“I’ll stay here and watch,” she said. “You should go and see Edwin. He’s in the camera obscura.”
*
Two staircases led up from the first-floor landing. One was the ingress to an attic apartment mysteriously occupied by an ancient female dependent Edwin in happier times referred to as “Mrs. Rochester”. The other led to the camera obscura, a large space in which an image of the house and its surroundings was projected by an apparatus of reflectors installed around the turn of the century by Edwin’s father.
Richard paused on the landing. It was carpeted by a linked series of Indian rugs, which could be easily pulled up. The far staircase, to Mrs. Rochester’s rooms, was in shadow. He thought he could hear her breathing, as he had often done twenty years ago. Most boys would have had nightmares about the asthmatic invalid, but Richard had no dreams at all, no memories to prod his night-thoughts to fancy.
He climbed up to the camera obscura and stepped into the dark room.
Edwin stood, leaning under a giant circular mirror, looking down at the mostly shadowed table. The distinct shapes of the house, the grounds, the village and the moor were outlined. By moving the mirror, Edwin could spy further afield.
Nothing was moving.
“Shadows,” Edwin said, his voice still strong. “Reflections and shadows.”
He dipped his hand into the image, waving through the church, scaling his skin with old stone.
“Richard, I’m glad you’re here.”
“It’s not a happy place, Edwin.”
Edwin’s dark face twisted in a smile.
“How would you put it, ‘a bad vibes zone’?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s a Hiroshima shadow.”
“Yes.”
At the sites of the atom bomb detonations, vaporised people left such shapes on the walls and streets, permanent shadows.
“I’m to pay for what I did.”
“You weren’t the only one, Edwin. You’re not even the only one left.”
“But I’m special. You see, I played it both ways. I had two chances. The first time, I was wise or cowardly and let it go. The second time, I was foolish or brave and took hold of it.”
“There was a War on.”
“There was always a war on.”
“Not now.”
“You think so?”
“Come on, Edwin. This is the Age of Aquarius. You more than anyone should know that. You helped throw the foe back into the outer darkness.”
“You’ve grown up being told that, boy.”
“I’ve grown up knowing that.”
The darkness that lay like a veil in his mind, blacking out the first years of his memory, throbbed. Things were shifting there, trying to break the surface.
“Do you want to see something pretty?”
Edwin Winthrop did not ramble. Even at his age, he was sharp. This was not a casual question, addressed to a child who had long grown up.
“I love beauty,” Richard said.
Edwin nodded and touched a lever. The table parted, with a slight creak.
Red light filled the room.
“It’s the Jewel of Seven Stars,” Richard said.
“That’s right.”
The gem lay on black velvet, its trapped lightpoints shining.
“The Seven Stars. They weren’t there earlier. In the sky. That’s not supposed to happen.”
“It’s a sign, boy.”
“What isn’t?”
“Very good. Everything is a sign. We won the War, you know. With this, essentially. People cleverer than I looked into it and saw a little of how the universe worked.”
Richard looked behind him. In the darkened room, shadows could glide like serpents.
“And I gave this to them. Not the Diogenes Club, me. Just as twenty years earlier, I let the jewel go. The club has always been people like you and I, Richard. We like to pretend we’re servants of the Queen or the country. But when it comes to this bauble, we’re on our own. As far as it belongs to anyone, it’s mine now. Can you imagine Truman letting Oppenheimer keep his bomb? Yet the club let me take this souvenir when it was all over.”
“Men can be trusted, Edwin. Institutions change. Even the Diogenes Club.”
“Do you want this?”
Edwin indicated the jewel.
It seemed to pull on Richard’s gaze, sucking him into red depths. A moment’s contact made him squirm inside. He broke the spell, and looked away.
“Very sensible. It can bring great gifts, but there are prices to be paid. A talented man was once elevated to genius by it, but his life dribbled away in waste and pathetic tragedy. We won a War, but we changed so much in the winning that I’m not sure we even came through it. I don’t just mean Britain lost an Empire. It’s more than that. Mrs. Rochester told me I took too many shortcuts. So I must pay. You’ve always seen the dark in me, Richard. Because, through no fault of your own, there’s a dark in you.”
Richard shook his head, vigorously. He could not let this pass.
“I’d have died in a concentration camp if it were not for the Diogenes Club, if not for men like my father and for you, Edwin. I was a boy with no memory. You’ve given me more than life. There’s been a purpose.”
“I’ve a terrible feeling we’ve just left a mess for you to clean up. All these, what do you call them, ‘anomalies’, all these wrongnesses in the world. Think of them as fall-out. And the other horrors, the ones everyone notices—the famines, the brushfire wars, the deaths of notable men. When I laid my hand on this”—he grasped the jewel, his hand a black spider over the red glow, flesh-clad bones outlined by the gem’s inner light—“I took the worst shortcut, and I made it acceptable. There used to be, in Beauregard’s time, an absolute standard. I destroyed that.”
Richard did not want to believe his old friend. If there was chaos where once there had been order, he was a child of that chaos. Where Edwin had gone by intellect, he ventured with instinct.
“Now, I must pay. I’ve always known.”
“We’ll see about that,” Richard said, determined.
A flash of light filled the room. Not from the jewel. It was lightning, drawn into the camera obscura from outside. Violent rain drummed the roof. A storm had appeared out of cloudless night sky.
Down below, in the hallway, there was a hammering.
*
As they emerged onto the landing, light fell onto Edwin’s head. Richard did not have time to be shocked by the new lines etched into his friend’s face.
They made their way to the main staircase. Catriona lay in a huddle on the stairs. The shadowman was gone. The front doors stood open, and someone stood on the mat, looking down.
The polished floor of the hallway was crowded. A dozen shadowmen, overlapping, reaching out, were frozen, swimming towards the foot of the stairs.
The house was invaded.
“Ho there above,” shouted the newcomer at the door, a woman.
Lights flickered as thunder crashed. Rain blew into the hall, whipping the woman’s long coat around her long legs.
Richard was by Catriona, checking her strong pulse. She was just asleep. He looked at the woman in the doorway. The door slammed shut behind her, nudging her into the hall. She stepped gingerly onto the tangle of shadows.
She had a cloud of white hair, medusa-snaked by the storm, with a seam of natural scarlet running through it. Despite the white, her face was unlined. The flicker of the lights made her freckles stand out.
The woman was of Amazon height and figure, well over six feet, extra inches added by her hair and stacked heels. Under a deep-green, ankle-length velvet trench coat, she wore a violet blouse, no bra, frayed denim hot pants, fishnet tights and calf-length soft leather pirate boots. She had a considerable weight of jade around her neck and wrists and pendant gold disc earrings the size of beer-mats.
Richard, though immediately impressed, had no idea who this woman was.
“All in this house are i
n grave danger,” she intoned.
“Tell us something we don’t know, love,” he replied.
She strode across the chaos of shadowmen, slipping off and shaking out her wet coat. Her arms were bare. High up on her right upper arm was an intricate tattoo of a growling bear, with the stars of the constellation picked out in inset sequins.
“I’m Maureen Mountmain,” she announced, “High Priestess of the Order of the Ram.”
“Richard Jeperson, at your service,” he snapped. “I assume you know this is Miss Catriona Kaye and the gent whose house you are invading is Mr. Edwin Winthrop.”
“There’s someone else here,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “I sense great age, and a strong light.”
“That’d be Mrs. Rochester. She’s sick.”
Maureen laughed openmouthed. She was close enough for Richard to catch her scent, which was entirely natural, earthy and appealing. Maureen Mountmain was extremely attractive, not just physically. She had a fraction of the magnetism he’d felt from the Jewel of Seven Stars.
“I don’t know her real name,” he admitted.
“It’s God-Given,” Maureen said. “Jennifer God-Given.”
“If you say so, love.”
“I told you my name was Maureen, Richard. Not ‘love’, ‘darling’, ‘honey’ or ‘pussycat’.”
“I stand corrected, Maureen.”
“Do people call you Dick?”
“Never.”
“There’s always a first time, Dick.”
There was a tigerish quality about Maureen Mountmain. The claws were never quite sheathed.
“Mountmain,” said Edwin, shakily. “I know that name.”
“Do not confuse me with any of my family, Mr. Winthrop. My Uncle Bennett and my Great-Uncle Declan, for instance. I believe you were present at their happy deaths. Mountmain men have always been overreaching fools. The women-folk are wiser. If you heed me, you might live out the night.”
Richard wasn’t sure whether he wanted to trust Maureen. He knew about the relatives she’d mentioned, from Edwin and from a comprehensive study of dangerous crackpots. If she was as well up on the War as he thought she was, she might fancy herself the Witch Queen of the Western Isles.
Come to that, she might earn the title.
“Don’t just stand there gaping, idjits,” she said, indicating the shadowmen at her feet. “You have other visitors. This is serious.”
Catriona stirred. Richard helped her sit up.
“Very well, Miss Mountmain,” Edwin said, a little of his old iron back. “Welcome to the Manor House. I am pleased to meet you.”
Edwin slowly made his way down the stairs, past Richard and Catriona. He stood at the foot of the stairs and held out his hand to Maureen.
“There’s been bad blood between the Diogenes Club and your family,” he said. “Let it be at an end.”
Maureen looked at Edwin’s hand. It occurred to Richard that the woman could snap Edwin’s neck with a single blow. Instead, Maureen Mountmain embraced Edwin fiercely, lifting him a little off his feet.
“Blessed be,” she announced.
Richard felt Catriona’s fur rising. A feud might be over, but enmities lingered.
“I remember Declan Mountmain,” Catriona said. “An utter bastard.”
“Quite right,” Maureen said, releasing Edwin. “And Bennett was worse. If either of them had been able to make use of the weirdstone, there’d be precious little of the world left by now.”
Catriona stood, daintily, and nodded a curt acceptance of Maureen Mountmain.
“What Declan and Bennett wished for may still come about,” Maureen said, urgently. “They were bested, and the greater forces who used them checked, by the rituals your Diogenes Club used in the War. But you woke up the Seven Stars, bought a short-term victory at the cost of long-term trouble.”
Edwin nodded. “I admit as much,” he said.
“Do not bother justifying your actions. All men and most women would have done the same.”
Most women? thought Richard.
“And you could have done it earlier, when victory would have seemed even cheaper and been far more costly. For that, the world owes you, Miss Kaye, a debt that’ll never be understood. Your influence, a sensible woman’s, tempered this man’s instincts. Like my uncles, Edwin and, I intuit with certainty, Dick here, are fascinated by the weirdstone. To them it is like a well-made gun that should be fired or a showoff’s automobile that must be driven. Men never think that guns have to be fired at something or cars driven to somewhere.”
Richard bristled. This bedraggled demigoddess had the nerve to barge into someone else’s home and deliver a lecture in occult feminism.
“Women have faults too,” she said, in his direction. “Men like guns and cars, women like men who like guns and cars. Who is to say which is the more foolish?”
“What’s happening here?” Richard asked.
Edwin looked down. Maureen stepped in.
“A crisis, of course.”
“It’s coming for the Seven Stars,” Edwin said, “swirling about the house, converging on the gem.”
“What is coming?”
“The Biafran Bank Manager,” Edwin chuckled, blackly.
“What?”
It was a strange thing to say. But Edwin was no longer the firm-minded man Richard remembered.
“A joke in poor taste,” Maureen explained. “He means the Skeleton in the Closet.”
Richard had heard it before, a reference to a television advert. It was one of a wave of desperate jokes made in response to the heart-breaking photographs of starved men, women and children that came out of Biafra during the famine. Any disaster that couldn’t be contained by the human mind spilled over in sick humour, graveyard comedy.
“Why now?” Richard asked.
“It’s been coming a long way, my boy,” Edwin said, “for a long time.”
“He’s been building you up for this,” Maureen said. “Your life has been a series of initiations.”
Edwin looked at her sharply, with new respect.
“I’ve had to teach myself, old man. But I’ve been coming along too.”
“It’s true,” Edwin said. “Richard, I knew I wouldn’t be capable of facing what is coming. I thought, almost hoped, I’d be dead by the time the changes really got underway, and you were the one we chose to take over. You’re stronger now than I ever was. You have talents. We had to work for things which are easy for you. I know that’s no comfort.”
Richard felt a deep resentment. Not at the way his life had been shaped, but that the great purpose he had always sensed was imperfectly revealed to him while an outsider, the daughter of old enemies, had understood.
Thunder crashed again, and the lights went out. They came back again and the shadowmen on the floor were crowded around the foot of the stairs, black fingers reaching upwards. The quality of the light was different, wavering. Filaments fizzed at the end of their tether.
It was the anomaly again, and they were inside it.
*
The lights strobed, leaving photo-flash impressions on his eyes. The periods of darkness between the periods of light lengthened. The shadowmen were in motion, revealed by a pixellation of still images. They crowded together as they swarmed up the stairs, passing under Richard and Catriona. A fresh wave spread out from under the closed front doors, scrambling around Maureen’s boots. Richard held Catriona and tried to gather his spiritual strength, controlling his breathing, feeling the focus gather in the centre of his chest, preparing for an assault.
The shadowmen flowed up onto the landing, gathering around Edwin, arms seeming to lift from the floor, as insubstantial yet sinewy as steel cobwebs.
From inside his jacket, Edwin took the Jewel of Seven Stars.
The lightbulbs all exploded at once. Glass tinkled onto polished wood.
The shadowmen were frozen.
Red light filled the hall, spilling down from the landing. Edwin held the jewel
up. The Seven Stars shone, like the ones no longer in the Heavens. The constant light held the shadowmen back.
“So that’s it,” Maureen said, awed. “I never dreamed.”
“You feel it, like everyone,” Edwin said. “The temptation.”
“I can’t blame you,” she admitted.
Edwin set the jewel on the floor. Once out of his hand, the jewel changed. Its light, fuelled by the wielder, dimmed. The shadows around Edwin grew. A thin arm, like a black stocking on a wind-whipped washing line, wrapped around Edwin’s leg. He sank to one knee, pulled down. Another shadow latched onto his arm.
Catriona broke free, suddenly strong, and ran up the stairs, Richard and Maureen at her heels. They hesitated at the landing.
Edwin lay on the floor, twisted. Shadowmen twined around him, pinning him down, growing tight. The lightpoints of the jewel, lying nearby, glowed like drops of radioactive blood.
Catriona released a single sob, and clung to the bannister. Richard felt Maureen’s strong hand on his arm, sensed the warmth of her body close to him. This was entirely the wrong time to be aroused, but he had no control over his surging blood.
The shadowmen wrapped Edwin like a mummy’s windings. He disappeared under black, elongated forms. The shadowmen coalesced into one man and flattened, leaving a final Hiroshima shadow.
“It took him,” Maureen said.
The anomaly wasn’t passed. It wasn’t over.
Maureen stepped past him and reached down for the jewel. Richard took her arm, holding her back, feeling the warmth of her bare skin, fighting the fog of desire in his mind, torn by a deep need to throw her aside and take the jewel for himself. With Edwin gone, it was up for grabs.
“No,” he said, finding his strength.
Maureen’s outstretched fingers curled into a fist.
“No,” she agreed.
They separated and stood either side of the jewel. It was changed, somehow. Edwin had passed into it or beyond it.
“It’d make a novel doorstop,” he suggested.
She laughed, with an appealing edge of hysteria.
Catriona still stood, clinging to the bannister, eyes sparkling with unshed tears, the life she had shared with Edwin torn away and crumpled up.
Dark Detectives Page 30