"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.
Rolling to avoid the blow he knew was coming, Doyle felt the fist of the man to his left connect sharply below his shoulder blade. In one swift move, Doyle snatched the trumpet from the table and swung it viciously up and around, catching the man square on the side of the face. Blood spurted from a gash as he stumbled and fell to his knees.
"Villains!" Doyle shouted, galvanized. He reached into his pocket for the revolver when a heavy blow landed on the right side of his neck, paralyzing his searching hand and arm. He turned to see the Dark Man lift a leaded truncheon to strike again and raised his left arm to fend it off.
"Fool!" The voice issued from the medium. Grinning maliciously, eyes blazing, she swiftly rose straight up into the air above the table. Distracted, the Dark Man turned to face her, truncheon still raised. Doyle felt the hands of the wounded man grab him roughly from behind.
"You fancy yourself a seeker of truth?" the medium mocked him.
She held out her palms, the skin roiled and rippled with hideous subcutaneous congestion. When she opened her mouth, a flowing volume of gray aqueous vapor billowed forth from both mouth and hands. Suspended in the air, the vapor traced the outline and then filled in the image of a full-length frame mirror. As the surface of the mirror refined itself, the medium's reflection appeared in the spectral glass.
"Then behold my true face."
Out of the void behind her likeness in the mirror floated another form, dim and indistinct, which settled on and then imposed itself over the medium's reflection, pouring into it like water saturating sand, until all that remained was an en-
tirely new visage: a skull-like creature with red, runny, abscessed sockets for eyes, skin gray and in many places gnawed down to the bone, writhing pockets of black stringy hair sprouting from more than the usual places. Independent of the medium, who remained still, merely smiling, the creature looked down at Doyle and opened the spoiled cavity that served as its mouth. Its voice was the one they had been hearing all along, but it now came exclusively from the fiend in the mirror.
"You imagine that you do good. See what your good has wrought."
Two hooded figures moved out from behind the tapestry, moving so swiftly that Doyle had no time to react. One clouted Lady Nicholson's brother across the head with a dimly glimpsed weapon; the wound spouted crimson as he fell away. The other grabbed Lady Nicholson and drew a long, thin blade smoothly across her throat, severing the vessels, arterial blood pumping furiously. The cry in Lady Nicholson's throat died in a drowning rattle as she slumped out of sight behind the table.
"God! No!" Doyle screamed.
A demented cackle from the monster filled the air before the ectoplasmic mirror exploded in a loud report of light.
One of the murderers now drew his sights on Doyle and nimbly jumped up onto the table, poised to leap down and strike at him with the mallet that had splintered the forehead of Lady Nicholson's brother, when Doyle heard something whoosh by his ear: a shape, a black handle bloomed at the throat of the assassin. He stopped on top of the table, dropped his weapon, and groped blindly at his chin; a dagger had pierced the span of his neck, pinning the material of the hood, drawing it down over the eyes. The man staggered, then toppled over.
With a grunt, the accomplice holding Doyle fell backward and away; he was free.
An unfamiliar man's voice spoke urgently in his ear. "Your pistol, Doyle."
Doyle looked up to see the Dark Man turning toward him with the truncheon raised. Doyle pulled the pistol from his pocket and fired. His left knee shattered, the Dark Man bellowed and fell to the floor.
The shape was moving behind Doyle now, kicking the candelabra, extinguishing half the room's light. Doyle just had time to note that the medium had vanished when his attention snapped back to a blur of gray; the advancing rash of the second assassin. Still unseen, Doyle's benefactor overturned the heavy table, throwing the murderer back. Hands pulled Doyle to his feet.
"Follow me," the voice instructed.
"Lady Nicholson—"
"Too late."
Doyle followed the voice into the darkness. They passed through a door, down a corridor. Doyle felt disoriented—this was not the way he had entered. The door at corridor's end fell as Doyle's confederate kicked it open, oozing a crepuscular light into the space. They were still interior. Doyle could make out a tall, rangy profile, see the man's breath vaporize in the cooling air, nothing more.
"This way," the man instructed.
He was about to lead them through another door when a shape leapt from the dark with a feral growl and ripped into the man's forward leg. He staggered, crying out in shock. Doyle fired a shot at the dim shape of the attacking animal. It yelped and fell back, howling in pain. Doyle fired again, stilling its cries.
The man shouldered through the door. In the shaft of light that fell back through the doorway, Doyle saw the still body of the street urchin, crimson flowing from its wounds, jaws pulled back in a death grimace, exposing blood and meat in its sharp, canine teeth.
"Almost there," the man said, and they left the terrible house.
chapter four FLIGHT
HIS DELIVERER TOOK THE LEAD IN A HEADLONG DASH DOWN
the dark alley outside. Unable for the moment to see the wisdom of any alternate course, as he followed, Doyle strained to keep the man's flowing cloak in sight. They turned once, twice, and turned again. Seems to know where he's going, Doyle thought wanly, his bearings yielding to the rattrap rookery of shacks and shanties through which the man's path threaded them.