From All False Doctrine by Alice Degan

Author:Alice Degan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sexton's Cottage

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He left Mrs. Barrington and Miss Nordqvist on a bench outside Hart House, went up the flight of granite stairs inside, and asked the porter at the top for the meeting of Purists. He had to resist an impulse to add, “Also, who was fed with the Grail?” He felt as if he were on a slightly suspect quest, though maybe that was just the Gothic architecture. He was told that the Purists were meeting in the Music Room. He went upstairs and turned the wrong way down the quiet stone corridor, turned back, and finally found it. Through the glass panes of the door, he could see that the meeting was in progress. He eased the door open and slipped through. He knew as soon as he got the door shut behind him that his uneasiness had, somehow, been well founded. There was an oppressive atmosphere, more like a hospital waiting-room than a party.

There were perhaps a dozen men in the room, and, he noticed after a moment, a couple of women. One, a dark-eyed girl in an ill-fitting man’s suit, looked around nervously at his entrance. Several of the men gave him puzzled looks, but no one asked who he was or challenged his right to be there. They were busy listening to the address of a man who sat near the fireplace, facing into the room.

“And we have found,” he was saying, “that by bringing two, three, or even more, the effects may be doubled, tripled, and so on. It is of course not easy, but the rewards are significant.”

Kit turned to a man near the door, and said in an undertone, “I’m looking for someone named Peacham. Peverell Peacham?”

The man laughed, rather mirthlessly. “Very funny. What are you dressed up like that for?”

“It annoys the bishop, and I think it’s rather smart. I take it Mr. Peacham isn’t here?”

The man shrugged and turned away from him. Kit scanned the room; Peachy was certainly not present.

“But you yourself have not seen fit to make the change,” a member of the audience was challenging the speaker. “Or so you would have us believe.”

The leader returned a smile that did not reach his eyes. “I have attained benefits compared to which a mere bodily alteration seems … trivial.”

He was a man in his forties, grey-haired and dapper. There was a girl with him, lolling beside him but with an unpleasantly detached air, her clothing a provocative mixture of the demure and the revealing. Her chaste white blouse was unbuttoned over her breasts, her tight grey tweed skirt rucked up past the tops of her stockings. Having noticed her, Kit could not stop looking at her. She looked like Elsa Nordqvist reimagined by someone with poor taste: Elsa before she had cut her hair, and with fuller breasts and shorter, plumper legs. Elsa with horribly vacant blue eyes. (The real Elsa’s eyes were a cooler grey, and emphatically tenanted.)

She must have felt Kit’s gaze on her, because she looked up and met it, and her eyes were suddenly no longer vacant, only horrible.

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