I: “too late in the year, surely, for wasps”
The Reverend Mr. Bartholomew Haskins, rector of Angel Down, paused by the open gate of Angel Field. His boots sank a little into the frost-crusted mud. Ice water trickled in his veins. He was momentarily unable to move. From somewhere close by came the unmistakable, horrid buzz of a cloud of insects.
It was too late in the year, surely, for wasps. But his ears were attuned to such sounds. Since childhood, he’d been struck with a horror of insects. Jane, his sister, had died in infancy of an allergic reaction to wasp stings. It was thought likely that he might share her acute sensitivity to their venom, but the reason for his persistent fear—as for so much else in his life—was that it was his stick, poked into a pulpy nest, which had stirred the insects to fury. As a boy, he had prayed to Jane for forgiveness as often as he prayed to Our Lord. As a man, he laboured still under the burden of a guilt beyond assuaging.
“Bart,” prompted Sam Farrar, the farmer, “what is it?”
“Nothing,” he lied.
At the far end of Angel Field was a copse, four elms growing so close together by a shallow pond their roots and branches were knotted. A flock of sheep were kept here. As Sam hauled his gate shut behind them, Haskins noticed the sheep forming a clump, as if eager to gather around their owner. There were white humps in the rest of the field, nearer the copse. They didn’t move. Wasps did swarm over them.
Hideous, dreadful creatures.
Haskins forced himself to venture into Angel Field, following the farmer. He kept his arms stiffly by his side and walked straight-legged, wary of exciting a stray monster into sudden, furious hostility.
“Never seen anything like this, Bart,” said Sam. “In fifty year on the land.”
The farmer waded through his flock and knelt by one of the humps, waving the wasps away with a casual, ungloved hand. The scene swam before Haskins’s eyes. A filthy insect crawled on Sam’s hand and Haskins’s stomach knotted with panic.
He overcame his dread with a supreme effort and joined his friend. The hump was a dead sheep. Sam picked up the animal’s woolly head and turned its face to the sunlight.
The animal had been savagely mutilated. Its skull was exposed on one side. The upper lip, cheek, and one side of the nose were torn away as if by shrapnel.
“I think it’s been done with acid.”
“Should you be touching it, then?”
“Good point.”
Sam dropped the beast’s head. The seams in his face deepened as he frowned.
“The others are the same. Strange swirls etched into their hides. Look.”
There were rune-like patches on the dead sheep. They might have been left by a weapon or branding iron. The skin and flesh were stripped off or eaten away.
“My Dad’d never keep beasts in Angel Field. Not after the trouble with my Aunt Rose. That was in ‘72, afore I was born. You know that story, of course. Was kept from me for a long time. This is where it happened.”
The wasps had come back. Haskins couldn’t think.
“Always been something off about Angel Field. Were standing stones here once, like at Stonehenge but smaller. After Rose, Grandad had ‘em all pulled down and smashed to bits. There was a fuss and a protest, but it’s Farrar land. Nothing busybodies from Up London could do about it.”
Grassy depressions, in a circle, showed where the stones had stood for thousands of years. The dead sheep were within the area that had once been bounded by the ring.
It seemed to Haskins that the insects were all inside the circle too, gathering. Not just wasps, but flies, bees, hornets, ants, beetles. Wings sawed the air, so swiftly they blurred. Mouth-parts stitched, stingers dripped, feelers whipped, legs scissored. A chitinous cacophony.
Bartholomew Haskins was terrified, and ashamed of his fear. Soon, Sam would notice. But at the moment, the farmer was too puzzled and annoyed by what had befallen his sheep.
“I tell you, Bart, I don’t know whether to call the vet or the constable.”
“This isn’t natural,” Haskins said. “Someone did this.”
“Hard to picture, Bart. But I think you’re right.”
Sam stood up and looked away, at his surviving sheep. None bore any unusual mark, or seemed ailing. But they were spooked. It was in their infrequent bleating. If even the sheep felt it, there must be something here.
Haskins looked about, gauging the positions of the missing stones. The dead sheep were arranged in a smaller circle within the larger, spaced nearly evenly. And at the centre was another bundle, humped differently.
“What’s this, Sam?”
The farmer came over.
“Not one of mine,” he said.
The bundle was under a hide of some sort. Insects clung to it like a ghastly shroud. They moved, as if the thing were alive. Haskins struggled to keep his gorge down.
The hide undulated and a great cloud of wasps rose into the air in a spiral. Haskins swallowed a scream.
“It’s moving.”
The hide flipped back at the edge and a small hand groped out.
“Good God,” Sam swore.
Haskins knelt down and tore away the hide. It proved to be a tartan blanket, crusted with mud and glittering with shed bug scales.
Large, shining eyes caught the sun like a cat’s. The creature gave out a keening shriek that scraped nerves. There was something of the insect in the screech, and something human. For a moment, Haskins thought he was hearing Jane again, in her dying agony.
The creature was a muddy child. A little girl, of perhaps eight. She was curled up like a buried mummy, and brown all over, clothes as much as her face and limbs. Her feet were bare, and her hair was drawn back with a silvery ribbon.
She blinked in the light, still screeching.
Haskins patted the girl, trying to soothe her. She hissed at him, showing bright, sharp, white teeth. He didn’t recognise her, but there was something familiar in her face, in the set of her eyes and the shape of her mouth.
She hesitated, like a snake about to strike, then clung to him, sharp fingers latched onto his coat, face pressed to his chest. Her screech was muffled, but continued.
Haskins looked over the girl’s shoulder at Sam Farrar. He was bewildered and agoggle. In his face, Haskins saw an echo of the girl’s features, even her astonished expression.
It couldn’t be...
.. .but it was. Missing for over fifty years and returned exactly as she had been when taken.
This was Rose Farrar.
* * * *
“There is one who would speak with you, Catriona Kaye,” intoned Mademoiselle Astarte. “One who has passed beyond the veil, one who cares for you very much.”
Catriona nodded curtly. The medium’s lacquered fingers bit deeply into her hand. She could smell peppermint on the woman’s breath, and gin.
Mademoiselle Astarte wore a black dress, shimmering with beaded fringes. A tiara of peacock feathers gave her the look of an Aztec priestess. A rope of pearls hung flat against her chest and dangled to her navel. As table-rappers went, she was the bee’s roller-skates.
She shook her head slightly, eyes shut in concentration. Catriona’s hand really hurt now.
“A soldier,” the medium breathed.
The Great War had been done with for seven years. It was a fair bet that anyone of Catriona’s age—she was a century baby, born 1900—consulting a woman in Mademoiselle Astarte’s profession would be interested in a soldier. Almost everyone had lost a soldier—a sweetheart, a brother, even a father.
She nodded, noncommittally.
“Yes, a soldier,” the medium confirmed. A lone tear ran neatly through her mascara.
There were others in the room. Mademoiselle didn’t have her clients sit about a table. She arranged them on stiff-backed chairs in a rough semicircle and wandered theatrically among them, seizing with both hands the person to whom the spirit or spirits who spoke through her wished to address themselves.
Everyone was attentive. The medium put on a good show.
Mademoiselle Astarte’s mother, a barrel-shaped lady draped in what might once have been a peculiarly ugly set of mid-Victorian curtains, let her fingers play over the keys of an upright piano, tinkling notes at random. It was supposed to suggest the music of the spheres, and put the spirits at ease. Catriona was sure the woman was playing “Knocked ‘Em in the Old Kent Road” very slowly.
Smoke filtered into the room. Not scented like incense, but pleasantly woody. It seemed to come from nowhere. The electric lamps were dimmed with Chinese scarves. A grey haze gathered over the carpet, rising like a tide.
“His passing was sudden,” the medium continued. “But not painful. A shock. He hardly knew what had happened to him, was unaware of his condition.”
Also calculated: no upsetting details—choking on gas while gutted on barbed wire, mind smashed by months of bombardment and shot as a coward—and a subtle explanation for why it had taken years for the spirit to come through.
There was a fresh light. It seemed sourceless, but the smoke glowed from within as it gathered into a spiral. A prominent china manufacturer gasped, while his wife’s face was wrung with a mix of envy and joy—they had lost a son at Passchendaele.
A figure was forming. A man in uniform, olive drab bleached grey. The cap was distinct, but the face was a blur. Any rank insignia were unreadable.
Catriona’s hands were almost bloodless. She had to steel herself to keep from yelping. Mademoiselle Astarte yanked her out of her chair and held tight.
The figure wavered in the smoke.
“He wants you to know...”
“.. .that he cares for me very much?”
“Yes. Indeed. It is so.”
Mademoiselle Astarte’s rates were fixed. Five pounds for a session. Those whose loved ones “made contact” were invariably stirred enough to double or triple the fee. The departed never seemed overly keen on communicating with those left behind who happened to be short of money.
Catriona peered at the wavering smoke soldier.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” she said.
“Yes, child...”
Mademoiselle Astarte could only be a year or two older than her.
“My soldier. Edwin.”
“Yes. Edwin. That is the name. I hear it clearly.”
A smile twitched on Catriona’s lips.
“Edwin... isn’t... actually dead.”
The medium froze. Her nails dug into Catriona’s bare arms. Her face was a study in silent fury. Catriona detached Mademoiselle Astarte’s hands from her person and stood back.
“The music is to cover the noise of the projection equipment, isn’t it?”
Mademoiselle’s mother banged the keyboard without interruption. Catriona looked up at the ceiling. The chandelier was an arrangement of mirror pendants clustered around a pinhole aperture.
“There’s another one of you in the room upstairs. Cranking the projector. Your father, I would guess. It’s remarkable how much more reliable your connection with the spirit world has become since his release from Pentonville.”
She poked her hand into the smoke and wiggled her fingers. Greatcoat buttons were projected onto her hand. The sepia tint was a nice touch.
“You bitch,” Mademoiselle Astarte spat, like a fishwife.
The others in the circle were shocked.
“I really must protest,” began the china manufacturer. His bewildered wife shook her head, still desperate to believe.
“I’m afraid this woman has been rooking you,” Catriona announced. “She is a clever theatrical performer, and a rather nasty specimen of that unlovely species, the confidence trickster.”
The medium’s hands leaped like hawks. Catriona caught her wrists and held the dagger-nails away from her face. Her fringes writhed like the fronds of an angry jellyfish.
“You are a disgrace, Mademoiselle,” she said, coldly. “And your sham is blown. You would do well to return to the music-halls, where your prestidigitation does no harm.”
She withdrew tactfully from the room. A commotion erupted within, as sitters clamoured for their money back, and Mademoiselle and her mother tried in vain to calm them. The china manufacturer, extremely irate, mentioned the name of a famous firm of solicitors.
In the hallway, Catriona found her good cloth coat and slipped it on over a moderately fringed white dress. It was daringly cut just above the knee, barely covering the rolled tops of her silk stockings. She fixed a cloche hat over her bobbed brown hair, catching sight of her slightly too satisfied little face in the hall mirror. She still had freckles, which made the carefully placed beauty mark a superfluous black dot. Her mouth was nice, though, just the shape for a rich red Cupid’s bow. She blew a triumphant kiss at herself, and stepped out onto Phene Street.
Her cold anger was subsiding. Charlatanry always infuriated her, especially when combined with cupidity. The field of psychical research would never be taken seriously while the flim-flam merchants were in business, fleecing the grieving and the gullible.
Edwin Winthrop awaited her outside, the Bentley idling at the kerb like a green and brass land-yacht. He sat at the wheel, white scarf flung over his shoulder, a large check cap over his patent-leather hair, warmed not by a voluminous car coat but by a leather flying jacket. The ends of his moustache were almost unnoticeably waxed, and he grinned to see her, satisfied that she had done well at the séance. Her soldier was seven years out of uniform, but still obscurely in the service of his country.
“Hop in, Catty-Kit,” he said. “You’ll want to make a swift get-away, I suspect. Doubtless, the doers of dastardly deeds will have their fur standing on end by now, and be looking to exact a cowardly revenge upon your pretty little person.”
A heavy plant-pot fell from the skies and exploded on the pavement a foot away from her white pumps. It spread shrapnel of well-watered dirt and waxy aspidistra leaves. She glanced up at the town house, noticing the irate old man in an open window, and vaulted into the passenger seat.
“Very neatly done, Cat,” Edwin complimented her.
The car swept away, roaring like a jungle beast. Fearful curses followed. She blushed to hear such language. Edwin sounded the bulb-horn in reply.
She leaned close and kissed his chilled cheek.
“How’s the spirit world, my angel?” she asked.
“How would I know?” he shrugged.
“I have it on very good authority that you’ve taken up residence there.”
“Not yet, old thing. The Hun couldn’t get shot of me on the ground or in the air during the late unpleasantness, and seven stripes of foul fellow have missed their chance since the cessation. Edwin Winthrop, Esquire, of Somerset and Bloomsbury, is pretty much determined to stick about on this physical plane for the foreseeable. After all, it’s so deuced interesting a sphere. With you about, one wouldn’t wish to say farewell to the corporeal just yet.”
They drove through Chelsea, towards St. James’s Park. It was a bright English autumn day, with red leaves in the street and a cleansing nip in the air.
“What do you make of this?”
One hand on the wheel, he produced a paper from inside his jacket. It was a telegram.
“It’s from the Old Man,” he explained.
The message was terse, three words. Angel Down Sussex.
“Is it an event or a place?” she asked.
Edwin laughed, even teeth shining.
“A bit of both, Catty-Kit. A bit of both.”
* * * *
Strictly speaking, the gentle sex were not permitted within the portals of the Diogenes Club. When this was first brought to Winthrop’s attention, he had declared his beloved associate to be not a woman but a minx and therefore not subject to the regulation. The Old Man, never unduly deferential to hoary tradition, accepted this and Catriona Kaye was now admitted without question to the Strangers Room. As she breezed into the discreet building in Pall Mall and sat herself daintily down like a deceptively well-behaved schoolgirl, Winthrop derived petty satisfaction from the contained explosions of fury that emanated from behind several raised numbers of The Times. He realised that the Old Man shared this tiny pleasure.
Though he had served with the Somerset Light Infantry and the Royal Flying Corps during the Great War, Edwin Winthrop had always been primarily responsible to the Diogenes Club, least known and most eccentric instrument of the British Government. If anything, peace had meant an increase in his activities on their behalf. The Old Man—Charles Beauregard, Chairman of the Club’s Ruling Cabal—had formed a section to look into certain matters no other official body could be seen to take seriously. Winthrop was the leading agent of that special section, and Catriona Kaye, highly unofficially, his most useful aide. Her interest in psychical research, a subject upon which she had written several books, dovetailed usefully with the section’s remit, to deal with the apparently inexplicable.
The Old Man joined them in the Strangers Room, signalled an attendant to bring brandy, and sat himself down on an upholstered sofa. At seventy-two, his luxurious hair and clipped moustache were snow white but his face was marvellously unlined and his eyes still bright. Beauregard had served with the Diogenes Club for over forty years, since the days when the much-missed Mycroft Holmes chaired the Cabal and the Empire was ceaselessly harried by foreign agents after naval plans.
Beauregard complimented Catriona on her complexion; she smiled and showed her dimple. There was a satirical undercurrent to this exchange, as if all present had to pretend always to be considerably less clever than they were, but were also compelled to communicate on a higher level their genuine acuities. This meant sometimes seeming to take the roles of windy old uncle and winsome young flirt.
“You’re our authority on the supernatural, Catriona,” said the Old Man, enunciating all four syllables of the name. “Does Angel Down mean anything to you?”
“I know of the story,” she replied. “It was a nine-day wonder, like the Mary Celeste or the Angel of Mons. There’s a quite bad Victorian book on the affair, Mrs. Twemlow’s The Girl Who Went With the Angels.”
“Yes, our little vanished Rosie Farrar.”
Until today, Winthrop had never heard of Angel Down, Sussex.
“There was a wave of ‘angelic visitations’ in the vicinity of Angel Down in the 1870s,” Catriona continued, showing off rather fetchingly. “Flying chariots made of stars harnessed together, whooshing through the treetops, leaving burned circles in fields where they touched ground. Dr. Martin Hesselius, the distinguished specialist in supernatural affairs, was consulted by the Farrar family and put the business down to a plague of fire elementals. More recently, in an article, Dr. Silence, another important researcher in the field, has invoked the Canadian wendigo or wind-walker as an explanation. But in the popular imagination, the visitors have always been angels, though not perhaps the breed we are familiar with from the Bible and Mr. Milton. The place name suggests that this rash of events was not unprecedented in the area. Mrs. Twemlow unearthed medieval references to miraculous sightings. The visitations revolved around a neolithic circle.”
“And what about the little girl?” Winthrop asked.
“This Rosie Farrar, daughter of a farmer, claimed to have talked with the occupants of these chariots of fire. They were cherubs, she said, about her height, clad in silvery-grey raiment, with large black eyes and no noses to speak of. She was quite a prodigy. One day, she went into Angel Field, where the stones stood, and was transported up into the sky, in the presence of witnesses, and spirited away in a fiery wheel.”
“Never to be seen again?” Winthrop ventured.
“Until yesterday,” the Old Man answered. “Rose has come back. Or, rather, a child looking exactly as Rose did fifty years ago has come back. In Angel Field.”
“She’d be an old woman by now,” Winthrop said.
“Providing time passes as we understand it in the Realm of the Angels,” said Catriona.
“And where exactly might that be, Cat?”
She poked her tongue out at him, just as the attendant, a fierce-looking ghurka, returned with their brandy. He betrayed no opinion, but she was slightly cowed. Serve her right.
“The local rector made the report. One Bartholomew Haskins. He called the Lord Lieutenant, and the matter was passed on to the Diogenes Club. Now, I’m entrusting it to you.”
“What does this girl have to say for herself?” Catriona asked. “Does she actually claim to be Rosie Farrar?”
“She hasn’t said anything yet. Photographs exist of the real Rose, and our girl is said to resemble them uncannily.”
“Uncannily, eh?” said Winthrop.
“Just so.”
“I should think this’ll make for a jolly weekend away from town,” Winthrop told the Old Man. “Angel Down is near enough to Falmer Field for me to combine an investigation with a couple of sorties in Katie.”
Winthrop had kept up his flying since the War, maintaining his own aeroplane, a modified Camel fighter named Katie. She was getting to be a bit of an antique paraded next to the latest line in gleaming metal monoplanes, but he trusted her as much as he did Catriona or the Bentley. He knew the kite’s moods and foibles, and could depend on her in a pinch. If she could come through the best efforts of the late Baron von Richthofen’s Flying Circus, she could survive any peace-time scrape. If he were to tangle with “chariots of stars,” he might have need of the faithful Katie.
Catriona was thoughtful. As ever, she saw this less as a jaunt than he did. He needed her to balance him. She had a strong sense of what was significant, and kept him from haring off on wild streaks when he needed to be exercising the old brain-box.
“Has this miraculous reappearance been made public?”
The Old Man’s brows knit. “I’m afraid so. The Brighton Argus carried the story this morning, and the afternoon editions of all the dailies have it, in various lights. Haskins knows enough to keep the child away from the press for the moment. But all manner of people are likely to take an interest. You know who I mean. It would be highly convenient if you could come up with some unsensational explanation that will settle the matter before it goes any further.”
Winthrop understood. It was almost certain this business was a misunderstanding or a hoax. If so, it was best it were blown up at once. And, if not, it was sadly best that it be thought so.
“I’ll see what I can do, Beauregard.”
“Good man. Now, you children run off and play. And don’t come back until you know what little Rosie is up to.”
* * * *
With Sam Farrar queerly reluctant to take his miraculously returned aunt into his house, Haskins had to put the little girl up at the rectory. He wondered, chiding himself for a lack of charity, whether Sam’s hesitation was down to the question of the stake in Farrar Farm, if any, to which Rose might be entitled. It was also true that for Sam and Ellen to be presented in late middle age with a child they might be expected to raise as their own would be an upheaval in their settled lives.
The girl had said nothing yet, but sat quietly in an oversized chair in his study, huddled inside one of Haskins’s old dressing gowns. Mrs. Cully, his housekeeper, had got the poor child out of her filthy clothes and given her a bath. She had wanted to throw away the ruined garments, but Haskins insisted they be kept for expert examination. Much would hinge on those dirty rags. If it could be proven that they were of more recent provenance than 1872, then this was not Rose Farrar.
Haskins sat at his desk, unable to think of his sermon. His glance was continually drawn to the girl. Now she had stopped keening, she seemed a demure little thing. She sat with one leg tucked up under her and the other a-dangle, showing a dainty, uncallused foot. With her face clean and her hair scrubbed—she insisted on having her silver ribbon back—she could have been any well-brought-up child waiting for a story before being packed off to bed.
Telegrams had arrived all morning. And the telephone on his desk had rung more often than in the last six months. He was to expect a pair of investigators from London. Representatives from Lord Northcliffe’s Mail and Lord Beaverbrook’s Express had made competing overtures to secure the “rights” to the story. Many others had shown an interest, from charitable bodies concerned with the welfare of “a unique orphan” to commercial firms who wished “the miracle girl” to endorse their soap or tonic. Haskins understood that the girl must be shielded from such public scrutiny, at least until the investigators had assessed her case.
One telegram in particular stirred Haskins. A distinguished person offered Rose any service it was within his power to perform. Haskins had replied swiftly, inviting the author-knight to Angel Down. If anyone could get to the bottom of the matter, it would be the literary lion whose sharpness of mind was reputed to be on a par with that of the detective he had made famous and who had worked so tirelessly in his later years to demonstrate the possibility of the miraculous here on Earth.
The girl seemed unaware of Haskins’s fascination with her. She was a Victorian parent’s idea of perfection—pretty as a picture, quiet as a mouse, poised as a waxwork. Haskins wondered about the resemblance to Sam Farrar. It had seemed so strong in the first light of discovery but was now hard to see.
He got up from his desk, abandoning his much-begun and little-developed sermon, and knelt before the child. He took her small hands, feeling bird-like bones and fragile warmth. This was a real girl, not an apparition. She had been vigorously bathed and spent the night in the guest bedroom. Ghosts did not leave dirty bathwater or crumpled sheets. She had consumed some soup last night and half an apple for breakfast.
Her eyes fixed his and he wanted to ask her questions.
Since she had stopped making her peculiar noise, she had uttered no sound. She seemed to understand what was said to her but was disinclined to answer. She did not even respond to attempted communication via rudimentary sign language or Mrs. Cully’s baby-talk.
“Rose?” he asked.
There was no flicker in her eyes.
Sam had produced pictures, yellowed poses of the Farrar children from the dawn of photography. One among a frozen gaggle of girls resembled exactly this child. Sam reluctantly confirmed the child in the portrait as his vanished Aunt Rose, the Little Girl Who Went With the Angels.
“What happened to you, Rose?”
According to the stories, she had been swept up to the Heavens in a column of starlight.
Haskins heard a buzzing. There was a wasp in the room!
He held the girl’s hands too tightly. Her face contorted in pain. He let go and made an attempt to soothe her, to prevent the return of her screeches.
Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.
The wasp was still here. Haskins was horribly aware of it. His collar was damp and his stomach shifted.
There was more than one.
The buzzing grew louder. Haskins stood up and looked about for the evil black-and-yellow specks.
He looked again at Rose, suddenly afraid for her. The girl’s face shifted and she was his sister, Jane.
It was like an injection of wasp venom to the heart.
Her mouth was a round aperture, black inside. The wasp shrill was coming from her.
Haskins was terrified, dragged back to his boyhood, stripped of adult dignities and achievements, confronted with his long-dead victim.
He remembered vividly the worst thing he had ever done. The stick sinking into the nest. His cruel laughter as the cloud swarmed from the sundered ovoid and took flight, whipped away by strong wind.
Jane stood on the chair, dressing gown a heavy monk’s robe. She still wore her silver ribbon. She wasn’t exactly Jane. There was some Rose in her eyes. And a great deal of darkness, of something else.
She reached out to him as if for a cuddle. He fell to his knees, this time in prayer. He tried to close his eyes.
The girl’s mouth was huge, a gaping circle. Black apparatus emerged, a needle-tipped proboscis rimmed with whipping feelers. It was an insectile appendage, intricate and hostile, parts grinding together with wicked purpose.
Her eyes were black poached eggs overflowing their sockets, a million facets glinting.
The proboscis touched his throat. A barb of ice pierced his skin. Shock stopped his heart and stilled his lungs, leaving his mind to flutter on for eternal seconds.
* * * *
Angel Down Rectory was a nice little cottage close by the church, rather like the home Catriona had grown up in. Her kindly father was a clergyman in Somerset, in the village where Edwin’s distant father had owned the Manor House without really being Lord of the Manor.
Colonel Winthrop had been literally distant for most of his later life, stationed in India or the Far East after some scandal which was never spoken of in the village. An alienist might put that down as the root of a streak of slyness, of manipulative ruthlessness, that fitted his son for the murkier aspects of his business. Recognising this dark face, fed with blood in the trenches and the skies, as being as much a part of Edwin’s personality as his humour, generosity, and belief in her, Catriona did her best to shine her light upon it, to keep him fixed on a human scale. The Reverend Kaye mildly disapproved of her spook-chasing and changed the subject whenever anyone asked about his daughter’s marriage plans, but was otherwise as stalwart, loyal, and loving a parent as she could wish.
They had found the village with ease, homing in on a steeple visible from a considerable distance across the downs. For such a small place, Angel Down was blessed with a large and impressive church, which was in itself suggestive. If a site can boast an ancient stone circle and a long-established Christian church, it is liable to have been a centre of unusual spiritual activity for quite some time.
There was something wrong. She knew it at once. She made no claim to psychic powers, but had learned to be sensitive. She could almost always distinguish between an authentic spectre and a fool in a bedsheet, no matter how much fog and shadow were about. It was a question of reading the tiniest signs, often on an unconscious level.
“Careful, dearest,” she told Edwin, as they got out of the car.
He looked at her quizzically. She couldn’t explain her unsettling feeling, but he had been with her in enough bizarre situations to accept her shrug of doubt as a trustworthy sign of danger ahead. He thrust a hand into his coat pocket, taking hold of the revolver he carried when about the business of the Diogenes Club.
She heard something. A sound like an insect, but then again not. It was not within her experience.
Edwin rapped on the door with his knuckles.
A round pink woman let them in. Upon receipt of Edwin’s card, the housekeeper—Mrs. Cully—told them they were expected and that she would tell the rector of their arrival.
The narrow hallway was likeably cluttered. A stand was overburdened with coats and hats, boots lined up for inspection nearby, umbrellas and sticks ready for selection. A long-case clock ticked slow, steady seconds.
There was no evidence of eccentricity.
Mrs. Cully returned, pink gone to grey. Catriona was immediately alert, nerves singing like wires. The woman couldn’t speak, but nodded behind her, to the rector’s study.
With his revolver, Edwin pushed open the door.
Catriona saw a black-faced man lying on the carpet, eyes staring. His hands were white.
Edwin stepped into the room and Catriona followed. They both knelt by the prone man. He had a shock of red-grey hair and wore a clerical collar, taut as a noose around his swollen throat.
The Reverend Mr. Haskins—for this could be none other—was freshly dead. Still warm, he had no pulse, heartbeat, or breath. His face was swollen and coal-coloured. His mouth and eyes were fixed open. Even his tongue was black and stiff. Droplets of blood clung to his hard, overripe cheeks.
“Snakebite?” she asked, shuddering.
“Could be, Cat,” he said, standing up.
She was momentarily troubled. Did she hear the soft slither of a dire reptile winding across the carpet? She was not fond of the beasts. A criminal mandarin-sorcerer had once tried to murder Edwin with a black mamba delivered in a Harrod’s hamper. She had been unfortunate enough to be sharing a punt with him when the scheme came to hissing light. She had cause to remember that snakes can swim.
“And who have we here?” he asked.
She stood. Edwin had found the girl, sat calmly in an armchair, wearing a man’s large dressing gown, leafing through a picture book of wild flowers. The supposed Rose Farrar was a tiny thing, too sharp-featured to be considered pretty but with a striking, triangular face and huge, curious eyes. Her expression was familiar to Catriona. She had seen it on shell-shocked soldiers coming home from a war that would always be fought in their minds.
She wanted to warn Edwin against touching the girl. But that would have been ridiculous.
“Little miss, what happened?” he asked.
The girl looked up from her book. For a moment, she seemed like a shrunken adult. The real Rosie would be almost sixty, Catriona remembered.
“He had a funny turn,” the child said.
That much was obvious.
“Do you have a name, child?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, disinclined to reveal more.
“And what might it be?” Catriona asked.
The little girl turned to look at her, for the first time, and said, “Catriona.”
It was a tiny shock.
“I am Catriona,” Catriona said. “And this is Edwin. You are...?”
She held up her book. On the page was a picture of a wild rose, delicate green watercolour leaves with incarnadine petal splashes.
“Rose,” the girl said.
This was considerably more serious than a hoax. A man was dead. No longer just a puzzle to be unpicked and forgotten, this was a mystery to be solved.
A panicked cough from the doorway drew their attention. It was Mrs. Cully, eyes fixed on the ceiling, away from the corpse.
“There’s another come visiting,” she said.
Catriona knew they must have been racing newspapermen to get here. There would be reporters all over the village, and soon—when this latest development was out—front-page headlines in all the papers.
“Is it someone from the press?” Edwin asked.
The woman shook her head. A big, elderly man gently stepped around her and into the room. He had a large, bushy moustache and kindly eyes: She knew him at once.
“Sir Arthur,” said Edwin, “welcome to Angel Down. I wish the circumstances of our meeting had been different.”
* * * *
Winthrop shifted his revolver to his left hand, so he could extend his right arm and shake hands with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The author was in his mid-sixties, but his grip was firm. He was an outdoor-looking man, more Watson than Holmes.
“You have me at a disadvantage, sir.”
“I am Edwin Winthrop, of the Diogenes Club.”
“Oh,” said Sir Arthur, momentously, “them.”
“Yes, indeed. Water under the bridge, and all that.”
Sir Arthur rumbled. He had clearly not forgotten that the Diogenes Club had once taken such a dim view of his mentioning their name in two pieces placed in the Strand magazine that considerable pressure had been brought to ensure the suppression of further such narratives. While the consulting detective was always slyly pleased that his feats be publicised, his civil servant brother—Beauregard’s predecessor—preferred to hide his considerable light under a bushel. Sir Arthur had never revealed the exact nature of the Club and Mycroft’s position within it, but he had drawn attention to a man and an institution who would far rather their names were unknown to the general public. No real lasting harm was done, though the leagues who followed Sherlock Holmes were tragically deprived of thrilling accounts of several memorable occasions upon which he had acted as an instrument of his older brother and his country.
“And this is Miss Catriona Kaye,” Winthrop continued.
“I know who she is.”
The sentence was like a slap, but Catriona did not flinch at it.
“This woman,” Sir Arthur said, “has made it her business to harass those few unselfish souls who can offer humanity the solace it so badly needs. I’ve had a full account of her unwarranted attack this morning on Mademoiselle Astarte of Chelsea.”
Winthrop remembered that Sir Arthur was a committed, not to say credulous, Spiritualist.
“Sir Arthur,” said Catriona, fixing his steely gaze, “Mademoiselle Astarte is a cruel hoaxer and an extortionist. She does your cause—nay, our cause—no credit whatsoever. I too seek only light in the darkness. I should have thought, given your well-known association with the most brilliant deductive mind of the age, you would see my activities as a necessary adjunct to your own.”
She had him there. Sir Arthur was uncomfortable, but too honest a man not to admit Catriona was right. In recent years, he had been several times duped by the extraordinary claims of hoaxers. There was that business with the fairies. He looked around the room, avoiding Catriona’s sharp eyes. He saw the body of Mr. Haskins. And the girl curled up in the chair.
“Good Lord,” he exclaimed.
“This is exactly the scene we found,” Winthrop said.
“I heard a noise earlier, as we arrived,” Catriona revealed. “Something like an insect.”
“It seems as if a whole hive of bees has stung him.”
Sir Arthur had trained as a doctor, Winthrop remembered.
“Could it have been poison?” he asked.
“If so, someone’s tidied up,” Sir Arthur said, confidently turning the swollen head from side to side. “No cup or glass with spilled liquid. No half-eaten cake. No dart stuck in the flesh. The face and chest are swollen but not the hands or, I’ll wager, the feet. I’d say whatever struck him did so through this wound here, in the throat.”
A florin-sized red hole showed in the greasy black skin.
“It is as if he were struck by venomous lightning.”
Sir Arthur found an orange blanket in a basket by the sofa and spread it over the dead man. The twisted shape was even more ghastly when shrouded.
“The girl says he had a ‘funny turn,’“ Winthrop said.
For the first time, Sir Arthur considered the child.
“Is this Rose? Has she spoken?”
The girl said nothing. She was interested in her book again. At her age, she could hardly be expected to be much concerned with grown-up things.
If she was the age she seemed.
Sir Arthur went over to the chair and examined the girl. His hands, steady as a rock when patting down a gruesome corpse, trembled as they neared her hair. He touched fingertips to the silver ribbon that held back her curls, and drew them away as if shocked.
“Child, child,” he said, tears in his eyes, “what wonders have you seen? What hope can you give us?”
This was not the dispassionate, scientific interrogation Winthrop had planned. He was touched by the old man’s naked emotion. Sir Arthur had lost a son in the War, and thereafter turned to Spiritualism for comfort. He betrayed a palpable need for confirmation of his beliefs. Like the detective he had made famous, he needed evidence.
The possible Rose was like a child queen regarding an aged and loyal knight with imperious disdain. Sir Arthur literally knelt at her feet, looking up to her.
“Do you know about the Little People?” she asked.
* * * *
Catriona had been given to understand that Rose did not speak, but she was becoming quite chatty. Sir Arthur quizzed her about “the Little People,” who were beginning to sound more like fairies than cherubs. She wondered if Rose were not one of those children who cut her personality to suit the adult or adults she was with, mischievous with one uncle, modest with the next. The girl was constantly clever, she felt, but otherwise completely mercurial.
It was only a few years since the name of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a watchword for good sense to most of Great Britain, had been devalued by the affair of the Cottingley Fairies. Two little girls, not much older than this child, had not only claimed to be in regular communion with the wee folk but produced photographs of them—subsequently shown to be amateur forgeries—which Sir Arthur rashly endorsed as genuine, even to the extent of writing The Coming of the Fairies, an inspirational book about the case. Though the hoax had been exploded a dozen times, Sir Arthur stubbornly refused to disbelieve. Catriona sensed the old man’s need for faith, his devout wish for the magical to penetrate his world and declare itself irrefutably.
“I went away with them,” the girl told them. “The Little People. I was in their home in the sky. It’s inside of a cloud, and like a hollow tree, with criss-cross roots and branches. We could all fly there, or float. There was no up or down. They played with me for ever such a long time. And gave me my ribbon.”
She turned her head, showing the ribbon in her hair. Catriona had noticed it before.
“Rose, may I see your ribbon?” Sir Arthur asked.
Catriona wasn’t comfortable with this. Surely something should be done for poor Mr. Haskins before the girl was exhaustively interviewed.
Rose took the ribbon out of her hair solemnly and offered it to Sir Arthur.
“Extraordinary,” he said, running it through his fingers. He offered it to Catriona.
She hesitated a moment and accepted the thing.
It was not any fabric she knew. Predominantly silvery, it was imprinted with green shapes, like runes or diagrams. Though warm to the touch, it might be a new type of processed metal. She crumpled the ribbon into a ball, then opened her fist. The thing sprang back into its original shape without a crease.
“You’re bleeding,” Edwin said.
The edges were sharp as pampas grass. Without feeling it, she had shallowly grazed herself.
“May I have it again now?” Rose asked.
Catriona returned the ribbon, which the girl carefully wound into her hair. She did not knot it, but shaped it, into a coil which held back her curls.
“A gift from færie,” Sir Arthur mused.
Catriona wasn’t sure. Her hand was began to sting. She took a hankie from her reticule and stemmed the trickle of blood from the scratch.
“Rose, my dear,” said Sir Arthur. “It is now 1925. What year was it when you went away, to play with the Little People? Was it a long time ago? As long ago, ahem, as 1872?”
The girl didn’t answer. Her face darkened, as if she were suddenly afraid or unable to do a complicated sum in mental arithmetic.
“Let’s play a game?” Edwin suggested, genially. “What’s this?”
He held up a pencil from the rector’s desk.
“Pencil,” Rose said, delighted.
“Quite right. And this?”
The letter-opener.
“A thin knife.”
“Very good, Rose. And this?”
He picked the telephone receiver up from its cradle.
“Telly Phone,” the girl said.
Edwin set the receiver down and nodded in muted triumph.
“Alexander Graham Bell,” he said, almost sadly. “1876.”
“She’s been back two days, man,” Sir Arthur said, annoyed. He turned to the girl and tried to smile reassuringly. “Did the rector tell you about the telephone? Did you hear it make a ring-ring noise, see him talk to friends a long way away with it?”
Rose was guarded now. She knew she had been caught out.
If this was a hoax, it was not a simple one. That ribbon was outside nature. And Haskins had died by means unknown.
“Why don’t you use that instrument to summon the police?” said Sir Arthur, nodding at the telephone.
“Call the police?” Edwin said. “Tut-tut, what would Mr. Holmes say? This matter displays unusual features which the worthy Sussex constabulary will not be best equipped to deal with.”
“This man should at least have a doctor look at him.”
“He has had one, Sir Arthur. You.”
The author-knight was not happy. And neither was she.
* * * *
Winthrop was satisfied that this girl was not the real Rose, and that an imposture was being planned—perhaps as part of a scheme to dupe the farmer, Sam Farrar, out of his property. The Reverend Mr. Haskins must have stumbled onto the trick and been done nastily to death. From the look of the rector’s throat, something like a poison-tipped spear had been used on him. It remained for the girl to be persuaded to identify the conspirators who had tutored her in imposture. She was too young to be guilty by herself.
“Now, missy, let’s talk about this game you’ve been playing,” he said. “The dress-up-and-pretend game. Who taught it to you?”
The girl’s face was shut. He thought she might try crying. But she was too tough for that. She was like any adult criminal, exposed and sullen, refusing to cooperate, unaffected by remorse.
“It’s not that simple, Edwin,” Catriona said. “The ribbon.”
Winthrop had thought of that. Lightweight metallicised fabrics were being used in aircraft manufacture these days, and that scrap might well be an offcut. It was a strange touch, though.
“There’s something else. Look at her.”
He did. She had an ordinary face. There was something about the eyes, though. A violet highlight.
“There are Little People,” she said. “There are, there are. They are bald, and have eyes like saucers, and no noses. They played with me. For a long time. And they have friends here, on the ground. Undertakers with smoked glasses.”
“What is your name?”
“Rose,” she said, firmly.
Was she trying to get back to the story she had been taught? Or had she been hypnotised into believing what she was saying?
Suddenly, he saw what Catriona meant.
The girl’s face had changed, not just its expression but its shape. Her nose was rounder, her chin less sharp, her cheekbones gone. Her mouth had been thin, showing sharp teeth; now she had classic bee-stung lips, like Catriona’s. Her curls were tighter, like little corkscrews.
He stood back from her, worried by what he had seen. He glanced at the rector’s body, covered with its orange blanket. It was not possible, surely, that this child...
...this angel?
“What is it, man? What is it?”
Sir Arthur was agitated, impatient at being left out. He must feel it humiliating not to have spotted the clue. Of course, he had come into it later and not seen the girl as she was when Winthrop and Catriona had arrived. It seemed now that her face had always been changing, subtly.
“Consider her face,” Winthrop said.
“Yes.”
“It changes.”
The violet highlights were green now.
Sir Arthur gasped.
The girl looked older, twelve or thirteen. Her feet and ankles showed under the dressing gown. Her shoulders filled the garment out more. Her face was thinner again, eyes almost almond.
“This is not the girl who was taken away,” Sir Arthur said. “She is one of them, a Changeling.”
For the first time, Winthrop rather agreed with him.
“There are bad fairies,” Sir Arthur said. “Who steal away children and leave one of their own in the crib.”
Winthrop knew the folktales. He wasn’t satisfied of their literal truth, but he realised in a flash that this girl might be an instance of whatever phenomenon gave rise to the stories in the first place.
You didn’t have to believe in fairies to know the world was stranger than imagined.
“Who are you, Rose?” Catriona asked, gently.
She knelt before the girl, as Sir Arthur had done, looking up into her shifting face.
Winthrop couldn’t help but notice that the girl’s body had become more womanly inside the dressing gown. Her hair straightened and grew longer. Her eyebrows were thinner and arched.
“Rose?”
Catriona reached out.
The girl’s face screwed up and she hissed, viciously. She opened her mouth, wider than she should have been able to. Her incisors were needle-fangs. She hissed again, flicking a long, fork-tipped tongue.
A spray of venom scattered at Catriona’s face.
* * * *
The shock was so great she almost froze, but Catriona flung her hand in front of her eyes. The girl’s sizzling spit stung the back of her hand. She wiped it instinctively on the carpet, scraping her skin raw. She had an idea the stuff was deadly.
The girl was out of her chair and towering above her now, shoulders and hips swaying, no longer entirely human. Her skin was greenish, scaled. Her eyes were red-green, with triangular pupils. Catriona thought she might even have nictitating membranes.
Catriona remembered the slither of the mamba.
She was frozen with utter panic, and a tiny voice inside nagged her for being weak.
Edwin seized the letter opener—the thin knife—from the desk and stabbed at the snake girl.
A black-thorned green hand took his wrist and bent it backwards. He dropped his weapon. Her hissing face closed in on his throat.
Catriona’s panic snapped. She stuck her foot between the girl’s ankles and scythed her legs out from under her.
They all fell in a tangle.
Rose broke free of them, leaving the dressing gown in a muddle on the floor.
She stood naked by Sir Arthur, body scaled and shimmering, as beautiful as horrid. She was striped in many shades of green, brown, yellow, red, and black. She had the beginnings of a tail. Her hair was flat against her neck and shoulders, flaring like a cobra’s hood. Her nose and ears were slits, frilled inside with red cilia.
Catriona and Edwin tried to get up, but were in each other’s way.
Rose smiled, fangs poking out of her mouth, and laid her talons on Sir Arthur’s lapels. She crooned to him, a sibilant susurrus of fascination. In the movements of her hips and shoulders and the arch of her eyes, there was a cruel cunning that was beyond human. This was a creature that killed for the pleasure of it, and was glad of an audience.
Sir Arthur was backed against a mantelpiece. His hand reached out, and found a plain crucifix mounted between two candlesticks. The Reverend Mr. Haskins had evidently not been very High Church, for there were few other obvious signs of his profession in the room.
Rose’s black-red lips neared Sir Arthur’s face, to administer a killing kiss. Her fork-tipped tongue darted out and slithered between his eyes and across his cheek, leaving a shining streak.
Sir Arthur took the cross and interposed it between his face and hers. He pressed it to her forehead.
Rose reacted as if a drop of molten lead had been applied. She screeched inhumanly and turned away, crouching into a ball. The scales on her legs and back sizzled and disappeared, like butter pats on a hot griddle. Her body shrank again, with a cracking of bones.
“Oh my stars,” said someone from the doorway.
Two men, strangers, stood in the hall, amazed at the scene. The one who spoke was a prosperous-looking man, face seamed and clothes practical. Behind him was the silhouette of someone large, soft, and practically hairless.
Rose looked up at the newcomers. Her eyes were round again, and full of puzzlement rather than malice. Catriona had a sense that the monster was forgotten.
The girl snatched up the dressing gown and slipped into it, modestly closing it over her body. Then she hurled herself at a window, and crashed through the panes into the gathering dusk outside.
She hit the ground running and was off, away over the fields.
“I knew that weren’t Aunt Rose,” said the newcomer.
* * * *
“The Great Beast is among you,” announced the fat bald man, referring to himself rather than the departed Rose.
Sir Arthur still clung to the cross that had seen off the Rose creature.
“Of all things, I thought of Dracula,” he said, wondering at his survival. “Bram Stoker’s novel.”
Winthrop was familiar with the book.
“The cross had exactly the effect on that creature as upon the vampires in Dracula.”
“Ugh,” said the bald man, “what a horrid thing. Put it away, Sir Arthur.”
Farrar had noticed the rector’s body, and was sunk into a couch with his head in his hands. This was too weird for most people. The honest farmer would have to leave these matters for the experts in the uncanny.
The man who had arrived with Farrar wore a once-expensive coat. The astrakhan collar was a little ragged and his pinstripe trousers shiny at the knees. A great deal of this fellow’s time was spent on his knees, for one reason or other. His face was fleshy, great lips hanging loose. Even his hands were plump, slug-white flippers. His great dome shone and his eyes glinted with unhealthy fire.
Winthrop recognised the controversial figure of Aleister Crowley, self-styled “wickedest man in England.” Quite apart from his well-known advocacy of black magic, sexual promiscuity, and drug use, the brewery heir—perhaps from a spirit of ingrained contrariness—had blotted his copybook in loudly advocating the Kaiser’s cause during the War. In his younger days, he was reckoned a daring mountaineer, but his vices had transformed him into a flabby remnant who looked as though he would find a steep staircase an insurmountable obstacle.
“Aren’t you supposed to be skulking in Paris?” Winthrop asked.
“Evidently, sir, you have the advantage of me,” Crowley admitted.
“Edwin Winthrop, of the Diogenes Club.”
The black magician smiled, almost genuinely.
“Charles Beauregard’s bright little boy. I have heard of you, and of your exploits among the shadows. And this charming fille de l’occasion must be Miss Catriona Kaye, celebrated exposer of charlatans. I believe you know that dreadful poseur A.E. Waite. Is it not well past time you showed him up for the faker he is, dear lady?”
Crowley loomed over Catriona. Winthrop remembered with alarm that he was famous for bestowing “the serpent’s kiss,” a mouth-to-mouth greeting reckoned dangerous to the receiving party. He contented himself with kissing her knuckles, like a gourmand licking the skin off a well-roasted chicken leg.
“And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose fine yarns have given me and indeed all England such pleasure. This is a most distinguished company.”
Sir Arthur, who could hardly fail to know who Crowley was, looked at his crucifix, perhaps imagining it might have an efficacy against the Great Beast.
If so, Crowley read his mind. “That bauble holds no terror for a magus of my exalted standing, Sir Arthur. It symbolises an era which is dead and gone, but rotting all around us. I have written to Mr. Trotsky in Moscow, offering to place my services at his disposal if he would charge me with the responsibility of eradicating Christianity from the planet.”
“And has he written back?” Catriona asked, archly.
“Actually, no.”
“Quelle surprise!”
Crowley flapped his sausage-fingers at her.
“Naughty, naughty. Such cynicism in one so young. You would make a fine Scarlet Woman, my dear. You have all the proper attributes.”
“My sins are scarlet enough already, Mr. Crowley,” Catriona replied. “And, to put it somewhat bluntly, I doubt from your general appearance that you would be up to matching them these days.”
The magus looked like a hurt little boy. For an instant, Winthrop had a flash of the power this man had over his followers. He was such an obvious buffoon one might feel him so pathetic that to contradict his constant declamations of his own genius would be cruel. He had seriously harmed many people, and sponged unmercifully off many others. The Waite he had mentioned was, like the poet Yeats, another supposed initiate of a mystic order, with whom he had been conducting an ill-tempered feud over the decades.
“The time for the Scarlet Woman is ended,” Crowley continued, back in flight. “Her purpose was always to birth the perfect being, and now that has been superseded. I hurried here on the boat train when news reached me that she had appeared on Earth. She who will truly bring to an end the stifling, milk-and-water age of the cloddish carpenter.”
“I find your tone objectionable, man,” Sir Arthur said. “A clergyman is dead.”
“A modest achievement, I admit, but a good start.”
“The fellow’s mad,” Sir Arthur blustered. “Quite cuckoo.”
Winthrop tended to agree but wanted to hear Crowley out.
He nodded towards the smashed window. “What do you think she is, Crowley? The creature you saw attacking us?”
“I suppose Anti-Christ is too masculine a term. We shall have to get used to calling her the Anti-Christine.”
Catriona, perhaps unwisely, giggled. She was rewarded with a lightning-look from the magus.
“She was brought to us by demons, in the centre of a circle of ancient sacrifice, enlivened by blood offerings. I have been working for many years to prepare the Earth for her coming, and to open the way for her appearance upon the great stage of magickal history. She has begun her reign. She has many faces. She is the get of the Whore of Babylon and the Goat of Mendes. She will cut a swathe through human society, mark my words. I shall be her tutor in sublime wickedness. There will be bloodletting and licence.”
“For such a committed foe of Christianity, you talk a lot of Bible phrases,” Winthrop said. “Your parents were Plymouth Brethren, were they not?”
“I sprang whole from the earth of Warwickshire. Is it not strange that such a small county could sire both of England’s greatest poets?”
Everyone looked at him in utter amazement.
“Shakespeare was the other,” he explained. “You know, the Hamlet fellow.”
Sir Arthur was impatient and Catriona amused, but Winthrop was alert. This man could still be dangerous.
‘“The Great God Pan,’“ Catriona said.
Crowley beamed, assuming she was describing him.
“It’s a short story,” she said. “By Arthur Machen. That’s where he’s getting all this nonsense. He’s casting Rose in the role of the anti-heroine of that fiction.”
“Truths are revealed to us in fictions,” Crowley said. “Sir Arthur, who has so skilfully blended the real and the imagined throughout his career, will agree. And so would Mr. Stoker, whom you mentioned. There are many, indeed, who believe your employers, Mr. Winthrop, are but the inventions of this literary knight.”
Sir Arthur grumbled.
“At any rate, since the object of my quest is no longer here, I shall depart. It has been an unalloyed pleasure to meet you at such an exhilarating juncture.”
Crowley gave a grunting little bow, and withdrew.
* * * *
“Well,” said Catriona, hardly needing to elaborate on the syllable.
“He’s an experience, and no mistake,” Edwin admitted.
Having been yanked from horror into comedy, she was light-headed. It seemed absurd now, but she had been near death when the Rose Thing was closing on her throat.
“I see it,” said Sir Arthur, suddenly.
He lifted the blanket from the rector’s head and pointed to the ghastly wound with the crucifix. Despite everything else, Sir Arthur was pleased with himself, and amazed.
“I’ve made a deduction,” he announced. “I’ve written too often of them, but never until now truly understood. It’s like little wheels in your head, coming into alignment. Truly, a marvellous thing.”
Sam Farrar looked up from his hands. He was glumly drained of all emotion, a common fellow unable to keep up with the high-flown characters, human and otherwise, who had descended into his life.
“The creature we saw had extended eye-teeth,” Sir Arthur lectured. “Like a snake’s fangs. Perhaps they were what put me in mind of Bram Stoker’s vampires. Yet this wound, in the unfortunate Reverend Mr. Haskins’s throat, suggests a single stabbing implement. It is larger, rounder, more of a gouge than a bite. The thing we saw would have left two small puckered holes. Haskins was attacked by something different.”
“Or something differently shaped,” Edwin suggested.
“Yes, indeed. We have seen how the Changeling can alter her form. Evidently, she has a large repertoire.”
Catriona tried to imagine what might have made the wound.
“It looks like an insect bite, Sir Arthur,” she said, shuddering, “made by... good lord... a gigantic mosquito.”
“Bart hated insects,” Farrar put in, blankly. “Had a bad experience years ago. Never did get the whole story of it. If a wasp came in the room, he was froze up with fear.”
An idea began to shape in her mind.
The Reverend Mr. Haskins hated insects. And she had a horror of snakes. Earlier, she had thought Rose was the sort of child who presented herself to suit who she was with. That had been a real insight.
“She’s who we think she is,” she said.
Sir Arthur shook his head, not catching her drift.
“She is who we want her to be, or what we’re afraid she is,” she continued. “Sir Arthur wished to think her a friend to the fairies, and so she seemed to be. Edwin, for you it would be most convenient if she were a fraud; when you thought that most strongly, she made the slip about the telephone. The Reverend Mr. Haskins was in terror of insects, and she became one; I am not best partial to crawling reptiles, and so she took the form of a snake woman. Every little thing, she reacts to. When I asked her what her name was, she quoted mine back to me. Sir Arthur, you thought of a scene in a novel, and she played it out. She’s like a living looking-glass, taking whatever we think of her and becoming exactly that thing.”
Sir Arthur nodded, convinced at once. She was not a little flattered to detect admiration in his eyes. She had made a deduction too.
Edwin was more concerned.
“We’ve got to stop Crowley,” he said.
“Crowley?” she questioned.
“If he gets hold of her, she’ll become what he thinks she is. And he thinks she’s the end the world.”
* * * *
XII: “the altar of sex magick”
There was only one place the Anti-Christine could have flown to: Angel Field, where once had stood a stone circle. Crowley knew Farrar Farm, since he had called there first, assuming the divine creature would be in the care of her supposed nephew. But Angel Field was a mystery, and there were no streetlights out here in the wilds of Sussex to guide the way.
Before departing, penniless, for England, he had telegraphed several of his few remaining disciples, beseeching funds and the loan of a car and driver. He was an international fugitive, driven from his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily at the express order of the odious Mussolini, and reduced to grubbing a living in Paris, with the aid of a former Scarlet Woman who was willing to sell her body on the streets to keep the magus in something approaching comfort.
He had left these damp, dreary islands for ever, he had hoped. He was no longer welcome in magical circles in London, brought low by the conspirings of lesser men who failed stubbornly to appreciate his genius.
No chauffeured car awaited him at Victoria, so he had hired one, trusting his manner and force of personality to convince one Alfred Jenkinsop, Esq., that he was good for the fee once the new age had dawned. As it happened, he expected the concept of money to be wiped away with all the other detritus of the dead past.
He found Jenkinsop in his car, outside Farrar Farm, reading The Sporting Life by torchlight. The fellow perked up to see him, and stuck his head out of the window.
“Have you seen a female pass this way?” Crowley asked.
Jenkinsop was remarkably obtuse on the point. It took him some moments to remember that he had, in fact, happened to see a girl, clad only in a dressing gown, running down the road from the rectory and onto the farm.
“Which way did she go?”
Jenkinsop shrugged. Crowley made a mental note to erase his somewhat comical name from the record of this evening when he came to write the official history of how the Anti-Christine was brought to London as a protégé of the Great Beast.
“Come, man,” he said, “follow me.”
The driver showed no willingness to get out of the car.
“It’s a cold night, guv,” he said, as if that explained all.
Crowley left him to “the pink ‘un,” and trudged through Farrar’s open front gate. His once-expensive shoes sank in mud and he felt icy moisture seep in through their somewhat strained seams. Nothing to one who had survived the treacherous glacial slopes of Chogo-Ri, but still a damned nuisance.
If Farrar’s vandal of a grandfather hadn’t smashed the stones, it would have been easier to find Angel Field. It was a cloudless night, but the moon was just a shining rind. He could make out the shapes of hedgerows, but little more.
He had an alarming encounter with a startled cow.
“Mistress Perfection,” he called out.
Only mooing came back.
Finally, he discerned a fire in the night and made his way towards it. He knew his feet stood upon the sod of Angel Field. For the Anti-Christine was at the centre of the light, surrounded by her impish acolytes.
They were attendant demons, Crowley knew. Naked, hairless, and without genitals. They had smooth, grey, dwarf bodies and large black insect eyes. Some held peculiar implements with lights at their extremities. They all turned, with one fluid movement, to look at him.
She was magnificent. Having shed her snakeskin, she had become the essence of voluptuous harlotry, masses of electric gorgon-hair confined by a shining circlet of silver, robe gaping open immodestly over her gently swelling belly, wicked green eyes darting like flames. Her teeth were still sharp. She looked from side to side, smile twisted off-centre.
This was the rapturous creature who would degrade the world.
Crowley worshipped her.
The occasion of their meeting called for a ceremony. The imps gathered around him, heads bobbing about his waist-height. Some extended spindle-fingered hands, tipped with sucker-like appendages, and touched him.
He unloosed his belt and dropped his trousers and drawers. He knelt, knees well-spaced, and touched his forehead to the cold, wet ground.
One of the imps took its implement and inserted it into Crowley’s rectum. He bit a mouthful of grassy sod as the implement expanded inside him.
Crowley’s body was the altar of sex magick.
The commingling of pain and pleasure was not new to him. This was quite consistent with the theory and practice of magick he had devised over many years of unparalleled scholarship. As the metallic probe pulsed inside him like living flesh, he was thrust forward into his new golden dawn.
The imp’s implement was withdrawn.
Hands took Crowley’s head and lifted it from the dirt. The Anti-Christine looked at him with loathing and love. Their mouths opened, and they pounced. Crowley trapped her lower lip between his teeth and bit until his mouth was full of her blood. He broke the serpent’s kiss, and she returned in kind, nipping and nibbling at his nose and dewlaps.
Her lips were rouged with her own blood, and marked with his teeth.
Oh joy!
“Infernal epitome,” he addressed her, “we must get you quickly to London, where you can spread your leathery wings, open your scaled legs, and begin to exert a real influence. We shall start with a few seductions, of men and women naturally, petty and great persons, reprobates and saints. Each shall spread your glorious taint, which will flash through society like a new tonic.”
She looked pleased by the prospect.
“There will be fire and pestilence,” he continued. “Duels and murders and many, many suicides. Piccadilly Circus will burn like Nero’s Rome. Pall Mall will fall to the barbarians. The Thames will run red and brown with the blood and ordure of the King and his courtiers. We shall dig up the mouldy skeletons of Victoria and Albert and revivify them with demon spells, to set them copulating like mindless mink in Horseguard’s Parade. St. Paul’s shall be turned into a brothel of Italianate vileness, and Westminster Abbey made an adjunct to the London Zoological Gardens, turned over to obscene apes who will defecate and fornicate where the foolishly pious once sat. The London Times will publish blasphemies and pornography, illustrated only by the greatest artists of the age. The Lord Mayor’s head will be used as a ball in the Association Football Cup Final. Cocaine, heroin, and the services of child prostitutes will be advertised in posters plastered to the sides of all omnibuses. Willie Blasted Yeats shall be burned in effigy in place of Saint Guy Fawkes on every November 5th, and all the other usurpers of the Golden Dawn laid low in their own filth. All governments, all moralities, all churches, will collapse. The City will burn, must burn. Only we Secret Chiefs will retain our authority. You shall beget many children, homunculi. It will be a magnificent age, extending for a thousand times a thousand years.”
In her shining, darting eyes, he saw it was all true. He buttoned up his trousers and spirited her away to where Jenkinsop waited with the car, unwitting herald of welcome apocalypse.
* * * *
Winthrop held Katie’s stick back, flying at an angle, nose into the wind, so the dark, shadowed quilt of Sussex filled his view. The dawnlight just pricked at the East, flashing off ponds and streams. Night-flying was tricky in a country dotted with telegraph poles and tall trees, but at least there wasn’t some Fokker stalking him. He tried to keep the Camel level with the tiny light funnels that were the headlamps of what must be Crowley’s car.
They had got to Farrar Farm just after Crowley’s departure, with Rose or Christine or whatever the girl chose to be called. Winthrop had set Catriona and Sir Arthur on their tail in the Bentley, and borrowed Sir Arthur’s surprisingly sprightly runabout to make his way to the airfield at Falmer, where his aeroplane was hangared. It was like the War again, rousing a tired ground staff to get him into the air within minutes of his strapping on helmet and boots.
He had assumed few automobiles would be on the roads of Sussex at this hour of the morning, but had homed in on a couple of trundling milk trucks before picking up the two vehicles he assumed were Crowley’s car and his own Bentley He trusted Catriona at the wheel, though Sir Arthur had seemed as startled at the prospect of being driven by a woman as he had when confronted by the girl’s monstrous snake-shape. When Winthrop had last seen them, Sir Arthur was still clutching his crucifix and Catriona was tucking stray hair under her sweet little hat.
He wished he had time to savour the thrill of being in the air again. He also regretted not storing ammunition and even a couple of bombs with Katie. Her twin machine-guns were still in working order, synchronised to fire through the prop blades, but he had nothing to fire out of them. His revolver was under his jacket, but would be almost useless: It was hard to give accurate fire while flying one-handed, with one’s gun-arm flapping about in sixty-mile-an-hour airwash.
Suddenly, the sun rose. In the West.
A blast of daylight fell on one side of Winthrop’s face. He felt a tingle as if he were being sunburned. For a moment, the air currents were all wrong, and he nearly lost control of Katie.
The landscape below was bleached by light. The two cars were quite distinct on the road. They were travelling between harvested wheat-fields. There were circles and triangles etched into the stubble, shapes that reminded Winthrop of those on Rose’s silver ribbon.
Winthrop looked at the new sun.
It was a wheel of fire, travelling in parallel with Katie. He pushed the stick forward and climbed up into the sky, and the fire-shape climbed with him. Then it whizzed underneath the Camel and came up on his right side.
He looped up, back and below, feeling the tug of gravity in his head and the safety harness cutting into his shoulders. It would take a demon from hell to outfly a Sopwith Camel in anger, as the fire-wheel recognised instantly by shooting off like a Guy Fawkes rocket, whooshing up in a train of sparks.
Katie was now flying even, and sparks fell fizzing all around. Winthrop was afraid they were incendiaries of unknown design, but they passed through his fuselage and wings, dispersing across the fields.
His eyes were blotched with light-bursts. It was dark again and the fire-wheel gone. Winthrop recalled the stories of the signs in the sky at the time of Rose Farrar’s disappearance. He assumed he had just had personal experience of them. He would make sure they went into the report.
Proper dawn was upon them.
A long straight stretch of road extended ahead of Crowley’s car. They were nearing the outskirts of the city. Crowley’s driver must be a good man, or possessed of magical skills, since the Bentley was lagging behind.
He knew he had to pull a reckless stunt.
Throttling Katie generously, he swooped low over the car and headed off to the left, getting as far ahead of Crowley as possible, then swung round in a tight semicircle, getting his nose in alignment with the oncoming vehicle. He would only get one pass at this run.
He took her down, praying the road had been maintained recently.
Katie’s wheels touched ground, lifted off for a moment, and touched ground again.
Through the whirling prop, Winthrop saw Crowley’s car. They were on a collision course.
The car would be built more sturdily than the canvas and wood plane. But Katie had whirling twin blades in her nose, all the better to scythe through the car’s bonnet and windshield, and severely inconvenience anyone in the front seat.
Crowley might think himself untouchable. But he wouldn’t be doing his own driving.
Winthrop hoped a rational man was behind the wheel of Crowley’s car.
The distance between the two speeding vehicles narrowed.
Winthrop was oddly relaxed, as always in combat. A certain fatalism possessed him. If it was the final prang, so be it. He whistled under his breath.
It had been a good life. He was grateful to have known Cat, and the Old Man. He had done his bit, and a bit more besides. And he was with Katie at the last.
Crowley’s car swerved, plunging through a hedgerow. Winthrop whooped in triumph, exultant to be alive. He cut the motors and upturned the flaps. Wind tore at the wings as Katie slowed.
Another car was up ahead.
The Bentley.
* * * *
Catriona pressed down on the foot-brake with all her strength. She was not encouraged by Sir Arthur’s loud prayer. The aeroplane loomed large in the windshield, prop blades slowing but still deadly. She couldn’t remember whether they were wood or metal, but guessed it wouldn’t make much difference.
The Bentley and the Camel came to a halt, one screeching and the other purring, within a yard of each other. She recommenced breathing and unclenched her stomach. That was not an experience she would care to repeat.
Somewhat shaken, she and Sir Arthur climbed out of the car. Edwin was already on the ground, pulling off his flying helmet. He had his revolver.
“Come on, you fellows,” he said. “The enemy’s downed.”
She helped Sir Arthur along the road. The car they had been pursuing had jumped the verge and crashed into a hedge. Crowley was extricating himself from the front seat with some difficulty. A stunned driver sat in the long grass, thrown clear of his car, shaking his head.
The rear door of the car was kicked open and a female fury exploded from it.
Rose was in mostly human shape, but Catriona could tell from her blazing snake-eyes she had been filled with Crowley’s cracked fancies. She was transformed into a species of demonic Zuleika Dobson, set to enslave and conquer and destroy London and then the world. As the dawnlight shone in the Anti-Christine’s frizzy halo of hair, Catriona believed that this creature was capable of fulfilling Crowley’s mad prophecies. She was a young woman now, still recognisably the child she had been, but with a cast of feature that suggested monumental cruelty and desperate vice. Her hands were tipped with claw-nails.
Her inky eyes radiated something. Hypnotic black swirls wound in her pupils. She was humming, almost subaudibly, radiating malicious female energy. Sir Arthur gasped. And Edwin skidded to a halt. The revolver fell from his hand.
Catriona was appalled. Even these men, whom she respected, were struck by Rose. Then, she was fascinated. It was alien to her, but she saw what magnificence this creature represented. This was not madness, but...
No, she decided. It was madness.
“You are powerless to stop her,” Crowley yelled. “Bow down and worship her filthiness!”
Catriona fixed Rose’s eyes with her own.
She took Sir Arthur’s hand and reached out for Edwin’s. He hesitated, eyes on Rose’s body, then clutched. Catriona held these men fast.
It was Sir Arthur who gave her the idea. And, perhaps, another distinguished author-knight, J.M. Barrie.
“Do you believe in fairies?” she asked.
Crowley looked aghast.
Sir Arthur and Edwin understood.
With all her heart, she imagined benevolence, worshipped purity, conceived of goodness, was enchanted by kindly magic. As a child, she had loved indiscriminately, finding transcendent wonders in sparkling dew on spun webs, in fallen leaves become galleons on still ponds.
“I believe in fairies,” she declared.
She recognised her kinship with the kindly knight. She was a sceptic about many things, but there was real magic. She could catch it in her hand and shape it.
The English countryside opened up for her.
She truly believed.
Rose was transfixed. She dwindled inside her dressing gown, became a girl again. Dragonfly wings sprouted from her back, and delicate feelers extended from her eyebrows. She hovered a few inches above the grass. Flowers wound around her brow. She shone with clean light.
Sir Arthur was tearful with joy, transported by the sight. Edwin squeezed her hand.
Spring flowers sprouted in the autumn hedgerow.
Crowley was bewildered.
“No,” he said, “you are scarlet, not watercolour.”
He was cracked and had lost.
“Come here,” Catriona said, to the girl.
Rose, eight years old again and human, skipped across the road and flew into her arms, hugging her innocently. Catriona passed her on to Sir Arthur, who swept her up and held her fiercely to him.
“I think your new age has been postponed,” Edwin told Crowley.
“Curse you,” Crowley swore, shaking his fist like the melodrama villain he wished he was.
“You’re going to pay for the car, sir,” said the driver. “Within the hour.”
Crowley was cowed. He looked like a big baby in daylight. His bald head was smudged and his trousers were badly ripped and stained.
There were new people on the scene. She supposed it was inevitable. You couldn’t land a biplane and crash a car without attracting attention.
Two men stood on the other side of the road. Catriona didn’t know where they could have come from. She had heard no vehicle and there were no dwellings in sight.
Rose twisted in Sir Arthur’s hug to look at the men.
Catriona remembered what the girl had said about the friends of the Little People. Undertakers in smoked glasses.
The two men were the same height, tall even without their black top hats. They wore black frock coats, black trousers, black cravats, black gloves. Even black spats and black-tinted glasses that seemed too large for human eyes. Their faces were ghost-white, with thin lips.
“They’ve come for me,” Rose said. “I must go away with them.”
Gently, Sir Arthur set her down. She kissed him, then kissed Catriona and Edwin, even Crowley.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said, sounding grown-up, and went to the undertakers. They each took one of her hands and walked her down the road, towards a shimmering light. For a while, the three figures were silhouetted. Then they were gone, and so was the light.
Edwin turned to look at Catriona, and shrugged.
* * * *
XV: “the vicinity of the inexplicable”
The Old Man nodded sagely when Winthrop concluded his narrative. He did not seem surprised by even the most unusual details.
“I know the Undertaking,” Beauregard said. “All in black, with hidden eyes. They appear often in the vicinity of the inexplicable. Like the Little Grey People.”
They were back in the Strangers Room.
“I suppose we should worry about Rose,” Winthrop mused, “but she told us not to. Considering that she seems to be whatever we think she is, she might have meant that it would be helpful if we thought of her as safe and well since she would then, in fact, be so. It was Cat who saw through it all, and hit upon the answer.”
Catriona was thoughtful.
‘“I don’t know, Edwin,” she said. “I don’t think we saw a quarter of the real picture. The Little Grey People, the fire-wheel in the skies, the Changeling, the undertakers. All this has been going on for a long time, since well before the original Rose was taken away. We were caught between the interpretations put on the phenomena in the last few days by Sir Arthur and Crowley, fairies and the Anti-Christine. In the last century, it was angels and demons. Who knows what light future researchers will shine upon the business?”
Winthrop sipped his excellent brandy.
“I shouldn’t bother yourself too much about that, old thing. We stand at the dawn of a new era. Not the apocalypse Crowley was prattling about, but an age of scientific enlightenment. Mysteries will be penetrated by rational inquiry. We shall no longer need to whip up fairy tales to cope with the fantastical. Mark my words, Catty-Kit. The next time anything like this happens, we shall get to the bottom of it without panic or hysteria.”