Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (18 page)

“But the main trouble, Cora, is that—assuming we got by them, and made it up to the fourth floor—the robbers would give chase again. We wouldn't have time to secret Elizabeth away, not when she's crippled. We'd expose her, unnecessarily, to that revolver and to the other dangers of these men.”

“I see,” she said.

“I've another idea,” Noah said. “This way.”

I took up the rear position as we set off in single file, knee-deep in disarray. We hit upon a trail soon enough and passed by a great stone fireplace, currently unused, of course. The sight of it reminded me of the cold, of my own shivering, and made me wish that I'd borrowed one of the mink coats myself.

We came to a small wooden cabinet painted white and built into the wall about chest high. It had a double set of doors, which Noah opened. Inside was a narrow brick shaft with two parallel ropes suspended vertically between a pair of iron guide rails on opposing side walls.

“The dumbwaiter shaft,” Noah said. “It starts in the wine cellar and extends to the fourth floor. It's the only way up without the robbers giving chase, or knowing that we've made it to the floor above.”

“Won't we need the cart?” I asked.

“Yes.” He reached inside the shaft and began to yank, hand over hand, on one of the ropes. A steady screech—presumably from a set of long unoiled pulleys—echoed inside the shaft and infiltrated the bedroom at an alarming volume.

“They'll hear,” I said just as noise erupted from the other bedroom, mirrors shattering one after another after another.

“Not if they keep up that racket,” Miss Buxton said.

Noah halted his work. “Those bastards. I must put a stop to their destruction now.”

“And get yourself shot?” I said.

“You don't understand,” he said.

“No one does, Noah, and no one likely ever will. Hurry up with that dumbwaiter cart. I'll go lock the bedroom door, just in case we're overheard.”

I took the candle and, not locating a path in the door's direction, stamped through scree-like piles of oddments. I found the key in the lock and made use of it.

By the time I returned to the others, the shattering of mirrors had stopped, but so had the creaking of the pulleys, for the dumbwaiter cart had arrived. It was a wooden box about two feet tall and wide as well as deep with the side that faced us missing.

“But no human being can fit inside that little space,” Miss Buxton said.

“We'll have to stand on top of the cart,” Noah said. “One at a time. Using the guide rails for balance.”

“Is it safe?” she asked.

“Safe enough,” he said. “Besides, it's only a short journey. Fifteen or sixteen feet.”

“Go ahead, Cora,” I said.

“No,” Noah said. “You first, Trenowyth.”

“Why?

“You're the heaviest, and with only one arm, you won't be of much use in hauling yourself up by the ropes.”

“It's true, I can't pull hand over hand.”

“And,” he said, “from down here, we'll have more leverage than if we tried to haul you up last from above.”

He lowered the cart about three feet so that I could easily step upon its roof. I had just slipped inside the shaft and balanced myself on top of it when I heard—when we all heard—a rattling cry of rage from the adjacent bedroom. I worried again about the noise of the pulleys.

“They may yet solve the closet trick,” I said.

“We'll hurry.” Noah took the candle from Miss Buxton and handed it to me. “Once you've made it to the next floor, tap twice on the roof of the cart to signal us to halt. When you're safely inside the room directly above this one, put the candle inside the dumbwaiter and tap twice again to signal that the cart is ready to be lowered for the next person.”

“Understood,” I said, and they began to hoist me with the rope. My progress was slow, but steady, achieved in uniform little jerks. The pulleys seemed to creak louder than before under the added strain of my weight, which ill health and lamentable habits had by this date thankfully reduced to no more than one hundred and sixty pounds.

It wasn't until the fourth floor cabinet doors had come into view overhead that a disturbance began below, inside Colonel Langley's bedroom. Excited voices. A cry from Miss Buxton. A commotion of clutter.

The dumbwaiter cart stalled. My candle blew out, and in the resulting darkness it was left to my inner ear to inform me as to why it had extinguished: I was in free fall.

Down I Go

The speeding rope made the pulleys shriek and burned my hand when I tried in vain to grasp it. The sounds from Colonel Langley's bedroom amplified ever so briefly as I dropped below the third floor with mounting velocity. My body scraped along one of the brick walls, and the friction slowed my descent enough for the dumbwaiter cart to leave my feet and hurry ahead in our mutual race to annihilation at the bottom of the shaft.

My legs flailed instinctively as I dropped until, unexpectedly, I found myself riding the cart again. I suppose the rope had begun to slow of human intervention, but I can't honestly say I sensed it. And what happened next is impossible for me to relate firsthand. To this day, a cloud of amnesia obscures the moments prior to when the dumbwaiter cart and I slammed into the floor of the shaft as well as shortly thereafter. For the impact left me unconscious.

The next thing I do remember is staring up at the flicker of a candle flame and noting a woman's face behind it, half-veiled in darkness.

My wife? Annabel?

No, hair too short, face not right. Dead.

It's that Belgian nurse, for I am racked with pain.

No, the war is over.

It's . . . it's . . Oh, dear God, no! It's Miss Buxton! I must still be there! Inside that accursed palace! That malodorous preview of hell! Noah Langley's fortress of ephemera!

“I wish you were dead,” I said.

“What did you say?” she said.

“I mean . . . I wish you were Annabel, and I wish I were dead.”

“You very nearly got your wish. Who is Annabel?”

“Some other time.” I noticed that she was on her knees, hovering over me in that borrowed fur coat, and that I was bent-kneed and on my back with lots of splintered pieces of wood about. “Where are we?”

“The bottom of the dumbwaiter shaft.” She nodded toward an opening in the wall. “The wine cellar's through there.”

“Alcohol,” I said. “That'll do.” I tried to sit up, but decided against it almost immediately due to a woozy head and pain elsewhere, everywhere.

“Where does it hurt?” she said.

“Where doesn't it? But the worst is here, above my right temple. It's throbbing rather severely. And there is pain—sharp pain—in my ribs. I think I cracked some new ones. Or else the old cracks got bigger. It hurts just to breathe. To talk.”

“I can help you to your feet,” she said, “but only with my left arm. I've broken the right one, I'm sure of it.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Two good hands between us now. How'd it happen?”

“I'll get to that shortly.” With her aid, I struggled to my feet and, gasping and wheezing, managed to squeeze through the dumbwaiter's cabinet doors and into the wine cellar.

She passed her taper candle to me through the opening before squeezing through it herself. The candle had broken in half, presumably from its fall inside the dumbwaiter shaft.

The racks of bottles beneath a low ceiling were flocked with cobwebs. One of those mutant cats that we'd encountered in the basement hissed at me a few times before pattering across the paved stone floor and into hiding in the rows of racks. The door was shut, and I wondered how it had gotten inside, how it lived if it couldn't get out.

Miss Buxton took her candle back and held it up to my face. “Oh, you look a fright, Miles, you really do. We need to get those scrapes cleaned up somehow, and those ribs bandaged, and I wish to examine your eye—That monkey wrench really did some damage, didn't it?—and there's swelling too on the side of your head from the fall that is already visible. But for now, you should just sit down and rest.”

I found a column of musty, old magazines to sit upon. (Haven't I mentioned that magazine and newspaper bundles were ubiquitous throughout the mansion?) But I quickly stood again. “I find I can breathe easier on my feet. Where's Noah?”

“On the fourth floor by now, if all has gone well.”

“The fourth?” I gave the ceiling a glance. “What happened up there?”

She sighed. “It was all my fault. We were sharing the rope, Noah and I, struggling a tad with your weight, but under control—until a rat I hadn't known was there bit me on the ankle, and I panicked. Screamed. Just once. But it was enough. Willie in that mirrored bedroom cried: 'They're one room over!' And so I panicked some more. I let go of the rope. Noah couldn't hold on to you alone, I guess, or perhaps it was because I got tangled up with him for a few seconds, I'm not sure.”

“So why do I still live and breathe?”

“Because Noah—that dirty, little Gunga Din—did
not
panic,” she said, “even though we soon heard one of the robbers rattling the doorknob to our room and banging up against it. He stripped the bed of a thick blanket, and used that to protect his hands as he gradually slowed the rope. When I realized what he was doing, I copied him with another piece of that same blanket, and together, we slowed your descent. But alas, not enough to halt you before you hit bottom.”

“How did you escape from that room?” I asked. “And reach me?”

“The rope in the dumbwaiter shaft. We had no other choice. One of the robbers was battering the door from the hallway. The other we could hear clearing boxes in the shared closet. I shimmied down the rope, while Noah climbed up at the same time. He'd insisted on reaching the next floor to comfort his sister and to prepare her, he said—though he didn't say how—for the arrival of the robbers.”

“And your broken arm?”

“I lost my grip and fell on top of you when you were still unconscious. I'm not sure how far I fell. Fifteen, twenty feet perhaps. My hands, as I'd pointed out earlier, were already raw from hauling you up by that tree root.”

“Of course. You're a brave woman, Cora. I admire you tremendously, and I would say that even if you were a man.”

“Thank you, Miles. You don't know what it means to hear—”

“You kept your head about you, even when Howard and his revolver surprised us in that hallway. You saved my life with your quick thinking up there too, and I won't soon forget it.”

There was moisture in her eyes now, which I attributed to my own, magnanimous remarks, until she said: “My arm really does hurt, by the way, now that the shock has worn off.”

“Let me see it.”

I determined that the break was about three inches above her wrist. There were no bones out of place, at least.

I made use of my military first aid training for her benefit. I untied the magazine bundle that I'd sat upon earlier and selected one of the magazines that matched the length of her forearm, a copy of McClure's, as I recall. I rolled it into a U-shaped cradle, meanwhile asking her: “Do you think the robbers know how it was that you and Noah managed to exit Colonel Langley's bedroom so abruptly?”

“Either that, or they're still marveling at our disappearing act.”

I placed the cradle I'd created beneath her forearm and, together, coordinating the only two good hands available, we secured it with the twine that had once held the bundle together to form an impromptu cast.

“So you don't know,” I said, “whether they know about the dumbwaiter shaft?”

“No. I heard only mumbles. I'd entered the shaft first, at Noah's insistence, and by the time the robbers had busted inside the bedroom, I must've been below them by twenty feet or more. It's anyone's guess whether they figured out the escape route, and I can only assume that Noah had the presence of mind to close the cabinet doors behind himself once inside the shaft.”

“We'd better hurry out of here, just in case. But first”—I began to cut through the cobwebs guarding the wine racks with a machete-like motion of my arm—“a bottle of wine to go. We can probably find an opener in the kitchen or butler's pantry upstairs. A few slugs of vino will surely dull our pains.”

“Good idea. I'm rather fond of claret, by the way.”

I snatched a dusty bottle from the rack at random and brought it over to the candle. Blew on the label. “It's in French. Which I can read, but not very easily in this light.”

“Let me help.” She dug into a pocket of the mink. “The candle broke in two during your fall, and I dropped the other half in here . . . Huh? What's this?” Instead of half a candle, her hand emerged with a glittering hunk of jewelry. “Oh . . . My . . . God! A canary diamond brooch!”

“So it is.”

She beamed at me. She inspected the brooch at the tip of her nose, weighed it in the palm of her hand. “Must be a hundred and fifty carats. Maybe more. It's true, Miles. It's actually true. This broken down house—this scrapheap, this overloaded pigsty—is filthy with buried treasure.”

“I never had a doubt myself.”

“This brooch must be worth a hundred thousand dollars at a minimum.” She dropped the gem back into the pocket of her mink coat. “And I'll bet its location is written down in Noah's little codebook.”