by Mark Gatiss
‘I see,’ I said quietly. ‘And you’ve been supplying this filthy stuff to someone, haven’t you? To what end?’
‘I cannot tell you…’
I pressed the pistol further into his face. Sweat was streaming over his oily skin. ‘Please! Please! I know only my instructions! I deliver purple poppy and I hear no more.’
I stepped away from the perspiring fat man while still keeping him covered with the pistol. ‘Deliver it where, exactly?’
Lee smiled his fat smile. ‘I can give you address, but it is impossible for me to leave these premises, my business, you understand –’
I levelled my revolver at his nethers. ‘You will take us there, Lee. Or the Neapolitan castrati will be acquiring a new member.’
The darkness was thickening as I commandeered a dog-cart and set off with Charlie and the reluctant Chinee into the sleeping streets. We must have made a pretty sight, lashing away at the skinny steeds but then Naples is accustomed to strange sights; half-mad city that it is.
Lee spoke little but contented himself with pointing and urging as we clattered through the narrow alleys, ducking wet washing that was strung between the houses and shops.
We clattered out of the city and along the coastal road.
‘Now look where we’re heading,’ observed Charlie with a grunt. It was no great surprise to see the great volcano looming before us, its fiery crown smoking like a beacon. After an hour or so, we rolled on into an area of broad parkland. A strange collection of buildings formed a squared ‘C’ shape around the perimeter. In the ruined isolation of the C’s centre stood a blackened villa, its windows fogged with soot.
‘This place,’ said Lee. ‘Place where I bring poppy.’
I jumped from the cart and swung my pistol round to cover Lee. ‘Come on, out!’
The Chinaman shook his head. ‘Please. Do not make me. I not want to go in there.’
‘What’s the matter?’ cried Charlie, clambering out and lighting a lantern. ‘We’ll look after you.’
Lee did not appear to be reassured and shook his head violently, eyes glittering like jet. ‘Not that. I never see anybody when I come. But…house haunted.’
‘Pah!’ I ejaculated.
‘No, no!’ protested Lee. ‘Is the truth, sirs! Please let poor Lee go home now.’
I shook my head. ‘I fear not, old man. Don’t worry your top-knot, though. Any spooks will get a blast of this.’ I cocked the revolver and the three of us began to make our way stealthily across the grass.
A dim light shone in the lower floor of a neighbouring house. We slipped into the shadows so as to remain invisible. I looked about. A pair of old, blistered black doors were visible at the base of the building. The coal cellar.
‘Where did you bring the poppies, Lee? To this cellar?’
Lee shook his nervous head. ‘No, no. Through front. Come, come.’
We moved silently forward to the blackened edifice of the villa and crept over the gravel to the porch. The front door seemed intact but all the windows that were visible had been boarded up. I reasoned it was wiser not to advertise our presence so, in a very few moments, I had pulled down some of the splintering wood and exposed a smoke-blackened window-pane. I took off my muffler and, wrapping it around my fist, smashed the glass. It gave with only a faint tinkling.
The three of us clambered inside, our feet sinking slightly into a carpet of glass and debris, Lee whimpering and squealing like a nervous child.
The atmosphere was at once oppressive with decay. The lantern showed fire-damaged furniture, their varnished surfaces blistered and cracked.
I turned to Charlie. ‘Seems quiet enough.’
‘As the grave.’
Lee wailed softly. I grabbed him by his robe. ‘Where did you leave the opium?’
The Chinaman was looking about in terror. ‘Here in hallway. Not want to stay longer than need to.’
The dusty floor of the entranceway had clearly been disturbed. Charlie held up his lamp revealing a series of trails, as though sleds had cut swathes through the dust.
I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘You explore the house, Charlie,’ I whispered, lighting my own lantern. ‘Mr Lee and I will take the cellar.’
‘Righto.’
I watched him heading for the mouldering staircase then began swinging the lantern about in search of the entrance to the coal cellar. I found what I was looking for in a recessed corner beneath the stairs.
‘Please, sir,’ whimpered Lee. ‘Let us go now. This place bad.’
I felt for a door handle. It was big and carved into a hexagonal shape. To my very great surprise, it turned easily and the door creaked softly open.
Gingerly we stepped down on to a poorly lit wooden stair. The smell of damp assailed me at once but my attention was riveted on the curious sight before me.
The coal cellar appeared to have been adapted into some kind of laboratory. The remains of tubes, flasks and retorts littered benches and there were fragments of geological charts pinned to the wall. Fragments, merely, as the place now resembled the flue of some great chimney. The broken walls were soot-streaked and wet. Glass lay twisted into fantastic shapes on the remains of benches and cupboards. In the corner was a broad, fat-legged table and on it burned a single candle.
There was someone else in this house.
Just as the thought crossed my mind, I heard a terrible moaning.
For a moment I took it to be Lee but the fat creature was jibbering with fear right by me, his eyes clamped shut. I glanced over my shoulder and back the way we had come. The sound was coming from up the stairs, an awful, wretched groan, followed by a burst of ragged sobbing.
‘Charlie!’ I cried. ‘Is that you?’
At once the noise ceased. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
‘Charlie?’
I jammed the pistol in Lee’s back and quickly we mounted the cellar steps, pushed open the door and stepped back into the hallway.
I held the lantern high above my head but could see no one.
Then the moaning began again, as though a soul were in torment. It seemed to be coming from upstairs. I swung the lantern in that direction and, just for an instant, caught a glimpse of something white on the landing above. It seemed to flutter into the shadows like a great bird. I started. Lee absolutely yelled in shock.
‘Shut up, you fat fool!’ I spat then, and, urging him forward with the revolver, made for the staircase.
The creak of our feet on the rotten stair seemed to halt the sobbing once more. We pressed on, ascending swiftly.
I called out for Charlie, then swung the lantern round as I caught sight of the whitish shape again, still above us on the staircase. It was a figure, dressed in some sort of billowing white gown. Or shroud, I thought dully.
I strode towards the phantom shape, determined not to be rattled.
‘Who’s there?’ I demanded. ‘Show yourself!’
With Lee almost hysterical at my side, I reached the top of the staircase and was confronted by a door. Gingerly, I reached out a hand and took hold of the knob.
I swallowed, nervous in spite of myself, and began to turn it.
A hand reached out of the shadows and clasped my arm. I pulled back in undisguised alarm, thrusting the lamp aloft and shining a light down on the frightened face of Charlie Jackpot.
‘Bloody hell, Mr Box! Did you see it? Did you see it?’
I nodded, a little too quickly. ‘I saw it!’
‘The face!’ he whispered. ‘Did you see its face?’
All at once, the door in front of us flew open and the figure in white seemed to swarm upon us.
I yelled in stark terror and batted at the thing with both hands. Lee took to his heels and pounded down the rotten stairway. Charlie threw himself behind me and we sank back against the wall as the spectre went hurtling down the stairs after the Chinaman, screaming and sobbing as though it were a denizen of Hell itself.
‘Christ Almighty!’ I gasped, afte
r we had picked ourselves up off the landing. ‘What was it?’
Charlie shook his head. ‘It went…it went towards the cellar.’
I stood up and opened the lantern to its fullest extent.
Slowly and silently, we descended the stairs and approached the door to the cellar.
There was no sign of Lee.
I opened the door, taking care that it should not creak, and then took a few tentative steps downwards.
I lifted the lamp. Behind me, Charlie gasped and clapped a hand to his mouth.
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Sitting in a fire-charred chair was the ruin of a woman. Dressed in a stained and tattered white robe, her hair hung about her shoulders in great, knotted clumps. It was her face, though, which drew all our attention. The eyes looked out from a skull-like visage from which the flesh seemed to have been boiled away. Great blistered lumps of skin hung like candle-wax from the jaw and cheek-bones.
‘Good God,’ whispered Charlie.
The woman looked at me wildly, those dreadful eyes glistening in the lantern-light. Then she began to moan once more, her whole body shuddering as though a disinterred mummy had been brought to some foul simulacrum of life.
And all at once I knew her.
‘Mrs Knight?’ I cried. ‘Mrs Midsomer Knight?’
‘Yes,’ said the voice of Lee behind us. ‘Most regrettable that you will never have chance to meet her properly.’
He was brandishing a Colt in his pudgy hand.
‘Please to stay still. I can certainly kill one of you before you have chance to overpower me.’ The Chinee turned his narrow black eyes upon me and smiled. ‘Drop gun.’
With a sigh, I dropped my revolver to the tiled floor.
Lee levelled his own gun at me, a horrible snarling grin flickering over his lips as he bent down to retrieve mine. He thrust it inside his robes. ‘You have done well, Mr Box. But it is time to stop toying with you. You dangle like child’s puppet. So sorry.’
He advanced on the wretched woman before us. He plucked a hypodermic syringe from somewhere in his robes, and with practised efficiency plunged it into her forearm. With a groan, she slumped forward. ‘Now, please to escort lady from cellar.’
He gestured with the Colt and Charlie and I manhandled Mrs Knight up the stairs and back into the hallway. Thanks to the nameless drug – no doubt the purple poppy in one of its many guises – she was the very opposite of a ghost. She weighed a ton.
Lee ushered us through the house, into a large, gloomy room dominated by a pair of disreputable-looking French windows. Itsv floor was an inch-thick in dust but clearly visible in its centre were four coffins, dragged in from the hallway.
Three of the coffins were sealed, the fourth open. Lee smiled. ‘One bird fly. She not have enough of purple poppy. Now she sleep better. Please to put her in.’
Reluctantly, Charlie and I lowered the woman into the empty coffin, its satin lining rustling in a peculiarly horrible fashion.
‘Let us check on others,’ said Lee with a smile. ‘Please to open coffins.’
Gingerly, Charlie knelt down and lifted the lid from the first of the grisly boxes.
‘Raise lantern please, Mr Box,’ said Lee with infuriating politeness.
Within the coffin was what appeared to be the corpse of a man, his skin waxen and deathly pale. He was of large build and had a very prominent chin. His eyes were spaced wide apart. Professor Eli Verdigris.
The remaining coffins revealed, as expected, Professors Sash and Quibble. All of them lived on. Lived on in some ghastly, drug-induced coma.
‘So all is ready. The party is complete.’
‘What the hell is all this for, Lee?’ I demanded.
Lee said nothing but indicated that we should move towards the French windows. Charlie pushed at the rotten woodwork until the doors groaned open.
Beyond lay an extraordinary landscape, lit by flaming torches – a vista of shattered stonework, tree-lined avenues and ancient, rutted roadways. I stepped out on to the flagged ground and gasped.
‘What is this place?’ cried Charlie.
‘You not know?’ said Lee with a horrid smile.
‘I know,’ I breathed. ‘It is Pompeii!’
The torches illumined the ruins in a fearful relief, the hazy black hump of Vesuvius rearing over the lost city like the back of some dreadful beast.
‘And now,’ said Lee, hissing with laughter and brandishing both pistols. ‘It is time for you to die.’
For an instant, I despaired, letting my hands drop to my sides. But in that moment, Charlie jumped out in front of me and hurled his lantern at the Chinaman. It hit him full in the chest, there was a satisfying splintering of glass and as the startled Lee looked down in surprise, his foul gown burst alight, and he was enveloped in flame.
I darted forward and brought my own lantern crashing down on Lee’s head. He staggered and fell forward on to his knees, dropping a pistol and battering desperately at his blazing robe with his free hand.
Despite his panic and his hideous shrieks of pain, Lee raised a shaking hand and aimed a pistol at me. Roaring like an enraged tiger I ran at him full force and planted my fist in his throat. I felt the flesh give sickeningly and he toppled to the flagstones, smacking his cheek against the crumbling masonry.
Charlie was at my side in an instant. He whipped off his jacket and succeeded in putting out the flames.
‘Well done, Charlie,’ I said, breathlessly. ‘Let’s get the fat lump inside. Once he’s recovered his senses, he can tell us what the hell’s going on.’
Charlie looked down at Lee and shook his head, ‘’Fraid not, sir. You don’t know your own strength. He’s a gonner.’
I turned the Chinaman over. His wind-pipe was crushed and he was quite still.
‘Bugger,’ I said eloquently.
Exhaling heavily, Charlie sat down on the flagstones and looked at me. ‘Now what?’
I peered into the fiery gloom. ‘Now, Mr Jackpot, we wait. Sooner or later, someone is going to come and collect those coffins.’
XVIII
NECROPOLIS
FOR what seemed like hours, there was no sign of activity. We passed the time exploring this relic of the ancient world – a frozen, grey world, stopped in a moment by the power of the great volcano. The ruins that littered the gardens of the villa did not seem to form part of the main excavation, and were unattended – a private monument. Charlie came across what appeared to be the entrance to a tunnel but it proved to be merely an ancient well. Neither of us felt further inclined to mess with wells.
I recalled my previous visit to the ruin and how, despite the loathsome press of gawping day-trippers, I had found Pompeii quite magnificent; its frescoed villas, its filthy pictures, its roads still rutted with the tracks of ancient carts. Yet it also wears a melancholy aspect, for here are laid bare past lives, here is the shattered grandeur that was the Roman Empire, here lie the actual folk themselves, or casts of their tortured remains – the skeletons still within – so that teeth show horribly in rictus grins from shapeless lumps of plaster.
In the flickering torchlight now, undisturbed by the goggling crowds, it was possible to feel one had actually slipped back in time. I explored the villa while Charlie walked about the grounds. The black and gold murals I found looked fresh and vivid, the ancient scribblings on the walls outside as though the graffitist had only lately quit the scene. When Charlie returned from his recce, I half expected his silhouetted form to resolve itself in toga and sandals.
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I gazed over his shoulder at the smoking summit of the volcano.
‘Look at her, Charlie,’ I whispered. ‘Vesuvius looks down upon Pompeii as if to say “I have destroyed you once. How dare you show your face?” One day it’ll make good its threat and cover all this up again.’
‘Then people could come and stare at us,’ chimed in Charlie.
‘Not a pleasant thought is it?’ I replied. ‘I’d hate to
have some hairy fool poking a stick at my petrified bum.’
We laughed. Charlie sat down next to me as I stretched out over the flagstones, enjoying my fag. Above us the stars packed the black sky.
‘What are you thinking, Mr Box?’ said Charlie gently.
I continued to stare at the sky. ‘Only that a night such as this should not be spent in the contemplation of mortal danger but of love.’
The boy lay down next to me. In the soft silence I could hear his quick breathing. I suppose I knew that he wanted me to place my hand on his, to turn him towards me and kiss him with all the fever that that sulphurous atmosphere demanded. Instead I flicked my cigarette away and heaved a sigh.
‘But business before pleasure,’ I said, sitting up. ‘Miss Bella Pok will have to wait.’
‘Who?’ said Charlie sharply.
‘A rather singular young lady of my acquaintance. Perhaps when all this is over…’
The boy’s face fell. Aren’t I a rotter?
Before Charlie could say something he might regret I stayed him with an outstretched hand. Just visible in the distant gloom was a curious purplish glow.
Charlie had already moved away and I could see him straining to listen. Soon I became aware of the sound of trudging feet on stone and, a little afterwards, seven or eight unnaturally tall men lumbered into our line of sight. Charlie gasped and I too wondered briefly whether they were some kind of phantasm. The queasy mauve light above their heads told its own story, however; the poor wretches wore the same brass helmets as my attacker from the Vesuvius Club.
They clumped in single file towards the villa and I beckoned Charlie to duck behind the cover of the opened windows. As the strange procession trooped past us and into the villa, we stood stock still, aware solely of the warm breeze in the great dark trees.
With effortful grunting, the helmeted zombies trudged back into the garden, carrying the four coffins between them. We waited as long as we dared and then set off in pursuit.