Nocturnes (2004)

by John Connolly

  “Many doctors’ wives do. Mrs. Allinson is trained as a midwife, and her skills now extend considerably beyond that. She can’t practice medicine, of course, but she knows what to do in the event of a crisis.”

  “The women of Underbury are fortunate to have her, then,” said Burke. “Very fortunate indeed.”

  The rest of the day added little to the sum of knowledge accumulated by the two policemen. With the help of Constable Waters, they completed their questioning of all those who had been present at the inn on the night of Mal Trevors’s death, and began talking to many of those who were not present. While few had a good word to say about the dead man, there was nothing to link them to the events of that night, and by the time evening came Burke’s natural silence had deteriorated into sullenness. He bid Waters a curt good-night, paused for a time to exchange some words with his sergeant, and then ascended to his bedroom, where he remained seated on his bed for the rest of the evening, rising only to receive his supper at the door.

  In time, he must have fallen asleep, for the room was darker than he remembered when he opened his eyes, and the inn was quiet. He was not even aware of why he had awoken until he heard voices speaking softly beneath his window. Burke left his bed and walked to the glass, concealing himself in the shadows as best he could. Two women stood in the yard below, and in the dim light filtering from the inn he could make out the faces of Emily Allinson and Mrs. Paxton. The women appeared to be arguing, for he could see Mrs. Allinson’s finger stabbing the air before the smaller, darker Mrs. Paxton. Burke could not make out their words, but then Mrs. Allinson abruptly walked away. Some seconds later, Mrs. Paxton followed, but by then Burke was already on his way downstairs. He left the inn, moved through the yard, and soon found himself following the two women along the road that led out of the village. They were heading toward the Paxton house, but as soon as Mrs. Paxton caught up with Mrs. Allinson they left the road and made their way across the fields. They seemed to be heading for the place in which Mal Trevors died, until Burke saw them reach a small gate in the fence, open it, and move toward the wall of the churchyard. The inspector kept low as best he could, aided by the clouds that obscured the moon. He was almost at the gate when the women stopped and turned to face him.

  “Welcome, Inspector,” said Mrs. Allinson. She did not look surprised to see him. In fact, Burke thought she looked rather pleased, and he knew then that he had stepped firmly into the trap they had set for him. Mrs. Paxton said nothing, but kept her head down, unwilling even to look in his direction.

  Burke heard footsteps approaching from behind. He turned to see Elsie Warden moving slowly through the grass, her hands brushing the tips of the weeds as she walked. She stopped when she was some twenty feet from him. Mrs. Paxton in turn moved away from Mrs. Allinson, so that Burke found himself at the center of a triangle formed by the three women.

  “Is this how you finished off Mal Trevors?” he asked.

  “We never laid a hand on Mal Trevors,” said Mrs. Allinson.

  “We didn’t have to,” said Elsie.

  Burke tried to keep turning, always holding two women in his sight and hoping that he might be fast enough to prevent an attack by the third.

  “I suspect there are wounds on your chest, Miss Warden,” said Burke.

  “And on my scalp,” she said. “He fought back. He always was quick with his hands, was Mal.”

  “So you attacked him?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” It was Mrs. Allinson.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Allinson. “But you will.”

  Burke felt the ground shift slightly beneath his feet. He leapt away, fearful of plummeting into some terrible depths. Over by the cemetery wall, fragments of stone shot a foot into the air, leaving gaping holes where they once lay. He heard a howling sound, like wind rushing through a tunnel, and then something scratched his face, opening parallel wounds across his cheek and nose. He stumbled backward, raising his arms to protect himself, and watched as the front of his coat was torn open by unseen claws. He smelled foul breath, and thought for a moment that he caught a disturbance in the air, as of heat rising from summer ground. Slowly, its form became clearer, allowing Burke to see, however indistinctly, the shape of breasts and hips.

  Faced with a target, Burke struck. He pounded his fist into the figure before him. There was slight resistance before his fist passed through it, but he saw Emily Allinson’s head jerk backward. Blood spurted from her nose. Burke tried to punch again, but he was attacked from behind before he could do so. His scalp was torn apart, and he felt liquid warmth upon his neck. He tried to rise, but his right hand was wrenched away from him and forced into the air. A sharp pain ran through three of his fingers, and the impression of teeth appeared upon the skin of his knuckles. Over by the fence, he saw Elsie Warden’s teeth gritted.

  Elsie shook her head furiously, the pain increased, and the fingers were severed from Burke’s hand. His eyes closed, and he prepared to die. Then from somewhere in the darkness he heard a booming sound, and a familiar voice said:

  “That’ll be enough now.”

  Burke’s eyelids felt heavy, and blood dripped from the lashes when he finally managed to force them open. Sergeant Stokes stood by the cemetery wall, and he held a shotgun in his hands.

  You took your bloody time, thought Burke.

  He caught sight of a disturbance in the air once again, moving quickly toward Stokes. Once again, it seemed to him to approximate the shape of a woman. Its body was blackened, and long fair hair trailed behind it as it crawled along the ground to attack Stokes. He tried to warn his sergeant, but no words came. Instead, his own head was pulled back by the hair, and he felt teeth upon his neck.

  Stokes saw the presence when it was almost upon him. Instinctively, he swung the shotgun around and fired.

  For a moment, nothing happened, then, slowly, Emily Allinson’s mouth opened and a great gush of red poured from it. She rocked upon her feet, and the front of her green dress darkened. Burke heard a scream that seemed to come from the ground beneath him, echoed in turn by Elsie Warden. His hair was released and he fell to the dirt, a weight upon his back as he was used as a stepping stone by an unseen presence. Burke’s left hand reached out and grasped a rock upon the ground. With the last of his strength, he rose up and straddled the thing, bringing the rock down with all the force that he could muster upon its head. He could feel it moving beneath him, although he saw it only as a shimmering in the air. The stone hit its target, and it spasmed beneath him.

  Behind him, Elsie Warden’s skull cracked. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell down dead.

  Stokes was running toward him now, reloading the shotgun as he came. He was watching Mrs. Paxton, but she was retreating from them, her face a mask of horror and disgust. She turned from them and ran across the fields, making for the little cottage that she shared with her husband. Stokes shouted after her, warning her to stop.

  “Let her go,” said Burke. “We know where to find her.”

  And then he sank back on the ground, unconscious.

  Summer came, and the streets grew bright with the plumage of women.

  The two men met in a bar close to Paddington. It was quiet, the lunchtime drinkers now departed, and the evening crowd yet to arrive. One man was thinner and perhaps a little younger than the other, and wore a glove on his right hand. His companion placed two beers on the table before them, then took a seat against the wall.

  “How is the hand, sir?” asked Stokes.

  “It hurts a little still,” said Burke. “It’s odd. I can feel the ends of my fingers, even though they’re no longer there. Strange, don’t you think?”

  Stokes shrugged his shoulders. “To tell the truth, sir, I don’t know anymore what’s strange and what isn’t.”

  He raised his glass and took a long draft.

  “You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ any longer, you know,” said Burke.

&
nbsp; “Doesn’t seem natural calling you anything else, sir,” said Stokes. “I do miss being called ‘Sergeant,’ though. I’m trying to get the missus to call me it, just so I can hear it again, but she won’t agree.”

  “How is the bank?”

  “Quiet,” he said. “Don’t care much for it, to be honest, but it keeps me busy. The money helps, though.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it does.”

  They were silent, then, until Stokes said:

  “You still think we did right, not telling them what we saw?”

  The two men had not met in many months, but they had never been ones to dance around a subject of concern to them.

  “Yes,” said Burke. “They wouldn’t have believed us, even if we had. Mrs. Allinson had my blood and skin in her nails, and the bite marks on my hand matched those of Elsie Warden. They attacked me. That’s what the evidence said, and who were we to disagree with the evidence?”

  “Killing women,” said Stokes. “I suppose they had no choice but to send us on our way.”

  “No, I suppose they didn’t.”

  Burke looked at his former sergeant, and laid his good hand upon the older man’s arm.

  “But never forget: you didn’t kill women. You never fired at a woman, and I never struck one. Let your conscience be clear on that score.”

  Stokes nodded.

  “I hear they let the Paxton woman go,” he said.

  “She supported our story. Without her testimony, it would have gone much harder for us.”

  “Doesn’t seem right, though.”

  “She wished a man dead. I don’t think she expected that wish to come true, and I don’t believe that she wanted a part of what the other women were offering. She was weak, but she did nothing wrong. Nothing that we can prove, at any rate.”

  Stokes took another draft from his glass.

  “And that poor beggar, Allinson.”

  “Yes,” said Burke. “Poor Allinson.” The doctor had taken his own life in the weeks that followed the incidents at Underbury. He had never uttered a word of blame toward Stokes or Burke for the part they played in his wife’s death.

  Burke spent most of his waking hours thinking about that night, juggling facts with suspicions but never able to make them fit to his satisfaction into a cohesive theory. A village depleted of its men; the arrival of a strong woman, Mrs. Allinson, from outside; the threat posed to Elsie Warden and, perhaps, Mrs. Paxton by Mal Trevors; and the response to that threat, which had led to Trevors’s death and the subsequent attack on Burke and Stokes. Burke had not yet been able, or willing, to put a name to that response. He now knew more about the Underbury witches and their leader, Ellen Drury, burned as she hanged. Possession, the term that Stokes had used in the aftermath, was one possibility, but it seemed inadequate to Burke. To him, it was something more. He believed with all his heart that it came from within the three women, not solely from some outside force, but then he would have been the first to admit that he had never enjoyed a great understanding of the fairer sex.

  They finished their drinks, then parted on the street with vague promises to meet again, although both men understood that they would not. Burke walked in the direction of Hyde Park, while Stokes stopped at a flower stall to buy some carnations for his wife. Neither saw the small, dark-haired woman who stood in the shadows of a lane, watching them closely. The air shimmered around her, as though distorted by the summer heat, and a faint smell of roasting meat could be scented by passersby.

  Mrs. Paxton made her choice, and slowly began to follow Burke toward the park.

  The Inkpot Monkey

  Mr. Edgerton was suffering from writer’s block. It was, he quickly grew to realize, a most distressing complaint. A touch of influenza might lay up a man for a day or two, yet his mind could continue its ruminations. Gout might leave him racked with suffering, yet his fingers could still grasp a pen and turn pain to pennies. But this blockage, this barrier to all progress, had left Mr. Edgerton a virtual cripple. His mind would not function, his hands would not write, and his bills would not be paid.

  In a career spanning the best part of two decades he had never before encountered such an obstacle to his profession. He had, in that time, produced five moderately successful, if rather indifferent, novels; a book of memoirs that, in truth, owed more to invention than experience; and a collection of poetry that could most charitably be described as having stretched the capacities of free verse to the limits of their acceptability.

  Mr. Edgerton made his modest living from writing by the yard, based on the firm but unstated belief that if he produced a sufficient quantity of material, then something of quality was bound to creep in, if only in accordance with the law of averages. Journalism, ghostwriting, versifying, editorializing; nothing was beneath his limited capabilities. Yet, for the past six months, the closest he had come to a writing project was the construction of his weekly grocery list. A veritable tundra of empty white pages stretched before him, the gleaming nib of his pen poised above them like a reluctant explorer. His mind was a blank, the creative juices sapped from it to leave behind only a dried husk of frustration and bewilderment. He began to fear his desk, once his beloved companion but now reduced to the status of a faithless lover, and it pained him to look upon it. Paper, ink, imagination: all had betrayed him, leaving him lost and alone.

  At first, Mr. Edgerton had almost welcomed the opportunity to rest his creative muscles. He took coffee with those less successful than himself, safe in the knowledge that a brief hiatus in production was unlikely to damage his reputation among them as a prolific producer of adequate material. He attended the best shows, making sure that his presence was noted by taking his seat at the last possible moment. When questioned about his latest endeavors, he would merely smile mysteriously and tap the side of his nose with his index finger, a gesture employed by Mr. Edgerton to suggest that he was in the midst of some great literary endeavor, but which instead gave the unfortunate impression that a particularly irritating fragment of snuff had stubbornly lodged itself in his nostril.

  But after a time, Mr. Edgerton stopped attending musical performances, and his peers were forced to find other sources of amusement at the city’s coffeehouses. Conversations about writing began to pain him, and the sight of those whose creative juices flowed more freely than his own compounded his agony. He found himself unable to keep the bitterness from his voice as he spoke of such blessed souls, arousing immediately the suspicions of his fellow, less prolific, scribblers, for although they were more than willing to skewer another’s reputation with a barbed witticism or unflattering anecdote, they avoided the use of brute insults or, indeed, any form of behavior that might lead a casual listener to suspect that they were not their rivals’ superiors in talent, success, and critical acclaim. Mr. Edgerton came to fear that even his silences now gave him away, clouded over as they were with brooding and frustration, and so his social appearances grew fewer and fewer until at last they ceased altogether. In truth, his colleagues were not unduly troubled by his absence. They had reluctantly tolerated his modest success. Now, with the taint of failure upon him, they relished his discomfort.

  To further complicate matters, Mr. Edgerton’s wallet had begun to feel decidedly lightweight of late, and nothing will dampen a man’s ardor for life more than an empty pocket. Like a rodent gripped in the coils of a great constricting snake, he found that the more he struggled against his situation, the tighter the pressure upon him grew. Necessity, wrote Ovid, is the mother of invention. For Mr. Edgerton, desperation was proving to be the father of despair.

  And so, once again, he found himself wandering the streets, trawling the city’s great rivers of people in the hope of netting a single idea. In time, he came to Charing Cross Road, but the miles of shelved books only depressed him further, especially since he could find none of his own among their number. Head down, he cut through Cecil Court and made his way into Covent Garden in the faint hope that the vibrancy of the market might sp
ur his sluggish subconscious into action. He was almost at the Magistrates Court when something caught his eye in the window of a small antiques shop. There, partially hidden behind a framed portrait of Admiral Nelson and a stuffed magpie, was a most remarkable inkpot.

  The inkpot was silver, and about four inches tall, with a lacquered base adorned by Chinese characters. But what was most striking about it was the small, mummified monkey that perched upon its lid, its clawed toes clasped upon the rim and its dark eyes gleaming in the summer sunlight. It was obviously an infant of its species, perhaps even a fetus of some kind, for it was no more than three inches in height and predominantly gray in color, except for its face, which was blackened around the mouth as if the monkey had been sipping from its own ink. It really was a most ghastly creature, but Mr. Edgerton had acquired the civilized man’s taste for the grotesque and he quickly made his way into the darkened shop to inquire about the nature of the item in question.

  The owner of the business proved to be almost as distasteful in appearance as the creature that had attracted Mr. Edgerton’s attention, as though the man were somehow father to the monkey. His teeth were too numerous for his mouth, his mouth too large for his face, and his head too great for his body. Combined with a pronounced stoop to his back, his aspect was that of one constantly on the verge of toppling over. He also smelled decidedly odd, and Mr. Edgerton quickly concluded that he was probably in the habit of sleeping in his clothes, a deduction that briefly led the afflicted writer to an unwelcome speculation upon the nature of the body that lay concealed beneath the layers of unwashed clothing.

  Nevertheless, the proprietor proved to be a veritable font of knowledge about the items in his possession, including the article that had brought Mr. Edgerton into his presence. The mummified primate was, he informed the writer, an inkpot monkey, a creature of Chinese mythology. According to the myth, the monkey provided artistic inspiration in return for the residues of ink left in the bottom of the inkpot. As he spoke, the dealer placed the inkpot on the counter before him, like an angler skillfully spinning a lure before a hungry fish in the hope of drawing it onto his hook.