The True History of the Strange Brigade

by Cassandra Khaw

  “I agree… about his mind. We must take care, then; employ diplomacy. Still, I must disagree on recruitment.”

  “I’m sure you could convince Broadway—”

  “Nothing to do with them. I won’t allow it.”

  The archivist stood up quickly. “He won’t be stopped. It would only raise more questions that you could not answer.”

  Webster was taken aback; the woman was talking to her as an equal, and she found herself, grudgingly, respecting her all the more. But something else was at work here.

  “Who is he to you?”

  The woman stared back, blinking but impassive as stone. She closed her eyes and breathed in. “That’s irrelevant, Lady Webster.”

  “It’s my job to determine what is and isn’t relevant and act,” Webster said, tapping the desk.

  The door burst open and a man nearly fell over Webster. “Reports. Another attack.”

  The other woman flew around her desk, snatched the papers. “Where?”

  The man, breathing hard, said, “Oxford.”

  DE QUINCEY PORED over the documents from his father’s desk. Now and then a word or phrase would jump out, then fly away. He followed the text with his left hand, and jotted down his interpretation with his right. Cuneiform, Latin, Arabic: the cultures blended and clashed, obscuring his father’s contention and drive. He noted strange runes and patterns, and traced them with his hand. He muttered them awkwardly, in languages he had barely understood years ago, and even less now. Speaking out loud helped him make sense of what he was reading.

  He soon realised, though, that he had gained no sense of what it meant. It was like a code.

  It was code. He began noticing faint traces of symbols throughout the pages, and set back to it, trying to identify the symbols, to identify a pattern.

  Eventually, he sat back and sighed. He had papers to mark, lectures to prepare. This was a futile. He figured he was trying to assuage his guilt at abandoning his father, for letting him rot in a dying house. The police were investigating; what use was an archaeologist?

  He rubbed his eyes and looked about the room, then froze. He slowly rocked forward, chair creaking as it hit the floor. Both hands on the desk, he leaned forward, staring at his father’s ancient map. The old man’s writing was still there, but now, in this light, he noticed something else in the reflection. He turned his head slightly, squinting; the window.

  He got up, chair scraping, and went to touch the glass. Someone had drawn on the window in ink, he couldn’t tell how recently. The pattern was similar. He turned and looked at the map. The shadows cast by the symbols fell onto a specific place he had long known about, one he knew intimately, one he was soon returning to.

  He grabbed the papers again and muttered the names of what he saw. “Shadow…. Memory… heart… stone and god… lives lost… regained… grant me… the vision… to see.”

  He looked back at the map. That was it.

  That was where his father was.

  As he returned to his desk, he heard a noise outside in the hall. At first he didn’t recognise it, but it grew louder, resolving into a scream. A long, unrelenting scream, rising in intensity. He watched in horror, through his office windows that looked into the corridor, as another professor ran past. He heard another sound now, another scream—no… a howl. Something was in the hallway, and it was coming closer.

  He dove behind his desk and peered out.

  He heard feet padding down the passage, slowly. He could see… smoke? Two thin plumes rising up, but they were moving. Then sniffing. A dog?

  No. Something else.

  His door burst in as the creature quivered on the threshold, snarling and spitting. He peered carefully from his desk, but wasn’t quite sure what it was in the gloom. He stopped trying to see, moved back completely behind his desk, breathing, not daring to move. Fear gripped him, like a trap around his ankles. He focused on listening instead of looking now.

  He heard the heavy footfalls drawing closer; his breathing seemed suddenly the loudest thing in the world. It neared the corner of his desk…

  Footsteps, outside in the corridor. The creature’s head snapped around and it ran out into the corridor, howling. Then there was nothing but silence.

  What had he just seen?

  HE WAS HOLDING a steaming cup of tea when Inspector Warren found him amid a gaggle of police officers. Squeezing his way through, he gently touched De Quincey on the shoulder.

  “Good God,” he boomed. “What a mess. How are you, professor?” He wasn’t looking at De Quincey when he asked, but then, De Quincey wasn’t looking at him either.

  “I’m fine, thank you. Just frightened. Can someone tell me what happened?”

  They were all in one of the common rooms. Some students emerged from wherever students disappear to, clutching books and papers. He thought he recognised one of his own, though he could never really tell them apart.

  “It looks like some kind of rabid creature got in,” Warren said. “Unfortunately got one of your night watchmen. His name was Henry… did you know him?”

  De Quincey did not want to seem insensitive—it didn’t seem appropriate to tell Warren he could barely tell his own colleagues apart, let alone staff—so he just nodded. “I think so, yes.”

  Warren pinched his lips, still looking down the bloodied hallway. People were kneeling over patches of blood and body parts and the smell was becoming overwhelming. De Quincey went to stand, but Warren gently pushed him down.

  “Sorry, professor,” he said. “I’m afraid I am going to need some more details from you.”

  “What?” De Quincey barked. “I told… you people everything I know. Do you think I had a hand in killing some watchman I don’t even know?”

  Warren finally looked at him. “I thought you said you knew him?”

  De Quincey blinked, cursing himself. “Yes… no. I think I did? Look, why would I… can I go?”

  Warren turned to a nearby officer. They muttered things to each other, Warren jerking his head toward De Quincey. The other officer nodded and walked away with determination.

  “Very well,” Warren said. “Officer Addison is going to go ahead of you and check your home, make sure everything is okay.”

  “My home? What does this have to do with my home? Just what is going on here?”

  Warren looked around nervously, and De Quincey realised everyone was staring at him. He had been shouting without realising it.

  “Professor De Quincey, if you’d come with me…” Warren’s voice was calm and De Quincey felt no accusation in it. It appeared Warren genuinely was concerned.

  “Fine.”

  The two men walked outside, De Quincey yearning to smoke despite having avoided it for years. It was too close to his father, too close to being part of who that man was.

  FROM A DISTANCE, Lady Webster and a few others watched two men leave the halls of the university. The police officer—she guessed—was a bear of a man, all hair and ears and eyebrows. The man next to him was obviously the professor. His eyes were distant, his skin pale and his clothes a mess. He had clearly been through some kind of horrific event. He clutched his coat as a child would its blanket. How could she ever recruit someone like this to the Brigade?

  “He’s stronger than he seems,” the archivist said to her, as if reading her thoughts. Another man whispered into the woman’s ear. “One of our informants in the police say it’s a possible Ripper attack. That’s two in Oxford alone.”

  There was the name no one wanted to speak of: Ripper. The infamous killer that had stalked the streets of London decades before seemed to have returned: the brutality, the butchery, the complete lack of evidence. Only Webster and her colleagues had managed to prevent the news leaking out wider, stopping anyone making the connections.

  At the time, they had furnished the press with fake evidence—it was someone in the Royal family, a doctor, a police officer, to list just a few—and the glut of data had simply overwhelmed the hounds. They ha
dn’t allowed the public to focus on any one suspect, and thus no one could grasp the truth. The attacks themselves eventually stopped, before the Department had worked out who—or rather, what—the Ripper was. She wasn’t sure it had returned, but she would not be surprised.

  If it was indeed the Ripper, the question was, why now? And why De Quincey? Whatever it meant, her organisation still had to cover it up. This could not get out. Explanations were necessary. Thankfully, her people in Scotland Yard had already garnered the necessary evidence for investigation, replacing them with their own narrative pieces: a wild animal of some kind. A dog? A wolf?

  De Quincey got into a carriage and was off. She needed to know why De Quincey was attacked.

  BEFORE HE COULD get into his own house, he had to wait while men combed through his office, bedroom and cellar. His house was modest, a mid-terrace that displayed bricks more than paint. Still, it was cleaner than most spaces and the neighbours kept to themselves. He had a tiny garden, but otherwise it was an unremarkable little house—all narrow angles and crooked walls. He had no time for repairs until it was necessary.

  He spent most days either at the university preparing for digs, or out in the field. His home was where he slept—when he slept—and stored his clothes.

  He actually preferred working at home, despite the endless books, sources and so on at the university. Home afforded him privacy—just him and the dead, ground to dust by history and waiting for him to reach in and retrace their stories.

  Warren stood by him, watching the men complete their search.

  “Be assured, professor, officers are patrolling this and other neighbourhoods for your protection.”

  De Quincey looked at him. “That’s a lot of work for just some wild animal.”

  Warren sniffed. “We’re not sure it was, yet.”

  “‘Not sure’? I told you what I saw. Is this why you’re searching my house? You doubt my story?”

  A shout from one of the other men signalled to Warren it was safe, and the inspector turned to the professor and waved to the steps. The two men ascended.

  Once inside, De Quincey began shutting doors and windows, muttering about the cold. Warren nodded and waited patiently. After a few minutes, the archaeologist made tea for both of them, and they sat down in his small sitting room.

  “Lovely home you have,” Warren said, looking around.

  “Tell me. What’s happening?”

  Warren nodded. “We’ve seen this type of killing before.”

  “I see.”

  “A few years back. My superiors are not convinced it is a habitual killer, let alone the return of one that might not have existed, but I have my suspicions. They want very strict definitions of what constitutes a serial killer, you see. We don’t want the public in a panic.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly calm.” De Quincey looked around. “I felt targeted. It was looking for me.”

  “The dog?”

  “The… dog, yes. The hound. Whatever it was.”

  “Yes, sir.” Warren conveyed nothing but patience.

  De Quincey looked at Warren for a while, slowly setting his cup down. “It’s clear you don’t believe me, Warren…”

  “Now, sir…”

  De Quincey held up a hand. “And yet you still post guards outside my door?”

  Warren sighed. “Just because I don’t believe events happened just as you said, doesn’t mean I think you’re out of danger. Until I know for sure what’s happening, I need you to be safe.”

  “Very well.”

  The men sat in silence for some time before the police officer left, leaving Archimedes in his lounge with the soft light of afternoon fading into twilight. He eventually got up and went to his cramped study. He picked up his notes and decided to throw himself into work rather than worry. He pushed aside papers until he saw the outline of the crown of Dagan, roughly drawn by his own hand but nonetheless an impressive depiction by any measure.

  He sat down. He began plotting the dig and trying to forget that there was perhaps someone or something trying to get him, for reasons he could not understand. What would someone want—

  “—WITH AN ARCHAEOLOGIST?” one of Lady Webster’s younger assistants asked.

  She raised an eyebrow at the head archivist, who ignored both her and the question. “It doesn’t matter. We must get to him soon.”

  The young man nodded and whistled to the horses. The carriage was essentially invisible amidst the sea of carriages, all black and damaged. The horses’ hooves sparked on the cobbles as they drove to De Quincey’s home. The two women sat in silence almost the entire way.

  “Are you sure you do not wish to tell me more about who he is to you?”

  The other woman stared out the window. “That would take up unnecessary time, Lady Webster. Time, I believe, neither you nor he has. Perhaps one day.”

  Lady Webster nodded. She would have better luck drawing milk from sunlight.

  Arriving at De Quincey’s home, Webster, her team, and the archivist scouted the area to make sure it was secure. After a few words, the archivist disappeared back into the carriage, muttering something about important work elsewhere and a barely sarcastic mention of the Lady’s abilities. Webster rolled her eyes, but let her go. Once satisfied that her people were hidden, Webster ascended the stairs and knocked on De Quincey’s door.

  IT FINALLY HIT him.

  For hours, he had been looking at the drawing of the crown, and at the maps. Something wasn’t sitting right. Now he realised he recognised the symbols: they were the marks he’d seen in his office.

  The drawings were from old notes of his father’s—the ones that had helped him trace the location of the crown to Iraq. He’d not mentioned them to his funders, lest they decide Mad Old De Quincey’s ideas were too ridiculous to take seriously, but the younger De Quincey had been desperate—he needed progress to secure funding, and so had quietly been digging through his father’s works for few years, trying to find anything substantial among the hodgepodge of nonsense and excitement and half-forgotten dreams. And he’d found the crown.

  There was nothing particularly special about the crown, to his knowledge. Dagan barely registered on anyone’s radar as worth the research. Sure, he had been called a God-King, but which king wasn’t, at the time?

  The notes and symbols were a mixture of languages, but between them they told a story. Where had his father even dug them up?

  His personal library.

  His father hated working at the university; he spent as much time as he could in his own study. De Quincey would have to return home, to find the books these symbols came from, to divine their meaning. Knowing his father, the key wasn’t in the symbols themselves, but the books they came from—in them, he was sure to find—

  There was a knock at the door. He blinked for a moment as reality came crashing back, and stood, his chair scraping—he hadn’t even noticed sitting down again, he’d been stomping around the room, a habit from his student days. He walked to the door and yanked it open, only belatedly realising how dangerous that could be.

  Before him, a hard-faced woman stared at him for a moment before turning and nodding to the dark. He registered movement in the shadows, and was suddenly confused and afraid.

  “Professor De Quincey? Archimedes De Quincey?”

  “Y-yes?” De Quincey’s hand shook slightly, pressed flat against the door. “What’s happening? Who are…?”

  The woman almost slid into his house, barely touching him. The way she moved scared him more than it should—refined, graceful, yet there she was, already making herself comfortable in his lounge. He poked his head out the door, but saw nothing but mist. It didn’t occur to him until later to wonder about the police patrol.

  The door closed and he turned back to the lounge. He started repeating his questions, but she interrupted him.

  “Don’t go to Iraq, professor. You will die.” The woman sat with her legs folded, showing well-worn but impressively sturdy boots.
She was the most elegant person he had seen, and also appeared dressed for any battlefield.

  “What? Who are—?”

  “You are trying to find the crown of Dagan, and I am imploring you”—she leaned forward, hands pressed together, elbows resting on her knees, eyes probing—“drop it. Move on. We will fund your book. Ignore this one trip.”

  He closed his eyes, breathing out. “Please. Tell me who you are.”

  “You can call me Webster. I work for a branch of His Majesty’s Government.”

  “Which branch?”

  “I am… not at liberty to say at this time.”

  De Quincey had been dealing with government bureaucrats his entire life, but this was something new. He’d run into political issues, clashed with governments of foreign nations, travelled into civil wars, among people keen to convey their hatred of the colonial invaders—as much as he wanted to stay away from conflict, it was sometimes unavoidable.

  He’d spent half his life digging, but he had never really wanted to take the artefacts. Not out of some moral duty or sense of compassion; they just weren’t his to keep. For him, the acquisition of knowledge was the thing, not the trinkets he found on the way. This philosophy hardly gelled with his funders, though, who wanted things to touch and feel, who sometimes had dealings with the government themselves, who wanted riches and other nonsense to help secure power in the world.

  Whatever was necessary for knowledge.

  He told himself the knowledge would benefit the world, that there were bigger issues than vases or tombs. Some part of him knew it was wrong, but he’d never bothered to interrogate why—he’d leave that to his philosophy colleagues. He had books to fund.

  “So I should just trust your word?” He folded his arms.

  She smiled, though her cold eyes barely shifted. He blinked at the sheet of paper she was holding out, covered with familiar signatures and seals—he hadn’t seen her produce it. He took it carefully, squinting at it. It signed by all his funders; his head of department, too. It indicated not only that he would still receive funding, but significantly more. More book deals, the possibility of tenure. His entire future outlined in carefully-worded governmentally-fuelled prose. Right there. Just sign. Any non-compliance would be regarded, not merely as a violation of the university’s code of conduct, but as possible treason.