The theater was tomb-still. A few lobby lights were on, but the bulbs in the ceiling fixture and over the stairwell landing were low wattage, so their light was dim and scattered, penetrating the shadows as effectively as a penlight through dense fog.
Claire chewed her lip. Somehow she’d missed Tom. She’d intended to meet him in front of the building, but it hadn’t worked out. It didn’t seem like she’d spent that much time in the parking lot with Jackie—her mood plummeted at the mere thought of that farewell scene—but by the time she’d come back to look for her keys, his motorcycle was gone. The lobby was cold and Claire held her arms tightly across her body, shivering in little spasms. She headed for the stairs. Hating to go up there, but knowing she had to, produced a sensation of slow motion where movement was dreamlike, as in those pre-waking moments when consciousness hovers just out of reach.
She got to the landing and walked as softly as possible to the ballet rehearsal hall. The door was unlocked so she slipped inside. It was empty and dark, although the mirrored panels across the room reflected streetlights outside, producing a disquieting sense of watery movement along the walls. Claire tried to shake off the feeling of tense awareness that pervaded the room as she came all the way in. She scanned the floor and quickly spotted her keys, right where she’d left them. The tall windows watched her like so many pairs of eyes. She stood perfectly still, her breathing shallow, listening for sounds of anyone moving around. Pocketing her keys, she hurried out and down the stairs, heart thudding against her ribcage. Then she heard a door opening and closing on the second floor, followed by footsteps coming toward the stairs.
Crouching in the shadows, she pressed herself against the wall beside the stairwell. This time Bayard seemed in no hurry as he came down, sauntered across the darkened lobby to the street doors, and locked them. Then he checked his key ring, found another key, unlocked the basement and went in, leaving the door open behind him. And why not? He was the only one in the building, as far as he knew. Claire waited, breathless, to see how long it took him to do whatever it was he did down there and come out again. Minutes slipped by, and then more minutes, until she was certain she’d been hiding for at least half an hour. Had he gone out a back door? The worst part was that now she was locked in, which meant the only way she was going to get home was to find him and ask to be let out. The thought of her mother at home, panicking because Clair was late, pushed her into action.
She crossed the lobby and stopped at the head of the narrow basement stairs. Bayard had switched on a light at the bottom, and its grime-encrusted bulb flickered as if it was not seated firmly in the socket, and every creak and sigh running through the walls and floors of the building threatened to short the tenuous connection. Peering down, she could see green-painted concrete walls, their pitted surface flanking steps that pitched steeply for maybe a dozen narrow wooden risers, then jogged right and went down a few more.
Claire descended step by step, heart jumping out of her chest, hand outstretched against the wall to steady her balance. The air in the cramped stairwell was stale and left an unpleasant taste on her tongue. Reaching the bottom step, she expected to find Bayard but saw no one. She hesitated, breathing and listening.
“Hello?” Her voice fell softly on the deadened air. The cavernous space of the basement stretched away from her, its walls lined with painted flats, piles of used lumber, broken furniture, and storage crates stacked one on top of another. Cobweb-encrusted shadows filled its corners, while square concrete pillars transected the room at regular intervals in stark relief from the bare bulb.
Claire stepped onto the basement floor, then walked out a few steps, her Reeboks squelching over the tiles. Holding her breath, she heard nothing but the pounding of her own heart. Silent seconds passed, as she fought the urge to run back up the stairs. Then she spotted ascending steps barely visible across the basement. They were set in the far wall, leading up to a metal door. Guessing it must open into the alley behind the building, Claire could only assume Bayard had exited that way. If the door could be opened from the inside, she would be free with quick access to the parking lot.
At that precise moment, a tower of filing boxes some distance away toppled with a heart-stopping crash, spilling papers and file folders in a jumble over the floor. Claire fled halfway up the stairs, and then dared to look back. The skitter of feet and a flash of a skinny naked tail gave the culprit away.
“Fuck…rat...” She could barely catch her breath her heart was pounding so hard. “Get. A. Grip.” She headed back down.
The far door was a long way across the basement and deep in shadow, but it really was her only option at this point. She stepped down onto the tiled floor again, resolute.
That was when the stench hit her. A rotten smell, but with a nauseous, sweet bite to it. Claire gagged and clamped her hand over her mouth. The last thing she wanted to do was throw up in the grubby basement of the Janus Theatre. Trying not to breathe in, she wiped sweat from her face and held her nose. The fetid odor was worse near the stairs…a dead rat, or something worse?
It was making her sick to the point of passing out, which didn’t make sense, given her occupation. She was quite used to the smell of blood, but this was something different. Pulse roaring in her ears, her vision narrowed to pinpoints and she fell with arms splayed out, catching at anything to break the fall. Her head struck the tiles and she half-bounced, half-slid with her shoulders wedged into a narrow crawlspace under the steps. Her open palms hit the row of foundation stones mortared in crumbling concrete, scraping the skin of her palms. Gasping, Claire lay still, her senses on overload. The stone closest to her face was eroded and irregular, unlike the others, which were finished and square. Its rough surface oozed something darker than the shadows. She touched it with trembling fingers, and then scrambled onto her hands and knees, leaving bloody prints.
“Shit…!” Claire’s fingers began to pulse with tiny electric shocks that flickered around her wrists and then went racing up her forearms. She clung to consciousness just long enough to note that both arms had gone numb to the elbow. Points of light whirled in front of her eyes, slowly coalescing into a gaunt, vaguely female face with wild, tangled hair. A screech split her eardrums as her field of vision went bright red and then black.
For one marrow-freezing second, she lay on the basement floor unable to breathe, but with the next gasp a warm, damp breeze blew over her face. Head aching and vomit threatening in her throat, Claire waited agonizing seconds with eyes clamped shut for the world to stop doing its tilt-a-whirl. Slowly the nausea retreated and she pushed up on one elbow, opening her stunned eyes. Impossibly, she found herself sprawled on a mud bank, the gloom of an overcast sunset settling over the tidal flats of a wide river. The stench still filled her sinuses, but it had shifted to a fishy, raw-sewage smell—the gag-inducing scent of blood had disappeared along with the Janus Theatre.
Claire groaned and tried to sit up. Her head ached beyond belief and even the faint light stabbed at her eyes. Likely a mild concussion. And possibly something worse; why the hell did the theater basement look, and smell, like the world’s worst polluted river? She closed her eyes and sat perfectly still, trying to make the pain subside. She’d never experienced a shock-induced hallucination before and wondered how long it would take to wear off. None of the clinical definitions and descriptions of head injury delusions she’d read gave any indication this kind of tactile sensory overload was possible.
She opened her eyes again and was dismayed to see the foul-smelling riverbank had not disappeared. She stared, disbelieving, at the stagnant water lapping at low tide along its banks. On the near side, small boats lying on their sides clustered like clam shells on the mudflats. A pair of swans drifted downstream, pale and incongruous. A man’s voice called to a boatman out on the water, and then Claire saw with a shock the dark outline of a city sprawling along the opposite bank and up onto the higher ground. As darkness began to fall, she saw soft lights sprinkled all over the hillside: candl
es in the windows of narrow houses, torches bobbing along the bankside road. Claire caught her breath—torches?
She rubbed her eyes, her dazed brain unable to account for what she saw. Even more disturbing, it looked vaguely familiar in a second-hand way, as if she’d seen it in a photo or something. Staring across the water, it came to her—the scene was on the front cover of the Shakespeare anthology Addie had loaned her. Impossibly, she was staring at the live version of the Thames, as seen from the Elizabethan theater district of Southwark. Shivering to her very core, Claire recognized the stinking, teeming body of sixteenth-century London hulking across the river like a great scabrous beast.
Dumbfounded, she couldn’t stop shaking. She put her hands to her face, then yanked them away. Her fingers and the creases of her palms were caked with blood. Stifling a retch, she wiped them on her sweat pants, but the stains wouldn’t come off. Staring at the evidence, she tried to remember how it got there. She hadn’t scraped her hands that badly on the stones under the stairs. In forcing her mind back to the blackout moment, she failed to see the two men struggling along the muck of the strand until they were too close to avoid notice. They dragged something heavy between them—as they drew closer, she saw it was a body.
She watched, frozen in terror, as the men hauled the body to the water’s edge and dropped it with a loud slosh face-down in the shallows. Their guttural voices echoed across the slow-moving current in accents so thick Claire barely recognized it as English.
“…give ‘is bloody plague germs to the fishes.”
“…was you as drunk after ‘im last—be catchin it yerself next off—”
“Whisht!” The first speaker slapped his hand across his companion’s chops and stood looking at Claire like a pointer that had just flushed a quail from a hedgerow.
“What is’t?” queried the second man.
“Tis a maid, don’t ye see? All by ‘erself there…”
Adrenalin flashed through Claire in a great white wave of alarm. Gulping air, she scrambled to her feet and turned to run up the bank, mud sucking at her shoes, but the taller man was too fast. He caught her in no more than half a dozen leaping strides, and clamped his filthy grease-coated arms, thick as oak branches, around her waist and held her squirming until his companion could catch up. Her mind rebelled—the immediate danger was overwhelming, but more compelling was the fact that this creature of her hallucination was solid. It held her as firmly as any live person could.
“Oh god,” she squeaked, pushing and kicking against the man. Her hair came loose, falling in a wheat-colored tangled mess over her shoulders.
“Wot we got ‘ere?” queried her captor, grabbing her by the hair and pulling her face back for a better look, which allowed her the same. Crude patch over one eye, stiff stringy hair near shoulder length, stubble of beard, and half an ear, over which a thick whitened scar pulled the skin tight on either side of its zigzagged line.
“Hold ‘er, mate, I’m coming,” called the second man, stumbling in an awkward, club-footed gallop like a hobbled donkey. “Wot is she, then?”
One-eye hawked and spat onto the dirt, then laughed in loud barks at Claire’s appalled face. “Somebody’s cast-off. Got on naught under ‘er coat but a bodice of some sort and pantaloons, as yer can see.”
“Aye, I see that fine enough,” shouted the other at close range, as if his hearing were none too good. His chest heaved with labored breathing, and his shoulders sloped off-center from his twisted torso.
“Please let go,” Claire pleaded, knowing in her gut such entreaties were useless, as was struggling in the man’s iron-hard grip. He was built like an ox, and smelled like one as well. She was holding her breath, trying not to breathe in the man’s overpowering aroma of carious teeth, musky sweat, badly tanned leather jerkin, and pants stiff with feces or stale urine. “I don’t have anything worth taking, no money, no jewelry...”
One-Eye laughed in her face. “She says she dunt ‘ave anything we want…‘ere’s what I want!” He ripped her sweater and medic’s smock off her shoulder, exposing her breast and engulfing it with four blackened fingers. The ring finger was missing at the knuckle. Claire screamed and tried to jackknife her knee into his groin. The hand released her breast and smashed across her nose and upper lip so fast she hung, stunned, across his arm for several seconds, lights arcing across her brain, before she fully understood what had happened. Testing her lip with her tongue, she felt a tear and tasted blood.
“Aw, why’d ye want to smash ‘er face, Fergis? Now she an’t so pretty as she was,” whined the twisted man, pawing at her shoulder.
“Would ye be trying to tell me how t’handle a wench?”
“Nay, but—“
“Whoreson, ye’d not even know wot to do wi’ the leavin’s when I get done with ‘er, you bloody sod.” Claire swung, dazed, as the man sidestepped a lunge from Club-foot. “Dog’s body!” laughed One-eye.
“Son of a plague-gutted whore, I’ll kill ye!” screamed the twisted man, pulling a short knife with a blackened blade from his jerkin.
“Come at me then, swine,” barked One-eye. He tossed Claire aside like a bundle of rags and took a fighting stance. “I’ll slice up yer liver an’ make to sup on’t, then I’ll have this skinny maid’s arse all to meself. Avast, filth!” He crouched, laughing between broken teeth.
Club-foot lunged at his companion, shrieking incoherent curses. Off balance, he careened into the pit of One-eye’s abdomen, where he punched vigorously at the stained codpiece.
“Arrrgh! I’ll rip out yer lights for that,” the big man bellowed.
Blind with pain and fear, Claire inched her way over a heap of rocks and rubble, expecting rough hands around her throat with each breath. But as the sound of their scuffle escalated, soon she was scrambling up the sloping bank and over a low stone wall. At a stumbling run, she crossed a rutted road and ducked down a narrow dirt lane between clusters of thatch-roofed houses. A gurgling scream in the direction of the river sent her sprinting over a cloud of chickens and on past the last house in the row to an empty cattle byre under the canopy of an ancient oak.
The dry, clean hay smell was heaven. Crawling under a head-high drift, Claire lay still, listening for sounds of pursuit. Instead, she heard two male voices in soft discourse—clearly not the two from whom she’d just escaped. She guessed the speakers to be near the trees on the far side of the byre.
“T’would seem the stone may needs be moved shortly, if he’s of a mind to keep it.” An old man’s raspy voice. His breathless, halting speech revealed his cardio-pulmonary disease to Claire’s trained ears. Her mother sounded that way.
“You made a clever choice in your successor, my dear doctor, appealing to his artist’s lust for fame and fortune, although why you chose not to keep it longer yourself after all the trouble it cost you—and me—to make it I cannot fathom.” The second speaker sounded younger and foreign, his voice silky, yet resonant and elegantly enunciated.
“Aye, ‘tis true enough.” Footsteps crunched over dry grass and twigs as the pair moved closer. “For all my learning, there was no wisdom in this matter. But I suspect you knew…have known all along…how I might best be used to your own ends.”
“Nay, not my ends but those of my master. Relinquishing the buachloch to another does not absolve you from our original bargain.” The voice was smooth as satin, with undertones of something else… Claire couldn’t put her finger on the exact quality that made her skin prickle but she was suddenly trembling far worse then she’d been during her encounter with two of London’s finest lowlifes. The fear was nameless, but palpable.
“I knew that.” The old man’s voice was resigned. “I simply could not continue, e’en though it meant a swift decline in health and fortune once ownership’d been given away. The fact that ‘twas you and not the Lord Gabriel who did come to fetch me on my deathbed was no surprise.” His voice sounded threadbare, worn thin and infinitely sad. Claire shivered. What was he…a ghost? She must be f
ull-blown, completely delusional to even be thinking such a thing.
The honeyed voice laughed softly. “You were not entirely forthcoming with our Master Marlowe about her ladyship and her needs…how if he failed to feed her, old age might o’ertake him in a most unpleasant way. He’d not be shielded from the arrival of the Black Carriage in that case.”
“If I’d told him all, he’d not have taken possession of the stone. No sane person would.”
“Indeed. I thank you, Professor Dee, for your recruitment of our illustrious playwright. I have enjoyed a fruitful, if reluctant, connection with him in your stead these twenty years past, despite the fact of him carelessly getting himself murdered—albeit temporarily. In his present guise he’s sent many a sacrificed soul down the path straight to Hell, for which I am most obliged. But as you see now, the threads of Fate pull taut. A choice looms.”
“I wonder if he will choose to retrieve it.”
“If not, then I shall collect his soul and you needs must find Mistress Banshee a new owner. A small but necessary request from my master.” Silence fell between them. “How shall I serve thee, my good doctor, once this task is done?”
“I would see the Great Library of Alexandria, before the fire…”
“Be assured, I shall be your perfect companion.” Soft laughter encircled the byre and sent a wintery chill over Claire’s skin.
Dee’s voice took on a sour tone. “I find no mirth since I was laid in the ground. Not e’en my daughters mourned long my passing.”
“Mirth is where you find it. I have enjoyed eternal amusement in tangling the skeins of human lives and then standing aside to see how they struggle to get the snare unraveled.”
The old man’s voice softened. “I suppose ‘twould explain why ye chose not to interfere when the boy came to me at my deathbed. I revealed all our secrets, y’know. What we twain had done together.”
“I care not, nor does my master. But it does add sauce to the game.” There was silence, then the same voice again. “Ah, see where the moment arrives.” The footsteps headed away from Claire’s hiding place. She hardly dared to breathe.
The Cornerstone Page 13