We was all struck sort of dumb by her tirade, I think, because not one of us even raised a finger to interrupt until she was well finished. I don’t know if what she said bounced off the Arcade girls or if it sank in—but I heard every word. Each one was like a stone dropped in me, and they rang louder in my head than that borglum’s knocking. I heard also the creak from the Singer as Priya stole a glance at me. She hadn’t been stomping, because it would have put the machine through the deck, but something about her gingerly footsteps seemed a little more fluid and a little less like she’d been gritting her teeth as she took every one.
I thought about Da taking care of Ma when her abscessed teeth went bad—the time she survived the fevers, and the time after when she didn’t. I thought about her sewing up his trousers until I was old enough to take it over, even though she hated sewing.
I hoped, wherever they was, that they was together.
Hypatia tossed her long, plaster-coated hair. All the strands had escaped her fancy coif and was draggled down, and she was still a fine-looking woman. I wondered what I was willing to pay, if she could tell me that everything was all right, and was going to be all right, and that I might see my parents again. I wondered if I would have Mrs. Horner’s strength of character if I lost Priya and somebody offered me the certainty that I could just reach out one more time and say good-bye.
Whether that certainty was a real thing, or an illusion.
I thought about the spider legs built into their corsets, and Hypatia speaking in tongues. I was still musing on that, and missed an exchange or two, but whatever had been said I came back into the conversation as Mrs. Horner shook her head and said, with some asperity, “Also, I know what you want, and you’re not going to find it here.”
“Wait,” I said. “What do they want?”
I swear to you, all four of them—Priya included—rolled their eyes at me as if I was the biggest lummox in the West.
“They want the illusions,” Priya said, before anybody else could answer. “That’s why they tried to guess the password.”
“My secrets,” Mrs. Horner agreed. “Mr. Horner’s secrets. You know, Hypatia, I would have just taken you on as an apprentice myself, after Mr. Horner died. You could have just asked. In fact, I’ll give you some free advice right now.
“Dispense with the theatrics. When you have a stunning effect, simple is better.” She laughed again, this time a merry, ladylike chiming. “You’re much more convincing when you just talk, young lady. Why, you have Miss Memery here half-convinced, and you’re not even aiming your guns at her.”
My belly felt kicked. She was right. Was I that pathetic?
And then it felt kicked again, I realized, because I wanted to believe. And maybe Mrs. Horner was wrong, after all. She had reasons to hate Miss Arcade senior, it sounded like, and people have a tendency not to believe anything people they hate tell them, whether there’s evidence or no.
So what I had to decide was, did I believe her?
* * *
Maybe it weren’t on a scale with collapsing hotels, crypto-whatevers, or con artists, but for me the crowning surprise of the evening was waiting for us in the dining room, and to be honest it startled me more than the borglum. Because my old friend Constable Waterson hailed us as soon as we stepped through the door.
He was carrying a hurricane lamp in one hand, and between it and the lights on the Singer we could see pretty clearly. Other than the tables, the dining room was largely undamaged. But it was dark, and I wondered if somebody had had the sense to cut electricity to the hotel to prevent the possibility of fires.
I’d been in a house fire once. My chest clenched up like a fist squeezing the juice out of my heart just thinking on that, and I decided that I weren’t gonna ponder it right now. Especially as Constable Waterson came forward, and plucked his cap off his thinning light brown hair, and said, “I’m here to get you ladies out,” with patent relief in his voice.
The Arcade sisters looked like they was about to take him up on it, too. And Priya might have been right behind them, because she shot me a glare when I put myself forward and said, “I think we solved those murders from a few years back, Constable.”
You ever want to see a man go from concerned rescuer to copper star in the shake of a lamb’s tail, all you got to do is signalize to an officer of the courts you got a little evidence to stir in and sweeten him. He didn’t quite whip out a steno pad and lick his pencil, but he got a real concerted look between the eyebrows.
I didn’t wait for him to ask. “Old Boston brought back a borglum from Anchorage, in that steamer trunk of his, and the thing was right . . .”
“. . . steamed?” Priya said.
And we all stared.
“Sorry,” she said, and the Singer emitted an embarrassed whisper of vapor as she shifted her weight—but her white teeth winked in her smile.
Constable Waterson sighed through his teeth, and I reckoned he was used to difficult witnesses. And he weren’t dumb. He made the connection right off.
He said, “You’re telling me that all this was caused by one critter that by rights should be in a hard-rock gold mine somewhere up in Alaska, and it . . . murdered a bunch of people down here four years back and it’s been hanging around the Riverside ever since, waiting for I don’t know what, and now something has finally set it off and it’s wreaking havoc again?”
Everybody was looking at me—even Mrs. Horner—so I swallowed hard and said, “Yep. That’s what we think, pretty much exactly.”
“Then how come it ain’t murdered all of you?”
“I reckon it ain’t as mad at us as it was at Old Boston. Hell, maybe it saw the Misses Arcade’s spirit-talking act and hoped that they would bring it home.”
Hypatia frowned over her shoulder at me but didn’t say anything. Hilaria put a small, narrow hand on her shoulder, though, and they shared another one of those silent glances. Hell, from the looks they was giving each other, maybe they was sisters.
“Well,” said Waterson, in the voice of someone turning words over and over in his head, polishing them, like, until he knew where they fit together to get set into a sentence, and just how they might shine. “We should evacuate you ladies immediately and send for a professional to deal with this critter.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” Priya said, draping her polished politeness over the intonations that made me probably the only person in the room who would realize it was her equivalent of “The hell you say,” “and also begging your indulgences. But it seems to me that if we have an opportunity to correct the problem, and the, er, critter is reaching out to us, then it is our responsibility to take care of the matter. Also, we’re pretty sure it’s in the basement.”
He looked at her, wrapped in the Singer’s armored carapace. And he looked at me. And he looked, one by one, at Mrs. Horner and the Arcade sisters. I imagined he was seeing a passel of ladies he felt he ought to gallant. But I remembered from the unpleasantness of the previous year that while he was a by-the-book sort, he was also not above leaving a warning lying around where somebody in some kind of trouble they didn’t deserve might find it useful.
“You can’t expect me to let you lot go down there unescorted.”
“Concerned about the damage to the hotel, Constable?” I teased.
“I’m sure whoever they’re paying their premiums to in Hartford can afford it.” He tipped his hat.
I weren’t wrong; there was a personality in there after all.
* * *
Waterson knew where the stairs were, and we went down them like a pantomime of actors in a motion picture about a haunted house. The constable insisted on going first, because he had notions about chivalry and propriety and the obligations of an officer of the law. Priya in the Singer probably should have been second, because she was the toughest in a fight when kitted out that way, but because of the hazard of her cracking the steps and tumbling through we made her go last. (The stairs complained something ferocious, but h
eld. Three cheers for good oak, designed to take the weight of barrels of wine and beer and sides of beef and hundredweights of flour and taters and whatever else it takes to keep a hotel dining room in provision and operating at efficiency.)
This time I remembered to take out my gun, which might not have presented the friendliest appearance, so it was probably a mistake. But it made me feel better. I hid it in my skirt and held on to the splintery board stair rail with the left hand. I caught myself trying to tiptoe, which was about as sensible as hanging sheets to dry in a dust storm, as Ma used to say, considering the noise our expedition was generating in its attempt upon the southern polar regions of the Rain City Riverside Hotel.
I expected a dusty and low-ceilinged cellar with thick joists made of raw lumber—whole trees with the bark still on, perhaps. I was part right; the joists were whole trees, but peeled and planed smooth, and flattened on top under the sprung floors, which explained why they’d shrugged off the weight of the Singer. But they was high—high as the ceilings on the first floor, at least—and the cellar was spotless. The supports were vaulted and mortared, but the foundation itself was fieldstone laid dry and solid. I could see places here and there where it had been repaired over the years, because drystone will settle, but it looked like the masons had done a first-rate job and there was barely a fingernail width between most of those irregular, undressed stones and their neighbors.
A locked, ironbound oaken door must have led to the wine cellar, and we decided to leave that one for last, in case we ain’t found nothing elsewheres. We fanned out across the floor then, not too far apart because the constable, Mrs. Horner, and Priya in the Singer had all our lights. Hypatia and Hilaria stuck side by side in between Priya and Waterson, as far from Mrs. Horner as they could get while still being in the room.
They was still not too sanguine about this whole basement idea but had given up letting us know it. I picked the spot between Priya and Mrs. Horner for me, though I couldn’t decide what to do about going over close to Priya. One part of me wanted to fall into her arms and snivel, and another part wanted to make her grovel for that wife crack, and those two parts was going at it hammer and tongs under my breastbone while I was theoretically keeping an eye peeled for the borglum.
Hypatia was the one who found the gap in the floorboards overhead where he’d plunged through. The hole had looked bottomless from above. Now we stood right under it and watched the streetlight shine in through the ruined door and illuminate the splintered wood edges. I wondered if there had been a hole to nowhere when the borglum dropped, or if it had just been a trick of the light and the mind.
Hypatia glanced around, found nothing—not even any footprints in the dust, because there was no dust to be found. She sighed and pushed her straggled hair back, turning slowly.
“Hello, Mr. Knocker?” she called, in a clear polite voice that suddenly had a little bit of a New York accent. “We’d like to have a word with you, if you have a moment.”
Well. That was one way of handling it. Pity it didn’t get no response at all. She tried again, and the silence—well, it weren’t quite deafening, because between all the feet tramping around and the six of us breathing and the Singer making its soft mechanical resting noises, my ears weren’t ringing so’s I’d notice. But the silence was . . . listening. Tense, like. Reaching.
I suppose I should have expected what happened next, given how Priya was still at a simmer a few degrees hotter than the boiler on the Singer. And how little she liked Miss Hypatia Arcade.
She huffed like a carriage horse that has just about had it with a driver who don’t know his stuff, and put her head down inside the Singer’s harness like that same horse leaning into the collar. And she slid her left hand out of the leather harness that made the machine move around her and with her, reached across her body inside the cage of the Singer, and grabbed a cord that hangs to the right of the operator’s head and a little above, out of line of sight and not long enough to bang you in the head when you’re moving around.
All of a sudden, I knew what she was planning. And I even thought I knew why. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but I didn’t see any way I could stop her. I might have yelled, but the expression on her face was mule going up a steep skid with a big ol’ log, and getting in the way of that will only get you trampled.
The Singer had a steam whistle on it, though I’d never had call to wind it up myself, especially given how sore my hearing got after being too close to that dynamite that one time. The sewing machine was built for factories and heavy industrial work—Madame Damnable had just kept it around as a joke. A joke that had saved my life, and probably hers, and who knew how many others’?—and being able to make a loud noise is for safety, under those conditions.
Priya shouted, “Cover your ears!” just as I was thinking a factory whistle ain’t too far off from a mine whistle, is it?
I covered my ears.
She hit that factory whistle, and reader, the top of my skull about lit up like the nose on the lumberjack at the fair when a big man swings the HOW STRONG ARE YOU? mallet. Dust filtered between the joists and floor planks, and didn’t show a whit among the plaster in all our hair.
For what felt like a dog’s age, nothing happened. Then a tremendous knocking sounded—five big raps, sharp enough I swear the foundation shifted. And the knocker appeared, just as before—leaning on his too-big pickaxe, with his crushed-up cap pulled down over his bushy eyebrows.
He did not look pleased.
“Holy!” Constable Waterson ejaculated. The rest of us having seen it before, we contented ourselves with some sharp intakes of breath here and there, though it seemed to me that the beams from the Singer’s work lights may have trembled a little.
I ain’t sure what was different this time, unless it was that we was on his turf and he felt cornered, or that the constable was with us and he was a man—but he didn’t stand there and lean on his tool like he had before. Instead, twirling that pickaxe around his fingers like a Celestial’s chopstick, the borglum advanced.
Mrs. Horner, bless her heart, stepped in hard with her electric torch held up like a police baton, as if that was going to do anything. It was brave alright, but a rolled sheetmetal tube versus a pick weren’t no fair fight, and we all knew it. I was on the other side of Priya and the constable was on the other side of me, and there was no way either one of us could have gotten to her in time. That didn’t stop me from lunging after her, mind—but my fingertips just about brushed her black worsted sleeve and she slipped past.
It felt like it was all slipping past. This didn’t have to be a massacre. I was figuring it out. I could feel myself figuring it out. And I wasn’t going to have time to make sense of it before we all got killed.
The knocker swung. Mrs. Horner stepped aside like a matador and actually managed to parry him. Her torch lens exploded in a shower of sparks and shards. I did something crowningly useful, like shouting, “No!”
“Get out, you idiots!” Mrs. Horner shouted. She stepped in again, the torch just a mangled club now. It wouldn’t take another blow, even a glancing one. She had decided the borglum was unfriendly, and she was buying us time. And she was going to get killed for it, too, because she was an old lady with a flashlight and the borglum was a mass murderer with a pickaxe.
She was going to get killed for it. Right up until Hilaria, who was closest to her, jumped forward, rose up suddenly supported on twelve telescoping spider legs about an inch thick and longer than I was tall, grabbed Mrs. Horner around the waist, and skittered backward ten feet without turning, while Mrs. Horner kicked and called her names. She thrashed some, too, but by then Hilaria had her wrapped up in spider legs as well as her own arms, and I knowed from my own rescue how strong them things was.
The knocker ran forward, and I could about see the smoke curling out between the hair tufting from his ears. Hypatia shrieked—terror? A warning? I couldn’t make out the words in it—and the constable used some words ladies ain’t supp
osed to know, because some or all of us was fouling his shot and he weren’t too happy about it.
It was Priya in the Singer went to meet that borglum. She moved before he could get to Mrs. Horner and Hilaria. I missed my grab at her, too, because I’d gone after Mrs. Horner and was out of position and also it was shaping up to be that sort of an afternoon, weren’t it?
Damn it all to East St. Louis, this weren’t meant to be a fight. This weren’t supposed to be a fight.
“Stop it!” I shouted after her, but maybe she didn’t hear me over the clank and hiss of the rising pressure, the shuttle of the pistons in their guides. Maybe she didn’t hear me, and maybe she decided not to listen. “Priya, I beg you, stop.”
The borglum whisked back his pickaxe and swung. I jerked my head away, eyes flinching shut as if the blow were aimed at my own face. I didn’t see what happened, but I heard the whang of metal on metal as Priya blocked the blow with the Singer’s arm.
I looked back in time to see that it staggered her. She reeled back inside a ton of metal, then caught herself before she could totter into us. She braced, dropping one knee and a hand, raising the other inside the metal gauntlet. What did she think she was going to do, shoot pins at the thing?
I still had my revolver in my hand. I spun the cylinder away from the empty chamber. Then I leveled it, braced it across the butt with my other hand, and stared through the iron sight at the blur of the little man as he wheeled and whizzed his pickaxe around so fast it sang like a lariat in his hand. I had a bead, if not the drop, and I eased my finger behind the guard and onto the trigger like I was sifting the last bit of powder into a priming charge.
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