This was what Stellmach had directed him to, the madness of women in an awesome record of degeneracy and diabolism, now all but buried under the quilt of the Enlightenment and the silk of superstition. And the more Groves read, the more he was transfixed.
He learned of women who raise mists and flames to muddle the senses and affect pious demeanors to camouflage their nefarious intentions. He read of the symptoms of possession—debased imaginations, phenomenal strength, an emaciated appearance, and the ability to speak literary and grammatical Latin. He found repeated mentions of incubi, the insatiable demons frequently summoned by witches to quench their lusts and do their bidding, and who sometimes appear as men, sometimes as satyrs, and sometimes as beasts and illusions. He examined the dreadful family tree of demons, including Aerial Demons, who assume bodies made of the dense air of hell and stalk the earth searching for victims; Water Demons, who live softly with women until their anger is inexplicably and irreversibly aroused; and Lucifugous Demons, who walk only at night and kill strangers with some breath or touch. And with an accelerating pulse he read of metamorphosis, the theory accepted by Thomas Aquinas and sanctioned by Augustine, in which the devil forms an image in the mind of the witch and from this immaterial state knits a second body to correspond to that projection, indistinguishable from a real being.
By the time he was finished he had a notebook bursting with arcana: everything from the location of the stigmata diaboli (the devil’s marks, most often buried in the privy regions), the demons’ fear of salt, a list of prayers to be used as talismans, and numerous notes reminding him to check any future murder scenes for drips of wax (the devil was said to keep a lighted candle up his excretory passage). He left the library with his mind swarming with appalling images, convinced that Edinburgh itself had been a veritable seminary for witches and devil worshippers, and seriously contemplating whether he might be justified in extracting a confession from Evelyn with glowing irons and rawhide whips.
When he reached home some yellowish urchins were skipping rope outside his very door:
Is she ugly, is she pretty,
Is she the witch of the cobble-stoned city?
The childish voices, resisting the charm of the first bedtime prayers he had muttered in fifty years, whirled and weaved around visions of orgiastic sabbats and ritualistic attacks, trawled through his dreams, and were still with him now, huffing and clanking away like Arthur Stark’s printing press, as he crossed graveyard-quiet Princes Street past stirring market gardeners and edgy piemen, with his head still throbbing and his heart pounding in his throat. He was heading directly for the Old Town, where he had Evelyn under constant surveillance and where his assiduous sentinels, making no secret of their presence, had reported mysterious shadows at her windows and unusual noises from inside her room (the men had been able to prove nothing, though, for knocking on her door had found her alone, ruffled as though having been disturbed from sleep, and staring at a single candle fluttering on her table). Her neighbors, too, agreed that she was an odd one, keeping unnatural hours, often departing for walks in the middle of the night, and harboring an uncommon affinity for homeless animals. None of this constituted damning evidence, of course, but neither did it dampen Groves’s suspicion that he was dealing with an unbalanced woman who inevitably would spill secrets of a dark and diabolical nature.
But presently climbing Candlemaker Row he found Pringle, to his surprise, calling him back and redirecting him into the Cowgate and, from there, to the nearby mortuary, a building that already featured regularly in his nightmares.
He shuddered with a now familiar mixture of dread and anticipation. Clearly another body had been found, and the implications of that alone were staggering. All the defiant humor the city had generated—at the University they were speculating that the killer might simply be boosting his shares in the Edinburgh Cemetery Company—could not conceal a darkness that bore talons and a fog that tasted of fear. And Pringle’s evasiveness suggested a new form of victim or a new manner of death: perhaps the body had been mutilated in a style more gruesome than could be accurately recounted. But that it was the work of Evelyn the witch—or Evelyn the devil’s spawn, or Evelyn’s own incubus—he knew in his very marrow.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” he muttered to Pringle as they passed a red-eyed cat.
But Pringle for some reason seemed amazed. “Aye…” he agreed in a whisper.
And when they opened the green-painted mortuary doors Groves braced himself.
The caretaker was in the middle of the sawdusted floor surrounded by bell jars and bloated organs, inspecting the body of a fully naked woman laid prostrate on the central slab. When he heard the two policemen approach he turned and retreated deferentially, saying, “Not a scratch anywhere, gentlemen. This was no murder. The death certificate has been signed.”
“I had Professor Whitty called to the scene of death,” Pringle explained to Groves. “He was the nearest residing doctor.”
But Groves was barely listening. He was staring at the white spotless body with racing eyes, unable to organize his senses but suspecting some unaccountable horror.
“Who…who is this?” he asked hoarsely.
“Sir?” Pringle said, looking at him curiously. “Did you not say you knew it was her?”
Groves squinted, confused, but then the realization cleaved him like a sword.
His eyes darted back and forth between the corpse’s chopped hair, the dainty ridges of the spine, the cleft of the petite posterior, and the immaculate alabaster of the skin, and he felt helpless, confused, abandoned, and betrayed. Pringle was saying something to him, but the words seemed spoken in a separate room.
Surely, he thought, it could not end this way. But neither could he deny the terrible evidence before his eyes.
It was Evelyn Todd who lay before him on the ungodly mortuary slab.
“Where did you find her?” he said, barely audible.
Pringle looked at him. “In…in Belgrave Crescent, sir.”
“Where Smeaton lay?”
“In precisely the same position, sir.”
“There were no signs of attack?”
“None, sir, that are visible.”
“Then how…how did she die?”
“They will drain her stomach, sir, but they believe she has poisoned herself.”
Groves clamped his teeth together and felt a violent skirmish of emotions. There was disappointment: the murder spree might now be over, but there would be no triumphant conviction to be recorded in his diaries. There was an irrational resentment: in death the waif had taken her secrets with her, perhaps spitefully. There was a flicker of pity: perhaps he had misread the seriousness of her instability from the start, or underestimated the legitimacy of her grievances. There was even a modicum of doubt: perhaps she had nothing to do with the murders after all and now herself had become a victim of the terrible forces. But more than anything else there was a deeply troubling tremble of something dark and unspeakable, a shameful frisson he experienced when his eyes caressed her pale, bare-skinned body.
He felt enclosed in a tiny, airless space. Some distant voice was trying to tell him that this was not real, but it was a futile denial.
He locked his throat and, reclaiming his senses, decided he would need to examine her for the stigmata diaboli, to at least establish her credentials as a witch. He turned to solicit assistance but discovered that Pringle had left his side to confer with the caretaker on some procedural matter, the two men muttering monklike in the darkness behind him. Left alone, he inhaled, sealed the disinfectant-heavy air in his lungs, and, not breathing, levered his fingers under the cold shoulders and thighs and diligently rolled her onto her back. The skin felt supple and the limbs yielding: there was not a sign of rigor mortis or lividity. Her face looked remarkably composed, in fact, and invested with a greater luster now than she had exhibited in life.
His eyes skipped her nether regions on a first visual sweep, but he could not avoid it fo
r long: it was in the meager tufts that the marks were most often concealed. Exhaling, he tried to imagine his fingers prodding and peeling in those parts, but even as speculation it was too much to bear, and with his loins in turmoil he stared at her angelic face with a brand of apology.
Though it seemed to him…looking at her now…that her lips were unnaturally vibrant for one deceased…almost stained red, in fact, as though she had been feasting on blood…and her cheeks, too, had acquired an oddly whoreish rouge.
He glanced around at the others, as though seeking an explanation, but the two men were even deeper in shadow and engaged in some increasingly cryptic conversation. He turned back, extended his hand tentatively to her mouth, and ran his fingertips across her rubied lips, startled to find that they were not only moist but that, underneath, her teeth were glistening with saliva.
Indeed, when he leaned forward a fraction he saw that her canines were unnaturally long and sharpened like fangs…bestial fangs, tiger fangs…and his pulse at once began hammering in his ears.
Simultaneously he noticed something in her mouth, something hidden there…a rolled-up page marked with Latin characters….
And now, with all the signs indicating that something was seriously amiss, he for the first time experienced a premonition of danger, the sense of being lured into a trap. But his movements were dictated by some deeper consciousness.
He inserted his fingers into her mouth.
Her body in response seemed to quiver.
He blinked. He thought at first it was an illusion, a trick of the fluttering light. He hesitated, hearing only the thunder of his heart, and then he noticed it again. A ripple of muscles through her torso, a spasm, as though a creature were buried inside her. It could not possibly be normal.
He watched it all, oddly paralyzed. He could not even blink. He had a strange conviction that Pringle and the caretaker had already fled the room. His own mind told him to withdraw as well, to pull out immediately, but his hand felt immersed in glue. He could not turn. He could not move.
He watched helplessly as her eyelids fluttered like bee wings and peeled back on yellow irises.
He tried to call for help, but his throat was jammed. He tried to squirm and thrash, but her mouth was a sucking void.
Her pupils contracted to slits.
He had a moment to register a feeling of mortality as piercing as any blade.
And then she clamped her saber teeth around his fingers, crunched through the bones, and rose up from the slab like a succubus as blood jetted from his ravaged hand. She enveloped him in her bony limbs and squeezed him like a monstrous octopus.
He screamed and squirted as her godless sucking mouth descended over his head.
And Acting Chief Inspector Carus Groves, fifty-seven years old, spasmed and wailed and fell in a tangle of soiled sheets from his Leith Walk bed, imploring the Lord God to save him from such frightful dreams as in the lurid chambers of his mind the skipping song echoed incessantly:
Is she ugly, is she pretty,
Is she the witch of the cobble-stoned city?
Chapter XVIII
MCKNIGHT REASSURED himself of the book’s weight in the side pocket of his jacket: a light volume, missal-size, almost concealable between two flattened palms, all the better to be carried with ease by the roaming pastor. Hundreds of years old, gilt-edged and decorated with gold leaf, it had been a component of his library for so long that he could not even remember purchasing it and had discovered it the previous day quite by accident. It now constituted another key in the complex procedure of unlocking the fortress of Evelyn’s mind.
“Have you been here previously?” he asked her.
“I come here…sometimes.”
“It is a place,” the Professor admitted, “of paradoxical privacy.”
They were in the Crypt of the Poets, the public house not far from Candlemaker Row where James Ainslie had once stalked for prey. It was an insalubrious establishment, glorying not in its blackened friezes, beer-soaked mats, and choking air but in the great spectrum of its patronage—quarreling students, cinder gatherers, horse soldiers in scarlet tunics, pricey courtesans in their finery—and the omnipresent thrum of its clashing conversations, fiddle music, and shouted orders, resilient even in a time of fear. This, together with its fabled gloom (the gas had long been cut off, and the place was illuminated by candles in ginger-beer bottles), meant that a company could repair to a rear table and engage in a game of whist, hatch a seditious plot, or indeed garotte one another without the turn of a single head or the presumption of an uninvited ear. McKnight, Canavan, and Evelyn now occupied a horseshoe-shaped booth beneath a begrimed portrait of Thomas Campbell, some ragged sandwiches and a barely touched bottle of port on the table between them, and the thick swirls of the Professor’s pipe smoke further enshrouding them in their own contracted universe.
“I appreciate your attendance here tonight,” McKnight told her, “and I assure you that, whatever happens, it is not my direct intention to hurt or disturb you. May I ask, to begin with, if you have experienced any nightmares since our last meeting?”
“None that involved murder.”
“And we could not have failed to notice that our streets have simultaneously been bereft of corpses. So you will concede that no harm can be done by prying a little deeper?”
“I care not for my own welfare,” Evelyn replied, “but submit myself in the hope of being some assistance to others.”
Canavan, sitting directly opposite her and staring at her in fascination, now interjected with a translation: “She will be as honest as it’s possible to be.”
And when Evelyn, for her part, glanced the Irishman’s way and nodded gratefully, McKnight had the unaccountable sense that the two had spoken together since their meeting in her little room. He was not inclined to verify the suspicion by asking them directly, but saw all the indications of an infinitely logical but nonetheless disturbing affection.
“I wish to talk about desire,” he announced bluntly, and noticed Evelyn’s gaze drop self-consciously to the table. “And the way in which people go about feeding their desires.”
She was silent.
“Evelyn,” McKnight went on, “you have spoken with some disdain, I believe, about romances…works of fiction.… books of fantasy and the imagination.”
Evelyn nodded stiffly. “Others find satisfaction in them.”
“And you cannot imagine what sort of satisfaction this is?”
“They find…refuge in them.”
“Refuge from reality? From the harsh and the mundane?”
She nodded, but clearly was suspicious of his purpose.
“So a man who reads a seven-seas adventure is feeding a desire to travel, even in his imagination, on the seven seas?”
“That is quite possible.”
“He might settle on this vicarious voyage because he is in reality fearful of the water, perhaps? Or he is restricted from a life on the seas by his commitments on the land? In any case, you will agree that his selection of the book defines in some way his desires?”
“I suppose that might be the case.”
McKnight nodded. “It is important here that I specify books, because a man’s broader choices can be narrowed by status and conditions and other factors beyond his influence. But books are by their nature so accessible and affordable, and in range so vast, that no one who regularly selects them could be said not to be leaving in the aggregate an expression of his deepest yearnings.”
“Not,” Canavan interrupted, “the only expression, I’d hope.”
“Of course not. But certainly the via regia to some inner being—some craving of the hungry mind. In your case, Evelyn, I refer of course to some of the books I found on your shelf, and I trust you will not think it improper if I name them?”
“Of…of course not,” she replied with some trepidation, because she did not wish to be guided into some sort of trap.
McKnight nourished his memory with an intake
of smoke. “There was Plato’s Republic,” he said. “Grant’s The Literature and Curiosities of Dreams. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea. Leibniz’s Monadology. And of course Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature.”
“They were not my own books,” Evelyn reminded him.
“No—on loan from the venerable Arthur Stark. So it might be said that they represent but a fraction of similarly themed books you have devoured.”
Evelyn looked unsure if she should be proud or ashamed.
“I seek not to cast doubt on your choices, Evelyn,” McKnight assured her, sending out a cloudy veil. “For these are all meritable works, and indeed they are all residents of my own library.”
“I have not yet read Monadology,” she clarified.
“But you will undoubtedly get there,” McKnight said, “and it is an effort to be admired.”
“Very much so,” Canavan added.
“You are compelled to read these texts not by the need to obtain a degree, and it must be said that many of my own students have found some of them difficult to the point of indigestible. I admit to struggling myself on occasion. And yet you, Evelyn, have selected them to read solely in your hours of leisure. It is, you have to admit, unusual.”
“I care not for the usual,” Evelyn said.
McKnight nodded. “I can barely attack you without attacking myself, of course. For I too was drawn to philosophy by a yearning for answers that other studies had failed to yield. I was impelled by a need to confront my demons and lay waste to delusions. I could not rest until I had located my true identity, which still eludes me.”
Evelyn nodded, surprised—even disconcerted—by this admission.
“And as a tangent of this quest I have naturally made it my task to keep abreast of all the developments in psychology, and in fact in all things to do with the mind. You’ve heard, of course, of the surgeon James Esdaile?”
“The mesmerist?”
“Aye. His book Mesmerism in India is one of the titles I observed on your shelf. What do you know of him?”
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