Peter and the Sword of Mercy (3 page)

As the little girl watched, the tall man beckoned toward the open doorway. A second man entered: short, bald, and stocky. The girl could tell by the hesitant way in which the shorter man approached that he, too, was wary of the tall man.

The man with the dark glasses leaned over and said something quietly to the short man, who then nodded and quickly left the room. Still bending over, the tall man turned toward the mourners, and as he did, his dark eyeglasses slid about an inch down the bridge of his long, thin nose. Immediately, he pushed them back up.

But for a half-second, the little girl caught a glimpse of what lay behind the tinted lenses.

She let out a scream.

Her mother, embarrassed, quickly swept up her daughter and carried her, still screaming, from the room. The rest of the mourners assumed that the child had been overcome by grief.

Later, when the girl had calmed down, she told her mother what she had seen. The mother dismissed it. A trick of the light, she said; an overactive imagination. No, insisted the girl. It was true. She had seen it! Finally the mother, embarrassed by her daughter’s outburst, ordered the girl to speak of it no more.

And so the girl spoke of it no more. But she could not rid herself of the memory of the tall man’s eyes. It came back to her over and over. It would come back to her for years, in her nightmares.

D
ISAPPEARANCE

London, 1902

J
AMES
S
MITH, SURROUNDED BY A THRONG
of home-bound commuters, climbed the steep stairs leading out of the South Kensington Underground station. Reaching the top, he felt the chill of the night air and pulled his overcoat tighter around him. He got his bearings and started toward Harrington Road. As he passed a newsstand, his eyes fell on a blaring black headline in one of the evening papers:

FOURTH DISAPPEARANCE
LINKED TO UNDERGROUND

James stopped and examined the illustration accompanying the story. It was a drawing of a middle-aged businessman in suit and tie, a man who looked like many in the crowd flowing past James now. James already knew the details of the story. Two nights earlier, the man had stayed late at his job at a bank on Surrey Street. He left the bank at 8:30 and was last seen by a coworker descending the steps to the Temple Underground station. The banker’s usual route home was to ride the train to Westminster, where he would leave the Underground and board one of the new motorized omnibuses for the rest of his journey.

But he never reached his home. As far as the police could determine, he never emerged from the Underground. He was the fourth passenger to vanish this way in the past two weeks.

All four of the missing had been on the District Line—the same line James had just ridden. And while Londoners were generally a stoic lot, James had sensed an unusual level of tension in his fellow passengers—wary glances, an uneasiness as the train rocked its way through the dark tunnel, a general eagerness to get back up to the street.

James was not a fearful person. By the time he was twelve years old, he had survived ordeals more deadly and frightening than most people, of any age, could ever imagine. In his current job he was routinely exposed to London’s dark and violent underworld. He remained calm in the face of danger; he was viewed by his coworkers as an exceptionally levelheaded man.

But even James had felt something in the tunnel. He wouldn’t call it fear, exactly. But there had been a feeling at the back of his neck as the train rumbled along a particularly dark stretch of track, and a jerk of his head when he thought he’d seen, out of the corner of his eye, something through the window: a quick and fluid movement; a shifting shadow.

It was nothing, he’d told himself. A trick of the light. But the image had stayed in his mind—the flicker of shadow. It awakened memories he did not welcome, memories that had slept for more than twenty years—memories of other shadows, in another place. …

James shook his head as if to fling these thoughts away. He had urgent business to attend to. This was no time to wallow in unpleasant memories, or in the mysterious Underground disappearances. Whatever unfortunate fate had befallen the banker and the other three, it could not possibly have anything to do with the purpose of James’s trip to South Kensington tonight.

He turned away from the newsstand, pulled his coat around him tighter still, and set off along Harrington Road.

T
HE
S
KELETON

Liege, Belgium, 1902

F
OUR FIGURES SWEPT ACROSS
the cobblestone plaza like wraiths, wrapped in heavy wool cloaks with pointed hoods that obscured their faces. A cold mist hung in the air, along with bitter smoke from coal fires. Of the hundred or so people crisscrossing the plaza, not one was smiling this foul day.

The figures—a man in the lead, followed by a woman, then two much larger men—approached St. Paul’s Cathedral, said to be modeled after Notre Dame. Its spires rose into the endless gray. Life-sized ornate carvings of saints, Popes, and revered patrons, stained by centuries of neglect, occupied recesses in the massive wall, judging all who entered.

The lead figure went to the cathedral’s massive door and raised his right arm, reaching toward the wrought-iron ring. The cloth of his robe slid down, revealing something barely recognizable as a hand—a mass of scar tissue, shaped like the gnarled root of a long-dead tree.

The woman reached out, restraining the leader’s arm.

“Not here,” she said.

The leader jerked his arm away.

“Do not touch me!” he spat, his heavily accented voice a dry rasp.

“But…”

“No!” said the leader. “You must
never touch
me!”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “But we don’t go in here.”

“Is this not the cathedral?”

“The old cathedral was torn down a century before this one was built. It is the museum we want, around back. That’s where we’ll find the curator.”

“And he will know where it is?” rasped the leader.

“He knows as much as anyone.”

The leader turned toward the woman. She fought the impulse to look away from his face, which was as hideously scarred as his hand, the shiny purplish skin drawn tight to the skull, hairless except for a few random tufts. A lone yellow eye glared from a deep socket; where the other eye would have been was only a hole. There was no nose; the mouth was a lipless cavern that could not fully close and thus revealed jagged teeth in a permanent mirthless grin.

He was called the Skeleton. It was said he had once been handsome.

“Take me to him,” he rasped.

The woman led the three around the cathedral. The museum entrance was a modest door at the back, with a sign displaying its hours. At the moment it was closed.

“I was afraid of this,” said the woman. “We’re quite late in the day.”

The Skeleton’s clawlike hand reappeared. He grasped the brass door-knocker and rapped it hard once, twice, thrice.

The door creaked as it opened. An elderly woman looked out, her eyes peering into the Skeleton’s hood. Seeing his face, she screamed and tried to close the door. But one of the large men had anticipated this; his hand was already on the door, pushing it open. The woman, still screaming, backed away.

The four figures, led by the Skeleton, moved quickly inside and closed the door. The elderly woman, seeing that her screams were useless, retreated into the cluttered museum.

From a back room, a frail voice called out to her, speaking in the Walloon dialect used in this part of Belgium. The curator appeared. He looked as old as time itself—hair as white as salt, and skin so wrinkled that he seemed to be wearing someone else’s body. His eyes, though, were an alert and piercing blue. The man glanced at his colleague, then studied all four hooded intruders. He showed no sign of fear.

“May I help you?” he said in accented English. “We’ve just closed for the night.”

The Skeleton turned to his companion.

“Tell him,” he rasped.

The female intruder stepped forward and pulled off her hood. She shook her hair, which fell past her shoulders in a glossy red cascade. Her jade green eyes sparkled in the candlelight.

“My name,” she said, “is Scarlet Johns. My employer”—she bowed toward the Skeleton—“has come a great distance in search of something. I believe you know where it is.”

“And what might that be?” said the old man.

“The tip of Curtana.”

The old man blinked, which was apparently as close as he came to showing surprise.

“And why do you think I might know where it is?” he said. “I am just a curator.”

Johns smiled. “You are a direct descendant of Gerard of Groesbeeck,” she said.

The old man blinked again. “I am impressed,” he said.

“You’ve spent a lifetime searching for the tip,” Johns continued. “As did your father before you.”

“And his before him,” said the old man. “And so on, back a thousand years to the day the sword was broken. In all that time, nobody has found the tip of Curtana. What makes you think I would know where it is?”

“If anyone does,” said Johns, “it is you.”

The curator studied her. His eyes flicked over the other three figures, lingering for a moment on the Skeleton, then back to Johns.

“And if I did know something,” he said, “why would I tell you?”

The Skeleton stepped forward. “Because I want you to,” he said.

For a moment the room was silent. Then the curator, his ice blue eyes on the Skeleton, said, “I don’t care who you are. I will not betray my ancestors. Do what you want; you will get nothing from me.”

Because of the severe damage to his face, the Skeleton was not physically capable of showing pleasure. But he was pleased with the curator’s answer.

“You are a brave man,” he said. With a swift motion he pulled back his hood, revealing his grotesque skull. The old woman whimpered. The curator struggled not to flinch as the Skeleton moved closer.

“But in my experience,” said the Skeleton, “bravery is no match for properly applied pain.” He leaned close, his lone yellow eye burning in his monstrous face. “And nobody,” he rasped, “has more experience with pain than I do.”