A bulky Indian woman took the seat opposite Doyle, her brown face obscured by a veil that revealed only her almond eyes and a daub of decorative scarlet on the forehead between them. An external representation of the mystical third eye, recalled Doyle from his Hindi dabbling, the window to the soul and the unfolding of the thousand-petaled lotus. He caught himself staring at her when the rustle as she rearranged the armful of parcels she carried brought him back to himself. He doffed his hat and smiled agreeably. The woman’s response was inscrutable. High caste, he decided, assessing her clothes and comportment. He wondered idly why she wasn’t traveling first-class, accompanied by family or chaperon.
The rhythmic rattle and roll of the tracks abetted the post-prandial drowsiness of the alcohol, and as the train left the London environs, Doyle drifted toward sleep. He awoke sporadically, for moments at a time, and dimly remembered seeing his subcontinental traveling companion hunched over a small book, running her finger along lines of the page. Sleep finally overtook him. His dreams were hot and swift, a phantasmagoric amalgam of flight, pursuit, dark faces, and white light.
With the jolt of the car coming to a sudden stop, he awoke to full consciousness, aware of some commotion. Along with the rest of the car’s occupants, the Indian woman was looking out the window to Doyle’s left.
They were in farming country. A rough road ran alongside the tracks, bisecting a vast tract of fallow land, planted with a failing crop of winter corn. A large hay trailer pulled by two huge drays had overturned in the ditch beside the road. One of the horses, an immense chestnut still tethered to the rig, bucked wildly, kicking at the air. The other, a dappled gray, lay on its back in a gully, struggling and braying, mortally injured. A young lad, the coach’s driver, tried to approach the wounded animal but was restrained by two adult farm laborers. Looking farther down the road, Doyle saw what had perhaps been the cause of the accident.
Was it a scarecrow? No, although it bore the same basic silhouette, this was larger, much larger, than the conventional field figure, approaching nearly ten feet. Not made from straw—more molded and contoured. Wicker, perhaps. The figure mounted what appeared to be a cross—were those spikes—railroad spikes—pinning the arms to the wood? Yes, no mistaking, rising above the faltering com rows just off the road, facing the tracks. It was a crucifix. And on its head was no crown of thorns. These were unmistakably horns, conical, sharp, and twisting. Doyle’s mind flashed to the beast he had seen engraved on the glass bowl in the hallway of 13 Cheshire Street. This was, as near as he could remember, almost certainly the same image.
As awareness of the figure spread through the car, there was a rising sentiment among the passengers to put the torch to this blaspheming display, but before any reaction organized itself, the whistle sounded, and the brutish vision receded as the train pulled away. The last sight Doyle registered was one of the farmhands, over the protests of the boy, approaching the fallen horse with a shotgun.
The Indian woman, after a long look at Doyle, which she averted the moment his eyes met hers, resumed her reading. The remainder of the two-hour trip passed without incident.
There was the poster—photograph included, if there were any further doubts—plastered to a pillar just outside the Cambridge rail station.
LECTURE TONIGHT, THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. H.P. BLAVATSKY. Eight P.M., the Guildhall near Market Place. Her whereabouts determined to the minute and location with four hours to spare, Doyle set out for King’s College and the offices of Professor Armond Sacker.
The afternoon’s sallow light was just beginning to fail. Doyle followed the road alongside the fens hard by the River Cam and down King’s Parade into the old town center, raising his muffler against the brisk wind blowing down across the broad, open byway. Charles Darwin walked these paths as a student. Newton as well. Byron, Milton, Tennyson, and Coleridge. The hallowed colleges reminded him of his youthful disappointment when his family’s modest circumstances required his attending the less financially rigorous University of Edinburgh. The deleterious effects produced by coming of age in the class system still resonated ripples of discomfort in his proud heart.
Across the commons from St. Mary’s Church stood the great classical facade of King’s College. Doyle passed through its gingerbread gatehouse and screen and found the court within entirely deserted with darkness quickly coming on.
Entering the only building to display a light, he heard a scuffling sound, and a wheezy snort that drew him to the entrance of a long library. A wizened clerk shuffled piles of books in a seemingly aimless pattern between the stacks and a mammoth wheeled cart. His face was mean, red and puckered, while his vulpine black robes and ill-fitting wig threatened to engulf the shrunken man entirely.
“Pardon me, I’m wondering if you could direct me to Professor Sacker.”
The Clerk snorted again, taking no notice of him.
“Professor Armond Sacker. Antiquities,” said Doyle, raising his voice considerably. “Most Egyptian. Some Greek—”
“Lord God, man!” The Clerk caught sight of him from the corner of his eye and lurched back against the cart, clutching his chest in fright.
“Terribly sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you—”
“There’s a bell!” the Clerk yelled. “You’re supposed to ring the bell!” He attempted to regain his footing by leaning back against the cart, but his insubstantial mass was enough to motivate the wheels ever so slightly backward. Consequently, man and cart began crabbing slowly away from Doyle down the lengthy library corridor.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t see a bell,” Doyle said.
“That’s what’s wrong with you boys today! Used to be students had respect for authority!”
Mortal fear of corporal punishment will do that to a body, Doyle was tempted to reply. Nudging the cart feebly ahead, the Clerk continued to retreat, not quite able to gain leverage to right himself, while Doyle kept pace equidistant behind.
“Perhaps if you displayed the bell in a more obviously visible location,” Doyle offered pleasantly.
“There’s a smart answer,” the Clerk spat viciously. “When school’s in session, I’ll have you vetted to the Proctor’s Office.”
“You have it wrong there, you see, I am not a student.”
“And so you admit you have no legitimate business here!”
The Clerk raised a long, bony finger in misguided triumph. From his squinting, Doyle realized the unpleasant little man was nearly as blind as he was deaf. And unless he was very much mistaken, this venomous old bookworm was a retired proctor himself; in his day Doyle had suffered plenty at the gleefully sadistic hands of the man’s ilk.
“I am looking for the office of Professor Armond Sacker,” Doyle said, producing Sacker’s calling card—they had by now traveled twenty yards down the hall, and Doyle felt no impulse whatsoever to assist the toadish misanthrope back to his feet—holding it just out of the sweeping arc of the man’s reach, “and I can assure you, sir, my business with him is exceptionally legitimate.”
“What sort of business?”
“Business I am not prepared to discuss with you, sir. Business of a more than passing urgency. And I daresay that if you are not prepared to assist me straight off, it will put me in a very foul humor indeed,” Doyle said, pointing his walking stick at the man and smiling intently.
“Term’s over. He’s not here,” the Clerk admitted, fear or exhaustion tilting him toward the cooperative.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. So there is, in fact, a Professor Armond Sacker.”
“You’re the one who wants to see him!”
“And having established that the good Professor walks among us, if we could now turn our attention to where the Professor might be—”
“I’m sure I don’t know—”
“Take careful note, if you would, my choice of words, sir: ‘might be,’ not ‘is,’ employing the speculative, as in speculation, sir: Where might he be?”
With a jolt, the cart collided wi
th the wall at the corridor’s end. The Clerk slid down to the floor, legs splayed, back against the cart, his pinched visage as pink as a well-scrubbed pig. He pointed up and to the right at a nearby door.
“Ah,” said Doyle. “The Professor’s office?”
The Clerk nodded.
“You’ve been most helpful. If I should happen to speak with your superiors during my visit here, I shall not fail to mention your timely and generous assistance.”
“Pleasure, sir. Pleasure indeed.” The Clerk’s treacly smile revealed a badly matched set of false choppers.
Doyle tipped his hat and entered Sacker’s door, closing it after him. The room was high, square, and lined with dark-wooded bookshelves, serviced by a ladder resting against one wall. Crowding the central desk were stacks of haphazardly open volumes, maps, compasses, calipers, and other cartographic tools.
The smoldering dregs of a bowl of tobacco sent up weak mist from an ashtray. The pipe, an elaborately carved meerschaum, was warm to the touch—the office’s occupant had vacated the room, at most, five minutes before, a departure hastened by Doyle’s voice in the hall? This Sacker was nothing if not an odd fellow, but would he purposefully avoid Doyle after what they’d been through together? If so, for what conceivable reason?
Surveying the desk, Doyle cataloged two standard texts on ancient Greece, a volume of Euripides, a monograph on Sappho, and a well-worn Iliad. Maps of the central Turkish coast, dotted and lined with calculations. Doyle hazarded a guess that the object of this quest was the legendary city of Troy.
An overcoat and hat hung on a rack by the far door. A walking stick leaned against the wall; a bit short for the lanky Sacker, Doyle thought. He opened the far door, which led to a small antechamber—no doubt where students sweated out their tutorials—and then passed through another door, leading into a vast hallway.
Perched on the newel posts on either side of a grand ascending staircase, large winged gargoyles stood sentry, scowling at one another: one a griffin, long of tooth and talon, the other a reptilian basilisk, scabrous and scaled. The day’s last light through the leaded-glass windows imparted a ghostly glow to the marble walls and floors. Total darkness was only minutes away and, saving a penny during the holiday, none of the gas jets were alight. Doyle listened but heard no footfalls.
“Professor Sacker!…Professor Sacker!”
No reply. A chill ran through him. He turned around. The gargoyles glared down at him from their posts in the stair-well. Doyle set off to find a privy—had those statues been facing his way when he entered? A memory of their having faced each other persisted—perhaps Sacker had gone to answer nature’s call.
He found every door along the hallway locked. Turning repeatedly as the corridor meandered, by the time Doyle realized he could no longer see his hand before him, he was not at all sure where he was. The air felt as frigid and heavy as the blackness was dense. He wiped the sweat from his hands. Fear of the dark was not something he commonly fell prey to, but after the last two days all such presumptions were forfeit. Attempting to retrace his steps—there had been lights burning in Sacker’s office, a place that now seemed a haven of warmth and security—he kept one hand on the cool marble wall and took each step cautiously.
An intersection. Did I turn right or left here? His answer was not confident. Right then.
Fear of the dark is a primitive, instinctual leftover, he reminded himself: Our remote forebears spent the better part of their lives groping blindly in the dark—and since there could be huge, carnivorous predators lying in ambush around every turn, it seemed altogether a very sensible response—but that by no measure meant the same dangers still existed in the modern civilized—What was that?
Doyle stopped. A sound, some distance away. What was it? Stay calm. It could be help, a neutral or friendly presence. Even Sacker himself. Perhaps we’ll hear it again. Perhaps it would be a fine idea if we didn’t move from this spot until we do. Err on the side of caution, and not only because we’re plunged into absolute darkness in an unfathomable maze and there are pitiless, unspeakable horrors tracking us from who knows which side of the etheric membrane—
Wait…there it was again.
Try to identify. Not a footstep, was it? No. No smack of heel, no shuffling skid or impact on marble whatsoever.
Go on, Doyle, you know perfectly well what you heard.
Wings. A flap of wings. Leathery, cartilaginous.
Well, perhaps a sparrow or pigeon’s flown through a window and gotten lost in the halls—let’s be honest, shall we? Late December, even if birds were still about, that was not the exercising of a small or even midsized wingspan, if there exists anywhere in the world a bird that could produce that sound, that could displace that much air—
It’s coming this way. Those first two flaps issued from a stationary position, loosening, limbering up, almost as if the—Doyle, put your mind in order, man: Allow into your heart the idea that those stone gargoyles on the stairs can fly, and in two ticks you’ll find yourself chained to a pallet in Bedlam.
On the other hand, something immense is moving through the air and coming closer, so from a purely precautionary standpoint, let’s move on. Don’t run, Doyle, use your walking stick ahead of you, like that—quietly, please—find a door, there’s a good fellow, any door will do—got one: locked. Damn. On to the next.
Rummaging for bird facts—do they see well in the dark? Depends on the bird, doesn’t it? How’s their sense of smell? Do they have one? They must: Their entire lives constitute an uninterrupted search for food. Terrifically reassuring. What have we squirreled away in there about the eating habits of gargoyles?
It’s not possible, but the wings seem to be advancing and receding simultaneously. Unless there are two of them; one on either side of the stairs for a grand total of—enough!
A door, Doyle, and please hurry, because one of them just rounded the corner we recently turned, which puts it fifty feet behind us and closing rapidly—
There: Grip the handle and turn and push and enter and close the door behind you. Can you lock the door? No bolt. Can you recall any avian facts that would support the possibility of a bird turning a doorknob? Be serious. Is there a window in this door? Solid oak. Blessed old, thick old door, God save the English craftsman—
You heard that, didn’t you? A settling of weight, a soft scratching on the marble floor. What goes with wings? Talons. And if talons were raked across the good old solid oak door, they would undoubtedly produce something remarkably similar to the sound we’re hearing now.
Time to see what kind of room we’re in, and more essentially, what other exits it offers. Reach in the pocket, find the matches, move away from the door, and strike a—Good Christ!
Doyle dropped the match and recoiled to ward off a blow that never arrived. This surprised him, because what he’d seen in the split second as the match ignited, bearing down on him at an imposing angle, was the face of a ghoul, hideously denuded of skin, yellowed teeth bared in a militant grimace. He waited. Surely, he’d be feeling its foul breath on his face. Hands shaking, he lit another match.
A mummy. Upright, in its sarcophagus. Beside it, on display, a coiled staff of Ra. Maneuvering the match to reveal more of his surroundings, Doyle realized he’d stumbled into a room of Egyptologiana. Amphora, jewelry, preserved cats, gold-inlaid daggers, hieroglyphed slate: Egypt and its detritus were all the rage these days, no world tour complete without an excursion to the Pyramids at—
Boom! Banging on the door. Boom! The hinges groaned painfully. Thanks to his panicked exclamation, whatever was out there knew he was inside—
The match burned his finger. He dropped it and lit another, looking for a—please God—yes, there, a window. He moved to it as quickly as keeping the match alive would allow, fixed the position of the latch lock, discarded the match, grabbed the latch, turned—the pounding on the door insistent, massive bulk heaving itself against splintering wood—and the window flew open. Doyle looked down at an
uncertain drop, no time to hesitate, tossed out his bag and stick and followed them, absorbing the shock of the fall with his knees, tucking and rolling, scooping up bag and stick and sprinting away from the Tomb of Antiquities.
He stopped to catch his breath under the vaulted exterior arch of St. Mary’s Church. He waited ten minutes in the shadows for the dreadful flapping to emerge from the darkness, for some vile avenging shadow to blot out the stars and streak down at him out of the sky. As his breathing steadied, the sweat that had soaked his shirt cooled, leaving him cold and shivery. Lights burned invitingly in the nave. He moved inside.
What had he escaped from? In the warm, same light of the church, the question turned on him; had his imagination transformed perfectly ordinary circumstances—say, an overzealous night watchman whose corduroy pants produced an insistent hissing—into a wallow of self-generated terror? He had studied how the strain of combat could induce in soldiers all manner of hallucinatory mental phenomena. Was he not now laboring under an even more insidious strain, in that his antagonists were unknown to him and could be, as Sacker had suggested, any passing stranger in the street? Perhaps this was their preferred method of assault, driving their victims mad with a constant noncorporeal menace more sensed than seen. Show a man a target he can strike back against, and you lend him a footing. Attack him with inexplicable night sounds, will-o’-the wisps, macabre scarecrows by the sides of train tracks, incite the stuff of his own nightmares, and the suggestive vagueness of it alone could send him reeling into lunacy.
Standing at one of the transept chapels, Doyle entertained an impulse to light a candle in appeal to some conventional higher power of good, for guidance or aid. GOD IS LIGHT AND IN HIM IS NO DARKNESS AT ALL, read the inscription.