Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (9 page)

“He's paranoid, Cormac. Probably got other weapons stashed around the house. No telling what kind. Knives, guns, swords, dynamite, armored tanks. Be prepared for anything.”

“ 'Paranoid?' ” Noah muttered as he stepped, in passing, between myself and Miss Buxton. “What a strange word.”

I told him: “It's a relatively new one. It means . . . overly cautious.”

“Hmmph,” he said. “Paranoid for good reason.” One of his hands covered the open flap in back of his union suit, an effort at modesty he would soon abandon as too tiresome, I suppose.

Miss Buxton addressed Howard. “May we have our coats now, Sir? It's rather chilly.”

“Not now, Miss. Your continued compliance will earn them back to you in time. Willie will carry them with us as a show of good faith.”

“Surely we are all to some extent gentlemen here,” I said, “and you won't object to returning Miss Buxton her coat at this time?” She was already shivering, though I wasn't actually sure if the cause were fright or cold.

“Very well,” Howard said. “Once I've searched her.”

“You wouldn't!” I exclaimed—in near simultaneity with Patrolman Cox.

“Wouldn't I?” Howard said. “Men have been killed by less than a hair pin, you know.”

He stepped up behind Miss Buxton and proceeded to knead his fingers through her tresses in search of such a pin. It was a patterned, deliberate search that turned deliberately sensual when Howard read my glower. His hands began to play, to stroke and pet her scalp, to swirl fingers at her temples. The hands slid down her neck to caress her shoulders, and from there dipped out of sight only to reappear quickly beneath her arm pits and reach for her breasts.

Yes, the fiend imprisoned Miss Buxton's mammary glands. Jiggled and shook that Heaven-soft flesh reserved by women of propriety for husbands and babes and no others.

“You cad!” I said, and so too Patrolman Cox. I stepped toward the scoundrel, only to be halted by the point of Willie's buck knife at my buttons.

Howard smirked at me from his position of safety, still clinging indecently to Miss Buxton. “No telling what a lady may sequester in her bosom.”

Miss Buxton did not, as one would expect, cry. Nor did she even cringe, but stood erect throughout the ordeal with an expression of fortitude.

This made no little impression on me. I decided she was, despite all manner of wayward notions, a woman of character, and resolved to deliver her free of our collective nightmare, come what may to my own rotting, half-wanted husk.

The First Casualty

Approximately 7:00 PM

Noah led the way up the basement staircase, followed in single file by Cormac, Miss Buxton, myself, Willie, Patrolman Cox, and lastly Howard and his ever-pointing revolver. We proceeded along a new trail, a shortcut, according to our little junk sherpa, leading back to the antechamber. The acrid basement smells to which we'd all adjusted—It's rather miraculous what depravities a human being may adjust to, eh, Doctor!—were replaced by fresh nasal assaults.

A dreadful blast met us in a hallway outside the kitchen's double-door entrance. One of the doors was tilting off its top hinge and three quarters open. From the darkness within, death washed over us, mammalian, aquatic, botanical.

We hurried along our path. I am not a spiritualist, yet I sensed vague traces of the miscellany's former owners. Our path led through an interior parlor, where crackled a small fire in a great hearth. Wordlessly, we formed a semi-circle in front of the flames. To either side of the fireplace and glowing in the pale light stood floor-to-ceiling fluted Corinthian columns gilded in 22-carat gold, if I've any eye for that sort of thing, and I do.

An axe leaned against the wall, and the landscape of clutter at our backs I took to be mainly fuel for the fire: a broken wagon wheel, broken crates and barrels, broken bedroom furniture, also a stack of three rough pine coffins of the kind loaded daily on the Fordham Street dock, bound for Potters Field on Hart Island.

“A peek inside, eh?” Cormac said, lifting the lid to the coffin stacked on top.

“If he's burning corpses for heat,” Willie said, “I. Don't. Wanna. Know.”

Noah offered no defense of himself, his mind elsewhere, his eyes focused on a tattered old wingback chair near the fire with his own body shape, I think it was, permanently embedded in it. Cormac took his peek, dropped the coffin lid with a bang, and aimed startled eyes at Willie.

“Have it your way, brudda.”

I'd seen milder over-acting at movie
matinées
, yet I still found myself fearing what Cormac had seen. By now, I think it's fair to say, most of us feared to learn anymore about the Langley family. No one else opened that lid, nor even asked Noah how he'd obtained the coffins.

Howard shooed us away from the fire to resume our trek. As I passed by the axe I contemplated using it to split him down the middle length-wise, to finish the job his center-parted hair had started. But then I remembered that I only have one arm now. I forget sometimes.

We reached the antechamber and could hear noises ahead, an intermittent clatter. Although echoes were scarce inside the mansion—given dense matter's habit for strangling sound—the antechamber was two stories high with empty walls above us and a domed ceiling, so the noise reverberated here.

It proved to be Brady's doing. We found him re-barricading the entry door, per Howard's instructions, with piles of Langley
objets d'junque
. The door and its sidelights, i.e., the tall narrow windows of leaded glass flanking it, were no longer visible, only the transom overhead.

“What about the newsie?” Howard asked.

“I got him, I got him,” Brady said, huffing and puffing from exertion. “No trouble at all.” He tossed a Saratoga trunk atop the barricade.

“So where is he?”

“You're about to step on him. Say hello, little Sambo.”

“Yes, Suh. Here I is.” Cormac's flashlight located the Negro face down on the floor at Howard's feet, hands bound behind his back with strips of frilly white lace. He was twelve or thirteen years old. “Please lemme go. I din do nuthin' and I'se skeered. I'se skeered in dis place.”

“Sit up, boy,” Cormac said, at the same time yanking the child into the desired position by his nappy hair. “Five hostages, Howie? We need five?”

“I suppose we do have ourselves a surplus.”

“Or too many.”

“Five
could
get a bit unwieldy.”

“Let's cull the herd.” He brandished his buck knife.

“By one,” Howard said. “We sacrifice one. For instructive purposes.”

I witnessed a slight nod from Howard an instant before Cormac slit the boy's throat.

The Laughing Buddha

The blade bit into flesh and journeyed ear to ear before I had the presence of mind to muster an objection. And almost instantly there was no helping the poor newsie, even if I could have reached him and ministered to him unperturbed, for that beastly mick had known enough about killing to tilt the child's head down during the incision—rather than up, as is commonly depicted in dime novels and movie serials—so that the steel's edge would be sure to sever both carotid arteries as well as the jugular vein. The blade cut deeply enough to sever the windpipe too, for the boy never did scream, nor cry out, nor voice any sounds at all besides the hiss and gurgle of air escaping his throat. We all watched—only some of us in horror, which was horrible in itself—as the boy writhed on the floor, kicking air, kicking Langley paraphernalia, choking to death on his own blood.

“Mercy!” Ms. Buxton said, one hand on her own throat in sympathy.

“Don't look,” I said. She fell against me at once, pressed her head to my chest.

Noah in his startlement backed into the barricade in front of the entry door, and the jaundiced light from the gas lantern rocking in his hand swayed and shimmied through the darkness, distorting our features and the myriad objects about us so that I felt to be in the grip of a violent hallucination. It was dim enough for an opium den, and for a second or two I heard the incomprehensible murmurs of Chinamen, saw red flickers from the bowls of pipes, a honeycomb of cantilevered roosts.

“Now you've done it,” Patrolman Cox said.

“Have I?” Cormac said. “Maybe I should cut your throat too, to be sure.”

The dying one's twitches stilled. Defecation and fresh coppery blood added notes of complexity to the home's mephitic aroma.

“I take it we understand each other now,” Howard said to his hostages. “We find the Lydian Croesids, you live this night through. We don't, and you end up food for those crazy cats. I take it we have your unqualified, enthusiastic cooperation?”

His gaze located each of us, one by one, insisting upon a word of agreement or a nod before moving on. It was cowing, I must say, to comply. The police officer hung his head afterwards as if he'd never look another man in the eye again.

For the record, I did not believe Howard. First blood had now been drawn, and even a Negro's murder meant the noose to these robbers if caught. I knew now—or felt I knew—that the men would never free any of us alive, twenty million dollars worth of rare gold coins or not. Whether aware of it or not, we players—robbers and hostages both—were
all in
now, as they say in the game of Poker, every last chip in the middle of the table.

Howard turned to Noah. “Where's the statue?”

“Um . . .” He produced his antique lady's lorgnette. “My note pad, please.” Howard handed it over, and Noah consulted his codes. “Near the base of the staircase. This way.” He and his lantern started down another narrow path until Howard ordered him to a halt so as to retrieve the note pad. Noah started off again, and we all fell in behind in the prescribed order, leaving the dead newsie where he lay.

We came to a broad staircase of mahogany with mahogany wainscoting along its walls and, of course, more junk—That ubiquitous debris!—heaped upon its steps. It was a winding staircase—serving every floor above, I would learn—and Noah had made use of the curve of its rise to create a tower of junk more than twenty feet high at a spot against the wall a short distance from its base. Wedged into this tower at about eye level and at a forty-five degree angle we found the object of our search: that folkloric deity popularly known as the Laughing Buddha.

The figure was centuries old. (Had I mentioned that already?) I knew it to be a representation of perfect enlightenment and contentment, which none who viewed it possessed, I should think. It depicted a plain, bald man with a broad—nay, ecstatic—smile, though he carried all his worldly possessions in a small cloth sack. His open robe exposed prayer beads around the neck and a William Howard Taft-like belly. The figure's copper surface had oxidized gray-green over time. Noah plucked it from the pile and, with the aid of his bejeweled lorgnette, examined it. The rest of us gathered round in a circle, taking advantage of a rare clear spot of real estate.

“Ah,” he said, studying the bottom of the base of the figure, “here's the next clue.”

“What does it say?” Howard asked.

“Next, we'll need to find a gold pocket watch, embedded with seven miniature rubies. It has a porcelain dial and was made by the Boston Watch Company. The clue is the engraving.”

“C'mon, old man,” Willie said. “Can't you remember the engraving?”

Noah closed his eyes to help make an attempt, but when he opened them, shook his head. “I'm afraid not. All I seem to remember is the watch belonged to my grandfather.” He consulted the Buddha again. “The watch is hidden, appropriately enough, inside one of my grandfather clocks in the great hall. There's no indication as to which clock—there are, uh, at least forty—but I might just remember the one.”

“Let me see that statue,” Howard said, passing the revolver to Willie.

“As you wish,” Noah said, “but the clue too is written in code.” Upon handing over the Laughing Buddha, he sidestepped in my direction and whispered into my ear. “Run, Trenowyth. Now.” An instant later, that small, grizzled wraith broke for the staircase with a spryness I would never have credited him.

“Son of a bitch!” Cormac said. “Get back here, you wee bastard!”

A moment before Noah dropped his lantern, its light rays glinted upon a thin silver wire that ran horizontally three or four inches above the floor directly in front of the staircase. Noah took an awkwardly large step in order to land a foot upon this wire, which was when I grabbed Ms. Buxton and threw her and myself beneath the bowl of an enormous marble water fountain long gone dry.

Noah had tripped a deadfall trap disguised as that junk pile towering overhead. An avalanche of impedimenta—enough to flatten us all—fell down with a tremendous roar, turning the atmosphere to dust.

The Screaming Policeman

As I sit here in my cell with the midday winter sun slanting across my desk through the window and a Foxhound puppy yapping at falling snowflakes in the courtyard outside, I hear once more—as clearly as if I were living through it again—the falling debris of the deadfall trap, which wronged my ears so, like a concussion shell. I taste the foul, floating dust, feel its sting in my eyes, the burn in my nose and throat, and I can't help but cough—once, twice—and clear my windpipe. It'd been my own coughing fit, combined with Miss Buxton's beneath me, which had first convinced myself that I was still alive.