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The Blazing Bridge

Page 12

by Carter Roy


  He bent over double, his body obscuring the flame. “Hot hot hot,” he said. “Did they have to put those things on so tightly? Nearly set my pants on fire.”

  Holding the lighter aloft, he picked his way across the floor. “Sheesh. So much junk in this place.”

  “Where are we?” I asked as he crouched down behind me. I could feel the heat of the flame on the insides of my wrists.

  “Pull your arms apart, Ronan. And … there.”

  I snapped my arms up and flung the melted remains of the zip tie away.

  “Now for your feet.” He kneeled down.

  “Ah! Ah! Ah!” A moment later, the heat disappeared, and I was free.

  “Sorry! Just a tiny bit of singeing on your ankles!” He stood and raised the flame high so we could see the whole of the room. It was a concrete bunker with an arched ceiling, filled with giant rusted pulleys, forty or fifty cardboard boxes marked RATIONS, and crates marked POTABLE WATER.

  Dawkins reached inside one of the rations boxes and pulled out a dented can. “Lima beans. Yuck. But at least we have water.” He took out what looked like a gas can, uncapped it, and took a big gulp. “Hmm … tastes like tin.”

  “Looks like the door is the only exit,” I said, picking up a nail from the floor.

  Dawkins inspected the stone around the steel door with the light from his Zippo. “The hinges and bolts are on the other side. And the frame of this door is solid steel. But this place was never meant to be a dungeon, so that old lock likely isn’t supersecure.”

  I got on my knees and squinted into the keyhole. “Maybe I can use this to pick it.” I showed him the nail. Back at Wilson Peak, Greta’s dad had given us weeks of training in lockpicking, but the only A student had been Greta. “I’m going to need something to use as a tension wrench.”

  Dawkins swept his hand across the floor and offered me a thin, flat strip of metal—a band that had been around a crate at one time. “Will this work?”

  “Maybe,” I said, and wiggled the metal strip and nail into the keyhole. “This might take a while. I’m no Greta.”

  He slumped down against the door, the Zippo cupped in his hand, while I scraped the nail around in the lock, feeling the mechanism and saying nothing. Finally I asked, “So what were all those hypnotized people doing in that glassworks?”

  “I’d really rather not finish that story,” Dawkins said. But he almost immediately relented. “We had no idea what we’d stumbled upon, so we did what kids always do when they get into deep water: we asked an adult for help.”

  CHAPTER 16

  A FOUNTAIN OF STARS

  Monsieur Vidocq did not believe us at first.

  “Hundreds of dead bodies, you say?” he asked the morning after our discovery, scratching at the thick fur of his sideburns.

  “Not dead, but alive. They breathe,” Fabrice said. “Their chests rise and fall.”

  “Alive but they do not mind you three going through their pockets?” He dropped his hand on the stack of documents we’d taken from the people in the room. Very few had actual identification papers, but many had receipts or calling cards or bank vouchers with scrawled names.

  “They were mesmerized,” I said. “Under some sort of spell.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “A spell.”

  “The couple we are searching for,” Mathilde said, unfolding one particular sheet. “They are among these people.”

  She handed him a bill of delivery for a Mme Adrien, with her address and signature.

  “It was in the pocket of her dress,” Mathilde said. “See? She signed for it on the day of her disappearance.”

  “And her husband?” Vidocq asked, peering at the bill.

  “Beside her.” Before he could ask how she knew, Mathilde added, “They wear matching wedding rings.”

  Vidocq patted the documents again, and then took a clean sheet of paper out of a drawer. He dipped his pen in ink and began copying names. “If this preposterous story is true,” he told us as he wrote, “it will be easy enough to find these people among the rolls of the missing in the offices of the Sûreté.”

  I’d been there only two days, and already I’d fulfilled my mission. The policemen of the Sûreté would confirm the missing persons, Mathilde would be safe again, and I could go home to London.

  “There was no one in that room,” Vidocq told us the next day, sitting down at our table.

  The names had belonged to the missing, so he and his policemen friends from the Sûreté raided the glassworks while we waited at a café.

  “But they were there!” Mathilde insisted.

  “Perhaps,” Vidocq said, signaling the waiter, “but they are there no longer. The room held only piles of broken glass.” He raised an eyebrow. “Apparently some vandals broke in a few nights ago and destroyed three months’ work.”

  “So that’s it?” I asked. “A dead end?”

  “Not quite,” Vidocq said, sipping at his espresso. “As we sat discussing the allegations against their workshop, I observed an employment notice on the wall.”

  I took a swallow of my coffee—

  “They are looking for a girl for their front office,” he said.

  —and spewed it all over the table.

  Fabrice used his napkin to wipe it up. “You are wasting good coffee!”

  I ignored him. “You don’t mean to send Mathilde into that place!”

  “That is precisely what I intend,” Vidocq said. “Unlike you, she is able to live by her wits.”

  “But it’s … dangerous,” I protested. Instead of merely observing this glassworks, Mathilde would be working there. I hadn’t completed my mission at all. I’d only made things that much worse.

  “All of a sudden you are all white and slimy, like blancmange,” Fabrice said. “Three days and already he is in love!”

  “Imbécile,” Mathilde said, standing up. She flipped her blond braid over her shoulder. “Monsieur Vidocq, I will go prepare.” She gathered her coat and left.

  “I am not in love with her,” I insisted to Fabrice and Vidocq. “I barely know her!”

  They laughed, because they understood what I did not: that I was lying—to them, and to myself.

  Mathilde wasn’t at the office when we returned.

  As we climbed the stairs to the door, a slouching peasant girl in a shapeless gray dress crossed the landing with a message. Her dirty brown hair hid her face to such a degree that when I went to give her a sous for her trouble, she couldn’t even see my hand.

  “Mademoiselle,” I said. “For you.”

  “Dawkeen,” she said, raising her face. “You are such a blind fool.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  Vidocq clapped, delighted, and said, “We shall christen you Sophie!”

  He brought in a forger friend to create documents, paid a clerk he knew to add an entry to the city’s registry of births, and couriered money and instructions to a couple in Montmartre to play the parts of parents should anyone come round their muddy hovel asking about a girl named Sophie.

  A few days later, Sophie won the position in the glassworks. The plan was for her to observe the goings-on from within, take notes, and then to hide her notes in the day’s trash, which was collected each night by a removal cart.

  “That is where you two come in,” Vidocq told us. “You are to be shovel boys!”

  Ours would be filthy, backbreaking work. Removal cart teams labored from dusk to dawn and smelled like what they hauled—mostly the horse manure that city sweepers left piled at the sides of the roads.

  “He is punishing us,” Fabrice told me that first night, “because you dared to woo Mathilde!”

  “I have not wooed Mathilde!” I insisted. “I don’t even know how to woo Mathilde. Now what does the note say?”

  We’d found it curled inside the hollow handle of a trash bin, as per the plan. It was written in code, which Fabrice knew well enough to decipher.

  In the afternoons the clientele of the glassworks changes. T
he new visitors do not purchase any wares; instead, the Burques show off what one glassblower calls the fiery furnace—a kiln as big as a room, used only for “the special project.” What is that? He will not tell me.

  “This is interesting, but it is not about the missing people,” Fabrice said.

  “We don’t know that yet,” I told him. “We don’t know anything.”

  “I can testify to that,” said our cart driver, another agent of Vidocq’s. “Because if you did, you’d know we have to get a move on if we’re to finish our work by dawn.”

  The next week’s note was about the fiery furnace itself.

  The glassblower swears the only things fired in the furnace are people. They die? I asked, alarmed. No, he said, they “volunteer, sweat inside all night, then come out alive, but like …” He let his jaw drop and his eyes glaze over. “Empty-headed cows!” He laughed. But why? His answer is mystifying. “Each person infuses one small blob of glass for M. Burque’s grand mask.” But what mask that is, I do not yet know.

  I’d known something awful was under way—the hundreds of hypnotized people in the back room had been proof of that much. But this fiery furnace that cooked people? For some kind of mask?

  “You must pull her out of there,” I told Vidocq.

  “You must mind your place,” he said, skimming her most recent report. “It is not for you to tell me what to do. Mathilde is safe, and she is looking for the evidence we need to arrest this Monsieur and Madame Burque.”

  The next night’s note was the most alarming yet.

  I spied on the evening shift. A client was shown out of the fiery furnace, and then a demitasse of molten glass was removed: the “infused” blob. It was blown up into a whisper-thin glowing sphere that, in the darkness of the glassworks, appeared to have a face—a visage like a demon that moved inside it. The tissue-thin bubble was forced into a mold, the mold dunked in water, and put on a rack to cool. Stenciled #334.

  There was nothing I could say to convince Vidocq to cancel Mathilde’s mission, so it fell to me. I’d have to go in the next day, destroy her cover, and force the owners to fire her.

  “When I see that dumb expression of yours”—Fabrice furrowed his brow and pooched out his lips—“I know it means you have a stupid idea in your head.”

  “I don’t have ideas!” I insisted. “I’m just thinking about … our work.”

  “Even I know you’re lying, boy,” said the cart driver, cracking his whip. “But if it’s work you’re pondering, why not get back to it?”

  It was dawn by the time we’d emptied our load at the dump. I threw my shovel into the cart knowing it was my last shift ever. Then I went to my bed in Vidocq’s back office and prepared.

  The glassworks was closed and locked up when I arrived at two that afternoon.

  I walked around the building, banging on doors until at last a window opened, and an older, elegant-looking woman told me to go away.

  “I am here for a friend,” I said. “Sophie? I am … her fiancé, Jacques.”

  The woman smiled and said, “I am afraid to disappoint you, Jacques, but Sophie has been given the afternoon off. She probably awaits you at her boarding house. Au revoir!”

  She closed the window and I stood staring at it for a long minute. This wasn’t going according to plan.

  I was trying to figure out what to do next when I heard a faint hiss. But though I looked all around, I couldn’t place it. A second hiss thoroughly confused me. I prayed no one was watching as I spun circles in the middle of the street.

  And then I was hit in the head by a stone.

  It knocked me to the ground. When I reached back, my fingers came away bloody. “Ow,” I said, looking around one more time.

  Finally, I looked up.

  Mathilde’s furious face stared down at me. I didn’t need to be any closer to hear her whispered, “Imbécile!”

  When I joined her on the roof, she immediately started hitting me.

  “Easy!” I said. “They might hear you!”

  “They will not,” she said. “It is far too noisy down below. What are you doing banging on the door and asking for me?”

  “Something terrible is going to happen,” I told her. “And I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “You are like a loyal puppy. Sweet, but dumb.” On her belly, she edged forward so that she could just peek through the skylight. I joined her. “This is the moment,” she said. “They are removing all the masks, you see?”

  Below us, the worktables had been cleared, and now lined up across their tops were faint rows of nearly invisible glass faces. Hundreds.

  “What are they going to do with them?” I asked.

  “I think we shall see, no?” Reaching down between us, she took my hand and squeezed it.

  For hours we watched, unobserved, as workers in aprons and gloves gently sandwiched pairs of the glass faces together, heated them until they melded, and then repeated the process. By the time the sun set, they had combined all of the faces into one very solid looking mask. It had a bloodred cast to it.

  “What are they adding to it now?” Mathilde asked.

  One of the workers kept touching it with a rod of white-hot glass, then pulling the rod away so that it trailed a thin strand.

  “Hair,” I said. “He’s giving it glass hair.”

  When at last he had finished, the man took the mask to a vat of water and lowered it. A cloud of steam enveloped him.

  When he emerged, he was holding the mask in his hands. He walked over to an older couple—

  “The Burques?” I asked.

  “Mmm hmm,” Mathilde said.

  —kneeled down, and held it out to them. The wife gestured to her husband, and he raised it to his face and put it on.

  Mathilde gasped. “Is it eating him?”

  The mask moved, squirming around on his face like it was alive.

  “No,” I said. The man didn’t seem hurt. He had raised his arms in the air with what looked like exultation. “It’s just … changing shape somehow.”

  Every second, the mask rippled, and every second, another face rose up from its folds of glassy flesh as though out of liquid. Plump faces became gaunt, sharp noses broadened, large eyes shrank under heavy brows. A whole population of faces passed through the mask’s features.

  “It’s all of them,” Mathilde whispered. “The missing people. They are in that thing somehow. That’s why their bodies were in the storeroom; they didn’t need them anymore.”

  Below, the man lowered his arms, and with his right hand, he touched his temple. Slowly, the forehead of the mask split open and revealed a third eye. It glowed an absinthe green.

  “What is that?” Mathilde asked, kneeling and pressing her hands to the skylight for a closer look.

  “We’ve seen enough,” I said. “Let’s go get Monsieur Vidocq.”

  I stood as the man below looked at his hand through the mask, waved it around as though it cast a shadow, and then turned and looked back, straight at Mathilde. There was absolutely no way he could see us in the dark—I was sure of it.

  And yet he did.

  He pointed and shouted something that we could not hear.

  Startled, Mathilde leaped to her feet, lost her balance, and fell.

  Right through the plate glass of the skylight.

  I reached forward and tried to catch her, grabbing the back of her old gray dress, but all I managed to do was tear it and pull myself after her.

  She had the good fortune to land in the vat of water where the glassmakers cooled their work. Me, I wasn’t so lucky.

  When I came to, I was bound to a wooden chair on top of one of the worktables. I was bleeding from dozens of little cuts, and my left arm dangled uselessly from my shoulder like an empty sleeve; I guessed I had some broken bones. Mathilde, completely soaked and indignant, was bound to a chair atop a table across the aisle from me.

  “Who are you, Jacques—if that is even your name?” asked the woman who’d sent me away
earlier—Madame Burque. She spoke in flawless English. “Our Sophie won’t tell us why she is here, and she does not understand what she is, but I’m betting you do.” She was beautiful, this Madame Burque. She looked like a kind person as she came close, laid a hand on my cheek, and asked me, “Are you with the Blood Guard?”

  “No … whatever that is,” I said.

  “You’re a poor liar, Jacques.” She smiled. “But I thank you. We did not know if our mask, le percepteur, would work as we’d hoped. But now we do.”

  She picked the red mask up. Off her husband’s head, it had stopped squirming. “Until now, the Bend Sinister had no way to see the light of the Pure.” She raised it up. “Every person in the world can sense the faintest glimmer of the Pures among them. They don’t know what it is that makes them like or trust that Pure soul, but just under the realm of the conscious mind, they see the aura nevertheless. We distilled that ability—distilled people’s very souls, the thing in them that responds to the Pure—and we combined them. Together, those hundreds of souls are able to perceive what the naked eye of a single person cannot.”

  “Bully for you,” I said. My left arm was useless, but I had almost managed to slip my right from the ropes.

  She laughed and took a thin rod of white-hot glass from a kiln. “You are one of the Guard. It is a pity you won’t be able to tell your friends of our success. My husband was confused to see his shadow when he put on the mask. Until he looked up and saw that she was the light source!” With a pair of tongs, she drew the end of the glass rod forward so that it formed a long thin point. And then she dunked it in water. “And now, for the second part of our experiment!”

  “What’s that?” I asked, my right arm free.

  “Why, the killing of a Pure, of course!” She used the tongs to snap off the blobby tip of the glass rod. What remained was razor sharp. “Her first, and then you.”

  “Dawkeen?” Mathilde called out. “What is she talking about?”

  “Don’t!” I shouted, rocking the chair back and forth. “It’s not—”

 

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