The Mystery of the "Fetter Lane Fiend" (2)

Or, The Adventure of the Roman Crypt

Sir Rochester rearranged himself in his chair, to the great discomfiture of the cat Cheops—who was settled quite permanently upon his lap—and then continued to recount THE MYSTERY OF THE “FETTER LANE FIEND”:—

“My hansom arrived at the late Mr. Delacourt’s establishment upon Fetter Lane shortly after five o’clock, and I discovered Insp. Bascombe already arrived, flanked by two doughty ‘bobbies,’ and with the solicitor, Charles Efferning, rather doubtfully wringing his hands nearby. Bascombe immediately pestered me with demands for an explanation, but I silenced that man with a withering glance—and he recognized at once that in me was not his old friend, but the resolute enemy of Mystery; and that is a creature never to be trifled with.

“Instead, I bade Mr. Efferning show us into the little shop, which he obliged; and after a moment’s fumbling with the padlock, we all five of us swept into the darkened place. Now I saw at once that it was precisely the sort of business I had expected it to be. Jack Delacourt, as I had learned from my earlier meeting with Mr. Efferning, was of a stolidly mercantile sort, descended of sturdy Huguenot stock, and utterly devoted to his small but fairly prosperous business. As I glanced round the store, I understood at once that his trade was largely in that curious commodity, nostalgia, liberally intermixed with novelty. The whole room was cluttered with a frightful assortment of dusty gimcracks and gewgaws, knickknacks and trinkets of the most deplorably tasteless sort; and the faint, sickly stink of tawdriness overlay it all.

“Bascombe could bear it no longer.

“‘Out with it, Rochester,’ he bellowed. ‘What has this place to do with the ‘Fiend’?

“But I ignored him, as I am wont to do whilst absorbed by the chase. Already, I felt the accustomed tingling surcharge of excitement invigorating my nerves, as I discovered the first, eerie confirmation of those suspicions that—even so—I had only halfheartedly entertained ere then. Though the place had clearly been unvisited for many months—as attested by the ubiquitous film of dust—I easily traced the outlines of an obviously clear path, swept free of any dust, leading from the front door to some anterior room. Amidst these, were the unmistakable markings of dried blood-spatters.

“I resolved then to allay some, at least, of poor Bascombe’s confusion. I put it to him clearly, as I put it to you now, gentlemen (and wife), and I held nothing back. I spoke at length, there in his forgotten store, of what little I knew of its whilom proprietor, the late Jack Delacourt, applying now and then to Mr. Efferning for clarification and corroboration; I spoke further of what was known of his death, in that very building. Murdered, pitiably and viciously slain by an unknown assailant, his intestines removed, his countenance effaced, his organs of sight excised with every evidence of deliberate care. In short, he was the first—by a long shot—of the ‘Fetter Lane Fiend’s’ victims, as I had known from the first, and, indeed, as the Yard itself had come to suspect. But they had sadly bungled the business, for the man’s alleged murderer had been caught ere the canonical Fiend murders began—they had jailed a vagrant, a night-wandering inebriate who had been often locked up for petty aggression, and who had been found nearby, bloody, drunk, and with an expression of insane fear in his eyes.

“But I maintained that this man was not responsible for Jack Delacourt’s murder; he was, I realized, merely a witness to a scene of unspeakable horror. Doubtless, he had unlawfully entered the shop, with some petty misdemeanor in mind, but was confronted with the slain corpse of a man—and, I think, he witnessed much more, and was become a mindless wretch for his troubles. Yes, I was pretty well certain that Delacourt was the first of the Fiend’s victims, and what was more—and at this point in my narrative, I directed the Inspector’s attention to the prints in the dust, and the blood-spatters on the floorboards—I believed the killer yet sheltered in this place.

“Now Bascombe understood at once the seriousness of this belief—realizing as he did the efficiency and utter reasonableness of the brain whence it proceeded. He did not argue vainly with me, nor demand immediate and exhaustive proofs or explanations; he merely asked me, in his quiet and deliberate way, what our next action must be. And on that score, thankfully, I was not at a loss. I bid him have his constables ready their lanterns (for it was already grown fearfully dark in the place, as the evening sun sank steadily), and follow my lead. I tracked that swath of dustless floor, inked in strange red characters like the cursive glyphs of some heretic Pharaoh, into that dim-lit back room whither it led, Bascombe and his ‘bobbies’ a-follow, and Mr. Efferning—poor, timid soul—panting breathlessly behind.

“I slowly opened the thick, wood-paneled door to the back room, which I understood at once to be a sort of storeroom adjunct to the main building, of the kind wherein proprietors might stock the sundry unused articles consequent to their trade. Naturally, I expected such a room—and in such an establishment as Mr. Delacourt’s clearly was—to be piled high with a frightful mass of worthless junk. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. It was singularly devoid of any furniture—utterly empty, barren of all clutter, which seemed to account, in my mind at least, for the great degree of material that made of the shop proper so busy and claustral a place. And, moreover, a tremendous foetor of mold and uncleanly, earthy stench overwhelmed my sense of smell; so appalling, indeed, was that reek, that I and the other men were compelled to cover our noses with our kerchiefs. The solicitor, a man of sheltered and delicate constitution, gagged and very nearly retched at the abysmal smell.

“Aside from such abusive manifestations of the shocking ill-use the place had been put to (and the source of that odor was, for the nonce, utterly mysterious), our exploration of dustless tracks, and our inquisition into the whereabouts of the promised Fiend, seemed to have reached something of a cul-de-sac. Had the detectives of the Yard been left to their own devices, I am sure it would have remained so; not through any real fault of their own, of course (Bascombe was, as I have said, a man of uncommonly keen perception), but rather from a dearth of imagination, and lacking the preparation in the macabre and occult such as I possess. Bascombe and the two constables were ready to own themselves defeated, but I bade them turn their lanterns upon the floorboards, and had the great satisfaction to descry the outlines of a kind of ‘trapdoor’ there amidst the flooring, with a very nondescript, rusty latch serving as the mechanism for its lifting.

“Bascombe and Mr. Efferning let out a cry of astonishment, and the constables were all for raising the hatch immediately; but I placed my foot squarely upon it, anticipating them. I felt it was high time, now, to divulge something of my thoughts on the matter—especially, anent what we might expect to discover in whatever it was lay below, which I believed to be an old Roman crypt, or catacomb, and I told them as much. I spoke in hushed tones, there in that musty, reeking, ill-lit room, of my queer conjectures about the death of Mr. Delacourt, and my theories as to who—or, more properly, what—I believed the Fetter Lane Fiend to be. In short, I suspected that, ere our business that night was resolved, we should have truck with a shuddersome Thing from the grave—a Thing not of this, nor any other wholesome world that we know; what the erudite might call an eldritch revenant from the Outside. I expected laughter, sheerest derision at this intelligence; what I received, instead, were serious, somewhat startled looks of inquiry, and from Bascombe, a glance of intelligent understanding that meant more to me than the hearty hallo’s of a dozen good friends.

“But there was no time then for long-winded exposition; I adjured them to place their trust in my knowledge of these affairs, to which Bascombe could well attest, and bade the constables, who were sturdy and strong-backed fellows, to raise the hatch. They obliged, and—but I will not dilate any longer on the disagreeable subject of the foul miasma that wafted from that yawning, inky portal to the world below, a veritable atmosphere of evil that engulfed us, mind and body, and involved us in the very substance of its vile malodor. Each of us was overcome with nausea; Mr. Efferning—the fop!—vomited loudly and objectionably into a corner, and I myself grew lightheaded, and fought vigorously to retain my flagging consciousness. You laugh, gentlemen, and I scarcely blame you; Lord—but you were not there! After some minutes of this, the air began to clear—or, perhaps, we grew accustomed to it…I know not which it was, nor do I care. However the case, my senses returned sufficiently that I could master myself, and snatching a lantern from one of the constables, who stood stupidly by, I flashed a beam into the lightless, subterraneous depths below. It was as I had suspected—a flight of ancient, worn limestone steps led down into a Roman crypt that seemed of labyrinthine dimensions. I could descry the evidence of Mr. Delacourt’s limited excavations—where he had reinforced the walls, or braced the steps, and even made some essay at introducing a kind of pumping mechanism (for evidently some levels of the subjacent catacombs were flooded), an enterprise that had early been abandoned.

“‘Lasciate ogne speranza,’ I laughed, and I began my descent into that nighted gulf. Bascombe and his doughty ‘bobbies’ followed close after me, but poor Mr. Efferning, by mutual arrangement, we left as a sort of indifferent lookout. I brandished the lantern in one hand, and drew my revolver with the other; and I looked me to the dog-eared Gospel in my jacket breast-pocket, ensuring that it was well at hand, and ready at a moment’s notice, though for what purpose, and to what avail, I could scarcely say. We coughed often and heavily, and spat abhorrent tastes from our dry mouths, for the place was of a foulness I can scarcely describe—a foulness, I well knew, that could not be wholly attributed to age and mortuary cerements alone. I had been in the unclean, untrodden subterraneous spaces of the earth before, as you gentlemen know, and in circumstances not entirely unlike these—and the monstrous horror of that Scottish souterrain was strong upon me as I crept into that dank, fearful relic of long-lost Roman Londinium.

“It was much as other such catacombs are alleged to be. A branching congeries of snaking passageways, wending hither and thither beneath Fetter Lane, its walls lined with multiple niches for great, lead coffins, for evidently this crypt, or at least that section of it, was intended largely for the well-off. But whether by ancient looters, or the more recent depredations of Mr. Delacourt, in search of priceless relics and trinkets that might have been interred with the dead, many, if not most, of these coffins were overthrown, turned or tipped out of their niches, with corpses flung sacrilegiously out upon the crypt floor, a hideous grimace of sepulchral reproach upon their grim and ghastly faces.

“As I inspected this grisly scene, the light of the lantern glinted off some dully metallic thing affixed to the stone-flagged wall of the crypt; it proved—upon closer inspection—to be a thin lead sheet, with deliberate Latin characters scrawled rather wildly upon it, which read:

TE ROGO QVI INFERNALES

PARTES TENES DEFICO ET

COMMENDO TIBI M

TYRANNIVM SYNISTOREM

COCCEII F HOSTEM MEVM

HIC IACENTEM VT SVAM

VAGANTEM VMBRAM

ABDVCAS ET LANIES ATQVE

INTER MALAS LARVAS ET

LEMVRES QVI OSSA MANDVCANT

ET SANGVINEM VIVENTIVM

DEGLVTIVNT RELEGES

The constable directly behind nudged me, and asked what the curious thing was.

“‘Gentlemen,’ I whispered, for we all spoke in hushed tones down there, as if thus to avert the notice of the dii manes with which our wrought-up fancies peopled the darkness, ‘this is the dread defixio maledicta—a curse of fearful efficacy and cruel malignancy laid upon some deceased inhabitant of this crypt.’

“‘Oh,’ said the man, who seemed rather in awe of it all (and small blame to him) ‘but what does the devilish thing say?’

“And I breathed the words of that ancient curse in the cold, charnel air of the tomb: ‘I beseech Thee, who is Lord of Hell, and I curse and remand to Thee Marcus Tyrannius Synistor, son of Cocceius, mine enemy who lieth dead in this place, that Thou mightest steal his wandering shade, and maim it, and banish it amongst the evil Larvae and Lemures, that crauncheth the bones and drinketh the blood of the living.’

“It was a terrible curse, a supernatural execration of the foulest kind, inveighed against some unsuspecting unfortunate inhumed within the crypt—a sign, I felt, of a monstrous hatred lingering across many centuries. Slowly, I began to understand—and a vision arose in my brain of an ancient deviltry, committed for forgotten reasons in a forgotten empire, that was visited now upon our own, unsuspecting generation.

“I was roused from this reverie by the sound of Bascombe hissing my name behind me, and so I turned round in the cramped conditions of the catacomb to speak with him.

“‘Rochester,’ he whispered, ‘what is our plan if we encounter the Fiend—whomever or whatever that might signify?’

“To you, my friends, I freely—if ashamedly—confess that I hadn’t one; the unheeding zeal of the hunter had infused my veins, and I stalked my Mystery with as little thought or care for the well-being of my comrades as any selfish child. But I said nothing of this to Bascombe or his constables.

“‘Bascombe,’ I hissed, ‘do you have your pistol?’

“He replied that he did.

“‘Then shoot the goddamned thing!’ And, caring nothing for this wasteful conversation, and less for his reply, I turned back to my going.

“‘Damn it, Rochester—I mean it!’ such were the impatient words that followed after me. He was angry, of course, and probably not a little unnerved, as we all were, so I cannot blame him his wrathfulness. We decided to split up, each man down one of the branching passageways. It was obvious that the ‘bobbies’ had taken my earlier talk of the supernatural character of our quarry as a thing to be dismissed; Bascombe, for his part, was plainly worried, very ill at ease. I should have scotched that business about parting ways—damn me for a fool! But I was eager, and heedless, and felt I had in my own intelligence ample resources for the contest with the Unknown that I fully expected. I was young then, gentlemen; Lord, I was young. And four-square and unabashedly stupid—is that not ever the way with the young?

“So we split ways, Bascombe and one of the bobbies down some yawning passageway to the right, the second constable down another such gulf to the left, while I continued down the lightless corridor we had been following, the main ‘hallway’ of the catacomb, with the thin beam of the lantern penciling out before me, and the charnel smells and sights of the tomb pressing with nauseous obstinacy upon my offended senses. It was down this passage, I felt absolutely certain, that I should discover my quarry. An eerie place for a rencounter with the insatiate dead, I can assure you! At odd whiles, I marked the religious paraphernalia of the ancient Romans, and had the situation lacked the danger and urgency that it did, I must certainly have stopped for a fascinated study of these priceless residua of a vanished people. I noticed a magnificent sculptural group, done in finest Italian marble, which I recognized was a representation of the Mithraic Mysteries—the figure of Mithras himself, with his queer Phrygian cap, and Persian outfit, his knife pressed to the throat of the bull. Flanking this were the images of Cautes and Cautopates, a series of exquisite friezes depicting the life of Mithras, and the menacing figure of the leontocephaline Arimanios, brandishing the ensigns of his office: the world-globe and the twining cosmological serpent. It was an even more wonderful specimen of its kind than that similar group in the Museum, but I passed it by, heedlessly, as a man consumed with a singular purpose.

“I crept further into the catacomb, and it grew colder and clammier as I went. The silence of the place was astonishing—verily the ‘silence of the tomb,’ as they say. Only, once or twice, I thought to hear a sound, a sound like chattering or the gnashing of teeth in the darkness behind me. But an inspection with the lantern-beam revealed nothing at all, and I attributed these ephemeral noises to nerves, or to rats, whose particular handiwork I had already marked, in the numerous evidences of gnawed or partially-eaten bones amongst the corpses. I hastened further along the corridor, with an expectant frame of mind I can scarcely communicate to you, my friends—and I beheld the end of the passage! The floor here was flooded with a great quantity of stagnant water, but clearly the crypt ended abruptly. There was simply nothing else.

“Could it be? Had I miscalculated? Here was the ignominious and unavailing end of my search—I felt certain I should have discovered some evidence of the Fiend ere now. I had performed the requisite research; I had marked my prey; I had, theretofore, defined the facts in the case of the Fetter Lane Fiend with absolute and incontrovertible accuracy. But here was the end of the road, and—I was thwarted! I glimpsed a light flashing down the corridor; it was evidently an attempt to attract my attention. I flashed my lantern in response, and retraced my path.

“Coming upon that section of the passage where I and the constabulary had parted ways, I heard Bascombe once more hissing my name.

“‘I am here, Bascombe,’ I whispered, ‘what have you found?’

“‘Nothing,’ he replied, ‘not a thing. Yourself?’

“I confessed that I, too, was unsuccessful.

“‘Then for Heaven’s sake,’ he said, ‘go collect Finch, and let us have done with this infernal place.’

“I nodded—unable to think of any just cause to gainsay him—and made my way down the leftward corridor that constable Finch had been detailed to reconnoiter. It proceeded in a straight direction for some fifteen or so feet, but then bent sharply again to the left. I heard the queerly muffled sound of a voice rounding that bend, which prompted me to call out to the constable.

“‘Finch,’ I cried, ‘Finch, have you found anything?’

“But there was no repetition of the voice. In this part of the catacomb, I suddenly realized with some astonishment, I had left behind the cold and clamminess of the further passages—here was only a humid and unpleasant warmth.

“‘Finch,’ I called again, ‘where are you, man? Let’s away from here.’

“I began to notice some peculiarities about this section of the crypt. Here the coffins in the walls had not been disturbed, all was left as, presumably, it had been some 1,600 or so years before; but the floor of the passage was littered with countless human skulls. Some of these evinced signs of remarkable age, blackened or pitted as if they had lain thus for a thousand years or more. But others were singularly unweathered, of a recentness that could scarcely be attributed to the passage of fifty years, let alone centuries. Many of these skulls, I noticed with my practiced anthropologist’s eye, were clearly those of small children. The smell of the place, also, as I clove the Stygian darkness of that passage, grew yet more appalling in inverse proportion to the direction of my progress toward Finch’s voice.

“I saw Finch’s lantern, placed—as if deliberately— upon the floor.

“‘Finch!’ I hissed, ‘where are you?’

“In another moment I had my answer. For a brief instant I supposed him merely resting, or perhaps overcome either from the heat or reek of the place. I nearly addressed him in this solicitous spirit, but some providential instinct counseled silence. A closer look, with a fuller application of the lantern-light, revealed the truth. He sat upon the passageway floor, back to the wall, arms out to his sides. His face had been obliterated, as there was not a feature left intact; his eyes scooped from their sockets. His evisceration had been thorough and complete, and I realized that there was very little left that was recognizable of the hale and hearty human being, with whom I had exchanged words but a few short minutes ago.

“And then I heard the chattering. Dear God!—but I heard that awful gibbering and gnashing, as of innumerable teeth, in the darkness before me. I knew then whence had proceeded that muffled ‘voice;’ I knew what had become of poor constable Finch. The unclean Thing, the revenant, the unspeakableness, the larva infanda of the Romans—it was the cursed demon formed from a man, that St. Isidorus whispered of in his roster of malificent spirits, and this ancient catacomb was its lair. How often have I told you that it is one matter to know a thing, intellectually, but quite another to be confronted with its physical manifestation? I heard the chattering in the darkness, as I said—like something between an evil chuckling and the snapping teeth of a shark—and the horrible sound of a soft padding on the roughhewn paves of the passage floor. I shone the beam of the lantern in the direction of that noisome pattering and chattering, and for an instant—only an instant—I caught a glimpse of the approaching Thing. White and pallid as the worms of the earth; sickly and diseased as if about to burst with the myriad maggots indwelling its yeasty flesh; gnashing teeth like the needle maw of some monstrous denizen of the deep sea; a great, shapeless head, elongate and hideously malformed, all pulsing and a-writhe with unclean life; tiny, beady eyes like sparks of malevolent, yellow fire; and, oh—how immense the Thing was, twice as great as a man…thrice, perhaps, for the corridor could scarcely contain its awful, doughy bulk, as it stooped and shambled in my direction, almost upon all fours. This, gentlemen and wife, this is the Monster that came at me in the corridor—this was the storied Fiend of Fetter Lane.

“Of course, in the time it takes me to speak of these things, the disagreeable episode had already played itself out, its many disturbing sequelae had already run their course. Though it seemed much longer, in reality, there could not have elapsed much more than a handful of seconds from the moment I beheld the Thing, to the beginnings of my precipitate flight. Now, mark me gentlemen—I was not wholly unmanned at sight of the foul specter. My revolver—damn me for a fool!—I had holstered on my way to fetch the constable; but in one hand I grasped the lantern, and in the other, by what way I know not how, I clutched my mother’s missal, with its Gospel of Philip. I may only assume—and it is only an assumption, nothing more—that my hand fumbled nervously and all unconsciously about my jacket breast-pocket, and laid hold upon that comforting Book as a firmer talisman, and produced it by some species of automatic reflex. Maybe…or perhaps some Power guided my hand to the needed instrument of my salvation—whether that Power be called Jehovah, or the Great Invisible Spirit, or the Abyss, or even Jupiter Tonans himself. Be it so—at sight of the Horror, I found clutched in my left hand the missal, rather than that more crudely material staff of Samuel Colt that I expected, and with a Latin curse upon my lips—‘manes exite paterni,’ Ovid’s magic formula, and the only that came to mind—I flung the Gospel at the onrushing Abomination. Now, my friends, what effect this action produced, I cannot rightly say; moreover, I do not consider it to have been a fine showing on my part, in the strictest sense, for this last gesture—the act of flinging the Gospel—admits not a little of hasty panic. I have replayed that scene many times in my imagination, and…well, it does not do to dwell.

“I ran, gentlemen. Oh, yes—Jesus, but I ran! I took to my heels with no thought either of dignity or propriety, my overwhelming concern was to escape that monstrous relict of a former age. What happened next occurred with such jumbled swiftness, that—after the passage of so many years—I can scarcely recall the true order of events. I darted back into the main corridor—thankfully, there was no danger in getting lost in the labyrinthine passages of the crypt, for once I won to that main artery, the way was clear. I shouted to Bascombe (yes, Sydney—hysterically, and you would not have done otherwise!) and bade him and the remaining constable get themselves hastily from the place. I beheld him in the act of turning down the passageway in search of me, but I fairly screamed at him ‘Go, goddamn you…go!’ He did not stop to wonder, nor dither in questioning me—he was a smart lad, and he conned instantly the urgency of the situation, though he knew not the cause. He fled back up the corridor, lashing the constable on before him with his curses; meanwhile, behind me, I discerned the sound of chattering, of the gnashing of needle-like teeth, and the horrible gibbering of inarticulate speech. The soft padding of feet and hands or forepaws or whatever they were, Heaven help me, that I could distinguish as a sickly, ‘squishing’ sort of sound upon the flags behind me, impelled me to even greater speed—but, I think, I had somehow slowed the Thing, when I flung my dear mother’s Gospel and uttered those curious words, and mayhap, it was this that saved me.

“At last, after what seemed an eternity, we won to those ancient steps leading up into the storeroom of the curio shop; the hatch was flung wide open, but there was no trace of poor Mr. Efferning. Whether he fled shortly after we had descended into that hell, or did so after hearing our panicked shouts and the sounds of our flight welling up from the darkness, I have never learned; I never saw the man again, and do not expect I ever shall. He was gone, but—may the Lord be thanked!—he had not shut the hatch. We clambered up into the shop, silent except for our gusty panting, and paused for a moment, to ascertain whether we were pursued. For a moment, we heard nothing, but—the approaching sound of chattering in the darkness below! Friends, I can assure you…you have never seen three men run so fast in your lives. We flew through the store, knocking down knickknacks and gewgaws as we went; the constable was the first to reach the front door, and after a moment’s panicked fumbling—made all the more terrible by the chattering sound we now heard emanating from the storeroom we had but just quit—he flung the door wide, and out we poured onto Fetter Lane, alive with the hustle and bustle of early nighttime activity, with men and women conducting their humdrum, homely affairs, and hansom cabs clattering merrily down the street. Several of the passersby gawked at us in astonishment, doubtless wondering what all the fuss was about, but as nothing of untoward interest occurred to satisfy their curiosity, they moved on, leaving us alone upon the street before the late Mr. Delacourt’s shop.

“Bascombe, myself, and the constable sat panting in the middle of the street—and a pretty picture we must have been—and stared with what feelings you may well guess into the yawning black aperture of the storefront door. Therein, we descried two shining points of malevolent light reflecting the flickering gleam of the gaslights, as if a menacing double-star pendent in the lightless gulf of space, that stared back at us with a supernatural hunger of the most awful kind; and we heard, as if a frightful echo of the clattering hooves of passing carriages, the horrible chattering and gibbering of the unclean Thing. For it dared not enter upon the Street, cowed—as the undead invariably are—by the sights and sounds and vigorous pulse of life, the very antithesis of its being.”

At that, the recitation of his ghastly tale, Sir Percy Rochester drew heavily upon his meerschaum, and leaned back in his chair with a visible satisfaction, as if making a material break with an old and trying episode out of his past. The other four members of the Mandeville Society were left to “chew the cud” on this remarkable ghost story—for such, in point of fact, was what it really was.

Dr. Roberts was the first to break the silence.

“But there must be more to it than that, Rochester. You mean to tell me you left the business unfinished? The foul Thing still lurks beneath Fetter Lane? And how came It to be in the first place, and what brought It back to light after so many centuries?” These questions burst from his lips as from a curious and irrepressible child’s.

But Rochester only laughed, and leaned forward to knock out the ashes of his spent pipe.

“The short of it is, Dr. Roberts—the Thing is gone. Bascombe and I spent the better part of that night and the morning next poring over the tomes of curious lore in my library; I may assuage your fears by assuring you that we familiarized ourselves quite thoroughly with the magical methodologies and formulae of the Ancients, and I may say that the manuals of that old African wizard, Apuleius, proved most helpful in elucidating a meaningful course of action. The things I have learned from that long-dead man—whom I consider my spiritual forbear, and a one-man Roman antecedent of the Mandeville Society—I cannot begin to enumerate with anything like thoroughness.

“But that is beside the point. Bascombe and I returned to the Antiquities, Ltd. shop during the afternoon of the next day—when the sun’s waning light was already dangerously low—and we performed a ceremony whose curious particulars I shall not now go into. Suffice it to say that Bascombe and I must have cut a very queer picture—garbed in the hood and flowing robes of some barbaric, Roman antistes, and performing such antique and pagan rites as these isles cannot have witnessed since Honorius and Stilicho recalled the legions. Oh yes, Dr. Roberts, we purified that polluted place, and we barred the entrance to that forgotten catacomb with a thoroughness and completeness that—I fervently hope—neither the curiosity nor the mechanical ingenuity of future generations may render insufficient. For, despite our preparations, we never actually went down into the crypt again, and the Thing, for all that, may have been immune to our spells and incantations—and it may yet linger. I told you how big it was, gentlemen—and that is, I am absolutely certain, a product of its great age, and the monstrous repasts that nourished and sustained the Foulness throughout its centuries-long vigil. Do you recall the myriad skulls I discovered along that passageway, before I found poor Finch’s corpse? These, I firmly believe, were the Thing’s victims, and how many generations of Londoners—especially London children—they must represent, I can scarcely guess. I may only assume that It has escaped Its imprisonment at odd whiles throughout history, snatching the young and the unwary, and feasting upon them. Such stories, I seem to recall, of strange disappearances and mysterious kidnappings, occur throughout all periods of London history. It fed and feasted throughout the ages, and grew in monstrous proportion to Its hideous aliment. Lord—when I think of how long It must have lurked down there!”

Sir Rochester shut his eyes, as if to obliterate the thought from his mind.

“What was the Thing, you ask?” he continued. “That is simplicity itself—for it bears a name, and, moreover, a phylogeny of great antiquity. It was one of the night-faring larvae, the dread bogies of the Romans that, as Isidorus reported, lurked and chattered in dark places, and affrighted children. But that was, of course, a great understatement, as is ever the case when specters of immediate and overwhelming horror are transformed into nighttime children’s correctives—though, as I now think, there may have been some truth to those old legends, for amidst the remains of the dead in its lair, as I mentioned, there was a great preponderance of children’s skulls. The Fiend of Fetter Lane was, I believe, the damned and bewitched soul, the anima larvata, that was so abusively and vilely execrated by the manufacturer of that defixio I discovered in the crypt; and that poor soul was, in all likelihood, as much an innocent as the many victims it was compelled to murder during its hateful, unhallowed, posthumous existence. The appalling method whereby the Fiend slew its victims should have alerted me to its existence—for Apuleius wrote of such murders as the especial calling-card of this class of ghoul. As for the gibberings and queer mouthings that it uttered, and that I at first wrongly supposed to be the muffled voice of poor Finch, I am at a loss to explain their significance; the witness who first described them, the opium-addict, claimed that they sounded like garbled Greek, which may really have been Latin, understandably misidentified by that man. Whether that is so—whether the dead Thing yet essayed at speech in its extinct, native tongue—I cannot surely say; but my suspicion is that the answer must be no, that it spoke no wholesome language known of men, but rather that evil and unmentionable jargon that lies at the back of all human thought, the horrible ‘Aius Infandus,’ the prehuman and primaeval speech whence all human languages derived in forgotten, anterior ages. 

“Now as to the matter of Its most recent emergence, that is easily enough understood. Poor, enterprising Mr. Delacourt, who, by profession, was something of an amateur antiquarian, must have made a singularly exciting discovery one day, some six months before. Perhaps he read the news story of those two boys, and their finding of curious Roman artifacts not far at all from his shop. With a serviceable knowledge of the City’s Roman past, Mr. Delacourt may have been led to some rather interesting conclusions—conclusions I myself should have made—and accordingly conducted a series of exploratory excavations. Or perhaps he merely came upon his unusual find by happenstance, whilst reworking his storeroom, perhaps, or fixing a leak. However the case, he stumbled upon the entrance to that catacomb beneath his establishment—and how wonderful an opportunity that must have seemed. Thousands of Roman curios, ready-made for the selling, and all to be had at no cost at all beneath his very place of business. Thus the sudden glut of extremely valuable artifacts in his inventory.

“Alas—what he could not know was that he had discovered much more than a ready source of income. He could not know of that other relic of the past, lingering down there in the catacomb. Of this creature, I may only say that It was the terrible legacy of an ancient and powerful magic—an evil curse laid upon a dead man, that infused his mouldering flesh with a strange and unnatural quickness, and caused his spirit to cling to an existence most foul and unclean. It is the ghost, yes, of our stories and children’s tales—but in this we find no rattling of chains, no mournful wailings, no wandering wraiths upon the moorland. It is shuddersome, and foul, and steeped in the hateful effluence of Evil at its starkest, and it is utterly inimical to Mankind—to Life. Is It gone? I hope that It is gone, and I pray that It never returns, nor aught like It. But…? That is all I may do, and watch and ware whenever my business takes me to Fetter Lane.”

With that, the night’s discussion was at an end. It was past midnight, Christmas was arrived, and, after an exchanging of gifts and a liberal quaffing of warm, spirituous drink, Sir Rochester (who professed to have business yet to attend ere the coming of morn) bade his three guests a happy Christmas, and promised them great things for the following week’s New Year’s Eve gathering of the Mandeville Society. So, with the lovely Lady Rochester apologizing unnecessarily for her husband’s rudeness and abrupt manner, he whisked—with a curt “Out you go!”—his three guests from their home, and sent them severally on their ways upon Gerrard Street, a little more nervous, perhaps, than when they had arrived, and possibly more prone to glance over their shoulders at the sound of clattering hooves, which their overwrought fancies transformed into the chattering of gnashing teeth.

And there was not one of them, you may be assured, but didn’t solemnly adjure his coachman avoid—even at the cost of a much-protracted journey home—the suddenly very unpopular Fetter Lane and its adjacent streets, byways and alleys.

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[So much for our Christmas tale, courtesy of the always outré and sinister Julie Jaquith. As for the “Fetter Lane Fiend,” well…we wonder if it still haunts the streets of London…

Anyhow, please join us in the next issue of The Florilegium of Phantasy, in which Mythistoricus submits a further installment of his “Excerpts From a Future History.”]