by Kim Newman
‘Unorna had a lover, Israel Kafka,’ said Kate. ‘He died. Still, look at her… as you say, she’s beautiful. She must have had suitors.’
‘I don’t know, Katie. You try being called the Witch of Somewhere and see how easy it is to get a boyfriend.’
‘Alraune has many admirers…’
‘And they all fade away or are ruined,’ said Irene. ‘Like the enemies she mentioned. I think she gets her lovers and her enemies confused. That happens more than you’d think.’
‘Not to me.’
‘No, Katie. Not to you. You have found the perfect husband and, by some strange circumstance, have managed not to marry him.’
‘That’s a needlessly cruel observation.’
‘You’re Angel of Truth, remember. That quality is often needlessly cruel.’
‘So, this – adventuring – is something we do before settling down in Twickenham to sew antimacassars and argue with nurse about baby’s colic? Or instead of.’
‘Or after. Erik has taken on widows over the years – Madame Lachaille and Madame Calhoun.’
‘The Angel of Love and the Angel of Light.’
‘Yes, them. I met Madame Calhoun. She wasn’t an official widow. Her husband did the decent thing and disappeared from the face of the earth. One of those famous unsolved mysteries everyone lets lie. Before she tried settling down in her equivalent of Twickenham, Calhoun was La Marmoset, the greatest detective of either sex in Europe. Mistress of disguise. Never showed the same face twice. Escapologist, too. Pity she isn’t with the Agency these days. She’d have those hinges off with a hairpin.’
She should have paid more attention to La Marmoset. The sleuth tried to tell her something and she wouldn’t listen. Irene had a blind spot. Great Detectives put her back up. Preconceptions and prejudices could be fatal for those who lived as she had, flitting from caper to con and seduction to scheme.
‘I’m an aunt,’ said Kate, quietly. ‘I had aunts and now I am one.’
‘Aunts do not have adventures. If you are an aunt, it is incidental. You are an Angel.’
‘I might have liked children,’ said Kate.
‘You might have not liked them too. Plenty don’t…’
‘Irene, do you have children?’
Unorna sat up straight, eyes wide open. And the subject changed, not too soon for Irene.
‘Antinea is here,’ Unorna announced.
‘Slightly late with that announcement,’ said Irene.
The witch was disoriented and unfocused. Irene offered her a nip from her flask, but Unorna said she wasn’t thirsty.
Kate gave Unorna a précis of what had happened since she conked out.
The witch wasn’t happy about it. She was intent on saying something.
‘One of us is not to be trusted. One of us is not who she seems.’
That just hung there, annoying and ominous.
‘You can’t say that and not give names,’ said Irene. ‘Otherwise, it’s worse than useless.’
‘One of us is not to be trusted. One of us is not who she seems.’
‘It is a pleasure to meet you,’ Kate rattled off. ‘I hope we shall be the best of friends.’
Unorna did sound like Olympia. Expressionless. A speaking box, not a person.
‘None of us are to be trusted and none of us are who we seem,’ said Irene. ‘That’s who we are. It doesn’t mean we can’t trust each other.’
Kate was dubious. ‘Unorna, what does that mean?’
The witch was still disoriented. ‘I’ve walked pathways in dark,’ she said, speaking for herself again. ‘I walked for… a long time.’
‘It’s only been hours since you… fell asleep,’ said Kate.
‘For you. I’ve been to… well, somewhere in the dark. Somewhere purple. I’ve spoken with the shades of the departed. I was told… one of us is…’
‘…not to be trusted, not who she seems,’ said Irene. ‘We got the wire.’
‘Which shade? The Persian?’
Unorna shook her head. ‘Pretty girl,’ she said. ‘Wore a man’s hat.’
‘Trilby,’ said Irene.
Unorna frowned. She didn’t know the name.
‘One of the first Angels of Music,’ said Kate. ‘The Angel of Beauty.’
‘Yes,’ said Unorna. ‘Her. She sang. Not with a human voice. She told me to tell you… one of us is not to be trusted, one of us not who she seems.’
Kate shrugged.
‘Trilby wasn’t very bright,’ said Irene, putting it tactfully. ‘Lovely girl, of course… but weak-willed, just the sort to fall under the influence of a mastermind. I don’t see how death would make her smarter. Who knows what pull Antinea has with, ah, shades of the departed? If it were La Marmoset, I’d put more store by the message of doom. So far as I know, the Queen of Detectives isn’t dead.’
Unorna didn’t respond. She wasn’t all here yet. Had she left something of herself behind ‘somewhere in the dark’?
‘More to the point,’ Irene said, ‘can you conjure up magic keys?’
Unorna didn’t seem to hear that.
It didn’t matter. The cell door opened.
‘You have Olympia to thank,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She’s become self-winding… and can speak to locks. It’s remarkable what her clever fingers can do.’
Alraune and Thi Minh peeked into the cell.
Unorna seemed about to repeat Trilby’s message… but decided against it and kept quiet. Her wits were coming back. Good.
Thi Minh gestured, trotting as if on a horse, looking over her shoulder. She raised a dented trumpet to her mouth as if blowing an alarum. Irene gathered she meant something like ‘the British are coming, the British are coming’.
A knife flew out of the dark and pinned the trumpet to the wall.
VIII
IN THE CORRIDOR, Unorna leant heavily on Kate and gestured with her free hand. Kate felt pressure in her ears. Dead electric bulbs flared and burst into tiny shards.
Rollo wasn’t put off. He had another knife in his hand.
Unorna gestured again. Nothing. The witch was still woozy.
Kate couldn’t help but worry about the message she’d brought back from her trance. But there wasn’t time to puzzle it out.
Rollo raised the knife above his head, gripping the point. He was in no hurry.
Kate supposed Alraune could kiss the knife-thrower with poisoned lips… but it tended to take a week or two for her victims to waste away. They needed him downed well before that.
Mrs Eynsford Hill was knuckle-tapping the wall like a lunatic. Finally, she hit a section that sounded hollow as a drum. She poked the eyes of a plaster cherub and a door-sized panel slid open.
The English woman must have looked long and hard at Erik’s architectural plans, to keep them in her head. She stepped through the secret door.
Rollo threw his knife. Serpent-swift, Thi Minh somersaulted in mid-air and kicked the flying blade off course. It thunked into a wall. Rollo was astonished.
‘Into the labyrinth,’ urged Irene.
Kate and Alraune helped Unorna through.
‘Antinea will know where we are,’ said Unorna.
‘Who’s a little ray of sunshine then?’ said Irene, following quickly. ‘Good news never stops rolling off the presses.’
Kate looked back into the corridor.
Olympia marched on Rollo, arms swinging. The knife-thrower recoiled in superstitious terror. The doll punched him in the stomach, and he bent over double – all the wind gone out of him. Thi Minh bounced off two walls and the ceiling like a triple cushion shot in billiards, and brought all her weight down on the torturer’s head. He collapsed in a pained sprawl. The tiny acrobat tugged Rollo’s knife-filled coat up over his head, wrenching his arms, pricking him with his own blades. He groaned and bled.
All very satisfying, but it wouldn’t hold off the army of Atlantis for long.
The last of the Angels came into the secret passage. The panel slid shut behind them. Ro
llo’s shouts for help were muffled.
Mrs Eynsford Hill – who, Kate remembered, was not who she seemed – struck a lucifer on the wall and lit a torch she took from a sconce. Chemically treated rags burned steadily, giving off much light, some heat and a foul smell. The English woman guided the Angels through a narrow, surprisingly undusty and non-cobwebbed passage to a coffin-sized dumb waiter.
‘We have to go down,’ she said. ‘There are pulleys and levers.’
Irene went first.
Kate followed. Long seconds in the dark, confined as if buried, listening to the clanking of chains – not a pleasant experience. She imagined Erik posting himself around the building like a human pneumatique message.
In the basement, she waited as the others winched themselves down to the basement. Thi Minh and Olympia shared the lift, fit together like spoons in a case.
They had to stoop not to bash their heads on a vaulted ceiling. Mrs Eynsford Hill’s torch left scorchmarks on the brick. Firelight reflected in murky water. A gold face seemed to bob just under the surface. A mask. Not even Erik’s, but flotsam from the opera stores. Props and costumes floated all around. Items that looked like stone statues or metal armour were buoyant wood and paste.
This was how Kate envisioned Atlantis. A civilisation swamped.
Where they stood was once Erik’s private dock. The flood had risen and the platform was under cold, shallow water. A step or two the wrong way and a careless person might plunge in over their head. Kate wore sensible if scarcely fashionable boots which kept the water out – but not the painful chill. Irene complained her shoes and stockings were ruined and she’d probably lose a toe or two.
‘Better a toe than a head,’ said Alraune.
No one argued with the German.
When the lagoon was low, this was a strange pleasure-boating lake. Erik would punt a gondola (scavenged from a production of Ponchielli’s Venice-set La Gioconda) silently across still water to the house he’d hidden beneath the Palais Garnier when he was helping build the place. His own black chapel was here, a temple to his art.
An eerie wailing-whining came from all around.
‘What in Hackensack is that?’ asked Irene.
‘It’s his organ,’ Kate said. ‘Water pushing air through the pipes. The flood won’t have done it any good.’
‘It doesn’t sound that much worse than Don Juan Triumphant,’ said Irene.
Erik had been composing his oratorio for decades. From what Kate had heard, it was decidedly too avant-garde even for avant-gardistes. The piece sounded like bombs going off in a seal colony. Perhaps the ‘mad genius’ school of fortissimo dissonance would have a vogue in the wake of the continental war Antinea was sure to foment… if anyone with ears was left at the end of it.
‘I suppose you don’t like music from this century,’ Alraune said to Irene. ‘Mahler, Schönberg, Strauss.’
‘I love Strauss,’ said Irene. ‘Those dear little waltzes.’
‘Richard Strauss.’
‘Oh, him. Teutonic noise-maker. Tunes you can’t hum.’
The German shook her head and didn’t take the bait. Had Erik been waiting for Angels who understood his music? Alraune had sung (and danced) Richard Strauss’s Salome in Berlin – her audition piece for the Opera Ghost Agency. A person of a cattier nature might suggest she’d forgotten to stop playing the role when the curtain rang down. She was plainly not to be trusted.
Kate was now inclined to agree with Irene about Unorna’s message from beyond. It was worse than useless. Antinea herself couldn’t have done more to sew doubts among the Angels just as they needed to rely on each other.
So, was Unorna – or Trilby! – she who was not to be trusted? In which case, the pronouncement could be safely ignored.
‘We shan’t be able to get out through the sewers,’ said Mrs Eynsford Hill. ‘The water’s too high. All the tunnels are flooded. We’ll have to go up again. One of Erik’s secret stairways is still passable.’
‘How do you know which one?’ Kate asked.
‘Them rats,’ said Mrs Eynsford Hill, nodding at a wriggling mass of the beasts. ‘You can tell a lot from a rat, you can. Rats is clever, rats is quick…’
She was doing someone else’s voice now. Someone who had better acquaintance with vermin.
Squeaking rats paddled towards a cave-like aperture, then scurried up steps inside.
‘Rats are also small,’ said Irene. ‘We can’t squeeze up drainpipes.’
Thi Minh made a ‘speak for yourself’ face. How could anyone know if she was who she seemed and to be trusted?
‘That’s no drainpipe, as you very well know,’ said Mrs Eynsford Hill.
Kate had spent less of her time as an Angel in the opera house than the others. She had stayed in Madame Mandelip’s Hôpital des Poupées, another of Erik’s bolthole-cum-outposts. But she knew where the staircase lead.
Up to a mirror.
IX
DEAR OLD DRESSING Room 313 seemed smaller than Irene remembered. They had to hold their breaths to walk around each other.
At least she could change out of her wet shoes and stockings. And, while she was at it, the rest of her clothes. The day had not been kind to her ensemble.
‘Some of Carlotta’s dresses are still here,’ said Alraune. ‘They might fit you.’
‘Ha ha,’ Irene responded mirthlessly. ‘Will you dress as Salome again? I heard that during the dance audiences begged you to put the veils back on again.’
‘Angels,’ rebuked Kate – who was being sensible.
‘We’re great pals, really,’ said Irene, hugging the bony German girl, running fingers through her huge tangle of strangely scented hair. ‘Darling, what do you use for shampoo? Some sort of healthy root?’
Alraune smiled at her.
‘I shall keep my secrets,’ she said.
Everyone except Kate and Olympia took the opportunity to change. Elizabeth came out from behind the dressing screen in an impractically chic pink dress with matching giant hat. A huge silk rosebud on her chest looked like an elaborate wound.
Unorna slipped into a monk’s habit with voluminous hood and sleeves. Thi Minh put on a sailor suit and straw hat. Alraune found a tailored jacket and skirt which suited her hipless, breastless shape. A knitted hat tidied away her hair and accentuated her plucked eyebrows.
Irene put on male evening dress, complete with red silk-lined black cloak, white gloves and top hat. The shoes were loose, but otherwise she was pleased.
Kate whistled, charitably.
‘Find a mask and you could be a new Phantom,’ she said.
‘I wouldn’t want to seem to be something I am not,’ Irene responded.
Kate pursed her lips. None of the others picked up on it.
While the others dressed, Elizabeth wrote several pages of notes – with diagrams.
‘She’s set down what she saw of the Atlantean campaign plans,’ said Kate. ‘Antinea doesn’t have that many supporters yet. Assolant hasn’t got the whole army behind him. But he is holding strategic points. He’s got the Fellowship of the Frog to surge up from beneath the waters. Grumbling malcontents will rally to the cause if it means an end to the Republic. Then, Antinea or Countess de Cagliostro or whoever she is can declare herself saviour of the country. She might as well call herself Joan of Arc Reborn or Betty Bonaparte and declare herself Empress-Queen-Pope of New Atlantis and settle in for a nice long tyrannical reign.’
‘Can she be stopped?’
‘If these papers get into the right hands,’ said Kate, picking them up.
‘How can we manage that? We’re trapped in the walls of this house… like lady rats.’
Alraune spoke up. ‘There’s a way down from the roof. Erik often uses it.’
Irene was not afraid of heights, but did have a teensy-tiny fear of falling from them. Still, no one else in the room expressed qualms so she had to go along with it. Every gal for herself wasn’t a slogan which would pass with Kate Reed.
&n
bsp; ‘The roof is patrolled,’ Irene pointed out.
‘They won’t be expecting us,’ said Alraune, holding up one of Erik’s lassos.
‘We’ll go up in small parties,’ said Elizabeth. ‘To attract less attention. If we look as if we’re New Atlanteans and not hunted women, we should pass. I take it we all know the way to the roof?’
Everyone did.
Elizabeth, Unorna and Olympia went first.
‘You look very handsome in tails,’ said Alraune, flirting.
‘Like your distinguished old rogue of a grandfather, perhaps,’ said Irene.
Alraune was quiet. ‘I don’t have family… not like that.’
‘You have family here,’ said Irene. ‘If not sisters, then aunts.’
Whatever the German girl had worked on women too. Irene wanted to make Alraune feel better, even though she wasn’t sure she liked her. The strange creature was attractive – devilishly attractive. Not what was expected of an Angel, perhaps.
‘It’s what’s special about the Agency,’ said Kate. ‘We don’t just work together.’
Was the Irish woman broody? Earlier, she’d almost gone misty about the children she hadn’t had.
Motherless Mandrake, meet Childless Angel of Truth… let’s see how you get on.
Alraune squeezed Kate’s hand. Then, the German girl left with Thi Minh.
‘Interesting Angel, that,’ said Irene.
Kate threw a cushion at her. Viciously.
Irene laughed at the unexpected attack. Kate’s eyes sparkled behind her cheaters – not with humour, but the beginnings of tears.
‘You can’t help liking her, in spite of everything.’
‘It’s her musk. Be careful of feelings you can’t help, Katie.’
Irene tossed the cushion back. It flew high. Kate reached for it, but missed.
The cushion struck a closet-catch and a door fell open. A slender white arm flopped out. A hand slapped the floor.
Kate quickly got over the shock. Irene’s heart hammered.
Between them, they hauled the body – the surprisingly heavy body – out of the wardrobe. A woman in a ballet leotard, folded up to fit into the space.