Death Comes to Dartmoor Read online

  Merula expected him to go on and explain that guests were staying here and they could have killed innocent people. He would calm them down, make them see reason. They would disperse and it would all be over. She could barely believe it, and clenched her hands by her side to will it to be so.

  But instead the unknown man said, “If you burn this place, the creatures will survive. They are not human, not flesh and blood. They are immaterial. They will rise again from the ashes to haunt you even more. They will come at night to the village to skulk through the streets, watch through the windows to wait until someone ventures outside. They will grab them and strangle them …”

  One of the two women screamed and fainted. Nobody bothered to catch her body as it slipped to the ground. They all stared at the man on horseback, appalled and entranced by his words.

  He continued, “By burning this house, you will simply multiply the creatures. They will come at night to take vengeance on you. They will kill every last one of you before you have even wounded them.”

  “He is right,” one man called. He wore a blacksmith’s leather apron, his bare arms thick with cords of muscle. “These beasts are not material. They can’t be killed. Only driven away.”

  “I’ll make sure they are driven away,” the man on horseback said. “I’ve promised you that. I’ll keep my promise.”

  “After how many deaths?” someone called from the back of the crowd.

  “It will stop. I promise. Now go home. There’s nothing to do here except make it worse.”

  The villagers stood and watched with wide eyes, undecided. The man in the blacksmith’s apron raised both of his hands over his head and made a gesture to push them back. His quiet emphasis brought a change to their faces. Fanaticism made way for dejection. They turned on their heels, shuffling away without looking at each other or speaking.

  With their heads down, they walked off, leaving the fainted woman lying on the grass alone.

  Their fervor had been terrible to behold, but this dejection was somehow even worse.

  Merula looked at the man on horseback, anger rushing through her veins. “Why on earth did you say that? Why did you pretend there are creatures here that can kill people? That will come out after them?”

  “I hadn’t exactly expected a hug and a kiss,” the man said, letting his eyes run over her at leisure, “but a thank-you would not go amiss. I helped drive this mob away. Else the house would now be burning, and I don’t think your dainty little hands could have put out all of those flames.”

  Merula took a deep breath. Part of her knew he was right, but she couldn’t agree with his way of handling the situation. “Perhaps it is true that you prevented the arson, but you shouldn’t have acted like their fears are justified.”

  She looked at the collapsed woman on the grass, wondering if she should go to her and help her. Then she noticed that the other woman and a young man hadn’t followed the dispersing mob but hovered some fifty yards away, watching like skittish animals for a chance to approach.

  “I tend to agree with Merula.” Raven appeared out of the house and eyed the man. “Instead of disarming the situation, you have only fed their fears. You sent them off like a pack of hungry wolves whose appetite has just been whetted. They will be back, and what then?”

  “I intend to solve it all. And you can help me. I assume you are friends of Charles Oaks?” The man let his questioning gaze dart from Merula to Raven and back.

  Raven leaned back on his heels, jutting his chin up. “Who wants to know?”

  “Oh, excuse me, but there was hardly time for a proper introduction.” He reached out his hand without bothering to take off his glove. “Bixby. I live nearby at Gorse Manor. I look in on poor Charles on occasion.”

  “Poor Charles?” Raven queried, ignoring the outreached hand.

  “Yes, his nerves are completely shot. He should be tended by a professional. Not just a doctor, but someone who knows about abnormalities of the mind. I tend to think his problems started in childhood. His constant traveling, the need for a change of surroundings, supports the assumption that he’s running from something. Perhaps the memory of some traumatic childhood experience?”

  “Are you an expert yourself?”

  “No, just an interested amateur. I daresay my collection on mental illnesses is the most extensive in the region. Specialists come to consult me.”

  “To consult the books, you mean,” Raven corrected.

  “Whatever you like.” Bixby smiled, patting his horse on the neck. Impatient with having to stand still, it scraped its hoof in the gravel and snorted. “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I never offered it,” Raven rejoined. “What do you want from Charles? Are you some quack who will talk him into believing he has a nervous condition so you can dip into his purse for extravagant treatments that have no scientific basis or proven purpose?”

  Bixby shook his head. “You’re sadly deceived. Your friend needs help. If not, he’ll soon be dead. Either because these people will kill him or because the police will come for him to charge and hang him.”

  “Hang him?” Raven echoed, puzzled. “You mean lawful execution after a trial?”

  Bixby nodded with a grave expression. He looked at Merula as if he wasn’t sure how much he could say in front of her. Then he seemed to make up his mind and continued to Raven, “I take it you are a rational man. I won’t try to delude you with tales of creatures who rise from the sea or from the ashes of a burned-down house.”

  “Finally you’re beginning to make sense,” Raven said, but the man raised an imperative hand to cut him off.

  “I spoke to these people in a language they can understand. You may disagree with me, but I’m certain that I did disarm the situation. I saved all of your lives. But I cannot save poor Charles. Because he is guilty. He is … shielding a murderer.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Merula gasped, staring at this oddly commanding man who had ridden in and taken charge of the explosive situation. He had to have come from the city with his book collection on mental abnormalities, and therefore must also be an outsider like Oaks, but still the locals seemed to respect and believe him.

  “Shielding a murderer?” Raven repeated with a frown. “How do you mean?”

  Bixby gestured up at the house’s upper story. “Hasn’t he shown you? How long have you been here, anyway?”

  “We arrived late last night,” Merula said. “As dusk settled in. We didn’t have time to get into any real conversation.”

  “Or assess the gravity of the situation,” Bixby added. He smiled at her. “I don’t blame you. Few people understand what is going on here. But I will show you.”

  He jumped down from his horse and pulled the reins over its neck, tying them to the steps’ railing. Then he took the steps in two long strides and entered the house. “Follow me.”

  Merula noticed that, as soon as Bixby had gone inside, the woman and young man approached the collapsed woman on the grass and leaned over her. Relieved that she was being cared for, Merula entered the house herself.

  Bixby was already at the stairs, intending to go up, but Raven caught up with him and blocked his path. “I don’t remember asking you to come inside. You’re acting like this is your house.”

  “Excuse me, but I’m on friendly terms with Charles. I’ve been here many times. Besides, do formalities really matter when lives are at stake?”

  Bixby looked over his shoulder at Merula. “There will be more deaths. Either in the village or … Charles himself will die. They’ll hang him. That’s not an idle threat. They’re terrified, and I want to show you why. Then you can fully grasp the seriousness of the situation.”

  Merula couldn’t deny that the villagers had repeatedly threatened Oaks and that they had been extremely violent in their behavior in general, so clearly Bixby wasn’t exaggerating. Perhaps whatever he wanted to show them could shed light on this whole confusing episode?

  “Take us to whatever you want us to
see,” she encouraged him, walking up to Raven quickly and signaling him with her eyes to get out of the way.

  Raven obeyed reluctantly, letting Bixby race up the steps ahead of them. Leaning over to Merula, Raven whispered, “I don’t like his attitude. He made the villagers even more afraid, and now he’s strutting about here as if he owns the place. He’s taking control of the situation, and we don’t even know who he is. Bixby, Bixby, I’ve never heard the name before. And if his collection is so important to specialists, why hide it out here in Dartmoor? Why not stay in London?”

  “I don’t know, but Bixby obviously knows more about why the villagers were here to demand Oaks’s death. We have to get some answers from him. After all, Oaks isn’t here to give them to us.”

  Raven couldn’t deny this and followed her with a grim expression.

  Upstairs, Bixby didn’t turn left to where the library and their bedrooms were but to the right, taking them to a broad door at the end of the corridor. It was decorated with metalwork in the form of leaves and branches spreading across the entire door.

  Bixby opened it and gestured for Merula to go inside. The curtains were open, and the light of the early-morning sun streamed in, playing across the objects sitting on the many shelves along the walls. The rays glinted off the tall, juglike containers made of glass. They were full of clear liquid, and in that liquid sat animals. The curve of the glass deformed their heads, giving them bulging eyes or even the impression that the creatures had five legs instead of four.

  Merula had heard of conserving animals in a chemical substance, an alternative method to mounting them, but she had never actually seen it. Right after the strange confrontation with the enraged villagers and talk of Charles Oaks possibly being mad and shielding a murderer, the sight of this uncommon collection raised the hair on her neck.

  “When Charles came to live here and started employing servants, they also got a glimpse of this room,” Bixby informed them. “They started to spread stories that he conducts gruesome experiments on dead animals and even on corpses.”

  Merula thought of the shelf with the skulls, some of which looked uncomfortably human, and shivered.

  Bixby continued, “Charles laughed it off at first, saying people were always afraid of the unknown and the rumors would die down. They might have if nothing further had occurred.”

  “Nothing further?” Raven frowned at the cryptic reference. “You mean, something happened that convinced the villagers that Charles was indeed experimenting?”

  “It was his latest purchase.” Bixby pronounced the latter word as if it was somehow despicable. “I assume you have heard of the kraken?”

  “That is what we’re here for,” Merula said. “It’s a huge sea monster, isn’t it? Able to drag whole ships down into the depths of the sea.”

  “I doubt it could do that,” Bixby retorted with a strange smile. “But it has other properties. Through there.” He pointed at a smaller door in the back of the room. There was a key in the lock.

  As Bixby didn’t seem eager himself to open the door for them, Raven walked over, turned the key, and pushed the door slowly inward. It creaked on its hinges.

  Merula held her breath as she approached and glanced in. Beyond the door was a room, probably once an antechamber or dressing room. It had just one narrow, barred window, and there was no carpet on the floor but tiles. In the corner was an old cracked bathtub and beside it stood a wooden rack for clothes. Across this rack lay the strangest creature Merula had ever seen.

  It seemed to be made of soft pliable material like jelly, but still it was solid because it kept its shape. It was not quite blue or gray or brown or pink but seemed to have shades of all these that kept changing in the dim light. It had long tentacles that hung down, reaching all the way to the floor.

  If this was the kraken, it was much smaller than Merula had imagined. Still it projected a strange, otherworldly presence that pushed goose bumps out on her arms. Her gaze slipped away from it across the tiles, and she noticed wet traces on them. She followed the trail to the bathtub. It seemed to be full of water. The water even seemed to move as if some invisible breeze stirred it. But the air in the room was perfectly still.

  Shivering, she stepped back, almost colliding with Raven behind her. “I don’t see,” he said to Bixby, “what this creature has to do with the village or its inhabitants.”

  “They believe it is alive.”

  Merula turned to look at Bixby. “Excuse me?”

  “They believe it is alive. That it crawls through the bars of that window at night and goes out to look for prey.”

  Raven held his head back and laughed. “We are in Dartmoor, aren’t we? Bowsprit mentioned a huge hound hunting people across the moors, so this must be its marine counterpart. The vicious kraken who slithers out of its prison at night to find prey.”

  “You wouldn’t be laughing,” Bixby said tautly, “if you had seen the victims.”

  “What victims?” Raven’s expression changed from suppressed mirth to utter seriousness.

  “The victims of the shipwrecks that occurred recently.”

  “Shipwrecks are not uncommon along the coast of Devon and Cornwall, I’ve heard,” Raven retorted.

  “No, but there were a huge number close together. People started whispering that it was the kraken.”

  “You can’t believe such a thing. Look at it. It couldn’t drag a ship down into the depths of the sea.”

  “No. I agree with that. But this morning a girl was found by the riverside. Strangled. Not by human hands but by some other … thing.”

  Bixby pointed at the kraken. “Have you looked closely at his tentacles? They are covered in suckers. If attached to skin, they’d leave marks. And those marks were on the neck of the girl who was found strangled. The kraken killed her.”

  Raven made a scoffing sound, then studied Bixby with narrowed eyes. “You seem like a reasonable, educated man. You believe this nonsense? You believe that this clearly very dead creature slithers through those bars at night and travels all the way across the land to the beach to kill girls? We came from Paignton yesterday. It is a long journey. How could this beast even make such a trip? It’s aquatic, it …”

  “They believe it follows the river,” Bixby retorted. “The river comes from the moors and goes past Cranley, through the woodland, to flow into the estuary. An open connection with the sea. Besides …” Bixby shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. The villagers believe it. When the shipwrecks increased, the whispers began, over ale at the inn. That something not human was at work here, a strange creature from the depths of the sea. These are superstitious people who believe the sea hides many secrets. And now with the death of this girl …” He clicked his tongue.

  “So it was a funeral last night,” Merula said, remembering the sad faces of the villagers walking out to the little church in the heart of their town. Perhaps they had conducted the service in their own church and then carried the coffin with the dead body to a church that did have a graveyard? Though it had been rather late in the evening for that.

  “No, the girl was still missing then. They went to pray that she would be found. Alive. Found she was, this morning at the break of dawn. But not alive and well. Very dead. Strangled, the reddish blots of suckers clearly visible on her neck.”

  Raven studied the kraken as if he wondered if the suckers would really leave impressions. But he didn’t reach out to test with his finger. He said slowly, “So there have been both shipwrecks and a strangled girl by the river this morning, and the villagers blame Charles for it. They believe he brought the kraken, the killer, among them.”

  “Unfortunately, yes.” Bixby consulted his watch, a fine golden timepiece kept on an elaborately decorated chain. “I’d better be going to look for him. I have to find him before they do. They’ll beat him to death. Or take him to the coast and throw him down the cliffs. To give him to the sea, as a sacrifice, to appease the creature.”

  Without waiting f
or Raven’s response, Bixby pushed past Bowsprit and Lamb, who hovered at the door.

  “This is terrible,” Lamb wailed, her hands up to her face. “That creature! I can’t bear to look at it. I want to go away from here.”

  “Hush, you silly girl,” Bowsprit remonstrated her. “That kraken is very dead. Whatever killed that girl, it wasn’t the thing you see hanging there.”

  “How do you know for certain?” Lamb backed up two paces. “First that horrible spider last night …”

  “It was in a drawing on the wall.”

  “It had a bird in its grasp. A grown bird!”

  Bowsprit sighed. “That drawing was made in Suriname. Tropical spiders are larger than the ones who live here.” He explained to Raven and Merula, “I discovered that it is a drawing by a Mrs. Merian, who traveled to Suriname about two hundred years ago.”

  “A woman?” Merula was intrigued. “Could she just travel there by herself?”

  Excitement caught her that something like that was even possible. Could she travel to see animals in their natural surroundings? A whole flock of parrots flying across the Amazon River. A troop of monkeys jumping from tree to tree, screeching to one another.

  Lamb cut across her hopeful thoughts, wailing to Bowsprit, “But just look at all those jars. What if they can come out and attack us? I want to go back to London.”

  “Well, you can’t.” Bowsprit glowered at Lamb. “You’re Miss Merula’s personal maid now, and you go wherever she goes. Do you see her sobbing and crying that she wants to go back to London? No. She wants to get to the bottom of this mystery. A girl died, and an innocent man is blamed for it. We have to find out what is really going on here.”

  “You call Charles innocent.” Raven raked back his hair with both hands. “But do we really know for certain that he is? I mean, I don’t believe for one moment that this kraken killed anyone, but Charles was acting very peculiarly last night. He is under nervous strain, and you never know what people might do then.”

  “You think he could have killed the girl?” Merula asked with a frown. “But what for? And why leave strange marks on her that point at the kraken that is at this house and thus indirectly at himself?”