Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,109

reached the night table and saw that the watch’s hands pointed toward midnight. The chimes stopped. She picked up the watch and examined the picture that she knew would be inside the watchcase.

The picture was a photograph of herself.

Lisette let the watch clatter onto the table, stared in terror at the four-poster bed.

From within, a hand drew back the bed curtains.

Lisette wished she could scream, could awaken.

Sweeping aside the curtains, the occupant of the bed sat up and gazed at her.

And Lisette stared back at herself.

“Can’t you drive a bit faster than this?”

Inspector Bradley resisted the urge to wink at Detective Sergeant Wharton. “Sit back, Dr Magnus. We’ll be there in good time. I trust you’ll have rehearsed some apologies for when we disrupt a peaceful household in the middle of the night.”

“I only pray such apologies will be necessary,” Dr Magnus said, continuing to sit forward as if that would inspire the driver to go faster.

It hadn’t been easy, Dr Magnus reflected. He dare not tell them the truth. He suspected that Bradley had agreed to making a late night call on Beth Garrington more to check out his alibi than from any credence he gave to Magnus’s improvised tale.

Buried all day in frenzied research, Dr Magnus hadn’t listened to the news, had ignored the tawdry London tabloids with their lurid headlines: “Naked Beauty Slashed in Tub”

“Nude Model Slain in Bath”

“Party Girl Suicide or Ripper’s Victim?” The shock of learning of Danielle’s death was seconded by the shock of discovering that he was one of the “important leads” police were following.

It had taken all his powers of persuasion to convince them to release him—or, at least, to accompany him to the house in Maida Vale. Ironically, he and Lisette were the only ones who could account for each other’s presence elsewhere at the time of Danielle’s death. While the CID might have been sceptical as to the nature of their late night session at Dr Magnus’s office, there were a few corroborating details. A barman at the Catherine Wheel had remembered the distinguished gent with the beard leaving after his lady friend had dropped off all of a sudden. The cleaning lady had heard voices and left his office undisturbed. This much they’d already checked, in verifying Lisette’s whereabouts that night. Half a dozen harassed records clerks could testify as to Dr Magnus’s presence for today.

Dr Magnus grimly reviewed the results of his research. There was an Elisabeth Beresford, born in London in 1879, of a well-to-do family who lived in Cheyne Row on the Chelsea Embankment. Elisabeth Beresford married a Captain Donald Stapledon in 1899 and moved to India with her husband. She returned to London, evidently suffering from consumption contracted while abroad, and died in 1900. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery. That much Dr Magnus had initially learned with some difficulty. From that basis he had pressed on for additional corroborating details, both from Lisette’s released memories and from research into records of the period.

It had been particularly difficult to trace the subsequent branches of the family—something he must do in order to establish that Elisabeth Beresford could not have been an ancestress of Lisette Seyrig. And it disturbed him that he had been unable to locate Elisabeth Stapledon nee Beresford’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery.

Last night he had pushed Lisette as relentlessly as he dared. Out of her resurfacing visions of horror he finally found a clue. These were not images from nightmare, not symbolic representations of buried fears. They were literal memories.

Because of the sensation involved and the considerable station of the families concerned, public records had discreetly avoided reference to the tragedy, as had the better newspapers. The yellow journals were less reticent, and here Dr Magnus began to know fear.

Elisabeth Stapledon had been buried alive.

At her final wishes, the body had not been embalmed. The papers suggested that this was a clear premonition of her fate, and quoted passages from Edgar Allan Poe. Captain Stapledon paid an evening visit to his wife’s tomb and discovered her wandering in a dazed condition about the graves. This was more than a month after her entombment.

The newspapers were full of pseudo-scientific theories, spiritualist explanations and long accounts of Indian mystics who had remained in a state of suspended animation for weeks on end. No one seems to have explained exactly how Elisabeth Stapledon escaped from both coffin and crypt, but it was supposed that desperate strength had wrenched loose the screws, while providentially the crypt had