The Angel of Highgate

4 THE ARMS OF MORPHEUS

Madame Rachelle’s enjoyed the reputation of being the very best brothel in Mayfair, with only the choicest, freshest girls.

Thraxton and Algernon lounged on a floral couch in an elaborately decorated parlor while a line of young prostitutes paraded before them dressed in lingerie and stockings. Thraxton, an old hand at this sort of thing, eyed each girl with obvious delight as she passed. But each time a girl looked upon Algernon and smiled coyly, he could not meet her gaze and dropped his eyes to the Persian rug at his feet.

In an effort to cater to the peccadilloes of the gentry, no matter how unorthodox, the brothel boasted women of every age and nationality. Some of the girls were as young as twelve or thirteen. These were typically dressed in sailor suits, or rustic smocks, their hair done up in pigtails and bows to make them look even younger. Often they clutched a doll to their flat chests to complete the effect. The older women, ranging from their teens to their early twenties, presented body types for every taste, from voluptuous maids with juddering bosoms that threatened to spill over the tops of their bustiers, to slender waifs laced into corsets so tight their waspish waists could be spanned by a man’s hands.

“Come on, Algy,” Thraxton griped as the girls made their third pass by the sofa. “Don’t take all day about it. You’re not marrying her, for God’s sake. Choose!”

Algernon looked up shyly at a fair-skinned blonde girl. “Oh, wuh-well, I, I suppose this young lady has a-a k-kind face,” he stammered. He indicated the woman with a slight nod. She smiled and dropped into his lap, draping a slender arm around his neck.

“About damned time, too!” Thraxton said with good-natured irritation. He returned his attention to the parade of female flesh. “Let’s see. Spoiled for choice, really. Don’t care for the little ’uns. Too thin. I like a wench with a nice, ripe arse. Something I can slam into from behind.” Thraxton grabbed the hand of a buxom brunette. She let out a squeal as he pulled her down onto his lap. But then a redhead also caught his eye. “What the hell, I’m feeling my oats today!” He grabbed the redhead’s hand and pulled her down next to him. Both women draped themselves around him and began to caress his neck and face, running their fingers through his thick mop of wavy black hair. The women giggled and cooed as he kissed first one, and then the other. Ah, he thought, is there anything more sublime than the feel of satin warmed by a woman’s body?

It was early afternoon when the two friends clambered into a hansom cab and rattled away from the front door of Madame Rachelle’s. Thraxton slumped against the worn leather cushion, his face slackened by a lazy look of satiety.

“Home now, Geoffrey?” Algernon said, his voice full of hope.

Thraxton glared disbelievingly at his friend, brows knotted in consternation. “Certainly not. We are only just beginning! Besides, I feel it, Algy. Don’t you feel it?”

Algernon replied with a weary look, “I feel like a glove that’s been turned inside out.”

“I feel the pull,” Thraxton said, his face dissolving dreamily. “The pull of the mystic east.”

Half an hour later the cab dropped them in one of the very worst parts of London, a district where white faces and fine gentleman’s clothes struck a discordant note. The buildings hereabouts were shabby and run down. The dank and fetid reek of the Thames meant the river was close — no more than a few streets away. As soon as Thraxton had paid the fare, the cabbie cracked his whip over the horse’s head, anxious to be gone.

What they failed to see were three shabby figures lurking in a darkened doorway across the street. The middle figure was Mordecai Fowler, a short, stout man, barely five feet tall and nearly as wide, though much of this bulk was due to the two undervests, two shirts, one waistcoat, two jackets, and three holed and ragged overcoats he was wearing. Beneath the crumpled bowler jammed over his lank and greasy black hair was a gorilla-like face with bushy black sideburns and coarse black stubble prickling his chin. To his left was the cadaverous Walter Crynge, six-foot-six and skeletally thin with a complexion the color of pus. Smallpox and gonorrhea had left huge pockmarks and open sores in his skin, while the ravages of syphilis had gnawed the cartilage of his nose until it collapsed inward, leaving only two oval holes in the front of his face. Many years ago, Crynge had been honestly employed as an undertaker’s assistant. The worn black frock coat and battered black top hat were all that remained of what he had stolen from his former employer. To Fowler’s right loomed the huge and bestial Barnabus Snudge, a bone-crushing Minotaur of a man. Snudge’s wiry red hair was combed forward over his low forehead and covered his eyes like an Old English sheepdog. Snudge boasted the strength of an ox, but fell far short of matching its intelligence. Mordecai and his cronies were mobsmen, denizens of London’s huge underworld, a vast criminal society that lived and thrived in the shadows of the wealthiest city on earth. That night the three were out “wilding,” prowling the streets for mugs and toffs with purses crammed with coins.

Fowler’s black eyes glittered as he studied the two figures across the way. From their clothes he could clearly see they were men of means — gentlemen. “Wot ’ave we got ’ere, eh, lads?” Fowler spat contemptuously. “A coupla toffs, out slummin’!”

“Yeth,” Crynge lisped, his ulcerous tongue waggling around the rotted stumps of the few teeth left in his mouth. “Bloody toffs!”

“Wot they doin’ on our patch, Mister Fowler?” Snudge muttered dimly.

“Come to rub shoulders with the less fortunate,” Fowler said. “Have themselves a bloody good old larf at how us rats live in the gutter. That’s wot the likes of them is here for, Snudgy.” Fowler slipped a hand inside his outermost coat. His stubby fingers closed around a gnarled, wormwood handle. “I fink it’s time my friend Mister Pierce made some new acquaint-tin-sees,” Fowler said. “Come along, lads.”

The three men stepped out of the shadowed doorway and tromped toward the unsuspecting friends.

Just then the sound of horses’ hooves grew louder as a pair of brewer’s carts, laden with barrels, turned the corner and clopped toward Algernon and Thraxton.

The carts stopped the mobsmen in their tracks. Unknowingly shielded by the passing carts, the two gents stepped to a battered green door, which opened at the first knock and drew them inside. Just a few feet away, Fowler and his mobsmen could only watch as their prey made good an unwitting escape.

“The toffs have gone into the Chinee’s place,” Fowler rumbled. “Gone to chase the dragon.”

“That’s a bloomin’ shame,” said Snudge. “Coulda had ourselves a bit o’ fun wiv them toffs.”

“We could wait here for them,” Crynge suggested.

Fowler grunted, scratching a stubbly throat with his filthy nails. “Naw. We got a job. Our friend the doctor has ordered a fresh ’un and he’ll pay a lot more than wot them toffs has in their pockets.” Fowler shook himself like a crow fluffing its feathers, yanked his coat shut and cinched the rope belt tight. “We’ll need shovels and the ’orse and cart.” He nodded to his men. “Come on, lads. Plenty more mischief to be done tonight.”

With that, the three mobsmen crossed the street and stepped into a narrow alleyway where the shadows swallowed them up once more.

“Opium,” Thraxton blurted as he pulled the pipe from his lips and exhaled a stream of smoke, “is the truest of all vices.”

“Whysh that?” Algernon said, struggling not to slur his words and slurring all the more for it.

Each lay on a low palette covered by a thin mattress. The palettes were scarcely six inches apart, but in the gloom of the opium den it was impossible to make out each other’s features in the sputtering light of a solitary greasy candle.

“Because… because…” Thraxton paused. “I’m sorry, I can’t remember. What were you saying?”

“Me? I wasn’t saying anything. It was you.” They both fell silent. For a while the only sound was the faint crackle of opium burning in the bowls of their pipes.

“Oh God, Algy,” Thraxton moaned from inside a cloud of smoke. He narrowed his eyes and tried to locate his friend’s face in the gloom. “What am I doing with my life?”

As Algernon slipped beneath the surface of an opium dream the pipe fell from his lips and clattered to the floor. He slumped on the mattress and began to snore.

Thraxton put the pipe to his lips and drew deeply, filling his lungs, holding it in. In his mind’s eye he could see the smoke billowing inside, a violet nimbus roiling in a body as hollow and empty as a porcelain doll’s. He pulled the pipe from his lips and released the breath. The plume he exhaled drifted sluggishly across the narrow room and burst against the wall, where it coalesced into the shape of a wizened old Chinese man sitting in a broken and lopsided chair. The old man, who must have been in his nineties, had a long gray braid of hair draped over one shoulder and was dressed in the traditional silks of old China. His lips were clamped around the mouthpiece of an opium pipe, which he never removed as he puffed, but rather drew in air through the side of his mouth and jetted out smoke through both tiny nostrils. The old man’s glittering black eyes remained fixed upon Thraxton all along.

“I know who you are,” Thraxton said.

With those words the old man’s wrinkled face blurred, dissolved, and rose up to the ceiling as smoke, revealing the grinning skull beneath. Death’s bony fingers continued to hold the pipe to the lipless mouth. But as it drew in again, smoke leaked from the eye sockets and the fleshless nostrils.

“I see through your disguises,” Thraxton continued, “all of them. If you want me, take me now. But I tell you this. I shall not love again. So there is nothing you can take from me.”

Thraxton’s eyes began to droop.

“Nothing.”

The pipe dragged from his lips and began to burn a hole in the mattress.

“Nothing.”

A trap door opened beneath him and he fell for a thousand years.