He always preferred to write the rules rather than obey them.
His smiled as the thought suddenly vanished. There was a change in the air, a chill that he could feel approaching. The transformed shaft was well lit for a hallway but now the distant ends of it were darkened and growing dim and dull in his vision.
Shades, he thought. The Shades approach and that can only mean …
The door in front of him opened.
“Mrs. Crow,” Merrick muttered.
“My lord,” the old woman acknowledged.
The Shades were drawing close to him from both ends of the hall. He could not see but a few feet beyond them as they approached. Merrick could pick out their forms in the hallway, what had been, or could have been, men and women shifting in their forms as they approached. Merrick could see his breath exhaled as wispy clouds into the frigid air before him.
He turned to face Mrs. Crow. “A rather nice touch, Mrs. Crow, considering I have never drawn breath.”
“We must keep up appearances, my lord,” Mrs. Crow said with a nod of her pleasant face and a thin smile. “Is Lady Ellis any closer to finding her prize?”
“How should I know,” Merrick snarled. “I don’t know where she is hidden, either.”
“But they are close to finding someone who does,” Mrs. Crow said agreeably. “And when they do, we shall all have our reward.”
18
FIGUREHEAD
“Where are you going now, Ellis?” Jonas called to her, but she was already pushing past Margaret through the short hall at the back of the rotunda.
“Into the trap,” Ellis responded over her shoulder as she rushed down the entryway. She swung abruptly through the open doors on the left and into the music room, the same room from which Merrick had emerged just minutes before. It had been a ruin at that time but now was restored to pristine beauty. The piano sat in its familiar place, its case polished and shining in the light streaming through the window. It occurred to Ellis that the garden should be outside those windows and the bay beyond but even as the idea rose to conscious thought she knew that if she parted the lace and curtains she would only be looking into another compartment of Echo House. The loss and disappointment of that idea only steeled her resolve.
She turned again and stepped up to the little built-in bookcase. There, as she expected, was a small vase.
“Ellis, wait,” Alicia pleaded as she trailed Jonas and Margaret into the room. “Perhaps we need to discuss this among ourselves and come up with a better plan than walking into a trap.”
The vase before Ellis was filled with dead flowers.
She smiled. “Except that it is my trap.”
Ellis reached up, lifting the vase off of its shelf. As it had before, she heard with satisfaction the click of the lock release.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea, Ellis,” Jonas said, the color draining from his face.
“I trapped you in here once before,” Ellis acknowledged as she pulled open the hidden doorway. “This time, we’ll all keep you company.”
The doorway swung open, illuminated from the room beyond with a dull red, flickering light. Ellis took a deep breath to steady her own resolve as she leaned inside the secret doorway for a look beyond.
The walls and ceiling of the room beyond were configured as she remembered them, a small, hidden craft room that she had specifically designed as a trap back in the world of Gamin. To Ellis, this meant that this incarnation of the house was not the one she remembered from the real world of mortality but the strange, dreamlike world of the Tween.
The striking difference was the complete absence of a floor. Instead of the polished hardwoods she remembered, a wide staircase descended at a precipitous angle down toward depths illuminated by red-tinted hurricane lamps. The chair rail paneling on the wall extended downward to meet the frighteningly steep stairs where they entered a cellar.
“What’s down there?” Margaret gave Ellis a questioning glance as she spoke.
“I … I think … is that hell?” Alicia whimpered.
“No, I think it just looks like hell,” Ellis said, nodding as much to herself as to her companions. “We’re actually way past hell, if the Disir sisters are to be believed. You said we needed to ask a devil, Alicia. I believe this is the best place for us to look to find one.”
“And how did you know it was here?” Margaret asked.
“Because I needed it,” Ellis said as she stepped onto the staircase. The tread groaned under her weight. “There are rules to this place, Margaret. I’m learning the rules.”
“My lady?” Margaret was at her heels. “Where are you going?”
“Where I must,” Ellis answered. She did not hesitate. For the first time in a long time there was a surety to her steps. She moved at once, each tread groaning beneath her. The stairs turned and continued downward between the red-glass hurricane lamps. Instead of growing cooler, the air became drier and hotter with every step.
Ellis hurried down the abrupt descent with purpose, the tumble of her footsteps mixed with the voices that fell in her wake.
“Ellis, no,” Jonas pleaded.
“Wait for us!” Alicia called out.
Ellis paid them little heed. Jonas who sat by the Gate. Alicia and Margaret who dreamed of their own Day. They would follow her, she realized, as they had always followed her.
The staircase emerged high on a cliff wall of an underground cavern. Ellis drew in a deep breath. The near walls were illuminated by the red lanterns but she could not make out their extents on either side. Nor could she see the bottom of the chasm beneath her. Only the continuing descent of the stairs before her.
“I don’t remember your uncle’s cellar being quite this big,” Jonas quipped.
“I don’t remember you ever going down there,” Ellis said with a smirk.
“It was dark,” Jonas said in his defense.
“Not this dark,” Ellis said, gathering her courage. “This is the way. Come on.”
“I thought I was supposed to guide you?” Jonas said.
Ellis thought for a moment then turned to Jonas. The paisley-shaped bruise over his right eye had become the disfigurement of a burn. Ellis could see the scarring of the tissue, the pulling of facial cartilage. There were a lot of the soldiers who were returning with injuries far worse. She had treated so many of them after she had entered into the nursing corps, the only branch of the service available to her. She was overtrained and overqualified but after Jonas had been drafted into the Canadian services, she had somehow woken up from the pain and the loss to realize that she had thrown away a great deal more. Somehow it felt that if she could serve the warriors coming home she might somehow be serving him, too. There was a penitence that she found comforting and somehow basically right. Her uniform was an outward symbol of that inner regret. It was certainly far less fashionable than she was used to and the color was …
Ellis glanced down at the hideous traveling dress she wore.
It was not a traveling dress at all. Though it was devoid of any of the chevrons, badges or patches it was that dull green color and unquestionably the remains of her uniform.
Ellis turned back to face Jonas on the stairs.
“Jonas.” Her voice was soft and spoke his name with a tenderness that surprised her. “I don’t think I want you to lead me anywhere anymore … and I don’t want you to follow me, either…”
She could see the pain fill his eyes, so she rushed her words, gently placing her hand on his chest. “But what I want … what I think I’ve always wanted … was someone who would stand beside me. I know you loved me, Jonas, and have always wanted what you honestly believed was best for me. And the more I remember of our life together, the more I believe that I had come to love you, too. But I don’t need you to save me, Jonas. I know that you will always place my needs ahead of your own. But what I truly wish to know is that you’ll place the two of us together ahead of either of us.”
She reached down and took his hand
.
“Can we face this together?” she asked.
“Together, Ellis,” Jonas said, intertwining his fingers with hers.
“That was a lovely scene and I’m sure both Margaret and I are grateful to have been a part of it,” Alicia said from behind them. She was shivering visibly. “But now that you know where you keep this demon of yours, could we possibly go back up the stairs now?”
“No,” Ellis answered with a firmer determination than she had known since she awoke in this place. “Never go back, Alicia. What’s done is done and cannot be undone. Never forget where you’ve been, but never, ever go back.”
“I don’t understand,” Alicia whined.
“Exactly,” Ellis responded. She started down the staircase, with Jonas by her side. There was no railing on the left of the stairs and the railing on the right shifted loosely under her grip. However, to her relief, there were just enough lanterns hanging at uneven intervals down the railing. They could make out further lamps down before them, each barely sufficient for them to see their next few steps ahead. The air grew warmer with every step and uncomfortably damp. The stairs seemed to descend interminably.
“Did you make this?” Margaret asked.
“I honestly don’t know, Margaret,” Ellis replied.
The descent seemed interminable with the moments stretching into hours. At last, however, something could dimly be perceived emerging from the gloom below. A dark, enormous shape lit by the same dull, red lanterns that had illuminated the upper staircase.
Ellis called softly back, “I think we’ve found it—or it has found us.”
“What do you mean?” Alicia shivered.
“I’m not sure,” Ellis answered back in hushed tones.
The shape as a whole was that of an enormous building, an inverted cathedral whose spires were driven into the rock at its base. The uttermost extents could not be determined as they faded into the darkness beyond the extents of their vision both beyond and overhead. It might have been an extension of Echo House thrust downward from the cavernous ceiling above but the closer they got, the more it was evident that the entire monstrous structure was an amalgamation from parts of a chaotic and eclectic assortment of ships. It looked as though the hands of a titan’s child had pushed together schooners, barques, steamers and ketches into a broken mass and tried to shape them into a Gothic stalactite. Bowed hulls stood on end, strangely angled turrets standing on a stone island rising from the bottomless chasm below. Masts and rigging stuck out at odd angles from the central mass.
Ellis and Jonas stepped off the bottom of the stairs with Alicia and Margaret close at their heels. The twisted masts, rigging, deck planking and ribbing were illuminated in various places with the same red hurricane lanterns that had lit their way on the way down the long stairs. It cast a dim light that still left the full extents of the structure obscured in the distance.
“There doesn’t appear to be a door,” Margaret suggested.
“Then, perhaps, we need to find another way in.” Ellis released Jonas’s hand and walked quickly toward the jumble of the building. She began examining the exterior in its detail. One fantail, upside down to her point of view, read Monte Blanche. A vertical bow nearby displayed the name Imo. There was even a piece of plating with the name Titanic and a wooden stern labeled Hesperus.
“What are we looking for?” Margaret asked.
Though her hull was weathered, Ellis could still barely make out the faded name on the side just aft of the bow.
“The Mary Celeste,” Ellis murmured to herself with satisfaction. Then she raised her hands, cupping around her mouth as she called out, “Ahoy the boat!”
“Ellis,” Jonas asked, urgency in his voice, “where are you taking us?”
“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘the devil to pay’?” Ellis asked him in return.
“Yes, of course,” Jonas answered, still perplexed.
“But do you know the origin of the term?” Ellis grinned.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Alicia blinked, trying to follow the conversation.
“‘The devil to pay’ is an old sailing phrase,” Ellis said. “My father was a doctor but he loved sailing. He never went to sea, but he loved visiting the Boston docks and telling me everything he had read about or learned from the sailors who he treated from the ships. He told me that the ‘devil’ was the seams between the planks of the old sailing ships. To ‘pay’ a seam was to caulk it with tar and hemp rope.”
“Fascinating,” Alicia said flatly as she shrugged. “So?”
“You said we needed to find a devil and that’s what we’re doing,” she responded, then called out loudly again. “Ahoy, Captain!”
“Go away…”
Ellis jumped slightly at the sound. It was a creaking voice that had spoken to her and just a few feet above her head.
“Go away!”
Ellis looked up.
Above her was the bow of the Mary Celeste. The bowsprit was gone, but there was now a large figurehead whose shape emerged from the wood of the keel. It began at the torso and was, remarkably, the bare-chested figure of a man. The arms swept backward from the shoulders, ending just above the elbow where the arms merged with the hull. The head, however, hung down and gazed with despair back toward the keel. It was a hideous figurehead for a ship: a tortured seaman trapped as part of the ship on which he served.
Even with its head bowed down and turned away from her, Ellis recognized the figurehead.
“Manners, Captain,” called Ellis upward softly.
“Ain’t interested in manners,” the carved statue called back.
“A trade, then, Captain Walker?” Ellis said in gentle response. “Surely you wouldn’t pass up a trade?”
The gaunt form raised his head. He had a hound-dog face though its features appeared to be made of weathered wood, cracked like long vertical scars up the face. There was an eternal sadness about his dull eyes as he looked back at them.
“Ye have nothing that I’d care for,” the captain called back. “Away with ye.”
“I have one thing,” Ellis replied.
“And that be?”
She turned and gestured toward Jonas.
“I have a soldier,” Ellis said. “And he can find the Gate.”
The figurehead Captain Walker shook and as he did the length of the hull groaned and creaked ominously behind him. “What good is that to me now?”
“Because I can free you,” Ellis said, then swallowed. I hope that I can free you.
“You know who holds me here?” Isaiah quieted down as he spoke.
“Yes,” Ellis said clearly. “And I need to see him.”
“You won’t be back,” Isaiah said, shaking his creaking head, drops of tar falling from his eyes in his pain. “He won’t let you.”
“We will be back for you, Isaiah,” Ellis said to the wooden figurehead above her. “Of anyone you know in the Tween, you know that I will come back for you.”
“You left her behind,” Isaiah said with a mixture of hope and accusation.
“Yes, I left her behind.” Ellis nodded. “And I came back for her, didn’t I?”
The figure at the prow of the Mary Celeste nodded with a slight smile. He pulled back his head, his mouth opening into a terrible, silent scream. As he did so, the hull planks began to bend. On either side of the bow, they separated with a popping noise from the keel, pulling back and exposing the ribs of the hull behind them. Then the ribs themselves separated from the keel, as though a chest cavity were being pulled open to expose the lungs and heart beneath.
Ellis took a step back.
Warm, golden light spilled out from behind the spreading of the shattered hull. Ellis could see a twisting hall beyond lit with unsteady, electric bulbs. It appeared to be a wrenched ship’s corridor that wound into the bowels of the broken, derelict ships.
“You know he is waiting for you,” the figurehead said.
“I know,” Ellis said as she steppe
d over the broken bow of the Mary Celeste and into the twisting corridor lit with the flickering, yellow light beyond.
19
LIBRARY
Ellis stepped cautiously down the hallway. It reminded her strongly of a luxurious ship she had visited with her father as a child in Boston Harbor, only now the gleaming white paint was splintered and the bright brass fittings twisted with the torquing of the hallway frames. There was a handrail of polished oak that ran bent and warped between the fittings, which she followed down the hall. Broken doors to staterooms on either side stood ajar and beckoned her with bright colors and even the soft strains of phonograph music could be heard from a few. Ellis ignored the temptation, afraid that if she did not have the railing to lead her back, she might become irrevocably lost in the labyrinth of the broken ships. She kept her hand on the railing and continued farther into the gathered ruins of the ships.
Jonas stepped carefully behind her over floorboards that occasionally lay shattered beneath their feet. With each passing moment, more memories of their life together in the world … itself a strange thought … grew clearer in her mind. The impression she had was that it had been a difficult life made somehow stronger and more meaningful, she thought, by the tragedies they had endured together. That life had forged a bond between them that she was only now beginning to understand and even appreciate. Yet wasn’t he responsible for her separation from Jenny in the first place? Hadn’t he selfishly and obsessively waited for her at the Gate only to pull her into a mortal life that she had not chosen for herself? She was uncertain, now that she knew what he had done, whether he was acting in their mutual interests or primarily on his own.
“What is this place, Ellis?” Jonas stepped softly behind her with an amazed Margaret and a rather fearful Alicia trailing behind.
“I don’t know exactly,” Ellis replied.
“But milady created it, did you not?” Margaret spoke as though it were both an assertion and a question all at once.
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