Beneath London (51 page)

Even now he did not know her true mind. It was entirely possible that she had been spirited away by Zounds and this renegade boy against her own wishes. Klingheimer had seen Zounds flee into the stone village with the woman alleged to belong to Smythe, carrying the rifle that Zounds had used to kill Shadwell. Carnality no doubt explained the dwarf’s desire to possess the woman. It was a motive that was easily as profound as greed. The human animal was far too often a repugnant creature. Clara must be convinced of this: that Jules Klingheimer had no base motives whatsoever, but wanted simply to rise to a more elevated plane.

Leaning his back against the wall now, he made himself as comfortable as a man could be who sat in a stone chair. He endeavored to cast a veil over his surroundings now by looking inward, silencing the mind chatter and allowing himself to drift. He pictured the wooden box of his childhood where it dwelt in the void, contemplating it until the mountain scene painted upon the front panel grew clear in the smallest detail. He saw the grain of the wood and the small cracks in the boards and the black iron latch, flecked with rust. The lid opened slowly now, circumscribing an arc as it rose and then descended backward, opening a window into the spirit world. He allowed his own spirit to drift upward above his sitting form, and he hovered over the box for a moment before descending into it. After a time he perceived the bat-like shadows of the spirits flitting roundabout him. In the distances lay the deeper darkness of the distant sea that he suspected was consciousness itself. It heaved and shifted like an actual sea, and he wondered whether one might sail upon it, perhaps descend within it – what varieties of monsters dwelt beneath.

With that thought came an awareness of two things – the odious presence of the deformed spirit of Maurice de Salles, and the nearness of Clara, whose mind was quite composed. He experienced a flickering vision of her face, of her closed eyes and becalmed features. She was lying upon a mattress in the stone hovel, her mind seeking his, or wary of it.
Yes
, he thought, and he settled his own mind nearby, very like a shepherd settling himself near a sleeping lamb.

A sound like air escaping from a dead and bloated animal issued from de Salles’s cage, bringing him partially out of his reverie, and in that brief, unhinged moment, Sarah Wright’s visage floated an inch from his own face. It sat upon its fungal stem, its dribbling mouth partially open, its animate eyes staring into his with a look in them of stark loathing. She blinked, and his mind jerked away instinctively, as if it were a fish on a hook. The image began to draw away, retreating toward the distant sea, growing smaller until it floated in the darkness like a green-tinted moon.

He forced his mind to compose itself again, although it was hampered by the thought that Sarah Wright had evidently looked in upon him. Certainly it was possible – he suspected that her mind had been active at Peavy’s – but such a thing was unlikely given the depth of stone that separated them. It was more likely a nasty trick of the imagination, an errant mental photograph and nothing more. A mind astray was a weak mind, he warned himself, and by and by he drifted downward once again.

Clara’s mind awaited him there, remarkably steady and focused. He searched for a means to enter it, and he welcomed her into his own mind, anxious to reveal his dreams and desires…

…and on the instant he felt a swelling within his head, a cacophony of mental noise like the drumming of dry bones on tin plates. A fog arose around him that his vision could not pierce. Now a wind began to blow, a wind that he saw rather than felt as it opened windows in the fog. Loathsome images appeared within these voids like objects in museum cases – murdered children, flayed animals, human body parts black with flies. In one he saw his own mother and himself as a child, his mother croaking out noises, grasping his wrist and dragging him toward the glowing coal that she held in an iron tongs in her other hand, a demented smile on her face. The images spun around him as if he were fixed at the center of a carousel. He remained still, not daring to move lest he step bodily into one nightmare or another.

The terrible pressure pulsated in his head, pushing at the back of his eyeballs as if another mind was shoving its way into the confines of his skull. He lurched forward, crying out and flailing with his hands in a wild effort to encounter the solidity of something actual. The back of his left hand cracked against limestone, and he found himself on his knees, his heart laboring, his knuckles running with blood. He clutched his temples and sat down again, breathing heavily and forcing down the gorge that had risen in his throat.

Where had the images come from? Clara had not generated them. She was incapable of imagining such things. But she had invited him to open his mind, and when he had, these things had rushed in, just as the silver bees had rushed into his mind at Peavy’s. He had descended into the dark inner core of his own mind, its doorway having been held forcibly open. It had been a masculine presence that had engaged him; he had seen enough of the horrors to know that. He staggered to his feet, picked up de Salles’s cage, and pitched it out through the door to the alcove in which he sat, watching as it bounced twice and then lay still – closer than he would have wished.

This… intrusion would not, could not, happen again. He had not wanted to use his own mind against Clara as he had used it against the lunatic Bates, but Clara’s willfulness left him no choice.

* * *

C
lara lay on the mattress, pretending to sleep. She had no wish to talk, even to Finn, for talk was a distraction that she could not afford, and Mr. Klingheimer might return at any moment. There had been fear and anger in him, along with a measure of bewilderment. She knew very well what had caused it – the odious presence of the thing that she had found for them on the riverbottom. The monster’s head was here in the land beneath, which could mean only that Mr. Klingheimer had brought it with him, thinking that it might be of use to him. It might as easily destroy him. Certainly it would not be a willing ally.

She had been aware of her mother’s presence for the past half hour. In Mr. Klingheimer’s first attempt, Clara had done little else but guard the doorway, to trick him into thinking that she was open to his entreaties. It had been her mother who had unshuttered his mind and kept it so. Her mother’s thoughts were disordered – not thoughts at all, actually, but unexpressed essences of love and sorrow, loss and regret, and of a deep and chaotic fury at the men who had taken so much from her and now were trying to take it from Clara.

She became aware that Mr. Klingheimer’s mind was ranging out once again, that he was seeking her own. As her mother had taught her, she envisioned her childhood in Boxley Woods: the black cat Larceny, whom she loved and who would take things that weren’t his and hide them in her wardrobe closet when the door was left open; the white chickens in the yard and the yellow chicks that grew too quickly; the color of the leaves in autumn and the green of summer; the clear stream and the animals that lived along its banks….

The pain was sharp, concentrated behind her eyes, when he made his second effort to enter. She compelled herself to lie still, watching the stream bubbling over the rocks, running into a clear pool. She began to utter “The Jumblies,” visualizing the words as they floated downward on the stream, the words and sentences passing out of sight around the swerve of the sandy bank. She knew that the stream would turn back onto itself on a neverending current – “They went to sea in a Sieve, they did, in a sieve they went to sea,” – and at once she felt her mother’s watchful presence as she herself envisioned the circulating stream and the sieve and the Jumblies not caring a fig.

* * *

K
lingheimer was puzzled by the placidity of Clara’s mind and his utter inability to see into it, to communicate with her. He cast out pleasant thoughts and imprecations, beseeching her to understand who Jules Klingheimer was in fact, and what he offered her: wealth, of course, beyond measure. More than that, however, he offered her a father and husband at one in the same time, a superior man quite unlike her own drunken oaf of a father, whom Mr. Klingheimer himself had removed from the world. He offered her insight rather than power, and he contemplated their mutual ascent toward a vista that looked down on all other creatures, an Avalon where the two of them dwelt as one in utter and complete unanimity. The logical sense of his offerings was impeccable, of that there could be no doubt.

He could discover no response, however. Instead, he had a growing consciousness of the sound of running water, of a swift flowing brook passing over stones. Beneath this sound a voice intoned verse – a repetitive, sing-song meter, the words and the rhythms and the ceaseless flow of water going round and round Clara like a moat. He listened for a time, mesmerized by the revolutions of sound. Then he caught himself and closed his ears to it, abruptly certain that it was more of Clara’s willfulness. She had never been taught to listen, never taught to obey. By learning to obey, he thought, she would free herself from the whimsies and vagaries of her own mind.

It came to him that he might use Sarah Wright herself to overcome the girl’s defenses – an earthquake to bring down the barricade. It would horrify the girl, but out of that horror might come reason. He set about picturing Sarah Wright’s head as he had first seen it, lying in a layered box within walls of bloody ice, the utter terror in the eyes: a terror that revealed the panic of someone who sees very clearly how she must die, who imagines the pain of the flesh parting around the blade, the nerves shrieking, the life blood flowing out. He envisioned the head in its cage: the horror of being alive in death, the grasping teeth of the fungal stem seizing on to the trailing flesh, the green fluids circulating, leaking out of her mouth and nose.

She was a hideous specter, and he focused on her with all the acuity that he could summon – saw her with particular clarity, every detail sharp in his vision, the wizened flesh, the scraggle of hair. He had always kept joy at a distance – a foolish emotion that opened the mind to distracting sentiment – but he found something very much like joy in what he saw within the cage that held Sarah Wright: elation in the stupendous fact that
he
had brought it into being. He had given a dead thing life, or some semblance of it, and it was within his power to grant it life as long as he chose to do so.

He felt Clara’s mind waver, as if struck by a blow, and he redoubled his energies. Without hesitation he thought now of the way in which her own father had used her, picturing it with invented clarity, but not far from the truth, for he had probed Clemson Wright’s mind and was familiar with the man’s misdeeds. He considered them quite specifically now, and again he was swept with a sharp elation. Spittle dripped from the corners of his mouth, and a laugh arose unbidden in his throat.

The sound of it checked him momentarily, but he considered that she had brought the unhappiness upon herself, and like a child she was resolutely clinging to childish notions, refusing to see, rejecting intellect for mere mawkishness. Again he assumed the persona of Clemson Wright, the pace of his dumbshow slowing as it increased in detail. He envisioned a summer afternoon, coming upon Clara in a forest glade, his intentions written upon his face. In his vision, the girl became aware of him, and her eyes revealed the loathing, the childish bewilderment, the knowledge of what was to be.

He had descended to a level of base lust that surprised him but also compelled him. He spoke to her in what he imagined was a fatherly way – base trickery, to be sure, for he knew exactly what he meant to do. She turned away toward the stream along which she had played since she could remember, but her escape was blocked by a thorny entanglement of vines. He felt a heightening pleasure as he moved toward her, hearing the sound of the water bounding over the stones.

But somewhere beneath the surface of that water there sounded the low murmur of a voice intoning rhymes – Clara’s voice – and it came to him in the midst of his increasing euphoria that the only audience for the theater playing out in his mind was himself, and without willing it he beheld Clara standing safely beyond the entanglement of thorns. Her mother stood with her, looking as she did in life, the sound of water and verse spinning around them.

Klingheimer was thrust bodily backward now, as if compelled by a heavy, concentrated gust of fetid air, and his head cracked into the limestone wall with such force that his skull rang and his eyes flew open. Gasping for breath, he peered around in misty darkness, the only illumination radiating from the strange moon that was the head of Sarah Wright. He had the sensation that insects crawled within the confines of his brain, pressing upon his skull, and it came to him that something – somebody – had entered him, that he
invited
it to enter – the demented spirit of Maurice de Salles. Unwillingly he pictured the decomposed face, and it seemed to him now to become his own face. In his mind he denied that such a thing could be, and he frantically willed it away in an effort to reclaim himself.

Instead of reclaiming anything, however, he recalled in vivid detail the day that he was hanged. He knew that he was enacting a role that wasn’t his own, and yet he saw the gibbet before him in utter clarity as he climbed the several stairs, saw the grain of the wood and the black iron hinges, flecked with rust, that were affixed to the trap upon which he was compelled to stand, a rough hand pushing him forward. He felt the noose tighten, heard the trap open with a ratcheting sound as he fell into the void, his breath choked off as he swung out over the crowd of people who had come to watch him die – to celebrate his death.

A foul smell came into his nostrils, and he heard a high, keening noise arising from his throat. His hands twitched and scrabbled in the darkness, plucking at the cloth of his trousers and slapping the rough limestone floor. He fought to awaken, to return to the world of the sun and moon and stars, but to no avail. His teeth clacked together, and warm blood gurgled out of his ears and mouth, choking him into a silent death, his last thoughts a chaotic idiocy of incomprehension.