“Too bad yew cain’t drive a cab,” Alf observed. “Yew’d hev yer pick, an’ they’d jest walk right inter yer open harms.”
Now, that was true. Impossible, of course, since all the cabbies knew each other, and a newcomer would be watched like a hawk by all the other cabdrivers. Not even in the rush at a train station would he be able to get away with impersonating a cabbie.
Nowadays only the very rich, the kind who could still afford stabling or carriage houses behind their townhouses, kept private carriages in London. Even many of the merely well-to-do used cabs instead of relying on their private carriages these days. Especially those who were staying in their clubs, or hotels—
“Hotels!” he exclaimed aloud. “Americans!”
Alf looked at him oddly, puzzled by his outburst. “Wutcher mean, ’Muricans, guv?”
“Wealthy Americans stay in hotels. Their daughters are very . . . bold,” he explained. “The girls are accustomed to being allowed to go where they want without chaperonage to a far greater extent than English girls are. They’ll be ever so much easier to acquire than English girls. And when the girl turns up witless, the parents will want ‘the best care in London,’ and the best care in London is exactly where we want her to go.” He pondered this again. “If we work fast, and we have good luck, we might be able to get two or even three in a single day.”
“Oi c’n get eight boys in a single day, guv, betwixt takin’ ’em off street an gettin’ ’em at ’iring ’all,” Alf chuckled. “Oi think we got a plan.”
“Not quite. We need to be precise about this,” he cautioned. “This will have to be by daylight, and we’ll have to be fast. We need a very detailed map of the area around each of the best hotels. We’ll need to have a secure spot for the coach near each hotel where you won’t be bothered, and where no one will see us putting the girls into it. And we’ll need one more thing.” Because while getting the girls was a difficult proposition . . .
“Wut’s thet, guv?”
“We’ll need to find a secure place to get rid of them from out of the coach. Once the entity spits them out, we’ll need to load them back into the coach, and take them somewhere else to drop them. I can’t just turn three girls out into the street in front of the flat all at once, and I can’t turn them out an hour apart, either. Someone is almost certainly going to be able to backtrack them if I do that. And it will have to be a safe place for them.” It did him no good at all with regards to the entity’s demands if some enterprising fellow reabducted them to use as prostitutes.
“Roight. Yew c’n leave thet part t’me. An’ th’ mappin’. But yew need ter talk t’thet thing in basement, an’ foind out if it c’n ’andle more’n a pair, an if it loike’s th’ ideer.” Alf tapped the side of his nose with a finger. “Be jest our luck fer us t’nobble three girls an’ three boys, an’ hev it turn up its nose, eh?”
Although going down into the basement this morning was the very last thing he wanted to do, Alexandre sighed, and nodded. “Let me get dressed, first,” he told his man. “I don’t fancy shuffling down there in slippers and a dressing gown.” He had no more appetite for breakfast, so he got up from the table and went to his room.
Rather than lingering over his morning preparations, he hurried them, skipping shaving, doing little more than a splash of water over his face, and putting on yesterday’s clothing. The sense of dread he felt at facing that thing only grew in him as he dressed; he wanted to get it all over with as soon as he could.
A mere half an hour later saw him treading the basement stairs, lantern in hand, peering anxiously at the void in the middle of the floor. He was pretty certain he knew what it was, now. It was a passageway to some other . . . existence. Like a door into a world populated by nightmares. Some of the magic books in his collection—and a great deal of fantastic fiction—hinted at, or outright described such things. And it was the only thing that made sense; how else could half the victims have been spit back out again? The entity wasn’t “eating” them as such; it was pulling them into its world, keeping one, stripping the mind of the other, and throwing that one back into this world. Whatever had happened to them over there, it had rendered the ones that returned mindless and malleable—and the thing had created some sort of mystical link to them, or it wouldn’t be able to use them once they were back here.
Though, of course, he still didn’t know what the thing was going to use them for. He only knew it wanted them all together to do it.
He hung the lantern up and stood as far away from the void in the floor as he could. He thought he was out of tentacle reach, but . . . how could he know for sure? In the silence of the basement he cleared his throat, hoping the entity would notice him if he made a slight noise.
Nothing. Tension grew in him. And so did dread.
“Ah, oh Great One? I have a question?” He realized he was trembling at this point, and he wasn’t in the least ashamed of doing so. Anyone who wouldn’t have been quaking in his boots in this situation would have been an oblivious blithering idiot, and deserved to be eaten.
He stood there uncertainly for what seemed like hours. He could hear a very few sounds from the flat above—the creak of floorboards as Alf moved about, a faint clink of china and silver. And then, just as he was getting ready to leave, the temperature plummeted; one moment, he was mildly uncomfortable; normal in a basement in winter. The next, he was freezing, he could see his own breath, and it had gone completely silent. Not a single sound penetrated from outside the room.
What do you want? The void remained the same. Thank God. If it had suddenly reared up into the pillar-shape, he might have gone too witless to ask his question.
He swallowed. “I was wondering if it would be acceptable to bring more than one pair of offerings at the same time,” he said, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering.
Acceptable, said the entity.
And the next moment, the temperature in the basement abruptly rose and he could hear the sounds in his flat again.
He grabbed the lantern, rushed up the stairs two at a time, and nearly ran into Alf, who had been waiting at the basement door. “Jeezus, guv!” the man exclaimed in shock. “Yer white’s that snow out there!” He took the lantern from Alexandre’s nerveless fingers. “An’ yer ’bout as cold!” He all but shoved Alexandre into the study, the warmest room in the flat, hurried out, and came back with a blanket folded in two, which he wrapped around Alexandre’s shoulders before pushing him down into a chair in front of the fire.
“It said we can bring more than one pair at a time,” he got out around his still-clenched teeth, holding his hands out to the fire. It felt as if he was never going to get warm again.
Alf nodded with satisfaction. “Well, tha’s good, hain’t it? We c’n get this thin’ satisfied, an’ get on wi’ henjoyin’ oursel’s.”
Maybe. And maybe it’s only going to demand more of us.
“Yes, but . . . now I can’t help wondering what this thing wants all these girls for,” Alexandre said slowly. “It called them witnesses, but what it is they are supposed to witness, I have no idea, since they’re presumably locked up in a London hospital and not witnessing anything but the four walls of their room. And it wants seven of them, which suggests it has some manner of magic planned to use them for.”
Alf shrugged, incurious. “Don’t matter to us, do it? If they be locked up in ’ospital, that’ll be far ’way from ’ere, so whatever it’s up to, it hain’t gonna ’appen ’ere.”
“I suppose not.” Once again, Alexandre thought about going to Lord Alderscroft and his White Lodge. But he was in too deep now. There was no way he’d escape punishment for the girls he had sacrificed to this thing’s needs. And there was no way he could play ignorant; they’d have it out of him, or they’d smell the thing’s dark power on him. No, the only way out of this was through.
Alf didn’t go so far as to slap his shou
lder like a boon companion, nor tell him to “buck up,” but it was clear that now that they knew the thing could and would take multiples of the victims, he wanted to get it all over with as quickly as possible. “Look, guv, once yew warm up, yew get yersel’ outside’a th’ best part uv a bottle an’ go t’bed. Oi’ll go nose about. Foind th’ ’otels with ’Muricans in ’em. Foind places fer th’ coach. Thet’ll take me one, mebbe two days. Soon’s Oi can, Oi’ll get us three lads, an’ ’ide ’em in th’ upstairs flat.”
“How do you propose to keep them quiet?” That concerned him. If he knew anything about boys . . . keeping them tied up for more than a few hours was going to be a problem. They’d have to eat, eliminate . . . and there was only himself and Alf to keep watch over them. You couldn’t leave them alone, they’d find a way to get out of their bonds. . . .
But Alf laughed. “Fust, Oi’m pickin’ skinny, meek’uns, all bone. Second, Oi’m tellin’ ’em th’ Marster’s away, an’ wants ’em fit t’work when ’e comes ’ome, an’ they has leave t’eat an’ drink an’ rest so’s they are. Third, Oi leave ’em wi’ a full pantry an’ plenty o’ beer an’ gin. So, they’ll be inna place fulla food ’n drink, plenty coal fer a fire, an’ th’ last think they gonna wanta do is look thet gift ’orse in ’is mouth. If Oi know boys, an’ Oi do, they’ll stuff thesselves an drink till they fall over, an’ wake up t’do it summore.”
“And by that time, we’ll have the girls.” It seemed a sound plan. He’d had a look at the flat upstairs; it was on the same plan as this one, and furnished in a rudimentary fashion, with one big bed in the room that corresponded to his, and two smaller beds in what would have been Alf’s room and his study. “You take the coach out before we do all this and pick up a few kitchen things, and lots of blankets. And curtains. We should make sure the windows have curtains over them. You’ll know better than me what the boys will need to keep them satisfied.”
Alf nodded. “Once I git ’em, we c’n make a try next day fer three girls. If we on’y get one, we’ll give th’ thing the girl an’ one uv the lads. Oi’ll tell th’ one Oi pick Oi’m takin’ ’im t’Marster’s ’ouse.” Alf certainly seemed to have taken the bit between his teeth on this, and Alexandre was disinclined to discourage him.
“I . . . think that’s a good plan, Alf,” he said, finally. “If we can take the third girl before the first and second are discovered to be missing—that will make it all immensely easier.” He considered the times he had run into American girls in the shops and dressmakers around the hotels they frequented. They were often alone. They were bold. They were fearless—never having learned to fear anything. All that would work against them. Yes, this might work. This might well work.
And meanwhile, he wanted to take Alf’s prescription of getting as much of a bottle of brandy inside him as possible and then going back to bed.
“Wait,” he said, and fumbled a nice packet of folded banknotes out of his pocket. “You’ll need money; you’ll be doing a lot of moving around, and later, you’ll have to buy those things for the flat upstairs. While you are scouting, you should take cabs or ’buses if you need them. We shouldn’t let the coach be seen before the day. Someone might recognize it—a doorman, or a shopgirl. And you’ll want luncheon, tea, dinner, and beer at least.”
“Roight yew are, guv,” Alf saluted him with two fingers to his forehead. Then he bustled out, and a few minutes later, the front door closed and the flat was silent.
After a while, Alexandre got up and went to the kitchen. He found it cleaned up with not so much as a dirty saucer in the sink. Alf had already tidied everything away—it occurred to him that for a fellow with such a low background, he was surprisingly fastidious.
Or maybe it’s because of the low background. Maybe he was sick of living in squalor by the time he was old enough to leave home. He already knew from tidbits that Alf had dropped that his father was a drunk and his mother a slattern. Not a whore—but someone who literally never swept anything so the floors of the single rooms in which they lived consisted of dirt and bits of trash pounded down by feet into layers of grime.
Alexandre found the half-open bottle of brandy in the pantry with the rest of the liquor, cut himself two thick slices of bread, buttered them well, and ate them. Long experience had taught him that if he was going to drink to get drunk, he needed to cushion his stomach first. Then, with the blanket still draped over his shoulders, he took a glass and the bottle and sought his room.
The fire was going well; he put coal on it to make sure it kept going while he slept.
But before he got ready to climb into bed, he opened the drawer full of magical supplies in his bureau and got The Book. Because right now . . . he didn’t want to sleep unless he had some protection.
I don’t think my standard protective magic is going to work against that . . . thing. But written after the summoning spell in The Book . . . he thought he remembered some sort of protective spell. Which would make sense; whoever had written the book out surely had a way of protecting himself from the thing he had summoned. I was just in so much of a hurry for power . . . I never even considered what I woke up might pose any danger to me.
Half averting his eyes, he flipped past the summoning spell, and then when he reached the next section, he began to read, carefully. And with a feeling of hope, he knew he had found what he was looking for. Yes! Here it is.
It was, as such things went, fairly standard, with just a couple of small tweaks to it—tweaks, he suspected, that had to do with this particular entity. Normally such things used holy water, or at least water the magician himself had blessed. This used heavily salted water, red paint into which a couple of herbs, ground fine, had been mixed, and a couple of precious oils. And he had everything he needed in that drawer, because after he’d made his first copy of The Book, he’d gone out and bought every last ingredient listed in it. Now he was inexpressibly glad he had done so.
He pulled the head of the bed a little farther away from the wall so he could make a circle all the way around it, picked up the rugs for the same reason, and went to work. He washed down the floor with the salted water and let it dry, made the circle in the red paint, an inner circle in the two oils, and painted certain glyphs in the four cardinal points of the compass, and more on the door to his room, on the hearth, and on the windowsills. Fortunately the paint was a quick-drying variety, and quite permanent—he’d consulted one of his artist friends on such things a very long time ago, and now his caution was paying off handsomely. Only when he was finished did he undress, get back into his nightshirt, and step over the still-drying circle to climb into bed.
It might have been all in his mind, but once he was in the circle he felt a sense of profound relief. As his body warmed up in the bed and the brandy he was sipping gradually relaxed his muscles, he felt the tension draining out of him. Finally he felt . . . not safe, precisely, but at least safer.
When he found himself starting to nod off, he put the bottle on his bedside table, drained the last of the brandy in the glass, filled it with water and drank that, and slid down into his bed. And finally slept.
When he woke again, it was late afternoon, and he could tell by the chill in the air and the silence in the flat that Alf wasn’t back yet. That was fine, actually. It meant Alf really was taking this with the deathly seriousness it required, and was being as thorough as only Alf could be.
The paint was quite dry by this time, so according to The Book, his protections were now complete and solid. He got out of bed just long enough to build up the fires in his bedroom, the study, and Alf’s bedroom. When he had washed off the coal dust in the kitchen, he made himself some cold ham sandwiches and took them and a bottle of beer back to the safety of his bed. He lit the oil lamp next to his bed and climbed in. Once there, he read more in The Book—trying to figure out just what it was that the entity wanted, and what it was going to do when he satisfied its need for victims.
He didn’t find much. Only one passage. He who serves the Master faithfully and well shall himself become the Master.
But nothing more than that. No indication of what that meant, if the “Master” was the entity, or if it was a classical Master of the Elemental sort and the “he who serves” would be an apprentice, or . . . well, it wasn’t clear what was meant, exactly. The Book did seem to assume you were at least an Elemental Magician, because it gave specific means of excluding creatures of all four Elements from the area of the conjuration. And it said this was to keep “spies” away.
Obviously whoever had written The Book knew very well what the entity was going to ask for, and that this sort of thing was likely to bring a White Lodge or the equivalent down on the caster’s head.
He’d followed those instructions to the letter, and had taken pains of his own to make sure there weren’t any snoops around. When he’d set up the magic chamber in the basement in the first place, long before he’d found The Book, he’d sealed it against intruders. The last thing he’d wanted, even back then, was for the local Masters to find out some of the things he’d been up to. He’d played about a bit with sex magic and performed some animal sacrifices, and both those things were frowned on by the prudish White Lodge. Now he was glad he had taken those precautions. He doubted that even the most powerful of the Masters would be able to sense what was going on past all the shields and barriers he’d layered, one over the other. The outermost one was a very clever thing he’d learned from Alf’s former employer—a shield that made it look quite literally as if there was nothing there, hiding all the other shields beneath it.
It was well past dark when Alf came in; by that time, he was up and dressed again, and had moved his researches to his study, which was the first place Alf went to look for him.
“One more day o’ scoutin’ guv,” Alf said with satisfaction, “Oi’ll take th’ coach out t’ pick up wut we needs fer th’ upstairs flat i’ th’ mornin’.”
A Scandal in Battersea Page 24