El Sombra

by Al Ewing

  He found Assistant Director Mandrake working, as always, in the semi-gloom of the fungus beds in the basement level of the Amaranth House. Here plants which thrived on the forest floor beneath the light-blocking canopy of the rainforest or in the dark sinkholes of the South American jungle plateaux, were tended in conditions that mimicked their natural environments. It was hot and dark down here, the atmosphere heavy with the smell of leaf-mould and wet loam.

  "Mandrake, a word."

  "What is it, Director?" the younger man asked, putting down his trowel. He too was in shirtsleeves as he worked in the stuffy heat, his black hair plastered to his head with sweat.

  "We've had a visit from one Ulysses Quicksilver, an Imperial agent."

  "Why would one such as he be interested in our work here?" the other asked innocently.

  "He isn't. He wanted my opinion on something. He showed me a specimen - a fungus. I don't know where he got it from but it looked very familiar. Greeny-grey with an epidermis like dead flesh."

  Mandrake said nothing, but simply looked at Hargreaves with something akin to mild curiosity.

  "You know what I'm talking about."

  "Do I, Director?"

  "You damn well know you do. It looked very like the specimens I've seen you working with recently down here." Hargreaves scanned the dark, dank space. "Where are they? What have you done with them? Where have you moved them to?"

  Mandrake fixed him with piercing pearlescent green eyes. They seemed almost luminescent in the gloom beneath the glasshouse. His skin was pallid and white from a lifetime working away in the darkness where the necrotising plants grew.

  "You're right, of course, Director. It's time you knew everything."

  "What is it you've been busying yourself with down here while the rest of us have been striving to get everything ready for Friday's official opening?"

  "Let me show you," Mandrake said, moving towards an iron door at the other end of the sub-basement. "This way."

  Professor Hargreaves joined his assistant at the iron door. The smell of damp and mould was even stronger here. Mandrake forcibly pushed the handle down and opened the door. "Please, after you."

  Professor Hargreaves stepped through into humid darkness.

  "Where's the light switch?" he asked.

  In place of an answer, the door slammed shut behind him and he heard the grate of bolts being thrown on the other side.

  "Mandrake? What the hell are you playing at?"

  Hargreaves froze as something wet and spongy to the touch grabbed hold of his hand in the darkness. Then the screaming began.

  Without any warning, without any wailing of sirens, the fire brigade arrived within the warren of slum tenements and decaying wharfs of Southwark. A gleaming brass and red-painted fire engine rumbled to a halt outside the Dog and Duck and its crew silently went about their business, extending the ladder atop the vehicle and unrolling hoses with practised efficiency.

  One of the helpful individuals from the crowd who had aided Ulysses Quicksilver earlier that day approached a fireman kitted out in full protective gear - fire-retardant coat, re-breather helmet and protective boots. The fireman went about his business, ignoring him.

  "Where's the fire?"

  The hulking fireman remained silent and quietly carried on unrolling the hose in his hands, giving nothing away.

  IV - Scorched Earth

  On the morning of the eighteenth of September, Ulysses Quicksilver returned to the scene of the prostitute Nancy's demise, but things were not as he had left them the day before. He had returned in hope of finding more clues to help him resolve both the mystery of her death and of the curious fungus, but something else entirely that he had not anticipated was waiting to greet him.

  The area had been ravaged by fire the night before. The Dog and Duck was nothing but a blackened shell, the streets around it sooty and blackened by flames that had been hot enough to melt the surface of the road and crack the bricks of buildings. Southwark was thick with a bitter charcoal smell. Wisps of grey smoke still rose from the burnt-out tenements. The fire had been intense but short-lived.

  The area had been cordoned off in the wake of the fire, just as it had been following the prostitute's gruesome death. The eager young bobby, who had accompanied Sergeant Sheldon the first time Ulysses had passed this way, was protecting the ruins from looters and heedless passers-by. It seemed that Sheldon was not prepared to entrust this task to the automaton-Peelers that had been drafted in from Scotland Yard.

  "Good morning, constable," Ulysses said, beaming despite the obvious devastation around him. "What's been going on since I was last here?"

  "Good morning, Mr Quicksilver, sir. It happened last night, when everyone was in the Dog and Duck."

  "Everyone?"

  "All the regulars, I mean."

  "Everyone who might have come into contact with Fungoid Nancy, you mean."

  "Well... I hadn't thought of it quite like that myself, sir. But now you come to mention it."

  "A bad fire was it?"

  "I think the fire service described it as 'intense'. They were here in no time and got it under control as quickly as they could."

  "Good to hear you can rely on London's noble fire brigade, eh?"

  "Yes quite, sir."

  "What of the prostitute's body? Was it moved before the fire broke out?"

  "It's funny you mention that, sir. The fire swept through the area not long after you were last here, Mr Quicksilver. There hadn't been time for the arrangements to move the body to be completed."

  "Is that so?"

  "Yes, sir," the constable went on, the word 'confidentiality' apparently missing from his copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. "Strange case, wasn't it?"

  "Indeed," Ulysses agreed, "and getting stranger all the time." Ulysses cast his gaze around the wasted ruin of the street, as if somehow a more intricate inspection would give him some further insight into solving this mystery.

  "And who'd have thought it? Two in one week, like that."

  Ulysses' gaze fixed on the affably smiling policeman.

  "I beg your pardon, constable. Two?"

  "Yes, sir. The first one was pulled from the Thames down by Southwark Bridge last Sunday. A man it was, well, what was left of him."

  "I don't believe it," Ulysses muttered to himself. "Allardyce must have known about it. Two cases in a week and he didn't think to share that little nugget of information."

  "I'm sorry, sir. Would you be meaning Inspector Allardyce?"

  "Know him do you?"

  "Well, of course, sir, but -"

  "What can you tell me about him?"

  "Inspector Allardyce, sir?"

  "The first body. You said it was a man."

  "Oh, yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Well, seeing as how it's you, Mr Quicksilver, I can do better than that. I can let you see the body if you like. It's still in cold storage down at the station. I'm guessing no one informed your bosses to come pick it up."

  "Then take me there forthwith, constable!" Ulysses exclaimed, the grin back on his face, excitement sparkling in his eyes. "It would appear that the game is afoot once more."

  "Do you have any idea who it could be?" Ulysses asked, staring down at what had once been a man of medium build and medium height with shoulder-length black hair, dressed in an unremarkable black suit.

  "No, sir. No one's been in to identify the unfortunate gentleman."

  As far as Ulysses could see, physical identification would be a near impossible task. It seemed that every square inch of skin was covered with the same grey-green puffball growths that had ravaged Nancy the prostitute.

  "And no autopsy has been carried out either?"

  Ulysses' breath clouded in the chill air of the morgue. The atmosphere was thick with the clinical smell of formaldehyde and disinfectant that Ulysses equated with death. Wisps of misty vapour spun in the vortices of air currents created by the cautious movements of the constable, Sergeant Sheldon and the dandy.

 
Sergeant Sheldon had left Ulysses to open the body bag himself, which he had done with incredible care and only after donning medical gloves and mask. However, none of the puffballs spored on opening. In fact they appeared to have already spored and were now entirely shrivelled, looking even more like dead flesh, as if they were dying back, their rapid development having consumed every nutrient provided by the host body, like a malignant, rampaging cancer.

  "Far as I'm aware, he's not even been reported missing," Sergeant Sheldon said, "so I doubt anyone's looking for him anyway."

  "Most interesting," Ulysses said, using a pair of tweezers to pull open one side of the dead man's river-ruined jacket. "And no one thought to check the dead man's body for any personal effects that might reveal his identity?"

  "His pockets were checked. He had nothing on him."

  "Then what do you call this?" Ulysses challenged, extracting a sodden, folded piece of paper.

  "Well I'll be damned!" Constable Harris swore.

  "I thought you said you checked the pockets!" Sheldon snarled.

  "Exactly how incompetent is Her Majesty's Metropolitan Police trying to be? Is there some incompetence award you're going for?" Ulysses flashed the constable a look of contempt that made him physically recoil. "Most Appallingly Slack Police Procedural Practice in a Borough Station?"

  "I... I don't know how that was missed, Mr Quicksilver," Sheldon apologised, a look of thunder on his face.

  "Because nobody dared look that closely, fearing that whatever did for this poor wretch might be the end of them. That's how! Let's take a closer look, shall we?" Ulysses said, his anger abating and his natural curiosity coming to the fore again.

  With the aid of the tweezers he managed to separate the sodden sides of the folded vellum. Despite the efforts of the Thames, the ink of the handwritten missive was still just legible.

  "What does it say?" Sergeant Sheldon asked.

  "Well, the gist of it is this," Ulysses replied. "The addressee is one Garic Mandrake, and it is signed by - if I am not mistaken - the eminent botanist and out-spoken critic of Magna Britannia, Auberon Chase, condemning the former's immoral work. He doesn't go into details, unfortunately, but he does state that he wants no part in Mandrake's brand of, and I quote, 'botanical terrorism.'"

  "Bloody hell," was all the ashen-faced constable could manage, reeling at the revelation that, like as not, the forgotten corpse in the cold store was mixed up in some plot against the stability of the Empire. In the wake of the Wormwood Affair, everyone took talk of terrorism very seriously, from members of the public to those in authority over them.

  "It seems likely to me that for the dead man to be carrying such a letter about his person, until it may be proved otherwise, we should take this corpse to be that of Garic Mandrake. Would you not agree?" Without giving Sheldon or the constable the chance to reply, Ulysses went on, into his rhetorical stride now. "And, by extension, one could safely surmise that perhaps Auberon Chase had something to do with his death, or at least knows more about it than we currently do."

  Sergeant Sheldon simply looked at him, opened mouthed.

  "You might well be dumbfounded, Sergeant. This station managed to miss two potentially crucial pieces of evidence."

  "T-two, sir?"

  "Firstly, the letter from Auberon Chase, and secondly," - he now used the tweezers to separate the matted locks of the man's hair behind what had formerly been his right ear, revealing angular ruddy petals caught between the fibres - "this seemingly innocuous scarlet flower."

  V - A Rose By Any Other Name

  The Rolls Royce pulled up outside the Suffolk country house, practically the only noise made by the car's arrival being the crunch of the gravel drive under its tyres.

  The Old Vicarage was all steeply-pitched roofs, arched stained glass windows, black iron guttering and faux battlements. The extensive gardens were shielded behind high hedges and a red brick wall. Several acres of beech woodland held all within its arboreal embrace.

  "So this is the home of the eminent, not to say curmudgeonly, botanist and orchidologist Auberon Chase?" Ulysses said, looking out of the window at the imposing gothic residence.

  "Is that a rhetorical question, sir?" his ever-faithful manservant enquired, his voice a cut-glass emotionless monotone at odds with Ulysses' excitedly upbeat attitude.

  "Of course it is, Nimrod," Ulysses replied flashing his retainer a wicked grin. Nimrod responded with a condescendingly arching eyebrow. "And as we're here, I think it would be rude not to pay our respects."

  Having exited the car, the two men approached the front door, the ostentatiously dressed dandy leading the way, his immaculately turned out manservant a pace behind. When the third ring of the doorbell still produced no response Ulysses decided to investigate.

  Passing through a gate into a walled flower garden, with ornamental lawns, carefully clipped topiary bushes and the rhododendrons of an arboretum beyond, Ulysses and Nimrod found their way to the extensive conservatory attached to the back of the house.

  Cautiously pushing open the unlocked door, Ulysses paused on entering.

  "Someone's been here before us," he said darkly, "and I don't mean our errant botanist." He pointed out the broken pane of glass in line with the door handle, the shards lying on the tiled floor inside.

  "So I see, sir," Nimrod assented.

  "We should proceed with caution."

  "Understood, sir," Nimrod said, taking a pistol from its hidden holster inside his tailcoat, as Ulysses took out his own gun.

  Plants filled the conservatory. Some were in the middle of being re-potted into larger terracotta containers. A half-open bag of spilled potting compost and a trowel lay as if they had only just been put down, as if whoever had been at work here had just stepped away for a moment. There was everything from tall-reaching bamboo and primeval cycads to a magnificent aspidistra and creeping grape vines. Along one glass-panelled wall was Chase's prized collection of rare and exotic orchids: everything from the magnolia-painted petals of the Butterfly Orchid to the Devil's Tongue.

  But the orchids were not the only rare plants that had a home here; there were a number of specimens that would not have been out of place within the newly completed Amaranth House at Kew. These included a Patagonian Mantrap, a six-foot tall specimen residing in a massive ornamental Grecian urn.

  It was this plant that Nimrod was examining when he made the pronouncement: "Sir, I think you should take a look at this."

  "Ah, Auberon Chase, I presume," Ulysses said with macabre humour as he approached the mantrap himself.

  All that Ulysses could see were a pair of trouser clad legs and two feet, one missing a shoe, protruding from the thorn-fanged maw of the mantrap amidst the spiny leaf-pseudopods of the plant.

  Ulysses turned before the woman spoke, his uncanny sixth sense giving him prior knowledge almost akin to prescience, pistol held level at waist height.

  "Don't move!" Despite having the bravura to challenge the two of them, she could not hide the undertone of nervous anxiety. "And put your hands up, where I can see them."

  "Which is it to be? Don't move, or put our hands up?"

  The young woman - in her mid to late twenties - stood at the entrance to the glazed plant house. She was holding a garden fork firmly in both hands, prongs pointed towards the dandy and his manservant. The look on her face suggested that she was prepared to make good use of it if needs be.

  She looked like she would have been more at home trekking through the jungles of Borneo than stalking Ulysses in the Suffolk countryside. Her petite, lithe, and richly-tanned body was contained within long cargo shorts and a positively disgraceful, tight-fitting brown vest top, under a sleeveless khaki jacket. Her choice of wardrobe was too daring and modern, even for the more progressive and increasingly permissive attitudes prevalent across the Victorian empire of Magna Britannia at the end of the twentieth century. Her dark, shoulder-length hair was tied back in a stubby ponytail.

  Her outfit obviou
sly favoured the practical but to Ulysses' mind it merely served to accentuate the pert curve of her buttocks, the hollow at the small of her back, the subtle swell of her bosom, her small breasts pushing against the tight material.

  "Well, hell-o," Ulysses smarmed. "And who are you?" He ignored Nimrod's tut of disapproval, drinking in the vision of loveliness before him.

  "Never mind that! Who are you and what are you doing in my uncle's house?" she snapped, glancing at the bloated bulb of the Patagonian Mantrap, a film of moisture covering her eyes. "What was it that caused you return to the scene of your crime?"

  "Madame," Ulysses said, his most endearing smile shaping the chiselled features of his face, "you are mistaken. We are not murderers returning to the scene of what would appear to be some heinous crime. We have only just now stumbled upon this unfortunate scene. But, I might ask the same questions of you. Who are you and what brings you here?"

  "I asked first," the young woman said stepping boldly into the conservatory, adding emphasis with a thrust of the fork.

  Ulysses reached into his jacket and pulled out his leather cardholder, flipping it open with a flick of the wrist. "I am Ulysses Quicksilver, Madame, agent of adventure, agent of justice, and agent of the throne of Magna Britannia, recognised for my valorous actions by Her Majesty Queen Victoria herself. I find myself here in my capacity as an investigator into two particularly unpleasant deaths." Ulysses returned his ID to his pocket. "Now, Madame, if you would be so kind as to return the favour."

  The young woman remained tight-lipped before relenting. "I am Petunia Chase, and Auberon Chase is... was... my uncle." Ulysses glanced at Nimrod, that one look full of meaning for the two of them. They had become embroiled with supposedly grieving female relatives before, and didn't want to be duped again. He had used to think himself a good judge of character - now his confidence in his own abilities had been shaken by the events of not so long ago.

  "And what brings you here at this inauspicious time, Miss Chase?" Ulysses asked, his tone measured.