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It was ectoplasm. It exuded through the top of the double doorsleading to the corridors and rooms, snaked across the ceiling, anddisappeared into the stairwell.
“Is it coming up the stairs or going down, I wonder?” hemurmured.
He stepped over to the doors and pushed them open. Gas lamps, inbrackets on the walls, illuminated the hallway beyond.
There were eight residential rooms on each side of thisparticular passage. Their doors were open. Ectoplasm twisted out ofeach one and joined the thick limb of stuff on the ceiling.
Burton clenched his jaw nervously, crept up to the firstchamber, and peered in. Its furniture had been pushed aside but fora large table. Seven chairs stood around it. Only one was occupied.The remains of a man sat in it. He was mummified, his skin shrunkenand desiccated, his sharp cheekbones poking through. His head wasthrown back and ectoplasm was issuing from his mouth and rising upto the ceiling.
“Bismillah!” Burton whispered, entering. “There was a seance,and it doesn't look like this fellow survived it!”
He bent and looked at the man's face, then jerked back with acry of shock, bumping into his companion, as the mummy's eyesflicked open and rolled sightlessly.
“Alive, by God! How long has the poor devil been here?”
He turned to his valet. “I have a horrible feeling it's going tobe the same story in the other rooms.”
It was. On the seventh floor of the Venetia, in every room,there was a table at which a seance had been performed, and atevery table there sat one shrunken, dried-out man, with head backand ectoplasm streaming out of him up to the ceiling and out intothe corridor.
When they descended to the sixth floor, they found the same,though the ectoplasm was more abundant.
On the fifth, it was even thicker and glowed slightly with agreenish-hued light. It had crawled down the walls, forming strangeorganic shapes reminiscent of ribs and veins and quiveringorgans.
The fourth floor was worse: walls, ceilings, fixtures, andfittings were so completely buried beneath the pulsating substancethat it seemed to Burton as if he and his valet were making theirway through the arteries of a living organism.
Cautiously, the king's agent led the way to the stairwell. Theroute down to the third floor resembled the gullet of a mythicalbeast.
“Stepping into the dragon's maw,” Burton muttered.
He took the step.
Something touched his mind.
“ You should be dead! ” a voice hissed inside his skull.
He felt the devastating force of Madam Blavatsky's presence.
“My apologies,” he said, aloud. “Alive and kicking. I thoughtI'd find you here.”
“ And pray tell me, malchik moi, what led you to me? ”
“I was told, some months ago, that this hotel had been fullybooked by a private party. It's a big place, so the party must havebeen very substantial indeed; and since the Venetia is slap bang inthe middle of the Strand, and the Strand is at the centre of thedisturbances-well, you can see why I concluded that the Rakes werehere with their elusive new leader.”
“ Not all the Rakes, but a great many, yes. Come, stand in mypresence. Bring your preposterous toy with you. ”
Burton moved down the stairs. The steps were almost entirelyconcealed by the thick mediumistic substance, which felt spongy andunstable beneath his boots. He gingerly placed one foot after theother, struggling to maintain his balance. The clockwork manfollowed.
Blavatsky poked and prodded at his mind.
“ My my! You are so much stronger, lyubimiy moi!”
“Beware of the brains you invade, bitch. Do you not think Ilearned just as much about you as you did of me the last time?”
“ Then you know that I lack your vulnerability. ”
“You have your own flaws.”
“ Is that so? Then it's to be a duel, is it, Gaspadin Burton?”
“If you wish.”
“ If I wish? I relish the prospect! Idi ko mne, moi miliy! Youwill find me in the library on this floor. ”
At the bottom of the stairs, Burton turned to the left, thedirection from which Blavatsky's power was emanating, and passedthrough open double doors into a hallway. The ectoplasm had madethe passage almost tubular, and, as he and his mechanical attendantprogressed along it, it constricted to such a degree that they hadto proceed on their hands and knees.
The temperature plummeted. A weird silence pressed against hisears, as if he'd suddenly become deaf, and an odd sense oftimelessness muddled his senses.
The tu
“Do you mean to crush me, woman?”
“ No, malchik moi. Let me help you. ”
The ectoplasm started to exude a clear slimy substance.
Burton felt his companion tangling against his legs as thetu
They lay sprawled in a heap, dripping slime.
“Damnation,” Burton grumbled. “That wasn't very dignified.”
“Dabro pazhalavat, Gaspadin Burton. What is this device you havebrought with you? ”
“He's my valet,” the king's agent responded, clambering to hisfeet and surveying the chamber.
A liquid chuckle gurgled in his head. “ It is good that you havehim. The staff here has been very unreliable of late. I ca
The library was completely buried beneath huge ribs of glowingectoplasm. They curved down from a big tangle of material in thecentre of the ceiling, over the walls, across the floor, and meldedtogether in its middle, where they rose up to form a slenderthree-foot-high plinth. At its top, delicate fingers of thematerial held a plum-sized black diamond-the Tichborne stone. TheSouth American Eye of Naga.
It hummed faintly.
“ You realise, of course, that I have allowed your companion toapproach merely to satisfy my curiosity. ”
“I was counting on it.”
“ Mechanisms of that sort do not normally function in mypresence. ”
“You are far too confident in your abilities.”
“ I am? ”
The king's agent turned to his valet and snapped: “Get thediamond!”
The brass man bounded across to the plinth, reached for thestone, and stopped dead.
A peal of laughter sounded from the ceiling.
Burton looked up.
“Fool!” Madam Blavatsky crowed, her voice deep and resonant.“You think you can defy me with clockwork?”
She was enmeshed in a snarled knot of ectoplasmic tubes, naked;a middle-aged thick-bodied woman, suspended upside down above theplinth, with her arms stretched out horizontally. Her skull hadcracked and broken open like an eggshell pushed apart from theinside, and bits of it hung loose. Her swollen brain bulgedhorribly out of the fissures. Thin ribbons of grey wrinkled tissuedangled down, entwining with her long brown hair and brushingagainst the diamond below.
Her fathomless black eyes seemed to suck at Burton's very soul,so dreadfully intense were they; they stabbed him like pinstransfixing a captured moth.
“You are defeated, Gaspadin Burton. Soon the king will fall, thepoor will flood out of your East End, and London will belong to theworking classes. The disorder will spread from the capital like adisease. It will infect the entire country! Think of all thosedowntrodden, exploited, destitute workers in Britain's greatmanufacturing cities-Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds-wherecivilised man is lured from his peaceful labours in the countrysideand turned back almost into an animal! What barbarous indifferencethey have suffered! How passionate shall be their revolt!”
Burton snorted in disdain. “Don't try to hide your agenda behindfalse philanthropy, madam! You care naught for Britain's workers.You regard them as a means to a nefarious end, and nothing more.You've made your intentions quite clear!”