The pretty young blonde smiled at him and disappeared back into the room, closing the door.
Malcolm slipped the small book into his coat pocket and continued down the corridor. There was a sense of ecstatic dedication in those women. Their lack of concern about their two friends who died disturbed him. They knew what had happened; they just didn’t care. And their use of the word ascending to diminish the idea they were murdered was ritualistic and unnerving.
Malcolm noticed another door, narrower and shorter than the rest, which had odd runic symbols painted on it. He checked around him before opening it. Behind the door were dark steps to a cellar. He found a lit candle on a side table and took it down creaking stairs. At the bottom, his foot stepped into soft dirt. The musty smell of damp earth rose around him. The ceiling was only five feet so Malcolm had to crouch. The faint candlelight hinted at heavy beams and rough brick walls. Spiderwebs crinkled across his face. He saw a shelf with jars of preserves and another with bottles of wine. Next to those shelves, Malcolm noted something square about five feet high, covered with a tarp and leaning against the wall.
Malcolm dripped wax on a shelf and fixed the candle. He then began to work with the tarp. Beneath it, he found a portrait of a beautiful nude woman. Olive skin and black hair. She stared back openly at the viewer. One hand extended out and the other lay on her stomach. She was serene, even beatific. She wasn’t oversexualized, nor idealized. The setting of the painting appeared to be the interior of a church. The juxtaposition of the nude woman with the holy setting seemed purposefully indecent. Then Malcolm noticed at the bottom of the painting was a symbol. It was a series of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the same as those in the Pendragon/Hawksmoor churches.
There was a second portrait and he felt a shock seeing it. The woman in the painting was the living portrayal of the lovely young blonde whom he had seen lying naked and vulnerable in a pool of blood at St. George’s Bloomsbury with her chest cut open and her heart branded. Madeleine Hawley. The poet.
“Here, what are you doing?”
Malcolm spun around with his hand slipping inside his coat for the butt of his pistol. He saw a burly man in a tweed jacket hunched on the bottom step. His face was wide and his nose flattened from numerous breakages. His massive hands had fingers like iron bars. His ratlike eyes burrowed into Malcolm, squinting ominously at the Scotsman’s hand buried in his coat.
Malcolm thought he saw a glimpse of red hair as the door closed upstairs. “Lilith asked me to bring up a bottle of wine.”
“The wine is over here. What’re you doing muddling with those pictures?”
“Caught my eye.”
“What do you have under your coat, mate?”
“A bottle.”
“You’re a liar. You’ve got a knife or a pistol.”
Malcolm drew back his coat to expose the heavy weapon in its holster. “Fine. It’s a large pistol. Step aside and I’ll be on my way.”
The man shook his head. There was a strange coldness in his beefy features, a certain simplicity that troubled Malcolm because this type of man often had to be killed.
Malcolm said, “This is a Lancaster pistol. It was designed in India for hunting tigers from the back of an elephant. The ball will tear a hole in you large enough to insert your own freakishly huge head. Do you understand?”
The man replied, “I understand, but I’m going to kill you.”
“Just for looking at pictures?”
The man proved fast and nimble in the cramped space. Malcolm felt an incredibly strong arm lock around his neck. The brute had him in a headlock. Very smoothly done, an excellent wrestling maneuver. Malcolm saw sparkles of light even as he tried to bow his neck and shoulders.
He preferred not to kill the brute so his fingers rubbed along the nearby shelf until they touched a smooth, narrow cylinder of glass. He pulled a wine bottle and smashed it back into the man’s head. He felt liquid and glass shards splash onto his hair. The man shook his head and tightened the vise.
Malcolm wrapped his arms around the man’s waist. He had done a bit of grappling in his day. He tried to take out the man’s ankles but it was like kicking the legs of a Clydesdale. So Malcolm braced his own feet and, with a twist, slammed the brute against the brick wall without effect. He surged up and bashed the man’s head against a heavy beam.