Thale watched her retreating figure while toying idly with an asparagus stalk soused in melted butter.
“Whence comest thou, Beauty? Heaven, or the Abyss?” he quoted. “My daughter is a very fine young lady, do you not think so, Richmond? She has been the muse to many a poet. Monsieur Baudelaire was smitten in his day. And I believe Mr Swinburne is currently most dreadfully in love with her. There is certainly competition for my Camilla’s favour.” His words dropped like small stones into the pool of silence.
*
Leaving that company was like coming out into fresh air from a closed room. Richmond changed into his working suit and then marched up the curved staircase. But when he reached the door to the Picture Gallery he was not reckless enough to rush in; he halted outside and put one ear to the oak.
There was no sound from within.
Very softly, Richmond placed his lamp down and eased the door open. The Gallery was not entirely in darkness: ranks of mullioned windows to his right admitted a wave of moonlight. The wall on his left appeared to be hung with paintings, but he couldn’t see far because the long cloister was barred by a multitude of naked tree-branches jammed in between floor and ceiling, their jagged snags piercing the broken panes of glass. The whole space was transformed into a crosshatched mess of moonlight and grey wood and black shadow that could not be deciphered by the human eye. An acrid smell tainted the air.
Richmond took one step into the room. The bare floorboards were polished where they were not besmirched with huge white splashes of bird-mess, or hidden under drifts of broken twigs. He looked at the first picture on the wall: an oil-portrait of Thale, depicted as an emperor robed and crowned.
There was the crunch of movement deep within the Gallery. Richmond started and peered down the hall. The sound was repeated, getting louder; the noise of some large body moving from branch to branch, flapping heavy wings, shoving though brittle barriers of dead twigs – getting much closer. Richmond blinked. Just as something suddenly emerged from the tangle and swooped shrieking upon him, he lunged backwards and threw the door shut. A solid weight thudded against the wood, scratching and scuffling, but though Richmond gripped the doorknob tightly there was no attempt made on that from the other side.
Breathing heavily, he retreated a couple of steps from the door. He had received a blurred glimpse as he’d fled of a fanged female face, withered breasts and outstretched crow-wings. He pressed his hands to his temples.
“That made you jump, I see,” said a voice behind him. “So you are not entirely a plaster saint.”
Richmond turned and found Aldones smirking at him. The personal secretary had changed out of his dinner garb and now wore a yellow silk dressing gown, beneath which his legs were bare but for a pair of Turkish slippers. “You were looking for me?” Richmond said.
“Of course. Come with me.” Aldones crooked a finger playfully and then saw Richmond’s face grow blank and masklike. “I can show you the Library,” he explained.
Richmond followed him along the passage to a door he had not previously entered.
“This is my bedchamber,” Aldones murmured. “I'm sure you'd have got round to it sooner or later. The Sebastian Room, on your little list.”
The room’s appellation was immediately apparent: the chamber, notable as it was for the huge four-poster bed and a central iron chandelier on a massive chain, was dominated by a painting of the martyrdom of St Sebastian, twice as large as life. The woeful ecstasy upon the youth’s face and the arrow-shafts jutting from his bloody flesh had been painted with loving detail.
“A charming picture, don’t you think?”
“If you say so,” Richmond replied. “Most people would find it difficult to sleep in the same room as that.”
“I don’t sleep here,” Aldones sniggered. “Nor anywhere in this house – I wouldn’t dare. After a few weeks you find you don’t need it. I have a pipeful every so often in the Smoking Room and that suffices. Now – you will want to be over here.” So saying, he went round the side of the bed and pulled away a small but heavy glass table from next to the headboard. Lifting the drape he disclosed a little door about twelve inches high set into the wall. There was a tiny gold key in the lock. “There,” he announced.
Richmond knelt before the door. He could only grip the key between thumb and one finger, but it turned easily.
“Has this always been a door to the Library?” he asked. Through the tiny archway he could make out a large room lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Firelight from some unseen source played on morocco-bound spines and gilt lettering. A cast-iron spiral staircase was just visible in one corner, rising up to a balcony above.
“No, it was a little cupboard for wine bottles when I first came here,” Aldones said.
Richmond pressed himself flatter against the floor and chanced pushing one arm into the room. His fingers just brushed the edge of the Persian carpet, but it was clear that his shoulders couldn’t follow though that small entrance.
“No way in,” he muttered, brushing the dust from his clothes as he stood again. He turned. The other man was seated upon the glass table, dressing-gown spread wide.
“Eat me,” Aldones suggested.
Richmond pulled in a sharp breath. “I think not,” he said coolly. He produced his pocket-watch, flipped it open, then reset one of the dials and walked away.
Aldones leapt to his feet, pursued him across the room and grabbed his arm just as he reached the door. “You wait one moment,” he hissed. His face was creased with spite. “Now sir, do get it into your head that this house is not a place for innocents. You, with your little cloud of sanctity – do you think you’re safe? Do you think you’ll emerge unscathed? You are wading through a swamp, and any step now it will close over your head.”
Richmond stared back at him, not flinching from the face thrust within inches of his own.
“You don’t have a clue, do you?” Aldones sneered. “You don’t know where you are. You think you’re mapping this place, but you haven’t the faintest idea. This is his. And he has lost his grip: he isn’t in control any more. What do you think will happen if you finish? He’s not going to get to his feet and reclaim the territory! Are you going to come back every month and find it for him all over again? His nerve is gone – his heart is not in it. After all these years, his grip is failing. Have you seen the things that are coming out into the light? Do you know that after midnight the Jabberwock stalks these corridors? And in the Roman Room something flounders across the floor in the dark and wails Thale’s secrets? I have heard it. They are his ghosts. He is too old. He cannot cope. He should be lifted of the burden – and replaced.”
Aldones drew back. His eyes were heavy-lidded. Slowly his grip on Richmond’s arm loosened. “You, he will use,” he muttered. “He is clinging to his power, and he is using you, but he will not admit how much he needs you. He will break you to prove he is still the master here.”
Richmond turned away and stepped through the door. As it swung shut behind him he heard Aldones’ last words: “No one can leave this place untainted.”
He walked slowly back down the dark passage to the staircase, and from there into more familiar territory. His own room was much as he had left it, except that it had been tidied in his absence. On the pillow was a small book: One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, with hand-coloured illustrations. Richmond closed the volume, laid it aside and went to stare out of the window. The moon glared down over the darkened gardens, turning the still waters of the lake to glass. It was at the absolute peak of fullness, round as an orange, just as it had been on the previous night.
He pushed open the window and leaned out, craning his neck to see the house above and to either side of him. Here at the back, the house was less uniform; he could dimly make out various architectural protrusions. To his left – a good distance away, almost at the far end of the building – the moonlight glinted upon a glass extension that jutted out into the kitchen garden. This, he guessed
, was the missing Conservatory.
Richmond considered seizing this unexpected opportunity and climbing out through the window to come directly at his goal, but thought better of it. Thale was unlikely to be pleased if he established a route that involved clambering out of the building and through the shrubbery after dark. He shrugged and closed the window.
He woke in the small hours, hearing outside his door something huge scrape and shuffle its way down the panelled corridor, whining to itself and scratching at the woodwork. The stink of carrion filtered into the bedroom. Richmond felt for the pistol under his pillow and lay very still until the noises died away.
*
On his second day of work at Lithly House, Richmond established the location of the rest of the known rooms. These included the Steam Room – a gallery occupied almost to the walls by the hissing black bulk of a huge locomotive engine, tank still hot and firebox still stoked, but with no visible doorway in the room large enough to have afforded entrance to such a behemoth. And the Ebony Bedchamber, which was full of flies; and the Parisian Bedchamber, which housed a terribly strange bed; and the Toy Room, which was filled with grinning, twitching, misshapen marionettes. And the Chapel, whose designer in a fit of ecumenical fervour had included not only an altar to the crucified Christ, but also to the dismembered Osiris, the castrated Attis, the decapitated Orpheus, the hanged Wotan and the disembowelled Prometheus. He mapped the Nile Study, wallpapered entirely in crocodile-skin; the Smoking Room, filled with a haze of opium; the Whistling Room, which suffered from an alarming defect in the stonework; and the Ballroom, which was empty of everything but echoes.
He gained access to the bottom of both the light-wells, just to be thorough. In one, dry and sandy, there was rooted a leafless tree as tall as himself, carved from a single seamless piece of ivory. In the other a fountain splashed among mossy rocks. He might have thought the liquid was water had not the acrid smell informed him that it was urine.
He inspected the servants’ quarters and the kitchens, whose fittings turned out to be entirely conventional, and then under Naotalba’s supervision he surveyed the cellars – whose fittings, although not at all conventional, were not the slightest surprise to him by this point. The stable layout of both areas informed him that they were regularly used.
Some time after his luncheon of ox-tongue sandwiches, Richmond entered the Egyptian Bedchamber. The room was filled with light from the south-facing windows and a cool afternoon silence had settled upon the house. Richmond reset his watch and then glanced at the fittings, but his interest was taken by the murals painted upon the walls: stylised in the Egyptian manner, they depicted ranks of vassals presenting their offerings to an enthroned woman. Richmond spotted the cartouche over the queen’s head and idly stepped closer to read the hieroglyphics.
“Nitocris,” he murmured to himself. “Of course.” At that moment his foot caught on something. He bent to pick it up. A twelve-foot length of chain dangled from his hand, one end attached to an empty leather collar, the other shackled to the foot of the bed.
He was still staring at it when Camilla purred, “You go hunting through the Labyrinth, Theseus. Do you have a clue to guide you?”
He turned. The four-poster bed, which he had barely registered, was completely enclosed by tulle hangings. But the light was shining through the thin material and within the enclosure he could now make out the darker form of his questioner. He approached the foot of the bed slowly and she stepped forward to meet him.
“Do you know what waits at the heart of the Labyrinth?” she asked. She stood with her arms raised to the posts at either side. Her breath stirred the silk curtain between them. He could see through the translucent cloth that she was naked, and he didn’t answer.
“In the heart of the Labyrinth, which is the soul,” she murmured, drawing back the curtain with a languid movement, “is the beast. Royal, yet a monster. The devourer. Inhuman. The source of all fear and all power, trapped. That is why we build the maze in the first place: for fear that the beast might rampage free.”
She paused, watching him to see what his reaction to her might be. Her creamy skin seemed to glow against the dark gloss of her unbound hair.
“Camilla,” he said, as if trying the name out. His gaze skidded up her lush body, finally resting on her face.
“Where is your beast?” she asked. “You keep it well hidden. See, I offer it a new landscape to roam, if only it would show itself.”
“It is Lithly House that I have been engaged to explore,” Richmond reminded her.
“Ah. In my Father’s house are many mansions. How true.”
Richmond’s spectacles glinted. “Tell me, where is the heart of his Labyrinth?”
She smiled slowly, eyes glittering under long dark lashes. “The Library,” she whispered.
“Ah.”
“Will you dare face the Minotaur there?”
“I am not afraid of Thale’s beast,” he replied mildly. “Nor yours.” He had neither flinched from her nor made any move toward her, and his face was calm. Something in that expression made her smile fade.
“You’re a strange man,” she whispered.
“What,” he asked, “is your basis for comparison?”
She pulled back slightly, lips pursed, and was silent.
“If you'll excuse me?”
He got halfway across the room before she said in a low voice, “My sister…”
This brought him to a halt. He looked back.
She hadn’t moved. “My sister. She is in one of the lost rooms. Which ones have you still left to find?”
He consulted his papers, needlessly. “The Library, Nursery, Elizabethan Bedchamber, Conservatory, Mirror Room and Pomegranate Bedchamber. I have located all the others.”
“The Pomegranate Chamber: that is hers. The night my father went out hunting, he was displeased with Cassilda and sent her without supper to her room. He instructed her not to come out until he fetched her.” Camilla’s eyes looked like black pits in the white mask of her face. “We have not seen her in weeks. He was ashamed to tell you.”
Richmond blinked. “Will she still be alive?”
“That depends whether she disobeyed him and left her room, and what others she might have access to. There was brandy in the Library, as I remember.”
“I see.”
Camilla’s hardened mouth pulled creases in her face. “You should look at your list and ask yourself: ‘Why these rooms? Why did he lose these ones first?’ They are not random. The Elizabethan Bedchamber was our mother’s. I can guess some of the rest… Did you know that he smashed all the mirrors in his own room after his accident? Mr Richmond, he does not desire you to succeed in your task. Whatever he says to you, he wanted to lose those rooms. He does not want them back. He does not care if Cassilda is dead.” With those words she dragged the curtain back around herself and the bed, the rings rattling like bones against the pole.
“Thank you,” Richmond said as he turned to the door. “I think you have after all, my Ariadne, given me the clue I needed to find the way.”
*
He made his way to the Palm Bathroom on the second floor. It had seemed an unremarkable chamber when he’d first catalogued it: tiled in white with a sunken marble bath and brass fittings, the air smelling faintly of carbolic soap. A statue of Priapus was the only ornamentation except for the half-dozen palm-trees that gave it its name, standing about in glazed pots, their heads bowed against the ceiling. But set into the white floor-tiles were pale green ones that made up the spiralling shape of a Troy maze.
He had to drag some of the palms aside in order to reveal the entire pattern. Wiping his hands on a towel, he trod the winding path into the centre. There he paused. No noticeable alteration had occurred in the room. Slowly he paced his way out to the edge again, where he was directly facing the door to the bathroom. Two steps took him to it and he laid his hand upon the porcelain doorknob, glancing back around him. Nothing had changed. He pulled the door o
pen.
There was no corridor outside the room, only a void of total blackness – and in the distance the doorway into some further room, through which light was streaming. A figure was silhouetted in that doorway. Richmond pulled the pistol from inside his jacket and stepped forward into the dark passage.
Both doors swung shut simultaneously and at once he was plunged into absolute darkness. He crouched and froze, ears straining. He could hear nothing but the rustle of his own clothes. A smooth, hard surface, very cold to the touch, was beneath his feet and his fingertips. No hint of any light reached his eyes; he might as well have been blind. No breeze stirred against his cheek, no scent came to his nostrils. Nothing told him he was not entirely alone.
At last Richmond laid down the pistol at his feet – it chinked audibly, though he was trying to be soundless – and felt around in his jacket pockets, to retrieve the stub of a candle and a box of lucifers. He struck a match and light erupted in the room; without looking about him he lit the candle.
He hung in the void. Around him candle flames burned like stars. He looked down and stared into his own pale face; he looked about him and a hundred Richmonds gaped back, light flashing from their spectacles. He stood up; an upside-down Richmond hung from his soles. All the other Richmonds were paired too, and they stood as he did and spun around as he did in perfect silent synchrony, an infinite darkening series of candle-bearers receded on every side into blackness. He shut his eyes and tried to reclaim himself.
He was in a room made entirely from mirrors. What the shape of that room might be he couldn’t guess. The only light source was his candle and its glimmering reflections. He couldn’t even see the ground he stood on; that was a transparent skin over the crawling depths of infinity. Richmond put away his gun, fished out the fob-watch, and reset it. All around him the reflections aped his motions. He raised his candle and they joined him a silent toast. He turned about and they spun like moons.
The Private Life of Elder Things Page 22