The Gates of Sleep

Still. That doesn’t add up to horror either. Evil should slaver and gnash its teeth, howling in glee at the rich vein of nourishment beneath Madam’s office. It shouldn’t wear stylish suits and smart frocks and give one strenuous lessons in etiquette.

There was only one possible conclusion here. There had to be something else behind the cesspit of vileness back there in Exeter.

And she would be hanged if she could figure out who was feeding off of it. Or what.

My head hurts. She felt a sinking sort of desperation. Out of her depth, unable to cope. Too much was happening at once, and on such wildly disparate levels that she couldn’t begin to imagine how she was to deal with it all. I am out, completely out, of ideas or even wild guesses. She stared at her poem, unseeing, as the railway carriage rocked from side to side. Someone else will have to solve this mystery. They can’t expect me to solve it—all they asked me was to see if there was anything there, after all… come to that, they never asked me, I volunteered to look.

She told herself to breathe deeply, and calm down. No one was expecting her to do anything—except herself. And anyway, it wasn’t her outlook to actually do anything about it either! Hadn’t Dr. Pike and Mr. Davies virtually volunteered to be the ones to track this thing down to its cause and eliminate it? She was only seventeen, after all, and no Master of her element! She wasn’t anywhere ready to go charging off, doing battle with vile magics!

They simply can’t expect me to do anything about this! It would be like sending me out into the desert after the Mad Mullah, for heaven’s sake—with only my parasol and a stern lecture to deliver! At some point, Marina, she continued, lecturing herself in her thoughts, You simply have to let someone else do things and allow that you can’t.

Well, there was one thing at least that she could do—and that was to let the proper people know about the —the vileness.

And another—to keep that poison away from Oakhurst.

She didn’t have any more time to think about it, though, for the train was pulling into the station, and Reggie was making all the motions of gathering up their things.

Reggie opened the door and helped her out onto the platform. The carriage was waiting for them, the coachman already taking up the parcels from the shops and stowing them away as they approached; they were inside and on the way within minutes. The coach rattled over cobblestones, passing the lights of the town, then jolted onto a dirt road; a crack of the whip, and the horses moved out of a fast walk into a trot. The coachman seemed in a monstrous hurry, for some reason; perhaps he sensed yet another wretched March storm coming, for he kept the horses moving at such a brisk pace that Marina was jounced all over her seat, and even Reggie had to hang on like grim death.

“I’ll be—having a word—with our driver—” he said between bounces. “Damn me! See if I—don’t!”

But the moment he said that, the reason for the rush became apparent, as the skies opened up and poured down rain.

This was a veritable Ark-floating torrent, and no wonder the coachman had wanted them to get out and on the road so quickly. It drummed on the coach roof and streamed past the windows, and Reggie let out a yelp and a curse as a lightning bolt sizzled down with a crash far too near the road for comfort. There was a sideways jolt as the horses shied, but the coachman held them firm and kept them under control.

The coach slowed, of necessity—you couldn’t send horses headlong through this—but they were near home now. The lights of the village loomed up through the curtains of rain; not much of them, no streetlights at all, just the lights over the shops, and the houses on either side of the road all veiled by rain—a moment of transition from road to cobbles and back again, splashing through enormous puddles. Then they were past, the lights of the village behind them, and they were minutes from Oakhurst. Over two hills, across the bridge, climbing a third—

Then the lights of Oakhurst appeared through the trees and just above them, although the rain was showing no signs of slackening off. Marina peered anxiously through the windows; lightning pulsed across the sky, illuminating Oakhurst in bursts of blue-white radiance. The coach slowed as they neared the front and pulled up as close to the door as possible, and servants with umbrellas dashed out into the downpour to shelter both of them inside and fetch the parcels.

To no avail, of course, with the rain coming as much sideways as down; Marina was soaked to the skin despite the umbrella held over her. Once inside the door she was swiftly separated from Reggie by Mary Anne and chivvied off to her own—warm!—room to be stripped and regarbed from the skin outward. For once Marina was glad, very glad, of the tendency of her room to be too warm for her taste, for she was cold and shivering, which combined with her headache made her ache all over. The flames in her fireplace slowly warmed her skin as Mary Anne rubbed her with a heavy towel then held out undergarments for her to step into.

“Madam’s got a bit of a surprise for you,” Mary Anne said, lacing her tightly into a brand new corset, which must have been delivered that very day. “Seems she found something in the attics she thinks you’ll fancy. She must have been that bored, to send someone to go rummaging about up there. Been raining all day, though, so perhaps that was it.”

“I didn’t even know there was an attic,” Marina ventured, wondering if she dared mention her splitting head to Mary Anne. She decided in favor of it. “Now I wish I hadn’t asked Reggie to take me to that pottery—I’ve such a headache—”

Mary Anne tugged her rustling silk trumpet skirt over her head with an exclamation of distaste. “I shouldn’t be surprised!” she replied. “Nasty, noisy, filthy places, factories. I’ll find a dose for you, then you’re to go straight to Madam. She’s in the sitting-room.”

The dose was laudanum, and if it dulled the pain, it also made her feel as if there was a disconnection between her and her thoughts, and her wits moved sluggishly. It occurred to her belatedly that perhaps she shouldn’t have taken it so eagerly.

Well, it was too late now. When she stepped out of the door of her room, she moved carefully, slowly, more so than even Madam would have asked, because her feet didn’t feel quite steady beneath her. She was handicapped now.

But I must look at her—really look at her, she reminded herself. I must know for certain if she has anything to do with that vileness. It seemed days, and not hours ago, since this morning, weeks since her encounter with what lay under the pottery, months since she had vowed to investigate. She had gone from utter certainty that Madam was behind it to complete uncertainty. She kept one hand pressed to her throat, trying to center herself.

As she passed darkened rooms, lightning flashed beyond the windows; the panes shook and rattled with rain driven against them and drafts skittered through the halls, sending icy tendrils up beneath her skirt to wrap around her ankles and make her shiver. The coachman had been right to gallop; it was a tempest out there. It was a good thing that it had been too cold for buds to form; they’d have been stripped from the boughs. The thin silk of her shirtwaist did nothing to keep the drafts from her arms; she had been warm when she left her room, and she hadn’t gone more than halfway down the corridor before she was cold all over again.

The sitting room had a blazing great fire in it, and by now Marina was so chilled that she had eyes only for that warmth, and never noticed Madam standing half in shadow on the far side of the room. She went straight for the flames like a moth entranced, and only Madam’s chuckle as she spread her icy hands to the promised warmth reminded her of why she was here.

“A pity the horses were slow,” Madam said, as Marina turned to face her. “Reggie has been complaining mightily and swearing I should replace them.”

“I don’t think any horses could have gone faster in the dark, no matter how well they knew the road, Madam,” she protested. “Before the rain started, Reggie was angry that he was going so fast, actually. And the coachman could hardly have made the train arrive any sooner,” she added, in sudden inspiration.

“True enough.” Madam’s lips moved into something like a smile, or as near as she ever got to one. “True, and reasonable as well. So, my dear, you have begun to think like a grown woman, and not like an impulsive child.”

Marina dropped her eyes—and took that moment to concentrate, as well as she could through the fog of the drug, to search her guardian for any taint of that terrible evil.

Nothing. Nothing at all. Magic might never exist at all for all of the signs of it that Madam showed. Never a