Beneath London, page 24
“Then there’s nothing we can do for you, sir.”
“But who’s to compensate me? I have the right to compensation.”
“The right, do you say? You have the right to be thrown into the street for being a damned ugly, slab-sided villain. Compensation, he says! Off with you now. Next! Yes, ma’am, step forward.”
The glove-wringing woman pushed forward now and in a broken voice told the sergeant that her young son had disappeared, describing him in a way that might apply to half the boys on earth. He took down the information impatiently, and then asked, “The boy’s name?”
“Charles Pickney, officer.”
“Perhaps he was taken up by the police,” the sergeant said, and he looked through a long list of names on sheets of foolscap before him.
“No, sir,” she said. “He’s not been taken up. He’s a good boy.”
“They’re all good boys, ma’am, until they prove otherwise. As I said, his name is not on the list. That decides the matter. Move along now, my good woman,” he said, waving her off. “Next!”
Alice watched the woman wander away in a state of obvious confusion and grief. Last night it had been Langdon who was missing, and she recalled her empty helplessness and despair as she lay there in the darkness thinking about it. She wondered what she might say to the woman that would help her, but nothing came to her. To the sergeant she said, “A friend of mine has gone missing, also. His name is James Harrow, and he is associated with the British Museum. He was allegedly kicked by a horse near the Swan Lane Pier, the night before last, his body taken away by the police. I’d like to verify that this is true and to discover where the body was taken. His sister has found it impossible to learn meaningful details of the event or the whereabouts of his body.”
The sergeant nodded and looked at his list again – a long list. “No such name here, ma’am. Wait a moment if you will, and I’ll ask Joe Matthews, who works along the river.” He arose and went off, passing through a door, from which he reemerged a minute later. “Joe tells me that your man is missing, as reported by his sister in Chiswick, like you said. His wagon was burned alongside the river. His body would have been conveyed to a dead house in the immediate area.”
“We were told that the body was taken away by the police. Wouldn’t there be a record of it?”
“There should be, ma’am, but there is not. His body would have been conveyed to a dead house, like I said, but Joe Walton didn’t hear of it.”
“Where are the dead houses?” Alice asked.
“They shift about, ma’am. People aren’t fond of ’em, you see. A shed back of a church, perhaps, or the basement of a boarding house that’s paid a fee by the Board of Works till the tenants move out because of the stink of the bodies. The Board can tell you better nor me. That’s their lookout. It’s right up the way, near Admiralty Arch.”
“I’ll pay them a visit,” Alice said. “Thank you, sir. You’ve been helpful.”
She moved away, the line having grown to six behind her, and she heard the sergeant’s, “Next!” as she pushed open the door.
She found Bill Kraken pacing on the pavement outside the coffee house, dodging pedestrians, and the two of them set out at once for the Board of Works, which was a matter of ten minutes’ walk under the windy blue sky.
Kraken entered the building along with her this time and sat down in a wooden chair by the door to wait. Alice was greeted by a small and very serious woman named Mrs. Green who asked whether she wished to make an official inquiry, to which Alice asked once again after James Harrow’s body, whether it had been conveyed to a dead house, probably in the City and somewhere near the river.
“We’re not fond of the term ‘dead house,’” Mrs. Green told her. “There are in fact three morgues in the general vicinity of the Swan Lane Pier, however.”
At that moment a small, narrow-faced man sitting at a nearby desk interrupted, suggesting to Mrs. Green that it was more pressing that she complete the monthly roster and that he would be quite happy to reveal the location of Mr. Harrow’s remains.
“Yes, Mr. Lewis,” Mrs. Green said, and went away, presumably to do as he asked.
Alice looked at the man attentively enough so that he became visibly flustered. The last time she had seen him had been through a pair of opera glasses while standing on the deck of the Hedge-pig, moments before the collapse of the Embankment.
TWENTY-SIX
THE PRISONER
“Am I a prisoner, then?” St. Ives asked the man whose name was Klingheimer.
“No, sir. You are merely detained in this room for a brief time. I ask your pardon for Dr. Peavy’s hasty actions. He is sometimes intemperate when he feels threatened.”
“I threatened no one,” St. Ives said.
“And yet you ran when you were confronted.”
St. Ives shrugged. “It seemed to me that I was the one who was threatened.” The man’s skin was an unhealthy milky green, much like Pule’s, although not so pronounced. St. Ives glanced at the several wall sconces, but none had a green shade. There was a faint stink in the air, also – the smell of the fungi, without a doubt. It came to him that Klingheimer must ingest the things, and he wondered whether there might be a narcotic quality to them.
A tiny chime sounded, and Mr. Klingheimer removed his pocketwatch from a vest pocket, glanced at it, and then showed it to St. Ives. “A Patek Philippe,” he said. “It’s an extravagance, but a man must sometimes satisfy his material desires. I could not resist the perpetual calendar. The watch is warranted to be running a hundred years hence.”
“Someone will be happy to hear it chime in that dim age, no doubt,” St. Ives said. “I’ll repeat what I said a moment ago: Dr. Peavy had no reason to suspect me of wrongdoing.”
“Dr. Peavy is a man who takes considerable risks. In his zeal to get at the nature of things he is unfortunately ‘careless of the single life,’ to quote Mr. Tennyson. I assure you that he is a savant, and the results of his experimentation more than justify his indiscretions, although they encourage a certain amount of secrecy.”
St. Ives looked past him. He could see a darkening sky through a west-facing cellar window. “‘Results,’ as you call them,” he said, “rarely justify indiscretions that are careless of the single life. Evil most often comes from that sort of indiscretion. Mr. Tennyson would be the first to agree, and to be doubtful about the abuse to his poetry.”
“I have no notion of evil as such. Our widely varying notions of good and evil are the central irrationality of humankind – the antithesis of truth, a weakness.”
“You sound very sure of yourself.”
“I have every reason to be sure of myself. If a man cannot be sure of himself, what can he be sure of?”
“Truth, perhaps, but that’s a different matter.”
“No, sir. It is the same matter, if a man is in possession of the truth.”
“Errant, despicable nonsense,” St. Ives said. “My time is quite precious to me at the moment, as you can well understand. I very much want to see my wife, to put it plainly.”
“I am delighted to hear you say it, and I hope to accommodate you soon. I myself am to be wed on the morrow to an extraordinary woman. Quite young, in fact, but we’re perfectly… aligned in every other regard. Age, I find, is immaterial. You know the girl, I believe.” Klingheimer sat back in his chair, smiling as if he were about to say something droll.
“Do I?” St. Ives asked. “What is the girl’s name?”
“Clara Wright.”
Klingheimer stared at him, smiling, his head cocked. “Do I amaze you, Professor?”
St. Ives had no desire to answer the question, which was rhetorical and self-serving. “You murdered her mother, then?”
“Not I, and ‘murder’ is a hard word. It is true that Dr. Peavy removed her head at my bidding. It is equally true that the head – the brain, the mind – is the only part of the human animal that matters in the least. The rest is a mere mechanism. It will amaze you to learn that Sarah Wright is still very much alive. You have a baffled look about you, Professor. I’ll tell you something that you do not know: Clara was removed from Hereafter Farm shortly after you and your handsome wife left for London. She dwells with me now – quite safe and unmolested, I assure you. My interest in the girl has nothing of an animal quality to it. Marriage to my mind is something – something ethereal.”
St. Ives nodded, affecting to take the man seriously. He glanced around the small, windowless room. Aside from the two chairs and small table, there was a narrow bed and a wooden cupboard on the wall that stood open some two inches. There were glass bottles visible in the cupboard, and St. Ives saw that they were filled with the green liquid.
“I have several questions for you,” he said to Mr. Klingheimer. “Will you answer them while we wait? I am entirely in your power, after all, and I am quite curious about a number of things.”
“I would like nothing better, sir. I detest secrets, especially between men of our stature. Put a question to me. I welcome an inquisition.”
“What do you want?”
“I want for nothing. I can tell you, however, that I take a certain joy in manipulating the world to my own ends. All of us do. Even a man who sleeps in a ditch knows in which pocket his pipe resides and sees that his matches and tobacco remain dry. Disorganization constitutes madness. Without our best efforts, we’re surrounded by mere chaos. I attend to such matters on a larger scale than our friends who sleep in ditches, however. My own is an ascending scale, I’m happy to say, a trek up Mount Olympus itself. I have not reached the summit by any means, but I have scaled the lesser heights, and even from those vantage points I find the view breathtaking. Clara and I will take the world upon our own shoulders; the two of us will send Atlas packing.”
Klingheimer smiled broadly, and it came to St. Ives that the man was unhinged, possessed by a demented grandiosity that made him a candidate for permanent residence in this very asylum. “What put you in mind of Clara and her mother to begin with, given that they lived in obscurity?”
“Clemson Wright, Clara’s father, was in my employ – a worthless man, but his coming to me was a stroke of luck in the end. When he was far gone in gin, he spoke of his daughter’s clairvoyant powers and referred to his wife as a ‘witch’ – a term that he understood to be the literal truth. Dr. Peavy had the pleasure of opening his head. What we found therein was interesting – quite convincing – at least until the man’s unfortunate death, at which point his brain matter would only have been of interest to a cannibal. In short, after I investigated his claims I determined to accomplish two things: I would wed Clara and I would possess Sarah Wright’s essence on a platter. What I set out to do, I do.”
St. Ives regarded Klingheimer for a moment without speaking. His matter-of-fact tone was appalling, but interesting in a clinical sense. “You knew that I carried a ham and pickled onion sandwich into the underworld,” he said. “How did you know?”
“Because an inept man detonated an explosive charge that cast you and Mr. Frobisher to your doom, or so I thought. I sent a party to search for you. The world below is vast beyond belief, however, and we failed to find either you or Mr. Frobisher. What we found was a scrap of newsprint that had recently wrapped a sandwich. Certainly that’s one of the lesser mysteries.”
St. Ives nodded. “No sign at all of Gilbert Frobisher?”
“Alas, none. I tell you that truthfully. Some weeks earlier we had made an exploratory foray into the underworld through a little-known point of access on Hampstead Heath. Perhaps you are now familiar with it. It was then that we came upon the living corpse, if you will, of Ignacio Narbondo. I was amused at the look of surprise on your face when you saw the Doctor in his vivarium – in his fungal jungle, if you will.” Mr. Klingheimer smiled broadly once again, although the smile was short lived. St. Ives wondered if his facial expressions meant anything at all, or were simply a continually shifting mask.
The door to the antechamber opened and Willis Pule walked in, carrying a silver tray with glasses, a bottle of sherry, and a half dozen cream tarts. He set the tray on the low table that separated St. Ives and Mr. Klingheimer and poured sherry into each of the glasses. St. Ives looked hard at the door and then at Pule.
“I adjure you to do nothing foolish,” Klingheimer told him. “It is utterly unnecessary. You’ve come to the place of your song dream, sir. I intend to offer you a noble position in the godhead, if you will – a minor dukedom on the mountainside, but palatial.”
Pule went out again. Mr. Klingheimer tasted the sherry and nodded in apparent approval. “And now a question for you, Professor. When you were finding your way out of the underworld you no doubt took an avid interest in the luminous mushrooms. You must have considered their very interesting effect on the animals they capture – a human animal in Narbondo’s case. How would you describe them?”
“I would describe them as nondescript, gargantuan, vampiric, predatory, motile relatives of the common field blewit, although this last is mere guesswork. The leech-like tendencies of the fungus are strangely pronounced, and they are apparently immune to the rapid growth and decay of countless species of mushroom here above. As you stated, their fluids seem to have the power to sustain life.”
Mr. Klingheimer nodded. “I wonder if you can distinguish the faint green pallor to my skin?”
“I can and I have. The effect is even more pronounced in Willis Pule. The pallid green tone is consistent with that of the liquid in the fungus, of course.”
“Indeed it is. Mr. Pule dines upon them, as do I. Both of us swill the luminous fluids. He was a pioneer, was Mr. Pule – a willing subject. The effect is startling – a sharpening of the senses, the diminution of age itself, the repair of the flesh. The fungal blood, I mean to say, is nothing less than the elixir of life.”
“Immortality, do you mean?”
Klingheimer shrugged. “There is no such thing,” he said. “There is, however, considerable ground between mortality and its opposite. One is the fate of mankind and the other the fate of the gods, all of whom have passed away in due time. How old do you take me for?”
“Old enough to have more sense and scruples than you apparently have, if either of those things in fact interest you.”
“Fie, sir. Philosophical gabble. What if I told you that I was ninety-three years old? What if I revealed that small doses of the elixir have had a salutary effect upon my health? I purchased a bottle of it many years ago from a man of whom you have some knowledge, and very shortly thereafter I set out to find my own source – a great challenge, I assure you, as was the process of brewing it. It is only recently, however, that I have discovered vast fields of it, as have you, without a doubt, given your trek underground. The pressing of my first harvest yielded a small keg of refined elixir, and now I drink it in quantity.”
“You mean to bottle it like wine, then? Set up as a commercial gentleman in a factory, perhaps.”
“Not at all, Professor. I simply mean to possess the elixir in quantity. I mean to annex the lands in which those fields grow. I’ll happily share it with my… associates – with yourself, if you’d like. I beg you to consider it.”
“Your increased consumption is not due to an addictive quality in the elixir? I’m reminded of the perils of chloral hydrate or laudanum.”
“Nothing of the kind, sir. It’s a noxious brew at first, and it requires an act of will to consume it, even if it’s diluted with spirits to cover the flavor and smell. Its result is efficacious, however, one relishes the effect and what it portends, if not the flavor of the swill itself.”
St. Ives tasted his sherry. Clearly Klingheimer had manifold addictions, extreme self-opinion fueling them, and was dosing himself in order to pursue his supposed ascent to some sort of lunatic godhead. There was no means by which a mortal could reason with such a man.
“Is the wine satisfactory?” Klingheimer asked.
“The elixir of life,” St. Ives said.
“Then pose me another question. I seldom get an opportunity to speak my mind.”
“What do you mean to do with Narbondo now that he too has the fluids flowing in his veins? Now that he has become one of your ‘associates.’”
“We’ve already done it, sir. We have accessed his mental faculties. Dr. Peavy has trepanned the man, and his mind has been explored. He is a receptacle of vast knowledge, which news does not surprise you, and because of the mushrooms that knowledge remains intact. He is also mentally unstable, a man driven by hatred – an emotion to be despised, as are most of what we refer to as emotions. Because of that he is destined to live out his life in his wood-and-glass prison. His life is mine to dispose of or to maintain. Would it astonish you to know that he is entirely conscious? You can speak to him, if it would amuse you.”
“Nothing about the man amuses me. How does Dr. Peavy effect this ‘exploration’ of the mind?”
“His methods involve the electrical stimulation of the cortex and the linking of two brains, connecting them, literally, with thin silver wires across which knowledge passes in an electrical current. Willis Pule has been the medium.”
“That explains the wires intermingled with the hairs on Pule’s head?”
“Just so. The wires are fixed in his brain. You can see for yourself that he bears no apparent ill effects. To the contrary, Mr. Pule has the honor of being the first explorer of the vast ocean that is the human mind. I myself am another.”
“Literally, do you mean? You’ve put yourself willingly under Peavy’s knife?”
“Literally, yes.”
“Despite his being careless of the single life?”
“Even so. That unfortunate carelessness led in time to great successes. Willis Pule is an example. Narbondo another. Dr. Peavy has made other discoveries also. He has discovered the seat of paranormal powers as well as a means to enhancing them.”
“You refer to this mumbo-jumbo about the pineal gland?”
“I can assure you, Professor, that ‘mumbo jumbo’ has nothing to do with it. It is a simple matter of effecting several small lesions with a very thin, charged wire – a matter of… opening a window, if you will.” Klingheimer bowed deeply and parted the hair on the top of his head, fingering a small circular scar. “Do you see it?” he asked.
