The List Of Seven (3 page)

Her livelihood depended on the urgency induced by cheap-jack gin in unfortunates like herself for the meager dollop of human comfort afforded by three minutes of intercourse in alleyways redolent of rubbish and raw sewage. Her looks were

long gone. She was indistinguishable from the countless others in her trade teeming through London's lowlife.

Her life began in some rural Arcadia where she was once her parents' joy, the prettiest girl in the village. Did her eyes sparkle, her skin aglow with health, when she opened her legs to the passing swain who planted the glamour of the city in her head? Had she arrived with hope intact? Did her sweet dreams of happiness die slowly as the liquor devoured her cells, or did a single catastrophic heartbreak snap her will like a clay pipe?

Cold bit through her decomposing coat. She thought dimly of families glimpsed through frosted windows eating Christmas dinner. It could have been an actual memory or a woodcut on a half-forgotten greeting card. The image fell away, replaced by thoughts of the squalid room across the river that she shared with three other women. The idea of sleep and the paltry comforts of that room animated her; her legs lurched numbly forward, and in that diminished state she decided that once across the river she would use the shortcut to Aldgate that crossed the abandoned lot near Commercial Street.

chapter three A TRUE FACE

LADY Nicholson spotted Doyle first, framed in the open doorway. He saw recognition, a rapidly rising blush of relief, instantly dampened to ward off discovery. A nimble mind, he concluded, slightly preceded by the thought, Here is the most beautiful face I have ever seen.

The table was round, covered in pale linen, in the center of the shadowy room. Light pooled from two candelabra flanking the table east and west, walls falling away into darkness. The cloying musk of patchouli hung heavily in the air, along with a dry crack of static electricity. As his pupils dilated, against a backdrop of dense brocaded tapestries suspended in the air, Doyle could make out six figures seated at the table, holding hands; to Lady Nicholson's right was her brother, the pregnant serving girl to his right hand, then the man Doyle identified as her husband, to his right the dark man from the window, and finally the medium, whose right hand held Lady Nicholson's left. Mediums borrowed most of their theatrics direct from the standard liturgical repertoire: smoke, gloom, and grave, incomprehensible gibberish. This assembly had produced the chanting he'd heard, an incantation of call and response initiated by the medium, ritualistic prologue to create the proper atmosphere of dread and ceremony.

The medium's eyes were closed, her head inclined back to the ceiling, exposing the fleshy wattles of her throat: the short, round woman in the new shoes, her accumulation of shawls discarded. Over the years, Doyle had catalogued the city's many practitioners, genuine article and charlatan alike: This one was unknown to him. She wore black, a wool weave, neither cheap nor extravagant, with a white bib collar, sleeves bulging with flesh buttoned to her wrists. Her face was bloodless and as studded with moles as cloves in an Easter ham. The woman's solar plexus palpitated in a violent cycle of respiration. She was on the threshold of entering, or effectively simulating, trance.

Lady Nicholson's color was high, her knuckles white, caught up in the performance, flinching in response to the progressive stranglehold applied by the medium's hand. Her brother's frequent, solicitous looks to her prevented his wholesale purchase of the game, as did, Doyle suspected, his habitually sardonic disposition. The way the pregnant woman's head postured upward signaled the traditional abandon of the blindly devout. Seen in profile, his jaw muscles working furiously, her husband's narrowed gaze fixed on the medium—agitation or anger?

The Dark Man saw Doyle next. His eyes pierced the air between them. Obsidian black, set like jeweled stones in deep round holes. Sallow cheeks the color of polished teak, pitted with pocks down to a sleek jaw and chin. Lips like razors. The expression in the eyes was fervent but unreadable. He released the hand of the man to his left and extended it toward Doyle, fingers paddled together, thumb extended.

"Join us." The Dark Man appeared to whisper, but the voice carried.

The man's gaze fell from Doyle to the boy, who turned to meet it obediently. A command passed between them. The boy reached up and grasped Doyle's hand: The fingers felt raspy and unpleasant. As Doyle let the boy draw him forward into the room, a discordant current spiked through the back of his neck and prompted the phrase You're someplace else now.

The boy led him to an empty chair between the two men. Lady Nicholson's brother looked up at him with slack puzzlement, as if his appearance represented one too many elements to process cogently.

As he accepted the Dark Man's offered hand with his right and settled into the waiting chair, the man to his left seized Doyle's free hand and clenched tight. When Doyle turned to Lady Nicholson, seated directly across from him, he encountered the ardent gaze of a woman who had just had a lifetime's polite, social dissembling torn away by the chamber's tonic of wonder and terror, awakening to find herself brazenly alive. That vitality illuminated her extraordinary beauty. Her

aquamarine eyes danced kaleidoscopically, and high color brushed her pale cheeks. Doyle summoned just enough wherewithal through his bedazzlement to notice she was wearing makeup. She mouthed the words Thank you. Doyle felt an involuntary thump and a skip in his chest: My heart, he observed with interest.

The intrusive jolt of an alien voice broke the connection.

"We have strangers here tonight."

It was a man's voice, deep-chested, round, and burnished as rocks in the bed of a cold stream, veined with a seductive, graveled tremolo.

"All are welcome." ,

Doyle turned to the medium. The woman's eyes were open, and the voice was issuing from her throat. Since the last time he'd glanced at her, it appeared to Doyle that the woman's facial structure had perceptibly changed shape, from pie-shaped to a cast more ruddy, skeletal, and square. Eyes gleaming with a reptilian glint, her mouth slithered into the salacious grin of a sensualist.

Remarkable: In his studies, Doyle could recall only two accounts of this phenomenon observed in mediums while in trance—physiological transmogrification—and had never before encountered it in situ.

The medium's lidded gaze wandered leisurely around the table, avoiding Doyle, precipitating tremors he could feel coursing through the hand of the man to his left. The medium engaged the brother until he was constrained to turn away like a shamed dog. Then the eyes settled on his sister.

"You ... seek my guidance."

Lady Nicholson's lips trembled. Doyle was uncertain she'd be able to summon a reply, when the Dark Man beside him spoke first.

"We all, humbly, seek your guidance and wish to extend our gratitude for this evening's visitation." His voice had a hiss in it, damage to a vocal cord. The accent was foreign— Mediterranean perhaps—Doyle couldn't yet pinpoint it precisely.

So this man was amanuensis, the medium's liaison to the paying customer, usually the brains behind the operation. He had clearly cultivated the fervid conviction of the true believer that served as his own best advertising. Fraud began

here; an opportunistic salesman exploiting what in many instances were mediums with some measurable facility and a childish incomprehension of the workaday world's mercantile realities. As a man in Gloucester had put it to him, describing the sensitive abilities of his own otherwise dim-witted son, "When they give you a window into another world, I warrant you forfeit a few bricks."

This was the team: medium, handler, all-purpose urchin, serving woman with child for emotional credibility, burly husband providing muscle, others unseen perhaps standing by. Clearly, Lady Nicholson was their target. Not an altogether unwitting one—she had sent Doyle the precautionary note—but one whose distress was sufficiently compelling to outweigh her misgivings. It remained to be seen how they would react to Doyle's unexpected arrival—but then, so far, unexpected didn't seem to particularly apply.

"We are all beings of light and spirit, both on this side and on your physical plane. Life is life, life is all one, life is all creation. We honor the life and light in you as you would do in us. We are all one on this side, and we wish you on your side harmony, blessing, and peace everlasting." This came from the medium in a burst, with the feel of a standard, practiced preamble, before she turned to the Dark Man and nodded politely, his cue to formally begin the proceedings.

"Spirit welcomes you. Spirit is aware of your distress and wishes to help in any way it can. You may address Spirit directly," the Dark Man said to Lady Nicholson.

Wrestling with a sudden, profound uncertainty, Lady Nicholson did not answer, as if to voice the first question were an admission that effectively laid waste to a lifetime's accumulation of inherited beliefs.

"We can go, we could go," her brother leaned in to offer.

"Begin with your son," said the medium.

She looked up, startled and instantly focused.

"You've come to ask me of your son."

Tears pooled quickly in her eyes. "Oh my God."

"What would you ask of Spirit?" The medium went through the motions of smiling, but the effect appeared simulated.

"How did you know?" Tears ran down her cheeks.

"Has your son crossed over?" The smile persisted.

She shook her head, uncomprehending.

"Has there been a death?" asked the Dark Man.

"I'm not sure. That is, we don't know...." She faltered again.

"The thing is, he's disappeared. Four days now. He's only three years old," the brother offered.

"His name is William," the medium said without hesitation. It would have been the Dark Man's job to find that out.

"Willie." Her voice brimmed with emotion; she was taking the hook.

Doyle throughout glanced surreptitiously around the room, at the ceiling, behind the tapestries, searching for suspended wires, projection devices. Nothing so far.

"You see, we've already been to the police. It's no good—"

"We don't know if he's dead or alive!" Her pent-up grief exploded. "For God's sake, if you know so much, then you know why I'm here." For a brief moment, her eyes found Doyle's and felt his sympathy. "Please. Please, tell me. I shall go mad."

The medium's smile lapsed. She nodded gravely. "One moment," she said. Her eyes closed; her head angled back again. The circle of hands remained unbroken. The silence that followed was thick and urgent.

A gasp broke from the pregnant girl. She was staring at a spot some six feet above the table where a perfect sphere of white mist was materializing, spinning like a globe on a central pivot. Expanding, fleecy extensions spun out from its core, breaking the circle down into a flat, square plane. By varying their density, the shards spread out and began purposefully assuming the dimensions of a random topography, foothills, rifts, peninsulas, all within the invisible confines of borders as rigid as a gilded frame.

A map? The shifting slowed, and the features crystallized, until with a rush of condensation the true nature of the vision appeared: a work of shadow and light, bleached of color, less precise than a photograph but more animated, suggestive of motion and distantly of sound, as if this scene were being viewed at great remove through some crude, impersonal lens.

In it, a young boy lay curled up at the base of a tree. He wore short pants, a loose tunic, stockings, no shoes. His

hands and feet were tightly bound with rope. The first glance suggested sleep, but closer examination showed the chest heaving, coughing, or sobbing—it was difficult to determine, until the ghostly and unmistakable sound of a child's pathetic, heartsick cries filtered into the chamber.

"God in heaven, it's him, it's him," Lady Nicholson moaned. The sight leveled her, not into despondency but a rapt, febrile alertness.

More details of the unearthly daguerreotype emerged: A small stream ran through the forest bed a few feet from where the boy was lying on a frost-tinged carpet of leaves. The rope that held the boy's wrists extended to a low-lying branch of the adjacent tree. The woods thickened behind him, clustering, evergreens. An object lay on the ground near the boy's feet: small, square, man-made: a can, bearing the letters ... GUI...

"Willie!" she cried.

"Where is he? Where is he?" the brother demanded, his attempt to generate outrage mitigated by dumbstruck astonishment.

Lost inwardly, the medium offered no response.

"Tell us!" the brother demanded, and he meant to speak further, but the air in the room was rent by a shattering, discordant blast of trumpets, an insane trilling, bound by no discernible harmony or rhythm. Doyle felt stunned, assaulted, pinned down by the oppressive weight of the vibrations.

"The horn of Gabriel!" shrieked the man to Doyle's left.

Now something black and odious crept into the edge of the image suspended above them: A shadow felt more than seen, oiled, foul and malignant, gathering mass without seeming to coalesce, the presence insinuated itself into the vision, seeping through the spectral wood, advancing toward the helpless child.

An inescapable conviction that he had witnessed this entity the night before in the hall outside his door left Doyle groping vainly for some rational causation. His mind snouted at him: This means not Death but Annihilation.

The cacophonous nightmare grew deafening. A long brass horn appeared in the air, opposite the picture, bobbing erratically. Now that's their first mistake—Doyle seized purchase

on the thought. Could he detect a telltale flash of filament at the trumpet's bell?

Drawing itself into a hungry spiral around the boy, the phantom sucked the last bit of light from the vision, swallowing the sound of his cries, on the verge of consuming him whole. Lady Nicholson screamed.

Doyle sprang to his feet and yanked his hands free. He picked up his chair and hurled it at the image; it shattered like liquid glass, dispersing and sputtering into emptiness. Its suspending cables severed; the brass trumpet clattered noisily onto the table.