Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (11 page)

“I don't dare remove it,” Cora said. She'd procured an English horse saddle from the rubble, its seat now a pillow for the impaled man's head. “It would be agonizing, and I'm not at all sure we could staunch the bleeding.”

“Must you be so helpful, Miss Buxton?” I said. Howard, using the butt of his flashlight, walloped me dizzy on the temple.

“I'll risk it,” Cormac said, “I'll risk it.”

“You heard him,” I said, earning another wallop.

“No,” Howard said, “it stays put for now.”

“But Howie—” Cormac tried to sit up, but couldn't manage it.

“We take that thing out, you'd need a surgeon right away, and we're not done here yet, not by a long shot.” He turned to Willie. “Find the man that flask of laudanum we left down in the basement, would you. Trenowyth's flask. That'll kill the pain in no time.”

“Oh, Christ!” Willie said. “Not the wild cats again!”

“Take the flashlight, leave the gun with me.”

“I'd prefer the gun.” But Willie departed without it, skirting the side of the mound, asking rhetorically, “Now which way is that fucking trail?”

With Willie gone, with Brady hunting Noah upstairs, and Cormac virtually incapacitated, the numbers favored the hostages for the first time. Howard seemed to recognize this too, for he backed away from me to a safe distance.

“Any progress with that code?” he asked, gun barrel and gaze fast upon me.

I shook my head. “It's complicated.”

“Hurry up about it, or else screw the code. We'll join Brady upstairs and hunt down Langley together instead.”

“Hunt him down? In here?” My eyes took in the beastly realm that we'd all been swallowed up by, or what could be glimpsed of it at the edge of darkness. “Don't kid yourself. Bre'r Rabbit's in the briar patch.”

“Says you. Decipher that codebook over the next hour—That's one hour, morphine for brains!—or we're going after Langley. And without any deadweight to slow us down. Follow?”

I nodded. My eyes dropped back down into the codebook.

Cora took the pulse of the wounded mick via the carotid artery, borrowing Howard's pocket watch to measure time. “It's one hundred and forty-four beats per minute,” she soon announced. “The blood loss is not too great then. He could survive for several hours in this condition.”

“Could?” Cormac said.

I peeked at him, watched the blood seep from his impaling and from a lacerated forehead, that oozing redness so vivid, so lurid against white-dusted skin. A bit of it kept dribbling into his brow, only to be mopped away by Cora. His breathing had grown labored, eyes glassy.

Yes, that foul-mouthed mick had been rendered useless, and would remain so sans surgery. It was just Howard now—he and his gun—against me. I would never face better odds in mounting an attack.

The Sister

With the gas lantern beside me on the staircase to serve as my reading light, I held the option to sweep us all into darkness in one motion, before Howard could get his first shot off. Yet, he seemed a fair marksman—having brought down the chandelier in one try—and thus likely capable of hitting me through the dark with that bullet, or with his second or third shot.

Another concern was that a lit lantern overturned in this setting of aged glut—with its snowpack of dust, its decay and desiccation—risked a fire. Nay, a monumental conflagration! That Noah had dropped the lantern without incendiary result while making his escape meant nothing, for the deadfall trap's stir had extinguished the lantern's flame as a giant's breath might a birthday candle.

“The statue?” Cormac said in a weak voice to Howard.

“We'll find it,” he said. “When Willie gets back, or if Brady—”

“Howie!” came a muffled voice from somewhere distant overhead. “You down there?”

“Brady?” Howard called, lowering his mask. “Where the hell you been? Did you—”

“I lost the little bugger! It's blacker than a pint of Guinness up here!”

“Son of a bitch!” Howard said. Cormac repeated the oath under his breath.

“Thought I had him cornered!” Brady said. “But he disappeared somehow!”

“Well, get your ass back down here! Now!'

“That's just it, I can't!”

“What d'ya mean?” Howard's gaze shifted for an instant from me to the ceiling.

“Can't find the staircase! I'm lost!”

“Lost? So just follow the sound of my voice!”

“Okay, then!” The two miscreants proceeded to shout each other's names, back and forth, one after the other, every few seconds.

“You're getting warmer!” Howard said after a time.

I pondered Noah's next move. Unbeknownst to the robbers, a secret exit to the street could be found somewhere within this vile labyrinth. On the day that he'd appeared at my law firm, Noah had used it to evade the authorities who'd come to evict him. But its location was unknown to me.

Could Noah access his secret exit without drawing the attention of the robbers?

Would he? To fetch the police?

Or would he instead scurry up to his sister's room? To hide with her perhaps?

My hope was for the latter option. If the police came pounding, then I had no doubt the remaining hostages would be executed before the robbers sought to flee. Cormac had threatened as much already—and before the killings. Now we were witnesses to murder, Miss Buxton and I, twice over, a child's and a police officer's no less.

Needless to say, prudence meant assuming that Noah Langley would summon the law, and so I resolved to attack the captors—or to escape them with Miss Buxton—just as soon as I'd formed a feasible plan.

“How's it coming?” Howard asked me.

“A pen would help,” I said. “To take notes.”

To Miss Buxton, who was still tending Cormac, he said: “You. Find him one.” He swung his gaze back to me. “What've you learned so far?”

I swallowed hard. “Give me a moment more.”

“I don't like the sound of that.”

“Just a moment more, I think I've made a start at last . . .”

I focused on Noah's writing with true purpose now—not in desperate hope that I might actually crack the code, but merely to concoct a lie Howard would believe, to allege a pattern I'd found in Noah's scrambled scribblings, a little specious progress to help ensure the progression of the lives of the hostages.

Brady's “Howard!” grew louder, nearer. Howard's “Brady!” became “Mickey!” for sport, then “Paddy!” then “Piker!” then “Green nigger!” and so on.

Meanwhile, Cora gamely sifted through the rubble for a fountain pen, whilst I hit on the idea of identifying the most common symbol in the notebook and declaring it to be the letter,
E
, which is the most commonly used letter in the English language. I was about to declare my bogus finding when Cora, who was by now searching on her hands and knees, suddenly froze.

“What is it?” Howard asked. She glanced at him, at me, back to Howard.

“The Laughing Buddha.” She pushed aside a bundle of old newspapers to reveal where it lay half-buried between a pair of moose antlers.

“Good work, Doll. Bring it here.” Howard turned the statue upside down to survey the coded inscription written on its base. A moment later, he tossed it high in the air and shot it to bits on the way down. “Langley!” he cried to the ceiling. “You're dead! You hear me? Dead!”

“Dead, dead,” echoed the antechamber.

To our party he said in a bitterly measured voice: “There was nothing on it. No writing, no markings of any kind at the bottom of the statue.”

“B'Jaysus!” Cormac said. “We've been hoodwinked!”

Howard tossed a piece of the splintered statue over a corseted department store dummy and into the darkness beyond. “It was all a ruse to spring his trap on us. The sneaky little bastard. I really will kill him for this. Wring his scrawny neck with my bare hands.”

“Not until—” Cormac began.

“Yes, of course,” Howard said. “Not until.” He went back to calling out: “Brady!”

“What about the codebook?” Cormac thumbed toward where I held it open in my lap. “A crock of shite too?”

“Most probably.”

“We need that wee bastard. To make him talk. But how do we nab him now?”

“Only one sure way I can think of—nab the sister upstairs.”

“Right,” Cormac said and coughed. “He turns himself over to us, or”—he grimaced in pain—“or she gets it. Then he tells us where the coins are, or they both get it.”

“He's got a head start,” Howard said, “and he knows every inch of this dump, but it can't be easy transporting a cripple. We get up there fast enough, we'll hear ole Noah dragging his sister across the floor. But if we don't, then they'll settle into some hidey hole and wait us out. We'd never find them.”

A gong rang, the sound gentle but not dim. I'd heard it once before in Noah's presence.

“What's that?” Cora said just before the gong rang a second time.

“Noah's sister, Elizabeth,” I said. “It's how she summons her brother. She pulls a cord in her bedroom and it rings down here. There's a series of pulleys and cranks buried in the walls. When the house still had servants it only rang in the kitchen, where there's a lever to indicate which room pulled the cord. But Noah, who used to be an engineer of some kind, rigged up the system so that a gong rings throughout the building, so that he can hear her summons from any room in the house.”

“She must've heard the great crash when the trap was sprung,” Cora said, “and the gunshots. She's worried about her brother now.”

“Excellent!” Howard stood, dusted himself off. “It means he hasn't got to her yet. It means there's still time for us to catch up to them before they can disappear into hiding.”

From high above us on the staircase we heard footsteps descending and Brady's voice. “Finally, the fecking stairs!”

“Stay put, Brady!” Howard called. “We're coming up!” He aimed the gun at my chest and cocked the hammer. “Well, some of us, anyway.”

Walking the Point

Instinct, or the life force within me, swept the gas lantern off its perch without consideration for the potential consequences. At the same time, I pitched forward in a somersault to avoid gunfire. I was still in a ball of motion when I noticed the revolver hadn't thundered and that a curtain of darkness hadn't fallen as I'd intended.

A spark from the lantern—and perhaps a bit of spewed kerosene—had almost instantly set ablaze one of the old newspaper bundles. It was bright as a campfire circle by the time I came to a stop on my fanny and saw Howard seeing me. For a moment lasting an eternity I was sure I was dead. But to my surprise, he uncocked the hammer of the revolver and lowered the weapon to his side.

“Notify Ringling Brothers. We have ourselves a one-armed acrobat.” He dropped his mask below his chin. “I wasn't really going to shoot you dead, Trenowyth. At least not yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I've thought of another use for you, now that it's a good bet that codebook you've got is a crock of shit too, and we're going after the sister instead. It's only Cormac who's staying behind.” From amid the debris at his feet, he picked up an artist's paintbrush, lit the bristles over the newspaper bundle, and used it as a taper to relight the gas lantern. “Now put out that damn fire you caused, before the whole building burns to the ground.”

But Miss Buxton had already removed her blue fox fur coat, and she proceeded to smother the newspaper bundle with it. I was left to stamp out a few stray flames licking up the dust nearby. Her coat was by now filthy and charred. She tsk-tsked at it mournfully, but slipped back into the garment, due to the chill.

“What use have you for me now?” I asked Howard.

“What use? We just had two tons of crap dropped onto our heads. And lest we forget, Langley had a crossbow rigged up and waiting to shoot arrows at intruders. How many more deadly surprises has he, do you think?”

I shrugged. “Quite a few, I'd say.”

“On every floor, I'd say. Maybe in every room. So guess who's going to lead our little search party upstairs. You, Trenowyth. And you'll be well out in front of the rest of us too, so that whatever booby trap goes off next, you'll be the only one who gets it. I think they call it 'walking the point' in the Army, am I right?”

“Yes,” I said and thought of Max Beasley, a comrade from the war who'd stepped on an anti-tank mine while walking the point. The only sign of him afterwards had been his helmet. I started for the stairs.

Howard kicked an empty tin can that sailed by my kneecap. “We never should've slit that newsie's throat.”

“Aye,” Cormac said. “He'd of made a fine sacrificial lamb too.”

“But at the time we had no way of knowing we'd need live bodies.”

I scooped up Noah's codebook from where I'd dropped it at the base of the staircase and faced Howard. “Are you sure you wouldn't rather have me keep working on this code? I've made a real breakthrough in the last few minutes. Honestly.”

“You'd say anything to avoid walking the point, wouldn't you, war hero?”

“No, really, if you'd just let me—”