26. Possession
Chapter 26
Possession
The feeling of him never left me.
Not through the night, when I dreamed so vividly of lying in Victor’s arms again that it was not until I awakened—a clear, bright dawn breaking through my curtains to follow the midnight storm—that I realized it was but a dream, and that I was alone in my small, disheveled bed.
Not as I rose and began my morning routine, and found that I felt no pain, and that even with its darkened hearth my little room was not so cold as it had been.
The memory of him still surrounded me—all the things he had left behind from the night before stood in silent testament to his former presence—and I noticed that in the center of all his flasks and jars and vials on my dressing table, next to the bronze bowl of poultice, was the small, familiar box I had left there the morning before, carved with the arcane sign of a crescent moon, sun-rays, and an archer’s ready bow.
I smiled, opened it, and found a full complement of my hairpins inside again.
Scarcely could I remember how I had made my way with Victor from his coach to my room in the rain, afflicted as I was by the sickening elf-shot of Gremio’s sorcery, much less the particulars of how my hair had come unbound—and whether I had set the pins in his carven box myself, or whether it was Victor who had collected them for me once more. Idly I found myself imagining his hand closing the black wooden lid, but then again my hand doing the same, as if to test which image were true; and soon in my wandering memory his scarred olive skin became my own, and I could no longer tell with certainty which features or sensations were his or mine—where he ended, and where I began.
With the box in my hands, I sat down again on the edge of my bed. It was not that I felt weak, nor faint—indeed, for my strange confusion and for all that had come to pass, I thought perhaps that I should—but nearly that I felt too vital, too tremulously wild inside my own skin, as if I were at once some great, quivering charger held only by the thin thread of a rein, and at the same time his rider atop the saddle, wondering when to dare enough slack to free the restless force he knows he cannot control.
As if I were at once Victor and myself.
I had dreamt this feeling, that night in my sleep that I envisioned myself in his form, atop a castle by the sea in a warm country that I did not know. And I had imagined it in waking life, forced some part of it upon the world, recreated the sensation of my dream and extinguished Forsythe’s candle with my own effortless, inexorable will.
My own sprezzatura , halfway stolen but no less mine for my audacity, bright as fire from Olympus.
And now he had lent to me that fire for my own. I could still taste the herbal tang of fennel on my tongue from the elixir he mixed for me, and despite the concoction’s unsettling texture and bitter bite, despite nearly being overwhelmed by its initial effect, I found that I did not abhor his instruction to drink from the second flask once midnight returned. I remembered him taking the short cuttings of our hair in his hands, blending his with mine, and a strange thirst rose in me for the contents of that flask: to consume again that thick, green mixture that united us within me, that bound some part of his shadow to mine.
The lingering influence of his art remained a dark heat within me, an unquiet fire, steadied only by the ominous promise of his unassailable strength.
It felt like the blaze of his Hellmouth hearth, my hand trapped and secure in his grip of warm iron.
I looked to my hands again—still small, soft woman’s hands, hardly recognizable for having ever been the hands of an orphan who held them out for a rind of bread—nothing at all like his. Nothing at all. An absurd, impossible notion, to ever have confused them thus.
Absurd, but not untrue.
Rising, I left the box on my bed and stepped to my dressing table, looking into the mirror with a long, considering glance. Nowhere did I find the demonic features I once half-expected to reveal themselves and replace the human face I had known, nor did I find any trace of Victor: I had gained no height nor breadth of shoulder; I wore no mask.
And though I felt him still, I was alone. No dark form loomed behind me in the reflection of my little room. He haunted my chamber neither as flesh nor as phantom.
But he haunted my eyes.
I looked closer, leaning against the front of my dressing table, and I saw myself tense, fighting the sudden shudder that threatened my spine. The change was subtle, but once I saw it I could scarcely look away: my eyes were darker—wilder—more intense.
More like his.
I looked closer—closer still—deep into my own eyes, and then I felt a fog of fascination begin to shroud my mind and I tore my gaze away, looking down at my hands as they gripped the edge of my dressing table and watching the heaving of my chest, listening to my racing heartbeat thunder in my head.
Had I nearly mesmerized myself? And had I not wrenched myself away, would the spell under which I fell be Victor’s or my own?
Or ours together?
A dim, distant pain pricked at my left lower leg, somewhere beneath the cloth wraps. It was a mere twinge, no more, but it brought the memory of his last admonitions back to me—he commanded me not to exert myself in sorcery, and to use in it no more of my stamina than I would for a walk—and I guessed first that I understood his purpose, and then as quickly doubted.
Was it, as first I assumed, that to strain myself in my sorcery would bring back the pain and the poison of Gremio’s spell?
Or because, in the excitation of our bound shadows within me—Victor’s and my own—I might unleash in myself some new art beyond my mastery to control?
Yet either way, dawn had come, and the time had come to renew the bindings of my wounds. With a match I set a fire in the hearth, allowing some water to heat in his small cauldron and then carrying it back with me to my dressing table. I peeled the strips of cloth carefully from my legs, washed the earthy crust of the previous night’s dressing gently from my skin with warm water and a clean washcloth—I found that he had left for me a small stack of them, along with a supply of cloth wrappings—and then drew the black cover back from his old bronze bowl. I dipped a curious finger into the poultice inside and rubbed it across my thumb. It felt something like an oily clay, rich and slippery to the touch and persistent in its coating of the skin; the scent of unfamiliar herbs was bitter and strange, though not entirely unpleasant. No sooner had I touched it than it began to warm into my flesh: a thick, penetrating heat, soaking through my tingling nerves.
It was now my part to do as he had done—to spread the poultice on my legs, attend especially to each place that Gremio’s claws pierced me, and then wrap my legs again—and so, I thought, the natural time had come to think of him, as he had asked me to do.
I felt a small, self-chiding smile twist at my lips: there were too few moments nowadays that I thought of much else.
Nonetheless, I allowed myself to interpret his words as he claimed to have meant them. As I took more of the poultice from the bowl, I let my eyes drift closed, imagining myself with his stature—his presence—his strength and his defiant pride; I felt his shadow rise through me until the sensation became true, unmistakable and alive, quickening my blood with the surging force of his art.
I pressed the poultice to a wound on my left ankle, and I felt myself tremble under the sensation of a warm, familiar touch that was not my own?—
My eyes flew open; I gasped at the feeling of his hand on my skin, or so I thought—so I heard—but my voice sounded strange to my ears, as if it were not mine.
It was only my little hand on my leg, after all; though I stared at it, almost foolishly, caught for a moment in the strange wonder. And then I exhaled slowly, closed my eyes again, and rubbed the grey mixture around and into the wound with the same firm, circling strokes I had felt him use, allowing myself to enjoy the uncanny secondhand sensation of his touch.
And as I healed myself—treated both legs, and wrapped them in fresh bindings—I wondered where he was, and if he thought of me, and if across whatever miles lay between us he felt somehow the ghostly sensation of my skin warming beneath his hands.
But as I thought of him, I could not help thinking again of the Talisman of Thoth.
As I dressed, foregoing my stockings and taking great care not to disturb the new wrappings as I pulled on my drawers, I endeavored to recollect what I now knew of the nature of the Talisman, and to order it in my mind as best I could. The Talisman was of no practical use to Gremio—even Gremio himself, treacherous as he was, did not deny this—and, as Victor told me, in Gremio’s possession it would be no more than another artifact for his so-called museum in Tartarus, a curiosity of the far green world to set upon a shelf. I did not doubt that Gremio would account it also a trophy of what he imagined to be his power over Victor: a symbol of his reduction of the sorcerer Vittorio D’Arco, hated and feared by the kingdoms of the inner earth for some past transgression I did not understand, to a procurer of useless novelties.
Should I wonder that Victor had had enough? That his pride could not suffer him to lay the bounty of another humiliating hunt before the cloven hooves of the monster who fancied himself his master? And should I wonder then that Victor burned to spring his long-laid trap—to seize shut the loophole in the contract like a hangman’s snare around Gremio’s throat?
No. No, I could not wonder at a justified lust for vengeance. Not when I understood that long, chapped thirst for it all too well.
But I could wonder at how he had borne for so long a yoke that so chafed him—an affront that galled him so deeply—and I could not help but think that something had changed, stoking smoldering resentment into new fury. Was it his?—
I paused, closing my eyes, remembering his touch. The slow, surreptitious stroke of his thumb across my palm when I feared that his elixir would overcome me. The way his strong, scarred hands, warm and slick with the mixture he had concocted for me, seemed to linger on my legs.
The tension in his body; the fury in his eyes.
The racing throb of the pulse in his wrist.
Was it his— regard for me?
So weak and cautious a word, when in the ache and fullness of my heart, the softness of my silent sigh, my senses cried out that it was more—that it was true—this thing that my oath forbade, and that could never be.
I wiped a single tear on the back of my hand, and returned slowly to my contemplation.
His regard for me, then: he had said it was, if not in such words, in the carriage on the way home—he said that he would avenge what Gremio had done to me.
And yet I remained haunted by the feeling that the Talisman was to Victor something more. It was a vague impression in my mind, little better than an instinct, but an instinct nonetheless. Had not Victor said to Gremio, before the clammy claws ever closed around my ankles, that Gremio had already broken his side of the contract?
But Victor had never said how. Nor had Victor said what the Talisman meant to him , other than to say that it was more powerful than I knew, and to imply that to a mortal man it might be much more than it was to Gremio: that when I sold the Talisman to Hargrave for so dear a price—room and board, money enough for simple necessities, and most of all a place in the Order—Hargrave was correct to wager that the true worth of the Talisman of Thoth might be far more than everything I asked of him in its exchange.
There the trail went cold, the hints and insinuations running out with Victor as he rode thundering through the midnight rain.
I was not so ungrateful as to even begin to object: he had indulged my curiosity more than long enough as he ministered to my wounds, strengthened me with his art and his herbal chemistry—his shadow and his touch—and brought me, I did not doubt, from the imminent brink of some nameless fate back to life for a while. Now I was to last until his return with the rest of the remedy, which he sought without an instant’s hesitation, with no rest nor recovery after his own exertions in his fight to protect me from Gremio, and (from his manner of speaking) at considerable danger to himself.
I did not doubt him. Whoever he was—whatever manner of man, whatever creature of the night hid his face behind that cruel steel mask; whichever foreign clime beheld his birth; whatever the names of his unnameable crimes that roused the fearful wrath of Hell and of earth—whether wisely or foolishly I trusted him, despite it all. Still, still after all our perils and adventures he had never betrayed me, never forced me, despite every opportunity and chance. Despite my animal reflex to tremble at his shadow’s touch, the eldritch Doctor D’Arco proved true, he always proved true, and every time he did my defenses weakened before the strength and strange comfort of his uncanny darkness, and it deepened the terrible ache in my heart.
And so it was not out of any matter of mistrust that I sought, in his absence, to research the nature of the Talisman so much as I could, despite that it had already left my hands. Indeed, I believe it was in part the vital influence of his shadow, bound to my own by his sorcery, that imparted to me some portion of his inhuman conviction: the same fire in the soul that goaded him relentlessly on through the driving rain, spurring his heaving sides even as he spurred his stallion in turn, would now not allow me to turn my mind away from the thought of the Talisman, and the longer I considered the notion the more it filled me, until I scarcely could bear to set it aside. All for the better, I thought—so much so that I wondered in passing if this were a part of his design: my fixation on the Talisman was a welcome distraction from worrying after him, wondering where he was now and whether he had met with danger.
And so, again, the Talisman.
But where to begin? Never before had I regretted that I brought with me no copy of my husband’s book, no more to me than a poor souvenir of a moment in my life I little cared to remember. Yet I wondered at it now: I thought that his book mentioned the Talisman, though precisely what it said about that particular antiquity I could no longer recall. Surely his published treatise on the artifacts of Egypt must contain something, something on the Talisman that would be of use to me; or if it did not, perhaps even the nature and style of its omission of further detail might in itself provide some esoteric clue. Certainly, knowing so much more of the wildness of the world than I did when last I read it, to locate a copy and revisit its contents would not be time wasted.
Lord Hargrave would have a copy, surely, in his great library adjacent to my little chamber.
I finished readying myself for the day, preparing to stop in Hargrave’s library before taking breakfast; I snuffed out the candles, put out the hearth, but as I stepped into the hall and turned to draw shut the door behind me, my eye caught the glint of the new day’s sun on something silver.
The scorpion pommel of Victor’s black walking-stick.
I went back into my room and shut the door for privacy. Picking up his gentleman’s cane in both hands, I wrung it as he had shown me in his coach, pulling it apart to unsheathe the long, dark dagger. The tines of its spring-loaded crossguard snapped into place with a satisfying precision. I held the weapon for a moment, as I had sitting beside him when he handed it to me; I felt its balance, hefted its weight, let its narrow blade flash in the dust motes of the ray of sunlight through my window.
I nodded to myself as I folded down its crossguard hilt—it was not so effortless for me as he had made it, but little trouble all the same—and slipped the dagger back into the cane, twisting closed the secret sheathe and tapping its butt end to the floor. His cane was clearly styled for a man, and a very tall man at that: I could not hand its sculpted scorpion pommel, which was in itself too large for my grip, without adopting an awkward position with my arm and looking rather absurd in the process. But I could hold its black shaft, and use it as a short walking-staff; my legs felt strong enough that I did not anticipate the need for a prop, but it was surely not a poor idea to be prepared. More than that, however, it was an iron blade—a defense against both disprite and man—that I could carry without suspicion. The bandages wrapping my legs excused the presence of a walking aid, telling the tale of why a young woman should need such a support, and the blackness of my dress would explain its form: a widow on injured legs, walking with her husband’s cane.
I allowed a faint smile, rubbing a streak of dirt off the scorpion’s claws from when Victor had dropped it to seize me in his arms and save me from Gremio.
Thank you, Victor , I whispered breathlessly, finding my grip on his cane. He had left it for me—he must have—saying nothing of it, trusting I would know what to do, content in his certainty that I would never be weaponless. How can I help but think of you?
And I would never be without a token of him.
I left my room, locking my door behind me, appreciating the authoritative tap of Victor’s cane on the creaking floorboards of the hallway as I made my way to the library.
The hinge of the door to Hargrave’s library groaned, long and slow, as I stepped inside. The room was empty, as I preferred it; and though I had visited it little of late, such time as I had for reading occupied entirely by the old scrolls and codexes lent to me by Victor, the environs remained familiar: the great Persian rugs, the chairs by the fireplace from which Hargrave and Karvonen had objected to Victor’s unconventional entrance, the door to the underground passages through which Victor and I had burst.
And the books—the books!—shelves upon shelves of them, filling the still air with the hopeful, dry-sweet fragrance of old paper and the animal scent of vellum. Perhaps this time Hargrave’s library would not disappoint me.
Yet I thought too soon.
I do not know how much time passed as I examined each spine for A Discovery of Minor Artifacts of the Egyptians or the name of S.R. Buckingham, taking each blank-backed book into my hand to check the cover or (if that too was unmarked) the title page before replacing it on the shelf. I sighed in frustration: the end of the shelves was approaching, and I had as yet nothing to show for my efforts.
As I slid the last faded old tome back between its brethren, I shook my head.
How could Hargrave not own such a volume, who cared so much for such amulets and antiquities as to purchase the Talisman from me at any price at all, with neither a moment’s hesitation nor a second thought?
Had Karvonen taken Hargarve’s copy to some private laboratory, to aid him in his alchemical testing of the Talisman?
No matter, I thought to myself. This was not the only occult library I knew. The door to the underground stairway was beside me—and I was now in the hunt, too fixed upon my prey, too stimulated by its having eluded me thus far, to defer my growing curiosity. Breakfast would wait. I took a candle in its holder from a small table by the stairway door, lighted it with one of the provided matches—a thoughtful amenity which I had not remembered seeing there before—and descended into the darkness.
Tap, tap, tap went the end of Victor’s cane on each cold stone stair of the first flight. I listened to the distant drip of water, matching it by my own caprice to the echo of the walking-stick’s rappings as I stepped down, down to the floor of the tunnel alone—and then I thought better of my game, tucking the cane under my arm. I waited, listening. The dim report of the dripping water continued unabated, uncontested by any other sound—no footstep, no hollow clatter of hooves—and I allowed myself to breathe again.
I should not fear: I made the same dark journey to Victor’s unmarked door each time I went to class, and was no stranger anymore to this stretch of the underground. In fact I was, in one manner of speaking, safer now than ever, with the threat of Gremio stalking the subterranean tunnels removed for a while.
And in another manner of speaking, I might be in more danger than before, now that I had given the deep denizens of Tartarus new occasion to haunt and to hunt.
Yet but for the eerie musings of my own mind, my walk to the door of Victor’s lair was without event. It was locked—I knocked—and I heard from some distance behind it a man’s harsh, surly, exasperated voice:
“No class today, no class next time, no Doctor Vittorio D’Arco. Occupied with private business. Go away.”
“Absolon,” I whispered through the gap beside the hinge. I put my ear to the door, listening for some evidence of reply.
Then I heard the sound of distant footsteps behind the door, a man’s footsteps, drawing nearer.
“Absolon,” I repeated. “It’s Elizabeth Buckingham. I should like to use Doctor D’Arco’s library, if I may.”
In the subsequent silence, I wondered whether I had chosen aright in making such a request at all. Absolon had never shown any particular hostility toward me, but never had I encountered him that he was not under Victor’s direct command—or at least on an assigned errand—and outside of his tolerance for Victor I knew that he had no love for mortal sorcerers. Not for a moment did I doubt Victor’s promise to annihilate him if he so much as disturbed a single hair on my head, but Victor was not here now.
And I was alone.
A strange sound followed: a muffled bestial snuffling, flickering my candle flame, and then a second silence.
“Doctor D’Arco,” came Absolon’s voice again after a time, slow with suspicion, “are you there?”
“No, Absolon. Only Elizabeth. I’m alone. But if you let me into the library for a while,” I added, my own previous mention of the library and of Absolon’s name reminding me suddenly of Victor’s tales of his own exchanges with the creature, “I will read something to you, if you wish. A poem, perhaps.”
A few moments more, and I heard the metal-on-metal click of the lock being released. Absolon drew the door open—no more than a few inches—enough only to peer at me with the Cartesian organ on his forehead between his horns, his staring red eyes with their slit black pupils still mostly hidden from my sight.
“Password,” he pronounced.
“Password?”
He nodded sagely. “Password.”
Victor had never mentioned such a thing to me. I was taken aback, not knowing for the moment what to say, and so I resolved to state my experience of the truth—firmly, and with confidence: “There has never been a password.”
I heard the hissing, chafing sound that I recognized as his laughter; as it momentarily grew almost uncontrollable he wrapped a fleshy, hairy hand around the edge of the door, his heavy claws curling through the inches’ gap to grasp the wood and steady himself from the exultation of his own cleverness.
“Correct,” he said, lowering his voice in an unmistakable imitation of Victor as he drew the door open and stepped aside, allowing me room to walk in.
I thanked him as I passed him, listening to him close the door behind me, unmistakably aware of being watched. I could tell little by his face—the inhuman features; the expressionless, sightless eyes—but I sensed somehow in him a curiosity, a considering suspicion, a vague sense of awe.
He said no more, but he followed me down Victor’s narrow stone stair. I did not turn to count how many steps behind he trailed me, but as the stairway opened into the cavernous, cathedral-like vault of Victor’s subterranean domain, I watched the only lighted candelabra we passed throw our shadows across the wall.
It was darker there without Victor, darker and colder than ever I had known it. In Victor’s absence I could not blame Absolon, dweller in the sunless solitary caves beneath the earth, for keeping it according to his own comfort. And yet to see so many of Victor’s candles black-wicked and lightless, their rivulets of white wax frozen in time, only made his lair seem emptier, deepening the reminder of his absence.
But he was not entirely gone. Not from my little room, not from his soaring abode within the bones of the earth. I felt him in the heaviness of the close, still air, as if every lingering darkness beyond the reach of the few candle flames were made of some remainder of his shadow; I felt the memory of him rise through the stone of the floor, spreading from my marrow through my healing skin, every time I set my foot for another step.
I felt as if I could draw him into me—lend my flesh, just for a moment, to the assemblage of these ghosts of his art—and as this thought crossed my mind, I heard behind me a sharp hiss in the shadows.
Absolon drew a sudden breath through his teeth as I turned to him.
“Tell me,” he murmured, and I realized that his accent was similar to Victor’s: the same vaguely foreign tone, whose origin I could not place; unlikely, after all, that there were any other mortals to whom he regularly spoke. “Tell me—can you see him?” Absolon stepped closer to me, and from the way he held his head I thought that he focused his senses upon my face. “Can you see him, can you see Doctor D’Arco with your eyes ?”
“No,” I shook my head, “there is nothing to see. I promise you,” I continued, wondering soon after whether it was in my interest to be truthful with him, or whether I would have assured my own safety by telling him that Victor was standing with me, “he is not here. It’s only me.”
“ Only ,” he repeated in a kind of sneer of disbelief, as if to show himself too canny for my tricks. “No. You are not only ? — ”
“Show me to the library,” I interrupted him, “please.”
A pregnant moment followed as he considered me again, drawing closer by another single step. Too close for my comfort: I saw one of his claws flex in the darkness, his shoulders subtly shift like the rising hackles of a beast.
I set down my candle on a small accent table, wondering if he sensed my trepidation—if the scar-like organ between his unseeing eyes registered the light perspiration of my hand, the way my grip tightened on Victor’s cane.
I was armed, I reminded myself, were it to come to that.
Armed with an iron dagger, yes—surely Absolon recognized Victor’s scorpion cane, and it was difficult to think that he did not know what it concealed—but armed above all with the very thing that Absolon had sensed in me: the living vestige of Victor’s shadow and his art. Though outside of Victor’s briefest of explanations I did not entirely understand how it came to be, nor all that it meant, I knew by the foreign feeling of my own burning blood that Absolon had sensed aright.
Doctor D’Arco was here.
I was not only myself.
Adjusting my hand again around the scorpion cane I tapped it firmly on the stone floor, drawing myself up to such paltry height as I could manage as I listened to the authority of that single, solid rap echo from the walls. No more a prop for my injured legs, no more even a mere scabbard for Victor’s second dagger, I held in my hand the scepter of his dark realm, the mark of my swelling sovereign power. I drew a deep, slow breath, and in the space of that single inspiration I gathered him into me—from the stone and the earth, from the close air of the underground, from the memory of the touch of his shadow and his skin—I breathed him in, shuddering under the thrill of sorcery that rose through me like a fanned flame as I watched Absolon draw away, afflicted by something like a passing madness: his blind red eyes seemed to widen further yet, his pineal organ quivered, his bared teeth gnashed.
So focused was I on the sensation of it all, the heat of Victor’s art surging through me more readily even than my own, that the sudden sting of pain through my legs startled me—broke my concentration on what must have been some manner of spell—and I grabbed the walking-stick in both hands to support me as I half-fell forward, catching myself in time, listening to the deep panting of my breath as I leaned nearly all my weight against the strength of Victor’s cane.
“Buckingham,” Absolon rasped. Belatedly I raised my eyes from the floor to look to him, watching him tilt his grotesque head to the side in interest: accustomed as I was to Victor’s habit of calling me Elizabeth when we were alone, the sound of my married name—my husband’s name—had grown unfamiliar to my own ears. “Doctor D’Arco possessed you.”
“Possessed me?” The shock of the word straightened my stance, even as the sharp pain of my wounds began to dull.
“Do sorcerers— ” he paused, allowing the disdain of the word to drip into the silence—“have a new name for it?”
“I don’t know,” I replied in honesty, uncertain once more whether to look to the organ on his forehead or the slit black pupils of his red eyes. “I thought it was only disprites who could achieve the possession of?—”
“He is like us, almost like us,” he chuckled dryly, “Novice Sorceress Buckingham. The Duke of Tartarus diminished you. The sorcerer Vittorio D’Arco filled the empty part with himself.”
“The empty part of… me?”
Absolon nodded, flashing his sharp white teeth. “To keep Gremio and his people out, mortal sorcerers out, the night and the fog, until you are restored. You retain your will?”
“Yes. Entirely, so far as I understand.”
“Partial possession. See how long the sorcerer sustains it. How fast it fades. Come,” he beckoned with a heavy, mole-like claw as he walked ahead of me down the darkened hallway, then turned around when I did not follow. “Library.”
“Thank you,” I replied, taking up my candle again and tucking the cane under the same arm. I could not entirely trust him—particularly not in the utter darkness of Victor’s long hallway, where his senses would endure to his advantage and I would become blind—but he seemed to me gentle now enough to be worth the risk for the book, now that both of us understood his fright at my command, uncertain and half-ungovernable though it was, of some dim, wild vestige of Victor’s art.
“Much he hasn’t told you,” I thought I heard Absolon mutter ahead of me in his arid voice; I picked up my pace, all of my mind fixed suddenly on the notion.
“What else hasn’t he told me?”
But Absolon made no reply, the restless heat inside me rose, and in the thrall of a new desperation I grasped for the back of his black cloak, unaccountably terrified that he would dissolve into the blackness without another word. To my surprise and satisfaction my grip found purchase, closing around a handful of black cloth—and then, as I heard his harsh laughter ring from the stone walls, I became aware that I held only a limp, empty garment that smelt faintly of damp dirt and animal.
Absolon was gone.
With the useless cloak in my disbelieving hand I wheeled this way and that, searching with my candle for any trace of him, and Victor’s leering stone gargoyles with their lightless candles seemed to laugh at me from the walls in Absolon’s voice. As the terrible laughter grew it occurred to me to wonder whether this was some manner of trap, and whether some pair of iron portcullis gates would any moment fall into place on either side of the passage?—
“Sorceress,” Absolon’s voice interrupted my dire reverie, and at the touch of a claw on the back of my shoulder I whipped around to see the creature standing immediately before me, waiting with a smug, sharp-toothed smile and an outstretched hand. “Cloak for me. Library for you. Poem for me.”
“And you will tell me whatever it was of which you spoke—whatever you meant when you said that there is much Doctor D’Arco hasn’t told me,” I added, forcing an air of confidence; even my momentary fear of my own grim imaginings could not turn me from my monomania on that thought. “If you want your cloak back, that is. The library for a poem was the original bargain; if you wish the cloak as well, then two for two is only fair.”
“Two for two,” he nodded. “Very fair. We have a bargain?”
“Yes, Absolon,” I replied, depositing the black cloak into the pale, fleshy palm of his broad mole-paw. “We have a bargain.”
No sooner did he don the garment with a practiced flourish than I felt the fleet, effortless sensation of his art: a feeling I recognized from his lighting of the carriage lamps, at once as dank as earth and ephemeral as the wind.
And then, somewhere within the stone walls of the hallway, I heard the long, creaking groan of great chains and gears slowly heaving to life.
My heart skipped; at the corner of my eye I saw the light of my guttering candle catch the white glint of Absolon’s smile as before me, behind me, the dark iron teeth of a pair of portcullises began to descend from the arch of the hall.
“You said nothing,” he said, his dry voice seething with self-satisfaction, “about escape.”
How had I known—how could I have known—how I had foreseen, only moments before, this very nightmare?
Released by Absolon’s art, the gates fell so slowly that I had time to think, time to escape if I willed it to be so. I shot a longing glance to the doors at either side of the hallway—one of them led to the library, if I could only remember which, but no success in securing a copy of my husband’s book (if even there were one to be found) would avail to guide me through a cage of stone and latticed iron.
Could I bargain with Absolon again; forfeit my demand of Victor’s secrets in exchange for my freedom? And if he did not accept, or stalled me for time, what then? Would I draw the dagger from the scorpion cane and fight him, perhaps foolishly outmatched even with an iron blade and my uncertain mastery of the art that terrified him so, risking myself—risking Victor’s ire—and all for no more than the mere chance of that damnable book? And even were I to triumph, would the gates still fall?
The portcullis that soon would sunder me from the exit toward the stair lurched a foot downward as if the great hidden gear skipped a cog, catching on its chain with a shudder that shook the walls.
Yes, I had time: time to overthink; time to paralyze myself under my own spell of indecision.
I drew a breath—gripped Victor’s scorpion cane in my free hand—cast Absolon a deadly glance with all the vehemence, all the venom I could summon without squandering the fortifying strength of Victor’s shadow.
And then I ran.
I ran away from Absolon, using the cane as best I could to block the wind of my pace from my little candle; under the sinking teeth of the portcullis, ducking low as I passed; past the sole lighted candelabra beneath the blackened vault of Victor’s foyer.
“No more two for two , sorceress,” I heard Absolon call after me, “but one for one: my cloak. Your escape. Very fair,” he chuckled, the sound swelling into harsh laughter as he seemed to congratulate himself on his triumph. “Very fair! Adieu! Such sweet sorrow!”
I did not slow until I met the narrow stone stair, panting for the stagnant air of the underground as I leaned on Victor’s walking-stick with every upward step. And in my slow, regretful climb up the stairway, I had all the time in the world to wonder whether it was another rash act in the fire of a moment’s passion that brought this misfortune upon me—I should not have grasped for Absolon’s cloak; I should not have lunged for Gremio—or whether Absolon had always meant to threaten to entrap me between the two hidden portcullis gates, and thereby assure that I would leave of my own accord?—
To allow him to resume his dark solitude in peace, freed from the hated intrusion of mortal man?
Or to protect Victor’s library—or some other manner of secret I could not begin to know—from the intrusion of my prying mind?
And could it have been any more than my own foolish whim to presume that perhaps, perhaps, he meant to keep me from my husband’s book?
No, I told myself. A coincidence and a caprice, no more.
And yet, I thought, I could do worse than to trust my instincts: perhaps it was some memory of Victor’s—in the remnant of his shadow within me, or in the stone of his lair itself—that allowed me the unaccountable foreknowledge of the falling gates.
Gaining the top landing, I glanced back down into the blackness of the narrow stone stair with a sigh. No matter the rest, my plan was thwarted, and until Victor’s return I could come no more to this dark place that had become (strange to say though it was) so close to my heart.
I stepped through the unmarked door, listening to the latch lock into place behind me as I began the familiar trek through the tunnel back to Hargrave’s house.
Absolon had defeated me.
No, not defeated, I thought to myself as I sat down at Hargrave’s table to take a particularly late breakfast alone.
Deterred from one route. Not from all.
“An odd time even for you, Mrs. Buckingham,” one of Hargrave’s servants said good-naturedly as he set silverware before me, “if I may presume to say as much. Is everything—” he looked to my eyes, and I was aware that he looked quickly away—“is everything all right?”
“An eventful day yesterday,” I smiled. “Quite educational. A lot to process all at once.” I paused, then felt my lips begin to purse. “Have you any breakfast left?”
“A bit.” His return smile looked rather forced.
“I should like some of whatever remains, please.”
He bowed, returning shortly with a cup of tea and a plate of assorted odds and ends—arranged with care to ameliorate the look of leftovers—and he tucked what appeared to be an unread copy of the day’s newspaper under the edge of the dish as a further apology.
I thanked him; he left (with, I thought, some urgency), and beginning with the single strip of bacon I began to eat, and to contemplate.
How headstrong must I be, I wondered to myself as I thoughtfully chewed, for every adversity in this morning’s quest for my husband’s book to only renew my determination to seize that elusive volume in my hands? Since the first notion to seek it occurred to my awakening brain, I had been so fixed upon this dubious prize that I had managed nearly to entrap myself before even taking breakfast. Was that not deterrence enough, or sign enough that this was not to be?
I swallowed. My own voice of reason could not deter me. Not when I knew—despite whatever quaver of caution I attempted to advise myself, against my own nature, to heed—that it was the strength of my own headstrong heart that had brought me this far; indeed, that had led me in the first place to set out with the last of my coin on a hired cab into the black midnight fog.
My presumption, as Victor would have called it.
The stirring of my sorcerous will.
And now that fire was fed by some part of his, ready to flash to inferno at a hair-trigger’s touch—under the weight of a thought alone—never to burn lower than the waiting embers that warmed me even now.
I took another bite, remembering the soot on the white horse and the sign hanging from a metal arm above the corner shop, dripping with a black condensation that obscured all but the world Spiritualist from the dim haloes of the streetlights. I remembered the unlocked door, the discordant clanging of the old bell, the long bookshelf with the staring skulls.
And I remembered the gilt glint of my husband’s name on a dusty book-spine.
Or perhaps it is more correct to say that I remembered it again , for never once had I forgotten. Yet the mere memory of its existence, provided it was still there at all, helped me little when the way back to Witch’s Corner seemed so uncertain. The underground tunnels might in theory be safe to traverse, now that the newly maimed Gremio ought to be too preoccupied with his injuries to haunt me with the sound of his following hooves, but even under that happy assumption I did not know the way back to the spiritualist shop on my own.
But one of the other students might.
The thought buoyed me—and then sank me again, when I realized I had no reasonable means to meet with any of them: no notion of where they resided, nor any places they frequented outside of Victor’s hall. Asking anyone in Hargrave’s household to convey a message for me would be too near to showing my hand. I could, had I thought of it, have been present at Victor’s door at class time, hoping to encounter a fellow sorcery student unaware of his professor’s absence—but the hour for that had already come and gone.
With my stipend from Hargrave I had the money to commission a hansom cab to Witch’s Corner and back, but I nearly shuddered at the thought, though I did not know why. Only a needless latent fear, I thought, for the imagined memory of all that might have happened on my previous ride to that place, fraught with dangers for which at the time I had no name nor knowledge.
Yet I thought of the falling gates in Victor’s hallway, and dared not mistrust my sense of foresight again.
Stymied once more, I ate, and sipped my tea—deepest black, as I preferred it, with the merest pinch of sugar—and began to idly peruse the paper. The long articles did not suit my restless state, but advertisements, as always, caught my eye, and I distracted myself in learning (to my mild entertainment) of the supposed virtues of a new scented soap, some tinctures of questionable medical necessity, and an exotic hair oil, as well as where to purchase gentlemen’s leather gloves and ladies’ corsets—where to see (I felt myself frown, thinking of Forsythe) a new production of The First Part of Henry the Sixth , opening in two weeks?—
And then I turned the page, and all frowning thoughts of Forsythe were forgotten. There by my right thumb was a modified edition of a playbill I had seen before. The familiar image of a dapper young gentleman dressed for the evening, rakishly tipping the brim of this top hat with a stage magician’s wand, seemed nearly to wink at me off the printed page from amid a new landscape, at once grim and vividly tawdry, of frolicking imps and mesmerized women floating above the licking flames.
I needed not read the words to recognize, my lips pressed together to ward off any audible sound of amusement, that dashing gentleman who looked slighter both of years and of girth than the real Luther Reinhardt I knew from Victor’s sorcery class. But I read them nonetheless, searching for a time and place with a sudden fervor of hope:
THRILL to the WONDER and MYSTERY of the MARVELOUS MANFREDINI!
The Continental MASTER of MAGIC presents his NEW INCOMPARABLE FEATS!
TONIGHT ONLY at the New Osiris Hall.
Commencing at 8 o’clock; late-comers admitted ONLY with GREATEST CAUTION.
Nearly could I have hugged that newspaper to my breast. This was it; this was my chance! I thought of what to wear, and how early I ought to set out on foot for the nearest street where I might expect to find a cab, and how to get Reinhardt’s attention from the audience somehow. But he would know the way to Witch’s Corner. He would know; of that much I was certain. Surely walking a bit, as Victor had instructed me, and then sitting in a theater would not be unduly strenuous for my condition—particularly not after refreshing the bindings of my legs at dusk—and the notion of this small adventure satisfied the test of my newfound foresight, filling me not with dread but with a bright anticipation.
I closed the paper, set it beside me on the table, and finished my breakfast with a new vigor that made even the cooling end pieces of dry cod filet seem a delicacy.
It was settled, then.
Tonight, I would pay a visit to the Marvelous Manfredini.