Part V: The Unnatural Conclusion
We forged within, through fog so thick and clinging that it was like trying to breathe particularly offensive soup. One had no sense of how large or small the room might be. “Look out for a crevasse or a well,” called Shalaby, his voice sounding muted though he was right beside me. Or so I assumed, for there was no seeing a hand’s breadth before one’s face. I inched slowly along the damp stones of the floor. The drip-drip-drip of water echoed from what seemed a vast, empty chamber. A shadow whooshed past, swift, soundless, and huge. “Shalaby?”
“Here,” replied Shalaby—from the other side of me.
“If you’re you, then what the deuce was that?” I heard my voice rise high and taut. I caught sight of a giant form, roughly manlike but vague in outline. It towered above me. As I tilted my head back to gape at its looming stature, something grabbed the brim of my hat. Dumbfounded, I watched the counterfeit topper lifted off my head by an invisible hand. It spun a quarter turn in the air, as if being donned by some rakish fellow composed of nothing but mist and—a coalescing shadow forming out of the fog.
I looked down to see a pair of patent leather shoes. A black Parisian suit. A neckerchief with a silver pin. I touched my own throat, the pin cold beneath my hand. And my stare leapt to the face.
A suave smile greeted me. My exact double held my eyes for a long moment, his devilishly handsome face smirking with amusement. “Come into contact with a counterfeit of the Brocken,” he said in my voice, “and you may become a counterfeit yourself.”
“Fecklace?” Shalaby called, “What did you just—”
Whip-quick, the double threw an uppercut in the direction of the inquiry. I heard Shalaby go sprawling to the floor. The apparition leapt on top of him like a wolf, while spellbound, I watched and did nothing. It was as if the hat snatched from my head had taken my brains with it. Shalaby winced as the doppelgänger kneed his wounded shoulder. He growled and kicked, sending the assailant flying. But the double launched itself back at him like a mad thing and seemed ready to overcome him.
As they rolled over and over, embroiled in the mist and locked in desperate fisticuffs, something strange seemed to be happening to Shalaby’s water-soaked greatcoat. I stared as if hypnotized while gradually, the waterstain contracted. It slid from the hem of his coat. It formed a glimmering pool that rushed across the floor and up the wall next to me. Then it shot out an arm and seized me about the neck.
And the arm was attached to a shoulder, the shoulder attached to a rotund and greatcoated figure with ginger whiskers. It was Shalaby—but for the wickedness that shone in his eyes. This new double drew me into a powerful stranglehold. Galvanized by the shock of its vaporous touch, I struggled. But to my dismay it gripped me with a wiry strength, a deadly aptitude that belied its avuncular middle-aged paunchiness. I wriggled, grasping and flailing to no effect. “Dash it, Shalaby, you must’ve been an enlisted man in your youth,” I panted.
Then a familiar English revolver flashed before my eyes. The barrel pressed against my temple. I ceased my efforts, dropping to one knee.
Above me, Shalaby’s double gripped my shoulder as the mist rolled away from the center of the floor, revealing Shalaby and my double locked in deadly strife. It spoke in a deep, deliberate tone: “Acesta a fost vârstele, Vilhelm.”
Shalaby’s head snapped up, eyes wide. At the moment of distraction my own double dealt him a savage backhand, knocking him flat. He sat up. Thunderstruck and dazed, he stared at the doppelgänger that held me. “You…” he stammered, “you are not I.”
“But I am, mei gemeni,” sneered the spectral Shalaby. “Down to the last detail. Oh, I may not be the real thing.” He held me by the hair and dug the barrel of the revolver into my cheek. “But he is.”
Shalaby sat motionless. His mouth fell open.
“Splendid,” I choked. “I’m about to die, and my closest friend can think to do nothing more than gape like a hooked fish.”
And then Shalaby lunged and his double aimed at him and pulled the trigger.
Click. Empty. A look of dismay came over the impostor’s face just before Shalaby’s shoulder hit his knee and he crashed to the floor, his pistol clattering harmlessly away. My own twin dove for Shalaby, scrambling to intercept him, but he rolled to the side and avoided capture. I leapt into the fray, having no notion but determined upon acquitting myself better this time. I laid hold of an arm here, a leg there, my enemies never visible in the shifting fog.
Suddenly, there was the scrape of metal, and a sharp, ringing clap. An otherworldly moan shivered through the room and the clammy fingers grasping my arm slipped away. The fog receded, slinking along the ground until a bare stretch of floor was all that remained. The belching cloud of mist stanched as if suddenly plugged up at its source. And I looked about me to find the doppelgängers were gone. An excellent silk top hat was all that remained in the middle of the floor, and before my eyes it vanished into a tremulous dew.
In the corner, Shalaby sagged in exhaustion over a tremendous concrete well shaft, now discernible in the ebbing fog. He had capped its gaping mouth with a heavy metal lid, and he screwed it down with a last firm twist. “That,” he said after catching his breath, “should be the end of that. Cut off at the source, I should think.”
I stared at him, trying to stifle my admiration. “Tremendous, old man. I never knew you’d be willing to take a bullet for me.”
“Not a bit of it.” He walked over and pulled me to my feet. We were both of us wet to the skin with the vapor hanging in the air. “An exact copy—down to the last detail. You’ll remember that my revolver was out of ammunition.”
“Brave soul,” I chuckled, shaking my head. “At any rate, words cannot express what a lot of explanation this all requires.”
“Hardly,” he sniffed. “We’ve more pressing matters to handle. This whole manor will have to be combed for evidence, and the local police called in.” He rubbed his shoulder and made a face. “What’s more, it’s all very simple, really. The Austro-Hungarians have always been rivals of Great Britain and they clearly—”
“But what of that doppelgänger and what he said? Who the devil is Vilhelm?”
“As anyone might conclude, the act of touching a Brocken counterfeit—whether hat or soldier—seems to allow the spectre to absorb and copy one’s—”
“And he spoke to you in—what was that language? Did you understand it?”
“—a spy plot, to be sure. Counterfeit hats bearing the label of Dawson, Dawson, Dawson and Milbanke might have worked their ways into the households of London’s wealthy and powerful, duplicating influential members of government and industry. Even the Queen—”
“Shalaby!”
“Fecklace I am tired,” Shalaby protested. “I need a doctor,” he added in a strained undertone.
After a moment, I smiled and conceded. “And a cup of tea.” I headed toward the under-kitchen. “I suppose Sir Norton Effingstoke will need a veritable doppelgänger army of lawyers to clear his late uncle of collaborating with a foreign plot. To say nothing of the lost wager.” I thought with relief of the bills at home, from beneath which I could now redeem my breakfast table. “Besides which, I suspect he won’t be inhabiting the family estate anytime soon, despite our having gotten rid of his haunting.”
“I should think not,” agreed Shalaby, picking his weary way up the splintered steps behind me.
I stepped into the under-kitchen and grinned. “And if he does, I’m afraid he’ll be forced to live in a most unnatural manor.”
“Byron. Just put the kettle on.”
If you found this serial suitably amusing, please consider purchasing the first and original Shalaby and Fecklace adventure, entitled “The Sorcerous Dogsnatchers of Fishwife Lane,” in the Obverse Book of Detectives, coming in February 2013.
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