by F. G. Cottam
‘You used magic to escape. It’s why you are still alive. You called upon something very potent to save you.’
He turned to face her.
‘It means we have allies there,’ Jane said, ‘in the shadow world. We must have. You were able to call upon their help.’
‘I’ll begin at the beginning,’ he said. ‘It began for me, as I’ve said, in the autumn of 1910 in Edinburgh. That was a bitter winter in Scotland.’ He smiled at the recollection. ‘No global warming at the start of the last century, not as I remember. The snow was already thick and heavy on the ground.’
Her name was Alabaster Swift. She was studying chemistry. It was rumoured that she had mounted a framed photograph of Marie Curie on the wall in her rooms but of course none of the male students knew that for sure because for men to go there was strictly forbidden by the college rules. What was certain was that she was a confident and extremely capable student. She was also strikingly beautiful, with violet eyes and a sensuous mouth and an unruly mane of auburn hair.
Its clandestine nature was the sustaining force of their occult society. They called it the Hades Club. McGuire did not think that any of them actually believed in occult goings-on, much less attempted their practice. But meeting by candlelight over a log fire at the inn room they hired under an assumed name was exciting.
They would scare one another with ghost stories and tales of curses and ancient prophesies of doom. The inn itself was supposedly haunted. With its gothic turrets and open blazes in great stone and iron grates, with the wind howling at its high, narrow windows, it was certainly properly atmospheric.
Because the Hades Club members were mostly students on the science courses, they were progressive generally. They were drawn to magic in the way that the computer geeks of a century on would be drawn to cyberspace fantasy games about witches and warlocks. They were secretive about their club, but not snobbish or misogynistic in the way that the equivalent society at Oxford or Cambridge certainly would have been at that time.
Nobody knew how Alabaster Swift found out about them. Or none of the members confessed to knowing. McGuire suspected someone had simply told her, pleased with themselves and showing off. When she made discreet enquiries about joining the Hades Club, they were delighted and flattered. Everybody who knew her knew of her intellectual accomplishments, her skill in the laboratory. But she was also enigmatic and distinctly glamorous. She would add to their exotic character and mystique.
She seemed to enjoy their stories about malevolent beasts of bosky legend and galleons struggling through hostile seas burdened by a pirate’s curse. Scottish and Scandinavian folklore intrigued and evidently also amused her. She was openly fascinated by stories of the Highland witches and their trials and persecution in the time of Oliver Cromwell. They did not really notice that she did not contribute material of her own. They were too busy trying to impress her, jostling conversationally to be the one to treat her to a monologue about a ghoul or a disturbing claim about some apparently blighted location.
They met once a week, on a Thursday evening. At the conclusion of the meetings they took turns to walk her home. Her college curfew was earlier than theirs and while the male students would linger over a late beverage, she would be obliged to leave punctually.
After the fifth meeting she attended, it was the turn of McGuire to escort her back. More accurately it was the turn of Angus Grayling, the young medical student he had been back then. For most of that particular evening, the dominant topic of discussion had been reanimation. They had strayed on to the zombies of Haitian voodoo and the vampire undead of Eastern European folk tradition. This latter mythic species had seemed to particularly fascinate Alabaster, and she continued to discuss it on the walk back.
Perhaps that was why they got lost. Alabaster was absorbed by the subject of nocturnal drinkers of blood who slept by day in their coffins. McGuire was flattered by the attention paid his words by a young woman far more attractive and engaging than any other in his youthful experience.
Then there was the snow. It made everywhere look the same. The city was featureless under its white uniformity. They only realized they had strayed into the rough area of the town when a party exiting a seedy-looking tavern turned and appraised and then began to follow them.
McGuire was three years away from beginning the habit of carrying a concealed blade in his walking cane. He was unarmed and unprepared physically or psychologically for a fight with half a dozen street toughs.
He thought that robbery was the likely motive for the pursuit but knew enough about crime in the city to think that violence would certainly accompany it. Should he resist, or would that only increase the severity of the beating? Would it endanger Alabaster even more than the situation already did?
He glanced at her. She seemed serene, unperturbed. Behind them, the gang members were closing the distance, packed snow on the pavement squeaking ever closer under their boot leather. Snow flurried thickly through the air. The streetlamps were few and their light scant in the lane into which they had strayed. And the weather meant that there was no crowd to take refuge in, no witnesses to deter a brazen attack.
‘You must promise me to keep what you are about to see from our fellow club members,’ Alabaster said. Her words were delivered in a murmur so low McGuire thought he might have misheard them.
‘What?’
‘Promise me.’
The gang was almost upon them.
‘I promise.’
‘Good.’ She turned. McGuire turned almost with her. There were seven or eight of them. They wore caps and overcoats and complexions made raw by whisky and cold. Two of them carried short wooden cudgels and there was the matt gleam in the snow of a brandished blade. The closest of them was near enough to have begun to raise, for the blow it would deliver, the heavy, leather-covered sap gripped in his right fist.
Alabaster lifted both hands and extended them. She flexed and folded her fingers in what looked to McGuire like the rapid parody of a pianist’s exercise. And on a hoarse intake of breath she made a rhythmic sound in a language he had never heard before and he thought, she is incanting something. The gang stopped as one man, as though petrified into stone. There was a half-blink of time when nothing happened. Their last exhalations of breath cleared from their frozen faces. And they toppled rigid to the ground.
‘I have not killed them,’ she said.
‘But you could have.’
‘They will remember nothing. They will awaken frozen and bruised, which is the least they deserve. You must keep your promise.’
‘You are capable of magic.’
‘Yes, I am.’
Snow fell on to the faces and clothing of the men on the ground. Their mouths lay open and their eyes were wide and senseless and the descending flakes did not make them blink. ‘Where did you learn it?’
‘You are far better not knowing,’ said Alabaster Swift.
She told him just the same. Her life was solitary, the more so because of her secret. Confiding in McGuire made it less so. She had crossed and she could successfully pass. But she missed things about the world she had been born and grown up in and she missed the trust and intimacy of friendship. In her new confidant there on earth, she rediscovered it.
They did not become lovers. McGuire hoped, but in a fairly hopeless sort of way. He was small featured and of slightly less than average height. On his optimistic days he thought he might possess a boyish charm. She was tall and imperiously beautiful.
Perhaps that would not have mattered to her. He did not know. Curiously, he knew that the age difference between them did not matter to her either. He was twenty years old on the evening of the spell cast upon the robber gang in the snow. Alabaster, she told him, was by then already fifty-eight.
‘Callow in our years,’ she said. ‘It’s an age that barely puts me beyond adolescence.’
‘Is it the same there for everyone?’
‘It is always so for those born with the gift of so
rcery. It is not so for everyone, though the lifespan there is naturally longer than it is here. That is often cited by our rulers as a symptom of our superiority to you people.’
‘You do not accept the argument?’
‘Sea turtles live to a great age, Angus. So do certain birds of paradise and some species of whale. It is an anomaly of nature only. Longevity requires no talent or special aptitude. It can be a gift or a curse but is not an attainment.’
‘You speak my language wonderfully well.’
She shrugged. ‘I speak it precisely.’
‘Will you teach me yours?’
‘Yes, I will.’
Two things made him more open to her revelations about Endrimor than he might otherwise have been. The first was his youth. The young are accepting of new concepts and the student mentality encouraged the acquisition of knowledge. He was more open than cynical and had no prejudice against possibilities he had not previously entertained.
The second characteristic predisposing him to believe was his own interest in matters mysterious and unexplained. Once told about the shadow world, about the great conflict and its spiteful architects, much of what had puzzled him about human history made clearer sense than it had.
And this process worked both ways. The Vampire mythos was obviously inspired by events on Endrimor. Though the count ruling the Kingdom of Parasites was human, the nocturnal bloodsuckers protecting him were not.
Nothing about his relationship with Alabaster Swift troubled McGuire as much as her abrupt abandonment of it. She vanished suddenly and completely. Months went by. A full year passed. There was no word or mortal trace of her. He immersed himself in his studies. Then, in the early December of 1911, he received the summons to London and to Whitehall.
From the start it was unconventional. He would sign no visitors’ book and fill out no forms. His attendance was not logged. The fact of it went completely unrecorded. Instead he was ushered into a side door on a narrow mews and taken through a labyrinth of corridors, the heels of his carefully polished shoes clacking along what felt like miles of parquet. Eventually his elderly, frock-coated guide paused outside a door. He knocked upon it lightly, once.
‘Enter,’ commanded a muffled voice from within.
McGuire walked into the room and closed the door carefully behind him. He was in a small study. A coke fire burned in a little grate. After the frozen ordeal of the London streets and the chill of the endless corridor, it was warm in the room. The man with whom he shared it stood with a hand on the mantelpiece. Leather easy chairs were angled before the fire and he gestured for them both to sit. He was tall and slender and very distinguished looking. His hair and clipped beard were white and his eyes had the glint of steel in winter sunlight.
He did not say anything immediately; nor did he look at the young man summoned there to see him. He stared over the steeple of his fingers into the red heart of his little fire. Finally, he spoke: ‘Chance is the name we give to events when we don’t yet know their purpose.’
McGuire swallowed. The Whitehall man had spoken the words in Endrimorian. He did not know how to reply. Finally, the man looked at him. And he said, ‘You understood that sentence, didn’t you?’
‘I think you know I did.’
‘Do you agree with it?’
‘I don’t know. What happened to her?’
Again, there was a long silence before any reply was forthcoming. ‘She committed a grave crime in coming here. She compounded it in studying a subject with the scientific rationality of chemistry. I can see the logic of it for her, the lure if you will; but it was a terrible risk for her to take.’
‘Why?
‘They abhor science. They despise technology. It mocks and threatens every warped principle on which their society is based.’
‘So what happened to her?’
‘We cannot be certain. Her nerve may have failed her and she may simply have fled. They may have located her and sent an assassin. If they did, he would have torn out her tongue and made her swallow it before killing her. Her death would have been drawn out.’
‘That’s barbaric.’
‘Barbarism isn’t far away, my young friend. It laps at our shores and the tide is strengthening. A storm gathers. A deluge looms and a flood threatens us.’
‘That all sounds very apocalyptic.’
‘I do not exaggerate.’ He smiled. ‘Let me have some tea fetched, Mr McGuire. Do you like toasted teacakes?’
‘Yes.’
‘With marmalade, I’ll warrant, since you’re a Scot.’
‘Marmalade would do very well.’
‘We will have our tea and we will discuss your career ambitions. I can always find gainful employment for a man of talent and the necessary discretion.’
By the high summer of 1914, much had changed about the young fellow who would eventually come to be known as McGuire. He was by then a qualified doctor. But there were other, less likely accomplishments.
He was an excellent swordsman and a skilled practitioner of the oriental martial arts. He was an expert shot with both pistol and rifle. He had learned to transmit Morse code. He was a very good driver and a capable mechanic. He could sail a boat single-handedly and navigate the route to any seagoing destination. On a clear night he could do this without instruments, by the light of the stars.
He thought that his old Hades Club colleague and confidante, the exotic Miss Swift, might find him a figure of greater substance and appeal by then. The diffidence had gone. He was capable and confident and decisive.
He would have said the weight of his responsibility to the world had made the change in him necessary, but he might concede privately that his experience of fighting and killing had brought gravity and seriousness to his make-up. How she might react to him he could only speculate. He hoped she was alive and happy somewhere, but he never saw or heard from her again.
The Sarajevo intervention had failed for a number of reasons. They had intelligence that the shadow world had sent Darius Maul, their fabled assassin. The agents of earth had been concentrating on the hunt for him. They had not thought the Black Hand capable of orchestrating anything really dangerous. They were fanatical, but they were badly organized amateurs. Fanaticism rather than professionalism was the qualification that earned their active members their decisive rolls.
It had not helped that the intervention was an international initiative. French and Italian agents were involved along with the Scotsman sent by Great Britain. Languages and egos inevitably clashed. The obsession with Maul was the key to the failure, though. His rumoured presence was a distraction that occupied too much attention and absorbed too much manpower. And the fluke of Princip’s ambling into the perfect position to take the shot was a piece of bad luck they could not have provided for. They had not known the identity of the five young Black Hand gunmen. Had they done so, they would have hunted down and discreetly eliminated them in the teeming anonymity of the Sarajevo streets.
‘The Maul distraction was clever,’ McGuire told Adam and Jane. ‘The murder of the archduke itself was a masterstroke. But what if it had been averted? I have often asked myself this. Could war by then have been prevented? Did any of the great nations really want diplomacy to prevail? Sometimes it seems to me they have needed little prompting from the shadow world to rush gleefully towards self-destruction.’
‘I’ve seen the photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination,’ Adam said. ‘I looked at them after coming here and speaking to you the first time, with the artefact. There is one capturing the moment of Princip’s arrest, and he looks dazed, almost hypnotized. Do you think there is a possibility that he was?’
‘I do and always have. I don’t think Maul was sent, but they sent somebody with another set of skills entirely. Someone with the power to enchant people infiltrated the Black Hand. I think all five of those young men were mesmerized. You will see a similar look on the face of your erstwhile colleague Martin Prior, should you see hi
m again. And I think you will. I also think you should be very much on your guard, both of you, when you do.’
‘They may not have needed to send their mesmerist from the shadow world,’ Jane said. ‘There was someone already on earth who was capable of magic and who could successfully pass. What’s more, she possessed a proven gift for learning earthly languages.’
‘And speaking them precisely,’ Adam said.
‘She was running,’ Jane said. ‘She had taken flight in Edinburgh and eluded them. By the time they caught up with her, they had a scheme requiring someone with her skills, so they offered her an opportunity to redeem herself. And, of course, she took it. And pardoned, she was then obliged to go home. Does that strike you as a plausible scenario, Doctor McGuire?’
‘It had occurred to me, of course. It’s a question of whether their pragmatism could outweigh their spite in the balance. If she did do it, she achieved something momentous for them. But she would have needed guarantees concerning her safety to go back willingly and the Crimson King is nothing if not capricious.’
‘You do not want to believe she did it,’ Adam said. ‘You loved her.’
‘More than that,’ McGuire said, with a wan smile. ‘She was the only woman I ever did love.’
TWELVE
They left McGuire and the professor just before eight o’clock and went to a seafront bar. Grayling had booked them into separate rooms at the same boutique hotel. It was only half a mile from the doctor’s promenade flat.
Brighton was a city and a very famous resort with a colourful history, but physically it was much smaller than most English cities. It would have been a cosy sort of place, Adam thought, if it wasn’t so self-consciously edgy, so drugged-up and heavily pierced and beaded and tattooed.
Their conversation was a bit stilted in the bar. Adam tried for carefree, but his dialogue didn’t take off, let alone soar. Partly it was the sobering magnitude of what McGuire had confided. His age alone was a quite terrifying revelation when you thought about how much he must have done and witnessed over that turbulent life of his. Partly it was nervousness over what was to come. He had never been nervous prior to a sexual encounter before, but he had never experienced sex with anyone about whom he felt the way he did about Jane.