The Revenant of Thraxton Hall

CHAPTER 19 THE CRYPT OF THE THRAXTONS

Conan Doyle lay in his bed for an hour, but sleep would not come. Finally, he gave up and lit the lamp on his bedside table, then propped the Casebook open on his knees and let his eyes wander over the chart he had drawn. The word Sherlock Holmes had said to him in the dream repeated in his head: Motive… Motive… Motive.… But as his eyes traced the names of the SPR members, he failed to find a single name he could point to as having a compelling reason to kill Hope Thraxton.

The room was close and airless, so he slid out of bed and went to crack a window. But as he flung up the casement, he looked out and glimpsed a heart-stopping sight. The third storey looked down on the rooftops of the east wing and the windows of the other guests’ rooms. Now he watched as the casement of one of the windows raised, a vague human figure appeared in the dark opening… and then floated out into space.

The moon had yet to rise. Through the darkness, he could just make out the murky image of a man in a long frock coat gliding along the line of windows. The silhouette reached a room where the top window had been left cracked open. The figure hovered in place for a second, and then floated onto its back and slid in through the open window. Conan Doyle blinked away afterimages. He wasn’t entirely certain of what he had seen, but if his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks, the shadowy figure could only be one person: Daniel Dunglas Hume.

Conan Doyle tore off his nightshirt and began to throw his clothes on. He was hurriedly snatching up the laces of his shoes when he heard a floorboard creak and looked up in time to see a note slide beneath his door. He rushed to the door and flung it open.

No one.

He leaped into the hallway and looked about, releasing an astonished gasp when he found it empty. The hallway was forty feet long. He puzzled how someone could have slipped the note under his door and run away in time not to be seen. And then he sniffed the air. The unmistakeable musk of Hope Thraxton’s perfume spiraled in the air. He stepped back inside and plucked up the note.

Conan Doyle crept down the stairs and crossed the entrance hall. Here and there he paused, flattening himself against a wall or ducking into a shadowy alcove, listening to hear if anyone was lurking somewhere, watching. When he had convinced himself no one was about, he slipped inside the portrait gallery. He had not brought a lamp, so he fumbled in his pockets, took out a match, and scratched it along the edge of the box. It fizzed and burned. The tang of sulfur caught in his throat. Then he liberated a candle from its wall sconce and kindled the wick. Cupping his hand around the flame, he crept along the gallery, eyes straining to catch sight of Hope. But he reached the end of the gallery and she was not there. He looked around him, raising the candle to cast a halo of light. The quivering candle flame animated the faces of the Thraxtons watching from the walls and gave them the illusion of life. The luminous eyes of the portrait to his right snared his attention. The painting was of a man in modern dress, posed stiffly, one hand gripping the back of a chair, his cold gaze fixed upon the viewer. This portrait had an engraved brass plaque at its base that read: “Lord Edmund Thraxton III.” Beside the portrait of Edmund was a bare space where the ghost of a rectangular dust print revealed where a smaller portrait had once hung.

An intriguing absence.

And then a disembodied giggle raised the hackles on the back of his neck. The laughter seemed to come from thin air, somewhere overhead.

“Hope?” he hissed, “Are you there?”

He crept forward and heard stifled laughter again. It appeared to come from a marble statue of a woman posed in a wall niche. Then the statue came to life as Hope Thraxton stepped down.

“Did I surprise you?” she asked in a playful voice.

“Much as a heart attack surprises its victim.”

She giggled at that. “I’m sorry I alarmed you, Doctor Doyle.”

“Please, call me Arthur. Doctor Doyle is what my patients call me.”

“Does your friend, Mister Wilde, call you Arthur?”

“Yes.”

“And your wife? Does she call you Arthur?”

“Yes.”

A fey smile played upon her face. “Then I shall call you Conan. For I am not your patient and I am not yet your friend.”

Her words dismayed him. “But I rather think we may become friends.”

“Do you really think so? Isn’t that somewhat presumptuous? I am, after all, a Lady.”

“I… I… I’m terribly sorry. I did not mean—

She laughed a musical laugh and touched a hand to his chest. “I am teasing you.”

“Ah, oh… I see. But then, what should I call you?”

She did not answer for a moment, her smile turning coy. “You must call me Milady — until we know each other better.”

Conan Doyle struggled to find a response. In the darkness, the young woman seemed transformed: bold, and playful — so different from the shy creature lurking behind the dark veil.

“We must compare notes,” he said. “The third séance is but a day away.”

“Yes,” she replied, a tremor in her voice.

“Have you had the dream again?”

She answered with a quick nod, her eyes evading his by looking away into the shadows.

“And what faces do you see?”

She turned back to him, her eyes lambent. “Only your handsome face.”

At her words he lost the power of speech.

“Come,” she said and linked his arm in a familiar way that would have shocked and scandalized Conan Doyle had he seen such behavior in two other strangers so recently introduced — and one a married man, at that. They walked toward the ballroom.

“No,” she said, in answer to a question he had only thought and not voiced. “It is not a happy house. Not for me. Not for my father. Not for my grandfather. Not for any generation going back to the day the first brick was laid. The locals whisper that it was built in a bad place — upon a fairy fort or a site sacred to the blood-hungry gods of the ancient Britons. It has seen many tragedies: suicides, murders, stillborn children. There are regions in the house where I cannot bear to tread — rooms that scream, walls that weep, staircases that groan. The very stones of this place are suffused with decades of silence and despair.” Her face quivered with emotion. “But mostly loneliness… terrible, terrible loneliness.…”

She looked away from him, her face masked by shadows. Then just as quickly she turned to him with her eyes sparkling and filled with mischief. “Would you like to meet my family?” she asked gaily.

“Family? I don’t understand, I thought—”

She laughed again and pulled him to a narrow door. She took down a large key from its hook and unlocked it. A stone staircase spiraled down into blinding darkness.

“We’ll need a lamp,” Conan Doyle said. He found one set beside the door and lit it with his candle, then trimmed the wick to a soft glow.

The steps were steep and precipitous, with no handhold or railing. Conan Doyle dragged one hand along the cinderous wall in an effort to keep his balance. After a dizzying spiral of counterclockwise revolutions, they corkscrewed to the bottom and stumbled onto a flagged stone floor.

From the deep chill, he could sense they were belowground. The smell told him they had descended into a crypt, dank and reeking of corruption. The halo of light thrown by his raised lamp revealed ranks of coffins.

“This is my family,” she said. “The Thraxtons, reaching back generations.” Her face loomed and he felt her breath warm upon his cheek — a closeness that stirred him. “Come, I will show you what no one else has ever seen.”

She led, and Conan Doyle followed. The crypt floor took on a downward slope as they descended farther, passing through rooms of coffins crossed by galleries running off to either side. And as they walked, they also journeyed back in time. The coffins became simpler, cruder. More dilapidated. Their echoing footsteps finally brought them to a place where the coffins, soaked in centuries of rot, had disintegrated, spilling bones upon the floor. Here and there, skulls leered from gaping holes in coffins riddled to splinters by the voracious appetites of boring wood lice.

The journey continued on until their feet swept stone flags untrodden in decades, raising gritty clouds. Bitterness filmed Conan Doyle’s mouth. An incipient cough tickled the back of his throat and he knew he was breathing the dust of Hope Thraxton’s ancestors.

She stopped at a place where the crypt seemed to end. The vaulted ceiling ran jagged with cracks and inky water dripped from above. Hope stood gazing at it. “This used to be a way out. Seamus and I would sneak down to the river through here — there is a door at the end. But then this appeared after my grandfather was lost on the moor.”

Conan Doyle took a step forward, raised the lamp high, and saw something quite inexplicable.

From this point onward, a viscous pool of black liquid flooded the crypt. It appeared to be seeping up from the foundations. As he watched, it burped up several large bubbles with a glugging sound and surged sluggishly forward.

“The level is higher than the last time I came,” she said. “By several yards.”

“What is it?” Conan Doyle asked in a stunned whisper.

“The black lake that will finally engulf this house and drown all its ghosts.” She turned and looked at him, her face tragic. “Including me.”

He tore his eyes from hers with difficulty. There had to be a rational explanation for this weird phenomenon. He looked around for a stick to probe the black liquid, but there was none to be found. He walked back to the splintery ruins of the nearest coffin and retrieved the yellowing femur bone of some ancient Thraxton from where it lay on the stone flags.

Up close, a bituminous smell rose from the lake, and when he probed the end of the femur bone into the pool it came up glossy black and dripping slime.

“It could be pitch or tar,” he speculated, “something naturally occurring. Perhaps the hall was built on an ancient peat bog.”

He looked to Hope, but she had turned her back and was already gliding away, past the ranks of crumbling coffins. Back the way they had come.

He hurried to catch up and they returned in silence to the first chamber.

“Shall I show you something more?” she asked.

Conan Doyle was afraid of what she might show him next. “We have been gone for some time. We should go back.”

But instead, she grabbed his hand and rested it on one of the newer coffins.

“Whose coffin is this?” he asked.

She flashed him a mischievous smile and lifted the lid. It took a moment for Conan Doyle to gather his nerve and look down. Thankfully, the coffin was empty.

“I don’t understand—” He started to say, but then the young woman sat on the edge of the coffin, swung her legs up, and lay down inside. “It is mine,” she said gaily. “I often come down here to lie in it — to see what it will feel like.”

“Young lady, no! You must not!”

He reached into the coffin, slipped his arms around her waist, and began to lift her out. She put a hand on his chest as if to stop him, but then her hand grasped the lapel of his jacket and pulled him close until their faces were inches apart. He could feel her breath on his face and the warmth of her skin beneath the silken nightgown, the quickened pulsing of her heart. He saw up close, for the first time, the tiny crescent moon birthmark in the corner of her lips. He succumbed to the gravitational pull, and their lips brushed. But then — at the very last moment — Conan Doyle realized what was happening and pulled away.

“I–I…” he stammered. “We must get back.”

His words struck like an open-handed slap. A flash of shock and resentment swept her eyes. She sprang from the coffin without his aid and hurried from the crypt, never once looking back.

Even though it was close to two o’clock in the morning, a crack of light showed beneath the door of Oscar Wilde’s room. When Conan Doyle lightly rapped on the door, his friend’s voice immediately called, “Come.”

Conan Doyle shambled in to find the Irishman propped up on a mountain of pillows. He was wearing black silk pajamas and a magnificent gold brocaded dressing gown embroidered with Chinese dragons. Once again the red fez perched atop his head, tilted at a raffish angle. He had a hookah cradled in his lap, and now he placed the mouthpiece between his full lips and drew at it. Water burbled as he sucked in a lungful and then jetted silver smoke from both nostrils.

Conan Doyle looked skeptically at the water pipe. “What’s in that thing?”

“Do not ask,” Wilde answered, “or I shall be forced to lie and tell you it is tobacco.”

Whatever was in the pipe was evidently potent, for Wilde’s features were melting into a fleshy puddle of contentment.

Conan Doyle sniffed the air, nostrils flaring. “Smells like hashish. I wanted you sharp, Oscar. I’m counting on your quick mind.”

“I am salving my mind.”

“Embalming it, more like!”

“As a doctor you should know, Arthur, that one man’s poison is another man’s medicine.” A silly grin smeared across Wilde’s long face. “And your fellow, Sherlock Whatshisname, was a free user of cocaine.”

“Yes, between cases, not during one!” Conan Doyle harrumphed with irritation, but then his own guilt softened him. He sank onto the end of Wilde’s bed, and dropped his head into his hands. “Forgive me,” he said in a voice of utter defeat. “I apologize. I… have something to confess.…”

Wilde laughed gently. “I’m afraid I am quite the opposite of a priest.”

“Yes, but you are a man of the world. I don’t think I could tell another living soul.”

“Oh,” Wilde breathed, “my poor, dear Arthur. You are a doctor, a man of medicine, and yet you are powerless to save your own wife. No one could. And now… now there is this young woman who has come to you to save her. She is fresh and beautiful and has awakened feelings that even your strict Jesuit upbringing is unable to quash.”

Conan Doyle nodded, his eyes gleaming. “I have no excuses for my behavior.”

“Tush!” Wilde said. “Stay silent for a moment, Arthur, while I play doctor to your soul.”

The Scotsman said nothing, and acquiesced with a nod.

“Arthur Conan Doyle, you are the very best man I have ever known.” Wilde chuckled. “And likely ever will. Your beloved Touie has been an invalid for years. Any lesser man — no, strike that—any other man would have sought solace in the arms of a mistress, a paramour, a prostitute… or a close friend’s wife. You and I both have a code we live by. Two very different codes, admittedly — and I would add that my code is a good deal more elastic than yours — but codes, nonetheless. That is why I have admired you since the day we first met.”

“Yes, but I made a vow—”

“And what is a vow but a promise we make to our own vanity?” Wilde put a hand on Conan Doyle’s shoulder. “Touie is dying, Arthur, and that is precisely why you must live. You are still a young man. Do not squander life, when I know you understand how very precious it is.”

Conan Doyle shook his head with resignation. “We may fail. I realize that now, Oscar. We may be powerless.”

“Nonsense,” Wilde said. “You and I are two of the finest minds in England — nay, I’ll be immodest; after all, I have much to be immodest about. We are two of the finest minds in the world. Together, we shall prevent this murder. We shall save Hope Thraxton.”

Wilde’s words were encouraging, but as Conan Doyle trudged back to his bedroom, he thought about Hope Thraxton’s erratic behavior and relived the moment when Hope had shown him the coffin that she would lie in, imagining her imminent death. As these thoughts percolated in his mind, an unpleasant reality loomed, one that he had been unable to broach with Wilde — the possibility that Hope Thraxton’s porphyria had driven her into madness.