The Black Charade. John Burke

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN BURKE

      The Black Charade: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror

      The Devil’s Footsteps: A Dr. Caspian Novel of Horror

      The Golden Horns: A Mystery Novel

      Murder, Mystery, and Magic: Macabre Stories

      The Nightmare Whisperers: A Novel of Horror

      The Old Man of the Stars: Two Classic Science Fiction Tales

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1977 by John Burke

      Copyright © 2012 by Jean Burke

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For David

      CHAPTER ONE

      Our torments also may in length of time

      Become our demons.

      John Milton—Paradise Lost

      It had to be tonight. The pain and fever had become too intense. Tonight he must go through and be cleansed and renewed, before it was too late.

      She had promised. He could wait no longer.

      He fought down a cough, clutching a handkerchief to his mouth. The attack bent him double. When he stood up, the crumpled whiteness came away red and foul.

      It would be stopped. There would be an end to pain. She had promised.

      His fingers trembled as he thrust the pin through his silk cravat. At the last minute she might tell him that the time was still not right. She would torment him, as she had tormented him before. There would be some reason, as there had been last time he implored her for speedy release, why it must be postponed. He could not be cheated again. He was ready for the ordeal. If the others were slow, they must wait their turn. For himself it had to be now.

      He went to the nursery to say goodnight to the three girls. The low flame of the gas jet on the landing caught a glint from one sleepy eye; a tiny, pale hand lay open on the counterpane.

      ‘Goodnight, my loves.’

      ‘Goodnight, Papa.’

      His wife came to join him in the doorway, looking uneasily at his face as he turned out of the room. When the door was softly closed, she said, in her tightest little voice: ‘Henry, you’re not thinking of going out this evening?’

      ‘I have an appointment.’

      ‘The fog is settling in. In your present condition it’s out of the question for you to leave the house.’

      ‘I must go. I shall be late.’

      ‘What would Dr. McLeod say?’

      ‘Dr. McLeod has said and done nothing to my advantage so far. I shall follow my own course of treatment.’

      ‘And what has that advantaged you?’ She reached up and turned the gas higher so that she might see him more clearly. ‘You should be in bed. Henry, this fog will...will....’

      He knew she had been about to say that it would be the death of him. A commonplace exaggeration, but in this case too close to the truth. Death would come if he did not soon take the essential step to conquer both fog and fever.

      ‘I have an appointment,’ he said again.

      ‘They’ll not expect you in such weather.’

      Explanations were useless. Of course he would be expected, whatever the weather. The meetings were governed not by the erratic miasmas of London’s smoke and runnels and sewers, but by signs and calculations far more ancient than the city itself.

      He blundered his way past her and went downstairs to put on his overcoat, its heavy velvet collar scuffed and shining a faint olive hue. Even this simple movement clutched at his chest again. He gasped for breath, and another searing cough burned up from within.

      ‘Henry, I insist that you listen to reason.’

      Later tonight, and tomorrow, and for all the years to come, she would see her mistake. There would be an end to her whining insistence; a return of the demureness and loving obedience she had shown in the early years of their marriage, before this fiendish thing began to consume his lungs. The pittance from her father and mother, which had kept them going during his illness, had at the same time done them all harm. It was time to set things to rights again. Renewed, he would take his rightful place as head of the household: renewed not in a feeble dream world beyond death, but here on earth.

      When he opened the front door, writhing wisps of sour yellow fog curled about the antlers of the hallstand. Before his wife could protest again, a hansom turned the comer of the street and sped towards them. He was glad of the excuse to hurry out into the March chill, raising his cane and shouting—a shout which brought another spasm of coughing upon him.

      Stepping into the cab and giving the address, he looked back once. Absurd to feel that this was the last glimpse he might ever have of his wife and home. Absurd, when the truth was just the opposite. After tonight nothing would be changed but himself.

      ‘Gibbet Wharf?’ said the cabby dubiously. ‘You sure you got the address right, guv’nor?’

      ‘The bridge above Gibbet Wharf, yes.’

      ‘Not much of a place to be strolling ’round after dark.’

      ‘I can take care of myself, thank you.’

      The cabby twisted his neck to glance back. If he had any further doubts, he kept them to himself. With a light flick of the whip and a click of the tongue, they were away.

      The trim suburban streets ran one into another for ten minutes and more, lit by smears of greenish light on lamp standards almost invisible in the murk. Then even that hazy illumination dimmed. Down some side streets and long terraces there was not the glimmer of a lamp. Occasionally a clear patch opened out, as if some strange ebb had sucked the fog back to the sides of an unsteady square. Once the cabby cursed and tugged his horse to one side to avoid loads of rubble where a new road was being driven through a warren of old houses and alleys. Sputtering oil lamps in a few windows showed that some folk were still clinging doggedly to rooms in buildings which were being eaten away behind them.

      At one junction the glare of naphtha lights picked out the stalls of a street market. Voices drifted like the smell of fish and smoke and vinegar, then died. The cab left them behind and went on into yet darker streets. A fire smouldered beside a pile of scattered bricks, urchins dancing in its glow; then that, too, died.

      Henry Garston sat well back, his shoulders jolting comfortably against the padded leather.

      They jogged under a railway arch, where the tang of smoke and steam became part of the fog, slowed up a long incline, and stopped at last under the shadow of hunched houses and decrepit sheds.

      ‘Well, this is what you wanted, guv’nor. If you still want it, that is.’

      The road humped over a bridge whose iron railing formed also the arch of a low tunnel. Here the dark water of a canal flowed into the open after half a mile underground, still dark until it picked up the reflections of crowded lights on the far side of a wasteland of bricks, splintered wood, and broken glass. Red breath of a main line engine pulsed above the long viaduct, the throb and roar of wheels increasing and then slackening as the train slowed towards a terminus beyond the crowded rooftops.

      Five years ago there had been a plan to take a spur from that line across the canal and on through north London to new suburbs in the east. A sprawl of slums packed around cramped courtyards had been demolished, when the company ran into difficulties and, while waiting to acquire fresh capital, found that more prosperous developers had begun to build smart new estates across their path. The railway line was never completed. Now hills and avenues of tall, fashionable