Chapter 18
Chapter
“Really, Mornaday, I have apologised several times.” I attempted but was possibly unsuccessful in keeping the waspish tone from my voice. “But you really ought to have declared yourself.”
Mornaday was frankly aggrieved. “I have already explained that I was doing surveillance.” His own voice was rasping—due to the effects of the stomach acids in his effluvia washing over his vocal cords, naturally.
I handed him my flask of aguardiente to wash his mouth, but that brought on a fresh bout of heaving.
“God, must you look to poison me as well? Is it not enough you have assaulted me and broken a rib and damaged my manly bits?”
“You do not know it is broken,” I replied.
I was speaking of the rib. The subject of Mornaday’s manly bits was not one I cared to address in any fashion.
Stoker generally enjoyed any calamity involving Mornaday, but he turned a hand to the fellow’s aid, probing at his side to palpate the injuries he claimed to have sustained.
I noticed he too ignored the question of Mornaday’s bits.
“Well?” I demanded when Stoker had finished.
Stoker shrugged. “Possibly. It is easy enough to crack a rib when one is accosted in such a fashion. But I felt no displacement.”
Mornaday gave him a black look and kept a hand pressed to his side. “I have been wounded. Grievously,” he said in a very good impression of a sulk. “And I shall never father children. I hope the pair of you are quite happy with yourselves.”
“Why were you skulking about behind us?” Stoker inquired. “Veronica is right, you know—far better to have let us know you were there instead of frightening Veronica when she was already seeing ghouls behind every shrub.”
“You mistake the careful attention of a trained scientific observer for nervous trepidation,” I assured him. “I was merely being cautious out of a desire not to compromise any evidence we might discover.”
“What evidence?” In spite of his purported injuries, Mornaday perked up, shoving his bowler to the back of his head and taking a proper sip of the aguardiente, his disdain for the stuff forgot.
He choked only a little this time and handed the flask back to me.
“Bracing,” he said with a cough. A bit of colour returned to his cheeks, and I suspected he was not as badly injured as he liked to believe.
I took a little nip of my own before replacing the flask.
“That is what we are here to find out.” I quickly related the little we had learnt from Thomas and our visit to Ruthven’s house as well as our current line of inquiry.
“Given young Thomas’s sighting of a woman who might well be Asphodel, we hypothesise that the location of Maurice Quincey’s body relative to the house of Lord Ruthven may not be coincidence. ”
“The cemetery lies between,” Mornaday said, grasping at once the implication.
“And Highgate is the perfect spot for dark rituals involving revenants,” I added.
Mornaday looked a little less certain at this suggestion. “That is a bit of a leap, logically speaking. And what do you mean by ‘revenant’?”
“Murder investigations are not solved with pure logic,” I reminded him. “They require imagination, particularly when the murderer is a vampire.”
“The murderer is not a vampire,” Stoker said through gritted teeth.
“A vampire,” I carried on as if he had not spoken, “with a witch for an accomplice.”
“A what now?” Mornaday asked in bewilderment.
“And Asphodel is not a witch,” Stoker continued.
“Then what,” I asked, pointing with a triumphant finger, “is that?”
Both men followed my gaze to a wide circle just beyond the line of graves where we had been standing.
It had been cut crudely into the mossy ground, the rich velvety green churned up with some rough blade.
Inside the circle was a series of symbols, each more arcane than the last, laid out in heaping lines of black grains.
At the centre was a headstone of some antiquity, the letters long since worn smooth, the grey stone weathered and darkly streaked, stained in some places, and dark, greasy puddles marred the surface. It looked—nay, it was—a pagan altar.
“My god,” Mornaday said, crossing himself swiftly, and this time there was no intended blasphemy in his speech. It was an invocation to his deity.
We advanced together to study the circle, careful not to disturb the signs and sigils which had been so deftly arranged. Stoker bent to put a forefinger to the black grains and touched the tip of his tongue to them.
“Salt,” he said in some surprise.
“Salt is often used in conjuring,” I remarked. “Although black salt is an unusual touch, I think.”
“Can you identify the markings?” Mornaday asked.
Stoker and I studied them for some minutes, then I shook my head. “They are unfamiliar to me.”
“Just a jumble of alchemical symbols,” Stoker put in. He pointed out a few of the more noteworthy examples. “Most are based upon actual scientific glyphs.”
“Scientific whatsits?” Mornaday’s expression was befuddled.
“Glyphs. Symbols meant as a sort of notational shorthand. They indicated planets, chemicals, different compounds. They were popular with alchemists once upon a time, but they’ve largely fallen out of favour.”
“Why were they used?” Mornaday pressed.
“Convenience, mostly. A little line drawing of a triangle surmounting a double-armed cross takes up far less space in a notebook than writing out the word ‘phosphorus,’ for instance,” Stoker explained.
He gestured towards the symbols on the stone.
“But these are sloppily rendered for all the care in the execution itself. They’ve missed out the details.
There is Mercury, you can see by the little horns atop his head.
But the bottom is wrong.” The symbol to which he pointed was based upon a circle.
Atop this was a curved line, giving the impression of a head with a pair of horns.
The body was formed by a simple cross. “The crosspiece ought to be straight for Mercury, but this is tipped like an Orthodox cross. And there is the glyph for antimony, similar to Mercury, but this one is even more incorrect. It ought to have little curved arms reaching upwards, yet it has asterisks, like stars.”
“What does it mean?” Mornaday pressed.
“Whoever laid these signs had an imperfect grasp of chemistry or thought to impress other people by making something that looks far more accomplished than it actually is,” Stoker replied. “It is nonsense.”
“This is far from nonsense,” I said. I had moved to the gravestone to study the makeshift altar.
The puddles on the top proved to be wax from black candles.
But the other stains were suggestive, dark reddish brown and heavily streaked on the stone.
I bent near, pulling off my glove to scrape at the stuff with a fingernail.
When I had collected enough of the dried matter, I dropped it onto a page torn from the notebook I carried in my pocket.
A drop of the aguardiente to moisten it, and it came to life, deep red against the white of the paper.
“Blood,” Mornaday said.
I gave it a deep sniff. Even with the potent fumes of the aguardiente, the ferrous scent of the blood was unmistakable. “It is.”
“Something was sacrificed here,” he said, turning slowly to take in our surroundings.
“An excellent spot for it,” I told him. “The cemetery is locked at night. One presumes there are watchmen, but with the enormity of this place, it would be easy enough to elude them.”
“And failing that, a guard could be bribed or frightened to silence,” Stoker added.
“How do you know they were here at night?” Mornaday asked.
Stoker pointed to the waxen spots before I could. “Every headstone here has marks of candle grease. They would not require such illumination by day.”
Mornaday turned once more in a circle. “My god, what abominations have happened here.”
“Perhaps nothing more sinister than the killing of a cockerel,” Stoker said. “There is not enough blood in those stains for a human.”
I hated to admit the truth of it, but he was correct. The streaks I had discovered were insufficient for the sort of blood loss Maurice Quincey had sustained. These definitely suggested occultish happenings of some sort, but they did not include the murder of a human.
Stoker, nose lifted like a bloodhound on the scent of a rabbit, took a turn about the clearing, pushing aside bushes and peering under broken gravestones. After several minutes of this—with the necessary swearing and imprecations after pricking himself on thorns—he gave a cry of triumph.
“Come and look,” he said, holding back a shroud of ivy tendrils. They had formed a sort of veil obscuring a broken bit of wall, and at the base of the wall was a rusting grate. From below was the sound of rushing water, flowing fast.
“One of London’s buried rivers,” I guessed.
I remembered all too well what had happened the last time Stoker and I had been forced to explore one of these endangered tributaries, and I was not eager to repeat the experience.
[*] Having a rat land in one’s décolletage is a distinctly unsettling encounter.
“I would have to compare it to a good map to be sure, but at the very least, it is part of the sewer system,” Stoker said. “But look there.”
He pointed to the rust patches on the grate, and with a horrible certainty I knew then.
“That is no rust,” Mornaday said, turning away with a slightly greenish cast to his face.
“No,” I agreed. “I believe we shall discover that that is the blood of Maurice Quincey.”
Skip Notes
* A Treacherous Curse