The Vesuvius Club

by Mark Gatiss

  He wheeled himself forward with one china-blue hand. The other, inevitably, clutched a book over his blanket-covered lap. He was probably sixty-odd yet contrived to look twice that. What little hair he had was of an almost translucent blond, as though old straw had been carelessly applied to his scalp with gum. Forever in the habit of licking his lips, an angry red halo had developed around them and his eyes were nigh on invisible behind a pair of ancient, filthy, thickly lensed pince-nez.

  Chuckling at the sight of me, he held out his hand and I gingerly gripped the perished-apple knuckles.

  ‘Sir Emmanuel,’ I cooed. ‘It is indeed an honour.’

  ‘Of course it is! Lucifer Box, eh? Can’t say I’ve heard of you. You’re some sort of painter, I gather. I do not normally grant interviews but I was told you had something that might interest me,’ he said, adjusting his spectacles. ‘Well, pray be seated. Do not mind those volumes. Move them along. There is a very pretty space there by Bleasdale’s Tales of Surgical Misadventure. There now!’

  I squeezed myself into a chair by the roaring fire.

  ‘Are you cold?’ he asked, suddenly.

  I was already perspiring horribly. ‘Quite comfortable, thank you.’

  Quibble shook his head mournfully. ‘It is like a tomb in here. I can never get warm. The servants complain that I stifle them but how can they object to a fire in December!’

  ‘It is July, sir,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Is it?’ He began a high cackling sound, exposing tiny peg-like teeth. ‘Perhaps I am too cold-blooded. My doctors tell me I have a thin hide.’

  I smiled indulgently. ‘I wonder you don’t have yourself dust-jacketed.’

  ‘What’s that?’ He cupped a withered hand around his ear.

  ‘You ought to equip yourself with a dust-jacket, Sir Emmanuel,’ I shouted. ‘Like one of your famous collection.’

  He liked that and cackled some more. ‘Capital idea! I know just the men for the job. Grindrod and Spicer of Camden Town. Let me see. Hmm.’ He extended his stick-like arms before him and looked them up and down as though contemplating the measurement of a suit. ‘Yes, blue card with calf-skin end-boards. I think I should go very well just above your head, Mr Box, between Patterson’s Pathology of the Goitre and Rabelaisianism. Can I tempt you with a Madeira? No? Then perhaps we shall eat.’

  He rang a little glass bell. I lifted my Gladstone and took out the book that Miracle had sent me. Quibble eyed it hungrily.

  ‘What is it? Let me see!’

  I lifted the volume and held it up to the firelight. The title glinted like gold in a stream.

  Quibble let out a little cry and wheeled himself towards me with feverish speed.

  ‘It isn’t? Can it be? Daniel Liquorice!’

  ‘It is.’

  I placed the book in his shaking hands. ‘I believe it is somewhat scarce,’ I said blithely.

  ‘Scarce?’ Quibble almost shook with pleasure. ‘It is practically unique. Daniel Liquorice! In my hands!’

  With great care he opened the book and raised it close to his bespectacled face. ‘“Being an account of the journey of an itinerant gentleman in His Majesty’s East Indies”,’ he read. ‘Heggessey Todd’s lost masterpiece! Where did you find it, Mr Box? Where?’

  He wriggled in his chair like a wormy baby, his tongue flashing around his raw mouth in a little circle.

  ‘I have my sources,’ I said, tantalizingly. ‘Perhaps we can come to terms over dinner.’

  ‘Yes, yes! Naturally. You must be fed!’

  He rang the bell again with renewed urgency. A servant came to the door. Quibble barked orders at him then turned again to me.

  ‘Mr Box, would you mind?’

  He waved a skinny hand at his wheeled-chair. I rose and began to push him through into the dining room.

  Paintings of what appeared to be Quibble’s ancestors were just visible behind yet more staggered heaps of books, varnished eyes staring out in mute appeal, as though their owners were drowning in yellowed paper.

  I pushed the wizened man to the head of the table where he sat cradling Daniel Liquorice as though it were a child. ‘Name your price, my dear sir. I have dreamed of owning this book since –’

  ‘It’s not money I want, Sir Emmanuel,’ I murmured. ‘But information.’

  ‘Information?’

  I walked to the opposite end of the table where I found my chair being pulled out by another servant. Dressed, like Stint, in rather mouldering livery, a patina of dust covered his dulled silver buttons and epaulettes. He was a tall young lad with a pebble-smooth face and close-cropped hair. His eyes were very blue under dark brows as bold as strokes of charcoal.

  He turned to the soup tureen and placed the lid gently at my side, fixing me with a look I can only describe as impudent. He smiled.

  ‘Evening, sir,’ he said, ladling beetroot soup into the dish before me. The voice was throaty from tobacco. Another relic from Blighty, it seemed.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said.

  He bent low, suddenly, till his face was right by mine. He smelled of honey. ‘Charles Jackpot, sir.’

  Then, bless me if he didn’t wink. ‘But you can call me Charlie.’

  XII

  A LONDON DERRIÈRE

  I SAID nothing and turned my attention to the beetroot soup.

  The nosh was dusty but passable. The soup was followed by a kind of salmon pastry and, after my new acquaintance, Mr Jackpot, had cleared this away, by an absolutely magnificent goose. Quibble clearly remained insulated against Italian notions of cuisine.

  Eschewing the grimy napkin, I sucked the grease from my fingers as the servant cradled the dishes in his arms. He didn’t speak, merely fixing me with the same impudent gaze. In the glow of the fire he had the face of a Renaissance saint. It was most unnerving.

  Clearing my throat, I wiped the dust from Quibble’s best crystal and poured myself a generous glass of plonk. I watched Charlie Jackpot as he loped back, with what I can only call a swagger, towards the kitchens.

  Quibble turned a page in the book. ‘Now, sir. May we get to business? I cannot rest easy until I know this volume to be mine. Time and tide, you know. They wait for no man.’

  He craned his neck and peered back into the other room, as though it pained him to be separated from his library for more than a few moments.

  ‘If you should like to know precisely how long they do wait, I have a volume on the subject. I believe it is over there between On the Dangers of Bicycling and Coprolites of the Permian.’ Quibble licked his lips till his spittle glistened on their flaking surface.

  Images are removed here

  I felt inside my coat and produced the photograph I had taken from Professor Sash’s study. I slid it down the table towards the invalid and watched Quibble carefully as he lifted the photograph and held it about an inch from his spectacles. He coughed throatily. It was a sound like brown paper crackling in an oven.

  ‘Where…where did you get this?’

  ‘It was among the…er…personal effects of Professor Frederick Sash.’

  Quibble’s head snapped up. ‘Effects? He’s not dead, is he? Sash isn’t dead?’

  I nodded. ‘And his body stolen. Along with another of the gentlemen in that photograph. Eli Verdigris.’

  ‘Verdigris too? How?’

  ‘That remains a mystery. I am investigating the matter, sir, and believe you can be of material assistance.’

  Quibble heaved a heavy sigh. ‘I hear nothing out here you see. Sometimes I think it was folly to leave the old country but I could get nothing done. The constant distractions! My great burden is work – so much that I am called upon to do!’ His tongue flashed around the wet hole of his puckered mouth in great agitation.

  ‘What of the other man in the photograph, Maxwell Morraine?’

  ‘Morraine?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure you know he died out here some years ago.’

  The old man suddenly fixed me with a malevolent stare. ‘Who are
you? What do you mean by bringing this volume here as though I were some horse-trader? What is the real reason for your visit, hm?’

  He waved the photograph at me, his shrivelled mouth turning down into a snarl. ‘You want to bring all that up again!’ he yelled. ‘Well, it won’t wash, d’you hear me? Let the dead rest in peace!’

  ‘All what, sir?’

  ‘Get out, sir! Out! Stint!’

  He grabbed at the glass bell and rang it until I feared it would shatter.

  I shot to my feet. ‘Forgive me, Sir Emmanuel, but I am convinced you are in grave danger –’

  ‘Stint!’

  The doors sprang open and the pale servant was framed there. ‘Sir?’

  Quibble writhed in his chair, shaking his bulbous head till cowlicks of sparse hair tumbled from behind his ears and his book-tentacles rattled. ‘Show this person out! You are never to admit him into my house again.’

  ‘Sir Emmanuel, please –’ I began.

  Stint was at my elbow. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, sir?’

  ‘I believe that a long-buried secret is threatening your life, sir, and that of a very noble friend of mine. Please, help me to find –’

  ‘Out!’

  I was escorted through the gloomy corridors and shown out into the muggy night.

  Well, that hadn’t gone very well at all, had it?

  Old Stint shook his head mournfully. ‘I do beg your pardon, sir. I’ve never seen the master so upset.’

  ‘Stint,’ I said earnestly. ‘I have serious reason to believe Sir Emmanuel to be in danger of losing his life. Watch him carefully and contact me should you notice anything suspicious. Do you understand?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I am staying at the Hotel Santa Lucia. Anything suspicious, mind. And tell your master that the book is a gift. A gesture of my good faith.’

  I pushed open the protesting gate and made my way back on to the drive. Grateful for the comparative cool, I stretched and took a deep breath before setting off for the carriage.

  As I moved off, however, there came the sound of a match being struck and then a tiny point of amber light glowed in the shadows as someone inhaled greedily on a cigarette.

  Sidling up to the gates once more I was somehow unsurprised to find the servant Jackpot loitering there. He smiled and the cigarette in his lips poked upwards, the curling smoke causing him to narrow his very blue eyes.

  ‘Hullo,’ he muttered.

  I touched my fingers to the brim of my hat and began to move off back towards the road.

  Suddenly the boy pushed his face to the railings and, after briefly looking about, spoke in an urgent whisper.

  ‘If you wanna see something of importance, Mr Box, meet me in town. Tomorrow. Midnight.’

  ‘Meet you? Why ever should I do that?’

  ‘Via Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. The house with the crimson light. You won’t regret it.’

  Now it was my turn to smile. ‘Won’t I? And what could you possibly have that would interest me?’

  His answer shocked me for a moment or two. For, stepping back a little from the railings, he suddenly thrust two fingers up at me.

  Before I had time to react, he curled two fingers of his other hand into a semicircle and banged them against his palm. The penny dropped. Here was a ‘V’ and now a ‘C’.

  I nodded.

  The servant flicked his cigarette into the shadows. ‘Midnight tomorrow.’

  And with that he was gone.

  Next day, as arranged, I called on Miss Bella Pok at her hotel. The sunshine had completely deserted us and there was a squally feel to the weather, combined with a high, keening wind echoing banshee-like over the land. After breakfast, at Bella’s insistence, we took a two-wheeler along the coastal road until we reached the outlying plains of the great volcano, its peak scarcely visible in the yellowy fog. She had a yen, you see, to travel on the famous funicular railway that had been constructed with great ingenuity (and no little bravery) right up the slopes of the grumbling peak, terminating just short of the cone itself.

  ‘I’m sure there are more interesting ways of passing the time,’ I said, smiling my wide smile.

  Bella touched a gloved hand to my arm. ‘But aren’t you fascinated by it, Lucifer? The boiling energy beneath our very feet? The fiery lava just waiting to erupt?’

  Well, I was, of course. But just then it wasn’t Vesuvius’s fiery lava that was on my mind.

  There was a station on the lower slopes that resembled nothing so much as a small desert fort, its flat roof thick with grey volcanic dust. I bought the tickets and we watched as the wind whipped balls of dust and old newspaper to worry at the feet of us travellers. A big clock struck two and we got aboard the cramped train carriage, watching the bleary sunlight glinting off the cable wires that stretched ahead up the slopes of the volcano.

  The carriage – a curious thing built in a stepped arrangement like a mobile block of steps – was half-empty. Bella sat down on one of the steps, staring with animated curiosity out of the filthy windows. Next to us was an old woman with a bag of knitting and a couple of American boys in offensively loud checked suits and wide-awake hats, already loudly proclaiming the mountain’s incredible majesty, though all we could see so far was greasy ash. As we crawled up the sheer slope, great filthy clouds of sulphur billowed over the roof of the train, condensing on the windows like poisonous teardrops.

  I suddenly noticed a young man sitting on the step above me. I received a quick impression of neat black suit and long auburn hair. His eyes were huge and brown, his nose slightly snubbed as though he had gently pressed it to a window-pane. He lifted his hat and smiled dazzlingly.

  ‘You are impressed?’ he asked.

  I didn’t know if he meant by the volcano or himself.

  ‘Very,’ I said.

  Bella glanced up and the stranger smiled.

  ‘Please forgive me, you are Signor Box, yes?’

  I nodded.

  ‘My name is Victor,’ he said, holding out his gloved hand. I gripped it firmly and introduced Bella.

  He took Bella’s hand and kissed it gently. ‘Our mutual friend, Signor Unmann,’ Victor continued, ‘expresses his regrets and begs that you accepted me as your guide in his stead.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, losing all hope of useful information from my supposed man in the field.

  ‘You know the mountain well?’ asked Bella.

  The young man took a deep breath of the frankly noxious air. ‘For me, Vesuvius is like a drug. I cannot help but travel up these slopes whenever I have the chance – even though I live here in Napoli.’

  ‘Yes,’ I coughed. ‘Intoxicating. Known Mr Unmann long have you?’

  ‘Oh we are old…how do you say? Chums. Yes. Old chums. Now tell me, after we have been up and down the great Vesuvius – like the Grand Old Duke, yes? – what would you like to see? Naples is such a thrilling city.’

  Bella began at once to itemise every last church in the place and I was slightly relieved when the guard called out ‘Destinazione!’ and our carriage creaked and wheezed its way into the upper station.

  Victor got nimbly to his feet and ushered us out of the train into a cloud of ash-filled steam. I wasn’t sure I wanted this little Eye-tie crowding my afternoon with Bella and made plans to get shot of him just as soon as we returned to the Funicular station.

  We set foot on black volcanic soil. Bella looked down at her feet and lifted her boots.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ I asked.

  She grinned. ‘Just checking that they hadn’t begun to spontaneously combust.’

  Only three hundred yards from where we stood, the immense caldera of the volcano glowed an intense orange, plumes of white smoke belching from the sizzling rock. The heat was so intense I could feel the tiny hairs on my hands shrinking. I wished I’d worn gloves. Exposure to the Neopolitan sunshine was already threatening to tan me like a navvy.

  I turned my face away from the oven-like heat. Victor stoo
d his ground and shook his head in wonderment. ‘What a magnificent thing she is!’

  ‘Been quiet for a while has it?’ I asked.

  He grinned. ‘A sleeping giant.’

  ‘But not likely to turn over in her sleep any time soon?’

  ‘You never can tell,’ chirped Victor gaily. ‘Come, let us go closer.’

  He led the way forward. It was easy to spot the fairly fresh lava flows that lay in petrified streams all about us and I shielded my eyes against the glare from the boiling ground.

  Victor closed his eyes. Smoke curled over and about his slim frame like ghostly vipers and we stood for a few silent moments amongst the blackened landscape. Bella clambered onto a great square boulder of volcanic rock and pointed down at the verdant plain. ‘What is that?’

  Far below us lay a collection of whitish buildings, scattered like child’s blocks in the greenery.

  ‘That is Pompeii,’ said the youth. ‘Look there if you wish to see what fearful power the Earth truly has within her.’

  We lingered on top of the volcano for some little time with our new acquaintance chatting amiably throughout. Bella seemed quite taken with him but I felt curiously out of sorts. Perhaps it was the impending appointment with the mysterious servant Jackpot. At any rate, I was grateful to get back into the funicular and begin the descent.

  Bella noticed how preoccupied I’d become.

  ‘You seem troubled, Lucifer,’ she said, crossing to where I stood by the misted window.

  I patted her hand. ‘Forgive me, my dear. Not quite comfortable in my own skin today, if you see what I mean.’

  She nodded, smiled. ‘It seems a shame. It’s such a bonny skin.’

  Our eyes locked for a moment, blue to green. We had the whole evening yet. Was this an invitation…?

  All thoughts of a jolly tumble with the divine Miss Pok were temporarily banished, however. As the funicular pulled into the station, I happened to glance through the milling crowds at the exit. At once a huge, barrel-chested figure caught my gaze, dressed in a heavy black coat and hat, his indigo-coloured spectacles lending his face a skull-like air.