—And found himself standing in the gondola of an impossible airship hovering over a vast desert, the hot wind making shifting snakes of the countless dunes. He wore a flowing white robe, wielding a spyglass with hands browned by the sun. Beside him in similar garb was his Isabel, her face as tan as the dunes hundreds of feet beneath them. She squinted into the distance, and he followed her gaze to the horizon, where a gargantuan black pyramid stood, gleaming darkly in the sun.
“Bismillah!” Burton heard himself say, but it didn’t sound like him. It was a voice made raw by hot desert winds.
“There it is, my love,” said this Isabel. She was hard and lean, wearing pants and boots like a man. A thin scimitar hung from her belt, and Burton sensed that this weapon was as lethal in this dream-Isabel’s hands as it would be in his own.
“Yes. We’ve found it. We need to tell El-Yezdi.” He pounded his booted foot on the floor of the gondola, and it rang out with a metallic echo. Burton realized then that his dream-self was not standing on a wooden platform suspended beneath the giant pale gasbag of a dirigible, but the familiar metal outline of the Nautilus!
“Captain Burton!”
Burton sat up and looking around, bleary-eyed. Someone had called his name. But who? He turned toward the door to spy Miss Angell standing there.
“I’m sorry to wake you, but Inspector Abberline is here to see you.”
Burton glanced about, saw the sunlight filtering in through the window behind him. “Of course. Send him up.”
Burton checked his pocket watch and was surprised to see it was almost nine o’clock in the morning. He flexed to crack his aching back as Abberline appeared in the doorway, removing his battered brown bowler.
“Sorry to wake you.”
“No apologies necessary. It appears I fell asleep in my favorite chair. The bloody thing is fine for sitting but atrocious for sleeping. What can I help you with this morning?”
“Well,” said Abberline. “I came round first of all to make sure you were all right. None of the men I put on the Awakened checked in last night.”
A cold chill fled up Burton’s spine. “Really? I didn’t notice the man you put on Goforth yesterday afternoon. I returned to the Theosophic Society to try and catch Swinburne and his new friend leaving their meeting.”
“And?” said Abberline.
“I followed them to a watchmaker’s shop, where I was run off by a shoggoth.”
“Blimey! I hoped never to see one of those bleedin’ jelly things again.”
“As did I,” said Burton. “And if one accosted me, perhaps they waylaid your men. Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry, Frederick.”
Abberline looked downcast. “Bloody hell.”
“But there was something else you came to see me about?’ asked Burton, eager to change the subject.
“Oh, yes. There’s been a most unusual robbery,” said Abberline.
“Oh? Well, unusual has been my stock and trade as of late. Come have a seat and tell me about it.”
Burton moved round to sit behind his writing desk while Abberline took a chair across from him. “I’ll get straight to it,” he said. “Someone broke into the British Museum last night and stole a meteorite.”
“Bismillah, that is strange. But what is even stranger, at least to me, is that our mutual employer thinks this is somehow related to the Awakened.”
Abberline gave a small nod. “Aye, that he does.”
“And why is that?”
“Because the last people to be seen near the exhibit when the museum closed were Mr. Goforth and Mr. Swinburne.”
A knot formed in Burton’s stomach. Algernon Charles Swinburne was many things, but a thief was not one of them. Until now. He inwardly cursed whatever entity had Shanghaied the poet’s body.
“There’s more to it than that, I’m sure,” said Burton.
“Yes. The meteorite is said to enhance certain psychic powers.”
Burton nodded. “I don’t believe I am familiar with this.”
“It’s called the Wold Cottage meteorite, named for where it fell, way back in 1795.”
Miss Angell brought up a tray laden with scrambled eggs and sausage, as well as a carafe of steaming hot coffee. Despite initially declining, the inspector tucked in and ate ravenously before telling Burton the rest of the strange tale.
“The meteorite has been the source of no small amount of unusualness since its installation at the museum,” said Abberline after a sip of coffee. “People have reported seeing queer apparitions, and those who claim to be clairvoyant in some way have admitted to seeing visions.”
Burton remembered his latest dream and shuddered. “Visions?”
“Yes. As a policeman, you hear them all the time. My Da’ used to scare me to sleep with tales from his time on the beat, which included the block where the museum sits. But as I grew older, I never gave much truck to such rubbish. That is, uh, until…”
“You and I met,” Burton finished for him, a bemused grin playing on his lips.
“Exactly. It has nothing to do with you, though. I’m just used to the world working in a certain way, you see. I’ve seen some terrible things in my time as a copper, but there was always a human cause. A footprint, a murder weapon left behind, and that leads us straight to the killer. A human killer.”
“And now?”
“Now, I don’t know what to think. Maybe there are ghosts. I know for a fact there are monsters. I’ve seen them. Both the human and the other kind.”
Abberline drained his coffee, and Burton could see that his hands were shaking. “Bloody shoggoths,” the inspector mumbled.
“It isn’t always a spectre or phantasm,” said Burton. “Perhaps there is a rational explanation.”
“Well, there is more to the tale,” said Abberline. “A few years ago, the sightings and visions got so bad the curator traced everything back to when they first installed the meteor, generations before he was born. He had some of his geology boys crack it open, and they found a thick vein of some black, shiny, rocky substance they could never quite identify. All they knew for sure was that they had never seen it before, and that it didn’t come from Earth.”
“That part should be obvious,” said Burton as he poured a little brandy in his coffee and gave it an exploratory taste. “After all, it did fall from the sky.”
“Indeed. But the strangest part was, all the eerie activity increased. The curator then had the entire vein removed from the rock—as best they could without further damaging it; there’s still some left—and the ghostly visions all but ceased.”
“Where is the substance they removed?”
Abberline shrugged. “No one knows. This was done by the current curator’s predecessor. He’s looking through the museum records now. I don’t have to tell you Mycroft Holmes is very interested in getting his hands on that queer dust.”
Burton sneered and nodded. “But there was still some left in the meteorite.”
“Abberline nodded. “A meteorite which is now missing.”
“All right,” said Burton, tapping his bottom lip. “Let’s put the pieces together, as we know them. A meteorite containing a substance that can amplify psychic powers has been stolen by a group of men who have had their bodies taken over by a group of possibly malevolent entities for some unknown purpose.”
“That was my figuring as well,” said Abberline. “And the sum doesn’t add up to anything good as far as I can tell.”