I felt the shudder that ran through the house even before her hand touched the door handle; it was a sensation so subtle yet so profound that I thought at first I might be ill.
Harcourt yelled. His nose was bleeding; the walking stick had come to life again in his hand and seemed determined to beat him to death. He managed to remove it to arm’s length, and struggled to keep it under control. The gargoyle, too, was shuddering back to life, and, from the variety of creaks and groans and fluttering sounds I heard coming from the next room, so were other bits of the collection.
“Move,” said Jesperson urgently, propelling me forward. “Get out of the house! Is there anyone else?” Hearing the shouts, the little maid who’d let us in reappeared, and, although looking utterly bewildered, she allowed him to usher her outside as well.
We met Flora at the front gate and turned back to look at the house.
“Where’s Harcourt?” Jesperson demanded. “He was right behind me.”
“He won’t leave his collection,” said Flora. “He’ll have gone back for it. He used to worry aloud about what he should save first, if the house were on fire.”
“But it’s the collection itself that’s the threat!”
On my own, I might have left Harcourt to his fate, but when my partner ran back inside, I felt it my duty to follow. Mounting the front steps, I was able to see through the window into the study, and what I saw brought me to a standstill.
Pale and portly Mr. Harcourt was leaping and whirling like a dervish, holding the silver-headed stick away from his body like a magic staff, as he struggled to avoid a flurry of small objects from striking him. Occasionally in his efforts he unconsciously pulled his arm in closer to his body, allowing the stick to give him a sharp crack on his leg or shoulder, and then he would shriek in pain or anger.
Books and other things continued to tumble from the shelves. Many simply fell, but others seemed hurled with force directly at him, and these struck a variety of glancing blows against his body, head, and limbs. A glassfronted display case shook fiercely, as if caught in an earthquake, until it burst open, releasing everything inside. A great malignant swarm composed of small bottles, jars, needles, pins, razors, and many more things I could not recognize now enveloped the man, whose cries turned to a constant, terrified howling as they attacked him.
Feeling sick, I turned aside and went indoors to my partner, who was throwing himself bodily against the solid oak door, as if he imagined he could force it open. Seeing me, he stopped and rubbed his shoulder, looking a little sheepish.
I gave him one of my hairpins, assuming he would know how to use it.
As he fiddled with the lock, I listened to the horrible sounds that accompanied the violence on the other side: thuds and thumps, shrieks and wails and groans, and then a shocking, liquid hissing, followed by a gurgle, and then the heaviest thud of all, and then silence.
By the time Jesperson managed to get the door open, it was all over. Harcourt was dead. His bloody, battered corpse lay on the carpet, surrounded by the remnants of his murderous collection. Whatever life had possessed them had expired with his. There was a sharp, acrid stench in the room—I guess from the contents of various broken bottles—but nothing so foul as the atmosphere it replaced.
“Vitriol,” said Jesperson. “Don’t look.”
But I had already seen what was left of the face, and it was no more shocking than the sounds had led me to imagine.
As I went out to give Flora Bellamy the news, and to send the maid to fetch the police, I already knew that this had not turned out to be a case I could write about for publication.
And, as it developed, it got worse.
It was fortunate indeed that Jasper Jesperson had some influential relatives who moved in the circles of power, for otherwise I think the local police would have been pleased to charge him with murder, in the absence of more likely suspects, and if he hadn’t done it, I was their next choice.
Even though we might argue we had saved his life, our client was so far from pleased with the outcome of our investigations that he refused to pay us anything. It was not Harcourt’s death that bothered him so much as Miss Bellamy’s insistence on releasing him from their engagement. She would give him no better reason for her change of heart than to say that she was reconsidering how she might best spend her life, and that she was inclined to seek some form of employment by which to support herself “like Miss Lane.”
Flora Bellamy never set foot inside The Pines again. Even though her guardian was dead, she had decided to take no chances, and hired others to empty the house before selling it. In his will, Harcourt left everything to his ward, with only one caveat: Although she could decide whether to keep or dispose of “the collection,” she must do so as a whole, and not break it up.
This stipulation she decided to ignore.
“Perhaps I’m wrong,” she said to me, the last time I saw her, “but I believe it could be dangerous. Individual objects are only things, but when gathered together, they became something more—first in Mr. Harcourt’s imagination, and then in reality.
“The concept in law of the deodand was that something which had once done evil could be remade into something useful, even holy, by good works. That was not allowed to anything in Mr. Harcourt’s collection—his use of those things was opposed to good; it venerated the evil deed.”
Her way of redemption was to donate everything that remained in the house to a good cause. Being extra cautious, she chose one so far away that she would not have to fear an accidental encounter with her former possessions, and had everything sent to a leper colony on the other side of the world.
I took it as a positive sign that she did not feel obliged to sacrifice herself in a similar way.
She decided to share a flat with her school friend, and embarked on a course of training in bookkeeping and office management.
Jesperson and I, naturally, discussed the details of this case—which began with one unsolved murder, and concluded with two—at great length when we were alone together, and also with Mrs. Jesperson, but we were never able to agree upon how to assign the blame for the killings. We all agreed that both Adcocks and Harcourt were murdered, yet we also agreed that if there was no murderer, murder could not have been done.
I hope our next case will be less of a curiosity.
LORD JOHN AND THE PLAGUE OF ZOMBIES
by Diana Gabaldon
