Unhonored (18 page)

“What of it, Alicia?” Margaret asked, deep suspicion obvious in her tone.

Alicia stepped from the stairs onto the rotunda floor, facing Ellis.

“Well, it occurs to me, your ladyship,” Alicia said with a coy lift of her eyebrows, “that if a Soldier doesn't know where Jenny is, then perhaps their opposite number might?”

“You mean, if one of my angels won't do…”

“Then what we need is a devil.” Alicia nodded.

*   *   *

Merrick plunged down the endless elevator shaft head-first, the tails of his morning coat flapping at his back. He snarled at the air as it rushed past. His held out his hands and arms, bringing him to face the bottomless abyss.

He bent his mind to the problem … and bent the shaft in turn.

Slowly, his surroundings shifted. The doors to the rapidly passing floors remained oriented to the vertical but the shaft rotated slightly from vertical and became an acutely angled passage. His feet connected gently against the slope that had been the back wall of the elevator shaft. Though his speed was still great, it was enough to begin slowing his momentum.

The chute continued to turn while the doors rotated in place. Soon the chute became a ramp and then fully horizontal to become a hall down which Merrick was sliding across the wooden floor that formed beneath him.

His foot caught on a tattered rug.

Merrick tumbled down the hall, rolling for nearly twenty feet before at last coming to a stop. He picked himself up slowly, brushing the dust from the old ruin of a hall from his morning coat.

He knew from the condition of the hall he had just transformed that he was still in the Ruins of Echo House. He also knew that things were not going according to his will in a place where his will was everything.

He considered the hallway. There was no reason why he should be constrained by the inconvenience of logic, space or time. The hall appeared to go forever in either direction and, he supposed, he could go back the way he had fallen and come to where he had been surprised by Jonas. He might more confidently find Ellis there but he abhorred the idea of succumbing to such mundane constraints as walking.

He always preferred to write the rules rather than obey them.

His smiled as the thought suddenly vanished. There was a change in the air, a chill that he could feel approaching. The transformed shaft was well lit for a hallway but now the distant ends of it were darkened and growing dim and dull in his vision.

Shades,
he thought.
The Shades approach and that can only mean …

The door in front of him opened.

“Mrs. Crow,” Merrick muttered.

“My lord,” the old woman acknowledged.

The Shades were drawing close to him from both ends of the hall. He could not see but a few feet beyond them as they approached. Merrick could pick out their forms in the hallway, what had been, or could have been, men and women shifting in their forms as they approached. Merrick could see his breath exhaled as wispy clouds into the frigid air before him.

He turned to face Mrs. Crow. “A rather nice touch, Mrs. Crow, considering I have never drawn breath.”

“We must keep up appearances, my lord,” Mrs. Crow said with a nod of her pleasant face and a thin smile. “Is Lady Ellis any closer to finding her prize?”

“How should I know,” Merrick snarled. “I don't know where she is hidden, either.”

“But they are close to finding someone who does,” Mrs. Crow said agreeably. “And when they do, we shall all have our reward.”

 

18

FIGUREHEAD

“Where are you going now, Ellis?” Jonas called to her, but she was already pushing past Margaret through the short hall at the back of the rotunda.

“Into the trap,” Ellis responded over her shoulder as she rushed down the entryway. She swung abruptly through the open doors on the left and into the music room, the same room from which Merrick had emerged just minutes before. It had been a ruin at that time but now was restored to pristine beauty. The piano sat in its familiar place, its case polished and shining in the light streaming through the window. It occurred to Ellis that the garden should be outside those windows and the bay beyond but even as the idea rose to conscious thought she knew that if she parted the lace and curtains she would only be looking into another compartment of Echo House. The loss and disappointment of that idea only steeled her resolve.

She turned again and stepped up to the little built-in bookcase. There, as she expected, was a small vase.

“Ellis, wait,” Alicia pleaded as she trailed Jonas and Margaret into the room. “Perhaps we need to discuss this among ourselves and come up with a better plan than walking into a trap.”

The vase before Ellis was filled with dead flowers.

She smiled. “Except that it is
my
trap.”

Ellis reached up, lifting the vase off of its shelf. As it had before, she heard with satisfaction the click of the lock release.

“I'm not sure this is a good idea, Ellis,” Jonas said, the color draining from his face.

“I trapped you in here once before,” Ellis acknowledged as she pulled open the hidden doorway. “This time, we'll all keep you company.”

The doorway swung open, illuminated from the room beyond with a dull red, flickering light. Ellis took a deep breath to steady her own resolve as she leaned inside the secret doorway for a look beyond.

The walls and ceiling of the room beyond were configured as she remembered them, a small, hidden craft room that she had specifically designed as a trap back in the world of Gamin. To Ellis, this meant that this incarnation of the house was not the one she remembered from the real world of mortality but the strange, dreamlike world of the Tween.

The striking difference was the complete absence of a floor. Instead of the polished hardwoods she remembered, a wide staircase descended at a precipitous angle down toward depths illuminated by red-tinted hurricane lamps. The chair rail paneling on the wall extended downward to meet the frighteningly steep stairs where they entered a cellar.

“What's down there?” Margaret gave Ellis a questioning glance as she spoke.

“I … I think … is that hell?” Alicia whimpered.

“No, I think it just looks like hell,” Ellis said, nodding as much to herself as to her companions. “We're actually way past hell, if the Disir sisters are to be believed. You said we needed to ask a devil, Alicia. I believe this is the best place for us to look to find one.”

“And how did you know it was here?” Margaret asked.

“Because I needed it,” Ellis said as she stepped onto the staircase. The tread groaned under her weight. “There are rules to this place, Margaret. I'm learning the rules.”

“My lady?” Margaret was at her heels. “Where are you going?”

“Where I must,” Ellis answered. She did not hesitate. For the first time in a long time there was a surety to her steps. She moved at once, each tread groaning beneath her. The stairs turned and continued downward between the red-glass hurricane lamps. Instead of growing cooler, the air became drier and hotter with every step.

Ellis hurried down the abrupt descent with purpose, the tumble of her footsteps mixed with the voices that fell in her wake.

“Ellis, no,” Jonas pleaded.

“Wait for us!” Alicia called out.

Ellis paid them little heed.
Jonas who sat by the Gate. Alicia and Margaret who dreamed of their own Day.
They would follow her, she realized, as they had always followed her.

The staircase emerged high on a cliff wall of an underground cavern. Ellis drew in a deep breath. The near walls were illuminated by the red lanterns but she could not make out their extents on either side. Nor could she see the bottom of the chasm beneath her. Only the continuing descent of the stairs before her.

“I don't remember your uncle's cellar being quite this big,” Jonas quipped.

“I don't remember you ever going down there,” Ellis said with a smirk.

“It was dark,” Jonas said in his defense.

“Not this dark,” Ellis said, gathering her courage. “This is the way. Come on.”

“I thought I was supposed to guide you?” Jonas said.

Ellis thought for a moment then turned to Jonas. The paisley-shaped bruise over his right eye had become the disfigurement of a burn. Ellis could see the scarring of the tissue, the pulling of facial cartilage. There were a lot of the soldiers who were returning with injuries far worse. She had treated so many of them after she had entered into the nursing corps, the only branch of the service available to her. She was overtrained and overqualified but after Jonas had been drafted into the Canadian services, she had somehow woken up from the pain and the loss to realize that she had thrown away a great deal more. Somehow it felt that if she could serve the warriors coming home she might somehow be serving him, too. There was a penitence that she found comforting and somehow basically right. Her uniform was an outward symbol of that inner regret. It was certainly far less fashionable than she was used to and the color was …

Ellis glanced down at the hideous traveling dress she wore.

It was not a traveling dress at all. Though it was devoid of any of the chevrons, badges or patches it was that dull green color and unquestionably the remains of her uniform.

Ellis turned back to face Jonas on the stairs.

“Jonas.” Her voice was soft and spoke his name with a tenderness that surprised her. “I don't think I want you to lead me anywhere anymore … and I don't want you to follow me, either…”

She could see the pain fill his eyes, so she rushed her words, gently placing her hand on his chest. “But what I want … what I think I've always wanted … was someone who would stand beside me. I know you loved me, Jonas, and have always wanted what you honestly believed was best for me. And the more I remember of our life together, the more I believe that I had come to love you, too. But I don't need you to save me, Jonas. I know that you will always place my needs ahead of your own. But what I truly wish to know is that you'll place the two of us together ahead of either of us.”

She reached down and took his hand.

“Can we face this together?” she asked.

“Together, Ellis,” Jonas said, intertwining his fingers with hers.

“That was a lovely scene and I'm sure both Margaret and I are grateful to have been a part of it,” Alicia said from behind them. She was shivering visibly. “But now that you know where you keep this demon of yours, could we possibly go back up the stairs now?”

“No,” Ellis answered with a firmer determination than she had known since she awoke in this place. “Never go back, Alicia. What's done is done and cannot be undone. Never forget where you've been, but never, ever go back.”

“I don't understand,” Alicia whined.

“Exactly,” Ellis responded. She started down the staircase, with Jonas by her side. There was no railing on the left of the stairs and the railing on the right shifted loosely under her grip. However, to her relief, there were just enough lanterns hanging at uneven intervals down the railing. They could make out further lamps down before them, each barely sufficient for them to see their next few steps ahead. The air grew warmer with every step and uncomfortably damp. The stairs seemed to descend interminably.

“Did you make this?” Margaret asked.

“I honestly don't know, Margaret,” Ellis replied.

The descent seemed interminable with the moments stretching into hours. At last, however, something could dimly be perceived emerging from the gloom below. A dark, enormous shape lit by the same dull, red lanterns that had illuminated the upper staircase.

Ellis called softly back, “I think we've found it—or it has found us.”

“What do you mean?” Alicia shivered.

“I'm not sure,” Ellis answered back in hushed tones.

The shape as a whole was that of an enormous building, an inverted cathedral whose spires were driven into the rock at its base. The uttermost extents could not be determined as they faded into the darkness beyond the extents of their vision both beyond and overhead. It might have been an extension of Echo House thrust downward from the cavernous ceiling above but the closer they got, the more it was evident that the entire monstrous structure was an amalgamation from parts of a chaotic and eclectic assortment of ships. It looked as though the hands of a titan's child had pushed together schooners, barques, steamers and ketches into a broken mass and tried to shape them into a Gothic stalactite. Bowed hulls stood on end, strangely angled turrets standing on a stone island rising from the bottomless chasm below. Masts and rigging stuck out at odd angles from the central mass.

Ellis and Jonas stepped off the bottom of the stairs with Alicia and Margaret close at their heels. The twisted masts, rigging, deck planking and ribbing were illuminated in various places with the same red hurricane lanterns that had lit their way on the way down the long stairs. It cast a dim light that still left the full extents of the structure obscured in the distance.

“There doesn't appear to be a door,” Margaret suggested.

“Then, perhaps, we need to find another way in.” Ellis released Jonas's hand and walked quickly toward the jumble of the building. She began examining the exterior in its detail. One fantail, upside down to her point of view, read
Monte Blanche.
A vertical bow nearby displayed the name
Imo
. There was even a piece of plating with the name
Titanic
and a wooden stern labeled
Hesperus.

“What are we looking for?” Margaret asked.

Though her hull was weathered, Ellis could still barely make out the faded name on the side just aft of the bow.

“The
Mary Celeste,
” Ellis murmured to herself with satisfaction. Then she raised her hands, cupping around her mouth as she called out, “Ahoy the boat!”