Again, hands had not been idle in this house. The desk was nearly empty but for a few squares of paper. Upon examination, they appeared to be bills for treatments signed by various personages. Nothing unusual about them, save for the one signed by Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury for the administration of medicine for…did that scribbling say anal warts?
Matthew returned the bills to the desk and wiped his fingers on his coat. Then he took stock of the trapdoor once again. What was down there, and why? Old files, perhaps? A bundle of letters? Perhaps the letter he sought?
Possibly. And possibly he had best check the next room on the left first, before he started descending ladders into dark holes. He had a sense of urgency now, and he was listening intently for the sound of horse hooves and coach wheels. He left the trapdoor open and went to the next chamber.
One step in, and a shiver of fear paralyzed him.
This obviously was Doctor Jason’s bedroom. It held a black chest of drawers, an oval full-length mirror on small wheels, a black leather chair and a canopied bed.
And on that bed lay, pressed together side-by-side, two naked bodies.
It suddenly occurred to Matthew what had been inside the sea chest.
He caught his breath and stepped forward. His light revealed gray flesh. The bodies were of a man and a woman. The woman’s sagging breasts and dark-haired vagina were pitiful. It was a skinny corpse, each rib showing. The man’s body was also ill-fed, and had the tattoo of an eagle just below the collarbone. Two toes were missing from the left foot. The hands were stiffened into claws, which seemed to be reaching in agony toward the canopy above.
But the thing that made Matthew recoil in true horror was that neither corpse had a head.
The heads had been cut off. The neckstumps were all ragged flesh and old brown crust. Matthew smelled the dried blood and the dusty sweet reek of flesh on the edge of decay, yet it was obvious these souls were not very long-departed from this earthly realm. He wanted to lower the lantern, yet lowering the lantern meant he would be giving the corpses over to the dark and if he imagined that one of them gave a sudden jerk of arm or leg he would puddle himself quite soggily.
He backed away, keeping the lantern up and the flintlock’s barrel aimed at the dead as if he might have to kill them again. Where were the heads? he wondered. In the leather case carried out by Doctor Jason? And what in the name of God were two headless bodies doing lying in the man’s bed?
“…pay for this dirty business,” someone said.
Matthew’s hair might have stood up under his cap. He froze at the doorway, a heart-pounding, vein-throbbing, near-puddling wreck of nerves.
Two men were speaking in the kitchen. “Should’ve got more, I say. Dirty and dangerous, too. You saw them shorts on there!”
“Aw, shut your hole! Bullett knows his trade.”
Matthew heard footsteps. Rough men wearing rough-heeled boots. They were coming back along the hallway. He peered through the door’s crack and there they were, each carrying a lantern. One man was lugging a burlap sack over his shoulder.
“Damnable job, this is,” said the complainer with the burden, who was met with a snort either of derision or accord.
Matthew realized with a fresh start of alarm that they were coming to this room. He saw only one place to retreat to: the other side of the bed, where he might lie flat on the floor. He quickly got into position and pressed the lever that dropped the lantern’s ribs and closed off all illumination.
“You hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Somethin’ made a noise.”
They pushed through the door. “It’s the echo inside your fuckin’ head,” came the retort. Then: “Ewww, ain’t they pretty all laid out like lovers? Kinda tugs at your heart-strings, don’t it?”
“It don’t. Help me with these and let’s get out.”
Matthew heard the thump as the sack was laid down on the floor perhaps five feet from his hiding-place. Something was dumped out, and made its own noise. He heard one of the men say, “Come on, hurry it up!” after which there was a hissing sound. A second hissing followed. Truly, this was a den of snakes. Acrid smoke stung Matthew’s nostrils. You saw them shorts on there, the complainer had said.
Shorts? It dawned on him that the meaning must be short fuses.
The men were lighting fuses with their candle flames, and whatever they were preparing was about to blow the house to pieces.
He swallowed hard and stood up. As he came off the floor, he cocked the pistol and opened his lantern. Light streamed out, catching one of the jackadaws lighting the last of four fuses that went into the same number of black cylindrical objects about a foot in length.
“Stop that,” Matthew said. The men fairly leapt from the floor. One gave his own explosion in the form of a fart. Matthew aimed his flintlock between them. The four fuses hissed and smoked, throwing blue sparks in their progress. “Stomp those out!” Matthew commanded.
“Who the hell are you?” the farter asked.
“Stomp those out!” Matthew repeated. The fuses were burning dangerously near their entrance holes into the cylinders, which appeared to be wrapped in oily black leather. “Now!”
“Sure, sure,” said one man, lifting his hand to show Matthew his palm. Then, as if they’d practiced this cue for just such a predicament, the second man threw his lantern at Matthew’s head. It hit Matthew’s shoulder as he twisted aside, and the flintlock pistol went off from a convulsive twitch of the trigger finger. Smoke bloomed, the bullet smacked into the opposite wall, and the concussion made the ribs of Oliver Quisenhunt’s device snap shut, cutting off Matthew’s light. It occurred to him, as the men rushed from the room and smoke whirled around him, that the apparatus needed more testing.
It then occurred to him, quite sharply, that the fuses were burning into their bombs, and though he was able to crush out two with his boot the other two snaked away and flared brightly as they entered the cylinders.
Matthew ran.
Through the door into the hallway, and just as he got out the Devil shouted in his ears and a fierce hot wave of Hell picked him up off his feet and flung him like a ragdoll through the doorway into the doctor’s treatment room.
Nine
SOMETIME in the next few seconds, as Matthew lay crumpled on the brick floor and the whirlwinds of flame gnawed at his coat, he realized that if he was going to live he would have to get out of this house.
He thought the roof might have blown off already, or at least a goodly portion of it. Pieces of fiery wood were falling about him. His ears made a roaring sound, but hollow as if he were in an underwater cavern. Everything hurt: shoulders, knees, backbone, neck, jaw, teeth. He felt as if his muscles and sinews had been stretched long and then jammed tight. There was a red haze before his eyes; he thought they might be swollen with blood. He swallowed blood and felt it streaming from his nose, which might have been broken in his collision with the bricks. Already the fire was surrounding him. It was a hydra-headed beast, growing bright orange horns, talons and teeth and tearing through the house. A piece of flaming timber crashed down on the floor about three feet from his right thigh. Cinders stung his face. He was at the center of a world full of red-hot hornets. Then he was aware that his fearnaught was on fire, and his own coat was going to eat him alive.