Quests of Simon Ark Read online

  She was tall and slim, with the stature of a fashion model, and yet there was something about her that hinted at a darkness beneath the surface. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said after I’d introduced myself. “Please come in.

  She led me down a narrow, dusky hall into a large room that might have been a study. Three walls were hung with a variety of small arms—guns, revolvers and automatics of all types. I judged there to be close to a hundred of them in the collection.

  “Yours?” I motioned toward the walls, never dreaming that they were.

  “Yes,” she surprised me by saying. “Shooting is a hobby with me.”

  “Interesting. Now, about this matter, Miss Richards …”

  “You can call me Rain.”

  “That really is your name? I could hardly believe it when I saw the letter.”

  “I was born in India during the monsoon,” she said, by way of explanation. “I guess my folks had a sense of humor or something.”

  From the looks of her, I would have guessed her age to be about twenty-seven, but it was hard to tell. I might have been five years off in either direction. She lit a cigarette as she talked, and casually blew smoke out her nostrils. “But you don’t want to hear about me, of course. You’ve come about my letter.”

  “That’s correct. You were quite right in saying that we’d be interested in this book you mention. Suppose you tell me a little more about it.”

  She relaxed deep into the chair and began to talk, with a soft toneless voice that flowed through the room like a glistening stream.

  “You’ve heard of Sir Francis Bryan? Good! Very few people have, you know. I myself first became interested in Bryan while I was at your Columbia University. One day I came across a line in Milton which refers to him as the ‘Vicar of Hell,’ and that started me searching. It was a hard, long job, because most modern historians seem to have completely forgotten Bryan. But I finally found a few facts.”

  She paused long enough to take another draw on her cigarette, and then continued. “Bryan lived during the first half of the sixteenth century, and he was a friend and advisor to Henry VIII. He was also a cousin of the ill-fated Anne Boleyn, and when she was put on trial, which resulted in her execution death in 1536, he deserted her in order to remain in Henry’s good graces. This deed caused Thomas Cromwell to refer to him in a letter as ‘the Vicar of Hell,’ a name that stuck with him until his death—though some historians credit Henry with first calling him that.”

  “But what about this unsolved murder you mentioned in your letter?” I asked her.

  “Oh yes. Well, in 1548, James Butler—an Irishman and the Ninth Earl of Ormonde—was poisoned while visiting here in London. Because they feared that his widow might marry an enemy of the crown, and thus strengthen his land-holdings, certain highly placed persons persuaded Francis Bryan, himself a widower, to woo and marry her—for the good of the country. Bryan succeeded in this last duty for his country, and he moved to Ireland to take over his new lands. However, he lived only two years, and died mysteriously in 1550.”

  “So you have two mysterious deaths on your hands—James Butler and Bryan himself.”

  “Yes,” she continued, in an earnest voice that he was beginning to like. “Now my researches have turned up further information, unknown thus far to any of the historians. Sometime during the seventeenth century, about a hundred years after these deaths, there was published a large volume which claimed to give a somewhat shocking solution to these deaths. The book was immediately suppressed by the government, and all copies were seized and destroyed.”

  “Then what makes you think you can turn up a copy, three hundred years later?”

  She rose from the chair and began striding back and forth across the room, her long legs moving quickly beneath the tight folds of her skirt. “Two weeks ago I received a letter from a man who’d heard of my quest. He offered to obtain a copy of the suppressed book for ten thousand pounds.”

  I relaxed and felt for my own American cigarettes. “So that’s why you contacted a book publisher. You expect us to put up … what? Around $30,000? Put up around $30,000 for a book that might not even exist!”

  “No; I simply want you to go with me to see this man. He refused even to see me unless I brought someone along who could offer that kind of money. Actually, ten thousand pounds isn’t very much for a book that may have been written by another Boswell.”

  I sighed, and puffed on the cigarette. “I suppose not,” I admitted. “At least it’s worth talking to this fellow.” Actually, since I’d crossed the ocean on this mission already, I had no intention of going back empty-handed. But there was no reason for letting Rain Richards know that—at least not yet.

  “Good,” she said; “let me call him.”

  She placed a call to a number in the Kensington Gardens section of London, “At least that’s where he told me he was located,” and waited until a man’s voice answered. “Hello? Mister Hugo Carrier? This is Rain Richards. I have an interested party over from the States. Can we get together sometime tonight? Oh …well, how about first thing in the morning? Fine…Let me jot down the address…Good, we’ll see you around ten in the morning.”

  She hung up and turned back to me. “He can’t see us until ten in the morning; will that be all right with you?”

  “Guess it’ll have to be. I’ll stop by here for you around nine-thirty.”

  “Fine,” she replied, the hint of a smile lingering on her face. “Till then…”

  I left her in the doorway and walked back toward my hotel. With the coming of night, the fog seemed even thicker, but I found Waterloo Bridge after nearly an hour of walking and hailed a cab for the remaining distance.

  Back in my hotel room, I found myself preoccupied with the memory of the girl named Rain. I took out a book and started to read, but it didn’t help. I found myself comparing her with my wife, Shelly, and presently I took out my wallet and gazed at the photo of Shelly—the one I’d taken at the beach some three years ago.

  Finally, unable to settle the troubled thoughts of my own mind, I climbed into bed and dropped off into a sound sleep…

  The morning dawned, bright and sunny, with only a slight mist to remind me of the fog of the night before. It was almost like a morning in New York, when the canyons of Manhattan seem like valleys for the flowering river of mist.

  Now that I realized just how far Rain lived from the center of London, I took a cab the entire distance. She met me at the door, looking as young and cool as I remembered her. “Come in,” she greeted me. “I’m just doing a little shooting downstairs. You may watch, if you like.”

  I followed her to the basement, where I found a sandbagged area, with targets on the far wall, that apparently served as her shooting gallery. On a shelf in front of her were a number of hand guns, and I recognized a U.S. Army .45 and .25 pocket automatic, and several foreign pistols.

  “This is my favorite,” she said, choosing a tiny weapon from the shelf. “A .41 caliber Derringer. Watch!”

  She brought the gun up to eye level with a single sweeping motion that my eye could hardly follow. There was a deafening roar as both of its twin barrels spouted flame, and I could see the bull’s eye of one of the targets fly away at the bullets’ impact.

  “You’re quite a shot.”

  “I had to be. I was in Burma when the Japanese invaded; they killed my folks.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “I’m over it now,” she said. “I’m back in jolly old England, where everybody’s respectable; and the war seems a long ways back. I suppose I’m lucky that my family had money back here, so I can devote myself to foolish projects like searching for lost manuscripts, and such.”

  As she spoke, she traded the Derringer for a tiny Colt .25 automatic and let go with five quick shots at another target. We walked over to examine it together. Four of the bullets had circled the bull’s eye; the fifth was off to one side.

  “That should have been in the center,” sh
e complained. “Well, what say we go to see Mister Carrier? It’s nearly ten now.”

  I agreed and she put away the guns. “Have to clean them later—that’s one part of it I don’t like. Here, I’ll take the Derringer with me; never can tell when it’ll come in handy.”

  She dropped it into her purse and I raised my eyebrows lightly. “Do you have a permit for that?”

  “The bobbies don’t carry guns around here. Somebody has to have one, or there’s no telling what would happen.”

  I shrugged and followed her out. The trip to Hugo Carrier’s tiny flat on the other side of London was made in a swift little MG with Rain at the wheel. It was my first ride in one of them, but it seemed to handle well under her command.

  Presently we came to a halt before a run-down block of apartments off Bayswater Road. “This is the address he gave me; he’s on the second floor.”

  We climbed the shadowy stairs to the first landing, and in the dim light of a single naked bulb read the names on the doors. “Here it is,” I said. “Hugo Carrier.”

  I knocked at the door and waited, but no one came. I knocked again.

  “It’s only five minutes after ten,” Rain said. “He must be here.”

  “Maybe he’s still asleep.” I tried the knob of the door, more as a reflex action than for any other reason. It swung open at my touch, and in that instant I already knew what we would find inside.

  But I was unprepared for the horror that met our eyes. For there, pinned to the opposite wall of the room, was the body of a man. His arms were spread in a cross, and the hands pinned to the wall with long arrows through each palm. A third arrow protruded from the man’s chest.

  Behind me, Rain Richards screamed…

  II

  The room seemed filled with the quiet men from Scotland Yard, popping their flashbulbs and dusting for fingerprints. We told our story for the tenth time to the inspector, who seemed to be in charge.

  “You hadn’t previously met this man, Miss Richards?” he wanted to know.

  “No,” she shook her head. “I’d only talked to him on the phone.”

  “And have you any knowledge of this mark on the floor?” He was pointing to something that Rain and I had missed in the first shock of our discovery. It was a sort of pentagram, in a circle, drawn in red on the floor in front of Carrier’s body. There was no doubt that the design had been drawn with the dead man’s blood…

  They took us down to the Yard for further questioning, but they seemed to be getting nowhere. Presently we were introduced to still another questioner, an Inspector Ashly.

  As soon as I heard the name, something clicked in my mind, like the tumblers of a safe. “Ashly! Inspector Ashly!” I exclaimed. “Simon Ark told me about you once.”

  Ashly’s face became alert at the mention of that name. “You know Simon Ark?”

  “Very well; I met him years ago back in the States. He told me of the odd happening at Devonshire a few years back.”

  Ashly was interested now. “I sometimes thought it was all a bad dream; I doubted, somehow, that the man ever really existed. It’s certainly a relief to talk to someone else who knows him.”

  Ashly was a short man with a deep, booming voice, and I well remembered Simon Ark’s tale of their adventures together in the snows of Devonshire. He was much as Simon had described him, and in that moment I knew that the odd murder of Hugo Carrier was another case that called for Simon’s special talents.

  “But did you know that Simon Ark was in England?” I asked him.

  “No! Where is he?”

  “I have no idea, but he left New York over a month ago. If we could find him, I’m sure he could help us on this case.”

  Inspector Ashly frowned. “He’s not a detective, though. And there hardly seem to be any supernatural elements in this case…”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” I replied. “You’ve probably heard that a pentagram was drawn in blood on the floor of the room. Isn’t that an old symbol of witchcraft and satanism?”

  Ashly struck the table with his fist. “I believe you’re right. And if so, we can build up a newspaper story that’s sure to attract Simon Ark if he’s anywhere around.”

  After that, we left the buildings of New Scotland Yard, and walked through the chill December air toward Westminster Abbey. Whitehall was buzzing with midday activity, and before we’d gone two blocks there was already a newsboy shouting about the “weird murder in Kensington.”

  We walked on, aimlessly, until at last Rain asked, “Who is this Simon Ark you both seemed to know, anyway? Is he a detective?”

  “No,” I replied, searching for the right words to explain the fantastic story. “He’s perhaps the wisest man in the world, a man with a past that may date back to the beginning of the Christian era. He’s been searching the world for a long time, perhaps for centuries, in hopes of meeting the devil in combat.”

  “But…are you trying to kid me? Is he some sort of crazy man, or what?”

  A double-decked bus rumbled by us, and we turned west on Victoria Street. Behind us, Big Ben was just tolling the hour of one o’clock.

  “Whatever he is, he’s not crazy,” I told her. “Actually, the Comte de Saint-Germain claimed to have lived for four thousand years, and it’s possible that he did. And the German physician, Paracelsus, is once supposed to have fought bodily with Satan. Certainly Simon Ark’s story is no more fantastic than theirs.”

  “But who is he? Where did he come from?”

  “That’s something nobody knows. My own guess is that he was once a Coptic priest, back in the early centuries after Christ; but he never says much about it. He told me once, though, that he knew Saint Augustine, personally—which would make him well over 1,500 years old.”

  Rain laughed at that and gripped my arm with hers. “I was beginning to think you were serious, but you’re just having some fun with me.”

  “Believe me, I am serious.”

  “Well, then you’ll have to show me this man and let me judge for myself. I saw many unusual things in India, but never a man who claimed to be over 1,500 years old.”

  A breeze somewhat cooler than the rest hit us then, and she pushed closer to me. “Let’s get inside somewhere, out of this confounded cold air.”

  “What we should be doing is trying to find that book Carrier had for us,” I told her. “If the book was the cause of his murder, it must be certainly worth having.”

  She was excited now, with the hint of intrigue in the air. “You mean that you really think there might be a connection between the book and his murder?”

  “It’s certainly possible; we should have searched the place for it.”

  “Oh, the police would have found it if it were there,” she replied. “It’s a folio, you know. Hardly the thing you hide behind a picture or anything.”

  “It does seem odd, though, that if all the copies were destroyed three hundred years ago, Carrier should come up with one now. Maybe the whole thing was a swindle of some sort.”

  “I doubt that,” she said. “He seemed only interested in receiving payment for the book.”

  We’d reached Victoria Station by this time, and we decided to hail a cab for the long trip back to Rain’s place, rather than return for the MG. Even the taxi trip across London was slow at this time of day, and it was nearly two when we reached her house.

  “Let me bring in the mail,” she said. “Not that there’s ever…” She paused and ripped open an envelope that had been addressed in a quick, almost illegible scrawl.

  “Look!” she exclaimed, “It’s from Carrier.”

  “What? Let me see that!” I took it away from her shaking hands and read: I may not be alive tomorrow when you come. If they get me first, I will at least have cheated them of their secret. The book you seek is titled The Worship of Satan, and together with accounts of diverse crimes of the 16th and 17th centuries, it also includes the forbidden rituals of devil worship. The only copy still in existence in London is in an ancient d
welling at 65 Crashaw Place, behind the Blue Pig Pub. You will find a room there which was once a priest’s hole, during the Elizabethan persecution of the Catholics. The book is in this room, though to insure payment of the agreed sum, I cannot tell you more as to its location. I sincerely hope that my fears will prove groundless. Hugo Carrier.”

  She had been reading it over my shoulder, and she said, “What’s all this about devil worship? What has that got to do with Sir Francis Bryan?”

  “I don’t know, Rain; I don’t know. I just hope that we succeed in contacting Simon Ark.”

  “Maybe you were right about this all being some sort of gigantic swindle.”

  I frowned and shook my head. “He sounds like an educated man, which doesn’t mean he might not have been planning a swindle—but the fact of his murder seems to bear out his honesty. In fact, he’s one of those men I sort of wish I’d met during his life.”

  She lit a cigarette and dropped the letter on a table. “Are you sorta glad you met me?”

  I raised my eyebrows to look at her, but she’d already gone into the kitchen in search of drinks for us. I ignored the question and said, “We should probably go to this place he mentions and look around. We might be able to turn up the book.”

  She returned with two tall frosted glasses. “I’m beginning to think it’s not worth all the trouble. After all, we might end up with arrows in us, too.”

  “It’s certainly a weird business,” I agreed as I sipped my drink. “Say, these are pretty good. What’s in them?”

  “A secret love potion,” she murmured with a grin; “let’s have a little music.”

  “I’m a married man, you know,” I told her, trying unsuccessfully to keep it sounding light.

  She came to me then, with the radio behind her playing something soft by Mantovani, and the clatter of passing traffic drifting in from the street. And it was as I’d feared it would be since I first met her.