London Macabre Read online

He grasped the golden handle and turned it.

  The pin pressed up against the glass and the clockwork mechanism ratcheted into place, but not hard enough to crack it.

  He opened the Kruptos Door and stepped into the al kimia, the hidden chamber as the words translated directly from the Arabic root. The wordplay amused him, as it no doubt amused the brothers of the rosy cross when they sealed the room up so many years ago. Even the most cursory inspect proved the place was every bit the treasure trove he had hoped. Skin-bound grimoires rested on lecterns, open on long-forgotten wisdom. A glass cabinet contained the shards of a humble cup, a grail of sorts, though not the one so precious to the Christian stories. A black grail. It was, if the small note beside it was to be believed, the vessel used to collect the sacrificial blood of Iscariot after he had been cut down from his hanging tree. He pressed his face against the glass, his fingertips less than six inches away from the black chalice. He could feel the malice emanating from each fragment of the simple cup.

  He smiled and turned his back on it.

  Numerous other treasures caught his eye: statuary claimed from Tibet, a jade jaguar with the ghostly essence of the great beast bound to its stone, the stone tip of the spear of destiny that wounded the Nazarene, the corpse of a clockwork man fashioned by Kepler long before he obsessed upon his astronomical clock, an ethereal figurine of unbeing, a Vodoun effigy of Baka and a statuette of Baron Samedi, the sketches of Hausenhofer’s blueprint for the uberman and more marvels inked on roll upon roll of vellum. On a small mahogany table sat a seemingly empty phial. He picked it up, turning it around and around in his hand until the essence began to solidify; a soul trapped in a bottle, bound to the vessel in death. There was so much more in the room, so many clues to the mechanisms of Heaven and Hell. He ignored them all, fixating on a stone cross braced upon the furthest wall. It was almost half his height, and engraved in a lost tongue.

  He knelt before the cross, his fingers feeling out every tongue and groove within the carving. He closed his eyes, committing them to memory. There were seventeen shapes, four engraved on each arm of the cross, four on the head and four at the feet, and one at the apex, a crucified man with a bestial face set in a snarl of seventeen teeth. It was a homunculus, a false human, twelve inches in height and rendered in perfect detail. A serpent was wrapped around the homunculus’s length. The cross itself was a key. The outside markings on each limb corresponded to an element: earth, air, fire and water, but it was the others that were interesting. Images of Shango, father of storms, and Mawu-Lisa, the hermaphrodite joining of twin, male and female deities, side by side with more obscure Judeo-Christian symbolism, and other markings that made no earthly sense whatsoever. Together they formed a complex cypher around the body of the homunculus that when deciphered unlocked a treasure map.

  The Brethren already had possession of the map, procured from a nameless tomb in the Afghan wilds. They had protected it for over two centuries, seeking the location of the key without realizing it lay under their noses in the very heart of Holborn.

  With the cross in to decode the map, he felt sure they would unearth the whereabouts of the fabled Catamine Stair, and with that knowledge would come the power to unleash the horrors buried deep since the dawn of time.

  ”There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And isn’t that just the truth of it,” he said to himself reverently as he lifted down the huge stone cross.

  In doing so, the man who wore the name Nathaniel Seth as effectively as any mask assured that all hell would break loose.

  Chapter Two

  Dorian Carruthers walked the copper thruppenny bit across his knuckles and made it disappear in a flourish of fingers. It was a simple trick, the eye reduced to believing what the hand wanted it to. He grinned wryly at the slight prestidigitation; it was smooth enough that only the most discerning spectator would have spotted the manipulation. He repeated the walk from finger to finger, slower this time, concentrating on the final palming of the coin. He spread his fingers wide and held out his hand, palm up. The coin was nowhere to be seen.

  In the doorway to the smoking room Anthony Millington teased off his white gloves and applauded.

  ”Your hat, sir?” Mason, the chamberlain asked, the slightest hint of distaste in his cultured tone. Millington was, after all, an actor. He was new money and rather proud of his vulgar exploits, regaling the gentlemen with stories that most assuredly kissed-and-told.

  Millington tipped the brim and rolled the plush aile de corbeau the length of his arm, catching it with a snap of the wrist. He held the top hat out with a raffish grin. ”Good man,” and to Carruthers, ”I see old man Locke is out like a light, as ever.”

  Brannigan Locke was indeed asleep, his face pressed up against the leather wing of his chair, his pipe still balanced precariously between his teeth. His lips rattled against the stem as he snored softly.

  Carruthers pocketed the coin. ”What news?”

  ”None of the good variety, I am afraid,” Millington said.

  ”And of the other variety?” Eugene Napier asked. Millington watched him tap out the ash from a thin cigarillo into the silver salver resting on the arm of his high-backed leather Chesterfield. Smoke curled lazily out of Napier’s mouth, rafting up across his pale face. He was a beast of a man, almost six and a half feet tall and built like the proverbial brick outhouse, his crisply laundered and starched white shirt straining across his barrel chest. His eyes were overshadowed by thick-knitted eyebrows and an atavistic brow. For all that, he was curiously soft-spoken.

  ”Plenty of that, I’m afraid,” Millington said, tossing his white gloves onto the table beside one of the empty armchairs. He sank rather theatrically into the Chesterfield, gesturing with two fingers at the decanter. Mason nodded once and took down one of the Waterford crystal snifters, filled it with two fingers of Delord Freres 1848 and served it to the actor. The rich Armagnac clung to the glass as Millington rolled it in his hand. He watched it with utter fascination before raising it to his nose, and breathed deeply of its nutty bouquet. He knocked it back in a single swallow and smacked his lips. ”But where to begin?”

  The Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club, nineteen spacious rooms—and a few not so spacious ones crammed with curiosities—in what used to be a lodging house on Grays Inn Road, was a sanctuary, a haven, a place for a few like-minded men to sit in quiet meditation undisturbed by the world, to smoke their hand-rolled cigars and Meerschaum pipes while leafing through the London Times and sipping vintage cognacs. There was an air of culture, of class, about the gentleman’s club. The wood panelling in every room was polished to a rich lustre and smelled of both wood and the ingrained wax, while old leather and smoke added to the flavours of the place. The marble floor in the reception room was inlaid with a stylised sun within a sixteen-pointed star fashioned out of overlaid triangles. Each of the points was engraved with alchemical elements; the devil’s fork or Poseidon’s trident of antimony; the interlocking closed and open triangles of arsenic; the broken figure eight of bismuth; the triple-barred figure X of copper; the circle within a circle of gold; the circle and arrow of iron, so like the symbol of man; the zigzag lines of lead; the D broken by what appeared to be an axe that represented magnesium in this very different rendition of the elements; and the rest, mercury, phosphorus, platinum, potassium, silver, sulphur, tin and zinc. None but the initiated would realise that they were walking across the First Matter of the universe, or the Khem, as the old alchemists of the Nile delta knew it. It was the most overt clue as to the true nature of the building and the purpose its inhabitants put it to.

  Twin open stairways, one on either side of the mosaic, lead up to the heart of the old lodging house. Each one was immaculately carved out of oak and closer inspection would reveal more of those telling details, in this case, carvings of chthonic snakes, salamanders, sometimes represented with wings the higher up the staircase one climbed, the solar phoenix and the cauda pervonis,
both important alchemical symbols of rebirth, while on the central wall where both stairs met hung a huge portrait of a beautiful hermetic couple, male and female in a single body. Behind them the great spread black wings of a raven seemed to fold around the loving couple to embrace them.

  There was an immaculate carving of a hippogriff beside the double doors that opened into the Smoking Room. The detail of every single feather and claw was beautifully rendered. To the casual eye it was nothing more than a curiosity, but of course, like everything else in this place, that was deliberate misdirection. The hippogriff was an alchemical crossbreed of griffin and horse—predator and prey.

  Beyond the double doors the gentlemen sat in the soft leather chairs, the open fire crackling in the hearth. Queen Victoria the First’s royal crest was engraved into the mantel above the flames. The motto beneath was filled with coal dust, making the Latin Honi soit qui mal y pense stand out in stark black letters. Evil to him who evil thinks… it wasn’t the queen’s motto, but rather something far, far older. It belonged to the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the medieval Order of Knight bachelors that were the inspiration for the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and so many other Arthurian and Holy Grail stories. The sentiment tied these Gentleman Knights of London that gathered in the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club to their antecedents.

  So while on the surface it was all very civilised—which was the image these few men had cultivated for the club—it was so much more.

  And like the chambers themselves, none of these men were what they first appeared; they were adventurers, explorers, thrill seekers. They were also gifted. Their gifts set them apart from the normal men and women of the city.

  Eugene Napier still bore the dusky tan of his recent expedition to the wilds of the African Continent, and brought with him stories of rain forests and fabulous creatures that stretched the bounds of credulity. He had stalked big game, giant gorillas, water elephants and such like by day, and more dangerous game at night. The locals called it a Palo Mayombe, a sangoma, lured to the servitude of the black arts. Superstition was that this Zulu priest could commune with the tribal spirits of the dead, but having opened himself up to their realm, the corruption of the afterlife twisted his soul, turning his gift for healing into a bane against all things living. Napier ended his misery, and nearly lost his own life in the process.

  This was what the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club was truly about, tracking and destroying the unnatural, the evil, the abominations of spirit and flesh. The Reading Room contained over eleven thousand texts and treatises on everything from alchemical formulae to divinations, testaments of witchcraft, confessions of idolatry and daemonology, and so much more, gathered from every corner of the globe. Together it represented the sum of man’s knowledge about The Art. Not black magic or hoodoo or witchcraft, these few men knew the truth; there were no such things. There was The Art, pure and simple. The means The Art could be put to were dictated by the practitioner, not the stuff of magic itself. That was akin to blaming the fountain pen for the words its writer espoused. It was elemental knowledge, not sorcery, that manipulated the stuff of the world.

  Even now, the seventh of their number, Simon Labauve, was out there somewhere between Chatham Quay and the New World navigating the Greyfriar’s Ghost through treacherous waters in response to reports about strange happenings in the deep. Reports of a steam clipper having vanished had reached them at the turn of the month. Coupled with older reports of similar disappearances in the same region what appeared a tragedy became something else entirely.

  Haddon McCreedy sighed, making a show of folding the pages of the broadsheet loudly. He took the pince-nez from his nose and laid them on top of the newspaper. ”Would you care to share your adventure, Millington? Or are we expected to pay for a performance like the hoi polloi?”

  ”A little appreciation would not go amiss,” Millington said, making a show of adjusting his position.

  ”We all appreciate you, Anthony, now please, talk before we die of old age.”

  ”All in good time, my man. All in good time.” Millington winked at him. ”I’ve had my snifter but a man needs a smoke before he talks of unbearable things.” The actor snapped his fingers and Mason appeared at his shoulder with an open humidor. Millington made his choice, clipped the cured leaves and lit up, puffing theatrically on the thick Havana. ”The city’s in a peculiar mood,” he said in all seriousness. ”The Peelers have found a dead flower girl.”

  ”A shame, but not the most unusual of occurrences in our beloved city,” Carruthers said, tossing the thruppenny bit into the air. He didn’t catch it because it never came back down. ”Pray tell, what is it to us?”

  ”Perhaps nothing,” Millington said, ”other than where she was found.”

  ”And where was that, Anthony? It is like squeezing water from a stone getting information out of you sometimes.”

  ”A little too close to home.”

  ”Here? There was no commotion, surely we would have heard the cries of blue murder?”

  ”Bedford Square, in the shadows of the museum, soon after midnight.”

  ”Close to Charlotte Street,” Napier observed. ”Perhaps the unfortunate girl merely wandered a little off her patch. There is nothing to suggest—”

  ”She had three and six in her purse.”

  ”So it wasn’t a robbery but there is still nothing to suggest we need to be overly concerned, I think you are jumping at shadows, dear boy,” Dorian Carruthers said. Once again the small coin walked across his knuckles. He didn’t so much as look at the actor when he said, ”But then, you always did have a penchant for the melodramatic, didn’t you?”

  Downstairs the door to the street slammed. The sound cut across their conversation. Frantic footsteps charged up the narrow flight of stairs. All eyes turned to the doorway as Fabian Stark, the last of their number, burst into the room. The emaciated Stark held up a hand for silence even as he bent double, gasping heavily. He straightened a moment later, his face livid as he took a final deep, steadying breath, and exhaled. He looked at the others one at a time before he finally said, ”We’ve got trouble.”

  Chapter Three

  Haddon McCreedy closed the door to the Reading Room.

  The latch fell into place with a satisfyingly substantial snick. The door was heavy, made from well-seasoned thick oak timbers and varnished with a cherry lacquer. Every wall, from floor to ceiling, was lined with books. The room soaked in that wonderful aroma of old paper.

  Haddon lit the gaslight and drew the heavy velvet drapes, effectively isolating the room from the outside world. There were curious markings etched into the wainscoting of the windowsill and again around the frame of the door; glyphs meant to ward off unwanted eavesdropping. He traced his fingertips over them. The same glyphs had been embroidered into the lining of the curtains themselves. More curious still was the thin line of salt beneath the sash window. The floorboards were polished to a shine, but even the thick veneer of gloss couldn’t mask the five-pointed rosewood star set into the boards. The round reading table was placed in the pentagram’s heart.

  Stark, Millington, Locke, Carruthers and Napier were already at the table.

  Carruthers stared at that coin of his as though it were the most fascinating thing he had ever seen while Locke breathed two streams of stale smoke from his nostrils that rose in front of his face like horns. The others sat unmoving, waiting for Haddon to join them and the Council of War to begin in earnest.

  Haddon adjusted the girth of his exquisitely brocaded red silk waistcoat, and withdrawing the silver fob watch from his pocket to mark the time, sat himself at one of the two empty chairs.

  ”The Kruptos Door was breached,” Stark said, laying his hands flat on the table.

  ”Impossible,” Eugene Napier said without thinking, utter contempt in his soft voice.

  ”And yet at sometime after midnight the seals were broken.”

  ”Just after midnight,” Millington noted, ”while
the Peelers were preoccupied with the dead flower girl, curiouser and curiouser, no? If this life of ours has taught me one thing it is that there is no such thing as meaningful coincidence.”

  ”What was taken?” Haddon asked, ignoring Millington’s musings. He snapped the silver cover of his fob watch closed and slipped it back into his pocket. There was no room for blather, what was missing almost certainly dictated who was behind the theft, and more importantly, their ability to do harm.

  Fabian Stark turned to Haddon, his cracked front tooth chewing into the pink of his lower lip. ”Only one thing, so far as I could ascertain.”

  ”And that would be?”

  ”The Homunculus Cross.”

  ”But … that’s just a gewgaw … why that of all the things?” Brannigan Locke steepled his fingers, cracking each one slowly and methodically.

  ”Why indeed?” Haddon said, thoughtfully. ”I suspect the error of our thinking is going to be made very clear to us before the sun rises.”

  ”What do we know about the cross?” Dorian Carruthers asked.

  ”Precious little, in truth, but even what we know is enough to warrant great concern. Do you have the ledger, Napier? There’s a good man.”

  The big man pushed back his chair, scraping the legs across the scored-deep line of the pentagram and rose to retrieve a large, smythe-sewn ledger from one of the lower shelves. He placed the book almost reverently on the table, cracked open the spine and turned through the pages until he found the entry he was looking for amid the cramped spider-like scrawl and began reading: ”The Homunculus Cross has been in our care since it was recovered from a mystic’s tomb in what was the Byrsa district of Carthage almost ninety years ago. Initial scrutiny suggests it predates the Pyrrhic War by quite some time, centuries perhaps, though it is difficult to gauge its precise position in antiquity due to the poor record keeping of the region. There are several familiar markings on the limbs of the cross itself that lead one to suspect it is in some way alchemical in nature, as the pictograms balance the elements of earth, air, fire and water, but beyond that, there are a number of other symbols, including the central effigy of a homunculus from which the cross takes its name.” Napier closed the book.