Melion frowned. “What of those Zhang Su killed? Did you…?” He swallowed thickly. “Were there any survivors from its attack?”
“Did I see to the proper disposal of the dead? Yes,” St. Cyprian flopped back into his chair. “Special Branch has certain contingencies in place for such encounters, though God knows I doubt that Molly expected to use them.” He paused. “And no. No survivors, thankfully.”
Melion sat back, somewhat relaxed. “And what of Zhang Su?”
“Someplace safe,” St. Cyprian said tersely. “Someplace where the eminent sage can hopefully rest in peace forever more.”
“We should all be so lucky,” Melion said as he finished his tea.
“Yes,” St. Cyprian said. He leaned forward. “William, let me help you.”
Melion smiled. “Worried about me Charles? Worried what else I might bring into the country? Or worried about what I might do?”
“All of the above,” St. Cyprian said bluntly. “The—ah—the illness. How…advanced is it?”
“Far enough to be distracting, not far enough to be a problem of your sort.”
“That’s not good enough, William,” St. Cyprian said.
“No, I suppose not. Feel free to check in as often as you like, if it’ll make you feel better.” He closed his eyes and massaged his temples, trying to block out the sounds of claws scrabbling at the roots of his soul.
“I’d rather help you.”
Melion laughed once, sharply, but then fell silent. Charles couldn’t help him. No one could help him. “No, Charles,” he said finally. “I will go on as I have begun. I have it under control for now. But, that doesn’t mean that I won’t be available for tea, when you have the time.” He looked at St. Cyprian. “I owe you a debt, Charles. And I mean to repay it.” He looked away. “But for today, I’m a bit weary.”
“Of course,” St. Cyprian said softly. He frowned. “I should be going anyway. Lady Molly has decided to call in her favor earlier rather than later. Something about an auction at Sotheby’s.” He rose to his feet. “William, if you need me…”
“I know where you live, Charles,” Melion said. “And you know where I live. In case anything…well.” Then he called, “Ghale—show Mr. St. Cyprian out please.”
Melion sat and listened as Ghale showed St. Cyprian out. As he heard the door close, he slumped in his chair with a great sigh. His limbs trembled and he felt sick and weary. The pain was back, and he dug at the scars with weak fingers, trying to massage away the memory of tearing fangs.
“You can come out now,” he said, after a moment.
Saxon Dorr stepped into the room. He’d arrived just before St. Cyprian, but for obvious reasons, Melion hadn’t wanted the twain to meet. It wouldn’t do to stoke the fires of Charles’ suspicions. “You didn’t tell him. Even after all of that, you didn’t tell the one man who might be able to help you,” Dorr said. He didn’t sound upset, or even pleased. Instead, he sounded amused, which to Melion’s way of thinking was much worse. “Why is that, I wonder?” he said, making his way across the room.
“Charles knows. Did you see his face? He knows. And he can’t help me. He means well, but he’s no Thomas Carnacki,” Melion said, not looking at Dorr. “No one can help me.” He clenched his fists. “I thought, maybe, that Zhang Su held some answer, but even that was nothing but a false hope. I’d hoped he’d found a way to cure himself, to burn the curse out of his system with deprivation and magics.” He closed his eyes and grimaced. “If even his wisdom failed to do anything more than imprison the beast he’d become, what hope is there for me?”
Dorr snorted. “How you do go on, old thing.” He gestured with his cane. “One thing I’ve learned in my long, wicked life is that while you still live, there is hope. You have looked to the past for help, and there is none. Fine. Why not look to the future, then? I hear that the Germans are doing wonderful things with molds and fungi. Or why not see if our mutual friend Cornelius can do something?”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Yes. I am,” Dorr said bluntly. “You’re a fool, Melion. The day you realize it, is the day you stop being one and perhaps become a more productive member of our motley clique.”
“You mean what’s left of it…Fleece is dead.”
“As is his daughter. Most unfortunate to see such a fine family so afflicted by tragedy. A house fire, I believe they will call it, in the end,” Dorr said as he took a seat opposite Melion. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Ketch?” Another figure moved into the room behind him. Tall and cadaverous, the dead man moved with a smoothness that belied his post-mortem state. He said nothing, but his hollow eyes burned with an ugly radiance and his fingers twitched with a strangler’s longing.
“Did she need to die?” Melion asked, tearing his eyes away from the corpse.
“You were the one baying for Fleece’s head not several days ago, my dear chap. And to answer your question, yes. Fleece, for all of his faults, was amenable to our methodology. His daughter, however, was more strong-willed than her father. If she had escaped, it would have been open war between the Order of the Cosmic Ram and your dear friend Charles. And that would have served no purpose whatsoever.” Dorr sat back on the couch, his hands resting on the head of his cane. “The Order is a resilient thing. Its membership stretches from the gutters of Whitechapel to the lofty heights of Westminster; it will find a new master—or mistress—directly, I feel. And when that time comes, we shall make ourselves known to them, and see whether they are…our sort of fellow.”
Melion shook his head. “It could take months for it all to shake out.”
“Time is on our side, William. Yours, perhaps, moreso than mine. There are benefits to your situation, you know, even if you can’t see them from the depths of your pit of despair at the moment. I have heard of a certain Polish nobleman, similarly afflicted, who has lived for—well—centuries. Think of the wonders that a man such as yourself might experience, were he to take full advantage of his peculiar ailment.”
“Advantage…?” Melion glared at his guest. “I see no advantage. Only an eternity of unrelenting horror stretching out before me.”
“Cornelius was correct. You do have a penchant for melodrama. Eternity of unrelenting horror indeed.” Dorr sniffed. “Given your temperament, I’d give you a few centuries at most.” He smiled. “Then, it is all rather moot, is it not? I saw the boy’s face, as he left. I’d wager he’s already wondering if he can bring himself to end your suffering.”
Melion flinched. Charles St. Cyprian was a good man. And there were few things more dangerous than a good man doing what he thought was right. He looked at his hands and said, “I won’t have him hurt, Saxon. I am many things, but not that. Not yet.”
“Perish the thought,” Dorr said, thumping the floor with his cane. “St. Cyprian is far too valuable to sacrifice unnecessarily.”
Melion looked up. “What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?” Dorr said. “Once upon a time, I approached a Royal Occultist about joining our merry little quorum. I was rebuffed. Soon after, he vanished, swallowed up in the night-black belly of the earth. As the situation stands, things worked out well.” Dorr smiled again, this time showing his teeth. “I considered making my offer to the current incumbent, but you talked me out of it. But I will have my use of him regardless, William. We have more enemies than just the late, lamented Sadie Fleece; enemies who would wreck all that we have sought to build. If St. Cyprian and his nasty little apprentice can be aimed properly, we shall reap the bounty of their efforts. And if not, well…I am given to understand that Mr. Ketch is quite eager to reacquaint himself with Charles St. Cyprian. Aren’t you, Mr. Ketch?”
Ketch’s fingers twitched like the legs of a spider. Melion shuddered.
Dorr smiled. “Now, where’s that man of yours? I could do with a good cup of tea.”
An Excerpt from
Book 3
THE
INFERNAL
EXPRESS
Coming 2015
PROLOGUE
New Bond Street, the West End, London
Charles St. Cyprian looked around the auction hall in wonder and not a little annoyance. Presentation tables seemed to groan beneath objects of the outré and occult. Crude statuary looted from Ponapean dynasties shared space with framed pages ripped from long banned grimoires, and curious oscillating devices were mounted above display cases of dreadful amulets and talismans of rare origin. “Look at these items—an uncorrected proof of Ferguson’s Devils of Xonira, a chunk of the Screaming Skull of Tavistock, a second edition of Meikle’s Vampyricon ex Albania, the etched finger-bones of Gough-Thomas. This is a ruddy black auction isn’t it?” He blinked. “I say…is that a human jawbone?”
“That particular remnant is afflicted with a potent curse,” Peveril, a representative of the esteemed brokerage in charge of the auction, said. “When the moonlight touches it, it becomes the lower jaw of a wolf. Found in the ruins of a monastery in Clontarf, I believe.” Peveril was a thin, sallow-faced sort, who seemed to vibrate on his own particular nervous wavelength. He’d met them at the front door of the Bond Street firm and escorted them down to the hall, where he now hovered like a mother hen over the gruesome array of items up for auction, as his staff bustled about quietly in the background.
“What’s a black auction?” Ebe Gallowglass asked. She was dark and feral looking, with black hair cut in a razor-edged bob and a battered flat cap resting high on her head. She wore a man’s clothes, hemmed for a woman of her small stature, and a man’s coat, dangling from her finger, over one shoulder. With the coat off, the heavy, unpleasant shape of the Webley-Fosbery revolver she habitually carried holstered under her arm was clearly visible. In contrast, St. Cyprian was tall and rangy with an olive cast to his features and hair just a touch too long to be properly fashionable. He wore a well-tailored suit straight from Gieves and Hawkes, in Savile Row, and wore it well.
Clothes made the man, in his opinion, and he spared no expense in making sure that everyone knew just what sort of man he was. The sort of man who could announce himself as the Royal Occultist in the Year of Our Lord 1920, and keep a straight face. The sort of man who regarded the investigation, organization and occasional suppression of That Which Man Was Not Meant to Know—including vampires, ghosts, werewolves, ogres, fairies, boojums, boggarts, barghests and the occasional worm of unusual size—by order of the King (or Queen), for the good of the British Empire to be not just a profession, but a calling.
St. Cyprian was the latest in a long line of men to hold the post of the Queen’s Conjurer, since Dr. John Dee had been named Royal Occultist by Good Queen Bess. If she lived long enough, his assistant, Gallowglass, would have his job in her turn, and be welcome to it, given that he’d likely be dead. They had never really talked about it. They had never really talked about a lot of things. And he hoped that they would go on not having to talk about things for some years to come.
“An auction, obviously,” St. Cyprian said, replying to Gallowglass’ query even as he peered at a framed, hand-drawn map of a region of the Congo. According to the tag, it was the work of one Sir Wade Jermyn. The name was familiar. He shook his head. Poor Arthur, he thought sadly. He and Carnacki had been present for the sad events at Jermyn House in 1913, alongside Professor Challenger and a few others, when Sir Arthur Jermyn had taken his own life, and in the doing, saved all of theirs. He turned to look at Gallowglass. “A black auction, my erstwhile apprentice, is an auction of the outré. A sale of real estate from the demimonde, as it were.”
“What’s a demiwhateveritis?”
“Unpleasant,” St. Cyprian said.
“So, like our place, then,” Gallowglass said, lifting a bit of silk to examine the painting hidden beneath. She whistled. “Cor, he’s a pretty one, ain’t he?”
“Ah, yes, the Wotton bequest—from the collection of Lord Henry Wotton, believed to be the remains of the lost masterpiece of the painter, Basil Hallward,” Peveril murmured, plucking the silk from Gallowglass’ hand and shooing her back. He lowered the silk and smoothed it daintily. “Believed to be a portrait of the infamous libertine, Dorian Gray, who went missing a few years prior to the war.”
“I heard about that,” St. Cyprian said. “Carnacki was asked to investigate Grey’s disappearance, but, well, with the war and all, it got lost in the shuffle. I remember meeting Wotton, briefly. Portly, older chap, liked his brandy a bit much.”
“I remember Harry,” someone said. “Bit of an ass, and something of a rakehell himself, before he went bust. In his silver years now, and broke as beezer, the old fool.” St. Cyprian turned to see a woman closing the hall doors behind her. He smiled.
“Ta, Molly,” he said. She held out her hands, and he took them, smiling. She gave him a quick peck on either cheek. “We’re here, as requested.”
Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk, formerly of Scotland Yard, now seconded to Special Branch, was closing in on the autumn of middle age, and was perhaps twenty years his senior, with hair that was still mostly a lustrous chestnut save for several prominent streaks of silver. She was dressed well, as if for afternoon tea at the Savoy, and carefully arranged her skirts as she took the seat Peveril held out for her. “As I knew you would be, Charles. You have many failings, but tardiness is not one of them,” she said, smiling. “Curiosity, on the other hand…”
He rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t curiosity that compelled my attendance, Molly. As you oh so subtly pointed out last time we spoke, I owe you a favour.” He spread his hands. “And thus, here I am. Do your worst.”
“Oh Charles, do hush. Melodrama is not required at this juncture.” Molly picked up a bell jar off of the table beside her, containing a tribal fetish doll. The doll was all eyes and teeth, and as Molly peered at it, it lunged at her, slamming its wooden face against the glass. Startled, she dropped the jar. Peveril made a sound like a dying cat as it tumbled towards the floor. St. Cyprian lunged and caught it before it shattered.
The doll flung itself savagely at the glass, biting and clawing. St. Cyprian grimaced and set it back on the display table. “Nasty little bugger. Zuni?”
“Y-yes,” Peveril said, mopping at his brow with a handkerchief. “O-often erroneously identified as African in origin, it is in actuality North American. A-ah-a representation of a spirit of the hunt.” He swallowed. “Please don’t agitate him. If he gets loose, we’ll never get him back in the jar in time for the auction.”
“Yes, lawks, wouldn’t want anyone to lose out on the opportunity to own a feral bit of statuary, what?” St. Cyprian wiped his hands on his trousers and stepped away from the table. “Molly, are you telling me that you approve of this sort of thing?”
“Not in the least, Charles. But dealing in devil dolls isn’t illegal these days,” Molly said. She reached out and poked him in the arm. “And as you yourself are perfectly aware, one does not need to approve to do one’s duty.” She gestured at the collection. “Besides which, none of this is our concern.”
“The evil doll isn’t our concern?”
“No,” Molly said, bluntly. She pointed. “That is the object of our quest today, young Galahad. And the reason I asked you to come.”
St. Cyprian followed her gesture, and saw a small, black box. It was open, revealing an interior inlaid with velvet, on which rested a single black pearl. It seemed to shimmer wetly in the light, and his psychical senses gave a twitch. “Is that…?”
“The Sforza Pearl, yes,” Molly said. “Plucked from the skull of the Devil himself by Muzio Attendolo Sforza, the founder of the line, or so the stories say.”
“They also said it helped him in battle. He could turn defeat into victory with a single word, and his family prospered for as long as the pearl was in their possession.” He scratched his chin as he examined the pearl. “Which was a century, give or take.” He peered at Molly. “If the pearl is here, I assume that means our…mutual friend has returned.”
Molly nodded grimly. “The gentlema
n who put the pearl up for auction turned up with a broken back and his head on backwards, a few days ago.”
“And the pearl itself was almost stolen from our representatives en route to London,” Peveril said. “Luckily, they were armed, and possessed of a fast automobile.” He licked his lips. “The—ah—the thief wrung the neck of one of them, regardless.” He took a breath. “In all my years of organizing black auctions, I have never seen such violence.” He hesitated. “Not until after the bidding is done, at any rate.”
St. Cyprian was about to reply, when Molly interjected, “It’s definitely the Creeping Man, Charles. He’s been sighted in the city, and he’s likely already on his way here.”
“The whosits?” Gallowglass said. She had the jar containing the Zuni doll in her hands and was shaking it repeatedly, further aggravating the tiny monstrosity. She giggled as the doll snapped helplessly at her. St. Cyprian couldn’t say which was more unpleasant—the hideous noises coming from the doll, or the sound of Gallowglass giggling.
He took the jar from her and set it back down. “The Creeping Man. We don’t know his name, or even if he has one. All we know is that he wants the pearl and he’ll rather messily kill anyone who gets between him and it. Also, he’s roughly the size of an elephant, with arms like an orang-utan and the disposition of a fairly upset badger.”
“Is he bullet-proof?”
“No.”
“Then why do I care what his disposition is?” Gallowglass said.
“Because, while bullets do not bounce off of him, they also don’t bother him overly much. Nor do blades, garrottes, drowning, fire or collapsing buildings. I have a list somewhere.” He patted his coat, as if looking for said list. “I keep a running tally of failed methods of dispatch. Eventually, we’ll run into one that puts him down for good.”
The Jade Suit of Death (The Adventures Of The Royal Occultist Book 2) Page 19
