The Strangely Beautiful Tale Of Miss Percy Parker Read Online Free PDF Page A

ancient maps. Roads twisted, took full-corner turns and vanished completely, began and changed names at strange places and disorienting angles, wound around masses of cramped architecture. From the Thames one gained one’s bearings, but a block up the bank there was no hope to see anything but the fresh, stately spires of Parliament. She noticed only one Catholic chapel, its gothic windows nestled between a cobbler and a butcher. Finally, a fortress the colour of a sooty autumn maple leaf hove into view, tucked within half a city block in the district of Bloomsbury on a road that remained nameless. It had seemed that her destination, Athens, a place the reverend mother had referred to as “London’s best-kept secret,” was perhaps a good place to keep one’s own secrets. Percy certainly hoped so.
    Allowing a sudden exhaustion, she sank onto her new bed in her new room. Her eyes felt strange, as if a curtain were drawn across them, and a vision followed: Tendrils of mistemanated from a dim opening, and a white glimmer appeared at the bottom of the widening black portal. A skeletal hand crept to the edge of the hole. Another hand appeared at the opposite corner. Another, and another…The bony host of hands clicked as they reached upon each other, and there came murmuring whispers of a thousand years. From the shadowy center of the door, something shifted into view—the huge head of a ghoulish dog. Wide canine eyes glistened and shone with an alien, crimson light. A dripping, gruesome snout sniffed as if the beast were on the hunt, preparing to race off and consume its prey…
    Percy shrank back, the vision fading. She had no idea what the creature might have to do with her—and she didn’t want to know.
    From the eternally dim shadows of the Whisper-world a voice resonated like a deep, angry bell tolling three o’clock: “Where. Is. She?”
    “I’ve no idea, dear,” replied a softer, feminine voice. “Was I supposed to do something about her? I thought you’ve been looking all this time. While you’ve only just noticed, it’s been eighteen of their years. She could be anywhere. She’s not my responsibility, you know.”
    The deep voice grunted. “Do. Something.”
    The woman sighed, her fair skin glowing in the moonlight. Placing her hands to her coiled tresses atop her head, she found something sharp. With a hiss, she brought her thumbs back into view; their pricked pads sprouted thick, dark jewels, garnets that began to overflow and weep. Lifting up her hands, she watched in fascination as the crimson trail spread from her thumbs onto her palms. She turned her hands one direction, then the other.
    “Hmm,” she said after a long moment.
    “Well?” pressed the voice in the shadows.
    “London,” she replied.
    “Something wicked, then?” the voice gurgled.
    The woman turned and smiled, nonchalant. “By all means, let the dog loose.”
    There was a grinding of stone. A ferocious growl erupted from the deep, before a barking, snarling, ugly cloud leaped into the sky. It vanished into the shimmering portal opposite the shadows where the woman’s master stood brooding, a portal where now rose the Tower of London.
    The voice tolled again from the shadows. “There will be hell to pay.”

C HAPTER T HREE
    London’s fashionable dead populated Highgate cemetery, near the suitably gothic moorland of Hampstead Heath. It was fitting that the estate of Professor Alexi Rychman was as striking, dark and brooding as its master had grown up to be, a building nestled at an equidistant point from those two eerily beautiful expanses of rugged flora and carved stone.
    All in black, greatcoat billowing about him, a widebrimmed hat low over his noble brow, Alexi strode toward the wide carriage that had sped to a halt at the end of his drive.
    “Evening, Professor,” called the driver from up top, bushy sideburns peppered with grey and a handlebar mustache framing a familiar jolly grin.
    “Evening, Vicar