'Fair enough.'
'Good versus evil, that sort of thing.'
'The eternal struggle.'
'In other words, a potboiler.'
'I'd hoped my sights were set a bit higher,' Doyle complained.
'Don't listen to me, friend, I'm no critic. Are you published anywhere?'
'A few stories,' Doyle replied, with only modest exaggeration. 'I'm a frequent contributor to a monthly periodical.'
'What would that be?'
'It's for children, I'm sure you wouldn't know it.'
'Come on, what's it called?'
'The Boy's Own Paper,' said Doyle.
'Right, never heard of it. Tell you what I think, though; nothing wrong with a bit of entertainment, is there? That's what people want in the end, after all, a little diversion, a ripping good tale, leave behind their troubles and woe.'
'Stimulate a little thought while you're at it,' Doyle offered sheepishly.
'And why not? Noble aspirations yield greater achievements.'
'I appreciate the fine sensibilities—now would you please tell me what my book's got to do with what's happened tonight?'
The man paused, then leaned forward confidentially. 'The manuscript was circulated.'
'By whom?'
'Someone with connections.'
'Circulated where?'
'Into the wrong sorts of hands.'
Doyle paused and leaned in to meet Sacker halfway. 'I'm afraid you're going to have to be a bit more specific,' Doyle said.
Sacker held Doyle's eyes mesmerically and lowered his voice.
'Picture if you will a group of extraordinary individuals. Ruthless, intelligent, even brilliant persons. Well placed, enormously rewarded by the world for their skills and achievements. All distinctly lacking what you and I would call... basic morality. United by one common pursuit: acquisition of power without limits. Hungering for more. Obsessively secret—exactly who they are is impossible to say. Rest assured they are real. Does this sound at all familiar to you?'
Doyle could barely speak. 'My book.'
'Yes, Doyle. Your book. You've written a manuscript of fiction, but by some elusive process you have drawn down into your work an uncanny approximation of the depraved plottings of a malignant sect of black magicians, seeking an end not at all unlike that pursued by your characters. Which was to—'
'To elicit the help of evil spirits in annihilating the membrane that separates the physical and etheric plane.'
'In order to—'
'Gain dominion over the material world and those who inhabit it.'
'Right. And if tonight's seance was any indication, my friend, they have breached the battlements and set foot across the threshold.'
'It's not possible.'
'Do you believe what your eyes saw in that room?'
Doyle found he was unwilling to hear his answer.
'It is possible,' Sacker maintained.
Doyle felt a jolt of dislocation, as if he were in a dream. His mind struggled to stay above the flood tide of shock and dismay. The fact was, he had borrowed not only the title of his book but his villains' motives from the woolliest works of Madame Blavatsky. Who would have thought his petty larceny would come so hideously home to roost?
'If my book has fallen into their hands ...'
'Put yourself in their shoes: What purpose does life hold for these diseased monsters without the threatening presence—real or imagined—of formidable enemies, whose very existence serves only to heighten their demented self-aggrandizement?'
'They think I've somehow stumbled onto their plan....'
'If they mean to kill you outright they probably wouldn't have gone to all this trouble, which leads me to believe they want you alive, if that's any comfort to you.'
'But surely they must know ... I mean, they can't think ... for God's sake, it's only a book.'
'Yes. Pity, that.'
Doyle stared at him. 'What's all this got to do with you?'
'Oh, I've been onto these rogues a good sight longer than you have.'
'But I haven't been onto them at all; until this moment I never even knew they existed.'
'Yes, well, I wouldn't care to try telling them that, would you?'
Doyle was speechless.
'Fortunately, my tracking them put me close at hand this evening. Unfortunately, I'm something of a marked man now as well.'
Sacker rapped sharply on the roof. The carriage came to a sudden halt.
'Rest assured: We've put a real spoke in their wheel tonight. Keep your wits about you, and don't waste a moment's time. And I wouldn't bother going to the police with all this, because they will think you mad, and word will only filter up to someone who could do you even greater harm.'
'Greater than murder?'
All trace of a smile vanished. 'There are worse things,' he said, then opened the door. 'Best of luck, Doyle. We'll be in touch.'
Sacker extended a hand. Doyle shook it. In his dazed, bewildered state, the next thing he knew, he was standing on the street outside his front door, watching the scar-faced cabbie tip bis hat, turn, and whip the carriage hurriedly into the night.
Doyle looked down at the hand Sacker had shaken. He was holding a small, exquisitely crafted silver insignia in the form of a human eye.
MAELSTROM WHIRLED INSIDE DOYLE'S MIND. He LOOKED
at his watch: 9:52. An ironmonger's cart rattled by. Doyle shivered with nostalgic longing as the prosaic, quotidian world in which he'd spent all but the last two hours of his life receded from him like dying sunlight. In the time it takes to bake bread, he had seen his life, if not his entire conception of the universe, turned on its head.
In the stillness left by the passing of the cart, forms and faces swam out of the dark; every shadow seemed to pulse with hidden, unspeakable danger. Doyle hustled to the presumed safety of his doorstep.
A face looked down at him from a high window. His neighbor, the Russian woman, Petrovitch. Wait—had there been a second face behind hers? Another look: both faces gone, curtains swaying.
Did his staircase, always a trigger for the pleasant prospect of home and its attendant comforts, now exude an aura of dread menace? No longer certain he could trust his instincts, Doyle took revolver in hand, trusting its filled chambers to contend with whatever might await, and slowly ascended the twenty-one steps. The door to his rooms came into view. It stood open.
The wood where the doorknob used to reside was splintered like so many matchsticks. The debris lay here, on the floor outside—the knob torn off, not kicked in. Doyle leaned back against the wall and listened. Certain that nothing stirred inside, with a light touch he eased the door open and gasped at what lay before him.
Every square inch of the front room looked to have been drooled or saturated with a clear, viscous fluid. Streaked and
textured, as if a gigantic brush had been maniacally stroked from floor to ceiling. A smell like scorched mattress ticking permeated the air. Lazy smoke curled up from where the substance lay thickest. Stepping inside,
