• • •
The General returned to work on his memoir. If anything, the events of the previous twenty-four hours seemed only to spur him on to greater efforts. I glimpsed him through the window, writing furiously. He’d rubbed a little clove oil under his nose to help with the stench.
As for myself, I disposed of what was left of the rat, but I still had no idea where the mud on its fur might have come from—or, indeed, the origins of the creature itself, for I had never before seen one so big, dead or alive. It was only as I was dumping it among the trees near the house—for the insects and birds would do a better job of ridding the world of it than I ever could—that it struck me how little blood there had been in the aftermath of its destruction. Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t recall seeing any blood at all, only bone and fur and some unidentifiable gray matter. I examined the remains more closely, and it seemed to me that the fur wasn’t quite of a whole, for it was not uniform, even through the mud congealed upon it. After a while, I became convinced that the patches of fur were not even from the same animal. Similarly, the bone fragments appeared to be of different ages—I could tell by their color—and as I began laying them out I thought I discerned what might have been part of a bird’s wing, and an upper jawbone that belonged more correctly to a smaller mammal: a squirrel perhaps, or even a bat, for I saw that it had two short fangs in the center with two longer ones at either side, and no rat that I had ever seen bore such teeth.
I sat back on my heels and considered the problem. It was, I thought, as though a rat had somehow been assembled from whatever pieces of other deceased animals might be found in the undergrowth or the soil, the fur and bones formed into a whole that, from a distance, might well resemble a large rodent but would not bear closer inspection. Yet how could such a thing be animated? Surely the General must have been mistaken in believing that he had seen it run, for this was a dead thing formed of other dead things. Someone must have been playing a nasty trick on him, perhaps the same individual responsible for tracking muddy footprints through his house.
And as my thoughts returned to the mud, so I made a kind of connection. I rose and walked through the trees to the pond at the heart of the woods. It wasn’t much of a body of water, even when swelled by rain, and the level was now as low as I could ever recall. Had I made my way to its deepest point, I doubt that I would have been submerged above my waist. The water was cloudy, and the bank was dry. I looked for traces of footprints, but could find none. Flies filled the air: nasty black brutes that went for my ears and eyes.
I caught a smell. It was fainter than the odor at the house, but I thought that I could detect it nonetheless. Then again, the stink of the mud at the General’s residence had attached itself to my clothing, my hair, and my skin, or so it felt to me, and I couldn’t be certain that what I was smelling had its source at the pond or had simply been carried there with me. I admit to feeling uneasy, though. I can’t say why. A kind of stillness, I think: a sense that something, somewhere, was holding its breath.
• • •
I met the General when I was on my way back to the house. He was carrying his shotgun, and I wondered if he had been thinking along the same lines as I. But no good could come of making the trek to the pond, for the day was unpleasantly warm and those flies annoyingly persistent. I told him I’d been out to take a look, and that the banks were caked hard by the sun. He appeared content to take my word for it, and we returned to the house together. I was glad of his company until we cleared the woods. Again, I can’t say why, except that the smell faded the farther we got from the pond, and then grew more noticeable again as we reached the garden. The General returned to his study to write, and I locked up my tools and went home.
• • •
I have what happened next only from the General himself. I saw nothing of it and can bear no witness. All I can tell you is what he told me after I found him out by the pond just as the rain began to fall.
He had remained in his study until after dark. His hopes of writing a memoir were, he realized, excessively optimistic, and he had instead determined to produce a piece for the Times or the Telegraph, revisiting again the events at High Wood and offering the truth of them, as he saw it. He immersed himself in his work, regularly smearing his upper lip with more clove oil to keep away the smell until his mustache was soaked in the stuff. Eventually, though, even the clove oil no longer worked, and he could only conclude that, somehow, the stench was getting worse, if such a thing were possible. The window before him was slightly ajar, but all the other doors and windows in the house were secured. He set aside his pen, poured himself a glass of whisky, then remembered the blasted clove oil. He could have one or the other, but not both, and he determined to wash the oil from his mustache and make do with the Scotch.
He stepped from his office, and his foot slipped in mud. The front door remained closed, but muddy footprints led from it to his study—where they appeared to have paused, as though someone outside had listened for a time to the scratching of the General’s pen—then made their way left to the dining room and the kitchen, and across the hall to the drawing room, and upstairs to the bedrooms. The footprints crossed one another, and even in the dim lamplight he could see that they were not one set, but many, for the feet were of different sizes, and the tread marks were not the same.
And the smell! God, the smell!
He followed the prints as if in a daze, heedless now of whom he might find, seeking only an answer to the mystery of their presence. In the drawing room he found smeared finger marks upon a photograph of his wife. The taps in the bathroom were clogged, the sink stained with dirt and, he thought, dark smears of blood. There were blemishes upon the wallpaper in the halls, and mud dripped from the door handles. The linen on his bed was no longer white, as though someone caked in filth had been overcome by the urge to rest upon it. Every room, with the exception of the study that he had occupied, bore traces of intrusion, but of the intruders themselves he found no sign.
The front door was open when he returned downstairs, and moonlight shone near bright as day on the lawn and the muddy tracks upon it, all now leading away from the house and into the trees. He walked in those footsteps, and the woods closed around him, drawing him deeper and deeper into themselves, until at last he found himself by the banks of the pond. He stared into the water at its base, the dankness of it seeming to swallow the moonlight, and as he did so, the water level sank, seeping away until all that was left in the pond was foul gray mud.
And in the mud, something moved.
The General caught sight of a shape ill defined, a figure that appeared both of the mud and yet a thing apart. It forced itself up from the mire, its back bent, its hands and knees braced against the bed of the pool. Fragments of old wood and rotting vegetation partly concealed its head, like the hood of a shroud, but he caught a glimpse of pale features, like the face of a second moon, and clouded eyes that turned toward him yet did not see, not truly.
Now all was movement, the mud in a state of slow yet constant turmoil as more and more men emerged, and the General had a vision of an immensity of bodies being forced up from below, a great eruption of the dead, hundreds of thousands of them, all with names to whisper, all with stories to tell, a generation of the lost that would give the lie to his every word of self-justification and crack the hollow shell of each excuse.
Because he had known. He had always known.
He sank to his knees and prepared to join their number.
• • •
That was where I found him the next morning, his clothes caked with gray mud, his body shaking from something more than cold. As I raised him to his feet the rain came, washing him clean, and the pond began to fill again. The General babbled as I half-carried him home, and I thought him unhinged. Even then, he seemed unsure of what was mud, and what was not mud. He thought, he said, as he shivered against me, that what he saw that night might not have been
men at all but merely the memory of them given form by whatever substance was closest to hand.
He never told the tale again, and never mentioned it to another soul, as far as I know. He’s gone now, of course. He died in 1941, just as another generation was facing the guns. As for his great rebuttal, I never heard him speak of it again, and I believe that he burned to ash what he had put down.
I’m not a scientific man, but I can read and write, and I retain a curiosity about the world. I have learned that we contain billions of atoms in our bodies, and all of those atoms at one point formed part of other human beings, so that each one of us carries within us a trace of every man and woman who has ever walked this earth. It is to do with the law of averages, as I understand it. If it is true of us, then is it true also of other things? Like mud, I mean. Ten million soldiers died in the Great War, most of them laid to rest in mud and soil. Ten million, each containing billions and billions of individual atoms. If each human being can contain within himself every other, could not something of those dead men be retained in the very ground, a kind of memory of them that can never be dispelled?
There are all kinds of mud, you know.
All kinds.
IV. THE WANDERER IN UNKNOWN REALMS
I
Through Chancery, pausing only to wipe the dung from my boots.
Through Chancery, to the chambers of the lawyer Quayle.
There are men of wealth and power who wish others to know of their position in society. They eat at the best restaurants and stay in the finest hotels; they revel in ostentation. Even those who serve the interests of men more important than themselves are not immune from grand gestures, and so it is that the Harley Street physicians who tend to the ailments of the great will acquire suites of rooms fitted with antique furnishings, as if to say, “See! I am as good as you. I can demean myself in displays of wealth just as readily as you can.” It should be said, of course, that it is somehow less noble to have bought your possessions with money earned than it is simply to inherit, and arrivistes who try to compete will always be looked down upon by those whose wealth was acquired so long before that the effort of its acquisition, the filth and the sin of it, have since been erased from memory.
Then there are those who understand that wealth and power are weapons and should be used carefully, and not without forethought. They disdain ostentation in themselves and in other men. In a way, they may even be ashamed of their privileged position. They have learned, too, that if those who look after their affairs—the physicians, the lawyers, the bankers—work in lavish surroundings, then someone, somewhere, is paying more than a shilling extra on his bill in order to provide such comforts. The man who looks after one’s money should know its value, and be as parsimonious with his particular funds as he is with one’s own.
So it was that the lawyer Quayle worked out of a courtyard in a part of Chancery that had changed little since Quayle’s near neighbors, the esteemed legal tailors Ede & Ravenscroft, had established their business on Chancery Lane as the seventeenth century was drawing to its close. A narrow arch led into a space not much larger than a bed-sitting room, its cobbles always slick with damp even in the driest of weather, the surrounding buildings craning over as though to peer down disapprovingly on interlopers, the old crown glass of the windows distorting the view of the world from both within and without. There was a smell of cooking to the place on that November morning, although none lived here, and none cooked, unless one counted the tea that Quayle’s clerk, Mr. Fawnsley, kept stewing on a little stove outside his master’s lair. In a moment of weakness, I had once consented to take a cup, and had not made a similar mistake since. Workmen applied tar to the roads that was tastier and less viscous.
A brass plate—somewhat tarnished by the years, not unlike the man whose services it advertised—was set beside a solid black oak door to the left of the courtyard. None of the other doors bore similar efforts at identification, and I had never seen any of them put to use. They appeared as permanently closed as the tombs of the ancients: were one to have been forced open, it would not have been a surprise to find the mummified forms of generations of advocates stacked behind it like gray kindling, while the papers from forgotten cases slowly decayed and fell like snow upon their heads.
A bell tinkled above me as I opened Quayle’s door, the sound of it incongruous in the gloom of the interior. It smelled of musty files and melting wax. A lamp burned on the wall, casting yellow light and flickering shadows over stairs that ascended, unevenly and unsteadily, to the floor above, where Quayle conducted his business. I had long since learned not to be shocked by the banister rail that seemed ready to give way beneath my hand, nor by the creaks from the steps that suggested an imminent collapse. Quayle was too canny to allow any mishap to befall his clients, and the most illustrious of London’s citizenry had been climbing these stairs without incident for centuries, ever since some distant relative of the current Quayle had formed a partnership of sorts with a fellow lawyer, a Huguenot refugee and widower named Couvret whose experiences in France had weakened his mind, and who subsequently fell prey to the curse of gin. Couvret was found robbed and near-gutted in Spitalfields, not far from the home of a pretty silk weaver named Valette with whom he was reputed to be having a discreet love affair. Once, over a lunch of braised lamb, a reward for an investigation concluded by me to his benefit, the current Quayle gave me to understand that family lore suggested his ancestor had grown weary of Couvret, and the unfortunate man’s robbery and murder had been arranged to remove him from the business of law entirely. In this, the action appeared to have succeeded admirably.
Mr. Fawnsley was at his desk when I reached the top of the stairs. Not to have found him there would have been a surprise on the scale of the Second Coming, for where Quayle lingered so, too, did Fawnsley lurk, at least during business hours, like the pale, sickly shadow of his master. What the man did in his own time, I could not say. I often suspected that, at five o’clock on the dot, Quayle turned a dial on Fawnsley’s neck, sending him into a stupor, then laid him carefully in the alcove behind his desk, there to remain until eight the following morning when the necessity of resuming business required his reanimation. Fawnsley was a man who seemed incapable of aging, which might have been said to be a good thing were it not for the fact that the actions of the years had ceased for Fawnsley not in relative youth, but in unhealthy late middle age, so he bore the aspect of a man who was perpetually teetering on the cliff edge of mortality.
Fawnsley looked up from his scribbling and regarded me resignedly. It didn’t matter to him that his master had summoned me to his presence. Everything was an inconvenience to Fawnsley, all men jesters sent by the gods to try him.
“Mr. Soter,” he said, tipping his head sufficiently to allow a small cloud of dandruff to fall from his pate and mix with his ink.
“Mr. Fawnsley,” I said, placing my hat on an understuffed chair. “I believe he’s expecting me.”
Fawnsley’s look gave me to understand that he considered this to be a serious lapse of judgment on the part of Mr. Quayle, and consequently he took his time about laying down his fountain pen.
“I’ll let him know that you’re here.”
He rose from his chair as one being pulled from above rather than impelled from below. His feet barely made a sound on the boards, so thin and light was he. He knocked at the door behind his desk and waited on some muffled permission to enter before cautiously poking his head through the gap like a man trying out a guillotine for size. There was a hushed exchange, and then, somewhat reluctantly, Fawnsley stepped aside and invited me to enter the inner sanctum.
Quayle’s chambers were smaller than might have been expected, and darker than seemed wise if their occupant was intent on preserving what was left of his eyesight. Thick red drapes hung over the windows, held back at the sides by bronze loops to allow a triangular pattern of light to fall through the glass and onto Quayle’s desk. The room was lined with shelves of books,
and carpets of Persian manufacture absorbed the sound of my footsteps. There was not a speck of dust to be seen anywhere, although at no time during my visits to Quayle’s chambers had I ever encountered a cleaning woman. There was only Fawnsley, and try as I might, I could not picture him teetering on a ladder with a duster in his hand. It was quite the mystery.
Quayle’s desk was an enormous construction of wood so old that it had turned black. Generations of Quayles had sat behind it, mulling over ways in which to work the law to the benefit of their clients and, by extension, themselves, and justice be damned. It was likely that, at this very desk, the fate of the unfortunate Monsieur Couvret had been decided, with one such as Fawnsley dispatched with coin to ensure the safe conduct of the whole grisly business.
Quayle himself was a surprisingly elegant man of sixty winters or more. (One might equally have said “sixty springs” or “sixty summers,” but that would have been inaccurate, for Quayle was a man of bare trees and frozen water.) He was six feet in height, and one of the few men I knew who could look me in the eye, although I had only a distant memory on which to rely for this, as Quayle rarely stood. His hair was very dark and smelled faintly of the boot polish that he used to keep the gray at bay. His teeth were too white and even, and his skin was so pale as to be almost translucent so that, in better light, one might have been able to discern his circulatory system in all its delicate glory. Instead, in the murk of his chambers, there was only the faintest hint of veins and arteries, like the shadows of branches cast on snow. Half-spectacles, rimmed in black, caught something of the sunlight, hiding his eyes from me.