the next. The girl was constantly clever, she felt, but otherwise completely mercurial.
It was only a few years since the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a watchword for good sense to most of Great Britain, had been devalued by the affair of the Cottingley Fairies. Two little girls, not much older than this child, had not only claimed to be in regular communion with the wee folk but produced photographs of them—subsequently shown to be amateur forgeries—which Sir Arthur rashly endorsed as genuine, even to the extent of writing The Coming of the Fairies, an inspirational book about the case. Though the hoax had been exploded a dozen times, Sir Arthur stubbornly refused to disbelieve. Catriona sensed the old man’s need for faith, his devout wish for the magical to penetrate his world and declare itself irrefutably.
“I went away with them,” the girl told them. “The Little People. I was in their home in the sky. It’s inside of a cloud, and like a hollow tree, with criss-cross roots and branches. We could all fly there, or float. There was no up or down. They played with me for ever such a long time. And gave me my ribbon.”
She turned her head, showing the ribbon in her hair. Catriona had noticed it before.
“Rose, may I see your ribbon?” Sir Arthur asked.
Catriona wasn’t comfortable with this. Surely something should be done for poor Mr. Haskins before the girl was exhaustively interviewed.
Rose took the ribbon out of her hair solemnly and offered it to Sir Arthur.
“Extraordinary,” he said, running it through his fingers. He offered it to Catriona.
She hesitated a moment and accepted the thing.
It was not any fabric she knew. Predominantly silvery, it was imprinted with green shapes, like runes or diagrams. Though warm to the touch, it might be a new type of processed metal. She crumpled the ribbon into a ball, then opened her fist. The thing sprang back into its original shape without a crease.
“You’re bleeding,” Edwin said.
The edges were sharp as pampas grass. Without feeling it, she had shallowly grazed herself.
“May I have it again now?” Rose asked.
Catriona returned the ribbon, which the girl carefully wound into her hair. She did not knot it, butshaped it, into a coil which held back her curls.
“A gift from færie,” Sir Arthur mused.
Catriona wasn’t sure. Her hand was began to sting. She took a hankie from her reticule and stemmed the trickle of blood from the scratch.
“Rose, my dear,” said Sir Arthur. “It is now 1925. What year was it when you went away, to play with the Little People? Was it a long time ago? As long ago, ahem, as 1872?”
The girl didn’t answer. Her face darkened, as if she were suddenly afraid or unable to do a complicated sum in mental arithmetic.
“Let’s play a game?” Edwin suggested, genially. “What’s this?”
He held up a pencil from the rector’s desk.
“Pencil,” Rose said, delighted.
“Quite right. And this?”
The letter-opener.
“A thin knife.”
“Very good, Rose. And this?”
He picked the telephone receiver up from its cradle.
“Telly Phone,” the girl said.
Edwin set the receiver down and nodded in muted triumph.
“Alexander Graham Bell,” he said, almost sadly. “1876.”
“She’s been back two days, man,” Sir Arthur said, annoyed. He turned to the girl and tried to smile reassuringly. “Did the rector tell you about the telephone? Did you hear it make a ring-ring noise, see him talk to friends a long way away with it?”
Rose was guarded now. She knew she had been caught out.
If this was a hoax, it was not a simple one. That ribbon was outside nature. And Haskins had died by means unknown.
“Why don’t you use that instrument to summon the police?” said Sir Arthur, nodding at the telephone.
“Call the police?” Edwin said. “Tut-tut, what would Mr. Holmes say? This matter displays unusual features which the worthy Sussex constabulary will not be best equipped to deal with.”
“This man should at least have a doctor look at him.”
“He has had one, Sir Arthur. You.”
The author-knight was not happy. And neither was she.
* * * *
VIII: “a changeling”
Winthrop was satisfied that this girl was not the real Rose, and that an imposture was being planned—perhaps as part of a scheme to dupe the farmer, Sam Farrar, out of his property. The Reverend Mr. Haskins must have stumbled onto the trick and been done nastily to death. From the look of the rector’s throat, something like a poison-tipped spear had been used on him. It remained for the girl to be persuaded to identify the conspirators who had tutored her in imposture. She was too young to be guilty by herself.
“Now, missy, let’s talk about this game you’ve been playing,” he said. “The dress-up-and-pretend game. Who taught it to you?”
The girl’s face was shut. He thought she might try crying. But she was too tough for that. She was like any adult criminal, exposed and sullen, refusing to cooperate, unaffected by remorse.
“It’s not that simple, Edwin,” Catriona said. “The ribbon.”
Winthrop had thought of that. Lightweight metallicised fabrics were being used in aircraft manufacture these days, and that scrap might well be an offcut. It was a strange touch, though.
“There’s something else. Look at her.”
He did. She had an ordinary face. There was something about the eyes, though. A violet highlight.
“There are Little People,” she said. “There are, there are. They are bald, and have eyes like saucers, and no noses. They played with me. For a long time. And they have friends here, on the ground. Undertakers with smoked glasses.”
“What is your name?”
“Rose,” she said, firmly.
Was she trying to get back to the story she had been taught? Or had she been hypnotised into believing what she was saying?
Suddenly, he saw what Catriona meant.
The girl’s face had changed, not just its expression but its shape. Her nose was rounder, her chin less sharp, her cheekbones gone. Her mouth had been thin, showing sharp teeth; now she had classic bee-stung lips, like Catriona’s. Her curls were tighter, like little corkscrews.
He stood back from her, worried by what he had seen. He glanced at the rector’s body, covered with its orange blanket. It was not possible, surely, that this child...
...this angel?
“What is it, man? What is it?”
Sir Arthur was agitated, impatient at being left out. He must feel it humiliating not to have spotted the clue. Of course, he had come into it later and not seen the girl as she was when Winthrop and Catriona had arrived. It seemed now that her face had always been changing, subtly.
“Consider her face,” Winthrop said.
“Yes.”
“It changes.”
The violet highlights were green now.
Sir Arthur gasped.
The girl looked older, twelve or thirteen. Her feet and ankles showed under the dressing gown. Her shoulders filled the garment out more. Her face was thinner again, eyes almost almond.
“This is not the girl who was taken away,” Sir Arthur said. “She is one of them, a Changeling.”
For the first time, Winthrop rather agreed with him.
“There are bad fairies,” Sir Arthur said. “Who steal away children and leave one of their own in the crib.”
Winthrop knew the folktales. He wasn’t satisfied of their literal tr
uth, but he realised in a flash that this girl might be an instance of whatever phenomenon gave rise to the stories in the first place.
You didn’t have to believe in fairies to know the world was stranger than imagined.
“Who are you, Rose?” Catriona asked, gently.
She knelt before the girl, as Sir Arthur had done, looking up into her shifting face.
Winthrop couldn’t help but notice that the girl’s body had become more womanly inside the dressing gown. Her hair straightened and grew longer. Her eyebrows were thinner and arched.
“Rose?”
Catriona reached out.
The girl’s face screwed up and she hissed, viciously. She opened her mouth, wider than she should have been able to. Her incisors were needle-fangs. She hissed again, flicking a long, fork-tipped tongue.
A spray of venom scattered at Catriona’s face.
* * * *
IX: “cruel cunning”
The shock was so great she almost froze, but Catriona flung her hand in front of her eyes. The girl’s sizzling spit stung the back of her hand. She wiped it instinctively on the carpet, scraping her skin raw. She had an idea the stuff was deadly.
The girl was out of her chair and towering above her now, shoulders and hips swaying, no longer entirely human. Her skin was greenish, scaled. Her eyes were red-green, with triangular pupils. Catriona thought she might even have nictitating membranes.
Catriona remembered the slither of the mamba.
She was frozen with utter panic, and a tiny voice inside nagged her for being weak.
Edwin seized the letter opener—the thin knife—from the desk and stabbed at the snake girl.
A black-thorned green hand took his wrist and bent it backwards. He dropped his weapon. Her hissing face closed in on his throat.
Catriona’s panic snapped. She stuck her foot between the girl’s ankles and scythed her legs out from under her.
They all fell in a tangle.
Rose broke free of them, leaving the dressing gown in a muddle on the floor.
She stood naked by Sir Arthur, body scaled and shimmering, as beautiful as horrid. She was striped in many shades of green, brown, yellow, red, and black. She had the beginnings of a tail. Her hair was flat against her neck and shoulders, flaring like a cobra’s hood. Her nose and ears were slits, frilled inside with red cilia.
Catriona and Edwin tried to get up, but were in each other’s way.
Rose smiled, fangs poking out of her mouth, and laid her talons on Sir Arthur’s lapels. She crooned to him, a sibilant susurrus of fascination. In the movements of her hips and shoulders and the arch of her eyes, there was a cruel cunning that was beyond human. This was a creature that killed for the pleasure of it, and was glad of an audience.
Sir Arthur was backed against a mantelpiece. His hand reached out, and found a plain crucifix mounted between two candlesticks. The Reverend Mr. Haskins had evidently not been very High Church, for there were few other obvious signs of his profession in the room.
Rose’s black-red lips neared Sir Arthur’s face, to administer a killing kiss. Her fork-tipped tongue darted out and slithered between his eyes and across his cheek, leaving a shining streak.
Sir Arthur took the cross and interposed it between his face and hers. He pressed it to her forehead.
Rose reacted as if a drop of molten lead had been applied. She screeched inhumanly and turned away, crouching into a ball. The scales on her legs and back sizzled and disappeared, like butter pats on a hot griddle. Her body shrank again, with a cracking of bones.
“Oh my stars,” said someone from the doorway.
Two men, strangers, stood in the hall, amazed at the scene. The one who spoke was a prosperous-looking man, face seamed and clothes practical. Behind him was the silhouette of someone large, soft, and practically hairless.
Rose looked up at the newcomers. Her eyes were round again, and full of puzzlement rather than malice. Catriona had a sense that the monster was forgotten.
The girl snatched up the dressing gown and slipped into it, modestly closing it over her body. Then she hurled herself at a window, and crashed through the panes into the gathering dusk outside.
She hit the ground running and was off, away over the fields.
“I knew that weren’t Aunt Rose,” said the newcomer.
* * * *
X: “Anti-Christine”
“The Great Beast is among you,” announced the fat bald man, referring to himself rather than the departed Rose.
Sir Arthur still clung to the cross that had seen off the Rose creature.
“Of all things, I thought ofDracula,” he said, wondering at his survival. “Bram Stoker’s novel.”
Winthrop was familiar with the book.
“The cross had exactly the effect on that creature as upon the vampires in Dracula.”
“Ugh,” said the bald man, “what a horrid thing. Put it away, Sir Arthur.”
Farrar had noticed the rector’s body, and was sunk into a couch with his head in his hands. This was too weird for most people. The honest farmer would have to leave these matters for the experts in the uncanny.
The man who had arrived with Farrar wore a once-expensive coat. The astrakhan collar was a little ragged and his pinstripe trousers shiny at the knees. A great deal of this fellow’s time was spent on his knees, for one reason or other. His face was fleshy, great lips hanging loose. Even his hands were plump, slug-white flippers. His great dome shone and his eyes glinted with unhealthy fire.
Winthrop recognised the controversial figure of Aleister Crowley, self-styled “wickedest man in England.” Quite apart from his well-known advocacy of black magic, sexual promiscuity, and drug use, the brewery heir—perhaps from a spirit of ingrained contrariness—had blotted his copybook in loudly advocating the Kaiser’s cause during the War. In his younger days, he was reckoned a daring mountaineer, but his vices had transformed him into a flabby remnant who looked as though he would find a steep staircase an insurmountable obstacle.
“Aren’t you supposed to be skulking in Paris?” Winthrop asked.
“Evidently, sir, you have the advantage of me,” Crowley admitted.
“Edwin Winthrop, of the Diogenes Club.”
The black magician smiled, almost genuinely.
“Charles Beauregard’s bright little boy. I have heard of you, and of your exploits among the shadows. And this charming fille de l’occasion must be Miss Catriona Kaye, celebrated exposer of charlatans. I believe you know that dreadful poseur A.E. Waite. Is it not well past time you showed him up for the faker he is, dear lady?”
Crowley loomed over Catriona. Winthrop remembered with alarm that he was famous for bestowing “the serpent’s kiss,” a mouth-to-mouth greeting reckoned dangerous to the receiving party. He contented himself with kissing her knuckles, like a gourmand licking the skin off a well-roasted chicken leg.
“And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose fine yarns have given me and indeed all England such pleasure. This is a most distinguished company.”
Sir Arthur, who could hardly fail to know who Crowley was, looked at his crucifix, perhaps imagining it might have an efficacy against the Great Beast.
If so, Crowley read his mind. “That bauble holds no terror for a magus of my exalted standing, Sir Arthur. It symbolises an era which is dead and gone, but rotting all around us. I have written to Mr. Trotsky in Moscow, offering to place my services at his disposal if he would charge me with the responsibility of eradicating Christianity from the planet.”
“And has he written back?” Catriona asked, archly.
“Actually, no.”
“Quelle surprise!”
Crowley flapped his sausage-fingers at her.
“Naughty, naughty. Such cynicism in one so young. You would make a fine Scarlet Woman, my dear. You have all the proper attributes.”
“My sins are scarlet enough already, Mr. Crowley,” Catriona replied. “And, to put it somewhat bluntly, I doubt from your general appeara
nce that you would be up to matching them these days.”
The magus looked like a hurt little boy. For an instant, Winthrop had a flash of the power this man had over his followers. He was such an obvious buffoon one might feel him so pathetic that to contradict his constant declamations of his own genius would be cruel. He had seriously harmed many people, and sponged unmercifully off many others. The Waite he had mentioned was, like the poet Yeats, another supposed initiate of a mystic order, with whom he had been conducting an ill-tempered feud over the decades.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 19
