Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (24 page)

“We've gotta scram, Howie.” She saw his face full-on. “Oh, Howie. Oh, God, what they've done to you.”

“I thought I was on fire,” he said. “I kept hearing screams, and wished they would stop, then I realized it was me screaming.”

She kneeled down beside her partner in crime. “There's a fire down below.”

“I know.” He glanced at me. “He just told me.”

“There's firemen and police outside the building.”

“The acid's still eating at me, I can feel it.”

“Did you hear me?”

“I've gotta get to a doctor. Get me to a doctor.”

“Right, Howie, I will. But first thing, we've gotta get out of this building. There's a fireman's ladder already in the window on the second floor. It's our only way out, and there isn't much time. The smoke—”

“What about the cops?”

“Lucky I held onto this gun. We'll use Trenowyth as a hostage to make our getaway.” She glanced down at me. “No other choice.”

“Why don't we just pretend to be house guests? Then make a run for it when—”

“Because I shot a fireman at the window, and he fell off his ladder outside.”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Your plan then. But first the coins.”

“What, are you kidding?”

“They're up here somewhere,” he said. “I can feel it. All the doors on this floor are locked, for some reason, but I've been busting 'em down one by one with this axe and searching the rooms thoroughly.”

“But—” she began.

“This is their real home, Cora. The Langleys, I mean. Their living quarters. Where else would they keep the most valuable treasure they own, but nearby?”

“There's no time.”

“Sure there is.” He stood. “I've only got a couple rooms left, and the old biddy—What's her name? Elizabeth?—has to be hiding in one of them. So if we can't find the coins on our own, we'll make her tell us where—”

We heard footsteps from below upon the stairs. Heavy, slow, awkward.

A moment later came that shrill, Zulu-like war cry, soon to be joined by a near-identical second voice. Its memory ices my spine even now.

The Final Chapter

Approximately 1:00 AM

The war cries echoed in the stairwell. It sounded as if an army approached. Miss Buxton sprang to the top of the steps, where she assumed a shooter's stance, aiming her pistol down into the wellhole. Howard labored to his feet, axe in hand.

“Let me shoot,” he said.

“You know I'm a better shot,” she said. “Besides, there's only one bullet left, and more than one bastard to shoot at. You'd be more useful standing ready with the axe.”

The cries neared. Their pitch heightened into a sort of keening.

So human their voices sounded to me, and yet so beast-like, and loud enough to have drowned out their plodding, arrhythmic footsteps for a time, but now I could hear them again.

“See 'em yet?” Howard said.

“No. Wait. Starting to . . . Oh, what have we . . . Oh, sweet mother of Jesus!”

“What is it?” he said.

“That
is
the question,” she said as the plodding footsteps plodded no more but bounded up the steps, Noah's creatures presumably intent on attack.

I rolled off my back and onto my left side in search of my sword. It lay within arm's reach. I gripped the handle, despite being wholly unsure as to whether I meant to run the robbers through with the blade or else join their side against the imminent, fearsome-sounding unknown.

Howard apparently assumed the former. With the butt of his axe head, I think it was, he backhanded me across the temple. Whereupon, I passed out, lost consciousness, drank of the midnight dew.

I rarely dream these days, per se. I mainly nightmare now. (It's the opium, Doctor, if by chance this particular curse of the poppy lover catches you unawares.) And the nightmare I had then—or at least the one I remember—I will merely summarize as the usual airy phantoms riding roughshod across my brain. I awoke smelling smoke.

I popped my eyes open to find the smoke gathered just below the ceiling in a dark, gray cloud. I sat up. More dark smoke billowed up through the stairwell.

Howard lay dead beside me on a blood-spattered floor, the axe buried deep in his skull. No sign of Miss Buxton. Nor the creatures.

Had I been spared somehow? Or had the alcohol and opium numbed me to a mortal wound somewhere on my person?

I stood. Still feeling no new injury beyond the blow to the head, I bent down to pick up my sword. But it was gone.

I soon recognized that I didn't need it anyway. I needed the axe. I plucked it from Howard's skull and marched off down the hall to search the rooms one by one for Noah's sister.

“Elizabeth!” I called. “Elizabeth Langley!” It hurt to shout by now, hurt terribly.

I bypassed the rooms with battered doors that Howard had axed earlier and already searched. But I happened to glance inside one such room and saw two-foot flames shooting up through the floorboards. At that moment, it's fair to say, hope fled trembling from my body. Mere panic moved my feet onwards.

“Elizabeth!” I called again. A seeming response came from nearby in the form of a loud groan. Then another.

I followed the sound into a room with a battered, open door. Unlike the other rooms I'd glimpsed, which had been small, servants's bedrooms with twin-size beds and matching dressers within—along with the ubiquitous clutter, of course—this room was spacious, about triple the usual size, as if Noah had knocked out walls between bedrooms to create it. Perhaps he had.

A huge iron cage, a good seven feet in height and considerably greater in width, consumed more than half of the space. (Noah had to have welded it together from within the room.) There was a horrific stench, a mix of body odor, meat, and feces pervading. The door to the cage was wide open, and inside, seated on the floor in a far corner, was a monster. The only monster of the mansion, as it turned out. A dying monster.

It was a set of conjoined twins. Two heads. One exceptionally wide torso. Two arms. Three legs. Clothed in filthy, bloody rags.

The body appeared to be of normal adult height, despite being hunchbacked, as I recall. But each of the two heads—which were male, or so I assumed from their beard stubble—were tiny, the size of a ten year-old's. Their foreheads were sloping, and their faces had mirror image clefts of lip and palate. Their chins had been well-bloodied from a night of feasting, I assumed, whilst a bullet wound seeped red from the center of their ogre-broad chest. The thing gripped my sword with one hand, but did not menace me with it. Both heads, in fact, groaned at me in what I took to be supplication for aid. But what could I do?

At my feet lay the headless corpse of Miss Buxton. A fire had been lit in the fireplace, presumably by Noah much earlier in the evening, and within sat her head roasting on the iron grate. Her eyelids were shut, her countenance one of perfect composure. What happened in the next instant you may attribute, Doctor Dunn, to all the laudanum coursing through my veins, or perhaps the explanation owes to the physics of heat, bone, and flesh, but Miss Buxton opened her eyes and stared at me.

Oh, barbarous memory!

“Elizabeth!” I called as I backpedaled from the room out into the hall. I called her name again and again, tearing my vocal chords to shreds, it felt to me, as I chopped away with my lone arm at a locked door. At last she answered me.

“In here!” Her cry had issued from the next room over. “In here!”

Smoke clogged the hallway by now. I choked as I worked to batter the door open—only to find when I did that Noah had locked her inside the bedroom closet. So with my flagging arm, my now-quivering forearm muscles, I battered that door open too.

I found her seated on the floor in an ancient, soiled nightgown, gazing up at me with sightless eyes. They had to be completely sightless, glazed so thoroughly with cataracts.

“Noah sent me,” I said, gripping her by the hand.

“I can't walk.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, letting go. “I forgot.”

“There is a fire?” She coughed from the smoke rushing in from the hall.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where is Noah?”

Now was not the time to answer her question. I shut the door to the hall to hinder the accumulation of smoke and opened the window to help clear the air and to wave for the attention of the firemen or police.

“God damn it!” I shouted upon seeing no sign of the emergency personnel. They'd congregated on another side of the building. I returned to Elizabeth with a last chance on my lips. “Noah mentioned a secret exit on this floor. If you know of it, we've no time to lose, Ma'am.”

She pointed directly overhead. “On the shelf.” Above her lay a carefully folded pile of rope and wood.

“A rope ladder!” I exclaimed. “Of course!”

I took the heap down and to the window. It was then I noticed for the first time two metal loops screwed into the base of the window, undoubtedly to secure the ladder. The corresponding hooks I soon found at one end of the ladder and hooked them into place before tossing the rest of the ladder out the window.

“We're ready,” I said as flames crackled from somewhere beyond the door to the hall. “And none too soon.”

“Are you sure you can carry me?”

At least she was as slight as Noah. “I'll do my best, Ma'am. But I warn you, I've only got one arm.”

“Dear me,” she said. “I am sorry.”

“I'll step out onto the ladder first, then place you like a sack of potatoes over my left shoulder, the side without an arm. Once I've shifted you into place, it'll be important for you to hook one arm around my neck to secure yourself, but to otherwise remain still, so that you don't fall off, and I don't lose balance.”

“Noah's gone, isn't he?” she said.

“We really should be off.”

“And what of my children?”

“You mean—”

“Yes,” she said. “I think you know who I mean.”

“By now”—I sighed deeply—“they are with Noah.”

“I see,” she said. The weeping function of her eyes still worked, I noticed.

We commenced our escape from the burning manse. I had to keep my torso twisted to the left so that Elizabeth's dead legs would not scrape against the wall as we descended. Progress was slow and arduous and painful for me—mostly due to my cracked ribs—and despite the fall of snow and the wintry air, sweat soon poured off me from exertion and from the heat of the fire.

We hadn't descended more than five or six rungs when I realized that we'd never make it to the bottom. Not by half. For I lacked the energy, the strength, the balance.

Yet I kept on going. It is what one generally does, after all, particularly when responsible for another.

We'd neared the third floor windows when I heard voices on the ground. A woman's voice called up to us.

“Hold on!”

A minute later, as many as a dozen firemen held a circular canvas life net with a red bullseye in the center below us on the ground. I spotted it only when one of the group called up through a speaking trumpet.

“Jump!”

I explained to Elizabeth Langley what awaited her below and then I gently slid her off my back. I watched her fall into the net and bounce once or twice before being cleared of the net and carried off in a blanket by one of the firemen. Another fireman took his place at the net's rim, and when I saw the team staring up at me, ready, I let go of Noah's rope ladder. The drop was not a pleasant one as I harkened back to the dumbwaiter shaft, but when I hit the canvas—Well, you can imagine my relief. Or perhaps you can't, you quite can't, without having lived through it all.

Wrapped in a wool blanket, I sat on the running board of a firetruck and watched as the Langley abode burned. Prior to the Great War, I hadn't known the awesome power of fire, how the flames from one mid-size building could heat you unbearably from two hundred yards away.

I discarded the blanket soon enough, and then my shirt, and the firemen soon wrote off the mansion as a lost cause and focused their efforts instead on protecting the adjacent buildings. A crowd gathered, despite the hour, and an electric ambulance soon arrived and took Elizabeth away. I remained behind, transfixed by the fire, fending off a series of well-meaning solicitations to bring me food or water or to drive me to the hospital—until I could speak no more, quite literally. A group of police officers decided for themselves that I was in shock, suffering from a numbness that required psychiatric intervention.

Hence, my arrival at Bellevue hospital. I suppose you know the key details from this point forward, Doctor Dunn, but allow me to give you my take on them. My admittance through the intake process was a farce. It owed much to my mute state as well as pent up fatigue and, I am fairly certain, the administration of a soporific by one of your nurses. The next day, I was to be discharged, having argued successfully for my release from Bellevue via pen and paper, when my sweat glands—and my agitation, I'll admit—coughed up the secret of my opium withdrawal to the trained eyes of the professional staff, and they summarily put the kibosh on my release.