***
The five of them—Lestrade was struck by the resemblance between them all—sat around a table, drinking tea or smoking. They were silent and he saw fear in their eyes as they turned at his entrance.
“First things first, ladies,” he said. “I take it you all got a note at some point recently, asking you to go to the Needle?”
His hunch had been right, all had received such a note, and the only difference in them was the time at which they had been asked to arrive. He was rather relieved to note that the first of them, a Miss Margaret Weems—a doctor at the Royal Hospital—wasn’t due her appointment on the Embankment until nine that evening.
He also got more of the story than he had from Mary Miller, not a lot more, though. He tried to pin down a description of the photographer—the closest thing to a suspect he had right now and apparently the instigator of everything that followed. But apart from the fact that the man had been of slim build, and noticeably of some great age, there were few details to be had. The fact that ten years had passed, and an aged man would be now even more diminished by time—or even already be long dead—meant that, as a suspect, he was not the best material, but he was all that Lestrade had.
He was still pondering that conundrum as he went back to his office. Clarke was there with a rather portly chap in a tweed suit, who was introduced as Professor Wilkins—an expert on all things ancient Egyptian. Lestrade sent Clarke off to compile a list of photographers in the city and have men sent to each, then passed the vellum inscription to the professor.
It only took as long as the time for Lestrade to get a fresh pipe lit before the portly man exclaimed loudly.
“This is not right. This is not right at all.” He waved the English translation in his left hand. “This is fine, but this . . . ” He waved the vellum transcription of the glyphs. “This is all wrong. I know the glyphs on that stone intimately, and these are not those.”
“So what is it then? Who would go to the trouble of transcribing a fake like that?”
“I cannot tell you who or why,” the professor said. “But I know what. It is a spell, from the Book of the Dead, an incantation to provide the spell caster with eternal life. Something to do with the making of images and the sealing of promises. All mumbo jumbo of course, but jolly fascinating all the same.”
Lestrade took the vellum from the professor and was about to take another look at it when he saw the photographs of the women laid out on his desk. There should have been ten there, but now there were only nine.
***
The news arrived from the Needle mere minutes later. Two constables had been on guard at the obelisk, and had stopped a woman—’a well presented lady with a Scottish accent’—on approach to the monument. They had only been talking for seconds when the lady disappeared, right in front of them, giving the young constables quite a turn. Nothing made much sense to Lestrade in their story, but it had a ring of truth to it. The less flustered of the two constables told of the last thing he had seen—a smoky, insubstantial figure, man-like but not a man, fading into smoke as he was sucked into the tall stone. Lestrade did not have to check the names on the remaining cards, he already knew who it must have been—the missing Aberdeen woman—no longer missing, but lost, perhaps forever.
The tweedy professor had listened in puzzlement to the constables’ reports and now had questions of his own, but Lestrade waved him aside.
“This spell of yours,” he said. “Is there a way to counter it?”
The professor blustered.
“But surely you cannot put any credence in . . . ”
“What I can and cannot put credence in is not of your concern. Can the spell be countered?”
“Well, you could try burning it,” the professor said, then yelled out loud as Lestrade moved to do just that by taking the vellum over to the fireplace. “No, it has to be done in the presence of the caster! That is the way their magic worked. If the caster believes in it, he somehow makes it real.”
“So if he believes that burning will break the spell, then all I have to do is burn it in front of him so that he can see?”
The professor shrugged.
“As I said, it is all bally mumbo-jumbo, but that is the theory in any case.”
“It is about all I have at the moment,” Lestrade said. He folded the vellum sheets and put them in his inside pocket and also put the remaining photograph there alongside. It was time to talk to the women again, the clock on his mantel told him it was fast approaching nine o’clock.
***
The other four women were at the opposite end of the table from Margaret Weems, as if afraid to be too close as the time of her appointment approached. The doctor, however, was made of stern stuff. She looked Lestrade in the eye.
“Have you caught the blaggard?”
Lestrade shook his head.
“We do not even know who he is, where he is, or what his motive is.”
“I can tell you his motive, right enough,” she replied. “He collects years. He told us as much back then in the room above the bar, ten good ones for us, then the rest for him, that was the deal, that was his promise. Well, I’ve had my ten, and enjoyed every minute of it. I’ve had a better life than most anybody I know, so if he can get good use out of what I have left in me in return, I reckon I got a good deal out of it.”
Her eyes told another story—of fear and bewilderment, but she wasn’t about to let it show in front of the others. The room fell quiet. The sound of the Westminster clock chiming the hour drifted in through the open window. Margaret Weems looked up at Lestrade.
“Would you hold me? I think I should like someone to hold me.”
Two of the other women smiled thinly as the doctor rose and leaned herself against Lestrade, who put his arms around her somewhat gingerly, unused as he was to public shows of affection. The lady gripped him tightly in response. He was about to protest and gently remove himself from her clutches when the air got much colder and a haze seemed to form between them and the window—a gray, smoky, haze that solidified and thickened, taking on the semblance of a thin, somewhat bent, human figure.
“It’s him! It’s him,” one of the women at the far end of the table shrieked, and stood so fast that she overturned her chair. Margaret Weem did not look round. She had her face buried in the cloth at Lestrade’s shoulder, and her grip was so tight that the Inspector was quite unable to move.
Big Ben chimed its ninth stroke. The shifting haze streamed closer to Lestrade. He turned his back so that he would be between the encroaching mist and the lady, and found that his arms were empty, her weight having lifted away leaving only its memory behind. Like Mary Miller before her, she had gone in the blink of an eye.
The gray mist, seemingly thicker now, wafted away, heading for the window.
It was only then that Lestrade remembered the vellum sheets in his pocket, but by the time he had removed them and got out his matches, the mist had already drifted off, leaving out of the window, traveling against the breeze.
Lestrade counted the remaining photographs.
Now there were eight.
***
“Who has the next appointment,” he asked, rather more sharply than he might have, but his dander was up, along with a developing grim determination that he would lose no more of them.
“I am at eleven,” the lady furthest from him said. He looked through the photographs and found her—Charlotte Newman—Clarke had told him earlier her husband was something big at one of the city banks.
“Right, the rest of you stay here. My men will ensure your safety, although when I am done, I do not think you will have anything else to worry about.”
He was aware that statement was more bravado than fact, but if it stopped the ladies fretting in his absence it would have done its job in any case.
He took Mrs. Newman by the arm and led her out of the room. He stopped by his office just long enough to collect his service revolver and the tin box with its contents, and then, accompanied by
Sergeant Clarke and the two constables who had been on earlier guard duty, made his way once again down to the Embankment—and the Needle.
They arrived early, at quarter to ten. Lestrade had the two constables and Clarke keep watch on the opposite side of the street while he went to stand at the obelisk with the lady. It was a damp night again, and thin wisps of fog drifted to and fro on the river, but they had a clear view along the whole stretch of the Embankment so they would see any new arrivals in good time.
The lady hardly spoke—seeing the Weems woman being taken had brought home to her the grim reality of her situation. Between ten and quarter past the hour she talked of their promise, of the decade that had passed too quickly, and of her good life with a good man, but as the hands of Big Ben crept ever closer to her allotted time, so she fell more and more quiet.
Lestrade passed the time smoking his pipe and periodically checking that he still had matches—and the vellum sheets—in his jacket pocket. Every so often he counted the photographs. No more had gone, so at least he could be thankful of that much.
The lady started to twitch around quarter to eleven, and decided that she would like to leave, and that her husband would be putting in a stern word against her treatment by the Yard. She even began to walk off until Lestrade, none too kindly, pulled her back to the Embankment wall. He might not get another chance at this, and he could not let the lady divert him from his chosen course.
And then it was too late for her to run.
***
Lestrade had been paying extra attention to the base of the plinth, and with good cause. At one minute to the hour, a fine mist rose in the cavity where he had found the tin box, streaming up and out until once again a thin, bent figure stood there. It was definitely more defined now.
It has been feeding.
The woman at Lestrade’s side almost fell, her legs going weak. In the second that the Inspector took to keep her upright the mist had moved, surging toward them, intent on reaching the woman. Lestrade stepped in front of her and, taking out the vellum sheets, lit a match and applied it to the bottom of them.
The mist came on, gathering definition. Lestrade looked into a face that was lined with wrinkles, eyes blazing a blue fire, a face that looked as if had gazed into hell itself.
Then the flames took hold of the vellum, so hot that Lestrade had to drop the sheets to the ground where they burned fiercely. The figure in the mist loomed high over Lestrade and the woman, tall, taller, almost as high as the top of the obelisk, the burning vellum reflecting in its eyes. The vellum kept burning—there was little left of it now but smoldering ashes. The misty figure seemed to swell again, a huge gray cloak ready to fall and envelop them.
Lestrade flinched and, for the second time that night, a lady grabbed tight at him in fear for her life.
The last of the vellum burned away. The last scrap of flame flickered, guttered, and went out. There was a single, high, scream that seemed to echo the length and breadth of the Embankment. Then there was only ash on the cobbles, and a rapidly thinning fine mist that quickly dispersed in the breeze off the river and was gone.
Lestrade turned away as the woman slumped against his arm and started to weep. He gently removed himself from her clutches and counted the photographs in his pocket—eight—a steady eight. And when he took them out and turned them over, their backs were blank, all trace of the blood signatures and numbers was gone.
He bent and gathered up the ashes of the vellum, then put them and the photographs back in the tin box. He laid it back in its place in the cavity at the base of the obelisk—a mystery for someone else to solve in ninety years’ time—and pushed the cast iron covering back into place with his boot.
He stood there for a long time, watching as he smoked another pipe, but there was only the fog on the river, a weeping lady at his side, and the silent stone above.
THE END?
Not quite . . .
Have you tried William Meikle’s Samurai and Other Stories yet?
Or dive into more Tales from the Darkest Depths:
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The eleven stories in Ugly Little Things by Todd Keisling explore the depths of human suffering and ugliness, charting a course to the dark, horrific heart of the human condition. The terrors of everyday existence are laid bare in this eerie collection of short fiction from the twisted mind of Todd Keisling, author of the critically-acclaimed novels A Life Transparent and The Liminal Man.
Behold! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders—Want to see something weird? Embrace the odd. Satisfy your curiosity. Surrender to wonder. Includes short stories by Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Lisa Morton, Ramsey Campbell, John Langan, Kristi DeMeester and many more.
Whispered Echoes by Paul F. Olson—Journey through the Heart of Terror in this eerie short story collection. Listen. They are calling to you. Do you hear them? They are the whispered echoes of your darkest fears.
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Embers: A Collection of Dark Fiction by Kenneth W. Cain—These short speculative stories are the smoldering remains of a fire, the fiery bits meant to ignite the mind with slow-burning imagery and haunting details. These are the slow burning embers of Cain’s soul.
Aletheia: A Supernatural Thriller by J.S. Breukelaar—A tale of that most human of monsters—memory—Aletheia is part ghost story, part love story, a novel about the damage done, and the damage yet to come. About terror itself. Not only for what lies ahead, but also for what we think we have left behind.
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Where the Dead Go to Die by Mark Allan Gunnells and Aaron Dries—Post-infection Chicago. Christmas. There are monsters in this world. And they used to be us. Now it’s time to euthanize to survive in a hospice where Emily, a woman haunted by her past, only wants to do her job and be the best mother possible. But it won’t be long before that snow-speckled ground will be salted by blood.
Brief Encounters with My Third Eye by Bruce Boston—over one hundred of Boston’s best short poems (under fifty lines) from more than forty years of publishing, including fifteen award-winning poems.
Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories—an anthology of dark fiction that explores the beauty at the very heart of darkness. Featuring horror’s most celebrated voices: Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Tremblay, John F.D. Taff, Lisa Mannetti, Damien Angelica Walters, Josh Malerman, Christopher Coake, Mercedes M. Yardley, Brian Kirk, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Amanda Gowin, Richard Thomas, Maria Alexander, and Kevin Lucia.
Blackwater Val by William Gorman—a Supernatural Suspense Thriller/Horror/Coming of age novel: A widower, traveling with his dead wife’s ashes and his six-year-old psychic daughter Katie in tow, returns to his haunted birthplace to execute his dead wife’s final wish.
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Tribulations by Richard Thomas—In the third short story collection by Richard Thomas, Tribulations, these stories cover a wide range of dark fiction—from fantasy, science fiction and horror, to magical realism, neo-noir, and transgressive fiction. The common thread that weaves these tragic tales together is suffering and sorrow, and the ways we emerge from such heartbreak stronger, more appreciative of what we have left—a spark of hope enough to guide us though the valley of death.
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Where Nightmares Come From: The Art of Storytelling in the Horror Genre edited by Joe Mynhardt and Eugene Johnson—With in-depth articles and interviews by Joe R. Lansdale, Clive Barker, John Connolly, Ramsey Campbell, Bev Vincent, Richard Chizmar, Stephen King, Christopher Golden, Charlaine Harris, Jonathan Maberry, Lisa Morton, Kevin J. Anderson, Tom Holland, Marv Wolfman, and many more. With an introduction by William F. Nolan.
Horror 101: The Way Forward—A comprehensive overview of the Horror fiction genre and career opportunities available to established and aspiring authors, including Jack Ketchum, Graham Masterton, Edward Lee, Lisa Morton, Ellen Datlow, Ramsey Campbell, and many more.
Horror 201: The Silver Scream Vol.1 and Vol.2—A must read for anyone interested in the horror film industry. Includes interviews and essays by Wes Craven, John Carpenter, George A. Romero, Mick Garris, and dozens more. Now available in a special paperback edition.
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