ABBOT NOIR REDUX.

But the inspector and Irene had not been speaking of my

mythical head monk at all. Not Abbot Noir, but abattoir,

a word I did know even if I did not expect to hear it

spoken in polite society.

Slaughterhouse.

-NELL HUXLEIGH IN CHAPEL NOIR BY CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

Soon our horse's clopping hooves were no longer part of the constant equine drumbeat along Broadway but became a singular effect. Godfrey's and my hansom turned down darker and even darker streets.

We'd borne west, not east. I'd assumed the slums of the East Side, teeming with tenements, would be the destination of so dangerous a criminal element desiring to hide.

But our hansom was slowing to navigate the damp, salty air of the docks. There was no way to muffle the horses's hooves. Both Godfrey and I felt as if our presence were announced with every step as definitely as by a footman pounding a staff at a royal reception to shout out the name of each arriving guest.

The rank odor of wet wood and dead fish was mild compared to another reek that hit us in the open hansom like a slap across the face.

"Godfrey-?"

He thumped on the trapdoor until the driver's top hat was visible, if not his face beneath the ragged brim.

"Where are we, man?"

"Holding pens," was the muffled answer. And another word.

"The Gurney?" Godfrey asked.

"Turned down this alleyway. I don't see or hear it, sir."

"Then stop at once. We'll get out here."

"But, sir, 'sno place to take a lady."

Godfrey released us both from the hansom. We stood on damp cobblestones shining faintly from some unseen light.

I glimpsed another gold coin handed up to the driver.

"Wait for us."

The top hat nodded, even as the gold piece disappeared. I wasn't sure he'd wait, but then, I didn't care. If we weren't successful in finding Irene tonight, no ride back to Broadway would bring the light back into my life, or Godfrey's, again.

"That odor!" I said as we walked away. "It's like a barn, but a thousand times worse."

"That's because these barns house thousands of farm animals."

"Thousands? This is a-"

"An area of slaughterhouses, I think."

I stopped dead in my tracks. "An abattoir." Of course I was familiar with the French word for slaughterhouse. I had, in fact, once visited the great Paris open market of Les Halles, where butchered meat hung on hooks and passersby had to be wary of slipping on the odd misplaced entrail. . . . One visit had been more than enough.

I also recalled once mistaking the word abattoir for a personage: Abbot Noir. This had been on the scene of the worst human slaughter Irene and I had ever encountered, only last spring.

"You can return to the hansom and wait." Godfrey seemed to sense my internal recoil. "In fact, I'd like some extra assurance that the driver will wait."

"No. If Irene and Consuelo are in this terrible place they'll need us both."

We resumed walking without more debate, each of us listening, but hearing only the muffled bawls of penned animals awaiting brutal death.

"Perhaps," I told Godfrey as we pushed as quietly as we could farther into the silent dark, "we are in the way."

"Perhaps. But I can't let Irene's fate rest in another's hands, no matter how expert, any more than you can. We must be discreet, Nell. If it appears that our presence will interfere with Holmes's scheme, we must defer."

For a moment, I said nothing. I recognized that the man had put himself in danger to resolve this mystery. That he had intended to risk himself and only himself. And perhaps Quentin.

I also recognized that Godfrey's and my claim upon Irene superceded any intent Sherlock Holmes might harbor. Besides, Holmes's first professional obligation was to poor little Consuelo Vanderbilt. Not Irene. No matter how personally he might wish to save her, he was committed to Consuelo. No one else. And certainly not to Godfrey and myself, whom he'd left flailing about in front of the Episcopal Club like a prize pair of turkeys!

Here, near the harbor, one could hear the eternal slap of waves against hull and piling and smell the sea in all its rank, commercial stink. Another scent was beginning to drown that out, and I recognized it. Blood.

In the occasional glimmer of moonlight between the hulking warehouses, I saw that Godfrey was attired in a midnight peacoat like Black Otto, a former personage of his on an earlier, less dire adventure in Monte Carlo.

I didn't doubt that his hand in his right coat pocket held pistol, or dagger, or blackjack.

I myself was ill accoutered for such a desperate expedition, save for the many useful articles on my chatelaine. But now I had to muffle this useful accessory with my hand to keep it from chiming our approach.

A horse snorted in the distance.

Godfrey stopped me with a hand on my wrist. We waited. Then moved forward.

A Gurney and two horses had been pulled close to a building.

We came near . . . and Godfrey bent over a bundle on the wet ground. The driver.

"Dead?" I asked.

"Perhaps. Certainly not likely to rouse until dawn."

We slipped past the horses, standing patiently in the way forced upon their kind, each with a forefoot lifted to ease the waiting.

The sight of these beasts of burden with one foot lifted against their wearisome fate always stirred my heart. My ire against those who had raced this Gurney here, to what dire purpose, rose like a fire in my throat. That they had also abused the two priests only increased my fury. That Irene and Consuelo were even now at their mercy . . . I suddenly knew the fiery heart of Lola Montez, and deemed no weapon-pistol, whip, or dagger-beyond my just and present use.

Godfrey's cautionary hand on my forearm almost spurred a striking out.

"Inside here," he whispered in my ear.

I was back, again-as in my dreams, my nightmares-in that ancient, crumbling maze in Transylvania, where creatures and rituals and rites unthinkable had required the utmost of my endurance. And resistance.

Somehow, Irene and I had now stumbled into a new variety of atrocity.

I breathed as deep as a well, inhaling all the brutal stench and stiffening against it. Then Godfrey cracked some unseen portal, and we eeled into a deeper, oily dark, a darkness silent and yet echoing with the drip of saltwater. Perhaps tears?

We moved forward together, on tiptoe, as we had before, and stronger for the first trial.

His fingers tightened on my wrist. My hand made a fist. And we stole further into the heart of darkness.

Some interior light leaked into the scene ahead of us.

I made out a high empty space, long steel tables, pulleys and huge hanging hooks. Scaffolding ahead, reaching up two stories. The smell here was as rank, but stale somehow.

"A deserted slaughterhouse." Godfrey's whisper danced against my ear like a moth dying in the light.

I nodded, not sure that he would detect such a feeble gesture.

We paused again. And heard faint sounds ahead.

So we moved on, sliding our feet along the rough floor, careful to keep from slipping or making any untoward sound that should betray our presence.

Surprise was our only real weapon.

The sounds became sharper, resolved into voices. Arguing voices.

We saw a sort of interior office ahead against one of the towering brick walls. Just a lean-to of wood, with a door and windows with glass panes inset. An overseer's office, I thought.

And from it came the voices.

We inched forward, stopping in tandem when a deep soprano joined the basso chorus. We clutched at each other in the dark. No words were discernible, but the tonal quality of Irene's voice was as unmistakable as a cello among bass fiddles.

I could hear the poor dumb beasts moaning and shifting in distant holding pens. The smell of their thousands and thousands of predecessors soaked this empty building with the metallic tang of spilled blood. This was an animal morgue, far cruder but no less brutal than the famous institution of Paris that attracted goggling crowds.

Would it become a usual kind of morgue before the night was done?

I noticed a glint in Godfrey's hand. Black Otto's businesslike dagger.

By now we were near enough for the light that leaked through the filthy glass to wash our own figures. We dared not go much closer without alerting those inside the office.

We hesitated. I glimpsed a motion atop the office structure, and pulled on Godfrey's rough sleeve.

He glanced up to see what I saw. A dark, hunched figure almost a sort of giant monkey, with a crest upon its head like some tropical bird.

To such an apparition, we would be as visible as statues in a museum.

While we braced ourselves for the next move, something rose up behind the shadow and merged with it.

A beast with two backs and four pummeling arms plunged to the floor.

Godfrey sprang to the office door, not to rush through it but to wait and listen.

Then the glass on the three visible office windows exploded outwards, a rushing figure at the center of each halo of breaking splinters. Glass flew like daggers of ice.

One shadow sprinted through the door. Godfrey brought his conjoined fists down on its neck, and the creature rolled to the floor.

Men, or beasts, came pouring out of the small structure, not counting the Quasimodo on the floor still contending with someone . . . one, two, three, four, five.

A pistol shot fired and the bullet whined off some distant slab of metal.

I crouched back, no match for any of the strivings before me, but perhaps able to startle or surprise at a later moment.

For all the gentlemen's vaunted desire to spare and protect me, at this moment, when my friends and foes were contending in a pitched battle for life and death, I mattered not a smidgeon. The first wrestlers rolled toward me, caught my skirt hem under their twisting bodies and nearly pulled me into their brutal wake.

Then the battle shifted and they rolled away.

I felt the floor around me. My hands shaped some mass of abandoned metal, heavy and so rusted I almost sneezed from the powder it left on my gloves as I lifted it. I struggled upright, the weight in my hands, and then staggered against the office wall.