Just fucking keep moving. Find the damn wind chimes and smash them to bits. The broader question of “what next?” could wait.
Gaelan followed the sound further and further into the cave network, finally reaching a chamber distant from the stairway. The strident grating grew more deafening the nearer he drew to the chamber, the sound transforming by the second: a wail, a shriek, the roar of a million panes of glass crashing in upon themselves over and over and over again.
The flame of a candle he’d snatched from the wall wavered and danced from the vibration, finally snuffing out as he entered the room. Stumbling in the complete darkness, confused and drowning in the chaos of the wind chimes, Gaelan collapsed to the ground, grateful as the noise evaporated along with all thought.
A female voice echoed through his sleep, deep from within a nightmare. Fragments of hideous monsters dissolved before him, camouflaged in a relentless gray fog. Their eyes stared vivid, dark and hollow. Blank. But human—and alive. The vision faded and the voice grew urgent as it threaded through Gaelan’s semiconsciousness, adding to his confusion in the nexus between sleep and wakefulness.
“Come! Quick, before the Burkie-boys find us. You’re not one of them, are you? Nah, don’t look the part.” A young woman, long hair pulled back in a braid and dressed in a gray metallic tunic, materialized, looming above him where he lay on the ground, hands on her hips. Her gunmetal tunic rippled as she impatiently tapped her foot.
Gaelan sat up, his head still spinning. “Who the bloody hell are . . . ?”
She either was not listening or chose not to answer as she extended him a hand. He did not recall falling. The chamber, yes. The infernal chiming . . .
But this place was not . . . And the discordant clanking . . . gone. Dreams within dreams within dreams, swallowing him alive like a vortex.
“We have to be quick! Let’s go!”
Gaelan dusted a powdery substance from his jacket and trousers as he stood unsteadily. The chamber had vanished, and he sensed he was somehow outdoors, yet all seemed strangely nebulous, like a black-and-white movie, dulled and streaked by age. A gloomy landscape suspended in the cool, dense air. Even the girl blended in, colorless but for the pink of her hands, the olive cast of her cheeks.
The glass piece, still clutched in Gaelan’s hand, glittered, sputtering as if wakening to life, emitting a dim, almost ghostly, glow in the amorphous achromicity of their surroundings. Just what the fuck was this—act two, scene one?
“I was dreaming,” he said finally, not really expecting a satisfactory answer. “How did I get—?”
“No time! We need to get inside. Now.”
Gaelan followed her through the fog until they reached the middle of a cul-de-sac. He was ankle-deep in a soft gray-white powder, which resembled more than anything else pulverized sand. It spun up miniature eddies with each step, his footfalls silent, absorbed by the substance. It burned his eyes and nostrils, the acrid sting familiar as its odor. Gaelan turned to ask the woman about it. But she’d vanished.
In the distance, the shadows of towering buildings loomed dark against a clay sky, blending into it, their rooftops disappearing into the fog. Crouching, Gaelan scooped up a handful of the powder, observing as it drifted through his fingers and floated to the ground, fine, like cornstarch, like the diatomaceous sand of a Caribbean beach.
To his right, a low range of hills spread against the near horizon, gray, of course, like the finish of a silver automobile dulled by time and neglect. A rhythmic pulse cut through the silence nearby, like the gentle lapping of tide against a breakwater, but erratic, randomly fading entirely until it returned, resuming its cadence.
Shadows scurried past in the periphery of Gaelan’s vision, wraiths, dark and huddled. Silent—like everything else here—keeping their distance, watching, listening. The monsters of his dream, returned.
A whisper near his ear and Gaelan jumped, startled. The girl had come back.
“Do not trouble yourself with trivialities—it will only make your brain hurt. Now if you’re finished exposing us both out here, please, follow me!” She reached for his hand.
A strange quality to it, corporeal, like the empty space where the fingers of his left hand had been severed by Handley’s knife. Phantoms to fill in the emptiness. Soft, but too soft. Not quite gelatinous, not liquid, not solid.
His hand slipped from hers as they ran. And ran. Gaelan could barely keep apace as she called back toward him to hurry, her voice a garbled blur as she accelerated, until she seemed almost in flight, too far ahead, until she disappeared from view.
“We can rest here for a moment. I don’t think anyone’s—” She was waiting for him to catch up.
“That skyline . . . something about it—”
“Skyline?”
“Yeah. Back there, I saw it in the distance . . . perpendicular to those hills.” Gaelan swept his arm in the general direction.
“Hills? Ah . . . the hills. Our fortress walls. Cool, huh? The magic of light and imaging. Hard times for people . . . like us. Gotta use what we can to protect ourselves on our little island, you know—”
Gaelan struggled to understand. “Like you? What are you talking about?” Mirrors within mirrors within mirrors.
He searched his memory back to Chicago, to the poison he’d created. Had it contained a hallucinogen? He did not recall one among the ingredients he’d added. Yet, it was possible in the mixing . . . a chemical reaction . . . If so, this was one fucking train wreck of a trip.
The girl had disappeared again. Perhaps he only couldn’t see her for the powdery mist. Gaelan called out. “Hello? Where am I?” Heaven, hell, purgatory? Or some sort of existential nothingness? Or something entirely “other”?
Just ahead, the sound of water again, closer now; he turned toward it, curious.
“Not that way. In here.”
Ah, there she is. They now stood inches from the base of a gray hill. The young woman craned her neck in all directions before placing her right hand flat on the surface. Silently, the hill slid open and a light from within beckoned them to enter.
“Never mind all that nonsense. Through here and be quick. If you’re the one, we’ll find out right away. If not . . .”
“The one . . . What?”
“Come on. You’re nearly—”
Gaelan stood his ground, refusing to follow. He had too many questions to follow this woman—anyone—blindly. Hallucination or not. “No. If not . . . what, exactly? Who do you think I am? I’m not going in anywhere until I—”
He was just so bloody tired. He could not manage another step; every bit of his strength bled away into the amorphous gray. He sat in the dust as large, dry flakes fell all about him, like lake effect snow, but not cold. Or wet. It gathered in his hair, on his shoulders. Perhaps he should simply stay put, wait for the dust or ash or dirt, or whatever the hell it was, to bury him alive. Gaelan’s eyes slipped shut as he gave into the silence.
Gaelan woke lying on his back; no longer outdoors, no longer covered in a strange powdery sand. The wind chimes had recommenced, no longer a dissonant noise, but pleasing, a plaintive harmony.
He blinked, gaze drifting up toward the ceiling as his eyes adjusted to the semidark. This place he knew.
The Quhawme Brethren of Dernwode House had constructed for their monastery a room of great arched lead glass windows reaching through the forest canopy and high above the grounds. From the ceiling they’d suspended a series of prisms—a pattern designed to maximize the effect of the small amount of natural daylight in their hidden location. The seòmar-criostalan—the room of crystals.
Every afternoon the sun would pour through the windows, painting the walls in refracted hues. Every color of the spectrum, reflecting off the glass and onto every surface. A lavish feast of color and light, a demonstration of nature’s power. The brethren insisted it was God; the young Gaelan knew such a splendid God would never take from him his entire family. He’d not changed his opinion, not even hundr
eds of years later.
Gaelan spent many hours waiting in the middle of the room, speculating upon the exact moment when the sun was at the proper trajectory, week by week, season upon season. How to make sense of the ever-changing facade of color—paintings not painted with anything but light and glass.
Then the moment would come, and the glass would transform the room as if by magic. Majestic magic borne of physics, by mathematics, by the ingenuity of the monks, so far ahead of their time in so many ways.
“Already we are hidden in the hills, Master Gaelan,” Brother Hugh explained so long ago, “and direct sunlight is a rare privilege. One day, we may be forced to hide yet further from the sight of those who do not understand our ways, who seek to destroy us. Perhaps survival will require retreating below ground, where creating such an approximation of daylight will be yet more crucial.”
And so they had. Transplanted the seòmar-criostalan to the cellarium.
“It will never be adequate to grow our herbs and food—except those that do not require light,” Brother Hugh said. “But a garden is a garden, and they are difficult to squelch, and especially one as hidden as ours. Ours will grow long past the time we are all gone from this Earth.” Had that, too, survived the long centuries somewhere among the brush and rocks of the ruins?
Or was this another hallucination? Dream? Or the simple haze of memory from a distant time past? Gaelan stood, steadying himself with a hand upon the wall. Reaching up, he plucked a small prism from the ceiling, running his hand along its jagged edge, slicing his index finger, cherishing the pain.
The skin peeled away, and he observed as the blood flowed freely from the wound, pooling in the cup of his hand. Real enough, but perhaps more unsettling than if all this were an elaborate nightmare. He did not wait for the gash it to repair itself, as he knew it would. A piece torn from his shirt would do for a bandage.
The black walls suited the prisms, rendered the refracted color more intense as they arced off the glossy basalt. The orange and yellow at the base of each refraction—miniature rainbows—bathed the chamber in soft light. Where was its source?
The teardrop! As the prisms glittered, drawing light, life, from each other, the opalescent glass piece, which now sat on the floor beside Gaelan’s foot, glowed, radiating up and around itself, caught by the prisms.
An idea burrowed through the chaos of Gaelan’s mind. He raised the drop, directing it toward the central prism; the light intensified, illuminating the entire room, bathing it in a damn good simulation of daylight.
“The glass object is a key to a portal,” Conan Doyle wrote in his journal. If Gaelan had, indeed, traversed this so-called portal, it had been into quite a desolate place, as distant from Conan Doyle’s magical mystery world of fairies and their domain as heaven was from hell.
To my sceptical friend, Conan Doyle long ago inscribed to Gaelan in a first edition Holmes. Someday you shall know me to have spoken true; mark here my words. I know a secret far greater than your own, my friend.
He’d signed it, For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
Was that what Gaelan had experienced? The strangeness of a world beyond their own? Conan Doyle’s world of fairies?
What utter nonsense! Whatever Conan Doyle had seen, it had been only of his own making, his own peculiar imagination. Perhaps senility had reduced him to a shadow of his former self, holed up in a deluded world of fairies hidden beneath a godforsaken Borders valley. Gaelan’s own experience best explained as folie à deux as he was sucked into the delusion.
Gaelan shuffled through Conan Doyle’s journal to the end.
I understand how difficult it must be for you, my dear reader, to embrace a truth I have known all my adult life. I know now that I am not a doddering old fool believing in fairy stories and crowing about some fanciful Otherworld for all to deride me. No. I know it is true.
Indeed, as I have seen, and you shall, if you but look beyond the expected. The likely. The probable, and into the Otherworld I have now known. I have proof at last that there exists amongst us an entire world in parallel to our own. It is there for our reaching. Call them fairies or by some other name if you must, but they exist.
I have written the following words before, but only in distance of faint possibility. I see them now as more prescient than I might have imagined when first I set pen to paper, and perhaps they will be useful now to restate: ‘We see objects within the limits which make up our colour spectrum, with infinite vibrations, unused by us, on either side of them. If we could conceive a race of beings which were constructed in material which threw out shorter or longer vibrations, they would be invisible unless we could tune ourselves up or tone them down. It is exactly that power of tuning up and adapting itself to other vibrations which constitutes a clairvoyant, and there is nothing scientifically impossible, so far as I can see, in some people seeing that which is invisible to others.’
The answer lies in these very ancient catacombs, in its peculiar prism chamber, in the patterns that govern all things in the universe—theirs and ours. It is mathematics; it is cosmology; it is biology and chemistry. All are governed by it, and through this universal truth it is possible to experience the seemingly impossible. The utterly unknowable to those not adept at this sort of perception. Not exactly as I envisioned in my seminal work on the fairies, but not far as you might find them not useful in your pursuit.
Gaelan had always been able to perceive beyond the ordinary. He’d learned the skill at an early age, and hundreds of years later, it had rescued him more than once. Perhaps it would again. Beyond his own, he’d saved lives countless more times. As he had a century ago. In London.
LONDON, 1826
CHAPTER 17
Sudor anglicus—the English sweating sickness—had vanished from Britain’s shores some thirty years before Gaelan was born. It murdered indiscriminately: the rich, the impoverished, slinking away as mysteriously as it began, as if by some magic incantation, never to return to these lands. Yet Gaelan could not wrest from his mind the similarities between Simon’s patient and those described in his grandfather’s notes on the illness, uncrated and placed on the shelf only a day earlier.
Perhaps it was nothing more than mere coincidence, a theory conjured from too-convenient clues. For were the notes not now fresh in Gaelan’s memory, would he make the connection at all?
The morning was proving mercifully quieter than Gaelan had anticipated as he considered Bell’s patient. He stepped into the dusty boisterousness of the street, having forgotten for the moment he was no longer in the tranquility of Hay Hill. That he would not be breathing in lavender and chrysanthemum wafting over from the park, easing his mind to birdsong.
Instead, his senses were bombarded by the stink of offal and dung, blood mingled with sawdust. The discordant symphony of cackling chickens, grunting pigs, and agitated cows and sheep herded tight into their pens blurred the mumbled “Good morrows” to mime.
Bell would be right to think him mad even to suggest sudor anglicus. There was too much else, known and unknown, that could be the cause. And it was but one patient. Yes, an overreaction fueled by Gaelan’s too-lively imagination and his grandfather’s papers. Cholera? No. There had been no intestinal distress. Or an influenza.
What if it was Bell overreacting to a simple fever—a cold. After all, what did Gaelan know of the man’s skills, beside the familial connection to Benjamin? Most likely the salt tonic would prove satisfactory, and Bell would return shortly with good news about his patient’s recovery. Or not return at all. Yet . . . those symptoms continued to gnaw at his curiosity.
The door swung open and in rushed a harried woman, startling Gaelan from his ruminations. Slim as a reed she was, but even after only a few days, he knew this one was a force of nature unto herself, and no one to be trifled with. He’d witnessed her resolute gaze and unbending stance as she dealt with the other ma
rket purveyors. She was tough as any man in Smithfield.
“Good morrow, Mrs. Faust, in what might I interest you this fine day?”
“Good morrow to you, Mr. Erceldoune. Have you any rose water today? I’ve used my last dregs, and as you know, I find a bit dabbed in front of the ear masks the ripe odors of the market stalls—”
“Indeed, I’ve several varieties, brewed myself. A moment, if you please.”
Gaelan returned from his workroom with a small cobalt blue bottle decorated in white enamel. “This is Damask water. Quite pleasant. From Damask roses. The oils are especially potent in this brew and should serve the purpose well, I think.” He had sold barrels of it to the ladies of Hay Hill. An endorsement unlikely to impress Mrs. Faust.
“It looks quite dear, and I’ve only—”
“Never mind all that; I’ll not accept from you a farthing. I’ve a greater need just now. If you would, Mrs. Faust, put aside for me a nice fat hen from your stall, and deliver it to Mrs. Mills for cooking into a stew. I would consider it an honor to give this to you in a more than fair trade.”
It had not gone well for the lady. Her husband shot dead by a highwayman, she had become both proprietress and mother to their small children—a difficult life, and she could ill afford the cost of such an extravagance. Hens she had in abundance.
“Thank you, Mr. Erceldoune. Good day to you, sir. And God bless you.”
Gaelan bowed slightly and ushered her from the shop, hanging the “closed” sign in the window. He needed peace and solitude to think. Should any have need of his services, he would hear the door quite well from the workroom.
First to check on Cate. Mrs. Mills’s stew would make a hearty dinner for her, rich and thickened with beef bone marrow. She was improving quickly, but she was not yet out of danger. A small downturn could plunge her into the direst straits, and with little warning.
She was asleep on the settee when Gaelan entered the flat. She’d eaten the luncheon he’d left for her, drunk the elderberry tea and salt tonic as well. All very good signs. Quietly, he gathered what he required and returned to the shop, settling into his chair, his grandfather’s notes on the illness at his side.
Alchemy of Glass Page 14