Down These Strange Streets

by George R. R. Martin; Gardner Dozois

  I made no more efforts to comfort. “So Mr. Harcourt considers you some sort of loaded weapon in his possession? Ready to go off when you are loved?”

  “He has never said as much, but that’s what I’ve understood by a gleam in his eye, and a quickening of interest, once I became of marriageable age. It was he who contrived to introduce me to a number of wealthy young men, until Archibald Adcocks took the bait. And he pressed me to accept, although I was inclined to wait.”

  “Regardless of what Mr. Harcourt believes—”

  “I know. And you’re right, I don’t believe it of myself. Mr. Harcourt imagines, because he kept himself so coldly distant, repelling my natural affection, and sent me to day school rather than risk my becoming too close to a kind governess, that I never was loved, and never loved anyone, since my father died.

  “But there was a girl at school . . . My guardian may have no idea how passionately girls can love each other, but I’m sure you will,” she said, with a look that should have made me blush. Instead, it made me smile.

  We looked at each other like conspirators. “I take it your friend remains alive and well?”

  “Indeed, and still my dearest friend, although we’re now more temperate in our emotions . . . or, at least, the expression of them. So, you see, I know my affection is not dangerous.”

  “And yet you seem to think that by becoming engaged to marry you, Mr. Adcocks signed his own death warrant. And that Mr. Randall is under threat for the same reason.”

  “Yes . . .” She looked thoughtful. “But not because of my feelings for him, or his for me. It’s something else. Marriage to anyone would take me away from this house, would remove me from my guardian’s collection. That’s it,” she said, and stood up.

  “What is it?”

  “He thinks marriage is the only way he might lose me. He’s never imagined I might simply decide to leave.”

  I stood up, too, to face her. “I don’t understand.”

  “Mr. Harcourt is scarcely sane when it comes to his collection. He cannot bear the thought of losing a single piece of it. He is happiest when gloating over it alone, and whenever he has a chance to add something new. Although he admits potential buyers, he only wants their envy and admiration as they view his objects—he will never agree to sell an item, no matter how much money he is offered.

  “And while he has been talking about my marriage since I was sixteen, and began pushing me at eligible bachelors on my eighteenth birthday, driven by thoughts of what he thinks will happen when I am once more part of a family, greedily imagining how his collection will grow after the violent, accidental death of my husband, he knows this will be possible only if he lets me go. In his twisted mind, I am part of his collection, and the thought of losing me, even only temporarily, and in aid of gaining more, is terrible to him.”

  “His mind is divided?”

  “I am sorry, Miss Lane. You should not have been brought into this. There was no need for William to enlist the aid of a detective. I should have realized that I am the only one who can end this madness.”

  She started back to the house and I followed. Although I had no idea what she intended, I felt that we were approaching crisis.

  She raised her fist to rap on the heavy oak, but at the very first blow, the door swung open.

  Harcourt was at the far end of the room, by the window, displaying something in a flat wooden box to Jesperson. They both looked around sharply as we entered, Harcourt startled and annoyed. Clearly, he had not expected us, and I could only assume that he had neglected to shut the door properly.

  “What’s the meaning of this disturbance?” he demanded, hastily shutting up the box.

  “I must speak with you.”

  “Let it wait. We have company.”

  “I am happy to have witnesses.” She took a breath. “I shall not marry.”

  I had tensed myself against the negative atmosphere upon entering the house, and had been particularly reluctant to enter Harcourt’s study, expecting it to be the epicenter, yet as I followed more slowly into that room, I found that what had been unpleasant and discordant was now harmonious. Using the metaphor of smell, consider bonfire smoke. A great waft in the face is horrible, but at the right distance, the scent of burning leaves and wood is pleasant.

  “You’ve rushed in here to say that? I am at a loss to understand why,” Harcourt replied coldly. “Your change of heart is of no interest to me. I suggest you write to Mr. Randall.”

  “You don’t understand. I mean I shall never marry.”

  His eyes bulged. “Are you insane?” Suddenly, he turned on me. “What have you been saying? What sort of mad rubbish, to turn her mind?”

  “Miss Lane had nothing to do with it,” Flora said swiftly. “I have been thinking matters over for the past several days, and only now decided to tell you—”

  “Oh, very likely!” He had been casting a venomous glare on me, but now stared coldly at Jesperson. “I’m afraid I must ask you to take this female person away, immediately.”

  I could see that my partner was at a loss: Should he leap to my defense, invent excuses, or pretend to a masculine solidarity that might leave the door open for future visits? Although I didn’t want to leave Flora alone with Harcourt, I didn’t know what we would achieve by trying to stay, so I left the room, just as Flora was demanding, “Am I not allowed to have my own friends?”

  “As long as I’m your guardian, Flora, you will do as I say. You’ll have nothing more to do with that female, and you will not break off your engagement. We’ll forget you ever said anything about it. Mr. Jesperson, if you please!”

  As they emerged, with Flora in the lead, I was surprised to see the hint of a smile on her face. She winked at me before turning on her guardian again.

  “So, I am to be your object and meekly allow your will to prevail in everything, until my twenty-first birthday changes everything?”

  “That will change nothing,” he said scornfully. “You don’t imagine you’ll be anything different than you are now? Than you’ve always been?”

  She flinched, but held steady. “In the eyes of the law.”

  “The law.” He snorted. “The law is an ass. It has nothing to say about you. It has no idea what you are.” His gaze on her was horrible.

  “I may as well go now,” she said quietly.

  “Go? What are you talking about?”

  “You are right that a few months will change nothing. You are pleased with the situation; I am not. So I shall leave.”

  She looked from me to Jesperson, saying, “If it’s not too much trouble . . .”

  He was swift to take her meaning. “Of course, come with us. Any help we can give—”

  I heard the rattle, and saw that the Chinese vase was rocking violently back and forth, until it tilted too far and fell, shattering against the hard floor, and spilling its burden of umbrellas and walking sticks.

  Only one of the sticks did not come to rest with everything else on the floor, but shot through the air, straight at Jesperson.

  If it had struck where it aimed, against his throat, I have no doubt it would have killed him, but he was quick. Almost as if he’d expected the attack, he stepped lightly aside, his arm rising, fluid and graceful, to catch the stick.

  Unlike an ordinary thrown object, the stick continued to move after it was caught, writhing and pulling to escape, while he gripped it more firmly, frowning as he looked for a thread or wire and tried to work out the trick of it.

  Certain there would be no invisible thread, I looked instead at Harcourt. His expression was nothing like those I’d seen on the faces of mediums or mentalists; he looked utterly astonished, and thrilled. If he had caused the stick’s activity, it was through a power hidden from his conscious mind, something he did not suspect and could not control.

  Then another movement, glimpsed from the corner of my eye, caught my attention, and as I turned to look, I heard the terrible grating, grinding noise made by the stone gargoy
le as it ponderously rocked itself across the floor. Although no one was near enough to be at risk if it fell over, I nevertheless called out a warning.

  Flora took one look and shouted: “Stop it! Stop it right now!”

  The gargoyle stopped moving, and so did the stick, although Jesperson still kept a tight hold and a wary eye on it.

  Harcourt took a hesitant step forward, his eyes still fixed upon the stick. “Give—give it to me, if you please, Mr. Jesperson,” he said. “That—that is the weapon that killed poor Mr. Adcocks; and before that, a young man in Plymouth. If not for your exceptionally quick reflexes, you would have been its third victim.”

  After a reluctant pause, Jesperson handed over the stick, saying, “You expected this might happen?”

  “Never,” the man gasped, staring at the stick in his hands with an unhealthy mixture of lust and fear. “Who would imagine that the instinct to kill would be inherent?”

  “You imagined it inherent in me,” said Flora. “A mindless, killing force so powerful that it could use me—a living, intelligent being—without regard for my own free will?”

  “No, no, certainly not,” he said, without conviction. “You were a mere infant, with no ability to think or act for yourself, when fate used you to terminate the lives of three innocent souls. It is quite different now.” He had been looking at her, but the lure of the object in his hands proved too much, and he soon returned to staring at it like a besotted lover.

  “You’ve always thought of me as another piece in your collection,” Flora said bitterly. “A mindless, soulless thing, and not even your favorite.”

  “Dear Flora, don’t be absurd. I know you are no ‘thing.’ You have been like a daughter to me. Have I not always cared for you as best I could? Bought you whatever your heart desired? My only concern has ever been to see you safely and happily married to the man of your choice, when the time came.”

  While my sympathies were entirely with Flora, I recognized that to an outside observer, she would seem hysterical, and Harcourt the sane one.

  “Yet you must have wondered,” Jesperson said, as if idly. “Eh, Harcourt? You surely wondered if your ward was intended by Fate for family happiness. Perhaps you saw her first engagement as a scientific experiment. The result was not as you hoped, but perhaps as you feared . . . ?”

  They exchanged a look, man to man, and although Harcourt shook his head ruefully, I saw the smug satisfaction beneath the solemn look.

  “You’re vile,” Flora murmured. She cleared her throat and announced, “I can never marry. I won’t put another life at risk.”

  This time, Harcourt did not protest. He shrugged and sighed, and said, “I would never force you to go against your will, no matter how foolish it seems to me.”

  “That’s not all. I’m leaving your collection today, Mr. Harcourt—”

  “Oh, come now. Don’t be childish. You can’t blame me for what you are!”

  “Not for what I am; only for what you’ve tried to make me. The atmosphere in this house is hideous, not because of the objects, but because of your gloating fascination with murder and violent death. I’m going. I won’t set foot in this house again as long as you are alive.”

  Having stated her intention, she made straight for the door.

  I felt the shudder that ran through the house even before her hand touched the door handle; it was a sensation so subtle yet so profound that I thought at first I might be ill.

  Harcourt yelled. His nose was bleeding; the walking stick had come to life again in his hand and seemed determined to beat him to death. He managed to remove it to arm’s length, and struggled to keep it under control. The gargoyle, too, was shuddering back to life, and, from the variety of creaks and groans and fluttering sounds I heard coming from the next room, so were other bits of the collection.

  “Move,” said Jesperson urgently, propelling me forward. “Get out of the house! Is there anyone else?” Hearing the shouts, the little maid who’d let us in reappeared, and, although looking utterly bewildered, she allowed him to usher her outside as well.

  We met Flora at the front gate and turned back to look at the house.

  “Where’s Harcourt?” Jesperson demanded. “He was right behind me.”

  “He won’t leave his collection,” said Flora. “He’ll have gone back for it. He used to worry aloud about what he should save first, if the house were on fire.”

  “But it’s the collection itself that’s the threat!”

  On my own, I might have left Harcourt to his fate, but when my partner ran back inside, I felt it my duty to follow. Mounting the front steps, I was able to see through the window into the study, and what I saw brought me to a standstill.

  Pale and portly Mr. Harcourt was leaping and whirling like a dervish, holding the silver-headed stick away from his body like a magic staff, as he struggled to avoid a flurry of small objects from striking him. Occasionally in his efforts he unconsciously pulled his arm in closer to his body, allowing the stick to give him a sharp crack on his leg or shoulder, and then he would shriek in pain or anger.

  Books and other things continued to tumble from the shelves. Many simply fell, but others seemed hurled with force directly at him, and these struck a variety of glancing blows against his body, head, and limbs. A glassfronted display case shook fiercely, as if caught in an earthquake, until it burst open, releasing everything inside. A great malignant swarm composed of small bottles, jars, needles, pins, razors, and many more things I could not recognize now enveloped the man, whose cries turned to a constant, terrified howling as they attacked him.

  Feeling sick, I turned aside and went indoors to my partner, who was throwing himself bodily against the solid oak door, as if he imagined he could force it open. Seeing me, he stopped and rubbed his shoulder, looking a little sheepish.

  I gave him one of my hairpins, assuming he would know how to use it.

  As he fiddled with the lock, I listened to the horrible sounds that accompanied the violence on the other side: thuds and thumps, shrieks and wails and groans, and then a shocking, liquid hissing, followed by a gurgle, and then the heaviest thud of all, and then silence.

  By the time Jesperson managed to get the door open, it was all over. Harcourt was dead. His bloody, battered corpse lay on the carpet, surrounded by the remnants of his murderous collection. Whatever life had possessed them had expired with his. There was a sharp, acrid stench in the room—I guess from the contents of various broken bottles—but nothing so foul as the atmosphere it replaced.

  “Vitriol,” said Jesperson. “Don’t look.”

  But I had already seen what was left of the face, and it was no more shocking than the sounds had led me to imagine.

  As I went out to give Flora Bellamy the news, and to send the maid to fetch the police, I already knew that this had not turned out to be a case I could write about for publication.

  And, as it developed, it got worse.

  It was fortunate indeed that Jasper Jesperson had some influential relatives who moved in the circles of power, for otherwise I think the local police would have been pleased to charge him with murder, in the absence of more likely suspects, and if he hadn’t done it, I was their next choice.

  Even though we might argue we had saved his life, our client was so far from pleased with the outcome of our investigations that he refused to pay us anything. It was not Harcourt’s death that bothered him so much as Miss Bellamy’s insistence on releasing him from their engagement. She would give him no better reason for her change of heart than to say that she was reconsidering how she might best spend her life, and that she was inclined to seek some form of employment by which to support herself “like Miss Lane.”

  Flora Bellamy never set foot inside The Pines again. Even though her guardian was dead, she had decided to take no chances, and hired others to empty the house before selling it. In his will, Harcourt left everything to his ward, with only one caveat: Although she could decide whether to keep or dispose of �
��the collection,” she must do so as a whole, and not break it up.

  This stipulation she decided to ignore.

  “Perhaps I’m wrong,” she said to me, the last time I saw her, “but I believe it could be dangerous. Individual objects are only things, but when gathered together, they became something more—first in Mr. Harcourt’s imagination, and then in reality.

  “The concept in law of the deodand was that something which had once done evil could be remade into something useful, even holy, by good works. That was not allowed to anything in Mr. Harcourt’s collection—his use of those things was opposed to good; it venerated the evil deed.”

  Her way of redemption was to donate everything that remained in the house to a good cause. Being extra cautious, she chose one so far away that she would not have to fear an accidental encounter with her former possessions, and had everything sent to a leper colony on the other side of the world.

  I took it as a positive sign that she did not feel obliged to sacrifice herself in a similar way.

  She decided to share a flat with her school friend, and embarked on a course of training in bookkeeping and office management.

  Jesperson and I, naturally, discussed the details of this case—which began with one unsolved murder, and concluded with two—at great length when we were alone together, and also with Mrs. Jesperson, but we were never able to agree upon how to assign the blame for the killings. We all agreed that both Adcocks and Harcourt were murdered, yet we also agreed that if there was no murderer, murder could not have been done.

  I hope our next case will be less of a curiosity.

  LORD JOHN AND THE PLAGUE OF ZOMBIES

  by Diana Gabaldon

  New York Times bestselling author Diana Gabaldon is a winner of the Quill Award and of the Corine International Prize for Fiction. She’s the author of the hugely popular Outlander series, international bestsellers that include Outlander (published as Cross Stitch in the UK), Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, and An Echo in the Bone, plus a graphic novel, The Exile, based on Outlander. The Lord John Grey novels are a subset of the Outlander series, being part of the whole but focused on the character of Lord John and structured (more or less) as historical mystery. The Lord John series includes the novels Lord John and the Private Matter, Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, and Lord John and the Scottish Prisoner (to be published Fall 2011), and a collection of Lord John novellas, Lord John and the Hand of Devils (including “Lord John and the Hellfire Club,” “Lord John and the Succubus,” and “Lord John and the Haunted Soldier”). She has also written The Outlandish Companion, a nonfiction volume, providing background, trivia, and resources, as well as articles on the writing and research of the series.