Beautiful Freaks (18 page)

Her walk through the woods was filled with plans of cunning and stealth, but when she reached the edge of the village she saw the mourning banners
hanging
.
Large black, billowing flags marked the sky like carrion.
When the villagers saw Seraphina
,
they stopped their tasks to turn and blow her kisses of sympathy
,
and weep tears of shared sorrow. The spoken silence of these actions told her that her mother was dead. They would not show such sorrow for their dead king.

With each footfall
, Serpaphina felt the metamorphosis. She felt her eyes widen, her body lengthen and her power grow. By the time she reached the gates of the castle she was an awesome predator
.
She was the bride of the dragon.

Under her raging stare
,
the great oak gates burst into flames so intense that they burnt themse
lves out in a matter of minutes. T
he castle’s defences
were reduced
to a pile of ashes.

Seraphina stalked through the courtyard and headed directly to the throne room
,
towards her murdering stepfather. There she found him – slumped in his chair, glass of wine in his hand. When he heard her enter the room, he looked
up through his bloodshot eyes.

“Ah, princess you have returned.”

“Yes,
p
apa.”

“You have seen the mourning banners I suppose.”

“How come she died?”

He looked away and stared into the mourning candle
that
had been lit and placed on her throne.

“Sh
e died of insubordination;
a common cause of death amongst women.”

Rage channelled through Serpahina and she felt
the heat of the dragon sear
her
heart
.

“Then you must be punished,
p
apa.”

“I am King. There
is no one who can punish me. I a
m
…
untouchable.” He raised his goblet in salute and poured the remaining wine into his mouth.

“I am your executioner.”

The king laughed. It was loud and raucous and rumbled through the hall. Then he stopped and fixed his eyes on Seraphina. The shadow of
a
man facing his own death fell over his face
. Then it contorted in
agony. Flames consumed his body and
licked his flesh with
heat. Within moments he was nothing more than a blackened skeleton dressed in the red velvet clothes of a king.
He still held the goblet in his hand.

Inside her head, the dragon lord l
aughed and Seraphina smiled
with
affection.

*

“Bravo!” Eve shouted from the
shadows of the stinking London alley she’d been hiding in.
Seraphina
turned, flashed her hot-
dragon eyes at the intruding witness
, but the woman did not flinch.
Seraphina
was genuinely intrigued; af
ter all
,
t
he woman had just witnessed her incinerate an unfortunate victim.

Eve smiled
and clapped
her hand
s in slow applause.
“
He h
ad that coming, if you ask me.”
S
he approached the murder scene.

“I don’t believe I did
ask you
.” Seraphina offered Eve a dark and threatening look but it wasn’t really meant.

Eve licked her lip and raised her eyebrow in friendly challenge.
“I saw you arrive yesterday, on
a
boat from the continent. You were a little conspicuous, dressed in scarlet silks. For one moment
,
I almost mistook you for one of those buccaneering American women.” Eve laughed and Serpahina couldn’t resist but crack a smile
across
her porcelain face.

‘
Whomever this woman is
,
’
Seraphina thought,
‘
I like her
!’

From within the folds of her skirt, Eve produced a small, thin cane and poked
at the victim. She lifted back
his perfectly unblemished black, velvet
evening jacket
out of curious wonder
.

“I suppose you could do with some lodgings and a way of earning some money?”

Seraphina pouted and tilted her chin upwards, “I don’t think so.”

Evangeline laughed, “Oh, you think I’m a Madame of a whorehouse!” Seraphina blushed at committing a faux pas she didn’t understand. Evangeline continued, “No, not quite. Why don’t you come and take a look?”

Seraphina heard the dragon stir
and purr richly. He at least was tempted but the angel fluttered his wings, sending a chill of warning through her. It was the darkening hours, the time of the dragon
. T
he violent events of the evening had already weakened her inner angel so that she found herself nodding in acquiescence.

12

MORGUE

Three bo
dies were now resident in ‘Room 3’
of the dingy Cheapside Morgue. One beautiful frozen boy, one man grown into his own coffin
,
and one repulsive burnt corpse. Seeing them here like some grotesque art exhibition, Steptree couldn’t help but feel that he had left the real world far, far behind.

He was alone and he wished he wasn’t;
Brown
was running a fever and would not be joining them and Chester had gone to collect Heartlock for his
‘expert opinion
.’
It annoyed Steptree that
they
might possibly need it.

The morgue was an e
erie place at the best of times
;
a
n old dockland warehouse with a heavy bolted door and a fat, drunken guard with a pistol. There was little science to the place
.
I
t was cool because it was damp and in the shadow of larger warehouses. In the middle of the vast and dusty space were eight wooden tables. A ring made by feet rubbing away the dust surrounded them

‘
Room 3
’
was reserved for the bodies of ‘
more refined clients
.’
A
place where rich wealthy relatives could identify the body of their loved ones without the horror of seeing the piles of filthy, sq
ualid corpses brought in fro
m the London
R
ookeries. In those rooms the stink of human detritus was almost unbearable and the floor was
a
sticky maze of congealed and diseased blood.

Steptree approached each body in turn and looked at it closely. He sought out the links in his mind: Ice. Tree. Burnt. There was something there, something obvious but his mind was refusing to see it.
‘Relax, it will come.’

The man in the tree was changing. Not rotting as might be expected
,
but he was definitely transforming. Where his body was connected to the tree, his body was turning ligneous, his flesh turning to wood and his blood
,
sap – as if he was being absorbed. The look on his face was haunted, and for one insane moment Steptree wondered if the man, although dead, might somehow still be conscious.

It had been in this victim’s pocket that he had found the business card for Evangeline’s. Now it
rested
in his own inside pocket, along
side that fateful playing card
.
‘Why haven’t I been there yet?’
he thought to himself. He didn’t really need to ask because he knew the answer.

He was scared.

The imagination is a powerful thing but it can
also
be a prison; one in which the bars are made of shadows and the lock made of fear. There was something about Evangeline’s ‘Palace of Freaks’ that tapped into Steptree’s darkest memories. As a child his uncle had taken him to a travelling circus. It should have filled him with wonder and excitement but instead it filled him with nightmares. Even now he couldn’t face the spectacle of the circus.

The latest body had been reduced to a disgusting thing, burnt and weeping.  His clothes were expensive and of the latest fashion. In his lapel, a white Chrysanthemum had gone slightly limp. Gold wires created the flamboyant detail of his waistcoat. A dark ugly stain seep
ed
through the silk. Steptree used his pen to turn back the front of
the victim’s
jacket. He was looking for the inside pocket, for the card that he was sure it would contain. It was empty.

The swollen wooden door
of the morgue
scraped across the cobbled floor making Steptree jump. Chester’s voice boomed across the
space, “Afternoon, Steppers
.”

Behind him
,
Heartlock entered in his wheelchair, pushed by his charge, Kaspian. There was something about Kaspian that made Steptree uneasy. He was far too handsome to be moral. A young man with his looks and background could buy a lot of trouble
,
and the boy had a curiosity in his eye that said he was looking for it.

“Evening, Chester. Dr. Heartlock.”

“Professor,” he corrected through a conceited smile.

Steptree did his best to ignore his rising irritation and focused on watching the boy. Kaspian’s f
ace reminded him of a clock-face;
smooth white enamel on the surface but a whole powerhouse of cogs and mechanics behind it. He was scanning the bodies, taking in the information from a distance, looking at them as a whole. It was
an
entirely different
approach
to Heartlock who
now
had his magnifying glass out and was slowly pouring over each of the corpses in a slow methodical system.

“I’ve got it!” Kaspian’s voice broke the silence of concentration. Heartlock jumped and nearly lost a grip on his looking glass.

“By God, boy! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“Sorry,” Kaspian whispered, “but I think I may have the connection.”

“Well tell us then.”

Kaspian stepped forward moving to each body in turn. “Water. Wood. Fire.”

‘Of course!’
Steptree thought.

“I don’t follow,” said Chester. His eyebrows were knitted together making him look almost comical.

“The Chinese element symbols,” Steptree and Kaspian said simultaneously whilst looking directly into one another’s eyes.

“It means that there will be at least two more.”

Chester
took in a deep breath and Heartlock took over,
“
The boy means there will be both
Air and Earth.” He wheeled back and turned to face his audience
before proceeding
in revealing
the detail
ed intricacies of the Chinese Elemental S
ystem.

Steptree was only half listening because he was still captivated by Kaspian’s face. There was something going on.
Those cogs were still turning
,
he was still making connections
. Then something showed – a small twitch at the corner of his eye, a flinch of the mouth.
‘He knows something,
but what exactly?’

*

Kaspian’s mind was unravelling. As soon as he had seen the
bodies
in front of him, his mind had
travelled
at hyper-speed. Connections
snapped into place, his heart sped
up. The boy, frozen and veiled in ice
,
and the man half
-
grown into a tree, looked like fr
eakish objects on display. A
s soon as this thought settled in his mind
,
it refused to disconnect from the exhibits he had seen at the ‘Palace of Beautiful Freaks.’ There was no real reason why these ideas should connect and he tried to convince himself that maybe it was his shame speaking.

It had been an insane evening
at No. 7
, full of the weird and the wonderful
,
but the experience had left Kaspian reeling and confused. Most of all it had left him with longing.

It had been only three nights since Hugh Denver
s
had introduced him to the temptation of Eve’s
,
but it was beginning to feel like a lifetime. The visions of Eve’s had refused to leave him so that his
night-time
dreams became his daytime fantasies. It was almost as if the freaks were haunting him – no not haunting
,
but seducing.