Unhonored

by Tracy Hickman

  “I believe I did, after a fashion,” Ellis commented as she turned the corner at an intersection of hallways into another passage identical to the one they had just left. It was increasingly apparent that they were in some form of a maze.

  “But this is madness,” Jonas said. “You’ve never been in such a place and I doubt very much if you have ever even imagined anything like this.”

  “You’re asking me what rules I’m following.” Ellis smiled to herself at the thought that Jonas did not understand the nature of the place he had taken her from a lifetime ago.

  “Yes.” Jonas nodded. “I suppose I am.”

  “Well, I hardly know them myself although given what I’ve learned of my life here before, I must have been rather adept at them in the past.” Ellis came to another intersection and led them to the right this time. “I don’t try to form a place with my thoughts so much as a purpose. It feels easier to let the exact form follow its own direction than to try and force every detail. The Tween seems to conform to our hearts rather than our minds on a level deeper and more complete than conscious thought. It then presents the Day in whatever form that will be the most meaningful to whoever’s Day it represents.”

  “I thought Merrick created this Day,” Alicia said from the back of the group.

  “Merrick was rushed into using a Book of the Day that was not his own.” Ellis came to another side corridor and considered it for a moment, then continued straight ahead. “It is still Merrick’s Day…”

  “But it was your Book!” Margaret said in wondrous delight.

  “Exactly,” Ellis agreed as they approached a turn in the corridor.

  “So you have some say in the formation of Echo House even if it isn’t your Day?” Alicia was so shocked by this thought that she momentarily forgot their terrible surroundings.

  “Yes, it appears that I do.” Ellis nodded.

  “But that’s cheating!” Alicia exclaimed.

  “No, just more rules; my rules, it would seem,” Ellis corrected. “Make no mistake, however, this is still very much Merrick’s Day. I’ve been able to change some of the places in Echo House into places that seem to serve our purposes although, in truth, the forms sometimes make no sense to me.”

  “Nor to me,” Jonas said, pointing ahead of them as they turned the corner in another corridor. “But it seems we have arrived somewhere.”

  The double doors before them were fitted with panes of frosted glass etched in an art nouveau stylizing of a woman stepping out of a well with a scourge in one hand and a mirror in the other. Words arched over the figure read Vérité sortant du puits armée de son martinet pour châtier l’humanité.

  “Whatever is that supposed to mean?” Alicia demanded.

  “It means ‘Truth rises out of her well to shame mankind,’” Ellis translated for the shaking woman. “What do you say to us rising out of the well?”

  Ellis reached forward with both hands, grasped both door handles and pushed both doors open wide. She stepped in with Jonas just behind her. Alicia clung to Margaret’s arm with a viselike grip despite the best efforts of the lady’s maid to extract herself. As they stepped into the room, the doors quietly shut behind them.

  It looked as though the hulls of seven enormous ships had been gutted and turned on their end to form a single monstrous room. The keels all rose to meet overhead at their bows, creating a domed roof fifty feet over their heads. The timbers that formed the horizontal ribs were exposed, marching upward from the scrubbed planks of a fitted hardwood floor beneath Ellis’s feet. The entire space was harshly lit by numerous electric chandeliers that hung suspended from the keels of each hull.

  There between each keel and set upon the horizontal rib beams were books.

  Thousands of books.

  Books filled every niche between the ribs, their courses rising nearly to the very peak of the room.

  To one side of the impossible library, a ridiculously tall ladder stood against one of the book stacks. Atop it, a single figure sat, its back against the books as it perched on the uppermost rung. Its long claws were black and sharp, struggling to maintain its grip on the book into which its face was buried. But the hands were brick red as were its arms where they were exposed beneath the rolled-up sleeves of its white shirt and the torn gray waistcoat whose buttons were undone. The man’s trousers were torn open and shredded at the knees, exposing sinewy legs matching the same brick red of its hands and ending in cloven hooves as black as its claws. A twisting tail of the same color wrapped around one of the legs of the ladder between its rungs, its bone-barbed end flicking listlessly as the creature buried its face in the book.

  Alicia released Margaret, cowering at once against the closed door.

  “Ellis, I think we need to leave.” There was an urgency in Jonas’s whisper.

  “Not at all,” Ellis replied in a clear, strong voice that echoed back toward her from the dome overhead.

  Margaret winced at the loudness of the sound in so quiet a space.

  “We’ve only just arrived here and would not wish to offend our host.” Ellis turned around, her face rising toward where the demonic creature remained with its face buried in its book. “And we certainly would not wish to offend our host, would we, Dr. Carmichael?”

  The demon perched atop the ladder lowered his book suddenly and stared down at Ellis. His face was now more angular than she remembered and his skin tone now matched the deep red of the rest of him. His eyes were an uncomfortable yellow color with a reptile-like slit instead of the expected pupil. The ears were distinctly pointed. Still, despite it all, Ellis recognized the general features of the creature and the wild shock of white hair he preferred combed backward from the forehead between two sharp horns protruding from his head.

  There was no denying that the demon atop the ladder was Dr. Carmichael.

  “Ah, Miss Ellis.” The demon smiled back at her with sharp, pointed teeth though there was venom in his eyes. “What a delight to see you again … goodbye and go away.”

  The demon Carmichael returned again to perusing the book.

  “We’ve come calling,” Ellis insisted.

  “Not taking visitors, Miss Ellis,” Carmichael called back from behind his book. “I am distinctly not at home!”

  “That’s Dr. Carmichael?” Alicia screeched. “What happened to him?”

  “Ah, Alicia Van der Meer, I see that you are as astute and quick-witted as ever,” Carmichael sneered as he slammed closed the book and gazed down from his perch. “What happened to me, indeed? Perhaps you could ask your friend, Miss Ellis Harkington, how it is that I appear in such a state?”

  “Why should we ask her?” Margaret insisted. “What has she to do with the likes of you?”

  “The likes of me?” Carmichael howled in sudden rage. The demon threw the book in anger from the top of the ladder, slamming it into the books on the opposite wall and causing a minor cascade of volumes. He leaped from the top rung, causing the ladder to shift dangerously.

  Ellis and Jonas took several hasty steps back as Carmichael plunged toward the floor. Suddenly, leathery wings unfolded from the torn back of the demon’s waistcoat, arresting his fall just before he hit the ground. Carmichael crouched from the impact and then stood before them, his wings quivering in his rage behind him as he faced Margaret, who had hastily retreated against a stack of books.

  “The likes of me is exactly why I look this way!” Carmichael shouted. He turned to face Ellis. “You did this to me!”

  “I did no such thing!” Ellis stood her ground, indignation evident in her expression.

  “You did exactly that!” Carmichael seethed, his wings still rustling behind him. He turned to Alicia, still pressed against the door. “Tell me, Miss Van der Meer, just whom were you expecting to find?”

  “We’ve come for Jenny,” Jonas said, trying to interject himself between Carmichael and the costumed girl.

  Carmichael ignored him. “And just how did you expect to find Jenny?”
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br />   “Well.” Alicia was hesitant. “Ellis said the angels wouldn’t help us so we needed to find…”

  Alicia’s eyes went wide.

  Lucian Carmichael took a step back, taking care of his own barbed tail as he bowed deeply, pain still registering in his eyes.

  “Just so, a demon.” Lucian completed the thought in his own words. “That’s how her ‘ladyship’ Ellis sees me and that’s how I must appear in this pointless charade. At your service … and leave me alone, I want no part of you.”

  Carmichael turned on his cloven foot and began walking away back toward where the book he had thrown had fallen. His wings dragged slightly behind him.

  “You can help us,” Ellis called to him.

  “Ah, if only I cared,” he called back over his shoulder.

  “We can help you in turn,” Ellis tried again.

  “Don’t care.” Lucian did not bother to even glance back as he spoke. He reached down and picked up the book again. “Nobody home. Don’t need anything you’re selling.”

  “But you’re looking for something, too,” Jonas offered, stepping forward. “Here in the books. Something you haven’t found yet.”

  “Very clever, sir, and I’ll bet you thought that up all on your own.” Carmichael continued picking up the fallen books, examining them and then setting them aside.

  “You’re looking for the way out, aren’t you?” Jonas pressed.

  “So what if I am.” The demon shrugged.

  Ellis raised her chin, suddenly understanding. “But you’re not just looking for any way out. You’re a demon. You inherently know where the Gate is back to your own infernal regions. But that’s not the Gate you’re interested in finding.”

  “You’ve changed your mind, haven’t you?” Jonas said. “You don’t want the demon’s Gate, you want to—”

  “And how do you think I’ll be able to get through the Gate looking like this?” Carmichael replied angrily. “What angel is going to convince the Sentinels that I’m done with the old ways? When I show up with everything but a pitchfork?”

  “Why would you even want to try?” Jonas asked. “You aren’t of the Tween; already chose the darkness. Why not just return through your own gateway back to the hell that sent you?”

  “Because I can’t go back,” the doctor snapped.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was lousy at my job!” Dr. Carmichael shouted. “They don’t want me back. They say that I’ve become too attached to the idea of Earth and seduced by the promise of mortality. I was supposed to come here and convert the souls of the Tween into choosing mandated order and instead, it seems, they’ve converted me into doubting my own choice.”

  “What?” Jonas scoffed. “A reformed devil?”

  “You ever read Heraclitus, boy?” Carmichael’s words were bitter. “He said change is the only constant. We all change or we rot. And, yes, just knowing about Heraclitus seems to call my commitment to my former masters into question. So I’m looking for a better offer from a, shall we say, more forgiving group. But how can I do that looking like this?”

  “Jonas will help you,” Ellis said, wondering if she had just lied to the demon.

  “I can,” Jonas replied. “I will.”

  Carmichael stood still, his breathing laboring against his emotions. It took him long moments before he managed to speak. “You … you just had to come back, didn’t you, Ellis? Why did you come back? I thought if I could learn about your life and what it was like to breathe and love and hate and have pain and joy that it would be enough. Why did you have to come back and show me what I was lacking? Why did you give me a taste for things I could never have?”

  “Jenny trusted you,” Ellis said. “She would have come to you first for help when Merrick changed the Day.”

  “Leave me alone.” The demon breathed the words out between his sharp teeth.

  “Where’s Jenny, Lucian?” Ellis asked quietly.

  Carmichael looked away.

  “We can help you but you’ve got to help us first.” Ellis’s voice was soft as she spoke. “She’s here, isn’t she, Lucian?”

  “Yes,” the demon replied in a whisper that she could barely hear.

  “Show me where she is, Lucian,” Ellis said, steadying her voice to a calm she did not feel.

  The demon reached down to the stack of fallen books at his feet. Ellis had not realized it before now but all of the books in this library were scrapbooks, as though all of the collected scrapbooks of each soul in the Tween had been gathered here to one place. Carmichael pushed several aside before lifting up a single tome, the cover of which was unadorned. He turned toward Ellis and handed her the book.

  “Here,” he said.

  Ellis took the scrapbook and examined it. Most scrapbooks she had found here were intricately adorned but this one was very simple. The cover was in blue dyed suede leather with a dull bronze binding on the spine.

  Ellis moved to open the book but the demon’s red, clawed hand came down gently on her own to prevent her.

  “Remember, Ellis,” Carmichael said. “Sometimes the only way back is forward.”

  Ellis gave the demon a quizzical look as he stepped back.

  “Ellis,” Jonas said in sudden alarm. “Wait!”

  She opened the book.

  She felt a sudden pull forward. The book suddenly grew in size or perhaps she was getting smaller. All she knew was that she was being pulled between the pages and into the binding.

  In the next moment, Ellis vanished from the library.

  20

  THE BLANK PAGE

  For a moment, Ellis felt disoriented.

  She stood in her green traveling dress in the middle of a featureless white plain. Her feet were firmly planted against the dull white surface but it seemed to extend away from her toward no discernable horizon. The sky above was white, too; she assumed everywhere was the same featureless blank.

  Ellis recalled having once been in a heavy snowfall in Boston when she was in her high school years. She could see nothing beyond the blank whiteness around her. The sunlight was so completely diffused by the clouds and snow that not even its brightness could be discerned overhead. She remembered it as being both disconcerting and comforting at the same time, as though one could walk anonymously through the falling snow and be sequestered from the world. This place, wherever it was, had much that same feeling about it: the interior of a cocoon.

  Ellis stooped down to touch the ground at her feet. As she ran her bare fingers across the surface she felt the slight roughness in the surface of its barely perceptible texture, yet it, too, was familiar to her.

  “Paper,” she said aloud. The words sounded flat in her ears as though they were absorbed completely by the eternal space around her.

  A sigh.

  Ellis looked up sharply toward the sound.

  There, in the distance, was something after all. It was a slightly darkened blotch at what Ellis could only assume was the horizon of this place. It was blurry and indistinct but at least it was something, a fixed mark that she could find her way toward.

  Ellis walked toward the blemish. Whether she walked for minutes or hours she could not tell. The dark blotch grew with every passing step. It began to take on the aspects of a watercolor done in shades of green and blue. The edges of the colors had bloomed together as though flowing through fibers in the paper from a brush that was too wet. It was not just beneath her but it also seemed to flow around her at the sides and above as well, staining the stark whiteness in its soft, colorful haze.

  With every step, more definition came into the painting that flowed about her. Above, the watercolor became a more distinctive blue with patches of white while the greens became more separated and varied in their sweeping shapes. Some congealed into blotches of individual leaves and long sweeping swaths of color reminiscent of tall grass. Soon browns, blacks and yellows appeared.

  A brownish path formed beneath her feet. It meandered amid tall blades of grass formed
of swaths of color more pronounced and with sharper edges than before. The blue of the sky congealed, retreating from where white clouds took form. Trees emerged from the blurred green shades, their trunks, branches and leaves growing more distinct with every step that she took. Soon the woods surrounded her on the path, the trees arching overhead, and the light from the sky shining down through the leaves dappled her form as she continued to follow the trail wandering before her. She recalled that she had come down this same trail before, sometime deep in her past.

  The pathway emerged from the woods into a small meadow. It continued across the soft grasses to the far side of the clearing where a familiar wall stood. It was rendered, Ellis thought to herself, in the mixed media of watercolors and pencils.

  In the wall at the end of the path was a gate.

  Not the Gate, she reminded herself. This, too, was drawn in the same manner as the walls and surrounding foliage but it nevertheless was a perfect likeness of the Gate out of the Tween through which she had somehow passed seemingly an eternity before.

  There, sitting next to the trail in the soft grasses and surrounded by flowers, sat the familiar form for whom Ellis had sought so diligently.

  “Jenny,” Ellis breathed.

  Her cousin looked up and smiled.

  “You’re … you’re changed,” Ellis said.

  Jenny’s bobbed hair was now long and luxuriously styled up onto her head. She was the picture of a Gibson girl and, judging by the sharpness of her appearance, the only thing truly real in the scene that had materialized before Ellis. She wore an old-fashioned dress of white linen and lace, complete with large leg-of-mutton sleeves. Her curls were carefully coiffed up off the shoulders. The skirt was splayed carefully about her on a picnic blanket that shielded her from the grass.

  “Not entirely changed, my dear Ellis,” Jenny answered. She held up her gloved hands, which appeared more deformed and contorted than Ellis recalled them. Still, her smile at Ellis’s approach was radiant.

  Ellis shook her head in puzzlement. “But your hair … the dress…”