The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus (69 page)

             
Two girls this time, the older a hardened street-wise moll, course and foul-mouthed. But the younger—no more than sixteen, slender, with pale, unblemished skin and a fair, frightened face. A delicate flower to find among the street weeds with whom they usually practiced their arts. Where did the Master Incarnate find such a girl? Better, he realized, not to wonder. And, in truth, Chauvelin was really not interested in the girl's antecedents. It was her slender, unmarked body, her youth, her innocence, and her capacity for terror that he found so supernaturally exciting. There is a special quality in tortured innocence—a pain-heightened wide-eyed terror: fear mingled with disbelief, and the constant hope of surcease—that is highly valued by the connoisseur.

             
The rose-trimmed ebony brougham coursed through the deserted streets of the West End of London, its steel-shod wheels pounding an allegro along the pavement. Chauvelin stretched his plump body across the wide cushioned seat and idly watched the gaslights pass in orderly procession outside the coach window, which was rolled up against the predawn chill. For all that life was tedious and dull, he mused, there were brief moments that blazed out with a hellish fire.

             
He sometimes thought that at a certain point in the intricate, prolonged ceremonies of this game of games, the slaves became truly aware. He could see it in their eyes: he could watch the comprehension grow with the careful repetition of pain, the measured torment, until it surpassed the fear, and transcended the weak flesh. So it had been with this girl; knowledge had grown under the screams. The knowledge that was greater than wisdom: that all was hopeless and that there was no escape; that life had no more meaning than death, and that pain—physical pain—endless pain—sensual overwhelming pain—was the closest one could come to reality. They all said they were grateful, of course; he made them say it. It was one of the rules. Humble appreciation for the pain that gave them meaning and assured them that they were still alive.

             
The brougham turned off Old London Road onto Bentham Way, and the coachman slowed up as they approached the gate to Infant Court, the small, private circle on which fronted three residences: that of a duke, another of an exiled queen, and his own.

             
Chauvelin was roused sufficiently from his reverie by the brougham's slowing and stopping before the gate to watch as two guards—in the comic-opera uniforms of the deposed queen's household troops—opened the gate and waved the coach through. He chuckled as they closed the gate behind him. Guarded like royalty, he was. Buttoning his waistcoat and the top button of his jacket, he allowed the coachman to swing down and open the brougham's door for him and then stepped gingerly out and waddled across to his own front door. The coachman,
wise in the ways of his master, clambered back up to the driver's seat and swung the brougham away without pausing for further instructions. Chauvelin expected his servants to behave like automata, without prompting, without recognition, without gratitude. When he stretched his hand out for his evening snifter of brandy, it had best be there. How it arrived there was not his concern.

             
The butler was neither required nor expected to man the front door after midnight; Chauvelin trusted no man's discretion save his own. He let himself in with his own two keys, lit a taper with a wooden safety match, and thumped his way up the broad staircase to his bedroom.

             
His bedroom was a rectangular room, much longer than it was wide. The ancestral four-post canopied bed crouched at the far end, away from the windows. Across from the door were three matched chiffoniers and a specially built triple-size wardrobe closet. Desmond
C
hauvelin did not believe in being far from his extensive collection of costumes and accouterments. Whatever one does, one must be correctly garbed for the occasion; and one might be called upon to do the strangest things on the shortest notice.

             
To the left of the door, by the large casement windows, stood his dressing table; and it was to this that he repaired, casting his garments to the right and left as he entered the bedroom. He paused only to light the gas mantle on the wall and the two beeswax candles in simple porcelain holders on the dressing table. The plum velvet jacket he hung on a drawer handle, the gold brocade waistcoat he draped over the back of a chair, the cravat he suspended from a brass hook on the gas fixture. The night's exertions had left Chauvelin happy. When he was depressed he was excessively neat.

             
He investigated his face in the large looking glass on the dressing table. He had heard it said that the health of the body and the soundness of the spirit could be determined by examining the eyes. Opening his eyelids wide, he stared through the glass at himself. The pupils seemed to have an unnatural luster, he thought, suggestive more of putrefaction than of health. He shook his head as if to clear it of the unnatural thought. It must be an effect of the candlelight; or the lateness of the hour. He examined his cheeks. They seemed red and puffy to him, and he could make out the tiny blue threads of broken veins beneath the skin. He pushed away from the mirror. I
lead an unhealthy life,
he thought. The idea seemed to amuse him.

             
What was that? A motion in the mirror? Something behind him, some great black object, flickered across his field of view in the shadowy light of the gas lamp.

             
There was someone in the room with him. He had not heard the door open or close, but nonetheless—

             
Chauvelin did not believe in ghosts, but it was with an almost supernatural dread that he leaped to his feet and turned to face the unknown intruder. He clutched at the hardbacked chair he had been sitting in and raised it chest-high, thrusting the chair legs aggressively out in front of him, examining the room through the cane bottom.

             
At first he thought he had been mistaken, so hard was the man to see, but after a few seconds the man's actions made him visible. It was not one of his servants, Chauvelin realized, but a tall, bulking man, he had never seen before, dressed in what seemed to be evening clothes covered by a full black cape that swirled in a full circle around him, his face shrouded beneath a wide-brimmed hat of a strange design. The man appeared to be going through the pockets of Chauvelin's discarded jacket. It was incredible! Right here in Chauvelin's own bedroom, with Chauvelin fifteen feet away waving a heavy chair at him!

             
"Who are you?" Chauvelin demanded, noting with some pride the calmness of his voice. "How did you get in here? And what in the name of all that's holy do you think you are doing?"

             
The man cast the jacket aside with a grunt of annoyance, and began deftly going through the pockets of the waistcoat. The presence of Desmond Chauvelin, who was advancing slowly toward him with the wooden chair held waist-high, did not seem to deter him in the slightest.

             
It was certainly a lunatic, Chauvelin decided, escaped from some local asylum. Any burglar would have run at his presence, and anyone with designs on his person would not pause to rifle his jacket pockets. Chauvelin debated calling for assistance. It seemed a good plan, except for the fact that almost certainly nobody would hear him. If he could get past the man to his bed, he could use the bellpull. There was nobody presently in the butler's pantry to hear the
ting
of the bell, but in four and a half hours, when the butler came downstairs to start his day he would see the little telltale flag on the call board and come to investigate.

             
The man dropped the waistcoat and for the first time turned to Chauvelin. "Where is it?" he asked, in the measured, reasonable tone of one who sees nothing unusual about his question. It might have been "What is the time?" or "Unreasonably chilly, isn't it?" from an acquaintance at the track. But it wasn't. It was a cloaked stranger, in his bedroom at four o'clock in the morning.

             
"Where is it?" the man repeated.

             
"What?" Chauvelin asked. "Look, my man." He took two steps forward and prodded at the apparition with his chair. "I don't know how you got in here, or what it is you think you're doing, but I am not amused. Come to think of it, how did you get in here, anyway?"

             
The man knocked the chair aside as a thing of no consequence and grabbed Chauvelin by the shirtfront with his left hand. "The bauble," he said, forcing Chauvelin to his knees. "Where do you keep it?"

             
Chauvelin's bowels knotted with fear. He felt a great desire to be calm, to be reasonable, to keep the conversation with his uninvited guest on a friendly level. "Bauble?" he asked. "What's mine is yours, I assure you. You have but to ask. What bauble? I don't go in for baubles. I have an extensive collection of cravats—"

             
"The bauble," the man repeated. "The device, the signet, the devil's sign."

             
"Devil's—" A strange look crossed the face of Desmond Chauvelin; a look of comprehension, and of fear. Of its own volition his right hand reached down and touched the fob pocket sewn into the top of his trouser waistband.

             
"So!" the man said. Slapping Chauvelin's hand aside, he reached into the small pocket and pulled out a circular gold locket designed like a miniature pocket watch. He flipped open the lid and looked inside, and the devil, arms akimbo, stared back at him. Spaced evenly around the outside of the engraving, circling and confining the devil, were the capital letters
D
C
L
X
V
I.

             
"Oh, that bauble," Chauvelin said.

             
The man picked Chauvelin up and threw him across the room. Chauvelin hit the floor and slid and tumbled, coming up hard against the high oaken sides of the four-poster bed. He felt something wrench and snap inside of him, and an intense pain centered itself on the left side of his chest. He did not lose consciousness, but the bubble of reason popped inside his brain and he began to whimper like a frightened baby.

             
There was, deep inside Chauvelin, a point of awareness, an observer that remained detached, and quizzical, and faintly amused, while his body retched with fear and curled into a tight little ball on the floor. That was interesting; he had always surmised that it would be so.

             
"I am going to kill you," the dark man said, striding across the room. "Don't vomit; none of the others have vomited."

             
Chauvelin raised his right arm defensively before his face.

             
From somewhere the tall dark man produced a cane. He looked down at Chauvelin almost compassionately. "I must do this, you understand," he said. "I am the wind."

             
Chauvelin gagged and puked all over his white shirtfront.

             
The tall man twisted the cane and pulled out a slim knife with a razor-sharp nine-inch blade. "The wind," he said. He bent over Chauvelin.

Laws were made to be broken.

— Christopher North

             
For the past five days, since the evening of his return from the observatory, Professor Moriarty had remained in his room. Surrounded by a great pile of books, mostly on loan from one of the libraries of the British Museum, he spent each day wrapped in his blue dressing gown, stretched out on his bed reading, or pacing back and forth across the small rectangle of floor between the bed and the dressing table, drinking tea, and smoking a particularly acrid brand of Turkish cigarettes.

             
"It is the cigarettes I object to mostly," Mrs. H told Barnett over breakfast the next Friday. "It will take months to get the smell out of the drapes and bed curtains. And when he is not smoking the wretched things himself, he cannot abide the smell."

             
"I find these periodic retreats of the professor's to be very trying," Barnett said. "This is the fifth time in the two years I've been here that he has disappeared into his bedroom for an extended period, and it always happens at the most awkward times. Everything has to grind to a halt around here while Moriarty takes to his bed and reads about aardvarks."