Lucien deliberately went late to Lord Mace's nitrous oxide party. It was only two blocks from Strathmore House to Mace's home, so he walked. Since the weather was unseasonably cold, more like January than November, he had the streets to himself.
The draperies were drawn at Mace's, making the house so dark that it appeared unoccupied. However, an impassive butler answered Lucien's knock promptly, took his cloak, and guided him to the drawing room. The dim lamps illuminated about a dozen people, mostly male but including several women. What distinguished it from other social gatherings was the rapturous smiles and the large leather bladders all of the guests held and periodically inhaled from. Footmen moved about quietly, bringing new containers when guests signaled for replacements.
Lucien scanned the room, looking for his host. Several guests were talking and laughing together, though there was a disoriented quality to their conversation. Others, perhaps more intoxicated, had turned inward to trance-like states, more interested in their own sensations than their surroundings.
In a corner Lord Nunfield lounged in a chair, alternating sips of wine with inhalations from his gasbag. Closer to hand, Lord Chiswick sat on the floor with a giggling woman sprawled across his lap. He raised his deflated bag and waved it at a footman. " 'S empty," he said querulously. "Need more."
The servant silently brought another bulging bladder and exchanged it for the empty one. After sucking greedily at the pipe stem, Chiswick's expression dissolved into a beatific smile.
Mace's cool voice said, "Glad you made it, Strathmore."
"Thank you for the invitation."
Lucien turned and found that his host had a flushed face and pupils dilated so widely his eyes appeared black. If nitrous oxide caused that, it explained the low light level.
"You'll have to work hard to catch up with the others," Mace said. "Come in here where it's quieter."
He led the way into an adjoining reception room, and the two men settled into a pair of leather-covered chairs. A servant promptly brought over two of the leather bladders.
Lucien examined his, guessing that it held a volume of about a gallon. "How is the gas produced?"
"By heating some substance—ammonium nitrate, I think," Mace explained. "I won't let the chemist make it here, of course, because sometimes the stuff explodes. Go ahead, try some."
Lucien adjusted the pipe stem, then began inhaling the gas, hoping that it wouldn't rot his brain. After emptying the bladder, he said, "It's relaxing, but nothing more."
Mace took away the original gasbag and handed his guest a new one. "It takes several minutes to feel the full effect."
Midway through the second bladder, Lucien began to feel light-headed, though not unpleasantly so. He inhaled again and vibrant tingling pulsed through his body, dancing along his veins and thrumming in his extremities. Colors seemed brighter, and he felt exhilarated, intensely alive. "Interesting. I'm beginning to understand why you like this."
"It gets even better," Mace said as he signaled for more. "If nitrous was easier to obtain, drink would go out of fashion."
Lucien laughed, for the comment seemed very humorous. He hadn't felt so carefree since he was a boy.
Mace lifted a notebook and pencil from the table beside him. "Describe the sensations you're feeling. My chemist is compiling data on how different people react to nitrous."
"It's like… being music." Lucien groped to explain the unexplainable. "A friend once took me to Westminster Abbey to hear Handel's
Messiah
. The building resonated with the sounds of hundreds of instruments and singers. This is rather like that."
"Are your ears ringing?"
Lucien considered. "Yes, pounding in rhythm with my heartbeat."
Mace continued to ask questions, though sometimes Lucien lost track of them. Time blurred as one container of gas after another was placed in his hands. He noticed that Mace was inhaling the nitrous at a much slower pace. Though it was obvious that the other man wanted him intoxicated, it didn't seem worth worrying about. Once or twice Lucien tried to collect his scattered wits, but he couldn't quite remember why he should try. He took things too seriously—all his friends said as much— so he should seize this opportunity to relax and enjoy himself.
A small corner of his mind stood aside, watching, but it had no power to act. It simply observed.
After a number of questions about reactions to the gas, Mace casually asked, "Why do you want to join the Hellions Club, Strathmore? I'd like the truth this time."
"I want to know… to know…" Lucien's mind temporarily went blank, and he could not remember what it was that he was determined to learn. In the seconds while he searched for the answer, he recognized the hard glint in his host's eyes. Mace had been waiting for this moment.
It was not unexpected. What shocked Lucien was that, in spite of years of practice at keeping secrets, he wanted to blurt out the truth. The normal walls of judgment and inhibition had vanished, and his tongue was ready to say that he was looking for a spy and intended to destroy the man when he found him.
The part of his mind that stood to one side said coolly that if he gave that answer and Mace was the spy, there was an excellent chance that Lucien would not survive the night. An accidental death would be easy to arrange. A slip on the icy cobblestones—an assault by unknown robbers—and he would be gone. Society would be shocked and regretful, for a day or two.
Struggling to avoid giving an answer, Lucien mumbled, "Sorry—the ringing is getting worse. Makes it hard to hear properly."
Mace sharpened his voice. "Tell me what you want to learn."
"I want to learn…" Grimly Lucien tried to focus his fragmented mind, to connect with that small part of himself that still had clarity. He rubbed his hand into his forehead and couldn't feel the pressure of his own fingers.
Think, dammit
!
He doubted that he could lie, even to save his life, but with a wash of relief he saw that he could offer lesser truths. "I wanted to learn… more about you and the others. Sometimes I get… very tired of myself. Too serious. I envy those who can live for pleasure, because I don't know how." And those were things he had never seen in himself, he realized with mild wonder.
Mace repeated his question several different ways, but now that Lucien had worked out his answers, he was able to reply more easily. At length Mace leaned back and regarded him through half-closed eyes. "Congratulations, Strathmore, you've just passed the Hellion test. No one can be initiated into the group without undergoing trial by nitrous oxide, for it seems to make men unusually candid."
Grateful to be able to lower his guard, Lucien asked, "Does anyone ever fail?"
"Not usually, but you might have. I wondered why you wanted to join us—complicated men make me wary. But I can understand being bored with too much sobriety. We will cure that. For men of wealth and breeding like us, pleasure is a duty." Mace inhaled deeply from a fresh bladder of gas, and his bloodshot eyes glowed with inner fire. "Simple animal satisfactions are available to all, but refinements of ecstasy require talent and imagination. You will learn, Strathmore, you will learn."
Mace rose and signaled to a footman to bring them two fresh gasbags. To Lucien he said, "Since you will be one of us, I can show you something special."
Dizziness swept through Lucien when he stood. He caught the back of his chair. After his head steadied, he followed Mace from the room. He felt nothing when his thigh struck the sharp corner of a table. In fact, he could not feel his body at all. He was not so much numb as disconnected. Very strange.
Halfway up the staircase, he turned and looked down at the foyer floor. If he fell down the steps and smashed into the marble squares, he wouldn't feel that, either.
"C'mon," Mace said, his impatient voice faintly slurred. "You're one of the few who can fully appreciate these."
Lucien obediently continued up a second flight of stairs and along a corridor that led to the back of the house. There Mace unlocked a door that opened into a room with a worktable in the center and glass cases lining the walls.
As Mace lit a lamp, Lucien said rather unnecessarily, "You keep your collection of mechanicals here." He looked into a case and saw a group of three figures, one of which appeared to be in the process of chopping off the head of another. "Bavarian?"
Mace nodded. "John the Baptist being beheaded. Very rare. But it's nothing compared to the ones I design myself." Using a small key that doubled as a watch fob, he opened the one cabinet that had opaque doors. Then he brought out a mechanical device and set it on the table. After a lengthy key winding, he stepped back so that his guest could see the device clearly.
It consisted of two exquisitely sculpted figures, a naked woman and an equally naked man lying between her legs. With a metallic rasp of gears, they began fornicating.
Lucien stared at the bare, pumping male buttocks and the female arms that flailed in mock ecstasy. The sight triggered an inner coldness so profound that even the euphoria generated by the gas could not dispel it. Mace's prized "toy" was a caricature of sexuality, a symbol of the mindless, mechanical copulation that Lucien loathed in real life. In his present uninhibited state, he wanted nothing more than to sweep the ugly thing to the floor and smash it to pieces.
The impulse was so strong that his arm trembled with the effort of holding it still. In a voice of careful neutrality, he said, "I've never seen anything like it. Excellent craftsmanship. You have an… ingenious mind."
"There cannot be another collection on earth like this. I design the devices and build the mechanisms, and a metalsmith makes the figures." Mace brought out another specimen. This one showed a woman with two men, each of them behaving in a most imaginative fashion. "I find
the work… exciting."
Lucien inhaled from the new bladder of gas, but it could not completely eliminate his distaste. Fortunately, Mace didn't look at his guest; he was too absorbed in admiring his little monstrosities. All Lucien had to do was make appropriately admiring remarks about the craftsmanship, with an occasional questions about unusual technical aspects.
When all of the devices were set on the table, they represented a gallery of sexual variations. Mace said in a roughened voice, "Help me wind them so all will operate at once."
Reluctantly Lucien complied, starting with a woman and a stallion. He hated touching the devices, but by ignoring what the figures represented, he managed his share of winding.
After the two men had worked their way from one end of the table to the other, there was perhaps ten seconds when all of the devices were working, filling the room with a chorus of mechanical buzzing. One of the figures—Lucien wasn't sure which—contained a small horn that crudely simulated bleats of rapture.
Mace stared at his prizes until the last one wound down. "I'm going to get one of the women downstairs," he said thickly. "Care to join me?"
Lucien bit back an honest reply. "No, thank you. I'm still dizzy from the gas."
Mace ushered his guest outside. "Dizziness passes quickly," he said as he locked the door. "If you need to lie down, the room across the hall is for guests."
Craving solitude, Lucien accepted the suggestion. The guest room was blessed quiet and dark. He found a chair by tripping over it and sat down. By the time he finished the last of the nitrous oxide, he was serene again. His mind drifted, afloat in a sea of unearned pleasure.
A rattle at the window roused him from lassitude. He glanced over and saw a lean black figure silhouetted against the glass like a human spider. An improbable sight; perhaps the gas was causing hallucinations.
The left-hand casement swung open, admitting a blast of frigid air along with a nimble human form. The burglar landed with a soft thump, then stood still, the labored sound of his breath filling the room.
A rational man would think twice about going after an intruder who might be armed, particularly if it wasn't even his own house. But Lucien was not rational at the moment. He rose and lunged at the burglar. He would have been successful if he hadn't bumped another chair in the darkness. It clattered to the floor, throwing him off-stride and alerting his quarry.
The intruder gave a sharp gasp of alarm, then dived out the window and vanished. Lucien blinked at the black rectangle of night sky and wondered if he had imagined the whole thing. But the window was certainly open. He leaned out and discovered a rope swaying two feet in front of him. Glancing up, he saw the dark shape of the burglar clambering onto the roof.
Driven by the same instinct that had sent him across the room, Lucien caught the rope and swung outdoors. As he climbed swiftly upward, the mental observer registered a bitter wind, but he felt no discomfort. The exhilaration of the drug still pulsed through his body, and he ascended as effortlessly as if he had wings. Even the awkward task of scrambling over the eaves onto the roof was accomplished with ease.
He released the rope and knelt on the flattened edge while he reconnoitered. The roof was shallow enough to walk on if care was used. Where was the burglar? Not to the right, where a broad expanse of slates stretched emptily. The fellow must have gone left, where a thrusting gable offered concealment.
Lucien's guess was confirmed when he realized that a faint slithering sound was the rope being pulled up and to the left. By the time he noticed, the end of the line was out of his reach.
The burglar must be just on the other side of the gable. Lucien swarmed upward, using the angle between main roof and gable to brace hands and feet and knees. As soon as he lifted his head above the peak of the gable, be was blasted by the full force of the wind. He ducked and steadied himself with a hand on the ridge pole while he looked for his quarry.
Though his black clothing rendering him almost invisible, the burglar was betrayed by his own swift movements. He had crossed Mace's roof and was halfway over the next house as well.