The Detective and the Devil

by Lloyd Shepherd

  He could see the silhouette of the fort from here; it was above him, its edges jagged in the moonlight. From the other side of the fort, the persistent breathing of the sea, in and out of that cave below.

  He tried the handle of the front door. It turned. The door gave slightly under his shoulder and then, as if making the decision for him, it opened. He pushed it open, staying as hidden as he could around the edge of the door, pushing it back until it was against the inner wall, squeezing anyone who might be hiding there into an impossibility.

  He peeked around the doorframe. The interior was dark and, apparently, empty. He stepped inside.

  The air was cold. Burroughs had lit no fire. He could pick out the dim outlines of some furniture in the parlour: two chairs, a desk, a door out to the kitchen. A bookcase lit by a shaft of moonlight from the window.

  Slowly, carefully, Horton went through every room of the house, and found nothing. In the surprising light from the moon, he made what investigation he could, and concluded that apart from books and furniture, Burroughs’s house was devoid of anything at all. It was even devoid of Burroughs.

  He sat in the man’s chair, which faced the dead fire and the chimney breast. He stretched out one foot and pushed the rug. For a moment he imagined he saw a trapdoor. But it was no such thing; just a line in the wooden floor, a gap between boards. And how, he asked himself, would Burroughs have returned a rug to cover a trapdoor once he had climbed down inside? He had allowed the night to take over his imagination. It was time to think clearly. Time to head back into James Town, and speak to Seale, and to Abigail, and relocate his rational self.

  But where on earth was Edgar Burroughs?

  He got up and walked over to the front door of the little house, casting his eyes once more around the place, marking again the strange absence of objects other than furniture and books. All he felt was an emotional vacuum. A building, not a home.

  He opened the front door, and a dark blur appeared beside him. An arm settled against his chest and throat, and a sharp point broke the skin on his neck before pausing. A hand gripped his arm and pushed it up behind his back, up impossibly far until the tendons in his shoulder screamed in protest and he cried out.

  ‘Constable Horton, I presume,’ said a voice.

  She was washing pans again. Her husband was out in the South Atlantic dark, and she was washing pans. Seale had gone out, she suspected to drink. He had said little to her since Charles had left. Perhaps their deception had made him unsure of her. She was alone, staring into the pane of glass which had become her familiar, her own face staring back at her.

  Behind that glass, high in the sky, were the stars of the South Atlantic. John Dee believed the ‘fixed stars’ influenced events on earth; that their size and arrangement in relation to the Earth dictated the strength of their various effects, and that these effects combined with the elements of the Earth – fire, earth, air and water – to create eddies of influence and power. She recognised the nonsense of this, the underlying error – the stars were not fixed, they were in constant movement, not around the Earth but around each other. And yet, what was this but another kind of influence? Did Newton not simply articulate this different kind of action at a distance? Was a distant star even now tugging at her, affecting her decisions, changing her life?

  She remembered the way her mind had slipped away from itself. More than a year ago now, it had been. It had been as if there were two Abigails – one acting, the other watching and recording. When she saw her face reflected in the glass of the kitchen window, it felt like she was looking back at herself. There was pity in that watching face, and anxiety, and something like loneliness.

  And just like that, she felt alone in the world. She felt the utter absence of children in her life, the signal failure to reproduce herself, to have other eyes and other faces looking back into hers, calling her mother, needing her regard. Abigail Horton had little need for God, for she had found so many explanations for the wonders around her in books and lectures. And yet she wondered at God now, and at why he had denied her children. How did the men of science explain that?

  She was angry and frustrated and worried. The fear which had rattled through her while she had undertaken to dose Burroughs with laurel leaves was now, if anything, a positive memory, of a time when she was excited and at least partially mistress of her own immediate future. She had smelled the leaves, and they had smelled of almonds. She had conjectured that they must contain some of the same materials as hydrocyanic acid. In this she had been right. She was clever and well read and imaginative. But now she had been left to wait, again, as all women must eventually wait: for a man to make something happen.

  She was very, very tired of waiting.

  Horton woke in the dark. He was in an unlit tunnel, and from down at the other end of the tunnel he could hear the sound of the sea.

  He sat up, and groaned. He put one hand to his head, and it came away sticky. He had done himself some kind of injury, falling down the stairs from the door. That mysterious bloody door which Burroughs had opened, before he had disappeared.

  How long had he been lying here? The blood on his head was sticky but not wet; the wound had congealed, it seemed. A half-hour, perhaps? An hour? He wondered where Burroughs was.

  ‘Edgar Burroughs,’ he’d said to the man who had held a knife to his throat outside the assistant treasurer’s house.

  ‘Of course. Now, walk. That way. Up to the fort.’

  Burroughs’s voice had been cultured and educated, the voice of London salons and not South Atlantic hillsides. His grip had been astonishingly firm. The blade had felt cold against his neck, and he could detect a warm trickle alongside it. His skin had been broken, then, by this man whom he still could not see. This man who seemed to be at the centre of every hole in this case.

  They had walked up the hill, Horton choosing his steps carefully, Burroughs allowing his own body to adjust to Horton’s pace and balance. The pressure on his shoulder had been enormous. As Burroughs pushed his arm up behind his back, it had felt like his internal rigging might snap and pull him down at any second.

  It had taken ten minutes to walk up the hill to the fort, past the big quiet farmhouse. The jagged shape of the place in the moonlight had been suitably Gothic. ‘Are you going to throw me from the cliff?’ he had asked.

  ‘Believe me, I have thought about it,’ the reply had come. ‘I’ve asked myself whether it was a very bad idea, bringing you here. She had better be worth it.’

  She?

  They had walked under the gaping entrance to the fort, its wooden door long taken by the islanders for some purpose of their own. The fort was open to the sky, its roof a distant memory. Horton had heard the waves crashing into Prosperous Bay, over the lid of the point.

  Bringing you here, Burroughs had said. She had better be worth it.

  He had thought of Abigail, because he had thought he was about to die, and he had wondered what she was doing. How late was it? How long had he been waiting outside Burroughs’s little cottage? She would be concerned, of course. No. She would be terrified. He had wandered off into the South Atlantic night, and he had not returned. Perhaps, now, he would never return.

  They had walked up to the closed door, the infernal door that Horton had tried so many ways to open. With a little shove, Burroughs had pushed Horton’s body into the door, squeezing a few more impossible degrees of arc into Horton’s agonised arm. Horton had turned his face so his cheek was against the door, trying to ease the pressure on his tortured shoulder.

  It had been warm, the wood of the door. Hot, even. As if something had been generating heat from inside. He had listened as Burroughs wrestled with something metallic from within his coat, or perhaps from a bag. Horton had turned his head around the other way, to the side he could detect Burroughs was standing, and he had seen something heavy and metallic being held against the door by his captor. Something that had looked like an iron bar.

  He had heard a grinding
sound from the far side of the door, as if someone on the inside were unhitching a bolt. Burroughs had moved the iron bar along the door, from outer to inner, and the movement had been matched by the metallic grinding from within. Then Burroughs moved the bar down six inches, and had performed the same procedure, and then quite suddenly the door had squealed open.

  Horton had found himself standing before a dark opening. Two or three stone steps, heading down below the fort, had been visible in the moonlight, but other than that the space had presented only darkness. Burroughs still had hold of his arm, and began to push him towards the step, when suddenly there had been something else there, a shape from the outer darkness which had thrown itself at Burroughs with an animal growl. Burroughs had cried out and had released his grip on Horton’s arm, and as if waiting for a cue Horton had spun himself around to see what had happened, and had caught only a glimpse of a somebody or something struggling with Burroughs on the ground before his feet gave way beneath him and with a single cry he had fallen back into the exposed entrance and down the stairs. He had managed to soften his body, become a ball almost, as he tumbled down the steps, but then his head had struck a rock at the bottom of the steps and he had lost all consciousness.

  But for how long? He put his hand out to stand up, and it grazed something on the ground, something with rough edges. The rock on which he had knocked his head, perhaps. Sitting up – his injured shoulder screaming in pain – he reached out and felt with his hands. He stood up slowly and walked back up the stairs in the dark, and found the door at the top was now closed. He ran his hands all over the door’s surface, felt its old wooden immensity, but failed to find anything with which to pull it open. The door continued to be a kind of impossibility, opened as if by magic by an iron bar. So he turned from it, back to the steps down which he had fallen.

  It was not quite dark here in the space behind the door. A weak glow came from the bottom of the steps, as if there were a light shining from somewhere within – from the same direction as the sound of the sea. There was only one choice available to him. He began to make his way back down.

  The steps were wooden, not stone. They had been built into the rocky cavity beneath the fort. Every step he took was an adventure, and the bottom of the wooden stairs came suddenly and jarringly, the absence of a final step shuddering through his leg. He squatted down in the gloom and felt the ground: soily sand, pretty dry, above a rocky base. He could feel the shape of the passageway around him; it seemed to have been carved by man, its edges relatively smooth. He was reminded of the absence he’d felt beneath his feet while floating at the sea-cave.

  He breathed in. He took a step. And then another. And then another.

  He walked forward again, hands outstretched. Ahead, something had disturbed the darkness. A yellow light, adding little illumination, such that he could see the shape of the space through which he was walking. He stepped forward with a little more confidence.

  After a few more minutes, he put his hands out again to either side, and they touched nothing. Breeze ruffled the end of his hairs, like a memory of the real world. He felt like he was standing in a larger space, and looked above and around him. But the darkness revealed nothing of its dimensions.

  ‘Stop!’

  A woman’s voice, sudden and loud, echoed around the chamber. A crisp island accent, spoken with real authority. He stopped, unhesitatingly.

  ‘Do not move, constable. Not another step, if you value your safety.’

  A light began to glow, and became deeper and stronger, as if its source were approaching him. It emerged from a cavity beside him, some thirty yards to his right, and as it glowed brighter it picked out the shape of the space of the room he was in. With every step, the space grew clearer.

  It was enormous, as big as a small church. He saw now that he was standing at the edge of a terrible slit in the floor, its bottom invisible in the darkness. This fissure ran across the far edge of this space. If he had carried on walking he would have fallen straight into the ravine. He took two steps back, an instinctive move of self-preservation. Steadying himself, he looked down into the fissure, but could see nothing in the gloom; the sound of the sea, though, was huge.

  Was he looking down into the sea-cave into which he had almost sailed earlier today? He thought he was.

  Alongside this fissure ran a series of works which reminded him of the try-works on the deck of the Martha. Huge iron pots, almost a dozen of them, stood in a row, some of them leaning out over the fissure. Channels of brick and metal ran from beneath these cauldrons or crucibles or whatever they were. Further along the fissure to his left there was the suggestion of more openings in the walls, leading, perhaps, to other tunnels or cavities beneath the fort. The whole installation looked very old.

  A figure had appeared from a space in the wall, carrying an oil lamp. She walked up to him in the gloom: a middle-aged woman, perhaps even old, wearing the clothes of a male worker, trousers and shirt and waistcoat. Her hair was tied up behind her head. She was as tall as him. Horton could not see her eyes in the flickering light, but when the woman spoke, her strong white teeth flashed in the shimmer from the oil lamp.

  ‘I have been waiting for you, constable,’ she said, in that forceful yet odd-sounding island accent, English and yet not.

  ‘You have? How did you know who I was, may I ask?’

  ‘Edgar told me all about you.’

  ‘Edgar Burroughs?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And where is Burroughs now? My shoulder would have words with him.’

  The woman frowned.

  ‘I know not where he is, constable. He struggled with Fernando, and escaped.’

  ‘He did not follow me into the tunnel.’

  ‘I believe he did not. Fernando removed his key.’

  ‘I saw no key.’

  ‘In the magnet, God has offered to the eyes of mortals for observation qualities which in other objects he has left for discovery to the subtler research of the mind and a greater investigative industry.’

  ‘Is that a quotation?’

  ‘It is. From a work by John Dee.’

  ‘Ah. Dr Dee. He seems to have cast a strange shadow over my life, these past months.’

  ‘John Dee’s shadow is a long one. It has lain over me for decades. Now, will you come with me, constable? It is time for all to be explained.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘All.’

  The warm breeze moved through the cavern, carrying with it the unmistakable smell of bitter almonds.

  She picked up a cup from the counter. It was chipped at one edge, and she passed the end of her index finger across the sharp little white wound, feeling it cut into her own skin, and watched with only mild interest as a deep-red drop of her own blood stained the powdery surface.

  She put the cup into the sink, and poured some water from a jug over it, and looked up, and shrieked. A face was at the window – an ugly, deformed face. It stared in at her, and muttered some sound from its throat, which she heard as a rasping series of unintelligible noises through the cheap, rippled glass.

  It was the ogre from the hillside. Its ugly noseless face stared at her longingly, and then it stepped back and held both arms out in a kind of surrender, a similar gesture to that which it had greeted her with on the hillside. It was a signal made pathetic by the hand missing on its left arm and the thumb missing on its right hand.

  It stepped back, away from the window and almost into the darkness. It gestured again with its thumbless right hand; a waving gesture. Come with me. Come with me.

  She was badly scared. Her heart felt like a rabbit darting about a field surrounded by hounds. But even so, she lifted her hand up and opened the little kitchen window. The creature took another step back, as if signalling that she should trust it not to attack. And this time it spoke recognisably English words.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ it said, and its voice was cracked with exhaustion and harsh with an accent she did not recognise.
/>
  ‘Come where?’

  ‘To where your husband is.’

  ‘And where is he?’

  ‘He was with the Company man. Now he is in the fort.’

  She frowned at it.

  ‘The Company man? Edgar Burroughs?’

  ‘Yes, yes, the Company man.’

  ‘He sent you?’

  ‘No, no. My mistress sent me. The Company man is not a good man.’

  ‘Who is your mistress?

  ‘Come, come. To the fort.’

  ‘How will we get there? It is dark.’

  ‘You will come on my horse. Come, my mistress said it was time.’

  ‘Time for what?’

  ‘Time for stories.’

  Horton followed the woman, as she turned down the opening from which she had emerged and walked down another corridor, similar to the one from which he had come. This one, though, was longer. Taking the fissure and the sound of the sea as his cue, he estimated that they were now walking in parallel to the edge of the island, to the south.

  The island had swallowed him up. He walked within it, once more a Jonah – although this time it was St Helena and not East India House that was the leviathan through whose innards he wandered. He had voyaged here chasing a mystery, one which was obscured beneath conspiracy and privilege back in London. He remembered the poor cabin boy on the Martha, being forced to climb down into the dead vacancy of the eviscerated sperm whale’s head, prodding the cavities of its brain with a sharpened shovel. At least that boy had had a shovel.

  The tunnel began to rise, and then the woman’s oil lamp picked out another set of wooden stairs fixed into the rock, rising up to yet another black door with no handle and no lock. She pulled an iron bar from a pocket within her dress, and moved it across the door’s surface as Burroughs had done, in a series of definite geometric sequences. From within the door he heard metal moving upon metal. And then the door swung open, the woman stepped through, and he followed her.