CHAPTER 16

THE SUMMONS

Far north, beneath the rain-soaked Rutlandshire soil, the letter Amos had brought up from London was proceeding at speed down the tunnel towards Gallstaine Hall. Whitlowe the Running Boy’s feet made muffled slaps on the coconut matting as he carried his sphere of light towards the house at the end of this strange subterranean driveway.

The tunnel began to slope gently uphill again after half a mile, and he ran back above ground and into a covered turning circle which swept around beneath a glass roof held in place by cast-iron pillars. He cut across the circle and up the steps to the main doors of a great sprawling manor house built from dark ironstone.

He paused to get his breath and then knocked on the door. Almost immediately it opened and a footman regarded him with a raised eyebrow.

“Letter… for… his… Lordship,” panted the child.

The footman just nodded and stepped back.

Whitlowe trotted past him, through another set of double doors and into the entrance hall of the house.

It was a cavernous space, two storeys high, and the child shivered and sniffed as he passed through it. He was an impressionable creature and though he had only once been in a cathedral, on a market day holiday in Lincoln, he felt there was something cathedral-like in the vaulting space around him. It was, however, a cathedral peopled by ghosts, or at least it appeared to be, since every piece of furniture was covered with dust cloths. Even the large mirrors and the pictures on the walls were draped, and the chandeliers were bagged in protective muslin, so that they hung overhead like spectral hot-air balloons, half deflated and frozen in mid-fall. All the windows were shuttered, and the doors to the rooms which ranged along the hall’s outer perimeter were closed.

The child jogged up the grand sweep of the stairs two at a time, the sound of his feet on the cold marble his only companion in the emptiness of the silent house.

He slowed when he came to the landing and walked very deliberately down the long corridor ahead of him as if this final leg of his journey required a sudden brake and injection of weighty formality. In truth, the important fact that his Lordship detested the sound of Running Boys had been beaten into him from the earliest time he could remember. So he edged stiffly down the long dark corridor, sniffling his way past draped chairs and paintings, carrying his lantern ahead of him and clutching the white letter to his chest as if scared it might hop out of his grip and lose itself in the shadows closing in behind him.

This was the very part of the journey that the boy always wanted to get over quickest, and the urge to run was strong. The reason lay in the glass-fronted specimen cabinets which lined the walls from the polished floor to the high ceiling above. They were not draped in dust cloths but he never got more than a few paces into the endless corridor without wishing that they were. The first few yards of wall were innocent enough, and on the few occasions when he’d been here in daylight (his Lordship being a man of studiedly nocturnal habits) he had paused to enjoy the ranks of brightly coloured butterflies which were pinned neatly in matching cabinets. A yard or so of sombre moths with wings like mottled patches of fusty velvet followed. Then the horror began to itch beneath Whitlowe’s skin as the homely moths gave way to spiky battalions of segmented centipedes, and millipedes frozen in regimented order next to shiny-dark phalanxes of scorpions and armoured beetles, some of which were nearly as large as the primordial-looking horseshoe crabs hung like half-helmets on the wall beyond them. In his mind the boy called this section the “Black Bone Yard” to distinguish it from the truly unnerving final section of bleached skeletons which followed it.

The last length of the hall seemed narrower because the specimen cases got increasingly thicker so as to accommodate the larger fish and then the mammals whose flayed and cured skins were pinned to the backboard behind their white and yellow bones, as if the animals had flung them off as carelessly as a coat.

Whitlowe sniffed and tried hard not to focus on any of this as he passed. This was where his nightmares came from. The ordered squadrons of spiny-boned fish were separated by banks of eel skeletons ranging in size from small cutthroat eels, through garden congers to the giant morays that were just simple spinal columns with hideously fanged jaws attached to them.

The eels were bad enough, but the bare bones of the primates were what really haunted him. They went from tiny prosimians, starting out with neatly ordered eviscerations of lorises, lemurs, night monkeys and tarsiers, some no bigger than a baby rabbit, all the way through to the larger species, and then the simians proper. Monkeys were splayed in cabinets with their tails precisely curled between spatchcocked legs, and then in the narrowest section of the corridor the tailless primates began with the lesser apes, a graded platoon of skeletonised gibbons giving way in turn to the great apes. The chimpanzees and orang-utans and gorillas rose up to loom over the boy, the sightless sockets of their eyes staring down at him out of increasingly human skulls in which yellowing teeth were bared in forever-smiles of rage and pain.

There were other things beyond the last of the gorillas. Their bones were not pinned and stapled to the back of the cabinets. They were splayed out and held by rusting iron shackles to wrist and ankle. Some of the skins stretched behind them had unnatural markings which he had thought–on the only occasion he had mistakenly noticed them–looked distinctly like tattoos but were, he decided, probably just regular monkey markings made to appear like that by the curing process. Possibly all apes had marks like that under their fur because these later primate pelts were smooth and hairless, and so must have–surely–been shaved prior to being stretched out and preserved by the taxidermist.

A footman sat on a stool at the end of the corridor, and did not move until Whitlowe had walked the whole length of it and stopped in front of him, sweating more from the effort of controlling himself while walking down the ghoulish hall than the two-mile underground run which had preceded it.

“Letter,” snivelled the child, holding it out.

“Wait,” grunted the footman, and took the envelope into the doorway beside him.

Whitlowe saw the tall double doors open and close and then stood there trying to re-snort the persistent dewdrop hanging off the end of his thin nose.

Inside the double doors the footman crossed a small anteroom to another door. This door was ironbound with a lattice of metalwork, and in its centre were a wide ledge and two letterboxes, marked in and out. A tray was positioned under the out slit, standing ready to catch whatever paper was pushed through it. The footman knocked three times on the door and then slipped the letter into the second slit.

The room on the other side of the door was cavernous and almost empty. Once it had been a great ballroom. Now the walls were stripped, the shutters closed and the whole interior was gridded–walls, floor and ceiling–with a latticework of iron bands, spaced a yard apart.

At one end of the room, the wall was entirely taken up to its twenty-foot height with a bookcase. The other three walls were unembellished and stark white behind the regular criss-cross of metal caging the room.

In the centre of the great chamber was a dark oak piece of furniture, a heavy-legged thing which might once have done service as a dining table before the Restoration, but was now a huge desk covered in neat stacks of paper. At the centre of it sat a powerfully built man with granite-grey hair brushed back from a cliff-like forehead, dark eyes gleaming on either side of a savagely hooked nose of heroic proportions.

Francis, Viscount Mountfellon, was writing by candlelight, and his steel-tipped pen did not cease its rhythmic scratching as he heard the rap on the door and the sound of the envelope falling into the tray. Instead he continued to the end of the sentence before looking up. He blew on the page to dry the ink and put it beneath a leather-bound paperweight on top of a tall pile of identical pages, and only then stood, stretching the kinks out of his back and striding across to the door. He read the front of the envelope and glanced at the green wax seal, returning the skull’s smile with an equally bony grimace of his own. Then he took a knife from the tray and slit the letter open in one fast cut, as if he couldn’t wait to gut it and read the contents.

In an angular copperplate hand which appeared to have been slashed rather than written and was so peppered with random capital letters that the writer might as well have loaded them into a blunderbuss and fired them blindly at the page, this is what he read:

Mountfellon passed a hand down his face, from forehead to chin, as if scrubbing the possibility of a smile from it, but as he crossed back to his table his eyes were sparkling.

He opened a casket and took out a folded sheet of paper and a small ring box. He opened the sheet of paper to check it: it was a sketch of a key whose bow, or handle, was made to look like the flared hood of a king cobra. He refolded it and slipped it into an inner pocket of his coat. Then he opened the ring box. There was no ring inside, only another fragment of paper with a wax blob into which a lion and a unicorn seal had been pressed. He snapped the box shut and slid it into his waistcoat pocket.

He dipped the corner of Templebane’s letter into the candle and lit it, holding it until the flames consuming it reached his fingertips. Then he dropped it onto a pewter plate on the tabletop, watching until all the fire was gone and only black ash and a gobbet of twice melted sealing wax remained.

He snuffed the candle and strode to the door, unlocked it and walked out, leaving the caged room to itself.