Hellbound Hearts (13 page)

Colin nodded. Though it had not occurred to him in those precise terms, he understood what his father had meant. “Was that when he began to build his own mechanism?”

Grandmother Abigail seemed pale in the sunlight shining through the window. “He thought if he could match his own machine to the rhythm, find a way to get the two in harmony, he could make his mechanism function on its own, without his—”
She'd cut herself off.

Colin stared at her. “Without his what?”

She shook her head, willing to go no further.

“Without his what?” he shouted. “Grandmother, please, there must be some connection to this mechanism and his disappearance. If there is, the only way I will be able to discover it is if I understand what he was thinking while he built it.”

Grandmother Abigail regarded him coolly, as if she had separated herself from him somehow.

“He managed to make it work in some rudimentary way by placing himself within the machine. Those shelves are seats, the levers and valves meant to be operated by hand.”

“But Father left no designs—”

The old woman narrowed her eyes as if daring him to challenge her. “I burned them.”

“Why would you do that?”

Her mouth quivered a bit, and then she lowered her gaze. “I was afraid for you, Collie. Your father thought . . . he . . .” She steadied herself, raised her eyes, and looked at him with the clearest warning he had ever seen. “You know that ever since your mother's death, your father has been obsessed with the idea that the connection they had could not be severed, that there must be some way for him to speak to her, even beyond death. Beyond life.”

Colin nodded. “All of those séances with Finnegan—”

Grandmother Abigail's expression turned to stone. “He educated himself, talked to spiritualists and scholars alike. If he heard even a whisper of some method he had not yet attempted, he experimented with it. Finnegan indulged him all along, let poor Edgar think his wish might one day be granted, and lined his own pockets with your father's money. But when your father began to talk of the sounds he heard in the walls, and when he began to build that mechanism in the cellar, Finnegan urged him to stop. No,
more
than stop. Finnegan wanted him to break it into pieces, threatened to have nothing more to do with Edgar if he refused.”

Fingers of dread crept up Colin's spine. “What happened?”

“Your father had Filgate throw Finnegan out of the house and told him never to return,” Grandmother Abigail said. “He kept working, building, testing that infernal machine, and less than three weeks later, Edgar vanished.”

Colin turned and stared out at the hall that led to the cellar door.

“Whatever you hear in the walls, lad, you mustn't listen,” the old woman said.

“And if that means we never find him?” Colin asked.

Grandmother Abigail lifted her chin, trembling slightly. “Better that than risk losing you along with him.”

Colin thought on that for several long minutes, alternately looking out the window at the diggers and back into the house in the direction of the cellar. When, at length, he finally met his grandmother's gaze, she must have seen his decision in his eyes, for her shoulders slumped with sadness and surrender.

The old woman turned from him without another word and left the room, as if he had already disappeared.

Church's men dug all around the foundation of the house at the rear corner where Sir Edgar's mechanism filled the cellar room, but they found nothing. The pipes that penetrated the walls in that chamber did not emerge on the other side. Church had no explanation, nor had Colin expected one. The pipes must simply have stopped several inches into the wall.

Colin did not believe that, of course. He had jostled one of the pipes enough to know that it did not end after a few inches. And then there was the matter of the nocturnal thrum, the vibration, of the machine. Where did that come from? Colin supposed that his grandmother might be right, that he might have imagined it just as his father had done, but if that was so, then where
was
his father?

An answer to that question had begun to coalesce in the back of Colin's mind once Grandmother Abigail had told him of his father's
falling-out with Finnegan, but he tried not to dwell upon it, for it seemed impossible. Felt impossible.

All that day, as Church's excavations revealed more and more of nothing and Grandmother Abigail's words resonated deeper and deeper in his mind, Colin felt a growing anxiety. With the onset of evening, emotional tremors passed through him, a queer combination of unease and anticipation. There could be no doubt what his next course of action must be, and over the dinner table he saw in his grandmother's eyes that she knew it as well. They barely spoke during the meal, and when it had concluded she excused herself, claiming a headache, and retired for the night.

Soon enough, Colin found himself alone in the parlor with a glass of brandy and a crackling fire, all of the servants having withdrawn.

He did not even pretend to retire for the night. Instead, he waited there in the parlor, listening for the hum and staring at a shelf of his father's old books without even the smallest temptation to pluck one down to read. He sipped brandy and felt himself grow heavy with the influence of the alcohol and the warmth of the fire, but as drowsy as he became, he would not allow himself to doze.

He felt his father nearby, as if, were he to close his eyes and reach out, he might grasp Sir Edgar's hand or tug his sleeve. The feeling chilled and warmed him in equal measure, and it occurred to him that this must be how his father had felt for so many years about his late mother. He had always talked of feeling her nearness, of his confidence that her spirit lingered, awaiting him, attempting to contact him, if only he could find the means to receive that communication.

Enough brandy, and the walls Colin had built inside his mind to prevent him thinking about his more outlandish theories regarding his father's disappearance began to break down. A little more, and he stopped denying to himself the certainty that had formed in the back of his mind. Somehow, in attempting to contact his mother, his
father had succeeded in breaking down a wall, tearing away the curtain between what Colin knew as tangible reality and some other existence. Whether his father was alive or dead, he did not know, but he felt sure that in matching the rhythm of the vibration in the walls, he had slipped out of the world.

Yet he felt just as certain that his father was still in the house—still down there in the cellar—and if he could match that same rhythm, as his father had done, it might be possible to draw the curtain back one more time and let Sir Edgar return.

A loud, sobering voice spoke up at the back of his mind, warning him that he might share his father's fate, but he took another sip of brandy and pushed the thought away. If his father had stepped onto another plane of existence, joining him there was far from the worst thing Colin could imagine. And
not
attempting to save his father was inconceivable.

Sometime after midnight, his vigilance was rewarded with a whisper.

“Deirdre,” said the walls. But now he felt sure the voice belonged to his father.

The thrum began moments later, and Colin set aside his brandy snifter, rose from his chair, and walked from the parlor, swaying only slightly.

Intuition guided him—at least that was what he told himself at first. From the moment he hoisted himself up onto the wooden shelf that functioned as a seat, and settled his arms onto the two smaller shelves that were angled downward toward the levers, he felt in tune with the machine. The support behind his arms gave him leverage, the seat taking his weight left his legs mostly free. Some of what had seemed to be levers were actually pedals.

But it wasn't enough simply to work those levers and pedals. One valve protruded from a metal arm that, when swung in front of his face, behaved more like the mouthpiece of a trumpet. When he breathed into it, the valve seemed to draw greedily from the air in his lungs until he found the perfect rhythm of inhale and exhale.

His breath powered the machine, as did his arms and legs. He listened so carefully to the rhythm in the walls, the clank and grind, the thrum and vibration, and worked his body—his own mechanism—to match it. Somehow, he knew, he had to find a way to meld himself to his father's machine, to turn the two mechanisms into one, acting in concert, and then extend that unification to the other machines beyond the walls, wherever they were, and to the mechanism that was his father. He could feel Sir Edgar there with him, breathing with him, moving with him, as if the man's body had been scattered into tiny particles that filled the air of the chamber.

The brandy had numbed him at first, blurred his thoughts, but soon it seemed to help crystallize them instead. Inhale. Exhale. Left hand, right foot, left foot, right hand, both feet, twist of the neck, inhale, exhale, inhale-exhale, as though playing a tune, a one-man orchestra, his body, the mechanism, a symphony.

Hours passed. His body did not require rest, did not crave food or even water. The machine was enough, feeding him, breathing through him. His limbs began to move of their own accord, instructed not by his own conscious thoughts but by the necessity of the machine.

“Deirdre,” a voice whispered, so close it might have been breathing in his ear.

The rhythm, perfectly matched.

Elated, he opened his eyes, unaware that he had ever closed them, and saw that the curtain had at last been drawn aside. There were no walls any longer, only the machine, only mechanisms as far as his eyes could see in every direction.

Close by, perhaps twenty feet away, Sir Edgar Radford moved in unison with the machine, in perpetual motion. Arms and legs, inhale-exhale. Pulling his mouth away to whisper and then darting forward again to place his lips on the valve. Pipes passed into his flesh and out the other side. Some seemed made of bone. Cables of sinew ran around pulleys, moving his limbs like the strings of a marionette.

The man's eyes gazed into the awful distance where cogs turned and pulleys rattled and levers rose and fell, and he never blinked.

“Father?” Colin said, his voice a new part of the rhythm between inhale and exhale.

His father did not seem to hear. He only stared deeper into the machine, far off across the joined mechanisms of this place behind the curtain.

“Deirdre?” Sir Edgar whispered.

Then Colin heard it, from far off. A reply. “Edgar?”

He watched as his father bent to his labors, working the mechanism feverishly, that one whisper of his name enough to drive him on with the promise that he had almost succeeded in his goal, that if he could draw back one more curtain, he might be with her at last.

“Deirdre?” Sir Edgar said again.

But this time, the voice that replied did not speak his father's name.

“Colin?” it said, so close he could feel her there, just out of reach.

He tried to scream but the valve stole his breath, requiring it to maintain the rhythm of the machine.

Inhale.

Exhale.