Doyle After Death (21 page)

He hid back there, in the shadows under the tree trunk, clutching at the roots like a man in a jail cell grabbing at the bars. “Stay away from me! I don't know where she is! Don't let him do it to me again!”

“You don't know where Touie Doyle is, Moore?” I asked. Maybe he was off balance enough to tell what he knew.

“I don't know! I just saw her for a second, when the glow things went past her! I didn't see who she was! She was going toward the mansion! Get away from here! You can tell your masters that I'll go underground now, and they won't be able to reach me!”

Moore retreated back into the shadows. I could barely see him back there.

“Okay, Bull,” I said. “I'll tell them that.”

Doyle was just climbing down the ladder, dropping to the ground by the tree trunk. “Bloody fool thinks he's Peter Pan. Barrie would be horrified. He need not have panicked so.”

“Did you threaten to drub him too?”

“No. I threatened to beat him black and blue.”

“You okay?”

“Scarcely injured at all. A scrape here and there. Come along if you're coming. I . . .”

He squinted into the darkness—­then smiled.

“What is it?” I asked. I peered off in that same direction, and then I saw it.

At first I thought it must be reflected light from a cloud of forgetters. It was about forty yards off, and hovering in the air between two trees, perhaps fifty feet over the water. But then I saw clearly it was all one creature, one
thing,
fluctuating in space. I thought at first it must be the afterworld's aurora borealis—­but it was too close, too distinctly glowing there, between the trees. It was like an aurora, and then again it was almost like a giant luminescent jellyfish, reticulating, fluttering in place—­reflected clearly in the water down below. “Is that . . . some kinda swamp animal? Or . . . a fox fire kind of thing?”

“No sir. That is not. That is a phenomenon we see rarely. I've seen it once before. But likely this isn't the same one. Look into it, as much as you can, from here. Clear your mind and really look.”

I looked . . . and its shape seemed to alter, as if my looking gave it shape. It became a human being, a nude young male made of translucent white glow, just floating there, looking at us, with a backdrop of aurora. It was as if the aurora were . . . wings.

And it seemed to me the creature was looking directly at me. “Doyle! Is that an angel?”

Doyle gave out a pleased chuckle. “Closest thing you'll likely ever see to one! That is a human being who has evolved, to vibrate harmoniously with a higher level: the ‘solar' level. They may or may not be around us, here, but if they are, it is quite a different place to them. They don't interfere with us, ah—­so far as I know. They seem to appear as an omen.”

I could feel something in the air—­a benevolence. Not quite a benediction. It was too objective for that. I felt its awareness of us, and I felt its inherent compassion. “Is it . . . a good omen?”

He made an inarticulate murmur in his throat as he considered.
“
It's a
significant
omen. Tell me—­does it look as if he's looking right at you?”

“Yes. It does, to me. Maybe it's an illusion.”

“No, I do not believe so. It looks to me as if he's looking at you.”

“Is he . . . Summoning?”

“That's not how it happens.”

“Then why?”

“It's just that . . . something significant has happened. You made a significant choice, Fogg. I don't know what that choice was. But it's good.” He fell silent for a moment, gazing at the apparition. Then burst out with a monosyllabic sound of disappointment, “Oh!”

The evolved spirit was fading into its aurora . . . which was backing away. It seemed to flick away . . . into everything at once. The world seemed lightning-­flash lit, for a split second, by its vanishing.

Then it was gone. I heard birds murmur sadly, somewhere. “
Gone for now . . . gone for now . . .”

Doyle shook his head. “That was extraordinary. We just see it so rarely. Only once before did I . . . ah well. We must go about our business. We have a task—­there's always a task, Fogg. Always. Small or large it may be. But always a task.”

He seemed to shake himself a trifle, then lunged back along the trail.

And I followed. On the way Doyle picked up his lantern, unshuttering it.

We hustled on and he didn't speak again for ten minutes. Suddenly he picked up his pace as he said, “You heard what Moore said, about Touie? Consider the implications, Fogg. We must be off! We must get to Merchant's private castle with all possible speed.”

“Great.” I was nervous about approaching the mansion, especially at night. “The mansion. Just . . . great.”
Higgs.
I didn't trust Higgs. Maybe this time it'd be a punji pit with sharpened stakes.

“Just great,” said a voice from the darkness. “Dandy!”

Doyle and I skidded to a stop and exchanged glances. “That's what I heard, earlier,” I whispered. I wondered for a moment if it could be something from the aurora creature we'd seen. But no. That being had been clearly benevolent. I could feel it.

This thing felt just the opposite. I felt its malignance.

“Oh yes, he heard it earlier,” said the voice from the darkness. As if my whispering didn't matter at all—­it had heard me anyway.

Doyle nodded for me to go on ahead—­I figured he was going to let the thing dog me, let me lead it away as he tried to sneak up on it. He turned and stepped to the edge of the trail, leaning back a little as if preparing to wade into the water.

I grabbed his arm and held him back, shaking my head. “Not this time, Doyle,” I said. “I'm going myself.”

Then, carrying my lantern, I turned, took a short run, and leapt off the trail feetfirst into the water.

It was waist deep here, warm and fragrant, but the mud was slippery and I barely managed to keep upright. I nearly dumped the lantern into the water.

I got myself steadied and heard Doyle call to me from behind, but I was listening to the thing's sloshing, its urgent movement off in the woods. It gave me a direction to go in.

I set off in pursuit, wading fast as I could.

I felt frogs, disturbed by my feet as they slipped along my crotch, up between my legs. It was altogether too intimate a contact from nature.

I kept sloshing on.

This is stupid,
I thought, as I got farther and farther from the trail.
Probably just one of those talking ringtail things.

But what if it wasn't? And what if it was trying to lure me off into the swamp? Who knew what was out there? How far did the swamp go on? Fifty miles? For all I knew it could go on for hundreds of miles.

I saw the thing then—­its movement seemed to activate the faint phosphorescence in the water, making glowing rings as it sloshed along, about forty yards ahead of me. Its movements seemed especially clumsy. Was it luring me on, that way?

It turned, then, and looked back at me—­and there was another light, two glows where its eyes should be, in the outline of a man. It stared at me. I needed an act of will to come moving toward it. But I kept going.

The mocking thing made a low, scornful, sniggering sound.

Then it turned away, took several especially big steps. I followed, making myself move as fast as I could without slipping or dropping the lantern.

I pursued it for a few minutes, splashing on, not able to get along rapidly—­but I could see I was closing the distance.

Then the mocking thing tripped in the slippery mud, and fell with a splash.

There was a hissing sound; I saw lights, blurred by the water, as it looked around . . .

I kept going, and suddenly the mocking thing was there, in front of me. I almost ran into it.

It was half sunken in the water, stretched out just a few steps from a raised trail. A little steam rose from the surface of the pool above it.

“Doyle!” I shouted, waving the lantern. “There's a trail here!”

I heard him call back to me, some sort of assent.

In the lantern's glow, the remains of the mocking thing seemed to be slowly sinking to the mud. It was a partly formed man-­shape. A coarse, dark, badly textured shape . . .

I held my lantern over it in my right hand, reached down and pulled the thing up with the other—­the dark shape came easily. It seemed to have lost a lot of its weight. It was wiry under my fingers.

I started climbing up onto the trail, slipping back once, then dug in and lurched upward. The water seemed reluctant to release me, but then I was up, dragging the man shape up onto the trail. I laid it down and turned it over, just as Doyle's lantern light came floating along toward me. It took a moment for me to see him carrying it.

“Fogg? Did you catch him?”

“I caught whatever it was. I don't think it's still a him, or what it was, at all . . .”

I set my lantern down near the thing's head. It wore no clothing—­it was the crude outline of a man, a little larger than me, made of slightly steaming wires. Its eyes were empty, hollow. It had no nose, or chin; instead of a mouth, it had something like a small megaphone. There was no sign of a soul spark.

“Is this someone who's just . . . died?” I asked. “Like Morgan Harris?”

“No, I don't think so,” Doyle said. “Notice the absence of the material you so memorably called ‘snail tracks.' ”

“Could've been washed off by the water.”

“It's quite concentrated, water-­resistant material. If any did come loose there would be some on the pool . . .” He went to look, using his lantern. “As I thought, it is not there. You will recollect the image in the journals—­the formulation of an artificial man, by ordinary human spirits. Or rather, the attempt. Formulation and deformulation of living things, carried out by human spirits, requires an admixture of that material—­it is, I believe, Dynamic Ectoplasm, drained from deformulated beings . . . or from a seam of the material deposited below. You will recall that ectoplasm is a spiritual material that forms the basis of souls materializing at séances, via mediumship . . . There were many photographs of it . . .”

“Ectoplasm. A seam of ectoplasm . . . below. Under the ground? Like oil?”

“Just so! Like oil! But it is quite difficult to reach! And it is not easily charged with life energy. To provide large-­scale formulating power a man must use raw spirit energy—­the actual crackling force of life. This he combines with ectoplasm should he wish to create creatures . . . living, moving things. Like the Golem of Hebrew legend.”

“This creature was glowing.”

“So it was, I'm sure. And it vaporized. It was raw psychic energy. Grit from the soil was combined with it, formulated through the use of a powerful mental control, and that sent it about its business. It is enough to give it some mobility. But without ectoplasm, and a considerable time to control the formulation, it's not possible to create much that lives, long . . . this has no trace of ectoplasm. Perhaps there was just enough . . . it may be a clue as to the motive of the man who killed Morgan Harris . . .”

“What motive?”

“I'm not sure—­I shall not muddy the waters, as it were, with further speculation.”

“This thing didn't seem to be trying real hard to get away from me . . .”

“No indeed. And it seemed to taunt you! It wanted you to follow it. But, it stumbled and lost its charge in the water.”

“Its charge?”

“Life electricity. The psychic energy I mentioned. Very like what Mrs. Shelley employed to bring her novel alive.”

“So this thing was luring me into the forest . . .”

“Yes. So I infer. To what end? Why, clearly, to destroy you. But not without a purpose. First of all, you are becoming troublesome to the creator of this thing. Secondly, you have something it needs. Just as it needed something from Morgan Harris . . .”

“Ectoplasm? I've got that stuff in me now?”

“Of course. It's basic to the function of your spirit body—­your afterbody. Our murderer created a sort of golem, which he controls psychically, to draw you somewhere in the forest. But we shall not be able to catch him there now. He's gone on . . . probably gone to ground. Let us move on to the mansion.”

“Can I wring out my pants first?”

“Do be quick about it.”

I removed my shoes, socks, pants, and underwear, wrung the cloth items out, and put them back on. It was only slightly more comfortable than before wringing. “I keep ending up having to slog around with water in my pants and shoes. Doyle . . . you really think Higgs took down all his traps? I don't want to be skewered. Whether it kills me or not.”

“Oh, no, I'm not sure at all. I think it likely. But surety? No. But, I am not overconcerned. You will naturally scout out the ground ahead of me.”

“I will?”

“Of course you will! Step lightly, Fogg! Step lightly!”

 

TWELFTH

T
he mansion had grown horribly large. Horribly large, horribly sprawling, horribly devised.

We stared at it—­it was all too easy to see since there were lights shining from nearly every window. It was as if someone had intercepted the architect's blueprint on the way to the construction site, and they'd defaced it and altered it with pathological levels of hostility.

Jagging projections, the kind you see on crystals: these were sticking out with a perverse randomness, and they shivered in the rising wind. I remembered Long's remark about gravitation working here—­these growths would surely collapse, and fairly soon.

“Somebody's gone right out of their mind,” I said. “Probably Merchant.”

The center front section of the mansion seemed the same. Higgs's big curved spikes were still up, as we'd left them—­a warning to passersby.

I started forward—­Doyle held me back.

“I'll go this time. Higgs might've put a new trap in here.”

He strode forward, before I could stop him—­and passed safely up to the porch.

The front door was unlocked and we stepped into the hallway . . .

At first it looked like wreckage. Then I could see that it was a sort of internal, cancerous growth of the original building. That upside-­down staircase that ran along the ceiling had replicated itself, zigzagging from its end down the open space to the left. It was impassable and absurd—­but well lit. Cracks in the walls emanated light, as if the creative force that had jammed all this extra material here was overflowing, glowing with frustration from the places where its growth had been constrained.

The entry-­hall stairway on the right that Garrett Merchant had descended when we were here before was intact but partly blocked by a jutting, angular outcropping of the ceiling over it. The carvings of angels and imps along the balustrade seem to have fleshed out and bloated, their arms reaching out in random directions as if the mythical beings were about to tear themselves from the posts and clamber madly around the room. The floor of the entry hall was flat—­then angled joltingly up as if a crystalline form out of a giant cavern had forced itself up, distorting the diamond pattern of black and white, and fused with the lowered, bloated, fantastically complicated chandeliers. The building was creaking in a way I found alarming, too; it was as if it were groaning in pain from architectural cancer.

I gaped around me. “What the f—­”

Doyle gave me a sudden frown of reproach.

“—­hell is all this?”

“An unhealthy formulation—­it's an extension of someone's diseased mind, I'd say. Or—­I suspect—­more than one man's diseased mind.”

“You think anyone's here anymore? I mean—­how could they
live
in this?”

“Both good questions.” He cupped his mouth with his hands. “I say, Higgs! Long! Merchant! Who's about?”

The only reply was the groaning of the house.

Doyle put his lantern down; I set mine beside his. There seemed to be plenty of light, some of it almost hurting my eyes, as if it were hostile.

“It occur to you this place might be unstable?” I asked.

“In which sense?” he asked.

“In which—­? Oh. I mean, structurally, at this point. Might be a house of cards right about now.”

“The thought has crossed my mind,” Doyle admitted, moving to the stairway on the right. “Let's see if we can make our way up this . . . it might be a tight squeeze . . .”

It was. We had to crawl over the stairway, at one point, to get past the down-­jutting projection from the ceiling. I thought about funhouses I'd gone to, as a kid, at the state fair. This house wasn't fun. It seemed to be dying, and threatening to collapse when it did.

I was starting to feel the afterworld peculiar variant of fatigue, a sort of psychic wearing, slowing me down.

“Come along, Fogg, come along!” Doyle called, as he straightened up and climbed quickly to the balcony. He had the tone of an Englishman riding behind his dogs, hallooing after the fox.

We entered a corridor off the balcony that passed back into the house, with bedrooms and suites to either side—­Doyle muttered that he'd been here when the house was more “itself” and this corridor had been straight. Now it had changed direction, judging from the tension marks and cracks at the sudden switches of angle, and it was almost a maze now. Once we realized it had doubled back and we'd gone in a circle, were now heading back the way we'd come.

Doyle paused and looked around, then turned to a door off the hall. “Let's try the master suite—­if it's still there.”

He tried the door—­it opened a fraction, then seemed to stick, refusing to open the rest of the way. The shifting of the walls had warped the door frame.

It took the two of us, applying our shoulders to it, with Doyle counting down, “One two
three
!” several times, before it finally gave.

We pushed past the crooked, broken door and into a short hallway leading into the master suite. There were closets of clothing to either side and farther on we came to the sitting room of the suite, with a fireplace, sofas, and carpets. French doors opened onto a back balcony . . .

Only the fireplace was projecting out from the wall like a grotesque, sucking mouth; it had projected into a coffee table, leaving it smashed up against a sofa. The other furniture was pushed out of place by anomalous constructions shunting up from the floor; the mirror was shattered, its shards mingling with glass from the cracked, warped French doors.

To the left was an open doorway, once rectangular, now shifted into a slanting convex quadrilateral. The doorway quivered, releasing dust and a squealing sound, then stabilized.

I was increasingly convinced the whole building might collapse at any moment.

While death might not have a guillotine-­like finality in the afterworld, I had no desire to be trapped in a collapsed building, unable to move, crushed and agonized, yet alive, for, perhaps, years. Would the afterworld leave me like that? I wasn't sure. It seemed possible. And it would be worse than death.

“This is really looking unstable, Doyle,” I said. “If it comes down on us, how do we get out of it?”

“Yet another good question,” he murmured, looking at the cracked ceiling.

“I'm suddenly missing cell phones and nine-­one-­one.”

“I've heard of cell phones,” Doyle said, peering around. “We are quite pleased to do without the blasted things.”

Doyle went into the next room, not stepping delicately enough for my liking. But I followed him.

This had been the master bedroom. The bed was now pressed against the ceiling by a group of octagonal columns that had thrust through the floor from below. I hoped Merchant wasn't stuck up there, squashed against the ceiling.

“Merchant!” Doyle called. “You here, anywhere?”

The building creaked, and squeaked . . . and squeaked again, as if asking for mercy . . .

That last squeak.
Maybe
, I thought,
it wasn't the building.

There was a bathroom, at the back of the suite. Had that last pitiful squeaking sound come from there?

I took the lead this time and went through the rhomboid doorway.

There was no toilet, of course—­just a sink, with gold fixtures, a shattered white-­and-­blue-­tile floor, and toward the back, a really large bathtub, larger than a hot tub, and in it was Garrett Merchant. But he was trapped there, half crushed, nude, looking purple and black . . . yet he was alive. Around him, at the level of water in a bath, was a dirty-­looking translucent gel, rather like aspic.

“G'me,” he squeaked, barely about to move his mouth. “G'me ooh.”

Porcelain projections had grown up, and they must have come up suddenly, judging from the splayed position his purpled naked body had been forced into. His hairy right leg was up, curled around a porcelain pole; his left was crushed brutally between two projections that rose at angles, crossing to hold the limb in place; a wall growth that took the shape of an old-­time public stocks, where men were held with their necks thrust out, had collared Merchant, gripping his throat tightly so he could hardly speak . . .

Other projections emanated from Merchant's back, angling into the walls, symmetrically arraying outward from him. They seemed an expression of him.

“Doyle—­does it look like to you that all of this sick architectural stuff grew right out of his body?”

“Yes,” Doyle said. “But likely it was not of his conscious volition. Help me try to release him.”

We tugged at the materials holding Merchant's neck. At first it was intractable. But when we worked together, pulling on a single part of the “stocks” holding his neck, it began to crack away. In a few moments we'd freed his throat.

Blood dripped from the place the stocks had gripped him, but there was no swelling. Our bodies here just don't work on the same principles.

Merchant spat blood, and gasped. “Oh thank God,” he sobbed. His voice was a rasp. I could barely hear him.

“Did you do this yourself—­perhaps unintentionally?” Doyle asked, as we struggled to free him from the rest of the architectural restraints.

“I—­no. Maybe . . . yes. But . . . he just walked in when I was in the bath and he dumped something in it and the stuff thickened . . . in an instant . . . so I couldn't get loose. And it . . . all started to happen . . . the changes to the house . . . like it came from me . . .”

“
Who
just walked in?” I asked.

“Don't know. I was half asleep, you know, having a memory dream, and when I came out of it and there he was . . . his face was . . . shadowed and . . . like, hooded. It did seem like a man. Faceless man. Clothing was black, something I haven't seen . . . there were symbols sewn on it. Red thread . . .”

Doyle seemed to hold his breath for a moment before asking, “What sort of symbols?”

Merchant groaned. “I don't know—­one was maybe an astrological thing.”

“He wore a mask?” Doyle asked, as we cracked the porcelain away from Merchant's right leg.

Merchant cried out in pain. “Oh shit. That hurts, it hurts . . .” He seemed close to weeping.

“You'll heal up fairly soon,” Doyle soothed him. “Now then—­his face was completely masked?”

“Yeah but . . . not a cloth. More like . . . mask made of . . . just blackness. Some . . . like magic. Black shadow over his face. Oh get me out of here . . .”

“No explanation from this guy about why he did this, Merchant?” I asked, as we helped him up. “Why he cemented you in here and started all this?”

“No. No . . . he was only here for maybe twenty seconds and then it started, and I was stuck, trapped, afraid that . . .”

“Have you seen Louisa Doyle?”

“Who? Oh. No. Only once about a year ago, in town.”

Conan Doyle showed no expression, hearing that. “Where are Higgs and Long?” Doyle asked.

“Don't know, don't know. Maybe he got them. Not sure. Don't know . . . Please, in God's name get me out of this tub . . .”

We lifted him between us, holding him up by the arms; he came loose from the thick gel reluctantly, like a tooth from a jaw, the extraction making a wet crackling sound. Merchant dripped the stuff as we carried him back out to the bedroom. He hopped between us on his intact leg; his damaged limb was sticking out at odd angles like an extension of the house's warped redesign.

The house shook; it quivered and grumbled to itself; dust silted down from above. The shining cracks in the walls pulsed more brightly.

The ceiling cracked wide—­and the room above began to tumble through the crack, chairs and a table dropping down, tumbling and clattering and splintering just in front of us, burying the doorway out. A rafter suddenly jammed itself through the wall to our right, crashing through like a ramrod through a rotten castle door. It stopped coming a few inches from the right side of my head.

“Another four inches and that would have hurt,” I pointed out

“Quick,” Merchant rasped. “The hall! Between those columns . . . there's a door . . .”

I was reluctant to go that way, but Doyle tugged us to our left, between the columns shoved under the crushed bed, and when we'd pressed through, dragging Merchant along, I saw the wreck of another set of French doors a ­couple of steps beyond the columns. It was warped open, and beyond it we could see a balcony.

The house seemed to be trying to wrench itself from its foundations—­we staggered, struggling to keep to our feet. Merchant cried out in pain.

“Oh bloody hell,” Doyle muttered.

Then Doyle got us going through the door to the balcony—­which was even less stable. It quivered like the lower out-­thrust lip of an angry child. We fell over backward, the three of us, Merchant gritting his teeth, me swearing a blue streak. Then I got up, and Doyle was up—­we tugged Merchant up on his good foot and struggled to the balustrade looking over the back garden . . .

A loud, angry cracking sound came from behind me . . .

I looked over my shoulder and saw a projection from the roof collapse backward, crushing its way into the house.

That seemed to be the one card that made the house of cards collapse.

“Hold on!” Doyle shouted.

The roof began to slide off the building toward us . . .

Long ago, in the Before, I saw floodwaters cresting on the Missouri River. The wide front porch and very large front section of a good-­sized house was sweeping down the river, coming past me. It was being pushed along by a big dirty brown wave filled with debris; it was as if the porch were surfing on the wave.

That's what it was like now: we rode the porch that way. The house collapsed into a mix of muddy fluid and fragments of debris—­it was as if the lower parts of the house were melting—­and we suddenly dropped down, and surged forward, thrust over Merchant's back garden, the porch riding along ahead of the wave, slopping along, its outward side tilting upward . . .