The hallway ended at a T junction, with a path to either side. Svenson stood, undecided, like a figure in the forest of a fairy tale, knowing that the wrong choice would lead to the equivalent of a malevolent ogre. One way led to a succession of small parlors, following one to the next like links in a chain. The other opened onto a narrow corridor whose walls were plain, but whose floor was strikingly laid with black marble. Then as he stood, Doctor Svenson quite clearly recognized a woman’s scream…dimly, as if the cry passed through a substantial intervening wall.
Where had it come from? He listened. It was not repeated. He strode into the black corridor—less comfortable, less wholesome, and altogether more dangerous—for if he chose wrong, the sooner he knew it the better.
The corridor was pocked with small niches for statuary—mostly simple white marble busts on stone pillars with the occasional limb-free torso. The heads were copies (though, given Vandaariff’s wealth, who knew?) from antiquity, and the Doctor recognized the varyingly vacant, cruel, or thoughtful heads of Caesars high and low—Augustus, Vespasian, Gaius, Nero, Domitian, Tiberius. As he passed this last, Svenson stopped. Dimly—though louder than the scream—he heard…applause. He spun to place the source of the noise, and saw, cut into the white wall behind the bust of that pensive, bitter emperor, regular grooves running up to the ceiling…rungs. Svenson edged behind the pillar and looked up. He looked around him and—taking a breath and shutting his eyes—began to climb.
There was no hatch. The ladder continued into darkness before his hands found a new surface to grasp. The Doctor opened his eyes and blinked, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dark. He was gripping a piece of wooden scaffolding, the end of a low catwalk. He heard distant voices…and then again the whisper, like a sudden rustle of leaves, of an audience’s applause. Was he backstage at some sort of theatre? The Doctor swallowed, for the dizzying heights from which stagehands operated the lifts and curtains always made him queasy (and his compulsion was to look up again and again, just to torment himself with vertigo). He recalled a performance of Bonrichardt’s Castor und Pollux where the triumphant finale, the titular pair ascending to heaven—an excruciatingly extended duet as they were raised (the twins operatically portly, the ropes audibly protesting) some hundred feet from view—had him near to heaving with dread into the lap of the unfortunate dowager seated next to him.
Doctor Svenson clambered onto the catwalk and crept along it quietly. Ahead he saw a thin glimmer of light, perhaps a distant door set ajar, allowing a single beam to fall into the darkness. What performance might be hosted in Harschmort on a night like this? The engagement party had been a dual event—a public celebration of the engagement of Karl-Horst and Lydia and a private occasion for the Cabal to transact its private business. Was tonight a similarly double-edged event—and could this performance be the respectable side of whatever other malevolence was at work elsewhere in the house?
Svenson continued forward, wincing at a tightness in his legs and a renewed pain from his twisted ankle. He thought of Flaüss’s boasting words—the Baron was dead, the Duke to follow. The Prince was a fool and a rake, eminently subject to manipulation and control. Yet if the Doctor could prise the Prince from the clutches of the Cabal—Process or no—might there not be yet some hope, providing the ministers around him were responsible and sane?
But then with a grim snort he recalled his own brief conversation with Robert Vandaariff over Trapping’s corpse. Such was the great man’s irresistible influence that any unfortunate or scandalous occurrence—like the Colonel’s death—was made to disappear. The grandson of Robert Vandaariff—especially if inheriting as a child and requiring a regent—would be the best return the financier could realize on the investment of his daughter. After the child’s birth Karl-Horst would be unnecessary—and, given everything, wholly unregretted at his death.
But what were Svenson’s choices? If Karl-Horst were to die without issue, the Macklenburg throne would pass to the children of his cousin Hortenze-Caterina, the oldest of whom was but five. Wasn’t this a better fate for the Duchy than being swallowed by Vandaariff’s empire? Svenson had to face the deeper truth of his mission from the Baron. Knowing what he did of the forces in play, if he could not prevent the marriage, which seemed impossible, he would have to shoot Prince Karl-Horst down—to be a traitor in service to a larger patriotism.
The reasoning left the taste of ash in his mouth, but he could see no other way.
Svenson sighed, but then, like the shift of a mountebank’s con-trick, the line of light in front of him—which he had, in the darkness, taken to be a distant door—was revealed for what it was: the thin gap between two curtains, not two feet in front of his face. He gently pushed it aside, both light and sound flooding through the gap, for the fabric was actually quite heavy, as if it had been woven with lead to prevent fire. But now Doctor Svenson could see and hear everything…and he was appalled.
It was an operating theatre. His catwalk door was perched just to the right of the audience and led across the stage itself at the height of the ceiling—some twenty feet above the raised table and the white-robed, white-masked woman bound to its surface with leather straps. The gallery was steeply raked and full of well-dressed, masked spectators, all gazing with rapt attention at the masked woman who spoke from the stage. Doctor Svenson recognized Miss Poole at once, if only by the woman’s irrepressible glow of self-satisfaction.
Behind them all, on a large blackboard, were inscribed the words “AND SO THEY SHALL BE REBORN”.
Standing unsteadily next to Miss Poole was another masked woman in white, her blonde hair somewhat disturbed, as if from physical exertion. As she stood Svenson noticed, distracted and disapproving, the very thin and clinging nature of the nearly transparent silk, making plain every contour of her body. To her other side stood a man in a leather apron, ready to support her if she fell. Behind, next to the woman on the table, stood another such man, wearing leather gauntlets and holding under his arm what looked like a brass and leather helmet—just what the Comte d’Orkancz had worn when Svenson had taken the Prince at pistol-point from the Institute. The man by the table set down his helmet and began to remove pieces of machinery from a nest of wooden boxes—the same boxes they’d seen taken from the Institute by Aspiche’s Dragoons. The man attached several lengths of twisted copper wire to mechanical elements within the boxes—from his vantage Svenson could only see that they were bright steel with glass dials and brass buttons and knobs—and then to either side of a pair of black rubber goggles, taking a moment to get the wire properly attached. Svenson realized—the electrified rubber mask, the facial scars—that they were about to perform the Process on the woman on the table, as they had no doubt just done to the woman standing with Miss Poole (the cause of the screams!).
The man finished with the wires and raised the hideous mask to the woman’s face, pausing quickly to remove one of the white feathers that she presently wore. She shook her head from side to side, a futile bid to avoid his hands—her eyes wide and her mouth—which he saw was blocked with a gag—working. Her eyes were riveting, a cold, glittering grey…Svenson gasped. The man strapped and then brutally tightened the device across her face, his body blocking the Doctor’s view. Svenson could not determine her state—was she drugged? Had she been beaten? He knew he had only until Miss Poole was finished with the blonde woman—who was she, he wondered?—until their vicious intent was worked irrevocably upon Miss Temple.
Miss Poole stepped to a small rolling side table—intended, Svenson knew, to hold a tray of medical implements—and took up a glass-stoppered flask. With a knowing smile she uncorked the flask and took a step to the front row of the gallery, holding the open flask up for her spectators to sniff. One after another—and always to Miss Poole’s delight—the elegant masked figures recoiled with immediate disgust. After the sixth person, Miss Poole stepped back to the brighter light and her blonde charge.
“A challenge to the most sturdy of sensibili
ties—as I believe all of you that have smelled this mixture will attest—yet such is the nature of our science and our need that this lovely subject, a veritable arrow in flight toward a target of destiny, has been made to consume it not once, but daily, for twenty-eight consecutive days, until her cycle is completely prepared. Before this day, such a task could not have been accomplished save by forcibly holding her down, or—as it has actually been managed—hiding tiny amounts of the substance in chocolate or an aperitif. Now, witness the strength of her new-minted will.”
Miss Poole turned to the woman and held out the flask.
“My dear,” she said, “you understand that you must drink this, as you have in these past weeks.”
The blonde woman nodded, and reached out to take the flask from Miss Poole.
“Please smell it,” asked Miss Poole.
The woman did. She wrinkled her nose, but showed no other response.
“Please drink it.”
The woman put the flask to her lips and tossed off the contents like a sailor quaffing rum. She primly wiped her mouth, held her body still for a moment, as if to better keep the substance down, and then returned the flask.
“Thank you, my dear.” Miss Poole smiled. “You’ve done very well.”
The audience erupted into fervent applause, and the young blonde woman shyly beamed.
The Doctor looked ahead of him on the catwalk. Bolted to an iron frame suspended from the ceiling—and in reach, for he realized that the catwalk’s sole purpose was to tend them—hung a row of metal-boxed paraffin lamps, as in a theatre. The front of each box was open, to aim the light in one direction, and fixed with a ground-glass lens to focus the light onto a more precise area. For a moment he considered—if he were able to climb out unseen—the possibility of blowing out each lamp and throwing the theatre into darkness…but there were at least five lamps over a fifteen-foot length of the iron grid. He could not reach them all before he was seen and most likely shot. But what else could he do? Moving as delicately and as quickly as he could, Doctor Svenson crawled through the curtain and into view of anyone who happened to look up.
Miss Poole whispered in her blonde charge’s ear and then led her closer to the audience. The young woman sank into a curtsey, and the audience politely applauded once more. Svenson could swear she was blushing with pleasure. The woman rose again and Miss Poole handed her to one of the Macklenburg soldiers, who offered an arm with a click of his heels. The blonde woman draped her arm in his and with a distinct brightening of her step they disappeared down one of the rampways.
From the same rampway emerged two more Macklenburg soldiers propelling between them a third masked woman in white. Her feet dragged in awkward steps and her head dipped—she was either drugged or injured. Her brown hair unspooled behind her back and around her shoulders, obscuring her features. Again, despite his best intentions, Doctor Svenson found his gaze falling to the lady’s body, the white silk clinging across the curve of her hips, her pale arms sticking from the balled-up sleeves.
At their entrance, Miss Poole whipped around in annoyance. Svenson could not hear what she hissed to the soldiers, nor what they deferentially whispered in return. In the moment of disturbance he looked to Miss Temple, the hideous mask in place across her face, twisting ineffectually against her bonds.
Miss Poole gestured to the new arrival.
“It is a different sort of case I present to you here—perhaps one emblematic of the dangers attending our great enterprise, and of the corrective power of this work. The woman here before you—you see her ragged appearance and lowly condition—is one who had been invited to participate, and who then took it upon herself, in league with our enemies, to reject this invitation. More than this, her rejection took the form…of murder. The woman before you has killed one of our blameless number!”
The audience whispered and hissed. Svenson swallowed. It was Elöise Dujong. He hadn’t recognized her—her hair had been back in a braid and now it wasn’t—such a foolish detail, but it nearly caused his heart to crack. All his doubts as to her loyalty fell away before this sudden pang of emotion. Seeing her hair down should have been an intimacy given to him from her, and now she was insensible, vulnerable, the intimacy blithely trammeled. He crawled quickly to the next lamp and dug in his pocket for the revolver.
“And yet,” continued Miss Poole, “she has been brought before you to demonstrate the greater wisdom—and the greater economy—of our purpose. For despite everything this woman’s actions carry with them undenied qualities of resilience and courage. Should these be destroyed simply because she lacks the will or the vision to see her true avenue of advantage? We say it shall not be—and so we will welcome this woman into our very bosom!”
She gestured to her attendant. He bent over Miss Temple once more to make sure of his electrical connections and then knelt at the boxes. Svenson looked wildly about him. In a moment it would be too late.
“Both these women—I promise you, more determined villains you could not find outside the Thuggee cult!—will join us, one after the next, by way of the clarifying Process. You have seen its effect with a willing subject. Now see it transform a defiant enemy to the fiercest adherent!”
The first shot crashed out from the darkness above the theatre. The man near Miss Temple abruptly stumbled back, and then dropped beneath the blackboard, the blood from his wound pooling in the leather apron. Screams erupted from the gallery. The figures on the stage looked up, but straight into the lamps and could not—at least for another precious moment—see past the glare. The second shot tore through the shoulder of the other aproned man, spinning him away from Elöise and to his knees.
“He is there!” shrieked Miss Poole. “Kill him! Kill him! ”
She pointed up at Svenson, her face an emblem of fury. The Macklenburg trooper had been pulled off balance by the second man’s fall, suddenly taking up the whole of Elöise’s weight. He released her—she dropped at once to her hands and knees—and swept out his saber. Svenson ignored him. He was well out of reach of the blade, and knew the Ragnarok troopers did not carry firearms. He aimed the revolver at Miss Poole, but then—what was he thinking! How could he forget her cruelty at the quarry?—hesitated to pull the trigger.
The catwalk behind him lurched. Svenson turned to see two hands grabbing hold of the edge. He shifted on his knees and rapped the gun butt down on each hand one after the other, dropping the man back into the seats. The catwalk lurched again. Now three sets of hands pulled on the edge, tipping the Doctor into the wooden rail. For a moment he looked helplessly down into the outraged crowd—men on each other’s shoulders, women shrieking at him as if he were a witch. He shot a foot forward and smashed it down on the nearest hand—but now there were men on either side of him, hefting themselves above the edge. To his left was an athletic young man in a tailcoat, no doubt an ambitious second son of a Lord determined to take an inheritance away from an older brother. Svenson shot him through the upper leg and didn’t wait to watch him fall before turning to the second man—a wiry fellow in his shirtsleeves (thoughtful enough to doff an encumbering coat before climbing)—who leapt the rail and crouched like a cat not three feet away. Svenson fired again, but more hands jostled the catwalk. The bullet flew wide and directly into one of the paraffin lanterns, shattering it completely. A shower of hot metal, broken glass, and burning paraffin spattered onto the stage.
The shirtsleeved man launched himself at Svenson, knocking him flat. A woman screamed from the stage—there was smoke—the paraffin—did he smell burning hair? The man was younger, stronger, fresher—an elbow across Svenson’s jaw stunned him. He thrust a hand ineffectually at the fellow’s eyes, and the catwalk careened as more hands pulled at them and more men climbed aboard—a creak, a popping snap of wood—it could not hold. The woman still screamed. The shirtsleeved man took hold of Svenson’s coat with both hands and raised him up—face-to-face with a triumphant leer—as a prelude to flattening the Doctor’s nose with his fis
t.
The catwalk gave way, tipping toward the stage and dumping them both over the rail and into the row of lamps—Svenson hissing with pain at the hot metal against his skin—and then (in one ghastly moment of weightless terror that convulsed Svenson from the top of his spine to his genitals) to the theatre floor.
The impact jarred the Doctor to his teeth and for a moment he merely lay where he was, dimly aware of a great deal of activity around him. He blinked. He was alive. There were screams and shouts from every direction…smoke…a great deal of smoke…and heat—in fact, everything pointed to the theatre being on fire. He tried to move. To his surprise he was not on the floor—he was not on anything smooth. He rolled on one shoulder and saw the waxen face of the shirtsleeved man, neck folded unnaturally to the side, tongue blue. Svenson heaved himself to his hands and knees—realizing as it hit the floor with a clunk that he still held the revolver.
The fallen lamps had set a line of flame between the stage and the gallery, effectively blocking one from the other. Through the rising wall of smoke he could see figures and hear their screams and shouts, but he quickly turned away at another scream, much nearer. It was Elöise, terrified but still dulled by the drug, kicking weakly at the flames that licked her smoking silken robe. Svenson stuffed the revolver into his belt and tore off his greatcoat. He lurched forward on his knees and threw it over her legs, patting out any flames, and then quickly pulled her clear of the fire. He turned to the table and felt his way to Miss Temple’s hand. Her fingers took hold of his arm—a desperate silent plea—but he was forced to wrench himself away in order to reach the buckle for her leather straps. He fumbled to free her arms and that done was gratified to see her own hands shoot up to the infernal mask around her face. He released her feet and then helped her from the table, once more—for Svenson was never one to become used to the matter—surprised at the meager weight of such an enterprising person. As she tore the wadded gag from her mouth he bent to her ear and shouted above the roar of flame and popping wood.
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Page 68