by Thea Devine
That in itself was strange. It meant the rooms all faced the inside of the house. But the opposite wall, also a long slab of glossy mahogany with those same incised seams, had no windows at all.
The hallway seemed to go on forever, but they were almost at the end, where there was a window and an intersecting corridor.
It was so quiet. The silence had an eerie quality to it; it felt ominous, disquieting. There was not a single sound. Kyger couldn't even hear his own breathing, and he knew it was coming fast because everything felt so flat and deadly, as though there were ghostly eyes everywhere.
Why were there no windows on that long hallway wall?
There were no answers here, not tonight, not for him, not with the added burden of her; he'd been a fool to even try, and his wisest course was to get the intractable virgin out of this place and figure out the rest later.
Easier decided than done. The intersecting corridor provided no answers. One way looked the same as the other, except that now he could see there were door handles along the interior walls on either side of the corridor.
All rooms facing inward. And not a sound anywhere. No conversation. No moans of ecstasy. No cries of rapture, no screams of pleasure. No sense of anyone anywhere.
And then . .. suddenly—
The sound of a door opening, and voices, in the distance.
He pushed Angilee around the corner to the left, into the intersecting corridor, and down on the floor, and then he folded himself over her.
Voices, closer, coming from the direction they had just come.
The guide's plummy voice—did he never sleep?—"This way, sir."
Closer, closer, closer—
They could never lie flat enough on the floor not to be noticed. The guide would trip over them first.
"Here we are, sir."
He was so close. Right around the corner from where they were crouched. One extra step, and he'd hit Kyger's knee.
The sound of a door sliding open. The guide again: "I'll send someone momentarily to help you prepare for your guests."
"Much obliged." A similarly plummy tone in response. The door slid closed.
And—silence. They listened for footsteps, but there would be none with that thick muffling carpet.
A moment, two, three—the suspense was killing—still on his knees, Kyger peered around the corner into the hallway. Empty. Immediately, he levered himself upright, grasped Angilee's hand, pulled her to her feet, and turned and pulled her down the corridor.
They ran. Around another corner, and another, turning here, a long hallway there—racing through a labyrinth of hallways—and getting nowhere .. .
Kyger stopped short suddenly, and Angilee pitched into him.
How was this possible, that there was no end to these hallways, and every last one of them led someplace else, and none of them led anywhere?
Anything is possible. Nothing is improbable in a house of secrets , ..
The rampant skeptic in him took over: the house turned on an axis so that the hallway from which you entered a room was not the one into which you exited. Rooms with more than one door leading into other corridors. Walls that were movable ...
Shift things around, and every perception changed.
Moving walls?
Make a room smaller, larger, make a place of confinement, make it a haven. Change the perspective. Confuse things.
Moving walls .. . ?
He ran his hand over the glossy smoothness of the mahogany. The incised seaming. Could have hinges. Push on one and it might collapse into itself.
He pushed. It gave slightly.
Moving walls .. .
He looked at Angilee. Her eyes were wide, wary. Her whole body was tense; her hands were icy cold. She opened her mouth, and he motioned for her not to speak. It was too risky. What they were doing was more than risky—it was an invitation to disaster.
He should never have taken her along.
If there really were watchers . ..
Following their every move. Knowing that strangers who should not be there were prowling the hallways of the Bullhead ... What wouldn't they do to keep their enemies from uncovering their secrets?
Cut them off. Confuse them. Send them in the wrong direction. Lead them away from the mysteries. Confound them with mirrors.
Direct them where they wanted them to go.
Corner them.
Kill them.
Moving walls.
Goddamn.
He had to test the theory. Dangerous to test the theory when he was hampered by the burden of the virgin's life in his hands.
Hell. He took Angilee's hand once again and motioned her to follow him. Now he walked slowly, down a hallway no different from the half dozen other hallways they had followed.
Deadly silence. Flat, hushed, eerie . ..
Flickering gaslight shooting shadows well ahead of them down the hall. Not a sound. Not a breath, not a moan, not a sigh.. .
Slow, slow, slow—passing a doorway, looking for a seam ... and suddenly, he turned and shoved his body hard into the wall.
It collapsed inward, and part of the succeeding wall went with it. A woman screamed as a dozen yards of wall toppled flat down on the floor, revealing two rooms, both with the occupants naked, and heavily entwined and pumping hard, one into the other.
Screams, shouts, scrambling for clothes and coherence. Kyger jumped into the closest room, pulling the stunned Angilee after him, and made for the door on the opposite wall.
How many doors? It didn't matter—moving walls, moving doors, moving motives—
It was as if the house were a living entity, watching them, surrounding them, swallowing them .. .
Out the door into another corridor, quick down that hallway to the end, where they could only turn right. Running, running, running in circles, squares, running toward nothing and everything—running around yet another corner—
And—flat out of anywhere to run. Walls. Moving walls, cutting them off like an executioner's blade.
No windows. No doors. Just the wall. And distant shouts and loud voices and the sense of the enemy coming closer. They were
the enemy, whoever was operating those moving walls with such vicious accuracy.
Kyger took the measure of the wall, gauging that it was some three feet wide. He ran his hand over the surface, finding the seam.
"Now what?" Angilee whispered, hazarding the question in spite of instructions. She hated this: rejected by him, depending on him. This whole thing had been a disaster. She wanted out of this ridiculous place, she wanted to get started finding that husband, and she wanted never to see the hired bull again.
Not likely, not yet. It was too apparent she'd never get clear of the Bullhead without him. Damn it.
"We do what we've been doing," Kyger said grimly, "—we push ..." And he pushed, leaning his body into the seam, and the wall gave, folding to a narrow vee, just enough so that there was a space at one end, and they could squeeze through.
He pushed Angilee through first—"It's dark ..." her whisper, barely a breath of air, came back to him. Dark. But they had no choice. There were no bells and horns sounding, even though the effect was as if they were breaking out of prison, but there had to be other alarms, other protections that came into play when security was breached like this.
He couldn't get in through that slice of opening fast enough, the rough edge of the wall scraping his chest through his shirt as he wriggled his way into the pure bone-chilling darkness.
There .was just a sliver of light from the hallway in that instant, but it illuminated nothing. And they couldn't afford to crack the wall open further.
"I'm scared," Angilee whispered. She was terrified. All this silence, all this mystery, and she was supposed to trust him? Still? In the dark, groping around, walking into who knew what?
"Me, too."
The fact he said that was momentarily reassuring. Until he pushed the wall back into place and immerse
d them in the unutterable evil blackness.
It was as palpable as a touch. Pure wickedness, surrounding them. A blank nothingness, no beginning, no end, what it must be like to tumble into hell.
Except the Bullhead was such a paradise of profligate promiscuity, there had to be a way out for a sinner or a saint.
Kyger took a deep breath, groped for Angilee's frozen hand, and reached out into the darkness of nothingness, looking for something to hold on to, something to guide them.
But the underworld would have no markers. For a long, dark pulsing moment, he felt paralyzed, dispirited, disoriented, and he didn't know quite which way to turn. It would be like stepping into emptiness, falling into oblivion.
Or—the skeptic in him rose up again: maybe he was meant to feel that way. Maybe everything had been manipulated to make an infiltrator feel off balance and as if he was losing perspective, losing life. As if death was close, and he was powerless to stop it.
Power. Yes. It was all about power: the power of influence, greed, sex, secrecy, persuasion, corruption, and control.
All that power. Seven powerful things ...
The power of seven ..,
Sevens everywhere ...
Whoever managed the Bullhead made it seem as if they were invincible. But whoever they were, they were only men, with enough money, or access to it, to move mountains, politicians, policy, and Parliament.
To make a murdered demagogue into a saint.
There was nothing supernatural or surreal about them except the mystery with which they surrounded themselves.
There was nothing inexplicable about the Bullhead. It was the trappings, the silence, the exclusivity. The unholy covenant with those who paid to be invisible.
There was a way out. This wasn't a priest's hole. They were encased in a little prison of moving walls. And if one wall moved, then other walls must move. He had only to find the perpendicular wall and follow that and see where it led.
He reached behind him to feel just where the entry wall was. Right there. Very close. Something substantial, real. And Angilee— she was inches away, rigid as a stone statue, shaking as though they were in a windstorm.
He folded her against his body to give her some warmth. The scrapes on his chest ached. Angilee in his arms made him ache.
But there was no time for that—now or ever. They had to get out of there. And that was as much help as he could give her.
He reached for the wall, turned to his right, and with his outstretched hand as ballast, and his other arm around Angilee, he moved into the darkness.
She felt as if the blackness were devouring them. As if they could step into a void and be lost forever. The only real thing was the warmth of the bull's arm around her shoulders, the pulsing of his breath, the firmness of his step.
He seemed absolutely certain as he moved forward, even though they were stumbling over each other in the darkness.
"Shhh," it was barely a breath against her ear, his body was solid against hers as they inched forward, but she hardly felt reassured.
How could she when the bull wouldn't even consider marrying her. It was a wonder he hadn't left her to her fate in that room.
Dear heaven, what was she going to do? Once they got out of this hell, once they were away from the salacious spell of the Bullhead, then what? Maybe it was best to keep her focus on that rather than the dark and the mystery of this place, and the stupidity of her chosen course altogether.
She couldn't afford to keep looking for a husband in brothels. Bulls in brothels were totally undependable.
On top of that, by now, her father would have discovered she was gone, and found that she'd taken—borrowed?—a whole lot of money. So it was imperative she find a way to simultaneously stay out of sight and find a likely candidate to marry her.
Or buy one. There had to be men who would marry for money.
Or she could go back to America.
Except, she couldn't count on anything once she got back there. Her father had sold everything and put all his assets into cash when he first determined they would go to New York to try to find her a husband.
And then, after that resulted in his failure to crack the upper echelons, he had conceived this misbegotten trip to England and somehow, sometime, contracted this improbable alliance for her with Wroth.
Well, that had obviously given him entree to connections he could not attain either by himself or in New York. And the price, apparently, had been her, because he'd made it too obvious he wanted that more than he cared about who she married. It was clear now that he had financed this trip for reasons that had nothing to do with her, and she would never feel any guilt again about what she had done to circumvent his plans.
But if she went back to the States, she would use up a good portion of the money she had, and there were no guarantees she would find a husband, or that she wouldn't wind up working in a mill or something.
That was not for her, especially with her pedigree and her father's wealth. It would be far more efficient to find rooms here, perhaps hire a chaperone who could introduce her to the right people. Could one hire a chaperone for that purpose? It didn't matter: if money could buy anything, it could buy a chaperone, and then she could continue to pursue her plan to find a convenient husband.
It was another way out. It was a plan. And it was one for which she didn't have to depend on the hired penis for one minute more than it took for him to find a way out of this yawning oblivion of wickedness.
She felt galvanized, impatient now, her hands no longer cold, her body heated and humming with the need to take action.
Kyger felt the change in her instantly; her body was no longer slack against him. The virgin was nothing if not determined, he thought, as she shook off his arm, grabbed his hand, and matched her step to his. Nothing kept this one down for long. Not a bad trait in a situation like this.
He was walking very slowly as he felt the wall. There seemed to be no end to it. And it was smooth, without a seam. That worried him, because it might mean this was a stationary wall, and that the other walls in this enclosure were as well, and that they were trapped despite all his efforts to save them.
Hellfire. No.
... wait...
He groped around. No, a corner. He pulled Angilee toward him as he rounded it. Hell. This was pure hell. Blankness. A feeling of emptiness, futility, with no awareness of time at all. Every
step forward could have taken hours, for all he knew. In an abyss of nothingness, time had no meaning.
They inched forward. The silence was like a feather bed, enfolding, suffocating, hot, breathing ...
Or was it them . .. ?
Shit. Where the hell was the end of this thing? He was starting to feel manipulated again. Pushed and pulled their way ...
Not their way, damn them all to hell—
... wait—another seam. He stopped short, and Angilee bumped into him. No—not a seam—
He ran his hand up and down—and there it was—the ring pull.
He pulled Angilee close and whispered, "It's a door."
She made a relieved sound.
"Shhh..."
He went very still, listening for any sound, anything discordant in the air. There was nothing. Just the flat dead silence.
He grasped the ring. A slight eeking sound, barely audible, that still seemed to squeak a little too loudly in the silence.
Angilee nudged him impatiently. But he couldn't risk sliding open the door just yet. He listened. Not a sound beyond the wall.
Maybe he couldn't not risk opening the door ... He inched it open a crack.
Another hallway was what he saw. Of course. And low lights. Long glossy walls. Jesus. No end to the goddamned walls—
Slowly, he eased the door open just enough so they both could slip through.
No—not just another hallway. There was a bank of windows at one end of this one and an archway at the other, over which there was what looked like some kind
of circular symbol suspended.
They crept closer, keeping their bodies flattened against the wall. The thing was dark, like shiny dark gray onyx, large, reflective, and perfectly round. Like an eye, watching them.
They are always watching. It played into the mystique of omnipotence. You couldn't help but believe it.
He believed it.
That circle symbol was eerie. It was nothing like an eye, and yet, the feeling that someone was watching was palpable.
Nevertheless, they had to move. They edged under it cautiously and found that the archway gave on to a low-lit balcony which overlooked a winding stairwell. Nothing else was visible except a faint glow below, and the ever-present darkness.
There was only one way to go from here, and that was down.
"Come." Again, a breath of a word.
Hand in hand they dashed down the steps, halted at the bottom, again flattening themselves against the wall, holding and waiting.
Silence.
A faint, deep, resonant musical note in the distance. Where?
The glossy circle was suspended here as well, over another arched opening that was shrouded by brocade curtains and lit on either side by gas sconces.
Kyger nodded, and they edged their way forward until they were just to one side of the arch. He pulled the curtain a fraction away from the molding that framed the arch.
Directly opposite was a brass double door incised with indecipherable symbols all over the surface, over which was hung the same dark glossy circle symbol. In the distance, they could hear a low hum. A faint, deep musical sound.
There was a pulsing sense of something imminent. Kyger motioned Angilee to the opposite side of the arch so she could watch, too, and he mimed wrapping himself in the curtain in case someone should come.
It was such a chancey strategy, but it was something. In case. Because there was nowhere to run if anyone should come down those steps or into that hallway beyond the curtain.
Something was happening. It was in the air. The humming sound pulsed, like a heartbeat.
