Mr. Timothy: A Novel (41 page)

And strangest of all: Mary Catherine, caught in the act of dragging a rug outside. She puts a hand to her clavicle, as though she has just discovered a missing locket.

--Mr. Timothy! My heavens, you look more of a fright each time I see you!

At a loss for words, I dive into the knapsack and draw out the butcher's knife.

--Yours. I'm sorry. I had to--

Normally, I would do my best to provide an explanation, but on this occasion I am stopped short by the scant residue of blood on the blade's tip. From Lord Griffyn's throat. And remembering that, I am all the more reluctant to part with it. Some curatorial instinct in me wishes to file it away for future generations of scientists.

Mary Catherine, though, is gently prying the knife from my hand. --Let me take that, Mr. Timothy, shall I? Put it in the scullery, shall I?

--Mrs. Sharpe...

--She's in her office with Mr. George. Shall I fetch her?

--That's all right.

Her eyes drift towards Philomela--still sporting that damned comforter, with her petticoat still in shreds.

--Funny sort of costume she's got.

--Never mind that.

--A bit young for working here, isn't she?

--She's not in that line, Mary Catherine. Please remember that.

--Oh, it's no affair of mine, I'm sure.

With an exaggerated shrug, she gathers up the rug and turns to go.

--No! Please, Mary Catherine. We're in need of a favour, I'm afraid.

--I'm very busy, as you can--

--Yes, I know. I need you to procure some keys for me.

--Keys?

--To the cellar.

--Oh, but I don't have them.

--You know where they're kept, though, don't you?

Poor thing. Couldn't dissemble to save her life. Mouth twists out of alignment, eyes blink: the game is up.

--I was told never to go down there, Mr. Timothy. On pain of I don't know what, I'm sure.

--You won't have to.

--Why, it's got all Mrs. Sharpe's best vintages. One breath of upstairs air could ruin 'em, that's what was told me.

--I will bear all the consequences, I promise.

--But if they found you, they'd know it was
me
as gave you the keys. They'd
know
, Mr. Timothy!

--I'll simply say I stole them. It's not a hanging offence, is it?

--But Mr. George...

--Mr. George will know nothing about it. Didn't you say he was engaged with Mrs. Sharpe?

And still she hesitates. The time has come to take a new tone, a
higher
tone. Not an easy task, given my battered face, my torn trousers, but I make the best go of it. A loud
harrumph
. A squeeze of the lapels.

--See here, Mary Catherine. I wanted to spare you this, but it appears I can't. This house...this establishment...is implicated in some extremely serious business.
Criminal
business. The police have already been dispatched, and they will be here in short order. Now, I mean to protect you and Mrs. Sharpe and everyone else as best I can. And so if there's anything down there, anything at all, it's best that I find it first. You do see that, don't you?

Whether she does is unclear. But something, I think, has swelled inside her--a germ of fear, an answered suspicion--cresting slowly and overwhelming every other scruple. She frowns. She lets go the rug.

--Wait here. And don't let a soul spot you.

By which she means:
Hide
. But Philomela and I must be done with all that, for we make not a move in any direction, and as it turns out, the only intruder is Mary Catherine herself, bustling back with the contraband keys jangling in the pocket of her apron.

--This way.

We pass quickly down the hallway and then pause by the cellar door while Mary Catherine fumbles for the right key. A good dozen and a half to choose from--a regular gaoler's ring-- and she seems bound and determined to try them all, and as her large, clumsy hands jam each new key into the lock, Philomela flinches...flinches again...and then nearly gives up the ghost altogether when she turns and finds, to the right of the door, Mrs. Sharpe's bald parrot, shivering as uncontrollably now as Lushing Leo.

He is indeed a disturbing sight, even for those of us who have witnessed his depilation in stages. But all he does in response to our gapes is poke out his black tongue, bow his head in a gesture of reflexive
politesse
, and cry:

--Kroo-sol! Kroo-sol!

This is followed immediately by the sound of a bolt sliding home. The door shudders but refuses to give way, no matter how hard Mary Catherine pulls against it. And even when I ply my own muscle against it, it resists...and then, of a sudden, abandons resistance altogether and wrenches wide open.

A cold sable light floods over us. A stream of dust and mould splashes across our faces and makes the flame of Mary Catherine's candle gutter.

Taking the candle from her, I usher Philomela inside and make to draw the door after us. But Mary Catherine puts out a hand and whispers:

--Don't be shutting it now. It'll lock on you.

And with that, she is gone--a jingle of keys and a pair of footsteps receding down the hallway--and all is quiet as Philomela and I stand on the uppermost stair, peering into this wall of cool, dusty, ventilated darkness. I take a step down; I wait for her to follow.

--We must hurry, Philomela.

The darkness has already so obscured her face I can no longer read its expression. I can only
feel
it: an eerie, paralytic pallor, waxen and faintly bilious.

--Shall I go myself, then?

--No.

One syllable, that is all, but there is in it a new note. A concern that extends beyond herself, beyond even me, perhaps.

I take her hand once more. She does not protest, not even when I draw her level with me. From there we pass to the next step and to the next, moving in a deliberate, dreamlike rhythm. After a few more steps, I lose all sense of descent or, indeed, of direction. The darkness folds us round, and Mary Catherine's candle, held straight out in front of me, does not disperse the darkness so much as carve a little redoubt from it.

--Just a few more steps, I should think.

But why make such an assumption? Absent any coordinates, we might just as easily be lowering ourselves into the earth's mantle. A damp, fetid spirit invades our nostrils. A faint dripping resonates from below. I can see no farther than the length of my arm, and yet I can clearly image, on all sides of us, dank green walls--solid on the surface but worried and honeycombed within by the constant drip of viscous fluid. An entire world, on the precipice of collapse.

And yet the stairs hold our feet quite comfortably, without even a creak. And when the steps come to an end, there is good solid stone floor awaiting us. And something else, too: a new smell, or perhaps an all-pervasive feeling. Excrement and sweat and sinew and pulsing skin. Presence and absence, all bound together.

This, of course, is pure intuition, for the darkness holds absolute. We take a step here, a step there, not from any hope of arriving somewhere but from an instinctual aversion to staying put. Stay put and be swallowed. And so we press on, in the endless circling rhythm of a nightmare from which there is no awakening.

Until something slams against my shin. An abrupt incursion of feeling...every fibre in my body explodes, and the candle leaps from my hand, and I watch, in dismal suspense, as it sails through the air. And in the parabola of light, I see, for the first time, the vintages that are kept in Mrs. Sharpe's cellar.

Not wine but coffins. A roomful of coffins.

Chapter 23

THE CANDLE IS DEAD ON THE FLOOR. My box of matches is upstairs, in the knapsack, next to the parrot's cage. And because no other light breaks through the Stygian gloom, the coffins, as quickly as they coalesced, revert to memory: a lightning-lit spectacle of elm-wood boxes on black trestles.

Only the throb in my shin holds me in the realm of the actual, and that pain becomes my home port as I light out into the darkness.

Within seconds, my hands have landed on a planed wooden surface. As I draw closer, its properties melt into view: a raised lid, a bevelled lip and, most disturbing of all, a row of nail heads, unnaturally burnished, glowing fiercely.

And more: an unspeakable odor, rising to meet me as I lower my face to the opening. Heavy and acrid and cloying, an
organic
odor, redolent of evacuation, so large and corporeal I can't imagine the box having room for anything else. And this somehow liberates me to plunge my arm straight into the cavity, to grub along the sides and comb every corner and crevice in search of...what?

It matters little. There is nothing there. An empty box.

And as I draw away, my head rocks with the futility of it.

Empty coffins. Why fill a room with empty coffins?

Then, like some provisional reply, a tiny cry leaps into the void. Almost undetectable at first--as assimilable as the squeaking of a hinge or the rattling of a window--until it repeats itself, a little more loudly. And then louder still.

Philomela.

I whirl back for her, but she is precisely where I left her--directly behind my left shoulder-- and the mask of her face has altered but little in the last minute. There is no possibility of such a sound emerging from her.

Then from where?

I close my eyes, the better to attend, but the sound refuses to locate itself. I hunt it down the way one hunts a housefly, in clumsy stealth, seeking to trap it in the corner only to find it buzzing on the far wall. And so I am reduced, finally, to groping my way amongst the coffins, running my hands along their raised lids and waiting for the sound to come to me.

And still it slips away, alternately sharpening and blurring itself in my ear, until it seems to draw itself up through my fingers into the very orifices of my body. I realise then that this particular coffin--the one by which I am now standing--possesses a feature that distinguishes it from the others in the room: it is shut.

Or as shut as it
can
be, given that its lid is checkered by a series of gouged-out holes, each large enough to admit a finger.

I kneel by the coffin. I lower my ear to one of the holes. I rap gently, three times.

From inside comes a sound such as I have never before heard. Not an extension of the earlier cry but something much larger: the throes of a soul. And undergirding that, the scratch scratch scratch of fingers clawing on wood.

--Philomela! There's someone in here.

Silly of me, expecting her to be shocked. The moment I see her face, I understand: this is why we are here.

And now she is by my side, reaching under the lid with a grim purposefulness, fumbling for a few seconds, and then, with a sharp, wrenching motion, drawing it upward.

A latch. The coffin has a latch.

Philomela pushes...pushes...until the lid is perpendicular to the ceiling. Then, after a ceremonial pause, she gazes downward, and I follow suit, bending my neck over the coffin's rim.

Gazing back at us is a pair of eyes. Eyes such as one might see on a drowned body: bluishwhite, with a web of exploded veins. Eyes swollen well beyond their normal size, and so fixed and unyielding as to land upon us with the force of an auger.

The eyes of death, I am about to say. Only
these
eyes blink. From the depths of their sepulchral chamber, they blink.

Some part of me must notice the pale crust of face, the dilating nostrils, the drawn-back lips. But I am lost, I am
drowned
, in these eyes. They stare
past
me, with an expression of such abject feeling I have not the heart to look away.

And so, for want of anything else, I say:

--You needn't be afraid. We're here.

But before I can finish, the girl has found her tongue.

--I good. You say. I good. No fight. You say them I good.

A
Mitteleuropa
cadence to the words, but the terror...the terror is beyond language. It is bone deep.

--I good. No fight. I good.

The sound she makes releases me, after a fashion. I am free now to take in the rest of her. That plump white face. The foreshortened body. The black shoes and stockings and the remnants of a white shawl, torn nearly in two and littered with what look to be marigolds.

And most of all, the hands: claw-shaped, bloody-knuckled. These are the hands that have been following me from day to day, street to street, in and out of consciousness.

--I good. I good. She is ten years old at most, but in this context, immeasurably aged. And in truth, lifting her from the coffin is akin to hoisting a longtime invalid from her daybed. There is no springiness in these bones, only
weight
. Philomela takes her by the legs, and I take her by the shoulders, and we lift with all our might, and I would swear we were lifting a giantess from the bowels of a pit. Gasping, Philomela sets the girl's feet on the ground, but the girl can no more keep her balance than a newborn baby. She swoons in my arms, and for a moment or two, we dance there, across the stone floor, between the coffins--a curiously intimate exchange that ends with both of us collapsed on the floor, sandwiched together like oarsmen. So close are we now I believe I can actually smell her fear, which mingles with the larger tang of shit and piss and sweat.

--Good. So good. You tell.

The girl shows no inclination to move, and it occurs to me we might profitably spend a fair amount of time in this very position--laying out our future, as it were--but that is not to be. From above us comes an abrading surge of light, and I look up to see Iris, dressed for work in a fitted bodice and long, full skirt, standing halfway down the steps and holding aloft a lantern. Her face is in shadow, but I have no doubt as to the expression it wears. And even so, I am desperate enough to run towards her, waving my hands.