Barnett blinked. Before his eyes a miraculous transformation had taken place: the dapper little man had become a street urchin. Fifteen years had been wiped off his appearance, and no one seeing him now would believe he could possibly have anything more on his mind than retrieving a stray ball.
The Mummer wiped his nose with his sleeve and stared up at Moriarty. “Wat’cher think, gov?” he demanded in the nasal whine of the slum child. “Do yer ’pose I’ll do?”
“Mummer, you’re an artist!” Moriarty exclaimed.
“It’s nuffink, Professor,” the Mummer said. “Now, if you’ll ’scuse me, I’ll go practice me art.” And with a skip and a slosh, he ran off down the street.
* * *
The man who was the wind was in the cellar of the devil’s house. He had stealthily unlocked a small window over a long-disused storage bin when he had delivered the casks of wine. And now he was among the casks. He could hear footsteps, faintly, overhead, as the devil’s imps arrived upstairs one by one. It was good. He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. There was plenty of time. Smiling a horrible smile, he reached for the nearest cask.
* * *
The Sons of Azazel began arriving at their clubhouse shortly after Moriarty and Barnett settled down to watch. One after another, at short intervals, the clatter of horses’ hooves would sound over the rain, and a carriage would pull up somewhere along that block of Upper Pondbury Crescent. Two broughams, three hansoms, a quartet of four-wheelers, and an elegant barouche with a black canvas panel covering what must have been a crest on the ebony door—all arrived within the first half hour. From each vehicle one heavily cloaked man emerged and proceeded toward the front door of the Hellfire house. When one of these gentlemen arrived close on the heels of another, he would wait on the pavement, stamping his feet impatiently, while the first was received at the door.
Tolliver dashed back across the street as the latest hansom was disappearing around the corner. “I got a fix on ’er now, Professor,” he said. “They goes up to the door and gives a pull on the bellpull. Then this little hole what is beside the door—over on the left—is opened from the inside. The gent what’s outside sticks something in the hole for the gent what’s inside to take a dekky at. I couldn’t get a good look at the item, but I think it’s one of them medals like you got. Then the gent what’s inside hands the gent what’s outside a mask, which he promptly sticks over his face. Then the door finally opens, and the gent what’s outside goes inside. You got me, Professor?”
“I got you, Mummer.” Moriarty turned to Barnett. “That explains one thing,” he said. “I have been wondering why there have been no masks found in conjunction with any of the bodies, since they maintain the habit of going masked. A nice little solution to the problem. It means, also, that we won’t have any trouble in entering the house.”
“How are we going to do this, Professor?” Barnett asked. “I’m ready for whatever has to be done.”
“It looks as though you and I will be the only ones entering directly,” Moriarty said. “We each have a medallion, and we are, each, disguised as a gentleman. That should be enough to get us inside.”
“Okay,” Barnett said, raising the collar on his coat and adjusting his hat. “Let’s go!”
“One at a time, remember,” Moriarty cautioned him. “I shall go first, and await you in the inner corridor. If, for some reason, that should prove too conspicuous, I shall be in the first accessible room. Try not to speak.”
“Excuse me, Professor, before you go,” Tolliver said, “but when will you want me and the other lads to join in the festivities?”
“Keep close watch outside,” Moriarty told him. “Here, take this; it’s a police whistle. If I need you, I will signal by throwing something through one of the front windows. Then you blow the whistle to assemble our men and head right in through the front door. Otherwise, just be prepared to give support if we have to exit quickly.”
“Right enough, Professor,” Tolliver said. “I’ll pass the word along to the lads to keep out of sight, but be ready to act if they hears the whistle.”
“Who are these ‘lads’?” Barnett asked.
“Colonel Moran,” Tolliver told him, “and some of his pals from the Amateur Mendicant Society. The colonel ’as a look on him like he wants to hit something; and I’m sure squatting under a porch in the rain ain’t doing his disposition no good, neither.”
“Tell him how things stand,” Moriarty said. “Tell him the answer to his problem is inside, and I shall bring it out. I’m depending on you, Mummer. Come along, Barnett, be right behind me now.”
Barnett stood on the pavement in front of the house, fingering the small medallion and watching as Moriarty was admitted through the front door. Then it was his turn. His heart pounding loudly, he advanced to the door and pulled the wooden bell knob.
* * *
His preparations were just about complete now. One final check—couldn’t have anything going wrong—and he would find his way upstairs and join the festivities. Festivities? He smiled. Eat, drink, and be merry, he thought, for it is almost tomorrow.
* * *
Moriarty waited for Barnett in a small room to the left of the entranceway, just out of earshot of the greeter at the door. Barnett looked around. “How prosaic,” he whispered to the professor. “A cloakroom.”
“The prosaic is ever intermingled with the bizarre and the frightful,” Moriarty commented. “The Executioner of Nuremberg wears a dress suit and white gloves, and uses a double-bladed ax. The Mongol hordes invented the game of polo, but they used a human head in place of a ball. The castle of Vlad the Impaler was noted for its fine view of the Carpathian Mountains. I’ll wager this place also has a washroom, and quite probably a kitchen.”
Barnett shook his head slightly. “Has anything ever surprised you, Professor?” he asked.
“Everything constantly surprises me,” Moriarty replied. “I think this is the direction we want to go.”
They went down the hallway, peering into each room as they passed it. Barnett tried to look nonchalant under his mask, but he kept having the feeling that every pair of eyes that turned his way would immediately see right through his disguise, and that any second one of the well-dressed masked men strutting about the hall was going to point a dramatic finger in the direction of his nose and exclaim, “That man in the wrinkled suit is obviously not one of us! Apprehend him!”
But the other masked men in the halls and rooms of this hellish club saw no difference between Moriarty, or Barnett, and themselves. And, Barnett was surprised to note, without seeing their faces he could detect no difference between them and other men. He wasn’t sure what sort of difference he expected to see, but once he got used to seeing a mask instead of a face, these Hellfire men bore no stigmata visible to Barnett. In their dress and bearing they would not have looked out of place strutting down the halls of the Bagatelle, the Carlton, or the Diogenes. Perhaps on other evenings they did just that.
The rooms off the short entrance hall were dedicated to games of chance. There were three small rooms, fitted out for baccarat, whist, and vingt-et-un; and a large room with two roulette wheels and a piquet table. The action was spirited at these tables, and the stakes were high. The games were supervised by a pair of stewards in severe black garments, wearing identical papier-mâché masks modeled to look like smiling faces, painted porcelain white, with black eyebrows and a pencil-thin black mustache. The dealers and croupiers were all attractive women in their twenties; their colorful dress and easy manner placed them as belonging to that segment of society which the French called the demi-monde, the English having no polite term for it.
It was a bizarre scene that Barnett found himself wandering through; masked men and scarlet women playing at card games with a savage intensity under the actinic glare of the multiple gas fixtures that were scattered about the walls like perverted gargoyles. There was another game going on too, a subtler game played with nudges and winks and nod
s and indirect conversation, and blushes and giggles from the demi-mondaines. This was also being played with a fierce intensity, although Barnett could not, from what he overheard, clearly discern the rules, rewards, or penalties. The game, superficially sexual in content, had the flavor of evil and decay. Barnett noted a cynical hardness around the eyes of the women, and he thought he detected in some of their eyes the glitter of fear.
“What do you think?” he whispered to Moriarty, as the two of them stood in an isolated corner of the large room near the piquet table.
Moriarty looked at him for a long moment, as though debating which of the many ways to answer that question he would choose. “I think we are on the periphery of evil,” he said. “We must proceed inward, toward the center. Prepare yourself for scenes that will not please you, and try not to give yourself away by reacting prematurely to whatever you see. Blend in with your surroundings, as distasteful as that may be.”
Barnett looked around. “If I have to play, I’ll play,” he said. “I have had practice. Which way, do you suppose, is the center?”
“I have been watching,” Moriarty said, “and as far as I can determine, the door in the opposite corner of this room would seem to be the portal to the netherworld of infinite and infernal delights. It leads to a corridor, and the corridor leads to—what, I wonder? I have seen several of the masked gentlemen go through it, but none of the, ah, ladies. Are you ready?”
“I hope so,” Barnett whispered.
“Stiff upper lip!” Moriarty said. “Or, at least, act as though your upper lip is as stiff as an Englishman is supposed to keep his upper lip. You are going now into the sanctum sanctorum of this blessed club, the delights of which are the reason you pay the Master Incarnate his twenty guineas a month.”
“I suspect I shall get more than my money’s worth,” Barnett murmured. “Lead on, Professor.”
* * *
He was among them now. They smiled and laughed and played at their devilish games; and he smiled and laughed under his mask, and played well his own game. He took out his watch, a gift from the Burgermeister of Fürth after a successful escape from the ancient dungeons beneath the Rathaus: it was now quarter past ten. In one hundred and five minutes all games would cease. Midnight, the witching hour. He laughed again, aloud, but nobody noticed.
* * *
The house was divided into four sections, which, like the levels of hell in Dante’s Inferno, were separated according to the sins favored by the inhabitants. Each level of greater sin was accessible at only one place, through the level of lesser sin. Moriarty and Barnett progressed from Level One, Gambling and Lechery; then to Level Two, Various Exotic Perversions with Willing—or Persuadable—Women. The room they entered, large, effusively ornate, and yet subtly tawdry, resembled nothing so much as the parlor in an expensive brothel. Which was certainly deliberate, and was in no way inaccurate.
Barnett ran his gaze over the flocked red plush wallpaper; the deeply cushioned chairs and couches, done in matching fabric; the elaborate and tasteless candelabrum, decorated with flowers and cherubim and remarkably voluptuous female angels; and the equally voluptuous ladies lounging on the couches, garbed in imaginative dishabille. “Aside from these idiotic masks,” Barnett whispered, “this could be any one of fifty clubs in London, all catering to the same ‘sporting’ population.”
“Nemo repente fuit turpissimus,” Moriarty murmured. “I find Juvenal quotable at the most unusual times.”
“How’s that?” Barnett asked quietly.
Moriarty shook his head slightly in mock annoyance. “Your American schools just don’t believe in a classical education,” he commented. “No wonder your English prose is so flat and unmellifluous; you are all innocent of Latin.”
“Discuss my educational deficiencies some other time, Professor,” Barnett requested firmly. “What did you say?”
“Roughly, ‘No one ever mastered the heights of vice at the first try.’ These chaps have to start somewhere, after all.”
Suddenly a scream sounded from one of the nearby rooms—a high-pitched cry of unendurable agony. Barnett jerked his head around, seeking the source of the sound, but none of the others in the parlor reacted at all, except for a few of the women, who twitched nervously.
Barnett clutched at Moriarty’s sleeve. “What was that?” he demanded.
“Casual, Mr. Barnett,” Moriarty whispered intently. “Remain casual. This sort of thing must happen all the time. Remember the part you are playing. You are well used to such sounds. Indeed, it is why you are here.”
Barnett stiffened his back and lifted his head into a parody of nonchalance. “What is it exactly that happens all the time,” he asked, “which causes girls to scream in distant rooms?”
Moriarty leaned casually against a patch of flocked wallpaper. “You really don’t want to know,” he said. “Suffice it to say that other people’s ideas of sexual pleasure may be far removed from your own.”
“You mean—but why would they put up with it? The women, I mean?”
“These ladies are all imported from elsewhere for service in this house. This is a practice that is common in London houses of this sort, although these people take more advantage of it than others might. They serve for about two months, which is probably the length of time that the house stays in any one location, and then are sent back whence they came with a sum of money in hand. If necessary, as it frequently is, their, ah, wounds are first tended to in a hospital far from here, where the causes behind their injuries are overlooked by mutual agreement.”
“Horrible!” Barnett said. “Much worse than any stories I’ve heard about the brothels in France.”
“Your studies in depravity did not descend deep enough,” Moriarty commented. “There are many similar places in Paris, as indeed in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, and every other European capital. With the possible exception of Rome—the Italians don’t seem to be as prone to institutionalize their violence. As to what happens in such houses in the Osmanli Empire and the Arab world, they make our friends here look like dilettantes.”
Barnett looked around him. “You make this place sound like a garden party,” he commented.
“You are mistaken,” Moriarty replied. “I said it was horrible, not unique. Besides, this is merely the, let us say, middle level of experience. The upper levels, for which they kidnap women off the street and throw dead bodies back onto the street, probably more nearly meet your requirements.”
Barnett clutched convulsively at Moriarty’s sleeve again, and then forced himself to let go. “If you can believe it, I had forgotten for an instant,” he said. “Let us go on!”
“We must locate the door through which the initiates go to practice vices few others even know exist,” Moriarty said.
“You expect to find Cecily at this next level?” Barnett demanded. “And yet you think she is still all right?”
“They must have cells,” Moriarty said, “where women are held for, ah, future use. I expect to find the lady in one of these cells, and I expect to find the cells deep in the heart of the beast.”
“Cells?”
“Yes. There were signs in the now-deserted houses that certain of their rooms had been used as cells.”
“Well then—” Barnett began.
“Grab that man!” a harsh, commanding voice suddenly rang out from somewhere behind Barnett. “Don’t let him escape! He is not one of us, he is a spy! Be sharp, now!”
Barnett started at the words, twisting around, and expecting to feel a heavy hand on his shoulder. To his amazement and relief, the short, imperious man who had barked out the commands was not pointing his accusing finger at Barnett, but at a slender man who had been quietly sitting by the piano.
“Here, now,” the accused said, rising to his feet. “What’s the meaning of this? Who are you, sir, and what do you mean by such an accusation?” He seemed amused, rather than alarmed. “Is this your idea of fun, little man?”
Several men who we
re dressed as servitors of the club appeared from different doorways, as though they had been awaiting the command, and moved closer to surround the tall, slender man.
“I am the Master Incarnate,” the little man announced. “And you are a spy!”
“Whatever makes you think that?” the slender man asked, ignoring the surrounding servitors with a splendid nonchalance. “Are you absolutely sure you’re right? Remember, Master, unveiling a member would be a very bad precedent to set, especially for you. Are you sure you wish to risk it, in front of all these fellow members?” With a wave of his hand, the slender man indicated the cluster of masked men, who had all stopped whatever they were doing and turned to watch the scene.
“I am sure,” the Master Incarnate barked. “Especially as I can name you where you stand, and then prove it by unmasking you… Mr. Sherlock Holmes!” He reached for the mask and yanked it off, exposing the sharp features of the consulting detective.
“I must hand it to you, Count,” Holmes said, edging toward the wall. “You have cleverly revealed my identity. But, after all, are you quite certain that I’m not a member?” He took a firm grasp on his stick and flicked it in the general direction of one of the servitors, who was approaching him from behind. The man jumped back with alacrity.
“Thought you could fool us this afternoon,” the Master Incarnate said, grimacing his satisfaction, “grubbing about in the cellar.”
“The cellar?” Holmes repeated, sounding surprised. “Whatever are you talking about, Count d’Hiver?”
The count ignored Holmes’s use of his name. “I heard about it as soon as I returned this afternoon,” he said, “and watched through a concealed peephole to see who would attempt to gain entrance this evening that shouldn’t. And it was you, Mr. Holmes—it was you. I had a feeling during the course of this investigation that you were going to prove too clever for us.”
Death by Gaslight Page 29