by Lee Carroll
I closed my eyes, meaning to rest a few moments beside him, but when Madame La Pieuvre woke me, she told me hat it was past six in the evening. “I let you sleep, ma chère, so you could be rested for what we have to do, but we must find Marduk before the sun sets.”
When we walked outside the château, the late-afternoon sky was so overcast I was afraid the sun had already set. Black storm clouds hung in the western sky. Madame La Pieuvre looked at them worriedly.
“Another storm. More lightning to feed Ruggieri’s machinery. We must hurry.”
“I’m sorry if doing this puts you in any danger,” I told her when we were settled in her carriage.
She shrugged. “You, being from the future as you are, are a descendant of the Watchtower. It is my duty to help you. Besides, it sounds as if you did me a favor in your time by taking me to the Summer Country.”
“I’m not sure how much of a favor that was. I’m afraid you might have gotten lost in the Val sans Retour.”
“And yet I was willing to risk the journey. I must have loved—will love—this woman Adele very much.”
“Yes, I think you did—I mean, will.” I described Adele Weiss to her and told her what I knew about how they had met during a war. Then, taking my notebook from my pocket, I drew a picture of her.
“She is lovely,” Madame La Pieuvre said, smiling at the drawing. “I’m glad that I will love someone enough to want to give up my immortality. It gives me something to look forward to.” She gazed out the coach window, her gray eyes as serene as the overcast sky. Four hundred years seemed a long time to wait, but perhaps to a creature who had already lived for millennia it wasn’t.
“We’re here,” she said as the coach came to a stop. We were in a narrow side street bordered by a high, windowless stone wall.
“This is Catherine de Médicis’s palace?” I asked skeptically as we stepped out into a lightly falling rain.
“The southwest corner of it. You didn’t think we were going in the front door, did you?”
“No, but…” I couldn’t see any door at all, just a shallow niche decorated with a large bronze bas-relief panel depicting Venus rising from the sea. Above the wall I could see the Medici Column, and beyond that I saw the spires of Saint-Eustache. I turned around in a circle, recalling the visit I’d made with Roger Elden.
“We’re standing right at the entrance to the metro,” I said. “Or where the metro will be in four hundred years.”
“And what is the metro?” Madame La Pieuvre asked.
“An underground”—I was about to say train, but remembered that she wouldn’t know what a train was—“passage,” I said instead, “that people use for transportation.”
“That’s just what’s here now,” she said, bending down before the carved plaque of Venus. She looked as though she were paying homage to the goddess—I supposed that Venus might be one of her gods—but then her fingers found some hidden catch in the grooves of the shell Venus rose from, and the bronze sculpture swung wide-open. A cool, briny gust of air rose from the dark passage behind the plaque as if it truly led to Venus’s ocean grotto. I followed Madame La Pieuvre into the dark passage, which became even darker when she swung the door shut behind us. The blackness closed in on me like a hand at my throat—then I snapped my fingers. The tiny flame that sprang out of my thumb lit up a flight of stone steps descending into a pit of darkness that my puny light couldn’t penetrate. Madame La Pieuvre’s moon-shaped face bobbed beside me. She smiled—a trifle condescendingly, I thought—at my thumb-light and then uncoiled her arms from her cloak. At a flick of her many wrists blue-glowing lights appeared up and down her arms. They cast a blue-green light that lit up the staircase down to the bottom, where it ended in a pool of water.
“Come,” she said, “these passages flood when it rains. We must be quick.”
I followed her, keeping an eye on her glowing limbs, which floated around her like seaweed. With the salt smell and the sound of water lapping against stone, I felt as though I were sinking in a bathysphere to the ocean floor, but the water at the bottom of the stairs turned out to be only a few inches deep. We had to hold our cloaks and dresses up, which meant I had to extinguish my thumb-light, but I didn’t need it anymore. Madame La Pieuvre’s bioluminescence, reflected in the shallow water, lit up a level tunnel in a turquoise blaze of light, illumining a lovely mosaic pattern of shells and sea creatures on the walls and ceilings.
“This is pretty,” I said. “What did Catherine de Médicis use the underground chambers for?”
“A means of escape should her palace be besieged by enemies, a secret entranceway for the sorcerers and witches she employed, and when someone displeased her—”
A scream cut her off. She stopped so suddenly I bumped into her; she wrapped two arms around me to keep me from falling. “And for torture,” Madame La Pieuvre whispered. “Only I had thought those days were over.”
A second scream punctuated her sentence. In the hollow confines of the underground chamber I couldn’t tell how close the sound was, or when the scream ended and its echoes began. The echoes seemed to surround us like the voices of all who had ever suffered in this dark, dank place.
A third scream rang out—and was abruptly cut off in a strangled gurgle that was even more awful and seemed to be echoed in the moving water at our feet. Tucking all her glowing arms but two in her cloak and pressing one finger to her lips, she pulled me forward. Her footsteps made no sound in the water, but mine sloshed and slapped. When we reached a flight of steps that brought us up onto a dry landing, I was grateful … until I saw what lay beyond the landing.
The vaulted room was lit by torches set in iron sconces. Long, pendulous shapes hung from iron hooks in the ceiling. They looked like huge caterpillar cocoons hanging from atree branch after a rain, water dripping off them into buckets set beneath them.… I blinked, refocused, and opened my mouth to scream. A wet tentacle slapped over my mouth before any sound could come out. I stared at Madame La Pieuvre, whose face had gone inky black, her eyes wide with horror and rage, and then I looked back into the torture room.
The “cocoons” were human beings hanging upside down from the ceiling, some of them with blood dripping from cut throats into tin pails. Two men first wrangled one of the bodies onto a hook. When the body had been suspended, one of the men took a long knife from a scabbard at his waist and, while his companion held the body still, drew it across the neck.
Only when the blood gushed out did I realize that the body had been alive and I understood that we’d just stood helplessly by while a man was murdered. I moaned beneath Madame La Pieuvre’s hand and she pulled me back away from the door and against the wall.
“What was that sound?” a man’s voice asked in guttural French.
“A rat,” his comrade answered. “Or one of the queen’s crocodiles. Did you know the queen kept crocodiles down here to discourage her prisoners from escaping? Why don’t you go have a look, Gaston?” The man laughed cruelly. I hoped that Gaston would be dissuaded from looking by his comrade’s mockery—or by the threat of crocodiles. Did every city in every time period have that urban legend? I wondered. The sound of footsteps approaching put an end to that line of thought. Madame La Pieuvre shoved me behind her and, with one more warning finger to her lips, turned to face the door. A man appeared on the landing holding a torch at and above the steps leading back down to the water. I saw Madame La Pieuvre unfastening the clasp of her cloak, and then, in less time than it took the cloak to fall to the floor, she surged forward, all eight arms writhing in the air. The man turned at the breeze her movement must have caused and I had time to see the look of horror on his face before she was upon him. One suckered hand wrapped over his mouth and nose, stifling his scream, while the others wrapped around him, keeping him from falling. It looked as if she were gently rocking him to sleep, only I could see his face turning dark in the reflected light of Madame La Pieuvre’s bioluminescence, his eyes bulging, then rolling back and freezing in
death. She lowered him gently to the ground and then turned around.
I barely recognized the refined woman I knew. Her face was puffed and mottled, her arms had grown suckers that pulsed like open mouths hungry for more prey … which had just appeared in the doorway. The second torturer stood gaping at this creature that was beyond any fictive nightmares he might have dreamed up to frighten his comrade. A small sound came out of him—like air escaping from a punctured tire—and then she was upon him. This time there was no gentle squeezing to death. Madame La Pieuvre tore him limb from limb, tossing pieces of him into the air. When she was done, she shoved the remains down the steps into the water.
“There,” she said, wiping blood from her mouth. “Let the crocodiles he was laughing about feast on his remains.”
I would have asked her then if those crocodiles really existed, but she had already swept past me into the torture room. She went from body to body, tenderly touching each one with the suckered fingers she’d only recently used to tear a man apart. “Some of these poor souls have been dead for several days and”—she knelt at the ground and sniffed at the rank stone floor—“blood has been spilled before that. How long have they been collecting blood and why?”
“For Marduk. They must have needed it to make him strong enough.”
“Marduk’s never needed any help getting his own blood. Dee and Ruggieri must have some reason to collect this much blood. Something special they have planned.”
I shivered at the thought of any plan that required such wholesale bloodletting—a shivering that wouldn’t stop as I followed Madame La Pieuvre further, keeping within the circle of her glow in case we ran into any of those crocodiles. We went through passages lined with bones and skulls piled high above our heads and curio cabinets full of strange instruments and stuffed exotic animals.
“Catherine was quite the collector,” Madame La Pieuvre remarked when she saw me staring at a stuffed aardvark. “And an amateur sorcerer. She dabbled in the black arts and poisoning, collecting whatever she thought might come in useful to protect her children and further her own dynastic ambitions … and yet when she died, she had outlived eight of her ten children, and of the two survivors, Henri the third died seven months after her, leaving only her daughter Margot, whom she had disowned during her life. A sad life. I’m not surprised that Dee and Ruggieri have chosen her abandoned palace for their evil purposes.”
She shook her head sadly and then continued on, leaving me staring at the cabinet full of strange instruments. They reminded me of something, but I couldn’t recall what. Only when Madame La Pieuvre’s glow had faded and I couldn’t see the instruments in the case anymore did I hurry to catch up with her.
She had come to a stop at the end of a hallway. She held an arm out to keep me back … and I saw why. Hers wasn’t the only source of light anymore. A glow was coming from around the corner. She motioned for me to stay put and then cautiously crept around the corner. After another moment she waved for me to follow her.
The scene in this room was not as blatantly horrific as the one in the dungeon. It was even peaceful. The room was hung with rich tapestries and lit by banks of candles. A body was laid out on a raised dais like a corpse laid out for viewing at a funeral, except that above the head of the “corpse” was suspended a leather bladder connected to the body by a long, supple reed. Walking closer, I revised my impression from funeral parlor to hospital ER. Liquid was dripping from the bladder, down through the reed, and into a metal shunt fitted into the crook of the man’s arm. Amazed, I looked at the face of the man on the table—and was even more amazed to find Will’s face.
“It’s not Will, you understand,” Madame La Pieuvre whispered as she came up beside me. “It’s Marduk.”
“I know … only when I saw him last, he had only partly taken on Will’s features. You could still see the monster below the skin, but now…”
“He looks like an angel. This hy Dee and Ruggieri are draining their victims. If Marduk fed directly from his victims, he’d take on their features, but feeding like this, he continues to look like Will.”
“But why? Why do they want him to look like Will?”
Madame La Pieuvre shrugged. “Why not choose a beautiful face for your monster? With this face he’ll be able to mingle with aristocracy and lure unsuspecting victims to their doom. He’s fooled you, hasn’t he?”
I tore my eyes away from Will—from Marduk—looked into Madame La Pieuvre’s keen eyes, and I knew I’d been looking at the monster with love. “He looks so much like Will. I’m not sure I can destroy him.”
“Leave that to me. You only need to get what you came for.” She withdrew a small, glass, corked vial and a slender Y-shaped metal pipe from inside her cloak. The end of the short arm of the Y was sharpened to a point. She took out the reed from Marduk’s arm and showed me how to insert the sharpened pipe into his vein. “Physicians use this for bloodletting,” she told me as drops of blood spilled from the pipe into the glass vial. I kept my eye on the vial to help keep it steady in my hand. When it was full, Madame La Pieuvre removed the pipe and corked the vial. Then I looked up and found Madame La Pieuvre staring into the monster’s open eyes.
“Go!” she hissed, giving me the vial. “He’s not fully awake yet. As long as I maintain eye contact, he won’t be able to move.”
“But—”
“Just go. I’ll take care of him. It’s almost dusk. Go to the tower. If you follow this passage further, you’ll come to the courtyard. Climb to the top and wait there for Will. After I’ve taken care of Marduk, I’ll keep Dee and Ruggieri away.”
I tried to think of an argument against this plan. I started to ask why she didn’t just kill Marduk now and come with me, but then I realized she didn’t want me to see her tearing apart a creature who looked so much like the man I loved. I didn’t want to see that either. So I followed her advice. I ran.
35
The Timepiece
And promptly got lost. The palace see
med to have been built like a maze, constructed according to some Machiavellian architect’s scheme to confuse one’s enemy. I ran through deserted salons occupied only by faded nymphs and fauns who looked embarrassed to be caught cavorting on their painted ceilings. The few remaining pieces of furniture were shrouded in ghostly canvas drop cloths. I nearly had a heart attack rounding a corner and coming face-to-face with a crocodile’s open jaws, but saw that it was only a stuffed specimen.
Past the crocodile’s tail I spied the courtyard through a large, grimy window. I couldn’t get the window open, but a marble urn sitting beside the stuffed crocodile broke it just fine. I squeezed through, only cutting my hand a little on the broken glass.
The courtyard was full of debris—broken furniture, shredded drapes, three more stuffed crocodiles in varying stages of decay … what was the fascination with crocodiles? I wondered as I picked my way across the littered ground. Whatever the reason for Catherine de Médicis’s fondness for the beasts, I didn’t have time to think about it now. Storm clouds still covered much of the sky, but in the west the sun had sunk beneath the clouds and hovered at the edge of the courtyard wall. It lit up the tower so that it seemed to glow against the inky clouds in the east. When I reached the low, arched door at its base, I experienced a moment of vertigo, recalling going through this same door only a few nights ago with Roger Elden. As I touched the handle, I could almost imagine that I was back in twenty-first-century Paris and that if I turned around, I’d find the metro stop. At the thought the watch pendant grew heavy and cold against my chest. I could be back, I realized, if I focused hard enough on the future, but I couldn’t go yet. Not without Will.
I forced myself to focus on the here and now: the grate of the metal door as it opened, the reek of pigeon droppings in the stairwell, the clank of my feet on the metal stairs. I made myself count all 147 steps as I made my way to the top to keep my mind clear of everything but the present moment. When I went through the trapdoor onto the top of
the column, I didn’t have to battle my associations with the future. The metal structure was much more elaborate than the bare framework that had survived into the twenty-first century. Amid the iron framework were bright copper rings engraved with arcane symbols. Surrounding the perimeter of the column was a narrow metal catwalk. I moved gingerly out onto it and looked toward the west.
The sun was balanced over the rooftops of the city beneath a sky of fierce, roiling clouds. It looked as if the clouds were trying to squash the sun down into the horizon, to stamp out its light forever. A wave of lightning moved through the clouds—a dense network of veins that looked like the metro map of Paris. The clouds were moving closer to the tower, carrying the lightning with them along with colder air that smelled like the sea. I shivered, wondering what would happen to me if lightning struck the tower while I was on top of it—which surely it would. That’s what it was built for. The whole thing was an enormous lightning rod.
The wind blew harder out of the west and the copper rings creaked into life, slowly revolving in their interlocking orbits. I was standing outside them on the catwalk; I thought I would need to be inside to make the time travel work. I’d wait on the catwalk until I saw Will.
No one was in the courtyard, unless you counted the stuffed crocodiles, who, in the murky green light of the approaching storm, appeared to be back in their native habitat of primordial swamp. I scanned the windows along the courtyard, walking around the catwalk, but there was no sign of life in any of them. What had happened to Octavia? Had she been able to kill Marduk? Should I have left her alone with him? But then I remembered how efficiently she had torn apart the second guard and figured she was probably able to deal with Marduk herself. It was too late to do anything but wait. The sun was about to disappear beneath the rooftops of Paris. Will would be on his way now. I knew from experience how fast he was.
When I’d summoned him to Governors Island, he’d come in a heartbeat. When I’d been in danger in the tunnels aof the ching the High Water Tower in Manhattan, he’d saved me. He’d waited months for me in a cave in the Val sans Retour—and we’d come out of the Val sans Retour together, which was only supposed to be possible for faithful lovers. But was he a faithful lover? I wondered, staring into the stygian gloom of the courtyard as the faltering light in the sky started to vanish. After hundreds of years of carousing was he capable of loving one woman?
