by Kat Ross
“It’s a constable from the Yard, Mr. Lawrence. I asked him to wait in the library.”
“Thank you.”
Alec made his way downstairs, hoping it was positive news but prepared for the worst. He recognized the officer standing before the cold hearth as one of Blackwood’s.
“Constable Graves,” he said, shaking the man’s hand. “What’s happened?”
Graves was in his early twenties, with keen grey eyes and a narrow, almost mournful face. “There’s been a death. D.I. Blackwood thinks it could be related to Dr. Clarence.”
Alec felt a sting of adrenaline. “Where?”
“Sotheby, Wilkinson, & Hodge of Wellington Street.”
Alec frowned. He’d expected it would be another of London’s poor lost souls. A prostitute or street urchin. “Who is it?”
“A clerk. The body was found just after closing.”
“Why does Blackwood think it’s related?” Vivienne asked from the doorway.
Both men turned as she entered the room wearing a high-necked gown of dark blue silk. Her wiry curls had been drawn into a complex knot pinned at the nape. Considering she’d been asleep not ten minutes before, Alec couldn’t fathom how she managed it so fast, even with Claudine’s help. The constrictive costume of this time was bad enough for men and pure hell for women—although perversely, Vivienne seemed to enjoy the spectacle.
Graves gave her a deferential nod. “Cause of death is still undetermined. The body was not abused in any way, milady. But the clerk”—he glanced at his notes—“a Mr. James Cromwell, had just assisted in an auction of rare books earlier this afternoon. By invitation only.”
“What sort of books?” Alec asked, his curiosity piqued.
“Well, that’s the thing, Mr. Lawrence. They were all related to the occult. Grimoires.” He cleared his throat. “Demonology. That sort of thing.”
“There was a grimoire involved in the Hyde case,” Alec said. “Give us a moment, Mr. Graves. We’ll come immediately.”
“I’ll have Henry bring the carriage around,” Vivienne offered, black eyes shining. “If it’s Clarence, perhaps we’ll catch his trail this time.”
A thick fog had rolled in, muting the street lamps to diffuse yellow orbs. Wellington Street wasn’t far, but the poor visibility slowed traffic to a crawl. Henry took the broad, stately thoroughfare of Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square and turned onto the Strand. They passed the newly renovated Adelphi theater, its electric marquis dark.
“They’re in rehearsals for a new play called The Silver Falls,” Vivienne observed, lighting a cigarette. “Another overheated melodrama, although I hear it’s a cut above most of the others. Olga Nethersole plays the wicked adventuress Lola. She’s one to watch. You should come with me when they open next week, assuming we’re still alive.”
Alec caught a glimpse of the poster advertising the play. It showed a young man, hand raised as if to strike a girl in a flowing white gown.
“Only if you buy me dinner at Pagani’s first,” Alec murmured. “It looks awful.”
Vivienne’s mouth twitched. “That seems a fair trade.”
Wellington Street intersected the Strand from north to south, affording access to Waterloo Bridge. Alec could smell the Thames, a witch’s brew of mud and sewage and rotting fish. It was better than it used to be, when all of the city’s waste flowed straight into the river, but not by much—especially at low tide.
Sotheby’s shared the street with an array of book sellers and publishers. Two constables waited at the door of No. 19, a stolid brick building occupied by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge since the turn of the century. They found Blackwood in the Sale Room, a grand space with floor-to-ceiling bookcases stretching along the walls. Two long wooden tables with benches occupied the center of the room, facing the auctioneer’s podium. To the right of the auctioneer sat a second railed platform with a desk, where a clerk would record the bidding.
Cyrus Ashdown, a devoted collector of rare books, had attended many auctions there. Alec accompanied him once or twice. Each lot for sale would be taken from the shelves by a porter and placed on the table for examination, and the haggling would commence. It moved at a breakneck pace and even a single instant of distraction could cost a buyer their desired lot.
The room also held a number of chairs, but these were tacitly reserved for the high priests of the rare book trade, who tended to congregate near the shelves on the far left where the lots being auctioned were kept. D.I. Blackwood sat in one of these chairs, reviewing a catalogue. He looked up as they entered, the dark circles under his eyes signaling he had yet to sleep since the night before.
“I take it the search of the asylum grounds turned up nothing,” Alec said after they exchanged terse greetings.
“The dogs lost the scent on the Wickham Hill Road. He may have found a ride on a farmer’s wagon headed to London. We checked Clarence’s rooms in Cheapside, but there was no sign he’d returned and the landlady said she hadn’t seen him for a month. I interviewed the new tenant myself. He wasn’t any use either. Have a look at this.” He handed the slim catalogue to Alec, who scanned it and gave it to Vivienne.
“No one saw a thing,” Blackwood continued. “The auction began shortly after one o’clock and ran until two-thirty. At the close of business, the lots were sent out for delivery. I have a list of everyone who was present, and who bought what. At six o’clock, one of the chars who comes in to clean found Mr. Cromwell stuffed into a closet.”
“I’d like a copy of that list,” Alec said.
“Of course. Any idea what’s he after? If it’s even our Dr. Clarence, which is far from certain. I have to consider all the possibilities, although everyone insists Mr. Cromwell had no enemies.”
“Dr. Clarence said ‘They’re here.’ What if he didn’t mean a person but a thing?”
“You think he might have been referring to one of the books?”
“Possibly. I’ll need to show the catalogue to Cyrus Ashdown. He’s the Society’s resident expert on such things. He probably knows all the people who attended personally.”
“Is anything missing?” Vivienne asked.
Blackwood gave a shrug. “It’s hard to say. There’s a large amount of inventory to account for. But nothing’s been reported so far.”
“So the auction lots were already out for delivery when Cromwell died,” Alec said.
“Yes. But he knew where they were going. He served as the clerk during the auction. I’ve already sent men to question everyone who was present—and to keep an eye on them in case Clarence decides to pay a visit. Lucky for us, it was an intimate affair. There were only nine people bidding.”
“Do you mind if we speak to some of the buyers as well?” Vivienne asked.
Her black eyes roamed over the empty chairs, as if imagining the room as it was earlier that afternoon when an elite group of the most hardcore collectors in England had assembled to dicker over centuries-old manuscripts devoted to the occult.
“By all means.” Blackwood paused. “I read the Brady report. The officers I’ve sent, most of them have families. They understand the risks, but I still feel like I’m throwing them to the wolves. This creature we’re dealing with….Will bullets stop him, Mr. Lawrence?”
Alec held his gaze. “I don’t know.”
Blackwood nodded. “Then let’s hope you find him first.” He turned as a constable entered the room.
“Morgue wagon’s here, sir.”
“Good.” He faced Vivienne and Alec. “But I think you should see the body first.”
“I’ll do it,” Vivienne offered.
She sensed his reluctance. Alec didn’t mind killing when he knew the thing on the end of his iron blade didn’t belong in this world, but he’d never gotten used to the violent death of innocents, no matter how many times he witnessed it. After seeing two of the Ripper scenes, including Mary Jane Kelly, he’d felt permanently soiled.
So Vivienne went and examined the body with Blackwood
while Alec waited in the Sale Room. He tried to picture the gathering earlier that afternoon. Invitation only. That meant rich and/or well-connected. He’d always found it amusing, the mortal fascination with the occult. It was all quasi-religious bollocks. The Dominion was real, but it wasn’t Heaven, nor Hell either. And the souls that returned as ghouls might have been church deacons for all he knew.
In Alec’s view, the last two millennia had been a history of pointless persecutions by men who used their power to terrorize. He himself knew what it was to be called a devil. A witch. Now everything had come full circle, and the very same books that people had been burned at the stake for were valued in the thousands of pounds and squabbled over by collectors.
But Clarence wanted something here. Clarence had been here. He thought he might sense a residue of the man, or whatever was inside the man, but there was nothing.
“Well?” he asked when Vivienne returned.
“We need to see Cyrus.” Her mouth set in a grim line. “Right away.”
“What did you see?”
“No injuries, but the expression on his face, Alec….” She trailed off. “I think the poor man died of fright.”
5
Sunday, December 16
They caught the early morning train from Charing Cross to Greenhithe, a tiny, bucolic village in Dartford. Cassandane, Cyrus’s daēva, met them at the station. A tall, strapping woman, she disdained all forms of frippery, preferring grey flannel trousers and a man’s hunting jacket.
She shook hands with Alec and grinned as Vivienne planted a warm kiss on her cheek. Despite their superficial differences, Vivienne and Cassandane had always been close. They were both warriors at heart. Foot soldiers against the darkness that bled through from the shadowlands.
Cyrus was the scholar. Their collective memory. In many ways, he was the most human of them all. Brilliant, complex, acerbic—and prone to black melancholies that might last for days or years. It couldn’t be easy to be bonded to such a man, but Cassandane managed it. They were so different, Alec always wondered what held them together. Not sex. Their relationship was platonic. It was something else. An extraordinary kind of love that made no sense to anyone outside of it.
“It’s good you come,” Cassandane said, tossing their bags into the open carriage. She jumped into the driver’s seat and urged the matched pair of chestnuts to an easy trot. “He’s in one of his moods. Barely leave the library.”
Before coming to England, she and Cyrus had spent many years in Buda-Pesth, and Cassandane still had a thick Hungarian accent. She kept her brown hair just long enough to cover a missing left ear that was also partially deaf. It was the only concession to vanity Alec had ever seen.
“We have an escalating situation,” Vivienne said as the carriage bounced through the cobblestoned streets of Greenhithe. “Something’s come through, maybe been summoned, we don’t know yet. But it’s on a bloody rampage.”
“Yeah, I hear about this from Cyrus.”
“It can burn things with its hands, Cass.”
“Fasz.” Shit.
“We need Cyrus’s help,” Alec said. “Yours too.”
“Sure. I could use some excitement.”
“Has it been quiet?”
“Only one ghoul in six months. Terrorized a bunch of nuns in Norfolk. I take care of it.”
“This one won’t be easy,” Vivienne said. “It got away. Could be anywhere by now.”
“Or anyone,” Alec added.
“Igen.” Understood.
“How bad is Cyrus? Will he pull himself together?”
Alec knew about the melancholies. Vivienne had them too sometimes. Her solution wasn’t to shut herself away as Cyrus did, but to throw herself into a frenetic schedule of charity work and social events. She fought the darkness tooth and nail.
“He seems better already,” Cassandane conceded. “Sidgwick’s cable cheered him. You know Cyrus. He needs a cause. Then he’s happy again.”
Ingress Abbey lay about three-quarters of a mile from the village, set on a vast estate of rolling lawns and wooded parkland. It had been built and re-built many times. The latest incarnation was a neo-Gothic heap with towering gables of grey stone—some of it supposedly pilfered from the Old London Bridge—and a central tower facing the Thames.
The Abbey had a colorful history, first as a 14th-century convent and later as a country retreat for King Henry VIII, who confiscated it from the nuns to pay for his invasion of France. Cyrus had bought the estate from a London solicitor and filled it with all the rare and wondrous objects he’d collected over the centuries. Visitors could sip tea from cups made during the Qin Dynasty, the glaze as fresh as the day they were fired, while admiring the skeletons of strange animals long vanished from the face of the earth.
Open a drawer and one might find cringe-inducing Egyptian medical instruments, or yellowed scrolls casting the horoscopes of people long ago turned to dust. There were iron-nickel meteorites and dory spears from ancient Sparta and bags of coins minted with the faces of forgotten kings. The flotsam of a thousand shipwrecked cultures.
Alec always enjoyed his visits to Ingress Abbey. It was the closest thing he had to coming home.
Rain began to fall as they turned up the drive to the house. It was lined with ancient, grey-barked elms, their naked branches dark against the sky. Cassandane stopped the carriage at the bottom of a long flight of weathered stone steps carved into the hillside leading up to the front door.
“You know where to find him,” she said. “I go to the stables and meet you inside.”
Alec got out and started up the stairs, ignoring the dull ache in his knee. Halfway to the top, he paused, leaning on his cane. He pretended to admire a sailboat cutting through the muddy waters of the Thames, but Vivienne wasn’t fooled.
“Take my arm,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not. Take my arm.”
Alec sighed and let her support him for the last three flights. She smelled of tobacco and the scented oil Claudine combed into her hair at night. Something with jessamine.
“It’s the weather,” he said.
Vivienne looked away. He knew she felt responsible, even though he had chosen the bond, not her.
“Or maybe I’m just getting old.”
She barked a laugh, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “You’re a terrible liar.”
The massive front door had been left unlocked. Vivienne pushed it open and gave a theatrical shiver.
“Goddess, how the hell do they live like this?”
Ingress Abbey was impossible to heat, and their breath steamed in the stark, gloomy entrance hall. White sheets draped a dozen marble statues, like an assembly of ghosts. Alec followed Vivienne through a labyrinth of hallways paneled in mahogany carvings of birds and fish and stranger creatures from medieval bestiaries. Another flight of stairs, more corridors, and they reached a heavy door with lamplight spilling through the crack.
Alec opened it, grateful for the rush of warmer air. Cyrus hoarded almost anything that caught his fancy, but books held pride of place. The library at Ingress Abbey contained thousands of volumes, many of them rare first and second editions bound in calfskin with gold leaf lettering on their spines. A treasured few were believed to be forever lost, like Plato’s Hermocrates and Livy’s complete history of Rome in one hundred and forty-two volumes.
Cyrus Ashdown sat ensconced in a large leather armchair, an afghan across his knees. His skin bore the livid sheen of a man who hadn’t seen daylight in months, but his predatory black eyes burned as bright as ever.
“My dears!” Cyrus gestured at two chairs barely visible beneath tottering heaps of books. “Sit down, sit down.”
Cyrus had aged more than Vivienne, but he still appeared no older than his early fifties, with silver-streaked hair, thin lips and a patrician nose. Beard stubble roughened his jaw. He wore a tatty dressing gown and fur slippers that looked like something Alec’s cat might cough up.
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br /> “Magus,” Vivienne murmured, kissing his cheek.
Alec cleared the chairs and took the one farthest from the coal fire that burned in an enclosed iron stove. Vivienne immediately lit a cigarette.
“Holy Father, must you?” Cyrus grumbled. He clutched a book in his lap, one finger holding his place on the page.
Vivienne exhaled a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “I won’t burn anything up, I promise.”
“Do you have any idea what the contents of this room are worth?”
“Roughly.” She looked around for an ashtray. “What are you reading?”
Cyrus pursed his lips but let it drop.
“William Blake. Of course. I find his gloriously mad visions to be quite stimulating, not to mention relevant to our purpose.”
Alec suppressed a smile.
Cyrus opened the book. “In the universe,” he quoted, “there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”
“Indeed there are,” Vivienne said, pouncing on an ashtray that appeared to be made from the skull of a small hominid.
Or, Alec thought, it simply was the skull of a small hominid.
“Perhaps you should tell me what’s come through one of those doors,” Cyrus said quietly.
“You’ve read Blackwood’s cable?” Alec asked.
“Yes.”
“This began in New York, there’s no doubt of that. But now it’s here.”
Cyrus raised a bushy eyebrow. “It.”
“Yes, it. Most definitely not a ghoul. Far more sophisticated.”
“How many known victims?”
“Eleven. Twelve counting the clerk at Sotheby’s. And I fear it’s only the beginning.”
The door opened and Cass stomped in. “I hate this English weather,” she announced. “Wet all the time. Who wants some pálinka?”
Alec’s stomach cringed at the sight of the murky green bottle in her hand, but Vivienne enthusiastically accepted a glass. Technically, pálinka was fruit brandy. The stuff Cassandane brewed down in the Abbey’s cellars, however, was more accurately described as Hungarian moonshine. Alec had gone blind for a few brief, terrifying seconds the only time he’d tried it.