The Casebook of Newbury & Hobbes (24 page)

They were still in the room.

He could sense them there, watching him with their blank, impassive eyes. They’d been there for hours, ever since he’d returned from the White Friar’s. Earlier, he’d convinced himself they were mere phantoms, nothing but products of his unconscious mind, but now he was beginning to doubt his own veracity. Were they in fact real, physical entities? Malign spectres that had come from the realm of the netherworld to torment him? He was no longer sure.

He’d tried calling out to them to provoke a response, but his words had fallen on deaf ears, echoing around the otherwise empty house. He’d received only silence in reply; only the same eerily unwavering, blank-faced stares. So he had smoked another of his cigarettes—the carefully crafted, opium-tainted cigarettes he’d taken to carrying in a silver case in his breast pocket—and allowed himself to drift away into the temporary seclusion of an opium dream.

Now, however, this short-lived reprieve had reached its inevitable end and the three figures still stood in judgement by the window, resolutely refusing to be dismissed from their vigil.

With a weary sense of inevitability, Newbury knew all of this before he’d even opened his eyes. He could feel the cold hostility of their stares, boring into him.

Newbury’s eyes flickered open and he drew a hand over his stubble-encrusted chin, issuing a long, heartfelt sigh. His lips were dry, his tongue thick in his mouth. It was late and he’d been unconscious for some hours. Outside, everything was still, quiet. He imagined a thick blanket of silence had smothered the street, as if the swirling, frozen fog had descended on the city and muffled everything, shutting out the world. Everything out there was covered in a layer of crunchy, hoary frost, crisp and white, as if, in the cold, it was somehow renewed, made fresh again.

Everyone else, he supposed, was at home in bed, preparing themselves for the morning’s festivities. He knew he should be doing the same. His home was usually his haven, his place away from the concerns of his chaotic life, from the Queen, from all the usual murder, vice and danger that typically occupied his time. Today, however, it was no haven. Today spirits had invaded his home. Whether or not they were figments of his mind mattered little: still they were there, still they were judging him.

Newbury stirred, massaging his aching neck. He chose not to look to the three figures by the window, but turned his attention instead towards the dancing flames in the grate. They spat and popped as they hungrily consumed the firewood that Scarbright had stacked there earlier.

Scarbright. Newbury couldn’t help but suppress a smile at the thought of the man. Bainbridge had made it more than clear that he had only intended to loan the butler—his own, personal manservant—to Newbury for a couple of weeks, but months had now passed and Scarbright was still there, at Cleveland Avenue, still cooking and cleaning and managing Newbury’s affairs. He’d proved a constant, reliable aide, and Newbury had to admit that he’d grown rather fond of the man.

Newbury knew that Bainbridge had already taken steps towards finding a replacement butler for his own household. He might have been an expert in dealing with the capital’s criminal elements, but the chief inspector struggled to even make a decent pot of tea for himself. It wasn’t likely he’d settle for temporary arrangements for more than a few months.

That Scarbright was no doubt reporting back to Bainbridge on Newbury’s activities was almost irrelevant; Newbury had long ago ceased to be concerned by his friend’s well-intentioned duplicity. There was little that he’d ever consider keeping from Bainbridge, and very little that Scarbright could tell Bainbridge that Newbury wouldn’t admit to himself. Bainbridge already knew of Newbury’s continuing experimentation with occult ritual and his ongoing abuse of the opium poppy, and in turn, Newbury had been made fully aware of what Bainbridge thought of such things. As a result, they had come to an uneasy, unspoken understanding on the matter: Bainbridge would continue to berate him, while Newbury would continue to ignore the said reprimands in return.

Newbury would see his friend in the morning, when the weary widower would venture across town to join him for Christmas dinner. It had become something of a tradition for the two bachelors to celebrate the season together, although this year they were to be joined by a third companion, a recent addition to their small circle. His name was Professor Archibald Angelchrist, and he worked in some opaque capacity for the government—a scientific advisor, or something of the sort. Bainbridge had been spending an increasing amount of time with the Home Secretary in recent months, helping to establish a new investigative bureau (the remit of which Newbury was still a little unclear of) and, during the course of this work, he had first encountered, and then come to know, Angelchrist.

Consequently, Newbury had got to know the man in the months that followed and, while perhaps still a little wary of one another, they had quickly become friends, if not yet confidants. He seemed like a decent sort of fellow—with a sharp mind and an even sharper tongue, and Newbury found himself enjoying the man’s company immensely. When, therefore, Newbury had become aware of Angelchrist’s situation—the fact that he would be spending Christmas alone—it had seemed only appropriate to invite him to Cleveland Avenue to join the festivities there.

Scarbright, who had already retired for the evening, would spend the morning preparing a goose, before being granted the afternoon off to visit his relatives in Shoreditch. The three remaining men would then no doubt concern themselves with food, drink and hearty banter. Newbury wished that Veronica could have joined them, too, but she had other more pressing familial concerns to attend to.

Newbury had always enjoyed Christmas. As a boy, he’d learned to love everything about the season, from the rich, spiced puddings prepared by the household cook, to the spirit of cheer that seemed to sweep up all the people of the great metropolis. Perhaps what he’d loved most about the day itself was not the neatly wrapped parcels filled with wonderful gifts, but the effect it had on his father.

Christmas day was the only day of the year on which he had his father’s full attention. The only day during which the man stopped working, hung up his boots and spent the day before the fire, watching, listening, and smiling. Newbury marvelled at how the man’s whole demeanour would soften, how his expression would become less troubled, how the worry lines around his mouth and eyes would seemingly melt away. He could still see that smiling face in his mind’s eye now, if he concentrated, underlit by the flickering light from the grate.

Together the two of them had roasted chestnuts over the fire and spent hours talking about books and reading Dickens’s Christmas stories. His father had filled his head with wondrous tales of adventure and foreign lands, stories that Newbury had never forgotten. Stories that still inspired him and filled him with a deep longing for those distant countries, where adventure and excitement waited for him around every corner. He had cherished those hours. Even in the years that followed, during his father’s declining days, Newbury had taken care to be at his side each Christmas day, no matter what else might be vying for his attention, where else he was supposed to be. He had learned that much from the man—that Christmas was a sacred time. Not, to him, in the religious sense, but as a time to rest and take stock of one’s life. To be with loved ones. To be still, if only for a day.

His father had died years ago, of course, but Newbury had continued to observe the many trappings of Christmas. Carollers, Dickens, mulled wine, gaudily decorated fir trees—to Newbury these were the essence of the season, and he kept it well each year. And these days he surrounded himself with family of a different kind; Bainbridge was as much a brother to him now as anyone else alive or dead. And Veronica... well, Veronica was something else again.

Recent weeks, however, had left Newbury with a heavy heart, and while he’d made every effort to engage his enthusiasm for the celebrations, he had found himself unable to truly embrace the spirit of the season. His mind was on other things. Troubling things.

His ritualistic experimentation had continued to yield results, and his drug-fuelled visions had become increasingly prescient. Alarming things lurked just around the corner. Newbury had seen into the future. Consequently, he was haunted by more than simple apparitions.

He looked up. The three figures were still there, watching him from across the room. They had every appearance of being genuine, physical entities, and Newbury felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle in fear, despite himself. It was certainly not outside the realms of his beliefs that spirits such as these should manifest themselves before him. But there was still doubt... still that niggling thought that his mind might yet be playing tricks upon him. Was it the effects of the weed? Or perhaps it was something worse, a consequence of the rituals he’d been performing, some sort of diabolical side effect?

Newbury eyed each of the spectres in turn, searching their faces for any sign of why they might be there, any clue as to the reason for their sudden appearance earlier that evening. One moment he’d been alone, smoking his pipe and reading his tattered old copy of Dickens’s
The Signalman,
the next the three interlopers had been standing in the shadows, menacing him from across the room. They were all the more terrifying for their startling familiarity, for adopting the guise of his friends, both old and new.

Templeton Black was there, lounging against the wall in his rumpled black suit, pencil thin and with a pale, almost unearthly, complexion. He had a shock of startling grey hair, and he was young—as young as Newbury remembered him. As young as he was the day he’d died.

The affair at Fairview House had been one of the worst of Newbury’s career, and he knew from the few words that they’d exchanged on the subject that Bainbridge felt entirely the same. That day, Newbury had lost not only an assistant, but also a dear friend. Templeton Black had barely been more than a boy, having celebrated his twenty-first birthday in Newbury’s company only weeks before his death. Looking at his pale face now, glaring back at him blankly from across the room, Newbury felt a sharp pang of guilt. He should have protected the boy. He should have
done
something. He should have been able to prevent it from happening.

Even now, years later, he found it hard to reconcile himself to what had occurred. The whole case had been a mess. The house, supposedly haunted by a malicious, murderous spirit, had in fact been rigged with traps and devices to spring mechanical death upon the unwary. Rather than a malign spirit, Fairview House had been inhabited by a madman, a lunatic hell-bent on living out his supernatural fantasies, and Newbury, Bainbridge and Templeton Black had been nought but unknowing playing pieces in his disastrous game.

The insane inventor and his bizarre creations had savagely murdered Black, who had sacrificed himself so that Newbury and Bainbridge should live. It had been a disaster of the highest order. As far as Newbury was concerned, it should never have happened. It should have been him. Templeton Black should have lived. Newbury should have not.

Whether he acknowledged it or not, the whole experience had scarred Newbury. And what was worse—what compounded the matter—was that he’d allowed it to happen again.

Earlier that year, the young reporter George Purefoy had died at the hands of the renegade doctor, Aubrey Knox. He had been murdered in the most excruciating manner, disembowelled alive, his intestines strung out to form a vast, grotesque pentagram, a sacrifice to some abominable agency to which Knox subscribed. Knox had hoped to divine the future in the boy’s blood. Now, through less diabolical means—but no less dangerous—Newbury was attempting to do the same. That he was doing it for the best of reasons—the protection of the realm and the people he cared for—made it no less of a moral crime. He had engaged in occult practices in a manner in which he had always promised himself he would not.

Was that why Templeton Black, or at least the spirit wearing his persona, was here now? Was his old, dead friend somehow judging him? Was Black sending him a warning?

“I’m sorry,” Newbury said, quietly. He could barely look the apparition in the eye. “I’m so sorry.”

Templeton Black—or the thing that purported to wear his guise—smiled. He took a step forward, holding his hands out before him in a placatory gesture.

“What is it you want from me?” Newbury said, and he could hear the tremor of fear in his own voice. “I don’t know what you want.”

The spectre frowned, but the look did not carry with it any malice. There was concern evident in those pale, ghostly eyes. Newbury realised with a start that what the apparition wanted was forgiveness.

“But it was me! It was my responsibility! You were only a boy... You were...” He trailed off, unable to continue.

Black smiled once again and shook his head. His lips remained tightly shut. He raised his right arm and pointed at Newbury.

“Me? You want me to forgive
myself
?” Newbury shook his head emphatically. “It doesn’t work like that, Templeton. It’s never worked like that! I can’t forget what happened, what
I
allowed to happen to you.”

But the apparition was changing before Newbury’s eyes. The fine, black suit was beginning to crumble and peel, curling away from the skeletal figure beneath. Black opened his mouth and dark, autumnal leaves began to spill out into the room, swirling away as if excited by a gust of wind that Newbury could neither feel nor hear.

“Templeton...?” Newbury called, but the wind seemed only to increase in ferocity in response, and the figure at the centre of the maelstrom, the spirit of his dead friend, seemed transformed now into nothing but a scattering of dry leaves. Moments later, Templeton Black had been swept away entirely, becoming dust once again, becoming nothing but a memory.

The heavy curtain drapes, which seconds earlier had been whipping about violently in the storm, fell still across the window. The room was utterly silent.