”Aye, she’s a big bonny lass all right,” the driver agreed, clambering down from his high seat. ”Christ, but she is,” he gasped, taking some of her weight from the chamberlain.
”Burn with me,” the woman gasped then. Her eyes flared open and she writhed in Mason’s arms. ”Burning … oh God … in Heaven … Ablaze … Burning … all of them burning … I failed Him. I failed them … forgive me.” Her voice trailed off into more words but now she was speaking in a tongue Mason had never heard before. He tried, but he couldn’t fathom a single syllable.
”Give me a hand to get her into the cab,” he said, talking over her. Winston looked at the woman and looked at the sheer amount of blood that had spilled out of her and seemed about to say no when Mason barked. ”Just open the damned door, man!” and he snapped into action.
Between the two of them they manhandled her into the cab and laid her out on the banquette. She murmured once more then fell silent. The blood pooled on the seat, violent crimson against the waxed leather. She shifted uncomfortably, moaning again.
”Where’s she cut?” the driver asked. ”I mean, if she’s had a big vein cut she’s already dead if’n we don’t do nuffin’. If we don’t stop the bleedin’ it won’t matter how fast we drive to London Hospital.”
Mason couldn’t argue with that, but for some reason he was hesitant to rip the woman’s clothes, and it wasn’t just for the sake of decorum. He needed to see the extent of her injuries but he couldn’t help but feel that exposing the ruined skin would only damn him further and faster. Ignorance, he thought for the second time since leaving the clubhouse, but instead of freezing he turned to the driver. ”Have you got a knife? We need to cut the clothes away if we’re going to get a look at the wounds. We can’t try and undress her. It won’t work.”
Winston nodded and disappeared around the back of the cab. He returned a moment later with a rudimentary tool kit, and in it a pearl-handled switchblade. It wasn’t a tool: it was a weapon. Mason took the blade from him and flicked it open with a confident snap of the wrist. The blood was already beginning to infect the inside of the cab with its stringent iron tang.
”I’m not going to hurt you,” he told the woman. She was in no condition to hear him let alone argue.
He pulled the material away from her throat. It came away wetly. With a single, swift, downward cut he sliced into the blouse and pulled it away. Beneath, she wore a blood-soaked corset and girdle. They were expensive undergarments, with lace trim. She had obviously been expecting a lover and instead she had met death. And she was going to die. There was nothing either of them could to do to change that fact. It was just a matter of trying to make her comfortable as she went.
He pressed the blade alongside one of the whalebones stitched into the black corset and cut against it. The material was tougher but the knife was good. It didn’t take more than a few seconds to pare the cloth away.
It didn’t make any sense.
As far as he could see there were no wounds, no obvious gashes or cuts at least. Her white belly was smooth, her ample breasts like porcelain. But she was soaked in blood.
”Help me turn her over,” he told Winston.
Together they did their best to slide her over onto her side, then over again onto her stomach without tearing her open any further.
He pulled the last remnants of the blouse away and peeled back the corset to reveal the mess of her back.
There was so much blood, and deep cuts, but that wasn’t the half of it. Midway up her spine what appeared to be the remnants of two vestigial growths had been hacked through. This was the source of the blood. All sorts of blood vessels had been sheered through. It was a mess. The roots of the growths remained, the white gristle and the severed cords of muscle, slick with blood. Mason could just make out the white of bleached bone. It was scarred with deep grooves where it had been hacked through.
”What in the seven hells … ?” Winston muttered beside him.
”Close,” Mason said, shaking his head. He was caught somewhere between wonder and revulsion. He thought about what she had said, the words he had been able to understand: Heaven’s on fire, and later, burn with me. Who was she to burn if Heaven truly was ablaze? An angel? The ruin of her spine could easily have been the mess left where her vestigial wings had been hacked away, and considering everything else that had happened since the homunculus had breached the seals and found the Kruptos Door and climbed the Catamine Stair mason knew one thing above all else—nothing now was impossible.
Chapter Twenty-Two
”Do you really think it tore her out of Heaven?” Anthony Millington shuddered at the very thought. There was something hideously repugnant about the idea that the homunculus’s reach might be so long—and the idea that Stark’s sacrifice against the Meringias so pointless. Fabian’s heroism deserved to save them, not simply hold off the end for another day. If a daemon could reach into Heaven and pull an angel out, kicking and screaming, what chance did a few Londoners, even ones with peculiar talents and the odd trick or two up their sleeves, have?
He stood beside the chamberlain while Mason very matter-of-factly recounted his discovery of the stumps where her wings had been shorn off, and the fallen angel’s incoherent cries as she lost whatever tenuous grip she had managed to hold onto this reality here and now and started to rave in the heavenly equivalent of tongues.
”I don’t know, Master Millington, truthfully. And worse, without Master Stark to help us, I fear we will never know.”
”Not so,” Dorian Carruthers said, his mouth twisting rather distastefully at the prospect of whatever it was he was about to suggest. ”There is a way we can know one way or the other, but not while she is still lingering like this.”
Millington turned to stare at him. ”So what you are saying is it would be rather useful if she just hurried up and died?” He was shocked. Beyond shocked. He was horrified at the notion that his friend might be willing this heavenly creature to die. It went against every philosophy he held dear.
”Or hurried up and recovered, Anthony,” Carruthers said defensively. ”It doesn’t always have to be the worst-case scenario, you know? Sometimes good things can be allowed to happen.”
”Just so long as they happen quickly,” Millington added pointedly.
”Precisely. At times like these, well, time is important. We don’t have it. I can’t change that and I most certainly didn’t make it that way, but it doesn’t change the fact that alive she can tell us what happened, dead, likewise, but this half-dead, this is just inconvenient.” He offered the last word with such seeming callousness it silenced the room.
Mason knelt beside the woman and pressed his fingers against the side of her throat. He coughed slightly, drawing their attention. When he had it, he said, ”It seems, if Master Carruthers is to be believed, that we have been rather fortunate, while this poor girl has been rather less so, and has left us while we were busy bickering amongst ourselves.” The sadness in the chamberlain’s voice shamed them all. ”Let’s not waste time with sentimentality now, shall we? She’s gone. I suggest, Master Carruthers, you do whatever it is you must do.”
His manner more than anything shocked the men assembled in the room. This was their man, Mason, a servant to the club, telling them how to comport themselves. It was unheard of. Mason served them, not the other way round. They did not take lessons in behaviour from a lackey, and yet here he was talking to them as though they were spoilt brats in need of a strip torn off them. He stood up and walked away from the body, making room for Carruthers to replace him there.
The young fop knelt without another word. He took his copper thruppenny bit from the depths of his pocket and walked it across the rough skin of his knuckles. It was more than just therapy this time. Between forefinger and middle it appeared to divide itself in two, both faces splitting into two identical coins. It was an accomplished sleight, if indeed it was a sleight and not a neat piece of prestidigitation. He lay the first coin, the head, wi
th Victoria’s stern face looking back up at him, and the tail, on the woman’s eyes. For a full minute nothing happened, and then Millington noticed the ever so slight movement of the Queen’s head as Victoria appeared to sink minutely into the eye socket itself. It was the subtlest of shifts. Then they began to lose their shape, becoming molten. It took another full minute for the bronze to sink through the dead woman’s eye sockets and into her skull.
And then the corpse opened her bronzed eyes and stared up at them.
”Can you hear me?” Dorian Carruthers asked, beginning the grotesque séance.
For a moment death rattled around the woman’s lips as they parted, drawing in air she could never taste again. It was instinctive. Habitual. It was also painful. Shocking. Sad. ”Why did you do this? Why did you bring me back? I am woebegone. I am despair. I deserve this death. Let me go back to it, please.” Her voice was both wretched and heartbreaking.
”Soon,” Carruthers promised. ”I only have you for a moment or so, and I need to know what happened to you? How did you die?”
”I failed my God,” she said, bronze eyes staring blindly up at the ceiling.
”How? Tell me? Make me understand.”
The woman’s body convulsed then. It was a shockingly violent shudder. When she stopped shaking there were bronze tears staining her cheek.
”I let it in,” she whispered. ”I opened the door. I trusted …” The convulsions intensified. Her entire body arched up off the chaise lounge and came down hard. Her dead weight split the wood, pulling the joints apart. It collapsed, but somehow—impossibly, it seemed to Millington—she hung suspended above the broken furniture, blood dripping from the rags on her back.
”Who did you trust?” Carruthers pressed. ”Tell me.”
The bronze-eyed dead woman twisted her head to look at him. Her mouth opened and closed and opened again, struggling to make a sound and for a moment nothing came out, no words, no explanation, no air, and then, dredged from the depths of her own personal hell, the angel said: ”Father.”
She fell, dead again, sprawled out across the broken furniture.
Did that mean she trusted God and He failed her? Millington wondered, trying to make sense of her last word. Or was she merely crying out as the fear became too much? God, her Father, the one hope she had against the coming darkness?
Carruthers reached for the two bronze coins which once again rested on her eyelids, and pocketed them. ”Well I had hoped for something a little more ’the Devil made me do it’ but I think that rather answers that, wouldn’t you say?”
”I’m not sure what the devil I’d say, truth be told, Dor. That was the single most vile and unnatural experience of my life,” Haddon McCreedy rumbled. ”Dead’s dead and that’s the way it ought to stay, if you ask me. Anything else is just … wrong.” The big man had obviously been looking for a more potent word but wrong was the only one that seemed to fit.
”Mason,” Carruthers said, dusting his hands off on the legs of his trousers as he stood once more. ”I could do with a stiff drink, there’s a good man.”
”Of course, Sir,” the chamberlain said, slipping comfortably back into his role of servant.
”On second thoughts, I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind? I could do with stretching the old pegs after that.”
”As you wish, Master Carruthers.”
The two of them left the others.
Curious, Millington followed them.
As soon as they thought they were out of earshot, Carruthers grasped the chamberlain’s sleeve and drew him toward one of the open doors off the landing. Millington couldn’t hear the precise words but there was no mistaking Dorian’s impassioned tone. At a guess he was trying to co-opt the chamberlain’s services, but for what, exactly, was any man’s guess.
Millington crept slowly along the landing, placing each foot carefully so as not to cause any of the old boards to creak. He wanted to hear what was being said. He stopped beside the open door. He could hear perfectly now, although it took him a little while to grasp the import of what was being said, and when he did it was all he could do to stop himself from bursting into the room and demanding Dor stop the whole damned thing. It was ungodly.
Chapter Twenty-Three
”If it goes wrong I need you to pull me out of it.”
”I don’t think this is particularly wise, young master.”
”I’m sure you don’t,” he said, grinning that infectious, lopsided grin of his. ”But I’m not exactly renowned for doing the wise thing, now am I, Mason?”
”Allow me put it another way then, if you would,” Mason untangled himself from Carruthers’s grasp. ”This is perhaps the single most irresponsible act I could imagine anyone doing under the circumstances. It is beyond foolish. If I can’t bring you back, and let’s make no bones about this, I have no great gift and the likelihood is that you are about to damn yourself to a half-life trapped half-in and half-out of the Prime Material. Are you ready to have your soul shorn in two? Because believe you me, I am not ready to walk into the Smoking Room and tell those few good men left that they have lost another friend tonight.”
”You are such an old woman, Mason. Just because something can go wrong it doesn’t have to go wrong. I know it’s popular to think that anything that can go wrong at sea most assuredly will go wrong, but just because a saying is in vogue does not make it the gospel now does it? We are both right-minded rational thinkers.”
”And as much as it pains me to say it, young sir, you are often a child in that you think like one. Like the toddler reaching out to the flame, tempted, you think that you can meddle in the matters of Heaven and Hell and come away without getting burned? That way lies madness.”
”Touché.”
”Tell me what I must do,” the chamberlain said, resigned.
Dorian gave a quick finger flourish, flexing each of them, and suddenly the two coins appeared in his palm. ”There are two aspects to what I call the hollowing touch, one as you saw in the other room, invades the dead’s repose and forces them to talk one last time, the other is far subtler, indeed it is more akin to a side effect. You see, when the coins moulded with her in their molten state they absorbed much of what she had been thinking and seeing in her mind’s eye. It is something to do with the electricity stored still within the corpse and the conductivity of the metal, but of course it is more complicated than that. The greatest truth of this life is that you can’t hide from your own thoughts, so even as she denied my questions with her words her mind’s eye was almost certainly replaying the truths for her for one final time, hence her pain. With the help of these,” he offered up the two thruppenny bits, ”and you, I intend to see whatever it was she saw. We need to know, Mason. This is a war, make no mistake, and—”
”All is fair in love and war, I suppose?”
”Actually I was about to say wars are won and lost because of intelligence or the lack of it. Ignorance will be the death of us all.”
He couldn’t have known it, but because the notion of ignorance and hidden knowledge had been plaguing the chamberlain all night he had stumbled upon the only rationale that could convince the man to go along with his hair-brained scheme. But then, if the woman truly had been an angel and they were up against a hell-beast, why wouldn’t the Maker interfere just a little to steer his lips toward the right words? What good was omnipotence if it came coupled with silence?
Carruthers handed Mason the coins.
He heard something out on the landing then, and pressed his finger to his lips. He strained to hear through the background chatter of the Smoking Room but everything he heard was dominated by McCreedy’s overbearing voice. The man’s baritone was anything but dulcet at the best of times, but when he was agitated it was positively abrasive.
He hadn’t chosen the room at random. It was the dining room, dominated by a huge cherrywood drop-leaf regency table that was quite capable of sitting twenty at a time. It was more than long enough for him to lie down on. He s
lipped off his dress coat and draped it over the back of one of the many dining chairs, then he hopped up onto the table, swivelled around and lay back.
”I’m going to close my eyes and count backwards slowly from ten to nought, and when I reach nought I want you to place the coins on my eyelids. Not before.”
”Understood, but, and I am certain you have considered this, you are not dead. You yourself said you needed the woman dead so that you could communicate, did you not?”
”I am going to put myself into a mild trance state—a heightened awareness if you will—hence the countdown. When I reach naught I will enter the zero state. It is my belief that in this state I shall be more receptive to the trace memories captured by the coins.”
”Belief?” the chamberlain said.
”Belief,” Dorian agreed. ”I haven’t exactly made a habit of psychometry, my friend. This is an untested science, hence my request that you pull me out of the trance if it looks like I am lost. My life, perhaps even my soul, is in your hands, Mason. I am trusting you.”
”And that is an oddly uncomfortable echo of the woman’s last words, if you don’t mind me saying, Master Dorian.”
Carruthers grinned that grin of his. ”Ten,” he said, closing his eyes. It was no answer at all. ”Nine … Eight … Seven …” And so it went, Carruthers voice steady as he talked himself down toward nought and the zero state. He felt the cold weight of the coins settle on his eyelids and instinctively flinched away from their touch, not sure precisely what would happen next, but justifiably trepidatious.
It was all he could do to lie still and wait.
He felt the surface of the coins begin to warm, and then grow hot. That heat became searing. The scream was torn from his throat as the copper coins melted and scorched through the soft skin of his eyelids and into the humour of his eyes themselves. Then, while he bucked and thrashed against the furious agony, even as he was blinded he began to see.
London Macabre Page 8