11TH JULY, 1901

ST BARNABY ’S SCHOOL/ EDDOWES BAY/ THE CITY

I

Albert Edgington, eighteen years old and intensely curious about what life might have in store for him, waited alone on his last day as a schoolboy outside the gates of St Barnaby’s. He had spent more than a decade here, at this quietly distinguished, expensive institution in the east of England, boarding away from home and being filled up with all the education and knowledge which befits a nascent gentleman.

He had, he knew, been lucky. As the youngest of three boys, he had been permitted to choose his own path to a greater degree than had either of his brothers: Silas, heir to the family estate, and Roderick who had, since birth, been marked out for the law. In contrast, Albert had followed his own passions – for the sciences in particular but also for the tragedies of Ancient Greece – and he had in consequence enjoyed much of his school career even if it had at times struck him as being a little rudderless and lacking in purpose. His own future seemed now quite uncertain.

There had once been talk of Oxford or Cambridge but that had ceased before Christmas when both universities had declined to meet with him. He was, after all, bright but not brilliant, eager enough to learn but hardly insatiable for knowledge. He was not even set to be a wealthy man; the great majority of the funds that awaited the Edgington boys had been marked out for Silas whilst Roderick was even now devoting himself to the creation of a sizeable fresh fortune.

In every way, Albert appeared externally to be unremarkable – a copper-haired young man of strictly average height with a distinct, still-puppyish plumpness to his features. It was late in the afternoon and he wore his uniform: frock coat and dark trousers, wing-collared starched white shirt and crimson tie. His single suitcase was by his side and he was waiting for the family chauffeur to arrive and take him home. He looked at his watch, checked the time and concluded that, on what would be far from the first occasion, he had very probably been overlooked.

All of the other boys had left now as had many of the masters. The school was emptying and at this particular point it felt to Albert as though he were almost entirely alone.

He looked at the school again for one last time, feeling that the moment ought to be important somehow and that he should fix it in his mind. Yet as he looked at the grey turrets of the place, its austere halls and chambers, its architecture which seemed to combine at once the qualities of a miniature castle and a well-maintained gaol, he realised that he felt no particular connection to these buildings at all. He could not imagine even missing the sight of them or feeling the least twinge of nostalgia for their numerous corridors and debating halls and libraries. In such defiance was this sentiment to all that he had ever been told and taught, Albert even wondered, with a surge of nervousness, whether this were normal or whether there was in fact something wrong with him.

This chain of thought was interrupted by the sight of a gowned figure emerging from the lodge house and stepping across that wide yard which led to the iron gates. As the person came fully into view, Albert raised a hand in greeting. “Dr Galsworthy!”

The master was a tall, rather striking man in possession of an extravagant black beard which was said by the boys to lend him the appearance of a skinny W. G. Grace.

Dr Galsworthy (who seemed to Albert to be well advanced indeed in years but who cannot have been more than five and forty) nodded in greeting, an informality which would not hitherto have been permissible.

“Edgington,” he said, “I thought that was you. Malingering by the gates, eh?”

“I’m waiting for my car, sir. To take me home again.”

Galsworthy made rather a performance of drawing out his pocket watch from its compartment in his waistcoat. He consulted the clock face and blinked.

“Running somewhat late, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir. I expect there’ll be a very good reason for the delay.”

“Hmm.” Galsworthy replaced the timepiece and peered through the bars at Albert (for the gates still separated them) and asked, seemingly with true curiosity: “And what will you say to the chauffeur, given the lateness of the hour, when he finally arrives?”

Without thinking, Albert Edgington gave the answer that he imagined that the older man wished to hear.

“I’ll show him the sharp edge of my tongue, sir. Give the fellow a lashing. Punctuality’s the politeness of princes.”

A look of great and undeniable disappointment spread across the master’s features. “Edgington,” he said, then carefully, thoughtfully: “Albert?”

“Sir?”

“School’s over now. You may call me Galsworthy as my friends do. But listen, before you go, I want you to think – really think – about what you say, what you do, what you believe…”

“I’m afraid… that is… I’m not sure that I follow.”

“All of this…” Galsworthy gestured vaguely behind him. “A place like this, it can give a fellow some strange ideas about the ordering of the world and about one’s place in it. Every one of us is doing our best, I know that, but you can’t spend time in these halls without inheriting, shall we say, a certain quality of presumption.”

Albert frowned. The encounter was like meeting an actor backstage after the play and finding him in real life to be altogether different to whatever swaggering braggart, pensive nobleman or heartsick lover he had essayed upon the stage.

“What do you mean, sir?”

Galsworthy tugged at his voluminous beard. For the first time, Albert wondered why the man had grown it to such length, whether it did not offer, in a sense, the comforts of disguise.

“I think,” said the schoolteacher, “that you have potential, Edgington.”

“Oh but sir–” Albert was about to rehearse once again his failings and uncertainties, but Galsworthy waved him into silence.

“Oh, not as a thinker or an academic or a sportsman but rather as a human being. For you have curiosity and a sense of decency, and, I shouldn’t wonder, the capacity for great good. There’s just one thing you’re going to need.”

“Oh?” Albert found that he was blushing. “And what, sir, is that?”

Galsworthy fixed Albert in a very grave and steady gaze and seemed about to give his answer when, at last, a motorcar came roaring into sight.

It was a big, sleek vehicle with large high wheels, two seats side by side and a steering wheel which had about it an unexpectedly maritime touch. There was something of the fairground about it too, as well as something of the racetrack.

“Not what you were expecting?” Galsworthy asked, his words almost lost to the clank and hum of the machine.

Albert shook his head. “And that’s not the family chauffeur either.”

A big, broad-shouldered figure, sat in hat and goggles behind the wheel and brought the vehicle to a noisy halt before the gates.

The brake was applied, though the engine roared on. The driver lifted up his goggles to reveal the cheerful, open features of…

“Silas!” Albert turned to Dr Galsworthy. “My elder brother.”

“I remember,” said the master.

“Hop on board!” Silas said. “There’s space beneath these seats for that trunk of yours.”

“I was…” Albert begun. “That is… I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Change of plan,” Silas said. “A change for the better. I promise you, you’ll approve.”

Without quite knowing why, Albert found that he was hesitating.

Silas turned and nodded in brusque acknowledgement of the teacher’s presence. “Still here, Galsworthy? I trust they’re keeping you busy in there?”

The tutor did not smile. “Always busy,” he said. “The work is never done, never complete.”

“Jolly good!” Silas gave a smile of blank indifference. “Up you come now, Bert,” he said and Albert found that he was unthinkingly obeying, stowing his luggage and clambering up onto the unfamiliar machine, taking his place beside his brother and putting on the protective apparel which had been left out for his use.

He waved at Dr Galsworthy. “I’d better go, sir. Thank you so much for everything.”

The teacher said nothing but only watched from behind the gates. Silas released the brake.

“We’re going home then?” Albert said, perhaps more loudly than was required as he became accustomed to the relentless sound of the engine.

“Oh no,” Silas said and grinned a real, ferocious grin. “Not there. Why, we’re going to the City.”

“What city?” Albert shouted. “Which one?”

“No, you don’t understand. We’re going to the City.”

And, with this, Silas turned the car in a few surprisingly swift and certainly expert motions and began to drive at speed away from the gates of St Barnaby’s. They moved down the long driveway which led out of the school grounds and out onto the road beyond, flanked on either side by green, unpeopled playing fields.

Albert, full of questions, was on the cusp of turning to his brother (who still smirked in a most disconcerting manner) when he caught sight of something behind them – a dark, sober figure in full flight, pursuing the motorcar on foot and waving his arms, his gown flapping out behind him like a cloak.

“Galsworthy!” Albert shouted. “Galsworthy’s trying to flag us down.”

The smirk on the face of his brother grew at this only more broad and Albert considered, somehow meaner too.

Teasingly, Silas increased the speed of the vehicle (he was later to boast that she was capable of speeds in excess of thirty miles per hour) as Albert craned his head around to see Galsworthy fall into the distance.

“Stop!” Albert cried. “I might have forgotten something. Left something behind.”

They were at the end now of the driveway. The open road – gateway to the adult world – lay beyond them, empty save, in the distance, for what looked to be a horse and cart of a decidedly quaint, painterly sort.

“That’s more than likely,” Silas grunted and now he stopped the motorcar. Unaccustomed to such treatment, the engine coughed and grumbled and appeared, for a moment, to be seriously considering stopping altogether. At this, irritation twitched at the corners of Silas’ lips. Then the engine settled itself and the grin returned.

Behind them, Albert saw, Galsworthy ran into view. He reached the side of the motorcar, seeming impressively untroubled by the exertion, scarcely out of breath and perspiring only a little.

At the sight of him, another flash of annoyance crossed Silas’ features.

“Don’t go!” Galsworthy said, standing by the car, looking past the eldest sibling entirely to fix Albert once again in his gaze.

“Go where, sir?”

“I heard what your brother said. But you mustn’t go there.”

“Oh Galsworthy,” said Silas. “I always thought you were the most frightful chump. A chump and a prude to boot.”

“Silas?” Albert asked. “Where is this place you’re taking me? What on earth is it?”

“It’s just the City,” said his brother. “I went there when I was your age. So did Roddy. And I bet this old gargoyle –” He made a blunt gesture in Galsworthy’s direction. “– I bet he’s never even visited at all.”

The schoolteacher blanched. “I’ve heard enough,” he said. “About what kind of a place it is. And the kinds of men who go there.”

Silas laughed. “You always were such an old woman. I can’t think why St Barnaby’s put up with you.”

Galsworthy ignored the jibe. “Trust me,” he said to Albert. “You don’t want to go to the City.”

“What is it?” Albert asked, his eyes now very wide. “What happens there?”

“It’s fun,” said Silas. “Just fun.”

On the road before them, the horse and cart came clip-clopping closer. It had a Romany look about it, Albert saw now, an emissary from some earlier time.

“Corruption.” Galsworthy was countering his brother’s argument. “It may seem like fun on the surface but there’s corruption underneath. Malfeasance.”

Silas rolled his eyes. “Pshaw.”

“You’re talking in riddles,” Albert said, keeping his eyes fixed on the nearing cart. “Please won’t one of you tell me what this place is and what on earth goes on there?”

“Better you don’t know,” Galsworthy said.

Silas winked. “Best I don’t spoil the surprise.”

Still the cart came closer. There was one driver – a haggard man in a tall hat, a feather in its brim. There was something in the cart but it was not yet close enough to make out the cargo.

“Albert, come back to the school,” said Galsworthy. “You’ll be safe there. I can contact your father. I don’t believe he can have the slightest idea of what your brother has planned for you.”

Silas laughed. “You really believe that our father knows nothing of this? The notion was his! He’s been to the City himself, on occasions too numerous to count. They know him well there.”

Galsworthy seemed startled by this information. He stepped back.

Silas grinned again and nodded with pantomime enthusiasm. “You should go yourself one day, you know. Might liven you up a bit, you desiccated old stick.”

“I’ll never go there,” Galsworthy said weakly. He stepped back again.

“Only because you’re a coward,” Silas said. Turning to Albert: “So what say you? Do you want to have some fun? Do you want to become a man?”

“If Father says…”

“Damn Father! This concerns you, Bertie. Would you like to be a man? Or a pale little worm like this fellow?”

“There’s no need,” Albert said softly, “to be unkind.”

“Can’t hear you!” Silas said over the rumble of the engine.

Albert turned to Galsworthy. “Before,” he said, “at the gates. You said that there was something I needed. To become all that I can be. What was it?”

Galsworthy gazed back at him, his gown settled limply around his thin form. He suddenly seemed very tired.

He spoke two words, too quietly to be heard, though Albert believed that he knew what they were.

“Come on.” Silas’ patience had snapped. “We have to get going. Ready for the City, Bertie?”

Succumbing to the inevitable gravity of the occasion, Albert nodded once.

Silas urged the car onwards, leaving the schoolteacher behind them. In the road ahead, the horse, startled by the lurch of the vehicle, reared up, whinnied, so dramatically that the driver had his work cut out to bring the beast back under control.

As the car sped away, Albert caught a glimpse of what the cart had carried – coils and coils of shining new metal which seemed to speak of restraint and partition.

Then the car was away and horse, cart, driver, master and school sank at last into the distance.

It was a while before Albert spoke.

Instead, he thought of the two words which he believed Galsworthy to have spoken in answer to his question.

They had been simple and direct, and they echoed in his imagination as they drove.

“A purpose.”

II

An odd atmosphere had settled between the two young men – even Silas had seemed uncharacteristically taciturn following their encounter with Dr Galsworthy – and it was not until the school was some fifteen miles away and they had passed into the Fenlands that conversation began, haltingly, to start up once more.

“It is good to see you,” Silas offered and his tentative smile seemed far more genuine than it had before, devoid now of any touch of cruelty.

“You too,” Albert said, grateful that the long hush was over.

“Been too long. Don’t see enough of one another. Always try to watch out for you. Make sure you’re thriving. Roddy too, of course, but there’s a special link, don’t you find, between the eldest and the youngest?”

Albert found that he was smiling now too, pleased for the flattery and eager for companionship. Beyond the car was the flat, stark vista which typifies Cambridgeshire even in high summer. With every additional mile, the warnings of his schoolmaster seemed to grow fainter and to recede further into memory.

“So you can tell me now,” Albert said, settling back into his seat, “exactly what’s waiting for us in this City of yours. What is it? A club of some sort, I suppose?”

The grin was back and a hint of slyness with it. “In a manner of speaking it’s a club, yes. Certainly only the most select sort of chap is invited. But it’s considerably more than that. It’s a feat – of architecture, engineering and imagination. Oh, I really can’t describe it. Not in a way which does the place justice. You’ll see – you’ll understand when we get there. It will be fun, as I said, but you’ll receive quite an education too – a finer, truer one than St Barnaby’s ever gave you.”

“Just tell me one thing, just one thing about the City. Then I’ll ask no more until we get there.”

Silas drew in a breath, then exhaled theatrically. “Just this,” he said. “No-one goes to the City for the first time and comes back the same. One sort of person goes in – and a very different man comes out. It leaves its mark upon you. The mark of Moreau.”

“Who’s Moreau?”

“One question, old chap. That’s what you asked for and that’s what I granted. All of the rest of it will become clear in the fullness of time. Now, let’s talk of other things. You hear much of old Roddie these days? I hear that wife of his has him fully under the thumb now, poor devil…”

The car went on, deeper into England, and as Silas chattered of family and duty and of the mysterious, inexorable workings of money Albert Edgington sat quite still, watched the level landscape roll by and let his mind roam ahead to the City.

III

The journey from the gates of St Barnaby’s to the place which led to the City took a little under three hours, a feat which would not have been possible even a handful of years earlier. Silas pushed the motorcar to its considerable limits, urging it on through the narrow country roads which led out of Cambridgeshire and into the county of Suffolk, ignoring the occasional protestations of the engine and taking visible delight in the power and speed of the machine at his disposal.

Albert meanwhile simply allowed himself to be driven and let their conversation wash over him. He had not been blessed with any innate sense of direction and they were well into the third hour of their journey before he realised what the nature of their destination must be.

“Are we headed towards the coast?” he asked.

They had just passed a weather-beaten sign which, looking as though it dated from the times of the witch trials, proclaimed Dunwich to be ten miles away.

“That’s right!” Silas called back. There was excitement in his voice, no doubt at the thought of their proximity.

“Surely,” Albert asked, coming out of the near-daze into which he had descended, “this precious City of yours isn’t in Dunwich?”

“As it happens, it’s not,” said Silas, “but don’t dismiss a place like that just because it seems like a little fishing village now. This used to be the capital of these parts in all but name. A great centre of power in the kingdom of the Angles.”

“Oh,” was all that Albert could think to say, quite unable to square his memories of the quaint, poor settlement which he had visited once or twice as a boy with his brother’s description.

“It was all different back then,” Silas went on. “Before the Normans came. In some ways – in a lot of ways – it must have been a better kind of England. Don’t you think?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Albert replied. “I don’t believe I’ve ever really thought about it.”

“Well, I have,” Silas said and Albert could tell that he was pleased – pleased, perhaps, at the thought that Albert was surprised by the breadth of his knowledge. “A man in my position has to. Because we’re part of a tradition – our family and families like ours – which goes back to before the Conqueror. We’re a captive people in many ways, still subject to the Norman yoke, and it behoves those of us who can to cherish and keep alive the spirit of this country as she used to be.”

Albert, shifting nervously in his seat, was about to ask politely as to the evidence that the Edgingtons were able to trace their lineage back before the eleventh century (for certainly he had never seen or heard of any) when Silas cried out in happiness: “Aha!”

They were approaching a rustic junction, green fields on either side of them. Ahead was a sign that seemed polished and brand new and which read in bold dark letters: EDDOWES BAY, 3 MILES.

“Almost there!” Silas said.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Albert admitted. “What is it?”

“Oh, nothing special. Just another village by the sea. At least… superficially.”

Albert could see the sea now, rising ahead of them in the distance, a swathe of blue and grey.

The road seemed to decline and on either side the banks grew higher. Albert had never seen anything like it, at least not here in this flattest of all the English counties. The road took on a downhill aspect and the mounds of grass and earth on either side grew taller and taller.

It was as though the car was descending into a valley of some kind, heading disconcertingly along a narrow mountain road.

Later – very much later – Albert wondered if this approach to Eddowes Bay was manmade, fashioned at great expense, and had concluded that this surely was the case. Although, of course, by then he had come to understand that there were very few practical limits to the resources of those who had built and operated the City.

As the motorcar sped down the road (too fast to stop safely, Albert noted, should another similar vehicle approach at the same velocity from the opposite direction), a solitary figure walking ahead of them came into view.

It was a young woman, not very much older than Albert himself. She had long blonde hair and wore a flowing blue dress – almost a smock – which gave her the quality of a figure from a storybook.

At the sound of the car, the young woman turned and pressed herself against the bank in order to let them pass. Albert saw her face – pale and fine-featured. At the sight of her, Silas braked hard, all but dislodging Albert from his chair.

“Well, well,” he said and there could be no doubt that his tone was anything other than lascivious. “It would seem that the fun has begun even sooner than I dared to hope.”

“Silas?”

Albert’s eldest brother ignored the speaking of his name and raised his right hand high into the air. “Halloa! You there!”

The woman said nothing but only looked intently at them both.

“Where are you headed?”

Still she said nothing but only looked at them, careful and skittish. “Eddowes Bay?”

The woman thought for a moment then nodded, guardedly, just once. Was any other destination even possible, Albert wondered, on this strange, deep road in this odd pocket of the country?

“Well, there’s a stroke of luck!” Silas declared, all bonhomie and smiles. “We’re headed that way ourselves. Might we offer you a lift?”

The young woman looked nervous, not frightened of them exactly, but wary and prepared. “Why would you do that?”

“Because we’re a couple of Christian gentlemen. Isn’t that right, Bertie? Think of us, my dear, as your passing good Samaritans.”

Albert turned to his brother. “She seems ill at ease,” he said as softly as he could and still be heard. “Besides there isn’t room.”

“Nonsense. These seats are made for big men. Great Teutonic bottoms. Plenty of space for the two of you on one chair if you don’t mind sharing.”

Albert felt his face grow warm at the suggestion. “Silas, no–”

It was too late. When Albert looked up again towards the young woman he saw that she was already walking in their direction. She seemed more confident now, her mind presumably made up, and her gait was almost a saunter.

“I’m Jessamy,” she said as soon as she reached the side of the car and before either of the men could speak.

“Surname?” Silas drawled.

“Not important,” Jessamy said.

“Pleased to meet you.”

Albert remembered his manners though he found himself unable to look the young woman in the eye. “My name is Albert Edgington and this is my brother, Silas.”

“What brings you to Eddowes Bay, Jessamy?”

“Oh,” she said vaguely. “Work. The promise of employment. I’m to meet a woman there.”

“Jolly good. Now, clamber on board,” Silas said. “There’s a good girl. Do move up, Bertie.”

Albert did as he was told and shuffled as far rightwards as he could upon his seat. The girl jumped up and into the vehicle. Though there was precious little space she managed to sit beside him. Their legs could not help but touch. Jessamy smelt of something sweet – something like apricot while underneath there was detectable the sharp, if not unpleasant tang, of her perspiration. Albert felt suddenly very young and gauche indeed.

“All aboard?” Silas cried and, without waiting for any reply, edged the car forwards again, down the narrow steep road towards the sea.

Though he could not bring himself even to glance at her, Albert could sense that Jessamy was smiling.

Silas began to whistle. And it was in this fashion that the three of them rode into the strange little town of Eddowes Bay, last calling post before the City.

IV

The town clung to the coastline. It was a pretty place, though no more so than plenty of other such settlements, outwardly similar, which could be found at that time and in that region of the country. There was a small high street – a butcher, a grocer, a baker – together with a single public house (The Idler’s Retreat) and, in the distance, the pale spire of a church.

Before them, the sea glistened and surged, looking, for once, on this bright summer’s day, almost blue and inviting.

Albert looked about him with curious surprise.

“Not quite what you were expecting?” Silas shouted.

“I don’t know. It looks very quaint but also…”

Albert’s words tailed off into silence as the car turned into the high street and passed by a group of half a dozen men on the pavement. They were all young and all were fashionably dressed. They seemed in high spirits and were jostling one another as they strolled, much as though they walked along some expensive London street and not this seaside backwater at all. At the sight of Jessamy, two of them called out and whistled.

“Ignore them,” Albert said. “Evidently not gentlemen.”

The woman at his side said nothing but only gazed at the strangers with a kind of blank resignation. Silas brought the car onwards to the front of the tavern. He parked before it and turned off the engine with a flourish.

“Here we are,” he said. “Now who’s for a preliminary snifter?”

Albert did not reply at first. He was still taking in the sight of this small, seemingly inconsequential town which appeared nonetheless to possess for many a great, even dreadful significance.

He took a deep breath, gulping in air. It tasted of two things, of sea salt and the warm, distinctive taste of hops.

Silas must have noticed his expression and guessed his train of thought because he said: “They’ve a brewery not far from here. Has to be.” He winked. “Lot of thirsty people come to Eddowes Bay.” Silas clambered out of the car, jumping adroitly to the ground.

“Anyway who’s for a drink right now? Bertie? Jessamy?”

The young woman who was in the process of disembarking from the vehicle did not speak.

“Surely…” Albert began. “I mean, that is – they won’t permit us to take a lady inside?”

Silas shrugged theatrically. “They have a saloon bar. Besides, the landlord is famously flexible in such matters.”

Jessamy turned her back to them, faced away from the inn and looked out down the high street and towards the ocean.

Albert, meanwhile, climbed out of the car and joined his brother who was looking hopefully towards the pub, a quiet, pleasant-looking place which seemed to be entirely empty. Apart from the young men on the street they had seen no-one.

“Where is everybody?” Albert asked, feeling as he spoke, an odd, fleeting sensation of oppressiveness.

“Oh it’s still early,” Silas said lightly. “I dare say a lot of them will still be… indoors. Now, how about that drink?” He seemed suddenly filled up with a kind of nervous energy. He shuffled from foot to foot. “I could murder a pint of half and half.”

“Yes,” Albert said, though even he could hear the lack of enthusiasm in his voice. “Yes, of course.”

“Come on then,” Silas said. “And bring the girl with you.”

They formed a curious tableau, these three – the elder brother edging towards the inn, though seemingly reluctant to go in alone; the young woman who stood watching in silence the restless motion of the sea; Albert, the schoolboy who stood between the two of them, caught by twin poles of magnetism.

“Jessamy?” he ventured. The girl did not respond. Behind him, Silas edged closer to the Idler’s Retreat.

Albert took three nervous steps towards the woman. “Would you like..? I mean, that is…” At last, she turned to face him.

“It’s not real,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“None of it. It’s… fake. Don’t you see? Like a stage set.”

“I’m afraid I don’t…”

“It’s all make-believe,” she said. “Or it may as well be. Don’t just watch, Mr Edgington, try to see.”

The two of them looked at one another for a long moment. Her gaze, Albert concluded, experienced at close quarters was queerly discomfiting. He looked away.

“Come on, in the name of Harry! Stop gawping and get yourselves inside.” Silas strode towards the door of the pub. Jessamy walked past Albert, appearing not to want to catch up with the older man.

“Coming?” she called back.

“Yes!” Albert said but he waited awhile all the same, thinking on the young woman’s strange words. He looked down the high street and at the sea beyond. No other human life could he discern. The place was silent and still. The houses which were clustered nearby all looked empty and dark.

Overhead, a gull screamed and swooped. Was he being watched? Albert thought that he could feel eyes upon him. Or was he simply tired, bewildered and the victim of his own imagination? He sniffed the air again, rich with its promise of water. Then, from nearby, he heard the simple sombre tolling of a single church bell.

Evensong, surely. The noise ought to have comforted him a little but somehow it did not.

With one last glance at the empty street Albert turned and walked towards the oddly unwelcoming sight of the only pub in Eddowes Bay.

V

A small bell tinkled when Albert pushed open the stout and heavy door. As it swung shut behind him, he became aware of the close, warm, almost muggy atmosphere of the place, as if all the doors and windows of the building had been kept tight shut during a heatwave and every room had baked and cooked in unrelenting sunshine.

Once again, as he had outside, he felt a sudden onrush of oppressiveness. This he forced himself to shake off and forget.

He saw that there were many faces upturned to greet him. The public bar was, so far as Albert could tell, all but full. How many men were there? Fifteen? Twenty? Five and twenty? All stood or sat or leaned. All held in one hand a flagon or tankard. All were smartly dressed, not formally so but apparelled appropriately for, say, a visit to the country to stay with some distant but wealthy relatives. The ages of the gathering ranged from only a year or two older than he to men who had evidently seen their eightieth year.

They all grinned expectantly at him, as though they had just been told the great majority of a joke and now expected Albert to recite the punchline.

Albert wondered how it was that he, his brother and Jessamy, had stood for some time outside, seen no signs of life within, noticed no-one coming or going and heard no beery chatter or clink of glasses. Behind the bar stood a thin man with silver hair, his arms folded in a posture of amused scepticism.

He peeled back his lips to reveal dirty teeth. “You’d be young Edgington?” he asked. “The smallest of the Edgingtons?”

“I suppose that I would, sir, yes.”

A snarl on the man’s face. “No, ‘sirs’ here, son. But your brother’s waiting for you. Back there.” He nodded to a dark brown door which Albert noticed now in the gloom at the back of the room. “Saloon bar.”

“Oh I see. Thank you.”

Albert stared at the figure of who he took to be the landlord. In response, the man grimaced. “Get back there,” he said and added: “Your girl’s still with him. Though Mrs Anman will be seeing to her shortly.”

“Who’s Mrs Anman?”

The landlord did not even acknowledge the question. As if at some invisible signal, the whole bar erupted into talking and drinking and ribald badinage.

Albert swallowed hard, lowered his head and walked through the crowd to the brown door. He felt them watching him as he went and he thought again of Jessamy’s words outside.

Beyond the door lay a hallway, filled with shadows. A dark crimson patterned rug cushioned the floor. The walls on either side were covered with a jumble of photographs in frames, all with an Indian theme: the Taj Mahal, a picnic in the Bengal, a bright-eyed English baby, robed in white, clasped tight in the arms of her aya. At the end of the corridor, a splash of yellow light upon the ground spilled out from an adjoining room.

From up ahead, Albert heard first the sound of female laughter and then the familiar bray of his brother. He walked towards the noise and light but, halfway there, he stopped and gazed with trepidation, upwards. In the ceiling, a floorboard creaked. Evidently, somebody was moving there but Albert felt with uncanny certainty that it signified more than merely motion, that he was the object of sustained scrutiny. For a space it even seemed to him that he saw something flicker upon the plaster and play about the beam, a bright red light. Then it disappeared. Albert rubbed his eyes but the little light did not return. No further movement could be heard.

Trying, though not entirely succeeding, to set aside his discomfiture, Albert walked on. The room turned out to be the saloon bar, of course, and, in contrast to the public version it was all but deserted. There must have been at least a dozen tables, a cluster of chairs around each, but only one of them was tenanted, by Silas and Jessamy. In the corner was a modestly stocked bar with a neat, black-haired man of around forty standing behind it. His eyes flicked up when Albert walked in though they betrayed not the slightest interest in the new arrival. There was a resemblance in this barman (around the mirthless mouth in particular) which seemed to suggest some familial connection to the publican who had directed Albert here.

“Bertie!” Silas raised a hand imperiously and beckoned Albert over. “We were starting to wonder what the devil had become of you. Sit yourself down, for God’s sake, and wet your whistle.”

Jessamy looked at him strangely. “What kept you?” she asked.

“Oh, I was just dawdling. Taking in the atmosphere. Strange sort of a place this, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it?” Jessamy echoed in a dull tone.

Silas grinned wolfishly. “I got you a pint,” he said and Albert saw now that there were four tankards lined up before him, each filled with a dark, oily liquid. Jessamy cradled a small glass in her hands, some light, mysterious drink glistening within.

“Come on!” Silas roared again and patted the nearest chair with the palm of his hand. The bartender watched impassively. Albert took a seat.

No sooner had he done so than Silas was pushing the flagon into his hands and urging him to: “Drink! Drink! Drink!” The eyes of his brother were sparkling with mirth. “Drink it all! Drink it down!”

Jessamy said nothing but looked away, not awkward or embarrassed but only, it seemed to Albert, wholly indifferent.

He took a sip of the thick, glutinous porter and swallowed uncomfortably.

“More!” Silas said and, leaning in, tipped up the glass, forcing Albert to drink faster and deeper. “More! More!”

Albert grinned at first, trying to go along with the spirit of the afternoon, but when he had difficulty in breathing, when his throat felt filled up and when he sensed the rising tide of panic within him, he had no choice but to move his head abruptly to one side and gasp for air.

Silas righted the glass in time but some of the liquid still dribbled from the side of his mouth, speckling his white collars brown. Silas winked and set down the tankard, now half-empty, back on the table.

Albert gasped again for air. His throat burned and his head swam.

“Not a bad start,” Silas said. “But it’s only a beginning. Now finish the blessed thing and we can all start to relax.” He pushed the glass across the table towards him.

Albert blinked. “In a moment,” he said. “Just give me a moment.”

Silas snorted.

Jessamy glanced towards them both. “He’s only young,” she said. “Why not leave him be?”

Silas grinned again, entirely without humour. “What’s it to you? Not your brother, is he?”

Jessamy shrugged and took a sullen sip of her own drink.

“Come on, Bertie. You don’t want to let me down now, do you?”

Again, the glass was pushed closer. “Just finish up this first drink and I’ll stop ragging on you for awhile. Trust me, the City is best not entered stone cold sober.”

Without replying, Albert reached out his hand, took a deep breath and drank down all that was left in the glass. He swallowed quickly to avoid as much of the taste as possible. When it was done, his head seemed to roar and his skin prickled. Jessamy seemed to look at him with a species of mild disappointment.

Silas nodded in grudging appreciation. Over by the bar, the silent man – son or brother, nephew or cousin of the publican – caught Albert’s eye and winked once, a gesture both flagrant and somehow salacious.

From next door there came a sudden cheer – the public bar erupting at some new arrival or fresh joke or observation or, perhaps, Albert thought dully, for no particular reason at all, save that they were here, half-drunk in Eddowes Bay and that the City, whatever it might be, was somehow, mysteriously, close.

VI

“So tell us more, Jessamy, about this job of yours.”

Silas’ interest in Albert seemed for now to have waned and the whole of his attention was focused instead upon the young woman. If she was at all unsettled by his enquiry, delivered in a half-ironic tone, then she did not show it.

“After all, you’ve been pretty mum about it so far.”

She gave no particular reaction. “I answered a listing in the Pall Mall Gazette. I was interviewed in London, at the end of which I was told that the position was mine if I wanted it. I agreed and so I was given directions here.”

“But what exactly, madam,” Silas smiled, “is the nature of this job?”

Albert was trying hard to follow this conversation but his senses were still in uproar. He had not eaten for hours and his stomach was whinnying in complaint.

He rubbed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply. In spite of the emptiness of this secondary bar he felt penned in and confined. His vision swam. He blinked hard. A second pint glass of porter sat before him, thoroughly unappealing in every way.

He must have missed some of the interchange between his companions because the next thing he heard was his brother saying, apparently in response to some unheard piece of information: “Oh really? Oh have they now? They’ve got you doing that here, have they?”

Jessamy was unsmiling. “So they tell me.”

Albert, trying his best to concentrate, was about to apologise for his temporary inattention and ask the woman to explain to him exactly what she was talking about when a shadow fell over their table.

Quite without Albert having noticed, a stranger had entered the room – in fact, two strangers. Jessamy and Silas had most certainly noticed, however, and they both stared up at the newcomers with curiosity. Of the taverner there was no sign; his bar stood unattended.

One of the strangers was a very tall, muscular man dressed in a dark and dapper suit which was nonetheless noticeably too small for him.

In the ordinary way of things, he would have been a striking and noteworthy individual yet somehow the figure who stood beside him drew the eye away immediately.

She was a short woman with long dark hair and an unusually melodious voice. More than this, Albert could not tell for she was wearing an outfit of a most unusual sort: coloured a faint powder blue, it was something like a robe, cowed and hooded, suggestive in equal parts of monastery and carnival.

Albert could not make out her face in any detail, so capacious was the hood which framed it. Her features lay in shadow and while there was visible a certain elegance there was something also that struck him as being indefinably wrong.

“You must be Jessamy,” she said, her voice soft and smooth yet somehow gurgling. “You’re every bit as lovely as I’ve been told.”

The woman in the hood ignored Albert and his brother entirely. “My name is Mrs Anman,” she said, “and I’ll be taking care of you from now on.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” Jessamy said and there was, at least in Albert’s estimation, an audible tremor of unease.

Silas, Albert noticed, was looking away, gripping his glass a little too tightly and gazing with improbable interest at the floor. Albert could not bring himself to do the same. There was something fascinating – indeed, there was something fascinatingly wrong – about the face of the woman. As surreptitiously as he could, he leaned forwards and tried to take a closer look. He could make out a nose and a pair of bright green eyes but there was something else, something that was different about her, masked by shadow. Without knowing quite why, he glanced down at her hands and noticed, somehow without the least surprise, that she was wearing long thick gloves. No inch of skin was visible.

She was still speaking to Jessamy who nodded with studied seriousness.

“You need to come with me now, my dear. We have to prepare so that you might best perform your duties.”

“Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am.”

At this, there was a note of absolute compliance in Jessamy’s voice of which Albert would not hitherto have believed her capable.

The soft, strange voice of Mrs Anman went silkily on: “Now you’ve not been to the City before have you, my dear?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Nor are you personally acquainted with any other of your sex who has?”

“Not so far as I am aware, ma’am.”

Silas, who had even in Albert’s earliest memories been characterised by his garrulous nature – a noisy child, a preternaturally confident schoolboy and now a loud and insistent adult, the kind of man who, in the right company, was capable of vulgarity – still said nothing at all and looked down beside him. Albert wondered if this was the product of embarrassment (surely not) or whether it was something more.

“Time to go, ma’am.”

These were the first four words that the man in the suit had spoken. He had an accent, from somewhere north of Coventry, which Albert could not readily place.

The woman in the hood inclined her head in response and for an instant Albert thought that he saw something that was more than shadow.

Was there something, he wondered, on her face? A birth mark? A discolouration of some kind, the consequence of injury or disease? Or even (surely not) excessive hair?

“Come along, Jessamy,” the woman said. “We should let these fine young gentlemen enjoy the preliminaries. Mayhap you will see them again in the City.”

Jessamy’s eyes met Albert’s then and he saw the reluctance in them, and the doubt.

“Jessamy?” the woman said again, more firmly than before.

“Of course,” said Jessamy and rose with purpose. “The brothers Edgington, I bid you farewell. At least for now.”

In a most unladylike fashion, she took her glass, still half-full and swallowed the rest of it in one swift gulp. “Goodbye,” she said, to Albert but not to Silas, and then she was moving away, flanked by that strange pair, moving across the room and towards the exit, her eyes cast back in what, if Albert was not mistaken, was something like an expression of imploring.

All at once, Albert was gripped by a compulsion – to stand up, to rush towards Jessamy, to take her by the hand and run out of this place to the strange streets beyond, to get her away at all costs from the soft-voiced Mrs Anman and the ghoul who walked beside her.

Without realising that he was doing it, he found himself tensing, his muscles tautening, ready to rise and to run.

He felt the hand of his elder brother then, hard upon his shoulder. “Don’t be a fool, man. Stay where you are and stay quiet.”

So forceful was Silas’ voice and so different was it from his usual tones that Albert obeyed without question.

Half a minute later, and Jessamy had left the room with her guides or captors. The two siblings were alone.

VII

It seemed suddenly very quiet and still. From next door there came a muffled roar of excited approval. Albert felt the removal of the pressure on his arm.

He looked over at his brother and saw the older man’s face set in an expression of uncharacteristic gravity. Then, sensing, Albert supposed, that he was being observed, Silas broke in a big, wide and almost convincing grin.

“No need to look so glum, Bertie. Trust me, there’s plenty more where she came from.”

“The woman…” Albert said. “In the hood. Mrs Anman… Was there… I mean, didn’t you think, that there was something wrong with her?”

“Dear me, but I thought we’d been raised better than that. Don’t be impertinent, Bertie, and don’t pry when the lady so clearly desires her privacy. And now, for goodness sake, have another drink.” He pushed the second flagon towards Albert who only looked at it uneasily.

“Drink, Bertie, for God’s sake.”

“Silas… I’m hungry.”

“There’ll be food later. Once we get to the City. And plenty of it.”

“When will that be? How will we get there? And do you think Jessamy is already on her way?”

“You’ll see soon enough. I hardly want to spoil the surprise. So just drink up, try to smile and stop asking so many damn fool questions.”

Somehow Albert found himself taking the glass up in both hands, raising it to his lips, drinking, and giving in to a surge of warm, all-encompassing, pleasurable confusion. As he drank, he noticed that the custodian of the bar had returned and that he was now watching them both with mistrustful eyes.

VIII

Albert thought later that around an hour must have passed until something in him finally snapped and he fled the Idler’s Rest only to begin, unwittingly, the final leg of his journey to the City.

It should be noted that this figure was necessarily approximate as much of that time, Albert spent in a haze. The strangeness of the long day combined with the application of alcohol contrived to lend events the shift and shimmer of a dream. Later, he could recollect his brother talking, though not the topic of their conversation. He could remember the return of the unsmiling barman who bore more drinks on a gleaming new tin tray. He could recollect taking more strong drink himself, more than he had ever drunk in his life before. He could recollect, after a while, the arrival of others, men of all ages dressed smartly and already on their way to inebriation who filled up the saloon bar in small yet noticeable increments. Some of these people, Silas seemed to know, at least by sight, and he exchanged greetings and badinage with them.

By the time that the hour was up, the place was noisy with an insistent male hum and thick with tobacco smoke. Albert’s head swam. Blood thundered in his ears. He felt, although he knew that he was not, very much like a prisoner.

He found himself unable not to think of Jessamy, to fret, in spite of the lag and confusion which now affected his mental processes, about her safety.

Silas was engaged in a robust discussion with a stout young whiskered gentleman about the question of Irish Home Rule. Their voices were raised and their manner was disputatious although as far as Albert could tell they seemed to be agreeing violently with one another.

Albert closed his eyes, settled back in his set and tried to make sense of it all. He believed himself to be unobserved but he was in this mistaken. When he opened his eyes again it was to find the barman all but crouching by his side, grinning levelly at him.

“Another drink, sir?”

Albert shook his head.

“Come now, Mr Edgington. Why not have one more to prepare yourself for the night ahead?”

“Thank you. But I believe I’ve had enough.”

The smiling man did not move or alter his expression. “There’s no such thing as ‘enough’, sir. Not round here.” He leaned closer, so close that Albert caught the stale scent of his breath.

Beside him, Silas talked on. The sounds of the room surged and roiled. Smoke stung his eyes and there was an all but intolerable pressure upon his bladder. Suddenly and instinctively, Albert rose to his feet.

“Excuse me. I need to take some air.”

The barman stepped back. Silas glanced up. “Bertie?”

Albert did not reply but only forced himself to walk away, out of the saloon, back into the ruck of the public bar and, eventually, out of the door and into the open air, the streets of Eddowes Bay. He stood alone, swaying slightly. In the distance he could hear the hiss of the sea. Gratefully, he breathed in and filled his lungs.

A momentary clarity came to him then and he looked about him to take in the scene in greater detail.

The town was busier than before. The streets were filling up with what he took to be visitors as all were smartly dressed and had the languid yet eager gait of the tourist or spectator. Albert could hear the sounds of lively conversation and enthusiastic laughter. A trio of neatly bearded gentlemen with the air of country solicitors walked past him to the pub and nodded in amicable greeting.

It took him a minute to place exactly where he had witnessed such an atmosphere of happy expectation before. It had been at the theatre or the opera; the loose chatter of anticipation was that which presaged some long-expected performance.

Had he thought that everyone abroad in Eddowes Bay was male, however improbable that sounded? He had and so far as he could see he was in this assumption very nearly correct. In the distance, however, heading away from the centre of the town and towards the sea, Albert saw a familiar hooded figure: Mrs Anman.

With an odd, unexamined determination which might have surprised even the version of him who had waited outside the gates of St Barnaby’s mere hours before, he stepped away from the Idler’s Rest and hurried after the cowled woman.

Something occurred to Albert as he walked as quickly as he could through the streets of Eddowes Bay. The town was ordered and regular, laid out in a clear grid. He had read of such manmade phenomena, of course, to be found in America in particular but he had never seen such a thing in England. The sense of symmetry seemed altogether out of place. Although he could not imagine precisely why this might have been done he most certainly found it useful, in his still drink-sodden state, to be able to navigate. Albert followed Mrs Anman to the end of the high street and its small row of shops, all of which seemed, unusually, still to be open.

Without looking around her, Mrs Anman turned left into a side street which led, after a series of narrow archways, into a different sector of the town, not so picturesque and attractive as the rest – row after row of grey, almost mean-looking residences, which, unlike many at the heart of the place, showed clear signs of habitation. Here, where the streets were once again all but empty and where there were certainly no perambulating well-dressed gentlemen, Mrs Anman paused once and turned around. As she stopped and seemed to lift up her head, Albert rushed into the welcoming shadows of a nearby porch.

He felt a surely ridiculous certainty that the woman was sniffing the air, as if she had caught his scent upon it. Albert heard a sound, a weird, high-pitched whinnying. Then the woman turned once again and began to run. She moved very fast indeed, melting almost immediately into the gathering dark. Why was she alone? Where was she heading? Where was Jessamy?

After only a few seconds of entirely forgivable doubt, Albert began to give chase.

He ran as fast as he could. Somehow the consumption of the night seemed only to hasten his flight, at least at first, as he dashed through the final few streets of the town and reached the edge of its circumference. The silhouette of the hooded woman glided before him.

Very soon the streets gave way first to grass and then to stones then to sand as Albert found himself endeavouring to move upon the beach. Almost without his becoming aware of it, the great dark slab of the sea bore up nearby, all but swallowing the horizon. In the distance was a small stone hut. The sound of the tides grew very loud indeed. Albert struggled. His sides ached and his stomach groaned in mutiny.

He thought too that he had lost sight of the woman. Perhaps, he thought, he had been mistaken in believing that she had come to the beach to begin with. What, after all, would she want in such a place at such an hour?

Then he saw her, closer than he had believed, but still moving away from him towards the point where the water met the land. He hastened after her but his movements had become tired and flailing. He lost his footing and fell back heavily upon the sand. The jolt of it caused him to cry out. He began to struggle upright and as he did so he saw something which at first he could not believe: the woman stopped, turned swiftly around and then seemed herself to topple forwards. Yet this was no mere fall. Rather, she became a dark shape upon the ground and seemed to surge forwards. With a thrill of horror, Albert understood that she was moving at great speed towards him and that she was doing so upon all fours.

It seemed too incredible to credit yet the sight was undeniable. Instinctively, Albert loosed a cry of fear. He stumbled upright, though this was but a temporary thing. Seconds later, he had been thrown over again to the sand, this time with Mrs Anman upon him. Held firm against the beach, pinioned by the woman as the sea breeze pushed back her billowing hood, Albert saw at last what he had begun, queasily and fearfully, to suspect: that Mrs Anman was not in truth a woman at all, nor human.

In the light of the moon he could only glimpse the nightmarish truth of it – that the face of the creature was covered in sleek, dark fur and that, while the top half of her features seemed ordinary enough, the lower half was altogether monstrous. In place of mouth and chin there was instead to be seen a great, protuberant bill, a long, hard snout.

She barked out a laugh, a harsh, and alien sound. He could taste her breath upon his skin, both salty and sour.

“Happy now?” she said and the sound of her voice was angular and weird upon that deserted stretch of coastal land. “Have you seen what you came to see?”

“I’m sorry,” Albert said, instinctively and without quite knowing why. “I didn’t understand… How could I have known?”

At this, Mrs Anman only snapped her bill. Almost idly, Albert found himself wondering how so peculiar a proboscis could ever have formed speech which had sounded even so much as passably human.

She leaned closer to him and he flinched away, wriggling upwards against the ground. Given the nature of her physiognomy it ought to have been impossible to tell but somehow Albert felt certain that Anman was at that moment smiling at him.

Then without warning, her bill came down hard, a hair’s breadth away from the skin on the left-hand side of his face. He yelped in fear and surprise.

“Stop,” he said but it was too late. She did it again, this time on the right, drawing blood now. The pain was sharp and shocking.

“Please.” He struggled to free himself but she was too solid and heavy. He felt certain that he was being toyed with by a practised predator and felt an acute sympathy with the field mouse as it spies, too late, the shadow of the barn owl overhead. Again, the creature raised its beak. Albert sensed that the games may be over and that this next assault may cause a great deal more than a scratch.

Yet before he could call out, Mrs Anman stopped, her head still lifted high, and turned her face a fraction towards the sea as though she were listening to some distant voice, caught only faintly on the breeze.

“Yes,” she said (Albert was certain that it was not to him to whom she was speaking), “if you think he may yet serve a purpose.”

If any reply came, then Albert did not hear it. Mrs Anman paused for a moment, then bowed her head as if in supplication. Unexpectedly, she spoke his name.

“Albert Edgington.” Each familiar syllable sounded strange in her voice. Another pause, and then a sigh and then in a sleek, single motion, the creature was off him and moving at speed towards the sea. Albert was, unexpectedly, gloriously free.

He ran then as fast as he could back towards the town, away from the callous gaze of the ocean. He half-expected to hear the Anman-creature behind him, in pursuit again, the awful crunch of her feet upon the stones, the shrill glissando of her laughter. He imagined that his apparent liberation was to be revealed as a hoax, all part of whatever bloodthirsty game she had been playing. He considered the hare being run ragged by dogs before the kill.

At the edge of the beach he hesitated. Some unbidden instinct made him pause and turn about to see the truth of his fears.

The shore was deserted and the sea was still. Of Mrs Anman there was no longer any sign. Then Albert looked further, towards the horizon and it seemed to him that he glimpsed, out towards the dark horizon something vast and tentacular and impossible.

He could not accept the truth of what he thought he saw and so he rubbed at his eyes like a child waking from bad dreams. When he looked again the sea seemed flat and empty, that brief vision no more, apparently, than a mirage.

Albert ran onwards, headlong and pell-mell, filled up with fear and wonder.

IX

The town of Eddowes Bay, when Albert arrived, ragged and perspiring, seemed once again to be altogether deserted. Gone were the strolling men, the ambling drinkers, the smartly dressed strangers with an air of happy expectation. Everything seemed entirely abandoned, like a stage after the theatre has been locked up for the night.

Edgington did not pass a single person on his flight through the streets nor did he see any sign that anyone had passed through before him. Even the air had a quality of motionlessness, as if it had long been undisturbed.

He went first to the Idler’s Rest. The door seemed jammed shut, stuck in its frame. A frantic shove pushed it open. There was only silence within. Public and saloon bar, both were empty. Even the barmen had vanished. So far as Albert could discern, the entire establishment stood vacant and untenanted.

“Silas?” His voice sounded puny and Albert suspected that no answer would come but he felt compelled nonetheless to speak the name. Again, louder this time: “Silas, where are you?”

The noise was dead and flat. No human voice replied yet it seemed to Albert that there was a response of a sort: as from somewhere in the distance came the resonant clang of a single tolling bell.

The church? Could it be, he wondered wildly, that the people of Eddowes Bay had sought some form of sanctuary there? Hours before little would have struck him as more unlikely but it seemed now no more improbable than much else which he had witnessed.

Albert strode out through the bar and into the open air. The bell still tolled and he followed it through empty streets till the little church hove into view.

As he approached, Albert saw that it was as though all the life that existed in this queer town was concentrated in that temple. The door was open and warm light beckoned. With a neatness which might under other circumstances have seemed almost comical as Edgington reached the entrance the bell ceased to toll.

A single, righteous male voice came from within. It sounded as though the end of a homily or sermon had just been reached.

“…and that is the wisdom which we have been granted to see for ourselves in the truth of the kingdom…”

Albert ran inside, quite uncertain as to what to expect. Yet the scene which awaited him seemed on the surface to be a wholly conventional one.

The church was full of a congregation. All were men and all were dressed expensively and in some style: the various individuals, Albert had no doubt, whom he had already encountered on the streets and in the tavern over the course of this long and terrible evening. Their general attitude and demeanour was more sombre than before but there seemed all the same to be a strata of irony and playfulness just behind the mask of probity.

At the head of the aisle before the altar there was a pleasant-looking young man, not very much older than Edgington himself, dressed in surplice and dog-collar and standing with his hands outspread.

“And now before we pray,” he said. “A moment’s silent reflections.”

If the priest had noticed Albert’s arrival then he gave no indication of the fact. No other person turned to see him.

Albert walked forwards, between the ranks of wooden pews. A part of him wanted to shout out, to speak of what he had seen down by the water’s edge. Yet no-one seemed to pay him the slightest mind. For a mad moment, he wondered if he had somehow been turned invisible, if, like some spirit, he could not be seen by any there present.

Three rows from the front, he spied his brother, watching the priest with an expression of amused curiosity.

“Silas!” Albert half-called, half-whispered.

The older man did not seem to hear him.

“Silas!”

His brother turned his head, with doleful, blinking slowness. “Oh,” he said. “There you are.”

“Silas–”

“Shh.” His brother raised a finger theatrically to his lips. “Better stand next to me,” he said. “Prayers now. You’ll like this bit.”

At this, Albert behaved just as his years of education had conditioned him: he stepped to the end of the row, stood beside his brother and lowered his head in a pose of contemplation. He even, upon instinct, closed his eyes.

Then the prayers began.

X

They were not prayers that Albert had ever heard before. There was something subtly disquieting about them, almost unchristian. The pastor led the way but soon plenty of the gentlemen who stood in solemn ranks were intoning along with him.

“Let us speak now the word of the law,” said the man of the cloth. “Let us know what it is to go upon two legs and let us be truly thankful for that honour.”

As he spoke, the priest began to process alone down the aisle and towards the great wooden door through which Albert had entered minutes before.

“To go upon two legs… that is the way of our law.”

The last four words of this were spoken also by the crowd. Silas dug hard into Albert’s ribs. “Speak up!”

“To take what we must from those upon four legs and from they who were born in that same estate.”

Again, the same response came – “that is the way of our law” – and on this occasion Albert was fast enough to join in with most of it.

By now the priest had reached the door. Somewhat unusually, he continued to speak even as he pulled it shut and drew across the bolt. The sound of it echoed. “To draw water from the earth and to pull down fire from the firmament.”

The same response: “That is the way of our law.”

The priest turned back and smiled. “To help where we can, to give aid and succour to those who truly are in need.”

There came then one final, massed response, heartier than before: “That is the way of our law.”

This done, there seemed to spread amongst the assemblage, an air of relief, as at the discharging of some necessary chore.

Hastily, Albert turned towards his brother. “I need to talk to you.”

“Not now,” he said.

“Silas, it’s urgent.”

In an unwelcome flash of self-knowledge, Albert heard the whine in his own voice. “Silas, please.”

The priest had returned to his place before the altar. He raised his hands once more. “We are good men,” he said. “We are honourable men. And now, in light of our acts and deeds, let us enjoy our reward!”

As he spoke there came to be felt in the church a faint but distinct rumbling sound combined with a slight tremor in the ground.

“Silas?”

His brother looked at him with a savage smile. “I said – not now.”

“But… I saw…”

The smile grew wider. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve seen,” he said. “It’s as nothing to what lies before us.”

The rumbling increased and the tremor in the earth grew more pronounced. All around them, the gentlemen stood quite still, pictures of unconcern.

Albert flinched as he felt his brother’s right hand tight about his left arm.

“Try to relax, old chap. Try to enjoy it. Though it’s always a bit unnerving the first time.”

Before them, the priest was lowering his arms.

“My apologies,” he began. “There may be some delay of a technical nature. Please allow me to–”

Yet he could say no more for at that moment it felt as though the floor itself gave way and there came at once both darkness and an awful, terrifying sense of plummeting. It was a long, dreadful descent. Albert screamed and he was in that crowd of men in this by no means alone. He felt Silas’ grip tighten.

“Be brave,” he murmured. “If you can’t bear it, close your eyes!”

In the roar and run of the moment, Albert did as was suggested and shut tight his eyes.

In the darkness he wondered if he might not be going quite mad, as if he were still at the gates of St Barnaby’s and that all of this was some crazed hallucination.

Yet when he opened his eyes again, he found himself in a place of inarguable reality. He found himself, at long last, in the City of Dr Moreau.

XI

The first words that Albert heard in the darkness were those of his brother.

“It’s quite something, don’t you think? As a feat of engineering, I mean.”

Albert did not reply – indeed, he could not, so utter was his discombobulation. It seemed certain to him that he had moved yet he still stood upon the same stone floor. The same pew was still behind him, his sibling stood beside him and (so far as Albert was able to tell) the same dark-suited gentlemen were all around him.

There was, however, almost no light at all and he was able to perceive no more than shapes and shadows. In the gloom he heard the high, confident voice of the padre.

“If you wouldn’t mind bearing with us for just a shade of a fraction longer. We hope at any moment to be able to bring you… luminescence.”

No sooner had he finished speaking than a dim light did become apparent, from the direction of the great wooden doors, a sharp white glow. The doors were opened then and the glow became a glare. At last, Albert Edgington found his words.

“Where are we? What’s happened?”

“Oh we’ve travelled,” Silas began, soon having to raise the volume of his speech since all of those others who had come to Eddowes Bay for who knew what reason had also now begun to chat and murmur, their studied ease and casual postures hinting at some suppressed excitement.

“We’ve gone down, that’s all. We’re beneath the surface.”

“How far?”

“My best guess? Around a hundred feet. But that’s only an estimate.”

“The floor…” Albert stumbled towards understanding. “It was in truth then, a kind of elevator?”

Silas nodded. “As I say, it’s quite something, don’t you think? And it obviously had you fooled. Had no idea what you were really stepping into, did you?”

A horrible kind of anxiety scuttled into Albert’s chest. “Why? What’s it for?”

“Just a bit of mummery. Nothing to be taken too seriously.” Now the church was flooded with light though darkness still clung to its stained glass windows.

“Feel free, please, gentlemen, to step outside whenever you’re ready. You’ll be pleased to know that we’ve arrived safely at the City. Please do as you will for the next eight hours. We will reconvene here at six o’clock to return to the surface.”

He had not finished speaking before several of the congregation, evidently frequent visitors, began to file out of the church doors and into that unnatural light which lay beyond.

Silas gave Albert a look of pure impatience. “Come on. Look lively.”

Albert reached out and tugged at his elder brother’s sleeve, a gesture he had not made since the nursery, at least not with the same urgent instinct. “But where are we?”

“You know where we are,” Silas said, all but shoving Albert out into the aisle. “Now come with me. It’s high time we started to explore.”

XII

For reasons which shall soon become apparent, for many years after this long and terrible night, Albert Edgington was asked by the curious exactly what it had been like to step for the first time through the doors of that remarkable edifice, out into the City.

At first, Albert would say he felt only trepidation as he walked behind his swaggering brother into the white light. This was succeeded, he would always say, with a touch of that winsome self-deprecation which had become his calling card, by a feeling of mild disappointment as the space beyond the church was revealed to be simply a very large and pale vestibule into which the gentlemen had been decanted.

At the far side of it (and the only visible exit in that huge, featureless space) was a small green door, a frame through which only one individual could pass at any given time and into which, in orderly single file, the group was now processing. The effect was, the elder Albert would say, something like discovering that a hallway provided the sole human entrance into Heaven (and a hallway at that which was most likely located in some corner of the civil service, a great Whitehall nest of clerks and panjandrums, of junior mandarins and governors in training).

So Albert and his brother joined the queue and patiently waited their turn, moving forward very slowly one step closer at a time.

Although there was some conversation around them, Silas himself did not seem at all anxious to talk. He looked away or behind him, catching the eye of some associate or acquaintance and exchanging salutations and courteous enquiries as though nothing outré had occurred at all and they were waiting simply to gain egress to some perfectly ordinary London club.

Certainly, he did all that he could to evade conversation with his brother.

Albert sensed this and made only fitful efforts to initiate a dialogue. Once he tried to ask Silas more about who had built all of it and why, to receive only a blank expression and a murmured “not for yours to reason why…”

Tiring of the secrecy and persistent strangeness of the day, he found himself all but crying out, “I saw a woman by the water’s edge, and she was not a woman at all, not even human.”

Several heads turned to look at him in the wake of this outburst. His brother hushed him with a gesture. “For goodness’ sake, keep a civil tongue in your head. There’s nobody here who wants to hear that sort of language.”

“Silas, please, I–”

“Later, I promise.” His brother sounded solemn. “You have my word that all will shortly become plain.”

Succumbing to the inevitable gravity of the night, Albert said nothing in response as the line edged slowly forwards.

He was often asked by those who had come to believe in his political cause whether or not he regretted not doing more to disrupt the order of things there and then, whether he had come to believe in his middle years that his much younger self should have been very much more forceful.

At this, Albert always went very quiet and still before, after a pause, replying: “I should not think so, no. For what could I have done to change anything? What could I have possibly said which would have changed the course of that night? Why, I’d only have plunged myself into a trouble. No, no. I kept my counsel then and to have done so was simply a matter of self-preservation. Nowadays, of course, is a very different matter.”

And so the line moved forwards and in time the Edgington brothers shuffled to the head of it. Three or four back from the front, Albert became aware of raised voices from beyond the door, and the sounds of queer music, and the smells of odd, alien scents, of exotic foods and impossible blooms.

Then, almost before he knew it, they were at the entrance. Silas went first and Albert followed, out at last of that weird, dull void and into the place which lay beyond.

XIII

How best to describe the City through Albert’s eyes?

It was, he said, more a question of impression than incidents, more potent sensation than details to be recalled in tranquillity. There was, he would often say, something of the island in The Tempest to the whole experience:

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again”

In truth, the allusion was more a helpful shorthand to the elder Albert Edgington than it was any particular piece of accuracy, relying as it did on his schoolboy memory of a drama which, as adulthood wore on and for reasons which he did not care to examine too closely, he found more and more unnerving.

Nonetheless, there were strange sounds in that place – high, chittering yelps; low bass roar and rumbles; a chattering, a swooping, a mewing and the weird ripples of laughter which, whilst sporadically charming, also did not sound quite female nor altogether human.

And there were scents too, as of weird perfumes and improbable blooms, combinations of sweetness which Albert had never smelled before nor ever would again, for all that he lived almost long enough to see old age.

The light was dim at first and it was not golden but rather of pink and amber hues. No source for this illumination was immediately apparent.

It ought to be stressed that the City was a real place, an actual conurbation, a settlement built of stone and rock, timber and glass. The architecture was of a quaint kind, though studiedly so, as if it had been built by those who had never visited any town in Europe but had only read of such places in the faded pages of ancient books.

The street onto which Albert emerged in the wake of his brother was cobbled and the houses which flanked it upon either side were high and crooked, drawn seemingly from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. The crowd of men surged along it, stopping to gawp at the citizens of that place who were standing amongst them or at lighted doors or leaning from open windows into the perpetual night.

Ah, yes. The citizens. The people of the City. None of them was human, at least not wholly so. Every single one was a creature of the island, every one a beast-person. On that first vista alone, there were at least a dozen separate species. Young Albert looked about him, in both wonderment and terror, unsure at first whether he had simply fallen asleep in the car beside his brother and all that had befallen him since had been the product merely of bad dreams. The alternative – that every moment of it was real – seemed too bizarre to contemplate.

“Oh do try not to gawp so,” said Silas, who had turned around a yard or so before him. “You look like such an ingenue.”

“Sorry,” said Albert, purely on instinct since he did not in truth feel at all apologetic. “But what exactly is this place?”

Silas grinned. “Why, this is only the tip of it.”

“But all these… people. What are they? Actors? Performers of some kind? Clowns?”

“You know that they are not.”

“Silas… are you, sure… I mean, this is all just so deeply strange.”

“I think you’ll find that you can become accustomed to it. Sooner than you think.” Silas shrugged. “Look here, I don’t have the time for this. I’m here for my own pleasure too, you know.”

“Silas,” Albert began, though before he could say more a stranger linked arms with him, the gesture swift and proprietorial.

“Are you new here?” said a soft female voice, hot against Albert’s ear.

Albert turned to face the speaker whose form was now very close to him.

She was dressed, as had Mrs Anman been, in a long flowing cape and a great blue hood. Though the face of this person was not hidden.

On the contrary, she peered out with a wide smile and neat white teeth. Her eyes were, as the writers of romance would have it, made of pure sparkling blue. And every inch of all her visible skin was covered with fine, silky brown fur.

Albert looked back only to see his brother wink at him. “You’ve found a guide, Albert. Well done. Now be a good boy and try to enjoy yourself, won’t you?”

Without waiting for a reply, he pushed his shoulders back, adopted a forceful pose and walked away, into the crowd towards the end of the street.

The woman said, liltingly: “What is your name?”

“Albert.”

“It’s a nice name. I am Faun.”

“Faun?” Albert frowned, his senses reeling. But then, as he had been trained to do in all the years of his expensive education, good manners came into play. “Well, I’m jolly pleased to meet you.”

The woman linked arms with Albert Edgington. “Come, I will show all the marvels of our City.”

“Thank you. You’re very kind.”

She squeezed his arm. “You’ve arrived, let me tell you, upon the most interesting of nights…”

And with this, she led him away.

XIV

Although he would tell his story often and in great detail in the years which were to follow, Albert was always coy about what occurred in the hours between his meeting the woman who gave her name as Faun and the beginning of the violence.

They wandered, he said, through the streets of that strange subterranean place, and they ate and drank many odd things. Time seemed to him to become elastic and there were many pleasures to which he was that night introduced. His memory, he said, was affected by what he ingested.

The City at that time was most assuredly a miracle, though one underscored by darkness. Many and varied were its courtyards and palisades. Wondrous were the high staircases, the low temples, the narrow paths and the mighty thoroughfares. It had at once the quality both of a set and a dream. There was much which was illusory and much which was performed. Yet the great majority was real – tangible and visceral. It was this, of course, not the coating of make-believe but the substructure of undeniable reality, which brought wealth and privilege there in such quantities.

Albert’s most abiding memories of this odd lull were twofold. The first of them was the people of the City, of which Faun and Mrs Anman were amongst the least bizarre examples. For everywhere he looked were the most remarkable hybrid creatures, every one of them (though Albert himself did not yet know it) a descendant of the peoples of the Island. Here were cheetah-people and goat-men, women who were at least half antelope and those who were semi-hippo. After an early burst of shock, Albert simply accepted it all, much in the manner as certain mystics are said to accept without question the most unearthly visions.

The second memory from this period which stayed with him was something less immediately peculiar: the curious profusion of statues. There they were, at the end of every road, the centre of every cul-de-sac, raised high about street level in some places and placed almost upon the walkways themselves in another. It was not merely the sheer number of them which struck Albert as strange but also the fact that, although they differed widely in their individual details, they seemed to depict the same man. He was large, clean-shaven and dressed in what appeared to be a sort of white safari suit. He did not look quite like anyone whom Albert had ever met, though there was something dimly familiar about him all the same, as though he had encountered him long ago, back in some other life.

He kept intending to ask his guide the reason for the repetition of this figure, again and again throughout the City, yet the moment for quiet conversation never came. Instead, Faun led him on to ever weirder locations, to parties which seemed to have been going on for days, to carnival processions which seemed to be entirely spontaneous, to mad jamborees which filled the boy up with sights and sensations of every kind. And so the impossible night wore on.

XV

The point at which Albert Edgington’s memories became more detailed and precise must have been around four to five hours after his entrance to the City and the moment when Faun first took his arm. He had become separated from his guide after they had left some extravagant gathering or other and taken once again to the streets. The specifics of this eluded Albert but somehow he had found himself alone at the end of an empty road, without any sign of any of the denizens of that place, let alone his brother or any other human visitor.

There was a path leading off from the main avenue into a small, shaded courtyard, centred around a single tree. Its leaves were an unearthly violet and weird vegetation flourished at its base, all the flora of the island transported here and changed in the long darkness.

Grateful for the chance of silence and respite, he walked on, down the lane to the courtyard and stood before the tree. In the distance he could still hear all the sounds of night-time merriment which typified the City, though it sounded comfortingly faraway. He thought of how he had come here, of the curious set-up of the village known as Eddowes Bay, of the crazy rigmarole of the entry and the forbidden tang of the underworld itself. He stood and sucked in sweetened air and thought of Silas’ glee and he had to admit, if only to the most secret part of his soul, that he understood entirely the dark allure of the place.

He noticed then that behind the tree stood an unmoving figure. Stepping forward to get a better view, Albert called out (“Hello!”) only to feel foolish a second later as he realised that he was facing nothing more than another of the City’s plentiful statues.

Then a voice came from behind him. “I met him once, you know.”

Albert, startled, spun around to see that there was a man standing in the shadows behind him. He must have been very silent and very still for the schoolboy had not so much as suspected his presence until now.

“Who are you?” Albert asked.

The man walked forwards, into the light. He was a small, slender man, white-haired. Ignoring Albert’s question, he nodded at the statue.

“Of course, he didn’t exactly look like that. And no statue can capture the way in which he moved: wild energy, focused and suppressed by iron control. I often wonder how quickly it took upon that island of his for all that control to ebb away. How swiftly he frayed at the edges.” The man turned away from the statue and directed his gaze towards Albert. It was as if he was only just seeing him now, for the first time. He shook his head, the very picture of a gentleman striving to restore order over himself. He forced a rictus smile, like an unwilling host greeting guests a party he’d avoided successfully for years. “I’m so sorry. How remiss of me. Who precisely are you?”

“I’m Albert Edgington. I’m… well, I suppose I’m a guest here really. And you?”

“My name is Vaughan,” said the other. “No first name. Not important.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr Vaughan. Are you a guest here too?” Even as he asked the question, Albert knew that the answer could scarcely be a simple “yes”. There was something wrong with the man, a vagueness suggestive of illness.

“Not exactly,” said Vaughan. “In a sense, I’m the owner. Or architect. Yes, perhaps that is a better, more accurate term.”

“I see,” Albert said and then found himself entirely unable to think of anything sensible to say next.

Vaughan was happy to speak without any need for prompting. He seemed, Albert thought, like a man in want of an audience. “You must be wondering how the idea for all of this came to me. What was the kernel of it? A night, long ago, years before you were born, before you were even thought of, I went into the laboratory of the man you see now before me, immortalised in stone.”

Albert found his voice. “What was his name?” he asked. “The subject of these statues?”

The answer came. “Moreau.”

Edgington shrugged. “My brother mentioned him before. But until then I’d never heard of him.”

“Truly?”

The schoolboy shook his head.

“You’ve never heard of The Moreau Horrors? The Ratcliffe Charnel-House? The monstrous dog?”

“Never.”

“How quickly the truth is lost. How swiftly history forgets.” Mr Vaughan sighed, apparently disconsolate. “And speaking of forgetting, I very much fear that your name has already escaped me.”

“Edgington, sir. Albert Edgington.”

“Of course it is, my boy. Of course it is. My own memory’s not what it was, you know. Everything’s starting to seem a little misty. And there are moments when the past and the present become in my mind quite tangled. Even times when I do believe I spy something like the future. A woman on some impossible train. A transformation in a hotel. Then, change on a scale undreamed of even by me.”

“I see, sir. That must be… jolly distracting for you.”

Mr Vaughan nodded, with unexpected enthusiasm. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. Distracting.” He smiled as if at a distant memory. “Do you think it’s something about this place, Edgington? Something eating me alive like this? Nibbling away at all I’ve ever known?”

The older man paused for a long while after this – so long, in fact, that Albert thought he was expected to reply.

“I’m sure I couldn’t say, sir.”

Vaughan showed not the slightest sign of having heard him. He went on speaking, as though unaware that there had been a gap of any kind. “Do you think it’s something essential in the soil and the rock that’s about us? Some poison or toxin? Or do you think it has to do with me? With the way in which I’ve lived my life?”

Albert swallowed and fidgeted, in just the way that he had always been taught not to. “I’m sorry, sir… I don’t have the knowledge to say.”

“Unwilling to make a diagnosis, eh?”

“I’m not a doctor, sir.”

Vaughan peered at him. “No, I don’t expect you are. You don’t have the look of a sawbones about you. And I’ve known a few in my time.”

“I think I should go, sir. My brother will be waiting. Is there anyone I should fetch, Mr Vaughan? Is there anyone who’ll be…” He found himself unable to complete the sentence.

Vaughan grinned and Albert received the strong sensation that his own discomfort was providing pleasure to the older man. “Yes?”

“I meant to say: is there anyone who’ll be missing you?”

Mr Vaughan said nothing. He seemed to be considering the question. At length: “No. And I’m not so sure that there ever has been. My mother, perhaps, when I was very young… A girl, once, long ago…” He winked rather grotesquely. “You should go, Mr Edgington. Find your brother. Enjoy the City. The peoples of this place can be very generous.”

With this, the conversation seemed done and the little man turned away and began to scuttle away. There was, Albert thought, something beetle-like in his gait.

“It was nice to meet you!” he called after him, though this was far from the truth.

Vaughan stopped short then and Edgington thought at first that it was because he meant to speak some more to him. He realised the truth a few seconds later. For all the older man’s evident confusion, certain of his senses were still unusually acute.

Faraway, in the distance, there could be heard the sound of screaming.

“What is that?” Albert asked. “Who is that?”

Vaughan blinked. “Sounds human,” he said. “I know the screams of the Beast People and that is not one of them.”

The first scream was joined now by others. And by other sounds also: cries of conflict, of steel upon steel and – once, twice, three times – the sharp retort of gunfire.

“Mr Vaughan?”

The man wore an expression of the most curious and paradoxical sort: suspicion, fear and what seemed to Albert to be something like relief. “At last,” he said. He sighed. “I knew this day would come. Any student of history would have said the same. I told them, Mr Edgington. Never let it be said that I did not tell them. Let it be recorded that they simply refused to listen.”

The sounds were very much less distant now. Whatever its cause, the violence was moving in their direction. More screams. The angry punctuation of gunshots. And fierce, strange cries, of exultant ululation, which were surely not formed by any human throat.

For a long moment, the two men stood in that secluded place as if frozen there, as if paralysed, able only to hear the fearful approach of the mob.

Then, as the ruckus drew near, Albert heard it, quite distinctly, rising up out of the melee, a voice filled with pain and fear: “Albert! Albert! Help me!”

XVI

For just an instant longer, Albert Edgington remained in a state approximate to paralysis. The strangenesses and horrors of the night seemed to him to be almost overwhelming. Then the desperate cry came again, audible even above the wild shrieks and hollers of the crowd.

“Albert! For God’s sake!”

The schoolboy turned, hesitated. The little man was watching him from his place at the edge of the square.

“It’s my brother. That’s my brother’s voice.”

Vaughan shrugged. “I wouldn’t go to him,” he said. “Not if I were you.”

“I have to.”

“They will, I think, be in a state of some considerable rage. Men such as your brother will not by them be received… kindly.”

“I have to help him.”

“You can come with me. I know all the secret places of the City. I can keep you safe until the rioters are quelled.” Vaughan looked as though he cared little for the answer, as though he were speaking these words purely out of courtesy.

Once more, the screams and antic shouts drew closer. Once more, the frantic cry of the eldest Edgington boy was heard.

“Thank you, Mr Vaughan. But I have to go.”

Albert did not wait for the stranger to reply but ran from that place, suddenly, and somehow almost excitingly, filled up with purpose.

XVII

The little man watched him go. “How sad,” he said, and then again: “How sad. We all of us did our best, of course. In our own ways.” He looked up at that ubiquitous statue which stood at the heart of the square. “You especially,” he said and nodded with careful politeness as though the figure were some acquaintance made of flesh and blood. Then he surprised himself: a single laugh bubbled out of him, a cracked, high, crazed thing. The sound of it scared him, as though he had truly heard it for the first time. And so, after that, he simply stood, and listened to the approach of the crowd and waited.

XVIII

Albert saw them almost as soon as he left the fragile safety of the square and ran back into the main thoroughfare. They must have numbered in the hundreds: a great, roiling mob of Beast People moving in a dense formation. The scientist in Albert thought it fascinating while the part of him which was drawn to the poetry of Ancient Greece thought it oddly beautiful.

Considerable damage had been wrought to the streets and houses of the City. In the distance, there was smoke and flames. It was as though he had emerged from momentary sanctuary to step into the frame of a painting of insurrection, some portrait of revolt.

In the midst of them was Silas, borne aloft by that raucous assembly as though he were a tribute, destined for sacrifice. He was struggling frantically yet was he held firm by the talons and claws of the mob. His clothes were torn and ripped. He had been cut and his face was bloodied. Every fibre of him was in a state of outrage and disgust.

Struggling upwards, he saw Albert. “Help me! Help me!”

Now that bestial collective took note of the schoolboy. They surged towards him, a phalanx of teeth and claws, and bloodied, matted fur. They bore down upon him. They shrieked in bloodlust and delight.

“Please!” Albert called out. “Please let my brother go!”

There came much laughter at this and some cries of fury at the suggestion. They were speaking one to the other, Albert realised; these were not mere animal calls but rather some unfamiliar language, unique to these creatures.

“Wait!” he called again. “My brother is a fool but he means no harm!”

At that moment, Albert lost sight of Silas. The mob dragged him down until he was amongst them.

No sign of him could be seen; not so much as a hand raised in desperation, pawing at the sky, or a glimpse of his wild hair, swaying above that agitated populace like the fronds of some fantastic subaquatic greenery.

Still the eldest Edgington boy could be heard. As Albert shrank back against the wall, and as the mob moved towards him like creatures in a dream, he had no choice but to listen to the sounds that were being made by his brother. Too tired now for screaming, the noise was something else (something which seemed to Albert to be somehow worse than mere hoarse panic or dread): a low, protracted moan as of a being upon the rack, a kind of solemn plain chant which seemed to speak of dreadful resignation.

Once more, Silas called the name of the young man whom he had brought to this place. “Bertie! Albert!”

Then there was a sound like linen being torn and ripped in a frenzy. Then an instant of almost silence in which only the snuffling, snorting, chittering sound of the Beast People could be heard. Then, inexorably, they moved forwards once again.

Albert himself did not call out, for all that he was aware of the extreme peril of his situation, more keenly cognisant than ever he had been before of his own mortality. He felt the stone of the wall behind him and his breath come in fierce, ragged bursts. Yet he also felt a weird sense of calm at the prospect which seemed suddenly to have reared up before him. Bad luck, he thought, this is just the worst kind of luck.

Then he recognised a face at the front of the crowd. It was Faun, the woman who had been his guide and from whom he had been separated scarcely more than an hour earlier. She seemed different somehow, changed even in the short time that they had been apart. Her clothes were ragged and stippled with stains. She bared her teeth.

“Faun!” he cried, although he already knew that it was fruitless. Somehow he had already adjusted to this hideous new reality.

The woman who had calmly acted as his guide now no longer seemed capable of forming human words. She hissed and raised her left hand high in the air. What emerged from her throat was more wild ululation.

Albert said nothing. He took a breath. He closed his eyes. And he made himself as ready as he was able.

XIX

In the end, what saved him from the mob was an unfamiliar voice.

“Leave him be!”

The words were clear, the accent British, the tone deep and filled with authority. At the sound of them, the crowd did not stop altogether but they did hesitate in their advance. Then the voice came again.

“Do not touch him!”

At this the crowd ceased to move. Instead they looked behind them and that little battalion of rioters began to part like the Red Sea, their actions no longer seeming like that of a rabble but rather of a force which could yet be moulded into the acceptance of military discipline. With fretful clarity, Albert saw their dread potential.

Two figures were approaching in the midst of the throng, coming increasingly into view as all of those bodies made way.

The first was entirely unknown to him: a lean, sinewy figure dressed in some sort of makeshift uniform, a darned, homemade thing of epaulettes and patches. The face of the figure was covered in sleek dark fur, the face of a young ape-man.

The second figure was familiar for all that Albert fumbled for a moment to place her: a slim young woman with dark hair. The blonde, he realised, must have been a wig. For it was none other than she who had earlier given her name as–

“Jessamy!”

A hard smile crossed the woman’s face.

“That is not my name.”

She and her companion reached the forefront of the mob. The peoples of the city gazed at them expectantly, cringing and obedient. Were they the commanders of the mob, Albert wondered? Or something more? For there was to the reaction of the crowd a distinct quality of religiosity.

“We should introduce ourselves to you, Mr Edgington. You ought to know our true names. I am Coral Mayfield.”

“Coral…” The name felt strange, yet somehow, oddly, familiar upon his lips.

“And this is my son.”

The furred soldier beside turned his piercing green eyes upon the schoolboy. “My name is Anta’Nar, son of M’Gari, son of Anse. You have picked an interesting day to come to the City, Mr Edgington. For today is our day of revolution. Today has been a day long in the making. We have worked for years to achieve this – this mighty hour of victory!”

At this, the crowd erupted into whoops and cries of triumph. Albert found that his breaths were coming in shorter and shorter gasps, that his heart was beating too fast, that there was a great roaring in his ears. Having felt an odd sense of acceptance and resignation scarcely a minute before he now found himself filled up with a desire to live.

“What do you want with me?” he asked once the victory shouts were over. “Do you mean to do to me what you did to my brother?”

“I am sorry about your brother,” said Anta’Nar. “Truly I am. Today has been a reckoning long overdue. I fear that the captured peoples of the City have not been lenient.”

“He was not a good man,” said Coral. “But he was no means the worst of them. He did not deserve the manner of his passing.”

“You speak,” said Albert, swallowing hard, “as though his body is not even now still being trampled beneath the feet of your swarm of rioters.”

Coral bowed her head as if to acknowledge his criticism. “You asked what we mean to do with you, Albert. And the answer is this: we want you to join us. We want you to help us in our cause. For today is only the beginning of a greater struggle.”

“Join you?” Albert asked. “But why?”

“Because I think you can be useful to us,” Coral said. “There’s something about you. A quiet intelligence.”

Anta’Nar spoke now. “My mother has told me that you are not like the others. I see it in you. You know that this place is founded upon injustice. You know, I think, with every fibre of your being that this is wrong. And that you may yet play your part in moulding a better future. So I ask you now, Mr Albert Edgington: will you join us?”

Albert thought of his brother, of his dreadful final moments, his screams of indignity and terror. He looked first at the dark-haired woman, her face a mask of implacable resolve. He looked into the eyes of the beast-man and he saw there, in almost equal measure, authority and rage. And then, he gave them his answer.

XX

Mr Vaughan heard something of this as he waited beside the statue of the spiritual founder of the City. He heard the death cries of the elder Edgington and even something of the conversation of the younger boy. He wondered why the crowd had fallen quiet and was able to admit to himself that he found their silence to be somehow more ominous than their earlier shrieks and baboonery.

The light in the courtyard began to flicker. He could smell smoke and hear the crackling of flames. The face of Moreau looked down at him, impassive and unmoving.

“I went further,” said Vaughan. “Further than you ever dreamed.”

Some part of him almost expected the stone man to speak. It did nothing of the sort, of course, though still Vaughan felt its gaze upon him.

The little man spat once at the base of the statue. “Not such a pygmy now,” he said. “Not such a pygmy!”

And then, regretting his burst of intemperance, he sank to his knees as if in prayer.

XXI

This, then, was how they found him in the end, the Beast Peoples of the City – Mr Vaughan upon his knees, by the foot of the statue of Dr Moreau.

Dozens upon dozens of them streamed into that little courtyard to surround him, having caught his scent upon the breeze and knowing, or at least suspecting, him to be the architect of their ordeal. They would have torn him limb from limb as they had Silas Edgington and they would have done so with glee. A hyena-creature and a tiger-woman were at the front of the throng, claws out and teeth bared. The air was filled with bloodlust and with vicious ululation.

Mr Vaughan did not rise nor did he turn to face those who wished him dead. He was expecting the killing stroke at any moment. Instead, he heard the soft, compelling, cultured voice of Anta’Nar.

“Get up, Mr Vaughan. I would look upon you.”

Curious, the man who had once been the most successful alienist in England did as he was told. He faced the beast-creature in his homemade uniform.

“You’re not one of mine,” he said mildly.

“None of us is yours!” roared the commander.

Vaughan raised his right hand in a gesture of apology, as though he had merely made a faux pas at a dinner party. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply that you were. I meant only that I do not recognise you. I do not believe you to be of the City.”

Anta’Nar shook his head. “I am not of the City.”

“How fascinating.” Mr Vaughan peered at him with a chilly, scientific gaze. “Then what exactly are you? Wait, don’t tell me…” His eyes ranged up and down the figure of the being before him, an ape-man who evidently held over him the power of life and death. Still Mr Vaughan narrowed his eyes and peered and sniffed the air. “But I do know you. Or rather I know who you must be. You’re the infant, aren’t you? The one the sailor took from here. The one he took to the boarding house. Oh but we could never find you. I’d given you up for dead.”

“My mother hid me well,” Anta’Nar said evenly. “And we had help.”

“The old priest I knew about, oh yes. Dear me. Silly old fool.” A certain vagueness came to the face of Mr Vaughan then as though he had temporarily forgotten where he was and why he was remembering. He seemed to flounder.

“We have a decision to make, Mr Vaughan,” said Anta’Nar. Behind him, the mob was growing restless. Many had they killed that day and copious had been the slaughter upon the streets of the City, yet still were they hungry, for the blood of the author of their misery.

“Oh?” Mr Vaughan seemed to be interested only moderately in the conversation, as though they were discussing supper plans for the week to come. “And what is that?”

“What to do with you.”

“I imagined you would want me dead. I’m fairly sure that this little army of yours desires exactly that.”

“I have great plans for this City. But I will need the respect of those outside of it. I cannot sanction execution without trial. Not, at least, once the initial violence is done with – that which was necessary to secure the whole of this place.”

Mr Vaughan smiled. “Spoken like all true revolutionaries. Already you make excuses for what you’ve done. I understand, my friend, for I recognise the trait from myself. One is looking for a reasonable explanation for the blood on one’s hands.”

At this, Anta’Nar moved close to the little man before him and snarled. Vaughan merely blinked.

“But as to your question,” said the little man still almost conversationally, “as to what would be best for a creature in your position to do with a man like me… Well. Might I be permitted to make to you just a very small suggestion?”

Anta’Nar, who, in spite of his earlier words, now felt very tempted indeed simply to open the alienist’s jugular with a single swipe of his nails, nonetheless leaned forward and spoke two words, flecked with danger.

“Go on…”

XXII

Coral Mayfield led Albert Edgington out of the City. It was a journey that he never forgot, no matter how hard he tried. Often, in later life, images from their trek would come back to him unbidden. They would wake him in the night and stalk beside him during daylight hours. They would return again and again, upon the slightest provocation.

The uprising had been both brutal and comprehensive. The streets were carpeted with the bodies of those visiting men beside whom Albert had stood mere hours before, in the pub, in the church, in the waiting room. Much of the place was in flames. Houses were smouldering and the pavements were littered with debris. Outliers from the main mob rushed and scurried by. There was in the air a febrile quality which was only now beginning to slacken, as though the fury, for so long pent up, was finally starting to break.

It was only because he was with Coral that Albert was safe. They seemed to know her, the peoples of the City, and they allowed both of the humans to pass unmolested. Albert was under no illusion that this would not have been the case had he attempted to escape alone. He knew that, had he done so, he would long ago have joined the ranks of battered and despoiled bodies.

In large part, they made the journey in silence. The magnitude of what he had experienced – the magnitude of his loss – was coming only gradually to Albert.

“What does this mean?” he asked, once they were back onto the main thoroughfare of the City, heading towards the entrance. “Everything that’s happened here?”

“Oh it’ll change the world, I expect,” said Coral, with a lightness that suddenly made her sound younger than her years. “Nothing will ever be the same after this.”

“This place…” Albert gestured vaguely as they strode on through the ruins. “Who ran it all? What was it for?”

“Money and pleasure,” Coral replied, as though the answer should be obvious. “That’s why most things exist, isn’t it? The machinery of the world. And Devil take the poor creatures who get crushed beneath its wheels, trapped in the cogs of the thing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You understand more than you think, Mr Edgington.”

“Please,” said the schoolboy. “You must call me Albert.”

By the entrance they came across an especially distressing sight: the hanged body of an antelope-woman with a scrawled sign about her neck which read: “COLLABORATOR”.

“Pity,” Coral said as they walked beneath her swaying feet. “And she was far from alone. There were many others, of course. Plenty of them acted as gaolers, turned against their own kind.” Then, with a smile that Albert thought distinctly chilling: “Still, let us hope that’s all done with now. The worst is over. Get rid of a few bad apples and we can all of us start to feel so much better.”

It was Albert’s turn now to say nothing further as they walked on, out of the City and back towards the surface world. As they went, Albert let a sense of numbness settle over him. He tried not to think of the future and he tried not to think of the past. He just kept breathing and took one step after another.

XXIII

The waiting room itself was empty, save for four dead gentlemen. Albert did not recognise any of them. Coral barely even glanced at their twisted forms.

On they went, across that big white space, and into the room beyond. This was as it had been before: an exact replica of an English church nave, with pews and altar still undisturbed. There were no corpses to be seen in here.

“Strange,” he murmured, almost to himself, “that they left it be.”

“The Beast People of the City have great respect for faith of all kind,” she said. “They brought their own religion with them from the island. They would not have trespassed here.”

The place seemed to Albert, after the uproar of the past hours, to be almost distressingly quiet. “How do we get back to the surface? How is it done?”

Coral sauntered to the front of the nave and to the lectern. “Don’t worry. There’s a lever here somewhere. It will reverse the mechanism and bring us back up.”

Albert paused midway in the church and watched as Coral felt around the back of the lectern, searching for the lever.

“You have to agree,” she called out (and was he right to detect a hint of nervousness in her voice?), “that it’s quite a feat of engineering, all this. Stupidly overcomplicated, of course, and madly expensive. You could almost admire it if it wasn’t so absolutely wicked.” She stopped, cursing beneath her breath.

“What’s the matter?” Albert asked.

“It’s snapped. It’s been broken off.”

“Then what–”

Before Albert could say more, he was interrupted – they both heard it – not by a voice but by a sound. The scrape of wood against stone. The noise of a pew being moved, surreptitiously, backwards.

“Who’s there?” Coral said and, suddenly, she was up on her feet and moving fast There came another sound, more frantic than before, and Albert saw a bearded stranger clambering awkwardly to his feet from what must have been his hiding place beneath the pew. He was at the rear of the church, in a place of shadows.

“Get back!” cried the man. “Both of you!”

He looked at them both, wild-eyed. In spite of the gloom, Albert realised then that he recognised this man: he had passed him (he thought) on the street after he had first fled from the Idler’s Rest.

The man, however, showed no signs of recognising Albert. “Who are you people? Are you… with them?”

Coral looked at him very coolly indeed. “What’s your name?”

“Simon… Simon Masters.” He took a noisy breath. “But you’re human, aren’t you? You’re human like me? And you want to get out of here?”

She gave him a long, level shrewd look. “Do you know why this mechanism is broken, Mr Masters?”

He shook his head, a shade too vigorously, Albert thought. “Perhaps they destroyed it. The animals. The Beast People.”

“Can you fix it?” Albert asked.

“Maybe,” Coral said, “but I need time.”

“You have to hurry,” said the stranger. “The others will be on their way.” He turned to look behind him, peering towards the open church door.

Coral busied herself with the mechanism, wrenching off a panel and examining the device beneath. Albert’s own attention, meanwhile, was taken up by the man who had given his name as Masters. There was a wrongness to the man, something indefinable which nagged at him as he watched the woman work.

“Mr Masters!” he called out. “Can you come here, please? We need your help.”

Coral looked up from her labours and gave him a questioning look. He nodded, hoping to convey the sense that she should trust him in this.

“Mr Masters!” he called again, for the gentleman in question still had his back to them. “Please, sir, you’re needed here.”

The figure raised a gloved hand. “In a moment,” he said. “Give me just a minute longer.”

“We need you now, Mr Masters.”

Coral glanced back at Albert. “What are you doing?”

The schoolboy whispered: “There’s something… strange about him.”

He looked again over at the stranger. “Please, Mr Masters. We need you here. Or else we’ll leave without you.”

Masters called back: “Wait for me, please, just wait for me.”

Albert mouthed one word to Coral: “Liar.”

“Then what…”

The woman never finished her sentence for in that instant of distraction the man turned at last and ran full pelt towards them.

Albert saw now what he had only hitherto suspected. Seen in full light, hidden no longer in the shadows, the truth about Masters was plain. He was no human at all but a creature of the City who had dressed himself in the clothes of a human being and (Albert realised with a surge of horror and disgust) in the skin of a man’s face. It hung off him now, bleeding and askew. As the creature, whose ancestry seemed to hint at the buffalo, pounded towards him, Albert found himself surprised that he had been taken in even temporarily by the masquerade.

“Albert!” Coral cried out but it was already too late and the buffalo-creature was upon Albert, throwing him back to the floor, claws outstretched, what was left of the face of Mr Masters clinging to him like melting cheese on hot bread.

The schoolboy shouted in shock and pain as the claws of the City-dweller fumbled at his face and throat. He pushed back with all his might but the buffalo-man was far stronger than he. With a single motion, the creature slashed Edgington’s right cheek. The pain was immediate.

“Coral!” he shouted, though no help came.

The beast bore down upon him and Albert saw in his blazing eyes that he would remove any obstacle to his escape from this place. The hairy hands of his opponent reached around his neck. Albert felt them tighten. He gasped frantically for breath. Then he felt surge through him an outraged fury, that the long day and his many trials should end like this. He pushed back hard. With secret strength, he kicked against the creature and pulled the hands that were at his throat apart. With a cry, the creature rolled off him. On all fours it sprang. Now Albert kicked again and met its midriff with his foot. It howled in pain then ran again only for a single shot to ring out. Blood, bone and cerebral matter were at once made visible as the buffalo-man sank first to his knees and then, with leaden, ungainly finality, onto his back.

Albert looked up. It was Coral, of course, who had fired the shot. That she even had a revolver upon her person he had not known till now.

“Thank you,” he said.

She shrugged. “He was a collaborator,” she said, as though that explained it all. “He worked with the humans. Guarded his own people.” There was in her voice no audible trace of sympathy or regret.

Albert, gasping, rose. “When did you realise? That he wasn’t who he claimed to be?”

“A little before you, I think.” She offered no further words of explanation but said simply: “You did very well, Albert. You’ll be very useful to us.” She slammed the panel back into the place over the mechanism behind the lectern.

“Now, shall we go?”

“You’ve fixed it?”

“Yes,” said Coral and smiled. Her hand was on the lever. “Goodbye to the City. Let’s go back to the surface. I would take you to the sea, Albert, and introduce you to a friend of ours who dwells there. Though I think you’ve already glimpsed him today.”

She pulled the lever and what had happened earlier that night now occurred in reverse. With a great wrenching sound the floor, the walls, the entire church, seemed to move upwards and at some speed. Without questioning why he should do so, Albert Edgington moved towards Coral. They clung to one another, ostensibly for balance, as the church moved swiftly upwards.

“Everything will be different now,” Coral said and Albert believed that he heard in her voice the traces of years of struggle. “The whole world will be altered by what’s been done here tonight. The future will look quite different.”

Albert said nothing in reply, but only clung still more closely to Coral Mayfield as they went up to the world above.