The Revenant of Thraxton Hall: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (29 page)

“Ah,” Wilde said in a despairing tone, setting the silver bell down. “Shall I take that as a
no
?”

Mrs. Kragan did not even bother to answer. But as she bustled past carrying a tray laden with breakfast dishes, Wilde arrested her by grasping her elbow. “I say, you haven’t seen Doctor Doyle this morning, have you?”

The dour face glared down at him. “I’m sure I have little knowledge of the wanderings of all our houseguests. Have you checked the doctor’s room?”

“Yes, I have. He obviously rose early. I could see by the basin that he hadn’t washed or shaved.”

“Well then, you know more than me, sir.” And with that, she clattered away with her tray full of breakfast dishes.

“How very odd,” Wilde mused.

“Vat is zat?” the Count asked.

“My friend Arthur does not miss much, and he rarely misses a meal.”

“Perhaps he went for his morning, how do you English say it, confrontational?”

Wilde allowed himself a smile and a chuckle. “Constitutional, Count. The word is constitutional, but you’re very close, and ‘confrontational’ is probably quite accurate in Arthur’s case.” He rose from the table and tossed his napkin down. “Please excuse me, I must seek out my friend.”

The Count also stood, clicked his heels, and snapped a low bow to Wilde. “I am a trained military commander. Might I assist in zis search?”

“No, that’s quite unnecessary. I’m sure Arthur’s safely ensconced in some little nook.”

*   *   *

Conan Doyle awoke from a hideous sleep, images torn from a nightmare still uncoiling in his mind.

Bewildered, he tried to stretch out a hand in the darkness, only to collide with an unseen surface. Blind, frantic gropings soon proved his worst fears as he realized, with soaring dread, where he was.

A coffin.

Fear surged through him, throbbing like a raw nerve torn loose of the flesh. His breathing quickened to gasps and then erupted into deafening screams. The sound, resonating in the cramped space, fed upon itself, cascading his terror ever higher. Barely able to lift his arms, he pounded his fists against the unyielding darkness, flailing blindly, nails raking the inside of the coffin lid. His anguished howls rose to a piercing shriek before his voice cracked and his arms fell slack and leaden.

Lying in the darkness. Panting. Heart banging. His body rilled with sweat. His situation seemed impossible
. Regain yourself, Arthur
, Conan Doyle told himself.
You must control your fear, or you are a dead man
. He forced himself to take a number of slow, deep breaths, but the air in the coffin seemed used up and spent. He felt another surge of terror and only choked it down by sheer force of will.

Matches
, he thought.
In my jacket pocket
. With difficulty, and only after shifting and twisting in the narrow coffin, was he able to snake a hand into his pocket and retrieve his box of lucifers. Given the dread nature of his situation, it was a small triumph. One-handed, he managed to draw a single match from the box and strike it against the rough wood of the coffin lid.

The match sputtered and flared, filling the coffin with light and a choking whiff of sulfur. He was lying on the bones of Mariah Thraxton, the teeth of her skull pressed into his cheek in an obscene kiss. However, seeing the tight confines of his prison was even more terrifying than the darkness. The light quickly dimmed as the match burned low. Conan Doyle inched his fingers to the very end of the matchstick, until the flame burned his thick fingers. He dropped the match with a pained howl, and the darkness fell upon him.

He closed his eyes, unwilling to fill his mind with the utter blackness of the coffin. Instead, he conjured the image of his beloved Touie, and of a pleasant summer’s day idling together in their garden, watching the children play croquet. But then the image slipped away, and instead he saw the black lake slowly creeping toward him, surging up the crypt’s stony throat, and drowning the side galleries, sweeping the coffins before it like buoyant boats. Something about the black lake held a terror beyond death. He realized what it truly was: nothingness passing forever from existence, and that he occupied just one of a fleet of coffins sailing through eternal night on a dark voyage toward a final destination:

Oblivion.

*   *   *

When Oscar Wilde reached the parlor, the door had been left open. The morning lectures had begun, and Henry Sidgwick was on his feet, addressing the Society in his soporific drone. Wilde scanned the surprisingly attentive faces long enough to assert that only the Count and Conan Doyle were not present, and then quietly withdrew before he could be seen and inveigled to stay. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, where he caught a thief in the act of stealing: a small, furry shape skittered up the stairs, an apple clutched in its hands.

The monkey aptly named
Mephistopheles
.

Wilde thundered up the stairs after it. The monkey scampered along the second floor landing and dodged through an open bedroom door. It was a room he recognized: Madame Zhozhovsky’s. Wilde quickly guessed that Conan Doyle had returned to study the crime scene a second time. Before he entered, he took the precaution of covering his nose and mouth with a lavender-scented handkerchief.

“Arthur, are you in here?” he called, stepping inside. A quick glance disappointed him. But then he noticed that the monkey was also nowhere to be seen. The wardrobe door was slightly cracked. It swung open to his push and his jaw dropped when he saw the obsidian rectangle of the secret passage. There was no question now of where Arthur had gone. Wilde couldn’t see far into the passage, but he knew that secret passageways were seldom dusted. He was wearing a black velvet jacket and black trousers—the worst possible choice. And then he looked down at his feet. He was wearing his two-guinea shoes. Exploring the passage was out of the question—he was simply not dressed for it. But then he reviewed the wardrobe he had fetched, and realized he was in a bit of a pickle. Wilde had picked out a selection of outfits based on style, color, and texture—he had not packed for the possibility of crawling through secret passages. Arthur, he reasoned, was a strong and resourceful man, excellently equipped for self-preservation. But still he dithered at the threshold, torn between fashion and friend-preservation. Yes, Conan Doyle was perhaps his best friend. But Wilde was wearing perhaps his best jacket.

He faced a vexing dilemma.

And so he stood, peering into the darkness, unmoving, his mind reefed in an inextricable knot. Finally, he shook himself, liberated a lamp from the hallway table, and plunged into the secret passage. He reasoned that, should Conan Doyle perish because he dallied, he would never feel comfortable wearing the clothes again.

Thus it was a moot point.

He paused when the secret passageway reached a junction, with one shaft leading off to his left and one to his right. With a lifelong preference for the sinister, he turned left. Within twenty feet he stumbled upon a flight of stone steps ascending steeply upward. At this point he contemplated turning back. He was a big man in a narrow space and claustrophobia was tightening a knot at the base of his skull. Nevertheless, he steeled himself, muttered, “
ad astra,”
and began the long climb.

He was puffing hard, his thighs burning by the time he reached the top step, coughing on the dust his feet were raising. “This jacket and trousers will never come clean,” he mourned aloud.

But then he saw that the way ahead was barred not by stone, but by a wooden door. Set in the top was a brass spy-hole cover. It was stuck fast, glued in place with the dust of decades, but cracked loose when he put his weight behind it. A cone of daylight streamed out, splashing across Wilde’s face.

He contemplated a moment.
Who could stand before a spy hole and not peer through? Certainly not Oscar Wilde
. He pressed his face close to the spy hole and gazed into a dimly lit space filled with mirrors. As his hand pressed against the door, it rested upon a handle mechanism, which unlatched with a metallic
ka-chunk.
The secret panel broke loose with a
crack
and swung inward, stone dust grating beneath its sill.

Feeling rather like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Oscar Wilde stepped from the darkness into the mirror maze.

CHAPTER 23

THE FAR SIDE OF THE MIRROR

The smell of formaldehyde was sharp and pungent. The room he was in had the cave-like feel of a chamber deep beneath the ground. Around him were tables covered in sheets draped over familiar shapes—corpses. Suddenly, one of the corpses sat bolt upright, and the sheet whispered to the floor. The dead man’s eyes were glassy and staring. Rictus had drawn the lips back so that he flashed the rotten stumps of a ruined smile; a knife wound across his face gaped like a second livid, red mouth.

Conan Doyle knew he was in the very worst place to be. Terror swarmed and prickled beneath his skin.

A swinging door at the far end of the room whuffed open and a small form stumped forward, tapping the way with a cane.

“Wh-who is that?” he called out.

The diminutive figure tap-tapped forward into a pool of lamplight.

Madame Zhozhovsky.

“What’s going on?” he cried, terror surging in his throat. “What’s happening? Where am I?”

The old lady put a crooked finger to her lips and shushed him. “You are in, what the Buddhists call, the Bardo.”

“Am … am I dead?”

She shook her head. “Consciousness has withdrawn from your body. You linger on the threshold. But beware—this is the realm of nightmares. Your greatest fears. A place between life and death, where the soul is tested and triumphs … or is destroyed, absorbed and imprisoned for eternity.”

More of the corpses sat upright. Sheets slid to the floor. And then tables groaned and squeaked as, one by one, the dead climbed down. Conan Doyle saw faces eaten away by syphilis and cancer, missing noses, empty sockets lonely for an eye.

“Who are these people? What is this place?”

“An illusion. An hallucination. What you fear the most, torn from a memory. Part of what you never resolved in life.”

“Yes,” Conan Doyle gasped. “I recognize parts of it: the morgue at Edinburgh hospital. I worked the night shift as a student of medicine. I was alone, and I was terrified.”

The corpses shuffled toward him, encircling him.

“This is not real,” Zhozhovsky said, “but the terror is real. You must let go of it.”

The figures crowded closer until he could taste the cloying reek of rotting meat and decay. They began to paw him with bloody stumps, hands shedding sheets of gray skin.

“Look away,” she urged. “You must look away. Paradise is there, you just have to turn your gaze a fraction.”

A ruined face gibbered inches away, rotten corpse breath washing over him.

“I can’t … can’t look away.…”

Hands began to paw at him, trying to pull him to the floor. He knew that if he lost his footing and fell he would never stand again.

“Resist!”

“I cannot! Help me!”

“You must resist. Put your mind somewhere else.”

He retched, gagging. The stench of rotting flesh was overwhelming, triggering waves of fear and revulsion. A scream coiled in his chest, gathering, and he knew if he opened his mouth, if he unleashed it, the scream would annihilate him.

“Look away!”

He pushed through the shadows in his mind, and grasped onto a memory, like a drowning man clinging to a chunk of flotsam.

Instantly, he was out of the dark place. He looked around. He was standing on the windy battlements of Edinburgh Castle, looking out over the gray city toward Arthur’s Seat, the hills to the east. A tall man towered beside him: it was his father, and he was a small boy. He recognized it as a moment from his youth, before his father’s drinking robbed him of his mind. The familiar bearded face looked down at him and smiled. “Have you come to stay with your old dad, young Arthur?”

A small woman stumped toward them. She lowered her hood: Madame Zhozhovsky.

“This, too, is an illusion. You still hover on the boundary between life and death. You must go back. Your mission on Earth is far from over.”

Conan Doyle looked at his father. He could not remember him looking so young. Joy tightened his chest. It was a happy moment. One of the happiest moments in his life. Why should he leave it?

“None of this is real. You must leave.”

“But why?”

“If you die in Thraxton Hall, your soul will be bound to it for eternity—as mine is.”

“I want to stay. I don’t want to leave—”

“Steel yourself and turn away!”

With a supreme effort, Conan Doyle tore his eyes from his father’s.

Instantly, the castle, the battlements, his father, vanished.

He was back in the crypt of Thraxton Hall. He looked down to see a coffin. At the same instant, he could see himself lying inside, eyes shut, head lolling slack, a handful of burned matches in his soot-smudged fingers.

Madame Zhozhovsky had disappeared, but he felt a presence close by. A small figure appeared at the end of the crypt: it was the little girl in the blue dress. She stood watching him mutely, tears falling as she sucked a finger, and then turned and fled.

He hesitated. She could be a trickster, a revenant. Despite his misgivings, he left the coffin and followed. He rounded a corner into another passageway of the crypt. The girl sat on the stony ground, her filthy bare legs folded under her. She looked up at him with despair on a face streaked with tears.

“Who are you, little girl? Are you Annalette Thraxton?”

Without answering, she sprang to her feet and hurried away. But at the entrance to another passage she stopped and looked back shyly, waiting for him to follow.

The girl is a portent of death
, he thought,
she could be luring my soul to destruction
. He resigned not to follow her. But then she held out a hand. It was a gesture that took him back to his own children.Something broke inside him. He stepped forward and took her hand. It was cold, tiny, and frail. She fixed his face with an importuning look and tugged. Meekly, he allowed himself to be led. She pulled him into a narrow, stony passage, and he found himself climbing a stone staircase that ascended through darkness. As they reached the top of the stairs, he saw a shining window. Light flooded in from the other side. As he reached the window, he saw that it was, in truth, the back side of a mirror. He looked through it and saw the interior of the mirror maze. And then, to his surprise, a hidden door juddered open and a dusty figure stumbled in. Oscar Wilde! He strode into the room, brushing dust from the shoulders of his jacket, and looked around.