“We need to have it.”
“Not now. For God’s sake, man.”
Doyle wavered but would not be moved. The bobbies closed in.
“The boy, what he called me: Do you know what an arhanta is?” asked Sparks.
Doyle shook his head.
“It means savior.”
The bobbies were only a few yards away.
“Here, then, stand clear, you two!” said one of them.
Doyle shoved a bed in their direction, breaking their stride, and then he broke for the door. Sparks flew after him, and they burst through the door into a hospital corridor. An alarm sounded, and the pursuit behind them intensified.
“Which way?” asked Sparks.
Doyle pointed to their left, and they ran, dodging a host of startled patients and doctors and medical paraphernalia. Using his intimate knowledge of the hospital, changing directions frequently—in and out of wards, up and down stairs—and finally through a ground-floor window, Doyle led them to the entrance where Larry waited. A half-dozen bobbies were just arriving via Black Maria; Sparks blew a silver whistle that he’d pulled from his pocket and authoritatively waved them toward the doors.
“Inside, hurry! They’re getting away!” shouted Sparks.
The bobbies hustled toward the entrance and collided with the officers and guards who were just running out of the building. A smaller coach pulled in behind the Black Maria; Doyle saw Inspector Leboux step out onto the running board as it slowed.
“Doyle!” Leboux cried. There was a pistol in his hand.
In a rush and clatter of hooves, Larry brought their carriage racing through the half-moon drive directly between them and Leboux, showering the air with gravel. Sparks grabbed Doyle and leapt up onto the moving cab. Through the windows, Doyle could see Leboux aiming his pistol at them, trying to clear a shot. Sparks and Doyle hung on to the rails as Larry steered into the turn; momentum edged them up onto the two outside wheels, a fraction of an inch from toppling over, before the cab crashed back down onto all fours. Doyle and Sparks bounced hard but clung to the frame, arms looped around the bar of the open window.
“Don’t stop!” Sparks yelled.
Larry cracked the whip and made straight for the hospital gates ahead. Behind them in the drive, Leboux’s carriage and the Black Maria started after them. Hand-cranked siren wailing, a hospital cab was coming directly at them through the gates at a steady clip. There was barely room for two carriages to negotiate the opening when both were at a slow walk; a head-on collision seemed certain.
“Hang on!”
Sparks and Doyle flattened themselves against the outside of the cab as the two vehicles passed within inches. The wheels sparked as they engaged, but the hubs failed to lock. Doyle felt the side of the ambulance brush his shoulder as they rushed clear through the gate. But in the immediate aftermath of their near collision the ambulance driver was not so fortunate; trying to brake as he confronted the following police sent him into a disastrous skid; horses reared and the ambulance went over, blocking the drive and any immediate access to the gate. Leboux’s cab stopped short of the wreck; bobbies poured from the Black Maria and rushed to the fallen horses, but it would be too late to effectively follow Larry. He drove Sparks and Doyle, still holding fast to the outer rails of the cab, around a corner out of sight of the hospital gates and into the covering flow of London traffic.
chapter fifteen
THEATRICAL TYPES
TO DOYLE’S SURPRISE, THEY MADE FOR THE NORTH, A straight course out of London; it had been his assumption they would return to Battersea to reclaim the engine that had provided their deliverance from Topping. Larry maintained a pace rapid enough to outdistance any pursuit without calling any undue attention to them—it wouldn’t be long before the telegraph wires were singing with news of their escape.
Doyle sat uneasily across from Sparks as they drove, Sparks staring moodily out the window, glancing only occasionally at Doyle, and then never meeting his eyes.
Whom do I believe? Doyle was forced to ask himself with such urgency that the logical vivisection of its separate issues proved impossible. There was only the question itself filling his mind, repeating like a church bell.
A lunatic from Bedlam. Was it possible? He was forced to admit that it was so. A man tormented by imagined persecutors. Living in a shadowy world of secret connections to high places—no less than the Queen, for God’s sake—constructed by a diseased mind while trapped in the confines of a madman’s cell. But Sparks had always seemed so lucid, so supremely rational. Although even lunatics were capable of sustained lucidity, or its flawless simulacrum, as Doyle knew full well; perhaps Sparks’s sapient belief in the incredible tales he told was the most damning indictment of his madness. Could Jack actually be all the things he claimed he was? There were the supporting testimonies of Larry and Barry to take into account, but they were recruited criminals, quick to follow and easily influenced, perhaps even knowing accomplices in the charade. A charade to what end? What possible purpose? None occurred to him. If Sparks were truly mad, there might very well be no discernible reason to his actions; the man could be acting without a script, tailoring his stories as he went to suit the cut of the moment’s fancy.
A darker question suddenly loomed behind these worrisome speculations; what if there was no Alexander Sparks? Was it possible this man was himself the criminal mastermind he had described his brother to be? He certainly possessed all the same attributed talents—and what other individual had he ever heard described who came closer to fitting the known profile of Alexander Sparks? What if this brooding puzzle of a man seated across from him embodied both brothers at once, fragmented selves residing in the troubled crucible of a single imagination, each believing the other as separate and autonomous, one stalking and killing at will, the other haunted by a memory of foul deeds committed in the eclipse of an obscuring derangement? Did that mean Jack was also the defiler and murderer of his parents? Painful to consider, but couldn’t it have been the very commission of those vile acts that had somehow split his mind, shifting responsibility for the unthinkable to a phantom figure that he constantly pursued or felt constantly pursued by?
The cooler side of Doyle’s mind rallied in protest; how then to explain the figure in black he’d encountered twice now, the man Jack had identified as his brother? There were the gray hoods and the séance, the destruction of his flat and the madness of Topping, all consistent with Sparks’s story, however strange it sounded, all of it his own direct experience. The murders of Petrovitch and Bodger Nuggins, the visions of Spivey Quince and the doomed boy in blue, and the evidence he had seen all too clearly with his own eyes—and felt on his skin; he could still see the vivid welts on his wrist where the ghoul had grabbed him—in the basement of the British Museum. Even if John Sparks was as mad as a March hare, he was only one figure in a crowded, cockeyed landscape that had long since lost the shape and flavor of the everyday world.
Doyle parted the curtain, looked out the window, and tried to purchase a sense of there they were; there was Coram’s Fields to the left, that put them on Grey’s Inn Road, yes, the carriage was heading due north out of London, toward Islington.
Should he share these wayward thoughts with Sparks? Or was there a more skulduggerous way to test the fidelity of his character? After all, wasn’t it just as likely that Leboux’s information was at fault? If only he’d had a chance to speak with him, hear firsthand the source of this news about Sparks and more details. That opportunity might now be lost for good; after Doyle had fled from the hospital in full view of his friend, Leboux’s patience had surely reached its end. He was a fugitive from justice, plain and simple, and his choices had narrowed considerably: He could either attempt an escape from Sparks to throw himself on the uncertain mercies of the police—risking the untold consequences of Sparks’s formidable wrath—or cast his lot with the man and his band of outsiders to whatever uncertain end lay in store.
“Anything in Blavats
ky about the Seven or a Black Lord?” asked Sparks.
“What’s that?” said a startled Doyle.
“I’m not as conversant as you are with her work: Is there any mention in her writings about the Seven or the Black Lord?” Still deep in thought, Sparks didn’t so much as glance at him.
Doyle rummaged through his scattered recollections of Blavatsky. It seemed a hundred years since he had spent that last quiet evening in his rooms, leisurely pondering her text.
“I recall something about an entity—the Dweller on the Threshold,” said Doyle, wishing he had the book in front of him. “It could nearly answer to the same description.”
“What was the Dweller on the Threshold?”
“A being…an entity of high spiritual origin that, as part of its pilgrim’s progress, consciously chose to come down into the world—”
“To live in human form, you mean.”
“Yes, as all souls do, according to Blavatsky: a way of learning, matriculation.”
“Why was this being different?”
“In its disembodied state, this one supposedly held a place of favor at the right hand of whatever word you wish to use for God. And when it entered the physical world, it fell—I’m trying to remember her wording; this wasn’t it precisely—it succumbed to the temptations of material life.”
“The ways of the flesh,” said Sparks.
“Devoting itself to the accumulation of earthly power and the satisfaction of earthy appetites, turning its back on its exalted spiritual heritage. In this way was conscious evil born into the world.”
“The Christians call it Lucifer.”
“The boy in blue said it is known by many names.”
“The myth of the fallen angel exists in every discovered culture. How did it come to be described as the Dweller on the Threshold?”
“At the end of each term of physical life—it has had more than a few apparently—Blavatsky claims this being, upon leaving the earthly plane, retires to a limbo at the door between worlds, collecting around it the lost, corrupted souls of persons who fell to its influence while alive and followed it blindly to their deaths—”
“Are they the Seven?”
“I don’t recall a specific number, but they were spoken of collectively.”
“So these twisted devotees are the first to return from this purgatorium to physical life,” said Sparks, his mind leaping ahead, “where their purpose is to prepare the way—the ‘passage’—for their Black Lord who ‘dwells on the threshold’ between the physical and mystic worlds, awaiting return to the earth.”
Doyle nodded. “That does her account of it some small justice. I don’t remember her alluding to the being and its acolytes as the Black Lord and Seven; they were simply referred together under the rubric of the Dark Brotherhood.”
Sparks fell back into pensive silence. They were by now clattering through the farthest outskirts of London, onto dirt roads through pastoral land. Were they going to venture all the way to Whitby by horse and carriage? A rough two or three days’ ride at the least.
“Many of the mediums you spoke with were having disturbing visions,” said Sparks.
“Vague sorts. Impressions, feelings. Fleeting and ephemeral, at best.”
“No specifics?”
“Only from Spivey Quince and of course the boy he foretold our seeing at the hospital.”
“This boy was a genuine medium, in your estimation?”
“I’d say he was an extreme sensitive. Dangerous to speculate without knowing his underlying physical condition, but it seemed to me the impact of the vision that assailed him contributed in no small way to his death.”
“As if the vision itself had turned and attacked.”
“And the very weight of it had crushed him,” said Doyle reluctantly.
“What does this suggest to you? That many experiencing these similar visions?”
Doyle thought for a moment. “Something stirring in the plane from which they draw their information. A powerful disturbance, like a storm at sea before it draws within sight of land.”
“The equivalent of psychic barometers registering an otherwise invisible change in pressure.”
Doyle shifted in his seat. “I admit I’m uncomfortable with the idea.”
“In the East, dogs and cats grow restless before an earthquake strikes. We send canaries into mine shafts to detect the presence of deadly gas. Is it so hard to imagine human beings are capable of similarly subtle perceptions?”
“No,” said Doyle patiently. “But it doesn’t make me any more comfortable.”
“The activation of an entity as formidable as the one described as this Dweller on the Threshold would generate quite a thunderhead on whatever plane it resided.”
“If such a thing were true—”
“If the return of this being is indeed what the members of the Brotherhood—the Seven—are after, how would these black magicians prepare the Dweller’s ‘passage’ for rebirth?”
“I’m sure I don’t know—”
“The spilling of blood? Ritualized murders?”
“Perhaps,” said Doyle, growing weary of the interrogation. “I’m not familiar with these things.”
“But It would have to be born as a child first, wouldn’t It?”
“Maybe they’re shopping around for a nice couple in Cheswick to adopt the little nipper.”
Sparks ignored the jibe. “A child with blond hair, seen in a vision? Taken from his father against his will, his mother an unwitting conspirator?”
“I’m sorry, Jack, but it’s all a bit too much for me. I mean, Blavatsky gets away with this sort of thing, but the reader naturally assumes, or at least I did, that it’s all metaphoric or at the very least archaic mythology—”
“Isn’t that what you wrote about in your book? The ill use of a child?”
Doyle felt himself go pale; he’d almost forgotten his damned book.
“Is it, Doyle?”
“In part.”
“And you wonder why they’ve come after you with such aggressiveness. What further confirmation do you require?”
The question hung in the air between them.
“Doyle…let me ask you,” said Sparks, softening his tone. “Knowing what you do about its history, what do you suppose this Dweller would be on about once it got its feet back on terra firma?”
“Nothing too out of the ordinary, I imagine,” said Doyle, refusing to commit himself emotionally to the answer he knew was correct. “World dominion, total enslavement of the human race, that sort of thing.”
“With a good deal more sophisticated weaponry available to the bugger this time around. Our capacity for mass butchery has increased a hundredfold.”
“I would have to agree with you,” said Doyle, recalling the presence on the list of Drummond and his burgeoning munitions empire.
Satisfied with the impact he’d made, Sparks sat back in his seat. “Then we’d best put a stop to this business straightaway, hadn’t we?”
“Hmm. Quite.”
But first I need to know you’re not one of them, thought Doyle. I need to ask you why I should believe you’re who you say you are, and I can’t, I can’t just now, either ask or believe, because if you are mad, you may not know or recognize the difference, and by asking I endanger my own life.
“What is an arhanta?” asked Doyle.
“You’ve never encountered the term?”
Doyle shook his head.
“Arhantas are Adepts in the Tibetan Mystery schools. Possessing spiritual powers of the highest order, an elite warrior class. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about them is the degree of sacrifice they are required to make.”
“What sort of sacrifice?”
“An arhanta spends the body of his life developing certain arcane—you might call them psychic—abilities. At the height of his strength, after years of hard, thankless study, the arhanta is asked to entirely forsake the use and exercise of those powers and to undertake a lif
e of silent, anonymous contemplation, far removed from the centers of worldly life. It is said there are twelve arhantas alive in physical life at any given time, and it is their radiant presence and selfless service alone that prevents mankind from self-destruction.”
“They’re not supposed to use these alleged powers to fight evil?”
“The teachings say that has never happened. It would be a violation of their sacred trust, with far more grievous consequences.”
Doyle chewed on that thought with no little difficulty. “Why would the boy call you one, then? On the face of it, you don’t readily answer to the description.”
“I have no idea,” said Sparks. He seemed as genuinely conflicted and confused as Doyle.
They wrestled with these thorny contradictions awhile. Doyle was jostled out of his brown study by the carriage running over a rough patch as Larry led them off the road onto a cart path leading through a dense copse of woods. Emerging into a clearing on the far side, they were greeted by the heartwarming sight of the Sterling 4-2-2 they’d left in Battersea, waiting on north-running tracks. Smoke belched from its stack, the furnace stoked and ready to roll. Behind it trailed a full coal hopper and, even more encouragingly, a passenger car. Emerging from the cab with a welcome wave was none other than Brother Barry, late of Pentonville Prison. There was nothing of the sentimental reunion about this meeting, however; it was grim, fast business, and hardly a word was spoken. Effects were transferred to the train, horses set loose to run, and the carriage carefully concealed in the woods. Sparks and Doyle boarded the passenger car, and the brothers took to the engine. Within moments they were underway. The sun slid low on the horizon; they would make most of their northern run at night.
Although customized, the passenger car was Spartanly appointed: four double seats facing each other, removable tables between them. Two bunked sleeping berths in a rear compartment. Planked wooden floors, oil lamps set in otherwise bare walls. A simple galley with a loaded icebox, stocked with provisions for the journey.
Sparks assembled one of the tables and sat down to pore over a packet of maps. Doyle took a seat across the car from him and utilized the silence to arrange his medical inventory and clean and reload his revolver. He obeyed an instinct to keep his pistol close at hand.