The Arcanum (26 page)

The approaching phantom was well over six feet tall and its cloak billowed in the wind. It walked slowly and steadily despite the driving rain, and glowed with a sickly green luminescence. More lightning seared the heavens, but still he could not see the being’s face. Although . . .

Darian thought he recognized the cloak.

He backed away from the hole where his doors used to be, panic adding an electric jolt to the chemicals already sizzling in his bloodstream. The solidness of objects became less dependable. The walls bled; the floor stretched like rubber. Darian squeezed his eyes shut, but could still see.

“Darian?”
Erica’s voice sounded from the next room.

“Go away,” he gasped.

A woman’s shadow crossed the floor about twenty feet from where Darian stood. He darted away from the shadow and plunged reflexively through the doors to the old wing—a place he normally feared to go.

The old wing was a hundred years older than the rest of the house, attached to the new wing by a gigantic corridor, a statuary with forty-foot windows looking out on the fountain gardens. Darian hated the corridor, having feared it since childhood. He was halfway down the towering hall before he noticed the blood, and froze. A trail of bloody bootprints showed up black on the old wing’s tile floor, glowing intermittently in the lightning flashes. Darian felt numb. There was a ringing in his ears.

Erica’s childlike voice sounded from behind him.
“Darian?”

He whirled around.

“No!” He backed away, slipping in the bloody footprints. He scrambled back on hands and feet across a slick of blood, screaming, as Erica DeMarcus pushed her way into the corridor.

She was bathed in blood and still wearing the black dress from the party.

“Don’t punish me,”
she pleaded.

“Pet,” Darian stuttered as he climbed to his feet, “pet, I’m sorry,” stumbling back from the bloody wraith of his sister.

“Don’t punish me!”
Her voice whined, high-pitched, like a windup toy.

“You were going to tell on me,” Darian protested. “Why couldn’t you let me be?”

She staggered toward him, seemingly having no control of her own limbs.

“No. Stay away!”

“Why, Darian?”
she said.

“Because you wouldn’t love me,” he admitted, finally confessing the deeper truth. “You betrayed me. I was your brother. You were supposed to be loyal to me, and instead you tried to hurt me. So I hurt you.”

“You killed me,”
she said.

Darian slapped his hands over his ears. Between the rain pounding on the windows and the jarring thunder, he could not think. “Stop it, Erica. You’re not real. You’re dead. I killed you!”

Darian lunged at her, but even as he reached out, she was torn in two by giant, unseen hands. Her torso thumped against the windows, trailing blood down the glass as it fell. Her legs slapped noisily into the wall, then collapsed in a sticky heap.

Darian’s knees hit the ground to the wail of his own voice and the rise of the thunder. He lurched away from the image of his slaughtered sister, only to find the phantom from the field standing at the end of the corridor, rainwater streaming from its cloak.

Darian raised his hands beseechingly.

“I warned you, Darian.”
The phantom walked toward him, its voice seeming to boom from the very heavens.
“I warned you the
price you would pay . . .”

Darian could summon only a hiss as the revelation struck him. “Duvall?”

The phantom continued forward as Darian shielded his eyes.
“. . . were you to steal the Book . . .”
it continued.

“Leave me alone!”

“Now you will answer for your unspeakable crimes . . .”

Darian thrashed his head back and forth. “Get out!”

The phantom towered above him.

“You will answer to your victims . . .”

And then the dreaded sound began again, above the storm, above the thunder—beating wings. The walls trembled from the din. Duvall’s voice rose above the noise.
“And the cost is your
broken soul!”

With that, bloated forms plunged down from the roof, on unfurling chains, jerking to a halt before the wide windows of the corridor. Lightning exploded again, revealing bodies swinging on hooks, slapping at the glass with ill-attached wings, smearing it with blood. One after another they fell, wrapped in dirty bandages. Body after body plummeted from the sky, to the crack of thunder, bloody pendulums painting the windows red, dancing on their chains to the chorus of Darian DeMarcus’s screams.

All around the house, a din of chimes, like church bells, rang out discordantly.

Duvall’s cloak fell away, and Darian found himself staring into the dark void of John Dee’s obsidian mirror. The chimes activated the mirror, causing its surface first to ripple, and then produce inexplicable images.

An alien landscape unfurled before Darian’s horrified eyes— a primitive world of strange, shiny dwellings, surrounded by jagged mountain peaks beneath an orange sky with four moons.

The images honed in on a triangular cyclopean temple in the heart of the alien city—taller and wider by far than any Egyptian pyramid. Darian heard a frenzied chanting on the hot winds as the mirror sucked him into the blackness of the temple.

Within was a canyon of tenebrous shadows. And in that wet and horrible darkness something breathed, and the swollen echo resounded through the temple’s endless, endless halls.

The light shunned the unknowable life-form hidden within the murk. At first, all Darian could sense was the creature’s size—it was grossly, ludicrously huge—and yet proportioned vaguely like a man with yellow, blistered skin.

But as his eyes adjusted, he could see fleshy pieces of tiny men dribbling from the massive hooks of its crablike mouth. The goliath shifted out of the shadows into the light . . .

But the rest was unrecordable, because Darian’s mind went white.

His eyes rolled back as his heart spasmed and stopped beating, and he crumpled forward onto the stones of the statuary hall.

Duvall’s phantom stood over the prostrate Darian—both still. In this frozen tableau, only the bloody angels swung outside the window.

The storm quieted its fury.

The rain eased.

UPSTAIRS, MORRIS STOOD in the darkness of a large ballroom, shotgun aimed at the curtains. A purring sounded behind him. He whirled, to see a lithe woman crouched on top of a table. She raised her hands in a gesture of piety. Morris lumbered toward her, lured by his childhood love of strangling cats. But as he got close, something glimmered in the cat-lady’s hands. She blew into her palms, and Morris was enveloped in a choking dust. It burned like embers beneath his eyelids and like acid in his throat. His mouth filled with spit, and clear fluid drained out his nose as he gagged—while behind him, the curtains parted and a figure emerged. A hand grasped Morris’s testicles, another clasped his burning throat. And, for the first time in his life, Morris was lifted bodily into the air.

He screamed as the giant threw him through one of the ballroom windows. He shut his eyes as his face burst through the wood and glass and his enormous body followed, clearing the window and pitched down. He felt the cold winds and biting ice rain on his cheeks, and when he opened his eyes, he could see the ground spinning up to meet him. The fall seemed to last a long time. Then, finally, Morris collided with the cement patio.

After that, there was only pain, and darkness—then nothing whatsoever.

BACK ON THE first floor, all was quiet.

Then there were footsteps like skittering mice.

Two A.S.M. magicians, dressed in black, darted out from the shadows and knelt over the torso of Erica DeMarcus. Together, they lifted her from the pool of corn syrup.

The phantom Duvall pulled back his hood, revealing Popo the acrobat crouched on a small platform near the head of the deftly engineered marionette. Lovecraft crouched atop another platform at the midsection, and a dwarf named Bruce finished up the triad by operating the legs.

Lovecraft was outfitted like a space explorer between the obsidian mirror and the hand-cranked Dictaphone slung over his shoulder with its recording horn. Not to mention the green-glowing halogen—his spirit illumination.

Doyle entered the corridor. “Did we get it?” he asked Lovecraft.

“I think so,” Lovecraft replied, patting the Dictaphone.

Angel bodies—really mummy-wrapped potato sacks dipped in syrup—were lowered to the ground from squeaking winches.

Sebastian Aloysius burst through the doorway. “Magnificent, eh? Better than
Prince of Blood
!”

Doyle raised an eyebrow. “Are the grounds secured?” he asked.

“Of course,” Sebastian answered, sounding hurt at the lack of praise.

“What about the orderly from Bellevue?”

Otto stepped in behind Sebastian, wiping his hands. “He fell out window.”

“It’s a wonderful victory, Arthur,” Sebastian insisted. “We should be celebrating.”

Something crunched beneath Doyle’s shoe as he gazed down at the body of Darian DeMarcus. “Forgive me if I don’t feel much like celebrating.” He lifted his shoe and saw Darian’s blue eye monocle shattered into pieces.

Lovecraft unfolded from his crouch as the Duvall marionette was disassembled by the A.S.M. crew. The demonologist then fixed the bone gauntlet—the Eltdown Shard—over his arm and spun the reel of the control unit. Once again, tiny pistons worked up a head of steam, and spectral symbols formed in the ether surrounding it. Lovecraft studied the ghostly equations.

“Anything?” Doyle asked.

“Nothing.” Lovecraft stopped spinning the reel and removed his goggles. “The grounds are clean.”

“Then we should send word to the others.”

41

ABIGAIL GAZED DOWN at the Vanderbilt Mansion from her lofty perch in one of the towers of St. Patrick’s. The night was cold, and the sky clear with stars but for a sliver of moon. Abigail heard the wind moan in the long corridors of the church. Below, tiny people hunched their shoulders against the chill, and pulled their collars tighter. All those people. She tried to count them, but she quickly gave up. There were too many, moving too fast—on foot, by trolley, horse, and car. Hundreds. Thousands. Husbands and wives on nighttime strolls, children pulling their grandparents into toy stores. Businessmen leaving work, pausing to check their pocket watches to see how late they’d be for dinner if they stopped off for a drink with the fellows. Even the people who walked by themselves had someplace to go. A brother to write to. A mother and father in the country. A lover waiting. All of them had families. All of them were born of mothers. All of them but her.

Abigail thought about these people’s lives as she absently dragged the knuckles of her fist over the wall, scraping the skin. She thought of Mr. Houdini’s wife, and the way she concealed her tears. What was it like to be loved that way, to have someone willing to sacrifice everything for you? Mr. Lovecraft had sacrificed for her, and all she’d been to him was mean. As she was to them all—and to her family before that. Family. She’d never called them that to their faces, though Judith had longed for it. Abigail had cursed them instead. Had run away. Stolen. Lied. She’d never let anyone love her. Instead, she’d blamed them for her sadness, for her anger, for her otherness. For their otherness. Her isolation. None of the people below had an inkling how lucky they were, no understanding of why Abigail would trade places with any single one of them in a heartbeat. They did not count the smell of their living rooms or the sound of their mothers’ slippers as they climbed the stairs among their treasures. She dreamed of the color of their bedsheets, and their end-of-the-day conversations around the dinner table. “How was work, dear?” and “What did you learn in school today, Margaret?” She even envied the orphans, who could at least turn to the stranger in the bed beside them and say, “We’re the same, you and I.” Abigail envied every last stupid one.

She looked out on the world from an invisible box with no key. And it wasn’t that she was incapable of love, she reminded herself. It’s just her love injured with equal impunity. Ask Matthew. Or the Rescue Society. Or the Arcanum. They were all decent people who volunteered to help her, and suffered because of it. And this night was no different. Somewhere out there, the Arcanum risked their lives for her. And for what? If Abigail were gone, who would miss her? No one. She was simply a burden, and if she were removed from the equation, their lives could resume. And in a moment of clarity, Abigail came to a decision. She could finally, after all this time, do something right.

BESS HOUDINI SAT on the steps of the altar, gazing at the cathedral ceiling while Archbishop Hayes sat in the first pew, hands clasped in prayer but eyes focused intently on the two A.S.M. magicians. They tinkered with the controls of a boxy, two-way radio that stood on four unsturdy wooden legs. The radio squawked, then hissed with static. Half-formed words occasionally surfaced from the noise as the men searched in vain for the signal.

The shorter magician—a stout Irishman in his fifties— flicked a switch on the box and spoke into a microphone. “This is Smedley. Do you read? Over.”

The larger magician—a sweaty chap with an enormous belly—looked up from the wires and hollered, “A little to the left, Bob!”

Bob, the red-bearded antenna man, had climbed to the highest point of the cathedral with mountaineering ropes, and now swung from the rafters on a makeshift rope seat, trying to hold up a twenty-pound steel antenna six feet long.

“I’ll try,” Bob replied gamely, and leaned back in his rope seat, making adjustments. The antenna wobbled.

A clear voice suddenly erupted from the radio. “This is Arthur Conan Doyle. Do you copy?”

Gasps of relief and praise and thanks encircled the group. Bess clasped hands with Archbishop Hayes as Smedley flicked the switch and spoke into the microphone. “This is Smedley, Mr. Doyle. Is everyone well there? Over.”

It was quiet for several moments. And for a second Bess feared the worst. Then Doyle’s voice rang out even louder.

“Mission accomplished. We’re coming home. Over.”

The magicians clapped hands over the radio as Archbishop Hayes rose to his feet, kissing his rosary. “Praise God.”

Bess wiped away tears of relief as Hayes took her arm. “Let’s go tell Abigail the good news, shall we?” he said.

It was not easy to reach the room Abigail had chosen to call her own, two hundred steps up the tower stairs. And when they knocked on the door and called her name, she did not answer. The archbishop’s brow furrowed. He opened the door. “Abigail?”

The room was empty, the window open wide.

“Oh dear Lord,” Hayes breathed.

Bess wheeled around. “Abigail?” She raced down the stairs, calling her name, and was out of breath by the time she reached the main body of the church.

Concerned, the magicians ran to help her, but Bess shook them off.

“Abigail’s gone. Smedley, Bob, alert the others. Go!” They broke into a run, Smedley grabbing his gas lantern off the floor as he went.

OUTSIDE, THEY SKIDDED to a halt. Smedley held the lantern up, cupped his hand over the light, and began to transmit a series of coded signals.

Atop one of the Vanderbilt Twin Houses, Johnny Spades—a master of playing card prestidigitation—read the code and instantly snatched up his two-way radio, spinning the crank.

The cord had been unspooled that afternoon and run across the rooftop of the Vanderbilt House, across Fifth Avenue, and south for several blocks to the arched roof of Delmonico’s on the corner of Forty-fourth and Fifth. There, the other end of the two-way phone buzzed. Chi-Chi, a tuxedoed dummy, answered the phone with a lit cigarette dangling from his wooden lips. He was hand-operated by the famous, and more than slightly eccentric, Carlos the Brazilian Puppeteer.

“Alo?”
Chi-Chi answered.

Johnny Spades’s voice burst from the receiver. “Put down that stinking puppet. Abigail is missing!” Johnny Spades exclaimed.

With a suction pop, Carlos extended his ship-captain’s spyglass and scanned the streets. While Carlos did that, Chi-Chi looked over the edge of Delmonico’s roof to help with the search.

“I don’ see not’ing,” Chi-Chi whined.

“I’ve got her,” Carlos said. “She’s headed for Grand Central.”

Through the lens, Abigail could be seen walking quickly down the sidewalk, her arms folded against the cold, her head tucked low. Carlos then panned his spyglass up a brick wall to a nearby rooftop, where several ragged creatures watched Abigail with gleaming ruby eyes.

Carlos lowered the glass, blinking twice. “What the hell?”

But when Carlos examined the rooftop again, the creatures were gone. He swung the lens left, then right. He found them again in the alley, but they weren’t there for long. He gasped as one of the creatures scrambled up the adjoining wall like a skinny spider. The spyglass dropped from his hands as he grabbed for the phone.

“I think she’s being followed,” Carlos reported.

Johnny Spades relayed this message via lantern signals to Smedley and Bess, who was now waiting with them outside the church.

Smedley grimaced as he translated the code. “She’s being followed,” he said to Bess.

Immediately, Bess broke into a run.

“Mrs. Houdini,” Smedley called, then took off after her, his gas lantern swinging.

GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL was an enormous, split-level structure composed of mighty columns and eighty-foot windows, swallowing up four city blocks and two avenues, interrupting Park Avenue at Forty-second Street. And below its high ceilings and ornate lobbies lay thirty-two miles of tracks, connecting the city to the rest of the nation.

As soon as Bess entered the station, she was swept into a press of bodies—the tail end of rush hour. Hundreds of people in anonymous suits of gray, black, and brown swarmed around her. It was impossible to see for all the bodies, so Bess took the stairs to a balcony, where she could look out over the entire station. After fruitless minutes of searching, she despaired of finding Abigail, but at that instant she spotted her quarry at the far end of the building, entering a line of ticketed passengers. Bess watched Abigail’s top hat disappear into a stairwell to the lower train platforms.

AT FIVE-FOOT-FOUR, all Smedley could see was an ocean of neckties. He elbowed his way through the crowd, then he heard a piercing voice call out from somewhere in the bowels of the station: “All aboard!”

ABIGAIL FELT A growing panic, jostled by the flowing current of bodies along the train platform. The air was warm and smoky. On platform after platform, steam rose and engines churned. The trains muscled against the platform like bulls in the gate.

“Abigail!”

Abigail whirled around, to see Bess Houdini descending the stairs.

Abigail ducked hastily onto the Empire State Express.

SMEDLEY JOGGED ALONG a neighboring platform, dodging columns, his eyes on the Empire State Express. The whistle blew, deafeningly loud. Smedley covered his ears. Bess Houdini still walked quickly alongside the train, peering into the passenger windows as rods and pistons began moving and the train rolled slowly from the platform.

“Mrs. Houdini!” Smedley called.

Bess turned to Smedley, eyes frantic. “Get help!” she replied, then darted through one of the train doorways at the last possible instant.

Smedley ran a worried hand over his head and stared after the train. As the Empire State Express retreated into the stygian tunnel, a curdling squeal rose in its wake, mocking the steam whistle of the engine. The sound came from above him. Smedley peered into the nest of steel beams soaring above the tracks.

At first he thought they were rats because of the way their red eyes shined, but then he realized they were far too big. But they didn’t move like men, either, the way they flowed across the beams like swift-moving snakes, chasing the Empire State.

Smedley watched in horror as the creatures dropped at the last minute from the ceiling beams and onto the steel roof of the train.