A Drop of Night

by Stefan Bachmann

  Hayden wasn’t so lucky.

  “We were supposed to die in that cube room. But we escaped.”

  “So now what?” Jules asks.

  “Now we hide,” I say. “Dorf said they were three miles away. Those things, trackers, whatever—if they’re anything like the guys with Miss Sei, they’re fast.”

  I walk to the table and grab an orange. I expected it to be fake, dangerous, maybe explode into poisoned barbs and skewer my hand. It doesn’t. I can smell the sharp tang of the oil from its peel, rubbing off on my fingertips. I stuff it in my sweater pocket, grab an apple, a bunch of grapes. Will takes a pear cautiously, eyeing it like a puzzling mystery.

  “Dorf said they could see us,” Jules says. “They might be watching us right now.”

  “Most likely.” I pivot. I have a weird sensation as the room turns around me. The air is so still, but now that I listen—really listen—it’s not a dead silence. It’s charged, thick with a sharp, buzzing energy. The hairs on my neck stand on end.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. Open them. “Which door? Pick one, any one.”

  Will points his pear toward a door in the left wall. I head for it.

  My brain starts up a panicky chant: There is no right door. They don’t want us dead yet, they don’t want us dead—I drag on the door’s handle, peer into the next room. It’s a salon, the place where fancy French families receive their guests. Crusts of gilt. Red brocade wallpaper. Stained-glass wall panels and crystal chandeliers. Chairs waiting like empty mouths.

  I walk in. The others follow at a safe distance.

  “Thanks a lot,” I say, without turning. “Wouldn’t want to be killed along with Anouk if the room is rigged, right? You guys are dolls.”

  This room has three doors, the one we came through and two in the far wall. What we’re doing is stupid. Running around randomly until we feel like we’re a long way from our starting point is not hiding, and it’s not going to keep us safe. Just because we don’t know where we are doesn’t mean they don’t.

  We’re going to have to prepare for the worst.

  I run over to the marble fireplace and try to lift myself onto the mantel. It’s taller than I am. I can’t get a footing on the smooth sides. I try again, slip off like a dork.

  Jules hurries over. “Uh, what are you doing?” He’s staring at me like I should be put down for rabies.

  I ignore him, drag a chair over, climb onto the seat. It creaks under me. I make it onto the narrow ledge of the mantel and start toeing my way toward the center. The others are probably contemplating leaving me behind as a peace offering to the psychos at this point. I don’t care. Above the fireplace, fixed inside a decorative coat of arms, are two swords—curved sabers with spun-gold hand guards, making an X.

  I grab one and try to slide it out. It doesn’t budge. I pry at the coat of arms. Unlatch it from the wall. Whoa. It’s heavy. I tip back. Realize I’m going to fall off the mantle if I don’t let go of the shield. Whirl and let the whole thing drop.

  It clangs against the floor, deafeningly loud. I leap down after it.

  “Are you crazy?” Jules hisses, and Lilly is turning circles, twisting frantically at one of the feathers braided into her hair.

  “Weapons,” I say. “You should find some, too.”

  I have no idea how to fight with swords. I can do a flawless dive roll and speak at length about the Florentine masters during the early stages of the Italian Renaissance, but I’m pretty sure whatever those trackers are, they will not find that impressive. Still, swords are better than no swords, if you ask me. I brace a foot against the edge of the shield and pull with all my might.

  Lilly catches on. She starts ripping drawers out of a side table, rummaging through them. Will goes to an armoire in the far wall. I get the first sword loose and rip it free.

  I rub my thumb along its blade. Not very sharp, but the tip is. It will do some damage if I jam it in hard enough. I wiggle out the second sword. Lilly comes over with a long, ivory-handled letter opener. Will has a gorgeously curled fire poker. Jules has nothing, so he picks up a porcelain statue of a lady holding a parasol, because it’s closest, and waves it menacingly.

  I grab it from him and smack it back down. Hand him Will’s fire poker, and since Will’s hand remains opened, like he’s still trying to catch up mentally with the sudden lack of fire pokers in his life, I replace the fire poker with one of the swords. Lilly grabs the other sword. I think subconsciously I wanted it, but whatever. I slide the letter opener into my jeans pocket. Hope I don’t impale myself while walking. Face everyone.

  It’s kind of sad. We’re like a group of overzealous mercenaries in a low-budget sci-fi movie, accessorizing with household items.

  “Great,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  I head for the door on the left. Slip through it. It’s like stepping into a picture frame, a 3-D masterpiece. The room isn’t large, but every inch of ceiling and walls is painted with massive landscapes in oil: shadowy, visceral scenes of myths and betrayals, twisting figures and roiling bits of cloaks and darkness.

  I know what this reminds me of: a miniature Sistine Chapel. I went to the real one at the tail end of the Italy trip last year. Rented a rooftop apartment in Rome and drank Montepulciano and ate pancetta with olives and pretended I was a grown-up. I had dramatic conversations with my parents in my head, screamed at the late-night revelers down in the street, the whole shebang. And when I visited the chapel, worming my way between the tourists, I remember tipping my head up and feeling like all those bodies on the ceiling were watching me. Here it’s worse. They’re closer.

  I want to keep going—the others are already moving past me, drifting through the room—but something about the pictures makes me pause. The brushstroke faces look angry. The figures are fighting, locked in battle, their eyes so deep set in their skulls they’re almost black. The skies are bruised, the trees warped.

  I imagine the trackers, streaking toward us through rooms just like this one.

  This room has four doors. One in each wall.

  The air still has that odd, prickling feeling.

  And a man is standing in the corner. Bleeding. Watching us.

  17

  For a second I think I’m imagining him. Bone thin. Red-rimmed eyes. Standing like a twisted angel against the baroque gilt and oil paintings behind him.

  There are rogue assets loose in the palace—

  And now Lilly sees him, too, and it’s like her brain is telling her one thing and her eyes are telling her another thing, because she’s walking straight toward him, saying, “That’s not—that’s not a person—”

  And now she shrieks so loud it hurts my ears, “Who-are-you-who-are-you?”

  And everything snaps. The others see him. We’re all running, trampling over each other trying to get to the nearest door, desperate not to turn our backs on him. He’s plaster pale. He’s wearing knee breeches and a ruffled, loose-hanging shirt, and the blood is drenching it, slicking it to his skin.

  He doesn’t move. He watches us, and his mouth drops open. Words start tumbling out of him, frenzied and desperate: “Reine,” he says, shivering. “Mere de misericorde, notre vie, notre joie, notre esperance, salut. Enfants d’Eve—”

  We’re crashing into a long, high gallery.

  I hear: “Nous crions vers vous de fond de notre exil—”

  It’s a French prayer, but it sounds mangled, dark, and in my head Dorf is laughing, screaming, You didn’t lock us out; you locked yourselves in!

  I whip my head around, almost fall into Jules’s back. The pale man is still standing, grinning. And now he follows. His eyes fix on mine. He’s charging toward us, feet pounding the floor. I face forward, running with all my strength.

  “What’s he saying?” Lilly screeches.

  I look back again, my vision bucking drunkenly. Four to one, four to one, if he catches up we can—

  He’s hurt, but those milk-white arms are corded with muscle, and his gangling legs are carry
ing him toward us like some bony, fast-moving spider. He’s still muttering, staring straight at me.

  We reach the end of the gallery. There’s no exit. What we thought was a door is a three-dimensional illusion painting depicting the gateway to the Elysian Fields. This room is a dead end.

  You have got to be kidding me.

  I look back. The pale man is fifteen feet away. Lilly drags her sword out and starts swinging it in front of her in wide, frantic arcs. “Stop!” she shouts. “Don’t come any closer. Anouk, speak French to him, what are you waiting for?”

  I spin. “Arrêtez!” I shout. “Arrêtez, n’approchez pas! Ne vous—” Don’t come any closer, don’t—

  He skids to a stop about five feet away. And everything goes silent. The others turn slowly. The man stares at us. A drop of blood, dark as wine, rolls from his fingertips and splashes to the floor.

  “Who are you?” I ask in French, and it comes out in an awkward yell. “Are you with the Sapanis?”

  He tilts his head. His eyes are bruised and bloodshot, and something about them—the way they’re pinned freakishly on my face—makes me want to crawl under the floor.

  “What do you want?” I ask again.

  The man blinks at me. And now he seems to cringe in slow motion, bowing elaborately, one leg forward, one arm swept back and up, his gory hand extended toward me like a pantomime. He takes a step closer, another one, his head still lowered.

  “Don’t touch him,” Lilly whispers. Her sword is extended toward him, the blade shivering.

  “Trust me, I don’t plan to . . . Écoutez,” I snap at the pale man. “What happened to you?”

  His eyes roll up to meet mine. For a second they’re sharp. Now they’re brimming, dripping tears and he’s inching toward me, fingers trembling, blood splattering the floor.

  “Aurélie,” he croaks. “Aurélie.”

  “Who’s Aurélie?”

  He doesn’t answer. Drops onto one knee and wraps his long arms around himself, head hanging. He’s so thin. His spine stands out like a little mountain range down his neck, strangely reptilian. “Aidez moi,” he whispers. “S’il vous plaît, ayez pitié. J’ai tellement peur.”

  “Help me,” Will translates softly. “Please, have pity. I am so afraid.”

  “He’s afraid?” Jules practically shrieks. “What about us? Dorf said there was something down here. That thing could very well be it. What if he’s infected or something?”

  The pale man tips sideways and clatters to the floor. His breathing is getting shallower, quick, weak gasps. His skin is turning a disgusting gray-purple color.

  “He’s going to bleed to death,” I say. It comes out cold, flat. I don’t know what the proper reaction is to meeting a terrifying person on the verge of death in the palace of your kidnappers. My brain is telling me to run back to the Sistine Room, pick a different door, and forget we ever saw him, but—

  “What if he can help us?” I step toward him cautiously. His breaths are so quiet now. A line of blood is creeping away from him across the floor, like a finger, reaching for us. “What if he can tell us what we need to know to get out of here?”

  “Are you crazy?” Jules whimpers. “No, no, no, we are on the run, okay? We are going to be killed.”

  “Jules, look at him. He’s hurt. He’s in the same boat as we are, and he’s probably been down here longer—”

  “It might be a trick,” Will says. “If he’s faking it—”

  “Then I die gruesomely and you guys know better for next time. Win-win.” I’m not waiting for a decision by committee. I pull my letter opener out of my pocket and walk up to the pale man. He raises his head, looking at me from under his lids. His skin is almost translucent now from loss of blood. Patches of red are blooming around his eyes and on his neck. His fingernails are thick and yellow.

  “Aidez-moi,” he wheezes again, barely audible. “Aurélie, aidez-moi. . . .”

  I crouch and hold his gaze. “Can you get us out of here?” I say in French.

  He begins nodding, but his eyes are glazing over. “Oui, mademoiselle, oui!”

  “Okay. Un accord. You help us and we’ll help you, got that?”

  He’s sobbing, grasping for my hand, tears dripping, mixing with the blood on the floor.

  I jerk away and force down the bile rising in my throat. “If he tries anything . . .” I turn to the others, “we knock his brains out and run. Until then we’re going to help him.”

  18

  He smells disgusting. A mixture of sweaty and grimy, New York City streets in summertime and something bloody and metallic that I can’t quite place. I’m trying not to breathe—trying not to touch his skin accidentally and throw up everywhere—as I wrap swath after swath of pine-green velvet from some drapes around his arm. It’s like I’m in Gone with the Wind, being all nurselike and mid-nineteenth century. Give me some hoopskirts and I’ll kick Melanie right out of town.

  “More,” I say, and throw my head back, staring up at the ceiling. “I need more cloth.”

  We’re one door over from the Sistine Room now. A little hexagonal sitting room with a concert harp standing in the center. The drapes were hanging in front of some fake mirror windows that I assume are supposed to trick you into feeling less enclosed, except they do the exact opposite. You see drapes and a window-shaped object, and you expect to be able to look through it and gaze out into the sky or wide-open fields, but you don’t. You see yourself. It’s disturbing.

  Will tears another strip off the drapes and passes it to me. I gulp air and dive back down, tying bandages as fast as I can.

  The blood is coming from a deep gash running from the base of his elbow to his wrist. It’s on the top of his arm, just a flesh wound, but it’s bizarre. It’s not a cut. Not a bite. It’s wide and smooth at the edges, a trough, almost like something burned him. Slowly.

  “He said he can get us out of here?” Jules mutters over to me. He’s hunched next to Will, trying to find the seams in the curtains. “And yet we can’t believe anything he says. So explain to me, why are we helping him again? We can’t trust him!”

  “We’re not going to trust him.” I tie another strip of velvet around his arm. Hear a wet squelch as I tighten, and feel my stomach roil. “We’re going to make sure he doesn’t die in the next five minutes and then we’re going to have him save our lives whether he wants to or not.”

  I glance at the pale man’s face. His skin hangs in folds, but I don’t think it’s from age. He’s like one of those Vietnam POWs in archive footage, or an extreme mountaineer after a hard climb. Exhausted and depleted and sick. I see why his eyes seemed bloodshot before. The dark irises are weirdly broken, as if they’ve begun to spread into the white. I think of the zombies in arthouse-y British apocalypse movies, how the characters look right before the infection grabs hold. I want to put this guy in a glass containment cell and talk to him through an intercom. He has other wounds on his body, too. Older ones. Tiny, hairline cuts on his neck and forehead and on the palms of his hands that have healed into delicate satiny scars. White as fish bones.

  “We need to go!” Lilly whines. She’s standing next to us, shifting from foot to foot and brandishing her sword like an angry garden gnome.

  I knot the last strip of velvet around the makeshift bandage and stand quickly.

  “We’re going. Can you walk?” I say to the pale man. “Pouvez-vous marcher?”

  He nods, but he doesn’t stand. Will helps him up. Lets him go. His leg cricks grotesquely, and he almost drops again. Will catches him.

  “By yourself?” Jules asks testily.

  Will holds him up, and we start to walk across the room. Slowly. Okay, maybe this was stupid.

  “Take us to the exit,” I say in French. “The way out. La police pour nous, l’hôpital pour vous.”

  He shakes his head wildly.

  “What d’you mean ‘no’? Yes! Like, right now!”

  “Not yet,” he says, lowering his head, squeezing his eyes closed,
doing that bobbing bow again. “Not safe. We must hide! They are coming!”

  “He says we need to hide?”

  “Where? Where do we hide?”

  “Follow,” he says, and now he rips out of Will’s grasp and begins to hobble unsteadily into the Sistine Room, through the doors, back toward the white antechamber. We hurry after him, Will going right up to his side in case he wants to make a run for it. We’re slamming through doors, through an endless string of sumptuous rooms. Drapes, gilt, paintings, and furniture pass in a blur. We’re in a narrow corridor, the walls paneled in dark wood, the ceiling ribbed with gilt, patterned as if it’s made up of massive dragonfly wings. The pale guy stops in front of a double door. He starts nodding, gesturing toward it.

  “Safe?” I ask, tapping a hand on the wood. “We’ll be safe in here?”

  He stares at me, eyes twitching. Jules turns, staring down the corridor.

  “Safe!” I repeat, urgently. “Est-il sécuritaire?”

  Something’s coming. I hear it now that we’ve stopped—far, far away, but getting closer, the unmistakable sound of pounding feet. Doors opening. And that humming’s back, sudden and sharp. The same humming I heard in the bone-white antechamber, but louder now—a thin, fuzzy line of sound, rising painfully. Whoever’s approaching, they can’t be more than five rooms away. In a few seconds they’ll be bursting into the corridor.

  The pale man is freaking out, and so is Jules. The hum is a bone saw now, cutting into my brain.

  Unless there’s a contingent of Sapanis on the other side of these doors, draped over chaises longues and sipping the blood of infants from martini glasses, this is where we’re hiding.

  I rip open the doors. Will grabs the pale guy, Lilly grabs Jules, and we’re all piling into someplace big, someplace dark—