The Dead Assassin: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (27 page)

“Menagerie?”

“Animals. He collects ’em. Running loose on the grounds.” The gatekeeper patted the blunderbuss fondly. “That’s why oi got this.”

“Indeed?” Wilde’s eyes flickered up from the man’s face to the primal darkness crouched beyond the gates. “And do you have a spare we might borrow?”

The gatekeeper chuckled. “Arrrr, ye’ll be all roit. Just keep to the droive and stay in the carriage and you’ll loikely come to no harm.”

The gatekeeper stepped to the double gates and swung them wide with a shove. As soon as the carriage passed through, Wilde hurriedly flung up the window and scooted back on the seat cushion, sitting as far from the glass as he could.

The house could not be seen from the front gate for the gravel drive ascended a steep grade. But as the carriage crested the low rise, the ancestral seat of the DeVaynes’ rose into view: a palatial, two-story manor with a Georgian fa
ç
ade. Amber light blazed from the tall windows. Struck by the sight, Wilde drew down the carriage window and leaned out. The chill night air pooled in his lungs and was only part of the reason why a premonitory shiver danced down his spine.

The circular driveway fronting the mansion was busy with fine carriages dropping off partygoers. “Draw up here, Gibson,” Wilde said, choosing a spot on the periphery. The driver climbed down from his seat, lowered the metal step, and Oscar Wilde descended. Despite the bitter chill, he chose to leave his overcoat behind, preferring to enter wearing only his formal black evening suit, a fresh green orchid pinned to his lapel. Earlier, he had spent hours at his toilette: bathing and shaving and brilliantineing his chestnut hair, then dousing himself with French cologne, reasoning that, if he could not erase the marks of time, he would at least tie them up in a pleasing package. Girding his loins for battle, he lit a Turkish cigarette, swept back his auburn waves, cinched the knot of his tie, shot the cuffs of his evening jacket, and strolled toward the blazing entrance in shoes buffed black and gleaming.

But as he crunched across the drive, the darkness around him irrupted with a cacophony of jungle sounds. He looked about nervously. Then something screamed. Loud and close. His polished shoes skidded to a halt. A large, unfathomable shape floated toward him from the darkness, which resolved itself as a strutting peacock. The bird unfurled its extravagant fan of feathers and gave them a shake. Relieved, he let out a breath and smiled at his fear. But then a lithe blur on four legs rushed from the night, snatched up the peacock in its jaws, and gave the bird a fierce shake to break its neck.

A huge lioness.

Noticing him, it growled a warning and trotted away with the bird in its jaws.

Wilde dropped his cigarette and hurried toward the safety of the house, scuffing the toes of his shoes as he kicked gravel. He reached the colonnaded entrance and flung himself through the open front doors.

The entrance hall was a grand vault of marble lined with tall Grecian urns and classical busts on columns. Overhead, giant chandeliers bedecked with candles flooded the space with light. Waiting to greet guests were two life-size golden statues of naked youths—a faun and a naiad—each posed holding a silver tray. Wilde was pleased to see that they were honestly nude, and did not comport with the English prudery of fig leaves or conveniently arranged drapery. He dropped his calling card atop the growing pile on the naiad’s sterling tray, at which point the female statue came alive, smiling and bowing to him.

Wilde started and laughed with delight.
“Tableau vivant!”
he crowed, and bowed in response to the two young people, who were clad only in gold body paint and laurel crowns.

The naked faun stepped forward and offered up a tray of Venetian masks.

“Would sir care for a mask?”

“No, thank you,” Wilde replied, “the one I am wearing usually suffices.”

He stepped into the wide hallway and was met by a bewigged servant, anonymous in a white porcelain mask. The servant presented him with a tray of champagne flutes effervescing with an intriguing emerald concoction.

“What on earth is this libation?”

The servant, who was apparently mute, answered only by miming lifting a drink from the tray and imbibing. Wilde had never seen a drink quite so green in color, a luminous shade of jade. He snatched up a glass, nodded his thanks, and continued on. The first sip set his palate alive with a premonition of rapture. On his second sip, his tongue parsed a giddy dance of gin, champagne, and botanical infusions commingled with a fatal undertow of absinthe that gave the drink its lethal green tinge.

Suddenly, a flock of sheep appeared, crowding the hallway as it surged toward him. He forded through the wooly mass like a man wading through deep water, struggling to keep his feet as the mindlessly
baa
ing creatures pressed around his legs. Following the flock was a comely young wench with her long blond tresses tied up in pink ribbons and ponytails. She carried a tall crook and was dressed in a shepherdess’s costume that could have been lifted from a child’s storybook, except that the front of her dress had been cut deliberately low to expose a pair of buxom breasts. She flashed Wilde an impish grin as she passed, and he looked back to find that the rear of her Little Bo Peep dress had likewise been cut high so as to frame the ripe apple of her naked arse.

The marquess had promised Wilde a revel. Now it seemed he had received a foretaste of things to come. He followed the hallway and soon reached a landing where a short flight of steps climbed to an open set of doors. He summited them and found himself on the threshold of a great hall resplendent with battle flags and suits of armor. In the middle of the hall, lit by the glow of a huge fire roaring in the fireplace, a different kind of war was taking place—a struggle involving an army of naked flesh. Men and women of all shapes and sizes and ages copulated on cushions and couches amid rapturous groaning and ecstatic moans.

The bacchanal, it appeared, had started without him.

He stepped into the hall, crashing through a curtain of hashish smoke. A small Indian boy in a dhoti and turban sat cross-legged before a huge hookah and now offered up the pipe. Wilde set down his glass and then took the pipe and clamped it between his lips. He drew in a deep lungful of smoke that funneled straight into his brain where it swirled in curling arabesques, dissolving his thoughts and any lingering inhibitions with it.

As he watched the orgy from the sidelines, a sudden revelation struck him. Although the participants wore Venetian masks, their identities were easy to guess at. Wilde was astonished to note that they comprised many from the upper echelons of English society, including cabinet ministers and their wives, members of the House of Lords, and even a number of high-ranking clergymen.

Just then a couple sauntered past on their way to join the torrid love pile. The woman, naked apart from rhinestone-spangled nipples and a black leather mask festooned with ostrich feathers, held a riding crop in one hand. The other hand gripped a leather leash by which she led a middle-aged man. The gent, bearded beneath the black leather mask, had a Buddha belly, flabby buttocks striped with red welts, and a flaccid penis that waggled sadly as he was led into the hall. Despite the disguise, Wilde instantly recognized the portly figure of the Prince of Wales and almost greeted him as such. Fortunately, he still possessed sufficient presence of mind to hold his tongue.

In the midst of all the nakedness, more of the masked house servants circulated, offering up salvers of sweetmeats and more of the exotically colored elixir to those orgiers who reclined on cushions at the side of the love pit, watching as they recuperated from their efforts. One servant noticed the lone Irishman and glided toward him bearing a tray of drinks. As he silently bowed and offered up the tray, Wilde could not help but notice the port-wine stain that ran from beneath the mask and down one side of the servant’s neck. Unfortunately, it was an observation his mind would not retain a moment later. The Irishman helped himself to another glass of the emerald cocktail and asked aloud, “What on earth is this sublime drink?”

“Nectar of the gods,” answered an elderly lady who wore a mask and a sparkling tiara in her gray hair and nothing else. From her excruciatingly posh drawl, Wilde recognized the lady as none other than the dowager Dame Helen Montague-Hunt. She was sipping a glass as she reclined on a pile of cushions, her spindly legs thrown over the shoulders of a muscular young man who was enthusiastically rogering her.

The green liquid glided down Wilde’s throat like molten gold. He felt his body changing state from solid into gas, as if he were sublimating, an atom at a time, into the surrounding air. While he was still able to form a cogent thought, he stopped a passing servant and asked, “The marquess?”

The masked servant pointed upward to the hammer-beam ceiling.

As if on queue, a woodwind of Middle Eastern origin wheedled an insinuating tune. The bacchants paused in their exertions to look up, calling and applauding as something extraordinary was lowered from the rafters of the great hall. At first, Wilde could not make out what it was, but as it descended from the shadows, he descried the shape of a giant cross, hung inverted. Lashed to the cross by ropes binding his arms and feet was the slim figure of a man, naked apart from a ragged loincloth, his tumble of red tresses capped by a crown of thorns.

Rufus DeVayne.

The orgiers parted as the cross touched ground. A bevy of servants rushed forward to catch it and turn it right side up. Amidst applause and cheers, the marquess was unlashed and stepped down from the cross blowing kisses. A smile lit his face as he noticed Wilde, and he moved forward to greet him, his slender body flushed, his eyes spilling stars.

“Oscar, my new friend. You came!”

“Dear boy, where beauty summons, Oscar Wilde must follow.”

The marquess shrilled a delighted laugh. He snapped his fingers and a servant scurried to offer up a tray of green cocktails. The marquess snatched one up, tossed it down, and snagged himself a second. A pair of servants came forward to draw his arms into the sleeves of a silk gown embroidered with hierophantic symbols and tighten the sash. He threw a slender arm about Wilde’s shoulders and whispered, “You must come up to my rooms.” He semaphored a vulpine smile. “I have something very special prepared for us.”

Wilde leaned his head toward the younger man, drunk with the liquor of longing. For a brief moment, he saw himself with a terrible acuity, and he knew that, if he followed the young man, he would leave his old life behind forever. He grasped that “Oscar Wilde,” the persona he had spent a lifetime crafting, would be utterly annihilated. He would be mad to succumb to such a risk. The cliff edge yawned before him and Rufus DeVayne beckoned him to step off into the abyss.

“Lead on, sweet youth,” he heard himself say, “I would follow you into oblivion.”

As the younger man led him from the hall, the marquess noted, “I see you chose not to wear a mask.”

“Yes, I came as Oscar Wilde. I could think of nothing more apropos.”

DeVayne laughed as they reached a grand staircase and began to climb. “Come, Oscar,” the marquess said, taking him by the hand. “We must ascend to Elysium.” At the top of the stairs they turned onto a long corridor. Although his feet still trod the earth, Wilde’s mind was a helium balloon tugged along by a string.

Their promenade along the hallway could have taken seconds or days. Suddenly, Wilde found himself inside a huge and sumptuously appointed bedchamber hung with paintings and lithographs that shared a common theme of nudity and torture. As DeVayne had promised, one wall held a giant canvas: a lithograph of a torture chamber of the Inquisition: a hanged man dangled from a gibbet, an arc of semen jetting from his huge erection.

“Do you like my art, Oscar? I have my own personal torture chamber close by should you wish to indulge.”

A premonitory jolt of anxiety swept through Wilde. “Perhaps another time,” he said, his lips dry.

The room was opulent with soft pillows and low sofas. An impossibly huge four-poster dominated one side of the room. Lying atop the bed were two children, a boy and a girl of perhaps six or seven. Their eyes were heavy-lidded and possessed only a smear of focus, suggesting both had been drugged. The children were naked apart from cherub’s wings strapped to their backs, and had been posed stretched out upon the bed, head to head. Each rested upon an arm that was in turn pillowed upon a human skull. A leather strap dangled loose about their throats. A short wooden stick lay close by.

Wilde scrambled to catch hold of the bobbing balloon of his mind and reel it back in. “What is this?” he asked.

“Do you not see? One for you. One for me. You may take either the girl or the boy. In truth, I am not particular.”

“What in God’s name are you proposing?”

The marquess chuckled. “Nothing we do here tonight is in God’s name. I presume you read the book I gave you? The ritual of immortality requires the sacrifice of a virgin.”

Wilde’s face turned to stone. “What? You mean the stick? The leather strap?”

“A garrote.” DeVayne’s face loomed close. Warm, carnivore’s breath washed Wilde’s cheek. “You will find strangulation far more intimate than sex. To stare into the eyes of your sacrifice and watch the soul slip from its fleshy prison gives you not just immortality, but eternal youth. I have read
Dorian Gray
a hundred times. Is that not your deepest desire? Eternal life? Beauty that time cannot wither? But while you can only write about it, I can manifest it.”

Wilde’s tongue was thick and clumsy in his mouth as he struggled to speak. Suddenly his intoxication was a leaden blanket he wished to shake free of. “B-but these are innocent children!”

“Yes, quite innocent. Guaranteed virgins. The boy cost me five pounds. The girl was ten pounds.” DeVayne giggled. “I think the family thought I was purchasing her for a brothel, hence the higher price. Fortunately, there are many parts of London where life is a commodity cheaply purchased.”