Broken Meats: A Harry Stubbs Adventure (11 page)

Chapter Eleven: The Reanimation of Robert
D’Onston Stephenson

How could I find the lair of a man who had deliberately hidden himself?
He might have been anywhere in London. Except that I did not think he had
travelled very far, not under the circumstances. He had most likely gone to
ground somewhere close by so that he could come and go easily.

I did have
one clue to go by. Lavinia, who was now in the care of the doctor, told me that
Howard was feeding the reconstituted body quantities of red meat to give it
substance. Assuming that the usual principles apply, to build up a twelve-stone
man, you would need—at the very least—the same weight in meat over
just a few weeks. Perhaps you would need several times that amount. I know for
a fact it requires more than a stone of scraps to get a pig to put on a stone. Somebody
would have started ordering meat in large quantities in the few weeks before I
began my search.

It was late
at night, but I still had the key to my father’s shop. I knew where he kept his
order book. There was no need to disturb him at that hour. I spent a few
minutes going through that ledger, reading the careful handwriting, watching
the march of days, and feeling a glow as I met so many familiar names. I saw
the addresses of houses where I had made deliveries on my bicycle. There were
little marks to show who liked their steak cut thick or chops trimmed lean and
who would want him to throw in a bag of scraps for the dog.

Along with
the names I recognized, there was a stranger. Mr Smith paid cash on the nail
and had deliveries four times a week. He was ordering ten pounds at a time of
what are known in the trade as broken meats—offcuts, which usually ended
up in sausages or the mincer, but he took them on the bone. The first address
was, of course, Howard’s. After that, the deliveries went to a different set of
premises. The last one included a request for a sheep’s head.

And so I
found myself walking down the deserted streets to an address in South Norwood
as the hour approached midnight. My hobnail boots, the ones I wore when there might
be doors to be broken down, sounded like a carthorse coming down the road.

In case you
should get the wrong idea, I was not going because I was brave and fearless.
Arthur had joked about me, thinking I was Douglas Fairbanks after the
Shackleton affair, and perhaps it had sharpened my appetite for adventure. But
there was nothing heroic about what I was doing now.

After the
fight with the Chinese strangler, I had started wondering if I had lost my
nerve. I had lost two bouts in the boxing ring, but they never shook my faith
the way the fight with the strangler had.

I had been
glad to get out of that encounter in one piece—but, as they say, once
bitten, twice shy.

I went on
not because I was brave but because I was afraid. As a fighter, if you don’t
face up to your fears, you’re nothing. It’s that willingness to stand up and
punch and be punched that makes you what you are. I could not let that be taken
away from me. I am not nothing. I will not walk away from a fight.

So even
though I felt my stomach fluttering unsteadily, even though my mouth was dry, I
kept going. My hands were thrust in my coat pockets. In one pocket was the
charm from Whatley; in the other was a pair of knuckle-dusters. I had
contemplated other weapons, but they might be too conspicuous on a man walking
after midnight.

It seemed
that I was walking against some resistance, as though the level street was
actually uphill. The streetlights flickered more than usual, and the shadows
crowded round more densely. I knew it was all in my head. But I wondered if someone
had put it there.

I pushed
on, and I felt a prickling on the back of my neck. I sensed that I was not
alone. I turned, and there was a cat, walking twenty paces behind me—a
big tabby cat. I stopped, and the cat stopped. It was not the usual mackerel
tabby but more of a marbled pattern. It sat down, looked at me, and gave a
long, slow blink with emerald green eyes.

“If you’ve
come to help, Mister Pussycat, you’re very welcome,” I said in an undertone. “Maybe
you’ve the same score to settle as me.”

I started
walking again, and without looking back, I knew the cat was still following.

Turning
back was no longer a possibility—not with someone watching, even if it
was only a cat. I set my jaw and pushed on until the resistance melted away.
The tightness around my chest loosened, and I turned off the main road on to
the street noted in my father’s ledger.

A minute
later, I arrived at a small, circular structure with glazed bricks and red
tiles. It was off Brickyard Street where there are so many manufacturing firms.
The building had a neglected air about it, but faint light shone through a
frosted side window.

My path had
taken me over dead bodies, through a thicket of lies and misdirection. I had
defied the attempts to throw me off the road. Finally, as the poet Mr Robert
Browning might have said, Childe Harry to the dark tower came.

The cat
stopped two paces behind me. There was no bell or door knocker, so I gave a
peremptory rap as I would for a defaulting debtor. I listened and knocked
again. No reply.

I kicked
squarely at the height of the lock. The hinges must have been rusted because
they gave way along with the dead bolt. The whole thing toppled inwards with an
empty boom.

Inside,
there was no sign of life except for an oil lantern hanging from a hook. The
building consisted of a single, medium-sized room, the centre of which was
occupied by a low platform of brick. It was a workshop with a solid chimney for
a furnace or oven, a high ceiling, and beams overhead.

I went
looking for entrances to concealed tunnels and found nothing. The bare stone
floor was flat and smooth. There was not the least sign of a hairline crack to
give away an opening. There were no currents of air and no spots that sounded
hollow. I spent fifteen minutes searching in this fashion.

The room
was not large, and I had circled it three times when the cat came in. It walked
to one side of the brick platform, sat down, and wrapped its tail round its
feet. The cat gave a single, low meow, the way cats do when they wish a door to
be opened for them.

“What do
you want?” I stopped dead.

The cat was
sitting in front of a round iron manhole cover. I could not have failed to see
it before.

I had
walked over that exact spot not a minute previously, and I would swear on a
Bible that the manhole had not been there earlier. But there it was, as real
and solid as anything.

It was not
too hard to lever it open with a piece of scrap metal. Below was a sheer
cylindrical drop of ten feet. Iron rungs driven into the brick walls made a
ladder. I unhooked the oil lantern and lowered myself, watched by the cat. The
first few feet of bricks were crude and uneven. After that, they were flat and
red like the old Roman bricks in London Wall.

This truly
was a descent into madness. I have never suffered from that morbid terror of
confined spaces known as claustrophobia, but when I reached the bottom rung and
saw that the manhole was invisible above me, I felt something very like it.

I was in a
narrow corridor with an arched ceiling and damp stone walls—old stone, I
could tell. The floor was worn into a channel from who knew how many centuries
of walking feet.

“Meredith,
we’re in,” I whispered to myself, as though the old joke was a protective
spell.

A faint
light glimmered ahead from another oil lantern such as the one I held. I walked
towards it.

After
thirty feet, the corridor opened into a roughly circular chamber with arched
entranceways leading into darkness.

One side
was a sort of study with a folding table and a single wooden chair with a coat
over the back of it. All around were piles of books with places marked in them
with slips of paper. There was an oil lamp on a hook, and a lit candle on the
table. I felt the seat of the chair and found it warm.

In the
middle of the room was a circular stone wall ten or twelve feet across and a
foot high, studded with stone posts;
 
it opened into a pit below. A wooden
ladder was propped up beside it. There was not a single sound.

“Mr
D’Onston,” I said in as firm a voice as I could manage—my debt-collecting
voice. “Or rather, Mr Robert D’Onston Stephenson. I might call you Howard
Phillips. though you’ve no right to the name.”

I expected
him to step out of the shadows at any moment but saw nothing but a slight
movement down in the pit. I wondered again if I might have come too late.

“You should
properly be dead. You’ve no right still to be walking this Earth and certainly
not in a body stolen from another man—a foolish young man, whose only
crime was that he was too easily entranced by your stories. Your lies, in fact.
He brought you back from the dead. You repaid him by tricking him into an
exchange of bodies.”

I had put
down the oil lamp and was moving around stealthily as I spoke, my words echoing
between the stone walls. The blue charm was clutched in my fist.

“You were
convincing enough as long as you kept your mouth shut. But I don’t think you
know a tenth as much about Palingenesis as Howard, and it showed. Also, you
talked about what Yeats and Madame Blavatsky talked about in Maycot as though
you were there. And when you came to talk to me in the pub, I saw through you
in a minute.”

I had hoped
that I could goad him into revealing himself. Roslyn was an arrogant man and
not one to stay silent when he was being attacked. I peeked through one of the
arches and saw the gleam of glassware.

“Now you’re
tired of being him. You don’t like being a short, pudgy man with weak eyes. You
want to be yourself again. But Howard was an amateur and made a botched job of
restoring your carcass, so you want to put it right.”

I was not
sure whether it was a trick of the dim light, but some of the walls seemed to
be carved with reliefs of grotesque figures, somewhere between human and
animal. The shadows were distracting, but I kept focused, looking and listening
for the slightest movement.

“You tried
to kill Yang at the séance, but you bungled that one.”

“Help.”

The
high-pitched voice was faint and tremulous but unmistakable. It came from the
pit, of course.

After
looking over my shoulder in both directions, I heaved the rickety old ladder
and lowered it into the pit. I could not see inside until I brought an oil lamp
over. The drop was about ten feet, and what I had taken for a pit was in fact
an opening onto another level below with more arched doorways leading away from
a central chamber. The ground was littered with bones, mainly mutton and beef
with some pork. The place had that familiar butcher smell of meat and blood.
The only other object of note was an earthenware bowl full of water, like a dog
bowl. Oddly, there were no flies.

I took the ladder
steps carefully. They were unsteady, and I half expected the rungs to give way
under my weight. I stopped after each step, looking up and down, ready for an
attack at any moment. None came, and I stepped onto the stone floor. Still
moving slowly, I picked up the ladder and lay it on its side. I did not want
someone hauling it up from above and leaving me down here.

Watching me
with wide eyes was little Chun Hua, the Chinese Spring Flower.

Roslyn
wanted human flesh and blood to restore his corpse to full humanity, and not
from just any source. No, he had gone back to the oldest requirement of all: he
had to have the blood of a virgin princess. Chun Hua was that “necessary element
for a successful outcome” in the letter that Yang’s people had intercepted and
that had so alarmed the Wu brothers.

Chun Hua’s
hands were tied above her head. The cord passed through a hole cut through a
stone protuberance.
 
As though it
had been made for sacrificial victims when chamber was sculpted out of the
bedrock.

“Don’t
worry,” I said in a low voice, swinging the lantern around as I looked in all
directions. “I’m here now.”

“Shhh,” she
warned.

The bones
on the floor were well chewed and picked clean of meat, and there were a lot of
them.

Looking
over my shoulder, I pulled at the ends of the cord that bound Chun Hua. After
some resistance, it came free. It was a long cord, perhaps a washing line. She
stepped away, rubbing her wrists. She did not seem to have been harmed.

“Are you
hurt?”

She shook
her head. I led her back to where I had descended, and I stood the ladder up
again. Chun Hua did not climb it but suddenly pointed past me into the
darkness. Something moved, far back in the shadows, scuffling on the stone
floor.

“Howard?” I
asked tentatively. “My name is Harry Stubbs.”

There was
no reply, but I sensed I was being watched from the darkness.

“I know
what you have suffered. I mean you no harm.”

My plan,
such as it was, involved catching D’Onston and compelling him to return Howard
to his proper body while D’Onston reoccupied his own resurrected remains. I had
assumed that Howard would be a willing participant in this operation.