The Woman in the Coffin

by Nathan Long

  “I’m an entertainer, sir. The music hall.”

  “Ah. I see. And how...” He paused, then rose and stumbled to a bookshelf where a decanter and glasses were shoved in beside an ancient globe. He looked back at Nellie, holding up a glass. “Drink?”

  “Er, don’t mind if I do, sir.”

  Tomlinson poured two glasses of amber fluid, handed one to Nellie, then sank back in his seat and took a long sip. “And how in the world,” he continued after wiping his lips, “did you end up crashing through my door just in the nick of time?”

  Nellie took a drink too. It might have been brandy. She’d never had brandy before, so she wasn’t sure. “I... I’ve been worried about Aurora, sir. She’s one of the acts at the Alhambra, where I play. Only, the gentleman she performs with, Dr. Malignita...well, he ain’t no gentleman. He’s been, uh...hypnotizing her, sir, and sendin’ her out into the night to—”

  “To kill,” said Tomlinson, staring at his drink. “To kill Wedlock, Brightline, Unwin, and now... me.”

  “She ain’t no killer, sir!” cried Nellie.

  “Of course she isn’t, my dear boy—er, girl,” he sighed. “No more than a knife is.”

  Nellie took another swallow of brandy. “Do you know what it’s all about, sir? When I heard you through the door, it seemed you knew...who you were talking to.”

  “Her puppet master is a man named Marwood,” Tomlinson said. “Joseph Eglinton Marwood. You say he’s performing on the stage now?”

  “Yes, sir. He goes by ‘Dr. Malignita.’”

  Tomlinson nodded. “Well, he would have to, I suppose. He’s wanted for murder under his own name in England, and as he said, I’m to blame for that, me and...the others.”

  “What happened, sir?”

  Tomlinson stayed staring at the floor for so long, Nellie thought he might have fallen asleep. Finally, however, he poured more brandy in his glass, took a drink, and then spoke.

  “We were all at Oxford then. Childers and Wedlock studying law, Unwin and I the classics, Brightline philosophy, and Marwood ancient history. What brought us together, out of our various colleges, was our obsession with the occult.”

  He held up a finger. “No, I take that back. It wasn’t the occult so much as what the occult could give us, which had us obsessed. What we wanted...was power.” He shrugged. “Natural, I suppose. Six unpopular, unmoneyed underclassmen, unsuccessful with...women, destined for mediocrity and unremarkable lives. Why wouldn’t we want power? So, we searched ancient books, tracked down obscure texts, visited madmen and charlatans of every description, searching for the true magic, the true alchemy, and failing every time. Until...”

  “Until,” prodded Nellie.

  “Until,” Tomlinson said at last, “Marwood found something. An Egyptian text—well, Greek from the original Egyptian—detailing how to see into the minds of others and how to bend their will to yours. Of course, we all laughed at him. We’d seen hundreds of texts, from Persia, China, India, Rome, all claiming to do the same thing or similar, and all utter quackery. But he said could prove it. He said he would bet us all our monthly allowances that he could use this Egyptian technique to convince his landlord’s daughter to join us for our usual Tuesday night card party and, er...perform for us, then make her remember none of it when all was finished.”

  Tomlinson swallowed. “We all knew this girl. A shy, unlearned, churchgoing lass who we liked to tease for her beauty, and because she would turn bright crimson at the merest suggestion of suggestiveness. There wasn’t a woman in Oxford less likely to do any sort of performing for us, let alone...” He flushed. “Anyway, we took his bet, expecting easy money.”

  He closed his eyes. “That Tuesday evening, Marwood arrived at my rooms with the landlord’s daughter—h-her name was Ruth—on his arm and said that everything he had promised would come true. He himself, he said, had to sit apart, concentrating, but Ruth would attend to the rest of us. Now, up to then, she had been shy as ever—frightened, even—and peeked out at us from under her cap like she wasn’t sure why she was there, but as soon as Marwood sat down and closed his eyes, she...she changed—completely.”

  A sob erupted from him and he dabbed at his eyes with his cuffs. “I-I’m sorry. I have done my best not to think on that night for some thirty years. She... She started by taking off her cap and letting down her hair, then she served us wine and oysters, smiling and laughing all the time, as if as happy as could be. Then she...well, she did all Marwood had promised us and more. She danced for us, growing more and more wanton until... Well, I shouldn’t say more before a young woman but...all that she did—and she did things I had never even heard of before—she did with all appearances of being a joyous, willing participant, except...except for one detail. She—”

  “She never stopped weeping,” said Nellie.

  “How did you—” asked Tomlinson, then he knew. “Ah. You have seen it, with this Aurora.”

  Nellie nodded.

  “Then, if you care for her, I would watch her closely when—if—you manage to free her from Marwood’s influence, for...” He shuddered. “Well, you see, when the bacchanal was over and we were all, er...spent, Marwood opened his eyes to laugh at us and collect on his wager, and...and the moment he released control of Ruth, she took up a knife from the table and....”

  “Y’don’t have t’say it,” said Nellie. “I heard before.”

  “We were horrified,” said Tomlinson. “Revolted. And racked with guilt as well, but that quickly turned to fury at Marwood—for making us complicit in such villainy, for not knowing what would happen when he let go of her, for letting the girl kill herself in my apartments. Immediately, the five of us turned against him and agreed to say that he had brought Ruth there while we were away, had had his way with her and then killed her in some fit of madness. We tried to hold him until the police could be summoned, but he was a big fellow and fought free. We never saw him again.”

  “Until now,” said Nellie.

  “Until now,” agreed Tomlinson. He finished off his glass, then looked to the window. “I gave up on the occult that very night, but the others... Well, Marwood had brought his books and papers with him when he had arrived with Ruth, and he had fled without them when we tried to restrain him, so they were there to be studied.” He snorted. “You can see by the fame and fortune of the others that they were dutiful students. Wedlock, the foremost industrialist of the age; Brightline, praised by all for his middling paintings and married to London’s most beautiful art model; Unwin, poet laureate and the richest playwright in the Haymarket, with a harem of adoring Bloomsbury bluestockings at his beck and call; Childers, who was nothing but the penniless third son of a baronet when we were at school together, now Sir George Childers, Earl of Arlington and leader of the opposition in the House of Lords.”

  “You didn’t use such tricks?”

  Tomlinson laughed and gestured around the room. “Look for yourself! I am a professor, I suppose, and respected among my peers, but I might have been Chancellor of the University had I...”

  Nellie stared at Tomlinson as his words trailed off and he continued to stare out the window. After hearing his story, she was tempted to finish Aurora’s—or, she supposed, Marwood’s—work and bash his brains out with her shillelagh. It was clear he was still racked with guilt for his part in the death of the landlord’s daughter, but a good man wouldn’t have gone along with her violation in the first place, would he? Wouldn’t he have fought against his friends to protect her? On the other hand, Nellie was no killer, and she was more concerned with Aurora’s fate than Tomlinson’s.

  “So, then,” she said at last. “Is this Childers next?”

  Tomlinson blanched. “By god, I suppose he is. Unless... Unless Marwood makes another try at me, that is.”

  Nellie leaned forward. “Then y’got a stake in helping me, don’t ye, sir?”

  “Helping you?”

  “Helping me get Aurora away from Malignita—Marwood. Helping me break the
spell.”

  “My dear, er, girl,” said Tomlinson. “I told you, I didn’t continue in the occult arts. I turned my back on it. I know nothing.”

  “Then maybe you know someone who does. Maybe some friend of the others? Or an enemy? Someone who hasn’t used this stuff for ill?”

  Tomlinson frowned, thinking, then nodded. “There is someone. Though I know her only through a friend of a friend. She helped him when Unwin achieved...undue influence over his daughter.”

  “Who, sir? What is the woman’s name?”

  “Her name is Lady Helia Skycourt, an heiress devoted to scholarship and philanthropy to the sciences, who knows more than anyone I’ve ever met about the occult. The truth of it.”

  Nellie felt better already. “Thank you, sir. And where might I find Lady Helia?”

  Tomlinson cleared his throat. “Er, she has a rather... peculiar address.”

  9

  The Madwoman

  It being too late to go a-calling after leaving Professor Tomlinson, Nellie headed for her boardinghouse, but her Kilburn-born sixth sense made her hesitate as she reached her block, and she saw a bobby watching the front stoop. She circled around through the alleys only to find another at the back door. Dr. Malignita had obviously told Scotland Yard a tale. She wondered what it had been.

  She hurried to the Alhambra, just to see what was what, and was not surprised to find bobbies there too, standing before the theatre’s locked doors, plus a detective inspector in topcoat and bowler.

  “Sewn up like a potato sack,” she murmured to herself as she angled off to Garrick’s. She didn’t dare go in, for fear some special-branch plain-clothes man might be drinking at the bar, but she waited down the block and was rewarded a while later when she saw Davey leave and start shuffling in the direction of his flat.

  “Hst, Davey,” she whispered as she caught him up.

  He spun, then stared at her, wide-eyed. “Nell! You’re not safe on the street! The Yard is looking for you.”

  Nellie pulled him into a mews. “I know, I know. What’s it all about? Was it Malignita?”

  Davey nodded. “’E said you’d molested his ward, Aurora, and took advantage of her somnambulant state.”

  “The dirty swine! Accusin’ me of his own crimes!”

  “Yer wanted for assault and...acts of perversion.” He swallowed. “It’s not true, is it?”

  “Aw, come on, Davey!”

  “It’s just, I know you favor feminine company, and you’ve been moonin’ over her these past days.”

  Nellie groaned. “Never unwilling feminine company. You know that. Never unwilling!”

  “Aye, aye. I know it. It’s just, he made it sound so believable when he told it, Malignita.”

  “He’s a mentalist, Davey. A hypnotist. That’s his stock in trade.”

  “I suppose you’re right. But what about you? Where are you going to go? I’d head north if I was you—Liverpool, Manchester. Maybe Ireland?”

  “No, I’ve someone to see tomorrow. But I can’t go home. Police are watching.”

  Davey put a hand on her shoulder. “Then you can stay with me. They can’t watch every actor’s nest in London, can they?”

  “Thanks, Davey. Now if only your suits fit me. I’m still in my stage gear. I look like a leprechaun.”

  ***

  Lady Helia Skycourt tapped her cigarette into a millennia-old Chinese vase and peered at Nellie through a sharp single eye.

  “Young lady,” she said, “you look like a leprechaun. Are you here to lead me to a pot of gold?”

  Nellie swallowed. Lady Helia was an intimidating woman, even sitting in a worn old armchair and holding a sheaf of ink-stained manuscript pages in her lap. Thin, refined, with a long nose and an eyepatch hiding her left eye, she was dressed in a green-and-black brocade dressing gown tied neatly over an immaculate white nightdress and Turkish bedroom slippers that curled at the toe. She looked to Nellie like an elegant and inquisitive crow, particularly when she cocked her head, as she did now.

  “Er, no, yer l-ladyship,” she stuttered. “I’m Nellie O’Day. An entertainer. T-These are my stage clothes; I’m afraid I haven’t had the opportunity to change.”

  Lady Helia nodded solemnly. “I see, I see. Well, we are not sticklers for formality here. It is a madhouse, after all.”

  She was not lying. The “peculiar address” Professor Tomlinson had mentioned the previous evening had turned out to be Hoxton Hall, a private sanitarium for wealthy lunatics, of which Lady Helia was apparently one. Nellie was relieved that, despite the ominous iron gates that surrounded the grounds, and the medieval-looking battlements of the main building, the interior was nothing like what she had feared. There were no wards full of screaming madmen tearing out each other’s hair, no tortured women strapped to their beds, no laughing lunatics eating flies. Instead, it had all been hushed corridors and nurses in crisp uniforms pushing semi-conscious ladies and gentlemen around in wheelchairs.

  Lady Helia had a private suite on the top floor that looked more like an apartment than a cell, with—in addition to the high-backed armchair—a writing desk near arched windows, bookshelves on every wall, Persian rugs layering the floor, a day couch, a grandfather clock, old-looking paintings and statuettes, and taxidermied birds of prey peeking from the shadows in any direction one looked. There was also a bedroom through a half-open door.

  “And what does Nellie O’Day want with a madwoman?” her ladyship asked.

  “Er, I was told to speak to you by a Professor Tomlinson. He said you might be able to help me with a matter of an...occult nature.”

  Lady Helia’s brows furrowed. “Tomlinson. Tomlinson. Oh, yes. The Winding affair. I remember now. Many years ago. He was the nervous friend. And what is this occult matter of yours?”

  Nellie looked around, as if afraid someone would hear, then lowered her voice. “Er...it has to do with the murders of Mister Wedlock, Mister Brightline, and—”

  “And Mister Unwin,” finished Lady Helia. “Ha! I thought they had a touch of the uncanny about them.”

  She took another cigarette from her silver cigarette case, lit it from the end of the first, flicked the first, still lit, into the Chinese vase, set the manuscript on the small table beside the chair, then leaned back and propped her slippered feet on an ottoman.

  “Carry on, O’Day,” she said, waving a long-fingered hand. “You intrigue me.”

  ***

  It took some considerable time for Nellie to get it all out—Lady Helia had smoked at least three more cigarettes in the interval—but at last she’d told it all, then stood waiting as her auditor stared at the ceiling and tapped her lips with the blade of an ornate silver letter opener.

  “Well,” she said at last. “You have certainly given me a ready-made plot for the next installment of Ghost and Skull. But what appalling people they all seem, and this Malignita in particular. He must be stopped.”

  “Yes, m’lady,” said Nellie. “But... But how? And how do I stop Aurora from killing again? How do I save her?”

  Lady Helia cocked her gaze at Nellie and smiled. “Ah. I see. Your interest in the matter becomes clear.” She nodded. “But you are right to put the girl first. Her safety is of far greater concern than that of dear old Georgie Childers, who has been a pestilence and a horror since childhood, and has only gotten worse since acquiring his uncle’s title.”

  She levered herself out of her chair and crossed to one of her bookshelves. Nellie stepped back in spite of herself as she passed. Even in slippers, her ladyship was more than a head taller than she.

  “Now, let’s see,” said Lady Helia, running a finger along the spines of a row of books. “The Egyptian Method. How to counter it. How to... Ah! Yes. Of course. Where is my Manetho?”

  She turned from the shelf and crossed the room to another, where she pulled down a large old leather-bound volume and began flipping rapidly through it, then stopped suddenly and flipped back.

  “Ah-ha! Yes! Here we are! How
to keep nosy strangers out of your skull.” She looked up with another grin. “A, er, loose translation from the Greek.”

  Nellie took a step toward her, amazed. “You found a way just like that?”

  “That and a lifetime of study, my dear,” said her ladyship, returning her single eye to the book. “Now, just give me a moment to...” She read for a short while, then looked up again, frowning thoughtfully. “Really, despite all the mumbo-jumbo, it’s very simple. Aurora needs a mask.”

  “A... But she has a mask.”

  “Just as you say. But she needs a particular kind of mask. You see, what your Malignita has done is... Well, he’s placed a beacon inside Aurora’s head, so that when he looks with his inner eye out across the vast dark forest of minds that is London, hers stands out like a tree on fire, and he can find it—and control it—from afar.”

  Lady Helia began to pace the room, the hem of her floor-length dressing gown shushing softly across the carpet. “Sadly, I don’t know how to give her the strength to resist these unwanted intrusions, but I do know how to make her invisible to Malignita—and therefore return to her the control of her own mind. She needs to hide her self inside another self.”

  The vision this conjured in Nellie’s mind made her shudder in horror. “Like... like a severed head, or...”

  “No, no, my dear girl,” said Lady Helia. “Nothing so gruesome, though still slightly macabre. She needs an imago. A death mask that has been venerated as if it were the person it represented. The Romans used the things in funeral processions. A hired actor would wear the mask to portray the deceased and walk behind the litter, and friends and family would pay their respects to them as if he or she was the genuine article.”

  Nellie scowled. “Always did think Italians was odd.”

  “Indeed,” said Lady Helia. “But how this helps us is this. Through this veneration, these masks—the imagos—acquire the occult...er, signature of the person who they were modeled after. Therefore, if Aurora wore one, Malignita would see only the soul of the person from whose face the mask was cast. As far as he was concerned, Aurora would have vanished—and their connection would be severed.”