The Dark Volume

by Gordon Dahlquist

  “Just like that devil promised!” cried Mrs. Daube. “He told me plain as day that any person crossing him would die. No doubt he went from here to the stables! Now that I remember, I am sure he said it quite clear: ‘If that boy crosses me—”

  The two townsmen erupted in astonished and outraged shouts, demanding that Mrs. Daube explain more, demanding of Svenson where his friend was hiding, insisting (this was Mr. Carper) that the fellow be hanged. Svenson put up his hands and called out, his eyes darting between the strangely satisfied innkeeper and her watchful guest.

  “Gentlemen—please! I am sure this woman is wrong!”

  “How am I wrong?” she sneered. “I know what I saw—and what he said! And now you say the boy's been slaughtered!”

  “The many cuts—” began Mr. Bolte.

  “The knife!” cried Mr. Carper.

  “I understand!” shouted Svenson, raising his hands again to quiet them.

  “Who are you anyway?” muttered Mrs. Daube.

  “I am a surgeon,” said Svenson. “I have spent the last hour attempting to save that poor boy's life—I am not unmindful of the savage way in which he was killed. Mrs. Daube, you have told us what Chang—”

  “He is a Chinaman?” asked Mr. Bolte, with open distaste.

  “No. It—it does not matter. Mrs. Daube claims that Chang told her—”

  “He did tell me!”

  “I do not doubt you, madame.” Indeed, Svenson was surprised not to find the imprint of Chang's hand still raw on the woman's face. “But when… when did this conversation occur?”

  Mrs. Daube licked her lips, as if she did not trust this line of questioning at all.

  “Yesterday evening,” she replied.

  “Are you sure?” asked Svenson.

  “I am.”

  “And after this conversation Cardinal Chang departed—”

  “He is a churchman?” asked Mr. Bolte.

  “He is a demon,” muttered Mrs. Daube.

  “A demon you last saw yesterday evening?” asked the Doctor.

  Mrs. Daube nodded with a sniff.

  “Why are you defending his man?” Mr. Potts asked Svenson.

  “I am trying to learn the truth. The boy was attacked only some hours ago, and by his wounds, the father at most only hours before that.”

  “That proves nothing,” offered Mr. Potts. “This fellow might have spent the whole next day tracking them, only to make his attack to night.”

  “Certainly true,” nodded Svenson. “The question is whether Chang left town in the intervening hours or not. You did not see him yourself, Mr. Potts?”

  “Regrettably, no.”

  “Mr. Potts and his fellows have each traveled different directions from Karthe,” explained Mrs. Daube, “the better to find the best hunting.”

  “And none of your fellows were back either?” asked Svenson.

  “I fear I am the first to return, being less of an outdoorsman—”

  “Not like the Captain,” said Mrs. Daube with a smile, “who has come and gone again. As handsome a man as this Chang is a terror—”

  “No one was here,” Potts insisted, over her words. “Suspicion naturally falls on this man Chang.”

  “Who else could have done these things?” asked Mr. Bolte.

  “Why else would anyone do them?” asked Mr. Carper.

  “Why would Chang?” countered Svenson. “He is a stranger here— like myself and Mr. Potts—and come to Karthe only in order to leave it, and leave before these killings occurred.”

  “And yet,” began Carper, “if he is a natural villain—”

  “How would we learn whether he had gone?” asked Mr. Bolte.

  “Quite simply,” said Svenson. “Did a train depart last night or this morning?”

  Mr. Bolte looked at Mr. Carper.

  “Last night,” answered Carper. “But we do not know this Chang was on it.”

  “Is there anyone who might know?” asked Svenson. “Usually this sort of thing is quite easily proven, you see.”

  “Perhaps we could ask at the train yard,” Mr. Bolte said.

  AN HOUR later Doctor Svenson walked back with Mr. Bolte—Mr. Carper, connected to the mines, was still speaking with the trainsmen. There had been an incident—the talk of the rail yard—on the previous night's train: a passenger compartment with its window and door shattered, and a mysterious figure, wearing a blind man's glasses and a long red coat, stalking through the corridor like a wraith. The damaged compartment had been splashed with blood, as had the glass on the trackside, but no victim—dead or alive—had been found. How ever, the trainsmen were sure: the strange figure in red had been aboard when the train had finally left.

  With Chang regrettably eliminated as a suspect, the two townsmen had speculated about who, or what, might have killed the boy and his father, seizing on the possibility of a wolf with enthusiasm. Svenson nodded where politeness required it.

  All of Chang's suspicion had stood before the Doctor in the form of Mr. Potts—obviously no simple hunter. If Potts was on any official Ministry errand there would be no fiction of a hunting party—there would be soldiers in uniform. Since there were not, Svenson had to conclude that the remnants of the Cabal in the city, all those masked guests at Harschmort who had received their instructions in specially coded leather-bound volumes, had not yet claimed power openly. Because of the disaster with the airship? Perhaps there was still time to stop them—the question was what Potts knew. Did he have their names? Was he informed about the glass? Would he denounce Svenson to the town? What were his exact instructions… and from whom?

  And of course, to the side of this, there was the unfortunate boy himself. Both he and his father—and, by the similarity of wounds, the two grooms in the fishing village—had been slain by shards from a broken blue glass book. Could this have been one of Potts’ soldiers, penetrating that far north, coming across the glass? But why the grooms and not Svenson himself—surely anyone in the fishing village would have directed the soldiers to Sorge's cabin.

  Was it possible someone else had survived the airship? Svenson recalled the crude map drawn on Sorge's table, the killings ascribed to two sources. He groaned aloud. Did that mean two survivors?

  “Are you quite well, Doctor?”

  “Perhaps I ought to eat,” he replied, smiling weakly.

  “I will show you back to the inn,” said Bolte, “and have one of the men on watch collect you later.”

  “Watch?”

  “Indeed yes!” Bolte patted Svenson heartily on the shoulder. “While you are having your dinner, Mr. Carper and I must rouse the town. We have a wolf to hunt!”

  MR. POTTS was not at the inn when Svenson returned. After Mr. Bolte had explained Chang's innocence, and how it was certain their culprit was a wolf, Mrs. Daube had grudgingly shown the Doctor upstairs to a small room with a bare mattress on a wooden frame. The woman sniffed, not at all ready to ease her disapproval, and asked again what place Svenson was from (this being a clear implication Macklenburg did not truly exist). Svenson took the opportunity to draw a map with his finger on the dusty top of the room's one little table, but he had not finished placing Macklenburg to the far side of Schleswig-Holstein before she broke in to ask what he desired for his meal. The Doctor swept his hand across the dust with a thin smile and replied that anything ready and warm would do—along with, if she had it, a pot of beer. Mrs. Daube briskly announced what this would cost and told him he was free to sit in the common room or to come down to the table in half an hour.

  He listened to her footsteps on the stairs, sitting in his coat on the bed, and then stretched out on his back. The discovery of the boy had launched him into hours of unexpected activity, the obligations of medicine that provided—as they had so often in his life—an illusion of purpose and place. But now, staring up at the slanted split pine roof of an over-priced, underkempt room in a town he had no desire to know, the Doctor felt the weight of his isolation. Chang, by catching that train, could e
ven at that moment have reached Stropping Station—back in a city where he lived as easily as a crow amongst carrion. But Svenson's escape from Karthe meant merely another destination for exile.

  Should he offer himself to a workhouse hospital? Or to the brothels as an abortionist? He lit a cigarette and blew smoke above his head. How recently—how very recently—had his heart been as light as a fool's? What ridiculous visions had inflected the corners of his mind? During one evening meal at Sorge's, Elöise had described her uncle's cottage, near some park, her summers there as a child… a glimpse of another sort of life. It was all veneer, the very idea of taking walks, for goodness sake, or possessing genuine concern for a garden, or tending the feelings of another. The more the Doctor imagined it, the more it seemed beyond his abilities—as well as quite beyond hope.

  SVENSON SAT listening to Mrs. Daube's distant puttering, and used both hands to quickly remove his boots. Walking softly in his stocking feet, the Doctor crept with the candle to the other guest rooms. The first was empty, the pallet rolled up against the bed frame. The next held Mr. Potts' things—travel valise, trousers and two shirts hanging from hooks on the wall, and a small pile of books on the bedside table— the navy's official book of tide tables, an engineering pamphlet on salvaging shipwrecks, and a distressingly thick serial novel, Handmaids to Messalina, which from randomly opened pages proved to be quite vigorously obscene.

  Svenson peered beneath the bed. A second pair of shoes, a ragged newspaper—the Herald, folded to dire proclamations on “Privy Council Defiance” and “Epidemic Silences Industry”—and beyond them both, poking out from the far side of the bed frame, what looked like another book. Svenson stood, leaned carefully over the bed, and extracted a thin volume of poetry—without question the same he had seen belonging to Chang. Svenson craned his head toward the stairway, heard no one, and flipped through the book with both hands. What could have made Chang forget it—especially if his time with Mrs. Daube was so fraught with suspicion?

  Chang would not have forgotten it—the man was, in his habits if not in his person, fastidious as a cat. He had left it for a reason, but it had been discovered by Mr. Potts. Svenson found a folded down page and Chang's terse note: “Our enemies live. Leave this inn …”

  He crept back to his own room and hid the book beneath his bed.

  THE DOCTOR sat near the hearth with a mug of beer. It was not especially good, but to the first beer to pass his lips in nearly a fortnight he was forgiving. Mrs. Daube clattered away in the kitchen. He wondered what Elöise was doing even then—most likely dismal conversation with Lina and Sorge. He wondered if Miss Temple was awake.

  The front door opened to admit Mr. Bolte.

  “I am afraid I must borrow your guest for a little time, Mrs. Daube,” he called, smiling in such a way as to let the woman know she had no say in the matter.

  Mrs. Daube snorted at the Doctor. “What's it to me if you eat it cold?”

  “WE HAVE found something,” Mr. Bolte explained once they were outside. “A clue.”

  In the road waited Mr. Potts, and—his work at the train yards evidently finished—Mr. Carper, both with lanterns, and some men Svenson did not recognize, each standing with either a new-sharpened stave or a bright lantern.

  “It was Mr. Potts' idea.” Bolte nodded to the crisply dressed city man. “Perhaps you will show the Doctor, Martin.”

  Doctor Svenson disliked this newfound familiarity, but forced himself to smile with curiosity at Potts, aware that the man's own earnest expression was an untrustable veil. Svenson had been attached to the Macklenburg diplomatic party as personal physician to the late Prince, but everyone with a brain knew his true task, to control the young man's penchant for excess and scandal. If Potts was from the Ministry he must know of Svenson…which meant he must also know that Macklenburg had declared Svenson a criminal. Yet here was Potts, saying nothing, leading them all to a patch of scrub grass near the road, half-way between the dead boy's house and the Flaming Star.

  Mr. Potts stroked his chin like a preening bird. “Indeed—well, it was this notion of the killer—the wolf—chasing the boy from the deathbed of his father to the rocks. I simply took a lantern and searched for any signs connecting the two—for example a trail of blood.”

  “And was there?” asked Svenson.

  “My word, yes,” replied Potts with a smile. “But not of blood! It's most strange, you see—nothing other than marbles! Beads of what to me looks like glass!” He crouched low, holding the lantern.

  There in the dirt lay a scatter of flattened, bright stones that in the flickering light seemed to contain the blue shimmer of a tropical sea. Svenson saw instantly that this had been some fluid ejected in a stream—a jet of coagulating blood, or clotted saliva—that had then hardened in the cold air. Could the boy have been wounded in the house? Had he fled to the rocks, leaving this unnatural trail?

  He realized Potts was watching him closely. Svenson cleared his throat.

  “Do you gentlemen know their… source?”

  “We rather hoped you did,” replied Bolte.

  “I am afraid this is beyond my knowledge. But perhaps Mr. Potts—”

  “Not I.” Potts fixed his gaze on Svenson.

  “Then let us hurry on,” Mr. Bolte urged. “Back to the rocks.”

  AS THEY walked, Mr. Bolte speculated whether the blue marbles might have come from some hitherto unknown mineral deposit or whether the boy's father had cadged them from unsavory dealings— here Bolte's voice dropped low—with a gypsy.

  “I should not think Karthe has traffic with gypsies,” offered Svenson.

  “We do not,” insisted Bolte.

  “Because of the isolation, I mean.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Then perhaps…” Potts risked a glance to the Doctor. “… we have not found a gypsy's marble. Perhaps it comes from a wolf… eating something unnatural.”

  Mr. Carper called over their shoulders, for he had fallen behind, his voice thick with effort. “A hungry wolf will eat anything!”

  Svenson felt Potts watching him and groped for some reply, but then they reached the rocks. With so many lanterns lighting up the inner clearing like an unnatural dark-skied summer day, the horrifying nature of the boy's last hour was inescapable. The rock face below his cleft of refuge was thickly striped in both blood and gleaming blue. The child had been clawed to pieces like a cornered rat—his assailant striking again and again from below, hacking at the legs but never able to catch a grip to pull the boy to the ground. Svenson turned away, dismayed to his heart. His gaze fell upon a ring of blackened stones, a fire pit. Potts called to him.

  “It seems to have been recently used, does it not?”

  “It might have been the boy,” Svenson speculated aloud. “Or a miner in transit with no money for the inn.”

  “But if it wasn't?” asked Potts.

  “Who do you mean?” asked Bolte.

  “I do not know. But if someone else might have been here…”

  “I saw no one,” said Svenson, “when I found the boy.”

  “Perhaps they too fell victim,” wheezed Mr. Carper, who did not seem the better for the walk. “Or perhaps they ran away.”

  “Perhaps they left a trail themselves,” observed Svenson, and he looked meaningfully at Mr. Potts. Immediately Potts was snapping orders at the other men—without a qualm for Mr. Bolte's ostensible authority—spreading them out to search the ground.

  Svenson looked up at the mournful crevice where the boy had lain. He turned to Mr. Carper. “If I might trouble you for a push, sir?”

  Carper was entirely obliging—it gave him an excuse not to search— and allowed the Doctor to press one foot off his cradled hands, and then another off his shoulder. Svenson clawed his way up the rock, gritting his teeth and refusing to look beneath him—even this minor height made his palms sweat. Why must he always find himself in these situations?

  “What do you see?” called Carper, holding up his lantern
.

  Svenson reached the crevice and pulled himself to the side of the sticky blood, exhaling with effort. The crevice was tiny, but extended farther than he'd thought, the depths too narrow for the boy to use. Svenson squinted… a pale object in the very distant dark… he flattened his body and extended one arm… his fingers touched cloth… he pulled on it, gently, and it came free—a grain sack… with something particularly heavy inside it.

  He slid to the ground. Before Mr. Carper could ask what Svenson had found, the Doctor leaned close. “We must find Mr. Bolte, alone.”

  The rest of the men were assisting Mr. Potts, nosing about like dogs in the shadows. Svenson crossed quickly, took Bolte's arm, and walked him out of the rocks altogether, Carper trailing behind with the lantern.

  “The Doctor has something to show you,” whispered Carper, a bit too dramatically.

  “Found in the crevice,” said Svenson, “where the boy was attacked. I believe it was what he was protecting—why he was killed.”

  “I do not understand. Is it food?”

  “It is not.”

  “Why would a wolf care about anything it could not eat?”

  “Mr. Bolte… and Mr. Carper, you too must know.”

  The two men exchanged a glance and drew closer.

  “There is no wolf,” said Svenson. “At least no wolf in Karthe. Be fore you say a word—believe me, my proof for all I say is longer than we have time to tell—you saw the ‘marbles’ Mr. Potts found on the road, and you saw the dead boy's legs—the gashes of blue?”

  “But you said that you did not know—”

  “I had hoped it was not necessary. It has become so.”

  He opened the sack and carefully held it open, rolling down the sides so the two men could see, but keeping his fingers in contact only with the canvas. All three flinched as Carper's lantern was reflected back into their eyes, a bewitching, luminous indigo.

  “It… appears to be… a sort of book…”

  “Made of… glass,” whispered Carper. “The same glass!”

  “But of what use is a glass book?” asked Bolte. “It cannot hold printing.”