A Drop of Night

by Stefan Bachmann

  “I have food and clothing, yes,” I say, my voice low. “And my mother is dead. There is no difference between pain of the heart and pain of the belly.”

  “And you think peasants are spared heart’s pain? We have both.”

  “You have a mother!” I shout. “She is alive. She was not shot before your eyes, and your sisters were not torn from you and locked away in some godforsaken palace. But you will not spare a drop of pity because I am rich? We have death in our gilded courts, too. We have disease and cruelty, and not a breath of air or freedom. You cannot say our lives are easy, any more than I can say yours is. They are lives, and so they are horrid!”

  The last word is a screech. I gasp, forcing the tears to keep from falling.

  Neither of us says a word for several moments. Jacques begins to move again, wandering about and straightening the pillows. Finally he turns to me. “I’m sorry, mademoiselle. Let’s not fight. Please? Everyone in the kitchens is on knife’s edge, every day. There is nothing but bile spewing and bitterness. Let us not fight, at least.”

  He finishes the bed and sits down across from me, cross-legged. I pretend great interest in a groove in the floorboards. I feel a stab of remorse for shrieking at him. He is poor and I am rich, and we each think ourselves the sadder and the more hurt. But there is no measure for pain. How wonderful it would be if there were no limit to sympathy.

  “I’m sorry, too,” I say. “And you may call me Aurélie. Please do.”

  We stay on the floor, neither of us looking at the other, simply lingering, unwilling to part. We are the same in some things: we are both young and lonely. We wish to protect the ones we love. We are both unable to do so.

  “Will you come with us when we escape?” I ask after a while.

  He looks up, surprised. “Where to?”

  “I don’t know. Wherever we go. London, I suppose.”

  I must sound terribly frivolous. I don’t care. I can almost feel the sun up there, the wind and the green grasses brushing against my fingertips. I can hear the birds. I feel I could burst these walls, burst the ceiling with my shoulders.

  “You would not want me along,” Jacques says, and he is looking at the same groove in the floorboard that I was so studiously inspecting. “I am no match for English chambermaids.”

  “And you have a family here,” I say practically.

  He stares at me. Nods. “That I have.”

  A knocking sounds, somewhere in the walls, dull and faraway. He leaves me.

  It is almost a week before I see him again. He unlocks the door to the boudoir and grins at me, tries to be light and jolly, but I know at once that he is neither. When he stretches himself long to reach the cornices, I see he has bruises on his hands and peeking, purple and green, from behind his collar. He will not tell me how he got them. I hope he is not being punished for the time he spends here.

  “Have you found a way out?” I ask him as soon as I dare.

  “No,” he says. “But I am closer. The butlers are run ragged with work. They . . . they become angry when the lower servants are slow, but there are fewer of them now and they cannot watch everything. I think some of them are being sent back up. Or perhaps they are escaping.” He studies his own hands, opening them across his knees. His fingers are brown and weathered like a farmer’s. “They will not let me near the outer chambers of the palace, or in certain wings, but I think it is only a matter of time. It is vast down here, immense. But it feels small. It feels airless.” His voice becomes soft. “I’ve been having the oddest dreams.”

  I wonder if they are like my dreams. I am about to ask him when a sound from beyond the door startles us to our feet. Jacques runs for the panel. I go with him, and as he steps through, my hand brushes his and he squeezes it. Now he is gone.

  I sometimes think I like him best when he is gone. I think of all the things I want to ask him, and I remember that if I were not here, if I were not a prisoner, I would not care to speak to him at all.

  23

  I’m dreaming. Nightmaring. Whatever it’s called. My back is flat against the floor. My shoulders stick disgustingly to my shirt.

  I’m in a banquet hall—beautiful, hideous, ornate. Everything is black and red. Red light. Black shadows. And everything is upside down. Chandeliers sprout from the floor like trees. A long table hangs from the ceiling. The table is covered with heaps of food, grotesque and unrecognizable in the dark, and somehow it doesn’t fall.

  I’m sitting at the table, upside down, my shoulder blades digging into a high, carved chair. And now gravity shifts and I’m upright. A plate is in front of me. I can’t tell what’s on it, but it’s piled high, steaming. . . .

  I flinch. Someone else is sitting at the table, way at the other end. He’s obscured by shadow, but I feel his eyes on me, and they’re cold. Sharp. Ice blue.

  A sound, like a knife against a crystal goblet, and the red lights flare along the table. I see the figure at the other end. It’s a huge man, a silhouette against the ruddy glow. For some reason I can only see parts of him, a red velvet coat, lacy cuffs resting on the table in front of him. The lower part of his face. Warts pressing like boils through the powder. The man is chewing, smiling, chewing and smiling, faster and faster, smacking his lips. I get little glimpses of his teeth––red teeth, stained teeth chewing.

  “Are you the butterfly man?” I want to ask, but something is clogging my throat, and I’m coughing, choking, vomiting bullets onto my plate—

  I wake up gasping.

  The sweat is freezing on my back. I shudder, pinch my eyes closed. Sit up.

  What time is it? Lilly is hanging off her chair. Jules and Will are sprawled every which way on the floor. The light seems to have changed. It’s pale white now, not the golden glow we went to sleep in.

  Something’s not right.

  The room feels crowded suddenly, stiflingly full. Lilly, Jules, and Will are next to me, but there are other people lying across the floor, propped against the fireplace, draped over tables. Sleeping people, their faces turned away from me, unmoving.

  I spin, searching for Perdu. He’s in the shadows behind a massive globe, crying, clawing at the painted map. And now he turns to me, and his eyes are red fire.

  Run, he spits. Run while you can. He’s seen you.

  I wake with a shout. Shove myself upright. The light is soft and warm. The sleepers are gone. It’s just Jules, Will, Lilly, me. Four.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Perdu’s gone.

  24

  I tear across the library.

  “Perdu!” I don’t even care if anyone hears me. The clock stopped at 2:17. Five hours after I last checked it. There’s blood on the floor, dark, stinking of hot metal. My feet are slapping in it.

  I reach the doors and stare up at them. All the furniture we had stacked in front of it is lying in a pile. I see soggy stacks of paper, stained red. Broken chair legs. The massive walnut table is on its side. The doors are still closed. The floor peg is out.

  No-no-no, how long was it out, how long was the door open—

  “Will?” I wail over my shoulder.

  I jam the floor peg in again and spin, racing back toward the fireplace. It’s not just blood on the floor. There are tufts of dark hair floating in the red, and fatty, pearly strands of white. Like something ripped at Perdu.

  “Jules!” The others are just starting to stand, gaping at the blood. “Jules, please tell me you didn’t fall asleep. Please—”

  He jerks around to look at me, his eyes wide.

  He fell asleep. We all did.

  Will peels away from us, heading for the door. I drop to hands and knees and crawl between the chairs, trying to see if anything is missing. My letter opener is still in my pocket. The compass is on the floor, half hidden under a heap of pillows and carpets. I grab it and clench it in my fist, still crawling. The two swords are lying on the floor. We don’t have anything else to steal.

/>   I leap to my feet and run back to the doors. Will’s there, one hand hovering over a bloody print on the wood. It’s smaller than his hand. Smaller than my hand. It’s tiny, almost delicate. Did Perdu have delicate hands?

  “Nothing’s broken,” Will says quietly. “The floor peg and the fire poker, it’s all fine, which means . . .” He coughs. “Which means the door was opened from this side.”

  I let out some sort of animal cry and turn in a circle, my fingers going to my hair, digging into my scalp. “Perdu let someone in and we didn’t hear? He pulled down a mountain of furniture, was possibly attacked and mauled, and we just slept through it?”

  Lilly and Jules race up, carrying the swords. Will grabs his. I drop down and jerk the floor peg out. We thought we were safe in here. We slept. As long as we’re down here, we’re nowhere close to safe.

  I stand, and we stare at one another for a second, our eyes popping from our dirty faces like marbles. I nod, knuckles bobbing around the grip of my weapon. I can almost hear our hearts beating, our thoughts screeching in unison.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “We’ll be okay.”

  I open the doors.

  25

  It’s like jumping into a nightmare, some sort of surreal, Dadaesque ballet. The floor is covered with bodies.

  They lie splayed over the marble, black suits glistening dully, legs pinned under them at horrific angles. We stand, frozen in the library’s doorway, gazing over the carnage. There’s no blood. Just helmeted bodies, dripped over the floor like tar.

  I’m the first one to move. I step forward and squat next to the closest one. If it’s a trap, we’re dead anyway—

  I nudge it. Its helmeted head rolls, facing me. The red light along the jaw is off, now only a dull, empty strip.

  “What did this?” Jules whispers, and Will says, “It doesn’t make sense.”

  No. It doesn’t. These were the trackers Dorf sent. They must be. They look exactly like the ones with Miss Sei in the mirror cube, and those things were fast. They probably could have killed us with one punch and picked their teeth with our swords. But there’s no sign of a struggle. Not a scratch on the surface of their glossy black suits. And no way did they stumble into a trap. No way we walked through this hallway unscathed and the actual inhabitants of this place were massacred.

  “Should we take off its helmet?” Lilly asks.

  That hum is back, turning the air bright and tickling. Will leans down next to one slowly. I watch in horror as he wraps his fingers around its helmet and pulls. It won’t come off. He grabs the visor. Slides it up.

  Bile rises in my throat. I reach over and slap the visor closed, but it’s too late. I saw the face. Everyone saw the face.

  It was almost human. Its skin was milky, a gel-like blue fluid making a film over its cheeks. Some kind of tech had been implanted around the lashless eyes. It was definitely dead. Thousands upon thousands of hairline scratches covered its skin, circling the eyes, the mouth, traveling down its neck and into its suit.

  “Perdu had scratches like those,” Lilly whispers. “All over him.”

  “You guys?” Jules stands. He’s pointing at something on the wall opposite the doors.

  We all look.

  There’s a sentence on it, gouged deep into the splintered wood—six words, chopped into the silk wallpaper and paneling in savage, angular letters:

  SEE HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN

  I stand abruptly.

  We exchange looks, the message hanging behind us like a gruesome grin, a jagged row of teeth. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We leave the bodies behind, running for the end of the gallery. Burst through the doors. Slam them and bar them behind us, but it doesn’t make me feel safe, not even close.

  “They’re supposed to be the bad guys,” Lilly says, leaning against the wall, pulling frantically at her clothes like she can’t breathe, like they’re constricting her. “So who killed the bad guys?”

  “Perdu—” Jules starts.

  “Not Perdu,” I say, cutting him off. “Perdu was scared. He was terrified of something down here, and he wanted to escape with us. I think it got him before he could.”

  “Then why didn’t it get us?”

  I shake my head. I have no idea. And the thought that there are worse things down here than trackers and Miss Sei and Dorf is not one I want to entertain. “Let’s just hope we don’t run into it.”

  I take out the compass and turn, watching the needle. I hear Perdu’s voice, high and excited, melding with the static in my head:

  A secret way . . . Due north . . . You will help me, won’t you? You will not leave me behind?

  I stare at the needle. Look up. And head north.

  26

  Walking in the open feels awful. Like leaving the house in your tiniest, flowiest party dress and realizing your front door opened straight into the tiger enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. Which is possibly something only I’ve ever worried about, I don’t know. We’re in a high, narrow gallery lined with doors. The lights are low and the floor is carpeted with an endless, purple-black Persian runner, embroidered with profusions of bronze flowers and satyrs. The carpet gives the space a weird feel, like it’s supposed to be homey, but my body knows I’m underground, in a windowless hallway below a trillion tons of soil and rock. It knows I’m trapped. It puts a little itch right in the center of my skull, impossible to scratch. This must be what insanity feels like.

  Behind me Lilly and Jules are talking in low voices. “Seriously, there’s no reason we, in particular, should have been picked for this. We’re obviously not here for our skill sets. We don’t come from remotely similar cultural backgrounds. My dad’s from Egypt. And we’re not even polar opposites, either, like a test group or something. We’re just random kids.” A pause. “I mean, I’m sorry, but when I saw you guys at JFK, I was regretting signing up.”

  “And now you’re not?” Lilly’s voice is scared.

  Jules doesn’t answer. We get to the end of the gallery. I shift the compass into my other hand, my throat dry.

  “Are we just going to hope Perdu was right about the exit?” Jules asks, his voice rising a notch. He’s talking to me. “The secret exit that we’ll totally find on our own?”

  “When you have a better plan you can tell us, Jules. No really, I’m on pins and needles.”

  The next room is a study, a shimmering chamber paneled entirely in polished squares of amber. We cross it in ten steps.

  “We could try negotiating,” Jules says.

  “D’you want to offer yourself up so the rest of us can go free? Yeah, me neither.”

  “I’m just suggesting maybe—”

  “No, Jules, you’re being a whiner.”

  “You guys, stop—” Lilly says nervously.

  Jules throws his head back and guffaws. Who laughs that loud when there could be literally anything right around the corner listening? But he’s got a wounded look to him now, injured pride, and he says: “Who are you calling a whiner, Miss I’m-so-saaaaad-I-have-to-forge-my-parents’-signatures-just-to-get-out-of-the-house?”

  Oh, he did not. I’m going to slap that kid’s face off, little punk hipster with his ink sleeve—

  I spin on him. Lilly jams between us. “Stop,” she snaps, and Will moves in front of Jules, saying, “Come on, bro,” really softly.

  I try to get Lilly out of the way.

  “Seriously, stop it,” she hisses. She braces herself against me. The top of her head barely reaches my collarbone, but she’s strong. “Us fighting each other is the last thing that’s going to help us get out of here. Okay? You need to quit.”

  Jules and I glare at each other. And now Jules is getting awkward and apologetic, and I hate that. It’s like cheating. You can’t punch someone in the throat and say you’re sorry and think that’s all it takes.

  But Lilly’s right. Fighting each other is straight-up stupid. I raise an eyebrow in what I hope is a devastatingly condescending gesture and head down a ga
llery.

  Jules comes after me. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says, but I don’t want placating. I’m tired and thirsty, and we have bigger problems. “I’m just saying, maybe there are other options. We’re walking around hoping some insane person was telling the truth, and in the meantime they’re chasing us—”

  “Who is chasing us?” I slam into the next set of rooms. “Not those trackers anymore. And why us? Why fly U.S. citizens to a different continent to murder them? And why are we all teenagers?”

  “Maybe they have preferences.”

  “For what? Stupid spoiled brats?”

  Everyone stares at me.

  “Sorry.” I look down at my shoes. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m pretty sure stabbing people with gas nozzles has the same effect whether you’re American or French. You don’t need to import your victims. You definitely don’t need to invent a complex ruse and send a Brazilian rain forest’s worth of paperwork, while literally prepping them for the ordeal.”

  We walk in silence for a minute. Pass under an archway and into a dim, grotto-like room with drifts of embroidered pillows and a tiled fountain in the middle. It looks like one of the courtyards at the Alhambra in Granada. We all check for traps, moving slowly across the floor. When we get to the fountain, we practically dive into it, drinking greedily. The water tastes cool and liquid and that’s all we care about at this point. I look up after a few gulps, and realize that there’s no door in the north wall. We’re going to have to turn west.

  As soon as we start moving again, Will clears his throat. “I have a theory,” he says, and it’s like we even try to walk quieter just so we don’t miss anything he says. Apparently not talking often has the awesome side effect that when you do decide to talk, people actually listen.

  “Not about why we’re here, just . . . you know, about the palace. We’re running from two different things.” His voice is low, and he looks at us one at a time, earnestly. “It’s like a triangle. Here’s us at the base on one corner. And Dorf and the trackers on the other corner. And at the tip is something else.”