Ghosts by Gaslight (62 page)

We stood for a few moments staring into the pot. Chibbins stuck his finger in, burnt himself, and cried out. Rothac looked up at me and, I must say, conveyed an expression of sympathy.

“This isn’t stew,” he said. “This is a recipe left for me by the Sanctity of Grace. She wrote it, over a series of nights, in the ash of the fireplace. I’d wake each morning with excitement and run to see what she’d written. I wrote it all down, and to entice her to return, I’d leave her sweetmeats. On the morning that she left the last of the recipe, she also left a dollop of vomit on the platter that had held her reward.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“What is it?” said Chibbins.

Rothac scratched his armpit. I took a step back. “It’s a drug,” he said. “It makes the imagination reel and real. Drink a mug of it and you’ll see. Ludiya calls it Sheer Beauty.”

“Ludiya?” I said. “She’s been to this pen?”

“No, Physiognomist Cley. Don’t get the wrong idea. I take it to the Palace sometimes when I’m invited for dinner, and we sip it afterward, lounging in the plush thrones. Mrs. Barlow is quite a devotee of the Beauty.”

“Something like this would be illegal in the city,” I said. “The Master wants no escape for his electorate.”

“Try it while you’re here,” said Rothac. “You’ll see.”

“I’d rather drink your bathwater,” I said. “I want this mess disposed of by tomorrow. If the Master were present, you’d already have been immolated.”

The diminutive creature bowed.

A
T DINNER WITH
Mrs. Barlow and her daughter, Chibbins seemed hypnotized by the food. He was blessedly quiet but for the sounds of his chewing as he dispatched each dish with a methodical rapacity. The main course was stuffed meat hole and peppered thistle roots. It wasn’t for me. A charred tube of pig meat as big as a log stuffed with cremat—shit in a pit is what it should have been called—and a peppered pile of the gardener’s rakings. No thank you.

“Rothac told me about Sheer Beauty,” I said to the ladies.

Ludiya glanced nervously at her mother. Mrs. Barlow, who had a dribble of cremat on her chin, said, “And what of it?”

“It’s illegal,” I said.

“Cley,” she said, “you don’t understand. Every summer, all summer long, I am in contact with the Master. He treats me like I’m his mother. We sit out in the statue garden, surrounded by rosebushes, beneath an umbrella, and he tells me everything. So you’ll do nothing about the Beauty. You’ll say nothing about it. Or this summer I will be a mosquito in the Master’s ear, suggesting you be sent to Doralice.” She smiled and wiped her chin.

The old witch had me. I calmly turned to Ludiya and said, “What is it like to take the Sheer Beauty?”

She was sopping up a puddle of cremat with a slice of bread. The sight of her bringing the brown stained mess to her lips initiated a wave of erotic nausea that swept through me. “Strange things happen,” she said. “Odd things that leave you unsure if they are real or unreal. The more you believe them unreal, the realer they prove themselves to be; but then put faith in them, and their illusory nature begins to reveal itself again.”

“Can you give me an example?” I said, smiling, even though her explanation was something Chibbins might have come out with.

“You can speak directly to the Sanctity of Grace if you drink it. Without the Sheer Beauty, a living person can only feel the force of her power, hear her wailing, but with the drug, she appears clearly before you, as the woman she was, and not merely a green glowing mist floating through the night. She says that she went to her grave a saint, but her decades in the dirt have made her bitter. She’s returned for revenge against Master Below. ‘I’ve etched his headstone,’ she told me one night in the gazebo. ‘And yours,’ she added. Then the sky lit up pink with fireworks and a buck came out of the willows and entered the gazebo. He sang ‘Last Carriage to the Moon’ accompanied by music that seeped out of the shadows. When the sky had again gone black and the beast had finished his song, the Sanctity mounted him, grabbing his antlers with both hands, and they loped away amid the trees toward the old cemetery.”

I
N A NIGHTMARISH
turn of events, I was forced to share a room with Chibbins for the night. I protested vehemently, saying, “You mean to tell me that in a palace of this size there isn’t another room for my partner? The basement will do.”

Mrs. Barlow shook her head. “There is one room; the others are closed up for the winter. It has a nice big bed for you gentlemen.”

“It won’t do,” I said.

“Like a mosquito in his ear,” she said and stared directly at me. In that instant, I saw one of her hairs, a long white one, drop off.

“Very well,” I said.

I made Chibbins turn around while I undressed and slipped beneath the blankets. Then he undressed, dropping his clothes in a pile on the floor. He approached the bed stark naked, all lumpen and the color of milk. I lifted the scalpel I’d placed on the night table next to me. Looking away from him, I said, “You’re sleeping on the floor.” I expected him to protest, forgetting for a second that this was Chibbins, whose reason was twisted as a pig’s tail. In silence, his pale pile drooped down to the floor. I lay back and entertained my thoughts about the case.

This was really the case that was no case. It was obvious. An investigation was wholly after the fact. What had happened, as I could see it, was that Rothac cooked up a pot of heady swill that had them all cockeyed. Barlow wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing and took a falling icicle through the back. Unable to deal with the old man’s passing and high on Sheer Beauty, they’d conspired to concoct some outlandish tale about a bitter saint in search of revenge. That was it. The only concern for me that remained was delving deeper into Ludiya’s personality, searching for the key that might open her and give access to her most sacred physiognomical junctures.

I rested back on the pillow and realized that Chibbins had shimmied under the bed. He was down there moving around and scratching on the underside of the mattress. “Damn you, Chibbins,” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

“Making a nest,” he said.

“Stop it,” I told him.

All was silent. I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes. Five seconds later, from beneath the mattress there came an extemporaneous song, like a child might concoct, about a monkey who worked at an island inn. I got out of bed, fully intending to beat him to a pulp. “Come out, Chibbins,” I called. His head suddenly popped out from beneath my side of the bed, and I gave a start.

“Ever at your service, Physiognomist Cley,” he said, looking up at me.

I kicked him in the side of the head with my bare foot. My large toe smashed against his rock skull, and the pain was exquisite. I hopped on one foot to the middle of the room, cursing wildly. By the time the pain had subsided, Chibbins had crawled out into the open and stood there, like some bitter ghost, returned to murder Reason itself.

I took one step toward him, and that’s when we heard the strange cry. It came from outside, the sound of a woman wailing. Even with the window closed, it drilled through the glass and lodged in my spine, making my ears twitch and my neck hair rise.

“Get dressed,” I told Chibbins. “Hurry.”

M
INUTES LATER WE
were out in the dark, crunching through the snow. Chibbins carried a small lantern that emitted a weak light, and I carried my scalpel. The moon was absent, but there were stars above. A cry came again from off in the direction of the fountains. It was freezing and there was a stiff breeze, the bare willow whips tapping together with each gust.

“Nabdoodle,” said Chibbins and spun in a circle, the beam of the lantern dancing wildly against the dark.

“To the fountain, ass,” I said and ran. I could hear my partner scuffing through the snow behind me. I was winded by the time we reached the iced-over pool, and I sat on the edge of it. Chibbins soon arrived and held the lantern up to light the curious statue at the center of the circular stone basin. Its copper figures had gone green, and although I could not make out the features in the poor light, I knew, from having seen it earlier in the day, that one was the Master himself, Drachton Below, naked, holding his member in his hand, his head tipped back slightly. The other form was that of a woman made of leaves. She held, in both hands, a goblet fashioned from a small pumpkin. When the fountain wasn’t frozen, the water represented the wine of Nature, continually being consumed by the Master, and at the other end, dispelled in an arc, so that it rained down upon a facsimile of the Well-Built City, which lay in miniature at his feet. The significance of it evaded me, but, of course, that was beside the point.

I listened to the wind and gazed at the constellations reflected in the pool’s glazed surface. “Chibbins,” I whispered. “Do you hear anything?”

“A physiognomist whispering,” he said.

Too weary to kill him, I got up, having decided we should go pay a surprise visit to the handyman. From a physiognomical standpoint, a technical examination of Rothac’s features in an attempt to conclude his potential for treachery was unnecessary. You couldn’t miss that fact that he was less of everything, ergo also less of morality and justice. Let’s be clear, he was, to my mind, part beast, and when Chibbins had sung his song about the monkey, beyond the fact that I wanted to gouge out his very eyes, I imagined Rothac as the monkey serving drinks and entertaining on the piano.

We’d not gone ten yards toward the handyman’s house when Chibbins leaped into the air and loosed a scream. I turned back to see him frantically dancing in place, his feet moving in a blur. Something was scuttling on the ground next to him. “It bit me,” he cried.

I raised the scalpel and moved toward him. “Lower the lantern,” I said, and I couldn’t believe he did as I’d actually requested. There was something there. As I got closer it appeared a snake rearing up to strike, but I knew it couldn’t be as there was still too much shadowed bulk beneath and behind it. Then I saw, the snake effect was caused by the long neck of a bird, whose feathers suddenly opened behind it. Even in the dim light I could apprehend its beauty. It let out a wail, exactly as we had heard, and I took a step back.

A voice came from behind me. “A peacock,” it said, and I turned to see Rothac with a cudgel in one hand and a lantern in the other. “The birds of the Summer Palace, they make a haunting sound, especially in winter.”

“I thought it was your ghost, the Sacrilege of Anonymity.”

“The Sanctity of Grace? You may see her yet tonight,” he said.

Chibbins had cornered the peacock and was petting its neck, purring like a cat.

“What, pray tell, brings you out at this time of night? I’m sure it wasn’t the cry of the Palace buzzard here. It wouldn’t have alarmed you.”

“I couldn’t sleep. Something’s about to happen, and I feel it’s not going to be good.”

“That statement could accurately have been made at any hour since my arrival. A sinister tedium, with dashes of the grotesque, yourself included.”

“Before this is over, Cley, you will need to imbibe the Beauty.”

“Think again, manikin. I . . .” The interruption was caused by a fearful noise coming from off in the distance. This too was a wail, but wholly different from that made by the bird. The very air seemed to vibrate from it.

“Look,” said Rothac and pointed.

I turned and saw it out amid the netted shadow of the willow branches. There was a green mist, floating above the ground, moving along at the pace of a funeral procession. It was headed toward us. Truthfully, I wanted to run but was stunned by the sight of it. The green fog, though continually disintegrating into nothing at its edges, appeared at times to be a thin sheet wound around a body so that certain features of physiognomy became momentarily clear beneath the insubstantial wrap.

It was on the path, twenty feet away from us. It wailed again, and I raised the scalpel. At the sound of the spirit, Chibbins sprang into action and dashed toward it. “Back, you idiot,” I yelled. Dropping the lantern, and making an arrowhead with his clasped hands in front of him, he dove into the miasma, still on his feet, and began laughing and flapping his arms as if to disperse it.

“It’ll kill him,” said Rothac.

“Could I be so lucky?” I said.

The handyman and I watched as the ghost left Chibbins behind, turning in circles, wildly waving his arms. Now it bore down on us. I thrust my blade forward for protection, only realizing then how useless it would be. Only a few yards from us, it stopped advancing. There came a loud popping noise from it, like a bottle of Sparkling Vertigo hastily uncorked, and something large and glistening shot out from within the green folds of mist. Whatever it was passed me by at a furious speed, and then I heard Rothac grunt. I turned to see him fallen back, his lantern on the ground. A huge icicle had pinned him through the chest, its partially shattered point, jutting from his back, keeping him inches off the snowy earth. I looked back to the mist, expecting the same fate, but the phantom had dispersed into night. Instead, Chibbins was beside me, very much alive.

“Chibbins is tired,” he said, and I beat him remorselessly.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
at breakfast, I described to Mrs. Barlow the demise of Rothac. We sat in a parlor with a wall-size window, looking out at the snow and willows. Sunlight streamed in, and I was happy for its comfort. Ludiya was there, and in the telling of the harrowing incident, I tried to make myself seem courageous and coolheaded. At one juncture, where I described wrestling with the spirit in a battle of life and death, the young Miss Barlow smiled and nodded. Luckily, Chibbins, now with a blackened left eye and a missing front tooth, was eating and could not surface to contradict me.

“So do you still doubt what I told you of my husband’s death?” asked the old woman.

I couldn’t verbally acknowledge my mistake. Instead I very subtly shook my head.

“Last night, after it killed Rothac, it came to my room,” said Ludiya. “It slithered up under my covers. Did I mention that I wear no sleeping apparel? I woke to its ghostly tongue, lapping my flesh. The green mist licked me from head to foot, and then I heard the voice of the Sanctity of Grace in my mind. She told me, ‘By tomorrow night, I will have consumed you all.’ Then she vanished.”