Trick of the Light

as commanded.

Sinclair grasped him by the back of the neck then popped the coin in and jammed the jaws shut as the boy’s eyes shot open in surprise.

‘Now leave and forget me,’ said Sinclair, coldly. ‘Before I cut your throat and feed you to the buzzards.’

The coin was almost gulped down at this but then spat out into the hand and Samuel Grant fled silently into the darkness of the nether wynds as if the hounds of hell were on his trail.

Sinclair took his pocket watch from a high waistcoat pocket where it exchanged beats with his heart, and squinted in the faint light.

Quarter before midnight. His grandfather’s gold timepiece rarely lied.

Rendezvous was the hour itself. Now or never.

He took a deep breath, replaced the watch and sauntered out into the docks like a man without a care in the world.

It only took a dozen steps. Enough for him to observe the sailing ships close by with a few small steamers beyond not at all suitable for blockade running, not enough speed and backbone; the ladies he desired, iron-paddled, schooner-rigged, the Emily, the Charlotte, the Caroline, were already built or being so back in Glasgow.

But that city had become infested with Federal agents of the Union and so he must transact commerce where the power lay. Every lady has her price. And a respectable pimp to boot.

Brothers of the Gusset.

Edinburgh, He had spent a week here in sober negotiation and opposite pursuits. Now, it all must end.

While these thoughts ran through his mind, his senses had been preternaturally tuned to the surroundings. There was a dense, muffled quality to the air as if everything was held in suspension, but nothing behind. No footsteps.

He whistled a tune under his breath. Devil take the blue-tailed fly.

Then a figure detached itself from the shadows up ahead and stood directly in Sinclair’s path.

At least his equal in height, the face hidden, shrouded in a black oilskin cape which fell to ankle length; like a deadly shade the figure waited for a reckoning.

Sinclair had twisted and turned in vain; he knew both the identity and intention of his adversary.

A dull glint of metal showed as the man raised his arm to point directly at the target. Sinclair gazed down with regret at his own hand where all that glinted was a thin gold wedding ring; he would never get to his revolver in time and would die like a dog for a vanquished cause.

The South was doomed. And he was no kind of hero.

A dull explosion and then the bullet smashed into his body. Jonathen Sinclair fell back and then lay still, fair hair spilled over the one hidden eye.

No angels came to take him away to a house on the hill.

For him at least the war was over.

2

Warped and woven there spun we

Arms and legs and flaming hair,

Like a whirlwind on the sea.

WILLIAM BELL SCOTT, ‘The Witch’s Ballad’

Leith, Edinburgh, 1882

James McLevy awoke with a snort of fear, hair standing on end as he shot bolt upright in his lumpy bed. Of late his dreams had been giving him hell and this was no exception.

Now was he truly out of the Land of Nod? As a policeman he would demand of his senses proof. Pain. Pain is a great indicator of the conscious state. A pin. A pin would be irrefutable, stuck into the back of the hand, but where do you find a pin in the pitch dark?

He scrabbled for a phosphorous match, struck it up and lit a squat dismal candle that had its place by his bed on a small rickety table. As the candle coughed its way towards a feeble luminosity, McLevy regarded the still burning match.

Caught yet by the wild fancy of the dream, what followed made perfect sense to him. He extended his thumb and wafted it over the flame. A howl of pain followed, the match was blown out, and the inspector then stuck the fleshly digit into his mouth to suck upon it like a distraught child.

A foul nightmare. Buried alive.

He had found himself in a cavernous long passage that wriggled ahead like a worm, having been led there by a female form that he might only observe from the back; the presence was shrouded in a long scarlet cloak with the hood pulled up as to obliterate all recognition.

How he’d got there he had no idea but it was surely connected to a previous fantastick episode where he’d been dancing naked round a fire; no, not naked, not him, he was in coat and low-brimmed bowler, in his heavy boots, the rest were naked or damned adjacent – female naked.

Was Jean Brash one of them? Surely not. She was a bawdy-hoose keeper with a fine taste in coffee, not one of these loose-lipped, loose-limbed wanton creatures capering round the flames. Their bosoms bounced with no regard for modest gravity and their rounded bellies heaved and shone through the draped shreds of discoloured linen that shook in ribald accompaniment to all this gallivantation.

The inspector should have arrested the sprawl where they pranced but what was he doing dancing in tune?

Then it was as if someone had drawn a curtain and the scene was blacked out.

And he was in the narrow tunnel, following the Red Figure – was it fatal? Had Edgar Allan Poe, a man McLevy found close to his own dark imagination, not penned The Masque of the Red Death?

The effigy did not look back and the passage became even more confined, with a glutinous creamy scum hanging from the curved walls.

This doesnae look good.

He remembered thinking that at the time and then the figure vanished from sight and he was left to stumble alone into the uncharted murky orifice insinuating onwards.

McLevy found himself upon his hands and knees, crawling like a Jerusalem traveller, the roof pressing down, the surface below a dismal brown claylike substance that clogged and sucked as he squelched forward. The creamy scum wasn’t much help either and some instinct told him that if any of that landed upon bare skin, it would scald a hole like hot fat through a stretched membrane.

His lungs were shuddering from lack of air as if a clawed hand were reaching through the wall of his chest and an impulse flashed into his head that he’d better get to hell out of this rat’s nest.

At the end of the passage was a small chink of light where an egg-shaped hole, too meagre for a man of his bulk to negotiate, indicated a possible source of succour. But how was he to squeeze through?

He jammed his arm and head in but that was as far as he could get, no chance of his big backside following