The Herne looked at the roll of cured skin for a long time. Then he hunkered down on his haunches next to the Sluagh.
“Tell me about this Mountfellon. Start at the beginning.”
CHAPTER 3
THE BLOODY HOMECOMING
On hearing that the Sluagh had committed an atrocity within his most private and hitherto invulnerable sanctum sanctorum, Francis Blackdyke, Viscount Mountfellon, had returned to Gallstaine Hall with a speed that had half killed his horses and broken the pelvis of his unfortunate coachman. Mountfellon had sat in the back of the speeding conveyance seething with anger and outrage. His mind, always agile, leapt from imagined horror to imagined horror, each worse than the other. He had bound his home and his study with bands of iron. It was inconceivable that any supernatural creatures who were, every reputable source agreed, repelled by iron should have gained entry. In fact, as a man of science he had seen empiric evidence of the phenomenon in the experimental chambers The Citizen had created beneath the house on Chandos Place. He had seen how a captive Sluagh’s flesh had almost seemed to boil as it tried to avoid the application of the hated metal in the form of a horseshoe bought in expressly for the purpose.
It was also a horseshoe that had led to the injury to the coachman, who had dared to slow the coach on the high road since, as he shouted down to the noble lord, he thought the lead horse had thrown a fore-shoe and that they would need to stop in the next village to have it replaced. Mountfellon had been fuming about the reported fact that some of his highly prized specimens had been desecrated and removed, and the coachman’s solicitude for the dumb animals under his charge was the straw that broke his master’s hold on rationality. Instead of answering, Mountfellon had simply torn open the door of the carriage while it was still in motion, hauled himself up onto the driver’s box and, without a word had grabbed the unfortunate Phaeton by the Belcher handkerchief around his neck and hurled him clean off the seat and into the road. The very large and surprised man tumbled through the air in a particularly ungainly fashion, his double-caped box-coat flapping and all four limbs flailing with all the unhandsome gracelessness of a hurled turkey. The shriek of pain that he emitted as he hit the hardtop and fractured himself was lost behind the noble lord who did not once deign to look back as he whipped the horses into a breakneck gallop and thundered towards Rutlandshire with all the reckless speed of a modern Jehu.
His arrival at Gallstaine was accompanied by much wailing and gnashing of teeth as those servants who had dared to remain and wait for the anticipated storm of recrimination bore the brunt of his rage, an anger unabated by the fact that those who had let the Sluagh and their mute companion into the building had had the sense to leave without notice and look for safer employment elsewhere. The only footman who had been a witness to the intrusion and who remained had had his mind turned so completely by what he had seen and been forced to do that he was quite comprehensively bestraught, useful for nothing more than sitting in a dim-lit corner of the stable and dribbling into a tin cup that one of the horse-boys had been kind enough to give him for the purpose.
Mountfellon looked at him in disgust on arrival and then went up to his collections. He came straight back down and thrashed the unfortunate lunatic until he broke the whip, and would have done more had not he injured his own shoulder with the fury of his onslaught.
He then staggered back up into the main house and took a more detailed but no less wide-eyed appraisal of the comprehensive outrage visited on his meticulously arranged collections: previously the cathedral-like immensity of his great hall had been an ordered space, held in a kind of muffled aspic, the furniture covered in drop cloths, the chandeliers above bagged neatly against the unnecessary accretion of dust, the marble floor kept shiny by regular sweeping. Now the great staircase that swung up to the first floor was scattered with shards and debris, glass, insects and bone fragments giving a clue to the likely state of the long corridor of specimen cabinets beyond.
“Didn’t like to clear up afore you got here, Milord,” mumbled the remaining sane footman who had not been present on the night in question. “In case we damaged some of the insects and …”
Mountfellon backhanded him so hard the blood from his burst nose spattered across the marble as he landed in a shocked pile against the balustrades. The few servants who had gathered at what they had deemed a safe distance back in the hall hurriedly reassessed their estimate and faded even further back into the shadows.
Mountfellon walked carefully up the stairs, quivering with outrage at what each new step brought into view. The long corridor leading to what had once been a ballroom but had long since been converted into his study had been a source of immeasurable pride to him. It had been physical evidence of the rational precision with which his mind had achieved a complete understanding of comparative anatomy. Walking between the cabinets had provided a representative taxonomy of living organisms ranging in size from meticulously pinned flies and beetles to the flensed and bleached skeletons of the great apes, human and even suprahuman animals at the other end. All the specimens had been neatly displayed in carefully considered order, pinned and pegged out in pleasing patterns with painstakingly labelled precision. None of that remained: in its place was chaos and confusion, a mess more akin to the aftermath of a frenzied riot in a madhouse. The front of each cabinet had been smashed, and the contents within methodically stripped and tipped out onto the floor. He gave up trying to avoid treading on any of the once-prized specimens and crunched his way onward, slipping and sliding over the drift of glass shards which shaled the marble floor. If he had not known as an inevitable law of physics that running would lead to him falling, he would have sprinted towards the ironbound doors hanging so treacherously open at the far end. The corridor, he felt, was prologue: the true horror of his violation lay beyond those doors. The skeletons of the great apes were unmolested, though the vitrines behind which they stood were as broken as all of them. Beyond them, the final two skeletons were missing. The Sluagh one had had the flayed and cured skin pinned out on the wall behind it to display the totality of the tattoos that covered it. He imagined the Sluagh had taken them.
The fate of the human skeleton from the specimen cabinet was revealed once he entered the iron-gridded immensity of his study. At first he was shocked by the lack of broken glass, the absence of any real mess. He had thought his great cliff of irreplaceable books would be tumbled and perhaps torn or burnt, yet there they were, as he had left them. The great oak dining table still stood foursquare where he had left it, untipped and still containing the unmolested neatness of the piles of paper he surrounded himself with. The greater shock was of course the absence, the thing not there.
The great long case that had contained the Sluagh’s Banner was gone from its place against the wall. Just above it, the Sluagh had pinned the human skeleton, driving a dagger that normally did duty as a letter opener on the table through one of the eye sockets, deep into the plaster beyond. It hung slightly lopsided, and held something in its teeth. He reached out and pulled it. It was a letter, or rather an envelope. It was the envelope in which Templebane had sent the note summoning him to London for his first failed attempt on The Oversight and the Safe House, the ruse that had hinged on the French girl that The Citizen had provided as bait, the glint. The Sluagh had outlined the seal on the letter in what looked like blood. The central motif, impressed into the wax, was another skull and the reminder “AS I AM, YOU WILL BE.”
There was no doubt in his mind. It was more than a message.
It was a promise.
Mountfellon crumpled the paper and kept a grip on it. Then he went to the desk and sat there, breathing heavily, reaching for self-control and the power to engage his rational mind, the great tool of which he was normally so proud and in control.
“Think,” he hissed between clamped teeth. “Think now … how did this happen …?”
The banner had been a thing of power, or if not an actual power he could measure empiri
cally, it was thought to be so by the Sluagh, and belief and sentiment were compelling in equally strong but less measurable ways. Its value to him had been in its antiquity, its associations and crucially its usefulness as a bargaining counter with which to make the Sluagh do his bidding. He was shocked to find they had managed to pierce his two lines of protection, the ironbound room within the ironstone house, and the stream he had had diverted and split as it flowed through his parkland so that the house was guarded by what was in effect a flowing moat. It was inconceivable that the Sluagh had overcome both the prohibition represented by cold iron and that of running water. And yet the box the banner had been rolled in was itself iron. And they had carried it away.
“So,” he fumed. “A posteriori reasoning says iron is no longer toxic to them.”
The thought gave him a shudder of anxiety, immediately and rigorously suppressed.
“But the water,” he said, rising. “But the water.”
He crossed to the floor-to-ceiling shutters and unshackled the pins with which the iron straps that held them closed were fastened. Metal shrieked against unlubricated metal as he pulled them open. Dust motes swirled in the low evening sunlight thus allowed to enter the room, and he moved through it to stand at the window and look out. The view over the charming parkland thus revealed, bathed in the flattering golden glow of the dropping sun, did not calm him: instead it made him scowl and then, as he looked closer and checked that what he appeared to be seeing was real and not a trick of the light, he snarled and stormed back out of the room.
One side of the bifurcated stream was flowing merrily. The other was dry. As he forgot himself and began to run down the debris-strewn corridor, his feet flew from under him and he fell. He reached wildly for support and crashed into the cabinet with the great ape skeletons in it, destroying the display as he smashed through and landed awkwardly against the back wall. He sliced a hand on the glass littering the case bottom, and tore his coat. He pushed himself to his feet and shook his head, a terrible look of white fury sharpening his already hatchet-like features. He grasped the long thigh bone of a gorilla in his bloodied fist, hefting it like a club. And then, careful this time, he strode inexorably down the corridor looking for the head gardener.
The head gardener had one great advantage over all the other servants in that he was able to keep out of the line of fire by having an entirely legitimate reason not to be in the house itself. He had capitalised on this by deciding, should the furious noble lord come looking for him, to be found hard at work on a project that he felt would be approved of: he knew that Mountfellon was adamant that the streams which circled the hall should flow freely, and was sure that his exacting employer could not but approve when he found his gardener in the act of sedulously following those wishes. Thus far he was, in outline, correct. But the devil is in the details, and in this case the detail was the means by which the unfortunate horticulturalist had decided to ensure the channels remained unblocked by weed and silt. The intention was good; the execution fatally disastrous, for he had closed the sluice gate on the easternmost stream in order to dam the water and allow him and his boy to get down into the dry bed and take out the choking weed and the clogging silt, deepening the watercourse and speeding the future rate of flow. The gardener had initiated the project in order to curry favour with his irascible master. He expected, if not smiles, at least a grudging acknowledgement that he had been well served.
He was therefore particularly shocked when the evening sun was blotted out by the unmistakable silhouette of Mountfellon who seemed to be carrying some kind of cudgel, and the calm of the evening was broken by a low hiss that said:
“What the devil do you imagine you’re doing, you old cretin?”
“Assuring the flow, Milord,” said the old cretin with a note of understandable resentment at the title he had just been given. “Assuring the flow, as you like it.”
Mountfellon jumped into the dry bed of the stream and stood much too close for the gardener’s comfort.
“You do not assure the flow, you cunny-faced blockhead, by stopping it!”
“Milord, I had to …” began the gardener.
But the world never knew what it was he had had to do, because the noble lord lashed the gorilla’s thigh bone into the side of his head with enough force that the skull shattered and he dropped into the slime and lay there, face down and twitching. Mountfellon watched until the twitching stopped, and then climbed out of the stream and walked back up to the point at which it split, where the culvert had been closed. He sighed and looked around for a servant to turn the great wheel that would open it again, but seeing none he gripped it himself and expended a further measure of his great frustration in wrenching it round and round until it was fully open and the dammed water freed to flow back into the dry bed of the stream.
The water found the body of the gardener and worried at it as it rose, loosening the grip of gravity and beginning to carry it downstream along with it.
Mountfellon didn’t give it a second glance as he walked past it and strode back to the house.
As he entered the hall, he surprised the stable boy who was hurrying along the servants’ corridor. The boy stopped and stared at him in shocked silence, too awestruck to step out of Mountfellon’s way.
“What are you doing?” said Mountfellon.
“Beg pardon, sir, was looking for Mr. Turner, sir,” gasped the stable boy. Turner was the coachman, and a great hero to the boy.
“Mr. Fucking Turner is walking home,” said Mountfellon. And then as an afterthought: “If you want to be useful, go and get the gardener out of the stream. He’s fallen and dashed his brains out, and I don’t want him blocking the culvert.”
And with that he pushed the boy aside and strode back to the desolation of his collection, determined to stay within his protective moat until he had worked out how to apply the same principal of retributive attack to those who had caused it: Sluagh, Oversight or both, he would destroy them.
CHAPTER 4
THE RUNNING DOG
The bitch Shay was a well-known sight on the Boston waterfront, being one of the parochial curiosities frequently shown off to visiting out-of-towners as she ran hither and yon, as often as not carrying something in her mouth. It was held to be a small marvel and a quaint source of local pride that the Tittensors had so cleverly trained the dog to scamper between their shipping office and the quayside carrying notes quite as effectively as if she were a regular messenger boy or carrier pigeon.
Some wharfside loafer had put the word about that the rangy hound was known to be a descendant of one of the two luckless canines executed for witchcraft alongside the twenty human victims variously hanged or pressed to death during the puritan frenzy of persecution that had taken place just up the coast in Salem a century and a half ago. This detail of the dog’s pedigree, whether true or not, only added to the lustre that accompanied her reputation as a neighbourhood marvel: what was undeniable was not only that Shay was faster than any two-legged runner, having the blood of Irish Wolfhounds in her tangled ancestry but, being a mongrel, was smarter than any three pure-bred dogs put together.
Her passage, carried out at a fast lope through the crowded harbour and the adjacent streets, was not therefore particularly remarked upon by anyone who saw it.
And no one took any notice of the fact the shaggy dog arrived at the shipping office and kept right on going, accelerating as the crowds thinned out, heading for the heart of the city.
CHAPTER 5
OF FIRE AND MIRRORS
The Citizen was now the sole tenant of the house on Chandos Place, his erstwhile host and collaborator the Viscount Mountfellon having hurled himself homewards to Rutlandshire as soon as he had heard of the outrages visited on his precious collections at Gallstaine Hall, and taking the only servant with him. The lack of a servant was the only irritation, and it had begun to occur to him with increasing regularity that he should equip himself with a helpmeet loyal to himself alone. There
were mundane things he needed done which he would much rather have someone else occupy themselves with, while he kept his physical and mental energies focused on his own important work. He needed, he secretly acknowledged to himself, some kind of general factotum.
The ancient Frenchman did not mind the solitude itself, and had enjoyed the opportunity it had given him to sanction Coram Templebane to go ahead with what must have been a final fatal blow against The Oversight. The satisfaction he felt at that did not, however, ease his growing worry that Dee, his associate within the mirror’d world, had not found him the Alps, breath-stealers who he had thought he had cunningly put in place a long time ago, and whose ministrations he now needed.
So he was gratified when he heard the sound of a small bell tinkling within the mirror’s cabinet set into the wall of his basement study. He was looking at the two caged inmates of his laboratory when the noise distracted him, and he dropped the curtain on the alcove, hiding the tiled laboratory that was—even he had to admit to himself—beginning to look more like an abattoir than a place of rational experimentation, since he did not have the energy or inclination to use a mop and bucket to remedy the situation. He walked stiffly up the two steps back into the body of his study proper.
Skirting the paper and book-strewn desk and table, he unlatched the door of the cabinet, grimacing as the catch stuck, as it always did. It was not a device with the fine glasswork and smooth mechanism of a true Murano cabinet, but it performed the same essential purpose. He tugged the door open and stepped back as a tall, stooped figure with a goat’s beard and hawk’s eyes stepped into the room, emerging from the mirror within.
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