Seventy-Seven Clocks

∨ Seventy-Seven Clocks ∧

25

Sevens

“I’m still hungry.”

Daisy Whitstable wiped the chocolate from her mouth. Her dress was filthy and crawling with lice, and even though the tunnel door was shut she was shivering in the bitter winter air. She had eaten nothing but ice cream since her capture. The wet brick arches had taken on a more sinister appearance since the van’s dying battery had faded its headlights. A neon tube had been plugged into the wall, and threw just enough light across the floor to keep vermin at bay.

Daisy was resilient, but her confidence was fading. She could no longer tell if it was day or night. Her ankles were loosely tied with a piece of nylon cord, and she was sick of scraping her knees on the rough concrete floor. She had given up crying. Tears only made her captor more upset.

“Can’t I have something that isn’t ice cream?” She was glad she could not see him. He was there, though. He was always there among the oil cans and coils of rope, crouching in the darkest corner with his head resting on his knees. Whenever he came closer she tried to move away, even though he had shown no desire to hurt her. She had stopped trying to understand why her mother and father had not come to take her home. Perhaps she was being punished. Suppose she never saw them, or her brother, ever again? Against her will, she began to whimper.

In the corner, her captor stirred and rose slowly to his feet. She tried to stifle her tears but it was too late. He was shuffling toward her now, and would push her back into the corner of the bench, as he had done before.

Or so she thought, until she saw that this time he was carrying a hooked knife in one hand.

♦

Maggie Armitage’s face had been created specifically for smiling. She beamed reassuringly at her clients, her eyes waning to happy crescents, and massaged their hands consolingly as she provided conviction enough for both of them. This was an important part of her function, for as the Grand Leader of the Camden Town Coven, Maggie was often the harbinger of distressing news.

Every Monday night, she and the six remaining members of her sect met in the gloomy flat above the World’s End public house opposite Camden Town Tube station, and attempted to provide some psychic balm for the city’s wounds. Evil could not be stopped, merely held at bay, but at least its victims could be aided and, if possible, forewarned.

John will be furious if he finds out I’ve agreed to this meeting, thought Bryant. May held no belief in the Hereafter, but his partner kept an open mind. In the past, information provided by the cheery white witch had proved to be correct, and had helped to close a number of longstanding police files. This good work went unacknowledged by the Met, who regarded fringe operators with the same distrust doctors reserve for practitioners of alternative medicine. The News of the World ran too many exposés on bogus covens. In years to come they would replace them with features on celebrity sex romps, but for now they were content to run photographs of naked women prancing around bonfires.

Bryant surveyed the ground-floor hall of the Victoria and Albert Museum, wondering why Maggie had specifically asked to meet him here, in this shadowy edifice of marble and stone. He turned to find her striding briskly between the glass cases, her spectacles swinging on an amber chain at her bosom. In keeping with the festive season, she had enough dangling plastic ornaments about her person to decorate a small Norwegian pine.

“Dear thing, how well you look!” she cried, causing several members of the public to turn disapprovingly. “I hope you didn’t mind coming here, but I’m with Maureen and daren’t let her out of my sight. She’s sitting her British Pagan Rites exam next week and I said I’d help with the research, but she’s a bit of a klepto and tends to heave open the cases when I’m not looking. She’s liable to have Aleister Crowley’s soup spoons up her jumper before you know it.”

“So you’re in here uncovering forgotten symbolic rituals, eh?” Bryant asked, beaming jovially.

“Actually I was in the gift shop admiring their casserole covers, but I’m on a diet so let’s not dwell. Maureen’s doing her Fellowship of Isis and Dion Fortune – it always sounds like a fifties singer, don’t you think? – and lately she’s developed the habit of dropping into trances, so she needs some looking after, especially when we’re on her scooter. I think you’ve met her.”

“I remember meeting a very pretty Jamaican girl a couple of years ago.”

“Oh, Katherine’s still with us, but she’s called Freya now and won’t talk to anyone who doesn’t acknowledge her god, Odin. Her husband’s not pleased because he’s on night work and keeps forgetting.” Maggie paused for a breath and donned her spectacles. Her eyes swam at him from sparkling plastic frames. “I wanted to talk to you rather urgently, as it happens. The coven has a resident numerologist named Nigel. He’s very good at Chaos Theory, which is just as well because his math is terrible, and at the moment he keeps coming up with sevens. Sevens, sevens everywhere, and it all seems connected with you. Or rather, with your investigation. You’d better follow me.”

She led the way back between glass cases of Victorian fans, canes, calling cards, and snuff boxes, as high above them the late-afternoon rain pattered steadily on angled skylights.

“Very few people bother with this part of the museum.” She turned into a corridor that had been partitioned off from the main floor. “There’s something I want you to see.”

Here the overhead lamps were spaced further apart, and the occultist’s multicoloured sweater sparkled like the scales of a tropical fish as she moved between pools of light. “We’ve been following the case in the papers, of course, and you know how one makes these connections. It was Nigel who remembered reading a Victorian text about the powers of light and darkness.”

At the end of the corridor, a red velvet rope separated them from a dark flight of stairs. Maggie slipped the hook and beckoned Bryant through. She flicked a switch at her side and a dim radiance shone from below. “The documents kept here are extremely sensitive to light,” she explained as they descended. “As a special-interest group we’re allowed access to them, although I’m not allowed to bring vegetable soup with me, after an unfortunate incident with a Necromicon. Nigel was checking some numerological data when he got to thinking about the sevens. Do you know anything about the power of numbers?” They reached the foot of the stairs and she looked across at him, her eyes lost in shadow, less comical now.

She paused to sign the visitor’s book which lay open on an unmanned reception desk, then walked between dimly illuminated cases, checking their contents. “Seven is a very special number. It traverses history like a latitude, always appearing at times of great upheaval. It’s a schizophrenic number, Janus-faced, often representing both good and evil, a grouping together and a tearing apart. There are many bloodstained sevens in history: Robert E. Lee’s Seven Days’ Battles in the American Civil War, for example; the destruction of the Red River settlement in the Seven Oaks Massacre; and the battle of Seven Pines. There’s the Seven Weeks War – that’s the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 – and of course the Seven Years War which involved just about the whole of Europe in 1756.

There are everyday sevens, like the seven-note scale, the Seven Hills of Rome, the days of the week, the seven-year itch. Then there are lots of legendary sevens: the seven Greek champions who were killed fighting against Thebes after the fall of Oedipus, the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, the Seven Holy Founders, the Seven Gods of Luck, the Seven Wonders of the World, the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola, the Seven Wise Masters of ancient Arab myth, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, soldiers who were resurrected from the dead – ”

“I think I get the idea,” interrupted Bryant. “What have all these sevens to do with the Whitstable murders?”

“Well, they don’t directly – but this does.” Maggie stopped before the end case and wiped dust from the glass with her sleeve. Bryant peered down. Pinned open in the case were several pages from a Victorian guild booklet that had been damaged by fire. The sheets were edged with gold leaf, a tribute to the Goldsmiths to whom they owed their origin. The watercolour illustrations had faded badly. Still, the central photograph was clear enough.

It showed a sour-faced man with bright, menacing eyes, muttonchop whiskers, and bushy eyebrows, standing in the centre of an ornately carpeted room. On either side of this commanding presence sat three men. Each man had a handwritten phrase marked beneath his person.

A chill draught blew at Bryant’s ankles as he read, from left to right: Arathron, Bethor, Phaleg, Hagith, Ophiel, Phul. The nomenclature beneath the sinister central figure was Och.

“The names pertain to the Seven Stewards of Heaven,” said Maggie, tapping the glass with a painted nail. “God governs the world through them. They’re also known as the Olympian Spirits, and can be invoked by black magicians. Each has a certain day associated with him, as well as a particular planet in our solar system. This central figure here, the tall man, is the Master of the Sun, Bringer of Light, and he governs Sundays. I wondered if you’d come across him yet in your investigation.”

“Oh, Maggie,” said Bryant, wiping his glasses. “I most certainly have. I saw his picture only yesterday. What is he doing here?”

“I’d say these finely dressed Victorians belonged to some kind of society, wouldn’t you?” The occultist smiled darkly. “Look at the arcane instruments on the table beside them. There’s no date to the picture but I’d say it was around 1870, perhaps a little later. There’s no way of identifying who six of the fine gentlemen are, but we know the identity of the seventh.” Her finger moved over the central figure of Och, then to the panel of text below. The name in the box was that of James Makepeace Whitstable.

“The Victorians were up to their ears in strange sects and movements,” she explained, “but the Stewards of Heaven had an ancient and extremely powerful belief system connected to the secret powers of darkness and light. Night and day, good and evil, held in perfect balance.”

“Presumably this particular sect is no longer in existence?”

“It hasn’t been for centuries, but it looks as if your victims’ ancestor was trying to revive it. As the Seven Stewards are hardly a familiar topic nowadays, I assume he failed to draw a large number of converts.”

“It may not have completely vanished,” murmured Bryant. “It could simply have remained dormant until now.”

“That’s what I wondered,” said Maggie, turning from the display case. “As alternative belief systems go, this one operates on a pretty grand scale. Such societies have a habit of reviving themselves when conditions are right. Their growth and decline occurs in a regular cycle.”

“How long would each cycle last?”

“It could be any timespan of up to one hundred years. In fact, century cycles are rather common.”

The image of the Waterhouse painting had sprung into Bryant’s mind. The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius depicted seven men.

He took another look inside the glass case, mentally superimposing the painting over the watercolour illustration. Seven acolytes in both. Cold draughts now filled the room, and he gave an involuntary shudder. “One hundred years,” he said. “That brings James Whitstable right back into the 1970s.”

“This is a very powerful occult force,” said Maggie. “It looks as if your troubles are only just beginning.”

♦

PC Burridge’s lanky body was numb with cold, and the freezing rain was starting to leak through his sou’wester. His late-night beat was dark, dismal, and depressing. It had never felt less like Christmas.

Be observant, they had always told him. Be ever vigilant. But there was nothing to observe beneath the arches of the Embankment except the occasional forlorn tramp, and vigilance was a matter of course with so many anti-war demonstrators around. No wonder they call us Plods, he mused, plodding heavily through the tunnel to emerge in a deserted alley at the side of the Mermaid Theatre. His beat was about to get worse: the prime minister was losing his battle with the electrical unions, and the constable would shortly be walking the streets in darkness.

A thin, echoing wail forced him to break from his thoughts. The cry came from the tunnel at his back. Perhaps there was something trapped in one of the recesses of the dripping wall.

The constable stopped and listened. Suddenly the crying began anew, rising in pitch. He screwed up his eyes and stared into the gloom. He could just make out a bedraggled cat, sitting beside a bundle of coloured rags.

As he walked further into the tunnel the cat ran off, and he saw that the bundle was a small body.

PC Burridge placed his arms around the child to pick her up, wondering if his pleas for recognition had been perversely heard and from now on he would be known as the policeman who discovered Daisy Whitstable. He pressed his ear against the child’s thin chest and heard a faint heartbeat within. Wrapping her inside his jacket, he radioed for an ambulance, praying it would arrive in time.