Part III: Much Mist
“By Jove, Fecklace, will you put down that cursed shilling shocker? The train ride was trying enough, but I refuse to keep steering you out of the way of oncoming trees in this fog.”
I folded Ned Kelly! The Ironclad Australian Bushranger into my pocket and turned up my collar to the brim of my new top hat. The fog was damnably close and thick, seeming to roll up to envelop us from the moment we’d alighted from the train. “Anyhow it’s hopeless trying to read when you won’t be bothered to hold the lantern still. Quite an inventor was that Kelly fellow. I’d almost gotten to the bit where he faces down the Australian police wearing homemade bullet-proof iron trousers. One of the unsung greats, you know.”
“I most certainly do not,” replied Shalaby. “A prodigy who squanders his intellect on criminal acts has a diseased mind.”
“I shall pretend you didn’t say that,” I sniffed with wounded aplomb, turning up the walk. “And that if you did, that it wasn’t a barb at me.”
“Think what you like.”
“Besides,” I flung an arm about his shoulders. “If I’m a disease, old fellow, then you’re the cure.”
Shalaby scowled and shook me off. He tucked his stick under his arm and raised the lantern as we groped our way up the fog-swathed stairs, anxious to get in out of the cold. “Patent infringement, purchase of illegal substances, importation of obscene literature, solicitation of indecent acts…” he muttered over the jangling of the keyring I was sorting through. “Lockpicking…”
“I’ll have you know this is a genuine key. This time.” The key rattled in the door and the front stairs creaked as we stepped into Effingstoke Manor.
The house had the feel of having been snuck up upon by the growing behemoth that is London. In the dark, the lights of distant factories winked through the windows where country squires had used to pasture their sheep. The sound of our locomotive screaming out of the station rattled down through the sloped Presbyterian churchyard that bounded the low-lying manor and its surrounding gardens. Above, a few last coaches hastening toward the outskirts of London clattered along the road.
The manor house itself seemed hunched as if in offended recoil against the advances of the city. A cramped staircase huddled half a pace from our feet, leading into the upper stories. “The ground floor is probably just servants’ quarters and kitchens,” I guessed. “Dashed leaky pipes, too.” The lantern illuminated a spreading water stain on the bowed ceiling.
Shalaby led the way up the dark staircase. The crooked door at the top of the stairs stuck—the frame swollen from the damp—then creaked open. “Well, by my sainted Bernard, we’ve gone back in time.” The parlor—it would be generous to so call it—was decorated in the style of a century ago. Dark hangings and low-backed Restoration chairs crowded rheumy gray walls.
“The furnishings are of no concern,” dismissed Shalaby, striding through the parlor to where a windowed dining room opened toward the rear of the estate.
“And what of that ghastly mist?”
Shalaby whipped round. A pistol was halfway out of his greatcoat pocket, a strange look on his face. A creeping fog had followed us up, as if drawn by the updraft created when we’d opened the door.
“Steady, old boy.” I grinned. “I don’t much like London weather myself, but unloading the revolver into it might be a bit of an overreaction.” The fog rippled along the carpet, lapping our ankles.
Shalaby lowered his gun, but not his guard, and continued to eye the floor. In the silence came the sound of dripping.
“Rather a damp place, isn’t it?” The cheeriness of my tone sounded jarring, but I brushed past Shalaby and through the dining room. Adjoining it I discovered a library with a swaybacked leather sofa. “Perfect.” I lit the lamp and settled back onto the sofa, getting out Ned Kelly!
I could hear Shalaby ascend more stairs, and then hear him rummaging about on the second floor, but I suspected he had matters well in hand without me. It being cold and insupportably dank, I left on my coat and hat as I leaned over the last chapters of my book. Runnels of water trickled from behind the curiously carved moldings and stole along the walls. In the low, mean light of the single damp-wicked lamp, shadows at the corners of the room kept leaping to my attention. Then I glimpsed someone standing behind me, his face leaning close to mine as he peered over my shoulder into my book. I startled and turned. The wan, clammy face had seemed so distinct. But there was no one, of course, just a billow of fog that hung oddly in the air. It had been a droplet of water that ran down my spine, and not a freezing fingertip at all.
Remembering my wager and the unpaid hosier’s bill, I tried to be absorbedly interested in the final standoff of the iron-clad Mr. Kelly and his gang with the Australian police. It was absorbing, fortunately, and after a few minutes I forgot myself.
“Fecklace.”
I jumped when Shalaby spoke, and looked up to discover him in the library with me, holding aside the heavy curtains. I looked down and noticed how the fog had crept up undetected. It now covered my feet and the base of the couch. The rows of bookshelves were indistinguishable in the vaporous tendrils that crowded about them like something massy and solid. “Fancy that.”
Shalaby was now crouched in the window and he turned round, speaking in an impatient hiss. “I’ll thank you to fancy this instead. Look: the road.”
Going to the window, I stared out onto the shipping road where an enormous wagon sailed through the fog. The driver guided four pale horses over the uneven road with the impossible smoothness of a boatman skimming a lake. “What time is it?”
“A quarter past eleven,” was his instant reply, “and not a street light to be seen. No lantern in the driver’s compartment, either.”
“One wonders how the horses find their way.”
“One wonders a great deal more than that,” said Shalaby in a tone of peculiar emphasis.
“To wit?”
“To wit—” Withdrawing from the window, he hastily buttoned his greatcoat “—whether it is this very manor they’re heading toward with such suspicious stealth. Our duty requires immediate action. Quickly.” He waved away the fog that wrapped about him as he strode across the room.
“Now wait just a moment.” I kept my seat. “Perhaps you don’t realize I have a wager. My honor as a gentleman is at stake.” I crossed my legs and stretched back out on the sofa, setting my book on my knee.
“A wager?” Shalaby turned. Even in the dark I could see indignation cross his face. “This is a game to you, is it?” He glared out the window, where indeed the wagon could now be discerned turning off the road in a manner unmistakably furtive.
I hesitated. But I envisioned returning home to the tender mercies of a Mrs. Fecklace left to stew all morning over a breakfast table strewn with contraband hats and unpaid invoices. “It’s one hundred guineas, Shalaby. Do be reasonable.”
“I, be reasonable!” Anger set his whiskers practically on end. “The unutterable callousness of gaming with such sums. Why, foul crimes are being committed under our very noses, man!” When I still didn’t offer to stir, he turned on his heel. “To the devil with your childish aristocratic paltering,” I could hear him curse as he hurried down the stairs without me.
There was a bitterness in his language that I’d seldom heard from Shalaby before, and I recalled with regret the doors of the Travellers’ Club shutting firmly behind me, leaving my middle-class companion in the street. I knew how it looked. Belatedly, I wished I’d been slightly more honest about the state of my finances.
In a few minutes I distinguished his portly form blundering up the garden steps and hooding a lantern before stealing into the shadows of the trees behind the house and into the darkness, alone. Toward what?
The book closed on my lap. “You may well sit back and judge, Ned.” I uncrossed my legs and paced the length of the room, my feet invisible beneath the rising fog. “But Shalaby W. Shalaby can fend very much for himself. As a matter
of fact,” I continued, raising my voice to counter the pressing silence and gloom, “I’m not entirely sure he’s the one for whom fending is needed…” I looked about me and remembered the pallid face peering over my shoulder. Surely, the water that dripped, steadily dripped from the ceiling was not growing louder. It was merely quieter in here, without Shalaby’s blasted walrus-like breathing.
Ned Kelly! and I waited two or three long minutes. “Not to worry, Ned,” I began faintly. And then I became aware of sounds rising from beneath the window. I looked out. Below me in the dark I discerned the whitish shapes of four pawing horses and the rectangular bulk of an enormous wagon pulled up to the rear bulkhead of the house. Men were stealthily emerging from it. They appeared to be armed.
“Oh very well, Ned. You were right,” I panted, stuffing the book into my pocket as I bolted down the stairs and found myself plunged into a clinging fog that rendered my every step treacherous. Clinging to the railing, I flew down to the ground floor and crashed into the benighted front door. I fumbled the handle and scrambled down the front steps, waist deep in more fog that seemed to pour—not into Effingstoke Manor but out of it.
I pounded around the corner of the building, stumbling my way through the swirling white night. Rounding the back of the house, I saw the wagon silhouetted ahead through yards of overgrown hedge. I began shouldering my way through the gnarled branches, when something snagged the hem of my coat. I reached back to tug it free. My hand seized not on a branch but on cold fingers that grasped like iron.
I stifled my gasp just in time, as Shalaby’s face loomed out of the mist.
I gave an apologetic grin. But Shalaby, all stern vigilance, ignored it. He lifted a branch to clear our way forward and together we crept on. At the edge of the shrubbery we stopped. A few yards away, bulkhead doors stood open and weak light streamed from basement stairs that descended into the manor’s foundation. One could see nothing, the entry was so obscured by the cloud of fog that rolled continuously up from the basement through the open bulkhead. A trio of dark, uniformed figures heaved up from the stygian depths. Austro-Hungarian infantrymen, by the look of them, foreign soldiers unaccountably here on English soil. But they moved soundlessly. There was a softness to their edges and a slight damp sponging sound as they ascended the stairs, bent under the weight of a wooden crate borne between them.
“Counterfeit-Hats-To-Be-Sure,” mouthed Shalaby, all aquiver with intensity.
“That-Is-The-Least-Of-Our-Troubles,” I tried to mouth in reply.
But Shalaby was checking the chambers of his pistol and tugging down the brim of his topper with alarming resolve. He bulled his way out of the hedge. “Shalaby W. Shalaby, detective. Gentlemen you are under arrest.”
Click-slide, crank. Rattle. Wait, I knew that sound. “Will—on your belly!”
The air exploded. From the open bulkhead, bullets ripped through the fog as both of us hit the ground, first me and then Shalaby a bare, a brutal second too late. The spray clipped him and tumbled him head over heels across the grass. He rolled to a stop beside the wagon, face-down, the back of his greatcoat ripped in a long slash.
After the first burst of fire there would come a break and I timed it, counted seconds through gritted teeth as I sprinted across the slick grass. Three. Four. Five.
Another eardrum-gutting rat-a-tat burst—I slid the last yard. “Damn me, they load fast. Don’t they, old boy? Shalaby?” There was no answer. I grabbed his coat collar and turned him over.
His eyes were squinted shut, his hands over his ears, and a scowl on his face that bespoke nothing so much as annoyance. I grinned.
“Disease,” Shalaby griped as soon as the second burst died and he could be heard. “Societal decay.”
“Five.”
“I beg your pardon?”
I pulled him to his feet and ducked my head. “Four, three, two.” We ran. “One.” The foggy night exploded behind us, our feet slipping on the wet lawn as we dove for the mercifully unkempt gardens.
The sounds of pursuit started up in our wake. Voices barked orders in German as we burrowed beneath the cover of a collapsed arch trellis. Shalaby fell in beside me with an awkward, lurching gait. “Some sort of an incantation, I’ll warrant you,” he coughed, his cheeks purple. “Black ensorcellment in the worst degree.”
“Not this time. That lovely lady,” I gasped, clawing my way up damp concrete garden steps, “was the Montigny mitrailleuse.”
“Whom?”
“She is a what. The Montigny mitrailleuse, the Belgian step-sister of the Gatling gun. She can fire two-hundred fifty brass rounds per minute from a thirty-seven cartridge plate with rotating cams. A bit of a femme fatale…”
“Wipe that…dreamy look off your face,” Shalaby puffed, glancing over his shoulder at the tramp of boots over the garden path and the crack and snap of vines and shrubs. We’d reached the servant’s entrance at the side of the house and he led the way inside, the fog nipping at our heels.
“Only it can’t fire that fast, you know,” I continued to ponder. “It’s impossible, a gun like that isn’t made to reload so rapidly, not without components the Austro-Hungarians don’t have, like—” My jaw dropped. “Like the Webley prototype fast-firing recoil compensator.”
Shalaby nodded. “Precisely as I’d feared,” he panted. “The Austro-Hungarian military…has clearly gotten in league…with a Brocken spectre. This is a serious matter.” He doubled over, wheezing. Wet crimson droplets flecked his whiskers and coat collar.
“Did she get you?” I ventured in a subdued undertone.
He waved me away, but clutched his shoulder with white knuckles. “Only a graze…but it will do well enough,” he breathed raggedly. “We’ve no further choice…but to call in…the real authorities.” His voice sunk.
“What,” I coaxed, “surely you’re not afraid to face a bit of spectre?”
“That…infernal gun…” he shook his head, getting his breath. “It’s no use. We shall take the first train back to London. The papers were quite right—and perhaps you were, too. This is above the pay-grade of a ‘sad, shabby little private investigator.’” He sagged against the doorjamb, the corners of his moustache turning down in resignation.
I hesitated. “Well I must say I’m severely disappointed, my dear boy.” He shot me a questioning glance. “Have you really let yourself be served defeat by some upstart second-rate Manchester news rag?” I shook my head. “I’m sorry to say I’d have expected a great deal more from Shalaby W. Shalaby, private detective.”
Shalaby harrumphed and stepped through the door, not quite hiding the smile that twitched his whiskers beneath a look of anxiety. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Well, be that as it may—I can be of no use against that wretched ‘machine’ gun.”
“You’re forgetting.” I drew myself up, suddenly grinning and clasping the book in my pocket. “You’re in the presence of Byron Fecklace, the criminally-minded prodigy and gentleman inventor. I call upon you to ask yourself: What would Ned Kelly do?”
“Ned Kelly? The ironclad Australian what-not?” Shalaby blinked furiously. “What are you about?”
“Light a lamp and let’s get a look at this kitchen, old chap,” I replied as the sound of renewed pursuit broke in upon us. “I wonder where the kettle is.”