The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  “The dilemma is indeed perplexing,” agreed Vandaariff, tapping the pulsing wound with his fingernail.

  “If you cannot do it, let him die.” This was Cardinal Chang.

  “O I can do it,” replied Vandaariff. Behind him Francis Xonck opened his eyes and groggily shook his head, pushing without comprehension against his bonds. Vandaariff tightened the mask with a tug. He turned and met Miss Temple's gaze. Her throat clenched hard, the arrangement of copper wires and hose around Xonck seeming to twist before her eyes into letters, nearly forming words. She was suddenly terribly afraid, but she could not quite pierce his intention… and then she burst out coughing, unable to speak. Doctor Svenson stepped to her but Miss Temple pushed him away, waving her hand at Vandaariff.

  “What is wrong with her?” demanded the Contessa.

  “She is ill,” replied Vandaariff. “An effect of the glass. Just like poor Francis. Can you hear me, Francis? Are you alive?”

  “Can you truly heal him?” asked Mrs. Trapping.

  Vandaariff tied off the end of a black hose. “Do you want me to?”

  “I… I do,” she whispered.

  An excitement leapt to Vandaariff's eyes.

  “But your brother is a wicked thing. If anyone deserves an agonizing death it is certainly Francis. No, Mrs. Trapping, I'm sure I don't believe you.”

  “I want him as he was,” she insisted.

  “You must convince me…”

  “I want him back,” she whimpered.

  “Back?” asked Vandaariff. “I see—so you can kill him yourself?”

  “No,” sniffed Mrs. Trapping, but then was overtaken by sobs. “I do not know what I want at all!”

  Robert Vandaariff sniggered, arch and vile. The Contessa spoke angrily. “When you open your mouth, Charlotte, it helps you not at all!”

  “As if I had a choice! In anything!”

  The Contessa snorted and pointed to the deathly pale little girl, huddled in an insensible ball at the feet of Mr. Phelps. “You might have remembered your daughter.”

  “I might have—I might have?”

  Mrs. Trapping took three quick steps toward the Contessa, like a high-strung dog, her hands raised, then staggered from an unseen blow. She wheeled to the glass woman in a tearful fury.

  “Do not touch me!” she shrieked. “I will not have your filthy mind in mine! I will break you to a thousand pieces! I do not care if my daughter dies! I do not care if I die! If you touch me again, this whole building can go to the devil's hottest furnace!” Mrs. Trapping swayed with the same crazed ferocity her brother had shown on the roof of Harschmort. “This is my factory,” she gasped, “my brother, you cannot—”

  “Be quiet, Charlotte!” snapped the Contessa. “Oskar, what pleasure is there in tormenting an idiotic…”

  Her words fell silent. Vandaariff's smiling lips were slick with black fluid.

  “Oskar?”

  “You never did credit my alchemy, Rosamonde.”

  “I beg your pardon? Who was it who took your learning to Vandaariff, to Henry Xonck—men of immense power of whom you had never heard.”

  Vandaariff nodded dismissively, stroking his chin as if it held the Comte's beard. “Yes, for you it was ever a means to power.”

  “For all of us.”

  “You lack higher goals, Rosamonde. At heart you are a dog. A pretty dog, but now look at you! You dismissed the glory of my plans for Lydia… for Margaret… even—” he giggled wickedly “—my plans for you. My goodness, yes—if you'd only dreamt what truly awaited you in Macklenburg… one limb at a time, my sweet… and your womb—O that more than anything, Rosamonde, your own sweet legacy… all given over to me.”

  The Contessa stared at him.

  “Oskar…you—even you—would not have dared—”

  Vandaariff barked with contempt. “Would not dare? Would not dare?”

  He raised his arm and Fochtmann, back at the line of machines, restored them to roaring life. The Contessa's eyes went wide. She looked with alarm at Miss Temple, still unable to speak, and shouted for him to wait, shouted for the glass woman to stop him. But Robert Vandaariff seized the handle on the brass box and pulled it down.

  MISS TEMPLE had stolen one glimpse of the Comte's cathedral chamber at Harschmort, with all its machines at full roar and Mrs. Marchmoor, Angelique, and Elspeth Poole laid out on tables awaiting transformation—and she had seen the sickening glamour of their grand unveiling in the Vandaariffs' ballroom later that night. But she had not witnessed the alchemical transformation itself, human flesh remade to blue glass. And so the spectacle of Francis Xonck writhing in unspeakable agony—madly shrieking as his body boiled away before them all—filled her with unprecedented horror.

  The change began at the gleaming lump near his heart and then spread out in twisting ropes, wriggling fingers surging up each side of his throat, fast-growing tropical vines rippling across his sweat-slicked chest. She heard muffled cracks, like splitting ice, as his bones were over-borne, and then came the bubbling away of muscle and sinew. The hissing glass erupted upwards to pepper the skin in raw blue patches, a horrid dense scatter of virulent blistering. Then these blisters fattened, pooling, colliding into one another until the whole of Xonck's exposed flesh congealed into one gelid gleaming sheet.

  At the first jolt of current, the man screamed and thrashed his arms—and it seemed he might tear free, so prodigious was his terror. But as his body incrementally stiffened, his ability to struggle was curtailed. His protests dropped at the last to a lost, vacant moan behind the rubber mask, the sound of wind against the lip of an empty bottle, and then he was silent altogether.

  Fochtmann switched off the power.

  No one spoke, and not one person moved, save for Robert Vandaariff, who delicately leaned to his new-made creature and whispered in its ear.

  “WHAT HAVE you done?” rasped Colonel Aspiche, lifting his head from the floor. “What madness?”

  Vandaariff did not answer. Gently peeling free the mask, he exposed Francis Xonck's face—an inhuman swirling blue, copper hair hanging in oily locks against his bare neck. Xonck's moustache and side whiskers were gone. He seemed so much younger—and his corruption more stinging. Vandaariff bared his teeth in a mirthless leer of satisfaction.

  “Were you saying something, Rosamonde? I could not hear.”

  “Oskar…” The Contessa groped for words, unable to turn from the spectacle of Xonck's body. “O Oskar…”

  “Oskar indeed—I trust any questions of identity can be laid to rest. As requested, I have ended Francis' struggle with the blue glass—to everyone's profit… or at least my own.”

  “Jesus…” Mr. Phelps seemed near tears. “Jesus God…”

  Vandaariff smiled. He scratched his earlobe with the nail of his right thumb. Miss Temple saw with a shudder how the sensibility that had been placed into Robert Vandaariff's body was not truly that of the Comte d'Orkancz. The Comte was an esthete, a sensualist who rated the entire world only by its beauty. Yet in his despairing grapple with death, that sensuality had been spoiled—like a freshly opened egg mixed with tar, like sugar frosting spun with putrid meat, like sliced fruit writhing with maggots—leaving his mind riddled with loathing and spite for everything that remained alive. Whatever ruin he could replicate in the world would merely echo the despoilment of his once-splendid dreams.

  He raised an eyebrow at Mrs. Marchmoor, who had not moved, and then addressed the Contessa. “You seem reticent, Rosamonde. Did you not want to renew our compact? Or has your recent ill fortune rendered you as tremulous as these men?”

  The Contessa held Phelps' revolver—it was within her power to shoot Vandaariff down.

  “Why do you hesitate?” hissed Miss Temple. “After what he was saying, what he would do to you—”

  “Be quiet, Celeste!” The Contessa licked her lips, weighing greed and arrogance and hope against the man's outright insanity. For a creature as once splendid as the Contessa to even hesitate, Miss Temple w
as appalled. The Contessa cleared her throat and spoke in a cool, careful tone.

  “I am sure the Comte was merely… exorcising his old rage.”

  “I was exactly,” said Vandaariff, smiling.

  “Telling stories.”

  “I was indeed.”

  Vandaariff turned to Miss Temple and smirked at her distressed expression. “The Contessa is my good friend, how could we not go on together? Of course, Margaret is a different story. She is imperfect, created from flawed premises, and so we see the result—beautiful enough, yet rebellious, acquisitive… stupid.” He called to Chang. “Take her head, I beseech you.”

  “Enough,” the glass woman whispered.

  The chuckle stopped in Vandaariff's throat, and his body stiffened. But despite the redness of his face and the bulging veins in his neck… he continued to smile.

  “I may be yours, Margaret,” Vandaariff gasped, his face streaming with sweat. “But Francis… is mine.”

  At once Mrs. Marchmoor rocked on her feet. She released Vandaariff, visibly shaking where she stood, and pivoted her attention solely to Francis Xonck. Still bound to the chair, Xonck had lifted his head to face her, his depthless eyes dark and bright. Miss Temple watched transfixed as each glass creature strained against the other— unnatural, hypnotic, battling statues—until it seemed that both must shatter. Xonck's mouth hung open, his broken teeth bared. Blue steam rose from Mrs. Marchmoor's damaged arm.

  “I cannot! I cannot!” wailed Mrs. Marchmoor, and at once the tension snapped away, the air in the room as crisp as if it had been split by lightning. Miss Temple's eyes burned and she covered her mouth and nose. Mrs. Marchmoor retreated to the canvas-covered window. Vandaariff barked with hoarse laughter.

  “Well done, Francis—though rather tardy. If you delay like that again… suffice to say that I do not tolerate independence.”

  He took hold of Francis Xonck's right ear and with a sudden turn of his wrist snapped the upper half clean off, tossing it away to shatter behind the machines. Xonck grunted and an invisible ripple of pain shot through each unprotected mind in the room. Vandaariff mockingly addressed the steaming stub.

  “Am I understood?”

  The Contessa stepped forward, one hand to her forehead. “Oskar…”

  Vandaariff ignored her, calling gaily across the room, “It is no use, Margaret, you will not fit through the bars! You've been damaged— and Francis is your match!”

  “What do you want?” the glass woman whispered.

  “Everything,” Vandaariff replied. “It would be more efficient to break you apart and pound the pieces into sand… but perhaps that arm can be mended after all. I can mend all manner of broken souls, can't I?”

  He looked into Xonck's swirling depths of color with a sour mix of delight and disdain. Miss Temple winced as Xonck's new voice entered her mind, a groping, graveled scrape, deeper than Mrs. Marchmoor's and more sad.

  “Oskar… I… I… never—”

  “Who asks for destiny?” replied Vandaariff with a strange light in his eyes. “You have been tempered to a harder steel. And perhaps there is justice in it—we have each preserved the other by way of torment.

  You are quite new! The corruption is gone, the weakness burned away—your body has undergone the true chemical marriage!”

  “You have no idea,” whispered Xonck.

  “You think not?” Vandaariff laughed coldly. “The arrogance of this world! Your puling grief, Margaret's grasping fear, this beastly hope—”

  Mrs. Marchmoor interrupted him. “What do you want?”

  He did not reply. Instead, he turned at last to the Contessa, smirking at the pistol in her hand.

  “What would you say, Rosamonde? What price to keep Margaret among us?”

  The Contessa looked carefully at Mrs. Marchmoor—her ally of just moments before—and shrugged, flinching against the pull of her shoulder.

  “Her continued service,” she said. “Even if she is no match for Francis, she remains inordinately powerful. And in our absence, she has no doubt discovered any number of useful secrets within the Ministries.”

  “Excellent practical reasoning, madame. I too am practical, and I think it is extremely important to retain control of this excellent facility—which means, of all things, Xonck.”

  “That is nothing to do with Margaret—”

  Again, Vandaariff did not seem to answer her words, but spoke from his own urges, the same poisonous resentment. “These machines are our future, but my vision. You deprived me of Lydia, Rosamonde. Her flesh had become my canvas.” Vandaariff's eyes sharpened. “Now my dreams have changed—they have deepened in astonishing ways… I see how I can go so much further…”

  His eyes settled on his target with a hungry gleam and Miss Temple felt her gorge rise.

  “My price… is the child.”

  “The child?” The Contessa shook her head. “But she is not Lydia—She cannot—What will you do with her?”

  “Absolutely anything”

  Vandaariff looked to the glass woman, who met his gaze and sucked her lower lip, measuring the foulness she had tasted against survival and a return to servitude. She nodded, the barest dip of her chin. Vandaariff turned to the Contessa. Her face was drawn and her mouth grimly set. “Done.”

  FRANCESCA TRAPPING screamed. Elöise had plucked up the girl—startling her—and run for the open door. Mrs. Trapping, shocked to life as well, shrieked after them.

  “Elöise! You cannot take my daughter from me! Elöise!”

  But Mrs. Trapping did not stir from where she stood—wringing her hands, tears on her cheeks—between the corpse of Mr. Leveret and the scarcely recognizable figure of her brother.

  Nor was Elöise able to escape. Just at the door she stumbled—her body stopped from afar—and toppled to the floor, face blank, pulling Francesca down with her. The girl had not been occupied. Now she struggled against the unmoving arms of her tutor. Her panicked eyes met those of Francis Xonck, and she screamed even louder.

  Miss Temple wheeled to the dais. It was Francis Xonck who had prevented Elöise from taking the girl.

  IT WAS not often in Miss Temple's life that she received credit for being intelligent. She had never cared for her studies. She had participated rarely in discussions of substance—business or finance or politics or religion, which was to say the discussions of men—the only sphere where intelligence might be seen as a factor. Instead, it was her lot to be found (and even this less often than she liked) cunning or clever, animal associations—as if one were to admire a badger for digging—less a compliment than a condescending description. Yet in that instant, Miss Temple's mind made a small leap, one that she herself found startling.

  It was also at that moment that she noticed a fallen soldier near Elöise move his arm.

  Miss Temple took hold of the Doctor's uniform tunic with both hands and shoved him as hard as she could toward the doorway.

  “The child is Xoncks!” Miss Temple hissed. “Get her away!”

  AS A person who naturally thought the worst of everyone, Miss Temple never doubted the revelations about Elöise and Colonel Trapping (or Elöise and Francis Xonck), though she had not understood why Mrs. Trapping still suffered Elöise's presence. She remembered the Contessa's letter to Caroline Stearne—that she possessed some secret to control Mrs. Trapping. Had Mrs. Marchmoor known it too? Perhaps it had been her taste of Xonck's blood in the garden. Only after that had Andrew Rawsbarthe been ordered to collect vials of blood from each child… and Mrs. Marchmoor had sampled all three vials in the same fashion, turning them to glass. Yet only Francesca had been taken inside the factory—for only her vial had matched the glass woman's earlier taste of her hidden parent—brought to provide leverage against both mother and father. Miss Temple was dismayed by the revelation itself, but the West Indies offered innumerable examples of distressing patrimony—one was always seeing features one shouldn't on the most inconvenient faces, and she herself had studiously ignored what migh
t be familiar noses or chins amongst her own plantation's offspring. The thought opened her heart the slightest crack to how troubled and painful the Trapping household must have been—the devastating tangle of loyalties and humiliations and betrayals, the impossibility of anything but the bitterest compromise …

  “FRANCIS!” CRIED Vandaariff. “Francis—stop him!”

  “Go to the devil!” barked Svenson. The Doctor stumbled as the force of Xonck's mind struck him, but then he lurched free—free of the same power that had toppled Elöise and overcome Mrs. Marchmoor. Svenson leapt forward to catch the sobbing girl's hands.

  “I cannot reach him!” whispered Xonck.

  “Reach her!” commanded Vandaariff.

  The girl slumped into dead weight. With an exasperated cry in German, Svenson pulled with all his strength, wrenching the slender child away from Elöise, and sprawling onto his seat.

  “Stop him!” Vandaariff's voice rose to a shriek. “She is my price! She is my price to spare the lot of you! If she escapes—”

  The crack of the Contessa's pistol rang in Miss Temple's ear and a white seam of new wood was ripped from the planks near Svenson's head.

  Miss Temple wheeled toward the Contessa and shrieked, desperately waving her arms.

  “The soldiers are waking up!”

  The Contessa could not help but look—and indeed the green-coated bodies were slowly writhing to life, their limbs like a welter of interlocked snakes—as did everyone else in the room.

  Everyone but Chang. At Miss Temple's cry he launched himself straight for Vandaariff. Fochtmann hurled himself in front of his new master, arms outstretched. Chang struck him on the jaw with the saber hilt, and the tall man flew back like a parasol taken apart by the wind. Vandaariff stumbled into the brass machinery, and hissed with pain as his bare hand touched the hot metal. Chang raised the blade. Fochtmann, bleeding from his mouth, dove at Chang's legs, knocking him off balance and sending the stroke wide, striking sparks from a snarl of copper wire. Chang kicked Fochtmann viciously below the ribs.