The List Of Seven

THE LIST OF SEVEN

Mark Frost

chapter one AN ENVELOPE

HE ENVELOPE WAS VELLUM, CREAM. FlNE STRIATIONS, CRISP,

no watermarks. Expensive. Scuffed at the corners, it had attracted grime as it was slid under the door, silently. The Doctor did not hear it, and his ears were keen, sharp as a crone's knees, like all his senses.

He was in the front room, had been throughout the evening, feeding the fire, absorbed in an obscure text. Forty-five minutes earlier, he had glanced up as the Petrovitch woman ascended the stairs, the scrabbly scuttle of her dachshund's claws dragging her back to an evening of heart-heavy sighs amid the torpid musk of stewed red cabbage. The Doctor watched their spidery shadows flit by, dancing off the glazed floorboards under the door. There had been no envelope.

He vaguely remembered wishing there were an easier way to examine his timepiece than extracting it from his waistcoat and cracking it open. That was why, when he spent an evening in, he set it open, on his reading table. Time, or rather the elimination of its senseless squandering, obsessed him. And he had looked at his watch when the rat dog and its scrawny, melancholic Russian mistress shuffled by: quarter past nine.

The text drew him back. Isis Unveiled. Surely this Blavatsky woman was mad: another Russian, like poor Petrovitch with her plum wine. When you uprooted these Czarists and tried to replant them in English soil, was lunacy some inevitable consequence? Coincidence, he reasoned; one heartsick spinster and a megalomaniacal, cigar-chomping Transcendentalist did not constitute a trend.

He turned to study the photograph of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the frontispiece: the preternatural stillness, that

clear, penetrating gaze. Most faces instinctively shrank from the insectoid jumble of the camera. She reached out and swallowed it whole. What was he to make of this curious tome? his Unveiled. Eight volumes to date, more threatened, all in excess of five hundred pages—and this only one-quarter of the woman's oeuvre—a work purporting to assimilate and eclipse, with a ringing absence of irony, every known spiritual, philosophic, and scientific system of thought: in other words, a revisionist theory of all creation.

Although, according to the biographical passage under her picture, HPB had spent the better part of her fifty-odd years trotting the globe communing with ;this or that occultist ashram, she coyly attributed the book's genesis to divine inspiration, courtesy of a steady roster of Ascended Masters materializing before her like Hamlet's Ghost, claiming that occasionally one of these Holy of Holies stepped inside her head and assumed the reins: automatic writing, she called it. True, the book possessed two distinctly different styles—he hesitated to term them "voices"—but as to content, the thing was a flea market of mumbo jumbo: lost continents, cosmic rays, root races, evil cabals of black magicians. To be fair, he had in fact employed similar notions in his own writing, but that was fiction, for God's sake, and she was offering this as

theology.

With that debate agitating his mind, he looked up and spied the envelope. Had it just been set there? Had some faint beneath-conscious perception registered as it slipped over the jamb and pulled his eyes to it? He remembered hearing nothing—no approach, no crack of bended knee, no glove on wood or paper, no one receding—and those timeworn stairs announced a visitor as reliably as a brass fanfare. Had immersion in Blavatsky so narrowed his senses? Not likely. Even in the surgeon's theater, with the dying, strapped down, spurting fluids, shrieking in his face, he picked up sounds around him like a restive cat.

Nevertheless, the envelope was there. Could have been there for ... ten o'clock now ... a good forty-five minutes. Or perhaps its courier had only just arrived and remained still standing just outside his door.

The Doctor listened for signs of life, aware of his heart accelerating and the acrid, irrational taste of fear. He was no

stranger to it. He silently drew from the umbrella stand his stoutest walking stick, flipped it deftly in his hand, and with its gnarled, blackened knob poised, opened the door.

What he saw, or didn't see, in the corridor's flickering gaslight would be a subject of internal contention for some time to come: Accompanied by a sharp suck of air as the door swung inward, an enveloping shadow fell away from that hall with the speed of a magician's black silk handkerchief snatched off an ivory tablecloth. Or so in that moment it seemed.

The corridor was empty. He registered no sensory impression of any person having just been present. Nearby he heard the whine of an ill-tuned violin; more distantly, an infant's colicky howl, hooves on cobblestone.

Blavatsky must be having her way with me, he thought; that's what one gets for reading her after dark. "I am suggestible," he muttered, as he withdrew to his rooms, locked the door, replaced the shillelagh, and turned his attention to the matter in hand.

The envelope was square. No writing on it. He held it to the light; the bond was thick, unyielding any silhouette. It looked perfectly ordinary.

Reaching into his Gladstone, he retrieved a sharp lancet and, with the surgical exactness that was his custom in all routine procedures, pierced and slit the crown. A single sheet of vellum, thinner stock than the envelope but matched, slipped smoothly into his hand. No mark or monogram adorned it, but this was clearly a gentleman's—or gentlewoman's—correspondence. Folded once, a clean crease, he opened it and read:

Sir:

Your presence is required in a matter of utmost urgency pertaining to the fraudulent public practice of the spiritualist arts. I am told of your sympathy to the victims of just such adventurers as these. Your aid is indispensable to one who may not be named here. As a man of God and science, I beseech your timely response. An innocent's life hangs in the balance. Tomorrow night. 8:00. 13 Cheshire Street.

Godspeed

First of all, the writing: block-printed, clean, and precise, an educated hand. Words embossed deeply in the hearty parchment, the pen gripped tightly, the hand pressed firmly; although not scripted in haste, the urgency was genuine. Written within the hour.

This was not the first such entreaty he had received. The Doctor's campaign to expose fraudulent mediums and their loathsome ilk was well known to certain grateful members of London society. He was not a public man and sought no public recognition, taking measures to avoid such exposure entirely, but word of his work occasionally found its way to those in need. Not the first such appeal, no, but certainly the most dire.

The paper carried no scent or perfume. No identifiable flourishes. The hand was as studiously sexless as the stationery. Anonymity this complete was practiced.

A woman, he concluded: monied, learned, vulnerable to scandal. Married or related to someone of note or station. A dabbler in the shallows of the "spiritual arts." That often described those who have recently suffered, or fear they are on the verge of suffering, a profound loss.

An innocent. A spouse or child. Hers.

The address given was in the East End, near Bethnal Green. A mean spot: no place for a highborn woman to venture alone. For a man largely unfettered by doubt amid even the worst uncertainty, there would be none regarding his response.

Before delving back into Blavatsky, Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle made a mental note to clean and load his revolver.

It was Christmas Day, 1884.

The flat where Doyle lived and worked occupied the second floor of an aging building in a working-class neighborhood of London. These were humble quarters, a sitting room and a cramped sleeping chamber, inhabited by a modest man of limited means and a steady, confident manner. By nature, and now in practice, a healer, Master of Surgery these three years, a young man approaching his twenty-sixth year and the cusp of entry into that unspoken fraternity whose members quietly carry on despite conscious awareness of their own mortality.

His physician's faith in the infallibility of science was ingrained but brittle and laced with a spiderwork of faults. Although he had fallen from the Catholic Church a decade before, there persisted in Doyle a hunger for belief; as he saw it, it now remained the exclusive province of science to empirically establish the existence of the human soul. He fully expected science would eventually lead him to the higher reaches of spiritual discovery, and yet coexisting with this rock-ribbed certainty was a wild, weightless yearning for abandon, a ripping away of reality's masking complaisance to incite a merging with the mystic, a death in life leading to greater life. This longing prowled his mind like a wraith. He had never spoken of it, not once, to anyone.

To appease that desire for surrender, he read Blavatsky and Emanuel Swedenborg and a host of other long-winded mystics, scouring obscure bookshops in search of rational proof he could quantify, confirmation he could hold in his hands. He attended meetings of the London Spiritualist Alliance. He sought out mediums and seers and psychics, conducted his own parlor seances, visited houses where the dead reportedly did not rest. In every instance, Doyle brought to bear his three cardinal principles—observation, precision, and deduction; these were the cornerstones upon which he had constructed his sense of self—and he recorded his findings clinically, privately, without conclusions, preamble to some larger work whose shape would reveal itself to him only in time.

As his studies deepened, the wrestling within him between science and spirit, these two irreconcilable polarities, grew increasingly clangorous and divisive. He pressed on nonetheless. He knew too well what could happen to men who surrendered that fight: To one side stood the self-appointed pillars of morality, manning the ramparts of Church and State, sworn enemies of change, dead inside but lacking the good sense to lie down; at the other extreme lay a host of wretches chained to asylum walls, wearing their own filth, eyes bum-ing with ecstasy as they communed with an illusory perfection. He drew no judgmental distinction between these extremes: He knew that the path of human perfectibility—the path he aspired to walk—lay exactly on the midpoint between them. It remained his hope that if science was unable to lead

him down that middle path, perhaps he could help science find its footing there.

This determination generated two unexpected results: First, when in this spirit of investigation he chanced upon some fraud or advantage taken of the weak of mind or heart by scoundrels for deceitful gain, he would without hesitation unmask the perpetrators. Low and foul characters, these swindlers generally sprang from the criminal class and understood only the idiom of violence: hard words, tables overturned, physical threats promised and delivered. At the urging of a Scotland Yard confidant, Doyle had recently begun to carry the revolver after the exposure of a counterfeit Gypsy provoked a dagger attack that nearly provided him with firsthand experience of the Great Beyond.

The second: Living with these contradictory impulses—the desire for faith; the need to prove faith genuine before embracing it—left Doyle with the simple human need to compose his unresolved reactions. He found the ideal forum in writing works of fiction, reducing his shapeless experience of this murky netherworld into straightforward narrative lines: stories of mythic planes, dread and eldritch deeds committed by plotters of evil intent, contested by men from the world of light and knowledge—not unlike himself—who ventured knowingly and for the most part recklessly into the darkness.

In service to that vision, during the previous years Doyle produced four manuscripts. His first three efforts had been dutifully submitted to a succession of publishers, where they were uniformly rejected and returned, then consigned to the depths of a wicker footlocker he'd brought back from the South Seas. He was still awaiting responses to his most recent composition—a rousing adventure story entitled "The Dark Brotherhood"—which he considered his most accomplished work for a number of reasons, not the least of which being his fervent desire to lift himself out of shabby-genteel poverty.

As to his physical appearance, suffice it to say that Doyle was man enough for the tasks he set himself, sturdy, athletic, without vanity but not above a conditioned twinge of shame if he encountered social betters while wearing cuff or collar frayed by his financial limits.

He had seen enough of vice to be sympathetic to the cap-

tives of its hooks and snares without ever having been entangled there himself. He was not boastful and by inclination held greater stock in listening than speaking. Of human nature, he hoped for basic decencies, and met its inevitable disappointments without rancor or surprise.

The fairer sex aroused in him a natural and healthy interest but also on occasion tapped a vein of vulnerability, a pocket of frailty and indecision in an otherwise solid granite facing. This tendency had never offered more of a predicament than the standard vexations and anxieties posed to any younger man in the pursuit of love. As he was about to discover, it would soon present far graver consequences.

chapter two 13 CHESHIRE STREET

A hirteen Cheshire Street stood packed in the center of a residential shanty row as flimsy as playing cards. Four steps led to a doorway with a pronounced starboard lean. The building could not yet be fairly considered a hovel, but that day was not far off. It appeared to possess no inherently sinister qualities. It appeared to possess no quality whatsoever.

Doyle looked on from across the street. He had arrived an hour earlier than requested by the letter. Light was in scarce supply, foot and street traffic scant. He kept to the shadows and waited, certain his presence had not been detected, watching the house through a small optic magnifier.

A pale aurora of gaslight limned the curtains of the forward parlor. Twice during his first quarter-hour, shadows pressed between the light and lace. Once the lace moved, a hand appeared, a dark male face dimly seen studied the street below, then withdrew.

At 7:20 a squat figure covered in an accretion of dark, tattered shawls ambled down the street, climbed the stairs, and methodically knocked three times, paused, then rapped a fourth. Five feet tall, well over fourteen stone, head and face obscured against the cold. High-button shoes. A woman. Doyle raised the magnifier to his eye; the shoes were new. The door opened, and the figure entered. Doyle saw neither the interior hall nor the figure's admitter.

Five minutes later, a young boy sprinted into view, straight to the door, where he repeated the same knock. Shabbily dressed, an urchin, carrying a bulky, irregular bundle wrapped in newspaper, bound by twine. Before Doyle could focus the glass clearly on the bundle, the boy entered.

Between 7:40 and 7:50, two couples arrived, the first on foot, working class, the woman sallow, heavily with child, the man thick, built for manual labor, uncomfortable in what Doyle reasoned was his best set of clothes. They also employed the signal knock. Through the glass, he watched the man hectoring the woman as they waited, her eyes downcast, defeated, a habitual state. He couldn't quite make out what the man was saying; an attempt to read his lips yielded the words Dennis and blagglord. Blagglord? They entered; the door closed.

The second couple came by carriage. Not a hansom, a private vehicle, dark leathers, steel-span wheels, the horse a handsome chestnut. Judging from the gelding's heavy lather, they had traveled at high speed from somewhere forty-five minutes to an hour away. Heading west, that placed them in Kensington, with Regent's Park the northern extreme.

The coachman dismounted and opened the door. His dress and deferential manner did not contradict what he appeared to be, a career servant, fifty, muscled, and dour. A young man alighted first, slender and pallid, bearing the tremulous conceit of a privileged university student—as broad cultural types went, not an inordinate favorite of Doyle's. Wearing an elaborate cravat, dickey, and beaver hat, he'd either come straight from a social function or considerably overestimated the formality of his destination. Curtly brushing the coachman aside, he lent a hand to the coach's second passenger as she descended.

She was in black, as tall as the young man, willowy and supple, swaying in emotional currents that seemed considerable. Bonnet and shawl framed a pale oval face; a familial resemblance to the younger man—his sister, Doyle chanced, two or three years his senior—but the glimpse of her features was brief as the young man took her arm and ushered her quickly to the door. He knocked straightforwardly, the signal apparently unknown to them. As they waited, the young man attempted to press her on some persistent point—perhaps imprecations against their rough surroundings; it appeared he had accompanied her under protest—but despite her apparent frailty, a steadiness in the set of her eyes indicated her will was the stronger.

The woman glanced anxiously about the street. This is the author of the note, and she is looking for me, Doyle realized.

He was on the verge of starting across to them when the door opened, and the house swallowed them up.

Shadows played against the parlor curtains. Employing the glass, Doyle saw the woman greeted by the man whose dark face he had spied earlier at the window, accompanied by the pregnant woman; she took the brother's hat, the woman's shawl. The dark man gestured modestly, indicating they should adjourn to an inner room, and with the woman leading the way, they moved from sight.

She is not acting out of bereavement, concluded Doyle. Grief collapses inwardly. What's propelling this woman forward is fear. And if 13 Cheshire was a. snare, she had walked eagerly into its jaws.

Pocketing the glass and reassuringly fingering his revolver, Doyle abandoned his post and crossed the street toward the coachman, who was leaning diffidently against his cab, lighting a pipe.

"Pardon me, friend," said Doyle, putting on an affable, half-pixilated smile. "This wouldn't be where they're having on that spiritualist thingamajig, now would it? I was told Thirteen Cheshire."

"Wouldn't know about that, sir." Flat, nothing. Most likely the truth.

"But wasn't that Lady . . . Lady Whatzis and her brother ... well, of course, you're their driver, aren't you? Sid, isn't it?"

"Tim, sir."

"Tim, right. You fetched my wife and me from the station when we visited out to the country that weekend."

The man peered uncomfortably askance at Doyle, feeling a social obligation to harmonize. "Out to Topping, then."

"That's right, out to Topping, when they had everyone out for ..."

"For the opera."

"Right-o, the opera ... Last summer, wasn't it? Now be honest, Tim, you don't remember me, do you?"

"Summers Lady Nicholson's got people out all the time," Tim offered as apology. '"Specially that opera crowd."

"Now I'm trying to recall: Was her brother there that weekend, or was he off at Oxford?"

"Cambridge. No, he was there, I think, sir."

"Of course, it's coming back now—I've only been out to Topping just the one time." That's enough, thought Doyle, I'm pressing my luck as it is. "Fond of the opera, are you, Tim?"

"Me, sir? Not my cuppa. The track, more like."

"Good man." A glance at the watch. "Look, it's nearly eight, I'd best get inside. Cheers. Keep warm."

"Thank you, sir," said Tim, grateful for the consideration or perhaps more so for Doyle's departure.

Doyle took the steps. Lady Caroline Nicholson—the full name leapt immediately to mind. Husband's father in government. Hereditary peerage, Topping their ancestral manse, somewhere in Sussex.

Which knock to use? The covert: three raps, a pause, then a fourth. Get someone to the door, then sort it out. He raised the cudgel end of his walking stick, but before he made contact, the door swung open. He couldn't recall hearing the latch disengage. Probably not closed properly; the cant of the doorframe, a gust of wind.

He entered. The center hall was dark, bereft, bare boards underfoot that never knew a rug. Closed doors to the left, right, and straight ahead. Stairs straining upward like bad teeth. The boards protested underfoot with every cautious step. After three such steps, the open door behind him swung shut. This time he distinctly heard the latch engage. Doyle reassured himself by recalling a gust of wind that preceded the closing of the door, of sufficient force to initiate the securing of the latch.

Except that the single candle on the table, its sallow flame now alone between Doyle and total darkness, had not flinched or faltered in its ovoid capsule. Doyle passed his hand over the flame; it danced agreeably, then he noticed that beside the candlestick on the table was a glass bowl, ensnaring stark ebon highlights from the flickering flame.

The bowl's mouth spanned the breadth of both his hands. The glass was dense, smoky, richly textured with a pattern. This filigree depicts a scene, Doyle realized as he traced a pair of conical horns sprouting from an upright animal's head. His eye drifted to a dark mass of something wet and charry in the bowl; flaked and blackened, it gave off a disagreeably ripe tang. Fighting an instinctive wave of revulsion, he was

about to insert an exploratory finger into the fluid when with a moist glug something shifted beneath its surface, something not inert. The bowl began to vibrate, its edges rimming the table, giving off a high glassine hum. Right, well, we can come back to this, he thought, backing away.

Low voices from behind the door directly ahead of him, soft, rhythmic, almost musical, consonant with the vibration, perhaps responsible for it. Not a song: more like a chant, the words indecipherable—

The door to the right opened. The boy he'd seen before stood there, looking up at him without surprise.

"I'm here for the seance," Doyle said.

The boy's brow furrowed, scrutinizing, enigmatic. Older than originally estimated, small for his age. Quite a bit older. Grime smudging his face, a mobcap pulled low over the ears, but dirt and cap not entirely obscuring wrinkles at the brows and corners. Quite a mass of wrinkles. And there was nothing of the child in those unnerving eyes.

"Lady Nicholson is expecting me," Doyle added authoritatively.

Calculation occurred behind the boy's look, and his eyes suddenly went alarmingly vacant, as in vacated. Doyle waited a long ten seconds, half expecting the boy to keel over—a petit mal seizure perhaps—about to reach out to him when his presence snapped crisply back into place. He opened the door and bowed stiffly, waving Doyle through. An epileptic, clearly much abused, growth stunted by malnutrition, perhaps a mute. East End streets play host to legions of these lost ones, Doyle allowed himself unsen-timentally. Bought and sold for less than the coins in my pocket.

Doyle moved past the boy into the parlor, the chanting voices closer now, issuing from behind closed sliding doors directly ahead. The door snicked shut behind him, the boy gone. Doyle treaded softly to the doors, and as he listened, the voices within went silent, leaving only the sibilant hiss of the gas jets.

The doors slid open. The boy stood on the other side now, waving him forward. Behind him, across a surprisingly commodious room, the seance was already in progress.

The modern Spiritualist Movement began with an act of fraud. On March 31, 1848, mysterious rapping sounds were heard in the home of the Foxes, an ordinary Hydesville, New York, family. The sounds continued to manifest for months whenever their two adolescent daughters gathered in the same room. In the following years, the Fox sisters capitalized the resultant national hysteria into a thriving cottage industry: books, public seances, lecture tours, hobnobbing with celebrated faces of the day. It wasn't until the end of her life that Margaret Fox confessed the enterprise had been nothing more than an increasingly sophisticated series of parlor tricks, by which time it was far too late to still a vox populi starved for authentic experience of the supernormal: Science's assertion of primacy over the rusting tenets of Christian worship had created a seedbed that Spiritualism took root in like wild nightshade.

The Movement's stated objective: Confirm the existence of realms of being beyond the physical, by direct communication with the spirit world through mediums—also known as sensitives—individuals attuned to the higher frequencies of noncorporeal life. Having discovered and developed this ability, the medium invariably struck up a "relationship" with a spirit guide, who served as interlocutor of a cosmic lost and found: Since most of the medium's supplicants were survivors of some recent death, they aspired to little more than reassurance that their dearly departed had arrived intact on the far side of the Styx. It was the spirit guide's task to authenticate the contact by retrieving proof from Aunt Minnie or Brother Bill, usually in the form of some hermetically private anecdote shared exclusively by both bereaved and lamented.

In response to these simple inquiries, information flowed from the spirit through rapping, a series of knocks on tables. More accomplished mediums entered a trance during which the spirit guide "borrowed" the host's vocal cords, assuming the voice of the loved one with startling accuracy. A few manifested an infinitely rarer talent: producing large volumes of milky, malleable vapor from their skin, mouth, or nose, a substance with all the appearance but none of the properties of smoke: It did not disperse or react to atmospheric conditions, behaving rather as a three-dimensional tabula rasa able to assume the shape of any idea or entity. It was one thing to

hear Aunt Minnie knock on the table, quite another to see her take shape before one's eyes in a cloud of clotted, autonomous fog. This strange stuff was called ectoplasm. It was photographed on countless occasions. No adequate debunking for it emerged.

Beyond the hordes of the grieving and confused, two other, smaller subsets consistently sought out the services of the mediumistically inclined. Motivated by similar impulses— albeit with diametrically opposed ends in mind—they divided along an obvious line of demarcation; seekers of light and worshipers of darkness. Doyle, for example, was driven by a conviction that if one could pierce the appropriate sphere of knowledge, the eternal mysteries of health and disease would fall within our reach. He researched the exhaustively documented case of one Andrew Jackson Davis, an illiterate American born in 1826, who while still an adolescent discovered an ability to diagnose illness through the use of his spirit eyes, perceiving the human body as transparent and the now visible organs as centers of light and color, the hues and gradations of which corresponded to their well-being or lack thereof. In this talent, thought Doyle, one could glimpse the once and future genius of medicine.

Worshipers of darkness, on the other hand, were striving to unlock the secrets of the ages for their own exclusive benefit, as in: Imagine the pioneers of electromagnetism deciding to keep that discovery to themselves. Regrettably, as Doyle was about to discover, this group was considerably more unified than their opposite number, and they had traveled a good deal closer to achieving their objective.

On this same night, at that same moment, less than a mile from the events about to unfold at 13 Cheshire, a poor and wretched streetwalker stumbled out of a pub in Mitre Square. Boxing Day had been a bust; what few coins she'd collected for services rendered had been quickly spent attempting to quench her unquenchable thirst.

Her livelihood depended on the urgency induced by cheap-jack gin in unfortunates like herself for the meager dollop of human comfort afforded by three minutes of intercourse in alleyways redolent of rubbish and raw sewage. Her looks were

long gone. She was indistinguishable from the countless others in her trade teeming through London's lowlife.

Her life began in some rural Arcadia where she was once her parents' joy, the prettiest girl in the village. Did her eyes sparkle, her skin aglow with health, when she opened her legs to the passing swain who planted the glamour of the city in her head? Had she arrived with hope intact? Did her sweet dreams of happiness die slowly as the liquor devoured her cells, or did a single catastrophic heartbreak snap her will like a clay pipe?

Cold bit through her decomposing coat. She thought dimly of families glimpsed through frosted windows eating Christmas dinner. It could have been an actual memory or a woodcut on a half-forgotten greeting card. The image fell away, replaced by thoughts of the squalid room across the river that she shared with three other women. The idea of sleep and the paltry comforts of that room animated her; her legs lurched numbly forward, and in that diminished state she decided that once across the river she would use the shortcut to Aldgate that crossed the abandoned lot near Commercial Street.

chapter three A TRUE FACE

LADY Nicholson spotted Doyle first, framed in the open doorway. He saw recognition, a rapidly rising blush of relief, instantly dampened to ward off discovery. A nimble mind, he concluded, slightly preceded by the thought, Here is the most beautiful face I have ever seen.

The table was round, covered in pale linen, in the center of the shadowy room. Light pooled from two candelabra flanking the table east and west, walls falling away into darkness. The cloying musk of patchouli hung heavily in the air, along with a dry crack of static electricity. As his pupils dilated, against a backdrop of dense brocaded tapestries suspended in the air, Doyle could make out six figures seated at the table, holding hands; to Lady Nicholson's right was her brother, the pregnant serving girl to his right hand, then the man Doyle identified as her husband, to his right the dark man from the window, and finally the medium, whose right hand held Lady Nicholson's left. Mediums borrowed most of their theatrics direct from the standard liturgical repertoire: smoke, gloom, and grave, incomprehensible gibberish. This assembly had produced the chanting he'd heard, an incantation of call and response initiated by the medium, ritualistic prologue to create the proper atmosphere of dread and ceremony.

The medium's eyes were closed, her head inclined back to the ceiling, exposing the fleshy wattles of her throat: the short, round woman in the new shoes, her accumulation of shawls discarded. Over the years, Doyle had catalogued the city's many practitioners, genuine article and charlatan alike: This one was unknown to him. She wore black, a wool weave, neither cheap nor extravagant, with a white bib collar, sleeves bulging with flesh buttoned to her wrists. Her face was bloodless and as studded with moles as cloves in an Easter ham. The woman's solar plexus palpitated in a violent cycle of respiration. She was on the threshold of entering, or effectively simulating, trance.

Lady Nicholson's color was high, her knuckles white, caught up in the performance, flinching in response to the progressive stranglehold applied by the medium's hand. Her brother's frequent, solicitous looks to her prevented his wholesale purchase of the game, as did, Doyle suspected, his habitually sardonic disposition. The way the pregnant woman's head postured upward signaled the traditional abandon of the blindly devout. Seen in profile, his jaw muscles working furiously, her husband's narrowed gaze fixed on the medium—agitation or anger?

The Dark Man saw Doyle next. His eyes pierced the air between them. Obsidian black, set like jeweled stones in deep round holes. Sallow cheeks the color of polished teak, pitted with pocks down to a sleek jaw and chin. Lips like razors. The expression in the eyes was fervent but unreadable. He released the hand of the man to his left and extended it toward Doyle, fingers paddled together, thumb extended.

"Join us." The Dark Man appeared to whisper, but the voice carried.

The man's gaze fell from Doyle to the boy, who turned to meet it obediently. A command passed between them. The boy reached up and grasped Doyle's hand: The fingers felt raspy and unpleasant. As Doyle let the boy draw him forward into the room, a discordant current spiked through the back of his neck and prompted the phrase You're someplace else now.

The boy led him to an empty chair between the two men. Lady Nicholson's brother looked up at him with slack puzzlement, as if his appearance represented one too many elements to process cogently.

As he accepted the Dark Man's offered hand with his right and settled into the waiting chair, the man to his left seized Doyle's free hand and clenched tight. When Doyle turned to Lady Nicholson, seated directly across from him, he encountered the ardent gaze of a woman who had just had a lifetime's polite, social dissembling torn away by the chamber's tonic of wonder and terror, awakening to find herself brazenly alive. That vitality illuminated her extraordinary beauty. Her

aquamarine eyes danced kaleidoscopically, and high color brushed her pale cheeks. Doyle summoned just enough wherewithal through his bedazzlement to notice she was wearing makeup. She mouthed the words Thank you. Doyle felt an involuntary thump and a skip in his chest: My heart, he observed with interest.

The intrusive jolt of an alien voice broke the connection.

"We have strangers here tonight."

It was a man's voice, deep-chested, round, and burnished as rocks in the bed of a cold stream, veined with a seductive, graveled tremolo.

"All are welcome." ,

Doyle turned to the medium. The woman's eyes were open, and the voice was issuing from her throat. Since the last time he'd glanced at her, it appeared to Doyle that the woman's facial structure had perceptibly changed shape, from pie-shaped to a cast more ruddy, skeletal, and square. Eyes gleaming with a reptilian glint, her mouth slithered into the salacious grin of a sensualist.

Remarkable: In his studies, Doyle could recall only two accounts of this phenomenon observed in mediums while in trance—physiological transmogrification—and had never before encountered it in situ.

The medium's lidded gaze wandered leisurely around the table, avoiding Doyle, precipitating tremors he could feel coursing through the hand of the man to his left. The medium engaged the brother until he was constrained to turn away like a shamed dog. Then the eyes settled on his sister.

"You ... seek my guidance."

Lady Nicholson's lips trembled. Doyle was uncertain she'd be able to summon a reply, when the Dark Man beside him spoke first.

"We all, humbly, seek your guidance and wish to extend our gratitude for this evening's visitation." His voice had a hiss in it, damage to a vocal cord. The accent was foreign— Mediterranean perhaps—Doyle couldn't yet pinpoint it precisely.

So this man was amanuensis, the medium's liaison to the paying customer, usually the brains behind the operation. He had clearly cultivated the fervid conviction of the true believer that served as his own best advertising. Fraud began

here; an opportunistic salesman exploiting what in many instances were mediums with some measurable facility and a childish incomprehension of the workaday world's mercantile realities. As a man in Gloucester had put it to him, describing the sensitive abilities of his own otherwise dim-witted son, "When they give you a window into another world, I warrant you forfeit a few bricks."

This was the team: medium, handler, all-purpose urchin, serving woman with child for emotional credibility, burly husband providing muscle, others unseen perhaps standing by. Clearly, Lady Nicholson was their target. Not an altogether unwitting one—she had sent Doyle the precautionary note—but one whose distress was sufficiently compelling to outweigh her misgivings. It remained to be seen how they would react to Doyle's unexpected arrival—but then, so far, unexpected didn't seem to particularly apply.

"We are all beings of light and spirit, both on this side and on your physical plane. Life is life, life is all one, life is all creation. We honor the life and light in you as you would do in us. We are all one on this side, and we wish you on your side harmony, blessing, and peace everlasting." This came from the medium in a burst, with the feel of a standard, practiced preamble, before she turned to the Dark Man and nodded politely, his cue to formally begin the proceedings.

"Spirit welcomes you. Spirit is aware of your distress and wishes to help in any way it can. You may address Spirit directly," the Dark Man said to Lady Nicholson.

Wrestling with a sudden, profound uncertainty, Lady Nicholson did not answer, as if to voice the first question were an admission that effectively laid waste to a lifetime's accumulation of inherited beliefs.

"We can go, we could go," her brother leaned in to offer.

"Begin with your son," said the medium.

She looked up, startled and instantly focused.

"You've come to ask me of your son."

Tears pooled quickly in her eyes. "Oh my God."

"What would you ask of Spirit?" The medium went through the motions of smiling, but the effect appeared simulated.

"How did you know?" Tears ran down her cheeks.

"Has your son crossed over?" The smile persisted.

She shook her head, uncomprehending.

"Has there been a death?" asked the Dark Man.

"I'm not sure. That is, we don't know...." She faltered again.

"The thing is, he's disappeared. Four days now. He's only three years old," the brother offered.

"His name is William," the medium said without hesitation. It would have been the Dark Man's job to find that out.

"Willie." Her voice brimmed with emotion; she was taking the hook.

Doyle throughout glanced surreptitiously around the room, at the ceiling, behind the tapestries, searching for suspended wires, projection devices. Nothing so far.

"You see, we've already been to the police. It's no good—"

"We don't know if he's dead or alive!" Her pent-up grief exploded. "For God's sake, if you know so much, then you know why I'm here." For a brief moment, her eyes found Doyle's and felt his sympathy. "Please. Please, tell me. I shall go mad."

The medium's smile lapsed. She nodded gravely. "One moment," she said. Her eyes closed; her head angled back again. The circle of hands remained unbroken. The silence that followed was thick and urgent.

A gasp broke from the pregnant girl. She was staring at a spot some six feet above the table where a perfect sphere of white mist was materializing, spinning like a globe on a central pivot. Expanding, fleecy extensions spun out from its core, breaking the circle down into a flat, square plane. By varying their density, the shards spread out and began purposefully assuming the dimensions of a random topography, foothills, rifts, peninsulas, all within the invisible confines of borders as rigid as a gilded frame.

A map? The shifting slowed, and the features crystallized, until with a rush of condensation the true nature of the vision appeared: a work of shadow and light, bleached of color, less precise than a photograph but more animated, suggestive of motion and distantly of sound, as if this scene were being viewed at great remove through some crude, impersonal lens.

In it, a young boy lay curled up at the base of a tree. He wore short pants, a loose tunic, stockings, no shoes. His

hands and feet were tightly bound with rope. The first glance suggested sleep, but closer examination showed the chest heaving, coughing, or sobbing—it was difficult to determine, until the ghostly and unmistakable sound of a child's pathetic, heartsick cries filtered into the chamber.

"God in heaven, it's him, it's him," Lady Nicholson moaned. The sight leveled her, not into despondency but a rapt, febrile alertness.

More details of the unearthly daguerreotype emerged: A small stream ran through the forest bed a few feet from where the boy was lying on a frost-tinged carpet of leaves. The rope that held the boy's wrists extended to a low-lying branch of the adjacent tree. The woods thickened behind him, clustering, evergreens. An object lay on the ground near the boy's feet: small, square, man-made: a can, bearing the letters ... GUI...

"Willie!" she cried.

"Where is he? Where is he?" the brother demanded, his attempt to generate outrage mitigated by dumbstruck astonishment.

Lost inwardly, the medium offered no response.

"Tell us!" the brother demanded, and he meant to speak further, but the air in the room was rent by a shattering, discordant blast of trumpets, an insane trilling, bound by no discernible harmony or rhythm. Doyle felt stunned, assaulted, pinned down by the oppressive weight of the vibrations.

"The horn of Gabriel!" shrieked the man to Doyle's left.

Now something black and odious crept into the edge of the image suspended above them: A shadow felt more than seen, oiled, foul and malignant, gathering mass without seeming to coalesce, the presence insinuated itself into the vision, seeping through the spectral wood, advancing toward the helpless child.

An inescapable conviction that he had witnessed this entity the night before in the hall outside his door left Doyle groping vainly for some rational causation. His mind snouted at him: This means not Death but Annihilation.

The cacophonous nightmare grew deafening. A long brass horn appeared in the air, opposite the picture, bobbing erratically. Now that's their first mistake—Doyle seized purchase

on the thought. Could he detect a telltale flash of filament at the trumpet's bell?

Drawing itself into a hungry spiral around the boy, the phantom sucked the last bit of light from the vision, swallowing the sound of his cries, on the verge of consuming him whole. Lady Nicholson screamed.

Doyle sprang to his feet and yanked his hands free. He picked up his chair and hurled it at the image; it shattered like liquid glass, dispersing and sputtering into emptiness. Its suspending cables severed; the brass trumpet clattered noisily onto the table.

Rolling to avoid the blow he knew was coming, Doyle felt the fist of the man to his left connect sharply below his shoulder blade. In one swift move, Doyle snatched the trumpet from the table and swung it viciously up and around, catching the man square on the side of the face. Blood spurted from a gash as he stumbled and fell to his knees.

"Villains!" Doyle shouted, galvanized. He reached into his pocket for the revolver when a heavy blow landed on the right side of his neck, paralyzing his searching hand and arm. He turned to see the Dark Man lift a leaded truncheon to strike again and raised his left arm to fend it off.

"Fool!" The voice issued from the medium. Grinning maliciously, eyes blazing, she swiftly rose straight up into the air above the table. Distracted, the Dark Man turned to face her, truncheon still raised. Doyle felt the hands of the wounded man grab him roughly from behind.

"You fancy yourself a seeker of truth?" the medium mocked him.

She held out her palms, the skin roiled and rippled with hideous subcutaneous congestion. When she opened her mouth, a flowing volume of gray aqueous vapor billowed forth from both mouth and hands. Suspended in the air, the vapor traced the outline and then filled in the image of a full-length frame mirror. As the surface of the mirror refined itself, the medium's reflection appeared in the spectral glass.

"Then behold my true face."

Out of the void behind her likeness in the mirror floated another form, dim and indistinct, which settled on and then imposed itself over the medium's reflection, pouring into it like water saturating sand, until all that remained was an en-

tirely new visage: a skull-like creature with red, runny, abscessed sockets for eyes, skin gray and in many places gnawed down to the bone, writhing pockets of black stringy hair sprouting from more than the usual places. Independent of the medium, who remained still, merely smiling, the creature looked down at Doyle and opened the spoiled cavity that served as its mouth. Its voice was the one they had been hearing all along, but it now came exclusively from the fiend in the mirror.

"You imagine that you do good. See what your good has wrought."

Two hooded figures moved out from behind the tapestry, moving so swiftly that Doyle had no time to react. One clouted Lady Nicholson's brother across the head with a dimly glimpsed weapon; the wound spouted crimson as he fell away. The other grabbed Lady Nicholson and drew a long, thin blade smoothly across her throat, severing the vessels, arterial blood pumping furiously. The cry in Lady Nicholson's throat died in a drowning rattle as she slumped out of sight behind the table.

"God! No!" Doyle screamed.

A demented cackle from the monster filled the air before the ectoplasmic mirror exploded in a loud report of light.

One of the murderers now drew his sights on Doyle and nimbly jumped up onto the table, poised to leap down and strike at him with the mallet that had splintered the forehead of Lady Nicholson's brother, when Doyle heard something whoosh by his ear: a shape, a black handle bloomed at the throat of the assassin. He stopped on top of the table, dropped his weapon, and groped blindly at his chin; a dagger had pierced the span of his neck, pinning the material of the hood, drawing it down over the eyes. The man staggered, then toppled over.

With a grunt, the accomplice holding Doyle fell backward and away; he was free.

An unfamiliar man's voice spoke urgently in his ear. "Your pistol, Doyle."

Doyle looked up to see the Dark Man turning toward him with the truncheon raised. Doyle pulled the pistol from his pocket and fired. His left knee shattered, the Dark Man bellowed and fell to the floor.

The shape was moving behind Doyle now, kicking the candelabra, extinguishing half the room's light. Doyle just had time to note that the medium had vanished when his attention snapped back to a blur of gray; the advancing rash of the second assassin. Still unseen, Doyle's benefactor overturned the heavy table, throwing the murderer back. Hands pulled Doyle to his feet.

"Follow me," the voice instructed.

"Lady Nicholson—"

"Too late."

Doyle followed the voice into the darkness. They passed through a door, down a corridor. Doyle felt disoriented—this was not the way he had entered. The door at corridor's end fell as Doyle's confederate kicked it open, oozing a crepuscular light into the space. They were still interior. Doyle could make out a tall, rangy profile, see the man's breath vaporize in the cooling air, nothing more.

"This way," the man instructed.

He was about to lead them through another door when a shape leapt from the dark with a feral growl and ripped into the man's forward leg. He staggered, crying out in shock. Doyle fired a shot at the dim shape of the attacking animal. It yelped and fell back, howling in pain. Doyle fired again, stilling its cries.

The man shouldered through the door. In the shaft of light that fell back through the doorway, Doyle saw the still body of the street urchin, crimson flowing from its wounds, jaws pulled back in a death grimace, exposing blood and meat in its sharp, canine teeth.

"Almost there," the man said, and they left the terrible house.

chapter four FLIGHT

HIS DELIVERER TOOK THE LEAD IN A HEADLONG DASH DOWN

the dark alley outside. Unable for the moment to see the wisdom of any alternate course, as he followed, Doyle strained to keep the man's flowing cloak in sight. They turned once, twice, and turned again. Seems to know where he's going, Doyle thought wanly, his bearings yielding to the rattrap rookery of shacks and shanties through which the man's path threaded them.

Breaking out of an alley onto a paved street, the man stopped short; Doyle's momentum carried him halfway into the street before the man yanked him back into the sheltering darkness. His grip was tremendously strong. Doyle meant to speak, but the man silenced him with a sharp gesture and pointed at the corner of an intersecting alley across the way.

Stepping around that corner into view was the surviving gray-hooded killer: crouched over, moving steadily, deliberately, eyes to the ground, a coiled predator tracking its quarry. What possible signs could it be searching for in the hard pavement? Doyle asked himself—and then, more alarmingly: How did it get here so quickly?

Doyle heard a whisper of steel on steel as his companion, face still obscured by shadows, sharp profile etched against the wall, drew from the walking stick he carried the base of a hidden blade. Doyle instinctively reached for his revolver. His friend's hand lay frozen on the butt of his rapier, as still as stone.

A carriage approached from the left. Four immense black stallions roared into view, clattering noisily to a stop on the cobblestones. The six-seat coach stood huge and black as pitch. No driver was visible. The man in the gray hood

moved to the side of the coach. A window slid open, but no light issued from within. The man nodded, but it was difficult to know if words were exchanged; nothing cut through the night but the labored sputtering of the horses.

The gray hood turned from the cab and looked directly into the alley where Doyle and friend were sheltered; both shrank back against the brick. The hood stepped toward them, stopped, and cocked its head like a hound tracing frequencies beyond human range. It stood like that for some time, the chilling blankness of the man finding perfect expression in the lifeless countenance of the mask. Doyle's breath died in his chest—Something's not right, he thought—and then he realized there were no holes for the eyes.

The door to the black carriage swung open. A short, strident, high-pitched trilling filled the air, halfway between a whistle and some less human vocalization. The gray hood instantly turned and leapt inside, the door slammed shut, and the steeds hammered the heavy carriage away, fog swirling greasily around the hole it carved in the mist.

As the clip of the hooves faded, Doyle's companion eased his weapon back into place.

"What the devil—" Doyle began, his breath bursting out in a rush.

"We're not safe yet," the man stilled him, voice low.

"All very well and good, but I think it's time we had a brief chat—"

"Couldn't agree more."

With that, the man was off again. Doyle had no choice but to follow. Keeping to the shadows, they stopped twice when the shrill whistling sounded again, each time at a greater remove, leaving Doyle to consider the disagreeable possibility that more than one of these hoods were on their trail. Doyle was about to break the silence when they turned a corner and came upon a waiting hansom cab, a compact cabbie atop the driver's perch. The man signaled, and the hack driver turned, offering a view of the ragged scar running obliquely down the right side of his face. He gave a brusque nod, turned to his horses, and cracked the whip, as the man opened the door of the moving vehicle and jumped aboard.

"Come on, then, Doyle," the man said.

Doyle followed up onto the stair, turning when he heard a

dull thump to his right; a long, wicked blade had just penetrated the cab door, its quivering razor tip mere inches from Doyle's chest. A shrill, insistent variation of the vile whistling filled the nearby air. Doyle looked back: The gray hood was twenty yards back, drawing another, identically vicious dagger from its belt as it sprinted toward him at improbable speed. With a prodigious leap, the hood jumped onto the running board of the accelerating coach, clutching for purchase in the open doorway. Hands pulled Doyle back into the cab; he scuttled to the far corner, digging for his pistol, trying to remember which pocket he'd left it in, when he heard the opposite door open. He looked up to see a flash of flapping coattail; his friend had fled, leaving him trapped in the cab with their relentless pursuer—where was his pistol?

As the hooded figure captured its balance in the doorframe and raised the weapon, Doyle heard the scuff of weight shifting on the roof, then through the open window saw his friend swing down into view and drive both feet into the open door, slamming it shut and rocketing the point of the embedded dagger completely through their attacker's chest. With a hideously muted mewling cry, the hood kicked and clawed ferociously at the invading blade, mauling its hands indiscriminately, then went suddenly and entirely limp, pinned to the door like a bug.

Doyle struggled to his knees in the jostling sway of the carriage and moved to the hooded man. Rough clothes. Hobnailed boots, almost new. Feeling for a pulse and finding none, Doyle was about to remark on the curious absence of blood when his defender reached in through the window, pulled off the gray hood, and tossed it away.

"Good Christ!"

A hatch pattern of symmetrical scars crisscrossed the stark white face. The man's eyes and lips had been crudely knitted up with a coarse, waxy blue thread.

Holding on from the roof, Doyle's companion reopened the door, and the body swung out with it: Suspended outside the rapidly moving cab, the corpse exhibited violent spastic movements as the coach bounced and jolted along. With a strong pull, the man drew the long knife back through the door, releasing the body from its attachment, and it fell away into obscurity.

In one deft move, the man pivoted into the cab, pulled the door shut behind him, and took a seat across from the stunned Doyle. He took two deep breaths and then ...

"Care for a drink?"

"What's that?"

"Cognac. Medicinal purposes," said the man, offering a silver flask.

Doyle accepted it and drank—it was cognac; exceedingly good cognac—as the man watched. Doyle saw him clearly for the first time in the pale amber light of the cabin lantern—his face was narrow; streaks of color painted his sharp cheeks; long, jet-black hair curled behind his ears. High forehead. Aquiline nose. Strong jaw. The eyes were remarkable, light and sharp, colored by a habitual amusement that Doyle felt, to say the least, was currently inappropriate.

"We could have that little chat now," the man said.

"Right. Have a go."

"Where to begin?"

"You knew my name."

"Doyle, isn't it?"

"And you're ..."

"Sacker. Armond Sacker. Pleasure."

"The pleasure I should say, Mr. Sacker, is distinctly mine."

"Have another."

"Cheers." Doyle drank again and passed back the flask.

The man unfastened his cloak. He wore black, head to toe. Lifting a leg of his trousers, he exposed the bloodied bite on his calf given by the feral boy.

"Nasty, that," said Doyle. "Shall I have a look?"

"No bother." The man took a handkerchief from his pocket and soaked it with cognac. "The puncture itself's not the worry, it's the damn tearing action when they prattle their heads about."

"Know a bit about medicine, then."

Sacker smiled and without flinching compressed the handkerchief tightly to the wound. Closing his eyes was the only concession to what Doyle knew must be extraordinary pain; when they reopened, no trace of it remained.

"Right. So, Doyle, tell me how you came to be in that house tonight."

Doyle recounted the arrival of the letter and his decision to attend.

"Right," said Sacker. "Not that you necessarily need me to tell you this, but you're in a bit of a fix."

"Am I?"

"Oh, I'd say so, yes."

"How, exactly?"

"Mm. Long story, that," the man said, more warning than excuse.

"Have we time for it?"

"Believe we're well clear for the moment," he said, parting the curtains for a brief look outside.

"I'll ask some questions, then."

"Better you didn't, really—"

"No, better I do," said Doyle, pulling the pistol from his pocket and resting it on his knee.

Sacker's smile broadened. "Right. Fire away."

"Who are you?"

"Professor. Cambridge. Antiquities."

"Could I see some form of identification to that effect?"

Sacker produced a calling card verifying the assertion. Looks authentic, thought Doyle. Not that that counted for much.

"I'll keep this," said Doyle, pocketing the card.

"Not at all."

"Is this your carriage, Professor Sacker?"

"It is."

"Where are we going?"

"Where would you like to go?"

"Someplace safe."

"Difficult."

"Because you don't know, or because you don't wish to tell me?"

"Because, as of this moment, there aren't all that many places you can truly consider safe: Doyle ... safe. Not much overlap there, I'm sorry to say." He smiled again.

"You find that amusing."

"To the contrary. Your situation is obviously quite grave."

"My situation?"

"Rather than worry, however, in the face of adversity it's

always my inclination to take action. That's what one should do in any event. General principle. Take action."

"Is that what we're doing now, Professor?"

"Oh my, yes." Sacker grinned again.

"I yield the floor," said Doyle darkly, his frustration with this cheerful enigma mitigated only by the man having twice within the hour saved his life.

"Another drink first?" he asked, offering the flask again. Doyle shook his head. "I really would recommend it."

Doyle took another drink. "Let's have it, then."

"You've attempted to publish a work of fiction recently."

"What's that got to do with any of this?"

"I'm endeavoring to tell you." He smiled again.

"The answer is yes."

"Hmm. Rough business, the publishing game. Fairly discouraging, I imagine, but then you don't strike me as the easily discouraged sort. Perseverance, that's the ticket."

Doyle bit his tongue and waited while Sacker took another nip.

"You recently circulated a manuscript of yours for publication entitled—have I got this right?—The Dark Brotherhood'?"

"Correct."

"Without any notable success, I'm afraid—"

"You don't need to rub salt in the wound."

"Establishing the facts, old boy. Haven't read it myself. I'm given to understand your story deals at some length, as fiction, with what one might characterize as a ... thaumatur-gical conspiracy."

"In part." How could he know that? thought Doyle.

"A sort of sorcerers' cabal."

"You're not far off—the villains of the piece, anyway."

"A coven of evil masterminds colluding with some, shall we say, delinquent spirits."

"It's an adventure story, isn't it?" said Doyle defensively.

"With a supernatural bent."

"Fair enough."

"Good versus evil, that sort of thing."

"The eternal struggle."

"In other words, a potboiler."

"I'd hoped my sights were set a bit higher," Doyle complained.

"Don't listen to me, friend, I'm no critic. Are you published anywhere?"

"A few stories," Doyle replied, with only modest exaggeration. "I'm a frequent contributor to a monthly periodical."

"What would that be?"

"It's for children, I'm sure you wouldn't know it."

"Come on, what's it called?"

"The Boy's Own Paper," said Doyle.

"Right, never heard of it. Tell you what I think, though; nothing wrong with a bit of entertainment, is there? That's what people want in the end, after all, a little diversion, a ripping good tale, leave behind their troubles and woe."

"Stimulate a little thought while you're at it," Doyle offered sheepishly.

"And why not? Noble aspirations yield greater achievements."

"I appreciate the fine sensibilities—now would you please tell me what my book's got to do with what's happened tonight?"

The man paused, then leaned forward confidentially. "The manuscript was circulated."

"By whom?"

"Someone with connections."

"Circulated where?"

"Into the wrong sorts of hands."

Doyle paused and leaned in to meet Sacker halfway. "I'm afraid you're going to have to be a bit more specific," Doyle said.

Sacker held Doyle's eyes mesmerically and lowered his voice.

"Picture if you will a group of extraordinary individuals. Ruthless, intelligent, even brilliant persons. Well placed, enormously rewarded by the world for their skills and achievements. All distinctly lacking what you and I would call... basic morality. United by one common pursuit: acquisition of power without limits. Hungering for more. Obsessively secret—exactly who they are is impossible to say. Rest assured they are real. Does this sound at all familiar to you?"

Doyle could barely speak. "My book."

"Yes, Doyle. Your book. You've written a manuscript of fiction, but by some elusive process you have drawn down into your work an uncanny approximation of the depraved plottings of a malignant sect of black magicians, seeking an end not at all unlike that pursued by your characters. Which was to—"

"To elicit the help of evil spirits in annihilating the membrane that separates the physical and etheric plane."

"In order to—"

"Gain dominion over the material world and those who inhabit it."

"Right. And if tonight's seance was any indication, my friend, they have breached the battlements and set foot across the threshold."

"It's not possible."

"Do you believe what your eyes saw in that room?"

Doyle found he was unwilling to hear his answer.

"It is possible," Sacker maintained.

Doyle felt a jolt of dislocation, as if he were in a dream. His mind struggled to stay above the flood tide of shock and dismay. The fact was, he had borrowed not only the title of his book but his villains' motives from the woolliest works of Madame Blavatsky. Who would have thought his petty larceny would come so hideously home to roost?

"If my book has fallen into their hands ..."

"Put yourself in their shoes: What purpose does life hold for these diseased monsters without the threatening presence—real or imagined—of formidable enemies, whose very existence serves only to heighten their demented self-aggrandizement?"

"They think I've somehow stumbled onto their plan...."

"If they mean to kill you outright they probably wouldn't have gone to all this trouble, which leads me to believe they want you alive, if that's any comfort to you."

"But surely they must know ... I mean, they can't think ... for God's sake, it's only a book."

"Yes. Pity, that."

Doyle stared at him. "What's all this got to do with you?"

"Oh, I've been onto these rogues a good sight longer than you have."

"But I haven't been onto them at all; until this moment I never even knew they existed."

"Yes, well, I wouldn't care to try telling them that, would you?"

Doyle was speechless.

"Fortunately, my tracking them put me close at hand this evening. Unfortunately, I'm something of a marked man now as well."

Sacker rapped sharply on the roof. The carriage came to a sudden halt.

"Rest assured: We've put a real spoke in their wheel tonight. Keep your wits about you, and don't waste a moment's time. And I wouldn't bother going to the police with all this, because they will think you mad, and word will only filter up to someone who could do you even greater harm."

"Greater than murder?"

All trace of a smile vanished. "There are worse things," he said, then opened the door. "Best of luck, Doyle. We'll be in touch."

Sacker extended a hand. Doyle shook it. In his dazed, bewildered state, the next thing he knew, he was standing on the street outside his front door, watching the scar-faced cabbie tip bis hat, turn, and whip the carriage hurriedly into the night.

Doyle looked down at the hand Sacker had shaken. He was holding a small, exquisitely crafted silver insignia in the form of a human eye.

chapter five LEBOUX

MAELSTROM WHIRLED INSIDE DOYLE'S MIND. He LOOKED

at his watch: 9:52. An ironmonger's cart rattled by. Doyle shivered with nostalgic longing as the prosaic, quotidian world in which he'd spent all but the last two hours of his life receded from him like dying sunlight. In the time it takes to bake bread, he had seen his life, if not his entire conception of the universe, turned on its head.

In the stillness left by the passing of the cart, forms and faces swam out of the dark; every shadow seemed to pulse with hidden, unspeakable danger. Doyle hustled to the presumed safety of his doorstep.

A face looked down at him from a high window. His neighbor, the Russian woman, Petrovitch. Wait—had there been a second face behind hers? Another look: both faces gone, curtains swaying.

Did his staircase, always a trigger for the pleasant prospect of home and its attendant comforts, now exude an aura of dread menace? No longer certain he could trust his instincts, Doyle took revolver in hand, trusting its filled chambers to contend with whatever might await, and slowly ascended the twenty-one steps. The door to his rooms came into view. It stood open.

The wood where the doorknob used to reside was splintered like so many matchsticks. The debris lay here, on the floor outside—the knob torn off, not kicked in. Doyle leaned back against the wall and listened. Certain that nothing stirred inside, with a light touch he eased the door open and gasped at what lay before him.

Every square inch of the front room looked to have been drooled or saturated with a clear, viscous fluid. Streaked and

textured, as if a gigantic brush had been maniacally stroked from floor to ceiling. A smell like scorched mattress ticking permeated the air. Lazy smoke curled up from where the substance lay thickest. Stepping inside, he felt the ooze suck at the soles of his shoes, but no residue clung to them when he lifted his foot. It moved to the touch, it had body, but its crust remained integral, intact. Doyle could discern the tessellated pattern of his Persian carpet suspended inside the stuff, like a scarab frozen in amber. He examined his chair and davenport. Side table, oil lamp, ottoman. Candlesticks. Inkwell. Teacup. The surface of every object in the room had been partially liquefied, then cooled and hardened.

If this was a warning—an inescapable conclusion—what exactly was its messenger trying to communicate? Perhaps to incite the question, What kind of damage could they perpetrate on a human body? Doyle picked up one of his books from the desk. It seemed to weigh about the same, but it wobbled in his hand, spineless as an overcooked vegetable. He could still turn the thickened pages, could almost make out the blurred, distorted text, but the thing lying limply in his hand no longer remotely resembled his enduring idea of what constituted a book.

Moving as quickly as the slippery flooring would allow, Doyle made his way to the bedroom. As he opened the door it drooped in on itself, the top corner folding over like a dogeared page. Doyle saw that the strange liquefaction had penetrated a few inches into the next room and then abruptly stopped: His bedroom had escaped the same debasement.

"Thank God," Doyle muttered.

Pulling his Gladstone bag from the closet, he dropped into it the invertebrate book, a change of clothes, his shaving kit, and the box of ammunition he kept hidden in the upper reaches of the armoire.

Back through the vulcanized room, Doyle stopped at the door—someone outside, the scuff of a shoe. He bent down to peer through the extruded keyhole and saw Petrovitch leaning against the balustrade, hands clutched to her scrawny bosom.

"Mrs. Petrovitch, what's happened here?" he asked, exiting to the hall.

"Doctor," she said, grasping his offered hand fearfully.

"Did you see anything? Did you hear something down here?"

Nodding vigorously. He couldn't recall the extent of her English, but it seemed at the moment particularly lean,

"Big. Big," she said. "Train."

"A sound like a train?"

Nodding again, she tried to supply the sound, accompanied by a series of generalized, extravagant gestures. She's been into the wine again, Doyle realized. Not without provocation. Glancing past her, he noticed another woman hanging back at the foot of the descending stairs. The second face he'd seen in the window: a short, stout woman, round face, penetrating eyes. Something familiar about her.

"Dear Mrs. Petrovitch, did ... you ... see ... anything?"

Her eyes grew round and large, and she traced the outline of a huge shape with her hands.

"Big? Very big?" Doyle offered encouragingly. "A man, was it?"

She shook her head. "Black," she said simply. "Black."

"Mrs. Petrovitch. Go to your rooms. Stay there. Do not come down here again until morning. Do you understand?"

She nodded, then as he turned to go tugged on his sleeve and pointed to the woman behind her.

"My friend is—"

"I'll meet your friend another time. Do as I've told you, Mrs. Petrovitch, please," he said, gently removing her hand. "Now I really must go."

"No, Doctor ... no, she—"

"Get some rest now. Have a nice glass of wine. There's a good Petrovitch. Good night now. Good night." The delivery of which carried him down the stairs and out of her sight.

He kept to the busiest streets and to each street's busiest side, seeking the light, walking always toward the thick of the crowd. No one approached or accosted him. He met no one's gaze and still felt the burn of a thousand malevolent eyes.

Doyle spent what remained of the night at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where he was known, only an hour of it sleeping on one of the cots set aside for working physicians, in a room surrounded by a dozen others, none of which afforded him the security of sanctuary. Displaying his bedrock

rectitude, and perhaps more revealingly his fear of ridicule, he spoke to no one, not even his closest colleagues, of his trouble.

The light of day brought few sparse grains of salt to the previous night's adventures. There must be clear physical explanations for everything that occurred at the seance, Doyle told himself—I just haven't hit on them as yet—no, stop; even this is a deception I'm imposing on myself. The mind depends on equilibrium and will seek it at any cost. This doesn't mean I accept all of what Sacker told me as gospel, but the unvarnished truth is, I have passed through a doorway that has vanished behind me; therefore I cannot go back. Therefore I must go forward.

As he walked out into the cool morning air, he found his terror and disorientation receding, and what quickly came to the fore was fury at the brutal slaying of Lady Nicholson and her brother. Her face would not leave his mind; her beseeching eyes, the cry as she fell. She sought my help, and I failed her in life; I will not do so now, he vowed.

Despite Sacker's admonition, his first stop upon leaving the hospital that morning was Scotland Yard.

An hour later, Doyle was standing outside 13 Cheshire Street with Inspector Claude Leboux. The thin, grimy sunlight brought no rehabilitative cheer to the place but only accentuated its glum neutrality.

"You say they went in here, then?" Leboux asked.

Doyle nodded. He had spared the details from his friend to this point. The word murder had been employed, judiciously but effectively. He had produced Lady Nicholson's note. No mention yet of spirits or gray hoods and blue thread. Or Professor Armond Sacker.

Leboux led the way up the steps and knocked. He was a solid Midlands ox of a man. A florid red handlebar mustache was the only decorative flourish he allowed himself, but its immaculately groomed and radiant plumage rendered any other such signatory moot.

Doyle had spent a year as ship's physician with Leboux onboard a navy cutter, sailing to Morocco and ports south, during which their unlikely friendship had gradually germinated. Leboux was Royal Navy, fifteen years older, rudimen-

tarily educated, a man of sufficient reticence to have his intelligence routinely questioned by the sharpies on board. But as Doyle discovered over the course of many card games and desultory conversations in the bow's netting as they languished in tropical doldrums, Leboux's diffidence shielded a sensitive heart and a character of unwavering morality. His mind seldom strayed from the parallel tracks of fact and truth—he prided himself on his lack of imagination. Those tracks took him straight from the navy to the London police and up the ranks in short order to his present position of inspector.

A small, fair Irishwoman Doyle had not seen before opened the door.

" 'Elp you?"

"Scotland Yard, Miss. We'd like to have a look around."

"Wot's this about?"

Towering over her, Leboux leaned in and intoned, "Trouble, Miss."

"I don't live here, you know, I'm just visiting me Mum," she said, backing away as they entered. "She's upstairs, sick as a dog she is, ain't left the bed in weeks. This ain't to do with her, is it?"

"She's a tenant, your Mum?" Leboux asked.

"That's right—"

"Who lives down here, then?" Leboux asked, stopping at the right-hand door the weird boy had opened for Doyle the night before.

"Don't know. Some foreign bloke, I think. Not here much. Neither am I, to be fair, only since Mum took ill."

Doyle nodded to Leboux. "Foreign" was a fair enough description of the Dark Man, and Doyle had mentioned him to Leboux. Leboux knocked on the door.

"Know the name of this man, Miss?" he asked.

"No, sir, I surely don't."

"Were you here last night then?"

"No, sir. I was home. Down Cheapside."

The queer glass bowl was gone from the table, Doyle noted. The pattern of splattered wax indicated someone had taken that candle and moved quickly. Leboux opened the door, and they entered the parlor.

"This as it was, Arthur?" Leboux asked.

"Yes," Doyle replied. "The seance was through here."

Doyle opened the sliding doors. The room as revealed appeared entirely different from the one in which he'd spent those dreadful minutes. Cramped with dusty, fussy furniture. No round table or hanging tapestries. Even the ceiling seemed lower.

"This isn't right," Doyle said, as he moved deeper into the room.

"Somethin' happen to the fella who lives here, then?"

"You go on up and visit your Mum now. We'll call if we need you," Leboux said, closing the doors in the young woman's face.

"They've replaced the furniture. The room was nearly empty."

"Where was the violence done, Arthur?"

Doyle moved to the spot where the table had been sitting. A plump love seat now occupied the space where Lady Nicholson had fallen.

"Here," he said, kneeling down. "There was no rug; the floor was bare."

As he moved it aside, Doyle noticed the imprint of the love seat's leg in the rug was deep and encrusted with dust. Leboux lent him a hand lifting the love seat away, then together they rolled back the carpet. The underlying floorboards were unstained and shiny with wear.

"It's been cleaned, you see. The whole room, top to bottom. They've removed every trace," Doyle said a bit frantic.

Leboux stood above him, stoic, noncommittal. Doyle bent to examine the floor more closely. He took a pipe-cleaning tool from his pocket and scraped at the joist between the slats: His efforts yielded a small portion of a dried dark matter. Doyle brushed the crumbs into an envelope and handed it to Leboux.

"I think you will find this substance is human blood. Lady Caroline Nicholson and her brother were murdered in this room last night. I recommend an immediate effort be made to alert their family."

Leboux pocketed the envelope, took out a pad and paper, and dutifully wrote down the names. They proceeded to conduct a more detailed examination of the room. Nothing discovered led them to further understanding of the crimes

:c rum:tied or the identity of owner or occupant. Following ±e paih through the nest of corridors that had led Doyle and S acker to the alley proved equally fruitless.

As they stood in the alley looking back at the house, Doyle sketched in the details of the murderous engagement. He made no mention of Sacker, or his use of the pistol Leboux himself had given him months before. Leboux crossed his arms, stock-still, betraying no sentiment suggesting the relative credulity of what he heard. A good while passed before he responded. Doyle was accustomed to waiting out his friend's epic silences: One could almost hear the tumblers of his mind clicking like slow hands on an abacus.

"You say this attack on the woman involved the use of a blade," was Leboux's first comment.

"Yes. A wicked-looking affair."

Leboux nodded, and then with some new sense of purpose in his eyes, said, "You'd better come with me then."

They walked three blocks to the vacant lot at the corner of Commercial and Aldgate. Police had sequestered the area. Bobbies manned the corners, directing away passersby. Leboux led Doyle through the cordon to the center of the lot where, that previous night, just as Doyle was arriving back at his rooms, the short, sorry life of the streetwalker known as Fairy Fay had come to a brutal and malicious end.

The rough canvas serving as her shroud was lifted. She was unclothed. The body had been eviscerated and the organs removed. Some were missing; the rest were neatly arranged outside of the body, in a pattern the significance of which was impossible to divine. The job had been quick, precise, and, as Doyle surmised from the absence of ripping at the entry points and edges of the wounds, executed with furiously honed instruments.

Doyle nodded. The canvas fluttered back over the corpse. Leboux trudged a few paces away. Doyle followed. Another Lebouxian silence ensued.

"Would that be Lady Nicholson then, Arthur?" he finally asked.

"No."

"Was this woman at the seance last night?"

"No. I've never seen her before."

With shock, Doyle realized that Leboux was probing for some weakness in his story. A policeman first and foremost, Doyle reminded himself, and the mood among the officers was grim and tight. Few, if any, had ever been exposed to the fruits of an act this savage and willful, certainly never in the routine of London police work.

"No one's come forward?" he asked.

Leboux shook his head. "Prostitute most like. Now. Those blades you described, could they have done this work?"

"Yes. Very possibly."

Leboux blinked myopically. "Could you describe the assailants?"

"They wore hoods," Doyle said, neglecting to mention that both killers had themselves been dispatched. Given that unholy facial stitching and the lack of blood from the mortal wounds they'd received, he didn't feel Leboux was of a mind to consider the question, How do you kill something if it's already dead?

Leboux of course sensed that Doyle was withholding key parts of his story, but was mindful enough of their friendship, and sufficiently convinced that Doyle had been through an authentically dire experience, to allow him to part company at this point. Watching Doyle walk away, Leboux felt daunted by the number of complications left to sort out. But after all, as he invariably said whenever confronted with a task of such complexity, that's what time was for.

Upon first viewing the woman's loathsomely mutilated corpse, one of the troubling thoughts he was still contending with had been, This is the work of a doctor.

chapter six CAMBRIDGE

THE FIRST PREREQUISITE OF ELABORATE MENTAL EXERCISE

was a full stomach. Doyle hadn't eaten since his ordeal began the night before. He walked into the first crowded tavern he happened across, sat by the fire, and ordered a large breakfast, thankful that what little money he'd left in his rooms hadn't fallen victim to the gelatinous infestation.

Afterward he pushed back his plate, lit a pipe, put his feet up, and felt the onset of that relaxed but heightened state of awareness wherein his mind hummed at maximum efficiency.

If, as Sacker had suggested, there was a conspiracy behind these events, it reasonably involved only a few individuals. Conspiracy requires secrecy. The greater number of people involved, human nature being what it was, the less likely secrecy became. The extent to which 13 Cheshire had been sanitized in those few short hours surely supported conspiracy. How to keep the requisite subordinates in line? Fear. Their ability to inspire it seemed beyond reproach. Black magicians? He was not personally acquainted with any, but that was no guarantee their numbers weren't legion.

As to the manuscript ... true, he'd contrived the villains' identities himself—and a fair piece of invention it was, too, if he did say so—but as to their actual objectives, means, motives, and so forth, the damnable truth was he'd more or less cribbed the "Dark Brotherhood" from Blavatsky. Which begged the question, if they were after him because of his book, how close to the truth of what they were up to had that lunatic Russian wandered? And if she had that much right, what credence did that lend to the rest of her harebrained works?

The seance. More problematic. Perhaps. The levitation: wires and pulleys. The mirror could have been done with,

well, with mirrors. The head of the beast a puppet of some kind, perhaps concealed in the bundle he'd seen that boy carry into the building. Conclusion: There could be logical explanations for the effects he'd witnessed, albeit of a more ingenious and sophisticated order than he'd encountered before....

Wait just a moment—here he was perambulating around this garden of unearthly delights like a vicar on holiday. The fact remained there were bloodless blind men with Oriental daggers stalking about London trying to carve him like a Christmas goose. He had seen these things: fat women floating on air, heart-stopping black shadows, red-eyed creatures in phantom looking glasses, that poor wretch lying back there in the weeds. The brother as he fell, already lifeless. Lady Nicholson's little boy, alone in that dark wood. The look on her face as the blade was drawn across....

He shuddered, drew his coat more closely around his shoulders, and glanced around the room. No one was looking his way.

Yes, all right, I was already half in love with her, he admitted. Maybe they are after me, but what they've done to that poor woman and her family in springing the trap makes my blood boil, thought Doyle. They think they have me routed, on the run, well, revenge is a dish the Irish have been serving cold for countless generations. And whoever these godless devils might be, they are about to discover how severely they have underestimated this particular Irishman.

Sacker. The encounter in the cab, all the attendant shocks, there had hardly been time to summon a coherent question. Doyle took out Sacker's calling card. He needed to confront the man while he had his wits about him. Cambridge was less than two hours by train. Tim, their driver, told him Lady Nicholson's brother had been at university there, a possible connection. At last, an occasion to be grateful for his lack of success as a physician; there were no critically ill patients for whom his sudden absence would prove a hardship. He'd make for Liverpool Street Station, straightaway.

As he replaced the card in his bag, his eye caught the cover of the altered book. Isis Unveiled. He'd been in such a state he hadn't even noticed. He lifted it, shielding its deformity from the rest of the room. Blavatsky: an appropriate companion for the journey he had embarked upon. Her photograph was still discernible through the rippling layer of ...

Good Christ. No, it couldn't be. He looked closer. Yes. The woman he'd seen with Petrovitch on the stairs of his building last night. It was her: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky!

The cab pulled up outside. He ran into the building.

"Mrs. Petrovitch!"

Dashing by his apartment, Doyle was told by a quick glance inside that nothing had changed^ since last night. He took the stairs three at a time to Petrovitch's floor and knocked vigorously on her door.

"It's Dr. Doyle, Mrs. Petrovitch!"

He noticed smoke seeping out from under the jamb.

"Mrs. Petrovitch!"

He threw a shoulder to the door, once, twice, stepped back, and with a heavy thrust kicked the door open.

Petrovitch lay on the floor, in the center of the room, unconscious. Smoke grew thick, but the room was not yet involved in flame; heavy brocaded curtains smoldered, lace curtains had already combusted.

Doyle ripped down the curtains, furiously beating back the fire so he could reach the fallen woman. He touched her and instantly knew she was dead. Redoubling his effort with the curtains, some anxious moments later he had the blaze dampened. Doyle closed the woman's eyes and sat down to try to reconstruct what had happened.

Petrovitch's dachshund wiggled out from under a sofa and nuzzled pathetically at its mistress's ear.

Doyle studied the room: An open decanter of wine stood on a table, the stopper beside it, next to an open tin of digitalis pills and some drops of candle wax. A small crystal goblet lay on the floor near the body; trailing away from it, in the rug, a crimson stain. The table from where the candle had fallen lay between her and the window. The window was open.

She'd lit a candle. Felt a chest pain—she had heart trouble; that much he knew. She poured a glass of wine, opened the pill tin. The pain grew stronger, alarmingly so. Feeling claustrophobic, she opened the window to let in some air, and in doing so toppled the candle. When the curtains caught fire, she panicked. Her heart gave out. She fell.

Two objections. First, there was a fresh watermark on the table. The wineglass had been set down—it should have

fallen toward the curtains, along with the candlestick. Second, there were a number of pills on the floor near the body. Even now, the little rat dog was gobbling one up off the rug. Perhaps she had dropped the tin and was in the process of replacing them when ... no, there were no pills in her hand.

He examined the tin. Lint and other detritus were mixed in with the pellets themselves. So the pills had been spilled and then replaced—

At the sound of a whine and a cough, he turned in time to see Petrovitch's dog keel over, spasm, and then lie still. Dead—better off, in a way, thought Doyle: It wasn't a dog anyone else was likely to love—foam bubbling at the corner of its mouth. Poisoned.

So someone had poisoned Petrovitch and perhaps not surreptitiously. Doyle lifted her slightly; there were pills under the body as well. Livid bruises on either side of her jaw. She had struggled, knocking the tin away, scattering the pills. Her assailant forced the poison on her, then quickly tried to replace the pills in the tin before fleeing out the open window. Yes: There was a scuff mark on the windowsill. The candlestick knocked over during the struggle or perhaps more deliberately by the killer to obscure the deed. The body was still warm. The killer had left this room within the last ten minutes.

Another death to lay at his crowded doorstep. Poor Petrovitch. Impossible to imagine the woman could have herself inspired an enmity that would result in murder.

Careful not to touch the pills themselves, Doyle closed the :in and placed it in his bag and was at the door when he no-:iced a spot of white peeking out from behind a small mirror on the wall.

He pulled out a piece of paper and read:

Doctor Doyle,

Urgent we speak. I am off to Cambridge. Petrovitch will tell you where to meet me. Trust no one. Nothing is as it seems.

HPB

Dated that morning. Blavatsky in Cambridge. The killer had stilled Petrovitch but missed this note. He left Petrovitch to heaven, with no doubt now as to his own destination.

Doyle detected no one following him to the station, nor was he aware of anyone watching him purchase his ticket or board the train. After he took a corner seat with an unobstructed view of the door, no one entered the car who took even passing notice of him.

As the train chugged away, Doyle scanned a stack of discarded tabloids, searching vainly for mention of Lady Nicholson's disappearance. The engine's tail of exhaust folded indistinguishably into the city's morning mantle of soot and smoke. As he watched the street life flit by outside his window, Doyle's envy for the plain uneventfulness of those ordinary lives gave way to an edgy excitement. However fraught with danger, a mission beckoned, and mission signified purpose, the lodestone of his internal compass. In spite of fatigue, his senses felt sharply attuned: the sweet pungency of the sandwich he'd bought for the journey, the agreeably warm froth of the bottled beer, the ripe mundungus of Moorish tobacco in the air.

A bulky Indian woman took the seat opposite Doyle, her brown face obscured by a veil that revealed only her almond eyes and a daub of decorative scarlet on the forehead between them. An external representation of the mystical third eye, recalled Doyle from his Hindi dabbling, the window to the soul and the unfolding of the thousand-petaled lotus. He caught himself staring at her when the rustle as she rearranged the armful of parcels she carried brought him back to himself. He doffed his hat and smiled agreeably. The woman's response was inscrutable. High caste, he decided, assessing her clothes and comportment. He wondered idly why she wasn't traveling first-class, accompanied by family or chaperon.

The rhythmic rattle and roll of the tracks abetted the postprandial drowsiness of the alcohol, and as the train left the London environs, Doyle drifted toward sleep. He awoke sporadically, for moments at a time, and dimly remembered seeing his subcontinental traveling companion hunched over a small book, running her finger along lines of the page. Sleep finally overtook him. His dreams were hot and swift, a phan-

tasmagoric amalgam of flight, pursuit, dark faces, and white light.

With the jolt of the car coming to a sudden stop, he awoke to full consciousness, aware of some commotion. Along with the rest of the car's occupants, the Indian woman was looking out the window to Doyle's left.

They were in farming country. A rough road ran alongside the tracks, bisecting a vast tract of fallow land, planted with a failing crop of winter corn. A large hay trailer pulled by two huge drays had overturned in the ditch beside the road. One of the horses, an immense chestnut still tethered to the rig, bucked wildly, kicking at the air. The other, a dappled gray, lay on its back in a gully, struggling and braying, mortally injured. A young lad, the coach's driver, tried to approach the wounded animal but was restrained by two adult farm laborers. Looking farther down the road, Doyle saw what had perhaps been the cause of the accident.

Was it a scarecrow? No, although it bore the same basic silhouette, this was larger, much larger, than the conventional field figure, approaching nearly ten feet. Not made from straw—more molded and contoured. Wicker, perhaps. The figure mounted what appeared to be a cross—were those spikes—railroad spikes—pinning the arms to the wood? Yes, no mistaking, rising above the faltering corn rows just off the road, facing the tracks. It was a crucifix. And on its head was no crown of thorns. These were unmistakably horns, conical, sharp, and twisting. Doyle's mind flashed to the beast he had seen engraved on the glass bowl in the hallway of 13 Cheshire Street. This was, as near as he could remember, almost certainly the same image.

As awareness of the figure spread through the car, there was a rising sentiment among the passengers to put the torch to this blaspheming display, but before any reaction organized itself, the whistle sounded, and the brutish vision receded as the train pulled away. The last sight Doyle registered was one of the farmhands, over the protests of the boy, approaching the fallen horse with a shotgun.

The Indian woman, after a long look at Doyle, which she averted the moment his eyes met hers, resumed her reading. The remainder of the two-hour trip passed without incident.

There was the poster—photograph included, if there were any further doubts—plastered to a pillar just outside the Cambridge rail station.

LECTURE TONIGHT, THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. H.P. BLAVATSKY.

Eight P.M., the Guildhall near Market Place. Her whereabouts determined to the minute and location with four hours to spare, Doyle set out for King's College and the offices of Professor Armond Sacker.

The afternoon's sallow light was just beginning to fail. Doyle followed the road alongside the fens hard by the River Cam and down King's Parade into the old town center, raising his muffler against the brisk wind blowing down across the broad, open byway. Charles Darwin walked these paths as a student. Newton as well. Byron, Milton, Tennyson, and Coleridge. The hallowed colleges reminded him of his youthful disappointment when his family's modest circumstances required his attending the less financially rigorous University of Edinburgh. The deleterious effects produced by coming of age in the class system still resonated ripples of discomfort in his proud heart.

Across the commons from St. Mary's Church stood the great classical facade of King's College. Doyle passed through its gingerbread gatehouse and screen and found the court within entirely deserted with darkness quickly coming on.

Entering the only building to display a light, he heard a scuffling sound, and a wheezy snort that drew him to the entrance of a long library. A wizened clerk shuffled piles of books in a seemingly aimless pattern between the stacks and a mammoth wheeled cart. His face was mean, red and puckered, while his vulpine black robes and ill-fitting wig threatened to engulf the shrunken man entirely.

"Pardon me, I'm wondering if you could direct me to Professor Sacker."

The Clerk snorted again, taking no notice of him.

"Professor Armond Sacker. Antiquities," said Doyle, raising his voice considerably. "Most Egyptian. Some Greek—"

"Lord God, man!" The Clerk caught sight of him from the corner of his eye and lurched back against the cart, clutching his chest in fright.

"Terribly sorry. Didn't mean to startle you—"

"There's a bell!" the Clerk yelled. "You're supposed to ring the bell!" He attempted to regain his footing by leaning back against the cart, but his insubstantial mass was enough to motivate the wheels ever so slightly backward. Consequently, man and cart began crabbing slowly away from Doyle down the lengthy library corridor.

"I'm sorry, but I didn't see a bell," Doyle said.

"That's what's wrong with you boys today! Used to be students had respect for authority!"

Mortal fear of corporal punishment will do that to a body, Doyle was tempted to reply. Nudging the cart feebly ahead, the Clerk continued to retreat, not quite able to gain leverage to right himself, while Doyle kept pace equidistant behind.

"Perhaps if you displayed the bell in a more obviously visible location," Doyle offered pleasantly.

"There's a smart answer," die Clerk spat viciously. "When school's in session, I'll have you vetted to the Proctor's Office."

"You have it wrong there, you see, I am not a student."

"And so you admit you have no legitimate business here!"

The Clerk raised a long, bony finger in misguided triumph. From his squinting, Doyle realized the unpleasant little man was nearly as blind as he was deaf. And unless he was very much mistaken, this venomous old bookworm was a retired proctor himself; in his day Doyle had suffered plenty at the gleefully sadistic hands of the man's ilk.

"I am looking for the office of Professor Armond Sacker," Doyle said, producing Sacker's calling card—they had by now traveled twenty yards down the hall, and Doyle felt no impulse whatsoever to assist the toadish misanthrope back to bis feet—holding it just out of the sweeping arc of the man's reach, "and I can assure you, sir, my business with him is exceptionally legitimate."

"What sort of business?"

"Business I am not prepared to discuss with you, sir. Business of a more than passing urgency. And I daresay that if you are not prepared to assist me straight off, it will put me in a very foul humor indeed," Doyle said, pointing his walking stick at the man and smiling intently.

"Term's over. He's not here," the Clerk admitted, fear or exhaustion tilting him toward the cooperative.

"Now we're getting somewhere. So there is, in fact, a Professor Armond Sacker."

"You're the one who wants to see him!"

"And having established that the good Professor walks among us, if we could now turn our attention to where the Professor might be—"

"I'm sure I don't know—"

"Take careful note, if you would, my choice of words, sir: 'might be,' not 'is,' employing the speculative, as in speculation, sir: Where might he be?"

With a jolt, the cart collided with the wall at the corridor's end. The Clerk slid down to the floor, legs splayed, back against the cart, his pinched visage as pink as a well-scrubbed pig. He pointed up and to the right at a nearby door.

"Ah," said Doyle. "The Professor's office?"

The Clerk nodded.

"You've been most helpful. If I should happen to speak with your superiors during my visit here, I shall not fail to mention your timely and generous assistance."

"Pleasure, sir. Pleasure indeed." The Clerk's treacly smile revealed a badly matched set of false choppers.

Doyle tipped his hat and entered Sacker's door, closing it after him. The room was high, square, and lined with dark-wooded bookshelves, serviced by a ladder resting against one wall. Crowding the central desk were stacks of haphazardly open volumes, maps, compasses, calipers, and other cartographic tools.

The smoldering dregs of a bowl of tobacco sent up weak mist from an ashtray. The pipe, an elaborately carved meerschaum, was warm to the touch—the office's occupant had vacated the room, at most, five minutes before, a departure hastened by Doyle's voice in the hall? This Sacker was nothing if not an odd fellow, but would he purposefully avoid Doyle after what they'd been through together? If so, for what conceivable reason?

Surveying the desk, Doyle cataloged two standard texts on ancient Greece, a volume of Euripides, a monograph on Sappho, and a well-worn Iliad. Maps of the central Turkish coast, dotted and lined with calculations. Doyle hazarded a guess that the object of this quest was the legendary city of Troy.

An overcoat and hat hung on a rack by the far door. A

walking stick leaned against the wall; a bit short for the lanky Sacker, Doyle thought. He opened the far door, which led to a small antechamber—no doubt where students sweated out their tutorials—and then passed through another door, leading into a vast hallway.

Perched on the newel posts on either side of a grand ascending staircase, large winged gargoyles stood sentry, scowling at one another: one a griffin, long of tooth and talon, the other a reptilian basilisk, scabrous and scaled. The day's last light through the leaded-glass windows imparted a ghostly glow to the marble walls and floors. Total darkness was only minutes away and, saving a penny during the holiday, none of the gas jets were alight. Doyle listened but heard no footfalls.

"Professor Sacker! ... Professor Sacker!"

No reply. A chill ran through him. He turned around. The gargoyles glared down at him from their posts in the stairwell. Doyle set off to find a privy—had those statues been facing his way when he entered? A memory of their having faced each other persisted—perhaps Sacker had gone to answer nature's call.

He found every door along the hallway locked. Turning repeatedly as the corridor meandered, by the time Doyle realized he could no longer see his hand before him, he was not at all sure where he was. The air felt as frigid and heavy as the blackness was dense. He wiped the sweat from his hands. Fear of the dark was not something he commonly fell prey to, but after the last two days all such presumptions were forfeit. Attempting to retrace his steps—there had been lights burning in Sacker's office, a place that now seemed a haven of warmth and security—he kept one hand on the cool marble wall and took each step cautiously.

An intersection. Did I turn right or left here? His answer was not confident. Right then.

Fear of the dark is a primitive, instinctual leftover, he reminded himself: Our remote forebears spent the better part of their lives groping blindly in the dark- —and since there could be huge, carnivorous predators lying in ambush around every turn, it seemed altogether a very sensible response—tout that by no measure meant the same dangers still existed in the modern civilized—What was that?

Doyle stopped. A sound, some distance away. What was it?

Stay calm. It could be help, a neutral or friendly presence. Even Sacker himself. Perhaps we'll hear it again. Perhaps it would be a fine idea if we didn 't move from this spot until we do. Err on the side of caution, and not only because we're plunged into absolute darkness in an unfathomable maze and there are pitiless, unspeakable horrors tracking us from who knows which side of the etheric membrane—

Wait ... there it was again.

Try to identify. Not a footstep, was it? No. No smack of heel, no shuffling skid or impact on marble whatsoever.

Go on, Doyle, you know perfectly well what you heard.

Wings. A flap of wings. Leathery, cartilaginous.

Well, perhaps a sparrow or pigeon's flown through a window and gotten lost in the halls—let's be honest, shall we? Late December, even if birds were still about, that was not the exercising of a small or even midsized wingspan, if there exists anywhere in the world a bird that could produce that sound, that could displace that much air—

It's coming this way. Those first two flaps issued from a stationary position, loosening, limbering up, almost as if the—Doyle, put your mind in order, man: Allow into your heart the idea that those stone gargoyles on the stairs can fly, and in two ticks you 'II find yourself chained to a pallet in Bedlam.

On the other hand, something immense is moving through the air and coming closer, so from a purely precautionary standpoint, let's move on. Don't run, Doyle, use your walking stick ahead of you, like that—quietly, please—find a door, there's a good fellow, any door will do—got one: locked. Damn. On to the next.

Rummaging for bird facts—do they see well in the dark? Depends on the bird, doesn't it? How's their sense of smell? Do they have one? They must: Their entire lives constitute an uninterrupted search for food. Terrifically reassuring. What have we squirreled away in there about the eating habits of gargoyles?

It's not possible, but the wings seem to be advancing and receding simultaneously. Unless there are two of them; one on either side of the stairs for a grand total of—enough!

A door, Doyle, and please hurry, because one of them just

rounded the corner we recently turned, which puts it fifty feet behind us and closing rapidly—

There: Grip the handle and turn and push and enter and close the door behind you. Can you lock the door? No bolt. Can you recall any avian facts that would support the possibility of a bird turning a doorknob? Be serious. Is there a window in this door? Solid oak. Blessed old, thick old door, God save the English craftsman—

You heard that, didn't you? A settling of weight, a soft scratching on the marble floor. What goes with wings? Talons. And if talons were raked across the good old solid oak door, they would undoubtedly produce something remarkably similar to the sound we're hearing now.

Time to see what kind of room we 're in, and more essentially, what other exits it offers. Reach in the pocket, find the matches, move away from the door, and strike a— Good Christ!

Doyle dropped the match and recoiled to ward off a blow that never arrived. This surprised him, because what he'd seen in the split second as the match ignited, bearing down on him at an imposing angle, was the face of a ghoul, hideously denuded of skin, yellowed teeth bared in a militant grimace. He waited. Surely, he'd be feeling its foul breath on his face. Hands shaking, he lit another match.

A mummy. Upright, in its sarcophagus. Beside it, on display, a coiled staff of Ra. Maneuvering the match to reveal more of his surroundings, Doyle realized he'd stumbled into a room of Egyptologiana. Amphora, jewelry, preserved cats, gold-inlaid daggers, hieroglyphed slate: Egypt and its detritus were all the rage these days, no world tour complete without an excursion to the Pyramids at—

Boom! Banging on the door. Boom! The hinges groaned painfully. Thanks to his panicked exclamation, whatever was out there knew he was inside—

The match burned his finger. He dropped it and lit another, looking for a—please God—yes, there, a window. He moved to it as quickly as keeping the match alive would allow, fixed the position of the latch lock, discarded the match, grabbed the latch, turned—the pounding on the door insistent, massive bulk heaving itself against splintering wood—and the window flew open. Doyle looked down at an uncertain drop, no time

to hesitate, tossed out his bag and stick and followed them, absorbing the shock of the fall with his knees, tucking and rolling, scooping up bag and stick and sprinting away from the Tomb of Antiquities.

He stopped to catch his breath under the vaulted exterior arch of St. Mary's Church. He waited ten minutes in the shadows for the dreadful flapping to emerge from the darkness, for some vile avenging shadow to blot out the stars and streak down at him out of the sky. As his breathing steadied, the sweat that had soaked his shirt cooled, leaving him cold and shivery. Lights burned invitingly in the nave. He moved inside.

What had he escaped from? In the warm, same light of the church, the question turned on him; had his imagination transformed perfectly ordinary circumstances—say, an over-zealous night watchman whose corduroy pants produced an insistent hissing—into a wallow of self-generated terror? He had studied how the strain of combat could induce in soldiers all manner of hallucinatory mental phenomena. Was he not now laboring under an even more insidious strain, in that his antagonists were unknown to him and could be, as Sacker had suggested, any passing stranger in the street? Perhaps this was their preferred method of assault, driving their victims mad with a constant noncorporeal menace more sensed than seen. Show a man a target he can strike back against, and you lend him a footing. Attack him with inexplicable night sounds, will-o'-the wisps, macabre scarecrows by the sides of train tracks, incite the stuff of his own nightmares, and the suggestive vagueness of it alone could send him reeling into lunacy.

Standing at one of the transept chapels, Doyle entertained an impulse to light a candle in appeal to some conventional higher power of good, for guidance or aid. god is light and in him is no darkness at all, read the inscription.

There was a lit taper in his hand; he'd caught himself nearly in the act. Curious: I'm standing square in the fulcrum of man's eternal dialectic between faith and fear; are we beings of light, gods waiting to be born, or pawns in a struggle of higher forces vying for control of a world beneath their separate, unseen realms? Unable to commit himself to either

side of that argument, Doyle extinguished the taper without lighting a candle.

With returning to see if Sacker had returned to his office an option of exceptionally limited appeal, the prospect of food and drink presented the preferred alternative; feed the body, quiet the mind. Then a visit to an individual uniquely qualified to lead him out of this metaphysical mire was in order: HPB.

chapter seven HPB

One full stomach and two hours later, Doyle was srr-ting amid a modest gathering of Transcendentalists at the local Grange Hall listening to H. P. Blavatsky hold forth from center stage. No lectern, no notes, she spoke extemporaneously, and even if the essential content and continuity of the lecture proved elusive in retrospect, the effect was undeniably mesmerizing.

"—there has never been a religious leader of any stature or importance who invented a new religion. New forms, new interpretations, yes, these they have given us, but the truths upon which these revelations were based are older than mankind. These prophets, by their own admission, were never originators. The word they preferred was transmitters. They never, any of them, from Confucius to Zoroaster, Jesus to Mohammed, they never said, These things I have created. What they said was, invariably, These things I receive and pass on. And so it is today."

As her passion mounted, her eyes flashed liked sapphires. Blavatsky's round, diminutive figure assumed protean dimensions, while her heavily accented English, broken and tentative to start with, flowed in a grammatically impeccable silver stream.

"There exists in the world today sacred wisdom which dwarfs our puny notions of history; I am speaking of books of ancient origin, vast depositories of them, hidden for centuries from the Western eye; the Northern Buddhists of Tibet alone possess three hundred and twenty-five volumes, fifty to sixty times the amount of information contained in the so-called Bible, recounting two hundred thousand years of human history. Let me repeat that: two hundred thousand years

of recorded human history. 'But that's pre-Christian! What an assertion! She must be insane! She must be silenced!' I can hear the venerable Archbishop crying out all the way from Canterbury."

She cocked a hand to her ear, the comic effect of which did not elude her audience. Doyle glanced around the room and noticed that the Indian woman who had ridden up with him on the train was sitting one row over, smiling at HPB and nodding approvingly.

"What was the most devastating act the Christians took against their precedents? How did they begin their fanatical and systematic eradication of the Ancient Knowledge? Answer? The Gregorian calendar. So simple: Year One. Time begins with the birth of the Nazarene prophet—oh there were some mildly significant events before this, but the years run backward, you see, away from this Supreme Moment, into the void of insignificance. We men of the True Church, we'll decide when time begins. And so with one stroke prove definitively that the writing implement is mightier than the saber.

"Do you see how damaging, how trivializing this decision is to all the history that preceded it? How this one act, born not of the traditional Christian pieties, but from the fear of unwelcome truths—that is, truths contradictory to the best interests of those currently in power—cuts human progress off from the most powerful spiritual resources it has or will ever have available to it."

Bold talk in a Christian country. Doyle had to admire the woman's verve and evident common sense. This was no fuzzy-headed mystic with her head in cloud-cuckoo-land.

"You have to grant them this. These early Christians. They were tenacious. Did their work well. They scoured the world for these Ancient Doctrines, and they obliterated them, almost entirely, in the Western world. The library at Alexandria, the last great archive whose contents straddled the pre- and post-Christian worlds, burned to the ground. Do you suppose this act of willful spiritual vandalism was an accident?

"This is why our travels, our work as Theosophists, must always take us to the East. That is where the knowledge is. From where it has always emanated forth. Fortunately, the

Adepts of the East had the sound historical sense to conceal their sources from these Western marauders, Holy Crusaders intent on their own parochial destiny, oblivious to the true concern of man: human spiritual evolution. And so you ask yourself, why has this knowledge of the Secret Science remained hidden from the Western masses? Would it not be in the best interests of these alleged Enlightened Ones to share their secrets with the emerging civilizations? Let me ask you this: Would you give a candle to a child in a roomful of gunpowder? These truths have been passed down by spiritual leaders, from generation to generation, since time began. They remain secret because contained within are the keys to understanding the essential mysteries of life. Because they are Power! And woe betide us all if they should ever fall into the wrong hands."

Her eyes rested on Doyle for the first time, then moved on.

"So this is our lot; even as we labor endlessly to bring these truths, in their reduced, acceptable form, before the court of public opinion we should not delude ourselves that our efforts will be welcomed in our lifetimes. Quite the contrary. We must expect to be rejected, attacked, ridiculed. No scholar or scientist will be permitted to regard our efforts with any degree of seriousness. It is simply our job to open the door, if only this much." She held up two slightly parted fingers. "It will fall to each generation of fellow explorers who succeed us to open that door a little wider."

Now she seemed to turn her attention directly to Doyle. He felt the force of her eyes as she held him benignly in her gaze.

"How is this to be done? you ask. Imagine you are a tourist, and you are traveling in a country that is very well known to you, a country in which you have spent your entire existence. You are familiar intimately with its roads, rivers, cities, people, and customs. It represents the sum of all you know, and so you therefore, quite naturally assume it represents the sum of all that is. Imagine then that while upon your travels, you have quite unexpectedly arrived at the border of another land. A land not identified anywhere on your most impressive collections of maps. This country is ringed, on every side, by insurmountable mountain ranges, so you are unable to see down into this strange land from your position. But you are

determined to go there. You are enthusiastic. You have courage. You have, for lack of a better word, a certain faith. What must you do?"

Scale the mountain, Doyle thought. Blavatsky nodded.

"And remember," she said, "when the path appears impassable, when your prospects are ruined, when even death seems imminent, you will have no other choice but to destroy the mountain. In this way, and this way only, will you enter the New Country."

With this perplexity, her presentation was at an end. Applause was brief and polite. Blavatsky bowed slightly, a slight smile not without irony on her lips, which seemed to Doyle to say, You are not applauding me, because these are not truly my words, but I acknowledge the divinity and comedy of our collective spiritual-physical paradoxical condition and commend you for your recognition of it.

Most of the crowd drifted out, satisfied with their evening, some smugly dismissive, others self-congratulatory on the subject of their own open-mindedness, a few stimulated to greater thought that would result in soul-searching to last the better part of the evening, or even, for one or two, into the next day, before the blanket of routine muffled that restless stirring back down to the parade of days.

Knowing he must speak with the woman, Doyle lingered on the edge of the circle of acolytes who pressed in around her, hungry for more direct experience of the truths she was peddling. An assistant—Doyle presumed he was an assistant by his habitually clerical nature—male, early twenties, set up a table of HPB's books nearby, offering the volumes Doyle was already familiar with at extremely reasonable prices.

The questions she fielded were earnest, if predictable, and she answered with wit and brevity that bordered on the discourteous. She was clearly not one of these charismatics Doyle had occasionally come across, whose express objective was to inspire a dependency, emotional and inevitably financial, among their faithful. She was, if anything, impatient with her standing as a figure of social curiosity and emphatically disinterested in the glamorous, self-aggrandizing aspects of the teacher-student dynamic. This is her gift, Doyle thought. She stirs the pot. What the individual does with the

information there was not her responsibility. Sensible anc pragmatic and not a little appealing.

"What do you have to say about the various religions?"

"Nothing. There is no religion higher than truth."

Why do you think elders in other religions are afraid oi what you are saying?"

"Bigotry and materialism."

"Are you saying Jesus was not the Son of God?"

"No. We are all sons and daughters of God."

"But are you saying he wasn't divine?"

"Quite the contrary. Next question."

"What about the Freemasons?"

"Whenever anyone asks about the Freemasons, I must say good night. Read my books, and to the greatest extent that you can manage, remain awake. Thank you."

With that, she withdrew through a door at the side of the stage, and the remainder of the crowd dispersed. A short, nattily dressed woman with a monocle and walking stick appeared at Doyle's side.

"Dr. Doyle?"

"Yes."

"My name is Dion Fortune. HPB would like to speak with you. Would you come this way please?"

Doyle nodded and followed. The woman's name was familiar; she was a founding member of the London branch of the Theosophical Society and an author of some note in the esoteric world. Doyle noticed the Indian woman lingering at the book table as Fortune led him through the door.

Her handshake was firm and cool. She looked him right in the eye with concern and warm support.

"I am most pleased to meet you, Dr. Doyle."

Having vouchsafed the initial introductions, Dion Fortune took a seat by the door. They were in a cramped dressing room next to a rumbling furnace. A spacious, well-traveled satchel stood open on a table—HPB's only luggage, her possessions and appointments were as utilitarian and utterly lacking in ostentation as her wardrobe.

Doyle returned the salutation, knowing he would feel remiss without telling her immediately of the events in London.

"Petrovitch is dead," he said.

Her features hardened. She asked immediately for exhaustive, specific details. He recounted the tale exactingly, as well as his conclusions, finally producing the tin of poison tablets from his bag. Blavatsky examined them, sniffed them, nodded.

"Would you like to drink with me?" she asked. "I recommend something stiff."

She pulled a bottle from her bag. Fortune produced some glasses.

"Vodka," she said, offering him the first glass.

"I thought spiritual teaching argued against the use of hard liquor," Doyle said lightly.

"Most spiritual teaching is hogwash. We must still move through the world as the personality into which we were born. I am a Russian peasant woman, and vodka has a most agreeable effect upon me. Na zdorovia."

She downed the drink and poured another. Doyle sipped. Fortune abstained. Blavatsky dropped into a chair, slung a leg over one of the arms, and lit a cigar.

"There is more you would like to tell me, yes?"

Doyle nodded. He was grateful for the vodka, as it seemed to elicit a smoother recitation of his story. She stopped him only once, to ask for a more detailed description of the wounds and external arrangement of the organs of the fallen prostitute.

"Would you be kind enough to sketch them for me as close to memory as possible?"

Fortune handed him pen and paper, and Doyle complied, handing Blavatsky the result. She studied the drawing, grunted once, then folded the paper and dropped it in her bag.

"Please continue," she said.

He guided her through the trip to Cambridge, his near encounter with God-knows-what in the Antiquities Building, and then showed her the altered book from his rooms.

"What could have caused such a thing?" he asked.

"Ectoplasmic detonation. An entity breaking through from the other side. This is what Petrovitch summoned me to see. Very bad. Of course, at the time I assumed they were after Petrovitch—perhaps they were, secondarily. Be thankful you weren't home at the time. Go on, Doctor."

Doyle's mind spun. "Madame Blavatsky, what can you tell me about the Dark Brotherhood?"

The question prompted a veiled exchange of looks between HPB and Fortune that he was unable to interpret.

"Evil beings. Materialists. Enemies of holy spirit. You should read my work on the subject—"

"I have read your work on the subject, Madame." Only too well, thought Doyle. "I need to know if you believe these beings are real."

She knocked on the table. "Is table real? Is glass real?"

"It appears that they are, yes."

"You have your answer then."

"But are these beings people—I mean, are they in human form, or do they just swim indiscriminately around in the ether?"

"They are spirits who desire human form. They hunger, hovering around it, seeking entry."

"For which, as you write, they require the cooperation of the living."

"Cooperation and sacrifice, yes. They must be invited onto this plane through the enactment of rituals and so forth," she said, somewhat disinterestedly. "Describe for me if you would this Professor Armond Sacker."

"Tall, rangy. Midthirties. Prominent nose, high, intelligent brow, light eyes. Long fingers. Athletic."

This prompted another look between his hosts.

"Is something wrong?" Doyle asked.

"As it happens, I'm to have supper with Professor Sacker this very evening," she replied.

"But you know him then," Doyle replied excitedly.

"For many years."

"You know him well."

"Very well indeed. That will be his step arriving outside our door even now."

There were in fact footsteps outside the door, two sets, and then a knock. Fortune opened the door, revealing the young book clerk.

"Professor Sacker to see you, Madame," said the clerk.

"Show him in," she replied.

Doyle rose. The clerk moved away from the door, and Pro-

fessor Sacker entered. HPB greeted him warmly with a kiss to either cheek.

"How good to see you again," she said.

"And you, my dear, and you," Sacker replied loudly.

Fortune welcomed Sacker familiarly as well and then presented him to Doyle, and Doyle shook the infirm hand of the stooped, diminutive, white-haired eighty-two-year-old man before him.

"Sorry, what was the name again?" asked Sacker.

"Doyle."

"Boyle?" He was nearly shouting.

"Doyle, sir. Arthur Doyle."

"Fine. Will you be joining us for supper then, Oyle?"

"I don't honestly—I don't know, sir!"

"Professor, please go ahead to the restaurant with Mrs. Fortune. I will be along to join you momentarily," Blavatsky said, making herself understood by the old man without raising her voice. She signaled Fortune, who smoothly guided Sacker out of the room.

Blavatsky turned back to Doyle, reading the shock on his face.

"Listen carefully, Doctor," she said. "I am leaving early in the morning for Liverpool and from there in two days' time sailing to America. You must try to remember everything I tell you, which as you have ably demonstrated will not be difficult for you."

"I'll try. If I could ask—"

She held up a hand to silence him. "Please do not ask questions. They will only serve to irritate me. There is a great urgency in you, and I do not doubt what you have told me, but this is a most dangerous time for many initiates in many places, and my presence is promised elsewhere. I do not expect you to understand. Please accept that what I have to tell you will be of some use to you and move forward."

"If I have no other choice."

"Good. Optimism is good, Common sense is good." She put out her cigar. "As mystics are to the occult, there are individuals known as sorcerers to Magick. Magick is the Left-Handed Path to Knowledge; it is the shortest way to the Englightenment we all seek. It has a higher cost. It seems to me that what the man who presented himself to you as Pro-

fessor Sacker has told you was correct in many details: You have been made a target by a group traveling the Left-Handed Path."

"Who are they?"

"This is unknown—"

"The Dark Brotherhood?"

"There are many names for that loose confederation of souls. Their hand is visible behind the sinister actions of countless factions around the world; do not mistake them for some benevolent protective order of lodge brothers. They are our counterparts in exploring what lies beyond, but their sole ambition is material power. They are exceedingly malicious and more than capable of ending your life, as they have done to my dear friend Petrovitch, who was, by the way, a highly advanced Adept who had been watching your progress with interest for some time—"

"My progress?"

She stilled him again and fixed him with her hypnotic gaze, which flared again with the persuasive power she had evidenced earlier onstage.

"You must not waver in your determination. It is your strongest asset. You must not fear, for that will let them in. Regarding all of these phenomena you have described, some of which I must admit are new to me—the blue thread, the strange state of your rooms, and so on—you must remember this: All of these manifestations they create mean absolutely nothing."

"Is that true?"

"Not really, but I strongly advise you to adopt this attitude at once, or things will not go well for you. By the way, may I have this copy of my book? I should like to study it. They appear to have penetrated the skin and altered its molecular structure. If this is true, it is not good."

He handed her the book, gulping back the impulse to ask her why? She studied the book for a moment before placing it in her satchel and turning to him for another long look.

"When things appear darkest, you have friends unknown or unseen—"

"Professor Sacker—"

"The Professor Sacker you have met tonight is a scholar of ancient Mystery Cults. He is a sympathetic colleague of ours,

an academic with no direct knowledge of your lamentable situation. The fact that the man who contacted you used his name is of great significance, which I encourage you to investigate."

"What should I do?"

"What should you do? That is a most excellent question," she said seriously. "What do you think you should do?"

Doyle thought for a moment.

"I think I should visit Lady Nicholson's estate. Topping."

"A sound idea. You are in the grip of a most interesting dilemma, Doctor. I sincerely hope our paths may cross again someday. Do you have copies of all my books?"

"As a matter of fact, they were lost in the—"

"Please see the boy outside. He will provide you with new editions at absolutely no cost. I trust they may prove useful to you."

She turned away and began packing her satchel. Doyle suddenly remembered the talisman sitting in his pocket.

"Excuse me, Madame ... but what do you make of this?" and he showed her the metallic eye Sacker's imposter had given him. She took it from him, looked it over, tried to bend it, then bit down on it. It bore no marks, which drew a nod of approval.

"This is very good. If I were you, I would wear it around my neck."

She handed it back and closed up her satchel.

"But what does it mean?"

"It is a symbol."

"A symbol of what?" he asked, somewhat exasperated.

"It would take too long to explain. I must go now. I would invite you to supper, but I don't wish to unduly alarm the Professor. His health is frail, and we need him to finish his work before he passes on, as he is scheduled to do so later in the year."

"Scheduled?"

"Come, come, Doctor. There is more on heaven and earth and so on. Shakespeare was an extremely advanced Adept. I trust you've read him extensively."

"Yes."

"Ah, the English educational system. Give us a kiss. A blessing on your head, Doctor Doyle. Do svidan'ya."

A swirl of her cloak and she was out the door. Doyle's head swam. He spotted a large book on the floor beside her satchel, picked it up, and followed her.

She was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the young clerk. A short stack of her other works had been left behind on the table in the empty Grange Hall. He looked at the cover of the larger book in his hand.

Psychic Self-Defense, by H. P. Blavatsky.

chapter eight JACK SPARKS

Now I'm really on the griddle, Doyle thought: Blavatsky confirms that assassins are indeed on my trail— cold comfort there—and no practical help forthcoming from her, since she's clearly more interested in pursuing her own mysteriously imperative agenda. Who would have thought that after all this danger, one would place so low in her hierarchy of spiritual distress?

But then what did I expect, really, that she'd drop everything and rally to my defense? And if she had, what help could she actually have given? A middle-aged gunnysack of a woman with common personal habits and a cadre of effete, intellectual bookworms? I don't envy the poor buggers she's bustling off to rescue in my stead, I can tell you that. A stern talking-to and a bottle of vodka aren't what's in order here, no sir: What I need's a heavily armed squadron of steely dragoons standing picket, sabers at the ready, ready to lay down their lives.

He was walking again through the commons toward King's Parade.

My flat ruined, Petrovitch murdered—what will Leboux make of that when the body turns up?—prostitutes carved up in the street like a dog's breakfast, a child kidnapped, his mother killed before my eyes as sorcerers lure me into ambush, rescued by impostors, misdirected into a wild-goose chase where I'm nearly meat for some stone Gothic basilisk. I never did like Cambridge, breeding ground for ruling-class contempt, perpetuating the whole rotten system—easy, Doyle: Let's not drag in the whole litany of a lifetime's social complaints. One calamity at a time, old man.

First things first: lodging for the night. Not much money left. No one to contact for help: Blavatsky had been his best hope in that department. Her damned books felt like an anchor in his bag. The vanity of the woman; ask for help, she weighs you down with her collected works and flees the country.

He had a plan, after all: Topping. Now what does one say to the husband? "Delighted to meet you Lord Nicholson— Yes, most unusual weather for this time of year, your for-sythia are thriving beyond all reasonable expectation. By the way, were you aware that your wife, Caroline, and her brother had their throats cut and brains bashed out in a squalid London tenement just the other day? No? Yes, sorry to say; I happened to be in the room at the time—"

All right, there was time enough to consider what his approach should be before he got there. The task at hand was getting through the night ahead of him alive.

An inn. Good. That's a start.

Doyle decided not to leave his bag in the room, although he felt secure enough to leave his coat on the bed. He took a seat by the fire in the public room and kept the bag in contact with his leg at all times. A half-dozen other patrons occupied the cozy snuggery: two elderly, donnish-looking men, a young married couple, and two solitary travelers, neither of whom in mien or aspect appeared to pose any threat.

Doyle nursed a hot buttered rum and studied the metallic eye. He considered Blavatsky's advice—perhaps I should make an amulet, what harm could come from it? Something caught his eye: the Indian woman again, ascending the stairs. Staying the night, apparently. Came up for the lecture. Probably returning to London tomorrow.

The false Sacker came back into his mind. He had presented himself as friend and rescuer but if that was truly the case, why give a false name? Why that particular one? Couldn't he just as easily be in league with the villains, insinuating himself into Doyle's confidence for some more sinister purpose? For all Doyle knew, during their carriage ride he might have been cheek by jowl with the Grand Master of the Brotherhood.

The wind came up and rattled branches against the window. A gust kicked up the fire, shaking Doyle out of his rev-

erie. The mug was empty in his hand. He heard horses nickering uneasily outside. He discovered with some surprise he was alone in the room. How much time had passed? Eleven-thirty. He'd been sitting there for nearly an hour.

With a howl of wind, the front door flew open, gaslight guttered in the rush of air, the room darkened, and in strode a towering figure in black, face obscured by a high-collared cloak and tricornered hat. The man banged impatiently on the desk and looked around. Doyle obeyed an impulse to pull back behind the chair and avoid the intruder's eye, although it denied him a view of the man's face. Doyle chanced another look in time to see the proprietor scurry out from a back room: The smile instantly vanished from the innkeeper's face. Although Doyle could not discern what the stranger was saying, the fulminating, guttural intent of his tone was unmistakably menacing.

Picking up his bag, Doyle discreetly made his way to the back stair, making certain the man at the desk did not see him. As he ascended, the only distinct words he heard were the intruder's specific request to view the register, and he knew intuitively that the man was looking for him.

"Right. Retrieve my coat from the room, and I'll be on my way," he murmured to himself as he moved down the hallway and fumbled the key into the lock. Take some small comfort, Doyle; if they've come for you again, at least this time it's in recognizably human form.

He entered and saw that the window on the far wall was flapping open, the rain that was just starting to fall splashing in over the sill. He moved to close it, and as he reached outside for the latch, the sight on the street below sent a chill crackling to the base of his spine.

Standing at the inn's entrance was the same pitch-black carriage they'd seen on the night of the seance. A figure in a black-cowled cape held the reins of the four black stallions. Doyle pulled the window in toward him, the figure looked up at the movement, the cowl fell away, and Doyle saw the gray hood covering the figure's face. It pointed at him and emitted its deafening high-pitched wail.

Doyle slammed the window shut and reached into his bag for the pistol and hustled to the door. Moving down the hall, he heard cries of pain from below; they were tormenting the

poor innkeeper—bastards, I'll fill them with holes—and he was fixed to hurtle downstairs to confront them when he heard a rush of footsteps on their way up. And another sound ...

"Psst." Where was that coming from?

"Psst." At the end of the hallway, the Indian woman stood in a half-open doorway beckoning to Doyle with a crooked finger. Doyle hesitated.

"Hurry, for God's sake, Doyle," the woman said. In a man's voice.

Doyle ran for the door and entered as behind him the attackers reached the floor he was on and headed toward his room at the far end of the hall. The room's other occupant was removing the long veil, and Doyle for the first time saw this person's face.

"You ..."

"Help me out of these clothes," said the man he'd known as Professor Armond Sacker.

Doyle gaped at him. The sounds of heavy blows and splintering wood ran down the corridor.

"Don't be a silly pudding, Doyle, they just discovered you're not in your room."

Doyle assisted as the man stripped off the padded sari, revealing the same black outfit he'd worn the night they'd met, and quickly toweled off the brown makeup on his face.

"You've been following me," was all Doyle could manage.

"They've found you much faster than I anticipated, my fault entirely," the man said, tossing the towel aside. "Is your pistol loaded?"

Doyle checked the chambers. "No, I'd completely forgotten."

The sound of banging on doors, and the startled cries of the floor's other occupants, was moving toward them down the hall.

"I suggest you hurry, old man," the man said coolly, kicking the sandals off his feet and pulling on a pair of soft leather boots. "We'll have to take the roof."

Rummaging through his bag for the box of ammunition, Doyle heard a creak and looked up to see one of the gray hoods opening the window above the bed. Grabbing the first solid object he could find, he reared back and hurled it at the

creature, hitting it dead square in the center of the hood, knocking it away from the window. They heard a clatter of roof shingle, then a heavy impact below.

The man picked up the projectile from beneath the window.

"Good old Blavatsky," he said, with a brief admiring glance, handing the edition of Psychic Self-Defense back to Doyle. "Off we go then."

Pocketing the veil he'd worn earlier, the false Sacker climbed through the window. Doyle finished loading the pistol, hoisted out his bag, accepted the man's offered hand, and joined him on the roof.

"You have a great deal of explaining to do," Doyle said to him.

"Right with you, Doyle," he said. "What say we first put some distance between ourselves and these bloodless fiends, fair enough?"

Doyle nodded. The man started away, straddling the roof's spine, Doyle following closely, each step on the rain-soaked shingles perilously slick. The storm howled around them.

"What do I call you?" Doyle asked.

"Sorry? Frightfully hard to hear out here."

"I said, what's your name?"

"Call me Jack."

They made their way to the rear edge of the roof. The street twenty feet below was empty. Jack put two fingers into his mouth and whistled loudly enough to pierce the wind.

"I say, Jack ..."

"Yes, Doyle."

"Your whistling like that, is that such a good idea?"

"Yes."

"But I mean, their hearing seems awfully acute by my reckoning."

"Acute doesn't quite cover it."

They waited. Jack unfolded the veil from his pocket, which Doyle noticed was nearly ten feet long and heavily weighted at either end. Doyle heard movement behind them; another gray hood appeared, loping down toward them over the crown of the roof.

"Shoot that one, will you?" Jack asked.

"I'll wait till it's a bit closer, if you don't mind," Doyle said, raising the pistol and drawing a bead on the figure.

"I wouldn't wait too long."

"I'd be happy to let you try—"

"No, no—"

"Because if you think you can do better-—"

"I'm brimming with confidence in you, old boy—"

The hood was no more than ten feet away. Doyle fired. The creature, incredibly, dodged the bullet and continued to slowly advance.

"Not trying to be critical, you understand. It's just," Jack said, beginning to twirl the scarf above his head in a tight circle, "they're a good deal quicker than they first appear. Better to lay down a dense field of fire and hope they dodge into it."

Doyle fired again; the creature slipped left, the bullet ripped through its shoulder, it staggered, righted itself, and still came on. Wiping the rain from his eyes, Doyle aimed down the sight of the gun.

"These things," Doyle said, "they're not quite alive, are they? In the traditional sense."

"Something like that," Jack said, and let fly the scarf. It whistled through the air and caught the creature at the throat. Both weighted ends whirled out and stemmed around the neck, gaining speed until the weights thwacked its skull with the sound of a melon being crushed by a wagon wheel.

"Now, Doyle!"

Doyle fired point-blank into the face of the hood. The thing toppled over, skidded down the slates, and fell from sight.

"Damn," Jack said.

"Thought it went rather well."

"I was going to use that scarf to get us off the roof."

"Handy little item."

"South American, actually, although they've been using a variation in the Punjab for centuries."

"If you don't mind my asking, how will we get down, Jack?"

Doyle thought he heard a carriage approaching below.

"We'll have to jump, won't we?"

Jack was looking intently down at the street and a now-visible approaching carriage.

"Really? We won't get far on a pair of broken legs—"

Before Doyle could further organize his objections, Jack grabbed him by the belt and jumped off the building. They hit the roof of the moving carriage and ripped right through the fabric, landing in a heap on the cushions of the cab.

"Good Christ!"

"Are you in one piece?"

Doyle quickly took inventory; save some discomfort in the ribs and a slightly turned ankle finding himself surprisingly intact.

"I think I'm all right."

"Well done."

As they rushed past the coach outside the inn, Doyle dimly made out dark figures scrambling after them in the downpour. Jack rapped on what was left of the roof and the driver, the same small scar-faced man who'd driven them before, appeared in the gap above.

"Evasive tactics, Barry," Jack said. Barry nodded and turned back to his work. Doyle heard the crack of the whip, and the cab quickly accelerated.

Jack settled back into the seat across from Doyle, holding up a hand to the water cascading down onto them through the roof.

"Sorry about the rain."

"Quite all right. We'll have another chat then, as we go?"

"Not just yet. We'll be getting out in a moment."

"Getting out?"

The carriage clattered across a short bridge and came to a sudden halt. Jack leapt from the cab and held open the door.

"Come on, Doyle, we haven't got all night," he said.

Doyle followed him back into the deluge. Jack waved to Barry, and the cab sped off again into the darkness.

"This way," Jack said, leading them down a steep embankment under the bridge they'd just traversed. "In here."

Jack pulled Doyle in under the relative dryness of the span of the bridge. Gripping his bag with one hand, Doyle used the other to haul himself onto a support strut, a precarious perch a scant few feet above the rising torrent of the stream below.

"Are you secure?" Jack had to yell to make himself heard.

"I believe so," Doyle replied, but the remark was obliterated by the deafening thunder of a carriage and four hurtling

across the bridge a foot above their heads. The sound moved away, quickly swallowed up by the storm.

"Was that them?" Doyle finally asked.

"Barry'11 have them running circles around Trafalgar Square before they realize we're not on board."

Doyle nodded, reluctantly admiring the man's resourcefulness. Some time went by. Doyle stared at Jack, who smiled amiably.

"What do you suggest we do?"

"I suggest that we sit here until the rain lets up," Jack said.

More time passed. Jack seemed quite content to wait it out in silence. The same could not be said for Doyle.

"Look here, Jack, or whatever your name is, before we go any farther, I'd very much like to know exactly who you are," said Doyle, realizing his patience was at an end.

"You'll have to forgive the subterfuge, Doyle, but there's a certain logic to all this, which you'll soon come to appreciate," he said, and smiled again, reaching into his jacket and retrieving his silver flask.

"So who are you then?"

"John Sparks, Jack to my friends, special agent to Her Majesty the Queen. Happy to make your acquaintance," he said, offering the flask. "A little brandy to keep the chill off, Doctor?"

chapter nine BY LAND AND SEA

CLINGING TO THE BRIDGE S UNDERBELLY, FEARFUL OF PLUNG-

ing into the icy cataract below, Doyle did not, during the remainder of the night, enjoy a moment's rest. Sparks, on the other hand, seemed to float in and out of a serene meditative slumber, upright, his arms nonchalantly wrapped around a sturdy timber.

The rain abated as the first light of dawn warmed the eastern sky. No clouds obscured the western horizon. Sparks's eyes sprang open, fresh and alert as a thoroughbred on Derby Day.

"The morning has promise," announced Sparks, after vaulting out of their hidey-hole onto the bridge like a Hungarian gymnast.

Stiff as a corpse, wet, famished, and bruised, Doyle dragged himself out onto the road, stifling with considerable effort his irritation at the man's enthusiasm as Sparks flew through an exotic routine of improbable Yogic postures, accompanied by vocalizations that suggested the nocturnal braying of ill-bred cats. Slack-jawed and glassy-eyed, Doyle found his thoughts diminished to visualizing cream-drenched kettledrums of hot buttered oatmeal or elaborately protracted ways for Sparks to die, one of which featured a strikingly original use of the oatmeal.

With a profound exhale and a salute to the rising sun, Sparks finished his exercises and for the first time acknowledged Doyle's presence.

"We should be on the march," Sparks said.

He smiled and walked briskly down the road. It wasn't until Sparks had nearly disappeared around the next comer that the urgency of sticking close to the man cut through the foggy lowlands of Doyle's brain. He took off after Sparks, breaking into a run, his sodden boots squishing with every step. Even after catching him, Doyle had to maintain a trot to keep pace with Sparks's invigorated stride.

"Where are you going?" Doyle asked.

"A moving target presupposes motion, Doyle," Sparks replied, between deep, naturalist breaths. "Unpredictability, that's the key."

Lord, the man's insouciance was aggravating. "So where are you going then?"

"Where are you going?"

"I'm quite sure I don't know."

"Look at you; you're going somewhere."

"I'm left with the impression that I was going with you."

Sparks nodded. There was another long pause.

"So where are we going?" Doyle asked.

"We should get off this road soon enough, I can tell you that."

The narrow lane was bounded on either side by dense forest. "You think it unsafe?"

"At present that's a fair description of just about anywhere." Sparks halted suddenly. His head moved back and forth like a bird, registering exactly what sort of sensory information it was difficult to ascertain.

"This way," he said, and quickly ran off into the woods.

Doyle followed, alarmed. Sparks led them so deep in that the road was no longer visible. Stalking through a gully of second-growth ferns on the forest floor, he slowed his step, came to a halt, and gently drew aside a column of brambles, revealing a spotty gooseberry bush.

"Let's eat," said Sparks.

They denuded the bush, harvesting a handful of berries apiece. They were malformed and bitter, but Doyle savored each one like napoleon creams.

"You like your food, do you, Doyle?" Sparks asked, watching him eat. "You look like a proper trencherman."

"I wouldn't turn down a proper meal, no."

"Nourishment. There's a subject. There'll be a lot to say about that before too long. The general health."

"Jack, if you don't mind, I'd rather not talk about the general health just now."

"Not at all."

"I'd just as soon talk about my health in particular; my health vis a vis these determined attempts upon my life. My health as in, I'd prefer to go on having it, thank you very much."

"I understand completely."

"Good, Jack. I'm glad that you understand."

"I don't need to walk a mile in your shoes to see how bleak things look from where you're sitting," Sparks said, rising to his feet, stretching, ready to press on.

"I wish I could say that were some small comfort to me."

"Comfort's a luxury we're a bit short on at the moment—"

"Jack: Where ... are ... we ... going?" Doyle said, refusing to budge.

"Where do you want to go?"

"I'd prefer to hear your answer first."

"Not as easy as all that, Doyle—"

"That's fine, but to be honest with you, Jack, I was counting on—depending on, actually—your advice and counsel in this matter."

"Here it is, then: Where I want to go at this particular moment in time is not to the point. Not at all."

"Not to the point."

"No. The point is, where do ... you want to go?"

Doyle considered shooting him, but the consumed berries, despite their aesthetic inadequacy, had planed the rougher edges off his temper. "I had entertained some vague plan of going to Topping. The home of the late Lady Nicholson. That was my most recent intention."

"Good. Let's be off," Sparks said, and he started walking away.

"Just like that?"

"It's you who wants to go there, isn't it?"

"So you endorse the idea, then," said Doyle.

"Sounds serviceable. Do you know where it is?"

"Haven't a clue."

"How were you planning to get there?"

"My plan hadn't evolved quite that far."

"East Sussex. Near the town of Rye. Come on, Doyle, we've a long walk ahead of us," said Sparks, setting off through the copse of woods.

"I do have more questions for you," Doyle said, rising to follow him.

"Fit discussion for the open road, are they?"

"I should think so."

"Not this road, mind you. Our route will by necessity be somewhat discursive."

"So I might have suspected."

The sun continued its morning climb, chasing the chill from their bones, blotting up the first layer of damp from their clothes. They kept to the main thoroughfare for no more than a mile before reaching an almost invisible intersection with an overgrown cart path. After some private deliberation, Sparks guided them to the left, down the forgotten byway. From that point forward, he demonstrated the presence of a formidable internal compass, never hesitating over a change of direction, even when.the sketchy track they were following entirely disappeared for extended stretches at a time.

Such as it was, the path fell away from the forest, down into a rolling valley of lush farmland. In the brilliant sunlight, the rich loam of the fields engaged and delighted the senses. A choir of songbirds kept faith with the day's emerging gentility. Doyle found it difficult to hold his worries squarely in mind and once caught himself starting to whistle. Sparks grabbed a handful of dry grass, thoughtfully examining and then chewing the stalks, one after another.

At Sparks's request, Doyle recounted his experiences since they had parted in London, remembering, as Sparks had importuned him to avoid the police altogether, to leave out his visit with Leboux of Scotland Yard. And quite cleverly, too, Doyle congratulated himself.

"So after leading the inspector to Thirteen Cheshire Street, you returned to your flat and discovered the body of Mrs. Petrovitch," Sparks said.

Buffeted, Doyle tried to bluff his way through.

"Allow me to unburden you, Doyle: Don't bother lying to me—"

"How did you know?"

"What does it matter? The damage is done."

"But you must tell me, by what manner of reasoning did you—"

"I was following you."

"Even then? Before the Indian getup?"

"Throughout, more or less."

"For the purpose of protection, or in the hope that I'd draw trouble?"

"Those ends are not working at cross-purposes—"

"Likewise for your presence in Cambridge."

"I had additional objectives there as well—"

"Such as?" asked Doyle, pressing what he now felt sure was the interrogatory advantage.

"Lady Nicholson's brother was an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius. I made some inquiries at the Bursar's Office."

"While I was off looking for 'Professor Sacker.' "

"That was the most opportune time, yes."

"I suppose that was your reason for giving the false name," Doyle concluded. "If I went to Cambridge to seek you out, you could keep one eye on me while you tracked down the brother—"

"Well considered, Doyle."

"As it happened, your best-laid plan nearly had me for birdseed."

"Most unfortunate."

"I don't suppose you have an explanation for what-the-devil was chasing me in the halls of the Antiquities Building."

"No. Sorry," said Sparks, without a hint of misgiving, then, sprightly, "Not without interest, though, is it?"

"A moment hardly goes by without my thinking of it. So what did you discover about the brother?"

"Last name, Rathborne; Lady Nicholson's maiden name. First name, George. He left school three days before the vacation on what he told the proctor was urgent family business. Hasn't been seen or heard from since."

"Nor will he be, poor devil. What about Madame Blavatsky?"

"Fascinating woman."

"Agreed. What has she to do with any of this?"

"I would say she's an interested and sympathetic observer."

"You're saying she's not involved?"

"You're the one who's spoken to her, what do you think?"

"Don't you know her?" Doyle asked, exasperation mounting again.

"Never met the woman. Effective speaker, though. Intriguing blend of crusading pilgrim and patent-medicine salesman. You'd almost swear she was American."

"And forgive me, Jack, but I must ask, what is this tommy-rot about you working for the Queen?"

Sparks stopped and looked at him with unimpeachable sincerity.

"You must assure me that you will never breathe a word to another soul of that association. It cannot be spoken of safely even here, alone in a remote glade. Lives far more precious to the preservation of the Empire than our own depend upon your discretion. I confide in you, with the utmost reluctance, only to impress upon you the gravity of the matter in which you are now regrettably involved. How I wish that it were otherwise."

Sparks's heartfelt invocation of the Crown brought Doyle's royalist sympathies to the fore, crippling his ability to find further objection with Sparks's veil of secrecy.

"Do I interpret you correctly to assume that this involves a threat to the lives of certain ... highborn individuals?" asked Doyle carefully.

"Indeed it does."

"Can I ... be of any assistance to you in this matter?"

"You have already. You're a most capable chap."

A threat to the Queen: Doyle could barely contain himself.

"Since you find my abilities not entirely without merit, I should like to place myself at your continued disposal."

Sparks studied him with equal parts compassion and cold assessment.

"I shall take you at your word," replied Sparks. "Do you have the insignia I gave you the other night?"

"Right here." Doyle retrieved the engraved eye from his pocket.

"Hold it in your left hand, please."

"Madame Blavatsky suggested I make an amulet of it."

"I see no harm in that, so long as you wear it away from casual glance," Sparks said, drawing an identical insignia, in the form of an amulet out from under his collar. "Now raise your right hand and repeat after me."

"Is it some sort of Masonic ritual?"

"We haven't got all day, Doyle."

"Right. Carry on."

Sparks composed himself and closed his eyes; just before Doyle began to feel discomfited by the silence that ensued, Sparks broke it.

"From the point of Light within the Mind of God, let Light stream forth into the minds of men. Let Light descend on Earth."

Doyle repeated the words, trying to breathe life into them even as he labored to decipher their meaning. Mind of God. Light. Light in the form of knowledge: Wisdom.

"From the center where the Will of God is known," Sparks continued, "let purpose guide the little wills of men—the purpose which the Masters know and serve."

More problematic. Unchristian, not that that was especially troubling. The Masters. Blavatsky had written of them: mythological, elder beings, gazing dispassionately down at the follies of man. Every civilization developed its own version: Olympus, Valhalla, Shambhala, heaven ...

"From the center which we call the race of men, let the Plan of Love and Light work out, and may it seal the door where Evil dwells."

Now they were getting somewhere: the door where Evil dwells; Doyle felt qualified to say that, if he couldn't pinpoint its exact location, he had definitely heard something knocking.

"Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth."

The Plan. Whose Plan? he wondered, and exactly how did they, whoever they were—now that he, presumably was one of them—intend to go about restoring it?

"What do we do now? Is there a secret handshake, something to seal the bargain?" asked Doyle.

"No. That's it," said Sparks, stuffing his amulet back under his collar.

"What does it mean exactly, Jack?"

"What did it mean to you?"

"Do good. Fight evil." Doyle shrugged.

"That'll do for a start," Sparks said, and he began to walk again.

"Not very dogmatic. For that sort of thing."

"Refreshing isn't it?"

"I was expecting, you know, a pledge of fealty to Queen and country, something along chivalric or Arthurian lines. That was pantheistic and positively nondenominational."

"Glad it meets with your approval."

"And what does the eye represent?"

"I've told you as much as I'm able for the moment, Doyle," Sparks replied wearily. "Anything more would not be in your self-interest."

They walked on. The fields ran uninterrupted in every direction. From the arc of the rising sun, Doyle figured they were traveling due east.

Hunger presently raised its insistent voice, darkening Doyle's mood. Yes, Sparks had pulled his fat out of the fire on more than one occasion. Nothing in his actions suggested he was anything other than what he represented himself to be, but he remained impenetrable, and the cloaking of royal secrecy around his true purpose rang discordantly. Doyle was in no position to reject the man's assistance, no more than he was of a mind to forfeit his surprisingly welcome company, but common sense prevented the full conferring of his trust. It was as if he were traveling with an exotic jungle cat, its defensive abilities beyond reproach but whose very nature demanded of its keeper a tireless, wary scrutiny.

Perhaps if he questioned Sparks more cleverly, he'd inadvertently yield up details from which the astute observer could assemble a more telling portrait of the man. A number of Doyle's speculative inferences were on the verge of congealing into conclusions. It remained for him to find the right moment to confront Sparks with them and, whether by the shock of recognition or the false vehemence of denial, determine their acuity.

Along the cart path there appeared every so often hedges and occasional embankments and at one point the crumbling remains of stone brickwork, underfoot or along the shoulder. Doyle had noticed the remains from time to time without more than passing curiosity, but as they traversed a more extensive patch of the ruins, his examination of them drew comment from Sparks.

"This is an old Roman road. A trade route running to the sea."

"Is that where we're going, the sea?" Well played, Doyle, devilishly clever the way you slipped that in.

"Of course, paths like this one were in use long before the Romans crossed the channel," Sparks continued, completely ignoring his question. "The early Celts used this path, and Neolithic man before them. Strange, isn't it? The same path used by so many different cultures, down through the ages."

"Convenience, I should imagine," Doyle said. He hadn't thought about it, in truth. "A new lot comes along, the old path is there, remnants of it anyway, why bother cutting a new one?"

"Why not, indeed? Make things easier; there's the history of mankind in a thimble, eh, Doyle?"

"In a roundabout sort of way."

"How do you suppose our prehistoric forebears chose this particular path to begin with?"

"Shortest distance between two points."

"Could be these were the same paths the animals they were hunting used before them," said Sparks.

"That has the ring of truth."

"And why do you think the animals blazed this particular path?" Sparks had slipped into the tone of a Sophist leading the ignorant step by step to the sacred land of truth.

"Something to do with the availability of water or food."

"Necessity, then."

"Their lives are ordered by it, aren't they?"

"Are you familiar with the Chinese philosophy of feng shui?"

"Never heard of it."

"The Chinese believe the earth itself is a living, breathing organism, and just as the human body has veins, nerves, and vital energies running through it, regulating maintenance and behavior, so too does the earth."

"I know their system of medicine is based on such an assumption," Doyle added, wondering what this had even remotely to do with Roman roads in Essex.

"Exactly so. Feng shui assumes the presence of these lines of force and attempts to bring human existence into harmony with them. Practitioners of feng shui are trained and initiated as rigorously as members of any priesthood, increasing their sensitivity to these powers and their ability to accurately in-

terpret them. The building of homes, roads, churches, the entire five-thousand-year-old Chinese Empire—the most enduring civilization our world has produced—was constructed in strictest alignment with these principles."

"You don't say."

"Aside from his obvious ignorance, filth, and lack of sophistication, what quality could most recommend to us prehistoric man?"

"He was quite handy with his hands," Doyle said, struggling to keep up with the man's mental vaults.

"He was in harmony with the earth," said Sparks, paying no attention to Doyle's answer. "At one with nature: part of it, not apart from it."

"The noble savage. Rousseau and all that."

"Precisely. And as a consequence, ancient man possessed an exquisite sensitivity to the ground he walked, the woods he hunted, the streams from which he drank. He didn't need to practice feng shui; he was born with it, innately, as were the animals he depended on for survival."

"So the paths they traveled fell along the lines of some vibratory pattern in the earth."

"Crisscrossing the countryside seemingly at random, these paths many constitute nothing less than the electromagnetic nervous system of the planetary being itself."

"On the other hand, they might just be roads," Doyle countered.

"Might be. But what if I were to tell you that at the intersections of these lines of force, where the—whatever you might wish to call it; the Chinese call it the 'breath of the dragon'—where this pulsating energy is at its zenith, early man erected his temples and holy places, on many of which now stand the Christian churches we make use of today?"

"I'd say the whole thing bears further examination—"

"Stonehenge is such a place. Likewise the ancient abbey at Glastonbury. And Westminster Abbey, which was built on the site of the Romans' Temple of Diana, sits squarely atop the most vigorous nexus of these lines of force in all of England. What does that suggest to you?"

"There's a good deal more in heaven and earth and so on."

"Yes, Horatio. Even more intriguing when you consider that the Greek deity Hermes—the ancient Greeks were aware

of these forces, don't you doubt it—was the god not only of fertility, as was Diana, but also of roads. And what did our Celtic ancestors do to honor Hermes? They erected columns of stone at significant crossroads. Mere signposts? Or primitive conductors of this earthbound energy?"

"But the Celts didn't worship a Greek god," Doyle contended, growing more confused.

"No, the Celts called him Theutates. But when the Romans completed their conquest of Britain, Caesar himself remarked on how easily the natives had been persuaded to worship Mercury, the Roman version of Hermes. Theutates is depicted as carrying a large staff entwined with a serpent, as are both Hermes and Mercury with the caduceus—"

"Two snakes on the caduceus, actually."

"And what does the caduceus symbolize, Doyle?"

"Healing. The power of healing."

"Precisely. Suggesting that if one taps into the power of the serpent, i.e., 'the dragon'—the lines of force in the earth: the natural force—they gain the power to heal. What if all this talk about 'dragons' in Celtic legend wasn't about literal monsters at all? Do you recall what old Saint George was suddenly able to do after 'slaying the dragon'?"

"Uh—"

"Heal the sick! Brave knight ventures out, sticks his lance into—not an actual dragon, in our revised scenario, but the 'coiled serpent' of natural power. Like dropping a conducting wire into a vast reservoir of energy, thereby taming the 'beast.' George then goes straight on to become patron saint of England, it's graven in our English schoolboy minds! Power, Doyle, the elemental power of the planet, running under, around, and through us even now, and we're too blinded and distracted by life's pettifogging natterings to see it!"

Each new idea made Doyle's brain ache. Perhaps there was a vitality-affecting undercurrent beneath these bricks, and it was draining him dry.

"And what was the first use civilizations tried to make of this force once they'd acquired it? What did we use those ancient temples for? Come on, Doyle, think!"

Doyle hazarded a guess. "Animal sacrifice?"

"Healing! Heal the sick; raise the dead. We appealed to the

gods to make us whole; the medical and theological professions were one and the same then. Not unlike two serpents entwined around a straight line of force, come to think of it," said Sparks, surprising himself with the discovery. "Do you remember who the eldest son of Hermes was?"

"Forgive me, it's slipped my mind," said Doyle, feeling slightly dizzy.

"The great god Pan, father of paganism and earth worship, the one the Christians decided to eradicate by calling him the Devil, because poor old, fun-loving Pan also represented that most unchristian of human attributes: unbridled male sexuality."

"Pity."

"Granted Pan has his mischievous side; he particularly liked to lie in wait for travelers in desolate areas, jump out of the weeds, and spook the living wits out of them, inducing a feeling in the victim called Pan-ic."

"I really need something to eat," Doyle said. The surrounding countryside, in spite of its bucolic, sun-drenched beauty, was beginning to look increasingly threatening.

"Isn't the mind extraordinary? One loose brick on the road leads us from feng shui all the way to Pan. By God, maybe there is something to the energy of this old road: I feel mar-velously invigorated!"

Doyle wiped his brow with a handkerchief as Sparks looked out over the fields, reviewing the crop of his recent thinking like a proud farmer.

"If this lines-of-force business is true, if this road truly is sacred, how do you account for the fact that it's fallen into such utter disrepair?" asked Doyle, self-satisfied with the sharpness of his rebuttal.

"In that single observation, Doyle, you express with epigrammatic precision the fundamental tragedy of modern man. We have fallen from grace, our ancient, instinctual link to the natural world forgotten. We're guests who no longer respect the house they inhabit, but rather treat it as a rough clay to be molded to our basest use. Think of the charnel-house factories of London, the befouled air, the mines, child labor; the countless devalued lives broken and discarded by the infernal machinery of the age. The eloquent ruins of this simple coun-

try path inscribe the eventual downfall of our vaunted civilization."

Doyle felt a tingling rush through his body, whether moved by the surprisingly tender outrage of his companion or some combination of starvation and sunstroke, he was quite unsure. It was near midday by now and unseasonably warm. Undulations of heat massaged the horizon line.

"What's that?" Doyle asked, and he pointed to the road behind them.

They had climbed and descended a sequence of gentle hills as the path moved down through the valley. A dark mirage-like heat devil was fluttering toward them along the line of the road. Its rhythmic, fluid movements suggested the beating wings of a gigantic crow.

"Perhaps we'd better clear off the road," Doyle said.

"No."

"Do you think that's, urn, wise, Jack?"

"We're in no danger," said Sparks, standing his ground.

Before too long, they could hear beating hooves: a single horse, at a sustained gallop. The shape metamorphosed through the distortion of the heat and revealed itself to be a solitary rider, a long black cloak flowing in its wake. Slowing as it approached, the rider appeared to a startled Doyle as a welcomely familiar face.

"Why, it's Barry. It's Barry, isn't it?" said Doyle, unexpectedly cheered by the prospect.

"No. It's not Barry," Sparks said.

He moved away to greet whoever it was as the horse covered the last few paces, and the man, who by every test of scrutiny Doyle could apply appeared to be none other than Barry, their erstwhile driver, dismounted and shook hands with Sparks.

"Good man, Larry, no trouble then," said Sparks.

"Kept a sharp butchers. N'trouble a'tall, sir," said Larry, who Doyle still insisted was Barry, not Larry.

"Larry is referring to the scattering of berries and wheat I've left along the way," Sparks explained to Doyle, as they moved to him. "There's not another tracker in all of England who could follow so scant a trail."

"None that is save y'self, sir," Larry added modestly. He was an East Ender, wiry and compact, as Barry had been.

with the same curly brown hair and lively blue eyes that Barry had; that Barry has, Doyle meant to say, still convinced this could be none other than the man himself.

"Larry and Barry are brothers," Sparks said, seeing Doyle's evident confusion. "Identical twins."

"We were, anyway; Barry's a one's wot got the scar, sir, which you'll notice is distinctly lacking on my physiognomy," said Larry, helpfully offering up his right, decidedly unscarred cheek to Doyle as testimony.

"Right," said Doyle. "No scar at all." As if he'd noticed from the start.

"Larry and Barry are something of a legend in certain London circles," Sparks said. "The sharpest pair of crack men you'd ever hope to meet."

"Crack men?"

"Burglars, sir," said Larry, smiling politely as if discussing tea-party etiquette with a maiden aunt. "Bit a' the old slash and grab, practitioners of the wedge, jemmy, and center bit, if you get my meanin'."

"I understand your meaning quite distinctly," Doyle said, affronted by the man's casual criminality.

"A perfect partnership," explained Sparks. "No one knew they were twins. On sheer technique alone they were ten leagues ahead of anyone else in the field."

"We ain't educated, but we 'ad an education, if you get my meaning," elaborated Larry.

"You'll appreciate the elegance of their methodology, Doyle. One of them goes out on the town and holds forth in a pub, cadging drinks, carousing, generally making a spectacle of himself."

"And that part's not the lark you might assume it to be, sir," said Larry, gravely. "A form of entertainment, that's how we seen it—emphasis on performance. Barry, now 'e's a singer, see, wit' a vast repertoire to draw from, whilst I favored epic recitation of the ribald lim'rick."

"So while the one's publicly and visibly engaged, the other brother goes about the fieldwork."

"That being the targeted burgle, in and out wit' the grab bag clean as a nun's wimple," added Larry.

"Both of them as quick as mice and able to work their way into places you wouldn't believe humanly possible," Sparks

went on—enjoying himself just a little too much with this story, thought Doyle.

"Barry, see, 'e can dislocate 'is shoulders in a tight spot and collapse 'imself down like an umbrella—"

"They're never seen together in public, so even if the brother on the job is pinched red-handed, forty eyewitnesses in the pub are ready to swear they spent the evening in the accused's flamboyant company. Absolutely foolproof."

"And Bob's your uncle it was, too, sir," Larry continued. "That is, till one dark day Barry buys hisself a bit of a hard cheese. Always after the ladies, Barry was: a tragic flaw. On this one particular night, he's flouncing a fishmonger's daughter. He's laid a mighty siege to the citadel of this dolly's virtue: The more defense she musters, the more engines of war Barry marshals onto the field of honor. Four in the morning, right there in the shop among the sardines. He's broken through her battlements, overrun the palace guard, and is about to breach her sanctum sanctorum when her old dad barrels in, unexpected like wit' a catch a' North Sea haddock, and before Barry can half pull his knickers on, the man whacks a cleaver 'cross his chops, cuts him right to the bone—"

"We can safely leave out the medical details, Larry," said Sparks.

"Right. Sorry, sir," Larry said earnestly, searching Doyle's face for any wounded sensibility.

"There's a place for the likes of you and your brother," replied Doyle. "It's called prison."

"No question about it, sir. And no doubt that's where we'd both be languishin' to this day, deservedly so, if it weren't for the good graces of Mr. Sparks 'ere."

"A long story we shan't belabor the good doctor with at the moment," Sparks said authoritatively. "Did you spy anyone else on the road?"

"I can say wit' some confidence that your avenue of escape remains undetected, sir."

"Welcome news. Now, my friend, what have you brought for us?"

"Beggin' your pardon, gents, 'ere I am gabbin', and you must be as parched as a medieval monk's manuscript."

It turned out Larry had brought in his saddlebags a great

many things that, if he hadn't been in such poor humor to start, would have gone a long way toward substantially revising Doyle's judgment of the wayward brothers. Sandwiches to start, numbers of them, in abundant variety: deviled ham, rare roast beef and sharp cheddar, turkey and mayonnaise, mutton slathered in horseradish sauce. And with them packages of nuts and sweets and water and cool beer. And perhaps most welcome of all, a change of dry clothes for them both.

They supped off the road, the horse grazing nearby in the tall alfalfa. Larry brought them up to date on his recent movements. Stationed for the last day and a half at the Cambridge railway office, upon receiving a coded wire from Barry in London—he'd led the pursuers a merry chase halfway back to town before eluding them entirely—Larry had taken to his horse and tracked down Sparks and Doyle off the beaten path. Although Doyle assumed it fell along the lines of employment, he found the exact nature of Barry and Larry's relationship to Sparks difficult to pin down and felt more than a little uneasy in asking. The proximity of such a clearly criminal personality, however putatively reformed, aroused in Doyle an Old Testament stoniness that the sandwiches and beer did little to dissolve, despite Larry's sunny attempts to ingratiate himself.

Freshly fortified, and wearing dry shoes again, Doyle and Sparks set off once more down the old Roman road. Larry mounted and rode off ahead of them to perform some undisclosed advance-guard action. The sight of his flapping cloak disappearing over the next hill brought back the memory of a recent and more sinister visitation.

"Who's after me, Jack? Who's that man in black I saw last night?"

A seriousness of aspect clouded his disposition. "I'm not certain."

"But you have some idea."

"He's a man I've been looking for. Last night was the closest I've come to him in many years. He's the reason I was at the seance the other night."

"Is he some part of this evil confederacy you've alluded to?"

"I believe this man you saw is their field general."

"It's someone you know, isn't it?" asked Doyle, with a flash of intuitive certainty.

Sparks looked at him sharply. To Doyle's amazement, there was in Sparks's cool eyes a flicker of fear. Shocking and unexpected.

"Perhaps." Then Sparks raised a roguish eyebrow with customary confidence, his more familiar self again. This unearthing of genuine fright, its mere presence, humanized the man, bringing him closer to the common ground of Doyle's understanding.

"Does it occur to you how little reason there is for me to believe anything of what you've told me?" said Doyle ungrudgingly.

"Certainly."

"I have the experience of my senses to rely on, but these tales you spin ... why couldn't there just as easily be a thousand other equally, if not considerably more, plausible explanations?"

Sparks nodded in rueful consensus. "What else are our lives finally but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain of living?"

"We have to believe life has meaning."

"Perhaps it can only be as meaningful as our own ability to make it so."

What a variety of feeling his friend had exhibited in so short a span of time. Doyle found himself amazed again at the violent elasticity of emotion, more mutable than summer weather. And he saw his opening.

"I completely agree," said Doyle. "For instance, I know next to nothing about you, Jack, factually speaking, and yet I'm still able to construct an idea of you—a story of you, if you will—that may or may not bear any relation to who you actually are."

"Such as?" said Sparks, suddenly keen.

"You're a man of about thirty-five, born on your family's estate in Yorkshire. You are an only child. You suffered a severe illness as a boy. You have a lifelong love of reading. Your family traveled extensively in Europe during your youth, spending a considerable amount of time in Germany. Upon your return, you were enrolled in public school and upon graduation attended college at Cambridge. More than

one college, I think. You studied, among other things, medicine and science. You play some sort of stringed musical instrument, probably the violin, and you do so with no little virtuosity—"

"This is astounding!"

"You briefly entertained the idea of a career as an actor and may in fact have spent some time on the stage. Military service was an option you also considered, and it's possible you journeyed to India in 1878 during the Afghan Campaign. While in the East, you spent time studying religions, among them Buddhism and Confucianism. I believe you have also traveled in the United States."

"Bravo, Doyle. You do amaze me."

"That was my intention. Shall I tell you how I came to these things?"

"My accent, what trace of it remains, gave away Yorkshire. By my manner and apparent means, you correctly assume I spring from family holdings sufficient to support myself in some comfort, without pursuing a life in commerce."

"Correct. Your vivid imagination leads me to believe you were invalided in childhood—perhaps the cholera epidemic of the early sixties—during which you entertained yourself by reading voraciously, a habit you maintain to this day."

"True. And my family did travel regularly through Europe, particularly Germany, but I can't for the life of me surmise how you arrived at that."

"An educated guess: Germany is the preferred destination for upper-class families of your parents' generation attempting to instill in their children some systematic appreciation of literature and culture. I suspect the Germanic lineage of our last few sets of royals has had much if not everything to do with that tendency among the landed gentry."

"Well reasoned," Sparks conceded. "One misstep: I do have an older brother."

"Frankly, I'm surprised. You bear the natural confidence and ambition of an eldest and only child."

"My brother is considerably older. He never traveled with us and spent the better part of my early life away at school. I hardly knew him."

"That explains it then."

"I did attend Cambridge—Caius and Magdalene—studying

medicine and the natural sciences, which you arrived at through my familiarity with the town itself and the apparent ease with which I retrieved the information regarding young Nicholson."

"Right again."

"I also briefly attended Christ Church at Oxford."

"Theology?"

"Yes. And, I'm embarrassed to say, amateur theatricals."

"Your knowledge of makeup and disguise led me to it. The effectiveness of your Indian ruse led me to believe you'd been to the Orient."

"I never entered the military, sorry, but I have traveled to the Far East and did indeed spend many hours in the comparative study of religions."

"And the United States?"

"You did not fail to notice my occasional use of the American vernacular."

Doyle nodded.

"I spent eight months tramping the Eastern Seaboard as an actor on tour with the Sasanoff Shakespearean Company," said Sparks with the tone of a penitent in the confessional.

"I knew it!"

"I thought Mercutio my finest hour on the stage, although in Boston they seemed to favor my Hotspur," he said, mocking his own vanity. "Now I follow your line of thinking on every one of these deductions save one: How on earth did you know I play the violin?"

"I once treated a violinist of the London orchestra for a badly sprained wrist sustained in a bicycling accident. He had a distinctive pattern of small calluses, from fingering the strings, on the pads of the fingertips of his left hand. You possess that same pattern; I assume you play the instrument as devotedly, if not as expertly, as my patient."

"Marvelous. I do congratulate you on your powers of observation."

"Thank you. I pride myself on them."

"Most people drift through life in a perpetual haze of self-conscious introspection that entirely prevents their seeing the world as it is. Your diagnostic training has granted you the priceless habit of paying attention to detail, and you have clearly labored to develop that skill to a profound level. It

suggests that you have also worked with equal diligence to develop an advanced philosophy of living."

"I guess I've always felt the less said about such things, the better," said Doyle modestly.

" 'Let actions define the man for the world, while the music of his soul plays for an audience of one.' "

"Shakespeare?"

"No, Sparks," Sparks said with a grin. "Shall I have a go at you then?"

"What? You mean, what have appearances told you about me?"

"The prospect that I've met my match in the exercise of observational deduction brings my competitive tendencies racing to the fore."

"How will I know these are legitimate inferences and not facts you've gathered by some covert means?"

"You won't," said Sparks, flashing his grin again. "You were born in Edinburgh, Catholic parents of Irish descent and modest means. You fished and hunted extensively in youth. You were educated in Jesuit parochial schools. Your lifelong passions have been literature and medicine. You attended medical school at the University of Edinburgh, where you studied under an inspirational professor who encouraged you to develop your powers of observation and deduction beyond the scope of their diagnostic application. Despite your medical training, you have never relinquished your dream of one day making your living exclusively as a man of letters. Despite your indoctrination in the Church of Rome, you renounced your family's faith after attending seances and encountering experiences too difficult to reconcile with an adherence to any religious dogma. You now consider yourself a confirmed, albeit open-minded, agnostic. You are very handy with a revolver...."

And so they passed the remainder of the afternoon, this meeting of the minds a great refresher for men so accustomed to the solitary exercise of their more acute faculties. Although occasional farms and one or two more developed settlements appeared in the distance, they stayed to their primeval path, quieting hunger and thirst as they arose from the stores that Larry had left them. They passed through meadows and birch woods and blasted, fallow flatlands, until sundown found

them at path's end on the banks of the River Colne, a wide and lazy waterway meandering through the fields and retiring farming villages of the Essex countryside. After a quiet evening meal under a sheltering oak, as darkness fell, Larry appeared again, putting in to shore near their camp at the helm of a twenty-foot sloop, seaworthy and strong, a lantern hanging off the bow. They boarded her while Larry held the gunnels. A worn canvas lean-to and a pallet of blankets offered shelter amidships. Under a clear night sky and the light of a three-quarter moon, they pushed off and drifted silently downstream with the current, passing unnoticed through a sleepy riverside town. At Sparks's insistence, Doyle took the first turn in the bunk, and before the boat had traveled another half-mile downriver, the gentle rolling of the water carried the weary doctor down into the dreamless arms of grateful sleep.

The river conveyed them uneventfully through the night, past Halstead and Rose Green, Wakes Colne and Eight Ash, wending through the knotty sprawl of ancient Colchester near dawn and then down past Wivenhoe, where the river widened out, preparing to meet the sea. Although they passed a number of barges and other small ships at anchor during the night, here they began to encounter for the first time larger vessels under steam. Larry hoisted the mainsail to aid their progress against the incoming tide and a following southeasterly bellowed the canvas, skating them around the cumbersome, cargo-laden traffic that snarled the channel.

Two brief, vertical catnaps were all Sparks had allowed himself during the journey and seemed to be all he required. Doyle slept through the night, waking refreshed and more than a little startled to find them passing landfall and approaching the open sea. With the wind full at their backs, they came about and made for the south. Sparks took the rudder as they rolled into the heavier swells, Larry took his turn on the blankets, and Doyle joined Sparks aft. Although conditions were favorable, Doyle could see by his touch on the helm and his feel for the wind that Sparks was an expert sailor. They soon left all sight of the river behind, keeping the barren reaches between Sales and Holliwell Point visible to starboard.

The restless touch of the waves and the air's salt tan§ brought back to Doyle a cornucopia of long-forgotten memories of days at sea. The pleasure they imparted must have crept into his features, for Sparks soon offered him the rudder. He gladly accepted. Sparks settled himself comfortabl> down into a coil of rope, pulled a packet of tobacco from his boot, and filled a pipe. With only the crisp crack of the sail and the screech of the seabirds to distract him, Doyle greedily drank in the riches of the unobstructed seascape. Whatevei manner of ordeal they had embarked upon seemed infinitely more manageable out here, in an open boat dwarfed by the ocean's immensity, a sight Doyle had oftentimes found comforting in far rougher waters than these.

It suddenly occurred to him: Why not complete the fugitive act and make for the Continent? As a seafaring man, Doyle knew there were a thousand distant, exotic ports of call into which a man could vanish and re-create himself, places his nameless, faceless persecutors would never hope to find. As he considered this possibility, it occurred to him how remarkably little bound him to his current life—family, friends, a few patients—but no wife, no child, no onerous financial obligations. Remove the sentiment of love and discover how dangerously fragile are rendered one's ties to the familiar world. How seductive the possibility of utter change. It was all Doyle could do to resist ruddering hard to port and setting course for the unknown. Perhaps that was the genuine siren's song of legend, the temptation to jettison the ballast of the past and rush weightless and unencumbered down a dark tunnel of rebirth. Perhaps that was the soul's destiny regardless.

But as he stood at the brink of that decision, into the vacuum created by that shimmering lure of escape returned his primal conviction that when confronted by authentic evil— and he felt certain this is what pursued him—to move off one's ground without a fight was an equal if not greater evil. An evil of failure and cowardice. One might pass a lifetime, or an endless string of lifetimes, without ever facing such an unequivocal assault as this against the covenant of what a man holds true about himself. Better to lose your life in defense of its sanctity than to turn tail and live out what remained of one's allotted days as a beaten dog. It was a hollow refuge that gave no shelter from self-loathing.

So he did not steer their boat to the east. No matter if his enemies were more numerous or powerful, they could flay the skin from his muscles and boil the bones before receiving the satisfaction of surrender. He felt fierce and cold-minded and righteous. And if they had harnessed some unholy power, so much the better: They were still flesh, and all flesh could be made to bleed.

"I don't suppose you remember the name of that last publisher you submitted your book to?" Sparks asked, gazing lazily over the side.

"Could have been any one of several. My account book was lost in the shambles of my room."

"How unfortunate."

"How did they do it, Jack? I can manufacture an explanation for nearly everything else that's happened—the seance and even beyond—but I can't for the life of me see that one clear."

Sparks nodded thoughtfully, chewing on his pipe. "From your description, it appears the parties responsible have happened upon some method to effect a change in the molecular structure of physical objects."

"But that would imply they're actually in possession of some dreadful arcane power."

"Yes, I suppose it would," Sparks said dryly.

"I find that unacceptable."

"If that is in fact what they've done, our opinions on it won't provide much of a deterrent, old boy. And while we're on the subject of inadequate explanations, there's also the matter of the gray hoods."

"You said that you didn't think those men were ... exactly alive."

"You're the doctor."

"For an informed opinion, I'd need to examine one of mem."

"Given their persistence, I'd say there's a better than fair chance you'll have that opportunity."

Their conversation had roused Larry from his rest. He crawled out from under the lean-to, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

"Larry's seen one of them up close, haven't you Larry?" asked Sparks.