30. The Sorcerers’ Sepulcher
Chapter 30
The Sorcerers’ Sepulcher
“Damn you, Simon!” I bellowed into the still air of the sepulcher in my consuming, tear-blind passion, the side of my futile fist striking down against my husband’s name engraved on his secret tomb—again—again, as my shoulders heaved with their great, racking sobs, and I felt the shudder of the impact through my bones, the sting of some edge of the newly chiseled epitaph drawing a fine streak of blood, but I did not care.
How dare he! How dare he come back to me now, mocking me from the safety of his stone sarcophagus that all my implacable fury was helpless to destroy; how dare the Order hide from me his death and his remains—oh, how I longed to pry open that heavy lid with my soft, thin fingers, send it crashing to its ruin on the floor, and see with the haunted fire of my own wild eyes what was left of him! Who interred him here? Who knew the truth of his disappearance beyond doubt, and thwarted me? Who let him rest in this place, trespassing neighbor to my joys and travails in Victor’s hallowed subterranean halls; who protected his unjust sleep while I wandered in doubt, as if whatever remained of my husband’s rotten carcass were the last and greatest secret he locked away from his own wife?
“Elizabeth… Elizabeth Buckingham…”
And did I hear a voice from beneath that infuriating stone lid, those impenetrable inches of the bones of the earth that were all that spared him from me now? Did foolish, ungrateful, sanctimonious Simon Ronald Buckingham dare address me as a paltry ghost? “Speak, damn you!” I cried out in my fevered rage; I was atop his coffin now on my hands and knees, my brain burning, my head bowed as I screamed into the lifeless stone. I heard my name again:
“Elizabeth Buckingham… Get out, get out! Open the door!”
Not a specter from the tomb—not my husband’s voice—only Greycliff at the door, and as my fingers clenched into the engraved valleys of the name of Buckingham I wondered that I could understand Greycliff now, and whether that should signify that the effect of the goldenscythe was dissipating from his mind, or whether I had grown as mad as he.
As mad as Greycliff? Ha! Madder, madder still; I did not fear him anymore, not his terrible laughter nor his lunatic knife; he was nothing to me, not my adversary—no! My only mortal foe was here—this grave I spat upon in vain, and in the exultation of my petty triumph my head began to grow light from its own heat. It all ran together now: the pain of my legs, the terror of time’s march toward midnight, the chase and the revelation of Greycliff’s face—the knowledge of him as almost surely the thief of the herb that should have cured me—the sweat-damp longing for Victor on the impenetrable rock of my husband’s tomb.
“Damn you to Hell!” I choked through my burning tears; a last, bitter curse as the strength in my limbs began to fail?—
I felt the fever break, the corpse-cold air of the sepulcher return.
I did not know how, nor who: some change in the chemistry of Victor’s ebbing shadow within my breast, perhaps, though it did not escape me that I was in the presence of two other sorcerers besides. Perhaps my crude defilement of the grave broke some manner of spell.
I knew only that I was seated again, with Reinhardt at my side, his arms cautiously around me as I sobbed into the black shoulder of his tailcoat. He felt nothing like Victor: soft and too yielding where Victor was solid and inexorable, all the fabric of his clothes thick with the sweet, earthy scent of his cigar smoke. That scent was welcome now, fresher and more wholesome than the moldering miasma of the charnel house.
“I’ll put the box back,” he said, and I sensed a kind of resignation in his tone, as if he had begun to despair of escaping the tomb alive. “I can fight him bare-handed.”
“No!” I exclaimed, shifting against him; I did not mean to rebuke him, but he released me immediately rather than risk appearing untoward. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “No. I need it. Throw it at Greycliff if you wish, if you think it necessary to our survival, only let me take it once it has performed its task.”
Reinhardt nodded with a forced smile, my proposed grave robbery apparently more palatable than the risk of raising my mad ire again.
“And before that,” I said, “I need to speak to him.”
“To Greycliff?”
I nodded, rested my weight upon Victor’s cane, and pressed through my trepidation to raise myself to standing. Success: I was steadier on my feet than I expected, and despite the pain I managed to make my way toward the door.
From the light of the lantern, I knew that Reinhardt walked behind and beside me, and I wondered what he imagined that Greycliff—a fellow sorcerer, after all—had the power to do through a locked door.
Just call me John , I remembered he had said to me the day Balnock struck him down, moments before Victor’s approach renewed his terror. The Brighton name’s cursed, and Greycliff Manor’s about as festive as it sounds.
I had never called him John. But, for the sake of Reinhardt’s life and mine, I could begin.
“John?” My tone was steady, even, calm. “John, this is—” I could not call myself Elizabeth to him, I could not bear for another man to address me as did Victor, and so (I grit my teeth) the abhorred name of my husband must suffice. “This is Buckingham.”
“Buckingham,” he repeated my name and laughed grimly, as if he found some dark entertainment in my presence. “You were dead in there, you know. There’s a grave with your name on it.”
I looked to Reinhardt, watching him shift his grip on the metal strongbox he held in his hands along with the lantern’s handle, and I wondered whether to take Greycliff’s words as a threat or the meaningless ramblings of a lunatic. “My husband’s grave,” I replied, turning back to the door, “not my own.”
“ There ,” Greycliff drew out the word for emphasis, like a drunken man overly impressed by some minor mystery resolved. “That’s why you’re still speaking. Why I saw you run. Explains a lot.”
“You’ve been inside here, John? You’ve seen my husband’s grave?”
“No,” he muttered, then groaned deeply as if something pained him. “There’s the problem.”
“Then if you have never been inside here to see it,” I pressed, knowing I was wasting time and yet far too tenacious to let the matter pass, “who told you? How did you know?”
“ Because I know too damned much! ” Greycliff roared as he slammed both fists into the door; I jolted back in reflex, but the lock and the wood held strong. “I know,” he panted, calming as something sinister grew in the sound of his voice, and for the greater clarity of his words I thought he must have pressed his scar-warped lips nearly to the split where the door met the wall. “I know too much… I see too much… a regular oracle, ha!” I could not tell whether his next sound was a chuckle or a sob.
“Unwilled Sight,” Reinhardt muttered to me, nearly under his breath. “Like Rothfield. Too much Seen too soon. This is bad—very bad?—”
“Thought it would make it better,” Greycliff’s voice cut in from the other side of the door. “Worth a try—can’t blame a man just trying to live—but oh good God, it made it so much worse…”
“John,” I said calmly, waiting for his silence before I continued. “I don’t mean to judge you. I only wish to know, in case you can help me.”
“Sure,” he groaned, and the bite of long-suffering irony in his slurring voice made me wonder if he understood more than I first thought. “Ask away. See what I can do.”
“Do you have with you any more goldenscythe?”
“Goldenscythe!” Reinhardt repeated, so astonished to hear the word that he neglected to lower his voice. “I thought goldenscythe didn’t exist?—”
“The Hell it doesn’t, D’Arco! I hear you in there! I feel you—your damned black shadow like a dead man’s shroud,” Greycliff’s voice trembled, and with something between a grunt and a gasp he managed to speak again. “Ah, you changed your voice, you fiend—you vampire!— but I feel you all the same! ”
“John, I’m Reinhardt?—”
“Liar!” Greycliff snarled. “Let her go, D’Arco! Open the damned door and let the widow go free!”
“I promise you, John,” I said, “it’s only Reinhardt and me. Doctor D’Arco isn’t here. He was never here.”
“I saw him… Buckingham…. I tried to find the antidote—every damned door… D’Arco chased you down the tunnel.”
“He was never here. It’s me you feel; he’s—” I paused, drawing a breath as I considered what to say. “He’s inside me. I was injured, and he partially possessed me—bound within me some part of his shadow.”
“Hell,” Greycliff murmured between fearful, heaving breaths.
“That’s all that’s here of him. He’s left now. Gone to seek goldenscythe to heal me. Please, John, if you have any left to spare…”
But with the mention of my possession he descended again into incoherent terror of Victor; beside me Reinhardt looked at his pocket-watch, muttered something in German that sounded like a curse, and slowly shook his head.
“Is there another way out?” I turned to Reinhardt and whispered.
His heavy sigh was answer enough.
“Go home, John,” I tried again to speak to Greycliff though the door. My voice was firm, in hopes of rousing him from the grip of his delusions, though in my own ears it sounded fraught with an urgency I scarcely could suppress. “All’s well here. Just leave us and go, and I’ll see that you’re brought an antidote. I promise.”
“No,” he replied, a sinister tone slipping again into his voice. “No, not yet. I want to see you both… see that he’s not there… know you’re honest. Open the door.”
I closed my eyes, wondering whether it was only in my mind that I heard the terrible ticking of the hands of Reinhardt’s watch.
“I have,” Greycliff continued, “something you might want.”
“Goldenscythe?”
“No,” he chuckled bitterly, “that’s gone, all long gone. Did you know,” his laughter rose, as if he thought this genuinely amusing, “someone broke into Townsend’s classroom last night?”
Absolon , I thought to myself, and said nothing.
“Not me! Don’t get ideas,” Greycliff continued with a sharp grunt. “While they investigated that ,” he went on, his words and his voice becoming more precise, and I wondered whether to take that for an auspicious or ominous sign, “I investigated Karvonen’s laboratory. Gone on sabbatical. Nobody watching his door. Found one I hadn’t seen last time.”
I took a breathless step backward.
Karvonen’s laboratory , where Greycliff had trespassed before.
The alchemist Doctor Karvonen, whom Victor said was conducting experiments on the Talisman.
This could not be.
It could not be true.
And then, for the second time that night, I bit down into my own tongue in attempt to wake myself from a dream.
“One what , John?” Reinhardt interjected. “We don’t have time!”
“Vial of gold,” Greycliff replied. “Real physical alchemy… impressive.”
“I don’t care for gold, John,” I replied with mingled disappointment and relief.
“Good! Good, because that’s not what I took.” He laughed again, really laughed, and then stopped as suddenly as he began. “But it’s no good to me—no better than the gold. Didn’t do a damned thing for my curse—didn’t reverse what the goldenscythe did—useless, but… ah… just open the door, Buckingham,” he sighed, sounding as defeated as were we. The miasma of the crypt affecting us all, I didn’t wonder—the dank, creeping stench of time’s triumph over human flesh?—
“Open the door,” Greycliff mumbled, “and I’ll give you this amulet.”
My mind went utterly blank.
I felt myself stagger, my hand nearly slipping on damp stone as I reached out to steady myself on the wall beside the door.
“Not a bad looking piece…” Greycliff droned on, and in my mind I thought of him turning it in his fingers, the pale hand of a mad sorcerer—the same hand that once wielded the knife against Reinhardt, its blade still embedded in the door—holding the key to Victor’s fate and mine before his haunted, unwitting eyes. “Nice Egyptian ankh on it. Bird for the sorcerer-god Thoth. Decent piece of lapis lazuli. Would look nice on you—don’t see you wear jewelry much…”
Time itself stood still.
Greycliff had the Talisman, and I had no longer the luxury of disbelief.
I did not know if it was Victor’s art or my own, whether any of his shadow still remained or whether mine had grown, but I felt so dark a surge of heat that before my eyes, in the aroused power of my Sight, my view of the mundane world of stone walls and tombs was lost to a blinding flare of violet-black fire; and in the searing pain that rose from my wounded legs I wondered if I felt, for the first time since Victor had possessed me, the cold slime of Gremio’s poison slipping in though the slackening force of Victor’s shadow—I felt my knuckles whiten beneath the scorpion pommel of Victor’s cane—I felt the fingers of my free hand claw and curl into the cracks in the stone wall. The Talisman of Thoth had come back to me; my amulet had returned to me, and it lay within arm’s length, sundered and separated from my grasp by no more than a simple wooden door?—
“Buckingham,” Reinhardt breathed, and from the tension in his voice I wondered what he sensed or saw in me. “Buckingham, what’s going on?”
“I have to open the door, Reinhardt.”
“If it’s a matter of life and death?—”
“It is a matter of life and death,” I cried, “mine and Victor’s both!” My desperate hand tore from the wall to seize the handle of the door, my shoulders heaving even as my voice dropped to a whisper. “I would explain to you, if there were time; I need that amulet—with all my heart, by all that is true in the world, I need that amulet—I have no choice.”
The lock clicked open beneath my hand.
I pulled, but the door was heavy for me—until it began to move under its own power, and I realized that the new force was Greycliff assisting me, pushing open the wooden door until its archway framed his pale form, and he stood like a ghost in the subterranean darkness.
Behind me I heard Reinhardt set down the lantern and shift his footing; I felt his tension, his readiness hanging thick in the sepulcher’s stagnant air.
Greycliff had no weapon that I saw—whether forgotten or proven too difficult to dislodge, the knife was still trapped in the wood of the door—and my eyes fell to the thin gold chain that hung trailing from his clenched right fist.
“The amulet, John,” I said quietly, slowly, and yet as firmly as I might without disturbing his state. “It’s only Reinhardt and me, as you see, and you are a kind man to offer me such a gift. I shall accept it with gratitude.”
He said nothing. He made no move, neither to hand me the Talisman nor to rescind his offer: he only stood still and silent, his breathing faintly ragged, staring through me and past me into the crypt.
“And then,” I continued, “we shall leave this place together. All three of us. I need to go home now, and you need an antidote. We’ll help you find one.”
Silence. Utter, staring silence. I wondered if I had opened the door a moment too late, and he had already lost what was left of his mind.
“John,” came Reinhardt’s voice behind me, and I stole a backward glance to see him holding the metal box before my gaze returned to Greycliff, “she is Elizabeth Buckingham. I’m Luther Reinhardt. The Marvelous Manfredini, remember?”
Greycliff’s hollow, haunted eyes shifted toward Reinhardt. By the light of the lantern I thought I saw their pale blue darken—and as it did, Greycliff suddenly lurched forward with a trembling groan, hunching his back to bend nearly in half, his free hand rigid with terror as he grasped his head in pain and his fingers raked through his muddied blond hair.
The darkening eyes, I thought to myself as I stepped backward with a silent gasp, watching him in horror and yet unwilling to risk looking away—the darkening eyes reminded me of my own: in the goldenscythe Greycliff surreptitiously consumed must have lingered some vestige of Victor’s sorcery; not enough to possess, but enough to disturb and disrupt this man who feared so desperately the art of Doctor D’Arco, combining with the effects of the herb itself to ravage and torment him from within.
I wondered if I could will him to drop the Talisman, and whether if so I could rush in quickly enough to seize it from the stone floor?—
Yet I had little time to contemplate: he staggered, shivered—and then he raised his head, and I watched the scar on his face hitch his lip into a distorted grin as his eyes, suddenly alive, fixed on Reinhardt.
“You…” Greycliff chuckled darkly, stepping toward towards him, his footfalls slow but all too steady. “It is you.”
“Indeed, John.” The wariness in Reinhardt’s voice was unmistakable. He stood his ground as Greycliff approached, holding my husband’s box low in both hands. I did not know whether I thought him foolish or brave, or whether the mind of a man lost to goldenscythe would be aroused to greater fury by stillness or the chase. “Luther Reinhardt, Second Degree Illusionist, formerly of the Order of Magisophists. An exile, like yourself.”
Another step forward. Greycliff listened, nodded… and then slowly shook his head.
“You,” he repeated in what began as a quiet growl.
And as I sensed what must have been his sorcery gather into him, as faint and yet fierce as the far echo of a sudden, distant storm, he howled his next words with a fury to wake the silent dead: “D’Arco, you liar!”
Reinhardt swung the metal box as Greycliff rushed him; from the backward snap of Greycliff’s head I could not tell whether the madman was struck or dodged aside—but no, it must have been no more than a glancing blow—Greycliff did not fall nor relent as he forced Reinhardt backward, and the illusionist’s second swing went wild as he stumbled against a tomb, the box dislodging from his hands to skid uselessly across the floor as they struggled.
“Run, Buckingham!” Reinhardt called out to me, fending off Greycliff’s grip as the pale lord bent him back over a stone sarcophagus and reached for his throat. “Back to the gallery, straight to Hargrave’s house! I’ll hold him off—I can wear him out! Run!”
“No,” I breathed, and I hurried toward them, not away, Victor’s scorpion cane in my hand. “No, I won’t go. I can help—if you can hold him still?—”
With a great grunt Reinhardt rose, throwing Greycliff off of him long enough to get up off the grave before they grappled again, shoving each other’s backs and shoulders into a series of statues and monuments as they fought their way down a far aisle. Greycliff was savage in his fury, mercilessly slamming Reinhardt’s head back against the bowed stone hulk of a weeping saint; but Reinhardt was heavier, and I heard the impact of his thick fist against Greycliff’s collar—and then the ghastly crash and crunch of brittle bones exploding into dust as Greycliff fell through an ancient, shrouded body to land on its raised stone table with a bestial cry of pain and indignation. His left arm seemed weaker than his right as he struggled to get up—I wondered if Reinhardt had injured, or even broken Greycliff’s collarbone—and his hands clawed for traction in the moldering winding-sheet and the shattered skeletal remains.
“Hold him, Reinhardt!” I cried again, but the illusionist was already lunging for his adversary through the ruins of the dry corpse, scattering shards of darkened bone as he grappled for control of Greycliff’s wrists.
“And then?” Reinhardt panted, wrestling Greycliff’s arms behind his back as the madman struggled in his horrible, blind rage, wrenching his neck backward in a vicious head-butt that nearly rammed into Reinhardt’s jaw.
I did not answer—I was nearly there.
“John,” I said calmly, firmly as I approached; up close I could see the blood that trickled from the corner of Greycliff’s lip and smeared across his chin, and the broken bruise that began to darken Reinhardt’s cheekbone.
As Greycliff snarled and thrashed to the side, unable to escape Reinhardt’s grip, I saw a flash of both of their hands: somehow, even then, the familiar chain of the Talisman still hung from the red-split knuckles of Greycliff’s right fist.
“Listen to me, John. I’m going to get you out of here.”
I did not know whether my words dulled the edge of his mindless fury, or whether it was only his injury or the strain of the fight itself that caused his struggle against Reinhardt to first begin to flag.
“Look me in the eye, John. Show me that you understand.”
Teeth gritted and bared in an uneven sneer, Greycliff grunted in what sounded like a mixture of pain and resentment as he pulled at Reinhardt’s hold on him, as much to express his enduring umbrage at the other man as in true hope of escape—and then he raised his head and turned to me, and our eyes met.
And with all such sorcery as remained in me I held his gaze fast, fixed my will upon him, and stared deeper into his eyes?—
It was little more difficult to begin than it had been to mesmerize the artist who sat beside me in the theater, and once more the effortlessness of my power almost unnerved me—though not as much, it seemed, as it unnerved Greycliff.
“ You’re D’Arco!” he hissed, the blood from the cut to his crooked lip reddening his teeth as a deep shiver of disquiet coursed through his body. “I know those eyes, D’Arco! ” He shuddered again, his heaving breath quickening, and I knew he was fighting me; I felt the pressure of his will rising against mine; I felt him strive to break my gaze and turn away.
“I would know those eyes,” Greycliff growled through his clenched teeth, his entire body tense with desperate wrath, “anywhere… Take off the mask, D’Arco! ” Insanity gripped him utterly, goading him to a new fever of terror and rage as sweat washed the blood in pink rivulets down his neck; “ Take off the mask ,” he roared, a last surge of fury nearly breaking Reinhardt’s grip, “ and show your face! ”
And then his breath hitched as he nearly froze, his teeth bared and eyes wide as he stared down the long, dark length of Victor’s dagger.
Were he to escape Reinhardt, I would have little chance against him unarmed, and in a moment’s despair of my own survival I twisted apart the scorpion cane and drew the iron blade, leveling its cruel, narrow point mere inches from the space between Greycliff’s eyes. In the shock of his distraction I felt his will falter, the defiance of his art waver; in blank incredulity his gaze rose from the blade to meet my eyes—I sensed, with a terrible glut of triumph, something within him slip?—
And then it was over. Though Greycliff struggled to look away, he never did, and I watched his eyes grow distant and then fall closed, the last of his strength suddenly overwhelmed by my art; with a deep grunt and a last tremor of fear he sank back into Reinhardt’s grip, limp and insensible, his right fist relaxing as it fell helplessly open against the decomposing burial shroud.
In the shadows of the desolate monuments Greycliff lay motionless but for the slowing rise and fall of his chest, the Talisman of Thoth glimmering in his open hand.
I took it.
After all else it was so quick, so private, so strangely simple a thing. A thousand thoughts at once regaled me with their florid tales of how it should have been, all fanfare and fantasy, the faeries of the lake proclaiming with wild revels the Talisman’s return to me, singing me home in spectral voices beneath the fiery stars?—
But it was not to be.
I took the Talisman from Greycliff in the dim silence of the sepulcher; a mundane event, for all its moment, graced neither by style nor ceremony: I merely fastened the clasp of its chain behind my neck and dropped it beneath the neckline of my dress. It settled between my breasts, its metal still warm from the madman’s hand.
Reinhardt opened his eyes and turned to look to me, and it was not until then that I realized he had spent the length of the brief contest of wills with his face averted from my gaze and his eyes clenched shut in his own quiet terror. He allowed a sharp sigh, as if releasing a held breath, and brushed the grave-dust and shards of bone from his shoulders as he shifted himself out from beneath Greycliff’s senseless form.
Picking up his wand from the detritus that had fallen to the floor he hefted it in his hand, looked at Greycliff, then turned to me again with his brows raised. “Other than to thank you for my life, I don’t know what to say—but I’ll have time to think of it. Gather what you need; we have to move quickly—it may already be…” He seemed to change his mind, letting the sentence fade. “How long until he awakens?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I haven’t done this before.”
Reinhardt shook his head with a quiet, true chuckle, nothing like Greycliff’s lunatic laughter but born of what seemed both amusement and relief: a human sign of life in the deathly stillness of the crypt, at once a light in the darkness and a reminder that we three were trespassers here, young foreigners in the long, stagnant kingdom of the dead.
It may already be too late for you, Elizabeth , I completed his unfinished sentence in my head as I assembled Victor’s cane and hurried to collect the lantern, the book, and the metal box. The witching hour may have come and gone —but there was nothing to be done for it. The thrill of the fight, the satisfaction of the triumph of my art could not sustain themselves now that Greycliff lay quietly in utter defeat, and as my pulse calmed every step became a strain. I was exhausted—drained—were Greycliff to rise and shake off the drug of my art, I did not know if I would have the stamina to overmaster him again.
But I had the Talisman of Thoth.
The Talisman!
Facing away from Reinhardt on the other side of the sepulcher, bending down to pick up the metal box where it had landed after escaping the illusionist’s grasp, I pressed my hand to the valley between my breasts, feeling the form of the amulet through the fabric of my dress and underclothes. I realized then that my instinct had been to hide it from Reinhardt; I resolved to myself that, should he ask after the amulet Greycliff had mentioned, I would make every effort not to lie to him: Reinhardt was a good man, as I had come to know that night, and after all he had done for me he deserved a better repayment than deception.
But I did not mean to broach the subject without necessity.
In truth I did not know what to do, much less what to say. By rights the Talisman ought to be returned to Karvonen, I supposed—but what manner of fool would I be to let it go so soon, when I had now in my possession both the relic itself and the texts that might solve its riddle?
And yet if I were to be caught with the Talisman in my possession, what would become of me, and of the life I had purchased at its price? What would Hargrave do, or Karvonen?
Or Victor himself?
But at every crossroads, I thought to myself, fear is a poor judge of path. If I had only ever done what was prudent, and respectable, and right in the eyes of the cautious world, I would never have taken that midnight cab to Witch’s Corner, never won for myself this new life at all. If Karvonen were truly away for a while, as Greycliff had claimed—a dangerous chance, to trust his ravings, but not all of what he had said had been delusion—and if, barring some unforeseen success, Victor would not return for perhaps another day or more, then I had time to conduct some research of my own.
Time . The word echoed in my mind. If only the box and the book were not so heavy as they seemed to have become, and my legs so sore, and the way so long?—
“Ready,” Reinhardt called to me across the crypt. Though I did not see him accomplish it, he had managed somehow to hurriedly maneuver Greycliff onto the ground with a winding-sheet beneath his prone form, and had begun to pull at the old shroud to drag him across the stone floor. With Greycliff lying on his back, his wrists and ankles bound by dusty scraps of twisted cloth, we looked every bit the part of grave-robbers stealing a young lord’s corpse and treasures from his plundered tomb.
Had I been in a stronger state myself, I would have smiled, perhaps even laughed.
As we passed through the door with such poor speed as we managed, Reinhardt fingered the handle of Greycliff’s lodged knife, tried briefly to pull it from the wood, then relented with a shrug. “A fine mystery,” he said, “for whatever lost soul comes here next. You have everything? Nothing left behind?”
“Nothing but my husband,” I replied quietly with a last glance at that accursed sarcophagus and its inviolable stone lid. I do not think Reinhardt knew how to respond. “Nothing I need.”
“Go on ahead,” he urged me as he drew the door shut behind Greycliff, “you have no time to waste.” I heard the now-familiar workings of its lock fall into place.
“Even if you had a light of your own?—”
“Leave it at the base of the stairs before you ascend; it’ll be enough.”
I shook my head as we made our way, the book and metal box and lantern handle held precariously in my left arm as my right side leaned upon the walking-stick. Reinhardt dragged Greycliff by the shroud with both hands.
“I should like to have the luxury of such a decision,” I breathed, thinking with some disappointment that my voice sounded weak. “But even encumbered as you are, I am no faster than are you.”
“Then put those on the shroud with him,” Reinhardt replied between increasingly labored breaths, nodding to the box and book I began to struggle not to drop. “A few more pounds won’t slow me any further. Did he really have some kind of amulet?”
I could not allow myself to freeze—not even to pause.
As I set my burdens down on the old grave-cloth next to Greycliff, I held my whispered voice as steady as I was able to force it to remain. “He did.”
“Did you take it?”
I nodded—I was not false to him—but I changed the subject as naturally as I could. “And he had stolen Doctor D’Arco’s goldenscythe as well, though I do not think he had any left on his person. Did you search him, before you bound him?”
“After. He has a skeleton key to most of the doors, some other personal effects—nothing remarkable.”
“I see,” I replied as we walked. “What do we do with him?”
“Doctor D’Arco’s dungeon,” Reinhardt replied, his voice low with trepidation, as if even after Greycliff’s attempt on his life he took no pleasure in resigning him to whatever dark fate awaited him there. “If what you say is true.”
“What will happen to him when?—”
I could not finish, though I did not at first know why.
“Buckingham?”
It was a bell that I heard—something like the dire tolling of a bell, somewhere in my mind—I stopped in my tracks; I closed my eyes to discern its direction, but it had none—its sound did not touch my ears—it filled my mind, and yet was nowhere at all.
“Buckingham!” The urgency was unmistakable in Reinhardt’s voice, but at the same time a sensation of slime crept up my ankles; slime mired me in place, and the sound in my head kept tolling, tolling forever?—
Not a bell, but the twelvefold peal of a midnight clock.
Think of me , Victor had said, the memory flooding back like a black tide: Think of me, and be strong.
The rest was a blur.
I cannot say how I knew that Greycliff was left to Absolon, heavy mole-claws hooking with sardonic amusement into the fabric of his winding-sheet, drawing him through a doorway into blind darkness; I do not know whether it was the thought of Victor or some last reserve of my own strength that permitted me to run, but I felt the excruciating pulse of my little shoes against the stone floor, the pounding of my heart, the heaving of my breath, the cigar-scent of Reinhardt beside me and the breaking of the darkness into candlelight—Was this truly the way to the New Osiris Hall?—Why did my great black Hessian boots sound so light upon the floorboards? I am Victor D’Arco, am I not?—Why was the keyhole to the door of my room—Elizabeth’s room—our room—why, for the second night in a row, was it so hard to find?
But I was inside then, alone, the rain beating on the dark window as it had last night, as I had known it would tonight again.
Where I had picked up the candle that was in my hand, I did not know, but I put it on down my nightstand; my husband’s book and strongbox I slid hurriedly beneath my cold bed, Victor’s cane— my cane, was it not?—I laid down on the floor near the headboard. I had no time to light a fire for warmth, nor even to properly undress; I kicked off my shoes, loosened my corset, removed my hairpins and set them in Victor’s wooden box—this last I would do no matter, no matter if it were with my last gasp—and as my hair spilled over my shoulders (as it had spilled over his, relaxed and half-wanton, as I lay in a swoon in my professor’s arms) I found the flask with the thick green liquid on my dressing table, my hand already wrapped tightly around its glass neck.
Relief flooded me. I swirled the flask in my hand to stir it, watching by light of the lone candle as the pieces of Victor’s hair and mine suffused throughout the mixture, listening against all hope for some sound of thundering hoofbeats in the pouring rain.
Relief—and a strange anticipation. I spared another few seconds swirling the glass, aware somehow that my lips parted in thirst with a silent sigh, feeling my heartbeat quicken.
Victor , I whispered, indulging in the strange comfort of listening to my own voice give shape to his name. Victor, become me; possess me again.
The notion was not without some dim, distant echo of fear—the memory of how last night the same mixture nearly overcame me; the horrifying recollection that it was an herb touched with Victor’s art which drove Greycliff’s mindless madness—but my vision swam with the pain of my legs, and the glass was refreshingly cool against my fevered lips, shaking slightly with the faint trembling of my hand. I knew that my breath fogged against the rim as my eyes drifted closed—and then, with grateful abandon, I drank.
I swallowed a deep, slow draught of the bitter elixir, set the flask quickly on my nightstand before my softening strength let it fall, blew out the candle and sank down comfortably into the bed. In my exhausted state, I did not have time even to draw up the bedclothes to cover myself. Already I felt a deep shiver in my spine build and then release, the fingertips of my hand curling weakly against the warped cover of the grimoire under my pillow; the last sound that I remember meeting my ears was the soft stutter of my own quavering sigh, vanishing into the driving rain, as the last of my fear melted into the familiar sensation of being filled and overwhelmed by Victor’s art. I fixed my fading mind upon the memory of Victor—the feeling and the dark scent of him, the heat and strength of his body against mine, the bare skin of my legs quivering under his touch—and allowed myself to fall into the rising, spreading warmth of his deep shadow.