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Chapter Text

Blood dripped from the neck of the severed head and fell in a drizzle of red raindrops, clotting into a ruby pool upon the black and white tiles . The face wore a grimace of surprise, as if the man had died in the middle of a scream. His teeth, each clearly divided from its neighbor by a black line, were barred in a horrible, silent scream. 

I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing.

The woman who proudly held the gaping head at arms length by its curly blue-black hair was wearing a scarlet dress—almost, but not quite, the color of the dead man's blood.

To one side, a servant with downcast eyes held the platter upon which she had carried the head into the room. Seated on a wooden throne, a matron in a saffron dress leaned forward in square-jawed pleasure, her hands clenched into fists on the arms of her chair as she took a good look at the grisly trophy. Her name was Drista, and she was the sister of the king.

The other woman, the one clutching the head was—at least, according to the historian Noah Foolish—named Lani. She was the niece of the King, whose name was Exdene, and Drista was her best friend. 

The detached head, of course, belonged to Darryle the Baptist.

••••••• 

I remembered hearing the whole sordid story not more than a month ago when Father read aloud the second lesson from the back of the great carved wooden eagle which served as the lectern at Church Prime.

On that winter morning I had gazed up, transfixed, just as I was gazing now, at the stained-glass window in which this fascinating scene was depicted.

Later, during his sermon, the vicar had explained that in Old Testament times, our blood was thought to contain our lives.

Of course!

Blood!

Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

“Will,” I said, tugging at his sleeve, “I have to go home.”

My brother ignored me. He peered closely at the music book as, in the dusky shadows of the fading light, his fingers flew like white birds over the keys of the organ.

Mendelssohn’s Wie gross ist des Allmächt’ gen Güte.

“‘How great are the works of the Almighty,’” he told me it meant.

Easter was now less then a week away and Will  was trying to whip the piece into shape for his official debut as organist of Church Prime. The flighty Mr. Fond, who had held the post only since last summer, had vanished suddenly from our village without explanation and WIll had been asked to step into his shoes.

Church Prime went through organists like a python goes through white mice. Years ago, there had been Mr. Toggart, then Mr. Dennings. It was now Mr. Fond’s kick at the cat.

“Will,” I said. “It’s important. There’s something I have to do.”

Will jabbed one of the ivory coupling buttons with his thumb and the organ gave out a loud roar. I loved this part of the piece: the point where it leaps in an instant from sounding like a quiet sea at sunset to the snarl of a jungle animal.

When it comes to organ music, loud is good–at least to my way of thinking.

I tucked my knees up under my chin and huddled back into the corner of the choir stall. It was obvious that Will was going to slog his way to the end come hell or high water, and I would simply have to wait it out.

I looked at my surroundings but there wasn't much to see. In the feeble glow of the single bulb above the music rack, Will  and I might as well have been castaways on a tiny raft of light in a sea of darkness.

By twisting my neck and tilting my head back like a hanged man, I could just make out the head of Lady Prime, which was carved in English oak at the end of a hammer beam in the roof of the nave. In the weird evening light, she had the look of a woman with her nose pressed flat against a window, peering in from the cold to a cozy room with a cheery fire burning on the hearth.

I gave her a respectful bob of my head, even though I knew she couldn’t see me since her bones were moldering away in the crypt below. But better safe than sorry.

Above my head, on the far side of the chancel, Darryle the Baptist and his murderers had now faded out almost completely.

•••••••

Twilight came quickly in these cloudy days of March and, viewed from inside the church, the windows of Church Prime could change from a rich tapestry of glorious colors to a muddy blackness in less time than it would take you to rattle off one of the longer psalms.

To tell the truth, I'd rather have been at home in my chemical laboratory than sitting here in the near-darkness of a drafty old church, but Father had insisted.

Even though Will was six years older than me, Father refused to let him go alone to the church for his almost nightly rehearsals and choir practices.

“A lot of strangers are likely to be about these days,” he said, referring to the team or archaeologists who would soon be arriving in Pomsmerda to dig up the bones of our lady saint.

How was I supposed to defend Will against the attacks of these savage scholars, Father had not bothered to mention, but I knew there was more to it than that.

In the recent past there had been a number of murders in Pomsmerda: fascinating murders in which I had rendered my assistance to Inspector Awede of the Manburg Constabulary.

In my mind, I ticked off the victims on my fingers: Antonio Frosty, Zak Diahmonde, Rae Valk, Tina Kit…

One more corpse and I’d have a full hand.

Each of them had come to a sticky end in our village, and I knew Father was uneasy. 

“It isn’t right, Wilbur,” he said, “For a boy who’s–for a boy your age to be rattling about alone in an old church at night.”

“There’s nobody there but the dead.” Will had laughed, perhaps a little too gaily. “And they don’t bother me. Not nearly as much as the living.”

Behind Father’s back, my other brother, Techno had licked his wrist and wetted down his hair on both sides on an imaginary part in the middle of his head, like a cat washing its face. He was poking fun at Sally Salmon, the pot girl at the Thirteen Drakes, who had the  most awful crush on Will and sometimes followed him around like a bad smell.

Will had scratched his ear to indicate he had understood Techno’s miming. It was one of those silent signals that fly among twins like semaphore messages from ship to ship, indecipherable to anyone who doesn’t know the code. Even if Father had seen the gesture, he would not have understood its meaning. Father’s codebook was in a far different language from ours.

“Still,” Father had said, “if you’re coming or going after dark, you are to take Tommy with you. It won’t hurt him to learn a few hymns.”

Learn a few hymns indeed! Just a couple of months ago when I was confined to bed during the Christmas holidays, Mx. Minx, in giggling whispers and hushed pledges of secrecy, had taught me a couple of new ones. I never tired of bellowing:

“Hark the herald angels sing,

Beechaun’s Pills are just the thing.

Peace on earth and mercy mild,

Two for a man and one for a child!”

 Either that or:

“We Three Kings of Leicester Square,

Selling ladies underwear,

So fantastic, no elastic,

Only tuppence a par.”

—until Will flung a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern at my head. One thing I learned about organists is that they have absolutely no sense of humor.

“Will,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

I shivered and buttoned up my cardigan. It was bitterly cold in the church at night. The choir had left an hour ago, and without their warm bodies round me, shoulder to shoulder like singing sardines, it seemed even colder still.

But Will was submerged in Mendelssohn. I might as well have been talking to the moon.

Suddenly the organ gave out a fluttering gasp, as if it had choked on something, and the music gargled to a stop.

“Oh fiddle,” Will said. It was as close to swearing as he ever came—at least in church. My brother was a pious fraud.

He stood up on the pedals and waddled his way off the organ bench, making a harsh mooing of the base notes.

“Now what?” He said, rolling up his eyes as if an answer were expected from Above. “This stupid thing has been misbehaving for weeks. It must be the damp weather.”

“I think it died,” I told him. “You probably broke it.”

“Hand me the torch,” he said after a long moment. “We’ll have a look.”

We?

Whenever Will was frightened out of his wits, “I” became “we” as quick as a flash. Since the organ at Church Prime was listed by the Royal College of Organists as a historic instrument, any damage to the dear old thing would probably be considered an act of national vandalism.

I know that Will was already dreading having to break the bad news to the vicar.

“Lead on, O Guilty One,” I said. “How do we get at the guts?”

“This way,” Will answered, quickly sliding open a concealed panel in the carved woodwork beside the organ console. I didn't even have time to see how the trick was done.

Switching on the torch, he ducked through the narrow opening and vanished into the darkness. I took a deep breath and followed.

We were in a musty Aladdins cave, hemmed in on all sides by stalagmites. In the sweep of the torches beam, organ pipes towered above us: pipes of wood, pipes of metal, pipes of all sizes. Some were as small as pencils, some like drain spouts, and others as large as telephone posts. Not so much a cave, I decided, as a forest  of giant flutes.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing to a row of tall, conical pipes which reminded me of pygmy blowguns.

“The Gemshorn stop.” Will said. “They’re supposed to sound like an ancient flute made from a ram’s horn.”

“And these?”

“The Rohrflӧte.”

“Because it roars?”

Will rolled his eyes. “ Rohflote means ‘chimney flute’ in German. The pipes are shaped like chimneys.”

And sure enough, they were. They wouldn’t have been out of place among the chimney pots of Buckshaw.

Something hissed suddenly and gurgled in the shadows and I threw my arm around Will’s waist.

“What’s that?” I whispered.

“The wind chest,” he said, aiming the torch at the far corner.

Sure enough, in the shadows, a huge leather trunk like thing was slowly exhaling with various bronchial wheezing and hissings.

“Pog!” I said. “It’s like a giant accordion.”

“Stop saying ‘pog’” Will said. “You know Father doesn’t like it.”

I ignored him and, threading my way among some of the smaller pipes, hauled myself up onto the top of the wind chest, which gave out a remarkably realistic rude noise and sank a little more.

I sneezed–once–twice–three times–in the cloud of dust I had stirred up.

“Tommy! Come down from there at once! You’re going to rip that old leather!”

I got to my feet and stood up to my full height of four foot eleven and a quarter inches. I’m quite tall for my age, which is almost twelve.

“Yaroo!” I shouted, waggling my arms to keep my balance. “I’m the King of The Castle!”

“Tommy! Come down this instant or I’m telling Father!”

“Look Will,” I said. “There’s an old tombstone up here.”

“I know. It’s to add weight to the wind chest. Now get down here. And be careful.”

I brushed away the dust with my hands. “ Hezekiah Whytefleet. ” I read aloud. “1679 to 1778. Phew! Ninety-nine. I wonder  who he was?”

“I’m switching off the torch now. You’ll be alone in the dark.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m coming. No need to get owly.”

As I shifted my weight from foot to foot, the wind chest rocked and subsided a little more, so that I felt as if I were standing on the deck of a swamped ship.

Something fluttered just to the right of Will’s face and he froze.

“Probably just a bat,” I said.

Will gave a shriek, dropped the torch, and vanished.

Bats were high on the list of things that turned my brother’s brains to suet pudding.

A further fluttering, as if the thing were confirming its presence.

Picking my way gingerly down from my perch, I retrieved the torch and dragged it along the rank of pipes like a stick on a picket fence.

A furious leather flapping echoed in the chamber,

“It’s all right, Will,” I called out. “It is a bat, and it’s stuck in a pipe.”

I popped out through the hatch into the chancel. Will was standing there in an angled beam of moonlight, as white as an alabaster statue, his arms wrapped around himself.

“Maybe we can smoke it out,” I said. “Got a cigarette?”

I was being facetious, of course. Will was death on smoking.

“Maybe we can coax it out,” I suggested helpfully. “What do bats eat?”

“Insects,” Will said blankly, as if he were struggling awake from a paralyzing dream. “So that’s no use. What are we going to do?”

“Which pipe is it in?” I asked. “Did you happen to notice?”

“The sixteen-foot diapason,” he said shakily. “The D.”

“I have an idea!” I said. “Why don’t you play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor? Full throttle. That ought to fix the little sod.”

“You’re disgusting.” Will said. “I’ll tell Mr. Haskins about the bat tomorrow.”

Mr. Haskin was the sexton at Church Prime, who was expected to deal with everything from grave-digging to brass-polishing.

“How do you suppose it got into the church? The bat I mean.”

We were walking home between the hedgerows. Scrappy clouds scudded across the moon and a raw crosswind blew and tugged at our coats.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to talk about bats,” Will said.

Actually, I was just making conversation. I knew that bats didn’t come in through open doors. There were enough of the things hanging in the attics at Buckshaw for me to know that they generally got in through broken windows or were dragged in, injured, by cats. Since Church Prime didn’t have a cat, the answer seemed obvious.

“Why are they opening her tomb?” I asked, changing the subject. Will would know I was referring to the Lady.

“Lady Prime? Because it’s the quincentennial of her death.”

“The what?”

“Quincentennial. It means five hundred years.”

I let out a whistle, “Lady Prime’s been dead five hundred years? That’s five times longer than what old Hozekiah Whytefleet lived.”

Will said nothing.

“That means she died in 1451.” I said, making a quick mental subtraction. “What do you suppose she’s going to look like when they dig her up?”

“Who knows?” Will said. “Some saints remain forever uncorrupted. Their complexions are still as soft and peachy as a baby’s bottom, and they have a smell of flowers about them, ‘The odor of sanctity,’ it’s called.”

When he felt like it, my brother could be down-right chatty.

“Poggers!” I said. “I hope I get a good squint at her when they drag her out of her box.”

“Forget about Lady Prime,” Will said. “You won’t be allowed anywhere near her.”

•---------•

•---------•

“It’s like eatin’ cooked heat,” Mx. Minx said.

I started doubtfully at the bowl of squash and parsnip soup as she put it on the table in front of me. Black peppercorns floated in the stuff like pellets of used birdshot.

“Looks almost good enough to eat,” I remarked pleasantly.

Sticking a finger into The Mysteries of Udolpho to mark his place, Techno shot me one of his paralyzing looks.

“Ungrateful little wretch,” he muttered.

“Technoblade…” Father said.

“Well he is,” Techno went on. “Mx. Minx’s soup is nothing to joke about.”

Will quickly clapped a napkin to his lips to stifle a smile, and I saw another of those silent messages wing its way between my brothers.

“Wilbur…” Father said. He had not missed it either.

“Oh it’s nothin’ Colonel Watson,” Mx. Minx said. “Mister Tommy has to have his little joke. Me and him have an understanding. He means no harm.

This was news to me, but I trotted out a warm smile.

“It’s all right Mx. M,” I told her. “They know not what they do.”

Very deliberately, Father closed the latest issue of  The London Philatelist which he had been reading, picked it up, and left the room. A few moments later, I heard his study door closing quietly.

“Now you’ve done it,” Will said.

Father’s money problems had become more pressing with each passing month. There had been a time when his worries made him merely glum, but recently I had detected something that I feared was far, far worse: surrender.

Surrender in a man who had survived a prisoner-of-war camp was almost unthinkable, and I realized with a sudden twinge in my heart that the bone-dry little men of his Majesty's Board of Inland Revenue had done to Father what the Empire of Japan had failed to do. They had caused him to give up hope.

Our mother, Kristin, to whom Buckshaw had been left by her great-uncle Tarquin Rosales, had died in a mountaineering accident in the Himalayas when I was a year old. Because she had left no will, His Majesty’s Vultures had descended on Father at once, and had been busily pecking out his liver ever since.

It had been a long struggle. From time to time, it had looked as if circumstances might take a turn for the better, but recently, I had noticed that Father was tiring. On several occasions, he had warned us that he might have to give up Buckshaw, but somehow we had always muddled through. Now, it seemed as if he no longer cared. 

How I loved the dear old place! The very thought of its wilting wallpaper and crumbling carpets was enough to give me chicken skin.

Uncle Tar’s first-rate chemistry lab upstairs in the unheated east wing was the only part of the house that would pass inspection,  but it had long been abandoned to dust and the cold of neglect until I had discovered the forgotten room and commandeered it for my own.

Although Uncle Tar had been dead for more than twenty years, the laboratory which his indulgent father had built for him had been so far in advance of its time that it would even now, in 1951, be considered a marvel of science. From the gleaming brass of the Leitz binocular microscope to the rank upon rank of bottled chemicals, from the forest of flasks and flagons to the gas chromatograph which he had cause to be built, based upon the work of the enviably named Mikhail Semenovich Tswett. Uncle Tar’s laboratory was now mine: a world of glass and wonder.

It was rumored that, at the time of his death, Uncle Tar had been at work upon the first order decomposition of nitrogen pentoxide. If those whispers were true, he was one of the pioneers of what we have recently come to call “The Bomb.”

From Uncle Tar’s library and his detailed notebooks, I had managed to turn myself into a cracking good chemist, although my interests were not so much given over to the splitting of atoms as to the concocting of poisons.

To me, a jolly good dose of potassium cyanide beats stupid old spinning electrons any day of the week.

The thought of my waiting laboratory was impossible to resist.

“Don’t bother getting up,” I said to Techno and Will who stared at me as if I had sprouted a second head.

I walked from the room in utter silence.

Chapter Text

Viewed through a microscope at low power , human blood first looks like an aerial view of the College of Cardinals, dressed in their scarlet birettas and capes, milling about in Vatican Square, waiting for the Pope to appear on the balcony. Not that they have to, of course.

But, as the magnification is increased, the color fades, until at last, when we are looking at individual red corpuscles in close-up, we see that, in reality, each one has no more than a pale pink tint.

Blood’s red coloration comes from the iron contained in the hemoglobin. The iron bonds easily with oxygen, which it carries to the most far-flung nooks and crannies of our bodies. Lobsters, snails, crabs, clams, squids, slugs, and members of the European royal families, by contrast, have blue blood, due to the fact that it’s based in copper rather than iron.

I suppose it was finding the dead frog that had given me the idea in the first place. The poor thing had probably been trying to make its way from the river that ran behind Church Prime to the small marsh across the road, when it experienced a major misadventure with a motorcar.

Whatever the case, the thing had been squashed flat even before I stuffed it into my pocket and brought it home for scientific purposes.

In order to make the corpuscles more transparent under the microscope, I had mixed a sample of its blood with a one-in-four solution of acetic acid; then, as I adjusted the fine focus, I could see clearly the frog’s corpuscles were flat disks—rather like pink pennies—while my own, which I had extracted with a quick jab or a safety pin, were twice the size, and concave, like dozens of red doughnuts.

The idea of comparing my own blood to that of my father and sisters had come later, and indirectly from Techno.

“You’re no more a Craft than the man in the moon,” he had snapped when he caught me snooping in his journal. “Your mother was a Transilvanian. You have bat’s blood in your veins.”

As he snatched the leather-bound book from my hands, he gave himself a rather bad paper cut with the edge of one of its pages.

“Now look what you’ve made me do!” he’d shrieked, holding out for my inspection on his bleeding, quivering from anger as it dripped spectacularly onto the drawing-room carpet. In order to increase the dramatic effect further, he had milked a few extra drops from the wound. And then without another word, he’d dashed, half-sobbing, from the room.

It had been a simple matter to sponge up a good bit of the gore with my handkerchief. Father was always going on about the importance of carrying a clean honking-rag, and there had been several occasions upon whichI’d offered up a silent praise for such excellent advice. This was another one of them.

I had dashed at once to my laboratory., prepared a microscope slide from the blood sample, and made several quite good sketches of my observations, coloring them neatly with a boxed set of professional artists pencils that Aunt Aimee had given Will several Christmases ago.

Then, through an incredible stroke of good luck, Will, who was uncommonly vain about her hands, ripped a hangnail at the breakfast table a few days later, and it was Tommy on the spot—which is rather a good witticism, when you come to think of it.

“Watch out! You’ve stained the table linen.” I said, whisking the napkin out of his fingers and handing her a wad of wooly lint from my pocket. “I’ll rinse this out in cold water before it sets.”

In my laboratory, I had added another set of colored sketches to my notebook.

The circular flattened disks of the red corpuscles, I had written, have a tendency to stick together. They display their characteristic red color only where they are seen to overlap. Otherwise, they are the pale yellow of the western sky after an evening rain.

Obtaining a sample of Father's blood had been more tricky. It wasn’t until the following Monday, when he appeared at the breakfast table with a tagged little patch of toilet tissue stuck to his throat where he had cut himself shaving, that I saw a way.

It was the morning after Vikram had suffered one of his awful midnight episodes, crying out every few minutes in a shockingly hoarse voice, followed by long, horrid periods of whimpering which were even more unnerving than his screams.

Vikram was Fathers general factotum. His duties varied according to his capabilities. He was sometimes valet and sometimes gardener, depending upon how the winds were presently blowing his brain. Vikram and Father had served together in the army, and together they had been imprisoned at Changi. It was something that they never spoke of, and what few details I knew of those ghastly years had been pried , bit by painful bit, from Mx. Minx and her husband, Johnathan.

In the morning, I realized that Father had not slept—that he had stayed and Vikram’s side until the terrors subsided. Father would never normally dream of allowing himself to be seen with lavatory paper clinging to his person, and the fact that he had done so said more about his distress than he could ever put into mere words.

It had been a simple matter to retrieve the stained scrap from the refuse container in his dressing room, but I must admit that in doing so, I’d never felt more guilty in my life.

Our red and white blood corpuscles, Father’s, Will’s, Techno’s, and mine, I had written in my notes, although I hardly wanted to believe it, are identical in size, shape, density, and coloration.

From a battered and interestingly stained book on microscopy in Uncle Tar’s library, I knew that the corpuscles of a bat’s blood were approximately 25 percent smaller in size than those of humans.

Even magnified a thousand times, my corpuscles were identical with those of my father and my brothers.

At least in appearance.

I had read, in one of the popular magazines which littered our drawing room, that human blood is identical in chemical composition to the seawater from which our remote ancestors are said to have crawled: that seawater, in fact, had sometimes been used for temporary transfusions in emergency medical situations in which the real thing was not available.

A French researcher and artillery officer, René Quinton, had once replaced a dog’s blood with diluted seawater and found that not only did the dog live—to a ripe old age, evidently—but that within a day or two of the experiment, the dog’s body had replaced the seawater with blood!

Both blood and seawater are composed primarily of sodium and chlorine, although not in the same proportions. Still, it was amusing to think that the stuff which flowed in our veins was little more than a solution of table salt, although, to be fair, both also contain dribs and drabs of calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, iron, and copper.

For a short time, this so-called fact had made me immensely excited, suggesting, as it did, the possibility of any number of daring experiments, some of them involving humans.

But then science had set in.

An extensive and carefully calibrated set of chemical tests using my own blood (I was faint for weeks) showed clearly the indifference.

I had demonstrated quite conclusively that what flowed in the veins of the Watsons was not seawater, but a different blend of the elements of creation.

And as for Techno’s accusation of me having a Transilvanian mother—well, that was simply ludicrous!

My brothers had attempted, on numerous occasions, to convince me that Kristin was not my mother: that I had been adopted, or left by the Little People as a changeling, or abandoned at birth by an unknown mother who couldn't bear the thought of weeping every day at the sight of my ugly face.

Somehow, it would have been much more comforting to know that my brothers and I were not of the same tribe.

Bat’s blood, indeed! That witch Techno!

However, all that now remained, in order to conclude my experiment in the correct scientific manner, was to add a few firsthand notes based upon my observations of the juices of an actual bat.

And I knew precisely where to find one.

I would get an early start in the morning.