“Well, Chauncey? Where did you see Moore?” Doyle asked, as we stalked along a side road from the east side of town toward the raised path into the swamp forest. To our right was Garden Rest, with its glowing lamps, the angles of its roofs. As usual, Doyle was charging ahead, and we were trying to keep up.
“See him?” Chauncey looked at Doyle in puzzlement. “Oh, I didn’t see him, Doyle, not myself. I put out the word that everyone was to watch for Moore! Mrs. Singh—Mrs. Peller now, actually—she got in touch, she saw him when she was collecting lilies on the edge of the swamp . . . I say, Doyle, do slow down!”
Doyle was pressing ahead, twice as fast as the rest of us. He shouted over his shoulder, “Not a hope of it, Chauncey!”
We kept after him, trotting to keep up. Our four lanterns bobbed along in the darkness, seeming, sometimes, to move on their own, without people carrying them. There was, after all, no starlight, no moonlight. There never is.
“Gonna trip and break my damn leg,” Bertram muttered, beside me.
“You can break bones in the afterworld?”
“I thought I told you . . . hell, if you doubt it, how about a bet. Fifty Fionas says I can break your arm.”
“I’ll take your word for that, just like the punch in the face, thanks. You don’t seem to think we’re hot on the trail . . .”
“Seems kinda obvious to me the lady just took a hike. Went off with some other tubby Englishman that reminds Bolliver of Doyle. No tracks . . .”
“Ah!” Doyle said, up ahead. He came to a sudden stop. “Tracks!”
We rushed where he was crouching over the path. “You see?” he said, pointing. “Two sets—I thought I saw traces, back there, where we began, on the path toward the Raining Lands, but that path is gravelly, takes so little imprint. This though—two sets of prints in the soft ground on the edge! One of them seems certainly Touie’s . . .”
He seemed a bit theatrical about all this. Was this some sort of a setup? Should I still trust Doyle?
I bent over, stretching my lantern over the marks. One set was partly blurred, but there was a shoe print that seemed about the size and shape of Doyle’s. The other set was smaller, and definitely a more feminine cut of shoe.
Doyle straightened up. “Do you see? The tracks are coming from the direction Bolliver indicated—someone must have seen Bolliver, and took her that way to throw him off. Then they took the roundabout trail, and came this way—toward the swamp. Come along, we’ve no time to waste! We have several leads now!”
He started toward the swamp.
We began to follow—then Mayor Chauncey came to a sudden stop and called out, “Doyle! I am not going into that woods at night! I’ll fall and get myself all mucked up and get those damned forgetters all over me! I don’t think much can be accomplished by it tonight—and I simply won’t do it!”
Doyle stopped, turned with his lamp raised over his head. His face was etched with a cross between cold fury and exasperation, the expressions all the sharper in the lamplight. “Well, where did she see Moore, then, and what did he say?”
We all stopped then; I stood with Bertram and Brummigen, in our triple overlap of lantern shine.
Chauncey put his lantern down. “Mrs. Singh . . . er, Peller . . . saw him not forty paces from here, where this trail meets the path into the forest, Doyle. She spoke to him—asked him if he’d seen you. You know how kindly and disarming she can be. He responded more or less rationally—apparently he told her he’d seen someone with your Touie walking into the woods. They were coming from this direction—the direction we’re taking now. He couldn’t see who the chap was. They did not carry a lamp, either one. He only saw her for a moment in the glow of a forgetter passing by.”
“Does she know where he is now?”
“No. He was carrying some lumber . . .”
“So he had been stealing lumber again. Then he’s gone to his hut in the sky. Very good— my thanks Winn. Off you go. Bertram, do take His Honor back home, he may fall into a hole if he toddles along here without a lamp.”
“Sure, boss,” Bertram said tartly. I could tell he was annoyed. “That’s just what I’m going to do, too. Major—mind if I open your bar?”
“Sure, sure, it’s not locked.”
Bertram turned to Chauncey. “Come on, Your Honor—it’d be my honor to buy you a drink.”
“That would be most agreeable. It is has been a long scrum of a day. I remember once when I was in India . . .”
They hurried off toward Garden Rest. Doyle turned to Brummigen. “Major—are we friends?”
“What? Of course we are!”
“You don’t think I’m a Spiritualist buffoon or . . . a wife murderer?”
“You’re certainly not a wife murderer. As for the other—buffoon is too hard a word.”
“Yes. Especially as we’re now in the afterworld. But we won’t get into that—would you do me a kindness? Would you go back to my house, and wait there, in case Touie comes back? Fogg and I can handle all this . . . if Fogg is game for it . . . and I want someone there. And I’d rather have no more footprints to obscure the trail than necessary.”
Brummigen looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Sure, Doyle. The house locked up?”
“Until now, I thought there was scarcely a reason to lock up, and rarely did. It still remains unlocked. I cannot say I will ever leave it unlocked again. Brandy’s up in the turret.”
“Okay, you got it. Let me know if . . .”
“I will, you may rest assured of it.”
Doyle turned on his heel and strode off. Brummigen shrugged at me.
“Brummigen,” I said, almost whispering, “do you think I should go with him? I mean—I know both Moore and Bolliver are unreliable but . . . maybe Doyle had motive. Maybe Doyle took Touie off and . . . Can I trust him? I thought I could, but . . .”
Brummigen raised his bushy eyebrows. It took me a moment to realize he was actually shocked. “Fogg . . . you know anything about Doyle’s life?”
“You mean, in the Before?”
“Yes. In the Before.”
“Some. I read a biography of him, and a book of his letters. And a lot of his novels and . . . why?”
“Do you know who George Edalji was?”
“No . . . wait. Was he that guy Doyle defended—a real detective case?”
“Yes. His father was from India, his mother British—there was heavy-duty prejudice against the guy, in those days, and someone framed him to make it look like he’d mutilated local stock animals. Doyle got wind of this and spent just incredible amounts of time defending Edalji, rallying people to his defense—and proving, with a Sherlock Holmes logic, that George Edalji was innocent. Do you know what he did to raise awareness of the atrocities in the Belgian Congo?”
“I remember something about it.”
“Even though he was a famous author and no longer young, he insisted on volunteering as a physician to go to South Africa and take care of wounded and dying soldiers in the Boer War. Right there in the war zone. Got some form of cholera himself from it. You want me to tell you stories about what he’s done in the afterworld?”
“Uh—no. I guess you made your point.”
“You get out there and help him, Fogg, if respect from me matters to you. Maybe it doesn’t, but . . .”
“It does,” I said.
Brummigen turned and walked off toward the village, his lantern swinging at his side, making shining arcs back and forth along the path.
I sighed—and followed Doyle into the darkness.
Doyle was well ahead of me, his lantern light dancing a wicked fairy jig in the trees. I hurried after him, thinking about calling out to him, realizing I’d better not. He wouldn’t stop anyway—and I might scare Moore off.
After a few minutes I thought I saw two lights, and almost called out a warning to Doyle, but then I realized the second light was a reflection of his lantern in the pools of clear swamp water.
I started jogging, pretty awkward with the lantern. My light flared off the pools; it caught in two saucer-shaped eyes, watching me. It was caught up in numerous pairs of golden eyes glinting at me from the surface of a small pond. Frogs, I supposed. At least I hoped so.
I was remembering the Scargel. If that was out there—what else could be in the afterworld?
Something Fiona had said when I’d first met her . . .
And if you wander a long ways out of it, then you have a greater risk of encountering predators. And yes you have died but that doesn’t mean you’ve passed beyond all danger. There is danger here.
“Well that’s just dandy,” I said out loud. “Passed on, dead as a doornail. Should be past caring. Still quite possibly screwed.”
“Is it dandy?” said a distorted voice from the darkness.
I stopped for a moment on the trail and raised my lantern, looked off in the direction I thought the voice had come from. I saw trees, the knees of cypresses lifted as if frozen in mid-dance move; I saw the lantern light angling, prismed down into the water; I saw the silhouettes of frogs and snakes flashing away. I saw a bird flitter by, just a silhouette—a large bird, perhaps an owl. Was that who’d spoken?
Must have imagined it. I hustled on, once more trying to catch up with Doyle.
“Is your doornail dead?” came the voice from the darkness. It was a male voice.
There was something about the voice I recognized. But it was distorted, too. On purpose, I thought . . .
“I know your voice!” I shouted, hoping he’d fall for it and come out of the shadows.
But the only response was scornful laughter.
Okay, fine, I told myself. Don’t hang out here, you damned fool.
I trudged rapidly on, turned a corner, stepped into a pool of water—and drew back, cursing. I got a brief memory from an Istanbul taxi driver whose forgetter spark was sliding around my ankle. Honking cars, narrow streets, people shouting in Turkish.
Then I turned, seeing another light—someone looming up at me.
It was Doyle. “You seem to be lost!”
“Ah—I might be.”
“Come along.” He led the way back along the trail, then to the fork I’d missed. “I heard someone shouting. Your voice and someone else. Couldn’t quite make it all out. Talking to a ringtail sloth, were you?”
“Might’ve been. Not sure. Might have been Bull Moore. Didn’t sound like him though.” I could see lights clustered in a tree, up ahead—motionless lights. “That the tree house?”
“Yes. Lower your voice . . .”
We approached the huge tree slowly. Its base reminded me of an African baobab tree. But it grew out of the swamp, with the raised roots, and in the darkness its foliage looked cubistic. It wasn’t foliage. It was the outline of Moore’s multitiered tree house. Only the middle building had lights in it. Lamps glowed from half-open windows . . .
Doyle put his lamp down and closed the shutter on it. I did the same with mine so that the only light was from Moore’s tree house, about two hundred feet away, and a faint phosphorescence from the swamp pools around it.
Something splashed, and splashed again. Was that someone wading through the water, behind us? I turned and looked. I saw only flickers of light, from forgetters, here and there, and the outlines of trees over feebly glowing pools. Nothing moved.
I turned toward the tree house, hearing Moore muttering, but wasn’t sure what he was saying. Something about the skies, no use watching, not anymore . . . At least I think that’s what he said.
“Doyle . . . maybe if we . . .”
He reached back and clamped one of his big hands over my mouth. “Quiet, Fogg,” he hissed. He drew his hand back and then signaled for me to wait there.
I shook my head. “No!” I whispered.
Doyle was trotting ahead, toward the big tree. The path led between two pools, right up to the trunk of the tree. I saw Doyle climbing the tree, not elegantly but without much apparent effort, and disappearing into the lower tree-house unit.
There was an immediate clinking clatter—Doyle had bumbled into some form of alarm, probably just pieces of metal and glass on a string. I heard him cursing, and then came a shout from Moore. “I knew it!”
The middle section of the tree house shook, as if something was being thumped about. Something large.
I shouldn’t have let him go. If Moore was the one who’d killed Morgan Harris, he could be using the same method to destroy Doyle now; to reduce Conan Doyle to a black shape and a spark.
I grabbed up my lantern, unshuttered it, and ran toward the tree, shouting, “Moore, stop! He’s not alone here!”
The middle section shook again. An outer wall split so that light speared out into the night. A group of dark birds flew up from a branch, crying out in protest.
“Not alone here! Damn you! Out, out!” screeched the birds.
Something heavy, something big, came tumbling from the smashed-open tree house. It fell through foliage and small branches, cracking them, sending out a burst of leaves, and then struck the water with an enormous splash.
“Oh fuck . . .” I was almost to the tree trunk, running to the still rollicking surface of the water. Mud plumed up from the bottom. Then a muddy figure rose slowly up, as if exuded by the mud—only to fall back again.
“Fogg? Don’t get too close to him!” called Doyle from above.
I looked up, saw him backlit by the glow from the ruptured tree house. “Doyle?”
Moore was up on his feet again, sloshing waist high through the water to the tree—where he hunkered down, and crept under the arches of the raised roots.
He hid back there, in the shadows under the tree trunk, clutching at the roots like a man in a jail cell grabbing at the bars. “Stay away from me! I don’t know where she is! Don’t let him do it to me again!”
“You don’t know where Touie Doyle is, Moore?” I asked. Maybe he was off balance enough to tell what he knew.
“I don’t know! I just saw her for a second, when the glow things went past her! I didn’t see who she was! She was going toward the mansion! Get away from here! You can tell your masters that I’ll go underground now, and they won’t be able to reach me!”
Moore retreated back into the shadows. I could barely see him back there.
“Okay, Bull,” I said. “I’ll tell them that.”
Doyle was just climbing down the ladder, dropping to the ground by the tree trunk. “Bloody fool thinks he’s Peter Pan. Barrie would be horrified. He need not have panicked so.”
“Did you threaten to drub him too?”
“No. I threatened to beat him black and blue.”
“You okay?”
“Scarcely injured at all. A scrape here and there. Come along if you’re coming. I . . .”
He squinted into the darkness—then smiled.
“What is it?” I asked. I peered off in that same direction, and then I saw it.
At first I thought it must be reflected light from a cloud of forgetters. It was about forty yards off, and hovering in the air between two trees, perhaps fifty feet over the water. But then I saw clearly it was all one creature, one thing, fluctuating in space. I thought at first it must be the afterworld’s aurora borealis—but it was too close, too distinctly glowing there, between the trees. It was like an aurora, and then again it was almost like a giant luminescent jellyfish, reticulating, fluttering in place—reflected clearly in the water down below. “Is that . . . some kinda swamp animal? Or . . . a fox fire kind of thing?”
“No sir. That is not. That is a phenomenon we see rarely. I’ve seen it once before. But likely this isn’t the same one. Look into it, as much as you can, from here. Clear your mind and really look.”
I looked . . . and its shape seemed to alter, as if my looking gave it shape. It became a human being, a nude young male made of translucent white glow, just floating there, looking at us, with a backdrop of aurora. It was as if the aurora were . . . wings.
And it seemed to me the creature was looking directly at me. “Doyle! Is that an angel?”
Doyle gave out a pleased chuckle. “Closest thing you’ll likely ever see to one! That is a human being who has evolved, to vibrate harmoniously with a higher level: the ‘solar’ level. They may or may not be around us, here, but if they are, it is quite a different place to them. They don’t interfere with us, ah—so far as I know. They seem to appear as an omen.”
I could feel something in the air—a benevolence. Not quite a benediction. It was too objective for that. I felt its awareness of us, and I felt its inherent compassion. “Is it . . . a good omen?”
He made an inarticulate murmur in his throat as he considered. “It’s a significant omen. Tell me—does it look as if he’s looking right at you?”
“Yes. It does, to me. Maybe it’s an illusion.”
“No, I do not believe so. It looks to me as if he’s looking at you.”
“Is he . . . Summoning?”
“That’s not how it happens.”
“Then why?”
“It’s just that . . . something significant has happened. You made a significant choice, Fogg. I don’t know what that choice was. But it’s good.” He fell silent for a moment, gazing at the apparition. Then burst out with a monosyllabic sound of disappointment, “Oh!”
The evolved spirit was fading into its aurora . . . which was backing away. It seemed to flick away . . . into everything at once. The world seemed lightning-flash lit, for a split second, by its vanishing.
Then it was gone. I heard birds murmur sadly, somewhere. “Gone for now . . . gone for now . . .”
Doyle shook his head. “That was extraordinary. We just see it so rarely. Only once before did I . . . ah well. We must go about our business. We have a task—there’s always a task, Fogg. Always. Small or large it may be. But always a task.”
He seemed to shake himself a trifle, then lunged back along the trail.
And I followed. On the way Doyle picked up his lantern, unshuttering it.
We hustled on and he didn’t speak again for ten minutes. Suddenly he picked up his pace as he said, “You heard what Moore said, about Touie? Consider the implications, Fogg. We must be off! We must get to Merchant’s private castle with all possible speed.”
“Great.” I was nervous about approaching the mansion, especially at night. “The mansion. Just . . . great.” Higgs. I didn’t trust Higgs. Maybe this time it’d be a punji pit with sharpened stakes.
“Just great,” said a voice from the darkness. “Dandy!”
Doyle and I skidded to a stop and exchanged glances. “That’s what I heard, earlier,” I whispered. I wondered for a moment if it could be something from the aurora creature we’d seen. But no. That being had been clearly benevolent. I could feel it.
This thing felt just the opposite. I felt its malignance.
“Oh yes, he heard it earlier,” said the voice from the darkness. As if my whispering didn’t matter at all—it had heard me anyway.
Doyle nodded for me to go on ahead—I figured he was going to let the thing dog me, let me lead it away as he tried to sneak up on it. He turned and stepped to the edge of the trail, leaning back a little as if preparing to wade into the water.
I grabbed his arm and held him back, shaking my head. “Not this time, Doyle,” I said. “I’m going myself.”
Then, carrying my lantern, I turned, took a short run, and leapt off the trail feetfirst into the water.
It was waist deep here, warm and fragrant, but the mud was slippery and I barely managed to keep upright. I nearly dumped the lantern into the water.
I got myself steadied and heard Doyle call to me from behind, but I was listening to the thing’s sloshing, its urgent movement off in the woods. It gave me a direction to go in.
I set off in pursuit, wading fast as I could.
I felt frogs, disturbed by my feet as they slipped along my crotch, up between my legs. It was altogether too intimate a contact from nature.
I kept sloshing on.
This is stupid, I thought, as I got farther and farther from the trail. Probably just one of those talking ringtail things.
But what if it wasn’t? And what if it was trying to lure me off into the swamp? Who knew what was out there? How far did the swamp go on? Fifty miles? For all I knew it could go on for hundreds of miles.
I saw the thing then—its movement seemed to activate the faint phosphorescence in the water, making glowing rings as it sloshed along, about forty yards ahead of me. Its movements seemed especially clumsy. Was it luring me on, that way?
It turned, then, and looked back at me—and there was another light, two glows where its eyes should be, in the outline of a man. It stared at me. I needed an act of will to come moving toward it. But I kept going.
The mocking thing made a low, scornful, sniggering sound.
Then it turned away, took several especially big steps. I followed, making myself move as fast as I could without slipping or dropping the lantern.
I pursued it for a few minutes, splashing on, not able to get along rapidly—but I could see I was closing the distance.
Then the mocking thing tripped in the slippery mud, and fell with a splash.
There was a hissing sound; I saw lights, blurred by the water, as it looked around . . .
I kept going, and suddenly the mocking thing was there, in front of me. I almost ran into it.
It was half sunken in the water, stretched out just a few steps from a raised trail. A little steam rose from the surface of the pool above it.
“Doyle!” I shouted, waving the lantern. “There’s a trail here!”
I heard him call back to me, some sort of assent.
In the lantern’s glow, the remains of the mocking thing seemed to be slowly sinking to the mud. It was a partly formed man-shape. A coarse, dark, badly textured shape . . .
I held my lantern over it in my right hand, reached down and pulled the thing up with the other—the dark shape came easily. It seemed to have lost a lot of its weight. It was wiry under my fingers.
I started climbing up onto the trail, slipping back once, then dug in and lurched upward. The water seemed reluctant to release me, but then I was up, dragging the man shape up onto the trail. I laid it down and turned it over, just as Doyle’s lantern light came floating along toward me. It took a moment for me to see him carrying it.
“Fogg? Did you catch him?”
“I caught whatever it was. I don’t think it’s still a him, or what it was, at all . . .”
I set my lantern down near the thing’s head. It wore no clothing—it was the crude outline of a man, a little larger than me, made of slightly steaming wires. Its eyes were empty, hollow. It had no nose, or chin; instead of a mouth, it had something like a small megaphone. There was no sign of a soul spark.
“Is this someone who’s just . . . died?” I asked. “Like Morgan Harris?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Doyle said. “Notice the absence of the material you so memorably called ‘snail tracks.’ ”
“Could’ve been washed off by the water.”
“It’s quite concentrated, water-resistant material. If any did come loose there would be some on the pool . . .” He went to look, using his lantern. “As I thought, it is not there. You will recollect the image in the journals—the formulation of an artificial man, by ordinary human spirits. Or rather, the attempt. Formulation and deformulation of living things, carried out by human spirits, requires an admixture of that material—it is, I believe, Dynamic Ectoplasm, drained from deformulated beings . . . or from a seam of the material deposited below. You will recall that ectoplasm is a spiritual material that forms the basis of souls materializing at séances, via mediumship . . . There were many photographs of it . . .”
“Ectoplasm. A seam of ectoplasm . . . below. Under the ground? Like oil?”
“Just so! Like oil! But it is quite difficult to reach! And it is not easily charged with life energy. To provide large-scale formulating power a man must use raw spirit energy—the actual crackling force of life. This he combines with ectoplasm should he wish to create creatures . . . living, moving things. Like the Golem of Hebrew legend.”
“This creature was glowing.”
“So it was, I’m sure. And it vaporized. It was raw psychic energy. Grit from the soil was combined with it, formulated through the use of a powerful mental control, and that sent it about its business. It is enough to give it some mobility. But without ectoplasm, and a considerable time to control the formulation, it’s not possible to create much that lives, long . . . this has no trace of ectoplasm. Perhaps there was just enough . . . it may be a clue as to the motive of the man who killed Morgan Harris . . .”
“What motive?”
“I’m not sure—I shall not muddy the waters, as it were, with further speculation.”
“This thing didn’t seem to be trying real hard to get away from me . . .”
“No indeed. And it seemed to taunt you! It wanted you to follow it. But, it stumbled and lost its charge in the water.”
“Its charge?”
“Life electricity. The psychic energy I mentioned. Very like what Mrs. Shelley employed to bring her novel alive.”
“So this thing was luring me into the forest . . .”
“Yes. So I infer. To what end? Why, clearly, to destroy you. But not without a purpose. First of all, you are becoming troublesome to the creator of this thing. Secondly, you have something it needs. Just as it needed something from Morgan Harris . . .”
“Ectoplasm? I’ve got that stuff in me now?”
“Of course. It’s basic to the function of your spirit body—your afterbody. Our murderer created a sort of golem, which he controls psychically, to draw you somewhere in the forest. But we shall not be able to catch him there now. He’s gone on . . . probably gone to ground. Let us move on to the mansion.”
“Can I wring out my pants first?”
“Do be quick about it.”
I removed my shoes, socks, pants, and underwear, wrung the cloth items out, and put them back on. It was only slightly more comfortable than before wringing. “I keep ending up having to slog around with water in my pants and shoes. Doyle . . . you really think Higgs took down all his traps? I don’t want to be skewered. Whether it kills me or not.”
“Oh, no, I’m not sure at all. I think it likely. But surety? No. But, I am not overconcerned. You will naturally scout out the ground ahead of me.”
“I will?”
“Of course you will! Step lightly, Fogg! Step lightly!”