Free The Bedlam Detective by Stephen Gallagher

permanently hospitalized.
    As a consequence, Sir Owain’s Royal Society lecture, in which all was to be revealed in detail, had attracted wide attention. The promise of sensational revelations, with no hint as to what those revelations might be, had stoked the public’s interest. The original meeting-hall venue had been ditched in favor of the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, a concert theater of much greater capacity. Several newspapers requested advance interviews, but were turned down. Sir Owain’s book was scheduled for publication within a matter of weeks, but no page proofs or early copies could be located.
    Even the society’s president had known nothing of what was to come. Following his introduction, Owain Lancaster had begun with a warning: that what followed might be hard to believe, but was true nonetheless. For much of it, he could offer no evidence beyond his own observations. His public testimony was underwritten by his private grief. He owed it to the dead to tell the whole truth.
    The whole truth, as he told it, was that the expedition had been wrecked by an early accident on the river that was carrying them downstream, after which the party’s survivors had been stalked by monsters. The monsters rarely showed themselves and were mainly known from the evidence of their attacks. Of all the party, Sir Owain was the only one who saw them fully with his own eyes. They included a serpent that tried to wreck the rescue boat that was carrying him home.
    The first ten minutes of Sir Owain’s talk were received in silence. The next five played to a growing rumble of conversation among the rows. His lantern slides were met with loud heckling and open derision, and the rest of his words went unheard; most of the audience was on its feet by then, and the ushers struggled to keep any kind of order. Some object was thrown, and something close to a riot followed. The speaker persisted and had to be stopped. Sir Owain was hurried from the building by a service door. His lantern slides, which featured some photographs but were mostly artists’ realizations of the monsters made under Sir Owain’s direction, were stolen during the upset.
    But they were no loss. Those same images appeared as plates in the published account, which went on sale shortly after. Its publishers, who’d been hovering over a decision to withdraw the book, found themselves with a runaway success.
    They were half embarrassed, half elated; they did their best to follow a line that allowed them to keep both their dignity and their profits. And so, as Sir Owain suffered public opprobrium and the censure of the society and withdrew to his West Country estate, they continued to sell copies of “this remarkable document, the subject of so much lively and continuing debate.”
    Stalked by monsters, torn by beasts. And an estate on which, it now seemed, people vanished and young girls of a certain age and development could not play in safety.
    As Sebastian’s predecessor had first noted, there seemed to be something more than coincidental misfortune at work here.
    W HEN S EBASTIAN stepped out into the main street, he could see that new activity had begun around the assembly rooms. Locals were again gathering outside. A hearse wagon and two undertakers’ men waited by the doors. Becoming aware of two women passing behind him, Sebastian tipped his hat to them; they didn’t even notice. He heard one telling the other that the parents had arrived and had gone in with the police. The women went on to join the assembly room crowd, and Sebastian turned away.
    The grief of the parents would be a hard sight to bear. He understood that there was a low point in any journey such as theirs. Some called it the hour of despair; others, the suicide hour. The notion was that if one could pass through it, then hope would begin. The hour could be deferred, or it could be ignored for a while. But if life were to continue, it could not be avoided. How did one pass through