The Angel of Highgate (2 page)

Thraxton’s eyes drank in the sight. He realized he had been holding his breath, and now let it out in one deep, languorous sigh.

“Ah, pretty one, has a coffin become your bridal bed? Will Death be the first to take your maidenhood?”

Thraxton slid out of his coat and let it fall at his feet. His fingers tore at the buttons of his waistcoat. He yanked the fine linen shirt over his head in one quick motion, shedding several pearl buttons. By now, anticipation had tightened him into a throbbing knot, and as he peeled off the tight breeches he was already stiff and quivering in the chill air of the tomb.

Naked, he climbed up onto the bier the coffin was set upon and stared down upon the body in a state of greedy rapture.

“And now,” he breathed, “a taste of the fruit new-fallen from the tree, before the worms can canker it!”

Thraxton lifted and spread the woman’s legs, letting them dangle on either side of the open coffin, then slid in between. It was difficult to move in such restricted confines, but he squirmed his hips left and right, searching for an entry, until he slid in effortlessly.

“I will cuckold Death and add my little death to yours!”

As he began to thrust, the cold body moved rhythmically under him. The sound of his labored breathing filled the tomb, and the light of the guttering candles refracted through the coffin’s crystal sides, threw grotesque, quivering shadows on the walls.

Outside, the morning fog was beginning to burn off under the weak September sun. The service at nearby St. Michael’s had finished but a few minutes ago, and now many of those who had attended, gentlemen and ladies, couples with their children, were enjoying a stroll in the tranquil peace of the cemetery grounds.

Inside the mausoleum, Thraxton’s thrusting had intensified to the point where the woman’s head was softly thumping into the end of the coffin. It could have been a trick of the shifting candlelight, but it appeared as though the corpse had the slightest of smiles upon its lips. The dead woman’s legs had slid down until the cold soles of her feet pressed on Thraxton’s steely buttocks. Even more miraculous was when the corpse’s eyes opened slightly and a singularly delicious giggle escaped the deceased’s lips.

Thraxton laughed and said, “Was there ever a more lovely Lazarus?”

By now the pathways of Highgate Cemetery were busy with morning strollers and relatives come to lay flowers on the graves of their loved ones. The visitors now looked up in alarm and horror as the serenity of a Sunday morning was broken by the echoing grunts and moans of a man and a woman in the throes of sexual ecstasy.

Their macabre tryst completed, Thraxton collected his scattered attire from the floor of the tomb, while the woman put on clothes that had been tucked beneath the coffin’s satin pillows. Dressed only in a white corset, the young woman let out a mischievous giggle as she tied the red silk bow that held up one of her knee-length white stockings. “You took your bleedin’ time, Geoffrey,” she said. “My bloomin’ arse was freezin’ in that coffin!”

Thraxton smiled as he cinched the silk cravat into an insolent knot at his throat. “Merely showing due deference and respect for the deceased, Maisy, m’dear.”

She snickered at that. “Bloomin’ ’eck. I don’t fink wot you just done to me was the least bit respectful!”

“Nonsense,” Thraxton corrected, slipping an arm around her narrow, corseted waist and pulling her towards him. “What greater respect can a mere supplicant show than to worship at the altar of Venus?”

Maisy’s eyes softened at his words. “I know I’m nuffink but a common tart, Geoffrey, but when you says them things it makes me feel all special and bee-you-tee-full!”

Never taking his eyes from hers, Thraxton slipped two fingers inside her, then put them in his mouth, tasting the acrid tang of their commingled essences. He sought to share it with a kiss, his tongue probing the sweet cavern of Maisy’s mouth. For a moment, she sucked on his tongue thrillingly. Perceiving her renewed passion, Thraxton felt his ardor rise again. But then Maisy dissolved, once more, into titters.

It shattered the illusion, reminding Thraxton that, despite the elaborate pretense, Maisy was merely a street girl he had purchased for a few hours’ diversion. He broke off the kiss, gave her cheek a fond caress, and went back to pulling his clothes on. “And so you are beautiful and special,” Thraxton said, digging a heavy coin from his pocket which he pressed into her hand. “And here’s a golden sovereign to keep your beautiful arse warm in the winter.”

Maisy, who had never seen much more than a shilling for herself in the four years she had worked as a prostitute, gasped at the largesse. “Thanks ever so much, Geoffrey! You are a proper gent you are!”

He grabbed her roughly and kissed her hard on the mouth, then spun her around and slapped her on the bare behind. “Now then, go, my child, and sin no more!”

Maisy rubbed her stinging right buttock and giggled effervescently. “My Gawd! You are such a card, Geoffrey. Really you are. You oughta be on the music hall stage!”

Thraxton paused in brushing a smudge of tomb dust from his top hat and threw his arms out expressively. “But I am, my dear. I am. And every day of my life is merely another act I must play.”

While Maisy pulled on her dress, Thraxton sat on the coffin staring into the shadows, a thousand conflicting thoughts wrestling in his mind. He was given to moodiness, and now he felt a post-coital depression settling upon him, mixed with the vague sense of disappointment that always accompanies the indulgence of a long-held fantasy.

Maisy by now had finished dressing, and with her parasol and little lace-up boots that showed when she coquettishly lifted her skirts, could have passed for the local vicar’s daughter out for a Sunday promenade. On her way out of the mausoleum she turned and curtsied to Thraxton. “Good day, milord,” she said and dissolved once more into giggles.

The heavy door thumped shut and Maisy was gone.

With the closing of the door a waft of fresh air crashed into the walls and dispersed, churning with the heady scents of candle wax, flowers and sex. Thraxton moved about the tomb, extinguishing candles until only one remained burning. He stood close by, feeling its heat on his cheek, his face lit by the candle’s amber glow. His eyes instead were fixed on the shadows that squirmed at the edge of the light. The candle flame shivered in a sudden draft that made the shadows lunge then recoil. Thraxton gazed into their shifting depths and sensed an invisible presence hovering there. When the hairs at the nape of his neck began to rise, he knew it had arrived. The Dark Presence. His old adversary. “Death?” he said, his voice a brittle whisper in the echoing silence of the tomb. “Can you hear me, Death? Yes?” He smiled. “Not today… not today.”

Thraxton licked his fingers and pinched the wick out with a sizzle, and with no light to hold them back, the shadows of the tomb fell in upon him.

* * *

When Thraxton finally left the family tomb, he found the harsh morning sunshine jarring, the knots of politely smiling middle-class strollers an irritant. He wished to cling to his sense of gloomy isolation a while longer, so he turned away from the cemetery entrance and followed the pathways to the center of the necropolis, the Circle of Lebanon. The fog here had yet to lift and he plunged once more into its cool and welcome veil. Ahead hovered the brooding mass of the pharaonic arch that formed the entrance to the Egyptian Avenue, a sloping tunnel, lined by mausoleums. With no lanterns lit, the avenue was an obsidian shaft. At its far end, luminous panes of silver fog swirled. He stepped inside the echoing space, a gloved hand brushing the bronze tomb doors as he trod the rising slope.

He froze as a figure appeared at the end of the stony tunnel—the silhouette of a small woman in long skirts, her face hidden by a deep cowl. “Maisy?” Thraxton called out, echoingly. “Maisy, is that you?”

But even as he spoke the words, Thraxton realized that the young prostitute had been dressed much more gaily, and would likely have left in the opposite direction, heading straight for the cemetery’s front gates. His mind vaulted back to the stone angel that crooked a finger and beckoned to him from the fog. The shadow-form seemed to regard him for a moment, then slid from sight.

Thraxton quivered with nervous excitement. He scurried up the tunnel and emerged into the Circle of Lebanon, twenty sunken tombs arranged around an ancient cedar of Lebanon. Darkness clung to the place: the towering cedar flung a wide shadow; the cold stone corralled a twisting torus of fog. The silvery tissues teased apart momentarily and he saw the vague shape again, thirty feet away.

“Hello?” he called out, lumbering after it. The shadow plunged into the fog and vanished and Thraxton pursued, the only sound his heavy breathing and the squeak of fine leather boots. A moment later he felt like a fool chasing his own shadow, for he had transited a complete circle and wound up back at the Egyptian Avenue. Whatever it was had eluded him. Just then the mists cleaved and a wan shaft of light broke through, illuminating a scattering of white blobs on the stony ground. He crouched and touched a finger to one. A white petal adhered to the tip of his gloved index finger. He rolled the petal between his fingertips. It seemed fresh. Had the petals been there when he first entered the circle?

The back of Thraxton’s neck prickled as he sensed eyes upon him. When he looked up, a figure stood at the top of the stone stairs that climbed out of the circle, watching. As he rose from the ground, it took a step backward, pulled the fog about its shoulders like a cloak… and merged into the seamless gray.

S
kin the color of old papyrus flaking and peeling away from the skull. Leathery lips drawn back, showing yellow, twisted teeth.

A tittering laugh.

Hollow sockets with eyes that had shriveled into raisins thousands of years ago.

An answering guffaw.

A skull lonesome for its lower jaw.

A booming voice answered by a wail of laughter
.

A Canopic jar with its contents: a dried and embalmed heart, liver and lungs, wrapped in linen, placed carefully alongside.

A crystal bowl of black sturgeon’s eggs settled in a bed of crushed ice.

The redolence of perfume mixed with the pervasive reek of corruption.

Sunday evening and the upper crust of London society were in attendance at a soirée in the unlikely environs of the Mummy Room in the British Museum.

Champagne corks popped. Servants scurried. In a corner of the room a quartet sawed away at violins and cellos. Here and there, elegantly dressed men and women stood in loose knots, speaking in loud voices, gesturing with excessive animation and laughing too long at the meagerest of witticisms.

Inside their glass cases, the desiccated corpses and mummies of ancient Egypt danced a frozen ballet of death, knees drawn up into fetal postures, spines twisted into sinuous contortions that counterfeited the final agonies of death. In their day they had been the aristocracy of ancient Egypt. Now they had been snatched from two thousand years of darkness and silence to be itemized, catalogued, and put on public display, a human life reduced to a curiosity to be gawked at over canapés and champagne.

The party had been in progress for almost an hour when Lord Thraxton appeared at the door, a light mist of rain beaded on the shoulders of his frock coat. A servant took his top hat, cloak and walking stick. As he strode into the hall he exchanged greetings and pleasantries with a gathering of cabinet ministers and their wives, then quickly excused himself and moved away. A balding banker with a voluminous beard accosted him and babbled something about investments in the Americas. Thraxton muttered back some vague incoherencies about annuities and yearly stipends and moved on. He accepted and returned more greetings from baronesses, viceroys, judges and heirs apparent. All the time he spoke his eyes searched the room until he found the person he’d been looking for.

Making conversation in a clutch of well-dressed gentlemen and ladies was a tall man with hazel eyes and blonde hair curling up on his collar. Thraxton strode deliberately over and slapped a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Algy, old fellow,” he boomed. “How is that scorching case of the clap of yours?” Thraxton bowed slightly to the group and then, seeing their horrified reactions, quickly added, “Please… do not recoil so. He is only slightly infectious.”

Algernon tried to laugh it off. “You must forgive Lord Thraxton. He has the most obtuse sense of humor.”

“Yes. Beg pardon, but I really must steal my friend for a moment.” Thraxton grinned as he jostled Algernon loose and propelled him in the direction of the refreshments table.

“Thank you, Geoffrey,” Algernon muttered as they walked away. “I had wished to be rescued, but perhaps not at the cost of my good name and standing in society.”

Algernon Hyde-Davies had been Thraxton’s friend and confidant since they met as schoolboys. They sauntered to a discreet corner of the gathering where Thraxton leaned close and whispered conspiratorially to his old chum.