A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  Using two fingers, he pulled the door open and stepped inside. There was enough light to see that he was in a scullery, the shelves on either side of him empty. Up three steps there was another door, also ajar, and from somewhere beyond it a deep, rich scent, dark and sour like newly composted earth mixed with an overly sweet incense. Shit and sandalwood.

  He’d seen the dark, closed front of the house then come around to the rear, searching for an easier entrance. Now, standing there, nerves stretched to the limit, he found himself drawn farther in by the dim light and the dark hypnotic sound.

  He went up the second set of steps, acutely aware that he was unarmed. He knew he was a fool for not using a call box to summon assistance but somehow he knew he had to confront Queer Jack alone. Katherine had exorcised his past; Queer Jack would give him the future.

  The detective eased through the open door and found himself standing in a kitchen. An electric torch was on a counter beside an enamelled sink, its fading beam the source of the light he’d seen. From somewhere high above, the thumping sound continued. The smell was even more pronounced now, the sweet incense unable to disguise the rank, foul odour beneath.

  Black took three quick steps and picked up the heavy torch. Not much of a weapon but better than none at all. He swung the torch around the small, bare room, the beam picking up the glint of metal on a cutting table. A cleaver, leather-handled with a strap, the blade pitted with corrosion, the flank of the metal stained with flecks of dark rust, or something rusty red.

  He went over to the cutting table, moving quickly and silently on the balls of his feet. He picked up the cleaver in his free hand. The leather handle was cold and cracked and dry, as though the instrument had gone unused for a long time.

  Directly in front of him was a door leading towards the front of the house and to his left there was the dark bottom step of a narrow staircase. Far above his head the pounding went on and, listening, he could now tell that it was actually two sounds, a firm mechanical progression followed by something else, a sound that was barely a sound at all. Ignoring the door ahead of him, he turned and began to climb the stairs, following the oddly patterned noise and the terrible, terrible smell.

  He reached the first-floor landing and paused, his grip tightening on the cleaver. The door here gaped widely but a quick flash with the torch showed him only an empty hall and great dangling wisps of dusty cobweb. A rotted carpet runner on the floor, stained wallpaper; empty and abandoned years before.

  Black went on, his back against the stairwell wall, the torch held so that its beam shone dimly upward, showing him his path, the cleaver ready in his other hand. He paused again on the next landing. The door here was shut but behind it the beating rhythm was much louder. A cold heart, calling to him.

  The wood panels of the door had been painted over by a madman, filled with a bizarre motif of twisting snakes, oddly shaped stars and roughly drawn creatures that could only have come from the depths of some horribly twisted mind. Half were male, their genitals huge and engorged, eyes monstrous and bulging, sores dripping from crippled limbs, mounds of coiled excrement piled beneath withered buttocks. The other half were hermaphrodites, penises small and immature, breasts huge and sagging, each face looking upward innocently, roughly splashed halos of yellow paint around their heads. The background to the writhing tangle of the figures was a fuming hell of flames in pink and red and orange that licked and framed the hideous scene.

  Black fell back against the wall and closed his eyes for an instant, turning the beam of the torch away from the door. The stench here was overpowering, thick and palpable like the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. His mouth filled with saliva and he swallowed, gagged and swallowed again. He could hear a new sound now. The harsh whispered buzzing of a thousand swarming flies. Turn back now, he told himself; turn back before the madness draws you in.

  He turned the torch around the landing and almost vomited. In one corner there was a crumpled nest of old newspaper, soiled with excrement. Lines and daubs of shit climbed up the walls around him, dried and caked over everything. A few steps away another flight of stairs led up to the attic floor. The muted pounding mocked him from the far side of the door. The flies buzzed. Black reached out with the hand holding the cleaver, turned the knob and pushed. He stepped back quickly, raised the weapon and shone the torch beam into the room beyond.

  He looked through the open doorway and into hell on earth. He stared, instantly aware that this was something that no man or woman’s eyes should ever have to see, a tortured, screaming horror more vile and obscene than the most blasphemous imaginings of any demented Brueghel or Dante Alighieri whispering, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here!’ The entire third storey of the house had been transformed into a single, glowing chamber, lit by a hundred candles fixed to rudely made tinplate sconces screwed into the walls and scattered from floor to ceiling. The walls themselves were primitively painted, depicting scenes a thousand times more ghastly than the ones splashed onto the door.

  Chasms swallowed entire flaming cities whole; white-hot tongs pricked lolling, pink-wet tongues; rutting boars, tusks red with blood, tore entrails from infants in the midst of being birthed by headless, limbless women; blood boiled in pools; flames rose everywhere, fuelled by squadrons of childishly executed, bat-winged aircraft, raining terror onto the orgy of violence and death below. Pale and fine as spider’s silk, a thousand careful lines connected one image to the other in a monstrous cosmology. A demon’s chart and guide.

  The ceiling was dull black, and from it hung one hundred lengths of bright, stiff copper wire, the ends of some hooked to impale small, leathery things that might have once been flesh, while dozens more were twisted to hold larger, splintered lengths of bone. On a wire close to Black’s right hand a new-looking revolver had been hung as a final trophy.

  Black’s quick opening of the door had disturbed the air and the fresh currents set the wires moving, bone tapping dully against bone like a terrible wind chime, flies thrown from their meaty perches and whispering in angry muted counterpoint. The flickering candle shadows danced and Black thought he saw small scuttling insect movements amidst the other hideous artefacts cast across the dark, oilcloth-covered floor.

  In the centre of the room stood the worst of all.

  A dozen metal poles stood at clock-hour distance from each other in a large circle on the floor. Atop each pole was a skull, wax flesh built up upon human bone, eyes made of bits of coloured glass. Below each poorly sculpted head was a small metal square and on each square, neatly printed with a draftsman’s hand, there was a name, twelve in all – Christ’s apostles, clockwise in alphabetical order.

  ‘Gottenyu!’ Black whispered, speaking in his mother’s tongue. ‘Gottenyu!’

  In the circle, on the floor, drawn symbols. A crude pentacle in yellow chalk, a snake in white and over everything, counterclockwise in bright scarlet, a swastika marching backward, the letter Z, inverted, four times over. Above the symbols a terrible device, Raymond Loudermilk’s savage realisation of deus ex machina, its application witnessed by the blind bottle-glass eyes of the surrounding saints and the buzzing, swarming flies.

  A metal frame rose tall as a standing man, forming a cage above the runic images. Scaffolding bolted to the cage held cogs and cams and wheels and pulleys, all powered by a huge, crank-wound mainspring in a boxlike framework of its own. The strange, oil-gleaming system of descending gears, looking for all the world like the works of some enormous clock, drove a piston through a long, angled tube that ended at the back of a high wooden throne. A rod of tungsten steel, sharpened to a chisel point, was being steadily pushed forward by the piston, each movement marked by the metronome swing of a weighted pendulum attached to the spring. This was the source of the thumping sound – the impact of the piston on the rod.

  The target of the slowly moving spear sat rigid on the throne, facing the door. A man, dark haired, a soft purple bruise at his temple, green-eyed and naked, palms flat on the ch
air’s broad arms, hands pinioned by a pair of heavy spikes hammered between the bones. Some crushing tool had been used to tear away the nails.

  The eyes bulged madly, and the man’s spine was arched away from the seat of the throne in a final, desperate attempt to escape the descending rod. It had pushed through the flesh of his neck, one fractional movement at a time, digging slowly down through fat and muscle, narrowly missing the spinal cord, eventually cutting through the oesophagus, silencing the tortured screams that had caused the man to bite through his tongue, then rupturing the madly beating heart.

  Oh, God, how long? thought Black, staring numbly at the clockwork killing chair. How long had it taken for the man to die? He would have felt the first cutting stroke, knowing what was to come, felt it puncture his screaming throat and then…

  A glitter of light reflected from the array of candles caught Black’s eye and he stared upward. It came from the ceiling, high above, and back from the throne. Eyes. Flashing chips of deep red glass. Eyes in the yellow wax face of the last apostle, staring down, Queer Jack’s avenging angel – St Paul: The Final Judgement.

  Morris Black swayed where he stood and then stepped back, shoulder brushing against the wire that held the dangling revolver. He whirled at the cold touch, then, almost without thinking, dropped the cleaver, reached out and grabbed the weapon. He tore it away from the wire, turned and ran. Behind him the oiled gears ticked on, the weighted pendulum swung steadily and the thumping piston slid forward smoothly once again.

  * * *

  At precisely 7:10, with the sirens still moaning through the windblown empty streets of St Paul’s Precinct in The City, The Number entered the cathedral through the small crypt entrance of the north-west tower, using the key he’d made to turn the ancient lock. He climbed confidently up the narrow circular stairwell in pitch-darkness, sure of every step, counting his way upward until he reached ground level and the heavy wooden door that led into the Kitchener Memorial Chapel.

  Here there was light, provided by a chandelier dangling from the vault above and electric sconces set around the large, circular room. Closing the door behind him carefully, he turned and began to cross the patterned marble floor.

  ‘My, we’re quick then, aren’t we? Raid hasn’t even started yet.’

  The Number stopped and looked around. On the far side of the room he saw a tiny, rotund woman sitting on a camp chair underneath the massive altar between the pieta of Christ and the Virgin Mary and the prostrate figure of Horatio Herbert, Lord Kitchener, in white marble. She stood and came forward, walking towards him, carrying a book, its place kept with one extended finger.

  She was very small, the shoulders of her firefighter’s canvas jacket heavily padded. A delicately sculpted face looked out from beneath a regulation tin hat, her small, Cupid’s-bow mouth painted with bright red lipstick. Long gold earrings dangled down below the hat, swinging as she walked over the echoing floor. Beneath the jacket she wore a short black skirt, black stockings laddered almost into oblivion and a pair of heavy workman’s boots. The hands, he noticed, were wonderfully small. Doll’s hands.

  ‘Brought your own supper, I see,’ she said, stopping in front of him and gesturing with her book at the leather briefcase in his hand. In contrast to her small size, the woman’s voice was rich and strong with a deep, almost seductive harshness.

  ‘Yes,’ said The Number. He hadn’t expected to find anyone there and for a moment he was confused. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, keeping the count in his head as the woman’s intelligent eyes looked him over. A false step or word and he’d have her, split her like a Christmas goose, her hot fat spurting, and her blood.

  ‘Where’ve they put you tonight, then?’ she asked finally. The Number breathed again. She’d taken him for a member of the Volunteer Watch, of which she was obviously a member. He shrugged and said nothing, counting, listening as the sound of the sirens outside faded, the silence before the terrible storm to come.

  ‘Don’t know,’ he muttered finally.

  ‘Head for heights?’

  He nodded and she nodded back.

  ‘Probably the dome then,’ she said. Frowning, the woman turned. She’d noticed the silence now as well. ‘Better cut along. Sounds like the fun is about to begin.’

  ‘Yes.’ He tried to smile then turned away, leaving her behind. He went through the arched entry leading to the side aisle and the nave then vanished around the corner.

  The woman listened to the silence and the man’s receding footsteps for a moment then went back to her seat between Kitchener and Christ. She sat down beneath the cold stone figures and began to read again. In the book, the hero, Robert Hunter, was armed with a high-powered rifle. He had just tried to pot Hitler from two hundred yards away and missed.

  ‘Twit,’ she muttered, then turned the page. ‘Might’ve saved us all a lot of trouble.’

  * * *

  Ian Fleming sat on the running board of the Flying Squad Wolseley, hunched over, head in his hands. He’d been violently sick and his breath was ragged and uneven.

  ‘Christ! I’ve never seen anything like that,’ the young man whispered, looking up.

  ‘Madness,’ said Liddell, standing beside him. The Wolseley was parked at the rear of 31 Mount Vernon Street, uniformed policemen moving back and forth along the narrow lane. From far down the long slope leading to the city and the winding ribbon of the Thames, he thought he could hear the growling, distant approach of the bombers. The raid had almost begun.

  Dick Capstick pushed open the high garden gate and approached the car, hands jammed into the pockets of his overcoat. The man’s broad face was set like stone, emotionless.

  ‘Well?’ Liddell took out his pipe then thought better of it. He gripped it tightly in his hand and waited for the broad-shouldered detective to make his report.

  ‘Your man right enough. Found his clothes in a heap behind the kitchen door. Wallet, money, everything. Some blood on the back stairs. From the looks of it I’d say he was coshed, then dragged up to that room.’ The big man raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘Gobs of other stuff. Three or four great whacking things that look like teleprinters in the basement, all taken apart. Shelves filled with electricals and such. Whole bleeding wardrobe on one floor filled with overalls and uniforms.’ The Flying Squad man shook his head. ‘Saved his shit as well, by the looks of it. Great stacks of little boxes, nasty things all dried up in shredded paper like so many birds’ eggs in their nests. Worst I’ve ever seen in all my time.’

  ‘That’s it then.’ Liddell sighed. ‘We’ll go back to the boat and see what he left behind.’

  Capstick shook his head. ‘Sorry, Captain, I’m afraid that’s not it at all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Someone’s been here, after your man was done over.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Certain. Boot marks in the blood on the steps, up as well as down. That chopper thing on the floor. Torch on in the garden, dropped there by someone running.’ Capstick frowned. ‘That’s how we knew where to look. A warden saw the torch beam, saw the rear door was hanging open.’

  ‘Queer Jack?’ said Fleming, getting to his feet.

  ‘No. Not him. Not leaving things behind and running like that. Not our Jack. He’d have none of that. Methodical, his sort.’ Capstick grinned. ‘Like coppers.’

  ‘Then who?’ asked Liddell.

  Capstick looked at the two men standing by the car. ‘I think it was Morris. I think he finally put a proper name to Jack and tracked him here. I think he came too late and now he’s taken up the chase again.’

  ‘You can’t know that for certain, man,’ Liddell answered. Capstick lifted his shoulders and then tapped a thick index finger along his nose. ‘I’m sure of it. Who else could it be?’

  ‘Where?’ asked Fleming.

  ‘Morris showed me the postcards,’ said Capstick. ‘All cathedrals, weren’t they?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I know
my saints. You saw that room yourself. Jack’s put one of them up there above the rest. There’s only one place he could be, I’ll bet my reputation on it.’

  Fleming stared, then turned, looking towards the southern darkness of the city. Suddenly the sirens began to moan again. ‘St Paul’s,’ said Fleming, suddenly understanding. ‘He’s going to St Paul’s.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Sunday, December 29, 1940

  8:15 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time

  Morris Black reached the underground station at St Paul’s just as the first bombs began to fall, the giant, whistling containers of incendiaries splitting open in mid-air, spreading hundreds, then thousands of the four-pound canisters across the densely packed buildings and the crowded rooftops, making a sound like a coal scuttle emptying itself across a marble floor. Screaming death, white-hot.

  Panting and out of breath, Black reached the upper exit and found his way barred by an ARP warden who was peering out at the raid from the safety of the exit doorway. He held his arm across Black’s chest and shook his head, stopping the detective’s headlong run.

  ‘You don’t want to go out there, mate!’ the man yelled, lifting his voice above the bellowing of the bombers and the chattering of the impacting bombs.

  ‘You’re right, I don’t,’ Black answered, fishing for his warrant card. He flashed it in the warden’s face then pushed the man aside. He ran out into Newgate Street, then turned south, running past the narrow entrance to Paternoster Row. A few seconds later he reached the broad open plaza of St Paul’s Churchyard, the cathedral itself a massive rectangle of towering stone, topped by the monumental dome.