Don't Go Alone

by Christopher Golden

  They faced one another in the elaborate foyer, surrounded by the odd religious icons that had been his father’s passion—and then peculiarity—over the years.

  “I suppose it’s too much to hope that he’s turned up,” Colin said.

  Grandmother Abigail shook her head, her lips quivering slightly, a tiny yet startling concession to her fear for her son.

  “Not a trace, Collie. Not a trace,” the old woman said, and then the familiar, hard mask he knew so well, returned. “Word has spread throughout the city for people to be on the lookout for him, but there’s been no word. The grounds have been searched and every room in the house, from attic to cellar, but the only thing down there is Edgar’s mechanism.”

  Colin frowned. “Mechanism?”

  His grandmother fluttered her hand in a way that revealed a new delicacy in her, one that he had never seen, now brought on by fear or advancing age or some combination of the two.

  “A strange contraption of metal and wood, with no purpose I ever saw or he ever shared,” she said, her disdain obvious despite her concern for her son.

  “I never imagined Father as much of an inventor,” Colin said, mystified.

  “He began building it last year, not long after an argument he had with that ugly Irish spiritualist.”

  Colin shivered. Finnegan had been a charlatan, no doubt, but his father had always seemed somehow to enjoy the man’s company. The birdlike man with his small eyes and misshapen nose had always tried to get Colin to call him “Uncle Charlie,” but as a boy he had only managed it once or twice, and as a young man, Colin had wanted nothing to do with him.

  But he’d been away at university for more than a year, home only for brief visits in the summer and at Christmas, and had never thought to inquire about Finnegan. He had not even been aware that his father and the ugly Irishman had had a falling out.

  Perhaps Sir Edgar Radford had finally realized that no matter what he claimed or what sort of show he put on, Finnegan’s mediumship was a sham. The Irishman had been trying to help the man contact his dead wife for more than a decade.

  “Do you want to see it?” Grandmother Abigail asked.

  Colin frowned. “See what?”

  “Why, your father’s mechanism. The very thing we were just discussing.”

  “I’d think my time better spent in joining the search, wouldn’t you?”

  Grandmother Abigail dropped her eyes, as though worried what he might see in them. “Perhaps.”

  “And yet?” Colin prodded.

  The old woman lifted her gaze. “The infernal thing troubles me, that’s all. In the past few weeks your father spent so much of his time down there, and he grew increasingly irritated at any intrusion. Fervent in his efforts and…hostile, yes, toward anyone who might question them. But, you see, I had no desire to linger in the cellar. The thing makes me uneasy, even if it doesn’t…”

  Dread climbed his spine on skittery spider legs. “Doesn’t what?”

  Again, she glanced downward. “It doesn’t work, of course.”

  “What is it you’re keeping from me, Grandmother?”

  With that, she shook her head and waved him toward the stairs. “Go on. Put your things away. Martha has seen to your room, and I’ll have a meal prepared for you. I imagine you’ll wish to speak to Thomas Church, who is organizing the search.”

  Grandmother Abigail turned away, bent with age, and began to retreat along the corridor that led to the kitchens. “Perhaps it’s better you keep away from the thing after all.”

  Befuddled, Colin watched her go. The old woman had never treated him with the sort of warmth many associated with the role of grandmother, nor did she exhibit the witch-like sort of behavior often portrayed in stories. Neither kindly matron nor wizened crone, Abigail Radford kept mostly to herself and had a fondness for coffee over tea and biscuits rather than scones. When not knitting or strolling the grounds on watch for “pests,” she had forever seemed to lurk just over young Colin’s shoulder, ready to tut-tut at any seemingly imminent infraction. If he attempted to slip into the kitchen for an early taste of dinner or to snatch a cooling scone from a baking sheet, she would be there. If he jumped on his father’s bed, slid on the banister, or tried to climb up onto the roof of the house, Grandmother Abigail seemed ever present, and able to dissuade him with a clucking of her tongue and the knitting of her brow.

  A gray, joyless woman. And yet he knew she believed her efforts were all to keep him safe, and that in her way she loved him, a vital bit of knowledge for a boy who had grown to manhood without the benefit of a mother.

  As a child, he had been told that his mother had gone off with the fairies and that one day she might return. A million fantasies had been born of this lie, and he had often imagined himself wandering into the woods in pursuit of his beautiful mother, joining her in the kingdom of the fairies, living with sprites and brownies and other creatures of magic and mischief. By the age of eight he had begun to realize that this was mere fancy, but it was not until he turned twelve that his father had told him of his mother’s drowning.

  Now, with his father having also “vanished,” he could not help but remember the lies about her death. Had Edgar Radford also gone “off with the fairies?” Had the old man wandered off in the grip of some dementia, been killed by brigands, or suffered some fatal misadventure?

  Colin meant to find him, no matter the answer. The idea that his father’s behavior had altered so radically over the past year with Colin completely unaware of the changes unnerved him. He would join in the search. If necessary, he would begin it again and conduct it himself.

  Yet even as he made this silent vow—climbing the stairs and striding down the corridor toward his childhood bedroom—he realized just how impossible a task he had set for himself. Norwich was no tiny hamlet, but a city, with thousands of dark nooks and shadowed corners, not to mention the woods and hills, and the ocean that had claimed his mother. And if Sir Edgar had left Norwich somehow…well, he would be found only if he wished to be found, or if some unfortunate happened upon his corpse.

  The quiet emptiness of the house—despite the presence of his grandmother and the servants—closed around him, suffocating, as he stepped into the bedroom. A fire had been laid in the fireplace and logs crackled and popped, low flames dancing. The room had been decorated in shades of blue and rich cream and it ought to have been filled with the warmth, if not of the fire then at least of memory.

  Yet it was cold.

  

  He did take a look that afternoon at what his grandmother had called Edgar’s mechanism, once he had searched his father’s study and found no note or journal or other document which might indicate the man’s state of mind prior to his vanishing. Sir Edgar had left only the mechanism behind.

  Though its intended use confounded him, Colin did not find himself unsettled by the machine the way the old woman seemed to be. Concerned, yes, even troubled—its seeming lack of purpose made him worry for the state of his father’s mind—but nothing more than that. If anything, the madness inherent in the contraption’s design made him hopeful that his father remained alive somewhere, that dementia had crept into his life and he had subsequently wandered off somewhere, forgotten the way home, and would eventually be found and returned to his family.

  Dementia seemed horrid, but Colin told himself he would prefer that to learning of his father’s death. Sir Edgar might be experiencing a certain amount of mental slippage, but at least Colin would be able to see him again, to provide him some comfort as he faded from the world. The man deserved that. For all of his eccentricities, Sir Edgar had been a proud, loving, and patient father.

  Colin had left him behind without a single reservation, presuming that he would always be there, that there would forever be a home to which he might return, and the strange wisdom of Sir Edgar Radford to draw upon.

  The air in the cellar was close and damp, warm even though the October days were chilly in Norwich and the nights even
more so. Filgate had seen to it that there were lamps burning in the cellar before Colin descended, but as he examined the machine he wished he had arranged for more light, or less. A single lamp would have done the job almost as well. With several, the light shifted and shadows played tricks upon his eyes, so that he had to use the lamp in his hand to take a closer look at the various gauges and turns and vents to ascertain their true shape, and attempt to determine their purpose.

  No matter how much light he shed upon the mechanism, however, he could not divine its use. During its construction, the cellar had been separated into three distinct spaces, one a wine cellar, one for cold storage, and one built around the base of a chimney, so that goods could be stored there in winter without freezing. Subsequent additions to the house had included expansions of the cellar, and it was in one of those that Sir Edgar had built his mechanism.

  To Colin, it looked like discarded pieces of other machines, a tangle of pipes and flues, enormous cogs and gears, wooden joists and shelves and pulleys. He pulled levers and turned cranks, but his experiments with the thing yielded no result save for a clattering here and a grinding there. The machine, whatever its ambition, did not work. It did not run.

  What puzzled him most were the thick iron pipes—perhaps four inches in diameter—that led off from the apparatus and directly into the stone walls in half a dozen places. They seemed intended to carry water or steam, but the mechanism worked not at all and so Colin could not determine which.

  After half an hour wasted in the gloom, he doused the lights and ascended the stairs to find Thomas Church awaiting him in the parlor. The ruddy-faced man had the paunch and thinning white hair of a friar, but his strong, scarred hands spoke of his youth as a mason, before circumstances conspired to raise him to a life in the magistrate. As a child, Colin had always found himself impressed by the air of authority Church carried with him, despite his meager beginnings as a tradesman.

  He spoke with that authority as he spoke of the search effort’s utter failure.

  “We’ve peered into every hole in Norwich and combed the hills and fields,” Church said grimly, running his fingers through his shaggy beard. “If Sir Edgar isn’t hiding, or being hid, he’ll turn up at some point. The lads I’ve got out looking aren’t ready to give up quite yet, but in a couple of days I’ll have to call it off. They’ve got lives to return to, y’see. Jobs and families.”

  “I understand, Mr. Church,” Colin said. “And I hope you’ll pass along my gratitude to each of them.”

  It was obvious Church wanted to say more, that he felt gravely dissatisfied with his own performance, but Colin could think of no words he might have spoken that would have provided solace, and so he offered none. He watched Church withdraw and then depart, allowing himself no outward expression of the despair that had begun to gnaw at his heart.

  

  That night, in the darkness of his bedroom, he felt sure he heard the walls whisper his dead mother’s name.

  At first, he thought it might be the moan of the October wind through the gap he had left in his window. He had surfaced from a deeper sleep into a state of disorientation, that drowsy, floating limbo that always waited on either side of wakefulness. Now his thoughts began to clear and he listened more carefully, ascribing any sound to the wind, the creak of old houses, or the rustle of curtains.

  And then, now fully awake, he heard it clearly. “Deirdre?”

  Not a cry or a shout, or even a moan as he had first believed, but a calling, as if the name were spoken by a blind man, lost and wandering, reaching out for the touch of the familiar. Colin did not recognize the voice, but it had a parched, weakened quality that might have masked its true timbre.

  He sat up in bed to listen and, sure enough, the voice came again, calling his dead mother’s name. “Deirdre?”

  “Father?” Colin said, his own voice equally thin and reedy in the dark. Though the voice did not sound precisely like his father’s, who else would be calling for long-dead Deirdre Radford in the middle of the night?

  Colin sat and listened closely, but long minutes ticked past without any further occurrence. Over time, however, he slowly became aware of another sound, a low thrum or vibration, so minimal as to be almost unnoticeable. Had he not been listening so keenly, he never would have heard it, and the sound would have remained part of the shush of the world’s quiet noise, the voice of a distant river, the wind on the grass, the soft breath of a slumbering lover.

  Alighting from his bed, he went to the fireplace, at first believing it to be the source of the thrum. It did seem louder there, but when he bent to listen more closely, he realized the tone did not emanate from within.

  As he cocked his head, trying to ascertain its origin, he placed his hand upon the mantel, then pulled it abruptly away as though he’d been burned. Thoughtfully, he put his hand once more upon the wooden mantel, and he felt the vibration there. With a glance around the room, wondering if the thrum was more pronounced in some corners than in others, he traced his hand along the mantel and then pressed his palm against the wall beside the fireplace.

  That contact was rewarded with a shift in tone. The vibration became louder and turned, for just a moment, into a grinding noise, followed quickly by the clank of metal, like gears turning over, and then a sigh as though of steam, before it finally diminished once more to its original volume and tenor.

  Somewhere in the midst of that noise, he might have heard the voice again, calling for Deirdre, but he could not be sure.

  Barely aware that he was holding his breath, Colin pressed an ear to the wall. Beneath the continuous thrum he could hear a soft clicking, as of cogs turning. Abruptly he pulled away from the wall, fetched his robe, and slipped it on. Tracing his fingers along the wall to be sure the thrum did not subside or diminish, he went out into the corridor.

  Colin kept his hand on the wall and then on the banister as he descended the stairs, but he already knew his destination. Only one new mechanism had been installed in the house during his time at university, and he had no doubt that his father’s mysterious invention must be the source of these unfamiliar sounds.

  No one else stirred as he made his way through the foyer and then along the hall to the cellar door. He thought that one or more of the servants might also be roused by the noise, though perhaps they had all grown accustomed to it over time. His grandmother had not been awakened, but she was an old woman and he presumed her hearing had deteriorated with age.

  Constantly alert to any change in the sound, afraid with each creak of a floorboard beneath his feet that it might cease, Colin fumbled to light the lamp that hung by the cellar door. Its soft glow cast strange shadows as he lifted it down from its hook, so that he turned quickly, thinking that Filgate or Grandmother Alicia had heard him wandering the house and come to investigate, secretly sure in the back of his mind that his father had appeared from some hiding place to explain all.

  But Colin was alone there, in front of the cellar door. And suddenly it seemed to him a dreadful idea to be up by himself in the middle of the night, about to descend into the cold and the dark and the queer depth of his father’s obsession. As a boy, he had always feared the cellar, and somehow in the burgeoning confidence of his time at university he had forgotten that fear.

  Now it returned.

  But that mechanical hum still vibrated in the air, and when he touched the cellar door he felt it far more strongly than before.

  “There’ll be no jumping at shadows,” he promised himself, and so doing, he opened the door and started down.

  The cellar looked much as it had earlier. Colin took the time to light several of the lamps that Filgate had arranged for him, though it now occurred to him that some of them had likely been put in place by his father, when Sir Edgar had been working on the contraption.

  Whatever he had been expecting upon his descent, however, his imagination proved far more active than the mechanism itself. The sound had increased in volume with every step and
as he approached the room wherein the thing had been constructed, but when he stepped inside he had to stop and stare in surprise. No levers moved. No steam escaped the valves. Cogs did not turn. The machine was absolutely still.

  Holding the single lamp in his hand, he maneuvered around the mechanism just as he had earlier in the day, his robe catching on a hinge and tearing slightly. Colin swore and continued his examination. He reached out to touch one of the bars of the mechanism with a hesitation akin to petting a stranger’s dog, but only the dullest vibration could be felt in the machine itself, less so than in the wood of the cellar door.

  Yet there could be no denying that the sound had grown louder as he entered this room. Colin began to walk the perimeter of the room to see if there were places where the volume rose or fell, and when he stepped over one of the pipes that jutted from the mechanism into the wall, he paused and looked back at the metal cylinder where it entered the stone foundation.

  Crouching, he grasped the pipe. His whole arm trembled with the vibration traveling through it, and he pulled away. Glancing back at the machine, he saw that nothing had changed. It remained still as ever. But here, where the pipe entered the wall, its extremities thrummed with the workings of some other machine or some unknown engine to which this one was attached, off beyond the cellar wall.

  Colin rose, staring at the wall. He turned in a circle, trying to figure where the pipes might lead. He walked to each of the seven pipes that extended from his father’s mechanism and found that each of them vibrated just as urgently as the first. As he checked, he fancied he could hear more subtle noises now, his ears adjusting to the thrum. There were clicks and whirs, hisses and clanks. Machines.

  But two of the pipes led into a wall that separated this room from another cellar chamber, and upon checking, he confirmed that they did not exit on the other side of that wall. One led into a wall that bordered nothing but stone, and must have run far under the remainder of the house, although how his father had managed to install it without excavating down through the floor of the parlor, Colin could not imagine.