“If it doesn’t work,” I said, “and if they get suspicious, we’ll be nabbed on the spot.”
“Not likely. You’ll knock the block off anyone who gets in our way. And we can do a smash-and-grab, get the idol, and be away before they know what’s hit them.” Skinner laughed merrily, giving me the impression he might actually prefer a ruckus and us running out, clutching our prize, chased by outraged men in black uniforms. He liked to create a bit of chaos. But he would be pleased enough just to outsmart them with his ruse and his radiometer.
“Now,” said Skinner, looking again at the letterhead he had created. “What we need are some words to put on this. Why don’t you go to the library and see if you can get one of those books of professional form letters for us? You know the sort of thing. We’ve got to get it just right so as not to arouse suspicion.”
And so, with a little help from Skinner, over the next few days I drafted and wrote the letters in my best copperplate hand, perfected during my brief career as a legal clerk. One letter would not be enough; Skinner believed that verisimilitude required at least three, coming from more than one department. His approach was slapdash. I made careful note of the names of the supposed officials and their roles and used a different pen with subtly altered handwriting when writing from a different office.
It was a long and painstaking business, but there was little else to occupy us apart from a reduced round of routine duties. Stafford had lost interest in the other activities. The only interruption came when a taxi arrived late one afternoon with another urgent summons.
“Our social standing is rising by the day,” said Skinner. “He’s inviting us into the house now.”
On our third visit to the Firs, we were admitted into the main building by the butler and shown into a downstairs drawing room. I had little time to take in the details; the floor was a plain, polished parquet, and the lights were classical female figures holding globes aloft. Stafford stood in front of the marble fireplace, which had a spray of peacock feathers in place of a fire. He looked ill at ease.
“Good of you to come,” he said. “Another problem with Pierce, I’m afraid. We thought he was calming down, but…”
“Has he got out again?” asked Skinner.
“There has been a lot of noise from the cellar,” said Stafford. “I didn’t think it was advisable to go down on my own.”
“Very close quarters,” said Skinner, nodding wisely. “You did the right thing. Difficult to swing a shotgun around in a confined space, and if he grabs the barrel, the game’s up. You’d best leave this to us, sir.”
The prisoner was confined in a locked room in the cellar. There had been some loud sounds an hour previously, followed by silence. None of the staff dared to go down and check on him; the gardener who had previously assisted us said that indoors was none of his job.
Stafford waited at the top of the stairs, shotgun in hand, as we descended.
“I fear for young Pierce’s health,” said Skinner in an undertone as we descended the stairs. “He wasn’t a well man the last we saw of him. If we find a body, you can bet that muggins here is going to be asked to get rid of it.”
I had some previous experience in that line myself, but I held my tongue.
At the bottom of the stairs was a short corridor with a bare electric light bulb. Four doors led off it. The one on the left, normally a store for root vegetables from the garden, was Pierce’s prison cell.
“Evening, Pierce,” Skinner said. “Stubbs and I have come to see how you are. Your people are worried about you.”
There was no reply. No sound at all except our breathing.
Skinner slipped the key into the lock, and I readied myself. He had advised me that I must not let myself be bitten or spat upon; we would need to subdue Pierce quickly.
Skinner turned the handle, and I nudged the door open with my toe. Inside, it was dark. The light from the corridor outlined ambiguous shapes.
“Hello, Pierce,” I called.
“Let’s shed some light on the matter.” Skinner coolly reached around into the dark room, feeling for the light switch. It would have been the perfect opportunity for an ambush if Pierce had been lying in wait. Skinner was betting against that.
The light clicked on to reveal a low-ceilinged cellar room that was bare, apart from a pallet in one corner with a jug and similar items near to it. From our viewpoint outside the room, there was no sign of the prisoner.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“He can’t have done,” said Skinner. “He must be up against the wall, where we can’t see him, or behind the door.”
I nodded then jumped into the room and pivoted round in a crouch, ready to confront Pierce. He was not there.
The room smelled terrible—not just the lavatorial smell of a place where a man has been locked up with only the most primitive means of hygiene, but an acrid, chemical smell that stung my nose. Heating pipes ran along the far wall and up through the ceiling. A heavy chain, which had presumably restrained the prisoner, still hung from them, trailing on the mattress.
It did not take long to discover his means of escape. Airbricks between this cellar and the adjacent one had been removed and the mortar around them scraped away. The gap this labour had created did not look large enough for a man to crawl through, even a youth like Pierce, but there was no other explanation.
Skinner and I looked through to the dark beyond.
“It goes into the coal-hole,” I said as I made out the glitter of light off the facets of the coal piled high.
If the coal cellar had been full, removing the air bricks would have brought the pieces tumbling through into Pierce’s cell, but this being the height of summer, there were only a couple of feet of coal in the bottom of the hole.
“It must be fed from a chute above, at the back of the house,” I said. “Either he’s still in there, or he got out through the coal chute.”
Before we left, I went to look at the chains. I wished to glean something of how Pierce had freed himself. The answer was simpler and more grisly than I would have guessed. The heavy chain, which might usually have been used to secure gates or other openings, had been fastened around Pierce’s leg. He had not picked the lock, sawed through it with a file, or prised it apart; it was still secure. Pierce’s foot was still there in the chains, ripped off cleanly at the ankle. Like an animal that gnawed through its own leg to escape a trap, Pierce had torn himself loose.
As with the thumb in the flowerbed, there was no blood, and the edge of the torn flesh was dry and powdery rather than bloody. The foot might have been a lump of clay rather than a once-living thing.
“Christ almighty,” said Skinner, turning away from it.
The hatch from the corridor to the coal cellar was too small to admit a person, so we went upstairs, offering a few words of explanation to Stafford.
Above the coal-hole was a chute that led up to a manhole cover. To open the cover from above, we needed a lifter key—a T-shaped steel instrument with an end that fit into a recess in the manhole cover. After a brief search in the household, we duly discovered that tool.
The other staff stood back while I opened the cover and Skinner shone a torch into the cellar below. He flicked the light this way and that. The bare floor showed under a scant covering of coal; perhaps a man might have concealed himself under it, but there was a more obvious alternative.
“What do you reckon, Harry?” Skinner asked in an undertone.
A man standing in the coal-hole could take hold of the ends of the chute, and if he was wiry enough, he could wriggle up the narrow chute, bracing himself against the metal sides with arms and legs. At the top, opening the manhole cover would be simply a matter of pushing upwards with sufficient force. They lifter key was only needed to gain purchase from above; there was no bolt. A small, determined man might have done it, especially one who had already forced his way through that small hole in the wall.
I knelt down to inspect the sides of the manhol
e. There was a scraping of whitish, powdery material on one edge. Surely, they would have heard the cover move; but that was probably one of the loud noises that had alarmed Stafford.
“Gone,” said Skinner, eyeing the white residue.
“Are you telling me he got clean away?” asked Stafford, unable to believe it.
“He did get clean away, sir,” said Skinner.
Stafford turned from us but not before we saw the agitation in his features. He was far out of his depth in a situation he did not fully understand, and he had nobody to turn to—except us.
“Would you like us to track him down?” Skinner asked.
“By all means—if you can,” said Stafford, gazing out into the darkness over the lawns. I stood up. The summer air was fresh and sweet after the chemical reek from the cellars. “I don’t understand it. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go… we must get that idol as soon as possible.”
“We were planning on collecting it next week,” said Skinner.
“Make it tomorrow morning,” said Stafford, looking into the sky as though the stars were an hourglass that showed time running out. “I don’t care what it costs. It must be before tomorrow night.”
“First thing tomorrow morning,” Skinner affirmed.
“The Grail,” he said. “Time is short. If only I could explain to you what it means!”
I felt we already had some understanding of what it meant, based on its effects on Pierce and Miss De Vere’s warnings. Stafford must have read the doubt in our faces.
“The physical effect is not important. It is the spiritual effect, a transformation, a transubstantiation…” He raised his hands and lowered them again. “A link between man and heaven.”
We left him looking up into the sky and wondering at the stars.
To Skinner, the turn of events was not unwelcome if it meant a little extra money. And I did not doubt that finding Pierce would be another task above and beyond the call of duty for which an additional gratuity would be forthcoming.
The butler escorted us down the gravel path, and my eyes sought out the greenhouse, which had been bursting with unnatural growth. It was empty. The lush vegetation had vanished, turned to powder, just as Pierce probably would be in a few days.
“The kindest thing would have been to put him out of his misery,” Skinner said with a brutal simplicity. “I know men who survived gas attacks and died slow. Ah, there you go, looking all offended now, but you know it’s the truth.”
The butler solemnly unlocked the great front gate for us. Skinner inspected the bars as he did so. They were too close-set for any except the smallest and skinniest burglar to squeeze through, but the gap was not so narrow as the opening in the coal-hole wall.
“Don’t bother locking the stable door, pal,” Skinner told the butler. “The horse has bolted. But we’ll get him back for you.”
Chapter Sixteen: Streatham Fair
I had suggested renting a van for our expedition. It would be easy enough to get an anonymous black vehicle, one that might have belonged to any government function. I felt it would make our entrance more convincing, but Skinner said it was unnecessary, as nobody would be following us in and out of the museum. He did, however, agree to a taxi to throw off any of Elsie Granger’s mob who might be dogging our footsteps.
As we crossed the car park, Skinner jerked a thumb at a glazier’s van. “That might have been an easier way of gaining admission. Plumbers, builders, glaziers, gasmen. All you need are some overalls, and you can get in anywhere.”
I wondered why the glazier would be visiting when my eye fell on another vehicle.
“More importantly,” I said, “we have been anticipated.”
Skinner followed my gaze to the limousine parked across the way. The passenger window was rolled down. When we hesitated, a red-nailed hand beckoned us over.
“Morning, ma’am,” said Skinner, touching his hat. “You received my message?”
“The idol’s gone,” Miss De Vere said. “The museum was broken into last night. The case with the idol was broken, among others. They haven’t noticed the idol is missing yet.”
“Did the night watchman see—”
“Oh, he saw something all right,” she said. “When we could eventually get him to talk—and it wasn’t easy—he said he’d seen a mummy.”
“A mummy?” Skinner asked.
“Pale, ghastly, withered. Usual get-up.”
“How did you get involved?” It was not my place to ask, being only the assistant of an assistant, but I was carried away by events.
“I’m a psychologist,” she said patiently, “specialising in trauma cases. Naturally, the police recommended me as I happened to be in the area.”
“This mummy,” said Skinner. “He didn’t happen to have a foot missing?”
“It was hobbling along with some difficulty,” she said. “But it hit the night watchman hard enough to crack his ribs. He was in a state of shock, and I had to sedate him.” She gave an ironic smile. “They’re checking that all the mummies are still there, just to make sure.”
“Do you know what it means?” Skinner asked.
“Yeah,” she said in a tired voice. “The flock are coming home to roost. You’d better get in.”
The limousine had the same arrangement of seating as a taxi, so we were able to sit facing Miss De Vere on folding chairs, presumably intended for attendants or bodyguards. Even with my bulk, the interior was roomy.
The driver faced rigidly away from us, eyes front, seemingly deaf.
We waited for Miss De Vere to speak.
“We have two sites of infection,” she said. “The meteorite inside the idol, and a contaminated source of water. Probably a pool, a well, or a spring that your gipsy woman knew about. If Pierce takes the idol to the water, they will combine. We need to stop that.”
She stopped, apparently bored at having to recite this to us.
“Because they’ll turn this place into the Sahara Desert?” Skinner prompted.
“Perhaps.”
“And the gipsy, Madam Hester,” I said. “There was a fire…”
“One less problem to worry about,” she said.
“We need to stop Pierce from getting to the water,” said Skinner. “How do we find him? Dogs…?”
“You won’t find him,” she said. “What you need to do is locate the source of the water and wait for him. He can’t move around in daylight.”
I forbore to point out that Madam Hester had been our best lead to finding the water.
“If I may ask another question,” I said. Miss De Vere turned her gaze on me as though I was an irksomely persistent child. “When one of these meteorites comes down to earth, unless it’s inside a metal container, it attracts lightning. The material disintegrates and gets into the water and may be absorbed by living things, changing them. Is that correct?”
She moistened her lips and paused before answering. “It does change things. If you want to expand your word power, the correct term is teratogenic. It eats through and replaces adult tissue, and it mutates growing tissue. It… makes monsters.”
“What I do not understand,” I said, “is how and why the two pieces would come together. Is there an intelligence guiding it? “
She sighed then spoke in quick, clipped tones.
“You might say it has a mind, or it is a mind. Not human. More like an ants’ nest. A million fragments, discontinuous but cohesive.”
A million fragments. Pierce had talked of Legion in his brain, Legion being the group of demons that Jesus cast out of the Gadarene swine. Before I could frame my next question, Miss De Vere spoke again.
“But that’s not the point. Your Mr Darwin was pretty clear about survival… kill or be killed. When a seed lands on a desert island, it either grows into a plant and makes more seeds, or it dies. We stamp seeds out.”
“If it’s intelligent, we could communicate with it… perhaps.”
A muscle in her jaw flexed, then relaxed. “It’s not
like us,” she said calmly. “It doesn’t know we even exist. It will destroy us without thinking. But actions speak louder than words. Extermination is easy to understand, even for something that doesn’t think the way we do.”
“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” said Skinner in a bad American accent.
Miss De Vere did not smile.
“If the Indians had killed every white man who landed, they’d still own America,” she said. “You know the word ambiguous? How about unambiguous? I’d like to send it an unambiguous message.”
“I see,” I said.
“You’ll need to neutralise what’s gotten into the gardener,” she said, taking something from her bag and passing it to me. It looked like a boiled sweet wrapped in cellophane, making me feel more than ever like a child with a teacher.
“Does he have to eat it?” I asked.
“Just throw it at him.”
I held it up. It might have been a translucent yellow-brown barley sugar round as a marble. I tried to pass it to Skinner, as leader of the party, but he refused.
“If only we had some way of finding the water.” I recalled Madam Hester’s tea reading and Yang’s divination. “Can you do anything?”
“I am doing something.” She looked at Skinner. “You know how to find it.”
It was the first I had heard of it. But perhaps Miss De Vere was more expert at reading people’s unspoken thoughts.
“Assuming your offer of a bounty if we can get the idol still holds good,” he said, smoothing his moustache, “I think I have an idea.”
“How?” I asked.
Skinner smiled enigmatically.
Miss De Vere nodded, more to herself than to us, and pushed the latch to open the car door. “I’ll see you boys tomorrow when you have it.”
Outside in the car park, Skinner seemed unusually animated. “Harry my boy,” he said, slapping me on the shoulder, “you and I are going to the fair.”
Alien Stars: A Harry Stubbs Adventure Page 16