[Previously: New York]
JANUARY 24, 1925: LONDON
During the war(1), I knew an English leftenant. A stiff old bird name of Wallis, who blew his nose with a hanky that somehow managed to stay mostly white despite the conditions and who insisted on taking afternoon tea no matter what circumstances we were in. Nothing ruffled his feathers. Though, there was one time, at St. Quentin Canal, when a thick fog had rolled in, the Krauts were raining down artillery fire, and our regiment needed to press our advance into German territory. Wallis, that old so-and-so, just grimaced, picked up his rifle, and told the rest of us to fall in behind him. Then, right before he charged into that field, I heard him mutter through his mustache, “Bloody Hell.” That phrase popped into my head more than once over the last few days.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A few weeks ago, I’d been summoned to New York by my old pal, Jackson Elias, who said he wanted to talk about the doomed Carlyle Expedition, a rich man’s African excursion that had ended in tragedy. Unfortunately, I never got to hear what Elias had to say. He was murdered by a bunch of religious nuts calling themselves the Cult of the Bloody Tongue the day I arrived. With the help of some more of Elias’s friends – Molly St. Claire, Doctor Rebecca Frome, and Neptune Lewis – I managed to get some revenge on the Bloody Tongue gang. We locked their leader, Silas N’Kwane, and a bunch of the gang in the unholy cellar under their headquarters at Juju House in Harlem and set the whole thing on fire. After that, it seemed prudent to dust out of the Big Apple.
Elias’s last stop before New York had been London. So, before the trail for his killers got any colder, the four of us hopped aboard the RMS Olympic for a one-way voyage to jolly old England, to backtrace his steps.
The trip lasted just over four days. I slept for three of them.
Minneapolis is known for its frigid winters, but at least it’s got snow, the fluffy white happy kind. London’s cold is wet and merciless, the kind that clings to your clothes, soaks into your skin, and sucks the blood from your veins. The best I could do was turn up my collar and stuff my hands into my pockets as I followed the others into the Blue Pyramid Club, a dim joint with an Egyptian theme where we were due to meet one Mickey Mahoney.
It might have been freezing outside, but the interior of the Blue Pyramid Club would have fogged up a man’s glasses. I’d almost forgotten how warming liquor can be, to a man as well as a crowd. Not that there aren’t places in America that still provide a dram when you ask, but a down-on-his-luck gumshoe doesn’t typically get invited to those kinds of parties. Before inheriting the bit of funds left by Elias, I’d been surviving on a not-so-steady diet of philandering husbands and wayward wives. Making use of those funds, I ordered myself a whisky – neat – and joined Mahoney at his table.
In addition to being another old pal of Elias, Mahoney was a newshawk, editor of a local rag called The Scoop. Apparently, Elias had been interested in several Scoop stories, the kind that feature monsters on the Scottish moors and the like. At one time, I’d have laughed them off as baloney. After New York, though, I’d become a little more open-minded.
For the last three years, London had been wracked by grisly murders with details suspiciously similar to Elias’s own: the victims were beaten and stabbed through the heart. Then their bodies were thrown into the Thames River. Nineteen of them, all told, across age and gender. The only significant link between them seemed to be that they’d all been Egyptian.
And here we were, sitting in an Egyptian nightclub.
Mahoney shared with us another detail: one of the murder victims had been the beau of a dame named Yalisha, who just happened to work at the Blue Pyramid as a dancer. Mahoney arranged for us to meet her in the alley outside the club, to hear her story straight.
Yalisha was a looker, but she was spooked. When she came out of the club, she kept glancing around, as if expecting a tail. Maybe it was her paranoia catching, but I thought I saw someone watching us from the other side of the street. It was just a glimpse, though, and it would have been rude to step away from a lady wanting to tell her story. Which was disturbing enough in its own right.
Yalisha’s beau, Badru, she told us, had been a good man but prideful. One night, a stranger made advances toward her, and Badru stepped up to defend her honor. The next day, he was found floating in the Thames with a hole in his chest where his heart used to beat. I asked her why she didn’t go to the local cops. She said what good would it do, her being an immigrant under the control of the owner of the Blue Pyramid Club.
Sidebar for the prosecution: On paper, the boss of the Blue Pyramid Club was a goon by the name of Abdul Nawisha, but the true big cheese was a woman named Zara Shaffiq(sp?). Shaffiq kept Yalisha and her fellow Egyptian expats under constant surveillance. There was also a rumor among the expats that Shaffiq was the high priestess of a cult called the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. I know what you’re thinking; I thought it, too. Another cult? But it made a kind of twisted sense, considering Elias had spent a career investigating cults from around the world.
The last thing I wanted to do was stumble into another Juju House situation, with tongue monsters and walking dead men. Especially since Molly insisted on giving Yalisha her little Deringer, the only weapon we’d managed to bring with us from New York. We’d need some real backup if we were going to confront Zara Shaffiq and any other goons along the way.
Mahoney had given us the name of the local man in charge, Inspector Barringer at the London Metropolitan Police. Barringer had been working the murders with his superior, an Inspector Cleveland, but Cleveland had recently gone missing. Take that as you will. While Barringer stayed tight-lipped about his own operation, he at least acknowledged that the local cops were keeping an eye on the Blue Pyramid Club.
They weren’t the only ones. On our way to the British Museum, where we wanted to do some more research, we picked up a tail. The always unpredictable Ms. St. Claire took care of them, though, with a swift stab to one of their tires while we were stopped at a red light. We’d definitely started to rub somebody’s fur the wrong way.
The museum’s curator told us a bit more about the so-called Black Pharaoh, Nephren Ka, and the fanatics who worshipped him. She was one of those academic types who thought the stories of cults and ancient evils were just stories.
Lucky her.
The next day, we decided to check out the Penhew Foundation, under Doc Frome’s suggestion. Penhew had bankrolled the Carlyle Expedition, the same one that Elias had been investigating before his death. The chief over there was a man named Gavigan, though he was indisposed during our visit. Under guise of a significant donation from Neptune’s parents, we got his major domo, Thomas Kinnery, to give us a brief tour.
Kinnery was an odd bird, a little too enamored with the cults of the southern hemisphere. When I asked him about the Black Pharaoh, he launched into one of those throaty creeds about ancient power and ruling over the masses. Unlike the curator at the museum, Kinnery seemed to be a real true believer.
There was a lot about Penhew that itched at us to do more digging, but we couldn’t do it during the day. We took a cab back to our hotel, only to notice on the way there a truck idling outside of the Blue Pyramid Club. We got a glimpse of a face of someone being hustled into the back of the truck: Yalisha.
Apparently, that deringer hadn’t done her much good.
We ordered our cabbie to follow the truck. It trundled out of the city, deep into the English countryside, until it came up to a large, gated estate. The name on the front was Gavigan.
The doc told the cabbie to find the nearest phone and call the London police, tell Barringer that Neptune had a message for him, and that Barringer should bring some men to the Gavigan Estate as soon as. There’d be a bonus if the cabbie came back for us with a full tank of petrol when he was done.
Neptune led the way to the house. The kid’s got some fear of the dark to make him so bold as to approach that place on his own. Then again, he has got those double flashlights with him, and in a pinch, those things work as well as a sap.
The truck we’d followed stood empty near the front door. That stood open, rarely a good sign. Nobody seemed to be inside that, either, though. The only noise came from around the back of the house: an eerie, steady chanting.
Why is it always chanting?
Lacking armament, we did a quick search of the house. Neptune found me a suit of armor holding an axe. Molly found herself a revolver and a shotgun that she gave to me.
The door at the rear was open, as well. Into the low field behind the house, we could see a bonfire blazing in the center of a circle of at least a dozen upright wooden planks. People squirmed against the stakes. Another dozen or so cloaked figures chanted to the stars, led by one of them standing closer to the fire. The cloaked figures lifted some spiky clubs. Then they started swinging. The people tied to the stakes began to scream.
Doc and Neptune rushed back to the truck. Molly started to set the house on fire. Maybe I should have gone straight for that circle with the axe and the shotgun, but it didn’t seem wise to rush a dozen armed cultists by myself. A braver man – or a stupider one – might have been more of a hero. They wouldn’t be alive to write all this down afterward, though.
A few minutes later, the truck came careening around the house with the doc at the wheel. She drove that thing like a tank, crashing into the head chanter and sending him flying. Then she kept going. Hanging out the other side of the truck, Neptune goaded the remaining cultists to follow.
As soon as they were through the trees, I ran down the hill, too, shotgun in one hand and axe in the other. I had to set the gun aside to use the axe, and I cut free the first person I saw, Yalisha. Unfortunately, she was the only one still alive to free.
By this time, the house was billowing smoke. Molly sucked on a cigarette as Gavigan’s estate sucked on flames. Doc Frome came roaring back with the truck, and we hopped inside.
I kept my arms around Yalisha. There was nothing in it; I was old enough to be her father. But she was badly shaken, and I wasn’t so steady myself.
We didn’t speak during the long, bumpy ride back to the city. We didn’t have to. Sometimes, it’s enough just to be alive. And while there were still cults and evil brotherhoods out there trying to bring Hell to Earth, at least I wasn’t facing them alone. Or unarmed. The shotgun from Gavigan’s estate was coming with me.
(1) West, being in his early thirties at the time, would have fought in World War I.
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