The Affair of the Mysterious Letter

by Alexis Hall

  “That is so,” I replied. “But we have no way of knowing which of us it was.”

  Mr. Castaigne curled his fingers despairingly into his hair. “Then we have failed.”

  The strategy to which I was about to commit was a gamble but, from what I had observed of Mr. Castaigne’s state of mind, it seemed my best hope of overcoming him. “There is perhaps one hope. If we both cast ourselves from the tower, we shall be certain that the traitor is destroyed, and our lives are a small price to pay for the security of the party.”

  “You’re right.” His eyes began to fill with tears. “And had I not been compromised I would have thought of it immediately.”

  I felt more than a little guilty at this, but my own survival was at stake. “That does seem logical.”

  He stretched out a hand towards me. “Serve well, Citizen.”

  And then he stepped backwards into empty air, but before he could fall I felt a rush of wind and a sickness like joy as I watched a ragged thing in yellow robes snatch him up and consume him.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Mr. Wyndham. Wake up.”

  I opened my eyes. Rising, I saw the door to my cell stood open. Beyond it, the hallway was deserted, and behind me I heard a sound like the tearing of cloth. In my left hand, I was still holding a chill, alabaster mask.

  “What are you waiting for?” said Ms. Haas. I remembered this but I did not remember it. “Put the mask on and move quickly.”

  I did as instructed, and some will not quite my own led me swiftly through the not quite familiar corridors of that strange tower. On the broken steps of a twisting stair, I met a slender, aristocratic man with a wild look in his eyes. Castaigne. I should have been surprised to see him but could not recall why.

  “The guards are dead.” He caught my arm. “This way.”

  He took me higher to a narrow ledge overlooking the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

  “When you get back home”—he pulled a silver whistle from around his neck—“tell our friends that the Repairers are ours.”

  I briefly considered protesting that I really did have no connection to Carcosan counterrevolutionaries but felt that now would be a spectacularly bad time to mention that particular detail.

  Raising the whistle to his lips, Mr. Castaigne blew a shrill note that tasted of blood and ichor.

  “You have been incautious, Citizen Castaigne,” a voice said. The masked and hooded woman from what I had thought was a dream emerged from a doorway that I was not sure had been there moments before.

  “Citizen de Luca.” Mr. Castaigne turned his pistol on me at once. “I have identified the traitor and am proceeding with his execution by winged messenger.”

  He pointed towards the horizon and I saw, approaching with great speed, one of the corpse-like, bat-like, mole-like beings that seemed to serve a variety of purposes within the Carcosan regime.

  “A commendably quick lie, Citizen,” returned the woman. “But a lie nonetheless. You have disappointed me, Castaigne, and my disappointment is never earned twice.”

  The flying creature was closer now, almost close enough that I could leap to it, though not so close that such a course of action would prove more than nominally survivable.

  Castaigne produced a pistol from his jacket and pointed it at the stranger. “There’s still time. The party is not what it was meant to be, but we can save it.”

  “So naive. There is nothing to save.” Behind Miss de Luca, a figure in ragged yellow robes began to coalesce out of the fog. “The party, the monarchy, what came before, and what will come after, they are all just . . . masks.”

  The grim calculus by which I had been balancing the inherent perils of remaining on the ledge against those of pitching myself bodily into space, in the hope that some winged monster would break my fall, tilted sharply in favour of the latter option. I sprang with as much strength as I could muster out into the empty air, aiming as far as possible for the ape-bird-mosquito creature that was bearing down upon us. It shrieked in predatory delight as its talons closed about my outstretched wrist, its alien voice mingling horribly with Mr. Castaigne’s scream of terrible and despairing apprehension. The beast swooped low as it carried me away over the spiderweb streets and shark-tooth roofs of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.

  “Mr. Wyndham. Wake up.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  A Process of Elimination

  I opened my eyes and found myself staring at the ceiling of my own bedroom at 221b Martyrs Walk. My left wrist ached sharply where the winged creature’s talons had dug into it and in my right hand I held a delicate white mask.

  “I doubt we shall have further use for that,” said Ms. Haas, plucking the object from my unresisting fingers. “Although one can never be entirely certain with these things.”

  I blinked up at her in some bewilderment. “Am I still dreaming?”

  “The distinction is often less relevant than you might imagine, but by most conventional standards, no, you are not dreaming, and yes, you are back in what it is useful to think of as the real world.”

  “What . . . how . . . I mean . . .”

  Ms. Haas perched herself on the end of the bed, wiping the blood from her eyes. Her physical condition had deteriorated remarkably since I last saw her. I suspected she had been neither eating nor sleeping as she should have, and her movements seemed pained as I had never seen before. “Do you mean how did we get out of Carcosa, and indeed, were we ever truly there in the first place?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Carcosa is a strange place. Like a rainbow on an oil slick it exists on the border between delusion and reality. One may enter or leave by a physical portal or by more dangerous and less reliable dream-paths involving certain meditations, incantations, and hallucinations. While it was vital that we enter physically in order that we might be functional on arrival, there were rather more options available to me when it came to the matter of extraction.”

  Sensible of the impropriety inherent in lying down before a lady, I endeavoured to sit up and realised that I was too fatigued to do so. “I’m not sure that explains how I went from a Carcosan holding cell to my own bed.”

  “Yes, well, your physical incarceration did rather rule out the portal option. Short of bombing the tower, there was no way I was getting your body out of there. So we had to dream our way to freedom, a task that could only be accomplished with the intervention of an unnameable god, best never invoked. I suspect I shall have a headache for some days.”

  “The guards were all devoured”—I laid my head back on the pillow, shut my eyes, and then immediately opened them, fearing what I might see—“by a spectre in yellow.”

  “That’ll be him. Best not to talk about it, or think about it, or remember it.”

  “And if I do find myself talking about it, thinking about it, or remembering it?”

  “In all honesty, that’s probably unavoidable. Just steer clear of Carcosan theatre for a bit and if you wake up in the night and discover that you’ve drawn eldritch symbols all over your bedsheets maybe come and have a word with me. Oh, also keep your gun handy because there’s a slim chance that the undying servants of the King Whom Emperors Serve will show up and try to claim your soul. Or mine. Probably mine, actually.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that. I was equally uncertain whether I should be thanking my companion for rescuing me from the Repairers of Reputations or challenging her for the decision to abandon me to them. Suspecting that she would be equally dismissive of either sentiment, I elected to broach neither topic and, wishing to forestall sleep as long as possible, spoke instead of my encounters with Mr. Castaigne.

  Ms. Haas shrugged, then winced. “A pitiable end for a pitiable man. After the unfortunate business at the café, I managed to track him down to a ghastly little flat in a concrete
government building. Contrary to what my researches had led me to believe, he was clearly a man of no real influence, terrified of the Repairers, and willing to say or do anything to cling to what little property and liberty remained to him. Not at all the sort of person who would be able to arrange for a complex interdimensional espionage and extortion operation.”

  “Even so, he did not deserve the fate we led him to.”

  “Nor did he deserve the privilege into which he was born, the tumult that fell upon his people, or the pernicious and corrupting influence that emanates from the mystical Lake Hali and seeps, to one degree or another, into every soul in Carcosa. Sometimes bad things happen to uninteresting people. Now, excuse me, I’ve been living on opioids and water for the last three days and I need to pass out.”

  And, with that, she collapsed across the foot of my bed and did not stir for several hours. For the best part of the next week, my companion and I concerned ourselves primarily with convalescence. I gradually learned again to trust that reality would retain a consistent shape and that waking would remain broadly distinguishable from dreaming, although my dreams themselves were not wholly without visions of those black stars, those shrouded towers, and that lightless lake. And, indeed, such images remain with me, if infrequently, to this day. Ms. Haas, by contrast, mediated her recovery through her usual assortment of medication, relaxation, and nocturnal perambulation. I flatter myself that I was able to encourage her at least slightly in the direction of more wholesome pursuits, managing to persuade her to take breakfast on no less than three occasions.

  As she had predicted, an unliving servant of the Yellow King did, eventually, come to our door, seeking to claim our lives and our essences in the forbidden name of its master. Ms. Haas and I both being somewhat indisposed, the monstrosity was met at the door by Mrs. Hive, who, although indignant at the intrusion, was pleased to discover that the entity—the livid and reanimated corpse of a local gravedigger—made a most suitable replacement for the stevedore whose body had, by this stage, decayed well past the point of viability. How she was able to overcome the animating will of the dread god the creature served I never asked, but it would not be the last time that I would be reminded that one should never try the resolve of our good landlady.

  The day after this most startling interlude, the bloated cadaver shuffled into the sitting room to inform us, in Mrs. Hive’s detached, droning way, that Second Augur Lawson was without and wished to speak with us. My companion’s response was to declare loudly, and in no uncertain terms, that the Second Augur’s presence was unwelcome, his aptitude suspect, and his parenthood likewise. To my mild embarrassment, he came in anyway.

  “All right, then, Haas?” He lowered himself into the only remaining chair. “Meaning no disrespect to your good self, we checked the suspects that you had previously investigated and, on this occasion, the official force agrees with your assessment.”

  Ms. Haas, who had been insensible upon the chaise since breakfast, now propped herself on one elbow. “What uncommon wisdom you display.”

  “This leads us to the secondary line of enquiry, regarding the possibility of interference by Carcosan agents. Owing to the sensitive nature of investigations pertaining to foreign powers, the remainder of information on this matter comes by way of the Office of Augurs Extraordinary, who assure us that while Carcosan agents do remain active in the city, as do agents of several nations, there is no indication that there was any organised effort by Carcosan intelligence to break up your client’s wedding.”

  At this juncture, Mrs. Hive entered with a tray of tea things. She had taken to preparing refreshments while we had been too injured and exhausted to do so for ourselves, and I had never quite had the heart to tell her that the saprophytic flora that she routinely shed into the pot rendered the end product utterly undrinkable, at least to me. Ms. Haas seemed either unaware or indifferent. The Second Augur took the proffered cup and saucer politely but, I noted, made no effort to drink from them.

  “Yes,” returned Ms. Haas, poking the fungal bloom in her teacup speculatively. “That suspect proved to have rather less reach than we thought he did. Also, he’s dead now.”

  “Not, I hope, as a consequence of your actions.”

  “Not directly. Besides, I’m sure the criminal element of this city is already taxing you quite to your limits.”

  The Second Augur tapped his metal fingers on the threadbare arm of the chair. “Oh, how I have missed our playful banter. Now, can you tell me anything else about this case or not?”

  “The case is solved, Mr. Lawson. You don’t need to worry your head about that.”

  “Solved?” I ejaculated. “But we’ve eliminated all possible suspects!”

  “That, Captain,” drawled Ms. Haas, with an air that it would not be uncharitable to describe as smug, “is precisely the point. When you’ve eliminated the possible, all that remains is the impossible, and I find that so much more satisfying to work with.”

  Demonstrating what in the circumstances constituted admirable restraint, the Second Augur asked, “So who was it, then?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  At this, the Second Augur’s response was not so admirable, containing as it did only three words suitable for publication, those words being “for,” “sake,” and “you.”

  “Now, now, Mr. Lawson.” Ms. Haas grinned with inappropriately sincere enjoyment. “While I would absolutely withhold information on a matter such as this just to annoy you, in this case I really am protecting my client. As I explained to you at some length before we left for Carcosa, this is a personal matter that cannot possibly impinge in any way on the safety of Khelathra-Ven or its citizens. You have done your job, Second Augur. Why don’t you go chase a shoplifter?”

  There was a none-too-pleasant silence, not aided by Mrs. Hive’s provision of biscuits into which some of her larvae had crawled. This created something of a quandary of etiquette, there being no established convention as to whether it was less polite to turn down such an offering or to consume part of your host’s gestalt body and consciousness.

  “You know what,” said Second Augur Lawson at last, “I’m going to pretend that I really think you’ve broken the habit of a lifetime and are trying to do what’s right by another person.” He rose, turning up the collar of his coat and putting his hat back on. “Good evening, Ms. Haas, Mr. Wyndham.”

  And he left.

  After I heard the door close and was certain that the Second Augur was some way down the street, I turned to my companion. “You will at least tell me who the blackmailer is?”

  “Captain, you disappoint me. I really thought you’d have worked it out for yourself.”

  “On the contrary, I am quite in the dark. We had five suspects at the start of this endeavour and now we have none.”

  Ms. Haas retrieved her packet of Valentino’s Good Rough Shag, packed her pipe, and lit it. “Then that, surely, is our first deduction. The perpetrator is somebody we hitherto had no reason to suspect.”

  “That would seem,” I ventured, “to narrow our list down from five to everybody in the universe.”

  “That is certainly a starting point, if—as we shall see later—a flawed one. But consider the other facts. When you analysed the letters, you saw no evidence that they had been handled by anybody but you, Eirene, and myself. The blackmailer clearly knows Eirene intimately, having shown quite startling knowledge of her personal habits and history. They expected, further, that Eirene would have similar familiarity with them, hence you will recall the effort made to disguise their handwriting.” Ms. Haas paused to take a puff on her pipe. “But throughout this whole affair the miscreant has demonstrated an utterly idiosyncratic and very specific set of motivations. They seem to want one thing, and one thing only, which is for Eirene to end her engagement to Miss Beck of her own free will. Furthermore, they have gone to quite considerable lengths to ensure that
no peripheral harm befalls either party.”

  I took an absentminded sip of tea and then immediately regretted it. “I confess that all of these details serve only to make the case more confusing to me.”

  “Then let me add to your confusion. It must have been the blackmailer who intervened in our defence on the Austral Express. But although they wore the guise of a Repairer of Reputations, Mr. Lawson’s contacts confirm that no Carcosan agent was involved and, if you think carefully, you will realise that the details of the mechanism by which they disguised themselves as a guard do not match the magics employed by the Repairers in their adoption of false personas.”

  “I’m afraid none of this is proving helpful to me.”

  “Then”—Ms. Haas wagged her pipestem in my direction—“I shall give you one last clue. You said that our list of suspects had been narrowed down from five to everyone in the universe. As ever, your thinking is too limited. Now come, we should go find Eirene and set this matter to rest.”

  We called a hansom and set off into the night, Ms. Haas staring idly out of the window and smoking, while I did my best to sift through the clues she had laid before me. But, for the life of me, I could not imagine how my companion had pieced them together to discover the identity of the blackmailer.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  The Final Piece

  Miss Viola had lodgings above a haberdasher’s in Little Carcosa. She did not seem eager to speak to us, and it took a significant amount of hectoring on the part of Ms. Haas before she would consent to admit us. Once within, we found the lady’s demeanour quite different from that to which I had become accustomed. While she had often displayed a somewhat tempestuous spirit, she had always presented herself with care and modesty. She greeted us now with her hair unbound and wearing nothing but a yellow silk dressing gown. Her room, which was small but decorated with a tasteful, feminine sensibility, was presently littered with empty wine bottles and reeked of cigarettes.