Chapel Noir (51 page)

And was suddenly jerked back by someone waiting behind the curtain. I tried to tear loose and bolt back into the panorama room and head for the back steps, but then I could hear boots springing up the metal steps two at a time.

A horridly strong grip had me around the shoulders while a hand clapped a thick, sickly-sweet-smelling cloth over my face.

I struggled like a drowning person, only my eyes above the noxious fumes that were suffocating my senses. I reached up, but my arm only reached as far as the small oval brooch of my watch before it flailed and fell limply away, a waxen appendage that did not quite belong to me.

A massive blur was thundering toward me like an ogre from a fairy tale. As the image neared and resolved into that of a man, I could smell the reek of liquor and vomit, could see red streaks upon his coarse, loose shirt, see finally and clearly his demented staring eyes, pale as the water that was rising over my head on a nauseous tide. . . .

He was laughing as he neared, a wild man. James Kelly came for me at last. I could sense rough hands pawing at the front buttons of my gown, but thankfully could no longer feel, nor think, nor know anything but darkness.

48.
No Quarter

I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and
lolling red tonques, with long, sinewy limbs and shaqqy hair
.
—
BRAM STOKER,
DRACULA

FROM A JOURNAL

Three of the Rothschilds’ men had Irene and me pinned against the rough granite wall, presenting a defensive bulwark to any who would rush us.

We both struggled, in vain, to elude this misguided protective border.

The other five had run to aid the two plainsmen as they tried to herd the dozen or so drunken, moaning wild men and women into one corner of the cavern, away from the bonfire and the crude altarcum–operating table.

A few of the group were too wounded to resist. Others were so drunkenly in awe of the oddly attired Americans that they fell on their knees and clutched at the men’s fringed trousers. Still, they were mad, drunken brutes who had surrendered to every bestial urge that the mind of man can imagine in the past couple hours and were not about to be subdued by only two men, however legendary.

Even I could see that neither plainsman was inclined to slaughter such inebriated and pathetic prey, for all their demonic deeds. I imagine they’d both seen, and perhaps done, worse in the Indian Wars.

I did think that the taking and flourishing of one scalp would have ended the resistance immediately, and this did not seem too bloody an act to perform given what we’d seen them do to one of their own, or on the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution and the offices of the guillotine, but do not think it would have done the reputation of the Wild West Show much good for future engagements.

While we were at this impasse, I heard a slight stir down the tunnel.

“Has Nell come back?” I asked Irene.

“I hope not, and I wish you had gone when you had a chance,” she said, trying once again to thrust her personal guardian aside, with little success. “The worst have gotten away,” she shouted in French at her defender. “Let me go after them!”

But their prime assignment was obviously protection, not capture, and we were the prisoners of their damned French chivalry!

Then a new figure ran onto the scene. At first I thought one of the fiends’ number had returned because of his simple workman’s trousers and shirt, but this man was taller than any of the fleeing figures.

He paused, observed our tableau against the wall and the other Rothschild agents standing uncertainly behind the contesting figures, their pistols aimed but unfired.

He called some French words.
Vite!
for hurry, then some I didn’t recognize.

The Frenchmen’s actions soon revealed his orders. The three men left off impeding Irene and me to join the others in forming a human line that drove the remaining people into so tight a knot that they could no longer fight.

He picked a bloody petticoat from the stones and, with a tremendous, heedless show of strength, ripped the cloth lengthwise into rags, tossing them to the agents to use as bonds.

Irene rushed to seize some ruffles from the petticoat hem and went to wind them around the chest of the moaning woman, who still lay by the obscene “altar.”

“Was she meant to survive this barbaric rite?” I asked as I knelt beside Irene to assist in the binding.

“If she didn’t bleed to death or become so infected that her festering wounds would kill her. I don’t think they thought beyond their frenzy.”

“What is the purpose behind it all? And has the Ripper sprung from this cult, or is he someone quite separate?”

“Ask Sherlock Holmes,” she said with a sardonic glance to the lean form that was bent over binding hands as we bound wounds. “I imagine that it will take even him some time to decipher the riddle of these lethal ceremonies. It is enough that we have stopped it for tonight, although I fear that—”

The woman we tended had become unconscious, and her release from pain seemed to permit Irene to think beyond the scene at hand.

“Buffalo Bill!” she called out, and he stepped from the mass of fallen men.

“We’ve got them hog-tied,” he announced. “Danger’s over.”

“But . . . did you see? Where is Nell?”

Before he could answer her eyes had sought and found Sherlock Holmes, who suddenly stopped tying knots as if sensing her attention. He turned to face us.

“You must know,” she told him. “You came in last. You must have seen Nell leaving, or outside.”

“I saw no one.” He stood.

“How are you here?” she asked.

“I suddenly realized that once again I was at home waiting until the morning to act, this time reading the chilling casebook of Krafft-Ebing. I also realized that waiting to act is a fatal mistake with you, Madam. I arose at once, went out, and inquired at your hotel. Your party’s manner of dress suggested the exposition. That you attempted to divert me again with the gift of a parting puzzle made me realize you expected to find some evil work afoot here. I’ve spent the afternoon and evening an hour behind you, interrogating sightseers and ultimately Gypsies. The trail led here.”

“Trail! In all the footsteps and hoofprints that have trampled these parade grounds?”

Sherlock Holmes pointed to Red Tomahawk’s feet. “Only one set of moccasins to follow.”

The Red Man nodded, a slight relaxation of his features the only hint that he was amused, and even pleased. “I came to follow, not to have one follow me. You would not have seen moccasins otherwise.”

“No doubt,” said Sherlock Holmes. He turned again to Irene. “But where and when did Miss Huxleigh go? She should be collected before she gets into trouble.”

“I know that!” Irene was standing. “I will search the grounds. I meant only to protect her from the worst of this ghastly scene. Where can she have gone?”

By now two of the Rothschild agents had picked up the swooning woman between them and were preparing to return up the tunnel with her. Others had preceded them out, seeking medical attention and the gendarmes, I suppose.

I wanted very badly to ask Irene what she believed had happened here, but she was looking around in a distracted state. “Nell must have gone out as I asked. We will have to follow her path and decide what she would have done.”

“She’ll be waiting for us,” I assured Irene. “Now that the police will be coming and going, she will feel safer about showing herself.”

“Quite likely,” Sherlock Holmes said, endorsing my explanation. “We will find her in no time.”

And he took the lead in conducting us out of that dreadful place of pain and terror.

49.
Lost Innocence

My age is fourteen ears . .. I was present when my mother
was married to J.J. Ford . . . The First time I seen Ford
take hold of mother, he attempted to choke her
.
—
PINKEY E. J. COCHRANE, ARMSTRONG COUNTY COURT, APOLLO,
PENNSYLVANIA, 1878

FROM A JOURNAL

There is a grief one sees only in madhouses, a grief so dark and deep that one possessed by it is immured beyond reach in a realm even lower than the pit of Hell itself.

I have been among such lost souls, and shall never forget it.

So shall I never forget those dreadful hours when Irene Adler Norton joined that forsaken company.

An hour’s search of the area outside the cavern found no trace of Nell Huxleigh. At first Irene was intent on the search, suggesting other places, other paths. For another two hours we ranged as far as the crowds still milling around the Eiffel Tower, interrogating the kiosk tenders, ambling fairgoers, the ever-present gendarmes.

Then she grew wild, wild with anxiety and fury at our helplessness in the face of Nell’s utter disappearance.

Only after a two-hour search did she bow to the conjoined urging of Sherlock Holmes, Colonel Cody, and Inspector le Villard, who had come along later, that she and I return to the hotel. There we would await the result of their united efforts to search the exposition grounds in the night’s wee hours with all the crowds gone.

Perhaps the last, laconic grunt of agreement from the Sioux tracker, Red Tomahawk, finally swayed her. And his comment, “Less feet better trail.”

Perhaps she also realized that, though she was far from hysterical, her personal terror would infect what must be a cool, impersonal process, a scientific process, in fact, tailored in Heaven for the likes of Sherlock Holmes.

“You have done the right thing,” I told her again and again in the carriage en route to the hotel. “Were I the worst and most elusive villain on Earth, I would still shudder to have three such superb hunters upon my trail. Not only Sherlock Holmes and the famous frontiersman Buffalo Bill, but an Indian tracker! The whole world knows the Indian for the finest reader of minute physical evidence. The entire prairie has been their hunting grounds. These few hundred acres of parkland and buildings are child’s play to such a one.”

“This is not child’s play,” she replied, and said no more.

How could I answer? When a man has gone missing there is always the possibility that it is voluntary. He may have gone to sea or the Army, or to another town to escape a burdensome personal or business life. When a woman or child has gone missing, there is scant such chance. If the missing person is not found swiftly and nearby, the odds increase with every passing minute that she will not be found, or will only be found far away long after, and no longer living.

Inspector le Villard exchanged a glance with me and shrugged as we jolted along in uneasy silence. I know that he ached to be back on the grounds with the trackers, but understood Sherlock Holmes’s insistence that he see us to the hotel.

Only an escort could ensure that Irene would follow the course she had so reluctantly agreed upon. Certainly I could do nothing to stop her if she wished to go back.

But, as with any course, the farther you follow it, the harder it becomes to reverse its momentum.

By the time the inspector had seen us to our rooms and bowed out, Irene’s agitation was ready to burst into uncivil unrest.

She began to pace back and forth. “I should have stayed. Why did I listen to them? Men are always trying to exclude women. In the name of protecting us, they actually protect their own domination of events.”

“This was hardly the case here, Irene. We were present for the capture of that fiendish cabal. Nothing of that atrocious scene was spared us.”

“They believe because my emotions are involved in Nell’s disappearance that I cannot think! I can think, only too well!”

My own thoughts returned to the bloody ceremonies our party had interrupted. If Nell had been kidnapped by anyone involved in those obscenities . . . dear God, the mind could not imagine possibilities dire enough. I could only consider them with my imagination averted, like a face half–turned away from a nauseating sight.

Irene was still pacing, back and forth like a great lion in a zoo cage. I could never stand to see such animals contained, pacing endlessly, rage and loss in their eyes and something even more alien for these once-free wild beasts: the first bewildering glint of fear in creatures who had never felt it before.

I could only keep watch. I loathed my feeling of helplessness, the lengthening absence of Nell, the fact that Irene and I were consigned to the ignorant fringes of events.

“You know why they wanted us away,” she said after long silence, during one lashing turn before she began pacing in the other direction. “They don’t expect to find her. Why? What led her away from us? Why would the fleeing madmen take her?”

“As a hostage, perhaps? But, Irene, we don’t know that the people from the cavern took her. She might have fallen in the confusion after she fled, might have hit her head and been carried to safety by someone meaning to assist her. I’m sure they will search the hospitals tomorrow.” I glanced at the windows, which were slowly turning the odd lavender-gray color of half-mourning clothes. “Today.”

I suggested we change from our walking clothes, and she vanished into her bedchamber. I offered to assist her, as Nell would have, but before I could even phrase my suggestion her face froze, and she refused.

Standing alone in the main room, I wondered if I could trust her. She was not beyond going out the hotel window.

But I heard encouraging rustling noises through the door, so slipped into my alcove speedily to don my own dressing gown. I rushed back to the parlor to find Irene’s bedroom door open.

She herself stood just outside it, to my relief, obliviously as resplendent as a Byzantine empress in her green-taffeta dressing gown, frozen like a tragic heroine in an opera, staring at an envelope in her hand.

“Irene—?”

She neither moved nor answered. I approached with the caution one reserves for things like coiled snakes. Only when I reached her did she extend the envelope to me.

“It was on my pillow.”

I lifted the heavy flap, which was unsealed, expecting God knows what momentous communication . . . a ransom note for Nell, perhaps, though it was hard to suppose that her disappearance had been planned.

The envelope was empty. I looked again and found a thick dark comma of hair in one corner.

“Nell’s hair isn’t—”

“It’s Godfrey’s.”

Her tone had been oddly flat. I looked into her eyes, and that is when I saw those empty hellish depths you find in madhouses.

I can’t explain it, though I’ve tried more than once. It’s as if all of a being’s energy has been drained deep into the earth. Only the physical shell of a person remains in the here and now. To see Irene Adler Norton reduced to such a state was horrifying.

She allowed me to guide her to our round table, to sit her on one of the chairs. A ghost sat there with us. Nell’s. I had never met Godfrey Norton, so he could not haunt me, but I saw his presence in the dull gaze Irene focused on some distant point only she could see.

How long we remained like that, I cannot say.

My mind tried to churn in speculation—her friend and companion, gone in an instant last night. Her husband, far away and now brought to mind and memory by the sinister token of a lock of hair left, intimately, on a pillow.

Someone had entered our rooms while we were out to leave this mute message, to imply danger at a distance as well as at hand. Were the incidents related, or oddly coincidental? How could I know? Only Irene would have the faintest notion, and she had retreated into shock.

Daylight crept into our dark night of the soul, gradually allowing the so-familiar furnishings of the room to take visible shape around us. Every object that became clear brought with it a memory of Nell passing behind it, or touching it. I almost felt I could reach out and make the memory solid, bring her back.

But there was only Irene sitting at the table, the envelope beneath her slack hands.

A knock at the door startled me, but not her.

I stood, hesitant, but she did not move.

So I went to answer it and admitted Sherlock Holmes.

He was dressed for business in striped trousers, frock coat, and top hat. Having last seen him only hours before on the exposition grounds in workman’s clothing, I found his current attire too reminiscent of a funeral director’s.

His face was gaunt, and his eyes had fastened on Irene at the table.

“News?” I asked.

He shook his head quickly, slightly, and came fully into the room.

She looked up slowly, and that look stopped him.

He reached into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew something gold.

When Irene neither moved nor spoke, he went near, and laid the object on the table scarf near her hand.

“We found her watch in the panorama building, near the entrance way. Colonel Cody is convinced it was lost during a struggle. I believe that she managed to unfasten it herself, and let it drop as a sign. There is a bend in the shaft that could confirm either conclusion.”

He paused, as if the next words were hard to say.

“Red Tomahawk,” he resumed a bit self-consciously, as what Englishman wouldn’t, given the name, “has quite amazing tracking abilities. We were able to discern three sets of footprints besides Miss Huxleigh’s. Only the three left the panorama building, but there were . . . drag marks. Also traces of chloroform on the velvet curtain near the exit. We assume she was made unconscious and abducted, which bodes well for her immediate survival. Red, er, Tomahawk believes he can identify the hoofprints of the carriage horse, but of course a search for hired vehicles will take some time, and the carriage may have been private. I confess that I cannot imagine why Miss Huxleigh should have been abducted.”

When Irene did not speak, or even look up, he set his hat and cane on the table.