The Devil's Mirror (23 page)

He who called himself Sarcophagus recoiled and slowly removed his bronze mask, indeed revealing the face of my erstwhile friend, Lord Jeremy. ‘Deuce take it, Boz old boy,’ he said, ‘how did you ever guess?’

‘When we first met, in the drawing room,’ I explained, ‘I was immediately struck by something strange, something decidedly unique about you, but at that time I was not able to ascertain the precise source of my feeling. Only now, in my last moments, did I realise what it was, and is. Your cravat, Jeremy. It is the school tie of our mutual alma mater, dear old Dampley.’

‘Dashed careless of me,’ he said. ‘Once a Dampley boy, always a Dampley boy, wot? But enough of that—into the box with you, Boz.’

I played my trump card. ‘Yes, Jeremy—as you rightly say, once a Dampley boy, always a Dampley boy. I do not cravenly plead for my life, old schoolmate; I do not call upon the shades of your sainted parents; I do not bring up the dignity and duties of your earldom; no—I merely remind you of Dampley, and of the pristine precepts we learned there in those hallowed halls.’ (He was, I noted, beginning to weaken—his chin trembled and a tear glistened in his eye.) ‘The tenets of fair play that were ingrained upon us on those cricket fields,’ I continued, ‘the codes of honour and of chivalry we came to cherish...’

Jeremy’s head now dangled in shame upon his chest, but still I did not stop. ‘Jeremy,’ I said, ‘before I die, will you join me in one last chorus of the dear old Dampley song?’ I began singing, to the familiar tune of
Gaudeamus Igitur
...

Hail the ivy on your mils
,

Hail the ivy in your halls
...

With fervent (albeit quavering) voice, Jeremy took up the melody:

On your floors and on your stairs
,

In your desks and on your chairs
...

Together, we harmonised:

From your ceilings ’tis suspended
,

With your cobwebs gently blended
...

And even Gwendolyn joined us in the closing bars:

You indeed are ivy’d aaa-amp-ly.

Nonetheless, we love you, Daaa-amp-ley!

The beloved anthem over, Jeremy was quite dissolved in remorse. ‘How fortunate for me, Boz,’ he said, ‘that you were here to act as remembrancer of our Dampley heritage. I was about to commit a hideous folly, but these memories have stayed my hand. You shall not die, good Boz!’ Then, turning to the lady, he said, ‘Farewell, fair Gwen! It is
you
who must perish for the sake of the insurance. You carry quite a sizeable policy, too, you’ll recall, and you couldn’t really ask me to kill a Dampley boy, now could you?’

As he pushed the protesting lady towards the yawning sarcophagus, I intervened, struck him forcibly, freed her from his grasp, and securely locked him within those deadly confines. ‘Come, Gwendolyn,’ I said to her, ‘let us leave this place, for at long last you are mine!’

‘Then you are not vexed that I plotted against you?’

‘I should be,’ I admitted, ‘but certain things urge me to overlook that flaw in your character. For instance, your large, round, lovely orbs—’

‘Oh, Bosley, do you really think I have pretty eyes?’

‘No, no, dear Gwen, not
those
orbs! I meant your—’

As before, she slapped me, but I quickly recovered, saying, ‘Then, too, there’s the insurance to think about. With Jeremy safely out of the way, you stand to grab off quite a boodle, eh? Several hundred thousand quid, I daresay.’ Embracing her, I added, ‘We can honeymoon at Dampley.’

Later, as we reverently packed Jeremy’s cadaver in ice and stowed it aboard the coach-and-four, I said, ‘You know, Gwen old girl, I am still a jot mystified about certain things. Such as: why did Jeremy talk all that tommyrot about vampires and werewolves and mummies? And why did he trouble to import me all the way from London, when surely there is a surfeit of potential corpses here? And who was that poor chap I saw stretched on the rack as I entered? And what year is this? And what, if I may make so bold, is my last name?’

‘Dear Bosley,’ she trilled with a pewter peal of laughter as we climbed up behind the horses, ‘these things will doubtless be disclosed in the thrilling pages of
Satyriasis, Sacrilegious, Sanctimonious
, and other tales in this author’s inexhaustible series of neo-Gothic novellas.’

‘By George and Merry England,’ I said as I cracked Jeremy’s black whiplash over the stalwart steeds, ‘I can hardly wait!’

Version History

Version #:
v3.0

Sigil Version Used:
0.7.1

Original format:
ePub

Date created:
March 29, 2013

Last edited:
March 29, 2013

Correction History:

Version History Framework for this book:

v0.0/UC
==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.

v1.0
==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. ~35 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.

v2.0
==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.

v3.0
==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.

v4.0
==> I've done a complete readthrough of the book, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.

Some additional notes:

vX.1-9
==> within my own framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".

Correcting my ebooks
— Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.