Page 3 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
CHAPTER FOUR
221b Martyrs Walk
Number 221b MartyrsWalk was, and to the best of my knowledge still is, a comfortable townhouse boasting two well-appointed bedrooms, a spacious sitting room, facilities that I shall not detail but which proved adequate for one’s daily ablutions, and a kitchen wherein I prepared my meals and Ms. Haas made occasional sacrifices to dark gods.
My editor has suggested to me that, since some readers may hail from worlds whose local physical laws and native occult practices differ from ours, it might be prudent to outline for them the precise manner in which Ms. Haas’s sorceries manifested themselves. It became quickly apparent to me during our acquaintance that she was an adherent of no specific arcane discipline but rather had acquired an eclectic and terrifying collection of rites, rituals, secret names, and forbidden bargains that permitted her, in the proper circumstances, to achieve such diverse effects as conjuring spirits from the beyond and returning them thereto, speaking with the dead, commanding wind and weather, surviving near-fatal injury through the never-to-be-courted intercession of blasphemous deities, effortlessly locating missing socks (a power she would often refuse to use for my benefit despite my full knowledge of her possession of it), altering her appearance at will, springing locks with a touch, striking her enemies with debilitatingafflictions, talking to cats, the invocation of flame ex nihilo via the True Words of Shaping (this being one of the most spiritually taxing and closely guarded mysteries of the cosmos and the one she had flagrantly used to light her pipe when we first met), and sundry magics of guiding, seeking, warding, and guarding, the broad utility of which she would use to supplement her other activities.
Ms. Haas’s supernatural experimentation, like many of her habits, had a tendency to make a mess of the fixtures and, like many of her habits, earned her the displeasure of Mrs. Hive. It was some days before I made the acquaintance of our landlady, and the meeting was sadly not auspicious. She was, at the time, occupying the corpse of a stevedore, which I learned she had purchased from a resurrection man the month before. During my time in the sunless lands I had faced numerous horrors and flatter myself that I maintained my composure appropriately, but the wasps crawling from the body’s empty eye sockets left me rather uncertain where I should, in civility, rest my gaze, which presented a hopefully understandable impediment to social intercourse. Mrs. Hive had wished to confront Ms. Haas about the poltergeist which my housemate had unleashed in the most recent of her rituals, but finding the lady in a drug-addled stupor, she had come to me for an explanation instead. Hoping to smooth matters over, I reassured her that Ms. Haas had been able to bind the spirit within a hatstand before it could cause too much damage to the property, and opined that the occasional trembling from the newly haunted item of furniture could perhaps be seen as giving the hallway a pleasing air of mystery. This line of reasoning did not satisfy her, and she was very cold with me for several days afterwards.
As for my cohabitant, the initial weeks of our acquaintance were, on my part, a process of rapid acclimatisation and, on her part, a process of occasionally remembering my existence. Having lived with both students and soldiers I had long since ceased to expect others to abide by the conventions of the society in which I was raised. Over the pastdecade I had become well used to people speaking the private names of deities, inviting unchaperoned guests into their rooms, and openly discussing matters that, in Ey, would be considered unassailably private. I was less accustomed to a companion who staggered home at three in the morning, her skirts stained with blood, and who would then proceed to engage me in a two-hour conversation about the distinguishing characteristics of certain fungi, before finally falling asleep on my bed. This last habit of hers meant that I had, in a sense, gone from living in my friend’s sitting room to living in my own.
At times she would disappear for a day or more and return either full of stories or full of silence as the mood took her. One afternoon, she burned that awful watercolour in a fit of rage, the cause of which I never discovered, then promptly retired to her chamber, whence she did not emerge for long enough that I sincerely feared she may have died. At any other stage of my life I would have never transgressed the boundaries of a lady’s boudoir but, on more than one occasion over my long friendship with Ms. Haas, I was required to set propriety aside and check that she had not smothered herself in the night or transported her spirit to some other plane of reality. I generally found her quite well. At times she was grateful for my concern. Upon others she would assail me with missiles or curses. In summary, my tenure at 221b Martyrs Walk was often frustrating and frequently terrifying but never, ever dull.
A peculiarity of Ms. Haas’s lifestyle was that, although I knew for certain she had a variety of colourful friends and associates, she seldom invited guests to the house. It was, therefore, a matter of some curiosity to me when one evening, a little over a month after I moved in, a lady called for her.
CHAPTER FIVE
Miss Eirene Viola
I was firstalerted to the presence of our visitor by the ringing of the doorbell and the buzzing from the attic as Mrs. Hive forced her way into one of her cadaverous puppets.
“It’s quite all right,” I called, rising from my armchair. “I’ll go.”
Perhaps it was presumptuous of me but, even in Khelathra-Ven, a dead body full of wasps did not cut a welcoming figure.
Opening the front door, which I had finally persuaded my companion that we should keep locked, I found upon the step a lady of notable beauty, dressed in a manner that spoke of taste but not extravagance. While I lacked Ms. Haas’s unusual perspicacity, I did not require it in order to recognise that our visitor was in a state of considerable agitation.
“Where’s Shaharazad?” she demanded.
“I fear she is indisposed.”
“Then redispose her. I must speak to her at once.”
I stood aside to allow her ingress, and she swept past me into the sitting room. My efforts over the last weeks had rendered it somewhat more habitable, although I had been able to do little about the bullet holes and scorch marks, or the pervading scent of tobacco and wormwood.
“Please do sit,” I said, “well, anywhere that you can.”
My concerns for the lady’s comfort proved to be unfounded. She draped herself over the chaise longue as though she belonged upon it. By the light of the standard lamp, I could see that she was approximately the same age as myself. Her hair was dark, as was common in the city, and twisted into some feminine knot that I could neither describe nor reproduce. Most arresting of all were her eyes, which were a brown so pale as to be almost yellow and caught the lamplight strangely.
While I would normally have offered refreshment, I thought it best to fetch Ms. Haas with the utmost expediency. I first attempted to achieve this by knocking politely but firmly on her bedroom door. She ignored me. I called her name twice and, when she continued to pay me no mind, resigned myself to entering.
I found her lying crosswise over her bed, in a somewhat immodest position, propped on her elbows over a large, leather-bound tome, her ankles plainly visible behind her and adorned by bracelets.
She didn’t look up. “It is impolite, Captain, to enter a lady’s bedchamber uninvited.”
“I attempted to announce myself, but you did not respond.”
“I hoped you would go away.”
I fortified my equanimity. “You have a visitor, Ms. Haas.”
“Tell whoever it is that they may wait if they wish. But they are likely to starve.”
“The lady seems most insistent.”
“Mr. Wyndham. I am currently attempting to encompass the secret names of the star-demons of Vz’att. This I find interesting. You and your mysterious guest I currently find boring. Persuade me otherwise.”
Later in our relationship I would be well versed in those things that would capture Ms. Haas’s attention and those that would not. At this time, however, I was forced to take a proverbial shot in the dark. “She asked for you by name.”
