Trick of the Light im-3 Page 13

  For a moment the figure paused and sniffed the air as if picking up the scent of prey but it was the acrid smell of smoke coming from a nearby chimney-stack had attracted its attention.

  This marked the spot. A sign. The stack was crooked as if it had been struck by lightning, unlike the adjoining roofs where the chimneypots and surrounds pointed straight at the sky.

  The middle house of the terrace. The beast knew this was the mark.

  But the smoke meant someone was awake. Still alive. Care must be taken. There was much to be done.

  A low, coughing grunt emitted from its throat. A series of words burnt into the mind.

  Find. Kill. Destroy.

  It was only right. The good man lay dead. Like a dog. Nothing left. Bits of flesh. Not even a face.

  Only right. Pay for the sin. Hell is hungry.

  The beast moved sideways, lurching at speed, knuckles close to the slates as it moved with silent precision to a window set into the roof.

  A skylight. Fast locked. Bolted at the inside. The hinges of heavy metal. Hasped. Strong.

  To keep death out.

  But the betrayed call for vengeance.

  Nothing is stronger than that.

  The frame of the window had a slight overlap. The creature hunched over, gloved fingers splayed, gripping round the wood and slowly levering upwards.

  At first nothing happened, then with a muffled creak the whole top half of the frame began to lift up as the bolts inside were wrenched slowly out of their sockets by the immense power generating from the rigid arms and squatting form above. A metallic screech signalled the hinges parting from the wood, the screw nails ripped from their safe haven, and with a sudden jolt, the whole structure was lifted off its moorings like the sliced top of a boiled egg.

  For a moment the beast froze with its prize clasped between the paws, the heavy black gauntlets anchoring the timber and glass in place against its thick torso though some small splinters of metal and wood fell onto the slates to skitter down and lodge in the guttering.

  Had anyone heard that sound?

  Had the sinner within been warned?

  The beast waited for a voice to call and break the silence of the night.

  Somewhere far off in the distance a cat yowled, a low menacing growl, but nothing answered.

  And nothing sounded below in the house.

  The buckled frame was laid carefully upon the sloping roof and wedged into the chimneystack to keep it in fast position.

  Somewhere in the dark sky, a seagull let loose a doleful screech like a mourner at a funeral.

  The figure then moved to the gaping hole it had created and swiftly dropped out of sight into the darkness below.

  Meantime, in the safety of his house with solid walls and locked doors, Gilbert Morrison gazed into the dying flames of the fire and reflected with muted satisfaction upon his life.

  Heat was his one indulgence; he had thin blood and felt the cold most bitterly, unlike his brother Walter who could be enclosed in an iceberg and not remark the situation.

  Gilbert jabbed at the fire with a heavy poker and wondered to add some more coal but decided contra.

  Coal cost money.

  Not that he couldn’t afford such but he had stayed up well beyond his usual bedtime and enough was enough.

  And, to be strictly exact, he had one other indulgence which had been relished this night.

  He replayed a scene in his mind from his visit to the establishment of the Countess and took great satisfaction.

  The woman supplied had been too fleshy for his taste but she had white skin and marked up in rousing fashion.

  The French girl had left the establishment and the little sensitive was beyond his grasp but he had kept her pale, veiled face in his memory while laying on the quirt.

  A most fulfilling encounter.

  The recollection would keep him warm in his cold bed and who knows what pleasant dreams might ensue?

  Behind him, the door to his study opened and a massive figure slipped inside with astonishing speed and stealth.

  The room was dark except for the glow of the fire and Gilbert was too absorbed in happy reminiscence to notice the addition to his company; also he suffered from wax in his hairy ears, thus tending to partial deafness.

  So what followed came as a big surprise.

  Two huge hands like bear’s paws circled his neck and wrenched him bodily from his armchair up into empty space.

  As he wriggled in agonised shock, feet kicking, eyes wide with fear, Gilbert was lifted higher until he must have been at least eight feet from the ground.

  He had lifted his own hands to claw unavailingly at the leather gauntlets, the nails scraping hard at the stiff material. They made little impression.

  Gilbert’s ears popped and his hearing improved to the point where he was able to distinguish the following words, coming from somewhere just beneath.

  It was in a guttural animal growl but just enough remained of speech that a dangling man might comprehend.

  ‘Betrayed. His sweet face. Nothing left.’

  Having uttered these words to no response from the choking man, the creature then followed the three precepts embedded in its psyche.

  Find.

  This had been accomplished.

  Kill.

  The hood of the cloak fell back and for a moment Gilbert twisted round to see his nemesis. Eyes blinked in recognition at the contorted face staring up into his, and then the beast’s hands jerked powerfully and the pinioned neck was snapped like a chicken.

  Destroy.

  Gilbert’s body was lowered carefully to the carpet, which was thick and received the corpus with a certain amount of give.

  For a moment the beast caught sight of itself in a mirror above the mantle of the fire, snarled in fear at its image and tore at its own hair.

  Then it looked. And saw the heavy poker lying in the hearth.

  As if it were a sign.

  Destroy.

  17

  He who plays at dice with death must expect the dog’s throw.

  EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON, The Last Days of Pompeii

  The candle flickered in a weak draught from the window and a hand was cupped round to shelter the flame. The writer laid his pen aside and peered closely at the heading on the page:

  The Diary of James McLevy

  That was the constant. What followed was variable and deserved all the secrecy granted.

  Private thoughts. Keep them so. But read on anyway.

  When I observe humanity I am aye struck by the fact that every bugger wants to have their own way.

  And takes it badly amiss when some other bugger, or life itself, does not correspond to requirements.

  Then violence of one kind or another ensues, the obvious being physical, the more deadly when the mind warps like an old piece of shipwrecked timber left out in the hot sun. Since I’m the one that writes this diary and the only one who ever gets to read it, I will allow myself the luxury of overblown simile.

  But it’s true in any case.

  A warped mind is the worst foe. It is not easy to see and as the Bard himself put it, ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.’

  Shakespeare would have made a great detective.

  Or criminal.

  When does an idea become so fixed that anything to oppose it is perceived as an attack? And furthermore, anything that does not lend its weight to the bone-crushing, grinding mill of this misplaced certainty is regarded as an enemy in waiting.

  ‘Wha’s no for me is against me.’

  Not quite so poetic, but accurate enough.

  I hold to justice. It is my rock. And the law is its chosen implement.

  Yet the law itself can turn to persecution, thinking itself infallible, crushing all who dare question it.

  As a politician will ignore the very folk who have elected him, thinking them beneath contempt. Or attention.

  And here I am, stuck in the middle.


  When I was younger I had no doubts but of late I am beset with nagging misgivings like a pack of dogs snapping at my heels.

  I don’t even like dogs.

  Perhaps I am being unfair, perhaps rather than some canine coven, my hesitations are subtle messages from an organism that has charged through youth and enjoyed the fruits of prime manhood but now finds the going a bit heavy, like a Clydesdale horse lugging a coal cart up a hill.

  And my body feels in its bones, in its cells, in the network of nerves dancing within and without my skeleton that a reckoning is being prepared.

  Somewhere along the line.

  Death is enough to give any man doubts.

  I have digressed. Let us return to the warped mind that is not my own.

  What is it protecting?

  What is the secret that must not be let into the light of day?

  Perhaps that secret is not even known. Or buried so deep that it cannot even be sensed.

  But it must be protected.

  At all costs.

  McLevy closed his diary with a thud.

  The trouble with writing is that often more questions are raised than can be decently answered by an author’s limited intelligence.

  He carefully stowed away the bulky tome; it was in fact an old office ledger, the cover once red in colour now faded with use, a gift from a grateful banker after the inspector had uncovered a case of embezzlement.

  It went into a cupboard by his writing table which was ranged against the wall and contained relics of past crimes solved and unsolved; but he would not delve in there tonight.

  A man has too many memories as it is.

  The half-drunk mug of coffee lay on his desk and he picked it up before walking to the window.

  As usual it was the dark, early hours of morning, the city not altered much from the night before, save perhaps that there was a brooding, heavy feel to the clouds as they almost sat upon the rooftops.

  McLevy slurped the brew and pondered about what he had just committed to words.

  He had no idea what it all meant but something was coming up from the depths, that was for sure.

  A reckoning.

  A warped mind.

  A secret to be protected.

  The inspector peered into his coffee cup as if he might divine this hidden matter or receive a message from a hidden universe but at that moment a coiled shape suddenly unfurled itself from a corner of the room and flew through the air to land with a screech of claws upon his table.

  For a moment McLevy, as Mulholland’s Aunt Katie would say, almost jumped out of his skin and left it lying there, but then the inspector realised the fiendish intruder was none other than Bathsheba.

  He had let her in earlier to partake of some milk from one of his many chipped saucers and she had promptly lapped her fill then gone to sleep.

  On awakening the cat had noticed a fat lazy fly that should have by rights been culled this late autumn but had survived in some cranny of the untidy attic room, lurking between Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and a journal of forensic science.

  Thus fortified by literature and research it had droned through the air to descend upon some crumbs where a collection of ginger biscuits had once held sway.

  The fly landed, then Bathsheba landed harder.

  A quick snap of the jaws and only a fragment of gossamer wing was left to indicate that one of nature’s marvels, evolving from egg to larva, pupa to adult, had once existed. The compound eyes now saw nothing unless the fly presently inhabited the spirit dimension and buzzed around annoying the spectres on their daily round.

  McLevy opened the window and the cat, thus nourished, leapt from table to sill, thence to pad cautiously on the slates, disappearing without so much as a backward glance.

  Nature has no time for losers.

  Kill or be killed, thought McLevy. No matter how much ye wrap it up, that’s what it all comes down to now.

  He pulled the window back down and considered risking sleep. Perhaps tonight he would have no dreams, or perhaps a mermaid floating peacefully under water – though the last sea-maiden he had summoned from the depths of slumber had turned out to be his dead mother with maggots and water eels crawling out of her head.

  Up from the depths.

  As long as it wasn’t the figure in the cloak.

  The naked females bouncing round the fire he could just about thole.

  But that other put a hitherto unknown feeling into him, a misgiving of dread that had reappeared throughout this whole day.

  What was it in the image that had stirred such fear?

  Like a heavy weight. Dragging him down to the bottom.

  McLevy could sense something out there in his city. A menace that would unleash its power. A deadly presence.

  Would it be the death of him?

  He softly whistled the Jacobite air of a king lost across the sea, who had carried so many desperate hopes and drowned under such a burden.

  ‘Charlie is my darling, the young Chevalier.’

  The window reflected back McLevy’s face like a ghost. Kill or be killed.

  In another part of Leith, Alfred Binnie slept like a child, the razor-sharp knife close to his hand by the pillow. There was a secret entrance to the Countess’s hotel from the back lane and he had used it to slip back inside and up the rear stairs to the room at the top where she had stationed him. Not long now. As he slumbered, his podgy little body twitched like a piglet in the sty. Whee, whee, whee, all the way home.

  The Countess prepared for sleep, eyeing herself in the mirror. It was not, in fact, a very attractive face but she could live with that. She bared her teeth to reveal a pair of small incisors, pointed on each side of the mouth like a predatory animal. She had received from certain quarters this night information that she would put to good use. Or bad. The good for her. The bad for Jean Brash. Such thought was amusing. She laughed aloud. A pity about poor Patrick but his nose would still function and she had warned him to take no more action. It might spoil a plan that was forming in her mind. A sweet surprise. She could almost taste it.

  All she had to do was convince a young fool that he could take revenge and be rewarded.

  The sins of the flesh were useful to that end.

  Jean Brash slept fitfully. Her bedroom was bedecked with delicate filmy curtains that rustled a little in a damp breeze coming through the part-opened window. An oil lamp burned by her bed that Hannah Semple forever worried might overturn and set the whole place aflame. The mistress of the Just Land, however, did not like the dark.

  Bad things had happened to her in the absence of light. She had lost her childhood. Taken from her. No way back. She surrounded herself with beauty, pretty favours, pampered her body with oils and perfume, but there was no way back. Burn a light, but the dark is always waiting.

  Sophia Adler loved the night. Lying in the pitch black, still as a corpse, eyes half closed, she listened to the voices take shape in her mind. Fragments of speech, echoes of disembodied plaintive cries, a force field of garbled sound that she floated through almost like a ghost herself. But never the voice she waited for. It would come. One day. And her life would have meaning. All would be at peace. One day. Or night.

  In the Sweet By and By. On the boat to San Francisco, there had been a gospel choir who sang hymns. For the Father waits over the way, to prepare us a dwelling place there. Their simple faith had touched her. But that was not her fate.

  Arthur Conan Doyle rarely knew serenity in sleep. His dreams were often peopled with malignant vampire women who sought to chain him to their bodies, and then twist the iron till they drained him of lifeblood. They bore no resemblance to the fair ladies of beauty and grace that he witnessed in daylight. His giant form twitched uneasily as dark tales unravelled in his mind. He feared a father’s genetic demon in the blood and marshalled his mind to resist by holding logic like a sword before him. Raised high, crashed down.

  But the dismembered monsters crawled back into his mi
nd to burrow and feast upon the cells of sanity.

  From the evidence presented, it would be safe to assume that there was a difference between the outer and inner man.

  Conan Doyle’s life would always be a struggle between what he presented to the world and the intensity of an inner vision that would not let him rest in peace. Art in the blood gives no quarter.

  Samuel and Muriel slumbered together as if children, she cuddled against his broad back. Her breath fluttered upon his neck and he marvelled that she put her trust in him. It made what he had committed all the more regrettable.

  Magnus Bannerman’s body smelled of soap and cologne. Sophia had bathed him like a baby then put him to bed. The blinding headache had gone and now he slept the sleep of the righteous.

  And James McLevy still hadn’t made it into the Arms of Morpheus. Too much on his plate.

  The unconscious could wait its hurry.

  18

  One day Massa rode aroun’ de farm,

  De flies so numerous they did swarm;

  One bit his pony on the thigh,

  De devil take dat blue-tailed fly.

  TRADITIONAL, ‘The Blue-tailed Fly’

  Glasgow, 1864.

  My Dearest Melissa,

  I feel as if I am embroiled in a world where nothing can be trusted and to be truthful I am not certain if this letter will ever reach you without being tampered with, opened, read, and perhaps destroyed.

  In that case it will never accomplish its mission. But I must write as if it does, as if it will.

  It is as if I have become a shadow, as if the life I have led up until now has no meaning, insubstantial, and I hunger for one moment that might give it significance.

  As if my identity, what I call myself, Jonathen Sinclair, is losing shape. I am becoming…indistinct.

  I fear that the fever which struck after Gettysburg is still hectic in my blood and I cannot trust my own thoughts, as if I am being manipulated by someone else who pulls the strings to make the puppet jump.