Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (20 page)

She took a step backwards. “Perhaps just a glass of water?”

“If it's potable,” I said.

“Well, of course it's potable,” he said. “But I don't keep much of it on hand, I'm afraid. We no longer have running water—Such an extravagance!—and so I haul away what we need in buckets from a post in Mount Morris Park, about four blocks to the south, and I carry it all up to the top floor to convenience Elizabeth when she gets thirsty, or needs a sponge bath.”

“It's no wonder you're in such fine shape for an old,” Miss Buxton began, “for a man of your experience.”

“What about a wine opener?” I said. “If you don't mind us consuming a bottle we've liberated from your stores.”

Miss Buxton held the bottle aloft. “Enough to dull the pains from our injuries?”

Noah seized the bottle from her grip and, with the aid of his flashlight, read the label. “French, is it?
Meursault Charmes
. Eighteen forty-six. Oh, yes. A favorite of my mother's. I recall it vividly now. Aromas of lime and grapefruit. Amber colored in the glass.”

“That'll do nicely,” I said. “The opener?”

“I keep a minor collection in a drawer over there.” He pointed to a preparation island. “Wines prosper with age, you know, unlike so much else, including ourselves. I must say it pains me a good deal to allow you to drink mother's wine, given the sentiment involved. Normally, it would be out of the question—Yes, out of the question!—but this
is
an extraordinary situation. Most extraordinary indeed. So go ahead, have at it. You can reimburse me later at market value.”

“Which is?” Miss Buxton inquired.

“About three hundred dollars per bottle, last I checked. On second thought, I really should add a ten percent markup in appreciation of the sentiment. But if you return the bottle to me I'll waive it.”

I exchanged a glance with Miss Buxton. “Perhaps we should wait on that water upstairs.”

“Nothing doing,” she said, retrieving the bottle from Noah.

A sound, which I imagined to be a person tripping over some clutter, came from somewhere not very far away. Noah dropped his lettuce on the floor and snatched his flintlock. At the same time, I withdrew the revolver from my waistband.

“Where did that come from?” I asked in a whisper.

“The meat locker, I believe.” Noah motioned with his arm for us to follow him. He kept the flashlight beam low to the floor.

“Oh, dear Lord,” Miss Buxton whispered, “anything but those shrieking war cries.”

We rounded the preparation island, where copper pots and pans hung overhead from iron fixtures on the ceiling, although the cobwebs seemed thick enough by themselves to hold the items aloft. Via Noah's flashlight, a thick steel door came into view. The door, to my surprise, was shut tight.

“You sure it came from in there?” I whispered to Noah.

“Fairly sure.” At the door, he handed off the flashlight to Miss Buxton, who first had to place the wine bottle on the floor to free her one good arm.

She aimed the beam at the center of the door. He gripped the handle. But I placed my hand on top of his to forestall his opening it.

“Whomever or whatever it is, perhaps we should simply lock the door and attempt to communicate through it?”

“Once we take a peek,” he said. “First we need to verify who—or what—is inside, and how many. But don't worry. With nine rounds between us, we should have the firepower to deal with anything we're likely to find.”

“Should?” Miss Buxton said from behind us.

He pulled the handle and flung the door open.

The Meat Locker

The adversary we encountered inside the meat locker was invisible. Yet it unleashed formidable violence upon us in an instant with a concussive-like blast of noxious fumes. It was nothing short of olfactory Armageddon. I will not suffer you, dear Doctor, with a more detailed description of these fumes, other than to note that I was taken back in memory to a corpse-strewn marshland, which I'd crossed about nine days after the end of the Second Battle of the Marne.

I turned away from the locker as fast and as involuntarily as if I'd been spun by a giant. Miss Buxton spun with me, dropping the flashlight on the floor, and proceeded to retch. Nausea roiled my own stomach. She vomited, and in perverse empathy, I vomited too, to the point where I thought my very soul would spew out.

“What the devil, Langley?” I said when I could speak again. It earned no response. He'd picked up the flashlight from the floor whilst we were busy heaving and—astoundingly—entered the locker. Miss Buxton had been reduced to tears again. I placed my arm around her shoulder.

“My throat burns so,” she said.

“Mine too.”

“I must have a drink of water.”

“I'm sorry, but you'll have to wait on that. We both will.”

“The wine,” she said. But when we cast our gazes to the floor, the bottle was covered in our own, shall we say, disgorgements. “I can't take anymore of this wretched stench, Miles. It's channeling right through me, as if I'm porous.”

“Take hold of yourself,” I counseled. “It's only bacteria, yeasts and molds.”

“And rotting flesh. Not to mention, vomit. If you'll excuse me.” And she slipped from my embrace into the darkness, where I soon heard her collide with the preparation island, I think, knocking over some utensils. “I'm all right,” she called. “I'm just going to wait over here. No, a bit further from here.”

With my hand rather futilely cupping my nose, I watched Noah survey the items inside the meat locker. I half-expected to see a human corpse hanging on a hook. I thought I did for a second until I realized it was a side of beef, five or six feet in length.

The other meats—which, to use the term loosely, included a string of mouse carcasses hung by the door—had been either salted, pickled, or smoked in an attempt to preserve the food for years at a time in the absence of any refrigeration. Ditto much fish and poultry. But too much time had elapsed for the bulk of Noah's food. I daresay some of it had taken up residence inside that locker for a decade. Hence, decay had widely spread, and there were scattered colonies of maggots in the meat. Some fresh blood on the floor had gathered cockroaches so thickly that, in one spot, they resembled a vibrating throw rug.

From the darkness Miss Buxton's renewed hysteria expressed itself through a bit of satirical verse, once popular in the wake of Upton Sinclair's muckraking novel,
The Jungle.

“ 'Mary had a little lamb,

And when she saw it sicken,

She shipped it off to Packington,

And now its labeled chicken.' ”

“Ah,” Noah said. “Here's the culprit.” His flashlight beam moved from the hanging wet skeleton of another side of beef to the floor below, where the missing beef lay. The flesh was, in color, a mottle of grays, browns and greens. It was shiny beneath the flashlight beam too. In a word, it had turned gelatinous. He peered out at me. “It slipped its skeleton. Bad meat, I guess, and bad timing. I can only assume it'd been on the verge of dropping for a while, and all it took was the miniature vibrations of our feet, or perhaps even our voices.”

From another room, war-like cries sounded: Noah's unidentified creatures, unmistakably. In a flash, Miss Buxton emerged from the darkness by my side.

“Where are they?” I said to Noah.

“The great hall somewhere. They smell the meat.”

Garbage

We hastened from the kitchen, leaving the meat locker wide open. Noah anticipated that its reek would attract—Yes, attract!—his uncaged creatures, that they would venture inside the locker to satiate their appetites for a time. (Thus, they grew more hideous yet in my imagination.)

“We should split the cost of the meat loss three ways,” Noah said at a trot, his bouncing flashlight beam our guide. “It's only fair, you must admit, as I've sacrificed for your safety too.”

“The meat was already lost,” Miss Buxton opined.

“Don't mind her, Noah,” I said. “We agree to pay. Where are you taking us?”

“Through the servery, then the refectory. It's the shortest route to the armory, given we must avoid the great hall.”

The servery provided little relief for our respective proboscises. For Noah had long ago converted the entire space from a dining-related storage area into a garbage dump. The room was narrow, perhaps fifteen feet wide, but five times that in length, with a few shut doors to the left and another few to the right. The garbage covered the floor, all but the slender access path upon which we hurried, and in many spots clumped in mounds as tall as myself. The only reminder of the room's original purpose was on display inside the open cupboards lining the walls: solid gold plates and saucers and other flatware—enough to serve forty guests at a time, I should think.

Noah halted at the first door to the right, a swinging door. He pushed against it, but it did not swing, nor even budge. An unknown force on the other side blocked its movement. I pressed my shoulder against the door alongside Noah until we cracked it open enough to slip through.

The resistance we'd encountered proved to have been more garbage. What must have been a huge mound of it had collapsed, blocking the door. For the dining hall—or what Noah had monastically termed the
refectory
—had become a garbage dump too.

Only the dining table and chairs had been spared of refuse. The table was narrow, but a city block long, it seemed, and every one of its places were set, though untidily. A ghostly dinner party might've been underway.

We followed Noah, wading knee-deep through a detritus of infinite variety spanning epochs, if I may be permitted more hyperbole. (What is no exaggeration, I suspect, is that for many years, and perhaps decades, not a single ounce of matter transported inside the Langley mansion would leave it again.) My foot slipped on what I believe was a pile of greasy chicken bones, and as a result I plowed head-first into the debris.

I wasn't quite back on my feet again when I heard—when we all heard—a distinct noise from behind us inside the servery. Someone—Or was it some thing?—had disturbed a cluster of empty cans, based on the tinny rattle produced.

“No war cries,” Miss Buxton said. “There's that.”

“Perhaps only because we're being hunted,” I said.

“What a thought! Perhaps I should wallow in the garbage too, to disguise my scent.”

“You're assuming powers of olfaction no better than a human being's.”

Noah reached the dining table, whereupon he scrambled on top of it and stood. “We'll make better time from up here, I should think.”

And so it was that I found myself trotting down the middle of the table, my ribs aching, my breath laboring, as I tried to keep up with the beam from Noah's flashlight. At every three paces, I was presented with a candelabra centerpiece to hurdle over. I was not always successful. And here and there I slipped upon gold plates and saucers, kicked silverware and the crystal glasses. There was an enormous antique tapestry on the wall ahead of medieval knights fighting in the crusades. Ever has the world mixed madness and bloodshed, it strikes me now, if not then.

Down from the table we jumped, one after the next, and through a door we sailed on, out of the refectory and into the middle of a long hallway. Noah took a right turn and led us, still trotting, down the hall.

Despite the chilly temperature, I'd begun to perspire. But the cause wasn't due to any physical exertion, I knew. It was the latest symptom of my opiate withdrawal. I knew also that soon, in an hour at most, I wouldn't be any good to anyone without finding a bit of the poppy to eat, swallow, or inhale. I'd likely ball up like a fetus—with no womb to protect me—and cry.

Noah's medieval armory, née billiards room, was a veritable museum. No, that's not nearly right. It more resembled a museum's storage area behind the current exhibits. For the ancient weapons and armor and accoutrements of battle often protruded from crates and boxes. Upon the walls hung Norman helmets and chain mail, shields and swords, flails and battle axes, longbows and crossbows, and quivers of arrows too. There was also the second catapult Noah had mentioned to us earlier, whilst the green felt of the still-present billiards table as well as another table for snooker had been converted into giant display trays for knives and daggers.

But what I actually noticed first was another source of light besides Noah's that came from across the room. It lit up an orderly company of full suits of armor hung on display stands and revealed the robber Willie, still in the same woman's bathing suit. The man was sighting us over the bolt of a huge crossbow.

“
Duck!” I shouted.

Battle in the Medieval Armory

I tackled Miss Buxton to the floor as Willie fired his bolt. It shook the wall behind us. Noah switched off his flashlight, and his shadow scampered away behind a cardboard box until it blended into the darkness. I hauled Miss Buxton and myself behind a wooden crate.

“He could've killed you with that thing,” she whispered.

“Or you,” I whispered back.