The Truth of the Matter Read online

began to become infernally dull after a few weeks of my convalescence, and my mind turned more and more toward Katherine. If events had progressed differently, I may have reached acceptance and begun to move on, as Clarence was always recommending I do, but, granted an excess of time for introspection, I took to dwelling on the past in a most unhealthy manner. Forced relaxation grated upon my nerves and sapped my strength in a way activity and exertion never could: I became a mere wraith, an indifferent and lethargic shade confined to my armchair by medical quackery. Poor Clarence. I’m afraid I was often rather short with him when he attempted to rouse me from my bloodless languor.

  But he knew me well and was sufficiently familiar with my disposition to diagnose the problem, and he hauled me bodily from the chair with all promptness in order to drag me over half of London and a good deal of the surrounding country, quite contrary to the wishes of my outraged physician. I swear the abominable man turned violet and positively collapsed in apoplexy when he heard. There was an amusing bit of business in Kensington that helped to break me from the clutches of ennui, and I began to regain some colour.

  Still, the wound festered. When one lives for a long time in the shadow of some infirmity, one becomes inured to the discomfort. I learnt to ignore it, and so remained dangerously unaware when it became gangrenous.

  Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, I do not know whether it was all real or illusion. They’ve told me that I was mad, crazed, and responsible for each misfortune by which I was plagued, but I remember it differently. I know what I saw and heard; I know that I could not myself have made such marks upon those bodies or upon my own breast; I know that, broken though my mind may be, nothing under heaven could have compelled me to commit such crimes as those of which I have been accused. Of course I cannot dare to hope that the good jury will believe me: it is all far too fantastic a tale, and all evidence is against me.

  Summer faded into autumn, and autumn plunged into overcast, dismal winter. London was cloaked in pristine snow that rapidly became filthy grey slush under the feet of the lamp-lighters and the wheels of hansoms. The chestnut-vendors appeared, swathed in heavy hound’s-tooth check from head to foot, their hands thrust into fingerless gloves, faces grimed with soot. Carollers began to make their merry rounds in the more affluent neighbourhoods and then worked their way into the lower parts of town as the season’s spirit brought forth the more charitable aspects of human nature. A-here we come a-wassailing among the leaves so green! It was the archetypal London holiday season, draped in holly and tinsel. Far too bright for brooding, I thought, so I buried my problems beneath routine and ritual and existed in a semblance of perfect normality. There was work to be done on the Continent, at Her Majesty’s request, which occupied me for a week or two before I was home in time for Christmas.

  Clarence sent me a wire on the second of January, saying that he was in Glasgow with his people STOP, but would I be interested in meeting up for a bit of fun on the town when he returned late on the seventh QUERY. I wired back my reply that of course I would be happy to oblige, if he had any specific idea for pastime STOP. The usual STOP, came his response. That, for Clarence, would mean night prowling, donning and dropping disguises as necessary to remain undetected or unrecognised. But of course. I always enjoy such pseudo-purposeful clandestine entertainments. Shall we pose as cab drivers, perhaps? French priests? Ladies of the evening? Don’t you dare feign affront, Clarence; I still remember the Hargrove affair, and it still affords me enormous amusement, though for the sake of your reputation I have never shared the details with anyone.

  Onward. Three days I spent moving between the clubs and case files, libraries and the abodes of unsavoury acquaintances, building my life back to what it had once been. It may actually have worked, too – I could feel myself sliding back into some sort of niche, though perhaps not the same one I had occupied before – if only the seventh had never arrived.

  Clarence returned earlier than I had expected. The landlord, Barclay, let him up while I was out, so that he could wait in the parlour with tea and some of Mrs Barclay’s muffins. I thought nothing of it until I reached my door.

  The door was slightly ajar. That in and of itself was not unusual, but that stench emanating from my rooms… What the devil can Clarence be up to? Has he got into my chemicals again? Blast him, I told him not to potter around with sulphur like that! Not without opening a window, man!

  I pushed the door open and stopped, aghast. For several seconds, my brain could not begin to fathom the sight that met my eyes – of all the horrors I had seen before and have seen since, nothing has ever struck me so hard or so deep as this. Oh, Christus Iesus, Filius Dei! Where have you gone, Lord? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

  It was Rothers, the filthy blackguard, his head and shoulders aflame with a fiery corona, his skin a deep and unnatural burnt bronze, eyes burning with unholy light! If ever I had doubted in the existence of Satan, all my scepticism was then and there put to rest, for I truly believe with all my being that I gazed upon the Prince of Lies at that moment. No angel of hell could have wrought a greater terror within my breast – this man, this thing which had violated my rooms, was no sort of human at all, but had become a creature seemingly composed of condensed darkness. It is the only way I can describe it – that the monster was made, rather than of solid matter, of solidified absence of light.

  And, moreover, it had Clarence by the throat, and was in the process of wringing the life from my friend and colleague. It loosed its talon-like brazen hands when I entered and turned its flaming eyes upon me, freezing me where I stood. Clarence fell to the floor with a nauseating soft thud, as of a fist striking putty. In the next instant, the creature was gone, my limbs loosened, but my horror was only magnified as I rushed to my friend’s side. He was dead, I could see immediately. No breath passed between his swollen black lips, no consciousness fluttered beneath the lids of his glazed, bloody eyes. A thin stream of blood from his nose stained his chin and dribbled down to fill the foul white hand-prints on his throat. A faint darkness clung about those points of contact, as though the Rothers monster had left some of its essence to befoul and contaminate Clarence’s sad empty shell.

  Poor Clarence! My brother in all but blood, I had always felt him closer than kin, almost a piece of my very self, and he was gone. Oh, Christ, would not a swift, clean shot or stab have been enough? His bloated black face, stiffening rapidly in rigour mortis, was contorted in an expression of the most abject terror and agony that managed to wrench even my hard heart in pity.

  “Rothers!” I exclaimed, feeling my chest tighten in rage. Was there no end, no limit to the man’s cruelty? Must the demon tear from me everything for which I felt care or tenderness? Barclay came rushing into the room at my cry, but made no move beyond the door, arrested by uncertain fear. I must have appeared truly ghastly in my anger, to stop so robust and unflappable a man in his tracks. I noticed his reaction only peripherally, though, and ran immediately out into the street, determined to find the Rothers monster and inflict terrible retribution. My mind was numb, responding to stimuli only in reflex, or I’d have undoubtedly waited for the police to arrive. That was the first blow against me, that I’d fled the scene as soon as Clarence was discovered. Surely only a guilty conscience could inspire such an action, they reasoned. That, and beyond the queer sulphurous smell, there was no evidence anyone had been in the apartment but Clarence and myself – those facts were quite enough to confirm the worst suspicions of the Yard, despite my spotless record, even without the accumulation of subsequent events. They’d attributed it to stress and grief – a mental collapse. There is a fine line between genius and insanity, they asserted, and Sebring Hadley Campbell has been tipped over the top of it. Poor man; he had such promise, too.

  Oh, for the love of God!

  I’d find that creature and bring it down! It had struck twice, heaven knew how many times before the first time or in the time between Katherine and Clarence, and by God, I wasn’t
about to let it happen again. The stench was easy to follow, and follow it I did, through Commercial Row, by Charing Cross Station, back again through Hyde Park , twice over the Thames, but it would never stop. It left no track or spoor, even where the ground was muddy, so that all I could go on was the smell. I began to wonder if it were not my own imagination I pursued when of a sudden I quite literally stumbled over the steaming corpse of an elderly woman in shredded finery. She’d been ripped open from the sternum downward, and the brown snow in which she lay was slowly turning deep crimson. But the edges of the brutal cut were obscured in black fog, identical to the traces left upon Clarence’s throat, proving to me that I was indeed hot on the trail.

  I could barely spare a glance for this fresh atrocity, however, for the night was approaching and the Thames was exuding its rank breath, giving life to the phantasmal misty shapes. Those faces returned, goading me on with their mocking laughter. I could hear it, too, though that may have been – probably was – my imagination; it spurred me onward nonetheless. They crowded in around me, miring me in white and