The Apollonian Case Files

by Mark A. Latham

  Dakin said nothing. In truth, Jim was almost as surprised as the constable that Miss Furnival had a full-sized Tesla pistol. He had been under the impression that no working examples had been recovered. The order, it seemed, always had its secrets. ‘On the count of three,’ Jim said.

  ‘One… two… three!’

  Both Jim and Marie swung around the corner. Jim found himself at once face-to-face with a wasted, ghoulish creature, which was momentarily lit by the flickering blue light of Marie’s pistol as she fired at something further along the corridor. A distant scream indicated that the American had hit her target. The creature before Jim hissed, its breath rancid, and sprang into Jim before he could fire. Jim slammed hard into the wall of the hospital corridor, his breath escaping his lungs with the impact.

  Dakin cried out. His light illuminated Jim’s monstrous assailant. The creature raised an outstretched claw, ready to strike. Jim’s own arms were pinned to the floor, and he knew he faced death, before the beast jerked backwards, and he was free. Miss Furnival shoved the ghoul away. That was the second time she’d saved his life today.

  ‘Don’t just stand there, Dakin!’ she snapped. ‘What are you, a man or a mouse?’

  Dakin dithered still. Jim struggled to stand.

  The creature leapt to its feet. Marie uttered an unladylike profanity. Jim felt as though he were wading through treacle; a growing sense of fear that he was about to see Sir Arthur’s niece meet a grisly end gripped him.

  Miss Furnival sidestepped the ghoul’s slashing claws nimbly, drawing her conventional revolver in one fluid movement. Before it could turn, she fired a round into its eye, dashing its brains over the wall.

  ‘Please feel free to cut in any time, gentlemen,’ she said, glaring at her compatriots.

  ‘Chastise us later,’ Jim said. ‘We have bigger problems.’

  A chorus of growls broke out from along the corridor. Black silhouettes, gangrel, ape-like, swayed in crouching posture, perhaps only twenty yards away. Six pairs of eyes blazed like coals.

  ‘Oh, this is too much…’ Miss Furnival moaned.

  ‘Come on, back the way we came.’ Jim tugged Miss Furnival’s sleeve, and shoved Dakin away.

  ‘To where?’ Marie snapped. ‘Every way is blocked. The only path leads upwards, and we can hardly escape from there.’

  ‘We have no choice,’ Jim retorted, dragging Marie along with him. ‘We’ll run out of ammunition before we kill them.’

  ‘Speak for yourself…’ Miss Furnival muttered, but relented regardless, picking up the pace as they raced back the way they had come. Dakin jogged ahead of them with the swaying light, following orders out of pure dumb compliance. ‘Captain Denny, do you not think we’re being… herded?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘These creatures aren’t normally so hesitant. Something is controlling these last ones – they’re holding back.’

  ‘That’s good!’ Jim tugged at Dakin’s sleeve to direct him left down the passage towards the stairwell. He swore he saw another pair of ghoulish eyes for a second, waiting in the dark.

  ‘How?’

  ‘If they wanted us dead, they’d have let the beasts take us. If they’re keeping us alive, it’s for a reason.’

  ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ she muttered.

  They emerged onto the first-floor landing, in time to hear a tremendous crash, and a cacophonous screeching sound like a pack of apes was loose nearby. Dark shapes moved in the void below them.

  ‘Up!’ yelled Jim, dashing up the stairs two at a time.

  The door at the top of the next flight was blocked by debris. Jim scrambled over piles of bricks and splintered wood, before helping Marie over. Dakin came next, almost falling in a panic when he heard the grunts and growls from below them.

  ‘Good man,’ Jim said, struggling to find words of encouragement to keep the lad’s mind off his fear. ‘Now come on, and hold that light steady. We won’t get far without you.’

  ‘Yes, sir; right, sir.’ They were the first words he’d spoken for some time. Jim took that as some small progress.

  They ran up another winding stair, pausing only at the sound of a loud metallic clang, and the ominous reverberation of the metal bars that encased the stairwell. Jim bade Dakin hang the lantern through the bars, and peered over cautiously to see a pair of wiry, pale arms clinging to the rails just a few yards below them. A grotesque, half-rotted face leered into view, teeth champing within an exposed jaw.

  Jim only quickened his ascent. At the top of the next flight, the door was ajar. Beyond that was a short set of stairs leading to a heavy-looking door, chained and bolted. Jim presumed that was an attic, or even the roof – he did not want to be cornered there. At least on a main hospital floor there was a chance of another way out; a second stairway, an emergency exit. Clinging to that thought, he barged through the door, emerging into a single long corridor, littered with detritus, and cold as the grave. But that was not what made Jim shiver.

  Near the end of the corridor, a pair of green Chinese lanterns blazed either side of a doorway.

  ‘Like I said,’ Marie Furnival purred in his ear. ‘A trap.’

  There was no way to bar the door behind them, and so Jim set off without reply, though cautiously. There was no sign of movement; no alcoves or junctions in which an enemy could hide. Jim passed two doors, both of which he tried, and both of which were locked. He wondered if their enemies had inhabited this building for long; whether they had keys to all the doors and might be lying in wait. He gripped his gun a little tighter.

  Marie cranked her Tesla pistol. ‘This is good for one more shot,’ she said.

  ‘Is that all?’ Jim asked.

  ‘This is practically a museum artefact. Unless you can find a certain Mr Tesla to make us new weapons – the other Tesla, I mean – this is the best I have.’

  Jim nodded. He hadn’t fired his derringer, and so he also had a charge remaining. It took too long to prepare in a prolonged firefight, but Jim had always found that most enemies were too afraid to continue a battle once he’d revealed the ace up his sleeve. Most enemies, however, were mere mortals.

  They reached the paper lanterns, which they now saw were adorned with Chinese characters, peculiar to the House of Zhengming – the lair of the Artist, burned to the ground nearly three years prior, its proprietor put to the sword by John Hardwick.

  Jim pushed at the door, which swung open easily, revealing not another darkened chamber, but what looked at first glance like rows of theatre seating, bathed in a rich crimson light as though a magic show was about to start.

  Jim slipped into the room silently, sweeping his pistol about. The pretension of stealth and caution at least made him feel better, although he knew it was too late for all that. Marie followed. He felt the press of her back against his, and they moved as one along a narrow aisle, at the uppermost level of a medical lecture theatre.

  The room was large and octagonal, with ten or so tiers of wooden pews sweeping around most of the upper space, separated by two narrow stairways that plunged steeply towards the circular stage below. Red paper lanterns hung overhead on long chains, bathing the chamber in a slaughterhouse hue, and singularly failing to illuminate the darkest corners, or the yawning, exposed rafters above, providing ample hiding places for crawling, scuttling ghouls.

  The only exit from the room was below – past the staging area, in which an arrangement of objects were illuminated in the ruby light.

  There was an operating table, which could once have been used by surgeons to dissect corpses in front of watching students. Now, it was laid out with several items, indistinct in the red glow. Behind the table, standing upon tall easels in a semi-circle, were five canvases – paintings of some dark and shadowy type – and these gave James Denny more cause for alarm than whatever lay on the table.

  The central canvas was covered in a dustsheet. Jim kept his eyes fixed on it as he and Miss Furnival moved cautiously towards the nearest s
tairs; he leading the way, she covering his back.

  ‘Dakin,’ Miss Furnival hissed. ‘Get in here.’

  Jim heard tentative footsteps behind him, confirming that the policeman had followed the American’s orders.

  ‘I can’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t here,’ Marie whispered in Jim’s ear. ‘Ghouls can move unheard and unseen if they wish. Or if they’re commanded to. And why the hell haven’t the ones chasing us arrived yet?’

  ‘As you said, they’ve forced us into a trap. I think we’re being invited to look at that table down there.’

  Miss Furnival peered over Jim’s shoulder. ‘And then what?’ she asked.

  ‘Then I suppose they’ll either set us free, catch us, or kill us.’

  ‘Wh… what?’ Dakin quailed. Marie shushed him at once.

  Jim led the way down the stairs, wincing as his boots crunched on brick dust and broken glass, his eyes darting to every shadow that slid across the walls in the flicker of blood-red lanterns.

  When they reached the floor, Miss Furnival at once darted around the back of the canvases, gun raised, in case anyone lurked there. Satisfied, she rushed to the doors, rattling the handles futilely.

  ‘Locked,’ she said, returning to Jim’s side.

  Jim examined the operating table which, to his distaste, was stained with blood, not altogether dry enough to be old. He could smell its iron tang in the theatre’s stale air.

  The objects were neatly arranged. A small, corked glass phial of etherium stood upright in the centre of the table. On one side of it was a pile of papers and folios. On the other side of the phial was a cardboard box, mottled with blooms of black mould. At the far end of the table was a Tesla pistol, the exact type of which Jim could not recall seeing before. It was sleeker than Marie’s, with a long silver barrel inscribed with ornate patterning. The loading capacity was larger, and the crank-handle had been replaced by a simple switch. Only the wooden body of the gun and the tiny coils, sitting flush with the sights, marked it out as a Tesla pistol at all. Marie went straight to it, snatching it up.

  ‘Impossible!’ she gasped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This was… I mean, I haven’t seen its like.’

  She composed herself quickly enough, but Jim knew when someone was hiding information from him; he’d been in this game too long.

  ‘Why would you have?’

  ‘I’ve just… seen a fair few of these. Cherleten provides them for me; this looks more advanced than the ones we have.’

  ‘Can you use it?’ Jim asked.

  ‘No – the priming cylinders are missing. The one in my pistol wouldn’t fit.’

  ‘You seem awfully sure of that.’

  ‘I know my guns, Captain.’

  Another lie. She could keep her secrets for now – he was used to that too, in Cherleten’s employ. He shrugged, and examined the papers. ‘Shipping manifests,’ he mused. ‘Good lord… this top one is the Glarus. Here… crates of lace, all paid for. Destinations… Oh no.’ Jim sifted through the other papers with increasing alarm.

  ‘What is it?’ Miss Furnival asked.

  ‘All of these manifests are dated this year. Dozens of ships, to ports all over Europe. Hundreds of crates.’

  ‘Crates of what?’

  ‘It has to be etherium. This is beyond anything I could have guessed. I thought we were curtailing the smuggling rings, but now…’

  ‘Captain, compose yourself. This could easily be a fabrication meant to rattle us. Where would that amount of etherium even come from? Until our people have verified the information here, we can’t get ahead of ourselves.’ Miss Furnival placed her hands on the box lid. ‘You don’t suppose this is booby-trapped?’

  ‘This is an elaborate show just to blow us up now, don’t you think?’

  ‘There are worse traps than explosives.’

  ‘Unless you have a better suggestion… on the count of three?’

  Miss Furnival opened the flaps of the box. ‘Enough with your counts,’ she said.

  Jim flinched involuntarily. Miss Furnival stepped back, jaw clenched. Jim peered into the box.

  The blood on the table was from the box. Or perhaps from the procedure that had created the box’s contents.

  A head.

  Jim held out a hand automatically, to prevent Dakin from idling over to look. Swallowing bile and holding his breath, he forced himself to look at the head, which already crawled with maggots.

  ‘Whittock,’ he croaked through a dry throat.

  ‘You know him?’

  Jim nodded. ‘Another of Hardwick’s men. God, I only saw him a month ago…’

  ‘This is starting to seem personal,’ Miss Furnival said. ‘And not for you or I.’

  ‘You say that, but I’m Hardwick’s man too, I suppose,’ Jim said, closing the box gingerly, very glad he was wearing gloves. ‘I fought with him at London Bridge. I was his friend.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘A story for another time, if I live long enough to tell it. These paintings…’

  Miss Furnival did Jim the courtesy of not pressing him. Instead, she squinted at the paintings, then went to the other side of the table to study them more closely.

  The four small canvases were painted in different styles, as though not all by the same hand. Three were cityscapes – Jim recognised Paris and Moscow. The third he could not immediately identify until Marie whispered aloud, ‘New York.’

  The American looked a shade paler, perhaps queasy at the discovery of the decapitated Sergeant Whittock; perhaps ill at the sight of a city from her homeland depicted in such a horrific way. For all three cities were in flames – buildings toppled, citizens dying in streets of blood. Strange creatures poured into the streets in an endless procession of twisted forms. Legs ended in cantering hoofs or bloodied stumps; backs were hunched, or winged; faces ended in porcine snouts, or jutting jaws, with tusks or horns or tentacles where mouths should be. These creatures, bestial and demonic, cavorted amongst panic-stricken men and women, tearing them apart, torturing them like the very devils of hell.

  Jim tore his eyes from the scene, though he could still see the creatures clearly in his mind. He collected himself, and nudged Dakin to hold up the light. It was not a trick of the Chinese lanterns – in all three of the pictures, from the most abstract to the most masterful, the sky was painted red. Indeed, it appeared to burn. Jim had seen that phenomenon once before, but not in any painting. He tried to swallow, but no moisture would come to his throat.

  The fourth canvas was an enigma; it meant nothing at all to Jim, and Marie offered no comment. It was a black piece, almost Rembrandt-like in its use of light amidst utter darkness. Silvery cobwebs drew the eyes to the blazing eyes of an enormous, bloated spider, which was half-hidden in shadows. The spider sunk its fangs into a beauteous maiden, tangled in webs, her face stricken with… no, not terror, but ecstasy. Her yellow dress was dotted with blood – both her own, and the spider’s, which bled from a great wound in its belly.

  The painting was disturbing, and Jim stepped past it quickly, and yanked the sheet from the largest canvas. His eyes widened as he took in the painting beneath. The most realistic of all. A masterpiece of the grotesque.

  London, in ruins, like the others. St Paul’s burned. Violet-eyed vampires battled hunchbacked demons in the streets. Madmen tore at their own faces, eyes streaming with blood. The sky blazed red, the people died. And over it all, taking up perhaps three-quarters of the tall canvas, was a shadow, tentacular and yet claw-like, glistening and yet insubstantial, tearing gaping wounds in the burning firmament. Jim could almost hear it, picking, clawing, scratching in his mind. And then he realised he was touching a hand to his head, because he could hear it. And Marie Furnival heard it too. Both hands were clapped to her ears. She trembled like a child afraid of the monster beneath the bed.

  She, too, had seen it.

  Then the Chinese lanterns guttered, and died. The room became dark, save for Dakin�
�s lantern.

  Footsteps thudded rapidly in the gallery above the agents, from where they had entered; someone ran from one end of the aisle to the other. Laughter echoed around the room – a woman’s laugh, cold and mocking.

  Dakin swung the lantern this way and that, jumping at the shadows it cast. Jim expected to see those cruel violet eyes reflected in the light, but saw nothing but the thick grey darkness.

  ‘Show yourself!’ Jim called out.

  Footsteps again, nearer. Perhaps from a lower tier.

  Jim snatched the lantern from Dakin’s grasp and shone it in the direction of the sound. A shadow moved swiftly away from the light – a swish of a dress or cape, perhaps; another laugh. This time it was followed by the report of Marie’s revolver. Wood splintered as her shot struck the back of a pew; all fell silent again.

  ‘That is no way to treat your host.’ The cool, sardonic voice came seemingly from all around the auditorium. Jim panned the hooded lantern slowly, but could not fix upon the speaker’s location.

  ‘Who are you?’ Jim shouted.

  ‘Irrelevant. All you need to know is whom I represent.’

  Jim detected the merest hint of an accent; he was certain she was no Englishwoman. Perhaps another celestial, although he fancied not. European? ‘And who is that?’ he asked.

  ‘You know. The Artist has returned from the grave, bringing word of things seen in the afterlife. Bringing grim tidings for Apollo Lycea.’

  Jim’s blood ran cold. Yet there was something alluring, almost mesmerising about the voice. Jim felt his hand slacken on his gun, his arm lowering the weapon; he checked himself at once, as though waking from a daydream.

  ‘The Artist’s visions are displayed behind you,’ the voice went on, now in another part of the room. Jim tracked it with the light, but saw nothing in its beam. ‘The curse of the Otherside threatens to consume the world. The Order thinks it alone opposes this threat, but it is wrong. Britain’s enemies are arming themselves against the coming storm. They gather etherium harvested from refugees, and amass weaponry to rival the power of your so-called “armoury”. The Order thinks it has the ultimate weapon – a living weapon – but the greatest nations on earth are in secret developing their own. The girl denies the truth of it, but you know of what I speak, don’t you, Captain James Denny?’