JL o Doyle's surprise, they made for the north, a straight course out of London; it had been his assumption they would return to Battersea to reclaim the engine that had provided their deliverance from Topping. Larry maintained a pace rapid enough to outdistance any pursuit without calling any undue attention to them—it wouldn't be long before the telegraph wires were singing with news of their escape.
Doyle sat uneasily across from Sparks as they drove, Sparks staring moodily out the window, glancing only occasionally at Doyle, and then never meeting his eyes.
Whom do I believe? Doyle was forced to ask himself with such urgency that the logical vivisection of its separate issues proved impossible. There was only the question itself filling his mind, repeating like a church bell.
A lunatic from Bedlam. Was it possible? He was forced to admit that it was so. A man tormented by imagined persecutors. Living in a shadowy world of secret connections to high places—no less than the Queen, for God's sake—constructed by a diseased mind while trapped in the confines of a madman's cell. But Sparks had always seemed so lucid, so supremely rational. Although even lunatics were capable of sustained lucidity, or its flawless simulacrum, as Doyle knew full well; perhaps Sparks's sapient belief in the incredible tales he told was the most damning indictment of his madness. Could Jack actually be all the things he claimed he was? There were the supporting testimonies of Larry and Barry to take into account, but they were recruited criminals, quick to follow and easily influenced, perhaps even knowing accomplices in the charade. A charade to what end? What possible purpose? None occurred to him. If Sparks were truly mad, there might very well be no discernible reason to his actions; the man could be acting without a script, tailoring his stories as he went to suit the cut of the moment's fancy.
A darker question suddenly loomed behind these worrisome speculations; what if there was no Alexander Sparks? Was it possible this man was himself the criminal mastermind he had described his brother to be? He certainly possessed all the same attributed talents—and what other individual had he ever heard described who came closer to fitting the known profile of Alexander Sparks? What if this brooding puzzle of a man seated across from him embodied both brothers at once, fragmented selves residing in the troubled crucible of a single imagination, each believing the other as separate and autonomous, one stalking and killing at will, the other haunted by a memory of foul deeds committed in the eclipse of an obscuring derangement? Did that mean Jack was also the defiler and murderer of his parents? Painful to consider, but couldn't it have been the very commission of those vile acts that had somehow split his mind, shifting responsibility for the unthinkable to a phantom figure that he constantly pursued or felt constantly pursued by?
The cooler side of Doyle's mind rallied in protest; how then to explain the figure in black he'd encountered twice now, the man Jack had identified as his brother? There were the gray hoods and the seance, the destruction of his flat and the madness of Topping, all consistent with Sparks's story, however strange it sounded, all of it his own direct experience. The murders of Petrovitch and Bodger Nuggins, the visions of Spivey Quince and the doomed boy in blue, and the evidence he had seen all too clearly with his own eyes—and felt on his skin; he could still see the vivid welts on his wrist where the ghoul had grabbed him—in the basement of the British Museum. Even if John Sparks was as mad as a March hare, he was only one figure in a crowded, cockeyed landscape that had long since lost the shape and flavor of the everyday world.
Doyle parted the curtain, looked out the window, and tried to purchase a sense of there they were; there was Coram's Fields to the left, that put them on Grey's Inn Road, yes, the carriage was heading due north out of London, toward Islington.
Should he share these wayward thoughts with Sparks? Or was there a more skulduggerous way to test the fidelity of his character? After all, wasn't it just as likely that Leboux's information was at fault? If only he'd had a chance to speak with him, hear firsthand the source of this news about Sparks and more details. That opportunity might now be lost for good; after Doyle had fled from the hospital in full view of his friend, Leboux's patience had surely reached its end. He was a fugitive from justice, plain and simple, and his choices had narrowed considerably: He could either attempt an escape from Sparks to throw himself on the uncertain mercies of the police—risking the untold consequences of Sparks's formidable wrath—or cast his lot with the man and his band of outsiders to whatever uncertain end lay in store.
'Anything in Blavatsky about the Seven or a Black Lord?' asked Sparks.
'What's that?' said a startled Doyle.
'I'm not as conversant as you are with her work: Is there any mention in her writings about the Seven or the Black Lord?' Still deep in thought, Sparks didn't so much as glance at him.
Doyle rummaged through his scattered recollections of Blavatsky. It seemed a hundred years since he had spent that last quiet evening in his rooms, leisurely pondering her text.
'I recall something about an entity—the Dweller on the Threshold,' said Doyle, wishing he had the book in front of him. 'It could nearly answer to the same description.'
'What was the Dweller on the Threshold?'
'A being ... an entity of high spiritual origin that, as part of its pilgrim's progress, consciously chose to come down into the world—'
'To live in human form, you mean.'
'Yes, as all souls do, according to Blavatsky: a way of learning, matriculation.'
'Why was this being different?'
'In its disembodied state, this one supposedly held a place of favor at the right hand of whatever word you wish to use for God. And when it entered the physical world, it fell—I'm trying to remember her wording; this wasn't it precisely—it succumbed to the temptations of material life.'
'The ways of the flesh,' said Sparks.
'Devoting itself to the accumulation of earthly power and the satisfaction of earthy appetites, turning its back on its exalted spiritual heritage. In this way was conscious evil born into the world.'
'The Christians call it Lucifer.'
'The boy in blue said it is known by many names.'
'The myth of the fallen angel exists in every discovered culture. How did it come to be described as the Dweller on the Threshold?'
'At the end of each term of physical life—it has had more than a few apparently—Blavatsky claims this being, upon leaving the earthly plane, retires to a limbo at the door between worlds, collecting around it the lost, corrupted souls of persons who fell to its influence while alive and followed it blindly to their deaths—'
'Are they the Seven?'
'I don't recall a specific number, but they were spoken of collectively.'
'So these twisted devotees are the first to return from this purgatorium to physical life,' said Sparks, his mind leaping ahead, 'where their purpose is to prepare the way—the 'passage'—for their Black Lord who 'dwells on the threshold' between the physical and mystic worlds, awaiting return to the earth.'
Doyle nodded. 'That does her account of it some small justice. I don't remember her alluding to the being and its acolytes as the Black Lord and Seven; they were simply referred together under the rubric of the Dark Brotherhood.'
Sparks fell back into pensive silence. They were by now clattering through the farthest outskirts of London, onto dirt roads through pastoral land. Were they going to venture all the way to Whitby by horse and carriage? A rough two or three days' ride at the least.
'Many of the mediums you spoke with were having disturbing visions,' said Sparks.
'Vague sorts. Impressions, feelings. Fleeting and ephemeral, at best.'
'No specifics?'
'Only from Spivey Quince and of course the boy he foretold our seeing at the hospital.'
'This boy was a genuine medium, in your estimation?'
'I'd say he was an extreme sensitive. Dangerous to speculate without knowing his underlying physical condition, but it seemed to me the impact of the vision that assailed him contributed in no small way to his death.'
'As if the vision itself had turned and attacked.'
'And the very weight of it had crushed him,' said Doyle reluctantly.
'What does this suggest to you? That many experiencing these similar visions?'
