“These people are dedicated pagans—that opens their field of worship to the collective pantheon—and with his years in Egypt, Alexander is surely up to snuff on his Tuamutef,” said Sparks. “Something has just struck me about one of the seven names on our list.”
“Which?”
“Maximilian Graves—what does that bring to your mind?”
Doyle ran it back and forth. “I’m sure I don’t know.”
“An alias, a play on words. Do you see it? Makes-a-million graves. Precisely the sort of diseased jest Alexander used to play with obsessively in his letters. Beware the inveterate punster, Doyle, it’s a sure sign of brewing mental disturbance.”
“You think Alexander’s responsible for Tuamutef being there?”
“Yes. In which case he’s responsible for that woman’s murder.”
“But if it was a ritual of some kind, why were her organs left at the scene? Surely they would have returned them here, to their shrine.”
“Perhaps the ritual was interrupted before completion, that’s not a worry—the thing is, I’m puzzled by what the statue itself is doing here.”
“Convenience—pop down the ladder with a bowl of guts for the old boy whenever the mood strikes—”
“No, Doyle,” said Sparks somewhat impatiently, “we’re in complete agreement on the reason for the statue being here; I’m trying to work out how it physically arrived.”
A light flickered around the curve of the tunnel ahead. Sparks stopped and gave out with another low whistle. A moment later, the whistle was returned.
“Larry,” said Doyle.
“Step lively, Doyle. We’re still being followed.”
Trotting on a hundred yards around the bend to where the tunnel terminated abruptly, they found Larry working by the light of his candle on the padlock of an immense doorway set into the dead-end wall.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, guv,” said Larry as they approached.
“Are you all right?” asked Doyle.
“Never better. The drop down was a bit more steep than I’d bargained for, I can tell you, knocked the Jenny Lind right out of me when I hit bottom. By the time I got my bellows and candle goin’ again and caught an eyeful of that bloody dog-man, I thought silence might be the advisable course of action.”
“The trap was closed after us,” said Sparks, inspecting the doors.
“Figured this for a setup job,” said Larry, lining his center bit up on the padlock. “Got in a mite too easy, didn’t we?”
“Why didn’t you say something?” said Doyle.
“Not my place, is it?”
Sparks knocked on the iron door and got back a booming, hollow echo.
“Listen to that. Hardly sounds like the end of the passageway, does it?”
“We gots a right rusty padlock to get through before we find out,” said Larry, pounding on his center bit. “Bloody stubborn.”
“I say, Larry,” said Doyle, “you didn’t happen to venture down that tunnel the other way before coming here, did you?”
“No, sir—come on, give!”
“I only ask, you see, because we heard what sounded like someone walking toward us from that direction.”
“I wouldn’t know about that—bloody bastard!” Larry hammered away again at the lock.
“Hold up for just a moment, Larry,” requested Sparks.
Larry paused. The echo of his last blow faded, and issuing out of the quiet that descended they heard the same relentless step-drag approaching from the south. Only now there were multiple variations of that familiar rhythm: three, four, five footfalls, possibly more—whether there were actually others present or it was simply some acoustic peculiarity of the tunnel was impossible to determine.
“Proceed, Larry,” said Sparks, moving back toward the curve.
“Anything I can help you with, Larry?” asked Doyle.
“One-man job, idn’t it?” said Larry irritably.
Sparks used the light to scan the walls. Lifting a second torch from the clutch of another iron sconce, he set it aflame and handed it to Doyle.
“Do you think it’s gray hoods?” said Doyle quietly.
“They’re a good deal swifter afoot than whatever we’re hearing at the moment, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes.”
“And if someone did close that door with the intention of trapping us here, it’s not unreasonable to assume they must be confident something was going to stand rather forcefully in the way of our escaping.”
The footsteps grew close enough to hear intermittent splashing and not promisingly, the pace of the steps seemed to be quickening.
“More than one now,” said Doyle.
“More like ten.”
Doyle and Sparks moved back away from the turn.
“Come along now, Larry,” said Sparks. “Speed is of the essence.”
“Got it!” said Larry, as he pierced the lock with a final blow and ripped it off the clasp. “Give a hand, gents.”
All three men grabbed one side of the double doors and heaved. The neglected hinges protested mightily but began to resentfully yield. Doyle looked behind them as they labored; he saw the outline of a column of tall black shapes emerging from the darkness fifty feet behind them.
“Pull, damn it! Pull!” exhorted Sparks.
With Sparks’s and Doyle’s ability to apply useful leverage hampered by the torches in their hands, the gap grew to an inadequate six inches. They dropped the torches and put their whole backs into the effort, but the door stubbornly gave up only fractions of an inch at a time. Larry squeezed through the crack and pushed back on the door toward them. Hinges wailed like a wounded ox; the breach widened another inch. Doyle chanced another hurried glance backward; the tall shapes formed a picket line of angular, indistinct, but decidedly human silhouettes, lumbering and weaving toward their position at the doors. There were considerably more than ten of them. The three men were apparently visible to their pursuers now, for a collective sound came out of the pack, a hideous, breathy, burbling snarl. Redoubling their assault on the door with the inspired strength of angels, they secured another precious two inches of space.
“Go, Doyle, go!” said Sparks.
Doyle turned sideways, shoved himself through to the other side, put his shoulder to the door, and pushed back with all his might, as Larry stuck out a hand and pulled Sparks through.
“The torches!” said Sparks.
Doyle reached back into the gap. As he took hold of the torch, a blackened, fingery mass of exposed sinew, tendon, and bone, dripping seared and tattered rags, clamped a vise-like grip on his wrist; Doyle bellowed in pain and surprise. In one swift move, Larry drew a knife from its holster and swiped the attacking arm. The blade sliced cleanly through its tissues as through wax paper; an appalling howl clawed the air as the severed limb fell away from the hand. Doyle shook the hand frantically off his wrist as Sparks took hold of his collar and yanked Doyle back through the opening, the torch still clutched in his hand.
“Pull, pull it shut!” Sparks shouted. “Help us, Doyle!”
Doyle scrambled to his feet and joined them as they grabbed a handle fixed to the inside of the door and pulled for their lives, the memory of their ancestors and their progeny to come. The hinges moved more cooperatively back toward them, and the gap quickly closed, but not before they saw a squalid, feverish windmill of fetid arms and hands foul the air they’d just been breathing. Frantic, frustrated squeals worthy of a saint’s last temptation tormented their ears, and a smell of a hundred desecrated sepulchers made a mockery of innocence before the void was sealed. They quickly lifted and slid a thick steel bar designed for such a purpose through the twin handles of the doors, securing their position, at least for the moment; the pounding and pummeling and scratching of nails on the other side of the iron doors that followed made speech, if not thought, impossible. At a signal from Sparks, pointing the torch in the direction he wanted them to go, the three men moved quickly and gratefully away
from the doors.
They ran headlong, without a thought to direction or distance. As their senses returned from the brink, and the torchlight revealed their surroundings, they realized this was no continuation of the tunnel; they were greeted by dimly lit vistas of a vaulted, train-station-sized chamber, where boxes and crates of every imaginable size, shape, and function were stacked like building blocks, forming a jagged-toothed skyline. They stopped to catch their breath and still the awful beating of their hearts. The hammering on the doors behind them continued, but at enough remove to allow them the luxury of brief respite.
“Jesus Christ!” said Larry. “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch, wot the bloody hell!”
“It was going to crush the bones of my wrist or pull the arm right off my shoulder,” said Doyle, testing the area for trauma.
“The devil’s own punchbowl is what that was,” said Larry. “That was old Horns and Hoofs himself nearly put the pinch on us. Up your uncle, Nick!”
“Easy,” cautioned Sparks.
Knife still in hand, Larry would not be stilled, angrily semaphoring an eloquent series of obscenities back in the direction of their attackers.
“Feather and flip you, daisy boots! Back to hell where yer mother waits patiently! I’ll carve you like a Christmas pudding, you mingy pross! I’ll sort you out large, Sinbad the Sailor your skidgy hide, ’n’ have your guts for garters! You twig me, yobbos? A handful a’ fives for you!’”
The pounding on the door stopped abruptly. Larry took a couple of deep breaths, then slumped exhaustedly down onto a crate. “Lord, I need a drink,” he said, his head in his hands. “I’m whacked to the wide.”
They regained themselves in the shelter of a cove of crates. Time slowly resumed its normal curve, and Doyle’s attention was drawn to the sea of curiosities surrounding them. He joined Sparks, who was standing on top of the tallest box surveying their position, holding the torch high.
“Good Christ…”
The room stretched out in every direction as far as the eye could see. The landscape was populated by small principalities of statuary: kings, queens, artists, scholars, scientists, foot soldiers and generals on horseback, heroes and villains of antiquity and folklore captured in their defining moments of triumph or infamy, parliaments of demigods and goddesses, their white marble skins aglow with a milky, luminescent sheen.
“What is this place?” asked Doyle.
“I believe we are in a subbasement of the British Museum,” said Sparks.
“So there’s a way out then, up above,” said Doyle, encouraged.
“We’ll have to find a door first.”
“Jack, what in God’s name were those—”
“Not now, Doyle,” said Sparks, leaping lightly down off the box. “Up and on, Larry, we’re not clear of this yet.”
Larry roused himself to his feet, and they set off trailing after Sparks.
“You all right, guv?” Larry asked Doyle.
“Nothing a few stiff yards of scotch wouldn’t set right,” said Doyle.
His stoicism seemed to put the starch back in Larry’s step. “Second the motion. Thought for a minute you was goin’ to chuck the sponge.”
“If you hadn’t been so quick with that lock, we’d have all turned up our toes by now.”
“Easy as winking. Should’ve had it off before trouble turned the corner.”
“No worry,” said Doyle. “Worse things happen at sea.”
They hustled to catch up to Sparks, who led them by torchlight willy-nilly through the immense storeroom. There were no paths to follow, no aisles or columns through which to plot a course. The cavern’s wonders seemed to have been scattered recklessly, without benefit of any discernible design. Each turn through the dreamworld delivered them to a cargo of new wonders: a colony of urns as big as boxcars, others as delicate as acorns; ponderous sarcophagi of silver and lead inlaid with precious stones, baroque coronation carriages of alabaster and gold leaf, catafalques of ebony, ivory, and shining steel, headless mannequins in ceremonial costume from Africa, Asia, and the subcontinent; immense tapestries illustrating wars of lost and legendary kingdoms; a comprehensive zoography of savage animals taxidermed to passive domesticity—bears from every corner of the earth, great cats, ravenous wolves, rhinoceroses, elephants and ostriches, crocodiles and emus, and a spate of stranger, night-dwelling species undreamt-of or never seen before; a gallery of epic paintings in gilded frames assaying every imaginable scene, battles, seductions, royal births and deaths, bucolic Arcadias and nightmarish holocausts. At one juncture, they wandered through a ghostly fleet of skeletal ships, stripped to the ribs, awaiting resurrection. Gigantic cannons, engines of war, battering rams, catapults, and siege machines. A cityscape of uprooted walls, huts, houses, transplanted tombs, and reconstructed temples. Great stone heads. Flying machines. Feathered serpents. Instruments of music or torture. In its breathtaking totality, the chamber’s contents added up to nothing less than an exhaustive anthropology of the known and unknown worlds, all of it shrouded in a thick dust of contumely and neglect.
“Have you ever seen the like?” said Doyle in amazement.
“No. I’ve heard rumors of the existence of such a storeroom for many years,” said Sparks, as they stopped again in a clearing, not a foot closer to finding an exit.
“Like civilization’s graveyard,” said Larry.
“The spoils of the expansion of British Empire,” said Doyle.
“Lord have mercy on the white man. Looks like we brung back every last stick we could carry and then some,” said Larry.
“That’s exactly what we’ve done; plundered the world’s countinghouses and looted its tombs, and what booty we don’t display upstairs in pride of conquest we covet from view down here in shame,” said Sparks.
“Just as every other dominant culture in history has done in its ascendancy,” said Doyle.
“I daresay the world above’s a poorer place for it,” said Larry, sadness magnified by his intimate acquaintanceship with unlawful greed.
“Let it be no cause for worry,” said Sparks. “Another conquering civilization will come along soon enough to relieve us of our burden.”
“It looks as if no one’s been down here in years,” said Doyle, wiping a black thumbprint’s worth of dust off the toe of a warlike Athena.
“Someone has: long enough to steal that statue of Tuamutef, at the very least,” said Sparks, laying that mystery to rest. “If not a great deal more.”
“How’s that, Jack?”
“Although the arrangement of these items seems willfully haphazard to the eye, there is still a loose, categorical method to it. And there were significant pieces missing from nearly every valuable collection we encountered. Here’s an example, do you see?”
Sparks drew their attention to a quintet of Hellenic statues depicting a series of animated and sensuous nymphs. “Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, and I believe this sprightly lass is Terpsichore,” said Sparks.
“The Nine Muses,” said Doyle.
“I had an uncle played the calliope,” said Larry.
“And only five of them left in attendance. You can clearly see here by these marks on the floor that the four missing ladies—help me, Doyle: Polyhymnia, Melpomene—”
“Thalia and Urania.”
“Thank you—you can see by these marks that the other four previously resided here alongside their sisters.”
“You think the others were stolen?”
“I do. I’ve noticed similar patterns of selective larceny throughout. As you’ve observed, Doyle, the curators of this circus are largely absentee. The members of the Brotherhood inserted that shaft into the tunnel in order to gain access to this room; they could siphon a steady stream of treasures out of this trove from now until doomsday and not so much as a teaspoon would be missed.”
“But to what purpose?”
“One of two reasons: to keep for themselves or sell off. You could hardly begin to put a price on what’s
in here.”
“Is that the Brotherhood’s purpose then? Cornering the market on antiquities?” asked Doyle.
“To assemble an elite circle of movers and shakers like the heavyweights on that list to run a fencing operation, no matter how ambitious, strikes me as a tiny bit prosy, wouldn’t you say, Larry?”
“Like the great chefs of Europe gettin’ together to bake hot cross buns.”
“Quite. I suspect the reasons behind these thefts are two-fold: the acquisition of specific and sacred items they believe necessary as their bridge to the mystic plane—i.e., our friend Tuamutef—and the profitable illicit sale of those items they don’t require to finance the rest of their efforts.”
“But as you pointed out, they are all enormously wealthy,” said Doyle.
“And I’ll acquaint you with the first ironclad rule of the enormously wealthy: Never spend one’s own money.”
“Amen to that,” said Larry, the memory if not the light of larceny shining in his eyes.
“Pardon me, Larry. That principle is undoubtedly a good deal less class-conscious than I just stated.”
“No offense taken,” said Larry. “’Fink I’ll have a peepers.” He lit his candle off the torch and wandered off around the next cluster of boxes.
“We can put a stop to their wanton thievery, that much is certain,” said Doyle.
“Sealing that tunnel will put an end to the robberies, though I fear the worst has already been done and the trail gone cold: Witness the ruined condition of that padlock on the iron doors.”
Doyle nodded, conceding the point.
“Whether or not we can successfully bring charges to bear against the firm of Rathborne and Sons for these crimes is a good deal less certain. It may not in fact be in our best interest.”
“How so, Jack?”
“Without a shred of physical evidence to support the accusation, an assault on the venerated, unsullied names of the Brotherhood through the plodding course of the courts will only vouchsafe their acquittal and drive them deeper to ground, while heaping untold ridicule upon ourselves. If we’re to pursue them to the heart of their purpose, it’s best we keep our efforts from public view until the moment we can strike decisively.”