Proper dawn was upon them.
A long straight stretch of road extended ahead of Crowley’s car. They were nearing the outskirts of the city. Crowley’s driver must be a good man, or possessed of magical skills, since the Bentley was lagging behind.
He knew he had to pull a reckless stunt.
Throttling Katie generously, he swooped low over the car and headed off to the left, getting as far ahead of Crowley as possible, then swung round in a tight semicircle, getting his nose in alignment with the oncoming vehicle. He would only get one pass at this run.
He took her down, praying the road had been maintained recently.
Katie’s wheels touched ground, lifted off for a moment, and touched ground again.
Through the whirling prop, Winthrop saw Crowley’s car. They were on a collision course.
The car would be built more sturdily than the canvas and wood plane. But Katie had whirling twin blades in her nose, all the better to scythe through the car’s bonnet and windshield, and severely inconvenience anyone in the front seat.
Crowley might think himself untouchable. But he wouldn’t be doing his own driving.
Winthrop hoped a rational man was behind the wheel of Crowley’s car.
The distance between the two speeding vehicles narrowed.
Winthrop was oddly relaxed, as always in combat. A certain fatalism possessed him. If it was the final prang, so be it. He whistled under his breath.
It had been a good life. He was grateful to have known Cat, and the Old Man. He had done his bit, and a bit more besides. And he was with Katie at the last.
Crowley’s car swerved, plunging through a hedgerow. Winthrop whooped in triumph, exultant to be alive. He cut the motors and upturned the flaps. Wind tore at the wings as Katie slowed.
Another car was up ahead.
The Bentley.
* * * *
XIV: “‘I believe...”‘
Catriona pressed down on the foot-brake with all her strength. She was not encouraged by Sir Arthur’s loud prayer. The aeroplane loomed large in the windshield, prop blades slowing but still deadly. She couldn’t remember whether they were wood or metal, but guessed it wouldn’t make much difference.
The Bentley and the Camel came to a halt, one screeching and the other purring, within a yard of each other. She recommenced breathing and unclenched her stomach. That was not an experience she would care to repeat.
Somewhat shaken, she and Sir Arthur climbed out of the car. Edwin was already on the ground, pulling off his flying helmet. He had his revolver.
“Come on, you fellows,” he said. “The enemy’s downed.”
She helped Sir Arthur along the road. The car they had been pursuing had jumped the verge and crashed into a hedge. Crowley was extricating himself from the front seat with some difficulty. A stunned driver sat in the long grass, thrown clear of his car, shaking his head.
The rear door of the car was kicked open and a female fury exploded from it.
Rose was in mostly human shape, but Catriona could tell from her blazing snake-eyes she had been filled with Crowley’s cracked fancies. She was transformed into a species of demonic Zuleika Dobson, set to enslave and conquer and destroy London and then the world. As the dawnlight shone in the Anti-Christine’s frizzy halo of hair, Catriona believed that this creature was capable of fulfilling Crowley’s mad prophecies. She was a young woman now, still recognisably the child she had been, but with a cast of feature that suggested monumental cruelty and desperate vice. Her hands were tipped with claw-nails.
Her inky eyes radiated something. Hypnotic black swirls wound in her pupils. She was humming, almost subaudibly, radiating malicious female energy. Sir Arthur gasped. And Edwin skidded to a halt. The revolver fell from his hand.
Catriona was appalled. Even these men, whom she respected, were struck by Rose. Then, she was fascinated. It was alien to her, but she saw what magnificence this creature represented. This was not madness, but...
No, she decided. It was madness.
“You are powerless to stop her,” Crowley yelled. “Bow down and worship her filthiness!”
Catriona fixed Rose’s eyes with her own.
She took Sir Arthur’s hand and reached out for Edwin’s. He hesitated, eyes on Rose’s body, then clutched. Catriona held these men fast.
It was Sir Arthur who gave her the idea. And, perhaps, another distinguished author-knight, J.M. Barrie.
“Do you believe in fairies?” she asked.
Crowley looked aghast.
Sir Arthur and Edwin understood.
With all her heart, she imagined benevolence, worshipped purity, conceived of goodness, was enchanted by kindly magic. As a child, she had loved indiscriminately, finding transcendent wonders in sparkling dew on spun webs, in fallen leaves become galleons on still ponds.
“I believe in fairies,” she declared.
She recognised her kinship with the kindly knight. She was a sceptic about many things, but there was real magic. She could catch it in her hand and shape it.
The English countryside opened up for her.
She truly believed.
Rose was transfixed. She dwindled inside her dressing gown, became a girl again. Dragonfly wings sprouted from her back, and delicate feelers extended from her eyebrows. She hovered a few inches above the grass. Flowers wound around her brow. She shone with clean light.
Sir Arthur was tearful with joy, transported by the sight. Edwin squeezed her hand.
Spring flowers sprouted in the autumn hedgerow.
Crowley was bewildered.
“No,” he said, “you are scarlet, not watercolour.”
He was cracked and had lost.
“Come here,” Catriona said, to the girl.
Rose, eight years old again and human, skipped across the road and flew into her arms, hugging her innocently. Catriona passed her on to Sir Arthur, who swept her up and held her fiercely to him.
“I think your new age has been postponed,” Edwin told Crowley.
“Curse you,” Crowley swore, shaking his fist like the melodrama villain he wished he was.
“You’re going to pay for the car, sir,” said the driver. “Within the hour.”
Crowley was cowed. He looked like a big baby in daylight. His bald head was smudged and his trousers were badly ripped and stained.
There were new people on the scene. She supposed it was inevitable. You couldn’t land a biplane and crash a car without attracting attention.
Two men stood on the other side of the road. Catriona didn’t know where they could have come from. She had heard no vehicle and there were no dwellings in sight.
Rose twisted in Sir Arthur’s hug to look at the men.
Catriona remembered what the girl had said about the friends of the Little People. Undertakers in smoked glasses.
The two men were the same height, tall even without their black top hats. They wore black frock coats, black trousers, black cravats, black gloves. Even black spats and black-tinted glasses that seemed too large for human eyes. Their faces were ghost-white, with thin lips.
“They’ve come for me,” Rose said. “I must go away with them.”
Gently, Sir Arthur set her down. She kissed him, then kissed Catriona and Edwin, even Crowley.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, sounding grown-up, and went to the undertakers. They each took one of her hands and walked her down the road, towards a shimmering light. For a while, the three figures were silhouetted. Then they were gone, and so was the light.
Edwin turned to look at Catriona, and shrugged.
* * * *
XV: “the vicinity of the inexplicable”
The Old Man nodded sagely when Winthrop concluded his narrative. He did not seem surprised by even the most unusual details.
“I know the Undertaking,” Beauregard said. “All in black, with hidden eyes. They appear often in the vicinity of the inexplicable. Like the Little Grey People.”
They were back i
n the Strangers Room.
“I suppose we should worry about Rose,” Winthrop mused, “but she told us not to. Considering that she seems to be whatever we think she is, she might have meant that it would be helpful if we thought of her as safe and well since she would then, in fact, be so. It was Cat who saw through it all, and hit upon the answer.”
Catriona was thoughtful.
‘“I don’t know, Edwin,” she said. “I don’t think we saw a quarter of the real picture. The Little Grey People, the fire-wheel in the skies, the Changeling, the undertakers. All this has been going on for a long time, since well before the original Rose was taken away. We were caught between the interpretations put on the phenomena in the last few days by Sir Arthur and Crowley, fairies and the Anti-Christine. In the last century, it was angels and demons. Who knows what light future researchers will shine upon the business?”
Winthrop sipped his excellent brandy.
“I shouldn’t bother yourself too much about that, old thing. We stand at the dawn of a new era. Not the apocalypse Crowley was prattling about, but an age of scientific enlightenment. Mysteries will be penetrated by rational inquiry. We shall no longer need to whip up fairy tales to cope with the fantastical. Mark my words, Catty-Kit. The next time anything like this happens, we shall get to the bottom of it without panic or hysteria.”
<
* * * *
Clubland Heroes
Catriona Kaye would always remember the first time she looked up and saw one of them. In her case, it was the woman—the Aviatrix—swooping from a cloudless sky. An unhooded hawk, the Aviatrix was tracking quarry through holiday crowds who were beneath her.
Like the 20th Century, Catriona was nineteen years old. On an unseasonably warm Spring Bank Holiday, she had motored down to Brighton in a charabanc with a rowdy group of nurses and their quieter patients. Most of the party were about her own age, but the girls, in flapping white uniforms, seemed a different species from the haunted-eyed men, all veterans of the Great War. In theory, she was researching an article for the Girls’ Paper on angelic latter-day Florence Nightingales aiding the recovery of shell-shocked officers. The commission had devolved into an outing to the seaside. The mostly tiny nurses, strong in the upper arm as wrestlers, got behind wheelchairs and pushed mind-shattered men along the promenade like babies in perambulators. They even held races, which made Catriona fear for fellows who had come through the War whole in limb but might here take a nasty spill.
Between the piers, she observed human behaviour. Fellows in striped suits and straw boaters loitered, eyeing each passing ankle, calling out cheerful impertinences. She had already fended off several propositions, and would have been more flattered had supposedly heartbroken suitors not instantly recovered to press their attentions on the next girl to twirl a parasol. Old ladies occupied deck chairs, snoozing or staring out to sea. Families shared fish and chips. Boys built sand-castles and conducted sieges with tin soldiers. Hardier types in bathing costume dared the still-freezing sea and, through wracks of shivers, proclaimed their dips most invigorating. By the West Pier, a knot of children gathered around a tall thin striped box, looking up with mouths open as Punch and Judy went through their eternal ritual of bloody farce. A cheer rose from the audience as the crocodile clamped long jaws around the policeman’s wooden helmet.
A news-vendor sang “Have You Seen Him?,” promoting the Daily Herald’s competition. Among the teeming crowds at the resort supposedly lurked that master of concealment, Lobby Ludd, whose silhouette was printed on the front page (in Fleet Street, Catriona had learned the expression “slow news day”) and on circulation-boosting posters. Keen-eyed readers brandished Heralds and barked “you are Mr. Lobby Ludd and I claim my five pounds” at bewildered local characters, sometimes tugging genuine whiskers in an attempt to unmask the elusive gent. She had witnessed several scuffles, with indignant non-Ludds battered by rolled-up newspapers, and one genuine fist-fight.
Floss, who could have boxed for Lancashire, trundled Captain Duell up to the guardrail and locked the brake on his wheelchair.
“I’ve got to spend a penny. Mind the cabbage, would you, love?”
At first, Catriona had been shocked to hear nurses say such things, but she’d soon seen they were ferociously devoted to their gentlemen. When a Member of Parliament touring the convalescent hospital refused to visit the shell-shock ward on the grounds that the patients there were all shamming cowards, Floss had rolled up her mutton-chop sleeve and personally punched his head for him. Captain Duell, twice sole survivor of his battalion, had served twenty-eight months in the trenches.
Floss tripped off in search of a convenience.
Catriona looked into the Captain’s watery eyes. He was in a near-permanent dream-state. He didn’t flinch at loud noises—those cases were left behind at the Royal Vic, since Brighton on a Bank Holiday wasn’t where they’d be at their most comfortable—or stutter to the point of incomprehensibility. He just seemed used up, forever on the point of falling asleep or starting awake, head hung loose on his neck, lolling forwards. Always tired, never resting. She couldn’t imagine what he’d seen.
A middle-aged woman carrying aHerald stared at Captain Duell, comparing his face to the front page silhouette. Catriona tensed, sure the Captain was about to be harangued as a probable Lobby Ludd, but the woman thought better of it and passed by, looking for another suspect character.
Catriona shrugged a smile at Captain Duell, forgetting momentarily that he had little idea she was there. Then, she saw something spark in his eyes. She knew better than to believe in miracle cures, but had learned that every tiny interaction with the world outside their minds was a triumphant step.
The Captain looked upwards, eyes rising. He lifted his head, detaching his chin from his breast.
“Yes,” said Catriona, “look at me.”
His gaze passed up over her face. She tried to encourage him with a smile, but he didn’t focus on her. She was puzzled as Captain Duell looked up higher, above her head, into the sky.
The crowds hushed. She had afrisson, almost of fear, and twisted away from the man in the wheelchair, following his eyeline. All along the sea-front faces were turned upwards. Fingers pointed. Breaths were held. Then, thunderous applause rolled over the sea. A cheer went up.
A woman flew out of the skies, towards the prom.
Catriona had, of course, heard about the Aviatrix.
Since her stunning debut, theGirls’ Paper had three times pictured Lady Lucinda Tregellis-d’Aulney—”Lalla” to her friends and an Angel of Terror to her foes—on the cover. Shortly after the armistice, distracted from her initial aerial experiments over Dartmoor, the Aviatrix had swooped upon an escaped murderer, bearing the terrified felon up into the sky and dropping him back in Prince Town Jail.
The principles of Lady Lucinda’s winged flight had been explained in learned articles which Catriona understood only vaguely. She had imagined a classical angel—though she knew a human with functional bird-wings ought to have a sternum like a yacht’s centreboard to anchor the necessary muscles. The Aviatrix’s wings, hardly visible unless sunlight caught them just so, were more like a butterfly’s than a bird’s. Complex matter seeped from spiracles along her backbone, like ectoplasm from a medium, unfolding into sail-like structures at once extraordinarily strong and supernaturally fine. Extruded through vents in her white leather flying jacket, the wings lasted a few hours. Shed, they liquesced like cobweb, melting to silvery scum. But while Lalla had wings, she could fly.
Like everyone, Catriona was awestruck.
She knew from her father, a country parson, that this was an age of miracles foreseen only by M. Verne and Mr. Wells. In his lifetime, the world had accepted the telephone, the Maxim gun, recorded sound, the motor-car, the aeroplane, motion pictures, raised hemlines, world war. But those were things, concepts, reproducible. The Aviatrix was a person, an embodied marvel, a heroine literally above ordinary humanity.
Captain
Duell tried to speak. Catriona was concerned for him; how could she explain that he wasn’t “seeing things?” Everyone else also saw the woman in the sky. She wasn’t an angel come for him.
The Aviatrix hovered, wings beating every few seconds, a rainbow shimmer of facets in sunlight. She was barely twenty feet above the sea, ankles primly together, arms casually folded. With a whoosh, she swam through the air, like a phantasmal manta ray. She flew over the beach, up towards the prom.
All at once, Catriona actually saw the woman with the wings. Lady Lucinda wore white jodhpurs and riding boots, matching her slightly baggy jacket. An abbreviated yellow leather flying helmet freed waves of pale gold hair that swirled about her shoulders, while tinted goggles concealed her eyes and a long white scarf trailed behind her. A button-down holster hung from her belt, heavy with a service revolver. As insignia on the breast of her jacket and caste-mark on her helmet forehead, she wore the d’Aulney coat of arms—birds and castles.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 21
