Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (12 page)

“Get moving.”

A Diversion

Approximately 8:00 PM

With one foot on the bottom stair, I hesitated. The narrow path leading upwards wove through a stockpile of clutter à la the paths that we'd traversed on the first floor and down in the basement. Its unpredictable twists and turns would help to conceal any booby traps ahead.

“Shouldn't we wait on the other reprobate?” I asked Howard. “Willie?”

“Never you mind,” he said and turned to Cormac. “When Willie gets back, tell him he needs to catch up to us, pronto.”

The injured mick postponed his low moaning long enough to say, “Aye.”

Howard turned back to me. “Go. We can't spare another minute.”

“As you wish.” I began my ascent, frequently bumping into matter, the omnipresent heaps of declining worth. “Which floor is our destination?”

“The top floor,” he said. “That's where Langley stuck his head out the window, greeting us earlier. She must be up there.”

“A logical guess,” I said. “But still a mere guess.”

“Brady!” Howard called.

“What is it?” Brady replied from above.

“Trenowyth's heading up first!”

“Yeah?”

“He's to continue on up to the top floor, no delays! Follow him, but leave him out in front by ten stairs, minimum!”

“What for?”

While Howard explained, I glanced over my shoulder. Miss Buxton was beginning her climb, not a hint of fear in her bearing. My Annabel, I remember thinking, would've lapsed into hysteria by now. Howard followed, gripping the lantern in one hand, the gun in the other.

“I'll need my own light,” I said to him. “Otherwise, our progress will suffer greatly.”

“Here comes the lantern.” He slithered by Miss Buxton in order to hand it off to me personally. “I need not describe for you what would happen to the woman should this light extinguish, or should you run for it.”

“Indeed,” I said, “you need not.”

Miss Buxton, more than half a dozen stairs below us, now had a brief opportunity to scramble back down to the first floor and to hide in the dark superabundance. But she did not avail herself of this action. I assumed she feared the likely repercussions against me if she fled.

“And you need not guess,” Howard said, “as to who walks the point after you. So try not to get killed too soon. Or anymore maimed than you already are.”

I resumed my climb. A few steps later a man from somewhere deep in the bowels of the old building screamed.

It was terror we heard, and it froze us all initially. But very soon we hurried downstairs together, Brady included, and rushed in single file along the path we'd taken from the basement. All the while Howard gripped the back of my collar.

The lantern in my grip swayed, bouncing light off darkness. Shadows trembled before us. The steady sounds of terror grew.

“Willie!” Brady called. “We're comin' mate!”

The screamer indeed proved to be the robber Willie. We found him in the great hall dancing spasmodically—or so it seemed at first—amid the sea of white linen-draped furniture. He kept swatting at himself as if being swarmed by bees; yet, as we neared, it became evident that his herky-jerky steps and spins arose from something else; for a nation of maggots wriggled and crawled upon his person.

How many,
Herr
Doctor? Too innumerable to estimate. But I daresay more than many a dead soldier's carcass forgotten on a field of battle.

Brady waded into the linen sea with a loosely rolled up damask curtain, which he'd scavenged from somewhere, and brushed off maggots with it, mostly by beating Willie over the head and across the shoulders.

“They're in my nose!” Willie screamed. “My mouth!”

When the maggots were at last in retreat, his screams subsided, replaced by bursts of spitting, coughing, and nose-blowing. He stripped off his costume, i.e., his workman's overalls, turned the garment inside-out, and flicked away the maggots he found clinging there.

“It's no use!” he cried, hunched over and shivering. “I can't put these clothes back on! Find me something else to wear! Anything! Dirty or clean, I don't care . . . Oh, no . . .”

“Oh, no, what?” Brady said.

“I'm going to be sick . . .” He dry-heaved once or twice then vomited, rendering an abstract design upon the linen-cloaked sofa he faced. Miss Buxton dangled her handkerchief for him—at arm's length.

“What happened here?” asked Howard, who stood beside me on the path.

“Over there.” Willie pointed to a spray of light on the floor of the path just beyond us. “It flew at me, whatever it was. Hit me across the chest, and knocked me down. I got up, covered in those fucking maggots.”

We approached the light—all but Willie. Brady arrived first, shortcutting through the sea of linen. “Holy Jaysus,” he whispered.

The light emanated in a cone shape. It was from the flashlight Willie had dropped. Its beam bathed the carcass of a German Shepard bursting with maggots. (But perhaps it would be more accurate to report that we encountered a pile of maggots bursting with German Shepard.)

“It's a dog,” Brady said.

“A dog?” said Willie.

“A dead dog,” Howard said. “Infested with maggots. What did you do, Willie? Trip and fall head-first into the carcass?”

“No! I told you! It flew into me! About fifty miles an hour! Chest high!”

Brady laughed. Howard laughed too and said: “Dead dogs don't fly, you imbecile. Especially dogs this dead.”

From across the great hall came a fairly loud creak. We all braced.

“Langley?” Howard called. “That you?” No answer. More creaking. Slow and steady now. “Let's work this thing out, man. I'm sure we can come to an agreement. What do you say?”

It was then we heard another type of sound, which proved in retrospect to be the approaching whoosh of a large projectile. It slammed into Howard's chest with sufficient force as to knock him off his feet. He fell backwards into the bed of a dray cart heaping with sea shells.

Atop him: another dead, maggot-riddled dog! This time, the lantern told, a Saint Bernard!

I had thought Noah might hide from the robbers, or else fetch the police. Never had I considered that he might choose warfare. And never had I envisioned, even in my thickest opium haze, ammunition so bizarre.

Howard writhed on his back, not yet realizing what he'd been struck by, not yet screaming à la Willie, though I could plainly see maggots wriggling on his scalp, Medusa-like. The gun was no longer in his grip, but wherever the weapon had fallen to, it wasn't in plain sight.

I blew out the lantern and pressed it to Miss Buxton's chest. “Take this, and wait here.”

“Hey!” Willie said. “Where's the lantern? Put that back on!”

The flashlight on the floor was still lighting up the German Shepard. I picked it up and switched it off, blackening all, and raced back to where I'd left Miss Buxton, bumping into her in my haste and blindness. I stuffed the flashlight into my pocket and took her by the hand.

“Follow me,” I said and we left the path for the damned junk.

In the Clock Forest

In utter darkness, Miss Buxton and I plowed our way through the Langley family's prodigious paraphernalia. We howled and cursed at sharp-shouldered objects, broke things sounding of glass, choked on the spider webs that never stopped netting us, on the copious dust we stirred up. A nest of mice we unsettled—Or were they rats?—led Miss Buxton to scream.

But despite our commotion, we were not pursued. Not initially. Howard kept wailing from a distance that kept growing.

“Get 'em off me!” he would cry. “Get 'em off! They're crawling everywhere! They're in my short hairs! My ass crack!” (And so forth.)

By chance we found ourselves at the base of the great pyramid of rolled up rugs. This I determined by shape and feel in the primeval void of light.

“We'll climb up and over it,” I whispered to Miss Buxton. “It'll be quieter than any other option, and once we're on the other side I can aim the flashlight beam where it won't be spotted.”

The steps were neither wide nor firm. We scaled the pyramid with considerable difficulty, a one-armed man and a woman with a lantern, and upon reaching the summit sat down for a rest and to listen for others.

A great deal of time's dandruff had settled upon the peak, and we'd stirred up enough of it that neither of us could avoid coughing at first. Howard had ceased wailing, but I was still able to reckon the general location of the three robbers via their heated conversation. They hadn't moved far from the area where we'd left them on the path.

“I say we bolt!” Willie said. “Forget the coins!”

“Forget twenty million dollars?” Howard countered. “Never! Not when we're this close! It's the chance of a lifetime, boys!”

“Aye, Howie,” Brady said, “but what next? I can't see me own fecking hand in front of me face.”

“We might as well be blind,” Willie said. “We're three blind men in a booby-trapped rubbish pile the size of a city block. No hostages left to step on the landmines for us. And a queer, little madman stalking us. Or is he some kind of evil sorcerer to be flying dead dogs at us? Feeding us to the maggots?”

“Alone in the dark and frightened, are you!” Miss Buxton called. “Ha!”

I whispered where I thought her ear should be. “Not another word. You'd only help them pinpoint our location.”

She whispered back. “Don't be absurd. We might as well have cowbells around our necks for all the noise we've made so far.” To the robbers, she shouted: “We overheard everything you said! Listen to Willie! Quit your enterprise!”

“No one listens to Willie, Miss!” Howard said. “Not even Willie!”

“Come back, Lass!” Brady said. “And give us a kiss!”

“I think not! Goodbye and good riddance!”

“Not goodbye, Miss!” Howard said. “Nor good riddance! The night is still young!” When she made no answer, he added: “There's time enough to obtain the coins, to slaughter Trenowyth, and to tarry with you afterwards!” It drew instant glee from his men.

“You curs!” I shouted, before swallowing more harsh words I felt urged to fling at them. They laughed at me, of course. They had, it seemed, rallied as a team 'round thoughts of murder, riches, and gang rape.

“This way,” I whispered to Miss Buxton and led her by the hand to the side of the pyramid facing away from our adversaries. Before switching on the flashlight, I dropped to my stomach and dangled the instrument a few feet below the summit so that none of its beam would be glimpsed by the robbers.

“No sign of the sorcerer,” Miss Buxton observed as the flashlight reconnoitered this new area of the great hall.

“Are you being wry or superstitious?”

“Both,” she said.

Below us lay the island chain of grand and baby grand pianos, its distant shoreline a winding footpath, and beyond the path stood a forest of grandfather clocks. Once on the ground, i.e., the floor, we made for the clocks. Their madly arrhythmic ticking and tocking and chiming and belling would help to disguise our sounds, our movements, the direction of our flight.

The cacophony grew unnerving as we neared the forest. It seemed to be the very heartbeat of this house, a continuous warning of the askew, the aslant, the cockeyed, the lunatic, the malignant.

“I must rest,” Miss Buxton said when we'd journeyed to the center of the clock forest.

“I don't blame you.” I would not have blamed her even if she'd been a man. For despite the flashlight's aid we'd expended much effort in slithering through, in shoving aside, in circling round, and climbing over the miscellanea.

She dropped to the floor, leaning her back against one of the grandfathers. I sat down opposite her against another.

“I must say,” she said, “I've fresh appreciation for Stanley and Livingstone.”

Beside her clock I glimpsed a human silhouette, erect and still. I bounded to my feet and bathed the figure in my flashlight's beam.

It wasn't Noah, nor a trick of the shadows. It was a man made of liquid silver, head to toe! An eyeless, alien apparition!

“What is it?” Miss Buxton said. A moment later, I saw the apparition for what it truly was: a medieval suit of armor hung on a display stand.

I sighed. “Company.”

“Oh,” she said, having faced the light. “But I'm afraid I don't go for knights in shining armor, Sir Galahad, or whomever you are. I'm far too modern and independent. Away with you.”

My flashlight caught her smile. The dusty coating on her flesh, all the scrapes and bruises, and her ruined habiliments reminded me of a band of French civilians I'd seen during the Meuse-Argonne offensive staggering from the fresh ruins of a church the Germans had shelled.

“I admire your
sangfroid,
Miss Buxton.”

“Oh, dear me, is it showing?” She straightened her skirt as if she'd taken
sangfroid
to mean an undergarment.

“Indeed, it is. You've kept your head throughout the evening, despite this nightmarish household and those . . . those murderous blackguards.”