Danielle Ackley-McPhail
“It began… with I…” his voice rasped from the deep shadows of the drawn bed curtains, breaking on the softest of syllables, only to ring out with the sharpness of honed steel, “but it ends with me.
“Oh?
“By God… it… did. It must! It will!
“One way or the other, aye?
“No! In a manner of my own choosing!”
I would have thought no less than three people conversed… or better to say, squabbled, had I not sat witness and heard each utterance pass the same man’s lips. His head—or perhaps just his hair—thrashed, the bright glow of his bandages remaining turned away as he went on in mounting vitriol, seemingly arguing amongst himself.
Again, subtle and peculiar modulations of tone caught my ear.
I shifted in the chair I had pulled up beside the bed, leaning ever so slightly closer, rapt by his diatribe. My efforts to glean the discourse for details of significance had thus far yielded nothing, until I grew desperate. Reckless, perhaps. The man stilled, his muscles taut, of a sudden alert, where before his attention turned only inward to his ever-fracturing turmoil. With slow deliberation, his head rotated in my direction. I swallowed a gasp at the two spots of faint rose hue seeping to the surface of the stark white gauze in mockery of what had once been his eyes.
A low, harsh rustle came from the bedding as the patient shifted.
“Oy! Back yerself off,” the orderly barked, his rough hand grasping my shoulder and yanking me away, chair and all, even as the damaged soul on the mattress lunged forward, his equally gauze-wrapped hand grasping for my arm. For the briefest of moments, the skin of his bare wrist brushed mine before the burly attendant drew me out of reach, depositing me safely behind him, close to the grandfather clock standing sentinel in the corner. My flesh burned like the cold of deepest winter, nay, like the everlasting void seeping into my soul. I shuddered and rubbed at my skin, the sensation dissipating as if it had never been, a fancy of the mind built upon rumor and speculation.
“Right, off with ye then,” the orderly pointed at the door, brooking no argument.
If he knew who I was, he never would have spoken so abruptly or without deference, but my… patient’s family wished none to know either their son’s standing or my own, lest their reputation be tarnished.
“But…”
The man’s broad brow furrowed into deep valleys, his eyes aglint with annoyance. “Ye weren’t to rile him. Ye has, so out ye go. It’ll take all day an’ half the night gettin’ him settled again.”
Quite uncustomary to my usual nature, my blue blood rose to the surface, a kindling flame that warmed my cheeks but left my gaze cold. I stood, shoulders back and spine straight, as only the strictest of Dunaway upbringings could instill, honed through twelve generations. Slowly, my head tilted just so as to gaze down the slope of my nose at this common man. The essence of a sneer toyed with the corner of my lip, but I did not indulge it. Without further word, I strode from the room, distinctly unsettled.
***
On the desk in my study lay a daguerreotype of Edward Moreton, first son and heir to his family’s fortune. A well-manicured gentleman of not much greater years than myself, slight and studious, I would hazard a guess, based on appearance. Until now, we were not acquainted, though in truth I could not claim to know the man he had been, only familiar with the fragmented remains I had so far observed. My brow furrowed as I noted a peculiar emblem pinned to his lapel. I could make out a small circle atop a larger rough circle surrounding a six-pointed star, but little else of the clearly ornate icon. It bore some faint familiarity to me, though I could not say why. Something from my studies, perhaps? Yet another puzzle to solve amidst all this madness.
No one could tell me what fractured my patient’s psyche. Or perhaps, no one would, to be more accurate. What horrors drove him to the depraved acts he’d committed I could only guess at, but for the mutilation of his features, which I am told were self-inflicted. The family—as old as my own, but of lesser standing—refused to furnish details, preferring to bury their shame. To pretend it had never been. Though how they expected me to proceed uninformed I could not say.
They had engaged my assistance by unofficial means, knowing, through our families’ shared circles, of my penchant for psychology. Long had I studied the works of Wundt and Freud and Titchener, among others, out of personal interest, rather than intent to practice. My devotion to this science had, in fact, brought me to reside—until now—in Boston, where I studied at Harvard under William James, who some already called the father of American psychology.
I found the workings of the human mind, both hale and broken, of particular fascination. Of late, I had also immersed myself in the study of brass instrument psychology and had even procured for myself a chronoscope and kymograph, along with assorted pendulums, gravity fall devices, and such, to better understand their function.
I would have perhaps rethought such dedication, had I known where it would lead.
Beneath the print bearing Moreton’s image lay a scant page or two of observations from the local inspector, written in broad, clean strokes, studiously vague on any details the family did not wish revealed. Regardless, I had requested more. The peculiar, the unsolved. Beginning from when the foundation of Moreton’s reason grew unstable. Anything I might connect with what transpired. I could not say if the constabulary would go against the family to honor my request, though I held high expectations, having consulted for the department in the past. For now, I poured over what I did have in the hopes of gleaning more understanding.
I found it difficult to reconcile that image, those accounts, with the individual I had myself so recently monitored. And yet, reconcile I must if I was to help knit the fragments of his mind back into one. Picking up the daguerreotype, I considered Moreton as he had been. We were contemporaries, by age and birth and standing. What happenstance led us each to this point, both divergent and unified at once? By what stroke of fortune had our paths not been transposed?
I shuddered as well-founded unease gripped my being.
And this is why I stood, at morning’s darkest hour, in the simple gardens of Pike’s Cliff Manor, the retiring house where Moreton’s family had sequestered their former scion, staring up into the sky in search of direction. I found a faint flicker of green light tickling the fading stars, but no more. Breathing a sigh, I slid my hands into the warmth of my trouser pockets and strolled the shrouded paths letting the cool darkness soothe my anxious thoughts before retiring to bed.
A futile effort.
***
Braced by a night of fitful sleep and a rather strong cup of tea, I entered Moreton’s chambers with strides both determined and confident. I was no dabbler. I had studied at the highest institutions of learning; I had consumed volume after volume on the science of psychology and was noted among the educated for my discourse on those studies. Cradled in my arms, the stout wooden box I bore contained the finest precision instruments of my chosen discipline.
I quite nearly dropped them.
Moreton’s chambers more resembled a tavern after a barroom row. My patient lay in his bed, unmoving, for once in full light, the torn bed curtains puddled on the floor, along with most of the bedding. On the far side of the room, by the seating area arranged before the fireplace, the orderly cleaned up the remnants of the grandfather clock that had stood in the corner. The clockface, with its hands bent awry, had been perched on the mantle, with the weights and their chains pooled around it, like an octopus nested among its tentacles. The rest of the cabinet lay like so much kindling on the hearth. Actually, nothing else in the room looked damaged, or so it seemed, until the orderly turned at my entrance, revealing bruises of deepening hue along his swollen jaw and climbing toward his ear. A single tendril of color crept out beneath his eye, which was not quite blackened but clearly tender.
“What happened?”
He gave me a look that bordered on stark hatred and his words of the night before echoed in my memory: Ye weren’t to rile him. Ye has, so out ye go. It’ll take all day an’ half the night gettin’ him settled again.
All he said now was, “T’were a bad night.”
I shifted my burden, my confidence momentarily shaken, but I had a task, and I would not retreat from it now.
“All right…” I responded in even tones as I set my box of precious instruments out of the way on a table beside the door. “Let’s get things into order and get to work.”
The orderly grunted and glowered and continued with his labor while I restored the bedding and tucked the drapery out of the way until the household staff could deal with it.
“Has he eaten?” I asked, trying to gauge how the morning would proceed.
“That blighter don’t eat.”
I frowned, all must eat and drink. Moreton looked haggard, tortured even, but not gaunt, and clearly had the energy for tantrums. My determination returned tenfold. Today I would take Moreton’s measure with my devices.
“Help me move him to the chair,” I said, pointing toward the seating area, where the side table by the wingback chair would serve nicely to hold my equipment.
“Nah, m’ shift’s done. Yer on yer own ’til Layton shows his face.” Without an ounce of deference, but a healthy dose of insolence, the man strode from the room.
Though I highly doubted he was meant to leave his charge—even if not strictly unattended—before his counterpart relieved him, my employer’s directive of anonymity stayed my objection as the orderly departed.
I would swear I heard ticking, though the clock lay shattered.
Turning, I considered my situation. With the bed curtains gone, the light from the window shone full on Moreton and if I moved the table from the seating area to the bedside, I could proceed even unaided. My course determined, I began my work, first arranging things to my liking, then retrieving the kymograph from the box, electing to leave the rest well distanced from potential harm. Setting the device on the table, I examined the workings closely, making sure the drum and the stylus were properly aligned with the paper, and winding the clockwork that propelled them. Lastly, I inspected the tube connected to its rubber membrane for any imperfections before running it along the table and applying the membrane to Moreton’s carotid artery.
As I leaned over him in my efforts, casting him once more into shadow, I would swear I saw the faintest of movements beneath the encrusted gauze that hid his ruined eyes. Just a flutter, caught in the corner of my gaze. A green shimmer, there, then gone. A moment of fancy, perhaps? For when I looked full upon him, I saw but the indentation of the empty, sunken pits I knew lay hidden there. Returning to my task, however, I could not help but cast a sideways glance, looking without looking as best as I was able, and I would swear to the Almighty that something writhed beneath that stained cotton, coiling and probing, testing the bounds constraining it.
Slowly—ever so slowly—I reached out a finger to determine if my eyes had lied, my chest inexplicably tightening the closer I drew.
“Here! What is this about?”
I may have cried out.
I most certainly jerked away, my arm snagging the tubing and pulling the membrane askew.
Even so, I heard a skritching at my back, faint and rapid as the stylus etched white lines across the soot-coated paper installed for the purpose of recording.
***
Banished once more from Moreton’s chambers, I tempered an increasing desire to flee the premises by ordering my steam-powered velocipede readied for a trip to town. I needed details, and with Moreton all but senseless, I had only one other source to tap. So far, my request had gone unanswered, but perhaps paying a call on the inspector would advance my efforts.
The further I traveled down the road leading from the manor the more my muscles uncoiled fiber by taut fiber. I would not say my tension left me but, without doubt, it loosened its grip. By the time I pulled up to the local ward my breath came much easier. Until that moment, I had not realized how scarce a full inhalation had been at the manor.
Climbing from the velocipede and leaning it out of the way beside the building, I extinguished the boiler for safety and went inside. The bustle of central processing assaulted my ears after my solitary drive through the countryside. I felt my muscles tighten once more, until I almost turned and fled, overwhelmed by the resurgent desire to drive off into the wilderness, never to return to Pike’s Cliff Manor.
But such would not do. Honor demanded I complete my task, no matter the obstacles before me. Drawing up my noble manner like the armor it was, I approached the registrar’s counter. The officer on duty was unfamiliar to me.
“Sir Gyles Dunaway to see the inspector,” I said, presenting my card.
The man scarcely looked up from the paperwork before him.
“He’s in a meeting.” The deflection would have borne more weight had I not a clear view of the man in question through a gap in his office door. “If you have something to report, the forms are right there. A constable will be with you shortly.”
Though his tone was more of overwork than disrespect, my ire rose. Stiffening my spine and hardening my gaze, I gave a sharp rap on the counter, commanding the man’s full attention, since manners had failed. The room fell silent around us.
“The inspector, if you please.” My tone brooked no argument.
Open-mouthed, the officer half rose. Before he could speak, the inspector left his desk and crossed the station to stand at the man’s back, lightly touching his shoulder.
“It’s okay, Burnell,” he murmured in a calming tone before turning to me. “Sir Dunaway, it’s good to see you. Shall we take this to my office?” With one hand, he gestured the way he had come.
With a curt nod, I preceded him, my thoughts and mood in such sudden turmoil I dared not speak. I had never in my life subscribed to the gentry’s entitlement, yet I found myself sliding into such manner more and more. I did not care for this.
Stopping abruptly, I turned. “My apologies, Mr. Burnell,” I said with a brief bow. The officer just stared at me, his expression shifting from anger to perplexity. Slowly, he nodded back.
A brief touch at my elbow moved me toward the office, where I sat in the chair set before the inspector’s desk. The door closed with a soft snick. The inspector resumed his seat and waited for me to speak, giving ironic truth to Burnell’s lie. I, not yet in command of my behavior, remained silent.
“Are you all right, Gyles?”
Drawing a deep, steadying breath, I met his gaze.
By long association over the course of several years and over a dozen consultations, I had come to count this man… well, if not a friend, something more than a professional acquaintance. And even so, the concern I saw in his gaze unsettled me, much as my current manner clearly unsettled him.
“By what definition?”
His brow furrowed even more.
I shook my head and drew another steadying breath. “More apologies are in order, clearly. I am sorry, John. I am not myself of late. Stress. Frustration. The most peculiar nature of my… patient.”
“Ah,” he murmured. “Now we get to the meat of it.”
“They will tell me nothing! I am more in the dark in possession of both eyes than Moreton is blind.”
The inspector shifted uncomfortably behind his desk, tensing in anticipation of my next words. I gave them voice, nonetheless. “I need details, John. All I know of is that poor sot Horton… gouges above his right eye and his left hand hacked off. Good Lord, they could not hope to cover that mess up, but that is not enough for me to base informed decisions on. I must know what I am dealing with. It is more than needing to know how to help him. How am I to protect myself if I am unaware of the risks?”
“The family…”
“I am aware, I assure you.” Grimacing at my continued lapse in manners. “My apologies. Let us set Moreton’s infractions aside. Is there aught else you can share without violating these vexing limitations?”
The silence in the wake of my words drew on in fragile filaments until I wondered would it shatter under its own weight. John defused the mounting strain with a slow, soft sigh. Without taking his gaze from mine he leaned to the side and opened his desk drawer. He withdrew a sheath of pamphlets and laid them before me.
My brow furrowed. The top pamphlet read Theosophy and the Mission of the Theosophical Society. I barely noted this, however, on seeing the crisp, clear icon above those words. I had seen this in Moreton’s image. When I reached to turn the page, John stayed my hand.
“Some reading for later. I believe you’ll find it most interesting,” he murmured with a slight frown, as if anyone were about to overhear. I nodded, acknowledging the care a public servant must take when dealing with the entitled. Though rank bore less weight in the Americas, the power of wealth still held sway.
Collecting the pamphlets, I slid them into my jacket for later perusal. As I did so, a possible path forward came clear to me.
“Inspector, I wish to offer my services… to consult on current cases for which your fine officers are at a loss on how to proceed. The bizarre, the peculiar, cases you have all but given up on… unsolved and unlikely to be…”
John’s frown eased and his gaze brightened as he nodded.
“I will see what cases might benefit from your… analysis.”
Accepting his word with grim satisfaction, I took my leave, turning the velocipede toward the Manor, still fighting my earlier impulse to fill the boiler to the brim and flee.
***
Though the hour was late by the time I reached Pike’s Cliff Manor, my curiosity would no longer be stayed. I ensconced myself in my study, locking the door and stoking the fire before withdrawing the pamphlets John had provided and spreading them across the surface of my desk. Lighting a lamp, I began to read.
The first few bore nothing extreme. Official tracts issued by the Theosophical Society touting high-browed mysticism and spiritualist palavering of the sort popular with the idle gentry around the civilized world. I dare say, I myself had attended one of their meetings in London—strictly out of academic curiosity—before leaving for Boston. Their philosophies did not mesh well with my own, but each to their own enlightenment.
By the fourth or fifth pamphlet, issued independently by a local chapter of the Society, the tone began to change, taking on a more occult nature, putting a whole new slant on their mission to prepare the world for the coming of the ‘World Teacher.’
Despite the fire’s warmth, I felt chilled, my nerves pricking along my skin like a train of angry ants. Wondering what Madame Blavatsky thought of the more extreme offshoots of her Society, I pushed the materials aside and contemplated the darkness encroaching on my thoughts.
Perhaps I should have saved such reading for the daylight hours.
***
I was informed, on the morrow, that Moreton’s family had ordered one Hydro-Electric Chain, the cure-all contraption touted by the wealthy and the broadsheets alike, reportedly employed by Dickens himself! I was also informed said device had arrived. I had heard of Isaac Pulvermacher’s “magic band,” and had even been trained in its operation, but must admit I had my doubts as to its effectiveness. My cynicism aside, what they thought such a device would accomplish for one whose senses were scattered, I could not say. The man’s condition was scarcely on par with headaches or palsy, particularly in light of the… spiritualist influences at play.
As I entered Moreton’s suite, I spied the broken soul bound into what I could not help but think of as a Bedlam coat, though most would call it strait. He sat slumped into a ladder-backed chair with his bandaged eyes angled toward the ceiling and one pallid bare leg resting in a basin of water. On a table beside the chair were arranged a series of electrodes connected by sturdy cables to a leather battery belt around Moreton’s waist.
A sense of uneasy relief coursed through me at the sight.
“Why is he restrained?” I asked the orderly, a different man than either of the others I’d seen before, but of the same burly stature.
“Fer protection.” The man did not clarify whose, though he too bore the shadow of what might have been a bruise at his temple.
I turned my attention back to the patient.
Moreton’s black hair resisted any sense of order, and the faint rose hue that had stained the gauze over his ruined eyes had darkened to an oxidized brown. I would have thought him a particularly macabre mannequin, poorly posed and lifeless, only as I moved closer, he tensed and drew upright, his half-blank face turning in my direction.
“It began with I…” he muttered, leaning toward me, the words altogether more sinister than before. They seemed to echo in my mind as if uttered by a mad horde and not a solitary shattered man.
Rattled though I might be, I did not engage him, instead turning my attention to the device, a single brow raising in uninhibited skepticism as I ran my hand over the casing, reacquainting myself with the buttons and toggles gracing the top.
“They must not be wasted,” Moreton hissed barely at the level of a whisper, low enough I would not have heard him, had I not been inspecting the contraption. “I won’t be made to begin again! Souls fighting their vessel. Marking time in frantic pounding. Like a heartbeat… faster… faster… You cannot stay the hands… Make it stop! Uncoil the spring! Pluck out the bright jewels of the movement!”
My brow furrowed at an unexpected change in the timber of his voice at first, before it fell into his usual cadence. I lost focus of that observation, however, as my own heart sped up to the rhythm of his words, my ears straining to catch each one. I gasped, wondering if I mistook his meaning or not, envisioning how he’d come to lose his sight.
“Quickly, man, before it’s too late!” his last words came on a stronger breath, desperate, insistent.
“Too late for what?” I murmured, not really expecting him to note my presence, let alone the question, any more than before.
Looking his way, I fumbled the electrode I had just picked up. Moreton’s shocking mimicry of a gaze locked steadfast upon me. In entreaty or calculation? I dropped the lead and rubbed the wrist he’d grazed that first night, suddenly as searingly cold as if I had brushed against M. Thilorier’s ‘dry ice.’ Was Moreton about to speak? To engage me directly? I leaned closer almost without realizing.
“Don’ just stand there! Get it done so’s I can bundle him back in bed. I’m due my tea in an hour.”
I jumped and straightened at the brash words, my gaze snapping to the orderly waiting with fisted hands to Moreton’s other side. With a sharp nod but no words, I took up the electrodes once more and approached Moreton. Though he clearly could not see, he stilled and went taut. The voids pulsed.
Did a bare whisper cross his lips? The fading echo of a plea? I dare say the words, ‘unseat the lodger who is in me’ taunted my ears. Imagined? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But those words were passingly familiar, though I could not pinpoint the source. The pamphlets, perhaps? Either way, the insight they might give to Moreton’s current madness disturbed me.
Again, the illusion of movement beneath that gauze. I recoiled, averting my eyes.
Before he could thrash about, the orderly moved behind the chair and planted his beefy hands one on either of Moreton’s shoulders, pinning him in place. Quickly, I stepped forward and placed the electrodes around his head, managing to do so without once touching the man’s flesh.
It is quite possible I drew not one breath the entire time.
Before I could rethink my purpose, I took position beside the Chain and flipped the toggle. The indicators on the gauges pinned all the way to the far side.
With a yipe the orderly stumbled back, shaking his hands and glaring in my direction. I barely noticed. A sharp sizzle and the scent of scorched hair filled the room as Moreton stiffened, his back arching impossibly. The water in the basin splashed with vigor as his foot twitched, and his unruly tufts of hair fairly stood on end. His mouth fell open, releasing an eerie undulation the likes of which I had never heard before.
I scrambled to disengage the machine. At the halting of the current, the patient slumped back in the chair, falling silent. What I could see of his expression seemed nearly peaceful. No movement at all, expected or otherwise. I released a quavering sigh on observing that his chest yet rose and fell with life’s breath. Such a charge had been known to stop a hale man’s heart, let alone one in such a poorly state.
Slowly, his head swung in my direction. “Not enough, damn you… you stopped too soon…next time…” His words trailed off.
Falling back from him and the machine, my head shook of its own accord, first slowly, then with building vigor.
Never. Again. Never. Again!
“Here! Warn a bloke!”
I turned to look upon the orderly, noting in both horror and fascination that his cheek yet jerked and twitched with the remnants of the current from the Chain until it seemed he parodied a wink. I had not anticipated the current traveling so, or I would have warned him to stand back. Even now, his face stood out bright red with the features limned in white, all his muscles clenched and poised, as if he barely restrained the urge to knock me arse over tea kettle.
I could not blame him.
I had no words to say in my defense. I had no words at all. With trembling hands, I removed Moreton’s leads and left the room.
***
I woke with an ache in my bones and the scent of scorched hair flooding my senses. Sweat beaded every swath of bare skin and elsewhere soaked the fabric of my nightshirt. The remnants of a screech echoed from my dreams to tease my ears as I pushed myself upright against the pillows. It took several long moments to calm my breathing as fragments of images tormented my sleep-clouded brain, of staring into a writhing, green-tinged darkness and having it stare back. Images that slowly faded as the room beyond the bed curtains lit with sunlight.
A quiet masculine humming came from the direction of my dressing room, its bright cheer chasing away the final shadows of my nightmare. I drew back the bed curtains and swung my bare legs to the floor just as my valet, Malone, entered the chamber. He had drawn the drapes, allowing the sun to stream through the French doors leading to the balcony. I squinted against the light. By the angle, it seemed closer to noon than dawn. My grip on the curtains tightened in an effort to still the tremors in my limbs.
“Good morning, sir,” Malone murmured, his eyes thoughtfully averted. “There’s warm water in the basin and cold in the pitcher. Will you be shaving?”
I blanched at the thought, though my own hand would not wield the razor. I could see no course where blood would not flow as his steady ministrations met my unsteady flesh.
“It can wait until later,” I murmured as I pushed to my feet and moved to the basin to begin my day’s ablutions. With no further discourse, Malone helped me dress.
“Would you like me to fetch you a meal?”
The mere mention wracked my body with shudders.
“Are you all right, sir?”
I waved him off as he reached to steady me.
“It’s nothing, just a chill.”
“Very well, sir. Some chowder, perhaps?”
“Just some coffee.” A rare indulgence, but I felt the need for something more bracing than tea and less scandalous than spirits.
In Malone’s absence, the faint ticking of the mantel clock plucked at my nerves. Moreton and his bloody mutterings. Uncoil the spring, pluck out the bright jewels. I shuddered. Unseat the lodger… Most would not have noticed, but to my reluctant ear, three steady, incongruent rhythms seemed to compete, forcing my heart in step until my head pounded threefold with their separate and varying beats. Until all I heard was the clicking gears advancing those unrelenting hands.
Again, Moreton’s manic muttering taunted me, “You cannot stay the hands…”
Whether inspired by my reading, or Moreton’s muttering, I found myself overwhelmed by the sense of something ominous looming. I stepped out onto the balcony to escape the sound, closing the doors behind me. Storm clouds moved steadily to obscure the sun, roiling low in the sky. In an echo of my dreams, they seemed tinged faintly green. I pushed that thought away and drew the crisp New England air into my lungs, willing the thunder of the waves below to drown out the intonation of the clock, only to find those three beats trapped within me. I fought to return my functions to a more natural rhythm, to some success, but only by fixing all my will upon the task.
In all confession, I startled like a young faun at a sudden gentle tap upon the glass behind me. Only my grip on the rail kept me steady. Turning, I spied Malone, his carefully schooled expression giving way to apprehension. I made no acknowledgment of his concern. My eye went from the steaming cup of coffee in his hand to the carafe on the dressing table beyond him.
I waved for him to step back, my free hand going to the handle on the door.
“God bless you,” I murmured as I accepted the cup, draining it dry in one gulp before moving to refill it.
Malone nodded but said nothing. His features returned to a pleasant neutral mien, though his eyes remained watchful.
I savored the next cup, only then noting a thick stack of folders beside the carafe. It had not been there before.
“Malone?”
“Sir?”
“The folders?”
“Oh! Yes. The local inspector delivered them this morning. Said you requested to see anything… unusual.”
The coffee cup clattered as I set it down. I had not expected John to act so swiftly.
I reached for the top folder, chagrined to note my fingers still faintly trembled. My heart seized on my distraction once more and took on the erratic rhythm of the clock, or perhaps it merely galloped and stuttered all on its own. I could no longer say. My focus locked upon the folder as I turned the top leaf to reveal a letter written in the inspector’s familiar hand and, beneath that, a stack of reports and what looked to be albumen prints.
Dunaway,
As discussed, enclosed you will find those cases that defy our explanation. As in the past, it is our hope your unique perspective might prove instrumental in their solving. Some, we have discussed in passing. Others, not. The murdered. The missing. Disfigurements enough to drive one to despair. Also included, please find another noteworthy volume I feel might be of interest.
For whatever good it may do you, I wish you well in your efforts.
Inspector J.R.L.
I moved the letter aside to gaze upon the reports beneath it. I had not anticipated the photographs. The first startled a gasp from me. I stood there staring at the remains of a young woman, my breath arrested. Again, it was as if a presence loomed over me, poised and ready, but for what I knew not. My head filled with the ticking of the gears until I clenched my teeth and forced the sounds away. My jaw still set, I flipped the photographs face down and focused on the reports. Not all of those provided had the feel of what I was looking for. Those I set aside, drawn by what, I could not say. But by the time I was done I had two piles, one thicker than the other by at least a factor of two. Dry accounts written by jaded men. Officers of the law who had clearly seen more than their share of the worst of humanity cataloguing details and moving on. Even so, upon occasion, some faint essence of their unease crept between their judiciously worded lines. Like the very edge of madness they carefully tread.
As I immersed myself, Malone retreated to the other room. I hardly noticed.
The barest shiver skated across my shoulders as I read those reports. And read them again. And again, until I could not say how many times I sifted them for details and patterns and relevance otherwise gone unnoticed with no path to clearly link one to the other, save for some sense that they were relevant. Tossing aside the reports in vexation, I took up the prints, steeling myself for their macabre images.
My weary eyes blurred and shifted. Or perhaps they merely sought to evade the horrors I demanded they observe. Details bubbled up like from a caldron, sickening. Bursting forth with a stench of pending decay.
With a shudder, I set them aside to take up the volume of which John made particular mention. On seeing the gilded title embossed upon the leather, I gasped. Isis Unveiled, a controversial tome penned by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, of which I was now more acquainted than I wished to be.
The lodger that is in me… Words heard most recently from Moreton’s lips, but first uttered by the Madame herself in regard to the book in question. Words perhaps holding a more literal significance for Moreton than one would expect?
No… surely not. Surely…
Casting the book away, I turned my attention back to the reports. Somehow less disturbing than my current thoughts. I ran my finger over those dull images of doomed faces, my subconscious clattering to the rhythm of my heart. Measured. Constant. Ticking up a beat, like a clock running fast, when instinct told me ‘this one.’ I nearly missed the pattern; it was so subtle. Anabel Lawson… her parents’ only daughter. Geoffery Taylor… the younger half of a set of twins. Henry Jacobs… the third in his family to bear that name. The others were trickier. More difficult to discern. The next was Francis Murphy. Frank, to his men, the foreman at the local lumber operation. Fore-man. Four.
My jaw clenched as my head throbbed. My normally neat hair stood out in tufts from raking through my fingers, looking for the pattern most diabolically hidden in these gruesome accounts. A pattern I would have had no hope of spying if not for my desperate grasping for sense in chaos.
Five about broke my reason, if not for that niggling instinct telling me Jack Turner was one of mine. For such had I come to think of them. And then the twisted sense hit me. Who but a Brit like me… and Moreton… would know a Jack for a five-pound note?
Why the progression I did not know, but now that I had clued to it, my mind sought the connections like an unhinged game. Six was a coal miner known simply as Augustus, a correlation no one but a well-read man could make, based on Moseley’s recent discovery of atomic numbers. Seven… Seith, a local Welsh farmer with an unfortunately numeric name. Eight was Sally Acher, who had celebrated her bronze anniversary. And nine… by all that was unholy… nine was one Father Patrick, doomed, for all I could determine, because the nineth hour was the hour of prayer.
The next brought bile to my throat. Beyond weary with the horror, I lay my head down and cried for little Milly Patterson, all of ten years old. Which brought me to Handy Horton, a sorry sot born with eleven fingers, who died with only five.
Eleven horrific murders, beyond disturbed. On the surface, nothing to connect the cases, but for superficial damage to the faces and hands. All unsolved, but for the last, which had been the pinnacle of Moreton’s downfall. And all for what? I may have deducted the pattern, but there remained no sense to it. Or did there…
Again, Moreton’s recent words whispered through my thoughts.
“It began… with I…”
I.
I.
I stared at the prints, flipping from one to the next and back again, fanning them like a child’s kineograph… the images in my hand creating a depraved flipbook no sane mind had ever intended. I noted for the first time, a pattern overlooked, on the face of it. On the face of it… my voice cracked on a barking laugh. With a finger, I traced the gouges marring the face of each seemingly unconnected victim. Never the same mark, never in the same place. Shoving aside the reports covering the dressing table, I searched in vain for a writing implement.
“Malone! A fountain pen and a sheet of foolscap, now!”
I all but snatched the items from his grip when he brought them from the other room as urgency drove me. Clearing a space, I carefully scribed a circle on the page and added the marks from each victim’s face in as precise representation as I could manage in both placement and shape. My hand trembled as I completed the last one, coming not quite full circle on the page.
My gaze went from my drawn image to the mantle clock, elegant with filigree and gilded roman numerals.
“It ends with me!”
Eleven… he stopped at eleven.
“One way or the other, aye?”
A peculiar, horrifying sense began to surface.
“You can’t stay the hands…”
My finger traced the damage on the top victim’s limb.
I could not say what I feared would happen, but I had a feeling it went well beyond murder and mayhem. Unholy, indeed. My battle against the sense of something… other looming faltered, then failed.
Dropping the pen, I scrambled from the room, the ticking, or my heartbeat, I couldn’t say which… thundering in my ears.
***
The hour had grown late without my notice, yet I rushed through the sleeping household, unmindful of the noise I made. Drawn to my charge’s rooms, I cursed the dimmed corridors lit by the barest glow of gas. My heart pounded and raced until my chest felt battered from within, until all of me felt battered from within. As I ran, my beleaguered vision insisted a greenish mist thickened at the corners of my gaze, like a foul and writhing miasma driving me forward.
As I approached Moreton’s chambers I stumbled and fell, tripping on something large and unyielding shrouded in the shadows at my feet. I turned to look, my head spinning as I peered into the gloom. Swallowing a cry, I scrambled back, only just noticing a heavy scent pinching my nostrils, like old copper pennies and sheer terror. I raised my hand to the orderly’s torn neck as if I might still find a pulse, only to snatch it back as something viscous dripped from my fingers, belaying any hope of life. I stared at the man’s face, puzzled to see no mark such as the ones that sent me rushing here.
Jerking to my feet, I backed away, sense telling me to run. To leave this place and never look back.
Honor—or insanity, more like—had me turn and creep toward the just-cracked door of Moreton’s chambers, with no thought but to end this, “One way or the other…”
More fool, I.
As the door creaked open, I stared, aghast.
Moreton stood before the cold hearth with his back to me. His head hung forward as he moved from side to side in a languorous sway, surrounded by a nimbus of eldritch light in a room otherwise steeped in darkness. Faint, smoke-like whirls wove about him and the stench of burnt sulfur competed with the metallic tang of fresh-spilt blood.
I must have gasped or made some other sound of which I had not realized, for the man stiffened and stilled his swaying. Slowly, his head rolled toward me, the motion disjointed, like a marionet with tangled strings.
At the sight that met my gaze, all breath arrested, silencing the scream now trapped within my throat. Where before I saw the implication of pulsing, swirling motion beneath Moreton’s gauze, I now spied bare flesh, the skin rent and putrid, pushed beyond the orbit of his eye sockets, exposing bone. And from those voids, and every other opening both natural and inflicted, phantasmic tendrils of celadon hue reached and thrashed, eager to break free of their vessel.
Moreton’s body twisted around to join his head in facing me, revealing the gauze wrapping his hands had likewise been torn away. I stumbled back at the sight of a poker brandished in his grip, the hook coated with blood and shreds of skin. A rictus twisted his lips until his bloodied teeth glistened at me in a grim display. Though his expression remained fixed and unresponsive the rest of him fair vibrated with energy, coiled, ready to be unleashed.
“Come, Dunaway, let us have done…” Moreton… or… something called out to me, the voice rasping. The tone, the cadence, oddly offset, as if formed by a mouth unfamiliar with the words.
“Have done?”
The eldritch glow in place of Moreton’s eyes flared and brightened. “Do not play the fool, sir. The portal is cracked enough to let our light shine through, not enough to cross. This one has proven unequal to the task. You shall shatter the barrier for us.”
My gaze skimmed the room looking for anything in reach I could use to defend myself, asking, half as a distraction, “But what of the orderly…?”
“It wasn’t his hour.”
I stilled in my search, my gaze snapping to the abomination. Me. This thing—the lodger within Moreton, be it World Teacher, or something other—from a dimension clearly not our own intended me to be the twelfth hour. It intended me to open this portal giving it free rein of our world.
Like Hell!
As the lodger sprang forward, translucent tendrils reaching for me, I allowed it to latch on as I lunged to the side, grabbing for the electrodes on Pulvermacher’s Hydro-Electric Chain. I flipped the toggle and slapped the electrodes on Moreton’s head, holding them in place as if the world, my life, and all I held dear depended on it, though I knew what was to come as the current hit.
For an eternity, our bodies jerked and thrashed in fading force, until with a final gasp Moreton’s fell motionless. And still I held steady, though my own heart stuttered and my vision dimmed. I waited for the final whisp of green to fade from the pits of Moreton’s eyes. Only then did I slap the toggle off, loosen my grip, and let the scion… the first son and heir of the Moreton family fall.
For an instant brief enough that my kymograph could have scarce captured it, I felt a sense of triumph, mingled with relief. And then, as if a stylus drew across Moreton’s flesh, a crooked X and two I’s etched the center of his forehead and the broken clock chimed the twelfth hour.
It ends with me…
My vision hazed in increasing shades of celadon hue, and the true horror of my failure took hold. First son and heir Moreton may have been, but, as myself, of the twelfth generation.
I stumbled back, but no distance would have been enough to save me. From the broken body rose an entity beyond my ability to describe. Solid and unearthly, lashing and thrashing tendrils wrapping around me, drawing me in. The trifold pulsing rhythm drowned out my screams as I knew everything and nothing and then no more.