by Nick Marsh
Check itinerary
Get tickets for Orient Express and connecting train from London
Packing for myself and Mrs Sunderland
Check latest Times ‘situations vacant’ (Is it too late to find a new employer?)
Personal Journal of Professor Alphonse Moretti (trans. from Italian) October 24th, 1925.
I will not deny that my movements and activities through the years have attracted more than their fair share of interest from the police or related Government parties[14]. On occasion this has been, shall we say, justified interest. However, I was not expecting a simple research trip to the British Museum Library to cause the furore that it did. Thankfully, I was not responsible for, nor even directly involved in, this gruesome incident. I think it is safe to say that I certainly hope not to get any more involved as time goes by.
I am fortunate enough to hold an invitation for the British Museum Library Reading Room, open for several months, to aid in some research which I have been conducting for a client of mine. This business with the Simulacrum intrigues me – an ancient artefact of which I knew nothing until yesterday evening. An artefact that seems important enough to kill for (assuming, of course, that the colonel is wrong, and we are not merely chasing the ramblings of a doddering old fool).
After our group’s meeting at Brown’s, the afternoon turned grey, and cold. Rain filled up the streets, but my spirits were lifted at the prospect of a trip across Europe, hopefully even a return home to Milan (provided that certain parties can be avoided, of course).
It is only a mile or so from the hotel to the museum so I decided to walk, despite the weather. Few others had been of similar mind, as it turned out, because as I entered the reading room (which never fails to impress!) I was alone save for the attendant and one other person; a thin man, still rudely wearing his heavy overcoat and trilby, hunched over a document. I took up a seat a few desks away, and began my researches.
I like to think of my skills in the use of libraries as excellent, but after several hours all I had achieved was to confirm the existence of the Simulacrum itself (a passing reference to it in von Juntz’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten), and uncover some hints that there may be more pertinent documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. A breakthrough of sorts came in a detailed perusal of Barbaro’s Giornale dell'assedio di Costantinopoli, which suggests that a set of documents known as the Sedefkar Scrolls were present in Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth Century. This may be the ‘information’ that Smith refers to. Further sources suggest that the scrolls may now be located at the Topkapi Museum in that great city.
Looking back now, my defence would be to say that I was greatly absorbed in these studies, which is why it took me so long to realise that the man in the hat, present since my arrival, had not moved one inch in all the hours I had been there. I cleared my throat rather loudly, but this produced no reaction from the figure. After several minutes of close observation, during which the man remained still as a statue, I called over the attendant and apprised him of the immobile stranger. Even then, fixated on my work, the gravity of the situation was not clear to me. The attendant nodded and approached the man, while I returned to my studies. I had got no further than glancing at my page, however, when a great shriek filled the massive dome of the reading room.
I looked up to see the attendant standing horrified over the man in the coat, who had toppled forward. His arms had spread out over the desk, exposing his hands - or at least, what remained of his hands.
Even from my seat, it was obvious that the skin had been stripped from both of them. Two dark streaks on the desk indicated where the bloody appendages had smeared across it as the body - for there could be no doubt now that the man was dead – had slumped.
The attendant stood in shock. ‘Fetch the police,’ I said to him as I approached. He looked at me, then back at the body, and rushed towards the door.
The man’s hat had slipped to one side as he had fallen, and underneath the trilby I caught a glimpse of red flesh. Carefully touching only the large overcoat, I took hold of the corpse’s shoulder and pulled it backwards into the chair. The hat fell off as I did so, and I was greeted with the sight of two wide, staring eyes in the midst of a red mass of muscle, teeth and gore. The overcoat slipped open, and the further horrors within confirmed that the unfortunate had been stripped of his clothes and all of his skin.
My shock (tempered, fortunately, by similar sights I have seen) was mixed with puzzlement. To remove a man’s skin is no trivial thing. To do it in the reading room of the British Library... ?
I looked from the body to the document the man had been studying – or at least, positioned in such a way as to appear to be. It was a single line of Arabic text, written on a leathery shrivelled sheet, roughly cut around the edges, and one did not need to be a doctor to deduce what it was made from. I shivered.
Fortunately, my Arabic is as good as my English. Scratched across the grisly parchment was the following message –
THE SKINLESS ONE WILL NOT BE DENIED.
It is somewhat shamefully that I admit my next action was to search the coat of the unfortunate man. In my experience of such situations, time is of the essence, and events usually slow to a crawl when members of the police force become involved. It is often better to find such clues as may be helpful to solving a case without their interference.
In the pocket of the coat, I found a small card. Taking it out and examining it, I was surprised to see that it was the business card of our troubled friend, Professor Smith. I inverted the card, and sure enough there was the message which the colonel had discovered. My first thoughts were of fear for the colonel, but then I remembered that Goodenough had returned the card to Smith’s manservant when we visited him in Cheapside.
The corpse before me was of far too slight a build to be Professor Smith himself, but the build and shape of the body, even the colour of the eyes, now that I had the idea in my mind, perfectly matched those of Beddows.
Still considering this disturbing find, and wondering what fate may have befallen Smith himself, I heard hurried footsteps indicating to me that the library assistant was returning. I quickly pocketed the card, although I decided against purloining the document on the table. The original attendant, with two of his colleagues, rushed back into the room.
I agreed, against my better instincts, to wait with them until the police arrived. After twenty minutes, two uniformed officers accompanied a small, shabby man, who introduced himself to me as Inspector Pike of Scotland Yard. One of the officers began to calm the now near-hysterical library attendants, whilst the inspector strode over to the gory scene. He examined the body still seated at the desk, making various asides to one of the officers beside him.
‘Just like the others,’ the inspector commented. The officer dutifully wrote it down in his notebook. After a long time, the inspector turned to me. He at least managed to pronounce my name correctly, after which he questioned me on what I had seen – which in truth, save for the body itself, had been almost nothing. Quickly realising this, the inspector gave me permission to leave, but I would not until my curiosity was sated.
‘I am sorry, inspector, but I could not help overhearing. Have there been other cases such as this one?’
The inspector frowned and his eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to work out whether to be annoyed with me or not. ‘Don’t you read the papers? Triple murder, some Turkish fella. Well, three Turkish fellas, all with the same name. Makrit or something.’
The uniformed man next to the inspector cleared his throat rather loudly. I had read something of this in the morning’s paper, but nothing about the bodies being skinned. I said as much to Pike, whose frown grew deeper.
‘Well, not totally. Not like this poor chap, but they all had patches--’
The policeman cleared his throat again.
‘Oh blast it,’ the inspector said, and a look of comprehension and embarrassment slowly settled upon his face. It was like watc
hing a bulldog gradually realising that it was being scolded by its master. ‘Erm,’ he said. ‘That’ll be all now, thank you, professor. If we have further need of you, we shall be in contact.’
I think this ‘skinless one’ may be safe from the clutches of the law for a while at least.
Upon my return home I re-read the newspaper article. Mehmet Makryat. The name had no meaning for me, and sadly there remains no more time for investigations, for we leave for Dover tomorrow. The incident today weighs heavily upon me. I fear we have been drawn into something bigger than any of us expected. I have decided to tell the others nothing of my discovery today save the results of my researches. We will be out of the country before it is mentioned in the papers, and it would not do to create unnecessary alarm. Better to let the others think of this as something like a holiday, at least at first. I think that leaving England may be the most sensible thing we can do at the moment, and it would be wise for us to keep our investigations as circumspect as possible.
I hope I have made the correct decision here. Time will tell.
End of Part One
Interlude – Violet Davenport’s Dream Diary
Although, at first glance, Mrs Davenport’s diary of her various dreams seems to have little to do with the ongoing story, retrospective study of this unique manuscript seems, at least from some points of view, to cast intriguing new light on events which were to happen later.
The dream diary is written in quite a different style to Mrs Davenport’s normal daily journal, and was kept separately from it, undated, so it is impossible to tell exactly when it was written. Given the frequent mentions of her husband, and the unlikelihood of the diary being written during the events in question, it seems likely that it was written some time before the winter of 1925. The dreams are presented intermittently at points where the chronicler feels they may have some relevance to the story.
It is, of course, possible - indeed, likely - that these dreams have nothing to do with that fateful journey across Europe made by the Sunderland party. The chronicler shall leave such questions for the reader to decide.
I dreamt of a city in flames – a huge, walled city, ancient and beautiful. In the distance, minarets toppled and domes were smashed. Screams filled the air and blood ran in the streets. Men on horses, wearing armour and shields adorned with red crosses, charged through the city, killing and looting.
On the high city walls, men and women hung by their arms from ropes, left to starve and rot in the baking sun. My heart ached to see such misery, but I could not avoid the scenes before me.
At length, I noticed something else on the wall – a dark shadow, crawling across it, like a great spider, but with the form of a man. The long, wicked fingers hooked into the very stone of the wall itself, and the thing climbed easily across the wall, legs and arms spread-eagled. Something about this figure frightened me very much, and although I tried to resist, I found myself drawn towards it, watching its repellent scurrying. It was picking its way along the line of figures hanging from the wall. Most were unaware of its approach, so consumed were they by their own misery, but after it visited them their heads hung low and they moved no more. One may have thought this creature was almost a dark angel of mercy, but I knew that mercy was not in the mind of this dreadful being.
As the dark creature reached its third victim, an elderly man dressed in the tatters of what must once have been fine, expensive clothing, the man raised his head and looked into its eyes. He gasped, and uttered a word in a language that I did not understand.
The creature stopped in its movement, surprised, then began to move closer to the man, who babbled and bowed his head several times in a pitiful attempt at supplication. The words would have been almost incomprehensible even if I had spoken the language, but one was repeated over and again – Safkar, or something like it.
The creature paused, listening, for a time, whilst the man muttered and cried and prayed. It even prompted him at points with questions of its own, but eventually the man tired and lowered his head. The thing remained still for some moments, staring at the hanging men. Almost as an afterthought, it reached up one clawed, twisted hand, and turned the man’s head in a complete circle. A dreadful crunching of bone and tearing of skin accompanied the cruel move, and I gasped out loud.
Until this moment, in the dream, I had no body, and seemed to float incorporeally, as an observer. But when I gasped, the creature on the wall started, dropping the head, which fell far from the body to the distant ground below. The thing turned to look at me, its eyes flashing and glinting through the shower of blood which now poured from the stump of the neck.
It saw me, and it grinned. And then, thank the Lord, I awoke.
It makes me shiver and my stomach turn even writing this, but hopefully in doing so, I’ll be able to forget it. I shall tell Walter nothing of this.
Part Two – Paris
Personal Journal of Professor Alphonse Moretti (trans. from Italian) 29th October
Ah, Paris! It has been a long time, but I have missed it. Not the elegance and sophistication of Rome, perhaps, but at least the French have an inkling of understanding of such words. It is true that I have committed many and various sins in my life, but I can think of none that deserve such a punishment as showing the wonders of Europe to four English citizens.
But I digress. This document is not intended to be a holiday journal, but a record and explanation of my researches into the Sedefkar Simulacrum, and as such it shall continue.
Upon our arrival in France, I informed the colonel and Mrs Sunderland, when we were away from the girls, about my unfortunate discovery in the British Library; I did not wish them to learn of it second-hand from the newspapers. Both were shocked and disturbed by Beddows’s fate – the colonel more so than Mrs Sunderland, I think, for he still believes that we are on a fool’s errand (though I quite agree that Professor Smith is a fool). They accepted my suggestion that it would be better not to inform the younger members of our party at the moment. Ignorance, in this one case, is bliss.
We are staying at a dreadful hotel called the Moulin Noir, but it is of no matter as I have thus far spent little time there. There is a job to do, after all. Of course, I had the foresight to cable ahead to the Bibliothèque Nationale, and so when the colonel, Mrs Sunderland and I arrived there on Saturday morning our papers were already in order. My companions have little or no knowledge of French, but Mrs Sunderland has some Greek and Arabic, and the colonel did quite well in Latin at school, so they may be of some use to me. We have allowed the girls to explore and enjoy Paris itself – if recent events are taken into account, they are likely to encounter less danger on the streets of the city than in the National Library.
To my eye the Bibliothèque Nationale surpasses even the British Library in scope and in beauty. The salle de travail des imprimés is spectacular and serene under those nine blue domes – but, as I say, this is a research journal, not a travelogue.
Smith has left us with almost nothing to go on. His notes suggest that the Simulacrum, in its entirety, was owned by a Comte Fenalik – but we have no clue how he came to be in possession of it, nor what happened to it afterwards, save that it was broken into parts. My instinct is that if we track down the Comte, we will learn more of the statue.
My investigations in the British Library indicated that this dismemberment had taken place around the time of the Revolution – a further complication as records are sparse from that chaotic time in history. It took all three of us most of the first day – a frustrating and tedious day, you may be sure – to even uncover some evidence that this Fenalik existed at all. In the end, both Mrs Sunderland and I discovered references in a number of court histories to an incident on the eve of the Revolution, where ‘Fenalik’, a German count and minor member of the nobility, was involved in an ‘indiscretion’ with Queen Marie. What happened to the fellow is not clear, but he disappeared without so much as a trial – likely there was something about this occurrence that
the queen wished to keep quiet. This would only make our job harder.
Maddeningly, the following day the bibliothèque was closed for some obscure French official business, and so, keen as I was to follow our elusive count’s trail, I instead was forced to take a trip with my friends around the splendours of Notre Dame Cathedral, and the Palace of Versailles. Not, you may think, torture in itself, but the colonel spent most of the trip muttering that it ‘wasn’t as good as the buildings they have back home’. Upon viewing La Tour Eiffel, he suggested that it ‘looked a bit like Blackpool Tower’, and at this point I am afraid I feigned a headache and returned to the hotel.
Fortunately, this interlude was brief, and we returned to the library the following day. The morning and afternoon passed with fruitless research, but at the close of day I uncovered documents which suggested there may be more detail on Fenalik’s incident with Marie Antoinette at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal – where the journals and diaries of many military men reside. Elated by the discovery, and only a little annoyed to find the colonel snoozing amongst the stacks, I suggested we decamp to this new library, not far from the Place de la Bastille. Upon arriving, however, we discovered it closed and our investigations were frustrated for another day.
My patience has been rewarded, however, for the discoveries came to us like rain today. The Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal is housed in what remains of the ancient arsenal of Paris. It is less impressive, and certainly smaller, than the national library, and poorly catalogued, but I nevertheless located a grand prize after only a few hours - the diary of Captain Louis Malon, wherein he describes an assault that he led on Fenalik’s mansion as a response to the royal ‘incident’ (about which I have found no further details). I have transcribed a pertinent section of Cpt. Malon’s account here:
When we arrived, the feast was still in progress, men and women were rutting like rabid dogs. We chased them out, arresting those who were not able to vouch for themselves. I sent Hulliam and five others to capture the Comte, while I entered the chambers beneath. I cannot bring myself to describe what I saw there, save that we had entered a cesspool, and it was Hell. God protect us.