The Lamplighter (30 page)

Groves and Pringle looked down the winding lane, where three cabs were stationed in close proximity to a house with a glowing lamp case over its door. The cabdrivers were inside their vehicles, out of the rain, clearly instructed to hug the building closely.

“Did you get a look at the third person?” Groves asked.

The constable shrugged. “Couldn't make him out too well, sir.”

Groves eased himself out of the cab, straightened his back, and strolled as casually as possible down the lane, the cabmen all the time watching him suspiciously. Approaching the house with the radiant lamp, he judged himself most fortunate, for he was well acquainted with the couple that resided in the opposing residence—a clock maker and his wife who owed him favors (“The Hour of Judgment”)—and would certainly be admitted without hesitation. He rapped confidently on the door.

Inside he quickly explained his requirements, whereupon he was cordially led to an upstairs storeroom filled with dismantled timepieces and directed to a window affording a splendid vantage point. Concealing himself behind the musty drapes, he first surveyed the cabs to ensure that he could not be seen, then looked into the brightly lit upper-level room across the lane, where he discerned three figures seated around a table, their features difficult to distinguish through the cascading rain.

“Who owns the place?” Groves asked the retreating clock maker.

“Henry Proudfoot, the solicitor. He rents it out.”

“The upper floor?”

“The upper floor's been a club room for as long as I can remember.”

“Used often?”

“Very rarely.”

Groves strained his eyes but could only make out a harried-looking woman, who would have to be Hettie Lessels, and a white-haired figure that was presumably Abraham Lindsay. The third party—a larger, smartly attired man—was clearly agitated, rising and walking around the room throwing up his arms, to which Lindsay appeared to have no response.

Groves stood watching for endless minutes, his only company a black cat that curled around his legs persistently. He was convinced that he would recognize the third figure if he could steal a clear glimpse, but the rain continued pelting unabated, and he challenged himself not to lose patience. He assured himself that his strategy was sound. He was accelerating toward the triumphant moment when the whole city, the entire Lothian region, would bow before him in gratitude.

Twenty minutes elapsed and the cat finally withdrew in frustration.

Another fifteen minutes and finally it looked as though Hettie Lessels had risen and was dabbing her cheeks. The distinguished-looking man was drawing on a coat. Even Abraham Lindsay seemed to have roused himself.

Wasting no time, Groves hastened down the stairs, slipped into the lane, and watched as the first cabman guided his vehicle as close as possible to the front door. There was a flash of light from inside the house and Groves glimpsed the Lessels woman almost leaping from the hallway into the open vehicle, which bounced with the sudden application of weight. The cab took off without delay and, as though executing a military maneuver, the second one immediately drew up in its place. The front door creaked open again.

Groves stepped forward.

The rain had eased, but a steamlike mist was curling off the cobbles.

The distinguished-looking gentleman—an immense and florid figure in a spotless Chesterfield overcoat—bustled out the door and was in the process of stepping into the cab when his eyes alighted on the watching Inspector.

Groves frowned, squinted, and his lips parted in surprise.

The other man seemed momentarily seized by indecision, unable to decide if he should glare or skulk, and he froze fatally.

Suspended in this awkward moment, grasping for a reaction and wreathed in mist, the two men only belatedly became aware of an advancing cacophony of hooves, a blast of withering air, and a hiss like that of a wounded buffalo.

Their heads swung around, their eyes struggled to focus, but it was all too late.

They had a mere second to register a great demonic juggernaut bursting from the fog and hurtling down the lane toward them.

No reflex could possibly be adequate.

In one continuous and strangely balletic movement the great crimson-skinned Beast swept past Groves, drove between the cab and the door, collected the distinguished-looking man in its talons, ripped out his gullet like chicken gizzards, tossed aside the body like a little girl's doll, and careered up the dark lane before vanishing in a whorl of silk and steam.

His heart smashing in his ears, Groves watched the horses rear up and the cabs peel away to reveal the Right Honorable Henry Bolan, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, flopping around like a dying sturgeon in the garish light of a bracketed lamp sprayed red with his own blood, as outside McKnight's cottage Canavan watched the stars melt from the sky, and in her little room in Candlemaker Row Evelyn awoke screaming.

D
EEP IN THE GULF
of Princes Street Gardens, Canavan held out his hand and felt a snowflake land and melt on his palm, the cool water draining through his fingers. He kicked at a ridge of black leaves and heard them squelch and scatter. His eyes swept from the colored lights of the street—red tobacconists' lanterns, blue pharmacy lamps, illuminated Christmas baubles—and across the deep-set gardens to the arabesque of shining windows in the Old Town skyline. He saw flitting shadows and flapping washing. He smelled the tang of reeking chimneys. He heard lusty shouts and songs. He hunted for a single false note, a simple lapse in this meticulous reconstruction. But the overlay was so immaculately rendered and aligned that it was practically undetectable.

He passed a bandstand where two vagrants huddled shivering in the cold. Were they real, or a demonic illusion? The train quitting Waverley Station and puffing eastward—made of atoms or dreams? The intonations of organ music from one of the High Street kirks—real sounds, or echoes reverberating in some vast cerebral chamber? The whole of Edinburgh itself—a genuine city, or a projection of a young lady's unconscious?

McKnight had always been on a headlong rush to the truth, and Canavan had always said that intuitive knowledge was the path to God…so why did he now find the truth so hard to accept? Everything pointed to it unwaveringly. The titles in McKnight's library, the twin Bibles, their encounters with the Beast when they assumed Evelyn could not possibly be dreaming…

It was too painful to believe, because it robbed him of a personal destiny, the one indulgence he had sought from God. Because it meant that he had not chosen martyrdom but had it assigned to him. Moreover, if he answered not to the Lord but to a tormented young woman, then what did it mean to feel pity for her? To love her? To sacrifice his life for her? What did it mean to have no identity?

He watched his misted breath rise like chimney smoke into the darkness. He felt a cruel gust of wind sting at his cheeks. He could even taste mustard lingering from McKnight's generous dinner. Never at any stage had he felt more alive. And yet he had never at any stage existed.

“This whole library,” McKnight had said, gesturing around him, “the shelves and everything on them…all of this is simply a projection, a metaphor for her mind, her memory. This entire cottage is just a fantasy. The streets we walk in are immaculate re-creations of real streets. The air we breathe is the abstraction of dreams.” He was looking at Canavan directly, and, sensing the potential impact of the revelation, he put out a hand both to steady his companion and to draw him closer to the truth. “And you and I,” he whispered, “the two of us…I fear that we, too, are just figments of a truly extraordinary imagination.”

At some indeterminate point, he said, in the darkness of concealed memories, Evelyn's mind had been so violently assaulted, so deprived of natural outlets, that it had swollen internally, feasting on reason, knowledge, and all the senses of recognition, and assembled entire refracted cities and populations of archetypes more nuanced than living creatures. It had objectified its own aspects and assigned voices and faces to them, and harbored and nurtured them, and furnished them with lives, memories, and characteristics…and all this in the shadow world of the imagination, cut off from temporality, in a separate consciousness as vast as Edinburgh and as deep as hell.

“The Beast himself comes from the underworld, from some subterranean realm we have only glimpsed, but at least he has the supernatural power to burst into reality, to scratch messages on walls, tear pages from Bibles, and strike men down in the street. We, I regret to say, have no such power. But then we were never conceived for such a purpose….”

He himself was a composite figure, he claimed, a mixture of living lecturers and dead philosophers. Physically, who was to say? A miasma of appealing elements glued together by an extraordinarily disciplined memory. His history? A fabrication that even all her energy could not prevent from fading behind him. His wife? A mirage. His students? Mirror images of real young men. His purpose?
Well…

“I am the archetype of logic,” he announced, “and the frontal lobes are my home. I am the personification of intelligence in the same way the devil is the face of evil. You, on the other hand, I gather, come from an even more tender organ….”

And Canavan, his own heart pounding sickeningly—he could actually hear it (surely it could not be a dream?)—heard himself say, as though from a great distance, “And who am I?”

To which McKnight, with a familiar look of mock admonishment, slapped him on the arm and said affectionately, “My boy, I fear you would think me blasphemous to say it.”

Intuition leads us to God
. And not wanting to accept that which he had always suspected, Canavan had fled the cottage to find the skies yawning in revelation.

For it was a responsibility too great to contemplate and a loss too overpowering to bear. The communion he had felt with Evelyn had been more deeply felt than anything he had ever experienced, and it had the potential to become more than that: a material union. But the consummation could never be, because there was only one spirit, one God, and he was already part of Her.

“All deities reside in the human breast,” McKnight had reminded him later in front of the hearth.

His face in his hands, Canavan had spared the time to nod in recognition. “William Blake…” he said hoarsely.

But McKnight only grunted. “Is that where she found it?” he asked, genuinely disappointed. “Pity. I thought it was one of my own.”

Snowflakes now swirled around Canavan like a blizzard of fragmented Eucharists.
Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi.
As much as he had always known that he was not destined to live on earth for eternity, he now balked at the idea of separation from the world he so dearly loved. This when McKnight, at the other extreme, seemed quite happy to have all his questions answered, his doubts leveled, and all his debts reduced to illusions. Canavan was the one who was supposed to be more disposed to martyrdom, and yet it was he who now, with a great sense of shame, wondered if the chalice could possibly be passed from him.

Bent over on a park bench with the snow gathering on the nape of his neck, he tried to imagine the magnitude of what was to come. It was the Professor's belief that Evelyn had constructed a genuine hellish underworld that they would need to breach through the agency of hypnotism. Here they would work to exhume her deeply buried past, present it to her, and in so doing allow her to hurdle and vanquish it. But what if even that did not work? What then?

“What would be required in that instance, I fear,” McKnight said solemnly, “is almost too grand to contemplate.”

“And if we
do
succeed? Will we dissolve even in her imagination?”

“Our world will only collapse if we do
not
save her.”

“But there's no
world
to collapse,” Canavan pointed out. “It has no substance greater than dreams.”

“And who is to say that any world is made of more?” McKnight said, and chortled. “Be grateful, lad, that we are at least constructs of a truly superior imagination—one with a continuity that is beyond practical measure—and that we have been able to experience an existence as rich as any living being. Be happy that we are not true creatures of fiction, leading cramped and cluttered lives and perishing with the last page of a disposable book. She has given us independent thoughts, this God of ours, and hopes, and aspirations, and we have acted of our own accord, and we have been permitted to stumble, to make mistakes, to question Her in person, and now even to offer our own lives to Her.
And all of our own volition
.”

The Professor was exhilarated: he had become the subject of one of his own lectures. What did it mean to exist in the imagination? Was it anyinferior to reality, simply because the imagination inevitably has to surrender to reality? Does reality in turn not have to surrender to the imagination? And which truly has sovereignty? The questions were generating whole networks of further questions right before his eyes, but rather than feeling lost in some futile maze, McKnight found philosophy the key to existence—his own existence—and as tangible and relevant as any experiment in the Faculty of Medicine.

Canavan now raised his head and watched a squirrel scamper across the powdered grass. He felt the windows of the city stare down on him. He felt the oppressive weight of destiny. He looked at the Castle, glowing with light on its implacable rock, and sensed the city's atmosphere of burgeoning tension, the expanding ripples of tightly woven whispers:
Did you hear…? The Lord Provost…Torn apart in the street…No one knows…No one understands…The devil walks among us…

Then, lowering his gaze with a sigh, he saw a familiar figure wrapped in coat and gloves negotiating the park's winding paths, looking one way and the other, and, spotting him, pause for verification before coming briskly forward.

“I suspected I might find you here,” McKnight said, drawing up at his side. “Are you ready?”

“I'm not sure my presence is necessary.”

“On the contrary, your presence is essential. Without you beside me she will never be accessible. She will see me as pitiless logic, working not entirely in her own interests, and the barriers will be insurmountable. With you offering support, however…”

Canavan shook his head. “This is…
absurd
.”

“This is our duty.”

“I've never avoided a duty.”

“Then why do you question it now?”

Canavan struggled. “Because I need a say in the matter…I need to feel that I have exerted…
free will
.”

“And this free will…this would give you the feeling that you truly existed?”

“It is the very basis of existence.”

McKnight sighed. “Then perhaps,” he said, with an aspect of dismay, “it is best that you do not come after all.”

And then Canavan experienced it: an overpowering sense of shame and thwarted responsibility. And he understood that he had always had free will. He had as much as any man. The forces that directed his actions had simply been filtered through another mind, but they burned on him with the heat of a concentrated sunbeam.

“No,”
he said, and exhaled fatalistically. “No…”

McKnight waited patiently, with a creeping smile, and eventually he put out his hand to assist his friend to his feet.

Canavan accepted the offer, and the two men were finally as one.

It was midnight when they headed for Candlemaker Row, the time when the lamplighters normally began their second nightly circuit, selectively snuffing out those lamps considered not integral to public safety. But in a hasty muster the Town Council had relieved the leeries of this duty until further notice, because the city's mounting fear had now been consummated with historic audacity—the murder of the Lord Provost—and the darkness had become more palpable and threatening, even, than the specter of increased expenditure.

Clutching a chipped cup of coffee, which he had accepted absently, the liquid long since tepid and untouched by his lips, Groves stood at the window of Hettie Lessels's Marchmont villa, staring over the railed fence that she claimed the Beast had rattled and into the street where a lamp blazed boldly beyond the midnight curfew. The window was frosted with condensation, there was a rim of dust on the sill, and the sash was cracked from overuse. It was odd that a man could notice such insignificant details—become fixated on them—when by rights he should have been in a state of insensibility.

He heard the door of the adjoining room creak open and turned to see the Sheriff—a dour man called Fleming—emerge with the Sheriff-clerk. They had come to Lessels's home to conduct a precognition, not under oath, wasting no time after the murder of the city's most eminent citizen. But to their frustration they had found the woman virtually impossible to take seriously. It was not that her sentences lacked meaning. They just seemed demented.

“Preposterous,” Fleming now sniffed. He went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands like a surgeon performing postoperative ablutions.