The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  “We must hide!” he hissed.

  “Not yet!”

  “They will see us!”

  She did not reply, bearing straight toward the house. Over his shoulder Svenson saw a lantern wink on and off in sequence. Figures silhouetted in an upper window of the white building replied with their own signal. With a sinking realization he knew the bargemen would assume him to be the murderer.

  Abruptly the Contessa dodged from the road. The Doctor followed, the undergrowth whipping around his knees. The Contessa vanished into the trees. An instant afterward the branches were slapping Svenson's face in the dark. The double doors of the building had opened wide—pools of light bobbed forward and over the trees. Then the Contessa stopped and he was right upon her, nearly knocking her down.

  “There is a party, coming down the road,” he whispered, “from the—the—”

  “Factory,” she finished his sentence. “Follow me. Walk on the leaves!”

  She darted ahead again, not quite so fast, moving with hushed footfalls under a line of high, old elms. He followed, making up the ground with his longer strides, and saw she held her dress with only one hand, to favor her injury. The minutes passed in silence, the moonlight flickering through the treetops onto her shoulders. With a puncturing loneliness, Svenson marveled at how delicate a woman the Contessa truly was, in contrast to the enormity of her character. He tried to imagine possessing the same determination, for he too had driven himself to extremes, but it had always been in the service of someone else.

  The Contessa reached with her good left arm and took hold of Svenson's tunic, slowing them both to a stop. Through the trees before them he could see torchlight. He reached carefully into his pocket for his monocle and fit it over his eye. The torches were moving—figures on the march down a different forest road… but marching toward the factory. Was this a second search party? Had they been cut off? He looked behind him, but saw no one following under the trees.

  He turned back to the roadway, screwed in his monocle more tightly, and frowned. The party walked with the serious intent of soldiers on a forced march—except, by their dress, these were evidently figures of quality. At least thirty people had passed… and the stream showed no sign of ending.

  “This is no search,” he breathed into the Contessa's ear, his concentration even then pricked by the smell of her hair. She nodded, but did not shift her gaze.

  The line of figures finally came to an end. As if the decision had been made together, both the Doctor and the Contessa inched forward. The road indeed led straight to the large brick building—fronted here by a high wooden wall and an iron-bound gate. They turned to look in the other direction, to where the strange crowd had appeared. Perhaps fifty yards away another set of torches was bobbing toward them.

  “Now!” the Contessa whispered. “Keep low!”

  They broke from their shelter and dashed across the road—horribly exposed for an instant—and stumbled into another grove of trees, this one more tangled with broken limbs. They threw themselves down in the shadows.

  “You know those people,” whispered Svenson.

  The Contessa did not answer.

  “I believe the preferred term is ‘adherents,’” he hissed, “those fools who have pledged their loyalty to you and your associates—and had it seared into their souls by the Process. One wonders what in the world such a collection of people is doing so far out in the countryside—almost as much as one wonders why you did not reveal yourself to them. It would seem the answer to all your present difficulties. That you did not tells me their presence here is a mystery—and that you fear they retain no loyalty to you at all.”

  The Contessa only pushed past him into the trees.

  When they emerged on the other side, another road crossed before them, overgrown with grass and knee-high saplings. Svenson realized it must have predated the canal, for it curved away around the forest, and recalled all the ruins he had passed in the woods while walking with Elöise. Parchfeldt Park was a sort of graveyard—like any forest perhaps, where every new tree fed on the pulped-up corpses beneath it. But as graveyards always brought to the Doctor's mind his own mortality, so standing on the derelict road placed all the new life and effort he had seen—the barge, the re-fitted factory, its master's blazing ambition—within the heavy shadows of time.

  The Contessa had not spoken since they'd seen the torch-led crowds. Doctor Svenson cleared his throat and she turned to him.

  “If I had not appeared, did you intend to simply approach the front door and charm the inhabitants to your will?”

  He was aware that sharp questions and a mocking tone must be strange to her, and did not doubt he was angering the woman—and yet his questions were also plainly meant. What had she expected? What seeds of defeat or despair might find purchase in her heart?

  “You're a strange man,” she at last replied. “I remember first meeting you at the St. Royale, where it was immediately obvious you were an intelligent, dutiful, tractable fool. I do not think I was wrong—”

  “I admit Cardinal Chang cuts a more spectacular figure.”

  “Cardinal Chang is merely another stripe of heart-sop idiot—you could each learn a thing from your little provincial ice floe. Yet I am not speaking of them, Doctor, but of you.”

  “What you think cannot be my concern.”

  The Contessa gazed at him, so wan and simple it made him blanch. “I will find the proper word for you someday, Doctor. And when I do, I shall whisper that word into your ear.”

  The Contessa turned and began to walk toward the factory.

  “Where are you going?” he cried. “We do not know who is there! We do not know why—if you have not called them—these people, your minions, have assembled!”

  The Contessa looked over her shoulder—an action he was certain caused her pain.

  “Content yourself with your card,” she called back to him. “The ideals you place upon the world are broken. There is nothing necessary here at all.”

  THE SHIMMER of her silk dress caught the moon even after he could, no longer distinguish her shadow from the surrounding dark, and then she was around the curve and gone. He did not follow, wondering why, and looked back at the trees where they had come from, and then down the overgrown road as it led away from the factory… a path he might follow to another world. He reached into his pocket for his cigarette case and felt his fingertips touch the cold glass card. Was there enough moonlight to see? Was it not an intensely stupid thing to do in such open ground?

  Doctor Svenson sighed, regretting the act already (what had Elöise said, that knowing more of a thing invariably meant more pain?), and turned his gaze into the glass.

  WHEN HE finally looked up again the world around him seemed unreal, as if he had been staring into the sun. He felt the sweat on the back of his neck and a stiffness in his fingers from gripping the glass rectangle so tightly. He slipped it back into his tunic pocket and rubbed his eyes, which seemed to be moist… tears? Or merely his body's response to not blinking? He began walking toward the factory.

  The card had been infused with Trapping's memory, but that made sense, since the man would have taken part in many gatherings where the Cabal recruited its intimates, where the cards were a prominent lure. Svenson had looked into two cards before this, each different from the other in the manner of captured experience. The first contained one specific event—the Prince's intimacy with Mrs. Marchmoor, when the woman's sensations had been bled into the glass on the spot. The second card, holding the experiences of Roger Bascombe, had been an assemblage of impressions and memories, from his groping of Miss Temple on a sofa to the quarry at Tarr Manor. To fabricate it, the memories must have been distilled into the card well after the fact, from Bascombe's mind.

  Trapping's card—as the Doctor now thought of it—was different from each of these. Its experience was not rooted in images, or even in tactile sensations. Instead, it conveyed—and to a hideous degree—an emotional state alone. There
was context—and here the card was similar to Bascombe's card, with an apparently random flow of trivial incidents: the foyer table of the Trappings' house at Hadrian Square… the Colonel's red uniform reflected in polished silver as he ate a solitary breakfast… the house's rear garden, where he watched his children from a cushioned chair. Yet suffusing each of these moments was a feeling of bitterness, of selfish need and brutish reaction, of exile and isolation, of a man whose bluff, unthinking complacency had been punctured by sorrow sharp as an iron nail.

  Mrs. Trapping appeared nowhere, yet her absence was not its source. What reason did Arthur Trapping have to be so bitter? His ambition had been handsomely rewarded… and suddenly Svenson placed Colonel Trapping's bottomless resentment: he owed the Xonck brothers for everything he had achieved. Each gleaming point of disgust spelled it out: a calling card in the foyer from Francis, Trapping's red uniform a disgraceful sign of Henry's patronage, the very house itself a wedding present, the children—even these, Svenson thought, shuddering, came under Trapping's eyes with guilty sparks of hatred, before the lightness of their voices spun the anger into a binding net of grief. And this struck Svenson most of all—that the lasting impression from Colonel Trapping was not rage, but unanswerable sadness.

  If Mrs. Trapping was absent from the card, Elöise Dujong was even more so—was she not the man's mistress? This was convenient if Elöise hoped to assuage Svenson's anger, but Doctor Svenson was not truly angry—perhaps, he thought dryly, it was a lifelong failing. The choices Elöise had made, however much apart from his own desires, were too easily seen to be contingent and human. She had done what she had done—though he did not especially want to think about it— just as he had buried his own grief for Corinna in useless service. And yet, to present him with the experience of this man—was that not simply cruel? Being the object of such cruelty deadened his heart. What else would she expect? What could trump the visceral distaste of being placed within his rival's body? That Trapping was sad? That Trapping loathed his in-laws? What did either of these matter when Svenson would have happily seen Trapping horsewhipped by both brothers and thrown into a salt-bath?

  THE LIGHT still blazed through the factory's windows, and Svenson could see the shadows of a gathered crowd against the wooden wall. As he came nearer he heard a buzz of discontentment, affronted mutters, and calls of disbelief. The gate had not opened, a turn of events the crowd found altogether unexplainable. The men with torches held them high, the better to shout to the unanswering windows. Their dress was not as formal as when he'd seen these same people at the final Harschmort gala, but there was no question they represented the highest levels of profession, the military. There was also a rank of younger faces within the whole—those for whom profession was but a path to pass the time, high-born siblings or cousins living near enough to taste the titles they would never hold, forever nursing jealousies and resentments. Svenson compared this gathering with the servants and clerks he'd met on the train to Tarr Manor, seduced into selling the dark secrets of their masters in exchange for what to the Cabal must have seemed like red feathers given to South Sea islanders for land—a decent place to live and enough money for a new coat in winter. What could any of the well-placed people before him lack, by what lures had they been led along? The Doctor shook his head—the terms did not matter at all. The Cabal had suborned each group by dangling before their eyes a credible prospect of hope.

  HE DROPPED onto his knees in the grass. The way into the factory was twice blocked—by the spreading crowd and by the wall. The crowd bunched in front of the gate, but their numbers were such that the mass had spread along the wall—perhaps as many as two hundred people altogether. Svenson could hear people knocking on the gate and calling for entrance, but their calls were so arrogantly presumptuous in their tone that the Doctor began to doubt that any of the crowd really knew where they were… or what might be inside. Did they not even register the contrast between the isolation of the factory and its fantastic new blazing inhabitation, between the derelict road and the recently raised outer wall?

  Svenson did not see the Contessa.

  He had seen a bust of Cleopatra once, in Berlin—his thoughts were wandering, it was getting cold—life-sized, but he had been struck by how small it seemed, that she was only one woman, who no matter how much of the world she had set aflame remained only so many pounds of flesh and bone, so much breath, so much warmth within one bed. He thought of the Contessa's lacerated shoulder, her quiver of pain beneath his touch, and laid against it like a wager her determined and rapacious—and cruel, he could not forget that— hunger. What life could have constructed such a creature? What events had shaped a man like Chang? Svenson had seen the scars of course, but those were only outward signs, the oil-slicked surface of a pool. He could not be less like them, despite his own bursts of invention or courage. Those moments were not who he was. And what of Miss Temple? He compared her with the men of privilege milling about before his eyes, discontented and hungry… was she not as restless and peremptory? The Doctor's mind went to Elöise, but he rubbed his eyes and shook the entire train of thought away.

  He stood and straightened his tunic. Some of these people had no doubt witnessed him being knocked on the head at Harschmort and dragged away to die—but that only meant they assumed he was dead. If the Contessa had avoided the restive mob, as he was quite sure she had, then there seemed all the more reason for him to do the exact opposite.

  Svenson reached the crowd and shouldered his way past the rearmost ranks before speaking aloud, in a disdainful voice borrowed from the late Crown Prince. “Why do they not open the gate? Do they intend we should wait like tradesmen in the lane? Have we not traveled all these miles?”

  A man next to him, in a crisp wool overcoat, snorted in commiseration. “No one answers at all! As if we were not even expected!”

  “There can be no mistake,” whispered a thin, older fellow with gold spectacles. “When so many of us have received the message.”

  This was met with a general murmur of agreement, but still the gate did not open. Farther down the wall—Svenson was some distance from the gate itself—he could hear the rapping of steel-toed boots kicking hard against the wood.

  “Have you seen no one?” Svenson asked.

  “When we first approached, the gate was open. They barred it shut at the sight of us!”

  “They must know we are summoned!”

  “They do not act as if they do!” complained the older man. “And now it has grown cold… and the country is so damp.”

  “Gentlemen,” offered the Doctor, hesitating enough to make sure of their attention. “Is it possible… there is trouble?”

  The man in the overcoat nodded vigorously. “I have the exact notion!”

  “What if it is all a… a… test?” whispered the older man.

  Svenson was aware that their small conversation had attracted many listeners.

  “Then we were best not to fail,” he replied, pitching his voice more loudly. “Would you not agree?”

  He was answered by nods and mutters by others around them.

  “I beg your pardon,” one said, “but your voice…your accent—”

  “We are not to know one another any more than necessary!” the older man broke in.

  “Our league is intended to be invisible in the world,” the Doctor agreed, “like a fishing net in the ocean, yes? Yet I will say, since you hear it clear enough, that I am from the Duchy of Macklenburg, serving my Prince, who serves the same… principles… as you yourselves.”

  “You are a soldier.” The older man indicated the Doctor's uniform.

  “Perhaps we are all soldiers now,” replied Svenson gravely, feeling an absolute ass. The men around him nodded with a cloying self-satisfaction.

  “Something has gone wrong,” announced the man in the overcoat. “I am sure of it.”

  “You were not told why you were summoned?” asked Svenson.

  “Were you?”

  Sve
nson felt the entire gang of men around him waiting for his answer.

  “Not told…” he began carefully. “Perhaps I over-reach myself…”

  “Tell us what you know!” urged the older man, and he was echoed by many others. Svenson surveyed their faces and then shook his head seriously, as if he too had come to a decision—to trust them all.

  He lowered his voice. “On the other side of this wall is a factory… the property of Xonck Armaments.” At this revelation came a gasp from the older man. “Exactly who controls the factory at this moment is a mystery. Francis Xonck has journeyed to Macklenburg. Henry Xonck has been taken with an attack of blood fever… and yet there has been a summoning.” Svenson swatted at his less-than-scrupulous uniform. “I say ‘summoned,’ but you will notice I am here later than you all, and after traveling for a longer time. I have come from Harschmort House, where the miraculous machinery of the Comte d'Orkancz has all been removed… removed and relocated into this very factory, behind this very wall.”

  “But is not the Comte gone to Macklenburg as well? Upon whose orders has this been done?”

  “Is that our business?” asked the older man. “Have we not sworn to serve?”

  “Serve who?” called out a voice from the knot of men around them.

  “If we were summoned, why are we shut outside?” called another.

  “Clearly we were not summoned by whoever is master in this place,” said the man in the overcoat.

  “So we must ask ourselves,” said Svenson, “just who can issue such a summons …and who cannot.”

  The men around him erupted into mutterings that spread along the wall like a wildfire leaping from treetop to treetop in the wind. The man in the overcoat bent closer, but his words were lost in the growing noise—outright shouts that the gates must be opened at once, and an explosion of kicks and fists upon the wooden wall. He caught Svenson's arm in a powerful grip. The Doctor stood ready to rip it free, but the man only squeezed harder, hissing into Svenson's ear, “What exact message did you receive?”