The List of Seven

  “Go on,” said Jack Sparks, gesturing to the door on the landing.

  Sparks picked up a broadsword from the jumble of armor, and he used it to finish one of the men, swinging it wildly to prevent the others from advancing.

  “Now, Doyle!”

  Another bullet whistled past their ears. Drummond took aim again, struggling to line a clear shot through the knot of men working their way around the armor.

  Eileen tried the door. “Locked!”

  Doyle and Jack threw shoulders against the wood; the lock splintered on the second try. Doyle grabbed a torch from a sconce on the inside wall, took Eileen by the hand, and they rushed down a bare, narrow servants’ passage. Sparks threw a vial onto the landing that produced a thick, noxious plume of smoke.

  “Go, go, as fast as you can.”

  They ran. Sparks followed. They rounded a turn, hearing shouting and footsteps in the passage behind them as servants braved the smoke, driven on by Drummond’s bellicose orders.

  “Are you all right?” Doyle asked Eileen.

  “I wish we’d killed them all,” she said angrily.

  “I saw you come off the wagon—” said Doyle back to Sparks.

  “It took an hour to get this far into the house; they must have a hundred men inside.”

  “Did you see—”

  “Yes: I reached the stairs before you attacked. I needed a distraction—”

  “We understand, Jack—where are we?” said Eileen.

  Good Christ, she’s calmer than I am, thought an astonished Doyle.

  They paused at an intersection. One fork of the passage led deeper into the house, the other sloped down and to the left.

  “This way,” said Sparks, leading them to the left.

  “How do we get out?” asked Doyle.

  “We’ll find a way.”

  The passage walls grew rougher as they moved down, woodwork giving way to masonry and masonry to raw rock. Sounds of pursuit behind them grew encouragingly remote.

  “They’ve killed Barry,” said Doyle.

  “Worse than that,” said Eileen.

  “I know.”

  “They must have Larry as well,” said Doyle.

  “No. He’s alive.”

  “Where?”

  “Safe.”

  They traveled nearly half a mile down. The temperature rose. Walls sweated moisture. Around another corner a heavy oaken door blocked the passageway. Sparks listened carefully, then reached down and lifted the latch. Open.

  Carved out of the earth, the cave they entered stretched ahead indefinitely, as broad as it was long. The ceiling barely cleared their heads. Deep straw covered the floor. A wind draughted in from somewhere, guttering the flame, the torch blackening the rocks above with streaks of carbon. The air felt unusually warm, permeated with an unpleasant pungency, like a field of overripe fruit. Doyle knew he had encountered that smell before, but he couldn’t place it.

  Stepping forward they discovered shallow water underlying the straw, up to a foot of it in spots. As they sloshed cautiously ahead, the door behind them caught in the breeze and slammed shut, giving them a start.

  “Did Larry come in with you?” asked Doyle.

  “No. I found him at the train. Barry was taken at the abbey.”

  So those had been Barry’s cries they’d heard raining down from the heights. Doyle hoped he hadn’t suffered long. Who knew if he was suffering still.

  They had passed halfway across the long chamber, their progress impeded by the curious combination of straw and water.

  “Where did you go last night, Jack?” asked Doyle.

  “A company of Royal Marines and two squadron of cavalry are on their way from the Middlesbrough. They’ll arrive here before dawn.”

  Never had Doyle been more willing to take him at his word. “Why didn’t you wait for them?”

  “Eileen was with you,” he said, without looking at them.

  Doyle stepped on something soft and yielding; his foot slipped off before he could replant it, but he regained his balance before falling. He was left with a vague, unpleasant impression that whatever he’d stepped on had moved when he touched it.

  “Jack, they’ve got Prince Eddy—”

  “I understand—”

  Something cracked sharply under Eileen’s foot.

  “What was that?” asked Doyle.

  She shook her head; Doyle held the torch as Sparks cleared the straw under her feet.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  Her foot had snapped the rib cage of a human skeleton lying half beneath the surface of the water, the bones bleached white, picked clean. A gruelly substance gleamed on the straw, trails of silver excretion circling around and away from the remains.

  “We’ve seen this before—the stable at Topping,” said Doyle.

  “Don’t move,” said Sparks. He was looking over Doyle’s shoulder.

  An undulating shape humped toward them beneath the straw, a slow, rippling, ophidian movement. The distinctive smell suddenly grew more potent, stinging their eyes.

  “Ammonia,” said Doyle.

  Doyle looked to his left; another shape slithered toward them from that direction.

  “There,” said Eileen, pointing straight ahead to more movement in the straw.

  “What are they?” asked Sparks.

  “If they can grow cabbages as big as globes and trout the size of dolphin…” said Doyle.

  “I’m not sure we want to know the answer to that,” said Eileen.

  The straw on every side of them seemed alive, as active as sea foam. The shapes closed in from every direction, but a gap opened in front of them.

  “Go. Straight ahead,” said Sparks, readying the sword.

  Doyle moved ahead, brandishing the torch. He felt something brush against his boot and stepped quickly to avoid it.

  A black shape slithered out of the straw to their right to a height of five feet. Its limbless, cylindrical shape ended in a fluttering orifice rimmed with palpitating suckers that surrounded a set of three gnashing jaws, each equipped with symmetrical rows of sharp white teeth.

  An identical shape lifted to their left, drawn by a rudimentary sense of smell. Another rose behind them. What they smelled was blood.

  They were leeches.

  Jack darted underneath the swaying head of the one to their right and ripped the sword down the length of its body. A sac punctured, spilling a fetid black fluid, and the creature tumbled back into the swampy water.

  Doyle waved the torch, keeping the creatures to the front at bay. Their black wrinkled bodies recoiled instinctively from the fire, moisture sizzling on their glistening skin.

  “Light the straw!” said Sparks.

  Another monster reared up behind Sparks and struck; teeth ripped into his shoulder before Jack wheeled with the sword and severed the thing in two. The surviving halves scurried frantically away.

  Doyle set the torch to the straw around them; the drier stuff on top ignited rapidly and spread across the room in a solid sheet of flame. The leeches nearest to them fell in its advance, combusting, bursting apart.

  “This way!” yelled Doyle.

  They chased the burning straw. Water sloshed as creatures fled from the heat, explosive plops filling the air as the fire consumed more of the loathsome worms. Sparks finished off the few survivors they encountered. The fire at this end of the room fizzled as it burned down to the soggy straw below. Holding the torch high, Doyle found a door in the wall ahead. Sparks lifted the heavy latch, and they were through the door.

  They found themselves outside, near a cooperage, barrels stacked around them, limiting their vision. Horses’ hooves, carriages, and angry voices could be heard nearby. A full moon burned high in the night sky above. Doyle extinguished the torch.

  “I’m going to be sick,” said Eileen quietly.

  She moved off. Doyle went with her and held her gently as she voided the corrupt meal they’d been served. Sparks waited a discreet distance away. When the
spasms had ended, she clung to Doyle and closed her eyes, shuddering against the cold air, nodding that she was all right in response to his entreaties. Refusing to speak about the nightmare they’d encountered was a way to deny its reality, Doyle supposed. He wondered how many other skeletons lay buried in that hellish breeding ground. Convenient way to dispense with disciplinary problems. Or drive one’s enemies mad with fear—he thought of the lines of salt across the halls of Topping; they had indisputably done the job on Lord Nicholson.

  Did these monsters give credit to Vamberg’s ravings about dark spirits and relationships with elementals? Had some fundamental secrets of spirit and matter been revealed to them?

  The thought broke off with the approach of Sparks.

  “How many did you kill?” he asked quietly.

  “Chandros. The Bishop. Probably Vamberg.”

  “Alexander?”

  Doyle shook his head.

  “Wait here,” he said, patted Doyle on the shoulder, and crept out of sight.

  “I killed him. That horrible man,” said Eileen, her eyes still closed.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Good.”

  She lay quietly in his arms. Sparks returned minutes later with two servant’s outfits and, even more welcome, warm woolen coats. They changed behind the barrels as Sparks kept vigil. Eileen stuffed her hair under a mobcap.

  Through a gap in the barrels, they looked out at a grounds-eye view of the courtyard where Doyle had earlier seen Jack slip from under the wagon. Servants and convicts ran in every direction. Panicked horses reared as they were held at rein before wagons and carriages. Platoons of guards gathered and dispatched under the direction of officers.

  “Evacuation,” said Sparks quietly. “The soldiers will arrive in time to mop most of this lot up.”

  “They won’t fight?” asked Doyle.

  “Not without orders. And we’ve ruptured their chain of command.”

  “What about Drummond?”

  “He won’t make a stand unless Alexander is with him.”

  “Maybe he is.”

  “There’s no cause on earth for which he’d sacrifice himself. He’s miles from here by now.”

  “Where will he go?” asked Eileen.

  Sparks shook his head.

  “What about Prince Eddy?” asked Doyle.

  “I would imagine Gull’s already gotten him well away.”

  “To where?”

  “Back to his train. Back to Balmoral. He’s not much good to them now.”

  “He’ll probably sleep through it,” said Eileen.

  “They wouldn’t keep him a hostage?” asked Doyle.

  “To what purpose? They’d be hunted down like dogs. He can’t harm them as a witness. Why would they risk confiding in him? He was the guest of some distinguished citizens for a country weekend.”

  “If that’s the case, we’ve beaten them, Jack. They’ve given up.”

  “Perhaps.”

  A more troubling question occurred to Doyle. “Why haven’t they come after us?”

  “They’ve got a few other wickets to mind, don’t they?” said Eileen.

  “They will,” said Sparks quietly. “Not tonight, or the night after. But they will.”

  A long silence followed.

  “How do we get out of here?” asked Doyle.

  “Through that gate,” said Sparks, pointing at an exit leading toward the factory.

  “How do we manage it?”

  “Simple, my dear Doyle. We’ll walk.”

  Sparks stood and headed out from behind the barrels. Doyle and Eileen followed, heads down, blending into the milling mix of the courtyard. No one stopped or questioned them. It wasn’t long before they cleared the open gates and left the walls of Ravenscar behind.

  The path led directly to the biscuit factory. Jaundiced electric lights lit up entrances as figures scurried in and out its open doors. To the west behind the hulking structure lay the moors, what remained of the snowfall glowing faintly in the moonlight. Sparks stopped where the railroad tracks branched toward the factory loading dock.

  “Let’s have a look,” he said.

  They followed the tracks to a pair of huge double-hung doors through which the train line ran into the building. Closed boxcars crowded the sidings that flanked the main spur.

  Inside the doors was no approximation of a biscuit factory. The air was sulfurous, choked with smoke, coal dust, floating cinders. Conveyors carried rough ore to crucibles suspended over howling, incendiary blast furnaces. Massive, lipped cauldrons poised over iron molds the size of houses. A concatenation of cables, belts, hooks, flywheels, pistons, linked in a dance of churning, perpetual motion, climbed impossibly high into the air under the sloping roof, an industrial Tower of Babel. Blossoms of flame spurted rhythmically out of twisted valves and malformed appurtenances. Smoke of various contaminated colors belched out of oscillating cavities and tubes. The army of shirtless workers moving about, blackened by the foul atmosphere, dwarfed by the monolithic machineries, seemed entirely superfluous; if they abandoned their stations, it seemed the host apparatus, with a frighteningly singular unity of purpose, would continue to grind on eternally.

  What end product resulted from this manufacturing hell was far from certain. Hulking shapes on trolleys leading to the tracks outside suggested the silhouette of cannon, but of a size far greater than any they had ever seen. Engines of war of some kind, of a war not yet glimpsed or even guessed at. As they watched, a strenuous final effort was apparently under way in the despotic factory, hot steel flowing, boxcars frantically loaded by workers driven on by armed overseers.

  No one spoke; they wouldn’t have been heard over the tumult of the infernal works if they had. Sparks gestured. They stepped away from the doors, back to the relative quiet of the boxcars.

  “What is it? What is it for?” Doyle asked, almost to himself.

  “The future,” said Sparks.

  “Look there,” said Eileen.

  She pointed to a path tramped out of the snow, paralleling the tracks as they ran away from Ravenscar, where two armed figures bearing lanterns escorted a column of men. They were headed onto the moors. The wrists of the men being led were bound in irons connected by a long, unifying chain. Judging by the ungainliness of their shuffling gait, their ankles were similarly encumbered. Some wore the dirty gray suits of the convicts, others the familiar servants’ garb.

  Was there something even more familiar about one of those hobbled figures? thought Doyle.

  “Where are they going?” he asked.

  “We’ll follow and see,” said Sparks.

  They set out along the spur. The track bed was elevated above the boggy ground on a levee of earth and cinder. Staying to the shelter of the opposite slope, they kept the light of the lanterns in sight maintaining pace with the column. Before long they saw a bright glow issuing from a shadowy structure set on a narrow rise a half-mile south of the tracks. Doyle identified it as one of the low buildings spotted from the window at Ravenscar. They heard what sounded like gunfire inside: single shots and occasional volleys. As the tracks drew even with it, the guards herded the column away from the rail line up a slight hill toward that dark building.

  “What’s in there?” said Doyle.

  Jack peered down the tracks to the west. Looking for something.

  “Let’s find out,” said Sparks.

  Moon shadows led them down from the rails to the path below. The ground felt soft underfoot, covered with lichen and low shrubs, slick with melting snow. A hundred yards ahead, the column of men had just reached the building.

  Keeping as low as the limited cover of the ground would allow, they crept up the hill and skirted the edge of the compound; two structures set on a level patch of land, roughly constructed of clay brick, adjoined by a narrow walled passage. Six stunted chimneys rose from the second building: Smoke and red heat chugged steadily from them, the origin of the glow they had seen in the distance.

  A shiftin
g wind sent the smoke in their direction; a fetid, malodorous stench swept over them, the overwhelming force of it driving them to their knees. Doyle fought off nausea. Sparks gave Eileen a handkerchief, and she gratefully covered her mouth and nose. Doyle and Jack exchanged a grim look, Sparks gestured to Eileen to hold her position, and the two men inched up the hillock to within twenty yards of the compound.

  The row of men they had tracked stood idly outside the first building, behind a second shackled group herded around a single door. The armed guards who had guided the column stood off to one side. Two others flanked the doorway.

  Doyle pointed to the figure he’d recognized in the middle of the group to the rear. Sparks nodded.

  Rifle fire rang out from inside. Muffled echoes cracked sharply over the moors. The two guards at the door took the shots as a cue; one trained his rifle on the men nearest the door, the second took a key from his belt and unlocked their chains. Shackles removed, none of the men reacted to their freedom; they stood lifelessly, as before, eyes obediently downcast.

  The steel door to the building opened from inside, and the first group of men were prodded inside. A row of riflemen lined an interior wall, reloading their weapons. Beyond them, carts laden with sprawling corpses were wheeled by men in gray down the passage to the second building.

  To the ovens.

  The door slammed shut. The second set of guards exchanged words with the two at the door—a transference of responsibility. The guards with the lanterns turned and headed down the path toward the tracks.

  Sparks waited until the guards cleared sight of the building. The trailing man’s neck was broken before he could make a sound. As the first guard turned, the butt of the second’s rifle silenced him for good. Sparks and Doyle moved up the hill to the crematorium.

  There was no stealth, no subterfuge. Sparks strode up to the guards at the door and cut them down before either man could lift his rifle.

  Doyle retrieved the keys and removed the irons from the hands and feet of the second column of men. None moved. All bore the traumatic stamp of Vamberg’s vile alteration. These were his failures. This was where they disposed of their waste.