by Alexis Hall
CHAPTER THREE
Ms. Shaharazad Haas
Number 221b Martyrs Walk turned out to be part of a handsome terrace in a clean, geometrical style that had been fashionable a little less than a century earlier. It sported large, square windows and a neat iron balcony that matched the gate and the rail that ran up the steps to the front door. This last was open, but I knocked regardless and received no answer. I thus found myself in something of a quandary. I would never under normal circumstances have entered another person’s home uninvited. However, the curious attitude of the door and the silence within caused me genuine concern.
I glanced up and down the street in the hopes of seeing a neighbour or attracting the attention of a Myrmidon—for those readers unfamiliar with the city, the Myrmidons are the peacekeepers of Khelathra-Ven, once tasked with enforcing the will of the ruling council and now primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime—but saw that I was quite alone and unsupported. Tightening my grip on the walking stick (for which on that day I had blessedly little need), I pushed the door wide and entered.
A narrow hallway led me to a well-appointed but chaotically maintained sitting room where a woman with light brown skin and a cascade of black hair sprawled on a chaise longue. No sooner had I entered than she levelled a pistol directly at my heart.
“If you have come to rob me,” she said, without so much as glancing in my direction, “you will find that I have nothing worth taking. If you have come to murder me, you will find that I am dead already.”
I thought it best to move little and speak calmly. “I have come to do neither. I have come in response to an advertisement.”
She swung herself into a sitting position, which better enabled me to observe her, although the bulk of my attention was still occupied by the firearm, which remained trained unerringly upon my person. Ms. S. Haas, assuming it was she (and hindsight vindicates this assumption), was a tall, striking woman of indeterminate age and background. She was dressed in a heavily flounced skirt of emerald-green satin; a gentleman’s shirt, somewhat stained with tobacco; and a charcoal-grey tailcoat. There was something of the chimera about her, being leonine of jaw, aquiline of nose, and lupine about the eyes—though, presently, they were dulled by an undiagnosable cocktail of narcotics and intoxicants.
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “I have come at a bad time?”
“Young man, I have danced with the gods at the dawn of creation and watched seas swallow worlds at the end of all things. My perspective on time, good or bad, is I suspect very different from your own.”
“Am I to understand, then, that you are not looking for a cohabitant?”
“I already have a housemate, as infuriating as I—” She stopped and was silent for the better part of a minute. “Or did he leave? Or die? Or both. And, if both, in which order?”
“Shall I fetch you a glass of water?”
“Water, in its pure form, is far too valuable a reagent to waste on thirst. You may pour me a brandy and you may be quick about it.”
I did not think it advisable for her to add alcohol to whatever she had already taken. On the other hand, she did have me at gunpoint. “Would you mind lowering your weapon? It disquiets me rather.”
Ms. Haas stared at the pistol with a look of genuine surprise. “Sorry. Forgot I had that.”
She cast it casually to the ground, where it discharged into the wall, sending up a spray of plaster dust and shaking loose an incongruously cheerful watercolour of a country cottage. Stepping carefully around piles of books, papers, and discarded syringes, I crossed the room to an ornate sideboard, where rested a selection of fine decanters and glasses. I poured the lady the beverage she had requested and passed it to her with as much composure as I could muster.
She regarded it warily for a moment and then tossed it back with the proficiency of a sailor on shore leave. Then she stood, shaking out her skirts, and while I consider myself neither especially courageous nor especially cowardly, I thought it best to take a step back. She turned the glass in her hand, watching the light catch upon the crystal, and, when she had satisfied whatever curiosity drove her, returned it calmly to its fellows.
“The rent is due monthly,” she said, as if continuing a conversation I was fairly certain we had not been having. “It comes to seventeen Athran florins, twelve Khelish rials, an equivalent value in seed pearls, sourced from wherever you wish, seventy-eight Eyan shillings, a Marvosi trade dagger, or three and a half lines from a Seravic chant of commerce. You may pay it to me or to the landlady directly. Her name is Mrs. Hive, and she infests the attic. Do not enter it without permission on pain of agonising death. There is no laundry service.”
“Yes. The advertisement mentioned that fact.” That is, it had mentioned the lack of laundry service. The possibility of agonising death, although present for one reason or another in a number of rented properties in Khelathra-Ven, was habitually elided from public notices.
She moved to where the picture had fallen, picked it up, appeared to consider rehanging it, and finally put it down again. “It is a matter of tremendous inconvenience to me.”
“I am quite capable of washing my own shirts.”
Ms. Haas’s eyes glittered in a manner I did not find entirely comforting. As it transpired, my misgivings were justified, for, within the week, I would become responsible for all of the household laundry and would remain so for the entire duration of our relationship. I should clarify for those readers who may be shocked by this situation that there were certain items of clothing I refused to handle, and for which Ms. Haas made her own arrangements into which I did not enquire.
“When can you move in?” she asked.
At this, I hesitated. While it is true that my circumstances were dire I was not certain that I had sunk so low as to share rooms with quite so singular an individual. Despite the reputation of my countrymen, I endeavour to refrain from judging others. However, this lady seemed to spend her days lying in a drug-addled haze with the front door open, casually discharging pistols into the wainscoting, and I did not believe that these were desirable traits in a housemate.
I cast about for a diplomatic way to extricate myself and settled on, “Do you not wish to ask me for references or question me as to my character or background?”
“Why would I need to do that?” She swung round, her skirts knocking over a precariously balanced collection of alchemical apparatus and a human-looking skull. “You were born in the Kingdom of Ey sometime before the revolution, raised in the Church of the Creator, educated abroad, probably in Khel, perhaps in Dvesh, but not Marvos or Carcosa. You have returned recently from military service in the Company of Strangers, where you acquitted yourself well but were forced into early retirement by injury. Your instincts run towards kindness and you are not easily startled. You are fastidious in your personal habits but tolerant of those who are less so. All of which suggest that you may, perhaps uniquely amongst the inhabitants of this city, be able to put up with me.”
“My goodness,” I exclaimed. “How could you possibly know such things?”
She stared at me speculatively for longer than most people would have considered polite. And, just when I was on the verge of protesting, she flung herself back on the chaise with greater animation than she had hitherto demonstrated. “I must thank you, Mr. . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“It is Wyndham, madam. John Wyndham.”
“In which case, I must thank you, Mr. Wyndham. I had expected to spend today imprisoned in the chancery of my own mind, havering between ennui and self-destruction. But you have quite perked me up.”
I was slightly at a loss. “Oh, good.”
“Since you expressed an interest, I shall explain to you how I know the things that I know. Or at least, some of them. The rest would drive you insane.”
She dug between the cushions of the chaise longue and retrie
ved an ornate, pearl-handled pipe. A nearby table held a stack of the daily papers and the assorted accoutrements of my new associate’s various habits, amongst them a packet of tobacco that bore the name of the popular brand Valentino’s Good Rough Shag. She pulled some out, packed it into the bowl, and spoke a word in a tongue so ancient and alien that it made my stomach twist and my eyes water. A flame flared briefly into being at the end of her pipe. Khelathra-Ven has few cultural taboos, especially when compared to my homeland, but the outright and flagrant practice of sorcery is one of them. I thought it polite not to mention this.
“Now then. To your question.” Ms. Haas brought the holder to her lips and inhaled deeply, smoke billowing forth with indecorous excess. “Your origins are simple to discern. You dress plainly, avoiding any form of ornamentation. Your clothes are fastened with hooks rather than buttons and your accent is decidedly northern. This marks you as a member of the Reformed Church of the Creator and a native of Ey. That you have left the kingdom and are presently seeking to take lodgings with a sorceress suggests you are not a zealot. That you nevertheless abide by the strict sumptuary laws of your homeland suggests that your manner of presentation is a habit formed in early childhood. Since the church would have been illegal in Ey until you were at least eleven or twelve it follows that your parents were revolutionaries. From here, the matter becomes what you are doing in Khelathra-Ven. People from your part of the world are a rarity in this city, but you have the look of one who is accustomed to us and our ways. This suggests that although you have retained the habits in which you were raised you have been exposed to other ways of life and modes of thinking. A foreign education, then, almost certainly here, or else you would have returned to the city in which you had attended university.”
“Why, this is extraordinary. But how did you know I had served with the Company of Strangers?”
“My dear man, it’s written all over you. Most obviously, you have the kind of pallor that a person only acquires living for a considerable period of time in the lands around the Unending Gate, where the sun never rises. Further, you hold yourself with military bearing, and you did not flinch when I pointed a pistol at you, nor when the weapon discharged. This suggests not only experience in battle but also several personal qualities that would all but guarantee your advancement. You were clearly injured, since you walk with a stick. The fact that you do not at present seem to need it suggests that your wound was courtesy of one of the peculiar weapons favoured by the legions of the Empress of Nothing.”
Somewhat disconcerted, I looked for somewhere to sit. I removed what I hoped wasn’t—but feared was—a dead dog from the seat of a wingback chair and lowered myself gratefully into it. Of course, I would normally not have sat in the presence of a lady without direct invitation, but I had reached the conclusion that waiting for Ms. Haas to observe such niceties was a doomed endeavour. Again, this instinct was proven correct by better acquaintance. In all the time I knew her, Ms. Shaharazad Haas never showed the slightest regard for the rules of society, the laws of the land, or the inviolable principles of the cosmos.
The ash from her pipe drifted to the carpet, where it was lost amongst the carnage. “This brings us,” she continued, “to the rather trivial matter of your personality. Much of this can be inferred from the conclusions I had already reached about your history, upbringing, and education. The rest from the way you reacted to encountering a strange woman clearly out of her mind on a staggeringly dangerous and transparently illegal collection of alkaloids, opioids, and mystical tinctures threatening you with a firearm and inviting you to come and live with her.”
Thus it was that I moved into 221b Martyrs Walk and began my long acquaintance with the sorceress Shaharazad Haas.
CHAPTER FOUR
221b Martyrs Walk
Number 221b Martyrs Walk was, and to the best of my knowledge still is, a comfortable townhouse boasting two well-appointed bedrooms, a spacious sitting room, facilities that I shall not detail but which proved adequate for one’s daily ablutions, and a kitchen wherein I prepared my meals and Ms. Haas made occasional sacrifices to dark gods.
My editor has suggested to me that, since some readers may hail from worlds whose local physical laws and native occult practices differ from ours, it might be prudent to outline for them the precise manner in which Ms. Haas’s sorceries manifested themselves. It became quickly apparent to me during our acquaintance that she was an adherent of no specific arcane discipline but rather had acquired an eclectic and terrifying collection of rites, rituals, secret names, and forbidden bargains that permitted her, in the proper circumstances, to achieve such diverse effects as conjuring spirits from the beyond and returning them thereto, speaking with the dead, commanding wind and weather, surviving near-fatal injury through the never-to-be-courted intercession of blasphemous deities, effortlessly locating missing socks (a power she would often refuse to use for my benefit despite my full knowledge of her possession of it), altering her appearance at will, springing locks with a touch, striking her enemies with debilitating afflictions, talking to cats, the invocation of flame ex nihilo via the True Words of Shaping (this being one of the most spiritually taxing and closely guarded mysteries of the cosmos and the one she had flagrantly used to light her pipe when we first met), and sundry magics of guiding, seeking, warding, and guarding, the broad utility of which she would use to supplement her other activities.
Ms. Haas’s supernatural experimentation, like many of her habits, had a tendency to make a mess of the fixtures and, like many of her habits, earned her the displeasure of Mrs. Hive. It was some days before I made the acquaintance of our landlady, and the meeting was sadly not auspicious. She was, at the time, occupying the corpse of a stevedore, which I learned she had purchased from a resurrection man the month before. During my time in the sunless lands I had faced numerous horrors and flatter myself that I maintained my composure appropriately, but the wasps crawling from the body’s empty eye sockets left me rather uncertain where I should, in civility, rest my gaze, which presented a hopefully understandable impediment to social intercourse. Mrs. Hive had wished to confront Ms. Haas about the poltergeist which my housemate had unleashed in the most recent of her rituals, but finding the lady in a drug-addled stupor, she had come to me for an explanation instead. Hoping to smooth matters over, I reassured her that Ms. Haas had been able to bind the spirit within a hatstand before it could cause too much damage to the property, and opined that the occasional trembling from the newly haunted item of furniture could perhaps be seen as giving the hallway a pleasing air of mystery. This line of reasoning did not satisfy her, and she was very cold with me for several days afterwards.
As for my cohabitant, the initial weeks of our acquaintance were, on my part, a process of rapid acclimatisation and, on her part, a process of occasionally remembering my existence. Having lived with both students and soldiers I had long since ceased to expect others to abide by the conventions of the society in which I was raised. Over the past decade I had become well used to people speaking the private names of deities, inviting unchaperoned guests into their rooms, and openly discussing matters that, in Ey, would be considered unassailably private. I was less accustomed to a companion who staggered home at three in the morning, her skirts stained with blood, and who would then proceed to engage me in a two-hour conversation about the distinguishing characteristics of certain fungi, before finally falling asleep on my bed. This last habit of hers meant that I had, in a sense, gone from living in my friend’s sitting room to living in my own.
At times she would disappear for a day or more and return either full of stories or full of silence as the mood took her. One afternoon, she burned that awful watercolour in a fit of rage, the cause of which I never discovered, then promptly retired to her chamber, whence she did not emerge for long enough that I sincerely feared she may have died. At any other stage of my life I would have never transgressed the boundaries of a lady’s boudoir but
, on more than one occasion over my long friendship with Ms. Haas, I was required to set propriety aside and check that she had not smothered herself in the night or transported her spirit to some other plane of reality. I generally found her quite well. At times she was grateful for my concern. Upon others she would assail me with missiles or curses. In summary, my tenure at 221b Martyrs Walk was often frustrating and frequently terrifying but never, ever dull.
A peculiarity of Ms. Haas’s lifestyle was that, although I knew for certain she had a variety of colourful friends and associates, she seldom invited guests to the house. It was, therefore, a matter of some curiosity to me when one evening, a little over a month after I moved in, a lady called for her.
CHAPTER FIVE
Miss Eirene Viola
I was first alerted to the presence of our visitor by the ringing of the doorbell and the buzzing from the attic as Mrs. Hive forced her way into one of her cadaverous puppets.