The door was locked now, from the inside, and Svenson reached in carefully and opened it. He stepped into the darkened room and closed the glass door behind him. In the moonlight he could see a desk and long walls completely fitted with bookshelves. He fumbled a match from his pocket, struck it on his nail and located a candle in an old copper holder on a side bookshelf. With this much light, he carefully went through each drawer of the desk, but at the end all he knew was that Lord Tarr had a keen interest in medicine, and next to none in his estate. For the single ledger—completely written in what Svenson assumed was his overseer’s hand—detailing Lord Tarr’s business, there were many, many notebooks and banded stacks of receipts from different physicians. Svenson had seen this enough before to realize that the Lord’s own ebbing health had been itself a pursuit of pleasure beyond any particular restorative or cure—indeed, the man seemed to record the failures with as much satisfaction in his journal. This was a neat volume Svenson had found in the top drawer, under another larger ledger of receipts for potions and procedures. He flipped through it idly, just ready to put it down when his eye caught a reference to “Doctor Lorenz: Mineral Treatment. Ineffective!” He turned the page and found two more entries, identical save for a growing number of exclamation points, the last also describing Lord Tarr’s bilious reaction and the subsequent forceful voiding of many chambers in his body. This was the final page in the journal, but Svenson saw a small ridge of paper between this and the journal’s back cover…there had been another page, several, but someone had carefully cut them out with a razor. He frowned with frustration. The entries were undated—the egotism of the patient assumed no need to record what he already knew—so Svenson had no idea how long this had been going on. No matter. He dropped the journal back in the drawer and slid it shut. The Cabal had made its attempt to swing Lord Tarr to their party long before they settled on Bascombe’s succession…and murder.
Svenson knelt at the keyhole and looked unhelpfully onto a bare wall some three or four feet away. He sighed, stood, and very, very slowly turned the knob, feeling the latch release with a far-too-audible click. He did not move, ready to shoot the bolt and run back for the garden. Apparently, no one had heard. He took a breath and just as slowly eased the door open, his eye against the growing gap. He desperately wanted a cigarette. The hallway was empty. He opened the door enough to poke his head and look in the other direction. The hall itself was dim, illuminated only from lighted rooms at either end. He could not see what those rooms were, nor could he hear. Svenson’s nerves were fraying. He forced himself to step into the hallway and close the door—he didn’t want anyone to come across it ajar and start investigating—even though he was afraid of getting lost in the house and not recognizing it again when he was trying to escape. He steeled himself—he did not need to escape. He was the predator. The people in the house should be afraid of him. Svenson stuck his hand into the pocket of his greatcoat and took hold of his revolver. It was foolish for a weapon to reassure him—either he had courage or he didn’t, he chided himself, anyone can carry a gun—but he nevertheless felt better able to walk to the end of the hallway and peer around the corner.
He whipped his head back and brought his hand up over his face. The smell—that sharp sulfurous mechanical smell—assaulted his nostrils and his throat as if he had inhaled the fumes of an iron works. He wiped his nose and eyes with his handkerchief and looked again, the handkerchief held over his face. It was a large room, a reception parlor, ringed with elegant old-fashioned sitting chairs and sofas, all with wide seats to accommodate women with bustles or hoops. Around the chairs were small end tables, the tops of each punctuated with half-empty tea cups and small plates bearing crusts and demurely unfinished slices of cake. Doctor Svenson made a quick count and came up with a total of eleven cups—enough to supply the women from the train? But where were they now—and who was their host? He crept across the parlor and peeked out the opposite doorway—directly into a small ante-room that housed a dauntingly steep staircase and, beyond it, an archway to another parlor. Peeking in from this archway at that exact instant was a short, well-fed woman dressed in black. As one they both recoiled in surprise, the woman with a squeak, Svenson with his open mouth inaudibly groping for an explanation. She held up a hand to him and swallowed, using her other to fan her reddening face.
“I do beg your pardon,” she managed. “I thought they—you—had all gone! I would have never—I was merely looking for the cake. If any is left. To put away. To bring to the kitchen. The cook will have retired—and it is a very large house. There may very well be rats. Do you see?”
“I am terribly sorry to surprise you,” replied Doctor Svenson, his voice tender with concern.
“I thought you all had gone,” she repeated, her own voice reedy and wheezing.
“Of course,” he assured her. “It’s most understandable.”
She cast an apprehensive glance up the staircase before looking back to Svenson. “You’re one of the Germans, aren’t you?”
Svenson nodded and—because he thought it would appeal to her—clicked his heels. The woman giggled, and immediately covered her mouth with a pudgy pink hand. He studied her face, which reminded him of nothing more than a smirking child’s. Her hair was elaborately arranged but without any particular style. In fact—he realized he was desperately slow at this kind of observation—it was a rather ambitious wig. The black dress meant mourning, and it occurred to him that her eyes were the same color as Bascombe’s, and that her eyes and her mouth bore his same elliptical shape…could she be his sister? His cousin?
“May I ask you something, Madame?”
She nodded. Svenson stepped aside and with his hand indicated the parlor behind him. “Do you apprehend the smell?”
She giggled again, this time with a wild uncertain gleam at work in her vaguely porcine eyes. She was nervous, even frightened, by the question. Before she could leave, he spoke again.
“I merely mean, I did not expect them to be…working…here. I assumed it would be elsewhere. I speak for us all when I hope it does not too much infuse your upholstery. May I ask if you spoke to any of the women?”
She shook her head.
“But you saw them.”
She nodded.
“And you are the present Lady of the house.”
She nodded.
“Can you—I am merely making sure of their work, you understand—tell me what you saw? Here, please, come in and take advantage of a chair. And perhaps there is some cake left after all…”
She installed herself on a settee with striped upholstery and pulled a plate of untouched cake slices onto her lap. With impulsive relish the woman crammed the whole of a slice into her mouth, giggled with her mouth full, swallowed with practiced determination, picked up another slice—as if having it in her hand was a comfort. She spoke in a rush.
“Well, you know, it is the sort of thing that seems, well, it seems awful, just awful—but then so many things seem that way at first, so many things that are good for one, or actually—eventually—delicious—” She realized what she had just said, and to whom, and erupted in another shrill laugh, stifled only by another bite of cake. She choked it down, her full bosom heaving with the effort beneath the bodice of her dress. “And they did seem happy—these women—alarmingly so, I must say. If it wasn’t so frightening I would have been envious. Perhaps I still am envious—but of course I have no reason to be. Roger says it will do wonders for the family—all of this—which perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, but I do believe he is right. My boy is a child—he can do nothing for his family for years—and Roger has promised, aside from every other generosity, that Edgar will inherit from him, that Roger—who has no children, but even if he did—he had a fiancée, but doesn’t any longer—not that that matters—she was a wicked girl, I always said, never mind her money—he’s quite eligible—and most impressively connected—he will pass it all back when the time comes. Fair is fair! And do you know—it is nearly
certain—we shall be invited to the Palace! I cannot say it should have happened with Edgar on his own!”
Doctor Svenson nodded encouragingly.
“Well, Mr. Bascombe’s work is very important.”
She nodded vigorously. “I know it!”
“Though it must—I can only imagine, of course—surely some would find it a touch…unsettling…to have such intrusions into their house.”
She did not answer, but smiled at him stiffly.
“May I also inquire—the recent loss of your father—”
“What of that? There is no sense—no decent sense to dwell on—on—on—tragedy!”
She persisted in smiling, though once more her eyes were wild.
“Were you with him in the house?”
“No one was with him.”
“No one?”
“If there’d been anyone with him, they’d have been killed by wolves as well!”
“Wolves?”
“What’s worse is that the creature’s not been found. It could happen again!”
Svenson nodded gravely. “I should stay indoors.”
“I do!”
He stood, gesturing to the ante-room with the staircase. “The others…are they…upstairs?”
She nodded, then shrugged, and finished the second slice.
“You’ve been very helpful. I shall inform Roger when I see him…and Minister Crabbé.”
The woman giggled again, blowing crumbs.
Svenson walked up the stairs, realizing that he was searching for Elöise. He knew Miss Temple was not here. In all likelihood, Elöise did not want to be found—that is, she was his enemy. Was he such a sentimental fool? He looked back down the stairs and saw the Bascombe woman cramming another piece of cake into her mouth, tears streaming down her face. She met his gaze, cried out with dismay and dashed awkwardly from sight like a silk-wrapped scuttling dog. Svenson thought about stopping to find her for perhaps one second and then continued up the stairs. His hand drifted again to his revolver. His other hand absently bounced against the black book in his other pocket. Was he an idiot? He’d forgotten completely about it—the lack of light to read, probably—but it was the surest thing to explain what Elöise—and everyone else—was doing there.
He reached a dark landing and remembered that this and the following floors were completely dark from outside. Tarr Manor was an old house, subsisting solely on lanterns and candles, which meant there was always a near sideboard with a drawer of tallow stubs for contingencies. The Doctor stumped down the hallway until he found the very thing, and snapped a match to the candle. Now for some place to read. Svenson glanced at the labyrinthine passages and doorways and decided to stay where he was. Even taking this long went against a nagging fear that something might be happening to the women even now. He remembered Angelique. What if Lorenz, who clearly lacked the Comte d’Orkancz’s esthetic scruples, was upstairs even then, unscrewing one of his glass-packed metal flasks?
Svenson controlled his thoughts—he was working himself up to no purpose. Two minutes. He would give the book that much.
It was all the task required. On the first page was the quotation he’d had read to him on the train. And on the second page, and the next, and throughout the entirety of the book, printed again and again in small script, one great continuous flow of the identical passage. He looked on the inside and back covers, to see if Coates had written anything…and saw that he had, a series of numbers, jotted in pencil and then ineffectively erased. Svenson held the candle close, and turned to the first of the pages listed, 97…it seemed like any other page, with no special sign or significance that he could see. An idea gnawed at him…he looked at the first word at the top of the page—could these add up to a message? Some kind of basic code? Svenson took a pencil stub from his pocket and began to jot notes on the inner flap of the book. The first word of TWO: Cardinal was “the”…he looked at the next number in Coates’s list, THREE: Surgeon…the first word was “already”…Svenson quickly flipped the pages.
He frowned. “The already remake realms vessels into…” did not seem like anything sensible. Perhaps it was itself a code—he tried to puzzle it out: “already” meant the past…so “already remake” might mean their progress so far…but why bother with “the” at the beginning? Weren’t coded messages supposed to be economical? Svenson sighed, looking at the book with as much insight as if it were a Hungarian newspaper, but feeling just within reach of the solution…he tried the last words of each page, but this gave him “of Lord will their night only”. It sounded like a dire prediction of some kind, but wasn’t right…
The letters! He looked at the list of first words—if he only took the first letters he got…“T-A-R-R-V-I”…he anxiously looked for the next page—the first word was “look”—it meant Tarr Village! He kept going and got as far as “Tarr Vill” when the next page, ONE: Temple, began with a blank line…as did the next, ONE: Temple. It came in an instant—3:02!—it was the time of the train! It was the matter of another minute before Svenson had nearly the whole of it done—there was only the last number, whose page started with the letter p…which gave him a last word of “bravep”…which could not be correct. He double-checked Coates’s numbering, and noticed that this last number was underlined. Could it mean something different? He chuckled and had it—it indicated the whole word! He jotted it down and looked at what he’d written:
Tarr Vill. 3:02. Who offers sin shall brave Paradise
Doctor Svenson snapped the book closed and picked up the candle. These people—in ignorance of one another—had been invited to come, to submit “sin” in exchange for “Paradise”. He knew enough to shudder at what this Paradise might actually be. Did any of them know with whom they trafficked? Had Coates? He walked back to the stairs, wondering why—why these people? Karl-Horst, Lord Tarr, Bascombe, Trapping—suborning them made mercenary sense, they were perfect well-placed tools. He thought of the stupid woman on the train and he thought of Elöise. He thought of Coates under the altar, and knew exactly how little these people were worth to those who had seduced them. At the base of the stairs Doctor Svenson took the pistol out of his coat and blew out his candle. He climbed into the darkness.
He heard nothing until he stepped onto the fourth floor. Above were the gabled attics, where he’d seen the light. His steps climbing were as light as he could make them, but anyone listening would have heard the creaks and groans of the old wood well in advance of his arrival. As he ascended the steps he also met a thicker concentration of the mechanical smell—perversely, as if he were in the thinning alpine air, his breath more shallow and his head dizzied. He stopped and put his handkerchief over his nose and mouth, sweeping across the shadowed landing with the pistol.
The silence was broken by a footstep above him in the attic. Svenson cocked the pistol and searched for the way up, nearly tripping on it: a ladder, flat on the floor. Whoever it was above him, they’d been marooned.
Svenson eased back the hammer and stuffed the pistol into his pocket. He picked up the ladder and looked above him for the hatch, only noticing it—the thing was quite flush with the ceiling—because of the bolt that held it shut. There was a wooden lip to rest the ladder against, and Svenson wedged it securely in place and began his tentative climb, eased by the darkness—he could not exactly see how high he was, nor thus how far there was to fall. He kept his gaze resolutely above him and reached out—nerves dancing with dismay at holding on with but a single hand—to undo the bolt. He pushed back the hatch and nearly lost his balance recoiling from the chemical stench. This was a good thing, as his instinctive shrinking from the smell caused his head to duck just out of the path of a sharp wooden heel. A moment later—taking in the swinging heel and the woman swinging it—Doctor Svenson’s foot slipped on the rung and dropped through it—a sudden descent of two feet until his hands caught hold (and his jaw smacked into a rung of its own). He looked up with distress, rubbing his stinging face. Looking down at him, hair in her
face and a shoe in her hand, was Elöise.
“Captain Blach!”
“Have they hurt you?” he rasped, working to restore his dangling leg on the ladder.
“No…no, but…” She looked to something he could not see. She had been crying. “Please—I must come down!”
Before he could protest, she was out of the hatch and nearly on top of him. He half-caught, half-hung on to her legs as they descended, finding the floor himself just in time to help her do the same. She turned and buried her face in his shoulder, hugging him tightly, her body shaking. After a moment, he put his arms around her—timidly, without exerting any untoward pressure, though even this much contact set off a wondrous appreciation that her shoulder blades could be so small—and waited for her emotions to subside. Instead of subsiding, she began to sob, his greatcoat muffling the sounds. He looked past her, up into the open hatch. The light in the room was not from a candle or lantern—it was somehow more pale and cold, and did not flicker. Doctor Svenson took it upon himself to pat the woman’s hair and whisper “It’s all right now…you’re all right…” into her ear. She pulled her face away from him, out of breath, swallowing, her face streaked. He looked at her seriously.
“You can breathe? The smell—the chemicals—”
She nodded. “I covered my head—I—I had to—”
Before she could erupt once more he indicated the hatch. “Is there anyone else—does anyone need help?”
She shook her head and shut her eyes, stepping away. Svenson had no idea what to think. Dreading what he would find, he climbed the ladder and looked in.
It was a narrow gabled room with the roof slanted on each side—perhaps a child of seven could have stood without stooping in the very center. Across the floor near the window were the slumped shapeless forms of two women, obviously dead. Equally clear, though he possessed no explanation, was that their bodies were the source of the unnatural blue glow animating the grisly attic. He crawled into the room. The smell was unbearable and he paused to replace the handkerchief over his face before continuing on his hands and knees. They were from the train—one was well-dressed, and the other probably a maid. Both had bled from the ears and nose, and their eyes were filmed over and opaque, but from within, as if the contents of each sphere had become scrambled and gelatinous under extreme pressure. He thought of the Comte d’Orkancz’s medical interests and recalled men he had seen pulled from the winter sea, whose soft bodies had been unable to withstand the crushing tons of ice water above them. The women were of course completely dry—nothing of the kind could explain their conditions…nor could any disease of the arctic account for the unearthly blue glow that arose from every visible discolored inch of their skin.
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Page 44