Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (22 page)

“Okay,” said Willie.

“So we've struck ourselves a bargain then?” I asked.

Miss Buxton held up two crossed fingers. “On the up and up, I swear.”

“Did you hear that, Noah?” He did not respond to me, but stared at the ceiling as if preparing to float upwards toward it and through it. Moments later, he did just that (if you believe in that sort of thing), for his hand went limp in my grasp and his eyes focused on eternity.

A Dear Old Friend Reappears

Noah's valiant heart had only just stopped beating when Miss Buxton handed me the notebook. “Tell us where to go,” she said, “and be quick about it.”

“Go to hell,” I said, tossing Noah's scribblings back. They bounced off her mink and fell on the floor between us.

“You first then.” She leveled the revolver at my forehead using both hands, even though one arm was broken. “And then the old hag upstairs, if that's your choice.”

“You'll kill us both in the end, no matter what I do. I just wanted to send Noah off with a little hope left.”

“He was never that stupid. You're being stupid, wanting it now instead of later.”

“It won't be now,” I said. “Torture is next, now that your threats don't work.”

“You're already being tortured, by the looks of you. Those glassy eyes. Sweating like a pig in this freezing room.”

“I'm starting to cramp too.”

“Don't think I won't put you out of your misery. There's a fortune in gold flatware not far from here, as you know. Not to mention the diamond brooch in my pocket, and a rack of mink coats upstairs. We could walk away right now, this very minute, with some rather spectacular consolation prizes.”

“And who knows what treasures we'd find on our own,” Brady added, “with another hour or two's stumbling about.”

Willie said: “By the way, a couple hours ago, Howie and Brady and me wandered into that old, Egyptian coffin the papers mentioned. Jewels on its lid gotta be worth plenty. Maybe the mummy inside too.”

“This gun's getting heavy,” she said to me. “I'm about to use it.”

“Be my guest,” I said.

“Wait,” Brady said. The three robbers huddled together out of my earshot by the suits of armor. They stood where they could keep their eyes on me throughout their sotto voce chatter.

I gazed down at Noah, that
dirty, little Gunga Din
, as the woman had called him an hour or two earlier—out of begrudging respect. For hidden amongst his countless possessions had been great stores of courage, guile, resilience, and humanity.

His life had known much loneliness and confusion, to be sure, and been so very diminished by his miserliness and by the untold tons of pointless accumulations. Had he known any peace at all? Until now?

The robbers strode back to me. Willie produced my silver flask of laudanum. My heart skipped a beat.

He unscrewed the top, took a swig, and smacked his lips with exaggerated pleasure.

“Ah! Good stuff!” He held the flask out to me. “Baby want his bottle?” I reached for the flask, but he pulled it back. “Ungh-ungh-ungh.” His eyes dropped to the floor.

I picked up the notebook.

The Music Room

Approximately Midnight

“Well, Trenowyth?” Brady was playing snooker versus Miss Buxton, a homemade cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, when I glanced up from Noah's notebook.

“To the music room,” I said. In an instant, it seemed, the crash of the billiard balls ceased, the pool sticks lay upon the snooker table, and all three robbers stood hovering over me, where I sat on the floor.

“The coins are there?” Willie asked.

“They're there,” I said. He rewarded me with the laudanum, one solitary swig—my second in total—before he seized the flask from my grip. Miss Buxton took a puff from Brady's cigarette (just to gall me, I think, with more unladylike conduct).

“What floor?” she asked.

“It doesn't say,” I said. “We'll have to hunt for it.”

“Damn it all,” she said.

The three robbers huddled together again by the suits of armor. I assumed that their agenda this time included how best to protect themselves against Noah's creatures as we moved about the mansion, while at the same time safeguarding me, their captive guide. Perhaps Howard was another topic.

Miss Buxton handed Brady the revolver. She transferred the flintlock to her good hand. Willie set aside the heavy crossbow in favor of a bastard sword,
I believe it's called. He donned some chain mail and a Norman helmet too, much to Brady's amusement. For good measure, they each tucked away one of the daggers that they'd tossed off the snooker table and onto the floor in order to play pool.

“On your feet,” Miss Buxton ordered me.

But I did not budge. “Another swig from the flask first.”

“Give him another, Willie,” Brady said.

“Better yet,” she said, “let's have him finish off the flask, all at once. If he's got any fight left in him, he won't after that.”

Willie and Brady hoisted me up off the floor and prepared to forcibly pour the laudanum down my throat, but I snatched away the flask.

“I'll do it myself, if you please.” And in one long gulp I downed what remained of my sweet addiction. The amount was considerable, and it rather burned my throat, the tincture being ninety percent alcohol.

At first, I knew, the laudanum would quash nearly all of my aches and pains and reanimate me so that I would feel as fresh as most people do within thirty minutes of waking in the morning. More than that, I would feel an unwarranted sense of optimism and invulnerability.

I wasn't sure of what so much laudanum downed so quickly would do to me eventually, but given my high tolerance for opium, I did not anticipate that it would incapacitate me greatly. None of the robbers were fellow acolytes of the poppy, I decided.

“Brady leads the way,” Miss Buxton said to me. “You behind him. Willie behind you.”

“Yeah,” Willie said. “And you'll feel the point of my sword in your back, if you don't keep pace. Worse, if you stray.”

“Understood,” I said.

A first flush of vibrancy from the laudanum coursed through me as the search for the music room commenced. Brady probed ahead with Noah's flashlight. Miss Buxton took up the rear with the kerosene lamp.

Three rooms on the ground floor turned up that I hadn't seen earlier: a salon for ladies, based on the décor; a terribly musty two-story library; and a fairly small art gallery, where the robbers delighted in having located more treasure, this time in the form of early Renaissance masterpieces, including a triptych that I verified with my own eyes as having been signed by Sandro Botticelli.

Every now and then, the robbers—mostly the two males—would needle me on how completely I'd been duped by Miss Buxton's role-playing.

“She stroked you something shocking, she did,” I remember Brady saying.

It had been a clever ruse. The robbers had known that, once inside the mansion, their relationship with Noah would turn adversarial, to say the least. So they had presented him with another compatriot in captivity besides me. Their hope, undoubtedly, had been that if Noah could not be persuaded through physical violence and other threats to reveal the location of the Lydian croesids, then he would succumb to Miss Buxton's charms and confide in her as to where the coins hid. The stratagem hadn't worked, but it might've, and their plan had the benefit also of saddling Noah and myself with a woman to protect—a woman clever enough to sabotage us at regular intervals and not draw suspicion.

“What a clod you are,” she said to me from behind as we made for the servants's staircase. “I was sure you'd catch on. You had enough chances. Because the men on my side kept getting bested by that sly, smelly little hoarder, and I kept having to bail them out, or steer them straight. Ain't it the truth, Brady?”

“Don't know what you're going on about, Lass.”

“The hell you don't,” she said. “Remember when you'd fallen for the old bugger's trap near the staircase, and I kept jabbering away so that you could relocate us, and capture us again? When you lost your wits over those flying dead dogs, and got stranded in the dark, and I called out to you, to let you know my general direction? When I helped you to flush out Trenowyth and me from our hiding place in the grandfather clocks? By scolding you for those idiotic torches that might've burnt the entire fucking house down?”

“How did you get away from us then?” Willie asked.

But she kept on as if he hadn't spoken. “When I told Howie not to shoot Trenowyth dead because he'd deciphered the code? When I shouted at you, Brady, in that room full of mirrors, trying to help you locate us by voice? When I screamed bloody murder after we'd slipped through that closet with the double entry and over into the next room, so that we wouldn't disappear on you again through the dumbwaiter shaft? When I slipped back inside the wine cellar to cut your wrists free and leave you the knife? When—”

“Enough, m'wee doll.” Brady was laughing by now. “You've made your point. All the men in our crew are eejits. And Trenowyth too.”

“Feck, yeah,” she said.

We reached the staircase and began to climb. On the second floor, we heard a noise from down the hall and halted. It was a steady noise, as if someone were rapping upon a wooden door.

“Must be Howie,” Brady said.

“Don't think so,” Willie said. “Last I saw him, he was heading up the staircase to the top floor. He thought that old lady might have some soap and water up there to clean the acid with.”

“But her brother locked her inside one of the rooms up there,” Miss Buxton said. “Locked all the doors on that floor, in fact, even the closets. So maybe Howie came back down.”

“He must've,” Brady said.

“No,” Willie said. “It could be those creatures who live here.”

“The cries they make.” She shook her head. “They must've burrowed up from Hell.”

Brady took a long drag off his cigarette as he contemplated our situation. He puffed out an O-ring that dissolved completely before he finally said, “Keep it quiet,” and led us off again, his flashlight beam low to the floor now.

The rapping came as steadily as ever and grew steadily louder as we made our way down the hall until we were able to determine which room it emanated from and halted in a tight bunch just short of the door.

Brady switched off his flashlight. Whilst concealing his body behind the doorframe, he turned the doorknob and, with a hard push, thrust the barrier fully open.

No light emitted from inside. The rapping continued unabated.

He stepped into the doorway, switched on his flashlight, and waved it around inside. He turned back to the rest of us, still huddled behind the doorframe, and his face broke into a wide grin. “The music room.”

He stepped into the room, and we followed. The first thing I saw was Brady's flashlight beam lighting up the strings of a giant harp. Behind it against the wall was a huge pipe organ. The usual clutter cluttered the room, along with enough musical instruments for a Saint Patrick's Day parade. To our immediate left, as we stood just inside the door, came the loud rapping noise.

The sound emanated from behind a boarded up window. At first I assumed that the cause had to be a branch in a storm knocking against the side of the house. But the boards began to split open in the center of the window frame, and I thought I'd caught a glimpse of an axe head. I wasn't the only one.

“Firemen!” Miss Buxton announced.

The authorities had come at last. Someone, at least, had reported hearing what had been the great collapse of the staircase.

The axe struck a few more blows before the axe head punched all the way through the wood, widening the split in the boards.

“Where are the bloody coins?” Brady said to me. “And be quick about it.”

“Hand me your flashlight,” I said. “I need to check the codes again.”

He gave it to me. Again, the axe struck. Again the hole in the wood widened.

I stalled for time with my face in Noah's notebook. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't.

By the time I'd looked up from the codes, a gaping hole in the boards had materialized, and a brightly uniformed and helmeted fireman stared in at us with a look of not inconsiderable surprise on his face. He hadn't time to utter a word before that abominable she-bitch fired a bullet from the ancient flintlock into his forehead.

Instantly, the fireman dropped from view, with only the prongs of a ladder at the base of the window to remind us of his recent presence. Through the hole came gasps and startled voices from somewhere down below outside.

“Well?” She pressed the barrel of the flintlock against my temple.

“There!” I pointed across the room to where two corners intersected and upon both walls hung a dozen or more string instruments—guitars, banjos, mandolins, violins, and so forth.

“Where?” Brady said.

“See the instrument hanging highest on the wall?” I said. “That thin one, painted black?”

“Aye,” he said.