The House of Velvet and Glass (51 page)

“You want I should wait?” the cabbie called.

Sibyl glanced back at him, a coil of trepidation tightening in her gut. She’d never been here by herself. She’d always come with Dovie there to smooth her passage. Sibyl considered turning around, climbing back into the taxi, and heading straight home again. But the thought of Harley crowded in on her; the incomplete, suggestive image of her brother hovered before her like a taunt.

“No,” she whispered.

“What’s that?” the cabbie hollered. “Miss?”

“No,” she said, raising her voice, firm. “Thank you. There’s no need to wait.”

Without saying anything, shaking his head, the cabbie gunned his car again and bounced away down the cobblestone street.

Alone, Sibyl approached the unmarked door. She knocked, softly, with her knuckles.

There was no response.

She scowled and rapped harder, this time with the end of her fist.

The aperture in the door slid open and an eye appeared. It stared at her.

Cursing to herself, Sibyl remembered that Dovie always had to show a slip of paper, like a letter of introduction written in Chinese, in order to gain entry. She didn’t have one. Determined, she stepped nearer to the door so that the thin red lantern light could pick up her features. She stared at the eye, waiting.

The eye blinked once. Twice. Then the aperture closed.

Sibyl cursed again, under her breath. She knew she shouldn’t have let the cab go so cavalierly. She ruminated, hands in the pockets of her shabby overcoat, wondering what she should do next.

Then, to her surprise, the door cracked open. Trying to act as though she were expecting this, Sibyl drew herself tall and stepped inside.

“Hello, Creesy,” she said to the withered man who opened the door for her.

“Good evening, Miss Allston,” he replied in a clipped colonial accent, which caused Sibyl to jump. He had never spoken when Dovie addressed him. In fact, Sibyl thought the man might have been a deaf mute. “Go right on up. I’ve taken the liberty of telling them you’re here.”

Sibyl shivered, anxious, but managed to keep her voice steady as she said, “Thank you.” Then she made her way up the stairs.

When she arrived on the landing, she found the elegant den sparsely populated, but warm and inviting. The usual fires were going, and the giant brass chandelier cast a soft glow over the room’s various textures of carpet and brocade. A few forms lounged on the couches or in nests of cushions on the floor, some fast asleep, but most lost in waking dreams of their own. A man bent over the Victrola, shuffling through records. There was no sound beyond the crackles of the fire, the ticking of the grandfather clock, and the occasional indolent snuffle of one of the patrons. Sibyl waited, shrugging off her overcoat and scanning the room. The Victrola started up, a woman’s voice warbling about clouds with silver linings and kissing away her lover’s tears. Such a maudlin song. Yet it always seemed to be playing when she was here.

Presently the proprietor shuffled forward on his ludicrous Turkish slippers, and Sibyl smothered a smile at seeing him in his self-consciously “Oriental” costume. But then, she supposed that he was selling the fantasy of the Far East, as much as he was selling anything else. He smiled broadly when he saw her and took her hand. He betrayed no apparent surprise at finding her on the doorstep of his establishment, alone, in the middle of the night. She supposed that the rules of decorum were different in the world of opium dens. “Miss Allston,” he said with a gentlemanly bow. “Such a pleasure to see you again.”

“And you,” she said.

“Shall I show you to your usual spot?” he asked. “It’s very nice over there, by the fire. Very private. You shan’t be disturbed.”

“That would be lovely, thank you,” she said, somewhat stiffly. He led her to the purple velvet chaise. Her hands twitched. She swallowed, nervous and ashamed. Under the shame, the insistent gnaw of hunger asserted its painful presence in her body.

“Here we are,” Mr. Chang said, gesturing to the chaise, which did indeed look inviting, bathed in firelight, with a low lacquered table close at hand.

“Perfect,” she said. She felt in her skirt pocket for the item that she needed and was reassured to find it still there, its slight weight soothing among the folds of her clothes. Then she settled herself on the couch and started to unlace her shoes.

“I’ll send Quincey over right away,” the proprietor said. “We have a lovely selection from Afghanistan this evening. Very delicate and refined on the palate, perfect for a lady. Perhaps you’d care to try it? Or would you prefer your usual Burmese?”

“Ah,” Sibyl demurred. “I think, the Burmese, just at the moment. Thank you.”

“Very good, Miss Allston,” the man said, with another tiny bow. “And,” he added, looking sidelong at her from under his slight brows, “I’m pleased to say that we’ve just acquired a supply of very fine gunpowder tea.” He paused.

“Oh?” she said, unsure what response was expected of her.

“Yes,” he said, watching her. “Your father’s preferred blend, if I’m not mistaken. Shall I bring you some?”

She turned wide black eyes on the smiling, courtly man in silk floral pantaloons, topped with an incongruous kimonolike robe, with his curly-toed slippers and pleasant, patient face. But of course. In fact, she wasn’t even surprised.

“Why, that would be delightful,” she said, smoothing her skirts with both hands. “How thoughtful you are.”

He inclined his head and shuffled away, gesturing to unseen people in the back of the den to bring her what was requested.

Sibyl sat motionless on her velvet seat, staring for long minutes into the heart of the fire. After a time she rummaged within her skirt pocket, withdrew the wooden box containing the scrying glass, and cradled it on her lap. She slid the catch of the box open with her thumb, and brushed the fingertips of one hand over the polished ball, lost in thought. Parallax, her father said. Sibyl rubbed one stockinged foot on top of the other, flexing her toes. If there were different possibilities, then she must see all of them. She must come up with a way to save Harlan from himself. And she would stay there, in the plush den above a shop front in Chinatown, until she’d seen every last one.

Some hours later, the embers of the fire glowed a deep molten red, and Sibyl rested on her back, immobile, her eyes glassy and unseeing. Her breath came fast and light, rasping over her parted lips. The skin of her lips was parched, and her tongue crept out to moisten them. On the table at her elbow sat the implements of her habit: the slender needle, the box with the brown lump lovingly wrapped in tissue paper, the long bamboo pipe, the lamp trimmed low and flickering. A cup of what had held tea, nearly empty, sat cold and unheeded, beads of moisture trickling down the side.

Her hands were slack but kept their loose grip on the crystal ball. Through the haze of her fatigue Sibyl mulled what little it had told her in the previous several hours. So far she hadn’t mastered the parallax question, the seeing of other alternatives if she could view the glass from a different angle. Over hours of repeated efforts she experienced the same vivid, progressive revelation of detail. But the details all added to one consistent picture, a picture that she could not accept.

Sibyl saw first the smoke-shrouded landscape, scored with trenches and coils of barbed wire, explosions in the distance. She crept along the edge of the trench, then lowered behind the rampart to scroll through the faces of the boys cowering within. She saw the rancid slush around their feet, she saw the dead boy with his hideous, open eye half submerged in the slurry. She approached Harlan’s face, under a lopsided circular helmet, his cheeks smudged with mud and spatters of blood, his eyes wide and frightened. Her brother’s uniform was different from the other boys around him, as if he didn’t belong where he was, but she hadn’t been able to discern why. And then, she saw the explosion. Every time, the explosion shook her out of herself, shocked her back to awareness, as if her mind couldn’t withstand the horror of what followed.

She had gone through the whole vision four or five times now, and nothing changed. More details, no alternatives. The dramatis personae didn’t change. The order of events didn’t change. She groaned and blinked. The backs of her eyelids felt like sandpaper scraping over her eyeballs, and she lolled her head back, gazing up at the ceiling.

A face leaned over her, moving into her field of vision like a ghost. It was Quincey, the man designated to help her with the complicated ritual necessary to prepare the opium. His head was hideous, his hair scraped back and thin on his scalp, the skin clinging to every contour of his skull. His mouth opened in a grin of rotted teeth when he saw that she was awake.

“Miss?” he croaked. “You want more?”

Sibyl coughed, raising herself on her elbow and casting a haggard look at the scrying glass in her lap. Then she turned to face Quincey and said, “Yes. Another bowl. Get it ready, please.”

Smiling and nodding with the hunger of a man in agreement, he knelt over the lacquer table, fixing and preparing and kneading and rolling. While she waited, Sibyl settled along the velvet couch, feet drawn up under her spread-out skirts, resting her cheek in her hand. She brought the crystal ball even with her nose and gave it a hard glare. It glowed with a faint light from within, not sparkling as it sometimes did, but emanating a deeper light, as if polished from heavy use. She’d try again. There was still time. She’d make it work. She must.

Quincey passed her the pipe without a word, and she pressed its end to her lips, leaning forward and holding the bowl angled to the flame. He brought the needle-end pearl of opium to the opening in the pipe bowl, and Sibyl breathed deep, watching the pearl burst into a tiny perfect flame, relishing the delicious numbing through her mouth. She leaned back, feeling the pipe lifted out of her hands, and exhaled. But the effect was deadened. Gone was the initial spreading warmth of pleasure that she yearned for. Instead she felt steady, and without pain, but the implication of pain to come lingered.

She cupped the scrying glass in her hands and brought it to her face, staring hard into its milky depths. She didn’t have to wait more than a second or two before the smoke started to fill it, black and greasy-looking. A minute or two of its ominous billowing, and then the tendrils parted, revealing the blasted earth with its deep grooves. All as she knew it would be.

Deep in the muscles of her back, Sibyl felt, under the comforting artificial softness of the drug, the twinge of spasm. She hadn’t stirred in hours, and her corseting dug red stripes into her flanks. Still holding the ball, Sibyl shifted, rolling from her back onto her side. The light moved over the surface of the orb, sliding along it like a silken scarf, and as it did so the image of the grooved landscape shimmered. The subtle shift in light within the crystal ball looked like the dropping of a shard of colored glass inside a kaleidoscope, a tiny movement that causes the entire image to shift.

Sibyl peered closer, angling the ball nearer the light from the fire so that she could get a better view. She still saw Harlan’s face, and it still looked wide-eyed and frightened, the same expression as it had before, but now his face wasn’t smudged with mud. It was clean, and his hair was combed. He looked older, but not by much—he had freshly minted lines around his mouth and eyes, and the texture of his skin was coarser, the face of a man in his mid-twenties. The same age that Sibyl was now. Sibyl strained her eyes to see more.

Her perspective drew back, and her brother was sitting at a large desk, surrounded by crumpled papers. The hour was late, his face lit from below by a green desk lamp, which cast his features in ghoulish relief. His eyes were rimmed with red and had deep gray-purple circles around them, and his skin was waxen. His nose was red with burst capillaries, and his features in general looked blurry, smeared by hard living and regret. At his elbow sat a bottle of liquor, nearly empty, and a tumbler stained with fingerprints. As she watched he buried his face in his palms, shoulders trembling.

For a long while Sibyl watched while her brother shuffled through the papers on his desk and grew more visibly stricken. The desk might have been in an office at their father’s shipping company, but Sibyl couldn’t be sure. Her brother looked wasted, as though his very soul had been eaten away. He leaned down, opening a drawer in his desk and rooting inside. Whatever he found there he drew into his lap. He turned to the bottle, tipping the dregs of its contents into the tumbler and tossing it down his throat with a trembling hand.

“Oh, Harley,” Sibyl whispered, unaware that she was speaking.

The apparition of her brother inside the glass, of course, could not hear her. Instead he slowly lifted the object from his lap and laid it with care on the desk.

It was a pistol.

Sibyl’s eyes widened in horror, and she whispered, “Oh, my God, Harley, no,” but it didn’t matter, he couldn’t hear her, he was just a vision of one possible future that lay in store if he didn’t go away to Europe. Sibyl understood that if he didn’t leave as he planned, her brother could continue to sink into a life of dissipation and anger. He would eventually be given some menial job in their father’s company, but he would never distinguish himself. He would never become the kind of man that he yearned to be.

Sibyl shook her head, saying, “No, that can’t be possible, there must be some other way.”

Holding the glass between finger and thumb, she swiveled it by ninety degrees, the firelight sliding over its surface, and the light inside the scrying glass turned over, again like a kaleidoscope. Inside, the image shifted, the setting around Harley rearranging itself. This time her brother was facing down a pistol still, but in the hands of a ragged-looking man on a dark street corner. Shaking her head, she turned the glass another ninety degrees, the image folded over on itself yet again, and there was her brother, still the same, the pistol back in his own hand, moving it slowly up to press against his temple as he sat in the armchair in his bedroom at the Beacon Street house.