Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (15 page)

“What occurred on that day?”

“I kissed my wife goodbye on the dock at the Port of Hoboken.”

“Bound for the Great War?”

“Yes. On a ship full of soldiers. I remember a popular slogan, during the crossing of the Atlantic: 'Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken by Christmas!' There
is
something vaguely purgatorial about Hoboken, so I suppose it's not the unlikeliest place from which to enter the infernal regions.”

From above we heard a shrill whistle. It came intermittently. I found its source as I gazed up at the moon and the stars and the refracted haze of the city lights, longing for the outside world like a prisoner. There were broken panes of glass in the skylight. The sound we heard was the whistle of the wind.

The temperature fell and, as we approached the third floor landing, mist from our own exhales appeared. Miss Buxton took to hugging her rib cage for warmth, and I wished I still had two arms to do the same.

“What's that smell?” she asked.

“Which one?”

“The one that smells like . . . dung.”

“Ah, yes. Animal droppings, I suppose.”

“What sort of animal?”

“Any sort found in the Bronx Zoo. That's how I'd limit a guess inside these walls.”

On the third floor landing were scores of stacks of mason jars in neat rows, many of its columns taller than myself. The glass jars glinted from the lights overhead. There must've been a thousand jars all told.

Several rows or columns had crashed to the floor, and rising out of a mound of fragmented glass and the contents of the jars, which in each case appeared to be dirt or fertilizer, was a living tree. It stood not more than four feet high, naked of leaves and with an aspect of undernourishment. All those long roots I now took to be a cry of starvation. Miss Buxton held her mouth agape.

“How . . . ?” she said.

“There is sunlight here,” I pointed out, “and rain through the broken panes of glass overhead. A seed is all it would've taken to start growing—a seed and some dirt. Or fertilizer.”

“Dirt,” she repeated. “Fertilizer. In all these jars?”

I was about to speculate that Noah collected seeds, and had dropped one where the tree now stood, or that a bird had flown in through the broken skylight and deposited the seed there, but as I approached the tree, the true contents of the jars were revealed to me and appropriated my attention. I turned to call to our guide, who was by now halfway up the final flight of stairs, and I spotted more jars—hundreds and hundreds more—on the steps above, precariously lining the way. I opened my mouth to shout, but realized I hadn't the faintest notion as to what to say.

You see, Doctor Dunn, the jars contained pure excrement, possibly of human origin. Miss Buxton assumed as much, for she let out a terrific scream and retreated down the staircase in full panic . . .

Losing Faith in Our Guide

She descended nimbly, despite complete hysteria, until the second floor landing, where we'd shoved the office safe over the edge. There she ran out of path and tumbled—head over heels, as they say—into the chaos of debris left behind by the avalanche.

When I caught up to her, she lay on her back, more or less upside down upon the staircase, at the center of a spewed collection of tattered parasols from the Orient, one arm hugging a large bronze urn which had somehow survived the avalanche intact. She was moaning and whimpering with her head shaking from side to side as if in the throes of a febrile nightmare.

“Madness,” she mumbled. “Madness.”

“You are right about that,” I said, helping her to sit up. “Madness above us and from below. But we can't head down any longer. That option's out. We've blocked our own retreat, you must recall.”

“There is shite in those jars!” She pointed upwards. “Human shite!”

Shite
. Irish slang for
shit
. I supposed that she couldn't quite bring herself to employ the usual American vulgarism and had substituted a similar word she'd heard the mick robbers use.

“It would appear so, but to be fair, we don't know that for a certainty.”

“I know it, you know it”—footsteps approached from above us—“and he damn well knows it!” She pointed a finger up at Noah Langley.

He stood towering above us at the edge of the second floor landing. “If she's not too badly off, Trenowyth, just leave her there, and come along. We're wasting too much time.”

“Out of the question,” I said.

“It's your feces!” she screamed at Noah. “Admit it! Yours! Your sister's! You've been saving it up for years, haven't you! Just as you save anything and everything else! You are the sickest—”

“Cora, please,” I said.

“Most vile—”

“Remember your profession.”

She turned to me. “You should've listened to me! Yes, listened to a frightened woman! We should've retreated when we had the chance!”

“It's only dog feces,” Noah said. “I assure you.”

“Liar!” she said.

“I've plans to dig a garden out back, you see—”

“Oh, spare me!” she cried.

“—and I'll be needing fertilizer.”

“Shut up, you mad fool! Just shut the feck up!”

“Cora!” I said. “Please don't repeat anything you've heard the burglars say. Particularly those two micks.”

“We really should move along,” Noah said, unfazed by the woman. “There's another staircase—the old servants's staircase—at the back of the house.” He did not need to describe the threat more. Should the burglars, the ones with their heads still attached to their bodies, find that other staircase, then they might yet intercept us, or beat us to Elizabeth Langley and lie in wait.

We hastened after Noah again. But with the extent of his mental illness suggested by those mason jars (an ironic observation in retrospect, given my own, present circumstances), following after the man no longer struck me as a reasonable course of action. So I paused on the second floor landing and tried the door to the hallway.

It opened easily enough, but revealed only blackness within. I might as well have been staring at a curtain of sealskin.

“What are you thinking?” Miss Buxton asked.

“I'll tell you.” I whipped out the flashlight that I'd been storing in my pocket since our tunnel escape and switched on its beam. “You and I are going to set off on our own.”

“That beam is dying,” she noted.

“It
is
growing weak, I'll admit.” I switched off the beam and stuffed the flashlight back inside my pocket. “Come. I'm going to wrest that lantern away from Noah, and with it, you and I will be off.”

“Are you sure—”

“No harm done. He'll have another lantern stashed somewhere for himself.”

“Where would we go? What would we do?”

“Find our own way outside. And in the meantime, avoid every other living thing inside this madhouse.” I proceeded to race up the staircase as best I could given the riot of matter to avoid and the shake and sway of the steps.

“No!” Cora said. “Wait!” I halted a few steps short of the third floor landing, where the tree stood and its roots ran thickly. Noah had just begun to climb the next flight. She caught up to me. “I lost my head. But I've got it back now.”

“I suppose we can't say the same for Cormac.”

“It wouldn't be right to abandon the Langleys.”

“No?” I said. That was when the staircase collapsed.

Marooned

It began with a sharp crack, like a rifle shot, and the staircase heaved. Piles of clutter toppled beside us, upon us, behind us, above us. Columns of mason jars on the landing shattered. We gripped the railing for balance.

“It's collapsing!” Miss Buxton cried. “The whole thing!”

“Quick!” I said. “Through that door!” I pointed to the door leading into the third floor hallway. We were a mere four or five steps below the landing, and yet now stood knee-deep in debris and could no longer see any steps.

“Right behind you!” she said.

But it was no easy task, certainly not in women's shoes, climbing atop all that loose, shifting matter. When I made the landing and looked back for her, she'd fallen onto her belly. I bent down to reach for her hand, but the staircase heaved again, pitching me off the landing so that my head came to rest beside Miss Buxton's feet. It was from that vantage that I watched in horror as the flight of stairs we were sprawled upon detached from the second floor landing with a great screech of wood and nails.

The bottom end of our renegade flight plummeted so that its steps became twice as steep as before the detachment. It was all we could do to hold tight to the balustrade. A long parade of stored objects slid off the end of the stairway and down, down into the black abyss which had opened up directly beneath.

“What now?!” Miss Buxton shouted over a concatenation of crashing inventory.

Before I could respond, the stairway dropped lower again—with a most violent jerk. I lost my grip at the base of one of the balusters and bumped and slid my way toward the abyss.

About halfway down the stairs, I somehow latched onto another baluster. Miss Buxton had lost her grip too and slammed into me. She would've slid on past except that I managed to scissor her around the waist with my legs. We dared not move until the stairway ceased lurching, and when it did, the angle of the steps had sharpened to just short of vertical.

“Climb!” I said.

She did not hesitate. She employed all four limbs, using the balusters like a ladder. Myself, I had but three limbs, as well as a sore foot, injured by Noah's deadfall trap. I could not keep apace with the female. Having only one arm required me to perform a chin-up with each baluster, and you must admit—if you've ever tried it, Doctor Dunn—that a one-handed chin-up is somehow more than twice as difficult as when achieved two-handed. My arm grew weary anon. By the time Miss Buxton reached the landing, I had progressed a mere five or six steps—with another six or seven to go—and my biceps muscle cramped and burned almost unbearably.

I could not lift myself up by even one more baluster. Could barely hold on. I was marooned on a vertical peninsula in the air—however briefly it threatened to remain aloft.

The staircase groaned and shook again, and the landing above me loosened from its moorings and tilted in my direction. Miss Buxton nearly spilled over the side, whilst mason jars, one after another, rolled past her and dropped off the edge to become little missiles aimed at me.

Without an extra arm to shield me, the jars kept striking my shoulders, neck, cranium. They threatened to knock me off my perch, or cause a blackout, so that I would fall to my death. And along with the jars fell a glittery rain of broken glass, mixed with some dark matter, which my nose instantly recognized as bits of Noah's—and perhaps quite literally Noah's—stored, stale excrement.

Miss Buxton kept to the edge of the landing. Her gaze shifted between myself, below, and what I took to be a search for Noah somewhere above.

“Go!” I shouted. “Save yourself!”

Her instinct for self-preservation finally manifested. She dashed away, and soon the door to the third floor hallway flew open. A moment later, I could see the top of her head as it hovered in the doorframe facing outwards.

An audience of one
, I thought,
to watch me die
.

In contrast to Miss Buxton, I gave up on life, as I had once before whilst trapped in No Man's Land and under fire during the Battle of the Canal du Nord. But I felt more at peace this time because this time Annabel was dead. A vision of her came to mind. She was not sickly, but in perfect health again, white gown flowing on a summer's breeze, smiling a lover's smile at me. I determined to die with that image in mind. Brain eaters be damned, I would simply let go of the balustrade and fall . . .

But another jar, with terribly rude timing, struck me on the head, and when I looked up instinctively, I found Noah Langley at the edge of the landing with a rope in hand—or so I thought at first. In actuality, he'd severed a long root from the tree with a piece of broken mason jar. He'd formed a loop at one end, tied a slipknot, and now, like a cowboy, whirled the loop end above his head, preparing to cast it down to me.

“Trenowyth!” he called. “Snap out of it, and slip this under both arms!”

His first toss missed me completely. The second grazed my shoulder before drifting out of reach. On his third try, the loop fell over my head. I wrapped my legs tightly around the balustrade so that I could briefly let go of my grip and wriggle the loop below my armpits. With a tug, Noah cinched it tight. Several nodules of the root dug into my skin, and when he leaned back to hoist my body up, it felt as if barbed wire were squeezing me.

He lacked the strength to lift me on his own, but Miss Buxton came back out onto the landing, and with her assistance they began to hoist me, inch by inch. The pressure around my chest was smothering.

Another loud crack from the staircase preceded more swaying. It was the worst yet, and I began to swing like one of Noah's clock pendulums.