Through a Glass Darkly

by Bill Hussey

  Mewes, bitterly disappointed, retired to his room overlooking the stables. He sat in the window, night after night, staring at the scrap of land, wondering what ancient learning lay beneath it. One night, the porter saw Professor Mewes burst out of his rooms and run down the cloister shouting:

  ‘It’s there! Jesus in his heaven, it’s there! Impossible but …’

  Mewes disappeared beneath the archway that led to the yard. The porter followed moments later. He found the enclosure empty. The horses dozed in their boxes. The watch-dog, chained to a spike at the mouth of the arch, started barking only when the porter appeared. There were no footprints on the dusty ground. Mewes had vanished. He was never seen again.

  The casement, from where the Professor willed the lost Cardinal Quad to give up its secret, was afterwards known as the Watching Window. Over the next hundred and fifty years, students, professors, masters and porters have reported seeing a figure standing in the window, his livid face pressed against the glass.

  And now, Jack thought, I’m following in your footsteps, Professor.

  The stables had been torn down in the thirties and the yard tarred over. Jack knew that only the lecturers’ car park lay beyond the archway. But the tunnel was very dark and he could not see the tarmac space beyond.

  Jack stepped beneath the arch and out of time.

  Twenty-three

  Beyond the fact that their son was now potentially the second victim of a child killer, Harry and Fran Lloyd knew nothing. Stephen may have taken his dead brother’s baptism dress, Mrs Lloyd wasn’t sure. Had he been acting strangely in recent weeks? She didn’t think so. Had he mentioned meeting any strangers? No. Dawn noted the responses and wondered, for the hundredth time, where the hell Jack had got to.

  ‘She don’t notice nothing,’ Harry Lloyd said, cracking open a beer and licking the foam from the rim. ‘I’m surprised Stevie was able to swipe the kid’s stuff. It’s hard to find a minute when she’s not bawling over it. Just look at this place.’

  A row of little porcelain dogs rattled as he ran his finger along the mantelpiece. He held out two grey digits in front of his wife’s face.

  ‘He was supposed to be with you,’ Fran screamed. She turned to Dawn. ‘He’s trying to blame me. He blamed me for Kyle. I put him on his back, I didn’t smoke around him, I made sure the room wasn’t too hot. Everything they told me. He was blue. His little eyes were big. He was supposed to be with you.’

  ‘Can’t you understand, Fran, I’m not blaming you? If you’d just let it go …’

  ‘Forget, you mean.’

  ‘… I’d still be here. Stevie’d never have to go out to meet me then, would he?’

  ‘You were supposed to meet Stephen last night, Mr Lloyd …’ Dawn began.

  ‘Bloody Church is her problem. Even got my boy involved. Choir boy. You can imagine the stick I get at work about that.’

  ‘You’re Catholic, Mrs Lloyd?’

  ‘Too right she is. That’s what’s screwed her up. Love to wallow in misery, the bastard Catholics.’

  ‘And Stephen, he was confirmed? Involved in the Church?’

  ‘Course he was,’ said Harry, crushing his empty beer can and throwing it into the grate. ‘They love to get their claws in early. Bastard Catholics.’

  Harry Lloyd seized one of the china dogs and dashed it against the stone flags of the fireplace. He stood looking at the broken pieces for a moment, then squatted down and brushed them into his palm.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he murmured. ‘Frannie, I don’t know what to do.’

  Fran Lloyd slipped from her armchair and knelt beside her husband.

  ‘We haven’t lost him, Harry. He’s our own. Jesus will keep him safe.’

  ‘Please,’ Harry rocked forward in her arms, his forehead resting on the flags. ‘Please, Jesus, keep him safe. Bring him home to us.’

  As his father begged for his safe return, Stephen Lloyd was being methodically dissected. Although he had not been as committed a Christian as Oliver Godfrey, he had intoned the name of God before he died. His prayers were brief, however, and Father Garret believed that, in the end, the boy had accepted his fate.

  When Garret murdered Oliver Godfrey, he had not anticipated what a messy business it would be. Stupidly, he had worn his everyday clothes. He had learned his lesson, however. Over the weekend he had purchased a rubber decontamination suit with matching gloves from the army surplus store. Now, the suit squeaking with his every move, Garret sliced diamond-shaped cuts from Stephen’s buttocks. Stephen, of course, had been kept in the cellar for only a day, and so his blood was full and rich. How different poor Oliver’s had been, after weeks of draining and being chained in the dark.

  Garret turned the boy over and started working at his stomach. A strip of moonlight flashed a bright mask across the devastated face. Pressure built in Garret’s head. He looked down at the hunks of meat in his hands and felt the blood becoming sticky between his fingers. As the light flickered across them, those features of Stephen’s face that remained intact raced towards Garret, receded, and then thrust forward again. The lustrous eyes snapped open. Lips moved.

  ‘You have disappointed me, my boy,’ the voice – not a child’s – croaked. ‘Where is your backbone? I bore it, so should you.’

  Stephen Lloyd was gone. Dr Ethram Garret, shining with the cancer that had killed him, lay at his son’s feet. He was exactly as Garret remembered him: very tall, very softly spoken, every fibre of his body racked with pain. He was so yellow that he seemed to glow with a light of his own.

  ‘This is what my son has become. Pathetic,’ the dead man sneered. ‘A murderer of children. Tell me why, Christopher.’

  ‘Because I watched you die, Father.’

  Christopher Garret could not bear to look into the uncomprehending eyes that stared up at him.

  ‘I – I saw your pain …’ he stammered. ‘I could have killed myself, I suppose, but … but I was offered another way. He came to me. He showed me that I might be damned in such a way that I would never see Hell.’

  ‘Foolish boy. You will see Hell. You don’t have the stomach to cheat Judgement.’

  Garret blinked away his tears. When he looked back, his father was gone. Stephen Lloyd lay upon the stone floor, still and dead.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Garret whispered, feeling the pressure in his head ebb. ‘I shall never be judged. I will be forever.

  The specially adapted metal tray in the furnace clanked as it expanded. Garret opened the grille door and threw the cuts into the hot pan. They sizzled and spat and smelt good.

  This is the end, Garret thought, as he watched the meat turn white. The end, thank God.

  A trail of viscid fluid drained away from the cooking flesh. It flowed down a channel indented in the base of the pan and out through a perforation in the side. A glass jar collected the fat. Garret burned his fingers in the dribble as he peeled off the Robinson’s Marmalade sticker. He screwed the lid back onto the jar, sealing it airtight. Then he placed it in an alcove in the cellar wall. It nestled there, amongst the containers of Oliver Godfrey’s fat and the baptism dresses of Kyle Lloyd and Jessica Godfrey.

  Fran and Harry Lloyd were arguing again. For a moment, as they comforted each other beside the fire, Dawn had seen a vestige of the love that grief had wrung out of them. It was fleeting, however. She left them with as many reassurances as she could but she knew the similarities between this disappearance and Oliver Godfrey’s were too striking to be a coincidence.

  She went back to the station. For the next hour, she sat in Jack’s office trying his home number at five-minute intervals. No joy. She called at his house on the way back to her father’s. No-one answered her knocks. Pulling into her father’s street, she tried Jack’s mobile again – Sorry, you cannot be connected …

  To divert her mind, she switched back to thinking about the case. The Church seemed to be the key. Oliver had been a devote Catholic and a committed Christian Youth Group member. He had
been abducted from a church day out. Stephen was also a regular churchgoer, though in his case it seemed this was due to parental pressure rather than any real faith. Both siblings of these abducted boys had died of cot death. Both siblings had had their baptism dresses stolen. She asked herself why Simon Malahyde would feel the need to seek out two boys with such specific histories. She thought over the little she knew about him, but there seemed no clue that answered the question.

  And then something struck her: she was beginning to assume, without question, that Simon Malahyde was the killer of these boys. She knew only too well that, in police work, such assumptions were dangerous. Of course, there was the linking evidence of the key fob but, as she had pointed out to Jack, it was a circumstantial link. Not real, stand-up-in-court evidence. What’s to say the murderer hadn’t also abducted and murdered Simon, and that he had planted the fob as a blind? Okay, it would be unusual for a kiddy-killer to go from targeting pre-teens to a seventeen-year-old, but it wasn’t unheard of. It was also feasible that Malahyde could have dropped the key in the lay-by several days ago, and that the cases were unconnected. As Jarski had pointed out at the press conference, Simon was not an official suspect. Not yet.

  Dawn realised that it was Jack’s own firm conviction of Simon’s guilt that had subconsciously swayed her. That and perhaps the sense that something wasn’t quite right about young Mr Malahyde. She remembered the feeling she had got while examining Simon’s various possessions. That sense of a fractured, inconsistent personality.

  As she dragged her bag and briefcase from the car, she noticed the Citroen Sedan parked across the street. There was nobody at the wheel. She could have sworn the same car had been parked outside her apartment block this morning.

  Has he mentioned seeing any strangers hanging around?

  She went over to the car and peered through the windows. Cassette tapes littered the floor, a brown leather coat sat on the back seat and a bag of Haribos on the dash. The gear stick acted as a bookmark for a copy of Hustler magazine.

  She tried Jack again. Sorry, you cannot …

  ‘Jesus Christ, where are you?’ she said. ‘Jack, I’m frightened.’

  Twenty-four

  The air was cold and molasses-thick. Jack pushed against the darkness that surrounded him. He remembered this as a short passageway yet he had taken maybe fifty steps and was still not through it. His feet ceased to clack against the cobbles. The ground shifted beneath him like sinking sand. And the worst of it was, he could feel them awakening. Squeals and shrieks rang down the corridors of his mind and echoed in the chambers of his soul.

  He brought the door of their prison to the forefront of his consciousness and peered through. The toy box lid was open a crack. Clustered eyes, spider-like, stared out, while black fluid seeped from the gap.

  Pi over four equals one minus a third plus a fifth minus …

  The flow of their mercurial bodies froze.

  … plus thirteen over fifteen minus seventy-six over one hundred and five plus …

  The dark matter shivered – hissed – ebbed back towards the box.

  … two thousand five hundred and seventy-eight over three thousand, four hundred …

  The lid snapped shut. Jack pushed the room back into the farthest recess of his mind. His senses returned.

  He was out of the tunnel and standing before a large wooden door. The legend, ‘Yeager Library’, was burned into the central panel. Turning back, he saw the archway and his own uncertain footprints on the clay path. Across the court to his left, candlelight passed a series of mullioned windows. For some reason, he took great comfort from those lights. He wanted to get away from the intimidating hulk of the Library and visit each cheery-looking room. He remembered Father Brody’s advice, however, and turned back to the bell-pull set into the cornerstone.

  The Yeager Library was a structure of stone and wood. The door was wide and arched at the top, mirroring the six lancet windows on either side of it. No lights illuminated the stained glass, but away to his right Jack saw a few glimmers shining through tiny octagonal holes set into the wall. These reached, like a string of sparkling beads, far into the distance. He put his ear to the thick timber. The echo of the bell rang through distant rooms.

  The door swung open.

  ‘Your business, Mr Trent?’

  The face of the figure in the doorway was masked by the glare of his lamp. Jack saw only that the man was perhaps five foot ten and dressed in black robes.

  ‘I’ve been sent by someone who …’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I was told to ask for a book …’

  ‘A book is only a tool. What do you want?’

  ‘Truth, I suppose.’

  ‘This library has collected books down the ages. It houses knowledge that spans millennia. But there is no truth here. Only a signpost or two perhaps.’

  ‘A signpost is good enough.’

  The monk stepped back and allowed Jack to enter a large, circular hall. The stone flags of the floor, worn to a shiny finish, were dusted with straw. Four fluted pillars rose to support an elaborately ribbed and traceried ceiling. Between these pillars stood three doors marked Archives, Reading Rooms and Library respectively.

  ‘So, Jack Trent, do you wonder how I know you?’

  The face that turned to Jack was full of strong features: a jutting jawline, a prominent forehead, pronounced cheeks raised above small, sunken eyes. It was as if an excess of bones had been squeezed into too small a space.

  ‘I might wonder, if that was the strangest thing that had ever happened to me.’

  ‘Indeed,’ the monk’s eyes narrowed. ‘I see them, you know.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Inside you. The ancient Romans may have called them ‘numina’, spirits that preside over a certain thing or place. In this case, your gifts. They drive your abilities, but they are also enslaved to you. Like the engines that came after my time, you need them to power your visions, but they also rely on your emotions for sustenance, for fuel. You know that already. There are books here that could tell you what they are, how they came to live inside you. Books that could tell you how to control them, so that you might reap the benefit of those powers without the curse of isolation. Books that could tell you how to rid yourself of them, if that was what you wanted.’

  Jack almost staggered under the weight of the librarian’s words.

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Of course. But you have a choice. There is no fee for the first visit to this library, but there is a limitation. You may read only one volume, unless, of course, you decide to stay. Your choice: read the book you were sent to read or the book that will set you free.’

  His years stretched out behind Jack in one long, lonely sweep. If the librarian was to be believed, he might walk back to the world and have a chance of becoming part of it. He could have friends. He could have a family. He could have her … But could he? With Jamie dead, and knowing that he had this opportunity to discover how the boy might be saved, could he rest easy as he held her through the long nights?

  ‘The Transmigration of Souls.’

  ‘Noble, Jack,’ said the librarian. ‘And in the long run it may be the wisest course.’

  The monk’s touch was gentle. He led Jack to the door with ‘Reading Rooms’ inscribed upon it.

  ‘Do you live here alone?’ Jack asked, trying to turn his mind away from the recent choice.

  ‘My brothers, those who were sealed within the night the fellows burned us alive, still abide here. Presently they are at prayer.’

  The librarian took a stone key from his robes. Numerals and arcane designs decorated the shaft and teeth, but Jack had no time to make them out before the key was fitted in the lock. The door opened, and Jack, expecting another large antechamber, was surprised by the low, long corridor. Red doors with brass nameplates stretched away in a crimson blur.

  ‘The reading rooms. All our visitors are assigned one for the period of their sta
y. Although that, of course, can never be accurately guessed.’

  The librarian shut and barred the way behind them. He ushered Jack down the passage, the light of his lamp burnishing the nameplates they passed. They had gone some way down the corridor, straw muffling their footsteps, when Jack stopped before one of the doors. On its brass plate was written:

  Kit Marlowe 1593 –

  ‘What is it, Jack?’

  ‘Kit Marlowe? Christopher Marlowe? He was here?’

  ‘He is here.’

  The librarian pointed to the gap beneath the door. In the strip of light, Jack saw a shadow pass and re-pass.

  ‘Many have come to seek knowledge. Some famous, some forgotten. Mr Marlowe is one of our more venerable guests. He came to us after a little trouble in Deptford, a ruse on his part to avoid a charge of treason, so he told me. He wanted to lie low for the night and be on his way in the morning. He became rather too absorbed in his studies, however … You may also have heard of Mr Marlowe’s near neighbour here.’

  The librarian held up his lamp to the nameplate on the opposite door.

  ‘Professor Rowland Mewes, Eighteen Fifty-Three,’ Jack read.

  ‘I hear Professor Mewes is quite the celebrity these days. He also keeps late hours.’

  Through the door, Jack heard the scratch of pen on parchment.

  ‘This may be an opportune time to give the customary warning … Ah, here we are.’

  Two doors along from the playwright’s room was a plate marked: ‘Jack Trent’.

  ‘The dates of your incumbency shall be added later,’ the librarian said, opening the room.

  Again, Jack expected something very grand, but was confronted by a simple sandstone chamber with only a desk and a chair for furniture. The ceiling was high and, at the rear, there was one of the octagonal windows he had seen from outside. On the desk sat an oil lamp, an hourglass, a pile of yellow parchment and a notebook.