The Dead Assassin

CHAPTER 23 A DINNER DATE TO REMEMBER

They drew the usual stares, but Conan Doyle no longer cared. He sat across the dinner table from Miss Jean Leckie, whose lovely head floated buoyantly on the exquisite curve of her long neck. They had returned to the scene of their first assignation, the Tivoli restaurant, and in the welcoming glow of the Palm Room’s electric lights, the young woman’s hazel-green eyes sparkled with delectation. After a dinner of watercress salad, oysters, and champagne, they had desserted on truffles drizzled with chocolate. Now he watched the tip of her pink tongue lick the chocolate from her spoon. She noticed his stare and stifled a guilty smile beneath her napkin.

“I must apologize, Doctor Doyle. Most unladylike. I assure you, my mother brought me up to have better manners.”

“Arthur,” he scolded gently. “You must call me Arthur.”

She rested the hand gripping her spoon upon on the table. Quite unconsciously, he reached out and placed his hand atop hers. “It gives me great joy to make you happy, Jean.”

He gazed into her eyes, a little too deeply. She looked down and drew her hand away.

He knew his behavior was appalling. Ridiculous even. He was a public figure. A well-known author. People were staring. Damn them, he thought. Let them stare.

“I do have a question for you, Jean.”

She looked up, her eyes brimming with hope. “Yes?”

Conan Doyle drew the small leather volume from his inside pocket. “I thought I might make use of your encyclopedic knowledge of the occult.”

Her expression faltered, but he failed to notice. She smiled gamely and said, “I would hardly compare myself to an encyclopedia, but perhaps I may be able to help.”

Conan Doyle handed the book across the table to her. She opened to the title page. Her eyes swept the gothic type and she looked up in surprise.

“Necromancy! How very dark!”

“You are familiar with the term?”

“My father had a comprehensive library. As a young girl I was expressly forbidden from reading certain books.” She flashed a wicked smile. “Of course, those were the books I read first.”

She dropped her eyes to the page and began reading. Conan Doyle contented himself to watch as she read the first page and then the second. At the third page, her eyes flickered as she scanned a line over and over. She closed the book and looked up at him, her expression unreadable.

“What do you make of it?”

“Is this something you are reading for research? A new book you are planning?”

“Ah, yes,” Conan Doyle fibbed. He could not endanger her by going into the details of his current adventure.

“Very heady stuff.”

“The book purports to have knowledge of a ritual to raise the dead.”

“Yes,” Jean replied. “It requires the sacrifice of a virgin.”

“Ah!” Conan Doyle replied, suddenly embarrassed.

The young woman reached across the table and placed her hand on his. “Fortunately, I have a brave, strong man to protect my virtue.”

Conan Doyle was struck speechless. From the sparkle in her eyes, it seemed clear she was offering him a gift.

It was fully dark by the time Wilde’s carriage rolled up to the gatehouse of the walled grounds encompassing the DeVayne estate. The gatekeeper who emerged from the tiny cottage proved to be a feral-looking man dressed in antique garb complete with knee britches and a leather tricorn hat. Wilde dropped the carriage window to speak to him and was alarmed to see a huge blunderbuss balanced in the crook of his arm.

“Good evening. My name is Oscar Wilde.”

“Arrrr,” the gateman replied as he scratched a bushy sideburn with long, horny fingernails.

“You have, no doubt, heard of me.”

“Arrrr,” the gatekeeper replied, by which Wilde could not tell if he meant yes or no.

“I am here at the personal invitation of the marquess.”

“Arrrr.”

“Might I inquire… why the weapon? Are you expecting armed raiders?”

“Arrrr. Ye know about the marquess’s menagerie?” the man asked in an accent so rustic it was practically sprouting stalks of corn.

“Menagerie?”

“Animals. He collects ’em. Running loose on the grounds.” The gatekeeper patted the blunderbuss fondly. “That’s why oi got this.”

“Indeed?” Wilde’s eyes flickered up from the man’s face to the primal darkness crouched beyond the gates. “And do you have a spare we might borrow?”

The gatekeeper chuckled. “Arrrr, ye’ll be all roit. Just keep to the droive and stay in the carriage and you’ll loikely come to no harm.”

The gatekeeper stepped to the double gates and swung them wide with a shove. As soon as the carriage passed through, Wilde hurriedly flung up the window and scooted back on the seat cushion, sitting as far from the glass as he could.

The house could not be seen from the front gate for the gravel drive ascended a steep grade. But as the carriage crested the low rise, the ancestral seat of the DeVaynes’ rose into view: a palatial, two-story manor with a Georgian façade. Amber light blazed from the tall windows. Struck by the sight, Wilde drew down the carriage window and leaned out. The chill night air pooled in his lungs and was only part of the reason why a premonitory shiver danced down his spine.

The circular driveway fronting the mansion was busy with fine carriages dropping off partygoers. “Draw up here, Gibson,” Wilde said, choosing a spot on the periphery. The driver climbed down from his seat, lowered the metal step, and Oscar Wilde descended. Despite the bitter chill, he chose to leave his overcoat behind, preferring to enter wearing only his formal black evening suit, a fresh green orchid pinned to his lapel. Earlier, he had spent hours at his toilette: bathing and shaving and brilliantineing his chestnut hair, then dousing himself with French cologne, reasoning that, if he could not erase the marks of time, he would at least tie them up in a pleasing package. Girding his loins for battle, he lit a Turkish cigarette, swept back his auburn waves, cinched the knot of his tie, shot the cuffs of his evening jacket, and strolled toward the blazing entrance in shoes buffed black and gleaming.

But as he crunched across the drive, the darkness around him irrupted with a cacophony of jungle sounds. He looked about nervously. Then something screamed. Loud and close. His polished shoes skidded to a halt. A large, unfathomable shape floated toward him from the darkness, which resolved itself as a strutting peacock. The bird unfurled its extravagant fan of feathers and gave them a shake. Relieved, he let out a breath and smiled at his fear. But then a lithe blur on four legs rushed from the night, snatched up the peacock in its jaws, and gave the bird a fierce shake to break its neck.

A huge lioness.

Noticing him, it growled a warning and trotted away with the bird in its jaws.

Wilde dropped his cigarette and hurried toward the safety of the house, scuffing the toes of his shoes as he kicked gravel. He reached the colonnaded entrance and flung himself through the open front doors.

The entrance hall was a grand vault of marble lined with tall Grecian urns and classical busts on columns. Overhead, giant chandeliers bedecked with candles flooded the space with light. Waiting to greet guests were two life-size golden statues of naked youths — a faun and a naiad — each posed holding a silver tray. Wilde was pleased to see that they were honestly nude, and did not comport with the English prudery of fig leaves or conveniently arranged drapery. He dropped his calling card atop the growing pile on the naiad’s sterling tray, at which point the female statue came alive, smiling and bowing to him.

Wilde started and laughed with delight. “Tableau vivant!” he crowed, and bowed in response to the two young people, who were clad only in gold body paint and laurel crowns.

The naked faun stepped forward and offered up a tray of Venetian masks.

“Would sir care for a mask?”

“No, thank you,” Wilde replied, “the one I am wearing usually suffices.”

He stepped into the wide hallway and was met by a bewigged servant, anonymous in a white porcelain mask. The servant presented him with a tray of champagne flutes effervescing with an intriguing emerald concoction.

“What on earth is this libation?”

The servant, who was apparently mute, answered only by miming lifting a drink from the tray and imbibing. Wilde had never seen a drink quite so green in color, a luminous shade of jade. He snatched up a glass, nodded his thanks, and continued on. The first sip set his palate alive with a premonition of rapture. On his second sip, his tongue parsed a giddy dance of gin, champagne, and botanical infusions commingled with a fatal undertow of absinthe that gave the drink its lethal green tinge.

Suddenly, a flock of sheep appeared, crowding the hallway as it surged toward him. He forded through the wooly mass like a man wading through deep water, struggling to keep his feet as the mindlessly baaing creatures pressed around his legs. Following the flock was a comely young wench with her long blond tresses tied up in pink ribbons and ponytails. She carried a tall crook and was dressed in a shepherdess’s costume that could have been lifted from a child’s storybook, except that the front of her dress had been cut deliberately low to expose a pair of buxom breasts. She flashed Wilde an impish grin as she passed, and he looked back to find that the rear of her Little Bo Peep dress had likewise been cut high so as to frame the ripe apple of her naked arse.

The marquess had promised Wilde a revel. Now it seemed he had received a foretaste of things to come. He followed the hallway and soon reached a landing where a short flight of steps climbed to an open set of doors. He summited them and found himself on the threshold of a great hall resplendent with battle flags and suits of armor. In the middle of the hall, lit by the glow of a huge fire roaring in the fireplace, a different kind of war was taking place — a struggle involving an army of naked flesh. Men and women of all shapes and sizes and ages copulated on cushions and couches amid rapturous groaning and ecstatic moans.

The bacchanal, it appeared, had started without him.

He stepped into the hall, crashing through a curtain of hashish smoke. A small Indian boy in a dhoti and turban sat cross-legged before a huge hookah and now offered up the pipe. Wilde set down his glass and then took the pipe and clamped it between his lips. He drew in a deep lungful of smoke that funneled straight into his brain where it swirled in curling arabesques, dissolving his thoughts and any lingering inhibitions with it.

As he watched the orgy from the sidelines, a sudden revelation struck him. Although the participants wore Venetian masks, their identities were easy to guess at. Wilde was astonished to note that they comprised many from the upper echelons of English society, including cabinet ministers and their wives, members of the House of Lords, and even a number of high-ranking clergymen.

Just then a couple sauntered past on their way to join the torrid love pile. The woman, naked apart from rhinestone-spangled nipples and a black leather mask festooned with ostrich feathers, held a riding crop in one hand. The other hand gripped a leather leash by which she led a middle-aged man. The gent, bearded beneath the black leather mask, had a Buddha belly, flabby buttocks striped with red welts, and a flaccid penis that waggled sadly as he was led into the hall. Despite the disguise, Wilde instantly recognized the portly figure of the Prince of Wales and almost greeted him as such. Fortunately, he still possessed sufficient presence of mind to hold his tongue.

In the midst of all the nakedness, more of the masked house servants circulated, offering up salvers of sweetmeats and more of the exotically colored elixir to those orgiers who reclined on cushions at the side of the love pit, watching as they recuperated from their efforts. One servant noticed the lone Irishman and glided toward him bearing a tray of drinks. As he silently bowed and offered up the tray, Wilde could not help but notice the port-wine stain that ran from beneath the mask and down one side of the servant’s neck. Unfortunately, it was an observation his mind would not retain a moment later. The Irishman helped himself to another glass of the emerald cocktail and asked aloud, “What on earth is this sublime drink?”

“Nectar of the gods,” answered an elderly lady who wore a mask and a sparkling tiara in her gray hair and nothing else. From her excruciatingly posh drawl, Wilde recognized the lady as none other than the dowager Dame Helen Montague-Hunt. She was sipping a glass as she reclined on a pile of cushions, her spindly legs thrown over the shoulders of a muscular young man who was enthusiastically rogering her.

The green liquid glided down Wilde’s throat like molten gold. He felt his body changing state from solid into gas, as if he were sublimating, an atom at a time, into the surrounding air. While he was still able to form a cogent thought, he stopped a passing servant and asked, “The marquess?”

The masked servant pointed upward to the hammer-beam ceiling.

As if on queue, a woodwind of Middle Eastern origin wheedled an insinuating tune. The bacchants paused in their exertions to look up, calling and applauding as something extraordinary was lowered from the rafters of the great hall. At first, Wilde could not make out what it was, but as it descended from the shadows, he descried the shape of a giant cross, hung inverted. Lashed to the cross by ropes binding his arms and feet was the slim figure of a man, naked apart from a ragged loincloth, his tumble of red tresses capped by a crown of thorns.

Rufus DeVayne.

The orgiers parted as the cross touched ground. A bevy of servants rushed forward to catch it and turn it right side up. Amidst applause and cheers, the marquess was unlashed and stepped down from the cross blowing kisses. A smile lit his face as he noticed Wilde, and he moved forward to greet him, his slender body flushed, his eyes spilling stars.

“Oscar, my new friend. You came!”

“Dear boy, where beauty summons, Oscar Wilde must follow.”

The marquess shrilled a delighted laugh. He snapped his fingers and a servant scurried to offer up a tray of green cocktails. The marquess snatched one up, tossed it down, and snagged himself a second. A pair of servants came forward to draw his arms into the sleeves of a silk gown embroidered with hierophantic symbols and tighten the sash. He threw a slender arm about Wilde’s shoulders and whispered, “You must come up to my rooms.” He semaphored a vulpine smile. “I have something very special prepared for us.”

Wilde leaned his head toward the younger man, drunk with the liquor of longing. For a brief moment, he saw himself with a terrible acuity, and he knew that, if he followed the young man, he would leave his old life behind forever. He grasped that “Oscar Wilde,” the persona he had spent a lifetime crafting, would be utterly annihilated. He would be mad to succumb to such a risk. The cliff edge yawned before him and Rufus DeVayne beckoned him to step off into the abyss.

“Lead on, sweet youth,” he heard himself say, “I would follow you into oblivion.”

As the younger man led him from the hall, the marquess noted, “I see you chose not to wear a mask.”

“Yes, I came as Oscar Wilde. I could think of nothing more apropos.”

DeVayne laughed as they reached a grand staircase and began to climb. “Come, Oscar,” the marquess said, taking him by the hand. “We must ascend to Elysium.” At the top of the stairs they turned onto a long corridor. Although his feet still trod the earth, Wilde’s mind was a helium balloon tugged along by a string.

Their promenade along the hallway could have taken seconds or days. Suddenly, Wilde found himself inside a huge and sumptuously appointed bedchamber hung with paintings and lithographs that shared a common theme of nudity and torture. As DeVayne had promised, one wall held a giant canvas: a lithograph of a torture chamber of the Inquisition: a hanged man dangled from a gibbet, an arc of semen jetting from his huge erection.

“Do you like my art, Oscar? I have my own personal torture chamber close by should you wish to indulge.”

A premonitory jolt of anxiety swept through Wilde. “Perhaps another time,” he said, his lips dry.

The room was opulent with soft pillows and low sofas. An impossibly huge four-poster dominated one side of the room. Lying atop the bed were two children, a boy and a girl of perhaps six or seven. Their eyes were heavy-lidded and possessed only a smear of focus, suggesting both had been drugged. The children were naked apart from cherub’s wings strapped to their backs, and had been posed stretched out upon the bed, head to head. Each rested upon an arm that was in turn pillowed upon a human skull. A leather strap dangled loose about their throats. A short wooden stick lay close by.

Wilde scrambled to catch hold of the bobbing balloon of his mind and reel it back in. “What is this?” he asked.

“Do you not see? One for you. One for me. You may take either the girl or the boy. In truth, I am not particular.”

“What in God’s name are you proposing?”

The marquess chuckled. “Nothing we do here tonight is in God’s name. I presume you read the book I gave you? The ritual of immortality requires the sacrifice of a virgin.”

Wilde’s face turned to stone. “What? You mean the stick? The leather strap?”

“A garrote.” DeVayne’s face loomed close. Warm, carnivore’s breath washed Wilde’s cheek. “You will find strangulation far more intimate than sex. To stare into the eyes of your sacrifice and watch the soul slip from its fleshy prison gives you not just immortality, but eternal youth. I have read Dorian Gray a hundred times. Is that not your deepest desire? Eternal life? Beauty that time cannot wither? But while you can only write about it, I can manifest it.”

Wilde’s tongue was thick and clumsy in his mouth as he struggled to speak. Suddenly his intoxication was a leaden blanket he wished to shake free of. “B-but these are innocent children!”

“Yes, quite innocent. Guaranteed virgins. The boy cost me five pounds. The girl was ten pounds.” DeVayne giggled. “I think the family thought I was purchasing her for a brothel, hence the higher price. Fortunately, there are many parts of London where life is a commodity cheaply purchased.”

“Surely this is all a tasteless joke!”

DeVayne misread the look of horror on Wilde’s face. “Do you doubt me? Do you doubt my abilities?” He reached in the pocket of his robe and drew out a small pistol: a two-shot derringer with an up-and-over barrel. He pointed the gun at the Irishman’s chest and for a terrible moment Wilde thought he was about to die. But then the marquess flipped the gun in his hand and extended it, grip-first to Wilde, who accepted it numbly. The marquess seized the barrel and drew the muzzle to his own chest.

“Put a bullet through my heart and I shall resurrect myself before your very eyes. Do it, Oscar. Shoot.”

Wilde’s finger trembled on the trigger. For a giddying moment he knew that, in that instant, he was entirely capable of murder. That nothing would give him greater pleasure than to end the life of Rufus DeVayne.

“Go on.” A mad smile quivered upon the marquess’s lips. “I can see from your eyes that you lust to kill me. Do it! I have heard you say that you can resist everything except temptation. Why begin an unpleasant habit now, when you stand upon the threshold of immortality?”

Wilde dithered. “I imagine the pistol is a stage prop. Or loaded with blanks.”

DeVayne shook his head. “Oh no. It is as real as I.”

The Irishman was seized by a sudden resolve. “Then we will see if your imagined immortality can withstand a real bullet.” DeVayne’s smile buckled as Wilde’s finger tensed on the trigger. But at the last second, he whipped the pistol aside and pointed the muzzle at one of the plump bed pillows. The gun fired with an ear-ringing BANG and the pillow exploded. Feathers and white down floated down from the ceiling, settling on DeVayne’s fiery hair and shoulders.

“Never doubt me, Oscar. Never doubt—”

Gripped by a mad impulse, Wilde lunged forward and gave the slighter man a vicious shove. The marquess reeled backward several staggering steps and sat down hard upon the floor. Seizing the moment, Wilde grabbed the boy by the arm and tugged him off the bed. DeVayne stumbled to his feet and stood wavering, held at bay by the derringer leveled at his chest. He watched, powerless, as the Irish wit scooped the little girl from the bed and tossed her upon his shoulder.

“I am leaving now. And taking the children with me.”

“You’re being very rude, Oscar. Are you trying to make me cross?”

“You must excuse me, Marquess, but I find that this room reeks of excrement, and I do not think it is from something I’ve trodden in.”

“Mister Wilde, you have spoiled my evening. However shall I redress this insult?”

“I suggest a strongly worded letter to The Times. I find them most efficacious.”

And with that final riposte, Wilde turned and fled the room, dragging the boy behind. The rush of adrenaline had momentarily burned off the fog swirling in his mind, but his bloodstream was still awash with narcotics and he struggled to navigate the labyrinthine hallways. Finally reaching the grand staircase, he stumbled down it several times only to find himself back at the top of the landing. On the third attempt, as he rested on the middle landing, he accosted someone coming up the stairs. The man wore a pair of fine boots and a shirt, but had carelessly misplaced his trousers somewhere. A Venetian mask concealed his features but could not hide a fine head of blond hair, tightly curled. Although he seemed familiar, the man was bleeding light trails and strangely colored sounds, which made further identification impossible.

“Excuse me,” Wilde said, addressing the stranger. “I am attempting to descend this staircase, but it appears to go up in either direction. Would you be so kind as to point the way down?”

The man gestured and stepped aside and Wilde followed his point and finally tripped off the stairs onto the ground floor. He noticed that he still held the derringer in one hand and, anxious to be rid of it, deposited it upon the silver tray of a passing servant. As he dragged the children past the open door to the great hall, he could not help but glance inside. The bacchants still writhed in the pit, and their sweating bodies, in the gleam of firelight, resembled a scene from The Inferno.

At last he reached the entrance hall, where the living golden statues had abandoned their posts and were trying to shoo the panicking herd of sheep out of doors. He pressed through their baaing mass, and was relieved to finally stumble down the marble steps into the night. The shock of cold November air scourging his lungs revived him somewhat, although as he hurried to his carriage, a pair of long-necked giraffes lollopped across the circular drive. Wilde could not be sure if they were real or a vestige of the volatile chemicals roiling in his brain. When he reached his four-wheeler, Gibson stirred inside the carriage, tossing aside the heavy blanket he had wrapped himself in. “Mister Wilde? What? Why do you have those children?”

“The evening began as an indulgence and quickly devolved into a rescue,” Wilde explained as he flung open the carriage door and loaded the children inside. “Quickly, Gibson, fetch a blanket to wrap these babes before they catch their death.”

“Are we going back to your club, sir?”

“No,” the Irishman said, hauling himself inside the carriage and collapsing onto the seat cushion. “We must find an orphanage to provide a safe haven for these waifs, and then I want to go home. To Tite Street. I have been a neglectful father of late and wish only to reside in the bosom of my family. After this evening I am done forever with drinking and carousing.”

The children were bundled under a pile of blankets and promptly fell asleep. Soon the carriage was rattling back up the drive, away from the house. As the Irishman looked out the window, a pack of something with sharp claws and razor teeth gazed back from the darkness with luminous eyes. He suppressed a shudder and slipped a hip flask from his pocket.

Well, perhaps just the carousing for now, Wilde thought to himself as he quaffed a mouthful of brandy.