Leith, Edinburgh, 1882
James McLevy awoke with a snort of fear, hair standing on end as he shot bolt upright in his lumpy bed. Of late his dreams had been giving him hell and this was no exception.
Now was he truly out of the Land of Nod? As a policeman he would demand of his senses proof. Pain. Pain is a great indicator of the conscious state. A pin. A pin would be irrefutable, stuck into the back of the hand, but where do you find a pin in the pitch dark?
He scrabbled for a phosphorous match, struck it up and lit a squat dismal candle that had its place by his bed on a small rickety table. As the candle coughed its way towards a feeble luminosity, McLevy regarded the still burning match.
Caught yet by the wild fancy of the dream, what followed made perfect sense to him. He extended his thumb and wafted it over the flame. A howl of pain followed, the match was blown out, and the inspector then stuck the fleshly digit into his mouth to suck upon it like a distraught child.
A foul nightmare. Buried alive.
He had found himself in a cavernous long passage that wriggled ahead like a worm, having been led there by a female form that he might only observe from the back; the presence was shrouded in a long scarlet cloak with the hood pulled up as to obliterate all recognition.
How he’d got there he had no idea but it was surely connected to a previous fantastick episode where he’d been dancing naked round a fire; no, not naked, not him, he was in coat and low-brimmed bowler, in his heavy boots, the rest were naked or damned adjacent – female naked.
Was Jean Brash one of them? Surely not. She was a bawdy-hoose keeper with a fine taste in coffee, not one of these loose-lipped, loose-limbed wanton creatures capering round the flames. Their bosoms bounced with no regard for modest gravity and their rounded bellies heaved and shone through the draped shreds of discoloured linen that shook in ribald accompaniment to all this gallivantation.
The inspector should have arrested the sprawl where they pranced but what was he doing dancing in tune?
Then it was as if someone had drawn a curtain and the scene was blacked out.
And he was in the narrow tunnel, following the Red Figure – was it fatal? Had Edgar Allan Poe, a man McLevy found close to his own dark imagination, not penned The Masque of the Red Death?
The effigy did not look back and the passage became even more confined, with a glutinous creamy scum hanging from the curved walls.
This doesnae look good.
He remembered thinking that at the time and then the figure vanished from sight and he was left to stumble alone into the uncharted murky orifice insinuating onwards.
McLevy found himself upon his hands and knees, crawling like a Jerusalem traveller, the roof pressing down, the surface below a dismal brown claylike substance that clogged and sucked as he squelched forward. The creamy scum wasn’t much help either and some instinct told him that if any of that landed upon bare skin, it would scald a hole like hot fat through a stretched membrane.
His lungs were shuddering from lack of air as if a clawed hand were reaching through the wall of his chest and an impulse flashed into his head that he’d better get to hell out of this rat’s nest.
At the end of the passage was a small chink of light where an egg-shaped hole, too meagre for a man of his bulk to negotiate, indicated a possible source of succour. But how was he to squeeze through?
He jammed his arm and head in but that was as far as he could get, no chance of his big backside following suit and anyway he could now see that the beckoning light had its origin from a lantern held by the Red Figure, who had popped up into view once more.
She stood by a small jetty. A rowing boat was moored in the still night-blue water where a spectral oarsman, black garbed and hunched over, rested with his back to the proceedings.
Not a promising sight, but then his attention was usurped by the slender white hand emerging from the folds of the red cloak to move towards the hood that still obscured the figure’s countenance.
For once in his life Inspector James McLevy abandoned the consuming curiosity of his natural bent, because he knew in his bones that once he saw that face the game was over.
He reached down into the depths of his being, where all this turbulence was wreaking havoc, and wrenched himself up and out of it into a shocked salvation.
Witness him bolt upright, hair aghast, thumb wedged between his lips, with the beginnings of a snottery nose.
He removed the singed digit, wiped the seeping organ with the cuff of his crumpled nightshirt and swung out of bed, feet landing with a thump on the cold floorboards of his attic room.
McLevy flapped his nightshirt over bare calves to create a welcome draught of cold air coursing up and over his clammy skin, then took a deep breath.
He was still alive, conscious of crime before it even stirred in the womb of Iniquity, a renowned thief-taker in his own city, feared by lawbreakers high and low, prone to violence when necessary and sometimes just for the hell of it, a great drinker of coffee, a sharp splinter in the rump of authority. He had survived bullets, knives, strangulation by a servant of the Crown and a drug-crazed thuggee, drowning even though he could not swim a stroke, at least two lethal women and ten times that number of murderous bastard men – one of whom had tried to spatter out his brains with hobnailed boot and viciously executed downward stamp.
The inspector realised he was muttering all this to himself: the sign of a disorderly mind.
A charred and dented coffee pot of discoloured metal stood on a stone ledge beside the hearth, where the dead ashes of last night’s fire lay scattered. He picked it up, shook it gently to and fro with his head cocked to the one side, then poured out the thick sludgy brew into an equally discoloured cup and sifted the mixture through his teeth.
The liquid hit the pit of his stomach like a falling stone and almost at once provoked his bowels into subdued commotion, but it did the trick.
He was himself again. James McLevy. Inspector of police. A solid, save for the bowels, proposition.
With measured tread he retraced his steps to the bed and shoved his feet into a shapeless pair of old socks. This action he followed by solemnly donning a nightcap with a dangling wee toorie – a birthday gift courtesy of his landlady, Mrs MacPherson, who knew well the prevailing chills of her attic rooms – and then made his way towards the large draughty window, which overlooked his beloved Edinburgh.
En route he stopped to regard himself in a mildewed oval mirror, bought from a toothless female hawker in Leith Market who had obviously no interest in further vanity. The glass was laid at an angle against a pile of his literary and scientific books. It reflected McLevy in all his glory.
He saw a distorted version of Wee Willie Winkie.
A man of some bulk. Curiously dainty hands; the one holding the cup raised a pinkie in elegant acknowledgement of his own image. Sturdy enough calves, from being on the saunter so long in the streets of Leith, a barrel-shaped corpus tending to a wee bit too much heft round the stomach, the broad shoulders sloping deceptively.
And then the face. It was on top of the body. That much you could say for certain.
The light from the candle threw a fragile arc round the room that rimmed him at the neck so McLevy craned forward, peering down to confirm what he already knew.
White parchment skin, pitted and creviced, full lips with a curious pout like the ornamental fish of Jean Brash’s new garden pond in the Just Land, a slightly spread nose from keeking hard up against too many windows, tufts of salt-and-pepper hair sticking out from the nightcap, and, below a gloomy brow, the eyes. Slate-grey. Lupine. Not friendly.