She shook her head. "I lay there for the longest time. I had no sense of time. I felt paralyzed. I would close my eyes and reopen them, and still he was there. With the first morning light coming in, I opened my eyes again, and he was gone. I got up from my bed. The door and windows to my room were locked, as they had been when I went to sleep. I hadn't truly been afraid until that moment... even though he never touched me, he never moved, I felt so ... violated."
"Miss Temple spent last night in this room," said Stoker. "I sat up all night in that chair with this in my hand ..." He picked up a double-barreled shotgun from behind the dresser. "No one came into this room."
Doyle looked at Sparks with alarm. "We shan't leave you alone again. Not for a moment."
Sparks didn't answer. He sat down on the bed and looked out the window. His shoulders slumped slightly.
"Am I mistaken in believing that the man in Miss Temple's room is the same man responsible for the crimes we've been discussing?" asked Stoker.
"No. You are not mistaken," said Sparks softly.
"What manner of man is it who can move through the night this way, move through doors and windows into rooms without a sound, who can strike down people in their sleep, carry them off, and never be seen?" Stoker moved closer to Sparks as he spoke, never raising his voice. "What manner of human being is this? Do you know?"
Sparks nodded. "I will tell you, Mr. Stoker. But first you must tell me what you were doing when you found us at Goresthorpe Abbey."
Towering over Sparks, Stoker folded his arms and thoughtfully stroked his generous whiskers.
"Fair enough," he said. Stoker leaned against the window-sill, and took a pipe and pouch from his pocket, busying himself with the small, precise rituals of smoking as he began to speak. "I spoke with a great many people in Whitby when I first arrived. Few had anything of substance to tell me. Then I met a man in a pub down by the bay. A whaler, a grizzled
old dog, seventy if he's a day. Been round the world a dozen times. Now he sits and watches the harbor and drinks his stout from noon to closing, alone. The publican and his regulars regard the man as a sot and a harmless nutter. The sailor called me over to him soon after I came into that place. He was most agitated and very eager to tell me something he was sure no one else would credit—or rather something he had tried to tell repeatedly that no one else believed.
"He never slept much, he told me, some combination of alcohol and age, and so he spent many long nights walking by the shore and up the hill, toward the abbey, where his wife was laid to rest ten years since. She speaks to him sometimes, he said, he hears her voice on those late nights, whispering out of the wind in the trees above the graveyard. One night about three weeks ago as he made his way through the headstones, she called to him. He said her voice was stronger than he'd ever heard it.
" 'Look to the sea,' she said. 'Look to the harbor.' The graveyard runs along a ledge directly above the harbor. It was a blustery night, and the tide was high. He looked down and saw a ship running in with the waves, running fast in to shore, too fast, sails flapping, lines loose; it was looking to go directly aground. The old sailor picked his way as quickly as he could down to the beach where the ship was headed; if they hit the rocks there, it could mean disaster; he'd have to sound the alarm.
"When he got to Tate Hill Pier, a small cove out of sight from the seawall, he saw the ship had dropped anchor fifty yards offshore. She was a trim schooner, showing a lot of hull, lying light in the water. A skiff was coming from it toward the beach; he saw with surprise there were people waiting onshore with lanterns, waving them in. He moved closer to them but stayed hidden, deciding not to reveal himself. He saw the bishop among their number."
"Bishop Pillphrock?" asked Sparks.
Stoker nodded. "The others he didn't recognize. The small boat made land, two men on board, one all in black. Their cargo was two crates, the size and shape of coffins, which were quickly unloaded. The man swore he saw a large black dog jump off the boat as well. The schooner did not wait for the return of the small boat; she had already pulled anchor, tacking against the wind for the open sea. The group onshore shouldered the crates, which did not appear to be heavy, and headed up the hill toward the abbey. They passed not ten feet from the old sailor's hiding place. He heard the Bishop say something about 'the arrival of our Lord'—he thought it was the Bishop who'd said this—and the man in black shouted at him in a harsh voice to be still. The sailor followed them and said he watched them carry the crates, not to Goresthorpe, but to the ruins of the ancient abbey farther up the bill. And he swears he watched that black dog run into the cemetery and disappear into thin air. Since then, he'd seen strange lights burning late at night in the ruins. What disturbed him most was that since that night his wife's voice had not spoken to
him again."
"We must speak to this man," said Sparks.
"They found him the next morning in the graveyard. His throat had been ripped apart, as if he'd been attacked by an animal. The caretaker said that during the night he'd heard the baying of a wolf."
Sparks and Doyle looked at each other. Eileen wrapped her shawl tight around her shoulders and stared at the floor. She was shaking. The walls seemed suddenly both too small to contain what they were feeling and far too insubstantial to hold at bay the forces arrayed against them.
"What's that?" asked Sparks, pointing to a package on top of the dresser.
"That was my breakfast this morning," said Stoker. "A local product, apparently."
Sparks picked up the package of Mother's Own Biscuits. "We'll tell you the rest of our side of the story now," said
Sparks. And so they did.
chapter sixteen DEVIL DODGERS
Sparks and Doyle spared no details from Stoker and Eileen, save Sparks his alleged government connection and Doyle his lingering reservations about Sparks himself—that note from Leboux still lay across his thoughts like an iron pike—and it was dark and evening before the telling was done. Snow continued to fall throughout the afternoon. Streets were already muffled with a fresh foot of it, and the storm showed no signs of abating. They sent down to the kitchen for a light supper of soup, cold mutton, and corn bread, which they shared in Stoker's room and from which they all took no small, restorative comfort. Eileen said little during the meal, never meeting Doyle's eye, withdrawing inside herself to some fortified place of sanctuary. Feeling a greater strength in numbers was called for, Sparks excused himself from their company to collect Barry and Larry from the inn near the station where they had registered earlier that long day. Eileen lay down on the bed to rest. Stoker took the occasion to draw Doyle out into the corridor for a private word, leaving the door slightly ajar so as to keep an eye on the room and more specifically the windows.
"As one gentleman to another," began Stoker quietly, "it is my fervent hope that the situation here does not appear to be an indelicate one."
"How so?" asked Doyle.
"I am a most happily married man, Dr. Doyle. My wife and I have a young child. Miss Temple, as you cannot have failed to notice, spent last night in my room."
"You were standing guard over her life—"
"Even so. Miss Temple is an actress and, you cannot have failed to notice, an extremely attractive woman. If any word of this were to find its way to London ..." Stoker shrugged in a way common to the private rooms of the most exclusive gentlemen's clubs.
"Given the circumstances, such a thing would be unthinkable," said Doyle with unexpressed amazement. Was there no end to their society's fanatic preoccupation with propriety?
"I shall depend on your discretion then," said Stoker, greatly relieved, offering his hand. "I'm going to fetch a brandy, may I bring you one?"