Although the Mutoscope has no sound, the mind supplies the concussive roar. Bodies and debris tumble high into the sky. The blast hits the camera and the world upends and tilts onto its side.
Feet run past the toppled camera. A top hat falls sideways to the ground and rolls uphill until a trampling foot crushes it. Black smoke swirls and the world dims to darkness.
The scene changes.
Daylight returns. The camera, once again upright, pans across a scene of devastation. Nothing remains of the reviewing stand but jagged splinters of wood, rows of toppled seats, and entangled within, the grotesquely sprawled bodies of the dead.
The scene changes.
Victoria sags in the arms of two men who support her by the armpits and drag her toward the waiting coach. But they must pick their way through wreckage, stepping over fallen bodies and severed limbs. The queen is loaded aboard the carriage, which jerks away.
The scene changes.
A final look at the devastated shore. Hatless and disheveled survivors stumble aimlessly, faces streaked with blood and dirt, eyes spilling shock. A handsome bearded man in a stovepipe hat shambles past the camera, craning to scan the foreshore where the young woman and her child were wading. He calls out for them, his face contorted in a mask of horror. And then his silent shouts become voiceless screams. His face darkens with the rush of blood. Whipcord veins pop from his neck and forehead. He turns away and stares blindly into the camera lens. But then the Mutoscope reaches the end of the drum and the final photograph falls. The coin drops into a metal box with a monetary ka-chunk, the bulb extinguishes, and the viewfinder goes black.
As the cooling filament fades, the viewer draws back from the Mutoscope. His is the same face glimpsed in the final frame, although the once-dark beard is now shock white, the trimmed and pomaded hair is a shoulder-length tangle of gray dishevelment and the handsome face now lined and haggard beyond the normal passage of years. The only thing unchanged is the haunted look of the eyes, which are tunnels receding into an empty, echoing darkness… swarmed by ghosts.
CHAPTER 6
AN ILL-TIMED LETTER
“Kiss me,” Miss Jean Leckie breathed in a husky voice. “Kiss me!” She and Conan Doyle were seated at a quiet table amongst the potted plants in the Tivoli’s fern room. All eyes in the restaurant turned toward them, watching. And yet, Conan Doyle did not care. Miss Leckie was leaning forward in her chair, so that her hazel-green eyes were all that filled his vision. She tugged insistently at his sleeve. “Kiss me, Daddy!” she breathed and Conan Doyle no longer resisted, but leaned into her face and pressed his lips against hers.
“Daddy! Dad-dee!”
Conan Doyle pried open his eyes and groggily dragged himself up from the pit of sleep. He was slouched in his writing chair, the Tivoli dining room jarringly replaced by his study and a desk strewn with pens and notebooks, the delicious dream still evaporating from the surface of his mind while an insistent hand jerked at his sleeve from below.
“Dad-dee. My soldier’s broken.”
He looked down to see Kingsley, his five-year-old son, yanking at his sleeve. The little boy was holding his very favorite toy: a windup soldier. Conan Doyle could tell from the gleaming red pout of the boy’s lip and eyes pooled to overflowing that his child teetered on the verge of hysteria.
“What is it, Kingsley?”
“My soldier’s broken Dad-dee. He won’t drum.”
Conan Doyle sighed and took the mechanical soldier from his son’s small hands. It was a tinplate guardsman with a painted red uniform and a black bearskin. When wound with the key in the middle of his back, the soldier would march forward in a grind of gears while a blur of mechanical arms pounded upon a tin drum.
“You haven’t overwound him again, have you?”
The little boy shook his blond head emphatically, but Conan Doyle suspected quite the opposite.
“Come, climb upon Papa’s knee and we’ll see if we can’t heal your poor wounded soldier.” The small boy clambered into his father’s lap. Conan Doyle gripped the key and gave it a gentle, experimental twist. It turned a few degrees, hit a hard stop, and sprang back when released.
Overwound.
“I’m afraid you have wound it too tightly, Kingsley. Daddy has told you before, you have to be careful winding it.”
“I need my drummer, Daddy! He beats his drum to scare away the monster who lives under my bed.”
Conan Doyle swallowed a grimace. The monster again. As a writer, he was all for encouraging a child’s imagination, but “the monster” was the cause of much bedwetting.
“Kingsley, I have told you there are no monsters under your bed. Monsters cannot enter our house. Daddy has expressly forbidden them.”
“Can you fix my drummer, Daddy? Can you?”
He hugged the little boy and said, “Well, let’s see. Papa will try his best, but I cannot promise.”
Conan Doyle rummaged a hand in his pants pocket and withdrew the small silver penknife he kept tucked there. The tinplate soldier was constructed in two halves held together by bent metal tabs. He worked the sharp knife blade under each tab in turn and levered them open. But when he eased the two halves of the soldier apart, there was a sproinnnnggggg as the tightly wound spring spat out like a metal tongue, uncoiling a spool of black spring steel that whiplashed across the floor.
“Oh, dear,” Conan Doyle said, struggling to push the spring back into the metal body.
“Is it broken, Daddy?”
“I’m afraid it is, Kingsley. But you’ve got lots of other toys to play with—”
“But I want my drummer!” Kingsley shrieked, his voice ripping on each syllable.
“Shush! Shush! Calm yourself. Daddy will take it to a shop when he goes to London and have it mended.”
During this exchange, Conan Doyle failed to hear the door open or footsteps until his wife spoke. “Arthur, I see you decided to return home at long last.”
He looked up in surprise. These days, his wife, Louise Doyle, or “Touie” as he affectionately called her, did not leave her bedroom very often. Five years earlier, she had been diagnosed with galloping consumption, the dread disease of the age, which carried off most of its victims within a matter of months. But thanks to Conan Doyle’s diligence, moving the family from Switzerland to Egypt to the rural climes of Sussex to find the most beneficent air, Touie had endured, although mostly as an invalid, bedridden and sickly. At times she hovered on the precipice of death, and Conan Doyle made sure his funeral clothes were cleaned and pressed. But at other times, she rallied. Touie had not left her room for a full month, so Conan Doyle was surprised to see her downstairs and dressed, although the apple-cheeked girl he had married was now emaciated, and her gaunt, hollow-eyed features held the deathly pallor of a consumptive. Even now, despite the efforts of her toilet, the smell of the sick room hovered about her.
“Touie, darling! You’re up.”
“I was concerned when the servants told me you had not slept in your bed last night.”
He caught the recrimination frosting her words and quickly replied, “I stayed at Oscar’s club. Had to sleep in a chair. Trains weren’t running because of the blasted fog.”
“Fog? Really?” his wife said, deepening the incrimination with a pause before adding, “We had no such fog.”
“Well, the house is in Sussex, darling. It’s precisely for the healthful air that I chose to move the family here—”
“Did you attend your meeting? The Society for Psychical Research, wasn’t it? The first Monday of the month?”