Chapel Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  In turn, Irene knew she would never hear the end of it if I had been left behind while Elizabeth accompanied her. At least Buffalo Bill had no qualms about a female presence. Apparently the harsh life of the frontier had forced women to rely more upon themselves and had made men less aware of their duty to protect them from all unseemliness. If the Rothschild agents objected to women, it did not show. They seemed to regard their role as a rear guard, ceding the night’s action to the odd commanding trio of Irene, the famed Indian fighter, and his exotic former foe turned employee.

  The rest of us stood at a respectful distance as the two plainsmen scoured the area with lanterns, eyes, and noses.

  Although I found the process distasteful to watch, they managed to produce evidence where I would have sworn there was none. While Red Tomahawk circled in the empty space like a dog (for good reason I was to learn later), Buffalo Bill made similar circles widening out from what had been the fringes of the camp.

  He returned with a pottery bottle that could have been as old as the Romans or as new as last week.

  This he first showed to Red Tomahawk, who sniffed it at great length and with an almost-snobbish seriousness, like a Frenchman judging a new wine, then nodded and pronounced a judgment the onlookers could not hear.

  Buffalo Bill moved to the fringes again and, lantern bobbing in his hand, carefully made his way back to us women.

  “Red Tomahawk says this held firewater,” he noted on arrival, “though I can’t smell whiskey and he admits that he has never smelled or tasted a spirit like this before. He says the same odd odor was present in the cavern near here where the murdered woman was found and in the bloodied cellar you explored near the Parc Monceau. You ladies care to see if you have a better nose for liquor than an old scout?”

  I certainly did not wish to play human bloodhound, but Elizabeth nodded eagerly. First Irene took the crude bottle and lifted its small mouth to her nose.

  She nodded at last. “I smell something faintly caustic, but can’t identify it. It could be spirits, it could be poison.”

  “Some say they are one and the same thing,” I pointed out.

  Buffalo Bill laughed as if I had committed a great witticism. “Truly spoken, Miss H. I’d guess it’s some crude homemade variety of pure alcohol, so unmannered it bears no odor of any aging process or wooden cask. I have sampled the products of England and France, but must admit they were all of splendid vintage, and all released a telltale and most persuasive perfume.”

  Elizabeth sniffed eagerly at the rude lip, but was unable to add anything to the speculations, as if a green girl could.

  I waved away the bottle in her offering hand. “I know so little of spirits that the only liquid I can recognize by aroma is good English tea,” I said.

  In the meantime, Red Tomahawk had returned to us. He turned to point out areas of the site. “Wagon left, loaded, with many people and dogs on foot beside it. I will follow.”

  At that he trotted off along the parade route, lantern in hand, pausing frequently to study the frequent horse droppings and to sniff at the foundations of buildings along the route.

  “What is he tracking?” Irene asked Buffalo Bill as we followed at a respectful twenty paces behind the Red Man. “Surely no footprints can be traced on this ground.”

  “I agree that the exposition grounds look like they’ve been trampled by a buffalo stampede, but even then a good tracker can find a sign or two. Red Tomahawk doesn’t have to do that. He’s following the most reliable trail markers on the planet: the Gypsies’ dogs. They are sure to mark any spot where another dog has left its scent. Dogs being dogs, that’s every few feet or so.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that we have an inadvertent pack of bloodhounds working for us.”

  “Exactly. And our own bloodhound to trail them.”

  The Indian had stopped and held up a hand to halt our party. Then he nodded to Colonel Cody.

  “Only we four should go scout what Red Tomahawk has found,” he declared, as if reading the Indian’s mind.

  Irene turned and instructed the men behind us to wait.

  We approached the area diffidently, Buffalo Bill in the lead, then Irene, with Elizabeth and I bringing up the rear in tandem, neither wanting the other to be the first to see and hear.

  Indian and scout conferred in a blend of English and some native tongue, with Buffalo Bill translating by pointing to what—to me—were meaningless marks in the trampled turf.

  “The wagon stopped here. See the deep heel marks? A man leaped out.”

  “How can he tell the marks weren’t made earlier by someone else?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Because the parade had already passed when the Gypsy wagon left by a reverse route. They made the latest spoor and thus the freshest impressions. Besides, Red Tomahawk detects a scent of the same spilled liquid here. The boots move onto less-trod-upon ground, toward the river beyond the promenades. And, he says, other feet have gone in that direction recently, perhaps two or three hours ago.”

  “You are saying,” Irene mused, “that one man from the Gypsy troupe left them here to join other men who had been gathering somewhere below on the river embankment.”

  Buffalo Bill consulted Red Tomahawk in the same guttural language, then turned back to us.

  “People, yes, but Red Tomahawk says several were women.”

  “Women!” I hadn’t intended to insert myself into the discussion, but was too shocked to keep quiet. “If women are meeting men below the promenades for some lascivious end, and if the man who left the Gypsy wagon is following them, he will have victims for the picking.”

  “It is indeed possible,” Elizabeth said. “Jack the Ripper frequented the one area of London where prostitutes were in profuse, open evidence. If there is a clandestine meeting place here at the exposition for such activities, he would naturally hunt those grounds, and that is why the woman was found in the nearby catacombs.”

  “Perhaps,” Irene said, sounding doubtful, “but I suspect it’s not nearly as simple as that. Colonel Cody, can you ask Red Tomahawk to lead us where this man has gone, but quietly so we do not lose our ability to spy upon him?”

  The scout chuckled. “You are talking about a war party sneaking up on an encampment. Red Tomahawk could do that in his sleep. But tell those city fellows to stay well behind us, and only to come forward if called.”

  Irene went back to the cluster of confused men to do just that. While she conversed in French with them, I shook my head.

  “What is the matter, Nell?” Elizabeth inquired, shivering with chill and excitement and stamping her numbing feet on the ground like an impatient horse.

  “French to the back of us, Pony or Sue or whatever breed of wild Red Indian I have heard of to the front of us. Was there ever such an odd hunting party?”

  “Pawnee,” Elizabeth corrected me. “And you forget to include the Romany language of the Gypsies. I find it hard to believe that Jack the Ripper is a Gypsy, though. You saw the women dancing; some were girls of barely twelve or thirteen. Plenty of women are freely available to Gypsy men; they have no inhibitions about that sort of thing, men or women. The book by Krafft-Ebing points to a killer who has little access to women, or who hates himself for wishing to consort with them.”

  “You are saying that Jack the Ripper has a conscience.”

  “That is one way to put it, I suppose. I would rather say that Jack the Ripper has a very confused conscience.”

  “That is exactly it, Pink.” Irene had come up during our discussion. “A man with a seriously confused conscience is a danger to himself and others. But, look, Red Tomahawk has shuttered his lantern and is moving down the embankment behind the Javanese temple building. It will be darker and steeper if we follow. Let us hold hands.”

  The ghostly outline of the panorama ship’s strings of electric lights lay along the waterline only a hundred feet from the Esplanade, and lent the area some slight illumination. With shock I recognized the moving panorama att
raction that had earlier been too crowded to see, now shut up and illuminated for the night.

  The ship’s faint glow made Buffalo Bill’s buff-colored fringed suit into a kind of will-o’-the-wisp to follow. Soon our bootheels were digging into soft dirt, and our downward progress developed an impetus of its own we were unable to slow, only our clasped hands keeping all three upright.

  We were forced to check our breakneck progress as we came abreast of the plainsmen on level ground. We glanced behind to see the bristled silhouettes of the Rothschild agents on the brow of the embankment above us.

  Red Tomahawk was squatting on the ground, the dimmed lantern beside him, shaking his feathered head from side to side.

  “Rock,” Buffalo Bill whispered to us. “No tracks.”

  “Not rock,” Irene answered in a hushed but triumphant tone, “but granite.” She nodded to the foundation of the Javanese temple’s elaborate upper stories. It was a cellar wall of hard stone. “There is a way beyond that wall,” she said, “and probably a natural cavern beyond that.”

  Buffalo Bill conveyed that conviction to Red Tomahawk, who leaped up and on silent moccasins approached the wall and began running his hands over it like a blind man feeling a door for the entry knob.

  He eventually moved to the wild bushes springing from the embankment base and suddenly stood upright, brandishing a trophy high in one hand.

  For a wild moment I feared a scalp, but it was only another of the crude pottery bottles he had found at the Gypsy camp.

  When we tiptoed nearer to see, he pulled aside the shrubbery to reveal a gaping natural opening in the rock perhaps four feet high.

  Without a word, Buffalo Bill sprang back up the embankment and brought the agents to our sides.

  Whispered consultation produced a plan: the plainsmen would lead, the women follow, the agents bring up the rear, weapons at the ready.

  No one said it, but we women were obviously to be sheltered in the middle of a front and a rear guard.

  Red Tomahawk bowed so low that even his penultimate feather would not brush stone and entered the tunnel.

  Buffalo Bill doffed his hat to follow suit.

  Irene and Elizabeth exchanged glances. Their broad-brimmed hats were affixed ‘til death did them part with foot-long pins and would only be a nuisance in their hands. They bent over deeply to enter the yawning hole.

  My cap was no problem and the Rothschild men wore bowlers, so we all made appropriate obeisance and instantly found ourselves in a dark passage. Both Red Tomahawk and Buffalo Bill (somehow I was finding it easier to use those astonishing names than I ever had been able to accept “Pink,” even now when I knew the nickname was a clue and not simply an affront to convention) had darkened their lanterns.

  Our first impression of the tunnel was a warm exhalation of air that implied it led deep into the earth. Then came the eerie thrum of sound, of distant chanting. A single voice droned for a few instants. Many voices responded.

  It sounded like nothing so much as a Roman High Mass.

  This sound paralyzed us all, perhaps for different reasons.

  Whatever we had expected, it was not ceremony, although Irene, perhaps, was the least surprised of us all.

  Nor had we expected the scent that wafted along on the warm air: candle wax.

  Yet again, this was not truly surprising. We had seen candle stumps and candle droppings on other sites, but had thought them necessary for light. Now we had to wonder.

  Of course we could not consult, bowed over as we were in the narrow tunnel, so we simply crept forward one by one, lost in our own speculations and worries.

  I wondered what the Indian warrior thought, if these sounds and mission were reminiscent of conflict-filled life on the frontier . . . if Buffalo Bill relished this return to his early scouting days . . . if the Rothschild men, city dwellers all who no doubt knew mob violence and secret cabals, could countenance the pursuit of people who retreated to caves for whatever Godless purposes they might have.

  Our path led upward and finally leveled out. Here the tunnel grew higher if not much wider, and we were able to walk upright, all but Buffalo Bill.

  A light was visible ahead: a bright yellow-white light. No one in our party by now could resist the pull of that unearthly vision so deep under the exposition grounds. Now the path led downward again, as if to Hell, and we walked until the light swelled to loom before us like an insubstantial door.

  Beyond it the chanting had stopped to be replaced by wild screams and cries, by the sound of people contending madly.

  Red Tomahawk assumed a crouch deep enough to follow dog markings and crept into the light, dodging quickly to the right of the opening. A moment later his left arm appeared, beckoning.

  Buffalo Bill replicated his beastlike posture and crept after him.

  Again a fringed arm appeared, also beckoning.

  Irene dropped to hands and knees and crawled after them, then Elizabeth.

  I hesitated. The cries and moans had reached a hellish pitch. I suspected that people so forgetful of all civilization would hardly notice our stealthy approach, especially if they were all murdering each other, as I suspected.

  No arms beckoned further. I glanced back at the Rothschild agents. One stepped up beside me.

  “What next?” he asked me in French.

  I didn’t know what to answer, and realized I shouldn’t know until I followed the others. I told him to wait. “Arrêtez,” I said in desperation, but he understood my meaning and held back.

  I dropped to my knees, pretending I was in the nursery and playing bear with the youngest children. Then I shambled into the light and heat awaiting beyond the opening.

  At first my dark-accustomed eyes could only water and blink. Noise filled the cavern and echoed back and forth until it sounded like all the souls of the damned were confined in this one space.

  I saw the others, still crouched, peering over a natural barrier of rocks into the scene below.

  I crawled near to Elizabeth and cautiously leaned over to view the cavern floor.

  Candles sat everywhere, the floor, on scattered rocks, in niches in the walls, spangling the dark stone with light. A blazing fire in the center provided the fiery furnace that lit even the cavern roof.

  Beside it stood a single robed figure, babbling in some foreign language, perhaps even a language not of this earth, hands and head lifted to . . . I hesitate to say Heaven . . . lifted to the ceiling of that devil’s cave.

  Around it danced and screamed a dozen naked figures, trampling their dark cast-off robes, more than half of them women, I am ashamed to say, the light cast by the flames licking at their writhing, glistening bodies.

  One naked man stood on the fringe with a whip, lashing anyone who lagged in the wild dance. Rivulets of blood as well as sweat streaked the quivering flesh, but some dancers collapsed to the cavern floor despite the lash. Then others fell atop them and they writhed and screamed until the vision of Hell was even more vivid than any Renaissance master could paint.

  The only ones untouched by the madness were a trio in monks’ robes who stood watching by the far cavern wall like an Inquisition panel of judges.

  The frantic motion, heat, noise made it hard to absorb the scene, what was happening besides utter madness.

  The leader had ripped open his shirt and trousers and hurled himself onto the writhing figures on the ground, a bed of naked abandoned women. One woman screamed as if being murdered at the bottom of a pile of three men, then two pulled her by her arms from the ground and laid her over a large rock. The third man drew a knife from the tangle of discarded clothes and bent over her.

  I couldn’t believe what I saw. Even as I write this now, many days later in my own desperate circumstances, my pen stops and fails to follow the will of my mind and my hand, my resolve to record all that I saw, however awful.

  The man took the knife and cut off her breast.

  I couldn’t help myself. I stood and screamed, my sound lost in the
shriek from the mutilated woman. The entire world seemed to be screaming as everyone around me stood.

  An ungodly whoop beside me, a blood-chillingly long, savage howl overcame even the din below.

  The man below with the knife lifted his bloody trophy, then stood paralyzed as a hatchet blade bloomed in the middle of his back. He fell, but the writhing, moaning, gabbling masses on the cavern floor were lost to everything around them, even when Buffalo Bill hurled a lantern into the middle of the fire, sending wood shards and sparks flying like fireworks.

  A pistol discharged, Irene’s, shot into the air. The Rothschild men pounded into the cavern, then stopped in horror.

  I noticed that the observers along the wall had vanished.

  Red Tomahawk, still howling, leaped over the barrier of rocks to the floor some fifteen feet below. Buffalo Bill followed him, and the Rothschild agents finally gathered their wits and ran down the ramp leading below, pistols pointed but yet unfired.

  The leader pushed himself free of the twining limbs of three wild-eyed women and started upright, looking like the only one who would give fight.

  “We must help that woman,” Irene muttered, starting after the men.

  Another wild man was charging from the fray, pupils lost in the rolling whites you see on a terrified horse, running toward us.

  Despite the half-clothed form and wild eyes and hair, I recognized James Kelly!

  And he seemed to recognize me!

  I saw the child in the wood, cringing away from the blade. I saw the woman on the street, screaming into the curtain of her own blood that fell red and heavy from her throat like a glittering garnet cascade.

  And always I saw the gaunt dark figure at the corner of my eye, the crow flying, the raven croaking, the ghost moaning, the monster laughing.

  He had always been there, and I had always chosen not to see him.

  Now he was looking right at me.