The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “I’ve thought long and hard about that,” Brunel said, “and I must admit that it still puzzles me. I agree that it must have been something that he was desperate to find, yet it must also have been of little intrinsic value. He had not sold it, you see, and he was the kind of man who would sell his shoes if he was in need of a drink. But someone else wanted it, badly enough to kill him for it.”

  “That is why you wished to interrogate his ghost.”

  Brunel began to walk to and fro again. “The men said that Coffee Joe had put a curse on the whole endeavour, Mr Carlyle. And the whole thing did indeed go smash and all to blazes after he left. The affair has reduced my father to working catch-as-catch can – he is away at this very moment, surveying the route of a canal near Oxford. And I am in much the same situation. We have never shirked hard work, and we have always faced up to disaster, done what we can to overcome it, and put it behind us. I have done my share of odd jobs, too, and I have my gaz project,” he said, gesturing towards the machinery heaped beyond the office space, “although I fear now that all the work I have done on that is no more than the building of a castle in the air. Perhaps our bad fortune was no more than unlucky geology and bad faith on the part of the damned directors. But perhaps there is more to the matter than that.”

  “What prompted you on this track, Mr Brunel? You’re an engineer. You are not the kind of man who usually becomes involved in the matter of the dead.”

  “You have a sharp mind, Mr Carlyle. Yes, I’m sure that I would have dismissed the rumours about Coffee Joe and the matter of his murder if not for one other thing – my own dreams. The work on the tunnel proceeded day and night, and I often caught a few hours’ sleep in a cot in the office. Toward the end of it, I often had nightmares of floods and collapses, but I paid no attention to them because we all had such nightmares after the first inundation. But a few days ago, the day that Coffee Joe was horribly murdered, the same dreams returned, and have done so every night since.” He looked straight at me, with a defiant glare. “There. Now I have told all, and you can believe it, or call me a fool.”

  “Before I do anything else, I think I must look at Coffee Joe’s cellar, and see what I can find there. And for your part, perhaps you should consider dredging the river above the tunnel. I believe that something lying there may provide the key to the affair.”

  We drank brandy and talked into the small hours of the night. We set our plans straight. I described several of the cases I had worked on in Edinburgh, and Brunel politely pretended to believe every detail. Despite what he had seen in the tunnel, he was still greatly sceptical of the matters to which I had dedicated my life. He talked a little of his own plans, and I quickly learned that although he was hard-headed and pragmatic, he was no utilitarian Benthamite. He was, in fact, as brimful of imaginative sympathy as any poet or painter, realizing his dreams in bricks and iron rather than in words or paint. Artists seek to move the minds of men; Brunel had enough energy and ambition to move the world itself, if he could but manufacture a lever large enough, and discover a suitable fulcrum. He had been working on the gaz-engine experiments for two years, or, as he put it, one tenth of the remainder of his life, but with no great success. “And now I fear that I am coming to the conclusion that no sufficient advantage over steam power can be obtained,” he said. “I have spent all my time and considerable money building a chateau d’Espagne, and now all my fine hopes have fallen into ruin. But there it is, and it can’t be helped. I had hoped by now, Mr Carlyle, to have laid the foundations for my fame and fortune, but the tunnel is dead, the gaz experiments are as good as dead . . . Well, well. If I can make no other living I will do so by the example of my father, working where I can for whom I can.”

  There was a considerable anguish hidden behind Brunel’s careless dismissal of his bad fortune and failure, and I saw now why he had hired me. Although he would never admit it, it was a last desperate attempt to revive the fortunes of the tunnel, and thence of himself and his father.

  It was too late to make my way back to my lodgings when at last we ran dry of both brandy and conversation, and I slept for a few hours on a cot in Brunel’s office while he curled up, like a cat, under his own desk. I had no dreams worth remarking on, and neither did Brunel, who when he woke was as spry as if he had slept twelve hours straight through in a feather bed.

  “Perhaps your intrusion somehow ended it,” he said.

  “If only it was as simple as that,” I said.

  “I know. You must make your inquiries, and I must make mine, and we’ll meet again as soon as we can.”

  I bade farewell to my new friend, and walked west and then north through the wakening streets. The air was already close and warm. Streams of clerks, shop workers, labourers and porters were walking toward their workplaces, joining the great river of humanity that flowed across London Bridge into the City, the tramp of their feet shaking the ground quite as much as the carts and coaches rumbling along the main road. In the brightening morning light that shone along the ship-choked river, the thousands of people, all moving in the same direction, all clad in the costumes of their trade, seemed like a carnival parade, and the air was full of conversation and laughter, and cheerful greetings sung out to friends and workmates.

  But here and there amongst the tide of the living, like spies and secret agents from some dolorous power, were the dead, walking with bowed heads and shuttered faces, drawn toward their former workplaces by ineradicable habit, unnoticed by any but me.

  I escaped the crowds, and the annoying attention of certain of the dead, in a coffee shop, where I enjoyed a fine breakfast of muffins toasted on a sea-coal fire and spread with butter and white honey, a plate of chops and kidneys and pickled onions, and a pot of bitter, strong coffee. Refreshed, and provided with directions by the waiter, I walked through the City and against the slackening tide of people flowing toward it from the new suburbs of Islington and Holloway, to my lodging house in Barnsbury.

  It was a fine terrace house of four storeys, built just ten years ago on a rise above the Caledonian Road, with iron railings in front and views north toward the fields and woods of Highgate. The lady of the house, Mrs Rolt, shot out of her parlour as I entered, and told me that I had missed a caller by just half an hour.

  “A strange old gentleman,” she said, fixing me with a stern eye. “Perhaps I speak too frankly, but I’m not entirely sure, Mr Carlyle, if I approve of him.”

  My visitor had not left a card, but he had made a great impression on the indomitable Mrs Rolt, a stout woman of middle years whose husband, a solicitor’s clerk in the City, was by contrast as meek a man as you could ever wish to meet. She told me that my visitor’s name was Dr Pretorius, and described him in enough detail for me to recognize immediately the haughty, white-haired gentleman who had attended the seance last night.

  “He would not state his business,” Mrs Rolt said, “but he did tell me that he would call upon you again. I would prefer it, Mr Carlyle, that you did not make this house your place of business. Especially if your business involves men of his kind.”

  “His kind, Mrs Rolt?”

  I was wondering, of course, how this Dr Pretorius had discovered my lodgings, and wondered too what else he might know about me.

  Mrs Rolt said, “He was polite enough, Mr Carlyle, and he spoke English exceedingly well – too well, if you follow me – but there was something sly and crafty about him. It was as if he was somehow playing a joke on me with his politeness.”

  “Are you implying that he is a foreigner, Mrs Rolt? And am I to understand that you believe that any foreigner should not be trusted?”

  “I get on well enough with anyone who is straightforward with me, Mr Carlyle, and I’m afraid to say that this gentleman had something crooked about him, for all his politeness. Pretorius – that’s no kind of name at all, not even for a foreigner. How can anyone trust a man without a proper name?”

  I found myself apologizing for my visitor, and tried to escape up
the stairs, but Mrs Rolt was not quite done with me, asking that I should take care to inform her the next time I was going to be out all night.

  “I’m afraid it was unavoidable,” I said. “A sudden business engagement.”

  As I said this, I realized with a sudden rush of happiness that I had taken on my first client since I had moved to London.

  “Your boots are muddy, and there’s mud on the cuffs of your trousers, too,” Mrs Rolt said, not unkindly. “Bring them down when you are ready, and I’ll have Jenny clean them for you. I like a clean house, Mr Carlyle, and a quiet one, too.”

  “And so do I, Mrs Rolt.”

  I had chosen my lodgings precisely because the house was quiet – not in the way that Mrs Rolt meant, but because it was too new to have accumulated much in the way of ghosts. I had tucked moly and rue here and there, to keep out unwanted visitors, and I checked these precautions before I took to my bed and slept for a few hours – one of the disciplines in the matter of the dead is to take rest when one can. It was noon when I rose. I washed my face and hands and changed my clothes. I cleaned my boots myself, but took my muddy trousers down to the basement for the attention of the maid, Jenny. I informed Mrs Rolt that I had a great deal of business today, so that she should not trouble to lay my supper by if I was late returning, and went out.

  Brunel had given me the name of the Inspector of Police who had attended the scene of Coffee Joe’s murder. After I had taken a lunch of salmon and shrimp sauce at a dining house, I found him in an airless, whitewashed office in the busy police station at Holborn. A stout, harassed man with thinning gingery hair and a red, sweating face, he read and reread the letter of introduction that Brunel had provided, and put me in the care of a blue-coated constable, who escorted me through the tangle of narrow alleys and lightless courts of St Giles Rookery to the cellar.

  It was a bleak, mean place, filthier than any stable, with a ceiling that sagged so low the burly constable had to stoop, and barely lit by a narrow, barred window where a brace of urchins peeked in. A heap of dirty straw and dirtier blankets was piled up along one wall, and most of the flagstones of the floor had been pulled up and flung aside, and the dirt beneath them was greatly disturbed and dug over. It was damp, and stank horribly of unwashed bodies and of rotten blood. There were black bloodstains on the walls and the overturned flagstones. There was also an imp posted in one corner, a vile little thing with a bloated frog’s belly and a tiny head that was mostly a pair of pale, protuberant eyes. It squealed in the moment I pinched it out, and left a curious chemical reek in my nostrils.

  The constable told me that this squalid cellar, which was not much bigger than the room I rented at Mrs Rolt’s, had been the home of some half-dozen people, who slept with the oranges and salt herring and the other wares that they hawked in the streets. He added that the inhabitants had all scattered, of course, and it was fortunate for me that the landlord had not yet been able to find anyone to set the place straight so that he could rent it again.

  I thought that the imp’s malevolence probably had as much to do with the landlord’s problem as did Coffee Joe’s murder. I pointed to the urchins who were watching us through the bars of the little window, and expressed surprise that someone could have been murdered in a room where half a dozen people lived, in the middle of an area so crowded that everyone’s business must have been common knowledge.

  “This is a hiding place for every kind of rogue,” the constable said. He was a saturnine man, with the weary air of someone who has seen entirely too much human rottenness, and he was not much interested in my business, nor in the murder. “Most of them are Irish, with no liking of English law. We call it the Rookery; they call it ‘Little Dublin’, or ‘The Holy Land’. We have no witnesses at all, only stories told by two of our informers. They both say it was a Savage that done it, but can’t agree to his particulars. One says that he was black; the other that he was more like one of the Indians from the South American jungles. The first claims that all his teeth were filed to points, the other that his teeth were mostly gold. And so on. All we know is that he murdered your man and chased everyone out of this room. Have you found something interesting, sir?”

  I had been turning over flagstones with the tip of my cane. “I notice that the bloodstains there are only on the top sides of these stones,” I said, “no matter which way they ended up. It suggests that the excavations were made by the murderer, after he had killed poor Coffee Joe. He must have spent some time at his work.”

  “No doubt people were watching at the door and window, and no doubt they saw which way he went when he had finished, but they’ll never tell us. Not that it matters, sir. Your man was on the run from the colonies, and this is a murder that saved the time of judge and jury and the hangman.”

  The constable needed little encouragement on my part to quit the cellar for the slightly fresher air of the court outside. I vaguely heard him shout at the two urchins, but I was already setting out the saucer I had brought with me, and filling it with brandy from the bottle that I had bought in the dining house where I had lunched.

  The brandy burned with a bright blue flame and a festive smell that sweetened the fetid air. I sat back and waited, sucking on a stick of barley sugar, and presently a pale face leaned, as it seemed, out of the shadows. It was gasping like a newly landed fish, and rivulets of blood poured from the gaping wound in its throat, splashing and smoking away on the floor, as it craned eagerly toward the fumes rising from the saucer of burning brandy.

  “I ’as such a great thirst,” it said, over and over, in a wheedling whine. “Just wet my lips a little, mister, and I’ll tell you all you want.”

  It told me anyway, of course, after I compelled it. Like most revenants, it was much confused, but it took only a few minutes to get its story straight. It seemed that Coffee Joe had made his way back to London as soon as he had completed his three years of hard labour, drawn by the thing that he had found in the muck in the Thames Tunnel. After he had returned to London, it had taken him several days and a great deal of drink to pluck up his courage, but at last he befriended one of the men who had a pallet in the cellar and came back with him, intent on disinterring his prize. The revenant had little memory of the man who had followed and attacked Coffee Joe, would only say that it was a powerful fellow who had frightened off everyone else.

  “He threatened me very badly, but I fooled him, didn’t I? I told him it was under the floor.”

  “How did he know that you had it?” I said.

  “He said his master had heard the story of what I had found, and had seen that I was touched by it. And it’s true, mister. My hand has never been the same since I found it – it has hurt me terribly and given me no little trouble ever since. I should have stayed in the colonies, but it tormented me every night, and only gave me rest when I swore to return.”

  There were more pleas for a little drink to dull its pain, and it grew very sulky when I compelled it to speak plainly and tell me where the thing was hidden. As soon as it gave up its secret, I relieved it of its suffering and found the loose stone in the wall, and the little parcel, wrapped in a filthy scrap of cloth, in the space behind it.

  My right hand began to ache badly and the taste of blood grew thick in my mouth as I unwrapped what Coffee Joe had taken from the Thames Tunnel:

  The two bones of a man’s finger, blackened by great age, yet still held together by a scrap of skin.

  I was following the constable’s directions toward Islington when a two-wheeled carriage cut out of the thick traffic and jolted to a halt by the kerb. The driver, a dull-eyed man with an oddly shaped head much too small for his body, stared slackly ahead, taking no notice of the spirited oaths of a carter who had been forced to rein in his horse to avoid a smash. The carriage door sprang open and the passenger leaned forward like a half-opened jackknife and beckoned to me – it was the white-haired man from the seance, Dr Pretorius.

  I was young then, and much less cautious than I am
now, and I accepted Dr Pretorius’s invitation with the same confident curiosity that had spurred me to attend the seance. Dr Pretorius pulled sharply on a chain as soon as I had climbed inside the carriage, and it moved off with a sharp jerk that banged the door shut and threw me onto the narrow leather-covered bench facing him.

  “I am delighted to meet you at last, Mr Carlyle,” he said. His accent was cultivated; his tone both mocking and amused. He wore the same black coat and high-collared shirt as at the seance, and a soft, shapeless hat perched on his vigorous mop of white hair. When I asked where we were going, he said, “You have not been long in the city, I believe. Allow me to show you something which will be of great interest to a man such as yourself. It’s just a little way beyond what was the valley of the Fleet, within the old wall.”

  “I am flattered that you take an interest in me,” I said, and it was not entirely untrue. At that moment, I was not afraid of this devilish man; I was eager to learn more of him, and to discover just what he knew of the matter of the dead. That he knew something, I did not doubt at all.

  “It wasn’t hard to track you down,” he said. “Men like us are rare enough, and growing rarer, but we have a natural affinity.”

  “I must assume that the thing in the cellar was yours.”

  Dr Pretorius’s smile was both cunning and mischievous. “Very remarkable, wasn’t it? I created it directly from seed by principles that I discovered many years ago, in another country. I had dreams of populating the world with a new race of creatures made entirely by men, but they were frustrated by the failure of a pupil I thought better than he was. Mrs Shelley wrote a popular romance which burlesques his downfall – perhaps you have read the revised edition that was recently reprinted? No? Well, no matter. It omitted my contribution to the affair completely, and had altogether too much sensation and not enough science. And besides, that was the past, and now we are at the dawn of a new age, and I have new plans: very powerful plans.