The Lamplighter (39 page)

The building had no right to exude ashen odors, the fire that had ravaged it having burned out nearly two decades earlier. But Evelyn's nose now curled at even older fragrances, even deeper permeances. The smells invaded her memory and generated a storm of long-dormant associations: the frills on her pillowcases; the kindly eyes of the regal black man; the sight of Lindsay and three strange men entering the room to seize her and bind her limbs. The wind hummed through the mutilated walls, snow dribbled in shafts between ceiling beams, and through holes in the charred floor she caught sight of the cellar where she had first been imprisoned. She blinked and almost blacked out, gulped for air, clutched a banister for support, and whimpered helplessly.

She heard a voice, far away—a man calling to her. He sounded imploring, guiding her through the darkness to the light.

“I'm here….”

She thought it was the lamplighter.

“I'm here….”

She thought it was the devil.

“I do not fear you….”

The voice, very real, was coming from a room at the top of the stairs.

Great roaring thunderbolts and sizzling ropes of electricity forced them to dodge and duck. Their firearms were useless here.

They continued down a winding wrought-iron staircase panting from exertion, their clothes stained black with sweat and shredded by talons. The skies fell away to reveal a dangerously overworked anatomy of groaning ratchet wheels, huge revolving cogs, squealing ventilators, spindles, regulators, hissing belts, and pistons oiled with blood. Brass cylinders swelled and shot jets of steam, cog teeth issued showers of sparks, gears vomited clots of grease, and horns blared incessantly in protest and alarm. The whole structure looked as though it might explode at any second.

But as they descended deeper, white-painted masonry appeared to cloak the hideous machinery, and they heard waves boom, seabirds caw, and the walls shudder like instruments of percussion. They entered a room filled with glittering panes of glass, dazzling reflectors, and polished lenses, and perceived that they had descended into some great cerebral lighthouse. They clambered down a stout brass ladder into a bedroom area set with two modest cots, a kitchen where pork chops were heating on a skillet, a storeroom filled with lenses and paraffin, and finally they came to a crudely fashioned door of nail-studded wood armored with steel plates. The door was set solidly into the floor, secured there with clamps and sturdy bolts, and resisted easy access.

Hunched over, his eyes squeezed shut and his neck tendons like bowstrings, Canavan hauled at the brass ring with all his might until he achieved some submission of wood and metal. The door popped loose and yawned back with a puff of distasteful mist on what should have been the provision room but instead was a bottomless void of infinite terror and blackness.

They craned their heads over the emptiness but as hard as they tried could make out no walls, no floor, nothing but a few sparkles like a far-distant constellation. They inhaled the ancient air and discerned eerie sounds: inconsolable breezes, sobs and whispers, and even, far below, a plaintive skirl of music.

“Bagpipes…” Canavan marveled.

Straining their ears, they listened some more: “Amazing Grace,” no less, but played in a painfully discordant manner that elicited no emotion other than despair.

Canavan grimaced, but McKnight nodded resignedly. “I always suspected hell would be a place of poorly performed music,” he said.

Pringle tasted the bile of disaffection and experienced the great hollowness of betrayal. He had manfully suppressed his doubts about Inspector Groves, wanting so dearly to believe in him, to surrender without question to a superior in exactitude, deductive powers, and moral fiber. But standing beside the man now, watching the dilapidated lodge and feeling the lingering burn of the Inspector's fingers on his forearm, his final resistance melted and all his willing delusions crumbled.

Evelyn had entered the house to inflict some sort of revenge on Abraham Lindsay, who had set himself up there to facilitate the punishment—that much was clear. But rather than impeding her, as it clearly was their duty to do, Groves now intended to remain outside and wait patiently for the evil to be fully perpetrated. Because he valued conviction more than human life; because he wanted to catch Evelyn after the crime rather than thwart her before it. And to Pringle this was simply unconscionable. And certainly beyond any impropriety that the Wax Man might sanction in the name of expediting justice.

Unchecked, Pringle's previously stifled suspicions about Groves's questionable motives and methods were writ large. And the man's repeated and presumptuous assessments of character, how could they be given any credibility? A dozen times he had quoted the late Piper McNab with hushed reverence—the man's name uttered as though he were a robed prophet or uncanonized saint—and a dozen times Pringle had tried to convince himself that Groves was speaking in jest. Because Pringle thought everyone in Edinburgh knew that McNab had been an incorrigible old lecher whose regular street performances were just a code to alert the city's bohemians to another after-hours orgy in the windowless upper rooms of a Rose Street bar. The rascally piper, who uttered nary a word that was not facetious, presided over the saturnalia like a bony Bacchus, playing his wicked strathspeys and toward the end of the evening hoisting his kilt and inviting the pink-cheeked lassies to play a tune on his own little blowpipe.

How could Groves ever have believed in such a man? Trusted him? Stood beside him?

Without the status to exert his own will or the courage to disobey, Pringle could only burn in silence, his frustration rising from him in clouds of steam.

Swinging from the extremity of the cord ladder, Canavan finally struck something: a curved ridge, deeply scored. Landing here, he was able to secure the end of the rope with a piton and hold it steady as McKnight slid down with the depleted provisions.

The glow from the lighthouse storeroom above barely penetrated the darkness. The only suggestion of a deeper world was the wall at their backs and the sparkles that still peppered the blackness like celestial bodies. And still the bagpipes droned on.

“He's calling us,” McKnight decided. “Leerie…”

“Guiding us,” Canavan agreed, awed.

And indeed they found it difficult not to warm to the appeal, the cry of one so long lost, entombed in darkness and begging as much as Evelyn to be free.

They hammered pitons into the wall and took step after step, then slid down a curved surface coated with fungus. By the time they had landed at the floor of the massive chamber they were grazed and thirsty and covered in adhesive grime. Their lanterns had given out entirely. They looked up to see the square of doorway an impossible distance above and the cord ladder hanging from it like a forlorn tongue. They emptied their canteens and dispensed with their weapons.

They trudged with great uncertainty across the undulating floor, never sure when they would stumble over a ridge or be swallowed by a pit. The surface was at times so hot that their shoe soles smoldered, and in places so covered in writhing creatures that they could barely take a step without crunching some scampering form. The sounds merged with that of their own sawing breaths and returned to them in the echoes of an eternal whispering gallery, strangely musical now, as though joined in some incomprehensible hymn.

Halting, they felt a breath of incongruously cool air and the sensation of moisture, and perceived the nearby rustle of water, which at first they had mistaken for another echo. It was a river, flowing swiftly by the sound of it, but invisible to their eyes save for the faint phosphorescence accompanying the churning of the currents.

“The Styx?” breathed McKnight, and Canavan dropped to a crouch and extended a hand, dipping his fingers into the current.

“Freezing,” he said.

McKnight nodded. “The Frigid River.”

They listened in vain for the sound of a ferryman and even jangled some coins hopefully, but they heard nothing until, making their way down the banks, they noticed a change in the tenor of the current—more agitated now—and they discerned, amid the great luminous swirls, huge blocks or boulders laid across the river like stepping-stones.

“Of course,” McKnight said. “Even Leerie needs to get out.”

“But he has wings,” Canavan noted.

“Then he has laid them down in a nightmare, specifically for our access.”

The stones were the great marble remains of a church altar, and McKnight and Canavan now hopped warily from one to another, fighting to maintain a foothold and not slip into the fabled waters. When they reached the other side they looked up with gloom-adjusted eyes and saw that what from afar had looked like stars were in fact highly reflective jewels set into the adamantine walls of a massive citadel. It was a structure so dark, so hostile to light, that it stood out even against the blackness, and they were soon able to descry lofty towers and spires thrusting into the heavens. But approaching the great plated walls they found no doorway, no aperture, no hint of an entrance or a window, and no inkling of how even the music might have escaped. Leerie had been sealed in a seemingly impregnable fortress.

“We might need to climb,” McKnight said, looking doubtfully at the bejeweled walls.

But Canavan now retreated a few steps, and was quiet a few moments, mustering his powers. And when he spoke it was in a determined whisper.

“Lift up your heads, o ye gates…and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors…and the King of Glory shall come in….”

In immediate response to the sacred command the walls of the great castle shook, there was a cascade of glittering dust, and two of the massive blocks separated just enough to reveal a narrow and brilliantly lit passage into the chambers within.

McKnight turned in wonder and saw in Joseph Canavan a bleeding and strangely luminous longhaired figure in tattered clothes resembling robes.