Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 55

Irene went back to the cl.u.s.ter of confused men to do just that. While she conversed in French with them, I shook my head.

"What is the matter, Nell?" Elizabeth inquired, s.h.i.+vering with chill and excitement and stamping her numbing feet on the ground like an impatient horse.

"French to the back of us, Pony or Sue or whatever breed of wild Red Indian I have heard of to the front of us. Was there ever such an odd hunting party?"

"p.a.w.nee," Elizabeth corrected me. "And you forget to include the Romany language of the Gypsies. I find it hard to believe that Jack the Ripper is a Gypsy, though. You saw the women dancing; some were girls of barely twelve or thirteen. Plenty of women are freely available to Gypsy men; they have no inhibitions about that sort of thing, men or women. The book by Krafft-Ebing points to a killer who has little access to women, or who hates himself for wis.h.i.+ng to consort with them."

"You are saying that Jack the Ripper has a conscience."

"That is one way to put it, I suppose. I would rather say that Jack the Ripper has a very confused conscience."

"That is exactly it, Pink." Irene had come up during our discussion. "A man with a seriously confused conscience is a danger to himself and others. But, look, Red Tomahawk has shuttered his lantern and is moving down the embankment behind the Javanese temple building. It will be darker and steeper if we follow. Let us hold hands."

The ghostly outline of the panorama s.h.i.+p's strings of electric lights lay along the waterline only a hundred feet from the Esplanade, and lent the area some slight illumination. With shock I recognized the moving panorama attraction that had earlier been too crowded to see, now shut up and illuminated for the night.

The s.h.i.+p's faint glow made Buffalo Bill's buff-colored fringed suit into a kind of will-o'-the-wisp to follow. Soon our bootheels were digging into soft dirt, and our downward progress developed an impetus of its own we were unable to slow, only our clasped hands keeping all three upright.

We were forced to check our breakneck progress as we came abreast of the plainsmen on level ground. We glanced behind to see the bristled silhouettes of the Rothschild agents on the brow of the embankment above us.

Red Tomahawk was squatting on the ground, the dimmed lantern beside him, shaking his feathered head from side to side.

"Rock," Buffalo Bill whispered to us. "No tracks."

"Not rock," Irene answered in a hushed but triumphant tone, "but granite." She nodded to the foundation of the Javanese temple's elaborate upper stories. It was a cellar wall of hard stone. "There is a way beyond that wall," she said, "and probably a natural cavern beyond that."

Buffalo Bill conveyed that conviction to Red Tomahawk, who leaped up and on silent moccasins approached the wall and began running his hands over it like a blind man feeling a door for the entry k.n.o.b.

He eventually moved to the wild bushes springing from the embankment base and suddenly stood upright, brandis.h.i.+ng a trophy high in one hand.

For a wild moment I feared a scalp, but it was only another of the crude pottery bottles he had found at the Gypsy camp.

When we tiptoed nearer to see, he pulled aside the shrubbery to reveal a gaping natural opening in the rock perhaps four feet high.

Without a word, Buffalo Bill sprang back up the embankment and brought the agents to our sides.

Whispered consultation produced a plan: the plainsmen would lead, the women follow, the agents bring up the rear, weapons at the ready.

No one said it, but we women were obviously to be sheltered in the middle of a front and a rear guard.

Red Tomahawk bowed so low that even his penultimate feather would not brush stone and entered the tunnel.

Buffalo Bill doffed his hat to follow suit.

Irene and Elizabeth exchanged glances. Their broad-brimmed hats were affixed 'til death did them part with foot-long pins and would only be a nuisance in their hands. They bent over deeply to enter the yawning hole.

My cap was no problem and the Rothschild men wore bowlers, so we all made appropriate obeisance and instantly found ourselves in a dark pa.s.sage. Both Red Tomahawk and Buffalo Bill (somehow I was finding it easier to use those astonis.h.i.+ng names than I ever had been able to accept "Pink," even now when I knew the nickname was a clue and not simply an affront to convention) had darkened their lanterns.

Our first impression of the tunnel was a warm exhalation of air that implied it led deep into the earth. Then came the eerie thrum of sound, of distant chanting. A single voice droned for a few instants. Many voices responded.

It sounded like nothing so much as a Roman High Ma.s.s.

This sound paralyzed us all, perhaps for different reasons.

Whatever we had expected, it was not ceremony, although Irene, perhaps, was the least surprised of us all.

Nor had we expected the scent that wafted along on the warm air: candle wax.

Yet again, this was not truly surprising. We had seen candle stumps and candle droppings on other sites, but had thought them necessary for light. Now we had to wonder.

Of course we could not consult, bowed over as we were in the narrow tunnel, so we simply crept forward one by one, lost in our own speculations and worries.

I wondered what the Indian warrior thought, if these sounds and mission were reminiscent of conflict-filled life on the frontier . . . if Buffalo Bill relished this return to his early scouting days . . . if the Rothschild men, city dwellers all who no doubt knew mob violence and secret cabals, could countenance the pursuit of people who retreated to caves for whatever G.o.dless purposes they might have.

Our path led upward and finally leveled out. Here the tunnel grew higher if not much wider, and we were able to walk upright, all but Buffalo Bill.

A light was visible ahead: a bright yellow-white light. No one in our party by now could resist the pull of that unearthly vision so deep under the exposition grounds. Now the path led downward again, as if to h.e.l.l, and we walked until the light swelled to loom before us like an insubstantial door.

Beyond it the chanting had stopped to be replaced by wild screams and cries, by the sound of people contending madly.

Red Tomahawk a.s.sumed a crouch deep enough to follow dog markings and crept into the light, dodging quickly to the right of the opening. A moment later his left arm appeared, beckoning.

Buffalo Bill replicated his beastlike posture and crept after him.

Again a fringed arm appeared, also beckoning.

Irene dropped to hands and knees and crawled after them, then Elizabeth.

I hesitated. The cries and moans had reached a h.e.l.lish pitch. I suspected that people so forgetful of all civilization would hardly notice our stealthy approach, especially if they were all murdering each other, as I suspected.

No arms beckoned further. I glanced back at the Rothschild agents. One stepped up beside me.

"What next?" he asked me in French.

I didn't know what to answer, and realized I shouldn't know until I followed the others. I told him to wait. "Arretez," I said in desperation, but he understood my meaning and held back.

I dropped to my knees, pretending I was in the nursery and playing bear with the youngest children. Then I shambled into the light and heat awaiting beyond the opening.

At first my dark-accustomed eyes could only water and blink. Noise filled the cavern and echoed back and forth until it sounded like all the souls of the d.a.m.ned were confined in this one s.p.a.ce.

I saw the others, still crouched, peering over a natural barrier of rocks into the scene below.

I crawled near to Elizabeth and cautiously leaned over to view the cavern floor.

Candles sat everywhere, the floor, on scattered rocks, in niches in the walls, spangling the dark stone with light. A blazing fire in the center provided the fiery furnace that lit even the cavern roof.

Beside it stood a single robed figure, babbling in some foreign language, perhaps even a language not of this earth, hands and head lifted to . . . I hesitate to say Heaven . . . lifted to the ceiling of that devil's cave.

Around it danced and screamed a dozen naked figures, trampling their dark cast-off robes, more than half of them women, I am ashamed to say, the light cast by the flames licking at their writhing, glistening bodies.

One naked man stood on the fringe with a whip, las.h.i.+ng anyone who lagged in the wild dance. Rivulets of blood as well as sweat streaked the quivering flesh, but some dancers collapsed to the cavern floor despite the lash. Then others fell atop them and they writhed and screamed until the vision of h.e.l.l was even more vivid than any Renaissance master could paint.

The only ones untouched by the madness were a trio in monks' robes who stood watching by the far cavern wall like an Inquisition panel of judges.

The frantic motion, heat, noise made it hard to absorb the scene, what was happening besides utter madness.

The leader had ripped open his s.h.i.+rt and trousers and hurled himself onto the writhing figures on the ground, a bed of naked abandoned women. One woman screamed as if being murdered at the bottom of a pile of three men, then two pulled her by her arms from the ground and laid her over a large rock. The third man drew a knife from the tangle of discarded clothes and bent over her.

I couldn't believe what I saw. Even as I write this now, many days later in my own desperate circ.u.mstances, my pen stops and fails to follow the will of my mind and my hand, my resolve to record all that I saw, however awful.

The man took the knife and cut off her breast.

I couldn't help myself. I stood and screamed, my sound lost in the shriek from the mutilated woman. The entire world seemed to be screaming as everyone around me stood.

An unG.o.dly whoop beside me, a blood-chillingly long, savage howl overcame even the din below.

The man below with the knife lifted his b.l.o.o.d.y trophy, then stood paralyzed as a hatchet blade bloomed in the middle of his back. He fell, but the writhing, moaning, gabbling ma.s.ses on the cavern floor were lost to everything around them, even when Buffalo Bill hurled a lantern into the middle of the fire, sending wood shards and sparks flying like fireworks.

A pistol discharged, Irene's, shot into the air. The Rothschild men pounded into the cavern, then stopped in horror.

I noticed that the observers along the wall had vanished.

Red Tomahawk, still howling, leaped over the barrier of rocks to the floor some fifteen feet below. Buffalo Bill followed him, and the Rothschild agents finally gathered their wits and ran down the ramp leading below, pistols pointed but yet unfired.

The leader pushed himself free of the twining limbs of three wild-eyed women and started upright, looking like the only one who would give fight.

"We must help that woman," Irene muttered, starting after the men.

Another wild man was charging from the fray, pupils lost in the rolling whites you see on a terrified horse, running toward us.

Despite the half-clothed form and wild eyes and hair, I recognized James Kelly!

And he seemed to recognize me!

I saw the child in the wood, cringing away from the blade. I saw the woman on the street, screaming into the curtain of her own blood that fell red and heavy from her throat like a glittering garnet cascade.

And always I saw the gaunt dark figure at the corner of my eye, the crow flying, the raven croaking, the ghost moaning, the monster laughing.

He had always been there, and I had always chosen not to see him.

Now he was looking right at me.

Now he was judging me worthy of notice.

Now I must see him in return to let him know that I am not afraid. Now it is he, or I.

Irene saw Kelly, saw our converging paths, the danger.

She seized and spun me to face the tunnel. "Run, Nell! Run out and do not look back, do not come back until we emerge safely. And we will. Don't question me!" She thrust a stick, probably Elizabeth's, into my hand. "Warn the authorities if you can. It is far worse than even I thought. For the love of G.o.d, go now!"

She shoved me so hard down the tunnel that I stumbled and nearly fell.

"Go! As you love me, go! Run!"

I cannot describe the imperative in her words, the utter conviction, the utter command.

I scrambled forward, still stumbling, my hands sc.r.a.ping along the rough stone ground until I could get my balance and run half-upright. I stumbled into first one side of the tunnel wall, then the other, only darkness ahead of me, shouts and confusion and occasional pistol shots behind me.

I must warn. Get out. Not look back. Not like Lot's wife. Not a pillar of salt. Not me. Run. Go. Not look back. Not think. Not decipher what I had seen. Run. Run.

Paranoia

We are entering panoramania. . . .

-THE VOLTAIRE, 1881

The longer I obeyed and ran, the less I could bear to leave Irene to the fray and condemn myself to learning the outcome later from a safe distance.

I let my pounding steps slow, even as my heartbeat accelerated. I paused in the darkness still lit by flashes from the conflagration behind me. I had the stick. Who knows if one blow might not make all the difference?

None of us had expected to encounter devil-wors.h.i.+pers at their evil rituals. The implications of this scene straight from an ill.u.s.tration of h.e.l.l on the history and ident.i.ty of Jack the Ripper were too ma.s.sive to contemplate. What I had glimpsed was branded on my brain, but without the clarity of meaning that would let the full horror penetrate.

All I knew is that our party had uncovered a nest of vipers far too numerous and venomous to handle and that my presence was a hindrance. I only could pray that Elizabeth, too, would heed Irene's directive, but I doubted it. I could only pray, as my feet pounded the packed dirt, that Irene would escape the carnage herself.

I could only take comfort in the brave way Buffalo Bill and Red Tomahawk had waded into the maddened creatures, unabashed by blood and frenzy, themselves figures of a fearsome and exotic force. A gathering of such prime evil required a foe that had practiced primitive warfare far from the rank and file of European battlefields.

The Rothschild agents on the cavern's fringes, even with their pistols drawn, seemed like lapdogs at a bear-baiting match. Irene, too, had been reduced to armed observer. I prayed she stayed that way, but suspected that James Kelly would not pa.s.s her to pursue me.

Yet I heard no more shots as I reached the level section of the tunnel and began the descent to the entrance. I did hear the feeble beat of running footsteps behind me. Irene and Elizabeth come to join me in retreat, like sensible women? Yes!