But Conan Doyle’s mind was calculating other possibilities. “A steam car,” he said. “Perhaps that’s what you heard the other night. Perhaps a steam car was used to whisk the body away.”
Wilde looked doubtful. “But the noise I heard was not so loud. And that steam car looked as if it could barely accommodate two passengers, with no room to stow the corpse of a large man.”
It seemed a cogent observation, and Conan Doyle mulled on it as they turned the coach around and headed the other way up Piccadilly, back toward Albemarle Street. But they had barely gone twenty feet when they heard a familiar sound: wisssshthump… wisssssshthump… wissssssshthump…
“Sounds like our friend with the steam car is returning,” Wilde noted. “No doubt he is as lost as we are.”
But the sound was quieter this time, and Conan Doyle noticed something missing. “If it’s the steam car driver, I see no coach lights.”
Up ahead, a wispy filament of fog calved from the gray mass, shifting shape until it coalesced as the tenuous shadow of a walking human form.
Slouching fast toward them.
The walking figure crashed from light back into darkness as it passed by the glow of each streetlamp, accumulating solidity with every step.
Wisssshthump… wisssssshthump… wissssssshthump…
It reached the glow of a nearby gas lamp that peeled the shadows from it and revealed a man in tattered clothing. A gray cloak fluttered about his shoulders like ragged bat wings — no, not a cloak, but a wispy veil of steam that wreathed about his head and shoulders. He lurched toward them with a faltering, foot-dragging gait.
“Remember what I said about Mephistopheles?” Wilde muttered in a despairing voice. “I wish to retract it.”
Wisssshthump… wisssssshthump… wissssssshthump…
By now, the shambling figure loomed large. It seemed ready to pass them on the far side of the street when, suddenly… it stopped. The eyes remained fixed ahead while the whole head turned to look their way, as if noticing the carriage for the first time. The figure was a large man with a bull’s chest. His clothes hung from him in rags. A greasy tangle of lank hair fell over both eyes. Thick arms hung leaden at his side. In the ghastly light, he looked like something that had stepped through a portal and arrived hot and smoking from hell. A charnel house reek of corruption shivered in the air.
The two friends stood transfixed, aware of being in the presence of something uncanny and utterly inhuman.
“G-good Lord…!” Conan Doyle breathed in a low whisper.
As if it heard, the head tilted back, the greasy fringe parted, and the white marble of a single eye fixed them with its glaucous gaze.
Time elasticated. The moment stretched to a trembling breaking point ready to snap. Wilde snatched aside the scarf wrapped about his mouth, unable to draw a breath. For long, silent moments, the thing studied them as they studied it. Finally, it seemed to lose interest. The lurid face turned away. Abruptly, the thing resumed its shambling walk and slouched away up Piccadilly, dragging a pall of wispy steam with it.
Wisssshthump… wisssssshthump… wissssssshthump…
Its crippled stride carried it beyond the glow of the streetlamps and the fog smothered it up. The wisssshthump… wisssssshthump… grew fainter until it dropped from hearing.
Shaken to the quivering core of his being, Conan Doyle turned to look first at Wilde and then up at Gibson.
“You both saw it, too?”
The driver sat mouth agape, eyes wide. Too stunned to speak, he nodded dumbly.
“I have seen that face before,” Wilde said in a quavering voice.
“The man called Charlie Higginbotham?”
Wilde nodded manically. “Not a man… a monster.”
CHAPTER 13
THE ASSASSIN KILLS AGAIN
“I have flirted with Catholicism in the past,” Wilde remarked. “If I were of the persuasion right now I would be worrying my rosary beads to dust.”
Conan Doyle regarded his friend archly. “Catholic, indeed? Oscar, you are a skein of contradictions.”
“I cultivate my contradictions, Arthur. It is how I remain fascinating to the world.”
He and Conan Doyle had decamped to the lobby of the Albemarle Club — a public space chosen because, at that hour in the morning, it was the only room that enjoyed a generous fire of cedar logs crackling in the fireplace. The two friends had paused only to sponge the smuts from their faces and collars, and now sat in adjacent chairs drawn up within pants-singeing proximity to the flames. Despite the heat, their clothes retained the chill of the evening air and the lingering tang of brimstone fog.
“Could we have witnessed a walking ghost?” Conan Doyle asked. “I have read tales of such things.”
“It seemed offensively corporeal to me. The thing stank like a dead dog dredged from the Thames.”
“Good evening, Mister Wilde.”
Both men jumped at the voice. Cranford had silently materialized at Wilde’s side. As usual, he had a white towel draped over one arm. “Will you be requiring me to open the kitchens, sir?”
“Not tonight, Cranford. The only thing I shall require you to open is a large bottle of brandy… oh and two glasses.”
Cranford nodded a bow and looked up at Conan Doyle. “And ice, sir? Is that how you take it?”
“Large chunk—” Conan Doyle grunted.
“Big enough to sink a ship,” Wilde finished the thought. “Just go lasso an iceberg, Cranford.”
The waiter failed to conceal a smirk. “Very good, sir.” And with that, he vanished.
“There was something supernatural about what we witnessed.”
“There’s something supernatural about that waiter.”
“It was dark… and foggy… but the figure bore an uncanny resemblance to the dead assassin we saw the other night… the Charlie Higginbotham character.”
“Uncanny is the word of the hour. Anarchist bombs detonating all over London. Hanged men walking abroad. And this accursed fog.”
“You don’t think—” Conan Doyle started to say.
“Think what?”
The Scotsman shifted in his seat. “You don’t think our friend, Charlie Higginbotham — if indeed it was him — was on his way—”
But Wilde was already aboard his friend’s train of thought and flourishing his ticket. “To assassinate another victim?”
“Dear God,” Conan Doyle said. “I am not a religious man either, but let us pray not!”
A moonless night starved of its shadows.
Outside fine residences guarded by spike-topped railings, a line of streetlamps receded dimly into the miasma, so that the farthest lamps showed as little more than smudges of titanium white on a palette painted in every hue of silence. From somewhere beyond the visible came the telltale sound: wisssshthump… wisssssshthump… wissssssshthump…
Silvery tissues of fog swirled as a shambling form tore loose of them. Guided by some internal compass, it slogged along the road in its wounded but indefatigable stride, the grizzled head looking neither left nor right.
Wisssshthump… wisssssshthump… wissssssshthump…
Suddenly the hoary man broke stride. Stumbled to a halt in front of a handsome Georgian house of six storeys. It was an area normally well policed of the poor, the indigent, of beggars and idle vandals. But tonight, someone had chalked a message on the low garden wall of the handsome house:
For a long moment, the horrid yellow eyes fixed upon the graffiti, as if in recognition. Then the head tilted on its muscular stump of a neck, and the glaucous gaze raked up the brickwork to a second story window that pulsed with the telltale flicker of a coal fire burning in the grate. The mouth slackened, releasing a rumbling, feral growl. The nostrils jetted plumes of steam. The figure stirred itself, and limped to the marble front step where it stood looking up. The bedroom boasted an iron-railed balcony, but the building’s façade was smooth limestone with few handholds. Impossible for a man to scale.