The Lamplighter (24 page)

He felt enclosed in a tiny, airless space. Some distant voice was trying to tell him that this was not real, but it was a futile denial.

He locked his throat and, reclaiming his senses, decided he would need to examine her for the
stigmata diaboli,
to at least establish her credentials as a witch. He turned to solicit assistance but discovered that Pringle had left his side to confer with the caretaker on some procedural matter, the two men muttering monklike in the darkness behind him. Left alone, he inhaled, sealed the disinfectant-heavy air in his lungs, and, not breathing, levered his fingers under the cold shoulders and thighs and diligently rolled her onto her back. The skin felt supple and the limbs yielding: there was not a sign of rigor mortis or lividity. Her face looked remarkably composed, in fact, and invested with a greater luster now than she had exhibited in life.

His eyes skipped her nether regions on a first visual sweep, but he could not avoid it for long: it was in the meager tufts that the marks were most often concealed. Exhaling, he tried to imagine his fingers prodding and peeling in those parts, but even as speculation it was too much to bear, and with his loins in turmoil he stared at her angelic face with a brand of apology.

Though it seemed to him…looking at her now…that her lips were unnaturally vibrant for one deceased…almost stained red, in fact, as though she had been feasting on blood…and her cheeks, too, had acquired an oddly whoreish rouge.

He glanced around at the others, as though seeking an explanation, but the two men were even deeper in shadow and engaged in some increasingly cryptic conversation. He turned back, extended his hand tentatively to her mouth, and ran his fingertips across her rubied lips, startled to find that they were not only moist but that, underneath, her teeth were glistening with saliva.

Indeed, when he leaned forward a fraction he saw that her canines were unnaturally long and sharpened like fangs…bestial fangs, tiger fangs…and his pulse at once began hammering in his ears.

Simultaneously he noticed something in her mouth, something hidden there…a rolled-up page marked with Latin characters….

And now, with all the signs indicating that something was seriously amiss, he for the first time experienced a premonition of danger, the sense of being lured into a trap. But his movements were dictated by some deeper consciousness.

He inserted his fingers into her mouth.

Her body in response seemed to quiver.

He blinked. He thought at first it was an illusion, a trick of the fluttering light. He hesitated, hearing only the thunder of his heart, and then he noticed it again. A ripple of muscles through her torso, a spasm, as though a creature were buried inside her. It could not possibly be normal.

He watched it all, oddly paralyzed. He could not even blink. He had a strange conviction that Pringle and the caretaker had already fled the room. His own mind told him to withdraw as well, to pull out immediately, but his hand felt immersed in glue. He could not turn. He could not move.

He watched helplessly as her eyelids fluttered like bee wings and peeled back on yellow irises.

He tried to call for help, but his throat was jammed. He tried to squirm and thrash, but her mouth was a sucking void.

Her pupils contracted to slits.

He had a moment to register a feeling of mortality as piercing as any blade.

And then she clamped her saber teeth around his fingers, crunched through the bones, and rose up from the slab like a succubus as blood jetted from his ravaged hand. She enveloped him in her bony limbs and squeezed him like a monstrous octopus.

He screamed and squirted as her godless sucking mouth descended over his head.

And Acting Chief Inspector Carus Groves, fifty-seven years old, spasmed and wailed and fell in a tangle of soiled sheets from his Leith Walk bed, imploring the Lord God to save him from such frightful dreams as in the lurid chambers of his mind the skipping song echoed incessantly:

M
C
K
NIGHT REASSURED
himself of the book's weight in the side pocket of his jacket: a light volume, missal-size, almost concealable between two flattened palms, all the better to be carried with ease by the roaming pastor. Hundreds of years old, gilt-edged and decorated with gold leaf, it had been a component of his library for so long that he could not even remember purchasing it and had discovered it the previous day quite by accident. It now constituted another key in the complex procedure of unlocking the fortress of Evelyn's mind.

“Have you been here previously?” he asked her.

“I come here…sometimes.”

“It is a place,” the Professor admitted, “of paradoxical privacy.”

They were in the Crypt of the Poets, the public house not far from Candlemaker Row where James Ainslie had once stalked for prey. It was an insalubrious establishment, glorying not in its blackened friezes, beer-soaked mats, and choking air but in the great spectrum of its patronage—quarreling students, cinder gatherers, horse soldiers in scarlet tunics, pricey courtesans in their finery—and the omnipresent thrum of its clashing conversations, fiddle music, and shouted orders, resilient even in a time of fear. This, together with its fabled gloom (the gas had long been cut off, and the place was illuminated by candles in ginger-beer bottles), meant that a company could repair to a rear table and engage in a game of whist, hatch a seditious plot, or indeed garotte one another without the turn of a single head or the presumption of an uninvited ear. McKnight, Canavan, and Evelyn now occupied a horseshoe-shaped booth beneath a begrimed portrait of Thomas Campbell, some ragged sandwiches and a barely touched bottle of port on the table between them, and the thick swirls of the Professor's pipe smoke further enshrouding them in their own contracted universe.

“I appreciate your attendance here tonight,” McKnight told her, “and I assure you that, whatever happens, it is not my direct intention to hurt or disturb you. May I ask, to begin with, if you have experienced any nightmares since our last meeting?”

“None that involved murder.”

“And we could not have failed to notice that our streets have simultaneously been bereft of corpses. So you will concede that no harm can be done by prying a little deeper?”

“I care not for my own welfare,” Evelyn replied, “but submit myself in the hope of being some assistance to others.”

Canavan, sitting directly opposite her and staring at her in fascination, now interjected with a translation: “She will be as honest as it's possible to be.”

And when Evelyn, for her part, glanced the Irishman's way and nodded gratefully, McKnight had the unaccountable sense that the two had spoken together since their meeting in her little room. He was not inclined to verify the suspicion by asking them directly, but saw all the indications of an infinitely logical but nonetheless disturbing affection.

“I wish to talk about desire,” he announced bluntly, and noticed Evelyn's gaze drop self-consciously to the table. “And the way in which people go about feeding their desires.”

She was silent.

“Evelyn,” McKnight went on, “you have spoken with some disdain, I believe, about romances…works of fiction.… books of fantasy and the imagination.”

Evelyn nodded stiffly. “Others find satisfaction in them.”

“And you cannot imagine what sort of satisfaction this is?”

“They find…refuge in them.”

“Refuge from reality? From the harsh and the mundane?”

She nodded, but clearly was suspicious of his purpose.

“So a man who reads a seven-seas adventure is feeding a desire to travel, even in his imagination, on the seven seas?”

“That is quite possible.”

“He might settle on this vicarious voyage because he is in reality fearful of the water, perhaps? Or he is restricted from a life on the seas by his commitments on the land? In any case, you will agree that his selection of the book defines in some way his desires?”

“I suppose that might be the case.”

McKnight nodded. “It is important here that I specify books, because a man's broader choices can be narrowed by status and conditions and other factors beyond his influence. But books are by their nature so accessible and affordable, and in range so vast, that no one who regularly selects them could be said not to be leaving in the aggregate an expression of his deepest yearnings.”

“Not,” Canavan interrupted, “the only expression, I'd hope.”

“Of course not. But certainly the
via regia
to some inner being—some craving of the hungry mind. In your case, Evelyn, I refer of course to some of the books I found on your shelf, and I trust you will not think it improper if I name them?”

“Of…of course not,” she replied with some trepidation, because she did not wish to be guided into some sort of trap.

McKnight nourished his memory with an intake of smoke. “There was Plato's
Republic,
” he said. “Grant's
The Literature and Curiosities of Dreams
. Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Idea
. Leibniz's
Monadology
. And of course Hume's
Treatise of Human Nature
.”

“They were not my own books,” Evelyn reminded him.

“No—on loan from the venerable Arthur Stark. So it might be said that they represent but a fraction of similarly themed books you have devoured.”

Evelyn looked unsure if she should be proud or ashamed.

“I seek not to cast doubt on your choices, Evelyn,” McKnight assured her, sending out a cloudy veil. “For these are all meritable works, and indeed they are all residents of my own library.”

“I have not yet read
Monadology,
” she clarified.

“But you will undoubtedly get there,” McKnight said, “and it is an effort to be admired.”

“Very much so,” Canavan added.

“You are compelled to read these texts not by the need to obtain a degree, and it must be said that many of my own students have found some of them difficult to the point of indigestible. I admit to struggling myself on occasion. And yet you, Evelyn, have selected them to read solely in your hours of leisure. It is, you have to admit, unusual.”

“I care not for the usual,” Evelyn said.

McKnight nodded. “I can barely attack you without attacking myself, of course. For I too was drawn to philosophy by a yearning for answers that other studies had failed to yield. I was impelled by a need to confront my demons and lay waste to delusions. I could not rest until I had located my true identity, which still eludes me.”

Evelyn nodded, surprised—even disconcerted—by this admission.

“And as a tangent of this quest I have naturally made it my task to keep abreast of all the developments in psychology, and in fact in all things to do with the mind. You've heard, of course, of the surgeon James Esdaile?”

“The mesmerist?”

“Aye. His book
Mesmerism in India
is one of the titles I observed on your shelf. What do you know of him?”

She delivered a faltering answer, partly directed to Canavan, as though in explanation. “He was a Scottish surgeon in India…in the 1840s…who used an advanced form of mesmerism to remove tumors, ingrown toenails, teeth, even limbs…without the need for chloroform.”

“Chloroform having been discovered at roughly the same time,” McKnight added patriotically, “by another Scot. And mesmerism itself, for that matter, being later refined by yet another. Tell me, Evelyn, what do you know of James Braid, formerly of the University?”

Evelyn forced herself to answer. “Braid wrote
Neurypnology; or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep
.”

“And his teachings, in a nutshell?”

“Braid believed that in a certain state of sleep the higher faculties of the mind are dethroned from their supremacy…and surrender to the power of the imagination…which is capable of being directed and controlled by outside forces.”

“Most authoritatively put,” McKnight said, genuinely impressed. “Braid called his advanced form of mesmerism
hypnotism
. Might you ever have seen a hypnotist at work, Evelyn?”

“I have seen Professor Herrmann perform at Albert Hall,” she admitted.

“Aye? And what marvels did you witness?”

“He…convinced a young man that he was a jumping gazelle.”

McKnight chortled at the thought. “And other tricks?”

“He temporarily erased from a young lady's mind the letter
g
. She could not even pronounce the word
dog
. And an older lady wrote a letter in the name of Cornelius Agrippa.”

“And may I ask if you found this entertaining?”

“I was not there for entertainment.”

“Of course not—that would be decadent. You were there, were you not, to acquaint yourself with the hidden powers of the mind?”

Evelyn's eyes shifted.

“Even the earliest mesmerists,” McKnight went on, “reported that in the altered state patients would frequently exhibit greater strength and powers of perception than they did in full consciousness. In some cases it extended to a sort of communion of minds: the patient humming aloud a tune the mesmerist was playing only in his head. Rarely had it become so apparent that man is jacketed by his own expectations of his mental capabilities and that some of his greatest strengths can be summoned only by deliberately circumventing the conscious plane. All of which suggests a magnificent and terrifying subterranean world where all sorts of beauties and terrors hibernate.”

He was watching Evelyn closely, but she did not lift her eyes.

“Many of these terrors lie in the form of hidden memories, it seems, and we are only beginning to explore this faculty in man. It is said that every single event in a man's life is stored somewhere in the cerebrum, able to be retrieved with the right impetus. There are numerous instances, indeed, of hypnotized patients retrieving episodes, entire dialogues, in minute detail, that they believed they had forgotten completely. Clearly the cryptic memory is infinitely larger than the conscious one. So in removing the tumors there with surgical skill, the hypnotist has assumed the role of the modern exorcist, with far more comprehensive results.”

Still observing Evelyn carefully, and noting in particular how she had stirred at the mention of the word
exorcist,
McKnight now reached into his pocket and extracted the missal-size book, depositing it on the table between them and watching her face slowly drain of color.

“Do you recognize it, Evelyn?”

She said nothing.

“A standard procedural guide for the Roman Catholic cleric. Mine is an exceptionally seasoned edition, true, but is it possible you chanced across other, fresher editions in the library of your convent?”

She was completely silent. But she was staring at the book fixedly.

“The
Rituale Romanum,
” McKnight said. “‘The Roman Ritual.' Covering every major Church order from Baptism to the Last Rites. And in the rear,
De Exorcizandis
—the Rite of Exorcism. Would you object if I now read a passage?”

She seemed to have drawn inward, as though conferring with some interior being for an appropriate response. But McKnight did not hesitate. He gathered up the red silk cord, flipped the book open at the chosen page, slipped on his spectacles, and in a dispassionate voice read that which he had already memorized.

“‘Exi ergo transgressor. Exi seductor, plene omni dolo et fallacia, virtutis inimice, innocentium persecutor…'”

He raised his eyes to Evelyn again, slowly folded the book, and translated the words in little more than a whisper. “‘Go out, therefore, thou transgressor. Go out, thou seducer, full of deceit and guile, enemy of virtue,
persecutor of innocence
…'”

He noticed Evelyn's chin starting to quiver and Canavan shifting sympathetically beside him, but he would not be thwarted. He spoke softly but steadily.

“‘Persecutor of Innocence,' Evelyn—the same words that were left with the body of Professor Smeaton.”

She glared at the book as though to render it to cinders.

“The same words you identified in your dream.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Evelyn…” he said. “It is my belief that the killer who scratched the message on the wall was making an explicit reference to the Rite of Exorcism.”

She shook protestingly.

“It is my belief that the killer is a devil who is now asking to be exorcised. And it is my belief that this devil resides deep in the mind of a fine and reputable young lady who releases him only in her dreams…and who for years has tried to bury this terrible suspicion while seeking to understand it through the reading of academic texts.”