“Imbécile!” Levi cursed. “He too curious!”
John Judge gave a final twitch and went limp. Blood dribbled down the sides of the altar. Henry Arundell gazed at it, aghast.
The Frenchman extended his arm toward Monckton Milnes. “The axe. Immédiatement!”
Monckton Milnes blinked, as if coming out of a daze, and handed it over.
Without hesitation or explanation, Levi raised it and sliced it down onto Judge’s neck. Three times he chopped, and on the third, the corpse’s head came away and rolled to the floor, making a horrible knock as it impacted against the stone.
“Holy mother of Christ!” Arundell moaned. “God forgive us! God forgive us!”
“We eradicate the unholy, Monsieur Arundell,” Levi said. “It is barbaric and horrible, but it is the Lord’s work. Now we must take the remains upstairs and burn them.”
Arundell and Monckton Milnes crossed to the upward-sloping passage and crawled out through it. Swinburne followed, carrying the severed head. Burton and the occultist, with great difficulty, then manoeuvred the corpse through the crawlspace.
After they’d replaced the removable steps and ascended to the square room, they put the dead man in the middle of its floor. Levi took the clockwork lanterns, broke each one open, and poured the oil from them onto the body. He struck a lucifer, threw it, and stepped back as the remains of John Judge ignited. “We not leave until it is nothing but ash,” he said. “But we wait in another room, non? The air will be very bad in here.”
The courtyard was half-flooded, the rain bucketing down, lighting and thunder still crashing overhead. They ran across to a doorway on its opposite side and into a high-ceilinged hall. It was dusty but dry, and they sank onto its floor and leaned against its walls and tried to process what they had just done.
Arundell buried his face in his hands. “Was I just party to murder?”
Levi answered, “Non, monsieur. It is difficult to understand, but John Judge was already dead. En fait, he was worse than dead. We have saved his immortal soul.”
“I shall never make sense of this.” Arundell looked pleadingly at Burton. “Please, Richard, I have come to regard you as family—tell me we have done the right thing.”
“We have,” Burton responded. “That creature—for he wasn’t a man—took my fiancée from me. Deprived you of your daughter. Others would have died at his hands.”
“Non!” Levi exclaimed. He banged his fist against the floor. “Not die! Not die! This is the horreur vraie—the true horror—of it. His victims do not properly die. They become un-dead—strigoi morti! They must each be disposed of as we have today disposed of Perdurabo—at very least, burned to nothing. If they are not, their terrible condition, it will spread like the plague. That is why I ask for two stakes.”
It took some seconds for his meaning to register.
“God, no,” Arundell moaned. “Surely you don’t mean to say—you aren’t suggesting—you can’t—”
All of a sudden, Burton couldn’t breathe. He grabbed his throat with one hand and clutched at the air with the other. “Bismillah!” he choked. “Please! Not that! Anything—anything—but that!”
Levi shook his head sadly. “Je suis désolé, but it must be done. We have set John Judge free. Now we must do the same for Mademoiselle Isabel.”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”
—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE RAVEN”
They found Thomas Honesty fussing frantically over the engine of the landau. “It won’t start! It won’t start!” he cried out. He recoiled away from them as they approached, brandished a pocketknife, and yelled, “Stay back! I saw what you did! Murderers!”
“Don’t be a bloody fool!” Henry Arundell barked. “It’s not what it seems, I can assure you. Move over! You’ve opened the inlet valve too wide—no wonder she won’t start. Come on, out of the way! We’re getting soaked to the skin!”
Honesty pressed himself against the side of the carriage, his eyes flitting anxiously from man to man as they climbed into the vehicle’s cabin.
The engine coughed and grumbled.
Arundell exclaimed, “Got it!” and joined his companions, pulling the groundsman inside with him.
Swinburne and Monckton Milnes didn’t enter, but climbed up to drive the vehicle, setting it into motion as soon as the passenger door had been pulled shut.
Eliphas Levi raised his voice over the rumbling of the rain on the wooden roof. “Monsieur Honesty, there is no danger. That man, he was the fugitive Monsieur Arundell told you of, and Sir Richard here is an agent of His Majesty the King. You witness a thing very terrible, but not murder. Non! Not murder!”
“What, then? You drove a stake through the man’s heart!”
“Oui, it was necessary, but to explain, ah, that is a difficult thing.”
“Not now,” Arundell interrupted. “In the name of God, not now! I can’t stand any more of it.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. “Tom, we are all traumatised. Rest this afternoon and come to the house before the church service tomorrow morning. We’ll give you a full account.”
Honesty looked searchingly at his employer’s face then gave a reluctant nod.
The landau slid and rocked its way along the path, stopped at the lodge, where the groundsman got off, then continued on to the manor, and into the vehicle shed.
An hour later, the men, having washed and changed into dry clothing, met in the smoking room. They’d missed lunch but had no appetite for anything but fortifying brandies and comforting cigars and pipes.
Burton was withdrawn, his thought processes paralysed, an intolerable constriction gripping his heart, but in his room he’d swallowed half a bottle of Saltzmann’s Tincture, and now, when he downed a brandy in a single gulp, its warmth permeated out from his stomach and didn’t stop. He felt it course through his arteries, branch off into the veins, spread through the capillaries, and bleed into the surface of his skin, spreading and flattening and reconnecting him with the exterior world.
Like Time. Dividing, dividing, dividing, until all its many filaments become indistinguishable from one another, the consequences of decisions—made and unmade—taken to their ultimate limits then conflated, unconstrained by context, fully perceptible from every possible perspective.
The unity of multiplicity.
A new mode of being.
The empty glass slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor.
He realised he was standing by the fireplace and the others were looking at him.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Clumsy.”
Henry Arundell rang for one of his clockwork footmen and instructed it to clean up the fragments.
“You and me both, Richard,” he said. “My hands won’t stop shaking.”
“A shock prolonged, it is very damaging,” Levi said. “So we must proceed intrépide—undaunted—though it hurt us bad. We act fast and cure this disease before it spread far.”