Phantom of Blood Alley (13 page)

The lifeless body of Miles Morgenstern remained hovering in midair for an instant, his dead eyes staring sightlessly into mine. Suddenly, it lurched to one side and, accompanied by a soft, strained grunt, rose towards the ceiling, flipped upside down and plunged headfirst into a large copper vat of half-set gelatine.

Transfixed, I stared at the body sinking slowly into the vat of gelatinous gloop. Chilling laughter, stifled yet clearly deranged, hissed in the air about me. I looked around the narrow attic room, but there was no one to be seen, and I took a step forward – only to be knocked roughly aside by something barging past me. I heard a sharp intake of breath and caught the faintest whiff of chemicals.

I was about to sheath my sword and hurry across to the vat when I noticed a splash of red at the tip of the blade. I touched it gingerly and inspected my fingertips. It was blood. Whatever had brushed past me must have been nicked by the blade, and I was struck by a thought.

Supernatural phantoms don’t bleed; invisible he might be, but the murderer was made of flesh and blood. It wasn’t a ghost or ghoul I was after. It was a person – an evil monster, maybe, but a person nonetheless.

Upending the vat, I pulled the body of Miles Morgenstern free and turned him over. I cleared the claggy gelatine from his nose and mouth with fumbling fingers, hoping against hope that the poor man might still be alive. But as I’d feared, his neck was broken. In the grip of the invisible phantom, he’d never stood a chance. I reached forward and closed his bulging eyes.

Behind me, I heard the sound of footsteps
echoing round the stairwell. I jumped to my feet, quickly left the garret and hurtled down the stairs in hot pursuit, reaching the hallway at the bottom of the building just in time to see the front door swing shut. The phantom was getting away.

‘Oh, no you don’t, Dean Henry Dodson,’ I muttered grimly through gritted teeth as I raced outside after him.

I skidded to a halt, and looked round in surprise. The snow had thickened. Huge feathery snowflakes were fluttering down now, white against a yellow-grey sky, and settling on the city below. I groaned, my breath billowing from my mouth.

Now what? I wondered as I looked up and down the snow-covered street.

Then I saw it. Pressed into the snow on the doorstep was a footprint. Then another, and another, leading off down Brazier Street in the direction of Blue Boar Lane. As I followed them, they became farther apart, and I knew
that whoever was making them had broken into a run. But there was something else about the footprints. These weren’t the ridged impressions of boots or shoes. No, I could see the heels, the balls and the toes of feet; unshod feet. The phantom was barefoot.

‘Murderer!’ I bellowed after him as I gave chase. ‘Stop! Murderer! Murderer!’

At the end of Brazier Street, the footprints turned sharply left. I skidded round the corner, straight into the busy thoroughfare of Goose Market Street, to the accompaniment of whinnying horses, the grinding of slewing carriage wheels and loud, impassioned cries.

‘You cretinous oaf!’

‘My legs, they’re trapped!’

‘What in the name of all that’s holy happened?’

The street was in uproar. To my right, an old woman was lying on the pavement. A passing timber cart abruptly lurched to a
standstill before me as the huge brown carthorse pulling it reared up.

‘Whoa, Jed! Whoa!’ the driver shouted.

A loud scream went up from the far side of the street. I turned and, through the falling snow, saw a woman stagger backwards. The next moment, the man to her right bent double and crumpled up in a heap. Beyond them, several passers-by went sprawling as the invisible phantom barged them aside.

I set off in pursuit and, as I reached the far end of the street, I saw the footprints disappearing round the corner. Blinking away the snowflakes that clung to my eyelashes and pulling my coalstack hat low over my eyes, I careered after him.

Skidding and sliding on the newly settled snow, I turned the corner into Blue Boar Lane. The snow was falling thicker than ever, with a good two inches underfoot. Ahead of me, something curious was happening to the invisible figure. Not only could I see his
footprints, but now the falling snow was giving the phantom a ghostly outline as he ran through the flakes.

Reaching the corner of Blood Alley, the phantom turned to see if he was still being pursued, and from two hundred yards away, I found myself staring at the same hideous, inhuman face I’d glimpsed at the window of the lock-up. There was the one disembodied eye, the side of a grimacing mouth and a strip of cheek, all disconnected, as if the face of Henry Dodson was slowly being reassembled.

The grisly apparition disappeared into Blood Alley. Like a wounded animal going to ground, the phantom was heading for his lair. I arrived at the lock-up on Blood Alley moments later, to find the door swinging on its hinges.

With a soft
swish
, I drew the sword from my cane, and raised it before me as I stepped cautiously inside the gloomy lock-up. Dean
Henry Dodson might, by some arcane powers of the occult or infernal alchemy, have cloaked himself in invisibility, but unlike his other victims I was armed and prepared to fight.

Just as my eyes were adjusting to the gloom, there was a small click and a sudden blinding flash, accompanied by the acrid tang of sulphur. In the next instant, something hard and blunt struck me on the side of the head.

There was a moment of searing pain. Then nothing …

I
don’t know how long I remained unconscious. A few minutes? A couple of hours? What I do know is that when I came round, the lock-up was stiflingly hot and bathed in a crimson glow.

I was sitting, slumped in a high-backed chair, my hands and feet bound tightly by thick ropes. What a fool I’d been to enter the phantom’s lair instead of retreating to Hibernian Yard and reporting everything to Inspector Clackett and the city constabulary.

But then would they have believed me? I scarcely believed it myself. An invisible professor committing murders all over town …

‘Ah, so you’re awake, Mr Grimes,’ came a rasping voice from over by the blazing fire, and I gasped as I saw a large, gleaming flask rise up from the nearby workbench, tip up shakily and a stream of liquid pour down into a bubbling vat below. Noxious vapours rose up in dense, crimson clouds. ‘I think it’s time we had a little chat, you and I.’ The voice sounded strained and racked with pain, yet there was an underlying tone of malice.

The flask was set clumsily down and, as the clouds began to clear, I saw a filthy, white laboratory coat, high-buttoned and sleeves rolled, seemingly hovering in midair. There were stains down the front and the material was pock-marked where splashes of caustic liquids had burned holes.

Footsteps approached and, craning my neck, I saw the laboratory coat coming nearer, though I could see no trace of either the legs or feet that might be propelling it. As it drew close, a hideous apparition emerged from the
red-stained fog. I stared at the fragmented patches of face floating above me as the spectral figure moved in the flickering light. A single eye, a strand of straight, matted hair and a ghastly sheen of translucent skin …

‘My war paint appears to be smudged. This weather has played havoc with it,’ the phantom sneered, obviously delighted by the horrified look on my face.

The white coat turned away and the lock-up echoed with a shriek of raucous laughter. I was in no doubt that I was in the presence of a madman. The poisonous chemicals which, even now, were swirling round the lock-up, must have stolen his reason. Miles Morgenstern had spelled out how dangerous they were. The toxic cyanide, the numbing ether and mind-warping mercury vapour had turned Dean Henry Dodson into this raging maniac, just as they had affected poor Laurence Oliphant.

I gazed up at the oliphantypes pegged to a
clothes line that hung from the ceiling above my head. The dean must have seen me, for he reached up with an unseen hand and plucked a print down from one of the waxed cords, and held it up before my eyes.

I stared at the image incredulously. It was me, caught in the moment of stepping into the lock-up in a blinding light.

‘Laurence Oliphant, the greatest painter with light the world has ever seen!’ the rasping voice proclaimed. ‘Pioneer of oliphantography, yet how was poor Laurence treated by the very world he sought to enrich with his creation? I’ll tell you, Mr Grimes. I’ll tell you!

‘He was betrayed, he was belittled, and he suffered torments, Mr Grimes. Torments! …’

The dean’s voice had risen to a deranged, high-pitched scream.

‘His financial backer withdrew his support! Because when he saw oliphantypes such as
this one, Mr Grimes’ – my photographic image shook in front of my face – ‘Crispin Blears realized that painting was dead!’

The oliphantype fluttered to the floor by my feet.

‘His assistant learned all he could from him, then left like a thief in the night!’ the phantom rasped, as the white coat paced back and forth in front of me. ‘Miles Morgenstern stole his master’s work, and then contaminated it with … with gelatine and eggs!’

He spat the words out with contempt.

‘Even his own sister refused to help poor Laurence in his hour of need. Sitting on a fortune in gold, yet she was deaf to his desperate entreaties for help …’

There was a barely stifled sob in the phantom’s throat, quickly replaced by a rasp of malice.

‘But she’ll pay, just like all the others. She’ll pay for her treachery!’

The white coat paused, motionless for a moment, its sleeves crossed in contemplation.

‘And then came the breakthrough – terrible, hideously painful; a torment, but also a triumph! And Albert Hoskins the chemist was unwittingly responsible. Imagine that! Stupid, money-grubbing little Albert, who adulterated the chemicals he supplied to poor Laurence to save a few miserable pennies, and by doing so caused the terrible … miraculous accident!

‘Poor Laurence. How it burned, Mr Grimes. How it burned! And yet … and yet …’

The phantom’s voice was hushed with awe.

‘When the fire was out and the smoke and fumes had cleared, Laurence discovered that where the chemical compound had splashed onto him, his skin had taken on a strange translucency. There was more of the curious solution lying at the bottom of
the vat, as clear and slippery as mercury …’

He pressed his gruesome fragmented face into mine. His breath was warm and foul.

‘Mirrorskin, Mr Grimes,’ he said. ‘That’s what Laurence called it. He mixed it with goose-fat. When applied to the human skin, it renders the wearer …’

‘Invisible,’ I breathed. ‘Is that why you murdered Laurence Oliphant? For this mirrorskin?’

The phantom’s deranged laugh echoed round the infernal lock-up.

‘Laurence Oliphant died,’ he said, ‘but not in the way you think, Mr Grimes. I’ve kept my eye on you as you snooped into his affairs. I was there in the house, giving you and your pretty little friend, Tilly, the run-around; and then in Centennial Park, upending that ridiculous contraption. But nothing you did has done Clarissa any good, I saw to that. She will hang for the murder of her brother, just as I planned!

‘You see, when Laurence discovered mirrorskin, he had some fun, I don’t mind admitting it. Passing freely around the city undetected was exhilarating. He helped himself to chemicals from Albert Hoskins’ warehouse, he stole a pedigree boarhound from the kennels of Lord Riverhythe’s estate; he pushed pedlars into canals, washerwomen into horse troughs and even slashed pompous Sir Crispin Blears’ cack-handed portrait of Lady Sarah Poultney as the goddess Diana with a fencing sword!

‘But then, as the pain persisted, the torments grew; headaches like needles through the eyes, voices taunting in the head. Laurence became more focused. He invited his mentor to his studio, and showed him his miraculous mirrorskin – two precious jars of the stuff – expecting the dean to be amazed. But instead of praising poor Laurence, the dean, his mentor, his hero, turned on him and told him that he was mad!

‘Laurence Oliphant, mad?’ the phantom screeched incredulously, crossing the room and standing behind my chair. I could feel his rasping breath on my cheek.