Excerpt from the Unpublished Papers of Professor Julius Arthur Smith
(Written circa 1932, discovered among his effects at University College London)
Chapter I – The Affair of the Blood-Red Fez
It is with some hesitation that I commit these recollections to paper, for even now—more than twenty years since those dreadful nights in London—the memory of them stirs a chill at the back of my mind. There are episodes in a man’s life that reason cannot quite reconcile, and which scholarship is ill-equipped to name. Yet truth, however terrible, has a habit of outlasting our silence.
I recall the evening precisely: Sunday, the twenty-second of October, 1893. The fog lay heavy upon the Strand and the lamps burned dim through a gauze of smoke. Within the warm halls of the Oriental Club, however, the world seemed safe and civilised. We had gathered there—friends, colleagues, and former pupils—to mark my return to London and the renewal of my post at University College. There was laughter, fine brandy, and all the complacency of Empire. And yet, even then, I confess I felt a disquiet I could not name. My eyes, I am told, lingered too long upon the windows, as though expecting a shape to form in the fog beyond.
I raised a final glass that night. “To discovery,” I said, “and to the courage to seek what lies beyond the known world.” How bitterly that toast would come to haunt me.
The party dispersed at a late hour, and I had arranged rooms for my guests within the club. Toward half-past two in the morning, the silence was broken by an urgent knocking and the trembling voice of a servant announcing a messenger. In the drawing room, amid the scent of dying embers and stale cigars, stood a small soot-stained boy—Charlie ‘Buttons’ O’Malley, one of Father Byrne’s East-End protégés—cap in hand and wide-eyed with fear.
“Father Byrne,” he stammered, “didn’t reckon to see you ‘ere, sir. These ain’t your sort o’ folk, are they? But I was told to find a Captain—think you’d do in his place.” He pressed a crumpled note into the young priest’s hand before being sent to the kitchens for warm milk and brandy.
The note, in my own hand, read only:
‘Am at 5 Durward Street, Whitechapel. For God’s sake come. Bring a gun. Julius.’
Captain Barrington wasted no time. Within minutes he had roused the others—Father Aloysius Byrne, Miss Amelia Meadowcroft, Professor Henry Worth, and Mr Sebastian Fairfax, the consulting detective whose powers of observation rivalled any I have known. Together they took a hansom through the fog-choked streets eastward into Whitechapel, where the lamps burn low and the river smell turns foul.
There they found me outside No. 5 Durward Street, lantern in hand and heart heavy with dread. Inside lay the wasted figure of Matthew Pook, a student of my colleague Prof Demir, attended by Dr Hobbs, a police surgeon, and watched over by the anxious landlady, Mrs Grim. She spoke of a certain Mr Leeds—a gentleman who had taken the upper rooms with three foreign associates and an unconscious youth in tow. Over successive nights there had been noises—chanting, screams, the thud of heavy footsteps—and then, that evening, much banging then silence followed by a single cry that turned the woman’s blood to ice, she sent for the Police and Mr Leeds and his three associates quickly fled.
When at last we entered the chamber, the stench was unbearable. Poor Pook lay in a feverish delirium, a hideous red headpiece fused to his scalp as though grown there. Scattered about were train tickets, scraps of translation—phrases such as “Dominion over all” and “Rising from the past”—and the unmistakable taint of the occult.
Then, before our eyes, the boy convulsed. He rose with a strength unnatural, tearing out the throat of the unfortunate Dr Hobbs. The scene that followed I shall not dwell upon: Worth’s desperate torch setting the bed aflame, Barrington’s shotgun thunder in that narrow room, Amelia’s pistol flash, and Fairfax’s final, merciful shot. When it was over, Pook lay still, and the dreadful Fez—for it was no ordinary headgear—had fallen free at last.
I am told they returned to the Oriental Club in grim silence. I spent what remained of the night in conversation with the police, while the others rested fitfully; Fairfax, I later learned, suffered terrible dreams.
By morning the investigation had begun in earnest. At the library, my companions uncovered references to the accursed headpiece: accounts of vanished travellers, of madness, and of blood. That morning, when we met again, I told them the truth. Mr Leeds was none other than Hieronymus Menkaph, a man whose studies in the East had led him into abominable practices. The artefact was known as the Blood-Red Fez, a relic of unspeakable antiquity. It could not be destroyed by ordinary means; yet there remained one hope—my colleague Professor Demir of Constantinople.
Our only chance lay in returning the Fez to its origin, and destroying it there. Through the generosity of Baron von Hofler, arrangements were made for passage aboard the Orient Express. My own health, and certain enemies in the Ottoman capital, forbade me to accompany them. Thus did I entrust that brave company with the most perilous charge of their lives.
The train was to depart on Wednesday the twenty-fifth. They had but a single day to prepare, and the shadow of the Fez already lengthened across their path.
How I envied—and pitied—them. For though I did not yet know it, their journey east would mark the beginning of horrors that no science could measure, and from which few would return unchanged.