Barry had summoned them to a rough passage hacked through the barrier, a head taller than a man and twice as wide. Wood chips covered the ground, mostly outside the entrance. A weathered ax lay on the ground nearby. Gazing through the opening, they could see stables and the house beyond. There was no sight or sound of activity inside.
“Complete your survey of the wall, please, Barry,” ordered Sparks. “I predict we’ll find this provides us with our only access.”
Barry jumped aboard the cab and headed off down the wall.
“Someone was cutting their way in, not out,” said Doyle, examining the edge of the gap.
“And after its completion.”
Doyle nodded in agreement. “Who cut through. Friend or enemy?”
“Keeping something out favors the latter, doesn’t it?”
Nothing stirred within, but ihey stayed where they were, as if some invisible obstruction as solid as the logs remained between them and the grounds of Topping Manor, until Barry returned from his survey to confirm that this portal was indeed the only entrance.
“Shall we have a look, then?” Sparks said casually.
“After you, Jack.” said Doyle.
Sparks instructed Barry to remain with the horses, slid his rapier from his walking stick, and ventured through the hollow. Doyle drew his revolver and joined him. They began by patrolling the wall’s interior perimeter, hugging the redoubt as they worked their way around. It was evident that most of the wall’s labor had been completed from inside. Ladders and stacks of unused logs were abundant. Bales of hay and other binding materials lay near pits packed with congealed clay. The wall ran a consistent fifty yards from the front of the building proper, but in the rear, where the architecture of the manor was more irregular, the wall moved considerably closer, in spots no more than ten feet away.
The grounds, once clearly immaculate and groomed, were a ruin. Hedges crushed, statuary toppled, grass trampled and slashed. One stretch of wall barreled through the remains of a topiary garden; odd bits of the animals’ spiny bodies extruded from the base as if severed by a train. A child’s playground had been equally mangled, smashed toys scattered about. A weathered hobbyhorse lay where it had fallen in a pile of sand, its painted exertions a parody of rictus.
Ground-floor windows had been barricaded from inside the house, curtains drawn around planks, tables, unhinged doors that had been randomly employed. Some windows were broken, glass fallen to the inside. Every door they tried was locked and immovable.
“Let’s try the stables,” said Sparks.
They crossed to and entered the freestanding stable on the far side of the graveled drive. No like effort had been made to secure it; the door stood open. Saddles and gear lined the shelves and pegs of the tack room. The grooms’ quarters were neat and tidy: beds made, personal effects filling the drawers and bed stands. A half-eaten kidney pie sat on a plate on the table in the common room, beside it a teapot and cup of cold tea. The orderliness of the place in the shadow of such monstrous chaos felt deeply unsettling. Sparks eased open a creaking door that led directly to the stables proper. The barn appeared empty.
“Listen, Doyle,” Sparks said quietly. “What do you hear?”
After a moment. “Nothing.”
Sparks nodded. “In a stable.”
“No flies,” said Doyle, realizing what was missing.
“Nor birds outside, either.”
They moved down the center, opening the stall doors one after the other. All were empty, but in some the ripe memory of horses lingered.
“They set most of them free early on,” said Sparks.
“Must’ve used some to pull in the wood, don’t you think?”
“The drays, yes. They let them go once they had the logs they needed. But there have been horses boarded in at least three of these stalls since the wall was finished.”
The last door wouldn’t budge. Sparks silently indicated his intentions. Doyle nodded, took the rapier from him, and raised his pistol. Sparks took two steps back, whirled, and kicked the door full force. It flew open with a loud crack. Inside the stall a body lay on its stomach in the straw, its left leg jutting out from the knee at an impossible angle.
“Easy, Doyle, he’s well past causing us harm.”
“Must’ve had his foot against the door,” said Doyle, lowering the gun.
They stepped cautiously in toward the body. It wore high boots, breeches, a shirt and waistcoat, the working costume of a footman.
“What’s this then?” asked Sparks, pointing to the floor.
Straw throughout the stall was clotted with thick trails of a dried, murky secretion: shiny, almost phosphorescent, laid down in a rambling, crazy-quilt pattern. From the body, the trails separated and led up and over the walls. It emitted no odor, but something about the silvery hue and oleaginous composition of the substance prompted one’s gorge to tumble.
“No smell from the body, either,” said Doyle. “It hasn’t decomposed.”
Sparks looked at him with comprehending curiosity. They knelt beside the corpse. Its clothes shone, polished and glossy, coated with the same strange residue. They put their hands under it and turned the body over; it was shockingly weightless, almost entirely devoid of mass, and then they saw why: The face was mummified, only the barest netting of flesh covering the bones. The eye sockets were empty, shrunken, the hands as delicately skeletal as a dried flower buried in the pages of a family Bible.
“Ever seen the like?” asked Sparks.
“Not in a body that’s been dead less than twenty years,” Doyle replied, examining it more closely. “As if it’s been preserved. Mummified.”
“Had the life sucked right from his bones.”
Sparks squeezed one of its clutched fists in his hand; it collapsed into a thousand dusty fragments, like a broken filigree of frozen lace.
“What could have done this?” Doyle said quietly.
A form moved behind them outside the stall.
“What is it, Barry?” Sparks said, without turning around.
“Some’fin’ you ought have a look at out here.”
They left the stall and followed Barry outside. He pointed to the rooftop of the manor. A thin ribbon of smoke issued from the tallest chimney.
“Started ‘bout five minutes ago,” Barry said.
“Someone’s alive in there,” said Doyle.
“Good. Let’s ring the bell and announce ourselves.”
“Do you think that’s wise, Jack?”
“We’ve come all this way. Don’t want to disappoint our host.”
“But we don’t know who’s in there, do we?”
“Only one way to find out,” answered Sparks, striding purposefully toward the house.
“But the doors and windows are all obstructed.”
“That won’t prove much of an obstacle to Barry.”
Sparks snapped his fingers. With a tip of the hat, Barry ran ahead and without skipping a beat leapt onto the front of the house, grabbed purchase for hand and foot in the margins between bricks, and scampered up to the second floor with the ease of a spider on a web. Pulling a jemmy stick from his coat, within seconds he persuaded a window to yield, pushed it open, and poured himself through to the interior.
Doyle was fraught with anxiety at what horror might be lying in wait for the little man. Sparks calmly pulled a cheroot from his jacket, struck a match with his thumbnail, and lit the smoke, all the while keeping a cool eye on the entrance.
“Just be a moment now,” Sparks said.
They heard movement on the other side of the door, the ragged scratch of heavy weight being dragged across a tiled floor, then a lock disengaging. A moment later, Barry opened the front door, and they entered Topping.
Tables and chairs had been stacked and jumbled against the door, which Barry now had the good sense to lock again behind them. Loose paper and rubbish littered the great hall. A decorative suit of armor lay defeated and broken on the black-and-white tile. With no day
light penetrating the occluded windows, the air was close with a heavy and oppressive gloom. Glimpses into vast public rooms opening out on either side of the entry revealed no substantial abuses, only disarray and neglect.
“Yes, I’d say the party is definitely off,” said Sparks, casually flicking away an ash.
“There’s a gent upstairs in ‘a hall,” Barry said unobtrusively, pointing to the grand staircase before them.
“What was he doing?” asked Doyle.
“Looked like ‘e was polishing the silver.”
Sparks and Doyle looked at each other.
“Why don’t you have a look around down here, Barry,” Sparks said as he started up the stairs two at a time.
Barry nodded and moved off into an adjoining room. Doyle found himself standing alone at the bottom of the stairs.
“What about me?” Doyle asked.
“Wouldn’t fancy walking these halls by myself,” answered Sparks, as he reached the top. “No telling what one might bump into.”
Sparks waited as Doyle ran up to join him. They moved into an intersection with a rambling hall that zigzagged off in both directions. Closed pairs of opposite doors lined the walls. There was no less light, but the air of menace was palpably thicker. Moving to the left, they turned the first corner and came across a thick white line of some granular substance poured across the width of the hall; Sparks knelt down and wet a finger, dabbed, sniffed, and then tasted it.
“Salt,” he said.
“Salt?”
Sparks nodded. They stepped over the salt and continued down the hall. Mirrors and canvases hung in the spaces between doors; every one had been turned to face the wall. They stepped over a second line of salt and rounded another turn. Here the hallway stretched away into the murk as far as the eye could see. At the far end, there was both movement and light; a candle was burning. As they moved closer, eyes adjusting to the dark, they saw the person Barry had described.
He sat on a three-legged stool, a pear-shaped, balding hulk of a man, middle-aged, pasty, and hollow-eyed. He wore butler’s livery, stained and grimy, buttons missing or fastened askew. Swallowed in folds of excess flesh, his features were doughy, ill defined. His buttery neck spilled over a collar gray with sweat. Laid out before him was a silver service, full settings for forty, set in precisely measured rows. In his pudgy hands, he held a tattered rag and a gravy boat, rubbing and buffing one with the other obsessively, polish and a basin of water on the floor at his feet. He muttered darkly as he worked, his voice a raspy whisper with plummy undertones.
“The forequarter of lamb requires three hours…two hours for the oyster pudding—must find the whetstone; carving knifes aren’t sharp enough—rosettes and a pastry bag for the charlotte à la Parisienne…for the ptarmigan a Madeira sauce…”
He took no notice of Sparks and Doyle as they approached and stopped at the edge of the silver display.
“Croquettes of leveret…a fricandeau of veal…boned snipe stuffed with forcemeat…”
“Hello,” said Sparks.
The man froze without looking up, as if he had imagined the sound of another voice, then, dismissing the possibility as unimaginable, returned to his handiwork.
“Shells for the quail and pigeon pies…yeast dumplings with truffles and foie gras…”
“Here’s a bright specimen,” Sparks whispered to Doyle, then: “I say; hello there!”
The man stopped again, then slowly turned and looked up at them. His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing; he blinked and squinted repeatedly, as if the sight of them was too much to hold within a single field of vision.
“Yes, hello,” said Sparks congenially and, now that he had the man’s attention, more quietly.
Tears sprang from the man’s eyes, and great lachrymose heaves erupted from deep inside him, rippling the fabrics encasing his slack, corpulent belly. His eyes disappeared into the mountainous recesses of his brow as waves of moisture skied shamelessly down his wobbling cheeks.
“There now, fellow,” said Sparks, with a concerned look at Doyle, “can’t be as bad as all that, can it?”
The gravy boat danced in his dangling hands as thunderous sobs racked his body. If his center of gravity had not been so low and prodigious, he would surely have plopped off his stool.
“Now, now, what seems to be the trouble here?” asked Doyle, slipping into his best bedside manner.
A succession of wheezes, gasps, and explosive eructations followed, as the man attempted to navigate the hot torrent overwhelming his emotional creek bed. His wet pink mouth convulsed like a trout beached in the mud.
“I’m… I’m… I’m… I’m…” A lame stutter was all the man could manage between palpitating spasms.
“It’s quite all right. Take your time,” said Doyle indulgently, as if cajoling a widow to discuss her neuralgia over a glass of elderberry wine.
“I’m… I’m…” The man inhaled mightily, captured and held the air at its apex, struggling as it vibrated hotly inside him, until he grabbed hold of his breath by the scruff of the neck—one could almost see him do it—and expelled it explosively out of his throat: “…not the cook!”
The man seemed shocked by the sound of his own voice, his lips stuck in a quizzical O.
“You’re not the cook,” Sparks repeated back to him, to clarify.
The man shook his head violently to confirm, then fearing he’d been misunderstood, nodded vigorously in agreement, accompanied by a swelling orchestration of bovine snorts, braps, snurrs, and gleeps, as he was clearly not yet equal to another assault on the peaks of articulation.
“Has someone…mistaken you for the cook?” asked Doyle, perplexed.
The man moaned most unhappily and shook his head again, his jowls whipping around him like an aspic.
“Let me make absolutely certain we all share in the same common understanding,” said Sparks, with a complicit look to Doyle, “that you, sir, are most assuredly…not the cook.”
The rationality of Sparks’s reply appeared to hammer a plug into the punctured keg of the man’s misery. The water-works subsided. His shuddering flesh slowly settled. He looked down and seemed genuinely bewildered to discover the gravy boat in his ham-sized hands—then, as if there were nothing else to do when one found a gravy boat in one’s hands, he began idly to polish it again.
“What’s your name, my good man?” Sparks asked gently.
“Ruskin, sir,” the man replied.
“I take it that you are currently in the employ of this good house, Ruskin,” said Sparks.
“Butler, sir. In charge of pantry, plate, and scullery,” said Ruskin, without a hint of pride. “Worked my way up from the knife and brushing room. Fourteen years old when I came to the Manor. The Master and I, we grew up together, after a fashion.”
“Why are you polishing the silver, Ruskin?” asked Doyle gently.
“Got to be done, doesn’t it?” Ruskin replied calmly. “No one else to do it, is there?”
“Not the cook, certainly,” Sparks said, sympathetically leading him on.
“No, sir. A very wicked and a lazy man, the cook. Pa-ree—si-an,” he intoned, as if no further explanation were necessary. “No discipline in him. Cuts corners. Never learned the value of a day’s labor for a day’s wage, in my opinion. Better off without him, we are. Good riddance to bad rubbish, if I may speak candidly, sir.”
“So you’ve been left with the cooking as well,” said Sparks, with a nod to Doyle, now able to trace the root of the man’s despair.
“That I have, sir. Now the menu, that was settled weeks ago. Had it printed up for the table settings.” He patted his pockets, smearing himself with polish. “Have a copy here somewhere.”
“That’s quite all right, Ruskin,” said Sparks.
“Yes, sir. And a glorious dinner it is, too,” said Ruskin, with a faraway light in his eye that Doyle associated with the dangerously unbalanced. Or perhaps it was the contemplation of all the food that so transported him.
>
“And there’s a problem with the dinner, is there?” asked Sparks.
“We find ourselves a bit understaffed at the moment, and with the cook gone as he is, well, I’m afraid it’s all a bit beyond my reach.…”
“Cooking the dinner,” said Doyle helpfully.
“Exactly, sir. I plan to get on to the cooking straightaway, after discharging my other responsibilities. There’s a great deal to do, and one needs time to cook the dinner properly, but I’ve committed the menu to memory should there be any confusion,” said Ruskin, absentmindedly patting his pockets again. “Dear. Dear, dear. I’ve misplaced my watch.”
“Quarter to nine,” Doyle said.
“Quarter to nine. Quarter to nine,” he repeated, as if the whole idea of time were alien to him. “The guests will be arriving—oh, are you gentlemen here for the dinner?”
“We’ve arrived somewhat ahead of schedule,” said Sparks, trying not to alarm him.
“Then you are the first, actually—welcome, welcome—oh dear, I beg your humble pardon, gentlemen, I haven’t offered to take your bags,” Ruskin said, attempting to rouse his quivering mass off the stool.
“It’s all right, Ruskin; our man has the situation well in hand,” said Sparks.
“Are you sure? I should drive your carriage round to the barn—”
“Thank you, Ruskin, it’s taken care of.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ruskin settled back down. He sagged visibly, and his skin turned a deeper shade of gray.
“Are you all right?” asked Doyle.
“I’m passing tired, sir. Truth is I could do with a bit of a lie down before the festivities, just a few minutes is all, but you see, there’s so terribly much to do,” said Ruskin, short of breath, dousing the abundant sweat from his forehead with the rag, streaking his brow with metallic black.
“Are you expecting quite a lot of guests for New Year’s Eve, Ruskin?” asked Sparks.
“Yes, sir, near to fifty. Quite the gala. Quite exceeding himself this year, the Master is.”