Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (17 page)

“Howard won't shoot you,” I said to Noah. “He needs you too much.”

“Oh, I'll shoot him, alright,” Howard said. “In fact, I'm going to obliterate the little bastard. It's just a matter of when.” Two steps forward was all he needed to press the tip of the gun's barrel to Noah's forehead. “Do you wish to die right now, old man? On this very spot? Or live a little bit longer and lead us to the coins?”

“Die now,” Noah said.

Willie laughed. “I could've predicted that one, Howie. He'd protect stale bread with his life, never mind twenty million in jack.” Willie was wearing what I imagine was the first outfit that he'd found after stripping off his maggot-riddled workman's costume: a woman's bathing suit from the mid to late 1800s, black with white trim, featuring bloomers and knee-high stockings.

“You think I'm bluffing?” Howard said to Noah. “Let's see what you think after your lawyer's brains splatter all over this wall.” Rapidly, he placed the tip of the gun's barrel against my temple.

“No!” Miss Buxton exclaimed. “You don't want to do that!”

“Oh, yes I do.” He cocked the gun hammer. “In the worst way.”

“He cracked the code!” she said. No one reacted, nothing moved, a tense
tableau
, especially tense for me. “Did you hear what I said?”

“The notebook?” Howard said.

“Yes,” she said.

“It's genuine?”

“It is.”

“You're sure?”

“I am.”

He thought awhile before asking: “Do you know the code too?”

“No,” she said. “I don't.”

“Where's the notebook now?”

“Mister Langley has it back again. Hidden in his union suit. You don't want to shoot Mister Trenowyth because I think you'll find him more amenable to conducting the translation for you than Mister Langley ever will be.”

“Soon, Trenowyth.” Howard uncocked the hammer. “Soon.” At last, he withdrew the barrel from my temple. He dropped the revolver to his side and studied Noah, even as he addressed Miss Buxton. “You must be telling the truth, Sweet Buns. Given the way the old boy's scowling at me now.”

“What has he there under his arm?” Brady wondered.

“An antique lighter,” Miss Buxton replied. “For the candles.”

“Put it down,” Howard ordered Noah, “and hand me the notebook.”

Noah stooped, as if to comply, but having surreptitiously loosened the lid to his Dobereiner's lighting machine, he rose up sharply with it—sliding the lid open—and splashed Howard in the face with a liberal dose of sulphuric acid. The robber uncurled a lengthy scream as he staggered backwards, firing off a wild round into the ceiling.

“My eyes! My eyes!”

Noah heaved his Dobereiner at the tight knot of robbers and tore off down the hallway. I seized Miss Buxton by the hand—as she seemed to be frozen by surprise—and together we raced back into the canyon of clutter, trailing our fearless guide.

“It burns!” Howard cried behind us. “It burns!”

“The gun!” Brady said. “Give us the gun, Howie!”

The kerosene lamp threw scattered light on the canyon walls, yet with every step we took it faded. Another shot rang out. The bullet pinged off metal—a gaslight fixture on the wall, I think—and ricocheted by my ear with a bee-like sizzle. Noah halted in front of a door on the left.

“In here,” he said. Once we'd entered the room and shut the door behind us, utter darkness prevailed. I tripped over something small on the floor and would've fallen except that my shoulder collided with a wall of junk, clutter, debris, or for all I knew absent light, museum-quality mementos.

“I dropped my candle back there,” I said. “Anyone still have theirs?”

“I have mine,” Miss Buxton said.

“But there's no lighter,” Noah said. Outside, running footsteps approached, two pair, and a strip of light began to show beneath the bottom of the door, its glow rapidly gaining strength.

A Room of Reflection

Approximately 10:00 PM

“The key should be in the lock,” Noah said in competition with the agonized and unrelenting wails down the hall from the man whom he had just scarred, if not blinded, for life. “Yes, found it.” The racing footsteps outside halted abruptly on the other side of the door. The key twisted in the lock with a metal scratch. The knob rattled impotently. A burst of Gaelic penetrated the barrier—some curse, I can only assume, from the still-living mick, Brady. His shoulder (I'll assume also) rammed the door. Rammed it again—this time so violently that extra light momentarily seeped inside along the door's edges.

“Join hands as before,” Noah whispered to us, “and follow me.”

We proceeded through the hateful dark. Our progress was slow and tortuous. Noah stopped at one point to slide some things aside. All the while the door complained of attack.

“Where are we?” Miss Buxton asked.

“My mother's bedroom,” he answered.

The doorframe splintered, and splintered some more, casting a feeble light inside. Moments later, when the frame gave way and the door flew open and the kerosene lamp that Willie held aloft truly exposed our surroundings, my jaw dropped open, faced at a glance with hundreds of mirrors. Yes, mirrors.

They were everywhere. Large, small, framed and unframed, round, square, and rectangular. They lined the walls. They littered the bed, the furniture, the tops of travel trunks, and myriad storage boxes. And within their silvered glass, an army of each one of us had gathered, whilst the glowing ball of the lantern filled the room like a galaxy of miniature suns.

I think we were all unsure at first as to whether the innumerable reproductions of ourselves exposed or camouflaged our true persons. But we huddled instinctively—Noah, Miss Buxton, and I—behind one of the full-length mirrors that stood at haphazard angles throughout the room, although we were visible in the reflections from every angle, including our backsides.

Slowly, Brady swung his gaze—and his weapon—around the room in search of us. From down the hall, a particularly grievous howl issued forth, prompting him to say: “You really aren't the full shilling, are you, Langley? Because you don't maim a man like Howie and expect to die a quick death.” He—and every one of his reflections—halted and fired.

Another full-length mirror—not remotely near us, by the sound of it—shattered to bits. He hadn't a clue as to which of our images were real.

“Seven years bad luck!” Willie announced just as the shot's reverberation brought down a large hunk of ceiling plaster to one side of us.

Noah muttered under his breath. “That was a carved walnut Queen Anne.”

Brady took aim in a new direction and fired—with the same result for another full-length mirror, and behind it, a wall mirror exploded as well. Noah muttered again, but I couldn't hear his words this time, due to all the ringing in my ears.

“Fourteen!” Willie said. “Make that twenty-one years!”

“Don't shoot!” Miss Buxton shouted. Noah cupped her mouth in a jiffy—I can see his skeletal fingers, his blackened nails, even now—but she fought free of his grip, adding: “Only these men can lead you to the coins!”

Brady swiveled toward the sound of her voice. “Aye, but another hole in their arses first would suit me fine.”

“In the leg,” Willie told Brady. “Shoot 'em in the leg. I'm sick of the chase.”

By now, according to my tally, six bullets from the revolver had been fired. Howard had brought down the Moroccan chandelier in the antechamber with one shot and wasted a second shot on the Laughing Buddha. His third shot had lodged in the ceiling of the hall outside, under the shock of a sulphuric acid dousing. Brady, most likely, had taken the fourth shot, which had ricocheted by me as we'd fled down the hall and into this bedroom of mirrors. Shots five and six had been the mirror shatterers. So Brady was either out of bullets, or hadn't yet realized the need to reload. It was time to risk a move.

But to where? Willie blocked the door. Brady's exact location was uncertain, given the strange, disorienting effect of the mirrors, and the two bedroom windows were boarded up and partly obscured by debris, to say nothing of our location on the third floor. And what if my bullet count was off by one?

“My brother's dead, isn't he?” Brady said.

“Who?” I mouthed to Miss Buxton.

“Cormac?” she whispered back.

“The stairs collapsed on him, right?” Brady said. No answer. He aimed the gun—adding “I hold you blokes responsible”—and fired. Rather, he attempted to, for the gun gave off a loud
click
instead. I'd got the bullet count right.

Noah rose from his crouch. “This way. Quick.” He bolted for somewhere, and we followed. He led us into an alcove or what I believe had once been his mother's dressing area.

Why?

The mirrors showed Brady hastily reloading the revolver, which meant that, earlier, Howard had found spare ammunition on Patrolman Cox after staving in the man's skull.

When I saw Noah crack open one of the doors to a double-doored closet and slip inside an alarm went off in my head.

We'll be trapped! Cornered!

Yet we followed him into that closet, Miss Buxton and I, followed after the Bre'r Rabbit of this stupefyingly odd briar patch.

The Shaft

We hunkered in darkness behind the closet doors. There was scarce room for all of us amidst a rack of musty, mothballed clothing—a collection of fur coats—and stacks of cardboard boxes. Willie's voice boomed out our location almost immediately.

“The closet, Brady!”

“Aye,” he said. “All three too.”

“We've got 'em now, for sure!”

I peeked out through the slats of one of the closet doors to find multiple images of Brady in the mirrors, each Brady stepping with caution and slowly enlarging. His arms extended out in front of him in the form of a
V
ending in the gun.

Behind me, Noah was shifting some of the boxes. “Help me put this one aside,” he whispered. “It's heavy.”

“What are you doing?” I said.

“It's a shared closet. Connected to my father's bedroom.”

“Of course,” I thought aloud. Secret rooms and passages were not uncommon in large, old Harlem mansions, and in a more puritanical era, a closet such as this one would have allowed for discreet nocturnal visits between a well-to-do husband and wife who maintained separate bedrooms. I helped Noah to complete the task.

“Wide enough,” he said. “Follow me.”

As soon as we'd removed to Colonel Langley's bedroom through the narrow space created, he and I shifted the cardboard boxes which had been set aside back into their original positions so that they obscured the second set of closet doors, disguised our exit. No sooner had we shut the second set of doors than the first set flew open and lantern light leaked into our side through the door slats above the boxes.

“What the—” Brady began.

“They're not here!” Willie said. “They've vanished!” We heard the coats that hung on the rack sliding back and forth, some of the boxes shifting.

“Get back and guard the door to the hallway,” Brady said. “We've made a mistake. Fell prey to some sort of illusion in these damn mirrors. They're still hiding in this room somewhere.”

“Could've sworn I heard 'em in here,” Willie said.

The light through the door slats faded. We were essentially in the dark again, but safe for the time being.

Noah whispered. “Do you still have that candle, Miss?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I've always hated the dark. Hate it worse now.”

“Stay here, I'll be right back.” We heard him stomping atop some clutter and, a while later, heard some soft rummaging at a distance. When Noah returned, he asked for the candle, and lit it. “My father kept a cherrywood smoking pipe by his bedside, along with some friction matches. I'd not disturbed his personal things since he passed. It was . . . hard to disturb them now.” I gave his shoulder a soft pat.

A bit earlier, Miss Buxton had removed her ruined fox fur and replaced it with one of the coats from the closet rack, a full-length mink. Noah stared at the garment now, severely enough to compel her to say something about it.

“It's all right if I borrow this beautiful coat for the night, is it not, Mister Langley? My own is filthy and torn.”

“It was one of mother's favorites,” he said noncommittally.

“Borrowing it 'for the night' may be optimistic,” I said. “We're still trapped.”

“True,” Noah said.

“Why?” Miss Buxton asked.

“Because,” I said, “we have no way to leave this floor safely.”

“Why not?”

“There's only one way off it now. The servants's staircase. To reach Elizabeth, we'd have to pass by Willie at the door to the other bedroom and probably confront Howard along the way.”

“But Howard,” she said, “is incapacitated.”

“To what extent?” I said. “His bellowing has ceased as of late.”

“So it has,” she said.