Gibbous House Page 19

  Once more, he stopped short. He fiddled with his collar and the bottom of his waistcoat, seeming remarkably uncomfortable in his clothes. Suddenly he threw out a forefinger toward Constable Turner.

  ‘You! Turner, put aside this nonsense! Tell your part of the story.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Turner seemed unperturbed by the outburst.

  ‘I informed Mr Allan that such disappearances were not uncommon. Indeed, I myself had heard of a mysterious matter occurring in rural Northumbria. A man seen in the company of a respected notary and not heard of since. Rumour abounded as to his fate, naturally enough.’

  Here Allan interrupted, having recovered a little of his poise, but remaining prone to excitement. ‘It was Cadwallader! Imagine that!’

  The professor’s glass shattered on the floor.

  ‘Imagine!’ I said equably.

  Equable was not a word one could have used to describe the look Maccabi gave me at this point. The professor seized the hand bell and rang it vigorously. As the dissonance faded, I bade the policeman continue.

  ‘Nothing more to say. I spoke with several notaries in the north Northumbrian region and none seemed disposed to throw any light on the matter.’

  The professor let out a breath like an old bellows. Maccabi’s parade ground spine was mollified a little, at least until the irrepressible reporter declared: ‘But I know he visited John Brown of Seahouses.’

  ‘And if he did? How came you by this information?’ Maccabi said, then wiped his spittle from the table with a sleeve.

  ‘A journalist’s sources are confidential.’

  Maccabi looked as though he believed that confidentiality’s battlements could be easily stormed, could he himself but grasp the throat of the newspaperman. The cracked bell rang sourly again, more to provide distraction than out of impatience, no doubt.

  As the professor placed the bell on the table, Mrs Gonderthwaite appeared, broom in hand. The woman’s appearance was quite fey enough to allow for the gift of second sight, although it might have been that her lack of substance enabled her to listen at doors undetected.

  ‘It seems Mr Allan is over-excited,’ I posited. ‘We should have allowed him a little more time in recuperation, perhaps?’

  There were enthusiastic nods. The professor offered to escort Mr Allan to his chamber. I thought it a capital idea. Mr Allan seemed less enamoured of the idea, shrinking from the professor’s touch as they left the dining room. Allan, still less than fully ambulatory, hopped and skipped ahead of the scuttling gnome.

  ‘I thought we’d never be rid of them, Jedediah.’ I smiled at the louring lumpkin. The policeman, as taciturn as ever, said nothing.

  ‘What you will, Mr Moffat,’ he sneered.

  ‘Indeed so, Jedediah. ’

  We all three stood close to the tapestry bell pull beside the fireplace. I looked into the huge space in the hearth. I could see no mechanism. What lay behind and whence had the professor come earlier? I looked again at the length of tapestry alongside the fireplace. The professor was in the habit of summoning servants with the cracked hand bell. I waved at the moth-eaten pull.

  ‘Would you mind?’ I asked, looking at Constable Turner.

  For answer he gave a perfunctory tug on the cloth. It proved sufficient: I heard the sound evocative of Ancient Egypt once more, and the stone to the rear of the inglenook grated to the side. As grimily cinereous as the fireplace was pristine, a passage led off to who knew what.

  ‘After you, Jedediah,’ I said.

  Scant steps into the passage, which inclined downward from the outset, the diameter of the corridor was constricted by two vast examples of columnar statuary. Maccabi sidled past for the way was strait indeed. Constable Turner followed.

  My eye was caught by the two statues, for though the couloir darkened somewhat a few yards ahead there was sufficient light to descry the lineaments created by the unknown mason. To the right was a man-like figure, although of gargantuan size. As I looked closer, I could see that no cold chisel had formed this representation: the piece seemed to be moulded from red clay. There had indeed been skill in it. In the huge head’s face the lines were as sharp as the features themselves were blunt.

  Their physiognomy revealed that no paragon of beauty had been discovered by the hand fashioning the clay. The mouth looked not so much cruel as coarsely incapable of expression. A low forehead indicated a base, unthinking nature, whilst the Mongolian cast to the eye brought to mind the brutal warriors of the Khan. The figure was naked: anatomically accurate and of proportionate size.

  The modeller’s whim made the gap between the two statues all the narrower. Facing the clay giant was a female figure of equally exaggerated dimensions. A cruelly beautiful face had been chiselled in the soft, red Collyhurst. This figure too was naked, save for a peculiar shaped shawl on her shoulders. A very fine chisel indeed had been applied to the delicate areas.

  Maccabi turned back. ‘Are you coming, Mr Moffat?’

  ‘But where are we going, Maccabi? Besides, there must be time to admire those things worthy of it on our way, don’t you agree?’

  ‘What? Oh, those.’

  I pointed at the erect member on the male statue. ‘Perhaps these are religious figures?’

  ‘Folkloric, Mr Moffat,’ Constable Turner interposed. ‘The lucky fellow, I believe, is a representation of the Golem of Prague, while the woman, most likely, is a dybbuk.’

  It was quite worth suffering the policeman’s smug look to see the slack dangling of Maccabi’s jaw.

  I knew the legend about the monster of reanimated clay, but was forced to enquire about what a dybbuk might be.

  Maccabi answered, ‘A dybbuk is a possessive spirit. The shawl shape on her shoulders represents the dybbuk. The woman is just a woman.’

  ‘A remarkable example nevertheless,’ I observed.

  I squeezed between the guardians and drew up to the others. At this point the passage was yet wide enough to allow us to walk abreast. The ceiling was unusually high, but lighting was there none. Maccabi drew out a lucifer match and struck light. We descended into Hades.

  It was hot indeed. Turner was the first to loosen his collar and abandon his coat. It lay behind us on the rough stone floor of the passage, relict of a burned scarecrow. The heat became almost unbearable before Maccabi dispensed with his own coat and thus allowed me to do the same.

  There were arcane, almost runic scratchings in the walls of the passage, even before the masonry walls gave way to the rough hewing through the rock beneath the house’s foundations. Yet still it was hot. We had walked several chains, although not yet a furlong, and while the descent was not precipitous it was remarkable. None spoke, although all were hard-pressed not to pant in the manner of hounds after a fox.

  At first it was merely dark. But the further we descended, the more the white shirts of my fellow troglodytes seemed to assume a faintly vermilion tinge, and the dark became more a crepuscular gloom. By this time, possibly by dint of an advantage in years over the good policeman, Maccabi was to the fore.

  He stopped suddenly. There was no cry of surprise or alarm. He said nothing, merely pointing a forefinger ahead of him into a red glow. Turner and I reached Maccabi at the same moment.

  ‘Are you previously unacquainted with this part of Gibbous House, Mr Maccabi?’ I asked.

  Answer came there none. Following the direction indicated by his forefinger, I looked into a large chamber bathed in a hellish-red light. Vast heating stoves filled the half of it. At any one time three or more of the stoves’ doors yawned, throwing out red light into the room and beyond.

  A great deal of activity greeted our gaze: dozens of tall and dark-skinned bodies fed the maws of the fiery beasts with coal and the occasional piece of furniture, for the remainder of the room contained pieces as eclectic and possibly as valuable as those in the famed Collection.

  I turned to the policeman.

  ‘A most wasteful source of heat for a house lacking so m
uch glaziery in its windows, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘That would depend, Mr Moffat,’ he said.

  ‘On what?’

  It was Maccabi, seemingly in possession of a tongue once more, who answered, ‘On whether such machines do serve some other purpose.’

  The Ethiops continued their task, oblivious to our observation. Maccabi made to wave an arm to attract their attention, but Turner laid a hand on his arm. ‘They are likely deaf and dumb; it would serve no purpose.’

  It was true that none could have worked many days in the cavernous room without becoming as deaf as stone, although we had heard nothing, even at the very end of the passage. On the threshold, it was uncommon loud. I stepped back a pace and the noise vanished as if it had never been.

  We retraced our steps in silence. I strained to hear any faint echo of the industrial cacophony in the underground chamber; there was none. As I stooped to recover my coat from the passage floor, I caught sight of the initials ‘HC’ hacked into the rock of the wall.

  A shiver racked my bones and I pondered the circumstances that had led from the carving of the initials to the hideous thing keeping vigil in the gatehouse of the estate. The other two recovered their own garments. Maccabi dashed the dust from his own, his lips tightening with each blow from the flat of his hand on the worsted.

  The statues straitening the passage looked less imposing from the reverse approach, although the Golem’s attributes remained impressive. The figures were not quite so well illuminated as before, since the entrance before us remained obdurately closed.

  ‘I presume there is a lever on this side too, Jedediah?’ I asked.

  ‘How should I know?’ he replied, somewhat snappishly I felt.

  ‘Have we more lucifers?’ enquired the practical policeman.

  Maccabi replied in the negative and the two of them set about feeling the environs of the featureless stone before us.

  ‘There is nothing,’ Maccabi said, although Turner continued his tactile examination of the blank wall.

  ‘There is always something,’ I remarked. ‘I believe at last I begin to understand the workings of the lunatic mind responsible for this most peculiar home of mine.’

  With that I returned to the statue of the Golem, and rendered his glory into a less erect state. The familiar grate of heavy stone echoed in the passage and the wall drew back to reveal the dwarf, grinning like a natural.

  ‘Welcome, welcome back from the Underworld, gentlemen.’ The professor threw back his head and laughed, an outburst that looked most peculiar from one of his stature.

  Maccabi started for the mannikin, hands outstretched as if to throttle the air above the fellow’s head and bellowed, ‘Slaves!’

  ‘Slaves?’ The professor hopped nimbly to the side, although in no danger from the much taller Maccabi – until such time as the latter approached him on his knees.

  ‘They are not slaves! Although they might well have been!’ he continued.

  ‘It is a strange kind of freedom enjoyed below the ground, Professor,’ the policeman offered.

  ‘Ach, they do not want to leave. What would they do here?’

  ‘Likely give rise to all sorts of rumours and fanciful tales,’ I interposed.

  The academic straightened to the limit of his short stature.

  ‘Septimus Coble and I bought these men some years ago from an American planter. They have been paid a working wage ever since. Should they wish to leave they may.’

  It seemed to me that he knew full well they would not; could not.

  The policeman was saved from preventing Maccabi assaulting the diminutive academic by the arrival of Miss Pardoner in a state of some agitation. Maccabi forced his hands behind his back and recovered himself sufficiently so as not to alarm the young woman.

  In truth, she spared him not the briefest glance. I had never seen her so lacking in self- possession and I felt a stirring at the prospect of inducing such a commotion in her myself. I hoped that the time would come soon.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  She was not so discomposed as to be hysterical. The colour in her cheeks was high indeed, however, and she shrilled breathlessly, ‘Professor, come quickly, the journalist, he’s... ’ She did not finish, her hand merely flew to her mouth and she began to chew the knuckle of her forefinger distractedly. The professor scampered toward the doors leading from the dining room. All followed, as bizarre a retinue as ever trailed behind anyone, much less a dwarf.

  Edgar Allan was not dead. The violence of his fit indicated that he might soon be so, or at least wish that he were. His head seemed half as big again as when last I had seen him, the whites of his eyes were a solid carmine, his lips were stretched wide and he gnashed as many teeth as would be visible in a flensed skull. It seemed foolhardy to approach his thrashing limbs. The pitcher and basin that had presumably been standing on the table at the bedside lay shattered on the floor, the pieces standing guard over something most unsavoury.

  Foolhardy or not, the professor braved the flailing arms of the invalid and produced a curious arrangement of gutta percha, a flat disc and two small wooden cylinders. These latter parts inserted into his ears, he approached the afflicted writer boldly and – evading teeth and arms deftly – placed the disc on the fellow’s chest. With remarkable sang-froid he remained still, head on one side, apparently listening for something. Abruptly he leaped back and snatched the contraption from his person.

  ‘Bah! What can you expect? That man Leared is nothing but a damned charlatan. I doubt if anything from the exhibition will amount to less than his ridiculous stethoscope.’

  Clearly, the apparatus had not functioned as advertised, although what that function might have been, I had no idea.

  The writer’s distress continued unabated, his back arching from time to time in simulacrum of the most flexible of Indian fakirs.

  ‘How long has he been so?’ The professor asked Miss Pardoner.

  ‘I do not know. The seizure was as you see it but a minute before I came to summon you.’

  Her eyes darted to the side as she spoke.

  Perhaps she did not want to admit to a moment of panic and some undue delay caused by it; from what I presumed of her character I felt that unlikely. Maccabi, predictably, hovered at her shoulder, constantly on the point of lending a comforting arm before deciding again to allow propriety its due.

  The professor addressed him sharply: ‘Jedediah, my medical bag. From my room if you please.’

  He was almost through the door when the policeman called after him, ‘No need for haste, not on his part.’ A long finger pointed at the frozen contortion that could not truly be called the writer’s final repose, although he would never move again.

  ‘The bell,’ said the professor.

  Miss Pardoner, stepping carefully to avoid the contents of the shattered chinaware, moved to exercise the pinchbeck pull mounted in the wall over the nightstand. It was a large and intricately cast piece of tarnished brass, whose base was formed in the image of a metallic corvid trapped in the substance of the wall, beak agape in protest at the indignity of being drawn from it repeatedly, with never a hope of escaping the plaster.

  Miss Pardoner gave a sharp cry as she drew the bird out; no blood was evident but it seemed that in the young woman’s haste to summon Mrs Gonderthwaite the raven’s beak had pecked her. She sucked her palm greedily. I thought this a little excessive for what must have been a scratch, but took pleasure in it nonetheless.

  The detective became suddenly animated. With a sharp glance toward the professor and myself, he enquired of Miss Pardoner, ‘How came you to find... Mr Allan so?’

  ‘I was in the kitchen, instructing Mrs Gonderthwaite to prepare a broth for... ’

  She nodded at the late reporter.

  ‘And?’ The policeman looked smug.

  ‘And the bell rang from – well – from this room. I bade the cook continue preparing the soup and—’

  She gave a poor impression of a woman abo
ut to swoon; it was most extraordinary. Maccabi, clearly taken in, made toward her, perhaps lest she fell. Miss Pardoner stepped backward out of his reach.

  Meanwhile, Constable Turner, having bumped the professor aside with a bony hip, lifted each of the departed’s hands in turn, inspecting them minutely. Without turning from the cadaver, he said, ‘Moffat, you’re an observant fellow, with which hand did this poor fellow write?’

  ‘Left,’ I replied, not caring to acknowledge the compliment.

  ‘I thought as much.’

  He turned his attention from the body and took no care of the faecal matter beside the bed. He removed a jeweller’s loupe from his pocket, screwed it into his left eye socket and peered at the raven’s head from every angle, taking great care not to touch it.

  Suddenly he leaped back, swivelled and seized Miss Pardoner’s right hand. She gave a squeal of protest and the policeman was indelicate in his treatment of her in turning it over to examine the palm. He held it up to show the rest of the company. It was unblemished.

  ‘You are a lucky woman, Miss Pardoner,’ Turner said.

  ‘How so?’ I asked.

  ‘The bell pull is covered in a liquid, although it has dried and is now merely tacky, no doubt. I wonder whence came the nux vomica?’

  He gave a meaningful look at the people in the room, much as if he hoped to extract a confession by the power of his glare.

  Perhaps it might have worked had Mrs Gonderthwaite not arrived and, alarmed by the crowded bedroom, thrown up her hands in shock, causing the soup to bespatter the white trousers of the policeman’s uniform. The soup must surely have been no more than moderately hot, since the fellow gave but one piercing scream.