by Ian Richards
As hungry as Tony was—and just the mention of fish suppers and oriental cuisine had been enough to set his stomach rumbling—something Martell said puzzled him. Who had he gone to the last auction with? His uncle was a notoriously solitary man—the kind who preferred the company of books and cats to people and parties. That he could have once gone to a midnight auction with somebody else—a friend? an old employee? —seemed as bizarre as anything he had heard that afternoon.
‘Who did you go with last time then?’ he asked.
‘That would have been my best friend,’ Martell said, smiling sadly. ‘Or ex-best friend, I should say. He’s not around anymore. He left town a long time ago.’
Tony nodded, still not understanding. ‘And did he have a name, this so-called best friend who almost cost you your life?’
‘He did,’ Martell said. ‘His name was Thomas Lott. He was your father, Tony.’
*
It was a gloomy evening in London town. A bank of rainclouds pressed over the city, their bellies full and their darkness immense. The last of the sun had been swallowed up by this looming presence some time ago. Now a cellar-like darkness gripped the streets. Monolith tower blocks stood out against the gloom like tombstones. Puddles trembled in anticipation of the coming storm.
Rose stepped out of the entrance to Barnes & Potter Antiques, Soho, est. 1901, cast a wary look up at the sky, and shivered. It was unseasonably cold. It felt more like the Arctic than central London. The wind whistled past her, whipping the tops off the puddles and sending abandoned takeaway wrappers dizzying up to the sky. Her tangled red hair danced wildly, as if possessed by malevolent spirits. Though the rain had stopped, everything told her that it wouldn’t be long before it returned. The storm seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for the perfect moment to resume its dramatic dance with the pavement below.
She walked. Headlong into the wind, her coat pulled tightly around her body.
This city. It was worse than she had thought. The streets were cramped and unwelcoming, the buildings tall and gloomy. Finding her way through such a maze was near impossible. The locals tried to be helpful—‘down there, love, second-right after the bookies. The bus stop is on the left. The 73 will take you to all the way to Victoria. Get your bearings from there, yeah?’—but their directions were meandering and confusing. She had known that finding the old man would be difficult; there were almost eight million people in the city after all. But this never-ending series of dead-ends and complications. It was almost as if she were being toyed with.
Antique shop after antique shop and yet not one of the owners claimed to have ever heard of Joseph Martell.
This last one, Barnes, or Potter, or whoever he was, he had known something, she was sure of it. She had seen a flash of recognition in his eyes when she said the name. But he had blustered and sighed and shook his head. ‘Martell’s Antiques? Doesn’t ring any bells, miss. Can I be of any service instead? We are the premier antiques dealership in the area, after all. If there’s something you’d like to buy then I’m sure I’ll be able to assist you.’
It had been the same in the last shop she had tried, too. The owner of Victor’s Victorian Valhalla, an overweight man with a stump instead of a right hand. ‘Joseph Martell? Never heard of him, sweetheart. I’m sure I could help you out though. Are you buying or selling?’
Cutthroats, the lot of them. More concerned with snatching up someone else’s business than helping her find her way.
In the distance a pulse of sheet lightning played across the clouds. A rumble of thunder followed, sudden enough to make her jump.
She was in trouble. She realized that now. Everything had been predicated on finding the old man before anybody noticed she was gone. But an entire day spent stumbling around this infernal city, these petty, unhelpful men in their cavernous junk shops.
He would know by now, she was sure of it.
He would know, and he would be angry, and he would have sent someone to bring her back.
What do I do? she thought. What do I do now?
She had some money in her pocket, enough to pay for a room for a couple of nights at least. But the morning would only bring the same problems again. She was lost, alone, and afraid. And London town was doing its damnedest to make sure she stayed that way.
Another tremor of lightning flickered overhead. Thunder boomed.
Rose broke off from her daydreaming and looked up.
The rain was here.
It started slowly, a few fat drops striking the pavement and rippling the puddles. Then the downpour began. She opened her umbrella and continued down the street accompanied by the sound of raindrops chattering on the black canvas above her. She tried not to think any more about finding Martell’s Antiques. That wasn’t going to happen, not tonight at least. She thought only of the shelter of the underground, a tube ride north to Camden Town, and acquiring a room for the night.
She picked up her pace and kept walking.
The hunchback in the café across the street, who had watched her go into Barnes & Potter Antiques, Soho, est. 1901, and now seen her come out again, left a few shiny pennies beside his empty cup of tea as a tip for the waitress who had served him. Then, slipping into his dark rain-jacket, one stubby arm at a time, he smiled, pulled up his hood, and followed her out into the rain.
3 - Enter Sir Roderick
The Gnarled Wand, the occult bookstore that had stood across the street from Martell’s Antiques for the best part of one hundred and fifty years, had a proud and colorful history. Like many of the businesses on Dover Street it had first made a name for itself during the reign of Queen Victoria, a time of smoggy, sulfur-colored skies that had seen this particular part of London transformed into a beacon for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. The streets had thrived with the spirit of enterprise. There had been fishmongers, butchers, tailors, toy-makers. Dover Street had been a neighborhood alive with market stalls and commerce, the beating heart of the local community. Merchant sailors newly returned from year-long voyages to the other side of the world carried sacks of exotic spices to sell to traders. Child pickpockets knew which shoppers to target and which ones to keep their distance from. And The Gnarled Wand, with its storefront painted serpent green and its name printed above the entrance in bright gold letters, was one of the borough’s greatest attractions.
The Gnarled Wand: the premiere occult bookshop in the country.
Specializing in works on mesmerism, vanishings, ghostly occurrences and visitations.
But time had taken its toll on The Wand, as it had on all the residents of Dover Street. Whatever glamour had once existed was long faded now. From the outside, the shop was a thin, malnourished building with the unhealthy pallor of a plague victim. The window display, such as it was, advertised books and tarot decks against a backdrop of purple drapes. Inside, amongst the rows of black bookcases and second-hand armchairs, the only thing of note was a spiral staircase that rose to the second floor in a serpentine coil of twisting steps.
It was this very staircase that the proprietor of The Wand descended in a fluster that night, summoned from his bed by an incessant knocking on the front door. He had tried to ignore it—he had feigned sleep, he had pulled a pillow over his head—but it had persisted, an angry hammering of knuckle against wood that echoed through the empty shop at an unbearable volume. Ebenezer Snout was thirty-five years old, skinny, and had a penchant for colorful waistcoats. He was not a brave man—not by any distance. Indeed, as he approached the shuddering door and caught sight of the dark shape on the other side of the frosted glass, he began to entertain the idea of not answering it at all. He would pretend he wasn’t in. It was after midnight, the lights were off. All he had to do was wait for the stranger to give up and walk away.
But the stranger seemed to read his mind. Suddenly the knocking stopped and the letterbox creaked open. A pair of eyes squinted through into the darkness.
‘I know you’re in there, Snout. Let me in this instant before I
lose my temper.’
Reluctantly, cautiously, Ebenezer unbolted the door.
The stranger blustered his way in at once, a thundercloud of a man with a thick black beard and a voice that could have shaken the books from their shelves. ‘You must be Snout. The man with the magic books. I have a job for you, Snout. And if you don’t do it for me I’ll be sorely tempted to snap you in half like the twig that you are …’
That was how Ebenezer ended up pacing back and forth on the cold stone floor in the back room of his shop, tugging anxiously at his earlobe and muttering doomy predictions about what would become of him. His wife, Trina, a busty brunette five years his junior, sat at the table behind him, tracing her finger down the pages of an ancient grimoire and trying her best to control her temper. Being woken in the middle of the night did not amuse her one bit. Neither did being summoned downstairs to assist with a ridiculous fact-finding mission for a man she was fairly certain she despised. Like the rest of the shop, the back room in which they worked was cold and draughty. It had a dank, European smell—the kind usually reserved for catacombs and mausoleums—and was certainly no substitute for the warm bed she had left behind.
‘Who is he anyway?’ she muttered. ‘Sir Roderick somebody. I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Neither have I,’ Ebenezer whispered back. ‘But that doesn’t mean much. For all we know he could be one of the really unpleasant ones.’
In the main body of the shop, deep amongst the towering bookcases, Sir Roderick had made himself comfortable in an old leather armchair and was now flicking happily through a book he had plucked at random from one of the shelves. Though An Encyclopedia Of Medieval Torture was probably not intended as a light-hearted read, from the grin on his face he appeared to be enjoying it tremendously.
‘How’s it coming along in there?’ he boomed, glancing towards the back room. ‘I don’t hear much work being done.’
Trina glowered at her husband.
‘We’re looking now, Sir Roderick,’ Ebenezer shouted back. ‘We won’t be long, I’m sure.’
‘Good.’ Sir Roderick’s voice was firm but he sounded bored now, as if he were already losing interest in the whole affair. ‘Snout, be a good chap and get your woman to fetch me a drink, would you? All this dust is tickling the back of my throat.’
‘Yes,’ Ebenezer called back. ‘At once, Sir Roderick. At once.’
In the back room Trina slammed the book shut and jabbed an angry finger into her husband’s ribs.
‘No,’ she snapped. ‘I am not fetching that man a thing. I absolutely refuse.’
‘I’ll get his drink,’ Ebenezer moaned, scuttling back into the kitchen and wishing not for the last time that night that he had stayed in bed. He poured a glass of red wine and took it out to Sir Roderick, who downed it in seconds.
‘Might as well bring the bottle, Snout. Save yourself the walk.’
Ebenezer did so, returning just in time to hear a reading from The Encyclopedia Of Medieval Torture that outlined a step-by-step guide to breaking a man’s ankles. This was followed by a disparaging remark about his appearance, an arm-wrestling challenge (turned down) and several minutes of pontificating on the merits of beards. ‘You should grow a beard, Snout. A nice thatch of bristles would do wonders for you. It might make you look less effete. Might not, though. Even the mightiest of beards would struggle to overcome that face.’
Ebenezer smiled the falsest of smiles and retreated to the back room, scowling. Nights like this made him hate being part of the occult book trade. It put him at the mercy of all manner of despicable characters. Almost every month he found himself obliging another dark stranger who would sweep in unannounced demanding information about something diabolical: spells, prophesies, how to curse enemies, how to summon demons, how to translate ancient texts into English, how to talk to evil spirits. As much as he resented these people—almost all were men, almost all were rude and unpleasant—he knew he had little choice but to placate them as much as possible. It was an unspoken assumption that those who went out late at night in search of knowledge of the dark arts were not the kind of people one should risk upsetting. Turn them away and the next knock on the door could belong to someone—or something—much, much worse.
Back in the shop Sir Roderick sat gulping wine straight from the bottle while admiring a particularly gruesome illustration of The Porcupine Method. Like many of Ebenezer’s late-night callers he certainly looked a frightening proposition. Perhaps fifty years old, jet-black hair, Teutonic beard, a pair of dark eyes that bristled with menace.
He turned the page, from The Porcupine Method to The Night Of The Broken Backs.
‘What’s taking you so long in there?’ he shouted. ‘I don’t have all night, you know. And bring me more wine. This bottle is almost empty.’
‘We’re going as fast as we can,’ Trina called back. ‘You just be patient.’
And in the candlelit darkness of the back room she turned to her husband and said, ‘What the devil is a midnight auction anyway?’
*
It was after midnight and Tony couldn’t sleep. There was too much to think about.
The doll.
The auction.
His father.
For most of his life Thomas Lott had been a mystery to him. He had seen him in photographs—a plain man with spectacles and a mop of chestnut-colored hair strikingly similar to his own. But these images had been too few in number to reveal any real information about the man.
In one, his father sat at a writing desk, looking up from some paperwork.
In another, he had been photographed alongside Tony’s mother, Emily, the two of them standing in the courtyard at the back of the shop and squinting into the sun.
These glimpses into the past, which he had studied so intently, so carefully, had always been frustratingly vague. They didn’t tell him what kind of a person his father had actually been. Was he happy? Sad? Friendly? Cold? Had he liked to laugh? Had he stood up for what was right?
It was impossible to say.
All the photos confirmed was that once he had been there and now he was not.
Tony reached down and ran his fingers through Pushkin’s fur. He always felt uncomfortable when he thought of his parents. They were strangers to him and always would be. It was as if he had just missed them, a quirk of bad timing that could never be amended. Martell still sometimes talked about his mother. She had been his younger sister and from the way he spoke about her Tony could tell that they had been close. But his father, he was never discussed. Thomas Lott was a void. A blank space. All Tony knew was that he had run out on his wife and unborn son and hadn’t been heard of since. Martell rarely mentioned him. Tony rarely asked about him. He was simply an absence. A hole in the centre of both their lives that they tried their hardest to ignore.
And yet this evening, finally, he had discovered something new.
Thomas Lott had been to a midnight auction, too.
It was a tantalizing piece of information—had his father also dealt in antiques? —but Martell had been careful not to say anything further and there had been no indication that he intended to do so in the future.
And how strange, he thought, that Martell, a man he knew so well, had hidden such a large part of his life from him.
Once again the image came to him of the world being spun like a roulette wheel and clicking to a stop on a new reality. A darker one. A richer one.
Trying to sleep now was pointless. His mind was too awake. Every time he closed his eyes he found himself thinking about Martell or the doll or what might await them at the auction. The images formed quickly—a fluid, shifting procession of dreams and fantasies. To begin with he saw long hallways lined with golden chandeliers and scented with the perfume of princesses. He saw guests in tuxedos fanning themselves with their program notes and discussing the antiques for sale.
But then he saw his father and at once the vision shifted. The auction house became darker. The colors drained away.
It was almost as if his fantasy had been infected—poisoned by this single rogue thought.
Dad.
Now the elegant men in his dreams transformed into monsters. The smell of perfume found itself replaced by the stink of rotting corpses, an aroma so powerful it reached into the back of his throat like an arm, sick and diseased and awful …
No. He opened his eyes and exhaled. The room was dark and cold, the familiar fragrance of dust and wood the only taste in his mouth. For several moments he lay motionless in bed, listening intently for anything beyond the immense silence pressing down on him.
There was nothing.
‘What’s it all about, Push?’ he said, reaching down for the reassurance of the sleeping cat. Because he knew that the auction on Saturday night wouldn’t be like any he had been to before—and though that frightened him, he couldn’t deny that there wasn’t a little part of him excited by this, too.
He sat up in bed and pulled back the curtains. The cobbles of Dover Street shone brightly in the moonlight: a lunar-blue walkway leading towards the end of the street and all the adventure that lay beyond it.