Supping With Panthers (24 page)

I stared at the line of faces, and then I shivered and looked away for, foolish though it will sound, I had felt almost as though their eyes were staring at
me
! I peered instead into the shadows on my left and right. These waited beyond the light of the gas flames which spurted above each alcove; I could not see what the darkness concealed. On its margins, however, the delicate lines of stairways stretched up and down in impossible sweeps; impossible, I say, for they appeared to be unsupported by any structures I could identify, but to have been spun instead from purest gossamer, and patterned in filaments through the naked air. I could see no limit to them, neither above nor below – an obvious illusion, for the warehouse had not been especially large – and yet the effect was really quite remarkable. I turned to Eliot ‘Just think,’ I said, ‘how much money has been spent on this place.’

He did not reply at first. He was staring, I realised, at one of the statues. It had clearly been fashioned by an Oriental hand, for it had the form and the garb of those Hindoo works of art which I have often admired in London’s museums. Yet this goddess, in truth, was of a quite different order of craftsmanship from anything I had seen before. Its face wore that mocking voluptuousness which it shared with all the other statues’ faces, and the effect was both repulsive and thrilling; merely staring at it, I felt my flesh begin to tingle. With an effort of will, it seemed, Eliot broke away from the statue’s gaze. ‘We must hurry,’ he said, turning to me. ‘We shouldn’t linger here.’ He crossed to the door ahead of us.

He opened it and passed through; I followed him. Ahead, stretched a long corridor carpeted with rugs of vivid patterns and colours; the walls were red, inlaid with gold, and the doors which led off the corridor at regular intervals were again made of ebony. At the end of it, far distant from us, there appeared to be a door; and then suddenly, seeming to reach into my blood, I heard the sound of strings. I had never heard music of such beauty before. It drew me … it was quite irresistible. There seemed something unearthly about it, almost frightening. I began to hurry down the corridor. Eliot sought to restrain me; he held me by the arm as he tried each ebony door, but they were all locked and I was quite content that they should remain so. There was only one door that I wanted to open, and that was the door which would take me to the music.

Yet no matter how rapidly I progressed down the corridor, I seemed to come no nearer to it. This was an illusion, of course – it must have been: it was likely that the opium fumes were still in my head and playing tricks on me. I paused and shook my head, to try to clear them, but the ebony door remained tantalisingly distant, and when I glanced back over my shoulder I saw that the door I had come from now seemed just as far away. I glanced at Eliot. His face was very pale, and beads of sweat were glistening on his brow. He tried another side door; the handle would not turn. He tried again with the next door; the same result. He stopped hurrying and leaned against the wall, wiping his brow. He stared about him and I observed on his face, normally so composed and restrained, a frantic disbelief. He cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Mowberley!’ he cried out. ‘Mowberley!’

At once the music stopped. I blinked. Clearly the sound of Eliot’s voice had banished my opium dream, for the ebony door seemed much nearer now. I walked towards it and opened it.

The room beyond was snug and painted pink. It might almost have been a little girl’s nursery, for a fire was blazing merrily in the comer and I saw next to it what appeared to be a doll’s house, and a stack of children’s books. In the centre of the room, however, was a large desk piled with manuscripts, and on the wall were pinned various maps and charts, some very old and clearly objects of study. By the far wall four men were gathered with musical instruments, violas and violins. As we walked in, they started and twitched, but they did not look up at us; instead their heads lolled forward onto their chests and their eyes, although open, stared at nothing. Their expressions, it struck me suddenly, were very like that of die helmsman we had pursued across the Thames.

‘Who are you?’

It was the clear, high voice of a very young girl which had come from behind the piles of manuscripts on the desk. I glanced at Eliot, who seemed as surprised as I.

Together we walked to the side of the desk. I could see now that there was indeed a little girl sitting there. She was a most exquisitely beautiful child, with long blonde hair tied by a ribbon and delicate features like a china doll’s. She wore a charming pink frock with a pinafore, and her white-stockinged legs, as she sat at her chair, swung to and fro. She was holding a pen, which she raised to her lips, and as she stared at us her wide eyes were almost comically solemn. She could not have been more than eight years old.

‘You are not meant to be here, you know,’ she said, with that self-possession so typical of children her age.

‘I am very sorry,’ replied Eliot courteously. ‘We are looking for a friend.’

She digested this information. ‘Not Lilah?’ she asked at length.

‘No,’ answered Eliot, shaking his head. ‘We want my friend. George Mowberley.’

‘Oh,
him.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘Oh,
he’ll
be downstairs,’ said the child, her nose wrinkled in faint disdain.

‘Could you perhaps take us to him?’ Eliot asked.

The young girl shook her head primly. ‘Can’t you see, I have my work to do?’ She laid her pen down neatly on the desk, then swung herself down from her chair on to the floor. She looked up at us. ‘But I will call Stumps. He can show you.’

She crossed to a bell-pull and, reaching up on tip-toes, gave it a tug. Then she pointed to a door behind her desk – not ebony like the one we had come through but painted pink and white like the rest of the room. ‘There now,’ she said, ‘he will be waiting outside.’ She swept back her hair almost coquettishly, then returned to her chair. Before she could pull herself up, Eliot had taken her in his arms and lifted her on to it.

‘Thank you very much,’ she said dutifully. ‘And now I must continue with my studying.’

‘Of course,’ said Eliot. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’ But the child had not looked up; she was already engrossed in some book on the table, and her mouth began to move as she sounded the words. Eliot smiled faintly as he looked on her, then gesturing to me we went out from the room. As I closed the door, I heard the stirring of music again. I wanted to pause and listen, but Eliot pulled on my arm. ‘Unless I am much mistaken, here comes our guide now.’

I gazed where he pointed. We were standing on a balcony, and stairways – much like those I had seen before – were stretching up and down before us. But there was a crucial difference, and I was now more certain than ever that I had earlier been the victim of some fleeting opium dream, for whereas previously the stairs had seemed like structures from a vision, there was nothing very strange about the ones before me now beyond the incongruity of their presence in a warehouse – which was remarkable enough, to be sure, but not impossible. I supposed that the owner of the place had a taste for the grotesque and bizarre; certainly, the servant approaching us supported such a view. I would estimate he was no more than three foot tall, and his face seemed almost to have been melted away. There were two small holes where his nose should have been, and his lower jaw was stunted so that his tongue lolled over his black, broken teeth. Flakes of skin were oozing on his scalp. His limbs were short and fat like a baby’s and yet, despite his page-boy’s uniform, he was clearly of a considerable age. I shuddered at the sight of him; but then I saw his eyes, which were deep and expressive with a sense of pain, and I felt almost ashamed.

He stood before us and grunted something. Because his lower jaw only reached the roof of his mouth, he was hard to understand, but was dearly asking us what we required.

‘Sir George Mowberley,’ said Eliot. ‘Can you show us where he is?’

The dwarf stared at him and seemed to frown, though it was hard to be certain, so twisted was his face. He pointed back down the stairs and gestured at us to follow him. We did so, walking slowly, for his pace was very slow. Half-way down, I was startled to observe a panther watching us. I tensed, but the panther merely yawned and with lazy nonchalance began to lick its paws. In the hallway at the foot of the stairs, I saw what seemed to be a python coiled around a chair; in a further room, we startled two small deer. ‘What is this place?’ I murmured. ‘We appear to be in a zoo.’

Eliot nodded slowly; but he made no reply. He was clearly tense; his face looked rigid and drawn, and he kept glancing over his shoulder as though expecting to be surprised. We saw no one, however, though I too, infected perhaps by Eliot’s mood of apprehension, began to feel possessed by a sense of dread.

The dwarf stopped at length by a door. ‘Here,’ he breathed. The effort of articulation appeared to cause him pain. He opened the door for us and Eliot thanked him. My dread was thickening into horror now. I could feel it as a cloud, rolling through my mind.

Eliot squeezed my arm. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. His forehead was clammy; his eyes seemed to be faintly protruding, as though with terror, and I wondered if my own eyes were looking the same. In a strange way, however, it comforted me to know that he felt as I did.

I nodded. ‘Come, Eliot,’ I said. ‘Let us face the worst.’

I had half-expected, I suppose, in the room beyond, to find some hallucination of the kind that had confronted me before. Instead there was just a heavy, velvet-red darkness. It took my eyes some seconds to adjust to it. Gradually I realised there were candles burning, tiny pinpricks of light flickering in an arc. Beyond them I saw the vague silhouettes of furniture, and beyond them the folds of curtains, rich and soft like the darkness itself, so that it was quite impossible to distinguish them apart and I felt enclosed, as though trapped within something heavy and alive. The air was thick with incense and opium smoke, and the perfumes of exotic, pollen-laden flowers. I felt quite drained of my energies. It was as though the darkness were feeding on me and I longed for some relief from it. Only ahead of me, where the arc of the candles met at the wall, had the darkness been banished and the curtains drawn back. There was a picture on the wall, illuminated. It seemed vividly pale against the red of the paintwork. It was of a woman. She had the face – I could tell at once – of the statues I had seen in the alcoves above. In this picture, however, she was represented as dressed in the very height of the latest fashion. She had the most ghastly beauty. I had to lower my gaze. When I did so, I saw for the first time a body spread like an offering on the floor. It seemed to be the Rajah. His clothes were sodden; there was a wound to his leg; his face was smeared with streaks of blood.

Eliot crossed to him and turned him over. I followed him and saw, by the Rajah’s head, a large silver dish I had not noticed before. It was filled with a thick, dark liquid. I touched it with my finger and held it up to the candle-light. ‘Eliot,’ I whispered, ‘I think it is blood.’

Eliot glanced up at me. ‘Indeed?’ he asked.

I shivered, and looked about me. ‘There is something about this place,’ I muttered, ‘which seems…’

‘Yes?’ Eliot inquired.

I shrugged. ‘Almost supernatural,’ I replied.

Eliot laughed good-humouredly at this. ‘I think we should exhaust all natural explanations,’ he said, ‘before turning to a theory such as that. And indeed’ – he turned back to the body whose pulse he had been taking – ‘this is not a case, I feel, which defies the laws of nature.’

Something in his tone alerted me. ‘You have a solution, then?’ I cried.

‘In the end,’ he replied, ‘it was very simple.’ I stared down at the Rajah’s face; it was the same, but… I can only say – it was not the same. The features were those I had seen before on the steps of the Private Entrance, but the cruelty had been softened and quite removed and the cheeks, I could see even through the streaks of blood, were now rosy and plump, not pallid at all. ‘I don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘It
is
die Rajah’s face, but it seems so remarkably – impossibly – changed.’

‘I agree,’ nodded Eliot, ‘it was a miraculous disguise that he wore. Even I when I first saw him failed to penetrate it.’

‘Who is it, then?’ I asked.

‘Why,’ replied Eliot, ‘Sir George Mowberley, of course.’

‘Is he…’

‘Oh, yes.’ Eliot nodded. ‘Perfectly alive,’ He briefly inspected the wound to Sir George’s leg. ‘It must have been the bullet,’ he murmured. ‘Nothing serious. But we should remove him from here as soon as we can.’ He glanced round and, as he did so, the candles guttered as though suddenly disturbed. At the same moment the room seemed to pulse about me; again I felt as though some force, some entity, were draining me, so that the touch of my tongue felt like leather, and I imagined that my bones were being turned into ash. My eyeballs were dry and burning, as though all their moisture was being sucked out, so that even my sockets began to ache. Feeling drawn, I turned to look at the picture on the wall. Eliot too was staring at it.

‘Can you feel it?’ I asked.

He turned. His face seemed shrunk to the contours of his skull. Suddenly, though, he laughed and shook his head.

‘What is it?’ I asked in some surprise.

‘Why, Stoker,’ he replied, ‘this is like a set from one of your plays – do you not think? A haunted house, with accompanying tricks? No, no’ – he shook his head again – ‘there is danger here, but not from any supernatural agency. The enemies we confront may be devilish, but alas, they are no less human for that’ He bent down. ‘Come,’ he said, lifting Sir George’s arms, ‘we must not be discovered here. Our conspirators will not be pleased to find us stealing their prize. Let us get moving at once.’

I took Sir George’s feet and helped to lift him up. With my other hand I opened the door; I had not remembered shutting it but I kept my mouth quiet, for I had no wish to suffer further mockery. Even so, in my imagination the darkness seemed still to be draining me; I wondered when my limbs would start to rustle, so withered and dry my body felt Eliot too, I thought, was struggling with his burden, as though much weakened; and though he smiled at me reassuringly, his face was rigid and pale again. We left the room; as we did so, we both simultaneously turned to stare at the painting one last time. The woman’s form glimmered; then a mist of darkness seemed to roll across the room and the candles were extinguished one by one as we watched them, until the whole room was dark. ‘For God’s sake,’ muttered Eliot, ‘let us get out of here.’ We staggered down the corridor. From upstairs, I could still hear the faint strains of music. We hurried away from it. At the end of the corridor was a large hall; and at the end of the hall, two heavy metal gates. They were both open. We passed through them, and felt rain against our brows. We had reached the street at last.