Chapter 28 #2
Bethany paced the room as I kicked aside my patched clothes and took down my cornflower-blue uniform.
“So, I was thinking about him, and the last time I saw him, and I was walking through the foyer like I had a thousand times before. But this time, something clicked inside me. And I realized what I’d seen before I’d stumbled upon No-Face. ”
I stepped into my skirts and pulled them up to tie them around my waist over my petticoats. “Okay, I’ll bite. What did you see?”
“That big painting of Agnes Voss.”
I stood stock-still. “The painting…?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “I know this sounds bizarre, but somehow, I think I… walked through the painting.”
God only knew how many walls she walked through in one hour. So her walking through the painting wasn’t really that extraordinary.
Unless there was access to the missing ballroom on the other side of it.
“This is good information, Beth,” I told her.
“It is?” Her face lit up with pleasure. “I knew I’d finally do something right.”
“You do plenty right. We need to take a look at that painting and see if we can find a way to access the ballroom around it. Maybe there’s a hidden door nearby? Something.”
“Should we go inspect it now?”
I thought for a moment, pulling on the bodice of my uniform. “I think there’s something I need to do first.”
After finishing dressing, I immediately hustled down the servants’ stairs and marched into the butler’s pantry.
Hoffmann’s cabinet was locked, but a ring of keys hung on a nearby peg.
I quickly looked through them until I found a few small enough to fit into the lock, and I tested them one by one until the lock clicked.
I swung open the cabinet door and blinked at a couple dozen bottles of coca wine. “Holy shite,” I murmured, searching the pantry for a container big enough to hold them all. I snatched a laundry basket from the floor, dumped the laundry out, and filled the basket as fast as I could.
Then I hefted it—barely— and carried it out the side door. Instead of going around back, I headed toward the front of the house, checking over my shoulder to ensure I wasn’t followed. Then I stashed the basket behind a bush.
“Now we’ll see if you stay up all night,” I whispered.
Mid-afternoon, I was summoned to the master’s chambers to help him with his cough.
It wasn’t a full-blown coughing attack like he’d had before, but it would have been if he’d let it persist. The housekeeper was right to be concerned.
Mrs. Culpepper left us alone for a few minutes while she took a bedpan to the dumbwaiter.
The master was coughing into his fist, mentally scattered, and eager for me to leave. He looked exhausted.
Like someone who’d been drinking cocaine wine to stay awake for days.
“I asked for my valet, not you,” he complained when I quickly took his pulse. “Where’s Hoffmann? I’ve been pulling the bellpull. What’s the point of these fancy contraptions if they don’t do what you want them to do? Do I have to go fetch him myself?”
“He can’t help your cough. I can. Besides, he’s getting ready for the storm, sir.”
“Tell him to get up here right now. I need… something.”
“Anything I can get you?”
He lifted his face to the ceiling and closed his eyes. “Only one more month and this will all be over.”
“Sir…?”
“Nothing. Just get Hoffmann. I don’t care if there’s a damn blizzard raging.”
“I’ll fetch him now,” I told him, filling my entire spoon with a double dose of cough syrup. “This will soothe you. Open wide…”
He grunted, but swallowed what I gave him without even looking at it.
And as soon as he had done so, guilt hit me.
Hard. Sister Helen would not like what I was doing whatsoever.
I could hear her now, scolding me for breaking my pledge to never administer a drug that harms. But I could also hear my mammy saying, Sometimes, Molly-o, you just have to do what you must to survive.
I headed downstairs to deliver the master’s message to Hoffmann and found him in a tizzy, asking Mrs. Culpepper if she’d moved things in the butler’s pantry.
Uh-oh. Definitely not going to fetch him now.
I didn’t give him the master’s message, nor did I stick around to hear the end of their conversation.
I just raced back up the servants’ stairs and found Bethany lying on the bed.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Finally. Will I need to hide?”
“Maybe,” I said, peering through my window.
The master was in bed, but I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping.
But with that dose of cough medicine, he should be soon—as long as Hoffmann didn’t have any extra cocaine wine hidden somewhere.
Part of me wanted to wait for Nin to show up, so that I could tell him what Bethany had remembered.
But I figured he’d find us wherever we were when he was able to leave the crypt, and I didn’t want to waste any more time.
“Let’s go,” I told Bethany.
No sense risking running into anyone in the servants’ wing, so we took the long way to the first floor, down the Menagerie Hall, past the master’s golden doors, and down the curving steps.
Since Agnes’s painting was the thing that Bethany had remembered, I made a beeline for the wall beneath the balcony.
There it was, hanging in its elaborate gilded frame: the life-size portrait of the same blond ghost Nin and I had found in the underground kitchen. A dozen candles burned in small votive glasses that sat on a narrow table below the frame.
How the mighty have fallen, I thought as my eyes scanned the big painting, thinking how Agnes must’ve had the world in her hands before this entire mess landed on her doorstep.
“She told me there was a western wing of the house, which should be there,” I told Bethany, pointing toward the left wall of the foyer.
But the only thing over there was a cold drawing room that never got used, and I’d been through a dozen times, looking for access to the missing area of the first floor.
There must be a door to access it somewhere nearby.
My gaze skimmed the painting itself, the area around it, the table below that held the votives.
When I stepped back to have a better look from a distance, my eyes were drawn to the floor in front of the painting.
Scratch marks curved across the floor. As if something was frequently moved over the floorboards.
Something like a door opening.
Dear God.
The painting itself was a secret door.
It was the right shape and size, but I couldn’t see a way to open it.
Heart racing, I felt my way around the frame, searching for anything unusual that might open the portrait.
Then I studied the altar table with the candles.
The back edge of the table, where it met the wall, had an odd cutout space. I stuck my hand into it—
And a latch clicked.
“Holy shite,” I mumbled.
“I told you!” Bethany said, clapping excitedly.
“Good job,” I told her.
The table, I quickly discovered, was bolted to the wall below the portrait, and when I pulled on it, the entire painting swung open with the altar attached.
Glass jostled and clinked. I nearly knocked over half the candles.
Panicked, we both stood stock-still and waited, listening.
When I heard nothing, I continued pulling open the portrait and peered into the space behind it.
A short, dark hallway stretched in front of me.
My pulse pounded in my ears. The master wasn’t watching… surely? I had no idea about the limits of his powers. But I waited several long, excruciating moments for the sounds of his golden doors opening upstairs.
But… nothing.
Best to press on. “You coming?” I asked Bethany, grabbing one of the votives off the altar, and I ducked through the open portrait along with her. A handle on the back allowed me to pull it closed behind us.
Now what? We were inside the hall with nothing but a small votive candle to light the way. It smelled old back here, slightly dank with a hint of rot in the wood. “Do you remember any of this?”
“I think it’s the hallway I came down after seeing… you know who,” she whispered.
Right. Mr. No-Face.
“I’ll definitely keep my eyes out,” I told her.
When we came to the end of the short hall, we found ourselves at a T-junction, where another hall crossed this one. Down that hall to the right was a brick wall. Hmm, wonder if this is a dead end? I took a few steps in that direction to get a closer look at the wall.
“That’s newer construction than the plaster walls,” Bethany said.
The master must have bricked this hall up. Probably to cut off access to whatever was back here.
I turned around, and we headed back to the T-junction, and then beyond it.
The hall was dark and empty. There were no paintings or furniture, but it also wasn’t bricked off like it was in the other direction.
I tried to get my bearings and figured this hall ran parallel to Voss’s balcony above.
Halfway down, black mold covered a damp spot on the wall—the source of the rotting smell—but otherwise, nothing remarkable.
Until my little votive candle flickered, and I spotted a door at the end of the hall.
“That’s it!” Bethany said. “I came through there. Oh, Molly, I don’t want to go inside.”
I didn’t either, especially not by myself. “The No-Face Man can’t hurt you,” I told her.
“He’s very scary,” she whispered.
“Sometimes nurses have to do scary things,” I reminded her. “Just stay with me, and I’ll protect you.”
She didn’t agree, but she didn’t refuse, either. So I blew out a long breath, and then turned the knob and slowly pushed the door inward.
Almost immediately, I noticed two things.
There had been a terrible fire.
And the room I was now standing in was enormous.
“Woof,” I said, covering my nose and mouth until I could become accustomed to the acrid stink of burnt wood. “Is this a ballroom? What do you think happened here?”
“Something awful,” Bethany whispered.
She wasn’t wrong. Was this where Nin had first been summoned? I remembered him talking about a trap from which he’d broken free. I turned my gaze upward. The ceilings were high in here, like they were in the rest of the manor, but there wasn’t enough light for me to see anything but dark above.
But I saw no symbols, no circle. And I didn’t feel any slithering sensations.
“I think it’s safe,” I told Bethany.
“I’m not so sure…,” she said, glancing around with wide eyes.
I took a few steps into the big room and bumped into a table.
Light from the votive revealed a hurricane lamp on the table next to a brass container filled with long matches.
The lamp had a handle, much like my nursing lantern, but its base held oil instead of a candle.
After removing the hurricane glass, I held my votive’s flame to the oil wick and felt joy when it caught fire.
I replaced the glass, and its pleasant yellow glow filled the area around us, allowing me to see a bit more of the room.
Most of the space immediately surrounding me was empty. I couldn’t see much at the far end of the room, just dark shapes. What little furnishings I could see around me included several iron candelabrums that stood as tall as me.
Windows lined the wall to my right, covered by heavy drapes.
I crossed the room and pulled one open. Soft gray light flooded the room from outside, which gave a picture-perfect view of the back patio and the gardens.
Dark storm clouds were gathering across the Hudson.
They looked nasty. Maybe this blizzard was really coming.
“Look,” Bethany said. “Doors. All boarded up.”
I glanced where she pointed along the wall of windows and spotted at least two sets of double doors across which several planks of lumber had been nailed. “Looks like someone didn’t want a single soul coming back here.”
At least the open curtain provided some additional light.
I turned from the stormy window to inspect the rest of our location.
The ballroom was long and rectangular with a marble floor much like the one in the foyer.
Round tables and stacks of chairs dotted the outskirts of the room, along with a dozen or more potted palms that were all dead and dried up.
An enormous fireplace sat in the center of the wall opposite the windows.
Its firebox was big enough for a human to stand inside.
All of it was blackened, including the surrounding wall.
Scorch marks stretched from the hearth to the center of the room, where several meters of marble flooring had been crushed to the point where the floor itself had collapsed and sunk.
It looked as if a flaming ball had fallen from the heavens and smashed through the floor.
Or maybe the flaming ball had come from the fireplace.
Hold on. It wasn’t a ball that had done this damage.
It was a god.
Because just there, drawn onto the cracked marble floor, were the remnants of a chalked circle.
This was where Nin had been summoned into this world. When he’d said he didn’t have his full strength, I hadn’t realized that he meant this kind of strength.
Movement near the fireplace snagged my attention. I stiffened, clutching the hurricane lamp in one hand. “Hello? Is someone there?”
A tall figure emerged from shadow.
I nearly screamed.
The figure was tall and blond, and very familiar.
“Oh my God,” Bethany mumbled. “It’s him—it’s our master!”