This chamber sat at the southeast corner of the house, and of the remaining four pipes, two each had been pushed through holes in the south and the east walls, respectively. Colin wondered about those pipes. The two that led into the adjoining room did not emerge in that room, but what of these, which appeared to run under the grounds outside?
He knew only one way to find out.
With one last look at Sir Edgar’s mechanism, Colin doused the lamps and retreated up the stairs. He did not bother returning to his room. Rather, he fixed a pot of tea and nibbled on a leftover apple tart in the kitchen as he waited for the sun to rise, so that he could pay a visit to Mr. Church.
“There’s nothing wrong with my hearing,” Grandmother Abigail insisted.
The old woman frowned at him, arms sternly crossed. When Colin had returned from town with Mr. Church and half a dozen of his workers, Grandmother Abigail had demanded to know what he thought he was doing, ordering them to dig holes in the grounds around the house.
Reluctantly, he had told her the story of his experience the previous night, including his amazement that the sounds he heard in the walls did not rouse any of the house’s other residents from their beds. He had long suspected Filgate of relying heavily upon brandy to carry him off to sleep, which would explain the man’s sound slumber, but his suggestion that perhaps age had diminished his grandmother’s hearing brought this angry protest.
“I intended no offense,” Colin said, his tone carrying as much apology as he could muster. “I simply cannot imagine how you managed to sleep through the noise. Granted, it wasn’t especially loud, but so consistent that the irritation alone would be enough to drive one mad if it persisted long enough.”
Grandmother Abigail’s expression faltered, and she shrank slightly. It lasted only a moment, but long enough for Colin to realize that her pique had been a mask behind which she hid some other, more subtle response to his inquiries.
“What is it you aren’t telling me?” he asked.
She shook her head and looked away, gazing out the window at two of the workers, who even now plunged shovels into soft brown earth, piling rich soil high beside the waist-deep hole they’d dug.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You did hear it,” Colin guessed. “You know precisely what I’m talking about.”
Her jaw seemed set, as though she might never utter another word as long as she lived, and then she took a deep breath and released it before turning to him.
“I hear nothing of the kind,” she said. “But your father heard… something.”
Colin straightened up. “Tell me everything.”
“He said almost exactly the same thing, about the sound being enough to drive one mad, given time enough. He heard…vibrations, yes, but he said whatever those machines were that he heard, they had a rhythm.”
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 between 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 somehow separated herself from him.
“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 would lead him 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 that 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 th
e 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 it away. If his father had stepped onto another plane of existence, joining him there was far from the worst thing that 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 the levers and the pedals. One valve protruded from a metal arm which, 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.
BLOOD FOR BLOOD
by Christopher Golden and Charlaine Harris
The screaming got old by the second day. On the first day, Peter Octavian was too battered to do anything more than wish the screamer would shut up. She would be silent for maybe eight hours, but then she’d start again. He was lying as still as he could on the stone floor, the chill creeping through his bruised skin and flesh and digging into his bones. He could have sworn those were bruised, too.
Time crept by, as it does when you’re in excruciating pain. Octavian slowed his thoughts to a crawl as he concentrated on his recovery. After so many years as a sorcerer, he had grown so used to being able to summon magic on a whim that he’d taken its presence for granted. Not here. In the midst of his pain, he kept searching within himself and reaching out into the world around him, but he could not feel much magic at all. Yes, he was in a strange land powered by a strange magic, but it felt as if his cell was lined with some substance that sapped his own sorcery.
Faery.
He hated the Fae. He hated Faery. He hated the mission that had brought him here. He hated the dungeon he was in, and the woman screaming next door.
He was sure it was a woman. He formed a picture of her. She was aged, with ragged graying hair and a bony frame, and she was hurting as much as he was.
But by the third day, Octavian decided she deserved it.
Food would come at intervals, and Octavian made himself crawl to the door and consume everything they slid through the space at the bottom of the door. He needed the strength. As he was eating the second meal, Octavian couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t heard a food plate being delivered under the door next to his. At first he didn’t understand what that meant, but the second time he was alert enough to listen and comprehend that the screamer was not receiving food. Maybe a cup of water? It was hard to tell.
After that realization, Octavian cut her a little more slack. He wondered, How does she have the energy to scream like that, if she’s not getting any food? But mostly, he worried about himself.
; Maybe for once, he was in over his head. Maybe this would be the end of him. A strange thing after so very long, to imagine an ending.
The third day, he decided to speak to the screamer.
“Shut up long enough to answer a question. Why aren’t they feeding you?”
The screaming was cut off as if he’d sawed it in two.
“Because the spell wore off,” a voice said, slowly and carefully, as if she were having to remember how to speak English.
“What spell?” he asked.
“To make the smell of Fae less intoxicating to me,” she said, still pausing between words.
“What are you?”
“Vampire,” she said, with just an echo of pride in her voice.
Everything made sense, now. The (more or less) eight hours of silence fell during the daytime, when she slept the sleep of the dead. Octavian had a long history with vampirism and vampires—he’d been one for centuries, before he’d been to Hell and things had…changed—but this one sounded a little different from the blood suckers he was used to.
“And the Fae are very good blood for vampires?” he asked. This was an unfamiliar fact, and Octavian tried to fit it into his world.
“Oh,” she said longingly, “the blood is like cake and honey. I am so hungry.”
“Where are you from?” Octavian asked quickly, before she could start screaming again.
“I live in the Rhodes nest.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, since she couldn’t see his blank look.
“What’s to understand? I live in America, in the city of Rhodes. It’s not far from Chicago. It’s a large city. I live in a vampire nest, and Joaquin is my sheriff.”
She might as well have been speaking Greek. Which was what she did next. It seemed as if she didn’t expect him to comprehend, and given the string of insults she was hurling at him, he decided to go along with that presumption.
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