another door, leading into a vast hallway.
Perched on the newel posts on either side of a grand ascending staircase, large winged gargoyles stood sentry, scowling at one another: one a griffin, long of tooth and talon, the other a reptilian basilisk, scabrous and scaled. The day's last light through the leaded-glass windows imparted a ghostly glow to the marble walls and floors. Total darkness was only minutes away and, saving a penny during the holiday, none of the gas jets were alight. Doyle listened but heard no footfalls.
'Professor Sacker! ... Professor Sacker!'
No reply. A chill ran through him. He turned around. The gargoyles glared down at him from their posts in the stairwell. Doyle set off to find a privy—had those statues been facing his way when he entered? A memory of their having faced each other persisted—perhaps Sacker had gone to answer nature's call.
He found every door along the hallway locked. Turning repeatedly as the corridor meandered, by the time Doyle realized he could no longer see his hand before him, he was not at all sure where he was. The air felt as frigid and heavy as the blackness was dense. He wiped the sweat from his hands. Fear of the dark was not something he commonly fell prey to, but after the last two days all such presumptions were forfeit. Attempting to retrace his steps—there had been lights burning in Sacker's office, a place that now seemed a haven of warmth and security—he kept one hand on the cool marble wall and took each step cautiously.
An intersection. Did I turn right or left here? His answer was not confident. Right then.
Fear of the dark is a primitive, instinctual leftover, he reminded himself: Our remote forebears spent the better part of their lives groping blindly in the dark- —and since there could be huge, carnivorous predators lying in ambush around every turn, it seemed altogether a very sensible response—tout that by no measure meant the same dangers still existed in the modern civilized—What was that?
Doyle stopped. A sound, some distance away. What was it?
Stay calm. It could be help, a neutral or friendly presence. Even Sacker himself. Perhaps we'll hear it again. Perhaps it would be a fine idea if we didn 't move from this spot until we do. Err on the side of caution, and not only because we're plunged into absolute darkness in an unfathomable maze and there are pitiless, unspeakable horrors tracking us from who knows which side of the etheric membrane—
Wait ... there it was again.
Try to identify. Not a footstep, was it? No. No smack of heel, no shuffling skid or impact on marble whatsoever.
Go on, Doyle, you know perfectly well what you heard.
Wings. A flap of wings. Leathery, cartilaginous.
Well, perhaps a sparrow or pigeon's flown through a window and gotten lost in the halls—let's be honest, shall we? Late December, even if birds were still about, that was not the exercising of a small or even midsized wingspan, if there exists anywhere in the world a bird that could produce that sound, that could displace that much air—
It's coming this way. Those first two flaps issued from a stationary position, loosening, limbering up, almost as if the—Doyle, put your mind in order, man: Allow into your heart the idea that those stone gargoyles on the stairs can fly, and in two ticks you 'II find yourself chained to a pallet in Bedlam.
On the other hand, something immense is moving through the air and coming closer, so from a purely precautionary standpoint, let's move on. Don't run, Doyle, use your walking stick ahead of you, like that—quietly, please—find a door, there's a good fellow, any door will do—got one: locked. Damn. On to the next.
Rummaging for bird facts—do they see well in the dark? Depends on the bird, doesn't it? How's their sense of smell? Do they have one? They must: Their entire lives constitute an uninterrupted search for food. Terrifically reassuring. What have we squirreled away in there about the eating habits of gargoyles?
It's not possible, but the wings seem to be advancing and receding simultaneously. Unless there are two of them; one on either side of the stairs for a grand total of—enough!
A door, Doyle, and please hurry, because one of them just
rounded the corner we recently turned, which puts it fifty feet behind us and closing rapidly—
There: Grip the handle and turn and push and enter and close the door behind you. Can you lock the door? No bolt. Can you recall any avian facts that would support the possibility of a bird turning a doorknob? Be serious. Is there a window in this door? Solid oak. Blessed old, thick old door, God save the English craftsman—
You heard that, didn't you? A settling of weight, a soft scratching on the marble floor. What goes with wings? Talons. And if talons were raked across the good old solid oak door, they would undoubtedly produce something remarkably similar to the sound we're hearing now.
Time to see what kind of room we 're in, and more essentially, what other exits it offers. Reach in the pocket, find the matches, move away from the door, and strike a— Good Christ!
Doyle dropped the match and recoiled to ward off a blow that never arrived. This surprised him, because what he'd seen in the split second as the match ignited, bearing down on him at an imposing angle, was the face of a ghoul, hideously denuded of skin, yellowed teeth bared in a militant grimace. He waited. Surely, he'd be feeling its foul breath on his face. Hands shaking, he lit another match.
A mummy. Upright, in its sarcophagus. Beside it, on display, a coiled staff of Ra. Maneuvering the match to reveal more of his surroundings, Doyle realized he'd stumbled into a room of Egyptologiana. Amphora, jewelry, preserved cats, gold-inlaid daggers, hieroglyphed slate: Egypt and its detritus were all the rage these days, no world tour complete without an excursion to the Pyramids at—
Boom! Banging on the door. Boom! The hinges groaned painfully. Thanks to his panicked exclamation, whatever was out there knew he was inside—
The match burned his finger. He dropped it and lit another, looking for a—please God—yes, there, a window. He moved to it as quickly as keeping the match alive would allow, fixed the position of the latch lock, discarded the match, grabbed the latch, turned—the pounding on the door insistent, massive bulk heaving itself against splintering wood—and the window flew open. Doyle looked down at an uncertain drop, no time
to hesitate, tossed out his bag and stick and followed them, absorbing the shock of the fall with his knees, tucking and rolling, scooping up bag and stick and sprinting away from the Tomb of Antiquities.
He stopped to catch his breath under the vaulted exterior arch of St. Mary's Church. He waited ten minutes in the shadows for the dreadful flapping to emerge from the darkness, for some vile avenging shadow to blot out the stars and streak down at him out of the sky. As his breathing steadied, the sweat that had soaked his shirt cooled, leaving him cold and shivery. Lights burned invitingly in the nave. He moved inside.
What had he escaped from? In the warm, same light of the church, the question turned on him; had his imagination transformed perfectly ordinary circumstances—say, an over-zealous night watchman whose corduroy pants produced an insistent hissing—into a wallow of self-generated terror? He had studied how the strain of combat could induce in soldiers all manner of hallucinatory mental phenomena. Was he not now laboring under an even more insidious strain, in that his antagonists were unknown to him and could be, as Sacker had suggested, any passing stranger in the street? Perhaps this was their preferred method of assault, driving their victims mad with a constant noncorporeal menace more sensed than seen. Show a man a target he can strike back against, and you lend him a footing. Attack him with inexplicable night sounds, will-o'-the wisps, macabre scarecrows by the sides of train tracks, incite the stuff of his own nightmares, and the suggestive vagueness of it alone could send him reeling into lunacy.
Standing at one of the transept chapels, Doyle entertained an impulse to light a candle in appeal to some conventional higher power of good, for guidance or aid. god is light and in him is no darkness at all, read the inscription.
There was a lit taper in his hand; he'd caught himself nearly in the act. Curious: I'm standing square in the fulcrum of man's eternal dialectic between faith and fear; are we beings of light, gods waiting to be born, or pawns in a struggle of higher forces vying for control of a world beneath their separate, unseen realms? Unable to commit himself to either
side of that argument, Doyle extinguished the taper without lighting a candle.
With returning to see if Sacker had returned to his office an option of exceptionally limited appeal, the prospect of food and drink presented the preferred alternative; feed the body, quiet the mind. Then a visit to an individual uniquely qualified to lead him out of this metaphysical mire was in order: HPB.
One full stomach and two hours later, Doyle was srr-ting amid a modest gathering of Transcendentalists at
