"Greater than murder?"
All trace of a smile vanished. "There are worse things," he said, then opened the door. "Best of luck, Doyle. We'll be in touch."
Sacker extended a hand. Doyle shook it. In his dazed, bewildered state, the next thing he knew, he was standing on the street outside his front door, watching the scar-faced cabbie tip bis hat, turn, and whip the carriage hurriedly into the night.
Doyle looked down at the hand Sacker had shaken. He was holding a small, exquisitely crafted silver insignia in the form of a human eye.
chapter five LEBOUX
MAELSTROM WHIRLED INSIDE DOYLE'S MIND. He LOOKED
at his watch: 9:52. An ironmonger's cart rattled by. Doyle shivered with nostalgic longing as the prosaic, quotidian world in which he'd spent all but the last two hours of his life receded from him like dying sunlight. In the time it takes to bake bread, he had seen his life, if not his entire conception of the universe, turned on its head.
In the stillness left by the passing of the cart, forms and faces swam out of the dark; every shadow seemed to pulse with hidden, unspeakable danger. Doyle hustled to the presumed safety of his doorstep.
A face looked down at him from a high window. His neighbor, the Russian woman, Petrovitch. Wait—had there been a second face behind hers? Another look: both faces gone, curtains swaying.
Did his staircase, always a trigger for the pleasant prospect of home and its attendant comforts, now exude an aura of dread menace? No longer certain he could trust his instincts, Doyle took revolver in hand, trusting its filled chambers to contend with whatever might await, and slowly ascended the twenty-one steps. The door to his rooms came into view. It stood open.
The wood where the doorknob used to reside was splintered like so many matchsticks. The debris lay here, on the floor outside—the knob torn off, not kicked in. Doyle leaned back against the wall and listened. Certain that nothing stirred inside, with a light touch he eased the door open and gasped at what lay before him.
Every square inch of the front room looked to have been drooled or saturated with a clear, viscous fluid. Streaked and
textured, as if a gigantic brush had been maniacally stroked from floor to ceiling. A smell like scorched mattress ticking permeated the air. Lazy smoke curled up from where the substance lay thickest. Stepping inside, he felt the ooze suck at the soles of his shoes, but no residue clung to them when he lifted his foot. It moved to the touch, it had body, but its crust remained integral, intact. Doyle could discern the tessellated pattern of his Persian carpet suspended inside the stuff, like a scarab frozen in amber. He examined his chair and davenport. Side table, oil lamp, ottoman. Candlesticks. Inkwell. Teacup. The surface of every object in the room had been partially liquefied, then cooled and hardened.
If this was a warning—an inescapable conclusion—what exactly was its messenger trying to communicate? Perhaps to incite the question, What kind of damage could they perpetrate on a human body? Doyle picked up one of his books from the desk. It seemed to weigh about the same, but it wobbled in his hand, spineless as an overcooked vegetable. He could still turn the thickened pages, could almost make out the blurred, distorted text, but the thing lying limply in his hand no longer remotely resembled his enduring idea of what constituted a book.
Moving as quickly as the slippery flooring would allow, Doyle made his way to the bedroom. As he opened the door it drooped in on itself, the top corner folding over like a dogeared page. Doyle saw that the strange liquefaction had penetrated a few inches into the next room and then abruptly stopped: His bedroom had escaped the same debasement.
"Thank God," Doyle muttered.
Pulling his Gladstone bag from the closet, he dropped into it the invertebrate book, a change of clothes, his shaving kit, and the box of ammunition he kept hidden in the upper reaches of the armoire.
Back through the vulcanized room, Doyle stopped at the door—someone outside, the scuff of a shoe. He bent down to peer through the extruded keyhole and saw Petrovitch leaning against the balustrade, hands clutched to her scrawny bosom.
"Mrs. Petrovitch, what's happened here?" he asked, exiting to the hall.
"Doctor," she said, grasping his offered hand fearfully.
"Did you see anything? Did you hear something down here?"
Nodding vigorously. He couldn't recall the extent of her English, but it seemed at the moment particularly lean,
"Big. Big," she said. "Train."
"A sound like a train?"
Nodding again, she tried to supply the sound, accompanied by a series of generalized, extravagant gestures. She's been into the wine again, Doyle realized. Not without provocation. Glancing past her, he noticed another woman hanging back at the foot of the descending stairs. The second face he'd seen in the window: a short, stout woman, round face, penetrating eyes. Something familiar about her.
"Dear Mrs. Petrovitch, did ... you ... see ... anything?"
Her eyes grew round and large, and she traced the outline of a huge shape with her hands.
"Big? Very big?" Doyle offered encouragingly. "A man, was it?"
She shook her head. "Black," she said simply. "Black."
"Mrs. Petrovitch. Go to your rooms. Stay there. Do not come down here again until morning. Do you understand?"
She nodded, then as he turned to go tugged on his sleeve and pointed to the woman behind her.
"My friend is—"
"I'll meet your friend another time. Do as I've told you, Mrs. Petrovitch, please," he said, gently removing her hand. "Now I really must go."
"No, Doctor ... no, she—"
"Get some rest now. Have a nice glass of wine. There's a good Petrovitch. Good night now. Good night." The delivery of which carried him down the stairs and out of her sight.
He kept to the busiest streets and to each street's busiest side, seeking the light, walking always toward the thick of the crowd. No one approached or accosted him. He met no one's gaze and still felt the burn of a thousand malevolent eyes.
Doyle spent what remained of the night at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where he was known, only an hour of it sleeping on one of the cots set aside for working physicians, in a room surrounded by a dozen others, none of which afforded him the security of sanctuary. Displaying his bedrock
rectitude, and perhaps more revealingly his fear of ridicule, he spoke to no one, not even his closest colleagues, of his trouble.
The light of day brought few sparse grains of salt to the previous night's adventures. There must be clear physical explanations for everything that occurred at the seance, Doyle told himself—I just haven't hit on them as yet—no, stop; even this is a deception I'm imposing on myself. The mind depends on equilibrium and will seek it at any cost. This doesn't mean I accept all of what Sacker told me as gospel, but the unvarnished truth is, I have passed through a doorway that has vanished behind me; therefore I cannot go back. Therefore I must go forward.
As he walked out into the cool morning air, he found his terror and disorientation receding, and what quickly came to the fore was fury at the brutal slaying of Lady Nicholson and her brother. Her face would not leave his mind; her beseeching eyes, the cry as she fell. She sought my help, and I failed her in life; I will not do so now, he vowed.
Despite Sacker's admonition, his first stop upon leaving the hospital that morning was Scotland Yard.
An hour later, Doyle was standing outside 13 Cheshire Street with Inspector Claude Leboux. The thin, grimy sunlight brought no rehabilitative cheer to the place but only accentuated its glum neutrality.
"You say they went in here, then?" Leboux asked.
Doyle nodded. He had spared the details from his friend to this point. The word murder had been employed, judiciously but effectively. He had produced Lady Nicholson's note. No mention yet of spirits or gray hoods and blue thread. Or Professor Armond Sacker.