“Mary!” he uttered and bounded up the stairs two at a time. He reached the landing just as Louise Doyle staggered out of her bedroom, clutching the doorframe for support. Conan Doyle ran into his daughter’s room only to find the bed rumpled but empty. For a horrible moment he thought she’d been snatched. But then the screams continued. He ran back onto the landing, noticing for the first time that the door to his own bedroom was ajar. When he and Touie rushed in, they found Mary wrapped in a cocoon of bedclothes, eyes wide, her small body convulsing with terror.
“Mary!” Conan Doyle said. “What is it? What ever’s the matter?”
“A — a—a — a…” The young girl was near catatonic. “… a h-horrible man! He t-took the lady.”
For the first time, Conan Doyle became aware of Jean Leckie’s absence.
“What happened?” Louise Doyle urged. “Mary, you must tell us.”
The young girl’s eyes darted wildly. “A bad dream woke me up. I brought my doll to sleep with the nice lady. I fell asleep, but then a noise woke me up. A man was standing over us. A horrible, horrible man. She pushed me under the covers so he wouldn’t see me. But then he grabbed the lady and carried her out. I screamed, but he didn’t stop.”
The full force of events hit Conan Doyle and his face prickled with pins and needles of shock. He turned and rushed from the room, thundered down the staircase and bolted outside. By now, dawn was a fiery stain on the eastern horizon. He reached the lane in time to see the figure of a man shambling toward the square hulk of a hearse parked in the distance. The figure carried a human form hanging limp in its arms. From the shambling walk, he instantly recognized that it was not a living man.
He set off running up the lane, sharp-edged stones cutting painfully into the soles of his bare feet. But the hearse was too far away and he would be too late to reach it. He stumbled to a halt and raised the revolver, drawing a bead on the back of the shambling figure, waiting for his pounding heart to slow before he squeezed off a round. But then he lowered the gun. In this light, at this range, he dare not risk a shot lest he hit Miss Leckie. Two men in undertaker’s garb flung open the glass door and the monster clambered inside with his burden. Conan Doyle heard the coachman’s shout and the crack of a whip and could only watch, helpless and impotent, as the hearse rumbled over the crown of the hill and vanished from sight.
Miss Leckie had been taken.
Stunned and despondent, he stumbled back into a house in uproar: the children crying, his wife screaming with terror, the maid and cook wailing and scurrying about. He stood in the hallway, cudgeling his brains. What to do? Who to call for help?
And then he noticed Kingsley’s windup guardsman lying in the middle of the hall rug. Its drumming had been what awakened him, but the tinplate toy had been crushed, flattened beneath the monster’s heavy tread. The metal seams had split wide and when he stooped to pick it up, something metallic and shiny fell out upon the rug.
A brass cogwheel.
It was an instantly recognizable shape. Conan Doyle suddenly knew who was behind the reanimated corpses… and where precisely he would find him.
CHAPTER 30
CHASING MONSTERS
Conan Doyle stepped through the main gates of Waterloo Station footsore and weary. Impossibly dense fog had stalled the train two miles from the station, forcing him to abandon the carriage and walk the tracks the rest of the way. He had a satchel thrown over his shoulder that contained his latest Casebook, as well as his Webley revolver and a full box of shells. Lost in his own turmoiled thoughts, Conan Doyle failed to spot the looming figure of a large man until it stepped from the fog in front of him.
“Arthur.”
“Oscar?”
For once, Wilde was dressed in a rather ramshackle fashion. His wild mane of chestnut hair was disheveled. He had not shaved and his eyes looked bleary and bloodshot from lack of sleep.
“My boy has been taken,” he said in dull and disbelieving tones.
“What?”
“Vyvyan…” His voice was utterly bereft. “… snatched before our eyes… by… dear God help me… by that… creature!”
At the news a giddy weakness flashed through Conan Doyle.
“Vyvyan, too?” He gripped Wilde’s arm. “Miss Leckie was abducted this morning. And by the same soulless devil we encountered the other night.”
“What are we to do, Arthur?” Wilde fretted. “What are we to do? We must summon the police! We must contact your diminutive friend from the palace, Mister Riddle. I will roust the old biddy Victoria from her bed if need be. My darling boy has been kidnapped!”
“I’m afraid we cannot wait for the police. We must seize the initiative. Our enemies are ahead of us. Remember today’s date and all that 13/13 business. The revolution, if there is to be one, will start within hours. The authorities will no doubt be overwhelmed.”
“What shall we do? Where shall we find them?”
Conan Doyle dipped in a pocket and withdrew the cogwheel, holding it up for Wilde to see. “Does this look familiar?”
“The gear you found at Tarquin Hogg’s home?”
“No, but its double. This fell out of Kingsley’s broken toy — the one I had mended at Jedidiah’s Emporium.”
“I fail to understand.”
“I now believe that our friend Jedidiah is behind the monster. If you recall we both gave him our calling cards. Cards that bore our home addresses. Very convenient for the kidnappers.”
“Dash it all! You’re right, Arthur. So what do we do?”
“We go looking for answers. Our first stop must be the Emporium of Mechanical Marvels.”
“But however shall we find our way? This blasted fog has brought the capital to a standstill. The omnibuses do not run. I could not locate a hansom and was obliged to walk all the way from Tite Street. Since I arrived here the fog has been steadily thickening. I doubt I could find my way home in this miasma.”
Both men stiffened at a jovial laugh that came from somewhere in the swirling gray.
“Foggy is it, gents?” a Cockney voice announced from the shadows beside the empty newspaper kiosk. “I wondered why it was so quiet about.”
Although he was only a few feet away, Conan Doyle and Wilde had to step closer before they made out the owner of the voice. Standing in his usual spot beside the newspaper kiosk was the Crimean war veteran and his tray of pennants. Tendrils of fog swirled about him, licking the black lenses of glasses behind which no vision was ever perceived.
But in the face of blindness, Conan Doyle suddenly knew how they would see their way.
The Scottish author kept a hand on the veteran’s epauletted shoulder while he and Wilde linked arms. With the veteran’s cane tap tapping the curbstone, they navigated slowly but steadily through the murky maze of London roads in a fog so total that street signs were invisible from more than two feet away. Twenty minutes later, they fetched up outside Jedediah’s Emporium of Mechanical Marvels.
“Well done, Sam,” Wilde congratulated.
“Yes,” Conan Doyle added. “Without your assistance we would have been lost after the first street.”
The shop was locked up tight just like all the businesses they passed; a CLOSED sign hung in the window. Conan Doyle took the Casebook from his satchel, scribbled a note, and then tore the page out and pressed it into the blind veteran’s hands.