The Lamplighter (19 page)

“Nothing at all?” he asked.

Not even a blink.

“No mysterious figures? Stealthy types in capes?”

“There's always those,” offered Billy Nichol.

“I mean figures of a peculiar size,” Groves said, and could not resist the description used by the Waverley Station witnesses. “A dark force?”

Silence.

“No savage beasts? Wild animals?”

“Saw a couple of Americans th' other night,” someone piped up, and there was a swift volley of guffaws, promptly stifled by Leonard Claypole with a stern warning.

But the amusement lingered in the form of grim satisfaction: it was the Americans of the Brush Electric Light Company who had erected the arc lights in Princes Street with the intention of decisively establishing the superiority of electricity over gas. Failing to account for the virility of Edinburgh's breezes, however, their delicate carbon contacts had dislodged on the night of the very first demonstration, resulting in a humiliating blackout and hasty summoning of the lamplighters: a moment toasted long into the night in the leeries' favorite howff. Famously persistent, however, the Americans had struggled on through a largely unsuccessful three-month demonstration and still had not the good grace to depart, their engineers continuing to toil away in some steam-driven plant in Market Street, fully confident of eventual success.

“Aye,” Groves acknowledged, as though sharing their amusement. “What about a young lass, then, with clipped dark hair—a slip of a thing, usually dressed in black? Anyone fitting this description you might have deemed unusual?”

The men shrugged.

“She might have been in the company of another. One who was doing her bidding.”

Nothing.

“And none of you have any regular association with such a lass? None of you has had cause to give her grief, or earn her spite?”

Not a word.

Groves sniffed. “Surely, though, you have read of the victims so far. Has any of you had cause to dislike any of them? To wish them ill? Or to inflict some harm upon them with dark powers?”

There was a collective creasing of brows as the leeries belatedly realized that they themselves had not escaped suspicion, though they were unsure what to make of it.

“Then that is all I can now ask of you,” Groves concluded. “But you should prepare yourself for more questions before this nasty business is through. I ask you to be especially sober, and look about you with clear focus, because you never know what your eyes might chance across. And you cannot discount the possibility that you yourself could be savaged one night and carted to the mortuary, think of that. These are dark days, gentlemen, and you would be advised to be wary. And if you are hiding some secret, concealing it under your hats, then be assured that Inspector Groves will find it in you like a tick in a dog and cut it out with a blunted knife.”

He lacerated them all with another slitted glare, but most of them were staring at the floor with their customary dim-witted expressions, as though they tolerated such rebukes every single day. Which, considering the reputation of the choleric Claypole, was highly probable.

It was much as I thought, they were of no help to me, nor could I see in any of them animal malice. Pringle reported that none of them seemed shaken or pale as I spoke, neither were any of them angry, and I left convinced that the lamplighters had no reason to be slandered by the Evelyn woman, they knew nothing of the murders, and the only demon they knew was the Yankee.

C
ANAVAN PLUNGED
into the Old Town after an exhausting night of debate in front of McKnight's crackling fire. The Professor's newly stated theories were convoluted and riddled with gaps—the Professor himself was happy to concede as much—and so bizarre that he dared not broadcast them beyond the ears of close friends. But as McKnight himself had observed in his own defense, there are crucial points in history when events and extrapolations coalesce in such a tempest that theories once deemed incredible suddenly burst into the form of revelations, and men once dismissed as insane take on the aura of prophets. Not, he hastened to add, that he had assumed any transcendent mantle. It was reality that would bear him out, he said, if indeed there was any reality left to do so.

They had parted friends, as always, but Canavan was still troubled by the enthusiasm with which the Professor had seized upon his explosive theories, like a reckless boy stumbling across a keg of gunpowder in an abandoned fort. Nor was he convinced that the man, for all his repeated assurances, really had the welfare of Evelyn as his primary concern. There were times, indeed, when she seemed little more than a hideously deformed patient, to be analyzed, sampled, and exhibited with the same sort of procedural insensitivity exercised by the lecturing doctors of the Royal Infirmary.

“Never forget we're talking about a young woman, not a crocodile,” Canavan said sternly at one stage.

“Evelyn? A woman impossible to dislike,” McKnight agreed. “And I have never said she is guilty of anything.”

“But your theory is based completely around her guilt.”

“My theory transcends such traditional notions.”

“Aye, but you must accept we haven't yet reached a stage when such theories can be used in any court, no matter how profound and admirable they might be.” Canavan had actually clenched his fists, he was so earnest, and he hoped the Professor had not noticed.

His knuckles were still white now, his muscles still tight, and for all the heavy chill and the hoary hour he could not bring himself to rest, returning home by the most circuitous of routes and all the time warding off the cold with the one phrase he had retrieved from the evening to warm the chambers of his heart:
a woman impossible to dislike.

He had been captivated by her immediately, of course. From the moment he stepped into her room with a strange rush of familiarity, to the way she repeatedly glanced at him, hunting for security, he had been at the mercy of forces more powerful than rationality. It was not romantic love, exactly, or not in the guise in which a man might usually recognize it. This woman was no unearthly beauty—no Emily Harkins—and his feelings were untainted by the madness of lust. Rather, it was the overpowering sense of understanding, and a deep conviction of tragedy, along with a corresponding desire to comfort and defend her, which in Canavan was a drive infinitely more powerful than carnal desire. He was staggered by the force of such emotions, as always, but also fearful of his inability to match them with any sort of security beyond his considerable physical strength. And that he was destined to protect her was practically incontestable: it was a vision as clear to his heart as anything he had seen with his eyes. And if his first task in its sovereignty was to clash sabers with his good friend Professor McKnight, in order to protect her against a most astonishing assault…then so be it.

“She hides something,” McKnight had declared, pacing restlessly in front of the glowing hearth. “You must surely have noticed the transparency of her answers concerning her departure from the orphanage. You might say she was ostentatiously evasive. As if she were peeling away a bandage and practically inviting us to attend to the wound. And it's this wound, I advance, that is the key to unlocking the code of her unconscious.”

“Some atrocity, I suppose you believe.”

“Do you not find it conceivable?”

Canavan paused. “What I find inconceivable,” he said, “is the ability of a young lady to perform a revenge of such brutality, even in her imagination.”

“But she has openly admitted to just that—it's common knowledge.”

“She's admitted to nightmares, which are not the same thing.”

“Ah, indeed,” McKnight said happily, as though arriving exactly at his destination, and he turned to his friend with a mischievous gleam. “Would you care for a deductive argument?” he asked, for all the world as though he were offering a cup of tea.

Canavan felt a curious sense of dread. “I'm always ready for a deductive argument,” he said stiffly.

McKnight smiled. “Very well, then,” he said, and inhaled, as though to snare inspiration from the air. “The major premise: Dreams are entirely subjective, since by their nature they can be perceived by one person alone. The minor premise: Nothing that cannot be perceived objectively—that is, by more than one consciousness—is real. And the conclusion: Dreams are not real. How does that strike you?”

“Very solid,” Canavan conceded. “Though I fear you've set it up specifically to be demolished.”

“Wise fellow. For I now ask you: Is the minor premise really valid? Evelyn, you'll recall, has insisted that when she dreams she is no more than a God's-eye observer. She dreams what others might see awake, at precisely the same time that she is dreaming. Her only part is to reimagine streets with the utmost vividness and accuracy. Waverley Station, for example, was reconstructed from the highest rafter to the deepest speck of soot. So perhaps in Evelyn we have discovered one who does not dream subjectively but objectively.” McKnight shrugged. “And if this is so, then the argument is unsound. Because either dreams are
not
entirely subjective or Evelyn's dreams are not dreams at all.”

Canavan frowned. “So what's your conclusion, then?”

“Well,” McKnight said, “I find it impossible to believe that anyone, let alone Evelyn Todd, has no dreams. Nor do I believe that any traditional dream can affect objective reality. But then Evelyn's dreams, as we've already observed, are not at all traditional. There is practically no appreciable difference between them and reality. And this acknowledgment allows me to draw my conclusion in one particularly challenging logical deduction.”

“I wait breathlessly.”

“The major premise,” McKnight said, “is simply this:
Evelyn's dreams are no different from reality
. You can argue degrees if you like, but I ask you to accept it here on the balance of evidence. For the minor premise, on the other hand, I will accept no challenge:
Evelyn's imagination is able to distort her dreams
. This, of course, is an understatement, and is as true of anyone as it is of Evelyn Todd.” He smiled. “And the ultimate conclusion? The point to which logic has led us irreversibly?”

Canavan had a fair idea but did not feel moved to contribute.

“Evelyn's imagination is also able to distort reality,”
McKnight finished victoriously, and Canavan could only scoff.

“Aye,” said the Professor with an acknowledging chortle. “An outlandish statement in any other circumstances, I'll admit that. But I would not say it were I not convinced of her exceptional imagination and the exceptional suppression of the same.”

“You have no evidence that she ever had a great imagination.”

“My evidence is in the very stoutness of her denial. In her discomfort at the very invocation of the word
imagination
. And in bookshelves that are laboring under the weight of so many academic texts that they are almost ready to collapse. These are the signs of one who has endured a serious punishment, or has been deeply branded with dogma and corrective measures, and has engineered traps and barbs to repel all accusations of weakness and depravity.”

“Your own bookcases strain under the weight of academic texts.”

“Naturally. I am a musty old professor, long lost to hope.”

“So you think it's improper for a young lady to take an interest in the reality of the world, is that it?”

“On the contrary, I find it most admirable. But for one of her age to impose such a severe discipline that even her dreams are drained of any threatening color or emotion…I certainly find that indicative of some unnatural repression.”

“But you cannot say her dreams haven't threatened her. They've done nothing but torment her.”

“Aye, but only as a completely aloof observer. And this is the very point: she is so ashamed of her own dreams that she can only bear to appear in them as an objective figure, a person whose movements she observes as she might yours or mine. Further, the reality she has constructed for herself, outside her dreams, is a being so bland that it is incapable of any sort of inspiration beyond sewing dolls for children. And this is an image she guards like a candle flame in a tempest, presenting to the world this upright, pitiable character untainted by a single corruptive notion.”

“Her immense imagination again.”

McKnight ignored the skepticism. “I believe the fortress containing it was formally constructed at about the time of her departure from the orphanage—the ‘parcel tightly bound.' Perhaps the foundations had been laid prior to this, and I certainly suspect she was reprimanded severely in those days, but then, at some crucial point, a dungeon was built to entomb her imagination so deeply, and under such force, that it has now inevitably protested, slipped through the bars of its cell, and driven violently into the open air, where to Evelyn's horror and shame it cannot be restrained, and has become manifest as the demon that terrorizes the streets of Edinburgh.”

“This is absurd,” Canavan said.

“Ce Grand Trompeur,”
McKnight went on, undaunted. “A euphemism for the destructive demon of the mind. ‘A murderer from the beginning'—a biblical reference to Satan. Don't you see? The killer is not identifying his victims. He's identifying
himself
. In a language that can only be understood through the likes of us. In a language that is inviting us to hunt him down.”

Canavan struggled to protest. “And ‘Persecutor of Innocence'? There are no such references in the Bible.”

“Not precisely. But
persecutor
and
innocence
appear independently in practically every book from Genesis to the Apocrypha. And I hardly think it presumptuous to assume that, when we eventually find it, it will prove to be another reference to the devil. All the shameful and undisciplined imaginative inclinations Evelyn has buried, you see, are challenging us to apply to them their proper collective name. And there are so many names to choose from, are there not?” McKnight smiled mysteriously. “Tell me—what do you know of the name Lucifer?”

Canavan was flustered. “I need to know, before anything else, if we're meant to be dealing with an innocent woman or the devil himself.”

“We are dealing with a human being called Evelyn, and a devil inherent in all of us. A primeval instinct, a fundamental component of evolution. Breathing the atmosphere of an imagination so fertile, and so violently repressed, that it has developed into an incarnation of hate.”

“Absurd,” Canavan insisted. “I say it again.”

McKnight was patient. “And I say again, what do you know of the name Lucifer?”

Canavan sighed. “Lucifer,” he managed, failing to see the point, “is one of the many names given to the devil.”

“I'm sure a good theologian can do better than that.”

“First used by the early Christians,” the Irishman offered wearily, “and later popularized by Saint Jerome. A name generally used to designate the devil as he was before his fall from heaven.”

“Aye—the magnificent Seraph, God's most brilliant and industrious courtier before the schism: the very icon of unchecked ambition. But you still haven't defined the name itself.”

“Lucifer appears but once in Scripture, in Isaiah—a translation of
heilel,
Hebrew for ‘spreading brightness.'”

McKnight nodded approvingly. “And in Latin?”

“It means ‘the bearer of light.'”

“Aye. The bearer of light. The carrier of fire. Spreading the fundamental stuff of the universe.” McKnight raised his eyebrows suggestively. “And so I ask you: Has not Evelyn all but given him his rightful name?”

The lamplighter
. Canavan froze with the realization.

He was speechless for full seconds, struggling for an objection and fighting in vain against the implications.

“But…”

But later he would not even remember how he had protested. He vaguely registered McKnight continuing along some tangled metaphysical line, but in truth he found it exceptionally difficult to concentrate. Because for all the current assimilation of philosophy and theology there was still an essential difference between the Professor's Lucifer—the corrupted instinct—and his own—the Prince of Darkness. Repeatedly the image of Evelyn's tortured and innocent features returned to him, and again and again he tried to find it absurd to think that this face, which he had already gilded in his memory, might shield some unspeakable evil. But ultimately he was too awed by the revelation to be an effective advocate for the defense, and too staggered by the knowledge that he was no longer denying the possibility of her involvement, and it was indeed just a matter of degree.