“My hat!” Swinburne whispered.

“Blasphemy!” Arundell gasped.

“Won’t our presence here wake him?” Monckton Milnes asked, gesturing at the prone figure.

Levi said, “Non. Observez!” And, leaning over Judge, slapped his face. Instinctively, the others took a hurried pace backward, but their caution was unwarranted; the big Irishman didn’t respond to the stimulus at all.

“Now we begin,” Levi said. He pulled a garlic bulb from his pocket, put it on the altar, and crushed it with the head of the mallet. Scraping up the juicy, piquant vegetable matter, he smeared it liberally around Judge’s nostrils and lips.

“What are you doing?” Henry Arundell asked.

“I make him uncomfortable.”

“Is that wise?”

“C’est nécessaire. See!”

Levi swung his lantern over Judge’s face. The man’s eyes had started to move agitatedly beneath the closed lids. He groaned and his fingers twitched.

“The volonté of John Judge is disturbed by the odeur terrible, by the bad stink. It struggle, and Perdurabo must battle to stay in control. See! It get very difficult!”

Judge’s limbs were now shaking and jerking as if gripped by an epileptic fit.

“The two who inhabit this body,” the Frenchman said, “they are now entrelacé—intertwined—and so die both at once when we do what we must do.”

Burton drew a pistol from his waistband and aimed it at Judge’s head. Levi reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Non! Non, Sir Richard! That is not the way!”

“Why not?” Burton growled. “A bullet in his damned brain will do for him, surely!”

“It is the volonté that must be first immobilisé and then destroyed. The volonté occupy not just the head but the whole body. The méthode appropriée, it is spécifique. There is much wisdom in tradition, even if we do not fully comprehend.”

Burton slipped his gun into his pocket. “All right. Let’s get on with it. Show me what to do.”

“We do it together.”

Levi took hold of John Judge’s shirt and ripped it open, exposing the man’s chest. He pulled one of the stakes from his jacket and held it with its point touching the sailor’s skin, directly over the heart.

“Take the mallet,” he said.

“You can’t mean to—?” Henry Arundell blurted.

“Leave!” Levi snapped. “Go! Do not be witness to this!”

Arundell stayed put.

“Monsieur,” Levi said to Burton. “One stroke. Very hard.”

The explorer hefted the mallet. He looked from one man to the other, then swung the tool up and, putting every ounce of his weight behind it, swept it down.

In mid-swing, everything happened at once.

A deafening crash of thunder reverberated through the castle.

John Judge’s head rolled sideways.

His eyes opened and flicked from total black to white with a blue iris. They looked past the men to the priest hole’s entrance.

The mallet impacted against the stake, driving it straight through Judge’s body.

A piercing scream rent the air, merging with the echoing thunderclap.

Judge bucked. He coughed a fountain of blood.

Burton and his companions, momentarily confused, suddenly realised the scream had come not from Judge, but from behind them. They swivelled around and saw Thomas Honesty standing at the mouth of the passage. His eyes were wide, his face filled with horror. He screamed again, turned, and plunged into the tunnel.

“Imbécile!” Levi cursed. “He too curious!”

John Judge gave a final twitch and went limp. Blood dribbled down the sides of the altar. Henry Arundell gazed at it, aghast.

The Frenchman extended his arm toward Monckton Milnes. “The axe. Immédiatement!”

Monckton Milnes blinked, as if coming out of a daze, and handed it over.

Without hesitation or explanation, Levi raised it and sliced it down onto Judge’s neck. Three times he chopped, and on the third, the corpse’s head came away and rolled to the floor, making a horrible knock as it impacted against the stone.

“Holy mother of Christ!” Arundell moaned. “God forgive us! God forgive us!”

“We eradicate the unholy, Monsieur Arundell,” Levi said. “It is barbaric and horrible, but it is the Lord’s work. Now we must take the remains upstairs and burn them.”

Arundell and Monckton Milnes crossed to the upward-sloping passage and crawled out through it. Swinburne followed, carrying the severed head. Burton and the occultist, with great difficulty, then manoeuvred the corpse through the crawlspace.

After they’d replaced the removable steps and ascended to the square room, they put the dead man in the middle of its floor. Levi took the clockwork lanterns, broke each one open, and poured the oil from them onto the body. He struck a lucifer, threw it, and stepped back as the remains of John Judge ignited. “We not leave until it is nothing but ash,” he said. “But we wait in another room, non? The air will be very bad in here.”

The courtyard was half-flooded, the rain bucketing down, lighting and thunder still crashing overhead. They ran across to a doorway on its opposite side and into a high-ceilinged hall. It was dusty but dry, and they sank onto its floor and leaned against its walls and tried to process what they had just done.

Arundell buried his face in his hands. “Was I just party to murder?”

Levi answered, “Non, monsieur. It is difficult to understand, but John Judge was already dead. En fait, he was worse than dead. We have saved his immortal soul.”

“I shall never make sense of this.” Arundell looked pleadingly at Burton. “Please, Richard, I have come to regard you as family—tell me we have done the right thing.”

“We have,” Burton responded. “That creature—for he wasn’t a man—took my fiancée from me. Deprived you of your daughter. Others would have died at his hands.”

“Non!” Levi exclaimed. He banged his fist against the floor. “Not die! Not die! This is the horreur vraie—the true horror—of it. His victims do not properly die. They become un-dead—strigoi morti! They must each be disposed of as we have today disposed of Perdurabo—at very least, burned to nothing. If they are not, their terrible condition, it will spread like the plague. That is why I ask for two stakes.”

It took some seconds for his meaning to register.

“God, no,” Arundell moaned. “Surely you don’t mean to say—you aren’t suggesting—you can’t—”

All of a sudden, Burton couldn’t breathe. He grabbed his throat with one hand and clutched at the air with the other. “Bismillah!” he choked. “Please! Not that! Anything—anything—but that!”

Levi shook his head sadly. “Je suis désolé, but it must be done. We have set John Judge free. Now we must do the same for Mademoiselle Isabel.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—

Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—

On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—

Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

—EDGAR ALLAN POE, “THE RAVEN”

They found Thomas Honesty fussing frantically over the engine of the landau. “It won’t start! It won’t start!” he cried out. He recoiled away from them as they approached, brandished a pocketknife, and yelled, “Stay back! I saw what you did! Murderers!”

“Don’t be a bloody fool!” Henry Arundell barked. “It’s not what it seems, I can assure you. Move over! You’ve opened the inlet valve too wide—no wonder she won’t start. Come on, out of the way! We’re getting soaked to the skin!”