Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (19 page)

“Let's go ask the ole bastard, shall we?” The voice came from behind me and spoke with an Irish brogue. Brady!

I turned to find in the darkness just a glint of metal protruding beyond the opening to the dumbwaiter shaft. That blasted revolver!

Recaptured in the Wine Cellar

“Flat on the floor now,” Brady said, “and with your ears to the stone.” He waited until we'd complied before maneuvering himself a portion at a time from the dumbwaiter shaft and into the wine cellar. It was while my head lay upon the cold, paved stone near the candle Miss Buxton had placed between us that I discovered how that cat managed to survive trapped in the wine cellar, if indeed it were trapped. For it was easy from such a low vantage to spot hundreds of mouse droppings.

“What now?” she whispered.

“I don't know.” I wasn't even considering our options. I was considering whether I had any fight left in me.

“So it's only two, is it?” Brady said, his thick boots stepping into view. “Now where might the wee one be?” Without an invitation, Miss Buxton sat up, and I followed her lead. “Far enough,” Brady said. He shifted his gaze from us to the darker recesses of the wine cellar. “Well? Where is he?”

“Top floor,” she answered. “With his sister.”

“His sister?” Brady glared at the ceiling a moment. “Arah beggorah! And the notebook with him?”

“Correct,” she said.

“And I should believe you?”

“Believe whatever you'd like.”

He smirked. “Let me see that brooch you were going on about, Lass.”

She dug into her pocket and handed over the gem. He stuffed the barrel of the revolver down the back of his pants and bent over to pick up the candle from off the floor, but never did take hold of it. For a gun shot rang out, and Brady fell forward.

Miss Buxton screamed. I snatched the revolver from Brady's pants as he writhed on the floor, and I turned toward the sound of the shot, the dumbwaiter shaft. I could see nothing but the dark, not even a glint of metal as before.

Miss Buxton was still screaming when, from inside the shaft, a flashlight switched on its beam. The strong light half-blinded me, yet revealed the gun which had just fired as it pointed in our direction from the opening to the shaft. Strangely, its barrel was emitting thick black smoke.

Miss Buxton continued to scream. She'd turned hysterical again.

“He's not dying,” Noah Langley said. “I only shot him in the buttocks.”

A 200 Year-Old Antique

Much like himself, Noah's weapon was an antique, yet still very much in working order. Black smoke had arisen when it fired because the gun and its ammunition predated the invention of smokeless propellants.

“It's almost two hundred years old,” he said. “A silver-mounted officer's pistol with a double barrel for multiple shots. It belonged to my grandfather. Some English duke or other had presented it to him as a gift while in London. I keep it by my bedside upstairs. Unfortunately, I've only three rounds left now.”

Brady lay on his left side on the floor, moaning. His pants I'd unbuckled and yanked down to mid thigh, for Miss Buxton was attempting to staunch the bleeding of his right buttock using dessicated old strips of newspaper. His hands we had already bound behind his back using the twine from another magazine bundle. His legs, likewise, had been tied at the ankles. Trussed like a pig on a spit, in other words.

“How is your sister?” I asked Noah.

“Much comforted by my visit, but no doubt anxious for my return, for a resolution to this unpleasant and precarious predicament, whether we escape the house together, expel these killers and would-be thieves . . . or eliminate them.”

“That'll be the day,” Brady said.

“Enough out of you,” I told him. “Or else we'll leave you sitting upright on that buttock where you can't move.”

“Were you able to hide Elizabeth on your own?” Cora asked Noah.

“Not very well,” he said. “As I've said, I need Trenowyth's brawn. She's behind a locked door now, at least. There are twelve rooms on the top floor, mostly small, servants's bedrooms, and I've locked every single door on that floor—including the closets—just in case we aren't the first ones up there.”

I wasn't sure whom he feared, or feared more—the robbers or those bizarre, ululating creatures we'd heard in the antechamber—but I said: “Good thinking, Noah. Anyone would have a devil of a time finding her now.”

“Perhaps you should tell us where she's hidden?” Miss Buxton said to Noah. “In case we're separated again?”

Noah glanced down at Brady. “In due time.”

“Yes,” I said, “better to discuss the matters before us in private. Let's be off.”

“Shouldn't we gag him first?” Noah said.

“No. Let him cry out.”

“Why?” Miss Buxton asked.

“In due time,” I said. “In due time.” Because I had the revolver and Noah his ancient flintlock pistol, I handed Cora a buck knife in its sheath, which I'd removed from Brady's belt. “Here, but I pray you won't need it.” She slipped the blade into one of the pockets of her mink.

“Mind pulling up me pants before you go, Lass?” Brady said. As she was doing so, he added: “You can pull them down again later, when we're alone.” I kicked him in the head for it. He sat up, his pants still unbuckled, grimacing less from the blow, I'll assume, than from the pain of sitting with a wounded buttock, and said to yours truly: “You should kill me, you know that.”

“I suppose that's your way of saying that the mercy we've shown you won't be reciprocated, should you somehow manage to turn the tables? That you still intend to kill us once you have the coins?”

“Intend?” he said. “More than intend, Plonker. Wait and see.”

I double-checked the twine securing the robber's hands and feet before moving to the door and opening it. Blackness.

“There's a lamp fixed high on the wall across from the door,” Noah said, and I used one of the half-candles to light the gas. A narrow set of winding steps made of stone led upwards. I held the door open for the others.

Noah exited, flashlight in hand. Miss Buxton, on her way out, left the other half-candle on the floor beside Brady—
Merciful womankind!
I thought—and then grabbed the bottle of wine that I'd selected earlier from a wine rack. As she trailed up the stairs after Noah, I took a last look at our captive. He'd lowered himself to his left side again, and he met my gaze with a glower.

“You killed me brother,” he said. I did not bother to correct him.

Instead, I shut the door and proceeded up the steps. No sooner had I begun when Miss Buxton hustled by me down the steps. “The brooch, Miles! The diamond brooch! It skittered away from that robber when Noah took his shot. I shouldn't have trouble retrieving it, though.”

“Oh, dear,” I said, “we mustn't leave a cluster of shiny, little rocks behind. Not even when our lives hang in the balance.” She made no comment, but continued on her way. Yet a worry struck me that I'd just earned myself another cockeyed disquisition of one sort or another.

“So why did we not gag that man?” Noah asked as we proceeded upwards.

“What would be the point?”

“To prevent his comrades from finding him, of course.”

“But they must already know that he went down the shaft. And if we let the man scream and holler, it might just encourage the others to mount a rescue.”

“Ah,” he said. “I'm beginning to see your logic now.”

By this point, I could hear Miss Buxton racing up the steps behind me. I noticed, when she was at my side, that she did not offer the brooch to Noah, but displayed it to me with a wink before dropping it back into its original hiding place in the mink.

“See what logic?” she said.

“Trenowyth actually
wants
the others to rescue that man down there,” Noah said. “For that might help clear the way for us to the top floor, to Elizabeth, and to my secret exit from this house. Isn't that right?”

“Yes,” I said. “And yet I'm considering now whether it wouldn't be far more prudent of us to pry open one of the windows on the ground floor, and exit that way.”

“No,” he said. “I've set up booby traps, you see, at each one of the ground floor windows to guard against break-ins.”

“How long would it take to disarm one of them?”

“Too long, considering Elizabeth.”

“But given the collapse of the staircase,” I said, “the monstrous noise it made, there's more than a fair chance that the city's rescue teams have already mobilized outside your house.”

“This neighborhood is hardly a priority anymore.”

“I say they're outside now. Attempting to break-in at this very moment. For this is no ordinary household, and the entire city knows it. It's regarded as a public health hazard by now.”

“All because of those rumors in the newspapers! Those lies!”

“And I'll bet police officers are on site too, especially considering the disappearance of one of their own this evening. Thus, it seems likely that we could secure Elizabeth's safety within minutes of—”

“No, no!” he said. “ 'Likely' isn't good enough! And besides, what if the other robbers are up on the fourth floor already? Busting down locked doors sequentially?”

“It's more likely Willie is attending to Howard's wounds.”

“Have you noticed we outnumber them now?”

“Only if you count the woman,” I said.

“And why not?” Miss Buxton asked, and I felt, more than saw, her smoldering gaze.

“Given you are the woman, point taken.”

“We possess two guns now,” Noah said, “and they have none.”

“But a mere nine rounds of ammunition between us.”

“You can't disarm the booby traps on your own, Trenowyth. Not safely.”

“I won't subject Miss Buxton to armed combat. Not when it's avoidable. We'll stay down here until the authorities arrive.”

Noah halted just shy of the last step, turned a shoulder to me, and raised his arm until the flashlight beam hit me square in the face.

“Aren't you forgetting who else may be lurking down here?”

Kitchen

Approximately 11:00 PM

There had been no need to ask Noah where the steps would lead us, given what my nostrils had already begun to detect from outside the door to the wine cellar. We emerged from the steps one by one into the very heart of the kitchen and the most damnable effluvium yet. Miss Buxton and I both succumbed to fits of involuntary coughs, hid our faces behind our sleeves.

The worst of a fetid
mélange
of emanations I found instantly recognizable. Perhaps anyone would. Rotting flesh.

Its origin was, for the moment, out of sight. For we were passing through a veritable produce graveyard. Ancient fruits and vegetables swarmed the countertops and burst from open cupboards and drawers and teemed from stacked boxes and crates—white with mold, black with death, growing strange appendages. The oldest botanicals were first cousins with compost. Much of the rest had been nibbled upon by man, animal, or insect. Likely all three.

“Very well, Noah,” I said as soon as I'd mastered my coughing jag. “Upstairs it will be, to rescue Elizabeth. But I insist upon—Oh dear God, the odor!—a short detour through your medieval armory. If we're going up against those robbers again, we're going armed to the teeth.”

“Agreed,” he said.

“The smell is dreadful!” Miss Buxton said. “What is the meaning of this, Sir?”

“It appears I've inadvertently left something out to spoil. Are you quite all right?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, her nose still in the crook of an arm. “But please, let's hurry along.”

“Hadn't you both mentioned you were hungry earlier? I'm famished. Let's take a moment to rummage through the cabinets.”

“No!” Miss Buxton and I said in perfect simultaneity.

“It won't take long. And we really must keep up our strength. Why, here's a pumpkin. I eat them raw. How about you?”

The gourd had collapsed inwards upon itself, as if having melted on the countertop. “How many Halloweens has that seen?” I wondered. “It's barely recognizable. It's an ex-sphere.”

“It's putrid, is what it is,” Miss Buxton said.

Noah studied the pumpkin. “Hmm. I suppose you're right. But the seeds should still be edible.”

“No, thank you!” she said.

“None for me either,” I said.

“Pity. It was such a beauty when I first obtained it.” He put his pistol down on the countertop and began to rifle through his stores. He held out to us an open jar of wheat bran infested with mealworms. We shook our heads in unison. He scooped up a handful for himself, oblivious to the ratio of cereal versus insecta, and munched on it as he continued with his search. He picked up a head of cabbage, harvested during the Taft administration, it seemed to me, and held it out for Miss Buxton. “Cabbages are very forgiving, my dear. The outside may be spoiled, whilst the inside remains quite comestible. Go ahead, take it with you.”