by Lev Grossman
“Not that I’m bitter or anything.”
“The Baroness has a visitor,” said Werner. “Your Grace had asked to be informed.”
“Very good.”
My voice remained steady, despite the emotion his words roused in me.
“You may go.”
As soon as I was alone, I stood up and opened the curtains.
There, in that courtyard, I saw them preparing to depart. She was cloaked and muffled as for a long journey, and as I watched he handed her up into a closed carriage. The dogs were silent. He himself mounted up to the driver’s seat, taking control of the horses with enviable skill, and at a word from him they lit out for the front gates at a gallop.
I watched them, transfixed—
“Hey,” said Peters. “Wait a second.” He dropped the gun pose and froze in place, staring off in the direction of the dining room.
Hollis stopped moving and listened.
“What? I don’t hear anything.”
“No, no, Jesus, that. On the table.”
Peters pointed into the dining room: there was an open bag of corn chips lying out on the long dining table.
“What’s the big deal?” said Hollis. “They could’ve just left it out.”
“What, and cleaned up the whole rest of the place except for that? It’s like Martha Stewart’s decontamination chamber in here. Jesus, I bet it’s their kid—I bet their kid’s home. Don.”
“Is that his name?” said Hollis. “They named their kid Don Donnelly?”
He took a couple of corn chips.
“Isn’t he going on the trip with them?”
“I don’t really know,” said Peters. “He could just be house-sitting.”
“Jesus, these things are terrible.” Hollis looked down at the bag, chewing. “That’s what I thought, look: they’re baked, not fried.”
“What do you expect? His dad’s a doctor. And he’s some kind of jock, too, I think—look, let’s just listen for a minute, maybe we can pick up something.”
They stood still for a minute. The house creaked softly with a gust of wind. Peters went over to the window, stepping softly, and cautiously peered out between the curtains.
Patient wakes up after an operation. All the curtains in his room are closed.
Patient: Hey Doc, how come all the curtains are closed?
Doctor: Well, there’s a fire in the building across the street, and I didn’t want you to think the operation was a failure.
Peters turned around and cleared his throat.
“Well, there’s a car in the driveway. But it was there before—it doesn’t mean anything, necessarily.”
He clapped his hands and rubbed them together.
“Why don’t we split up?” he said.
“That always works in the movies.”
“We’ll do it like this: one of us goes back outside and walks around the house. Maybe we can see somebody in the window or something.” Peters took off his glasses and inspected the lenses, a little nervously. “The other one can just snoop around in here a little.”
“Sharp thinking,” said Hollis. “Which one of us does which?”
“We’ll flip. Do you have a coin?”
Hollis checked his pockets and came up with a nickel.
“Heads,” said Peters.
“Jeez, man. Call it in the air.”
Hollis flipped. Peters called it again:
“Heads.”
When Hollis snapped his hand down to catch it, he missed and open-hand-slapped the nickel across the room and out the door instead. It flew out into the entrance hall and landed silently somewhere on the carpet.
Peters watched it go. He smiled at Hollis.
“I win, by reason of forfeit,” he said. “You’re on indoor patrol.”
He clapped Hollis on the shoulder.
“Don’t try to be a hero, kid.”
“Story of my life.”
Peters started buttoning up his coat.
“Don’s room was on the second floor, back in the day, but who knows where he might be now. Anyway, it’s probably nothing.”
“Sure.” Hollis took another corn chip and munched it with exaggerated casualness. “I’ll meet you back down here in—I don’t know, five minutes?”
“Roger that,” said Peters.
He headed off back through the kitchen and out the door. It closed behind him.
Hollis was alone.
Courage, mon vieux.
The chairs at the table were hard and straight-backed. Someone had already pulled one out, and Hollis sat down, slumping down as far as he could. He listened to the house for another minute, biting the insides of his cheeks.
Somebody tapped on the windowpane, and Hollis started up out of his chair, but it was only Peters. He waved apologetically and disappeared back into the darkness. Hollis sat down again.
A wooden clothespin was lying on the table, the old-fashioned one-piece kind without a wire spring, and he rolled up the bag of chips and clipped it shut. From where he was sitting he could see into the living room; there was a kind of plaster proscenium arch around the doorway, with Ionic columns, and medallions at the corners that were molded into elaborate faux Book of Kells knots. The grandfather clock whirred into life in the next room and chimed four notes: it was ten-fifteen. With the heels of his hands over his eyes, Hollis let his head sink backwards against the hard wooden chair: he was so tired it was almost comfortable, and his coat cushioned him a little. He started mentally trying to add up the number of hours he’d slept in the past few days, to see how far behind he was, but he kept getting confused.
He leaned forward and put his head down on the tablecloth.
The kitchen door opened. He sat up with a start: it was Peters.
“I hope you were exploring the house with your astral body,” he said.
“Something like that.” Hollis shook his head, trying to wake up. “Did you see anything?”
Peters pulled out a chair from the table, turned it around, and sat down on it backwards.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We may have a bogey, on the third floor. There’s a couple of lights on up there.”
“Did you see somebody?”
“It was kind of hard to tell. Maybe. These glasses aren’t that good—I need to get a new prescription.”
“I thought you said the lights were on a timer.”
“Well, they still could be,” Peters said. He shrugged and put his chin down on the back of the chair. “It could be nothing. Did you hear anything in here?”
“No. Nothing.”
They were silent, looking at each other.
“All right,” Hollis said. “Whatever.” He planted his hands on the table and pushed himself up. “I’ll be back down in a couple of minutes.”
“That’s the spirit.” Peters pointed his finger at him.
“Eye of the tiger.”
Epatez les bourgeois.
The staircase’s carpeting muffled his footsteps. He made his way up stooping over, patting the steps in front of him with his hands. When his head was even with the second floor, he scanned the gallery.
The lights were off. It was empty.
From the top of the stairs he could see most of the way down the two main hallways, which led off in opposite directions.
You are in a small, U-shaped gallery.
There are two corridors leading North and South.
There is a staircase leading down.
Through the window, he looked down onto the broad front lawn and the white circle of light around the lamppost. His breath frosted on the glass.
The first hallway was deserted so he jogged back to the landing the way he had come. As he walked past the head of the stairs he looked down to the first floor. He could see Peters serenely reading a magazine by the light of the small chandelier in the dining room, with his sneakers propped up on the table.
The library was just the way they’d left it, with the two armchairs still turned in a little towards each other. F
arther down the hall was the study, and the pink bathroom where Peters had hidden before, and the cheap Monet print of the haystacks on the wall.
When he turned the corner Hollis noticed a little dim light coming from behind one of the doors. He walked towards it, skimming his hand along the wallpaper; the pattern on it was slightly embossed, and he followed it with his fingers. He was humming something over and over again under his breath, though he couldn’t remember where it came from or even what the lyrics were. He crept up to the door: a low rushing, hissing noise was coming from inside which he couldn’t quite identify. The light was tinted a little, candy colors—yellowish, greenish, pinkish.
Will this fantastic voyage never end?
He listened, but all he could hear was the rushing noise. After another minute he pushed the door open a little farther.
It was a billiard room. The pool table was in the middle of the room, precisely centered along both axes. A lamp with a green glass shade hung low over the green felt. The balls were all stowed away underneath, and the table was empty except for a few gouged-out cubes of light-blue chalk. The air in the room smelled like tobacco smoke; Hollis noticed an extinct cigar butt in an ashtray on the edge of the table, and he nudged it fastidiously with his finger.
In one corner was a kitschy diner-style jukebox, with glowing pink and yellow tubes running up the sides with little air bubbles rising up inside them. The tubes filled the room with a faint pastel wash. A record was turning on the turntable; the song was over, but the needle was still down, and the speakers were just playing static. The record was “Jailhouse Rock.”
A little dorm fridge next to the jukebox turned out to have a flat bottle of gin tucked away in its freezer, encrusted with ice. It was so cold that the gin was slightly viscous, but Hollis poured out a capful and tossed it back. It burned going down. He put the bottle back.
Peters was waiting for him at the head of the stairs, leaning on the railing, studying a painting.
“Anything?” he said in a stage whisper.
“Nothing worth getting too worked up about,” said Hollis. “I found some booze—there’s a bar in the pool room.”
“Ruh-roh,” said Peters, in a Scooby-Doo voice. “Well, maybe it’ll speed up your reaction times. What do you think of this painting?”
It was an old-master-style portrait of an English noblewoman, blond and petite, in a blue dress with a high neckline.
“Remind you of anybody?”
Hollis peered at it in the half-darkness. She was sitting by herself on a chair in a drawing room, very erect, with a slightly blank expression on her face.
Downstairs the grandfather clock chimed again.
“Help me out here,” said Hollis.
“Oh come on, Hollis, it’s Eileen. Look at it. She’s a dead ringer.”
Hollis bent down to look closer and sniffed.
“Give me a break,” he said. “Listen, I’m going upstairs. The suspense is fucking killing me.”
“I’ll be waiting. Stay out of trouble.”
He trotted back downstairs, and Hollis waited till he was gone before he went around to the next flight.
This time he didn’t bother trying to hide, and he walked through the gallery at the top of the stairs without paying much attention to it. Things didn’t look very different from the second floor. He thought about taking off his shoes, to make less noise, but he decided he might need them for a quick exit.
It was a race to the edge of space.
Hollis worried about getting lost in the narrow corridors, but somehow he couldn’t quite work up the energy to keep track of them. As he strolled from room to darkened room, he blew into his hands. He noticed a little lump in the lining of his overcoat, and while he walked he wrangled it around until he could get it out: it was a superball. He held it up to the dim light: it turned out to be the transparent kind, with multicolored sparkles floating in it. He chucked it down at the floor as he walked, and it bounced up off one wall and down back at him off the ceiling. He snagged it one-handed, but when he tried it again he missed the catch, and it went off his foot and bobbled away somewhere back down the darkened hallway.
He was examining a set of sepia-tinted baby pictures that looked like they might have been taken in the nineteenth century when a pair of headlights flashed in through the front window and swept across the room. He flattened himself up against the wall, out of the light, as they went by.
They’ll never take me alive.
The car went past without stopping.
He sighed shakily and ran his hands through his hair.
I can’t work under these conditions.
Down at the far end of the hall, where it turned a corner, a large wooden cabinet stood against the wall. Its shelves were crammed with an incredible assortment of knicknacks: blown- and colored-glass animals, ornamental beer steins, Indian-looking brass figurines with many arms, polished marble eggs, miniature square copper lanterns with glass windows. A huge ornamental serving dish made out of silver or pewter sat by itself on the top shelf. It had a historical scene molded into it.
Even from where he was Hollis could see a thin band of golden electric light reflected in its surface.
The friendly lights of the village still glowed along the shore.
Hollis stood there looking at it. A phone rang somewhere in the house.
Away team to Enterprise. This is an emergency. Come in, Enterprise.
He walked toward the cabinet until he could see his own reflection in the dish, blurry, elongated, upside-down. The parquet creaked under him, and he winced. A little caption engraved in a waving banner along the bottom identified the scene as the Raid on Harpers Ferry. He peered around the corner and saw a door, painted white. Light filtered out from under it, and along the side where it was open a crack. Hollis’s palms were sweating, and he wiped them on his jeans. He had to go to the bathroom.
The phone rang again, and again, and then on and on. There were two different phones somewhere not very far from him, both ringing. One of them had an actual old-fashioned metal bell in it, and in the silences between the rings he could hear it keep on resonating.
There was a plastic click, and somebody picked up.
Hollis was still wearing his overcoat. He felt in the pocket, just in case: the blackjack was still there.
Little health insurance.
A woman’s voice answered the phone. She spoke in a neutral tone, nicely modulated but indifferent, like a computer counting down a self-destruct sequence.
“Hello?”
There was silence, and a sound like somebody shifting in a chair.
“Yes, I’ll accept.”
Hollis walked up to the door. He put his hand on the glass knob and pushed it a little farther open. Suddenly he felt afraid, and everything around him started to take on a slightly jumpy quality, like a piece of cheap animation, or as if he were seeing it by the light of a very fast strobe light.
He leaned forward and put his eye up to the opening.
“Don’t move,” he whispered, soundlessly. “Don’t you move, motherfucker, or I’ll blow your motherfucking head off.”
His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and now the light was painfully bright. Even squinting he could hardly make out the room in front of him: there were red carpets, some high book-shelves, a massive wooden desk. It looked like an office, or somebody’s study. A dark-haired woman was sitting at the desk with her back to him, in a plush black leather office chair, talking on the phone.
As he crouched there looking at her, she reached over and with a little high-pitched grunt of effort pushed open one of the windows a crack. Immediately the air pressure changed, and a gust of warm air blew down the hall from behind him, lifting some of the papers lightly off the desk and scattering them on the floor. Before he even noticed what was happening, it blew the door in front of him wide open.
The woman swiveled around in the chair.
I’m trying to think who that girl reminds me of.
Somebody famous.
It was Xanthe.
She didn’t look surprised. She met his eyes with her own large, dark eyes, and with her free hand she covered the mouthpiece of the phone.
Hollis didn’t move. For some reason, he didn’t know why, his eyes filled with tears.
“Just a second,” she said evenly. “It’s a long-distance call.”
She turned away from him, and he watched her for a second, looking at the back of her head above the padded leather chair, her stockinged foot pointing its toes. Then he walked across the room towards her, slowly, like a sleepwalker. As gently as he could, he took the phone out of her hands and laid it aside on the desk. She didn’t resist him. He bent down and gathered her hands together in both of his hands. Then he closed his eyes and kissed her, very, very lightly, on the forehead.
CHAPTER 12
STARDATE 45652.1
At three in the morning Peters came upstairs wearing a chenille bathrobe with a Park Plaza monogram on one of the pockets. His face was pink, and his hair was wet and wavier than usual. He had a white towel around his neck.
Hollis was in the library, and Peters knocked, softly, before he came in.
“There’s like a whole gym in the basement,” he said. “Check it out—now’s your chance to get in some extra reps.”
Hollis didn’t look up from the magazine he was reading.
“You’re such a tourist,” he said.
Peters dropped into the armchair facing him and unwound the towel from around his neck. He shook it out with a flourish and draped it gracefully over his face.
“Ate it,” he said.
His voice was muffled by the towel. He burped.
“Drank it. Watched it. Played with it. Bathed in it.”
The lights were all out, and Hollis had lit candles. They stood all along the long rectangular room, on different shelves and niches, dripping wax onto ashtrays and sheets of blank stationery. The flames reflected off mirrors and windows and in the glass panels of cabinets and the polished wood of the bookshelves. Hollis cupped a huge glass brandy snifter a third full of red wine in both hands. An open bottle stood on the floor next to him, and there was an empty one lying on its side on the rug, along with an empty six-pack of Corona and a third of a ravaged-looking lime.
