Updated_PerilInTheOldCountry_SamHooker_EbookFormatting_Nook

by Peril in the Old Country (retail) (epub)

  “Who’s there?” said whoever it was. It was a woman’s voice, but he couldn’t place it.

  “Hmm? Oh, hello,” replied a calm and care-free voice that sounded remarkably like Sloot’s, and even seemed to come from his mouth. It couldn’t have been Sloot though, he was too busy losing his composure and falling into tiny pieces. Apparently, there was a level of panic above his resting rate that could freeze him up! The voice that had spoken was entirely calm.

  “You’re not supposed to be in there,” said the woman’s voice, “come out at once!”

  “I’m nearly finished,” said the mysterious Sloot Peril impersonator. The real Sloot wondered—between attempts to stop hyperventilating—how and when this interloper had managed to invade his mind and take over. Perhaps he could ask Myrtle if this was possession.

  He remembered then that Myrtle was gone, and that cut his panic with sadness. He couldn’t tell if that was good or bad, but he decided to hold off on lamenting that he’d been possessed, at least for the time being.

  “I’m going to call for the constables if you don’t come out of there this— Sloot?”

  “That’s right.” He turned around. It was Beatrice, one of his former coworkers.

  “You don’t work here anymore,” said Beatrice. “What were you doing in my office?”

  Sloot waited for whoever had possessed him to step in, but nothing happened. Perhaps he hadn’t been possessed at all. Had his mouth simply launched into the rote recitation of simple phrases while his brain caught up?

  “Well?” Beatrice’s fists were on her hips.

  “Ahem, sorry,” said Sloot. “Just … you know, checking on things.”

  “Checking on things?”

  “No. Yes? That is—”

  “Look, Sloot, I don’t want to get you in trouble or anything, but this—”

  “Congratulations!”

  “What?”

  “The promotion!”

  “Oh. Thanks, but—”

  “Well, I’ve got to go.”

  A nice walking panic. That was what Sloot needed, and that was what he got. He was doomed! Not in the general spirit of inevitability sort of way, well and properly doomed! He and Beatrice had got along as well as any two competent accountants might, under the standard tacit agreement not to involve themselves in each others’ business, or really learn anything about each other, or socialize at all, but could he trust her to keep her mouth shut?

  Not likely. She’d still been shouting questions at him when he fled the counting house, and none of them had been very cordial. He walked as quickly as he could toward Whitewood. He needed Roman’s counsel on this one.

  ***

  “That’s the problem with my job,” said Roman. “No one ever comes to me before they launch their zany capers, only when things have gone horribly awry.”

  “Sorry for that,” said Sloot. “I had the idea and I just, I don’t know, went for it.”

  “That’s a first for you.”

  “It’s a last for me. What was I thinking?”

  “You weren’t. Bravo! How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six,” answered Sloot. He could have been far more specific, but people didn’t usually appreciate that.

  “Far past due for an inadvisable rush to action!”

  “What?”

  “I’m torn.” Roman’s comically large eyes darted about the room as he stroked his chin.

  “Between?”

  “On the one hand, in my role as spymaster for the Salzstadt office of Carpathian Intelligence, I’m compelled to reprimand your recklessness. What were you thinking? You can’t approve your own stealth missions, not at your pay grade!”

  “And on the other hand?”

  “I feel as though I’ve become something of a father figure to you, Sloot.” Having never known his father, Sloot resolved to take Roman’s word for it. “It’s a father’s duty to keep his son on the straight-and-narrow, but not to excess. Boys are supposed to make some mistakes! Bloody noses, hands in the cookie jar, all that. Have you ever been reprimanded for something like this before?”

  “No.” Sloot had never done anything worthy of a reprimand, not before he committed treason and fell under the guidance of his self-proclaimed father figure, at least.

  “Well, blood and honor, then! Get out of here, you scamp!” Roman ruffled Sloot’s hair.

  “Stop that! What am I going to do about Beatrice?”

  “Can you trust her to keep her mouth shut?”

  “Am I the first accountant you’ve ever met?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there’s your answer. We do things by the book, accountants.”

  “I see,” said Roman. “And what does this book compel you to do in this situation?”

  “Say something,” replied Sloot. Roman should have known about that one. Even though he was entirely unaware that Sloot was, in fact, referring to the Three Bells employee manual, there were the posters. The Ministry of Propaganda had spent a great deal of time and effort on their Suspect Something, Say Something campaign.

  “Leave it to me,” said Roman. “Just make yourself scarce for the rest of the day.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What I do best. Subterfuge.”

  ***

  It was no counting house, but the library was still one of Sloot’s favorite places in the world. It had been since he was a child. He’d often thought that if accounting hadn’t been the only logical career choice for him, he’d have become a librarian. He never really regretted the missed opportunity—ledgers were clearly superior to books, after all—but he’d always fantasized about what might lie beyond the steel-reinforced door to the restricted section. Although he didn’t fancy himself a dreamer, he’d never wholly given up the thought that he might see it one day.

  Today would not be that day, of course. Today, he had but two things on his mind: to keep out of sight, and to figure out what was going on with the mysterious transactions he’d uncovered.

  Oh, and the Really Wicked Spiders. Three things, then.

  He couldn’t help thinking of Myrtle. Arthur was fond of alcoves, as they were good for ponderances. The library was absolutely silly with alcoves. It was a wonder she’d ever managed to drag herself—themselves?—away from it.

  Beyond the alcoves, there were books. It was a library, after all. The shelves on the first floor were mostly devoted to nationalist propaganda, of course. Most of the good people of Salzstadt had no need of the rest of the building.

  The second floor was fiction. Bah. Fiction was dangerous, as far as Sloot was concerned. Things that happened, now that was worth reading! Works of fiction were the product of fussy debutantes who couldn’t stomach reality. Three cheers for Imelda Lillellien, librarian extraordinaire, for exiling it all to the second floor where it could moulder and rot in obscurity!

  The third floor. Now there was where things got interesting! Mind you, land records were no economic theories—you’d have to continue up the stairs to the fifth floor for those—but they had real stories to tell. True stories. Tales of who owned what parcel of land, operated what sort of business, and sold it to whoever else since the founding of Salzstadt. Heady stuff, if you’re an accountant. The stuff dreams are made of.

  Anyone preferring “the stuff of which dreams are made” should bugger off to the second floor where they belong.

  “How can I help you?” The third-floor librarian’s long white beard continued to jiggle for a moment after his lips stopped moving.

  “That’s all right,” said Sloot. “I know what I need, if I might just—”

  “You might not,” interrupted the librarian, bristling at the offense. “That’s not the way we do things around here! This is the third floor. Deeds and titles. You’re free to roam the stacks downstairs, but it’s trained
hands only up here.”

  “Really? I’ve gotten my own things here before.”

  “Things have changed,” said the librarian. “You can tell me what you need, you can leave of the power of your own two feet, or I can ring this bell and have Thorgrim escort you out.”

  Sloot didn’t imagine that he and anyone named “Thorgrim” would agree on the specifics of what an “escort” would entail, so he didn’t push the issue. He didn’t want to leave empty-handed either, so that only left one choice. He needed to know more about a few fishy-sounding companies and addresses that he’d read in the counting house, so he wrote the names on a scrap of paper and handed it over.

  It was a good thing that Sloot wasn’t in a hurry. The librarian had several tries at holding the scrap of paper at various distances with one hand, while peering at it through different monocles held in the other. Sloot had time to wonder how awful it must be for a librarian to have so much difficulty reading. He felt sorry for the old man.

  “You have the penmanship of a child,” remarked the librarian. “The wild animal who taught you should be put down at once!”

  “I’m sorry,” Sloot replied, feeling slightly less charitable. “I could try again if you like. I’ve got some more paper just here—”

  “No, it’s fine,” said the librarian, drawing out “no” and “fine” in a very musical way that implied it was anything but. He was holding a stack of three monocles now and had lit another pair of candles. He moved the paper closer … closer … and he stiffened.

  “What do you want with these?”

  “Just doing some fact-checking for Lord Hapsgalt.” Sloot refrained from mentioning which Lord Hapsgalt. It was the same strategy he’d suggested to the kitchen staff when talking to the grocer.

  “For … Lord Hapsgalt?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you … know what these are?”

  “Of course,” said Sloot, who’d only just noticed the ring on the librarian’s finger. Two silver snakes coiled around a black stone.

  “Then why are you wasting my time? These will be down below.”

  “Down below?”

  “I thought you said you’d been here before.” The librarian was squinting at Sloot, which could have been suspicion, or perhaps he was just trying to focus. He had a fistful of monocles that were throwing off Sloot’s perception.

  “So you’d have me go down below on my own, then?” It stood to reason that the old man would be just as unreasonable about that, and he was right. He was the sort of man who, if on fire, would have precise criteria for men bearing buckets of water. As such, he insisted on personally marching Sloot down to a part of the library he’d never visited before. It was two floors below the ground, and the stone walls had a very “dungeony” aesthetic that filled Sloot with dread, whether they were designed for that purpose or not. They almost certainly were.

  “Hello Susan,” the old curmudgeon said to the hammer-wielding librarian posted outside a steel door with wicked gargoyles etched into it.

  “Hello Stan!” shouted Susan. The veins in her neck bulged at the effort, though she had very little neck showing through the entourage of muscles surrounding it.

  “For the last time, I’m not deaf! Here, he needs to go inside.” The old man jerked a thumb toward Sloot, then started walking back up the stairs without another word.

  He has the sort of interpersonal skills that would have taken him far as a bureaucrat, Sloot thought.

  “Name?”

  Sloot hadn’t been prepared for that. He was supposed to be lying low! Roman hadn’t taught him anything about subterfuge or secret identities yet, but he was reasonably sure that giving one’s real name would poorly service the effort.

  “Bannister,” answered Sloot, blurting out the first thing he saw. “Er, Roger Bannister. Ma’am.”

  “Papers.” Susan held out a hand so rough there might have been a few loose coins lodged between the calluses.

  “Well,” said Sloot, who lacked papers with the name “Roger Bannister” on them, “I don’t exactly—”

  “Papers.”

  Susan’s monotone insistence on the point implied that she was the sort of person who didn’t ask for things a third time. Some bestial, primordial part of Sloot that knows only instinct sprang into action. Unfortunately for Sloot, the instinct that drew itself up from within him was obedience. He handed over his papers.

  “Wait here.” Susan lumbered through a smaller door in the wall opposite the big scary ones, and Sloot was left alone to panic.

  What had he done? He’d given a fake name! He’d handed over his real papers! He didn’t like his chances that there was someone older than Stan looking them over just then, who’d run out of monocles and decided “no one would be stupid enough to come down here if they didn’t belong, much less give a fake name. Let him through, and offer him some tea, would you?”

  He should run. There were real instincts at work now, older and simpler than the ones that govern things like obedience and hygiene. They’d know he was guilty if he ran, but so what? They were about to realize he was guilty anyway! He was as skilled a runner as most newborns, but at least when they caught him he’d not have to ask himself why he stood there, stock still, waiting for death like a—

  “Mr. Bannister, is it?”

  “Yes! No. What?”

  “Imagine my surprise,” said Imelda Lillellien, the head librarian in a hushed voice, “when Susan told me that the most notorious assassin in the ranks of our order was waiting outside the sanctum door!”

  Sloot said nothing. Either this was a bizarre mind game, or the fake name he’d given—by some stroke of outrageous fortune—had some fortuitous significance among The Really Wicked Spiders that just might result in his blood remaining inside his body, whizzing around a full set of intact bones!

  “Forgive me,” said Imelda, “I don’t mean to pry, it’s just that … well, have you ever given your name outside the Shadow Chamber?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Sloot.

  “Never mind.” Imelda waved her hands. “We shouldn’t be talking out here, anyway. Please, allow me. Susan?”

  Susan put her shoulder to the door and heaved. The steel hinges groaned, and the door opened into the darkness beyond it. Sloot followed Imelda inside, and his heart sank into his chest as Susan pulled the door closed behind them with a grunt. The darkness enveloped them.

  “Have you ever entered this way before?” asked Imelda.

  “I haven’t,” answered Sloot. It felt good, telling the truth.

  “Your eyes will adjust in a moment,” she said. “While we wait, do you mind if I ask … Sloot Peril?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, in addition to being a superb set of fake papers, that name happens to belong to one of the pawns that Mrs. Knife has placed in the game.”

  “Is it?”

  “Financier to the younger Lord Hapsgalt. Of course, you must have known that already! But why take an alias of someone in the public eye? And a name that sounds so Carpathian. Aren’t you afraid it will give you away?”

  “Er, hiding in plain sight.” Sloot didn’t know what sort of game in which he was a pawn, but it didn’t sound good. He blinked a few times, and a greenish glow started to flood into what turned out to be the very long hallway in which they were standing.

  “Marvelous.” Imelda’s silhouette was handing him the silhouette of his papers, which he took and shoved into his coat. “This way.”

  Imelda led him toward what only could have been his grisly death, and he could not but follow. He couldn’t tell where the green light was coming from. It just sort of oozed in from between the stones in the walls, casting a glow of despair on all of the nothing around them. It was precisely the sort of ambiance one might expect from a place perfectly embodying the absence of hope, warmth, and che
er. Well done, if that’s what they were after.

  They made several turns and passed several doors on either side of the hallway. The ghastly green light was far brighter through the cracks in most of them, except for the one that was entirely dark. That’s not to say that there was simply no light within it — it was entirely dark. It gave Sloot the impression that no light could survive within it, not even the metaphorical sort that lived in the hearts of children and kittens. He wasn’t monster enough to even wonder how a kitten might fare in a room like that.

  “Here we are,” said Imelda at last, her silhouette motioning toward a door that had ghastly green light within it, thankfully. “Please take as long as you like, and give Lord Hapsgalt my compliments. I assume you can show yourself out?”

  “Er, yes, thanks.”

  “The pleasure is mine! If you leave the way we came in, just bang on the door and Susan will open it for you.”

  Imelda took a key from her belt, unlocked the door, and opened it. Then she gave a little bow, backed into the shadows, and was gone.

  It was just what Sloot would have expected from the subterranean archive of a clandestine society whose nefarious ends he couldn’t begin to fathom. Why wouldn’t there be smoke roiling from within that book next to some perfectly normal land records? There was a book on the shelf below it that gave a constant, baleful moan, as though it desperately wished someone would end its life, wedged between two volumes of romantic poetry. It didn’t seem out of place at all when one considered the vaguely human-shaped lump under the bloodstained sheet on the floor that twitched every so often.

  Honestly, if the sourceless green glow that illuminated the room had failed to send Sloot screaming from it as fast as his legs would carry him, why should a few malevolent terrors succeed in its stead?

  Context. Why should any of these horrible things inspire any more dread than the place itself? Sloot suppressed his palpable urge to scream at the top of his lungs, mustered up all of the context he could in lieu of courage, and set to work.

  He found the records he sought, and they told him exactly what he thought they would: Mrs. Knife and all of the other Really Wicked Spiders were part of a secret society calling itself The Serpents of the Earth, and the Hapsgalts and The Three Bells made up its black and odious core.