Chapter 18
We’ve come here expecting to find an ally of Hart’s, but this man seems ridiculously happy to see me.
As for myself, I’ve never seen him in my life that I can remember, which means he isn’t glad to set eyes on me per se, but the lunatic version of myself who had quit the bookstore and gotten rid of all of my own reading material.
Perhaps we’ll learn more if he thinks I still remember him? “Of course,” I say, and hope he doesn’t follow up with any awkward questions I can’t answer.
Thank God, Adrian steps in by extending his hand to the pharmacist, a pleasant smile on his brown face. “Luke Miller,” he says, and I pray I can remember his alias. “You must be Dr. Davis.”
Davis’s smile fades, and he glances questioningly at me. I don’t know what he’s asking exactly, other than it must have something to do with welcoming Adrian, so I just give a small nod in return.
His smile returns, and he shakes Adrian’s hand vigorously. “Always nice to meet another horologist.”
Oh lord, did my alter ego quit the book trade for some new, even more esoteric, hobby? Do I have a secret second apartment somewhere, filled to the brim with clocks and watches?
“Likewise,” Adrian says, as if this is the most natural conversation in the world.
“But where are my manners? Come, come.” He scurries deeper into the shop, catching the attention of the overwhelmed man at the cash register. “Harris! I have business to attend to in the back. We are not to be disturbed for anything short of the building catching fire, do you understand?”
Harris nods, though he doesn’t look happy about being abandoned to deal with the customers by himself.
Davis leads us through a door at the back of the store, which opens on to what appears to be the pharmacy’s storeroom.
We navigate through the boxes, barrels, and crates to yet another door.
He takes out a set of keys, unlocks it, and turns on an electric light to reveal a set of sturdy stairs leading down.
At the bottom is another well-lit storeroom, though this one is uniformly filled with wooden crates of the same size and shape, all labeled CHRONO-FLAV SYRUP. I’ve never heard of the brand; maybe Davis makes his own syrup for soda fountains.
Seeing Adrian eyeing the boxes, Davis pauses and pats one, his chest puffing proudly. “As you see, Chrysalis production is coming along very nicely.”
Chrysalis? What does he mean by that? Is it some sort of trade name for Chrono-Flav Syrup, or something far more sinister?
I keep my face neutral, while Adrian takes his cues from Davis and nods approvingly. “So I see.”
Pleased, Davis leads us through yet another door, this one unlocked.
It opens onto a space perhaps two-thirds the size of the pharmacy upstairs, what must be a final door at its opposite end.
The room appears to be a laboratory of some sort, filled with tables, beakers, distilling apparatus, scales, and other equipment whose use I can’t guess.
Unlike an ordinary laboratory, some of the tables have elaborate runes and symbols painted carefully on them. The smell of incense lingers in the air, and rather than white coats, long robes hang from the hooks on the wall.
“Now this, Mr. Miller, is where the magic happens,” Davis says with a wink. “Literally!” He laughs at his own joke.
Is he some sort of madman? Maybe he and Hart have some sort of shared delusion, or…
I remember the rain turning to ice, the car holding our pursuers skidding helplessly off the road, the feeling of somehow being responsible for the unseasonable weather.
Emerson standing in the fog, eyes full of hateful green fire.
“Very impressive,” Adrian says.
“Oh, and look!” Davis hurries over to a machine with a long nozzle, an open box of Chrono-Flav Syrup beside it. Plucking out one of the empty containers that’s presumably waiting to be filled by the machine, he turns it over so we can see the bottom.
Stamped into the ceramic is the same symbol from the tapestry in Hart’s hidden room: an hourglass with a death’s-head hawkmoth superimposed on it.
“Just in case,” Davis tells Adrian with another wink, though just in case of what I can’t imagine.
“Very clever,” Adrian says, and Davis beams at him. No wonder the insurance company hired him as an investigator; he seems to know just how to respond, even though he’s as much in the dark as I am.
Davis carefully replaces the syrup container. “But I shouldn’t keep you waiting. You must be wanting something warm to chase out the chill of this wretched weather. Will the others be joining us?”
Others? Hart, perhaps, or Myers back from whatever the hell he’d been doing in Massachusetts.
“No.” Best to keep my answers as short as possible lest I give myself away.
“You wanted to talk to me alone?” he asks hopefully.
“Yes.”
Seeming barely able to contain his excitement, Davis unlocks what must be the last door, unless the basement runs beneath the street above. The room beyond isn’t large, but I have to hold back a gasp when I see it.
All four walls are plastered and painted in brilliant white, while the arched ceiling is a deep blue spangled with golden stars.
Two long tables run along either side, with comfortable-looking wooden chairs behind them.
Down the center of the aisle between the tables, a line of seven symbols have been inlaid in the concrete floor.
It takes me a moment, but I realize each is a different fragment of the hourglass-and-moth symbol, all of them combining in the final mosaic.
Beyond that, against the far wall, is a chair I can only describe as a small throne.
Davis closes the door behind us, then turns to me and bows deeply. “Welcome back, my lord,” he says, gesturing obsequiously to the throne. “As always, your rightful seat awaits.”