The Wanderer in Unknown Realms Read online

  “Astonishing,” I said.

  “Every day more arrive,” said Mrs. Gissing. “I’ve left the new ones in the library for Mr. Maulding’s return.”

  For the first time, she showed some sign of distress. Her voice caught, and her eyes grew moist.

  “You will find him, sir, won’t you? You will bring him back safely to his books?”

  I told her I would try. I asked if the grounds had been searched, and she told me that they had: the groundsman, Mr. Ted Willox, knew the property intimately. He and his sons were the only other people in the village aware of Lionel Maulding’s disappearance. Willox had engaged his sons to help him search Maulding’s land, and they had gone over it, every inch. They had found no trace of the master of the house.

  Willox was away that day, visiting a sister who was ill, but was due to return to Maidensmere the following morning. I told Mrs. Gissing to send him to me as soon as he arrived. I was, I confess, surprised at the loyalty of Gissing and Willox to Maulding, and their willingness to protect his privacy even as they feared for his safety. Mrs. Gissing seemed to sense this, for as she showed me to my room, she spoke once more.

  “Mr. Maulding is a good and kind man. I just want you to know that, sir. He’s always been generous to me. My boys, my lovely boys, they’re buried in the cemetery here, and I get to speak to them every day. There are always fresh flowers for them, no matter the season, and the weeds are kept at bay. Mr. Maulding arranged that, sir. He spoke to the generals in London, and they brought my boys home for me, each of them in turn. I’ve never wanted for anything, Mr. Willox neither. All Mr. Maulding asks in return is for his meals to be prepared, his clothes to be cleaned, and his bed to be made, and otherwise to be left in peace with his books. There is no harm to the man, and no harm should come to him.”

  I wanted to tell her that such was not the way of the world until I remembered that she had buried two sons and was thus more conscious of the world’s true workings than any of us. Our arrival at my room saved me from uttering any further foolishness, and she left me to unpack the small bag I had brought with me and to explore my environs alone. Next door to my room was a bathroom with a fine claw-toed bathtub. I could not recall when last I had enjoyed a bath that didn’t involve a tin tub, and saucepans of water with which to fill it, and I promised myself the luxury of a lengthy immersion that evening.

  None of the rooms had been kept locked. As Mrs. Gissing had intimated, most were being used for storage, and the only items that Lionel Maulding desired to store were books. I began to grasp a sense of the house’s arrangement, for it was, in truth, simply one large library: here were volumes on geography, there on history. Three adjoining rooms gathered together studies on biology, chemistry, and physics respectively, with a series of shelves in the final room being given over to more general works that touched on all three aspects of the sciences. There were many rooms for fiction and almost as many for poetry and drama. One sizable area was given over to beautiful books of art reproductions, some of them very old and probably very valuable. A few were of an erotic nature but did not appear to have been perused any more closely than the others.

  In time I came to Maulding’s bedroom. Once again, there were books on every surface, and each wall was furnished with shelves, floor to ceiling, except for the wall above his bed, although even here a single shelf had been placed to accommodate those books that were clearly occupying Maulding’s attention at any particular time. Bookmarked on that shelf were a volume of Tacitus, a book on beekeeping, a guide to growing one’s own vegetables, and two oddities: A Lexicon of Alchemy by Martinus Rulandus the Elder, dating from 1612; and a single-volume edition of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy. The Rulandus bore a leather bookmark in the “Supplement to the Alchemical Lexicon,” and two entries had been heavily underscored. A pencil lay beside the book, so I took it that Maulding had made the marks. The two entries, one beneath the other, were:

  Angels—The chemical Philosophers sometimes gave this name to the Volatile Matter of their Stone. They then say that their body is spiritualized, and that one will never succeed in performing the Grand Work unless one corporifies spirits, and spiritualizes bodies. This operation is philosophical sublimation, and it is certain that the fixed never becomes sublimated without the assistance of the volatile.

  Angle—The thing which has three angles—a term of Hermetic science. The Philosophers say that their matter, or the Philosophical Mercury, is a substance having three angles as regards the substance of which it is composed, of four as regards its virtue, and of two in respect of its matter, while in its root it is one. These three angles are salt, sulphur, and mercury; the four are the elements; the two are the fixed and the volatile, and the one is the remote matter, or the chaos from which all has been produced.

  These final words—the chaos from which all has been produced—had been more heavily underlined than the rest, although I could make no more sense of them than I could of anything else that I had read there. I completed the search of Maulding’s room but found nothing that might help in discovering his whereabouts. I then continued my examination of the house, until I came at last to the kitchen, where Mrs. Gissing was preparing enough food to last a whole family for a week, as I had informed her that it would not be necessary for her to come to the house every day while I was there. My needs, I explained, were probably even fewer than her master’s.

  “Where does Mr. Maulding spend most of his time?” I asked.

  “In his study, sir.”

  Hardly surprising: I should probably have guessed that for myself. I had poked my head into it on the way to the kitchen, and the only thing to distinguish it from the rest of the house was that it contained marginally more books than any other room, although it was a close-run thing.

  “Where would I find his papers, and the household accounts?”

  “In his desk, I should imagine.”

  “Did he keep it locked?”

  “Why would he do that?” she asked. She seemed quite surprised at the question.

  “Well, some men are rather private about the matters of their finances.”

  “But what kind of person would pry into the affairs of another?”

  “A person like me,” I replied.

  She didn’t have an answer to that, or not one that she felt inclined to speak aloud, so I left her to her pots and pans and made my way to the study.

  III

  IT TOOK me some time to make sense of Maulding’s filing system, in part because there wasn’t one, as such: there were simply piles of paper, some older than others, separated loosely into invoices and receipts, all relating to the year in hand. Some digging behind three sets of encyclopedias produced binders containing details of his income and expenditure in previous years. Most of his purchases were made by personal check, but sometimes in cash, and he kept notes of expenses, major and minor, in a small ledger. So, over the course of the afternoon, and fueled by tea and sandwiches from Mrs. Gissing, I became familiar with the processes by which he maintained order in his finances. I could find little personal correspondence, some begging letters from his nephew apart, as any post that he received related almost exclusively to the purchase and, very occasionally, the sale of books. He appeared to deal with booksellers throughout Britain and, indeed, a number on the Continent and in America.

  Still, it was the most recent of his purchases that interested me and gave me some clue as to his purpose in traveling to London. It appeared that he had begun dealing with two new suppliers of books in the months preceding his disappearance: Stanford’s, the specialists in scientific literature in Bloomsbury; and an antiquarian establishment, of which I had previously been unaware, called Dunwidge & Daughter. I counted at least thirty receipts from Dunwidge, all acknowledging cash payments for books, the nature of which were detailed on the documents themselves. There was The Hermetic Museum, which appeared to relate to something called “the Philosopher’s Stone,” a first Engli
sh translation from 1893 of a work apparently originally published in Latin in 1678; The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals, undated, by Johannes Trithemius; the Grimoirium Imperium, alleged to be a copy of a work originally owned by the alchemist Dr. John Dee, published in Rome in 1680; The Theatre of Terrestrial Astronomy by Edward Kelly, Hamburg, 1676; and assorted others in a similar vein. I could not claim to be an expert on such matters, but it seemed to me that Lionel Maulding had spent a great deal of time, effort, and money to begin acquiring a library of the occult, and Dunwidge & Daughter had been the principal beneficiaries of this new enthusiasm. Unlike the better-known Stanford’s, though, Dunwidge & Daughter had not appended a contact address to their receipts, merely the name of their business.

  I paused in my perusals. Something had been nagging at me ever since I had begun reading this list of esoteric volumes. Slowly, I retraced my steps through the house, examining shelves and taking note of the divisions and subdivisions of subjects. It took me some hours, and by the time I was done the light had begun to fade. My back ached and my eyes could barely focus, but I was certain of this: I could find no trace of a section devoted to occult literature in Maulding’s house, the two volumes on the shelf above his bed excepted. Neither could I find any trace of the books that he had apparently purchased from Dunwidge & Daughter. Naturally, it was entirely possible that I might have missed them, or that they had been misfiled, but the former seemed to me more likely than the latter, for Maulding struck me as a meticulous cataloger of his collection. I determined to make a second search the following day, just to be sure. Maulding had no telephone in his house, so I asked Mrs. Gissing to send a telegram to London on my behalf on her way home, asking Quayle’s assistant, Fawnsley, to ascertain the location of the business known as Dunwidge & Daughter, and to reply by return of telegram the following morning.

  It was by now well past six o’clock. Mrs. Gissing had prepared an eel pie, which I ate accompanied by the best part of a bottle of Bordeaux from Maulding’s cellar. When I was done, Mrs. Gissing ran a bath for me before departing for the night. I thanked her for her kindness, and then I was alone in Bromdun Hall for the first time.

  I checked the bath, but the water was still too hot to bear. I had no desire to boil myself like a lobster, so I returned to my room and poured the last of the red wine while I waited for the water to cool. I had taken some books from the shelves for my own amusement, among them McNeile’s recently issued Bulldog Drummond, published under the pseudonym “Sapper.” McNeile had fought at Ypres, and I’d admired his stories for the Daily Mail and The War Illustrated, even if he had sugared the pill more than I liked. Then again, he was writing while the war was still ongoing, and had he dwelt upon the true horror of the fighting at the time, none of his stories would have seen the light of day.

  I had read about two pages of the novel when I heard the sound of splashing from the bathtub.

  “Mrs. Gissing?” I called.

  Perhaps she had returned to the house for some reason and felt compelled to check the water while she was there, but I had not heard the front door opening, and the stairs leading up to the bedrooms creaked and moaned like souls in torment. Neither did the sounds coming from the bathroom resemble those of a hand being briefly swished through water in an effort to gauge its temperature. Instead the splashing was intermittent yet consistent with the noise a person might make while washing in a tub.

  Mrs. Gissing had set a fire in my bedroom before her departure. I picked up a poker from the fireplace and, gripping it tightly, made my way to the bathroom. The door was slightly further ajar than I had left it, although that might simply have been my nerves playing tricks on me. The difference was marginal at best. As I drew nearer the door the splashing increased in tempo before ceasing altogether, as though someone inside had become aware of my approach and was now listening for me.

  I used the poker to push the door open to its fullest extent. The bathtub was unoccupied, and there appeared to be only the faintest hint of disturbance on the surface of the water. That water, though, had changed in color. When I had left the room it was relatively clear, with only the faintest hint of brown to it. Now it was a sickly, unpleasant yellow, like curdled milk, and there was a faint scum upon it. There was a smell, too, as of fish on the turn.

  I stood above the tub and, feeling faintly foolish, used the poker to probe the water, half expecting to feel soft flesh give beneath it and a torrent of bubbles to rise to the surface as the force of the poker expelled the air from whoever might be hiding below. No such bubbles appeared, however, and the only obstacle the poker encountered was the porcelain of the tub itself. There was nowhere else in the bathroom where anyone might have hidden.

  I called Mrs. Gissing’s name again, the sound of it echoing from the bathroom tiles, but got no reply. I wrinkled my nose at the smell from the water. Perhaps what I had heard was some emission from the taps, an expulsion of pollutants from the pipes that had tainted the water. I had no intention of bathing in it now, but I was still intent upon a bath. Mrs. Gissing had assured me plenty of hot water was to be had, so, almost without thinking, I reached into the tub to pull the plug.

  Something moved against my hand. It was hard, and jointed, reminiscent of the carapace of a lobster. I withdrew my hand with a shout, the chain of the plug still grasped in my fist, and watched as the water began to drain. Down, down it went, leaving a layer of yellow scum on the sides like foam on a beach after the tide has departed. When barely six inches of water was left, a sudden flurry of movement came from the vicinity of the plug hole, and a form broke the surface. I had a brief impression of an armored body, pinkish-black in hue, with many, many legs. I caught a glimpse of pincers like those of an earwig, except larger and wickedly sharp, before the creature somehow forced itself into the plug hole and exited the tub, even though its body had seemed far too wide to be accommodated by such a constricted means of escape. Noises came from the pipes for a time, and then all was quiet.

  Unsurprisingly, I did not take my bath after all. Having immediately restored the plug to the plug hole, I did the same thing with every bath and sink I could find, more for some false peace of mind than out of any real hope that a plug of rubber and metal could stop such a creature from emerging again, should it choose to do so.

  I sat up in my bed, wondering. What could it be? I thought—some crustacean of the Broads, unfamiliar to me but a commonplace sight to those who lived in these parts? Had I mentioned it in the Maidensmere Inn, might the landlord have tipped a wink once again to his customers and announced that what I had seen was merely X, or Y, and that fried with some cream sauce, or boiled in a pot with a little white wine vinegar, it was actually most palatable? Somehow, I suspected not. My fingers tingled unpleasantly where they had touched the thing, and they looked red and irritated in the lamplight.

  Eventually I dozed. I dreamed of Pulteney’s tanks rolling ineffectually toward High Wood, great rumbling silhouettes moving through the darkness until picked out by the light of flares and the explosion of shell fire. Then the shape of them began to change, and they were no longer constructions of metal but living, breathing entities. They did not roll on heavy tracks but propelled themselves on short jointed legs. Turrets became heads, and gun barrels were transformed into strange, elongated limbs that spat poison from orifices lined with curved teeth. The flares were bolts of lightning, and the landscape they illuminated was more terrible yet than the wasteland between the trenches, even as it seemed almost familiar to me. I picked out in the distance the ruins of a village and realized I was looking at the Norfolk Broads, and what was left of Maidensmere, the steeple of its sixteenth-century chapel still somehow intact amid the rubble. But it was another town, too, a place not far from High Wood, where bodies lay broken in the ruins, killed by shell fire: old men, women, little children. We were told that everyone had fled, but they had not.

  I woke with a start. It was still dark, and only the ticking of a clock disturbed the silence.r />
  But there was no clock in the room.

  I sat up. The sound was coming from the other side of the bedroom door, which I had closed—and, yes, I admit it, locked—before going to bed. As I listened, it became clear that it was more a clicking than a ticking. I lit my lamp and gripped the poker, kept close at hand for any such eventuality. I climbed from the bed and padded across the floor as softly as I could. The sound began to increase its tempo until, just as I reached the door, it stopped, and I heard what seemed to be footsteps moving swiftly away. I unlocked the door and pulled it open. Before me stood only the empty hallway, illuminated as far as the stairs by my lamp. Beyond was darkness. I squinted into the gloom but could discern nothing.

  I looked at the door. The wood around the lock had been picked away, leaving it splintered and white, as though someone had been trying to expose its workings. I reached down and rubbed a finger against it. A splinter caught on my flesh, causing me to gasp. I took it between my teeth and pulled it loose, then spat it on the floor. A tiny jewel of blood rose from the wound.

  From the shadows there came the sound of sniffing.

  “Who’s there?” I said. “Who are you? Show yourself!”

  There was no reply. I moved farther into the hallway. The darkness retreated a little farther with each step that I advanced, and I was reminded uncomfortably of the bathwater slowly disappearing from the tub until the creature in the water had no option but to expose itself before fleeing. Two steps, four, six, eight, the shadows before me giving way to light, the shadows behind me growing, until, when I reached the stairs, the darkness made its stand. It seemed to me that a deeper blackness was apparent there, and this did not move. It was larger than a man, and slightly hunched. I thought I could discern the shape of its head, although the flickering of the lamp made it difficult to tell, and its form blurred into the shadows at its edges, so that it was at once a part of them and apart from them. Within it were the reflections of unseen stars. It turned, and where its face should have been I had an impression of many sharp angles, as though a plate of black glass had dropped and been frozen in the first moment of its disintegration. I felt blood trickle from the cut in my finger and drop to the floor, and the sniffing commenced again.