He simply stared at her for a moment. Then he beckoned again, with one bone-colored finger. As she entered, he thrust the candle close to her face and stared at her with eyes that were not truly mad but were still far from sane. He seemed to be examining her, and eventually he grunted, and nodded. “This way,” was all he said.
She followed him down a long corridor. The candle-flame threw fantastic shadows about the two of them, and in its light the grandfather clock and the spindly chairs and table danced and capered. The old man fumbled with his keychain and unlocked a door in the wall beneath the stairs. A smell came from the darkness beyond, of must and dust and abandonment.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He nodded, as if he had not understood her. Then he said, “There are some as are what they are. And there are some as aren’t what they seem to be. And there are some as only seem to be what they seem to be. Mark my words, and mark them well, Hubert Earnshawe’s daughter. Do you understand me?”
She shook her head. He began to walk and did not look back.
She followed the old man down the stairs.
Far away and far along the young man slammed his quill down upon the manuscript, spattering sepia ink across the ream of paper and the polished table.
“It’s no good,” he said, despondently. He dabbed at a circle of ink he had just made on the table with a delicate forefinger, smearing the teak a darker brown, then, unthinking, he rubbed the finger against the bridge of his nose. It left a dark smudge.
“No, sir?” The butler had entered almost soundlessly.
“It’s happening again, Toombes. Humor creeps in. Self-parody whispers at the edges of things. I find myself guying literary convention and sending up both myself and the whole scrivening profession.”
The butler gazed unblinking at his young master. “I believe humor is very highly thought of in certain circles, sir.”
The young man rested his head in his hands, rubbing his forehead pensively with his fingertips. “That’s not the point, Toombes. I’m trying to create a slice of life here, an accurate representation of the world as it is, and of the human condition. Instead, I find myself indulging, as I write, in schoolboy parody of the foibles of my fellows. I make little jokes.” He had smeared ink all over his face. “Very little.”
From the forbidden room at the top of the house an eerie, ululating cry rang out, echoing through the house. The young man sighed. “You had better feed Aunt Agatha, Toombes.”
“Very good, sir.”
The young man picked up the quill pen and idly scratched his ear with the tip.
Behind him, in a bad light, hung the portrait of his great-great-grandfather. The painted eyes had been cut out most carefully, long ago, and now real eyes stared out of the canvas face, looking down at the writer. The eyes glinted a tawny gold. If the young man had turned around and remarked upon them, he might have thought them the golden eyes of some great cat or of some misshapen bird of prey, were such a thing possible. These were not eyes that belonged in any human head. But the young man did not turn. Instead, oblivious, he reached for a new sheet of paper, dipped his quill into the glass inkwell, and commenced to write:
“Aye…” said the old man, putting down the black tallow candle on the silent harmonium. “He is our master, and we are his slaves, though we pretend to ourselves that it is not so. But when the time is right, then he demands what he craves, and it is our duty and our compulsion to provide him with…” He shuddered, and drew a breath. Then he said only, “With what he needs.”
The bat-wing curtains shook and fluttered in the glassless casement as the storm drew closer. Amelia clutched the lace handkerchief to her breast, her father’s monogram upward. “And the gate?” she asked, in a whisper.
“It was locked in your ancestor’s time, and he charged, before he vanished, that it should always remain so. But there are still tunnels, folk do say, that link the old crypt with the burial grounds.”
“And Sir Frederick’s first wife…?”
He shook his head, sadly. “Hopelessly insane, and but a mediocre harpsichord player. He put it about that she was dead, and perhaps some believed him.”
She repeated his last four words to herself. Then she looked up at him, a new resolve in her eyes. “And for myself? Now I have learned why I am here, what do you advise me to do?”
He peered around the empty hall. Then he said, urgently, “Fly from here, Miss Earnshawe. Fly while there is still time. Fly for your life, fly for your immortal aagh.”
“My what?” she asked, but even as the words escaped her crimson lips, the old man crumpled to the floor. A silver crossbow quarrel protruded from the back of his head.
“He is dead,” she said, in shocked wonderment.
“Aye,” affirmed a cruel voice from the far end of the hall. “But he was dead before this day, girl. And I do think that he has been dead a monstrous long time.”
Under her shocked gaze, the body began to putresce. The flesh dripped and rotted and liquified, the bones revealed crumbled and oozed, until there was nothing but a stinking mass of foeter where once there had been a man.
Amelia squatted beside it, then dipped her fingertip into the noxious stuff. She licked her finger, and she made a face. “You would appear to be right, sir, whoever you are,” she said. “I would estimate that he has been dead for the better part of a hundred years.”
“I am endeavoring,” said the young man to the chambermaid, “to write a novel that reflects life as it is, mirrors it down to the finest degree. Yet as I write it turns to dross and gross mockery. What should I do? Eh, Ethel? What should I do?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, sir,” said the chambermaid, who was pretty and young, and had come to the great house in mysterious circumstances several weeks earlier. She gave the bellows several more squeezes, making the heart of the fire glow an orange-white. “Will that be all?”
“Yes. No. Yes,” he said. “You may go, Ethel.”
The girl picked up the now empty coal scuttle and walked at a steady pace across the drawing room.
The young man made no move to return to his writing-desk; instead he stood in thought by the fireplace, staring at the human skull on the mantel, at the twin crossed swords that hung above it upon the wall. The fire crackled and spat as a lump of coal broke in half.
Footsteps, close behind him. The young man turned. “You?”
The man facing him was almost his double-the white streak in the auburn hair proclaimed them of the same blood, if any proof were needed. The stranger’s eyes were dark and wild, his mouth petulant yet oddly firm.
“Yes-I! I, your elder brother, whom you thought dead these many years. But I am not dead-or, perhaps, I am no longer dead-and I have come back-aye, come back from ways that are best left untraveled-to claim what is truly mine.”
The young man’s eyebrows raised. “I see. Well, obviously all this is yours-if you can prove that you are who you say you are.”
“Proof? I need no proof. I claim birth-right, and blood-right-and death-right!” So saying, he pulled both the swords down from above the fireplace, and passed one, hilt first, to his younger brother. “Now guard you, my brother-and may the best man win.”
Steel flashed in the firelight and kissed and clashed and kissed again in an intricate dance of thrust and parry. At times it seemed no more than a dainty minuet, or a courtly and deliberate ritual, while at other times it seemed pure savagery, a wildness that moved faster than the eye could easily follow. Around and around the room they went, and up the steps to the mezzanine, and down the steps to the main hall. They swung from drapes and from chandeliers. They leapt up on tables and down again.
The older brother obviously was more experienced, and, perhaps, was a better swordsman, but the younger man was fresher and he fought like a man possessed, forcing his opponent back and back and back to the
