The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  Ahead on the left Drumgate Cemetery came in sight, perched awkwardly on its hill. And beyond it, glowering over a substantial forecourt overgrown with weeds and thistle, lay the gutted hulk of Colonel Munnoch’s hunting lodge—the house, as she knew it better, of Mr. James Ainslie, the home of the Great Deceiver, and her introduction to hell.

  The skies flashed and grumbled and marshaled their redoubtable energies. But the new path was more a gentle gradient through a terrain of almost lunar desolation: parched earth, smoking craters, distant mountains like the peaks in a child’s drawings.

  But as they progressed they noticed leafless white trees crowded with strangely familiar, harpylike creatures glaring at them with red eyes. The harpies scratched their naked haunches, stroked their drooping breasts, and hissed and clicked their tongues, communicating in some alien code.

  “Have your gun ready,” McKnight warned, but Canavan already had drawn his revolver, sensing they would no longer travel unnoticed.

  They were in sight of a glowing cleft in a looming cliff face when there was a bansheelike battle cry, and a flock of the creatures launched from the trees and took to the air with a frightful flapping, merging overhead and spearing down at them with raucous shrieks.

  The first assailant had no sooner laid a claw on Canavan than he wheeled around and aimed the revolver at its head. But his finger froze on the trigger when he noticed, with a shudder of horror, that the face of the creature—the face of all the harpies—was that of Evelyn.

  There is no hell quite like self-loathing.

  Appalled, Canavan could not bring himself to fire. But McKnight had no hesitation.

  “It’s not her, lad!” he cried, thrusting the rifle into the harpy’s mouth. “It’s only what she sees in herself!” He squeezed the trigger and the head exploded in chunks of flesh and pus.

  Two more harpies, sensing the Irishman’s hesitation, wrapped themselves around him and dragged him to the ground, dislodging his gun. It took all McKnight’s strength to reach through the wings, pry one loose, and cleave its head with a well-aimed machete. The other he shot at point-blank range, and was sprayed with a backwash of oily blood and writhing tissue. Trembling with disgust, Canavan himself dispatched a fourth assailant with his retrieved revolver.

  The remaining harpies hovered above them warily, snarling and spitting but strangely unwilling to attack. Pointing their firearms threateningly and backing through clouds of gun smoke, McKnight and Canavan, dripping with effluent and entrails, made it through the fissure and rolled a boulder across the entrance, having one last glimpse of a hundred disfigured Evelyn faces staring at them delightedly.

  They turned to find themselves in a cavernous nest of harpies.

  From a distance, with her black dress bellied by the wind, she looked crowlike and sinister. She drifted into the forecourt and halted in front of the lodge, staring fixedly at the blackened unicorn rebus in the facade as though emerging from a dream, and behind her Groves and Pringle for the first time thought it prudent to conceal themselves behind a withered hedge.

  The old building’s doors were missing, its windows like gaping wounds, the roof a mixture of fallen arches and surviving beams. But there was light glowing dimly from somewhere within.

  “Abraham Lindsay…” Pringle whispered, but Groves said nothing.

  They watched Evelyn fondle her purse, as though to reassure herself of the weapon’s presence, and then raise her head and march, not without hesitation, into the building’s impious maw.

  Pringle moved at once to follow her but was surprised to find his forearm clasped tightly.

  “No,” Groves breathed through clenched teeth, and Pringle looked back at him with dismay.

  A vile grin was tugging at the Inspector’s lips, and his eyes were set like glaciers.

  The legion of harpies slept and snored, clinging to the roof upside down amid huge stalactites. The cavern was choking with superheated air and sulfurous fumes of lava. Bridging the chasm below was a single nail-studded arch barely the breadth of a hand.

  “I have a feeling,” McKnight said tightly, “that we are not welcome here.”

  “Perhaps we should reconsider,” Canavan whispered. “The damage…it might already be too late.”

  “That’s not you talking,” McKnight assured him, “but the voice of self-destruction.”

  They forced themselves onto the bridge, dizzied by the bending waves of heat and blooming gases, and almost immediately mosquitoes the size of stag beetles materialized to alight on their faces. Brushed off, the insects wheeled around and attacked with even greater ferocity. The two men fought frantically for balance as the disturbed harpies jostled and squealed in their sleep.

  Their bodies dripping with perspiration and their thick-soled boots repeatedly pierced by wicked barbs, McKnight and Canavan soldiered across the bridge, batting continuously at the mosquitoes, gasping at the scorching air, and fighting the attraction of the glowing swirls of lava. They were halfway across when an eerie silence alerted them to the fact that the harpies had awoken.

  They no longer had time for diligence. Without turning they pounded down the last length of bridge, balanced by momentum alone, and it was only the immensity of Evelyn’s self-hatred that allowed them to escape, the thousand pursuing harpies colliding and tangling in midair, rendered useless by numbers and haste, and watching in vain as the Professor and Canavan slipped breathlessly through a door into the land of malfunctioning mechanisms.

  The building had no right to exude ashen odors, the fire that had ravaged it having burned out nearly two decades earlier. But Evelyn’s nose now curled at even older fragrances, even deeper permeances. The smells invaded her memory and generated a storm of long-dormant associations: the frills on her pillowcases; the kindly eyes of the regal black man; the sight of Lindsay and three strange men entering the room to seize her and bind her limbs. The wind hummed through the mutilated walls, snow dribbled in shafts between ceiling beams, and through holes in the charred floor she caught sight of the cellar where she had first been imprisoned. She blinked and almost blacked out, gulped for air, clutched a banister for support, and whimpered helplessly.

  She heard a voice, far away—a man calling to her. He sounded imploring, guiding her through the darkness to the light.

  “I’m here….”

  She thought it was the lamplighter.

  “I’m here….”

  She thought it was the devil.

  “I do not fear you….”

  The voice, very real, was coming from a room at the top of the stairs.

  Great roaring thunderbolts and sizzling ropes of electricity forced them to dodge and duck. Their firearms were useless here.

  They continued down a winding wrought-iron staircase panting from exertion, their clothes stained black with sweat and shredded by talons. The skies fell away to reveal a dangerously overworked anatomy of groaning ratchet wheels, huge revolving cogs, squealing ventilators, spindles, regulators, hissing belts, and pistons oiled with blood. Brass cylinders swelled and shot jets of steam, cog teeth issued showers of sparks, gears vomited clots of grease, and horns blared incessantly in protest and alarm. The whole structure looked as though it might explode at any second.

  But as they descended deeper, white-painted masonry appeared to cloak the hideous machinery, and they heard waves boom, seabirds caw, and the walls shudder like instruments of percussion. They entered a room filled with glittering panes of glass, dazzling reflectors, and polished lenses, and perceived that they had descended into some great cerebral lighthouse. They clambered down a stout brass ladder into a bedroom area set with two modest cots, a kitchen where pork chops were heating on a skillet, a storeroom filled with lenses and paraffin, and finally they came to a crudely fashioned door of nail-studded wood armored with steel plates. The door was set solidly into the floor, secured there with clamps and sturdy bolts, and resisted easy access.

  Hunched over, his eyes squeezed shut and his neck tendons li
ke bowstrings, Canavan hauled at the brass ring with all his might until he achieved some submission of wood and metal. The door popped loose and yawned back with a puff of distasteful mist on what should have been the provision room but instead was a bottomless void of infinite terror and blackness.

  They craned their heads over the emptiness but as hard as they tried could make out no walls, no floor, nothing but a few sparkles like a far-distant constellation. They inhaled the ancient air and discerned eerie sounds: inconsolable breezes, sobs and whispers, and even, far below, a plaintive skirl of music.

  “Bagpipes…” Canavan marveled.

  Straining their ears, they listened some more: “Amazing Grace,” no less, but played in a painfully discordant manner that elicited no emotion other than despair.

  Canavan grimaced, but McKnight nodded resignedly. “I always suspected hell would be a place of poorly performed music,” he said.

  Pringle tasted the bile of disaffection and experienced the great hollowness of betrayal. He had manfully suppressed his doubts about Inspector Groves, wanting so dearly to believe in him, to surrender without question to a superior in exactitude, deductive powers, and moral fiber. But standing beside the man now, watching the dilapidated lodge and feeling the lingering burn of the Inspector’s fingers on his forearm, his final resistance melted and all his willing delusions crumbled.

  Evelyn had entered the house to inflict some sort of revenge on Abraham Lindsay, who had set himself up there to facilitate the punishment—that much was clear. But rather than impeding her, as it clearly was their duty to do, Groves now intended to remain outside and wait patiently for the evil to be fully perpetrated. Because he valued conviction more than human life; because he wanted to catch Evelyn after the crime rather than thwart her before it. And to Pringle this was simply unconscionable. And certainly beyond any impropriety that the Wax Man might sanction in the name of expediting justice.

  Unchecked, Pringle’s previously stifled suspicions about Groves’s questionable motives and methods were writ large. And the man’s repeated and presumptuous assessments of character, how could they be given any credibility? A dozen times he had quoted the late Piper McNab with hushed reverence—the man’s name uttered as though he were a robed prophet or uncanonized saint—and a dozen times Pringle had tried to convince himself that Groves was speaking in jest. Because Pringle thought everyone in Edinburgh knew that McNab had been an incorrigible old lecher whose regular street performances were just a code to alert the city’s bohemians to another after-hours orgy in the windowless upper rooms of a Rose Street bar. The rascally piper, who uttered nary a word that was not facetious, presided over the saturnalia like a bony Bacchus, playing his wicked strathspeys and toward the end of the evening hoisting his kilt and inviting the pink-cheeked lassies to play a tune on his own little blowpipe.

  How could Groves ever have believed in such a man? Trusted him? Stood beside him?

  Without the status to exert his own will or the courage to disobey, Pringle could only burn in silence, his frustration rising from him in clouds of steam.

  Swinging from the extremity of the cord ladder, Canavan finally struck something: a curved ridge, deeply scored. Landing here, he was able to secure the end of the rope with a piton and hold it steady as McKnight slid down with the depleted provisions.

  The glow from the lighthouse storeroom above barely penetrated the darkness. The only suggestion of a deeper world was the wall at their backs and the sparkles that still peppered the blackness like celestial bodies. And still the bagpipes droned on.

  “He’s calling us,” McKnight decided. “Leerie…”

  “Guiding us,” Canavan agreed, awed.

  And indeed they found it difficult not to warm to the appeal, the cry of one so long lost, entombed in darkness and begging as much as Evelyn to be free.

  They hammered pitons into the wall and took step after step, then slid down a curved surface coated with fungus. By the time they had landed at the floor of the massive chamber they were grazed and thirsty and covered in adhesive grime. Their lanterns had given out entirely. They looked up to see the square of doorway an impossible distance above and the cord ladder hanging from it like a forlorn tongue. They emptied their canteens and dispensed with their weapons.

  They trudged with great uncertainty across the undulating floor, never sure when they would stumble over a ridge or be swallowed by a pit. The surface was at times so hot that their shoe soles smoldered, and in places so covered in writhing creatures that they could barely take a step without crunching some scampering form. The sounds merged with that of their own sawing breaths and returned to them in the echoes of an eternal whispering gallery, strangely musical now, as though joined in some incomprehensible hymn.

  Halting, they felt a breath of incongruously cool air and the sensation of moisture, and perceived the nearby rustle of water, which at first they had mistaken for another echo. It was a river, flowing swiftly by the sound of it, but invisible to their eyes save for the faint phosphorescence accompanying the churning of the currents.

  “The Styx?” breathed McKnight, and Canavan dropped to a crouch and extended a hand, dipping his fingers into the current.

  “Freezing,” he said.

  McKnight nodded. “The Frigid River.”

  They listened in vain for the sound of a ferryman and even jangled some coins hopefully, but they heard nothing until, making their way down the banks, they noticed a change in the tenor of the current—more agitated now—and they discerned, amid the great luminous swirls, huge blocks or boulders laid across the river like stepping-stones.

  “Of course,” McKnight said. “Even Leerie needs to get out.”

  “But he has wings,” Canavan noted.

  “Then he has laid them down in a nightmare, specifically for our access.”

  The stones were the great marble remains of a church altar, and McKnight and Canavan now hopped warily from one to another, fighting to maintain a foothold and not slip into the fabled waters. When they reached the other side they looked up with gloom-adjusted eyes and saw that what from afar had looked like stars were in fact highly reflective jewels set into the adamantine walls of a massive citadel. It was a structure so dark, so hostile to light, that it stood out even against the blackness, and they were soon able to descry lofty towers and spires thrusting into the heavens. But approaching the great plated walls they found no doorway, no aperture, no hint of an entrance or a window, and no inkling of how even the music might have escaped. Leerie had been sealed in a seemingly impregnable fortress.

  “We might need to climb,” McKnight said, looking doubtfully at the bejeweled walls.

  But Canavan now retreated a few steps, and was quiet a few moments, mustering his powers. And when he spoke it was in a determined whisper.

  “Lift up your heads, o ye gates…and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors…and the King of Glory shall come in….”

  In immediate response to the sacred command the walls of the great castle shook, there was a cascade of glittering dust, and two of the massive blocks separated just enough to reveal a narrow and brilliantly lit passage into the chambers within.

  McKnight turned in wonder and saw in Joseph Canavan a bleeding and strangely luminous longhaired figure in tattered clothes resembling robes.

  The stairs were delineated with snow, and the steps creaked in protest as she ascended. She looked up through the broken corbels and the charred oaken beams, her hand gliding over the jagged banister, her head all the time feeling on the verge of collapse.

  Remembering Ainslie’s stuttering ascent when he had carried her up to Leerie, on stairs that were at that time immaculate, she arrived on the landing and turned to what had been her bedroom, and from where lamp glow now emanated just as it had twenty years earlier.

  She shuffled tightly toward the door…and arrived there unblinking…and peered with great dread into the room.

  There was an old man inside, staring back at her. />
  He was folded into an austere little chair in the middle of the room, underlit by a low-burning lamp. He looked surprised, even alarmed, to see her.

  “Who…who is it?” he whispered, as though he had been expecting someone else.

  She stared at him wordlessly.

  He blinked and squinted, and finally seemed to understand. “Evelyn?” he said with awe.

  And though she did not answer, the old man decided it made perfect sense, and squinting some more he ascertained that it was indeed his former charge—fully mature now, and bearing an even greater resemblance to his departed wife—and he eased back in his chair, delighted that she had honored him with a personal visit and overwhelmed by the prospect that she would effect his punishment with her own hands, in full command of her senses.

  “It is I, child,” he whispered, smiling in welcome.

  Her eyes widened in recognition.

  “It’s Lindsay.”

  He was what incalculable generations had made him, the personification of ultimate evil. He had the eyes of a crocodile, the ears of a boar, the horns of a steer, the teeth of a tiger, the rings of a pirate, the nostrils of a savage, the beard of a dilettante, the hide of a bull, the shaggy flanks of a stag, the hooves of a goat, the wings of a bat, the talons of an eagle, the tail of a scorpion, the exaggerated physique of a colossus, and the robes of a pharaoh. He was ensconced in an ornate throne of bonelike forms in the center of a majestic candelabra-lit chamber of impossibly intricate carvings and fantastically ornamented crystal pillars, the whole palace of a type that had rarely existed on earth, for if there is one thing that is constant about evil, it is that it has always had more money than sense.