The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal by KJ Charles

Author:KJ Charles
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Gay;romance;historical;Victorian;paranormal;ghosts;mystery;short stories;vignettes;ghosthunter
Publisher: Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2015-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

Devils on Horseback

By the New Year I had taken my place by Simon’s side. I threw myself into arcane studies, in order to earn my keep and underpin the instincts which I had, reluctantly, to accept I possessed. I settled into the strange house on Fetter Lane with Miss Kay (who has never to this day remarked on the fact that Simon and I share a bedroom) and the mute Cornelia. I even managed to rid myself of Caldwell Place, and wished the buyers joy of it.

After a couple of months, I wrote up my first of Simon’s stories and sent it to The Strand Magazine. I need not rehearse its popular success or the clamour for more that followed. Miss Kay read it out to Simon, adding a withering commentary at which I had to laugh while I winced. Simon merely said, “Good God, Robert,” but in truth I think he was pleased by his portrayal. Even if he had not been, I doubt he would have objected. Writing satisfied me, so he was content.

I was a writer once more, and a ghost-hunter’s companion, and very soon a part of London’s occult hinterland.

Those who knew London of the 1890s will recall the importance of the clubs. There were clubs for braying young oafs of good family, and for upper servants on a spree, for Navy or Army, for the universities and the professions, for political beliefs and sporting habits, artistic inclinations and personal tastes, too. If one wished to describe a good, likeable, pleasant fellow, one would simply call him clubbable.

Simon, needless to say, was not clubbable. He was a member of the Diogenes Club, to which he had been nominated by one of his more peculiar acquaintances, a Government man whose intellectual capacity was matched only by his physical corpulence. This establishment gathered the least sociable men in London under one roof where conversation was strictly forbidden, and was thus Simon’s place of first resort. I did not consider application (I suspect Simon would have blackballed me himself), preferring the undistinguished Stratton Club, where the penny-a-line crowd gathered to talk shop, and the atmosphere was as raucous as the Diogenes was monastic. But we both belonged to the Remnant.

Its exterior was not welcoming—an undistinguished red-brick house on the corner of Lincoln’s Inn Fields—but then, it did not wish to attract passers-by. The Remnant was the occultists’ club. Here was the biggest library of arcane texts in the British Isles, including some volumes that were locked in cages, and not for fear of thieves. Here gathered the students of shadows, the men and women (for the Remnant admitted both) who had plunged deep into the world beneath the world, and been irrevocably stained. Here one might find Dr. Silence, with his faithful hound by his side; Thomas Carnacki, always ready to tell a story (at length); the formidable Beatrice Phan, with her ever-friendly face, forgiving little and forgetting nothing; and on one memorable occasion Dr. Nikola himself, who held

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