The Angel of Highgate

32 THE WORLD DISINTEGRATES

Doctor James Fuller knew full well Thraxton was standing there, but did not look up from his desk or the open journal in which he was scribbling notes — in fact, he had not looked up from his writing since Thraxton entered the room more than ten minutes ago. He finished a sentence, dipped his quill in the inkpot and continued to write. At last, the doctor appeared to have finished his entry. He picked up a shaker and sprinkled the page with sand to blot the ink dry. Thraxton’s wait seemed over; but no, the doctor then turned the page and began to write more.

It was a test of wills.

Even though Thraxton had been announced, Doctor Fuller’s office was the one place where professional qualifications outranked inherited titles — lord or no lord.

Thraxton cleared his throat quietly at first and then a second time, thunderously.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?” the doctor asked without ever looking up as the pen continued to scratch across the page.

“I am here on a matter of great import.”

“I am a doctor, sir.” The physician pried his eyes up from the journal for the first time. His face was warty, gray-bearded, a lank straggle of hairs smeared sideways across his bald scalp. The eyes, round and heavy-lidded as a turtle’s, peered at Thraxton over a pair of half-moon spectacles. “All of my business involves matters of great import.”

“You have a patient, one Aurelia Greenley.”

“Are you a relative?” The tone was accusative.

“No… yes… that is, I am her fiancé.”

The doctor stabbed the quill into the inkpot and left it quivering there. “I know the Greenleys. They have been patients of mine for years. I recollect no mention of a suitor.”

“Sir, you know that Mister Greenley was severely beaten and Aurelia kidnapped. I understand you treated both of them.”

The doctor’s shrug did nothing to either affirm or deny he knew of the event.

“I was the one who rescued Aurelia from the hands of the criminals who abducted her.”

“That’s as may be. As a physician, I am bound not to share privileged information with anyone outside the immediate family.” And with that he yanked the quill from the inkpot, shook the excess ink onto a blotter sheet and began to scribble again. “The door you entered by is still there,” he said without looking up. “Please close it from the other side.”

BANG! The golden phoenix head of Thraxton’s walking stick smashed down onto the open book, crushing the quill, narrowly avoiding smashing the doctor’s fingers, and splattering a huge blot of black ink across the page.

The doctor recoiled in shock. “Are you mad?”

Thraxton leaned over the desk, his face looming. “Yes, I am mad — mad as a hatter. Perhaps you have heard of me. My name is Lord Thraxton. I am told I have something of a reputation: dueling, gambling, whoring. There are many who consider me the wickedest man in London. The fellow who snatched Aurelia is dead. I killed the bastard! What say you now?”

The doctor studied Thraxton’s rage-contorted face for a moment and then, unexpectedly, burst into laughter. “Yes,” he chuckled. “I think you are mad. Full of piss and vinegar as we used to say where I grew up.” The doctor leaned back in his chair and regarded Thraxton over his steepled fingers. He clearly was not a man to be bullied or cowed by threats. “I see you are quite earnest.” He shuffled his chair back to the desk, ripped the ink-sodden page from his journal and dropped it and the ruined quill into a waste paper bin near his feet. “Very well, I will tell you what I know.” He nodded toward the chair on the far side of his desk. “I suggest you sit down.”

Thraxton ignored the advice, which proved to be a mistake.

The doctor mused for a moment and then began. “Aurelia suffers from a malady of the blood. It is an inherited trait, passed down the generations on the maternal side. Exposure to sunlight produces rashes and blistering of the skin. But there are more serious symptoms: abdominal pain, cramps, even periods of delirium.”

Thraxton’s knees began to tremble. “What is this malady called?”

“Medicine has no name for it. It is very rare, although there are rumors that this disease affects some of the highest people in society. As high even as to touch the royal family — I expect you to be completely discreet about this, of course.”

“Of course, but what—?”

“Is the prognosis?” The doctor removed his half-moon spectacles and set them on the desktop. “I am sorry to say it is not good. Aurelia has suffered these attacks since puberty. I do not believe she will have a long life…”

For Thraxton, the doctor’s words were being drowned by the surf-like crash of his own heartbeat.

“… but with care and attention she may live a good few years. Of course, children are out of the question.”

“Children?”

“Yes, the strain of childbirth would be entirely too much for her delicate condition. After all, her mother died giving birth to her…”

Thraxton could see the doctor’s lips moving but could no longer hear his words for the percussive pounding in his head. Steely needles tattooed numbness across his face. The room suddenly upended and he staggered into something that crashed to the floor as purply darkness exploded behind both eyes.

The world constricted to a trembling point of light and then extinguished. For a time, nothing.

Then two sharp blades drove up through his sinuses and into his brain. His eyes fluttered. The knives plunged a second time, driving so deep they pierced the top of his skull.

Smelling salts.

His eyes snapped open and the world surged back around him. The doctor was kneeling beside him, an arm about his shoulders pulling him into a sitting position on the rug. The doctor brought the smelling salts up a third time, but Thraxton pushed his arm away.

“She carries your child?”

He looked dumbly at the doctor and nodded.

“Dear God,” Doctor Fuller said. “Then she is in the hands of the angels.”

Someone coughed in his ear, but his mind was in freefall.

“We’re here, sir.”

He could not move. Could not speak.

“Sir, we’re here…”

Thraxton blinked — his mind was a servant scurrying from the far back reaches of a mansion in reply to the bell pull. His head swiveled to the right and he looked, vacantly. Harold’s face was framed in the open window of his brougham and now he opened the door, spilling in light and damp, chill air. “Sir, we’ve arrived at Mister Hyde-Davies’ home.”

Thraxton dragged himself from the carriage seat, settling the black top hat on his head as he stepped down. The words the doctor had spoken kept playing over and over in his mind so loud they deafened him to all exterior sound or sensation as he stumbled numbly up the short path to the front door. At any other time he might have found it strange that the door stood wide open on a chill October day, but upon stepping inside he blundered into a scene so chaotic it jolted him from his reverie.

The front hallway was piled with luggage: chests, hampers, baskets of clothes, crates of books and even now the servant, Horace Claypole, clomped down the staircase, his arms being stretched from their joints by the weight of the huge portmanteau he lugged.

Thraxton looked around at the scene, bewildered.

“Geoffrey!” Algernon said as he sailed from the parlor. He was stripped to the shirt sleeves and carried armfuls of books which he thumped down atop a teetering stack.

“I… I have some news…” Thraxton started to say.

“And I, too! The most wonderful news — well, two pieces of news, really. But come, I am absolutely bursting to tell you.”

Algernon’s attention was snatched away briefly as he noticed Horace sagging beneath the weight of his burden, patiently waiting for instruction. “Put that down over there, Horace. Oh, and fetch the other portmanteau downstairs — the heavy one.”

A frisson of despair rippled across Horace’s face, who turned and trudged back up the stairs, grumbling to himself as he massaged his forearms.

Inside the parlor, Algernon pushed Thraxton into an armchair then threw himself down on the ottoman.

“I’ve done it!” Algernon said.

“Done what?”

“Taken your advice. And bloody good advice it was! You were right, Geoffrey. To hell with society. To hell with decorum. I have asked Constance to be my wife and she has consented.”

“Oh… that’s wonderful. When are you?”

“Next week. Tuesday. Yes, I’m not fibbing. Tuesday! Can you believe it? It’s madness, I know.” He chortled with wicked glee. “Of course, I expect you to be my best man. And I hope Aurelia is well enough to attend.”

“Next Tuesday?”

“I see from your expression that even you think it insanely hasty, but I have my reasons, which brings me to my second piece of news.”

His friend seemed ready to burst apart with excitement, so Thraxton prompted him with a nod.

“I can scarcely believe this myself, but I am about to undertake a voyage on behalf of the Royal Botanical Society. I am to journey to the Galapagos Islands to collect new plant specimens.” Algernon laughed. “Can you believe it? Two of my profoundest dreams are coming true at once!”

Thraxton’s face visibly paled.

“You… you look disappointed.”

“The Galapagos? Where Mister Darwin went?”

“The same.”

“The other side of the world?”

“Yes, marvelous, isn’t it?”

“How long will you be gone?”

Algernon smiled skeptically. “You’re not getting sentimental on me, are you? Surely not you, Geoffrey, of all people! You have Aurelia now. You shan’t miss me a tick.”

Thraxton cleared his throat. “Um, no… not at all. It is wonderful news. How… how long?”

“As you rightly said, it is the other side of the world, so it’s a hell of a long voyage. Plus I will be conducting many months of exploration. I expect to be gone two years at the very least. Perhaps three.”

“Three years?”

“Which is why I had to rush forward my nuptials. Constance and I shall be traveling as man and wife. Our new life together will be an adventure in every sense of the word.”

To Thraxton, the happy news was poison surging through his veins. “That’s… wonderful.”

Algernon finally remembered himself. “Oh, but you had your own news? Is it about Aurelia? She is quite recovered, I expect?”

Thraxton started to say something, but the words caught in his throat. He swallowed their bitterness and forced a smile. “Yes, that was my news. Aurelia is… very well.”

“Excellent. Then we shall expect you both at the wedding?”

“Yes,” Thraxton smiled, rising from his chair. “Yes, of course.”

Thraxton made his excuses and left shortly after. The open trunks, the bustle, it all made sense now: Algernon was packing up his household for the long sea voyage. As Thraxton stepped through the open front door, he almost collided with Constance.

“Lord Thraxton,” she smiled. “You have heard our news, then?”

“Yes… wonderful… congratulations.”

“And how is Aurelia?”

Thraxton was unprepared to see her and so had not had time to recompose his face. Although he did not utter a word, Constance instantly saw the terrible truth in his eyes. She seized his hand.

“Oh, God! Have you told—?”

“No!” Thraxton shook his head. “Please… you must not tell Algy.”

“But we cannot go now—”

Thraxton squeezed her hand. “You must. You shall.”

“No. This changes everything. You and he are best friends. We must be here for you.”

Thraxton took her hand in both of his and squeezed it. A few moments passed before his power of speech returned and when it did his voice shook with emotion. “Constance, I have had little love in my life. In Algy, I have had more than a friend. More even than a brother. He has been the anchor that kept me tied to the earth, else I would have floated away into the clouds. I never deserved Algy, but you two deserve each other. He and I have shared a journey for most of our lives. Now you have come into his life as Aurelia has come into mine. Our paths have diverged. We each must make the journey separately.”

“The years will fly,” Constance said, although her lips trembled as she said it. “We shall all be back together soon enough.”

Thraxton’s face sketched a forlorn smile. “I think not. The woman I love lives in the darkness and I must follow her wheresoever that leads. I think it likely we shall never see each other again… on this side of the Great Divide.”

Thraxton gave her hand a final squeeze. “Be happy,” he said, although his voice broke on the last word.

And with that he walked away.

At the waiting brougham, Harold saw his master approaching and shook himself lively beneath a waxed leather cloak beaded with rain. His hands gripped the whip and reigns, but Thraxton shambled past the carriage as if he didn’t see it and continued walking up Warwick Square under a fine, slanting rain.

“Guvnor!” Harold called, thinking his master had forgotten he had brought his own carriage.

“Lord Thraxton!” he called again. But when he still received no response, it became clear that his master’s black mood had darkened ever further and that he wished to walk. Harold flicked the reigns lightly. The horses stirred and began to plod forward, so that the carriage followed twenty feet behind as Thraxton walked, stiff-backed into the damp fog, his cheeks running with more than just the misting drops of rain.

Silas Garrette leaned back in the armchair, closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply through the chloroform-soaked handkerchief draped across his face.

As always, just as he was going under, the voices began.

One at first, and then another, more and more joining in until a clamorous babble resonated inside his skull. Some spoke in English, some in foreign languages, some in an alien tongue decipherable only in dreams. He inhaled faster and faster, pumping chloroform into his lungs until the voices slipped away into silence. Then the images began. Mostly these were chaotic — a clutter of nightmares accumulated during his past life: Crimea, the hospital tent, when he went by a different name. But tonight, the images were orderly, comprehensible, and he soon realized that this was a dream of a very different quality. Soon he understood that his mind had tapped into a current flowing through the ether from the future going back in time to the present.

He was seated at a card table in a darkened space, the surrounding walls no more than the suggestion of a red smudge. Seated across from him was a woman, her face hidden by a white veil. A sudden wind blew and snatched the veil away and yet the woman’s face remained a blur of indistinct features. From her gray-streaked auburn hair he guessed that she was nearly forty.

The woman reached down to a deck of cards on the red velvet table, drew one card from the deck, and set it down in front of him. It was a Tarot card.

The Hanged Man.

He looked up from the card. The woman’s face blurred and then zoomed into focus. She was younger now, maybe thirty. A handsome woman, but her most striking feature was her eyes, which were a startling shade of violet.

The woman peeled another card from the Tarot deck and set it down next to the first.

The Nine of Wands.

A voice said: I must wake up.

He looked up. The face blurred, then sharpened. This time the woman was younger still, barely twenty. She took another card and set it down in front of him.

The new card was of a tower blasted by a bolt of lightning, shattered masonry tumbling to the earth.

This time the woman had become a girl of sixteen. She placed the next card.

The Hierophant Chiron, the wounded healer.

A dagger pierced his heart. He saw himself in the card and realized his fortune was being laid out in front of him.

Wake up. I must wake up!

This time when he raised his gaze, the woman was a girl still in pigtails. Maybe eight or nine. She played the last card.

The Death card.

Of course. An intense cold surged through him. His lungs cramped and he could no longer draw a breath.

I must wake up! Open your eyes! Wake up!

When he looked up again, the room, the table was gone. In front of him was a fetus, hanging suspended in darkness. The fetus was pale, the skin almost translucent. It sucked its thumb and watched him, revolving slowly.

WAKE UP!

His eyes tore open.

Darkness.

He was lying on the floor. At some point he had fallen from the chair. He groped blindly, felt the edge of a work bench, the legs of his toppled chair. Then he heard the hiss of escaping gas and realized where he was and what had happened: in the fume-laden workshop, the gas light had gone out.

He was asphyxiating.

He scrabbled to the door and pulled it open, spilling light from the outer office. He dragged himself to the window, but was too weak to open it. A hat stand stood close by. He pushed until it toppled, smashing through the window. Cold air blew in. He pulled his face close, sucking in chestfuls of oxygen, flushing his lungs.

He rolled onto his back and lay gasping as a headache hammered at the back of his eyes. Parts of the dream were already evaporating like ether in a dish, but he knew who the fetus was and the woman it would grow into. The unborn child was what he had been looking for all along — the next leap in human evolution.

She would bridge the void between life and death and open a dialogue between this world and the next that would confound all religions and bring an end to the reign of terror that death had held for aeons.

He realized now that nothing had been an accident — not the incendiary shell that exploded above his tent. Not the appearance of the man named Silas Garrette he had become. Not the encounter with Thraxton that led him to Aurelia Greenley, for the fetus he had glimpsed grew inside her. He knew that the future he had seen had to be prevented.

Aurelia Greenley and her unborn child must die.

For a moment, Thraxton thought he was too late.

The shadowy gates of the cemetery were closed. But the glow of a lantern showed between the bars. As he stepped down from his brougham, he saw a figure at the gates in a battered bowler hat and a heavy wool coat: Charlie, the sexton. He had slipped the chain around the bars and was just about to padlock them shut.

“I’m just closin’ her up for the night,” Charlie said. “Bit late if yer lookin’ for a stroll about the grounds.”

“Actually, it’s you I’ve come to see.”

“Me, sir?”

“Yes, I need some advice.”

Charlie chuckled at the thought. “Don’t rightly know what advice you’d been wantin’ from the likes of me, sir. I ain’t exactly had much heducation.”

“No, I think you’ve had exactly the education I need,” Thraxton said.

Charlie slipped the chain loose and swung the gate open.

“I’m just about to start me rounds, if you don’t mind taggin’ along.”

“No, that would be perfect.”

Encompassed in a halo of light from the lantern, the two men meandered together around the two main paths that looped the cemetery.

“Is there something you’re wantin’ to ask me about, sir?”

“Yes, but it seems ridiculous now.”

“Might not seem that daft to me.”

“You said your wife is buried here?”

“Yessir.” The sexton raised his lantern higher to throw a wider circle of light around them. He nodded toward a stand of modest gravestones tilting this way and that.

“Right over there, by the oak trees. She was a lover of trees, my old gal was.”

They strode on in silence. Thraxton grappled with how to phrase the next question as they passed beneath the pharaonic arch and entered the Egyptian Avenue, an echoing tunnel lined with tombs. Their shadows shuddered eerily along the tomb doors as the lantern jogged against the sexton’s leg.

“The first time we met, you said that these paths were sometimes walked more at night than during the day.”

“Did I say that?”

“I have never forgotten it.”

They stopped outside one of the tomb doors.

“I talk a lot of rubbish sometimes, sir. Livin’ on yer own does things to yer head.”

The sexton pushed the tomb door open and entered. Thraxton followed. Inside, a lead coffin sat atop a bier. The sexton set his lantern down atop it and began to rummage in his coat pockets.

“No. I don’t think it was rubbish. You spoke about walking the paths and losing yourself in conversation with your late wife.”

The sexton fished a number of items from his pockets and arranged them on the leaden lid: a long hat pin, the broken stem of a clay pipe, and a box of Lucifer matches.

“It’s not talkin’ to the dead that’s the difficult part,” the sexton said. “It’s the listenin’. Most people don’t know how to listen. You listen wiv yer head, you don’t hear nuffink. You listen with the heart.” The sexton put a hand to his chest, his eyes lambent. “Then you’ll hear.”

Thraxton watched as the older man took the long hat pin and started to drill into the top of the lead coffin, twisting the pin back and forth.

“What exactly are you doing?”

The sexton paused.

“Oh this, sir? Regulations call for all above ground burials in the city of London to enclose the casket inside a lead coffin.”

“I see.”

“Only problem with that is, after the body gets a bit ripe, the unhealthy vapors given off start to build up inside. Sometimes they’ll balloon the lead out until the coffin explodes.”

Disgust rolled across Thraxton’s face.

“Yeah, nasty,” the sexton agreed. “Very nasty indeed. I should know… it’s me what’s had to clean it up a time or two.”

He continued twisting the hat pin until it penetrated the lead and then worked it around in ever-widening circles to enlarge the hole. As he drew the pin out, Thraxton could hear the faint hiss of escaping gas. The sexton quickly pushed the narrow end of the broken pipe stem into the hole, and then struck a match. The invisible gas lit with a whumph and a weirdly luminous flame danced in the air above the coffin.

“My God,” Thraxton muttered. “The human body rendered into flame. We literally become the phoenix!”