The Feaster From The Stars (Blackwood and Harrington)

by Alan K Baker

  Unless it were not corporeal in any sense which was described or accepted by science; in which case, it would not be confined to the tunnels, but would be capable of moving through the ground as easily as a man walks through the air…

  In a few moments, they gained the main line running out of Aldgate and took some comfort from the fitful glow of the lights mounted upon the walls. But that comfort was short-lived indeed, for away in the distance in the depths of the tunnel, another sound came to them: the sound of men screaming.

  ‘It’s the search party!’ de Chardin cried. ‘The fiend has got them!’

  He made to run towards the sound, but Blackwood grabbed his arm. ‘No, de Chardin!’

  The detective turned to face him. ‘What do you mean “no”? Those men are in dire peril. We must help them!’

  ‘And how do you propose to do that? Think about it, man! Whatever the thing is, we’ll be just as powerless against it as those poor wretches.’

  ‘Do you suggest we run? Save our own skins?’

  Blackwood caught the tone of disgust in de Chardin’s voice, and felt a sudden wave of anger rising in him. ‘Do you suggest we sacrifice ourselves in some stupid gesture of futile gallantry? And what then? The thing will still be there to wreak whatever havoc it wishes!’

  For how much longer this argument might have lasted, neither Blackwood nor de Chardin could have said, but as they stood glaring at each other, the awful sounds emanating from the depths of the tunnel ceased: the screams of the men and the vast, wet moans of their unseen and unthinkable tormentor, fell away into complete silence.

  CHAPTER FIVE:

  A Lecture and a Revelation

  It was a little after eight o’clock in the evening when Sophia’s carriage brought her to the Langham Hotel in Marylebone. The late afternoon had been a busy one. From the Bureau, she had gone first to Blackwood’s apartments in Chelsea, to leave a message with Mrs Butters that she would be unable to accompany him to the lecture they had planned to attend (she knew that he would go home at some point to dress for the evening). Then she had returned to the SPR headquarters in Kensington, where she had switched on her cogitator and connected to the Æther.

  Her intention was to discover where Simon Castaigne was staying while in London. Blackwood, of course, could have found out for her, but she’d had no intention of asking him. She wanted to do this by herself, and she certainly didn’t want to risk his vetoing her plan.

  ‘With my able assistance,’ she muttered, while she waited for the astral connection to be established between her machine and the Akashic Records. ‘Pah! I’ll show both him and Grandfather how ably I may assist!’

  The cogitator’s scrying glass glowed with a faint, pearly luminescence, and a message appeared in elegant characters:

  You are now connected to the Æther.

  Please type in your next command.

  Sophia typed:

  I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHERE DR SIMON CASTAIGNE IS STAYING WHILE IN LONDON.

  The characters dissolved, and were replaced with another message.

  Please wait while a search is made of the Akashic Records.

  Sophia’s fingertips drummed impatiently on her desk while she waited for the information. Presently, it appeared.

  Dr Castaigne has reserved a room at the

  Langham Hotel in Marylebone.

  It is noted that the hotel is equipped with a cogitator.

  Would you like to send a message to him?

  Sophia typed:

  NO, THANK YOU.

  I WOULD, HOWEVER, LIKE TO KNOW WHICH ROOM HE IS STAYING IN.

  Another few moments passed, and then the cogitator responded:

  He is staying in Room 304.

  Sophia smiled in satisfaction as she switched off the machine and left her office.

  Now, as she descended from her carriage and stood before the imposing edifice of the Langham Hotel, she felt both her resolve and her self-satisfaction waver a little. Somewhere in her mind, a voice said, This is really no way for a lady to behave.

  No, she supposed, it really wasn’t.

  And what will Thomas say when he finds out?

  She really didn’t care what Thomas would say: if he had not the good manners or wherewithal to congratulate her on her initiative, that would hardly be any concern of hers! And would his scruples prevent him from acting on any information she managed to secure this evening? She rather doubted it.

  Nevertheless, the little voice would not be silenced and continued to admonish her even as she ascended the wide steps and entered through the massive portico.

  Sophia was well acquainted with the Langham Hotel: the restaurant boasted one of the greatest chefs in the world (the man had trained with Escoffier himself), and she had dined there on a number of occasions. As she entered the vast and opulently appointed foyer, the hotel’s manager, who happened to be passing, noticed her and came over.

  ‘Lady Sophia,’ he said. ‘A pleasure to see you.’

  ‘Good evening, Mr Broughton,’ she replied, feeling her heart begin to beat even faster. ‘I trust you are well.’

  ‘Never better, your Ladyship. Are you dining here tonight?’

  ‘Ah, no. I am visiting an old friend who is staying here.’

  ‘I see. If you would be so kind as to tell me the room number, I shall arrange for champagne to be sent up with the compliments of the Langham.’

  Sophia’s heart jumped in her chest. ‘You are most kind, Mr Broughton, but that will not be necessary. We have made arrangements to attend the theatre, and so we cannot linger.’

  Broughton smiled and gave a brief, shallow bow. ‘Of course, I understand. In that case, I shall wish you a pleasant evening.’

  ‘You’re most kind.’

  Sophia walked on across the foyer towards the bank of pneumatic elevators lining a far wall. You fool! she thought. Why did you say that? Now, if he sees you leave, he’ll wonder where your imaginary friend is! In fact, Broughton had caught Sophia completely off guard. She normally took a very dim view of lying and was not used to uttering untruths herself, and for this reason her own lie had been a clumsy one. Fortunately, Broughton’s impeccable manners had prevented him from pressing her further on the location of her ‘friend’, and she could only hope that, once her mission was complete, she would manage to leave the hotel without him seeing her.

  Her face flushed with embarrassment, Sophia entered an elevator and asked the boy for the third floor, reflecting that she really wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing.

  Blackwood was feeling wretched for several reasons. He and de Chardin had made a search of the tunnels but had found no trace of the search party whose screams they had heard, nor of the unseen thing which had apparently attacked them. As they probed the darkness, he had felt a burning shame at his reluctance to seek out and face the thing directly, to offer whatever aid might have been possible to the poor wretches who were now nowhere to be found. He had continued to sense de Chardin’s antipathy, and the fact that he knew himself to be right did nothing to alleviate his sense of embarrassment at having spurned the idea of rushing headlong to meet the aggressor. If de Chardin thinks me a coward, then de Chardin is a fool, he told himself, for he had no doubt that it would have been suicide to do battle with the massive abnormality whose abhorrent moaning they had heard.

  In fact, something else was weighing on his mind much more heavily than his spat with the Templar detective. While Alfie Morgan had apparently not been touched by the fiend, Seamus Brennan most certainly had been, and now the party of men who had been looking for him were nowhere to be found. Walter Goodman-Brown had opined that it had been merely curious about Morgan, but it had certainly gone on the offensive with Brennan and the others. What was the reason? Did it consider them a threat? Was it acting offensively… or defensively, like an animal protecting its territory?

  If that was the case, Blackwood asked himself, what was the thing defending?

  Now that he and de Chardin were sa
fely out of the tunnels, he began to regret not having allowed Sophia to join them. With the benefit of hindsight, that decision now seemed rather callous, for it was clear that she desperately wanted to make a contribution to the investigation. Indeed, the Queen had made it quite plain that she desired the involvement of the SPR in this affair, and after all, who was Blackwood to prevent Sophia from doing her part?

  He brooded uncomfortably on the matter as his hansom approached Chelsea in the gathering dusk. That Sophia was more than capable of holding her own, he had no doubt, and yet, the fact remained that she was a woman, and Blackwood could not free himself of the conviction that physical danger should be the province of men alone.

  He was aware of another reason for his reluctance to expose Sophia to peril, but he much preferred not to dwell on that. He was sure de Chardin knew, or suspected, and he could only hope that Sophia’s anger had clouded her vision enough to prevent her from realising the truth. It was, after all, most inconvenient: an annoying and potentially hazardous distraction which he would do well to put aside.

  It was important that their relationship be placed once again on a firm professional footing, based on mutual respect and trust. As the cab came to a halt outside his apartment building, Blackwood decided that the best course of action would be to offer Sophia a sincere apology and promise not to pull rank on her in such a belittling way again. All the same, it would be difficult, for Thomas Blackwood was not a man used to apologising.

  It was therefore with no small measure of relief that he received the news from Mrs Butters that Lady Sophia would be unable to attend the lecture with him this evening. Under other circumstances, he might have felt some irritation with her, but he found himself far from averse to the idea of postponing the apology he had decided to offer. Blackwood was not normally a man to put off until tomorrow what he could do today, but on this occasion, he felt a certain satisfaction in being able to do so.

  He thanked Mrs Butters and went to his dressing room to prepare for the evening.

  Sophia emerged from the elevator on the third floor and walked along the corridor to room 304. She knocked on the door and waited, this time with a better-prepared lie at the ready in case Simon Castaigne should still be there. There was, however, no answer: he must already have left for his speaking engagement. Checking that the corridor was still empty of guests or hotel staff, Sophia withdrew her lock-pick from her purse and quickly inserted it in the keyhole. A brief twist and the door was open. She stepped swiftly inside, closed and locked the door behind her.

  Her heart was now racing wildly with a combination of excitement and apprehension that, she had to admit, bordered on the intoxicating. Who would have thought that breaking and entering could hold such a strange allure?

  She turned up the gaslights and quickly took in her surroundings. Castaigne had spared no expense on his accommodation while in London. She was standing in the sitting room of a large suite; through an open door she could see the bedroom, while another door, closed, presumably led to the bathroom and water closet. The sitting room was decorated with all the sumptuous elegance for which the Langham was famed, and Sophia recalled Blackwood’s description of Castaigne as a man of independent and substantial means.

  As she looked around, her eye was immediately caught by a large Gladstone bag, which was standing on the floor next to a Chippendale escritoire on the far side of the room. Putting on her gloves (and congratulating herself that such a precaution had even occurred to her), she hurried over and placed the bag on the escritoire. She tried the clasps. It was unlocked. She opened it and looked inside.

  The bag contained a large sheaf of papers, bound together with a ribbon of red silk, and a Moroccan leather box, similar in appearance to a shaving case. Sophia took out the papers and quickly leafed through them. They contained notes handwritten in a small, meticulous script. As her eyes skimmed the sheets, she noticed references to Carcosa, to the King in Yellow, and also to something called the Lake of Hali. She recalled that the Song of Cassilda, which Blackwood had read to her from Castaigne’s book, contained reference to a lake…

  As she examined the notes, it occurred to her that the title of his lecture was The Plurality of Life on Other Worlds… and yet she could find no mention of any world other than Carcosa in the notes. She set the sheaf of papers aside and turned her attention to the leather box, which she opened slowly and carefully, unsure of what she would find inside.

  The contents consisted of a dozen glass ampoules, an inch or so long, which contained a fine, dark powder. Sophia took out one of the ampoules and held it up to the light. And what is this, I wonder? she thought.

  The answer came to her almost immediately. Of course! It must be the Taduki drug which Mr Shanahan mentioned – the means by which Castaigne is able to send his mind voyaging through the Æther.

  As she held the tiny ampoule in the palm of her hand, gazing at it in fascination, another thought occurred to her, and she caught her breath at the danger and audacity of it. Without allowing herself time to reconsider, Sophia thrust the ampoule into a pocket of her coat.

  She was about to return to the notes and go through them in greater detail, when there was a metallic click behind her.

  She spun around, her heart jumping wildly. The door to the suite was being unlocked. Oh good heavens! she thought, as panic seized her. Castaigne has returned!

  Glancing this way and that, her eyes fell upon the door to the bathroom, and in another moment she had flown across the room and into her makeshift hiding place, closing the door behind her just as the door to the suite opened.

  Panting with fear, Sophia stood in the darkness, for she dared not turn up the gas. She heard the door being closed again. Her only hope was that Castaigne had forgotten something and had returned only briefly to retrieve it. With any luck, he would be gone in a trice… but then Sophia realised that he would see his bag open and the contents placed on the escritoire. He would know that someone had entered without his permission and gone through his things, and without a doubt he would wonder if the intruder were still in the room.

  What would he do then? Would he call for the hotel’s security? Or would he make a search of the suite himself? Either way, she would be discovered, and she could imagine the look on Blackwood’s face when he found out.

  Standing there in the darkness with her heart pounding in her chest, Sophia realised that her only chance of escape would be if Castaigne went into the bedroom: then she might just be able to leave the bathroom and slip out of the suite unobserved.

  She crouched down, silently withdrew the key from the keyhole and peered through the tiny opening.

  What she saw made her gasp.

  There were two men in the sitting room, wearing dark suits and grim expressions. They glanced around the room and, without exchanging a word, moved quickly and silently to the escritoire, where they began to examine the contents of Castaigne’s Gladstone bag.

  Oh good Lord! Sophia thought. They are intruders, like me!

  Blackwood’s hansom stopped outside the Hall of the Society of Spiritualistic Freemasons in Mayfair. He had never visited this Lodge before, and his face twisted in distaste at the grim ugliness of the building’s edifice, with its fat grey columns and square windows.

  He paid the cabbie and hurried through the chill evening air to the entrance, where he showed his invitation to the doorman and was ushered inside.

  The entrance hall was decorated in typical Masonic fashion: the floor was of blue and white marble in a chequered pattern, while the walls held numerous paintings and symbols, each of which had a particular and arcane meaning. There was, of course, the principal symbol of the Square and Compass, common to all Masonic Lodges; in addition, however, there were symbols with which Blackwood was unfamiliar, at least in the context of Freemasonry. On one wall, for instance, there was a large engraving of the letters of the alphabet, which surrounded an arrow-like feature. Blackwood surmised that it represented a Ouija Board. Another
wall was dominated by a rather well-executed oil painting of a man lying prone in bed, his form duplicated in a figure composed of smoke-like wisps hovering above, their heads connected to each other by a thin, silvery strand. This clearly represented the astral self, separated from the physical body, perhaps preparing to journey into the realms of the spirit…

  Blackwood’s inspection of the decor was curtailed by the approach of a stout man with thinning grey hair and a magnificent handlebar moustache. Over his evening suit, he wore a pale blue sash, upon which several Masonic symbols were stitched in gold.

  ‘Mr Thomas Blackwood?’ the man said.

  ‘I am he.’

  The man offered him a broad smile. ‘I bid you good evening and welcome, sir. I am Cuthbert Fforbes-Maclellan, Worshipful Master of the Society of Spiritualistic Freemasons.’ He offered his hand, which Blackwood shook in the Masonic fashion.

  ‘An honour, Worshipful Master.’

  ‘We were hoping you’d be able to make it,’ said Fforbes-Maclellan. ‘This evening promises to be a most fascinating and educative one.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. In fact, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’