The List of Seven Read online

  “You…seek my guidance.”

  Lady Nicholson’s lips trembled. Doyle was uncertain she’d be able to summon a reply, when the Dark Man beside him spoke first.

  “We all, humbly, seek your guidance and wish to extend our gratitude for this evening’s visitation.” His voice had a hiss in it, damage to a vocal cord. The accent was foreign—Mediterranean perhaps—Doyle couldn’t yet pinpoint it precisely.

  So this man was amanuensis, the medium’s liaison to the paying customer, usually the brains behind the operation. He had clearly cultivated the fervid conviction of the true believer that served as his own best advertising. Fraud began here; an opportunistic salesman exploiting what in many instances were mediums with some measurable facility and a childish incomprehension of the workaday world’s mercantile realities. As a man in Gloucester had put it to him, describing the sensitive abilities of his own otherwise dim-witted son, “When they give you a window into another world, I warrant you forfeit a few bricks.”

  This was the team: medium, handler, all-purpose urchin, serving woman with child for emotional credibility, burly husband providing muscle, others unseen perhaps standing by. Clearly, Lady Nicholson was their target. Not an altogether unwitting one—she had sent Doyle the precautionary note—but one whose distress was sufficiently compelling to outweigh her misgivings. It remained to be seen how they would react to Doyle’s unexpected arrival—but then, so far, unexpected didn’t seem to particularly apply.

  “We are all beings of light and spirit, both on this side and on your physical plane. Life is life, life is all one, life is all creation. We honor the life and light in you as you would do in us. We are all one on this side, and we wish you on your side harmony, blessing, and peace everlasting.” This came from the medium in a burst, with the feel of a standard, practiced preamble, before she turned to the Dark Man and nodded politely, his cue to formally begin the proceedings.

  “Spirit welcomes you. Spirit is aware of your distress and wishes to help in any way it can. You may address Spirit directly,” the Dark Man said to Lady Nicholson.

  Wrestling with a sudden, profound uncertainty, Lady Nicholson did not answer, as if to voice the first question were an admission that effectively laid waste to a lifetime’s accumulation of inherited beliefs.

  “We can go, we could go,” her brother leaned in to offer.

  “Begin with your son,” said the medium.

  She looked up, startled and instantly focused.

  “You’ve come to ask me of your son.”

  Tears pooled quickly in her eyes. “Oh my God.”

  “What would you ask of Spirit?” The medium went through the motions of smiling, but the effect appeared simulated.

  “How did you know?” Tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Has your son crossed over?” The smile persisted.

  She shook her head, uncomprehending.

  “Has there been a death?” asked the Dark Man.

  “I’m not sure. That is, we don’t know.…” She faltered again.

  “The thing is, he’s disappeared. Four days now. He’s only three years old,” the brother offered.

  “His name is William,” the medium said without hesitation. It would have been the Dark Man’s job to find that out.

  “Willie.” Her voice brimmed with emotion; she was taking the hook.

  Doyle throughout glanced surreptitiously around the room, at the ceiling, behind the tapestries, searching for suspended wires, projection devices. Nothing so far.

  “You see, we’ve already been to the police. It’s no good—”

  “We don’t know if he’s dead or alive!” Her pent-up grief exploded. “For God’s sake, if you know so much, then you know why I’m here.” For a brief moment, her eyes found Doyle’s and felt his sympathy. “Please. Please, tell me. I shall go mad.”

  The medium’s smile lapsed. She nodded gravely. “One moment,” she said. Her eyes closed; her head angled back again. The circle of hands remained unbroken. The silence that followed was thick and urgent.

  A gasp broke from the pregnant girl. She was staring at a spot some six feet above the table where a perfect sphere of white mist was materializing, spinning like a globe on a central pivot. Expanding, fleecy extensions spun out from its core, breaking the circle down into a flat, square plane. By varying their density, the shards spread out and began purposefully assuming the dimensions of a random topography, foothills, rifts, peninsulas, all within the invisible confines of borders as rigid as a gilded frame.

  A map? The shifting slowed, and the features crystallized, until with a rush of condensation the true nature of the vision appeared: a work of shadow and light, bleached of color, less precise than a photograph but more animated, suggestive of motion and distantly of sound, as if this scene were being viewed at great remove through some crude, impersonal lens.

  In it, a young boy lay curled up at the base of a tree. He wore short pants, a loose tunic, stockings, no shoes. His hands and feet were tightly bound with rope. The first glance suggested sleep, but closer examination showed the chest heaving, coughing, or sobbing—it was difficult to determine, until the ghostly and unmistakable sound of a child’s pathetic, heartsick cries filtered into the chamber.

  “God in heaven, it’s him, it’s him,” Lady Nicholson moaned. The sight leveled her, not into despondency but a rapt, febrile alertness.

  More details of the unearthly daguerreotype emerged: A small stream ran through the forest bed a few feet from where the boy was lying on a frost-tinged carpet of leaves. The rope that held the boy’s wrists extended to a low-lying branch of the adjacent tree. The woods thickened behind him, clustering, evergreens. An object lay on the ground near the boy’s feet: small, square, man-made: a can, bearing the letters… C U I…

  “Willie!” she cried.

  “Where is he? Where is he?” the brother demanded, his attempt to generate outrage mitigated by dumbstruck astonishment.

  Lost inwardly, the medium offered no response.

  “Tell us!” the brother demanded, and he meant to speak further, but the air in the room was rent by a shattering, discordant blast of trumpets, an insane trilling, bound by no discernible harmony or rhythm. Doyle felt stunned, assaulted, pinned down by the oppressive weight of the vibrations.

  “The horn of Gabriel!” shrieked the man to Doyle’s left.

  Now something black and odious crept into the edge of the image suspended above them: A shadow felt more than seen, oiled, foul and malignant, gathering mass without seeming to coalesce, the presence insinuated itself into the vision, seeping through the spectral wood, advancing toward the helpless child.

  An inescapable conviction that he had witnessed this entity the night before in the hall outside his door left Doyle groping vainly for some rational causation. His mind shouted at him: This means not Death but Annihilation.

  The cacophonous nightmare grew deafening. A long brass horn appeared in the air, opposite the picture, bobbing erratically. Now that’s their first mistake—Doyle seized purchase on the thought. Could he detect a telltale flash of filament at the trumpet’s bell?

  Drawing itself into a hungry spiral around the boy, the phantom sucked the last bit of light from the vision, swallowing the sound of his cries, on the verge of consuming him whole. Lady Nicholson screamed.

  Doyle sprang to his feet and yanked his hands free. He picked up his chair and hurled it at the image; it shattered like liquid glass, dispersing and sputtering into emptiness. Its suspending cables severed; the brass trumpet clattered noisily onto the table.

  Rolling to avoid the blow he knew was coming, Doyle felt the fist of the man to his left connect sharply below his shoulder blade. In one swift move, Doyle snatched the trumpet from the table and swung it viciously up and around, catching the man square on the side of the face. Blood spurted from a gash as he stumbled and fell to his knees.

  “Villains!” Doyle shouted, galvanized. He reached into his pocket for the revolver when
a heavy blow landed on the right side of his neck, paralyzing his searching hand and arm. He turned to see the Dark Man lift a leaded truncheon to strike again and raised his left arm to fend it off.

  “Fool!” The voice issued from the medium. Grinning maliciously, eyes blazing, she swiftly rose straight up into the air above the table. Distracted, the Dark Man turned to face her, truncheon still raised. Doyle felt the hands of the wounded man grab him roughly from behind.

  “You fancy yourself a seeker of truth?” the medium mocked him.

  She held out her palms, the skin roiled and rippled with hideous subcutaneous congestion. When she opened her mouth, a flowing volume of gray aqueous vapor billowed forth from both mouth and hands. Suspended in the air, the vapor traced the outline and then filled in the image of a full-length frame mirror. As the surface of the mirror refined itself, the medium’s reflection appeared in the spectral glass.

  “Then behold my true face.”

  Out of the void behind her likeness in the mirror floated another form, dim and indistinct, which settled on and then imposed itself over the medium’s reflection, pouring into it like water saturating sand, until all that remained was an entirely new visage: a skull-like creature with red, runny, abscessed sockets for eyes, skin gray and in many places gnawed down to the bone, writhing pockets of black stringy hair sprouting from more than the usual places. Independent of the medium, who remained still, merely smiling, the creature looked down at Doyle and opened the spoiled cavity that served as its mouth. Its voice was the one they had been hearing all along, but it now came exclusively from the fiend in the mirror.

  “You imagine that you do good. See what your good has wrought.”

  Two hooded figures moved out from behind the tapestry, moving so swiftly that Doyle had no time to react. One clouted Lady Nicholson’s brother across the head with a dimly glimpsed weapon; the wound spouted crimson as he fell away. The other grabbed Lady Nicholson and drew a long, thin blade smoothly across her throat, severing the vessels, arterial blood pumping furiously. The cry in Lady Nicholson’s throat died in a drowning rattle as she slumped out of sight behind the table.

  “God! No!” Doyle screamed.

  A demented cackle from the monster filled the air before the ectoplasmic mirror exploded in a loud report of light.

  One of the murderers now drew his sights on Doyle and nimbly jumped up onto the table, poised to leap down and strike at him with the mallet that had splintered the forehead of Lady Nicholson’s brother, when Doyle heard something whoosh by his ear: a shape, a black handle bloomed at the throat of the assassin. He stopped on top of the table, dropped his weapon, and groped blindly at his chin; a dagger had pierced the span of his neck, pinning the material of the hood, drawing it down over the eyes. The man staggered, then toppled over.

  With a grunt, the accomplice holding Doyle fell backward and away; he was free.

  An unfamiliar man’s voice spoke urgently in his ear. “Your pistol, Doyle.”

  Doyle looked up to see the Dark Man turning toward him with the truncheon raised. Doyle pulled the pistol from his pocket and fired. His left knee shattered, the Dark Man bellowed and fell to the floor.

  The shape was moving behind Doyle now, kicking the candelabra, extinguishing half the room’s light. Doyle just had time to note that the medium had vanished when his attention snapped back to a blur of gray; the advancing rush of the second assassin. Still unseen, Doyle’s benefactor overturned the heavy table, throwing the murderer back. Hands pulled Doyle to his feet.

  “Follow me,” the voice instructed.

  “Lady Nicholson—”

  “Too late.”

  Doyle followed the voice into the darkness. They passed through a door, down a corridor. Doyle felt disoriented—this was not the way he had entered. The door at corridor’s end fell as Doyle’s confederate kicked it open, oozing a crepuscular light into the space. They were still interior. Doyle could make out a tall, rangy profile, see the man’s breath vaporize in the cooling air, nothing more.

  “This way,” the man instructed.

  He was about to lead them through another door when a shape leapt from the dark with a feral growl and ripped into the man’s forward leg. He staggered, crying out in shock. Doyle fired a shot at the dim shape of the attacking animal. It yelped and fell back, howling in pain. Doyle fired again, stilling its cries.

  The man shouldered through the door. In the shaft of light that fell back through the doorway, Doyle saw the still body of the street urchin, crimson flowing from its wounds, jaws pulled back in a death grimace, exposing blood and meat in its sharp, canine teeth.

  “Almost there,” the man said, and they left the terrible house.

  chapter four

  FLIGHT

  HIS DELIVERER TOOK THE LEAD IN A HEADLONG DASH DOWN the dark alley outside. Unable for the moment to see the wisdom of any alternate course, as he followed, Doyle strained to keep the man’s flowing cloak in sight. They turned once, twice, and turned again. Seems to know where he’s going, Doyle thought wanly, his bearings yielding to the rattrap rookery of shacks and shanties through which the man’s path threaded them.

  Breaking out of an alley onto a paved street, the man stopped short; Doyle’s momentum carried him halfway into the street before the man yanked him back into the sheltering darkness. His grip was tremendously strong. Doyle meant to speak, but the man silenced him with a sharp gesture and pointed at the comer of an intersecting alley across the way.

  Stepping around that comer into view was the surviving gray-hooded killer: crouched over, moving steadily, deliberately, eyes to the ground, a coiled predator tracking its quarry. What possible signs could it be searching for in the hard pavement? Doyle asked himself—and then, more alarmingly: How did it get here so quickly?

  Doyle heard a whisper of steel on steel as his companion, face still obscured by shadows, sharp profile etched against the wall, drew from the walking stick he carried the base of a hidden blade. Doyle instinctively reached for his revolver. His friend’s hand lay frozen on the butt of his rapier, as still as stone.

  A carriage approached from the left. Four immense black stallions roared into view, clattering noisily to a stop on the cobblestones. The six-seat coach stood huge and black as pitch. No driver was visible. The man in the gray hood moved to the side of the coach. A window slid open, but no light issued from within. The man nodded, but it was difficult to know if words were exchanged; nothing cut through the night but the labored sputtering of the horses.

  The gray hood turned from the cab and looked directly into the alley where Doyle and friend were sheltered; both shrank back against the brick. The hood stepped toward them, stopped, and cocked its head like a hound tracing frequencies beyond human range. It stood like that for some time, the chilling blankness of the man finding perfect expression in the lifeless countenance of the mask. Doyle’s breath died in his chest—Something’s not right, he thought—and then he realized there were no holes for the eyes.

  The door to the black carriage swung open. A short, strident, high-pitched trilling filled the air, halfway between a whistle and some less human vocalization. The gray hood instantly turned and leapt inside, the door slammed shut, and the steeds hammered the heavy carriage away, fog swirling greasily around the hole it carved in the mist.

  As the clip of the hooves faded, Doyle’s companion eased his weapon back into place.

  “What the devil—” Doyle began, his breath bursting out in a rush.

  “We’re not safe yet,” the man stilled him, voice low.

  “All very well and good, but I think it’s time we had a brief chat—”

  “Couldn’t agree more.”

  With that, the man was off again. Doyle had no choice but to follow. Keeping to the shadows, they stopped twice when the shrill whistling sounded again, each time at a greater remove, leaving Doyle to consider the disagreeable possibility that more than one of these hoods were on their trail. Doyle was about to break the
silence when they turned a comer and came upon a waiting hansom cab, a compact cabbie atop the driver’s perch. The man signaled, and the hack driver turned, offering a view of the ragged scar running obliquely down the right side of his face. He gave a brusque nod, turned to his horses, and cracked the whip, as the man opened the door of the moving vehicle and jumped aboard.

  “Come on, then, Doyle,” the man said.

  Doyle followed up onto the stair, turning when he heard a dull thump to his right; a long, wicked blade had just penetrated the cab door, its quivering razor tip mere inches from Doyle’s chest. A shrill, insistent variation of the vile whistling filled the nearby air. Doyle looked back: The gray hood was twenty yards back, drawing another, identically vicious dagger from its belt as it sprinted toward him at improbable speed. With a prodigious leap, the hood jumped onto the running board of the accelerating coach, clutching for purchase in the open doorway. Hands pulled Doyle back into the cab; he scuttled to the far comer, digging for his pistol, trying to remember which pocket he’d left it in, when he heard the opposite door open. He looked up to see a flash of flapping coattail; his friend had fled, leaving him trapped in the cab with their relentless pursuer—where was his pistol?

  As the hooded figure captured its balance in the doorframe and raised the weapon, Doyle heard the scuff of weight shifting on the roof, then through the open window saw his friend swing down into view and drive both feet into the open door, slamming it shut and rocketing the point of the embedded dagger completely through their attacker’s chest. With a hideously muted mewling cry, the hood kicked and clawed ferociously at the invading blade, mauling its hands indiscriminately, then went suddenly and entirely limp, pinned to the door like a bug.

  Doyle struggled to his knees in the jostling sway of the carriage and moved to the hooded man. Rough clothes. Hobnailed boots, almost new. Feeling for a pulse and finding none, Doyle was about to remark on the curious absence of blood when his defender reached in through the window, pulled off the gray hood, and tossed it away.