The List Of Seven (29 page)

Doyle asked Larry to stay with the cab, knowing Spivey would be thrown sufficiently off stride by Doyle's surprise appearance that he was unlikely to admit to his house any stranger unequipped with a written and sealed bill of health. Quince answered the bell himself—he kept no household staff; penuriousness was another cornerstone of his wealth—in his customary monogrammed red silk pajamas, matching robe, and amber-tasseled brothel creepers. Although his closets were bursting with a plenitude of fashionable styles, Doyle had never known Spivey to appear in any ensemble other than this boudoir outfit he was currently sporting.

"Hallo, what's this—why, Dr. Doyle," said the slight Quince as he opened the door a crack. "Heavens, I don't remember sending for you—"

"You didn't, Spivey," said Doyle.

"Thank God. I thought perhaps for a moment I was suffering the effects of a dread delusional fever, you know, something tropical, Amazonian, treatable with massive doses of quinine. Is something wrong? Am I ill?"

"No, you appear to be fine, Spivey—"

A rebuttal of tubercular proportion burst from the depths of Quince's chest. "There, you see? I could feel it coming on all day. You have arrived not a moment too soon," Quince said upon recovering. He took a cautionary look outside at the spreading fog. "It's the change in weather; I'm simply not myself. A London Particular like this so soon after such an unseasonable warming trend could spell the death of me— come in, come in—I hope you've brought your complete pharmacopoeia, God knows what you'll eventually diagnose me with."

Doyle entered, and knowing Spivey's reluctance for making contact with anything foreign, took off his hat and coat and hung them on the rack.

"I don't have my bag at the moment, Spivey. This is more social than a medical call," explained Doyle, trying to harness every symptom of his own nagging affliction down to unde-tectable proportions; one whiff of contagion in the air would send Spivey racing for quarantine.

"You see, I haven't been sleeping well recently, and I always feel more susceptible when I'm not getting my rest," Quince said, ignoring Doyle's opener as they moved down the hall.

"Any disturbing dreams?"

"Terrible. Giving me fits. Can't seem to remember them, though. I'm just about to drift off when something jolts me awake. No doubt my genera/ lassitude comtributes to this feel-ing of imminent dis-ease."

Quince led Doyle into the living room/newspaper morgue. Although the room was grand and spacious, the furnishings were handed down, threadbare, antimacassars serving yeoman duty on every shiny arm and back. Except for the towering newsprint monoliths obscuring the walls, the room was fastidiously clean. Neat rows of patent medicines lined the surface of the table beside which Quince took a seat. He racked out another spasmodic cough and patted down the rebellious thatch of ginger hair on his head that threatened to sprout in every direction. His color was good, his posture strong and correct. In every observable way, Spivey Quince seemed the very picture of robust and hearty health.

"Haven't you even brought your stethoscope?" said Quince anxiously. "I feel something loose rattling around in my chest with every cough. Perhaps I've dislodged a rib, or God forbid a blood clot might be forming. One can't be too careful about these things. Not in January."

"I wouldn't worry about it—"

Quince elaborately hawked up something unsavory into a handkerchief, which he then examined like a parson poring over Scripture. "What do you make of this, then?" he said, offering the handkerchief to Doyle.

"Eat more oranges," said Doyle after a moment of feigned sagacity. Afraid that any further hesitation would plunge him into prognostic purgatory, he unveiled the medium's portrait from his coat. "What do you make of this?"

Quince would not touch the picture—he seldom touched anything if he could avoid it, not without gloves on, and at the moment he was absent them—but he studied it alertly. Doyle chose not to reveal who the woman was or why he was seeking her; if Spivey had the second sight, let him use this opportunity to authenticate it.

"You wish me to read it for you," said Spivey.

"If at all possible, yes."

Spivey continued to stare at the picture. His eyes grew drowsy. "Not right," said Spivey after a while, almost a whisper. "Not right."

"What's not right, Spivey?"

A caul of nervous energy had settled over Spivey's coun-tenance; skin taut, he trembled with pulsing energy. His eyes went as wide as an owl's, and they midged about as if Ms sight had been inverted. Doyle recognized the signs of entrance to a waking trance; he was seeing internally now.

Slipped into it as quick as a pair of his pajamas, thought Doyle. Perhaps Spivey was the real item after all.

"Can you still hear me?" asked Doyle after an appropriate interval.

Spivey nodded slowly.

"What do you see, Spivey?"

"Daylight ... a clearing ... there's a boy."

Better than I could've hoped for, thought Doyle. "Can you describe him?"

Spivey's eyes squinted blindly. "No hair."

No hair? Doesn't sound right. "Sure he's not blond?"

"No hair. Bright clothes. Blue. Near horses."

The ponies. Apparently, Spivey wasn't inclined to clairvoy anything other than the track when he went under. Maybe the "boy" was a jockey in his multicolored silks. "Is he ... at the races?"

"No. Curved road outside. Men in red."

Doyle thought for a moment. "Buckingham Palace?"

"Tall building. Grass. Iron gate."

He's describing the Royal Mews, thought Doyle. "What is the boy doing there, Spivey?"

No answer.

"What is the significance of this boy?"

"The sight. He sees."

Fine. That and thruppence will buy me a biscuit. "That's very helpful about the boy, Spivey. Can you by any chance divine something about the woman herself?"

Spivey frowned. "A biscuit?"

"A biscuit?" He plucked that right out of my head fair enough, didn't he? thought Doyle with a start.

"Biscuit tin."

Something nagging about a biscuit tin. Yes, it came back to him: the seance, in the corner of that vision of the boy—a cylinder with the letters CUI. Of course, that's what it was, a biscuit tin. But where was Spivey reading this, wondered Doyle, out of thin air or from my imperfect memory?

"You don't happen to know what brand of biscuit mat was, do you, Spivey?"

"Mother's Own."

Here was help uncounted on. Mother's Own Biscuits. He could hardly wait to tell Sparks how he'd single-handedly cracked the case open like a soft-shelled peanut.

"Anything there besides the biscuit tin, Spivey?"

Spivey shook his head. "Can't see. Something in the way."

"What's in the way?"

Quince was having difficulty "seeing." "Shadow. Great shadow."

Curious. Not the first person to use that same phrase— Spivey suddenly reached forward and grabbed the drawing from Doyle's hand. As he took hold of it, his body jerked and shuddered as if the paper were electrified. Doyle half expected to see smoke pouring from Spivey's ears: He was loath to touch the man for fear this dangerous energy would be conducted back to him.

"The passage! Close the passage!" Spivey shrieked alarmingly. "Block his way! The throne! The throne!"

That's enough, thought Doyle, and he seized hold of the drawing—odd, he did feel something like an insistent buzz pulsing through the page—but Spivey's grip on it was fierce; as Doyle tried to pull it away, the paper ripped to pieces. That seemed to break the current; Spivey relaxed his grip, the shards of the drawing fell between them, and Quince slumped back in his chair. His eyes cleared slowly. His entire body shivered, and his forehead beaded with sweat.

"What's happened?" asked Spivey.

"You don't remember?"

Spivey shook his head. Doyle told him.

"Something came at me off that woman's image," said Spivey, staring down at his quivering hands. "Something that's made me feel quite ill."

"You don't look particularly well at the moment," said Doyle. For once.

"I'm all at twos and eights. Good heavens. Good heavens. Can you provide me with something? My nerves are in a frightful jangle."

Feeling liable for inciting Spivey to this hysteria, Doyle surveyed the array of medicines on the table and concocted a compound that might soothe his discomfort. Spivey accepted the recommended dosage docilely.

"Why I prefer to stay indoors, you see," said Spivey gently, trying to catch his breath and control the shaking that beset him. "Never know what I'll encounter in the street. Like a wild river. Dangerous currents. Rocks and eddies. I couldn't survive unprotected in those waters. My mind couldn't take the strain, I'm afraid."

That seemed true enough. Doyle felt a wave of sympathy for the man: He's as helpless to control himself as a tuning fork. Any adjacent vibration might set him off. What a predicament. Who's to say I wouldn 't care to leave my rooms in that case either? thought Doyle.

"My father wanted me to be a doctor," said Spivey, his voice fluted with exertion. "He was one, too, you see. Surgeon. The same life he'd planned for me. I was a boy, he'd take me round to hospital with him. First time he led me into the wards I ..."

"It's all right," said Doyle.

Spivey's eyes misted with tears. "How could I explain to him my horror? I discovered I could see the patients' illness on them. I could see ... these people ... covered with ... blossoms of waste . .. flowering on them ... weeds consuming a landscape, I could see it ... inching its way across them, their disease ... eating them alive. I fainted. Couldn't tell him why. I begged him never to take me back to that place. What if a like illness should trespass onto me? That was the rub. What if I was forced to watch that excrescence slowly make a meal of my own flesh, before my own eyes? I'd go mad. I'd sooner end my own life."

"I understand, Spivey."

Shades of Andrew Jackson Davis, the Appalachian mystic, thought Doyle. Spivey had the gift, all right, and it proved too much for him, poor bastard. Never again will I regard this particular hypochondriac's complaints too lightly. He made elaborate apologies for his intrusion and started toward the door.

"Please—could I trouble you to take this with you, Doc-tor?" Spivey asked, eyes closed, gesturing weakly toward the shredded picture on the floor. "If you don't mind. I don't wish to have it in my house."

"Certainly, Spivey. No trouble at all."

Doyle gathered up and pocketed the tatters. He left the depleted Spivey Quince reclining in his chaise, left hand resting on his heart, the right, palm out, touching lightly to his forehead.

"A bald boy in bright colors hangin' round the Royal Mews. Hope you didn't lay out too many readies fer that priceless pearl. And me luvely drawin' torn to bits in the bargain."

"I've known Quince for three years, Larry," said Doyle. "Something tells me this may be worth looking into."

"Mother's Own Biscuits indeed. You know what his problem is: He's hungry. He needs to get out more. He's got biscuits on the brain pan. What time've you got, guv?"

"A quarter to ten."

"Right. Mr. Sparks wanted us to run by his flat at ten sharp."

This was the first Doyle had heard mention of a London residence. "Where is his flat?"

"As it happens, sir? Montague Street, adjacent to Russell."

Larry whipped the horse and drove the hansom due east on Oxford to an address on Montague, directly across from the British Museum: number 26, a whitewashed, well-kept, but otherwise nondescript Georgian town house. The carriage was stabled in the rear, they entered, and Doyle followed Larry up a narrow flight of stairs.

"Come in, Larry, and bring Dr. Doyle with you," Sparks shouted through the door before they'd even knocked.

They entered. Sparks was nowhere to be seen, the room's only human presence a ruddy-cheeked, middle-aged, roly-poly Presbyterian clergyman. He was seated on a high stool, conducting an experiment at a long chemistry bench covered with a mystifying array of apparatus.

"Charcoal dust on your fingers; you've something interesting to tell me," said Sparks's voice out of the minister's mouth.

If one wasn't aware of his genius for disguise, thought

Doyle, the only possible explanation would be demonic possession. He replayed for Sparks his visit to Spivey Quince.

"Eminently worth investigating," said Sparks.

Doyle squelched a prideful impulse to shame Larry with a look and glanced around the room. Shades were drawn— Doyle doubted they were ever opened, so close and musky was the air—and every inch of available wall lined with bulging bookshelves. A stack of index cabinets filled one corner. Above them a bull's-eye target of thatched straw with the let-ters VR spelled out in bullet holes. Victoria Regina. A strange way for Sparks to demonstrate devotion, but a sort of tribute nonetheless. The largest map of London Doyle had ever seen, studded with legions of red- and blue-headed pins, consumed the wall behind the chemistry bench.

"What do the pins signify?" asked Doyle.

"Evil," said Sparks. "Patterns. Criminals are generally thickheaded and inclined to ritualize their lives. The higher the intelligence, the less predictable the behavior."

"The devil's chessboard," said Larry. "That's what we calls it."

A tall glass-front highboy standing in the opposite corner caught Doyle's eye. It displayed a diverse collection of an-tique or exotic weaponry, from primitive Stone Age daggers to flintlock muskets to a cluster of octagonal silver stars.

"See anything in there that you'd prefer to your revolver?" asked Sparks.

"I prefer the predictable," said Doyle. "What are these lit-tle silver gewgaws?"

Shinzaku. Japanese throwing stars. Absolutely deadly. Kill within seconds."

Doyle opened the cabinet and picked out one of the gad-gets: expertly crafted from high-tensile steel, edges serrated lik.e fishhooks that were thin and viciously sharp. It sat as lightly in the hand as an oyster cracker.

I must say, Jack, wicked as it feels to the touch, it doesn't look all that dangerous," said Doyle. Of course you have to dip them in poison first." "Ahh."