The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  “Tell me,” he said, leaning close, “did you have any luck, in that horrible cellar?”

  I felt a first pang of alarm, and was horribly aware of the fingerbones that I had recovered. They seemed to beat like a tell-tale heart in the breast pocket of my jacket, and I had to quash the impulse to put my hand over it, to hide my discovery from Dr Pretorius’s piercing scrutiny. Suppose he had set several imps to keep watch in the cellar, and I had not seen only one? Suppose one of the urchins peeking at the window had been in his employ?

  I said, as casually as I could manage, “Is the murder of particular interest to you, Dr Pretorius, or are you merely interested in it for the sake of sensation?”

  He was not at all put out by this, but sat back, saying, “Very good, very good,” as he pulled a flask from his jacket. He drank, shuddered as delicately as a cat, and offered it to me, explaining, “A little gin, to celebrate our meeting. It’s my only weakness.”

  I declined, and he shrugged. “Were you searching that cellar out of ‘interest in sensation’, or could it be that you are in the employ of your new friend?”

  “If I have business with him, that’s my business, and his.”

  “Not if it interferes with the business of others,” Dr Pretorius said, with sudden sharpness. But then he smiled, and said, “But we should not be arguing, my dear Mr Carlyle! We are both interested in the same truths. We know things about the world that other men only dare dream about. We know how the world really works – the truth that underlies the petty reality which men like your engineer friend labour to master. They are like ants, building castles from crumbs of sand: mighty fortress to them, but to us mere heaps that we can crush in an instant. Yes, I saw how that young man took you up, Mr Carlyle, and I wish I had spoken to you then, but I confess that I was enjoying the scene you created, and was too slow to follow its creator. A very amusing diversion it was, too, far better than the silly bit of cheap theatre those gypsies put on. That, I must say, was very disappointing, but meeting you is more than enough compensation.”

  “You know something of the matter of the dead?”

  “I know much about the matter of life, my friend. More, dare I say, than your poor parents. Oh yes, I know about their experiments into the nature of the human soul, the ghastly business with the resurrection men, and the unfortunate accident that occurred when they tried to reanimate the dead with ghosts.

  “I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it,” he added, with sly false sweetness. “By the band that you wear, I see that you are still in mourning.”

  “As a matter of fact, doctor, I mind very much. It really is none of your business.”

  “Oh, but I think it is,” Dr Pretorius said, tapping the side of his nose with a finger. “I mentioned a pupil of mine. He was in the resurrection trade too. He stitched new bodies from old, and infused them with electricity in place of the life force. Not so much different from your parents’ work, I think, and it came to an equally bad end. It was almost the death of me, in fact, but I escaped, and learned some valuable lessons, too. Our driver, for instance. Perhaps you noticed him? He has greatly benefited from my attentions. In his former life he was nothing but a common thief, who thought to break into my establishment one night and steal the day’s takings. I caught him, and I made a new man out of him. A little brain surgery, some cranial reconstruction . . . Ah, here we are.”

  The carriage jerked to a halt – its driver was all stop or all go, and nothing in between – and Dr Pretorius opened the door and sprang out with surprising alacrity. He took my arm when I climbed out after him, and steered me across the pavement to a iron grille set in the base of the wall of a bank.

  “The London Stone,” Dr Pretorius said grandly. “I can see that you are unimpressed, but I think that if you look closely, you’ll understand why I brought you here.”

  It sat in a niche behind the grille, a blackened lump of stone about two feet across, quite undistinguished except for the pair of grooves worn in its rounded top. If it had been lying on a piece of waste ground, I would not have troubled it with a second glance, but as I stared at it I felt as if it was opening up like the mouth of a well or shaft that plumbed a dimension I had never before noticed. When Dr Pretorius pulled me away, the ordinary noise and bustle of the street reasserted itself with the suddenness of an explosion, leaving me so faint that I reeled back against the wall.

  “You see its puissance,” Dr Pretorius said, like a teacher encouraging his best pupil. “I knew you would.”

  I could still feel its black power in a corner of my mind, like the onset of a headache, or a thunderstorm. I said, the words coming so hard that they might have been the first I spoke after a year of silence, “What is it?”

  “Some say that it is a Roman milestone, perhaps the pivot from which all measurements in the province of Britannia were taken. Others claim that it came from Troy, brought here by the great-grandson of Aeneas, who led the exodus of the defeated Trojans after the Greeks destroyed their city; they would have it that London is the New Troy.”

  Dr Pretorius struck an attitude and declaimed with actorly vibrato, “ ‘And Kings be born of thee, whose dredded might shall aw the World, and Conquer Nations bold,’ ” then winked at me, and added, “Or perhaps it is no more than a bit of rubble from some forgotten building of old Roman London. It does not really matter what it was. What matters is what men think it is, as I’m sure you’ll agree. The Kentish rebel, Jack Cade, rode into the City and declared himself mayor by striking the stone with his sword. Many others have sworn similar oaths upon it.”

  “Why have you brought me here?”

  “This stone is on public display, on a public street. Do you not think, in a city as ancient as this, where the streets are raised a good twenty feet above the original ground by the rubble and trash of the ages, that there might be other stones, more puissant, more powerful, hidden away beneath our feet?”

  “If there are such stones, Doctor, I believe that they should stay buried. I certainly understand why this one is caged – not to protect it from the public, but because, like a wild beast, the public must be protected from it.”

  “I’m disappointed,” Dr Pretorius said, although he was still smiling his sly, feline smile. “I thought you a man of ambition and vision, like myself. Perhaps it is the shock. Perhaps,” he said, offering his flask, “a little gin will help you think more clearly.”

  “I can think clearly enough,” I said. I was angry, stung by Dr Pretorius’s insinuations about my parents, and my anger made me very reckless. “I think that Coffee Joe was murdered because he had found something you need. I think you flatter me because poor Coffee Joe resisted your questioning, and now you need my help to find what you seek.”

  “I do not need your help to look for what I already have,” Dr Pretorius said, and wagged a bony finger in my face when I started to speak. “We are equals, my dear Mr Carlyle, and we should not conceal anything from each other. The engineer has hired you, I suppose, to rid that ridiculous tunnel of a malign influence. Yes, I know that you went there with him last night. He heard of the murder, realized that the man’s boasts of finding something were true, swallowed his considerable pride, and attended the seance. He hoped to ask a question of a ghost, and found you instead. And what, I wonder, have you found?”

  “I won’t help you.”

  “I could take it from you. I could freeze your blood with one word and take it now.” Dr Pretorius studied me for a moment, then said, “The engineer does not know what he has stumbled upon. It is a far greater matter than removing a hex from a hole in the ground.”

  “Nevertheless, he is my client.”

  Dr Pretorius laughed. “You are a stubborn fellow, Carlyle, but not too stubborn, I hope, because I would not like to lose a talent like yours. Such wonders we could do together! When you are ready to talk with me, I can be found at the Museum of Natural Curiosities, on Farringdon Street. It is not far from here – just outside the old walls. Now, you
will have to excuse me. Things are progressing very well, and I must be about my business.”

  As soon as Dr Pretorius had climbed into his carriage, the horse bolted as if stung by a bee. Dr Pretorius waved from the window, and the carriage and its strange cargo were swallowed in the unending stream of traffic.

  I recovered most of my poise and perhaps half of my strength by consuming two rounds of beef-and-horseradish sandwiches and a pint of strong coffee in a coffee house, and found my way to Farringdon Street, taking a circumambulatory route to avoid the killing grounds at Smithfield, where the air was still thick with the residue of witch-burning mobs. The street, jammed with slow-moving carts and carriages, ran through a narrow valley; I remembered that Dr Pretorius had said that we would cross the old course of the Fleet, and supposed that I had discovered it.

  The Museum of Natural Curiosities was a double shop-front, its woodwork painted bright red and the glass of its windows gilded. Boards listed the wonders to be seen within (amongst others, a dog-headed boy, a two-headed sheep, the skeleton of a giant, a genuine mermaid from the Floridean shore, an exquisite miniature ballerina). A large black man stood in the doorway, his muscular arms crossed over the keg of his chest as he scrutinized every passer-by. He wore a kind of Arabian Nights costume of loose buttercup-yellow trousers, a broad cloth belt, a deeply slashed pink tunic, and a white turban. The sword sheathed in his belt seemed to be no more than painted wood, but he was of such a size that he would have needed no other weapon than his fists to deal with most troublemakers. I had no doubt that he was the man who had murdered poor Coffee Joe.

  I watched the museum and its muscular guardian from the other side of the busy road, munching on roast hazelnuts purchased from a street vendor, but saw no sign of Dr Pretorius. At last, I took my chance and crossed the road when the heavy traffic came to a standstill (all around me, hundreds of horses, momentarily released from their work, snorted and tossed their heads), coolly walked past the Museum and its forbidding guard, and entered the tobacconist’s next door. For the price of a screw of snuff, I learned that the Museum had been open for just six months, and that the tobacconist, who lived above his shop, was thinking of bringing legal action against the owner because of the construction work that continued day and night, and which more than once had caused his cellars to flood.

  After escaping from the tobacconist’s torrent of complaint, I walked north through the brawling streets toward my lodgings, pausing only to donate my screw of snuff to an indigent on a street corner, with the request that he stop torturing his set of bagpipes until I was out of earshot.

  When I returned to Mrs Rolt’s house, I found on the hall table a folded slip of paper with my name written on it in slanting copperplate. It was a message from Brunel. All arrangements were in hand, and I should meet him at the yard in Rotherhithe at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon “for an unusual perambulation”.

  I took supper with Mrs Rolt and Mr Rolt and their two daughters, and retired to my room as soon as I could decently disengage myself from the general round of conversation. The encounter with Dr Pretorius had exhausted me, and I was eager to examine the grisly remnant that had cost Coffee Joe his life. Yet although I studied them long and hard, I could find no power, not so much as an imp, in the conjoined stubs of blackened bone, and I could not imagine why Dr Pretorius needed them, and what they might signify in the matter of the tunnel.

  At last, I wrapped the bones in a clean linen handkerchief, set them on the little table that served as my desk, and made a few notes about my adventures of that day before retiring.

  I woke the next morning from a terrible dream, drenched in sweat, my heart pounding hard. I tottered to the window and drew in calming draughts of the warm morning air. All around, the ordinary world was getting on with its ordinary business. A blackbird, perched on a fence top with its tail cocked and yellow beak agape, was singing its heart out. Two gardens over, a woman was pinning white sheets to a line. The smell of grilling bacon drifted up from the kitchen window directly below me. The black, smothering mood of the dream faded, and I was able to think about breakfast, and getting dressed.

  I was lacing up my boots when I noticed that the handkerchief had somehow become unwrapped, and that the two fingerbones had fallen to the floor, lying there in their scraps of black skin like the mummy of an exotic caterpillar.

  When we met in the yard, I told Brunel of my discovery of the fingerbones, the encounter with Dr Pretorius, and the dream. He listened with close attention, absorbing the matter of the interrogation of Coffee Joe’s ghost as if it had been a description of some clever bit of lathe work, and asked at the end if he could inspect my prize. I had interred the bones in a tin which had lately contained Parma violet pastilles. Brunel stirred them with his forefinger, and said, “You think that this gave you your nightmare of drowning?”

  “Not of drowning, Mr Brunel; of being drowned. Of being sunk deep in cold, lightless water, with water filling my nose and mouth and lungs, and such a great weight of water pressing down on me that I could not move.”

  “My dreams were of being drowned when the tunnel flooded, instead of escaping,” Brunel said, looking sideways at me. An unlit cigar was stuck in his mouth. “Still, it’s not so very different. But if your dream was given to you by these little bones, what gave me mine?”

  “In my limited experience of bones, Mr Brunel, where you find one, you are likely to find others to match.”

  Brunel grinned around his cigar and handed the tin back to me. “You think that these little bones came from a body lodged above the tunnel. Well, it’s time to look for it, don’t you think?”

  “You promised ‘an unusual perambulation’. What, precisely—”

  “Let’s not spoil the surprise,” Brunel said, and took me by the arm and steered me across the yard.

  It was a fine sunny day, and the masts of the ships anchored along the edge of the river were like so many black trees scratching the blue sky above the roofs of the warehouses, as if Birnam Wood had waded into the river to pause and cool its rooty feet before resuming its march on Dunsinane. A wharf stood up to its knees in the low tide. A small boat with some kind of cargo draped in oiled canvas was moored on one side; an ordinary skiff with a man waiting at the oars on the other. As soon as Brunel and I had settled into the skiff, the boatman cast off and with strong strokes hauled us aslant the river’s strong race, each dip of the oar blades releasing little packets of noxious stink that blew past us in the hot, heavy breeze. Brunel lit his cigar against the smell; I covered my mouth and nose with the handkerchief that had lately acted as a winding sheet. The bristling hedge of ships along the far bank, and the roofs and steeples rising beyond them, were shrouded in a thickening haze. A steam packet went by, dragging a thick tail of smoke behind it, its paddle wheel threshing up foamy waves that rocked and rerocked our little skiff as they chased each other toward the bank. Brunel grinned when I clutched at the damp wood of my seat, and pointed to a low dark barge anchored a little way off. There was a crane angled up from its mid-section, and on the deck below the crane’s beak, connected to it by a cradle of slack chains, was a bronze sphere that, with sharp highlights winking from it in the hot sunlight, could have been a bell taken from a cathedral tower. “There’s our destination,” he said.

  “The barge is moored over the end of the tunnel, I take it.”

  “Not at all. The tunnel extends more than fifty feet beyond. But that, so I calculate, is the place it reached when Coffee Joe quit his position. What is it, Mr Carlyle?”

  The bones had begun to rattle inside their little coffin, which I had tucked in the breast pocket of my jacket. I took out the tin and placed it flat on my palm. As Brunel watched it shiver and shake, I said, “If they can produce bad dreams, I suppose we should not be so astonished that they are also able to move.”

  “I don’t doubt that they are moving,” Brunel said. “The question is, why are they moving?”

  “Perhaps these are animate
d by a desire to be reunited with their fellows, although I confess that I have never before seen such a thing.”

  “They are altogether unique, aren’t they? With your permission, Mr Carlyle, I would like to try a little experiment.”

  He had me pinch the tin between thumb and forefinger as, watched by a couple of men on the low deck, the boatman took us parallel to the barge’s black, wet side. The tin began to vibrate urgently and noisily when we cleared the bow, and Brunel told the boatman to let the current take us for a moment. The rattling grew less as we drifted backward; increased again as we rowed forward. Brunel took a sighting of either shore to mark the spot, and told the boatman to make for the ladder.

  After we climbed aboard, Brunel introduced me to the captain and then strutted over to the gleaming bell (his reflection swimming up to its shining surface to meet him) and briskly rapped it with his knuckles. “I borrowed it from the West India Dock Company, Mr Carlyle. Are you much troubled by enclosed spaces, by the by? I clean forgot to ask.”

  “No more than any other man,” I said. “What does a bell have to do with dredging up—”

  “Dredging? No, sir, that’s far too chancy, as I think someone else has discovered. We’re going to dig it up.”

  Brunel left me to wonder about that as he gave the captain instructions, pointing to the spot of water a few dozen yards off the bow of the barge where the fingerbones had become most agitated. The barge blew a cloud of black smoke from its tall chimney, raised its anchor, and moved against the current and dropped anchor again, all in a minute. Brunel satisfied himself as to the spot, and then two men started up the steam engine of the crane. Chains rattled as they were wound on a great drum, the frame of the barge creaked as the bronze bell was lifted a yard above the deck, and I tardily understood Brunel’s audacious plan.

  A narrow wooden footboard ran around the inside of the bell, a foot or so above the rim, and there were leather straps riveted to the curved metal wall. Hatless and in our shirtsleeves, accompanied by a gruff labourer armed with a grappling hook and a wooden shovel, Brunel and I clung to these straps as the bell was swung out over the swiftly running brown water and lowered into it.