The Uncanny, page 10
“You know, it’s funny,” he murmured, “this woman here, this one trying to get out—she looks kind of like you, Harper. Harper …?”
To his surprise, when he looked again, she had vanished. Only Jorge Swade was there, jogging his oily hair as he bounced up and down inside his red sports jacket.
“If you would … Over here, if you could … this way …” he said, gesturing fitfully towards the recess in the stone wall.
Squinting against the firelight, shielding his face from the heat of the torch with an upraised hand, Storm moved in that direction. And there was his queer old friend. Leaning on her stick in the alcove, in its deep shadow. Waiting for him by the lectern there. With a ceremonial flourish, she motioned to the lectern’s slanted surface. There lay a large, thin volume with a brown leather cover. Storm drew nearer. Harper flipped the cover open so that it fell against the lectern with a whap.
“This is the other reason I brought you here,” she said. “Tolle, lege, young Richard.” And when he gawped at her clueless, she translated: “Take up, dear boy, and read.”
She and Jorge stepped away to murmur together. Storm approached the book, stood over it. Gripped the lectern by its edges like a preacher. Bowed his head over the open page. He traced the illegible script through the darkness, made out that it was in some foreign language. Found the translation printed more neatly beside it. And read:
Anna had lain in the moldering family vault this long year past, and her bereaved husband Conrad would not be consoled …
2
There was a man standing on the corner outside The Sign of the Crane, and Harper didn’t like the look of him one bit. Big he was, and hunch-shouldered. With piggy eyes under a brutally cut forelock of tawny hair. Plus he had a scar on one side of his mouth that gave him a permanent sneer. He hung back, out of the glare of the streetlight. Nursed his cigarette in his cupped hand to hide the glow. It was almost nine-thirty now, so he’d been standing there like that for more than twenty minutes. Ever since Harper and Storm had entered the pub, in fact.
Harper remained at the window, eyed him. Gnawed on her pipestem. Stroked the jaw of the meerschaum skull with her tobacco-blackened thumb. She would not have thought so jaded, so scarred a heart as hers still capable of such flutterings, such mixed emotions. But there they were. Fear. Weariness: she felt much older than she was. And excitement too. She had to confess it. Adrenaline tuning her nerves, making her pulse tympanic. Was it possible, after all the blind alleyways, after a quarter-century of faint clues and faded trails—could it really be possible that the hunt was finally beginning in earnest, that she had smoked her adversary out at last?
If so, then Bernard was right—it was Storm who somehow had made it happen. His coming here. Reading that ghost story. Somehow that was what set the whole thing into motion. And this also was a burden to her, a weight of dread and sadness.
She adjusted her vision. The man outside on the streetcorner blurred. Storm, his image reflected on the window, came into focus.
He was sitting at a small, round table behind her. Chin down. His left hand wrapped round a glass of Diet Coke. His right hand massaging his left shoulder. He didn’t know she was looking at him and was staring into the fizzy brown surface of his drink with all the grief in his grief-stricken eyes plain to see. Around him, the dark wood tones of the tavern faded into obscurity. Only the brass rail of the bar was gleaming. A couple of older fellows stood propped against it, pints in hand, talking at times, but mostly staring into the gas fire, which burned high, blue and orange, in the large grate. Except for a video slot machine—sparkling with blithe idiocy in a corner, unused—the place was dim, the yellow lanterns on the wall kept low. The atmosphere was mellow, as usual, quiet.
After a while, Storm stirred where he sat. “All right,” he said slowly. “Run this by me again.”
Harper had to dredge herself out of her brown study. She answered with a sigh. Not turning. Keeping watch on the scarred man outside as he smoked in the shadows. “ ‘The Alchemist’s Castle,’ ” she said. “It was published anonymously, in German, sometime around 1798, about a hundred years before the English story ‘Black Annie.’ When I raised the issue of a possible link between ‘Black Annie’ and the Belham Abbey ghost, Jorge was reminded of the German work. He located the ‘Alchemist’ manuscript in a private collection in Dresden. In Dresden, mind. The collector attributed the work to one Hans Baumgarten, who was a member of the artistic circle that included Rhinehart. Baumgarten wrote the story in Dresden, shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century. At the same time and place, in other words, at which Rhinehart painted the triptych of which The Magi is the first panel.”
“Right. Okay.” Storm went on kneading his arm, working his way down from shoulder to elbow. “And all this is stupendously incredible and fantastic because ‘The Alchemist’s Castle’ and The Magi have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”
“Precisely,” said Harper Albright. “The Magi—with its cowled figures before a wedge of wall—is reminiscent of ‘Black Annie.’ But ‘Black Annie’—with its foully murdered child and its reiterated sound—reminds us of ‘The Alchemist’s Castle.’ A possible inference is that all three works had a common, earlier source.”
“You mean the painting I saw at the auction house with Sophia and the story of Black Annie might actually be based on the same thing.”
“So a reading of ‘The Alchemist’s Castle’ would suggest.”
Storm thought this over, massaging his arm. “So then I was right—when I saw the painting and said it looked like Black Annie, I was right. And all that stuff Sophia was saying about German Romantics and English ghost stories was—”
“Interesting,” said Harper, “but not to the immediate point.”
“I’ll be damned,” Storm said softly. “So what you’re saying, you think maybe Sophia was trying to throw me off the trail? But why would she do that?” And then he answered his own question at once: “Because maybe ‘Black Annie’ and the painting and ‘The Alchemist’s Castle’ are all somehow related to the ghost out at Sophia’s house. And maybe that’s why Sophia dropped her glass when I read the story.”
“Ah,” said Harper.
“All of which is supposed to have something to do with this cult guy, this Saint Iago.”
“I must say your grasp of the implications is admirable.”
“My grasp of the … Hey, listen, I love it when you talk like that,” said Storm with a forlorn laugh. “Only what I’m grasping here is that you think Sophia’s in trouble with a dead cult leader who may never have existed and somebody in a cowl going tick-tick who’s over two hundred years old.”
“Well, it’s a ghost you were after,” Harper Albright said grimly. “It was a ghost you came here to find.” And now she did turn, she did face him. Left the thug on the corner to fend for himself, left her fear and excitement in abeyance, and faced him squarely.
Storm had dropped back against his seat, had stopped nursing his arm. He had started to spread his hands in a comical gesture of confusion. But when their eyes met, when he saw what Harper was thinking, his hands sank down again, and he dropped the comedy.
“Hey,” he said.
“You’re dying, aren’t you, young Richard?” asked Harper Albright.
She felt her spirit grow heavy, felt it fall heavily inside her, as the air rushed out of him, as his hands came to rest on the tabletop and he sagged towards them. “Yeah, pilgrim, yeah,” he told her. “It sure looks thataway.”
Harper had left her dragon stick leaning in a corner by the fireplace. So she had to hold on to the back of a nearby chair. The old, weary weight of pity again. She had felt it often in her life.
“And this is, I presume, a certainty?” she asked gruffly.
“Yup.” Storm winked at her. “It’s that old devil brain. Being eaten away apparently. Listen, in my business, it isn’t even a liability.”
“There’s nothing they can do.”
He snorted into his Diet Coke. Flicked his wrist and tossed the drink down. Then he set the glass on the table with a bang. “Yeah, well, see, that’s the whole thing. That’s the whole thing right there. There isn’t—but that wasn’t gonna stop them. At first, when they found it, they sort of blurted the whole thing out. The tumor’s too deep, they said. Too involved with vital functions. Blah, blah, blah, this and that. Then—you could see it—their fingers started itching for the scalpel. ‘Well, we could do an exploratory. We have got a new technique. We might just run a tube into your head and pump the radioactive stuff right on in there.’ It wasn’t gonna stop me dying, see. They just wanted to make sure I’d be as miserable as possible before I went.”
Harper did not want to trouble him with her tears. But the smile at the side of his mouth, the hard glint of humor in his eyes, the courage … She turned away from him, back to the window. She glared at the scarfed thug on the corner. She felt only a simmering anger for him now.
“So I ran away,” Storm said. “They wouldn’t stop, you know. They were like Satan or something. Tempting me. A small chance of remission. Good results in a test in Baltimore. I was afraid I would lose my nerve, seize the chance—and then they’d have me, they’d butcher me for no reason, ruin the rest of my life. So I ran away. Came here. I figured, what the hell. I wouldn’t have even known I had it if I hadn’t cracked my head one night. Had to have a CAT scan, and that showed something. Then they did this magnetic image thing. I wouldn’t even have known, if it wasn’t for that. Doctors said I might go another six months to a year without even having any symptoms …”
Here his voice trailed off in a manner that squeezed Harper’s heart. He touched his arm once more, lightly, and she understood that the symptoms were already upon him. Before she could say anything, though, she heard his chair scrape, saw his reflection on the window as he stood up.
“Anyway, now you see the problem. With Sophia, I mean.”
Quickly, Harper rounded on him again. Frowned at him. “I do not. If I’m right, and she needs help … if I’m right and she’s shown a certain unconscious inclination to confide in you as she’s never been known to confide in anyone … then I refuse to see the problem. A man and woman should be able to help one another without its becoming … overly complicated.”
He laughed, working his trench coat off the back of his chair. “They should be, sweetheart, no question,” he said. “But they’re not. And even if they were, I wouldn’t be, not with her. I’m like a tinderbox around her. It’s not just her looks, either. I don’t know what it is. Every time I see her. I want to kill a rhinoceros for her, or build a castle or something—and then make love to her till the universe turns to clay.” Shaking his head, he slid the coat on. Made an ironical expression. Standing there, hands in his pockets. Tall, fit, youthful, lively. It was hard for Harper to tolerate the sight. “Great timing, huh?” he said.
He walked towards the double doors, towards her. Stopped to stand beside her, with his hand resting lightly on one door’s brass push-plate.
“Hey—don’t look at me like that,” he told her. “What can I do?”
“That’s not for me to say,” Harper answered slowly. “I can only tell you that the young woman seems to me to be in trouble. Judging by the fervor with which she denied it, I would guess it does have something to do with The Magi. Perhaps the auction represents some sort of crisis point—”
“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he said. He closed his eyes a moment, held a hand up at her. “Don’t. I mean, if you’re right, and she took to me for some reason, and she wants my help—and if, like you say, she’s—fragile, you know, in the emotions department, then it’s even worse, Harper. Best-case scenario: I break her heart. So please. All right? I haven’t been a saint. I want to go out clean.”
And then he did go out—fled from her, practically, out into the winter’s night. And she watched him from the window, sad and afraid.
A terrible moment followed. As Harper looked on. As Storm stepped into the middle of the narrow street, glancing this way and that for a cab. The thug on the corner tossed his latest cigarette into the gutter. Straightened. Two other hulking figures detached themselves from the surrounding darkness and began to close in on Storm. Harper’s entire body went rigid. Storm, finding the street empty, had begun to move away to the corner. The scarred thug gave a look to his two massive henchmen, a signal with his eyes.
And they withdrew. As Storm strolled casually past them, they dropped back into the shadows.
Harper relaxed. Nodded to herself. That was as she thought it would be, as she thought it should be too. No matter what mystic role Storm’s arrival had played—no matter what role he himself would play—in the events to come, this was not his hunt, not his battle. It was hers.
And she was the one they were after.
3
The siege wore on.
The scarred thug left the corner for a while, but was replaced by one of his mates. A real Frankenstein’s monster, this one—cinderblock head and gorilla arms and all. Harper sensed there were still others, standing by, out of sight. She was going to need reinforcements.
She phoned Bernard—twice—from the pay phone at the far end of the bar. He wasn’t in, of course. She could hardly have expected him. He lived above the office, in her house right across the street, but he seldom returned there before dawn. His nights, she understood, were spent in the sort of prowling debaucheries she only wished were beyond her wildest imagination. Just in case he should call in, as he sometimes did, she tried to leave a message on his private machine. It being a machine, however, and she being herself, she wasn’t quite sure she had succeeded.
So she retired to the fireplace. Sat at a table. Nursed a warm pint of Guinness. Fitfully smoked her pipe, relit it nervously, lay it steaming on the tabletop beside her Borsalino. And prayed that help would somehow arrive.
Shortly before eleven, the two old gentlemen at the bar packed it in and headed for home. Harper was left alone with the barkeep. Robert. A likely lad, sinewy in his paisley shirt, with stand-up hair the color of wheat and a pendulous jade earring in one lobe. But she could no more put him at risk than she could Storm. She was out of options. She finally accepted the fact that she had to call the police.
“Phone’s out,” Robert told her. She had already picked it up, had already tasted the acid gout of fear at the sound of silence down the line. “Went down about twenty minutes ago.”
“You have a house phone,” she said.
“That one’s out too. Bizarre, isn’t it?” He shrugged one shoulder, flipped through the pages of a magazine. “There’s another pay phone down on the next corner, you could try that.”
“No,” said Harper. “That’s all right.”
“Last call, by the way,” said Robert. “We close in ten minutes.”
“I’ll just finish my pint,” she said.
She waddled back to the window. Glanced out. The scarred man had taken up his post again. Was raising his overturned hand to his lips, drawing smoke from the hidden cigarette. He’d grown bold now. He was staring directly at her. His sneer widened when he saw her there.
She showed him her back and hobbled once more to her place by the fire.
The last minutes before closing ticked away. She sat over her stout and brooded. Perhaps it had been a mistake to let Storm leave her here. He would have gladly stayed if she had asked him. He would have wanted to. And he had the courage for it, she had seen that.
But no. This was not his business, not this part. Despite all his talk about ghosts and the paranormal, he was a child of the century. Its prejudices were his, more than he knew. Psychology. Science. Materialism. He could understand only with the understanding of his age. No. It would have been wrong—it would have been sinful under the circumstances of his illness—for her to enlist him against an enemy he could not possibly comprehend. The burden of the Uncanny was hers.
There are few who work the work of wonder. She was one. For others, there could be skepticism or belief; there could be credos, sciences, religions; theories or philosophies; politics; a point of view. For her, there was only ever this slow, steady tramp into the dark, and the narrative trail it left behind. If this should be the end for her—if help did not arrive, if the barkeep should call time and send her out into the street alone—then she would go in the fullness of unknowing. And so she would go whenever time was called. Because unknowing was her nature, the first rule of her game. The burden of the Uncanny was hers.
In the event, however, just as the clock struck eleven, Bernard wafted in. Heavy-lidded, foggy-eyed, he stepped, as if by magic, out of the gent’s lavatory. Robert the barkeep started. But Bernard only waggled his fingers at him as his willowy form drifted past like smoke.
He settled into the seat across from Harper. Harper sniffed at him.
“Hmph,” she said, so that her Guinness rippled.“You reek of your perversities.” She really had been frightened, and her heart was hammering now. “Also you’re drunk—or whatever it is you get.”
He made a listless gesture of indifference. Sat slumped in his black windbreaker and jeans with his legs splayed under the table, his trainers towards the flames. His shaven head shone in the firelight. “Also, I’m here—which you should be bloody thankful for,” he said. “How many of them are there outside—twenty-seven?”
“Three that I’ve seen so far.”
“I had to slither through the toilet window like a snake. No offense, darling, but in your case, I don’t think so. What were you planning to do, handbag your way home?”
“All right, all right, I’m glad to see you.” Her heartbeat was slowing down again. “If nothing else, I’m gratified by this evidence of our mystic nexus. You seem somehow to have sensed my troubles telepathically …”
