Numbed, Matthew followed the direction of Devane’s arm. What else could he do? He felt as much in chains here as he ever had in Newgate; even more so, for all this sunny brightness and blue sky was a hollow shell that seemed to confine everyone he gave a care about.
“Turn here,” Devane said.
They turned to the left, onto the way marked with a sign of Conger Street. They were approaching the sea. Matthew saw instantly where they were headed, and had been so dazed by his encounter with Berry that he hadn’t noticed above the other roofs the two-storied construction standing about sixty yards away, at what appeared to be the wall’s northwestern edge. It was a squat square castle keep of a house, formed of the same stones as the wall and so blending into the larger picture, making Matthew think of a snakeskin camouflaged by the rocks around it. Numerous windows, some made of stained-glass, looked out upon the professor’s realm. A balcony circled the upper floor. Upon it stood a dark-garbed figure whose hands gripped the railing. As Matthew and Devane neared, the figure turned away and disappeared through an arched doorway.
An iron gate was open at the bottom of a slight incline up to the house, the gravel pathway ornamented on both sides by small trees, contorted into windblown shapes, that had obviously been transplanted from somewhere else. Devane got in pace beside Matthew and steered him toward a main doorway at the top of a short set of five steps with an ornamental iron railing. He opened the sturdy-looking oak door without hesitation. “Enter,” he said, and never had a single word filled Matthew with such dread.
Devane closed the door at Matthew’s back. It was quiet in the house but for the ticking of a clock somewhere. There was the chalky smell of old stones and the hint of a sweeter, musky aroma that Matthew thought might be some kind of Oriental incense. He stood in a narrow hallway with walls painted sea green and lined with parchment prints of aquatic creatures in small black frames, all done in a scientific style with the different parts of the organism identified by their Latin nomenclature. Light entered through a window of clear glass at the end of the hallway and filtered in hues of yellow, red, and blue through stained-glass windows on the upper level. A black runner with dark blue swirls in it covered the polished floorboards, and just ahead was a staircase with the same color rug going up the risers. Two lanterns burned on a black lacquered table just within the entrance.
“Take one of those and follow me,” said Devane. He picked up a lantern, as did Matthew, and led the way past the staircase to another door off to the right.
“I thought I was going to see Hudson Greathouse,” Matthew said, as Devane opened the door and a musty dungeon smell wafted out.
“You are.”
“What, he’s being kept down there?”
“He’s being kept,” said Devane, his face expressionless, “where he can’t hurt himself.”
Matthew’s throat tightened. “What’s been done to him?”
“Come along,” Devane said, and started down a set of stone steps so narrow Matthew wondered how they’d gotten Hudson’s big-shouldered body down them.
Though he was both seething and terrified inside, Matthew again had no choice but to follow. He thought he could smash Devane in the head with the lantern he held, but what good would that do? None whatsoever. He docilely descended the stairs.
At the bottom, there was a stone-floored circular chamber dimly illuminated by a single lantern burning on a wallhook. The lamps Matthew and Devane carried helped, but to Matthew it seemed that the dark, damp walls absorbed light. Four wooden doors were set equidistantly around the chamber. Each door had a slot through which a tray of food could be delivered, and a small viewport about head-high that could be unbolted, the covering square of wood pivoted out, and an observation made of the prisoner within the cell. Currently all the ports were closed.
Devane approached the first door on their left. Matthew stopped.
“Come on,” the man said. “You wanted to see him, didn’t you?”
Matthew couldn’t get his legs moving. His face felt like a lump of clay. If this was not the worst nightmare of his life he needed no other any more terrible, for he knew Hudson was in that cell and it was not going to be a pleasant sight, and he was completely and totally powerless to help his friend.
Devane unbolted the port and stepped aside. “Have a look,” he said.
Matthew moved forward.
All was dark within the windowless cell. He shone his lamp in and angled his head to see.
The walls were covered by some kind of thick, gray padded material. The floor, the same. There was a bare mattress on the floor. There was evidence that the occupant of this cell had been allowed to lie in his own filth. There was a bundle of rags in a corner.
Then when the light touched the bundle of rags it shivered and moved. A voice whimpered, like that of a child facing a brutal lash.
“Hudson,” said Matthew. “I’ve—”
The figure began to try to winnow itself under the mattress. Matthew caught sight of both hands clasped to the face, and as he watched the bare feet and legs work desperately to push the body beneath the mattress either he or the man in that cell gave a heart-wrenching moan that sounded torn from the very throat of a soul damned by all the demons of Hell.
“He’s afraid of the light,” said Devane. “He’s afraid of voices. Afraid of his own name. Afraid of most everything, really.”
Matthew spun upon the man. He felt his lips draw back from his teeth in a grotesque rictus. His face was afire. There was nothing in his mind but the desire to kill the bastard who stood so calmly before him.
Devane took a backward step, his eyes heavy-lidded. Before Matthew could leap to the attack, Devane said, “Professor Fell will see you now.”
Thirty-Five
DID you hear what I said?”
Matthew’s eyes had been searching the walls, looking for hooks where the keys to these cells might be kept.
“The keys are not down here,” said Devane, correctly inferring what Matthew was after. “Shall we go? He’s waiting for you.”
Matthew gritted his teeth so hard the muscles in his jaw jumped and nearly locked. As his rage settled he reckoned he didn’t have enough teeth left to spare in grinding the rest of them into powder. The fire in his face abated, but his head and heart still pounded with the horror of what he’d seen in that cell.
Devane closed the viewport and slid the bolt home. “Better for him to remain in the dark,” he said. “After you, please.”
Matthew climbed the stairs, with Devane right behind him. In the hallway the man took Matthew’s lantern and put them both on the table where they’d been. “Upstairs,” came the command. Matthew obeyed as if he truly had no mind nor will of his own.
On the upper level, another corridor led between several closed doors. Again on the walls were hung the framed prints of marine creatures. At the end of the corridor was an open doorway. Matthew could see in that room a large window and beyond it the cloudless blue of the sky. He kept going, step after step, his boots making hardly a noise on the black runner, and then he crossed the threshold into what he knew was the professor’s inner sanctum.
It was, as he’d expected, an intellectual’s heaven of what must’ve been at least three hundred books on dark oak shelves. On the floor the black runner had given way to an intricately-woven Persian rug that was swirled with the many colors of the sea in many conditions of light: deep blue, blue-green, pale green, dark gray and light gray, a violet that edged toward ebony. From the ceiling’s thick rafters hung a black wrought-iron chandelier holding eight tapers and shaped like an octopus, each tentacle holding a candle. The room’s oak walls must have been scrubbed down with some kind of polishing wax, from the way they glistened, and upon them were various framed etchings of sea creatures…yet they were the aquatic beasts of nightmare and fable, for here a tremendous creature with a fifty-foot-long sword at its snout was impaling a longboat as the crewmen jumped for their lives, and there a leviathan of a kraken was
enfolding a three-masted ship toward the massive, gaping spear-toothed mouth at its center. A section of one wall held shelves upon which rested a collection of jars of fish, crabs, small squids, mollusks and the like—Rosabella’s “fishy things”—preserved in a smoky amber liquid.
A door to the right of the room led out onto the balcony, which was at a height just above the fortress wall. A brass telescope was aimed at the vast expanse of the sea. Sunlight glittered on the ocean’s surface, throwing sparks into Matthew’s eyes.
And there in the center of the room, his back to the window, sat a man at a writing desk with ornamental diamond shapes carved into the front. Two black leather armchairs for the comfort of visitors were situated before the desk. The man was scribing something with a quill in a ledger book open before him on a green blotter.
He had not looked up as the two others had entered, but continued his writing.
Devane made no sound. Neither did Matthew. A passing flock of seagulls caught Matthew’s attention and his gaze followed them out of sight. From here he could see upon the ocean to his left what appeared to be a couple of small fishing boats moving with the swells.
The man still did not lift his face, but his slender left hand made a quick gesture that meant away. Devane left the room, closed the door, and Matthew was alone with Professor Fell.
Matthew’s host was wearing a black silk robe trimmed with gold down the front and at the cuffs. Though the room needed no more light than that of the sun, a single candle burned in a pewter holder next to his right hand. The scribing went on as if no one else was in the room.
Matthew called up what remained of his courage. He turned his back on the professor, walked to the shelves and began examining this absolutely wonderful collection. In a matter of seconds he took in such titles as John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Roger L’Estrange’s Fables, Ned Ward’s A Trip To New England and A Trip To Jamaica, several astrological almanacs, Cotton Mather’s Wonders Of the Invisible World, and…
Had he made a sound, or had he imagined doing so? Because the volume his gaze had settled upon, bound in cracked, dark brown leather with faded gold lettering upon the spine might have brought forth from him a small exclamation.
The title was The Lesser Key Of Solomon.
He realized it was the third copy of this particular work that he’d seen in connection with Professor Fell. The last one he’d come upon was in Fell’s library on Pendulum Island.
He had looked through the volume there, on the island, and found it to be a book that described in great and horrendous detail the demonic royalty of Hell.
Those pages held the Latin script and elaborate woodcuts that depicted hideous combinations of man, beast, and insect as might be created from the seething rage of the underworld to war against the power of Heaven. He recalled some of the names of the demons, which were given titles as befitted such nightmarish nobility: Duke Ashtaroth, Count Murmur, King Zagan, Prince Seere, Marquis Andras, King Belial and on and on through descriptions of the specialties of these infernaradoes, such as the deliverer of madness, the king of liars, the destroyer of cities, the reanimator of the dead and the corruptor of the dignity of men.
He remembered also that within the cracked binding, which itself resembled the snakelike skin of a horned demon, were spells and rituals written out to call these monstrosities from their caverns to do the bidding of men.
The Lesser Key Of Solomon.
A guidebook to summoning demons, with detailed descriptions of their powers.
This…the third copy…
He suddenly heard in his mind the voice of Mother Deare, speaking about Fell’s interest in finding Brazio Valeriani.
Valeriani possesses information the professor needs. It has not to do with marine life, but…in a way it does involve the deeps.
Matthew’s hand had reached out to take the book, but now he held it just short of the devil’s snakeskin.
He thought…the deeps?
How much deeper could one descend than to the gates of Hell itself?
“Have you found a book you wish to read?”
The voice, as silken as the robe, was right behind him.
Matthew hesitated. He lowered his hand, took a breath and released it, and then turned to face Professor Fell.
Just as Professor Fell had said at their first meeting on Pendulum Island that Matthew was younger than he’d expected, now Matthew found that Fell was older than he’d thought…or, at least, the wages of the man’s life had been paid in the currency of years. Matthew had assumed from the voice behind the automaton’s mask that Fell was in his late forties or early fifties, but now it appeared he was closer to sixty, from the hollows of the eyes, the fine lines around them and across the forehead, and from the whiteness of his cropped cap of hair, which was allowed to bloom out in tight curls on either side of his head like the wings of a snowy owl.
The professor was indeed a mulatto, his skin the color of creamed coffee. He was very slender, almost frail in appearance, and stood two inches taller than Matthew, who was himself nearly six feet. But even if Fell’s age was in the vicinity of fifty-eight to sixty or so, the man’s presence was in no way softened by the approach of those golden years in which a regular man might be assumed to crawl into an easy chair with pipe and slippers and be waited upon by doting grandchildren. No, this man stood a far cry from the scene of loving relatives gathered around the home hearth.
Fell’s shoulders might be a fraction stooped and the hands he held clasped before him lined with blue veins, but in his long-jawed and high-cheekboned face, which might be also described as gaunt, there resided the tiger in repose. Or, more fitting to the professor’s interest, the slowly circling shark. His thin-lipped smile hung between humor and cruelty and showed the faintest glint of teeth. But it was his eyes in their dark hollows, like luminous orbs in fleshy caverns, that truly communicated to Matthew Corbett the persona of the man who stood before him.
They were the same smoky amber color as the liquid in the specimen jars, yet they were also aflame. They were the eyes of a highly-intelligent and gifted man who had given his life to the pleasure and achievement of academics and found his life changed forever by brutality, and thus in revenging himself upon brutality had become brutal, and been both consumed by its voracious maw and reshaped by its twisted guts. They were the wary, dagger-sharp eyes of a man who had fancied himself passive but who perhaps had always secreted the seeds of violence and the desire for power from youth, and who had suddenly been thrust into a situation where those seeds not only grew into misshapen trees of barbed thorns but entire forests of them. They were the eyes of a supremely civilized man who had released his most primitive reptilian force upon both himself and his world, and perhaps those lines and appearance of age in his faintly-smiling face were the marks of the battlefield his soul had crossed.
Professor Fell was in essence, Matthew thought, a man who had decided that to live he must die, and in dying live. Was the murder of his son Templeton on a London street the only motive for a brilliant academic to find salvation in savagery? Possibly not; possibly the murder had simply hastened the speed of a long-burning fuse, and the man who had lived in the confines of law and order found such existence a prison, his only chance for freedom the taking up of a mask of power that would forever separate him from the world in which loved ones celebrated a life well-lived.
No one loved this man, Matthew thought. They feared and respected him, yes, but never would he know love…and those burning, smoky amber-colored eyes of Professor Fell told Matthew he had cast off the desire for that cloak of honor long ago, and now he wore the black robe of the bad man for it was all he had.
The professor awaited an answer.
Matthew had to steel himself a little further before he could reply. Then he said, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
The gaze moved past Matthew, and Matthew was certain it locked upon The Lesser Key before it returned to him.
“Come sit down,” said the professor. “Let’s have a nice visit.” He turned away, went back to the writing-desk, sat down and waited as if about to interview an applicant for the job of groundskeeper.
Matthew removed his tricorn and cloak. He laid the garment over the back of one of the chairs and then eased himself into the seat as one might lower his body onto a bed of spikes. He kept the tricorn in his lap, a most uncertain shield against swordpoint or pistol ball.
“I am so glad to see you, Matthew,” Fell said silkily. “You look fit enough, though a bit thin. Mother Deare tells me you’ve been through some hard weather. Newgate Prison…the Black-Eyed Broodies…nice mark on your hand there, by the way…and a little visit by a moony dentist. But you’re a survivor, aren’t you? Yes, you are. And to be admired for that.”
Matthew almost said thank you, but he held his tongue.
“I was just about to call for a slice of vanilla cake and a cup of tea. May I offer you the same?”
Matthew decided there was no more use for caution. “Laced with what drug?” he asked.
“Is powdered sugar a drug? The vanilla bean? Flour? Oh, some consider oolong tea to be a drug, of course. Is that your meaning?”
“You know my meaning.”
“I know that you’ll have to eat and drink something, at some time or another, or you will wither away. Why not start here, in my company?”
“I’d rather not.”
Fell’s smile, which had been soft, now sharpened. More glint of teeth showed. “How do you think dying of thirst and hunger will help your two friends?”
“Is there any help to be had for them?”
“Your third friend is here,” Fell said. “He arrived this morning around four o’clock. The good Judge Archer, also known as—excuse my little laugh—Albion.”
Matthew thought that now was time to throw his own poisoned dart. “Next you’ll be telling me you’ve found Brazio Valeriani and he’s been put into the dish closet.”
Fell was silent. His smile began to fade.
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