Though that was hard to imagine just now, as Lamech fell to the floor, rolling and twisting, beating at his hat with his fists. This, Unwin thought, was how Lamech’s life was to end: suffocated by his own hat. He could not stop it from happening. And when Lamech died, the recording would end. He did not have much time.
“Penny, Penny,” the biloquist whispered, almost singing her name. “We lost each other so long ago. Where have you been? Your eyes, when you were born, like little mirrors; terrifying! Caligari saw you and claimed you for his own. But you’ve come back to me just in time. I need your help. We’ll work together, like we did before.”
Sivart laughed. “Sure. We all know how well that went.”
“November twelfth was a fluke,” Hoffmann snapped.
Sivart waved his hand dismissively, but the woman in the plaid coat was listening with evident interest. She and Hoffmann stood looking at one another. He was nearly a foot shorter than she was, almost forlorn in his rumpled pajamas.
“Kiddo,” Sivart said to her. “Don’t listen to him.”
Penny ignored him. “We need to talk,” she said again to her father. “Alone.”
With a nervous glance at Lamech, Sivart snatched his own hat off his head. But Hoffmann was not preparing any new tricks. “I’m not taking my eyes off him,” he said.
“What do you think he’ll do?” Penelope asked. “Rummage through the junk in the back of your brain? Find out you’re one of the bad guys? Let him wander for a minute.” She gave Sivart a meaningful look and added, “We’ll have him back here soon enough.”
Hoffmann was frowning, but he sighed and said, “All right.” He snapped his fingers, and behind him a single mirror dissolved into mist. The stairs down to the carnival were just beyond.
Sivart shrugged and put his hat back on. Then he puffed at his cigar a few times, until the ember burned red again. “You kids have fun,” he said, and with a last look at Lamech’s writhing form he went briskly from the hall of mirrors.
Unwin followed him. Outside, the eldritch light of the carnival had grown brighter, almost fiery, and the rides were chugging and whirling at breakneck speeds. The air smelled of popcorn and fresh sawdust, and the music of the hurdy-gurdy roared. Sivart leapt onto the turning platform of a carousel, and Unwin hurried after him, grabbing hold of a horse’s reins to steady himself. Sivart debarked on the other side and jogged away into the outer reaches of the carnival.
The detective was moving purposefully, as though according to some prearranged plan. Could he and Penelope Greenwood have conspired in advance to allow him this reprieve? Unwin did not know how far he could follow. He was already pushing at the boundaries of what Miss Palsgrave’s machine had recorded, and he felt a tug at the back of his skull. This dream was nested like one of those dolls that contain themselves a dozen times over. But if the chief clerk of the third archive had been observing the dream, might she have shifted the focus from one mind to another, changing frequencies as Lamech said she could? Yes: the closer Unwin kept to Sivart, now, the better the recording maintained its coherence.
Sivart had reached the edge of the carnival. There at its border was a small, almost perfectly square building, its windows reflecting the fairground’s glow. The detective went up to the steps and put his hand on the doorknob, then shut his eyes and wrinkled his brow. “Okay,” he said to himself, “easy as spinning a radio dial.” He turned the knob and threw the door open with a flourish.
On the other side was Unwin’s bathroom.
Sivart went in and looked around. He yawned, stretched, then took his coat off and flung it over the shower curtain. “This is more like it,” he said. He turned on the hot-water faucet and undressed, then reached up into his coat pocket and pulled out a small bottle of smoked glass. This he unstoppered, sniffed, and emptied into the water. The tub filled with bubbles. When the bath was ready, he tested the water with one toe and got in. With his hat down over his face, he began puffing on his cigar, dropping ashes into the tub. The only spot of color in the room was the ember of the cigar, and it burned so hot it made the steam over the tub glow red.
Unwin stretched his legs beneath the covers of an underclerk’s bed in the third archive of the Agency offices. In his dream of Lamech’s dream of Hoffmann’s dream of Sivart’s dream, a dreaming Unwin opened his bathroom door, a fresh towel over his arm, his robe cinched tight around his waist. Sivart scrubbed his feet with a long-handled brush, and the other Unwin said, “Sir, what are you doing in my bathtub?”
Sivart told the other Unwin not to use his name. Somebody could be listening in. He accused him of being forgetful. He said, “I’m going to tell you something that you’re going to forget. Ready?”
“Ready,” the other Unwin said.
“Okay, here it is. You’re awfully worried about getting everything right. I’ve seen what you’ve done to my reports. I’ve read the files. You edit out the good parts. All you care about are details, and clues, and who did what and why. But I’m telling you, Unwin, there’s more to it than that. There’s a . . . I don’t know”—he waved his cigar in the air—“there’s a spirit to the whole enterprise. There’s mystery. The worse it gets, the better it is. It’s like falling in love. Or falling out of love, I forget which. Facts are nothing in comparison. So try, would you? Try to leave the good parts alone?”
“Sorry,” Unwin said, “what were you just saying? I was thinking of something else.”
“Never mind. Just remember this: Chapter Eighteen. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Say it back to me: Chapter Eighteen.”
“Chapter Elephant,” Unwin said.
FIFTEEN
On Skulduggery
If you are not setting a trap, then you
are probably walking into one. It is the
mark of the master to do both at once.
S
omewhere an elephant trumpeted. Somewhere else an alarm clock rang. And back in Lamech’s city, someone was screaming.
The cord that had tugged at the back of Unwin’s brain grew taut and wrenched him from the nested dreams, out of his bathroom, out of the carnival, back into the hissing static of the rain. A dark shape rolled on the ground at his feet. It was Lamech, still pulling at his hat, which was shrunk tight over his face now, so that his nose and brow were visible through the felt. Unwin crouched over him, wanting to help somehow, trying to get hold of the hat, though he knew it was impossible.
Lamech kicked his shoes against the cobblestones and bellowed. He twisted and rolled, his shirt coming untucked. Finally the hat popped off. His face was red and sweaty, his mouth a perfect O as he gulped the air.
The hat had lost its shape and lay on the ground, a dead little animal. Lamech slapped it into the gutter, where the water carried it away. He rose slowly to his knees and watched it go, his breath coming in hoarse wheezes. Then he got to his feet, brushing himself off with his hands. So it was not Enoch Hoffman who had murdered the watcher.
He looked nowhere in particular and said, “All right, end of the tour. There’s little else I can do to help you. We’re pickles in our own jars, Mr. Unwin. That’s how it has to be now.”
He wiped his brow with his sleeve. He was breathing easier, but his voice was quiet. “I could have done better. I could have shown you more. We’re in trouble, the whole lot of us. Read your copy of the
Manual.
Find Sivart if you can, and get him out of there before he makes things worse.”
Lamech thrust his hands into his pockets and looked around. “Well?” he said. “Wake up, already.”
Unwin woke up.
BENEATH THE HEAVY COTTON BLANKET, his feet were damp in their socks. His head was heavy, and the pillow felt heavy beneath it. He had the odd impression that his skull had been magnetized. There was an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth.
No music played in the third archive, and Miss Palsgrave had left her machine. Hilda, the Giantess Hildegard, the Chief Clerk of—of all this, Unwin supposed—was nowhere to be seen. Around him her underclerks carried on with their slumberous labors. What strange visions had Hoffmann and his daughter contrived for their perusal? Only the ever-wakeful Jasper Rook could remain immune to them forever—and Jasper, Unwin reminded himself, was probably back in the city by now, searching for the man who killed his brother.
The phonograph needle had reached the lead-out on the record of Lamech’s final dream and was traveling an endless, soundless loop. Unwin stopped the machine and flipped the record over, found more grooves on the B-side. Lamech had told him there was nothing more to see, but the watcher did not seem to understand everything that was happening. Unwin needed more; he put the needle down and closed his eyes.
Again the sounds formed patterns, the patterns shapes, and this time he sank into the dream from above. For a moment he had a dizzying view of Lamech’s city beneath him. He descended quickly, matching speed with the rain, so that each long drop appeared to hang unmoving in front of him. He looked up. More drops hovered like daggers over his eyes; he wished for his umbrella, had it, opened it. The umbrella parachuted over his head, and he swung below it like a pendulum while the rain drummed over his head.
Lamech was headed for the entrance of a building, the tallest in this part of the city, in all of the city, maybe. It stood a little apart from those nearby, a dark obelisk. There was something familiar about the place. Just as Unwin’s feet touched the ground, he realized why. It was the Agency office building.
Unwin followed, slipping through the lobby doors before they closed behind Lamech, then collapsed his umbrella on his way toward the elevator, just as he had done many hundreds of times before in that other lobby, the real one. If Hoffmann’s mind was represented by a hall of mirrors, whose dreaming thoughts were housed here?
Lamech went past the elevator doors, mumbling to himself as he walked. “Stupid, stupid,” Unwin heard him say—to himself, apparently. Then he shook his head, as though to clear his thoughts. At the back of the lobby, he angled his watch in the dim light. Someone called out, “Come in, Ed, you’re right on time.” Unwin did not recognize the voice; it came from behind a door stenciled in black letters: CUSTODIAN.
When Lamech went in, Unwin heard a noise that was immediately familiar. It was the rustling of paper and the cooing of pigeons. The sounds froze him for a moment, and he barely had time to squeeze through, ducking under Lamech’s arm as the watcher closed the door.
The room was small, and smaller for its contents. Piles of paper, some bundled into files, some floating free, were stacked floor to ceiling. Filing cabinets stood in rows and at odd angles, forming a kind of maze. A living breeze inhabited the place, lifting pages from one pile and dropping them onto another or discarding them on the floor. Some of the file drawers stood open, and in most of them pigeons had roosted, with nests of twigs and paper and bits of trash. The birds regarded Lamech familiarly, puffing with disdain when his coat brushed their drawers.
“Won’t you ever clean this place up?” Lamech said. He rounded a filing cabinet and stood with his hands in his pockets. “Arthur, there used to be a chair here.”
The custodian was seated at a little desk that had fallen to the same disarray plaguing the rest of the room. His accordion was hung on the wall behind him, over the wide basin sink from which a mop handle extended. Hanging beside it was a pistol in its holster. The place must have been a replica of the custodian’s real-life office, though surely the original was not equipped with so many file drawers. And hopefully the custodian did not have all these pigeons, either—nor that gun.
Arthur looked up from the file he was studying, stared at Lamech a moment, then removed his spectacles. It was the first time Unwin had seen the man’s eyes. They were pale and attentive. “Emily,” he said. “Find our guest a place to sit, please.”
Unwin had to stop himself from speaking her name aloud as Emily Doppel, wearing a yellow peignoir and blue slippers, emerged from behind a stack of papers at the back of the room. She stuck her pencil into her hair and came around the custodian’s desk. Waving her arms, she evicted the pigeons nesting on a chair, then moved a pile of papers off it and onto the top of another pile.
“Elaborate,” Lamech said, watching her.
“She’s real,” Arthur said. “I have her come in to keep things tidy, but mostly she does crossword puzzles. Imagine the devotion, to do crossword puzzles in your sleep.”
Emily sniffed at this.
“I hope he pays you enough,” Lamech said to her.
“He doesn’t pay me,” Emily said. “I have a condition. I fall asleep when I mean to be awake, and he takes advantage by bringing me here. Nights, too. I’ve always wanted to be an Agency operative, but this is not what I imagined.”
“Tell him to get you a day shift,” Lamech said.
“Get me a day shift,” she said to Arthur.
“What, and have you nodding off on the job? Sweetie, you know it wouldn’t work.”
“I quit, then,” she said. The two men watched as she gathered her things: black lunch box, newspaper, a pillow. She brushed past Lamech and went out of the room, slamming the door behind her. The pigeons fussed and warbled.
“She does this every day,” the custodian assured Lamech. “It’s the only way she knows how to leave. I do have plans for her, though. Just waiting for the right assignment to come along. Now sit, sit.”
Lamech shrugged and sat down, letting his coat droop open. His face was still red from the struggle with his hat. He probably could have dreamed up a new one, but maybe he could not bear to.
Arthur ran his tongue along his teeth and looked at the ceiling. “Those memos of mine,” he said.
Lamech waved his hand. “You know, Arthur, it gets hard to keep track of all the rules. It’s getting to be like the bylaws need bylaws.”