The Arcanum (3 page)

5

DOYLE TAPPED HIS stick against the spot where Duvall had died. It was dusk on Sunday. Traffic was light. Bicycles rolled by in the park, and a few motorcars filled with formally dressed families drove home from afternoon Mass. Doyle breathed in the autumn air and turned to face the British Museum, feeling like a venerable hound lured away from the barn by the scent of a fresh young rabbit.

A mystery beckoned.

He squeezed past a horde of tourists leaving the museum, run out by a stout, high-collared security guard with a deep bass voice. The man stood like Gibraltar between two enormous ancient Egyptian sculptures of Anubis.

“Five o’clock. Museum is closed. Don’t forget purses, umbrellas, or packages. Please ’old small ones by the hand as you leave. Doors will close in two minutes.” The security guard saw Doyle approach and announced at full volume, “Best turn right back around, sir. Museum’s closed, and I’ve a sup waitin’.”

Doyle smiled at his fellow Scotsman. “My name is Arthur Conan Doyle and—”

“I’m Little Miss Penny Maypole,” the guard finished. “Now, sir, please, the missus is preparin’ her beef stew and I’ve a laxative to imbibe, so—”

Conan Doyle presented identification. The security guard glanced at it, then straightened with a start. “Bugger all.” He did not look Doyle in the face as he spoke. “With all due respect, sir, I’m a boneheaded fool. My missus always tells me so, and now I’ve proven it true again. God help me. ’Ow can I be of service, now?”

“What’s your name, man?”

“Welgerd, sir.”

“Well, Mr. Welgerd, I’ve been sent on the orders of Lord Churchill to investigate the circumstances of the accident that took place the other night.”

“The gentleman wot was struck by the motorcar?”

“Precisely. And if I’m not mistaken, there was also an attempted robbery here that same night?”

“Wouldn’t call it so much a robbery, sir, but we did have a window broken, which set off the bells. But I’ve been over the premises backways to Sunday, and I assure you nothin’s gone missin’.”

“I’ve no doubt of the thoroughness of your search, but I hope it won’t offend if I, myself, take a small tour of the building to satisfy my curiosity.”

Welgerd wrinkled his nose. “After thirty years, sir, I’ve come to know this museum like it were a part of meself. I assure you nuthin’s missin’.”

“I’m not at liberty to divulge the particular sensitivities of my mission, Mr. Welgerd. Suffice it to say that your cooperation on this matter would mean a great deal to Lord Churchill. And I would be gravely mistaken not to mention your assistance in my report to his lordship. And, of course, to forward that report to your good lady wife, whose dinner may grow cold as a result of my unannounced visit.”

At this, Welgerd seemed to weigh his loyalties. “That’s kind of ye, Mr. Doyle, sir, but it won’t spare me a whale of a hollerin’.”

“You’re a brave soul, Welgerd.”

Welgerd nodded and corralled the remaining visitors out of the main hall. The boom of the locks echoed through five miles of empty museum corridors, leaving a blanket of silence behind.

“Follow me, sir,” Welgerd said, polished black shoes clicking on the floor as he marched off.

Doyle hurried to keep up.

The two men entered the Hall of the Dark Continent. Behind huge panes of glass stood some of the world’s first frozen images of the many tribes and indigenous peoples of Africa. Visitors to the museum were particularly drawn to the wild masks and ceremonial skirts, which depicted demon faces and hinted at primal energies.

Welgerd pushed a lever, and electric lights blinked on down the length of the exhibit. With a fistful of keys, he unlocked the heavy cage door and rolled it into the ceiling.

“You were here that night?” Doyle asked as they strode down a long corridor lined with medieval suits of armor.

“At the other end of the buildin’, sir. Then the alarms rang, and me and some of the other fellows went about searchin’. We weren’t awares of the accident till much later. Far as I knew, the man wot got struck wasn’t even dressed for the weather. Poor bugger likely lost his senses. It ’appens.”

“And nothing else unusual occurred that evening?”

“Nuthin’ that arises in memory.”

Doyle drew to a halt. “I’m afraid this is where we part ways. Government business, you see.”

Welgerd looked disappointed. “Oh, of course. Well . . . You know the museum well, do you?”

“Should I get lost, I’ll shout your name.”

“Right, then. No worries.” Welgerd flushed in the cheeks and looked down at his hands, where he clutched a pad and pencil. His hands mangled the pad with indecision.

“I’d be honored.” Doyle took the initiative and pried the pad from Welgerd’s hands. The museum guard stood on his toes as Conan Doyle signed.

“I’ve, ah, penned a few stories myself, sir.”

Conan Doyle continued to write. “Is that so? You’ve a literary bent, Welgerd?”

“No, nuthin’ so stately, sir. Just cops-and-robbers-type scenarios. But my missus enjoys them and she adds suggestions and that type of thing.”

“And the gentlemen from Scotland Yard, they searched the area?”

“With a fine-tooth comb, sir. Absolutely.”

“Splendid.” Doyle finished the autograph and handed back the pad. He had written:
To Welgerd, Well named and well done.
Keep up the writing. Arthur Conan Doyle.

Welgerd grunted with appreciation as he read it. Doyle tipped his hat, and strolled off down the corridor.

IN THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL exhibit, Doyle looked dwarfed beneath the colossal Assyrian reliefs. Yet for an investigator of a robbery, he scarcely glanced at the Rosetta Stone and ignored the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon at Athens. Instead, he descended a flight of stairs and passed through another hall of ancient Greek pottery and textiles, looking neither left nor right.

His steps came to an abrupt halt at the door to the water closet, located in the farthest corner of the British Museum.

He entered. The paint on the walls was yellow and peeling above a stretch of green and white hexagonal tile. There were two stalls housing toilets flushable through the pull of a chain. The only notable aspect of the room was its history, for this was the very spot where they had broken ground on the present neoclassical structure imagined by Robert Smirke over the foundation of Montague House, the museum’s home since 1759.

Doyle washed his hands and dried them on a towel folded atop the basin. Then he turned to the tiled wall across from the door. He touched one of the center tiles with his palm, then moved his hand to a spot two tiles above and did the same. His hand then glided across some five tiles and pressed again, then dropped down another four.

After a pause, there was a grinding, and an assortment of tiles receded into blackness, forming the jagged outline of a hidden doorway.

Doyle swung the door open, glancing briefly behind him, then stepped into the shadows. With a grinding of gears the tiles reattached to the door, leaving—for all intents and purposes—a perfectly uninteresting wall.

A flaring match illuminated Doyle’s face as he touched the flame to a candle in a tin holder set by his feet. A stairwell curved down before him, consisting of twenty steps. The texture of the walls changed halfway down from smooth plaster to uneven rock and grit. At the bottom was a simple wooden door. Doyle turned the knob, and it opened.

The revealed office smelled of old paper and jasmine incense. It was not a large space, wide enough to accommodate a desk against one wall, a chair, a wardrobe, and a single shelf of books. Arabian silks stained plum and emerald shrouded the cracking walls, and draped low from the ceiling. The wardrobe in the corner contained a portion of Duvall’s famous shoe collection: Thai slippers, Tibetan yak boots, German dancing clogs, a crumbling pair of Samurai two-toed socks . . .

Doyle turned to the coatrack. Resting there was Duvall’s staff: a five-foot piece of wood, smooth and twisted. Burned into its surface were Druidic ogham. Sagging on posts were Duvall’s beret and overcoat.

Doyle spoke in a whisper. “Gone walking in the rain, Konstantin? Without your staff? Without your hat?”

Doyle glanced at a chessboard beside the desk, its pieces arranged in mid-game.

He next turned to the bookcase stationed at the wall farthest from the door. It held a collection of occult texts. There were rows of interesting first editions: a 1619 folio of
Clavis Alchemiae
by Robert Fludd, a 1608
Discourse des Sorciers
by Henri Boguet, Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled,
and a 1555
Les Propheties De M.
Michel Nostradamus
—admirable titles for an adept of the occult, but child’s play to a magus of Duvall’s stature.

This brought Doyle’s attention to a map. It was an eighteenth-century map of the world tacked above Duvall’s desk, its face marred by hundreds of small handwritten scribblings: symbols, x’s, and dates. Doyle withdrew a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket and held it close to the map, his finger tracing a line from Greece to Italy. Magnified by the lens, the notes read:

First record of lost tribe, Athens to Rome in 420. Consult Dee’s
journals for date of Enochian fragments. Tribe separates in
Imperial Persia. Some to Buddhist India, others to Han China.

Conan Doyle freed a necklace from one of the nails holding the map to the wall. The charm hanging from the frayed leather band was a coin, the symbol of a soldier on horseback on its face. It appeared to be an antique Roman coin. Glancing back to the map, Doyle noted a thick circle drawn around Manhattan Island in the United States.

Spies and evidence suggest tribe reunited in New York City.
Consult Lovecraft. New players. New dangers. Sacred Order of
the Golden Dawn.

The last line was written in an almost manic scrawl and underlined several times:

PROTECT THE SECRETS OF ENOCH

“Where is it, then?” Doyle spoke aloud as he surveyed the otherwise empty walls. He checked under the antique ashtray lamp. His fingers frisked the sides of the bookshelf and poked among the books, searching for false bindings. He tossed the Persian rug aside and stamped on the wooden boards, listening for hollows. But in vain. Doyle’s brow knit with frustration as his gaze drifted to the chessboard beside Duvall’s desk.

He noted an obvious move on behalf of white, which had always been his color when playing Konstantin. But making the first move wasn’t nearly advantage enough. Most of the time when they played, it felt to Doyle as if Duvall was simply humoring him, delaying the kill out of fear of boredom. In this case, however, Doyle spotted a nearing checkmate.

“Castle, of course,” he muttered as he switched the positions of the rook and king.

At that moment, the bookcase clicked open. “Cagey bastard,” Doyle whispered, with a grin. Duvall could best him even from beyond the grave.

Doyle pulled the bookcase away from the wall to reveal an elevator lift beyond. His heartbeat picked up. Trapping his cane under his arm and carrying the candle, he entered the lift. He forced the operating handle clockwise a half revolution. Machinery hummed as the cage door slammed shut, then Duvall’s office lifted out of sight. The candle flame wavered in the suffocating blackness as the lift descended. Pipes banged. Thick wires slid against metal. The lift shook. After ten uneasy seconds, it came to a jarring halt.

Doyle braced himself against the walls. For a moment he stood there, listening to his own furtive breaths. Then he folded the cage door open and stepped onto a carpet of rich red velvet.

Candlelight flowed across the mustard-colored walls of a small salon, replete with mirrors and standing candelabras. On the walls were framed portraits—one of which bore a distinct likeness to Doyle himself. At the far end of the room were a set of French doors. He opened them, then reeled backward, stunned.

He had found the Hall of Relics.

The items were displayed on masterwork pedestals, protected by globes of Venetian glass. One of the first relics, a corpse, rested inside a glass-enclosed coffin. It was a woman, her decayed arms stretched taut at her sides, her face hollowed to a husk, eyes black sockets, hair splayed about the withering skull like so many spider legs.

Doyle knew the body, and recalled its discovery. He remembered the waves of a West African ocean rolling it forward in the sand.

His eyes traveled down the rest of the body, past the shriveled stomach, to where the legs would normally be—if she had been human. Instead, there was only a thick fishtail, scales flaking off the sides. The inscription on the coffin read:

MADAGASCAR, 1905—PHYSICAL PROOF OF
MERMAID LIFE, POSSIBLE ATLANTEAN
DESCENDANCY

Doyle moved on, holding up the candle to the next display. A shimmer of green met his eyes. It was a slate of emerald, carved with an ancient Phoenician script, circa 200 A.D. It was the grail of Alchemical scholarship, brief as a sonnet, yet fathomless in its truths.

THE EMERALD TABLET OF HERMES TRISMEGISTUS

The mere sight of the next relic raised the hairs on his arms. Doyle had led the investigation to its discovery, and bore witness to the exorcism that had quieted the demonic spirit. Yet evil still pulsed within its broken smile. For beneath the glass was a skull, belonging to the vilest man of an age, whose malice was so pure it survived his living body. The inscription read:

1766—THE CURSED SKULL OF “BLUEBEARD”
GILLES DE LAVAL

Doyle quickly turned his attention to the objects on either side of the skull, counterbalancing the energies of the room.

One was a pile of brown rags: monks’ robes. A rope belt was visible in the folds. The importance was the wearer, and the healing power bestowed upon those who touched its hem. The inscription read:

THE ROBES OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI

Across from it, imprisoned also in glass, lay a slender piece of wood and a hunk of iron on a cushion. Once it was a weapon held by a Roman soldier. The blood it had spilled belonged to Jesus Christ as he hung on the cross.