more than a little grateful not to have been attacked by the beast or waylaid by dark men with even darker designs. All three were bone-fagged and brain-sore, and still coming to terms with the crazed events of the day. Lloyd felt particularly bleary, since he had not slept more than an hour the previous night owing to his encounter with the Quists and the Bushrod Rangers.
Something in the performance with the Eye had drained him, he felt, and perhaps had also energized him in some new way, which he considered might account for the spell that had overcome him when caning Josh Breed. He had no explanation for the women in white. Then the shock of finding the Clutters, and all the questions their grisly situation called forth! It was all such a jumble, and yet he sensed that just to the edge of his mind’s sight was an explanation that brought it all together. The hint of it toyed with him for a while, as he lay clutching his bag of precious items on the hard bedroll in the skin-smelling tepee that kept the night damp at bay.
For a few moments he listened to his parents’ emphatic whispering, trying to clear his head-trying to feel the protective presence of Lodema and to imagine where his beloved Hattie was, hoping she was out of danger and knowing that almost certainly she was not. It was in this anxious, exhausted, wondering state that a dream began to enfold him.
He had the idea that he was hunting for Hattie, trapped inside a giant music box. The inside of the box was like an empty theater he had peered into in St. Louis. Hattie was hidden somewhere within, but he could not find her; she was being held prisoner by a man like Junius Rutherford with mechanical crab-claw hands. Then into the darkness of the empty seats there came a weird wind that brought with it a cloud of what looked like fireflies, luminous tiny insects that were so beautiful to behold that he wanted to reach out and touch them. But when he did they burned his hand like cinders. He swatted at them, trying to escape, and when he readjusted his eyes he saw that on every empty chair there now burned a sleek candle with even flames rising from them like the voting hands of some dire and unanimous congress. A door opened, and he saw a figure he took to be Hattie dragged from the theater and out into the light. He raced after them, feeling the scorching flecks of the insects against his face, hearing the hissing of the candles, like a religious chant.
He knew that he was still inside the music box, but it was much larger than he had first thought. The door of the theater opened into the street of a town, a ghost town lit by unknown means, like the lights he had seen in Mother Tongue’s grotto. Dead people were walking about as if in a trance. Skeletons and mechanical men and women, like a vast fair of haunted machines. There were folk dressed in historic costumes and all manner of fantastic creatures from out of fairy tales, while women in hoopskirts with the same porcelain mask for faces paraded past in silence.
In the dark of the windows he ran by, he glimpsed things like torture chambers-people getting their limbs removed, human bodies with the heads of other animals, pits full of reptiles with the faces of children. On and on he ran, trying to catch the man who had Hattie-or was it his sister?
Gradually, the light began to change, and he saw that the music box that he thought was a theater and then a town was like another kind of theater yet again. There were living people watching, pointing, ogling the sights-as if the entire maze he was lost in was but one huge medicine show. The people were in costumes of a type he had never seen before. Bright artificial colors, ridiculous shoes. Many of the women were baring obscene amounts of flesh, and everyone seemed obese. The more frantically he explored, the more disgusted he became, for he came to see and smell the overpowering aromas and quantities of the nauseous, tempting food they were devouring. Gorging like maniacs.
In the labyrinth of the automata ghost town, there were islands and lagoons where machine men dressed as pirates fought with swords and fired cannons. Somnolent blank princesses sang to birds and squirrels, whose mouths opened on hinges in perfect time. He saw riverboats like the kind he had ridden on, filled with talking dolls. All the living people were laughing at these distractions, stuffing food into their mouths as if they had never eaten before. The horror of it almost made him forget why he was there, what he was chasing-for in some unspoken way he understood that it was the mechanical creatures and the fantasies unfolding all around that were driving the living people mad with gluttony. Everywhere he turned, there were more frightening visions.
The giant music-box theater, which had turned out to be inside a town, which was really a bigger theater, revealed itself to be a city, swirling and swarming with bloated people in insane colors with masks like clock faces. Hunkered in doorways, like beggars, were rodent forms and filthy derelicts with the tails of lizards. There were trains that whisked by as if they ran on light, and carriages without horses or oxen that looked like eggs or beetles. In the sky overhead were flying machines like those he had envisaged, but inside them were just more people eating and drinking. The women wore next to nothing, and yet street-corner preachers set fire to random passersby. Bodies and baubles hung from the street lanterns-a murder and a sale of some kind were transacted on every corner. And, all the time, Lloyd told himself, “The oddest thing of all is that I know I am still inside the music box.”
Still, knowing this did not help him find Hattie. Then he peered out beyond the festering false-face emporia and saw something that held his eye. It was, in fact, something like the Eye. Only in the shape of an enormous building, like a cathedral. Limestone and metallic green, it towered in the distance. Until he saw that it was not a citadel of some kind, nor was it human-made. It trembled rhythmically, like some deep music. It was laced with lightning and rainbows as dark as the skin of the fish he remembered catching in the Licking River back in his other life. Hovering on the horizon like an omen and a promise, he saw in its inverted pyramid shape the complexity of the Ambassadors’ master symbol. It was a tornado-heaped and spiraling chaos that somehow retained its form. And at the base, in the gorgeous crisis that anchored it to the earth, was a door-and in the doorway was a girl.
CHAPTER 9. A Bend in Another River
EVERYTHING WAS JUST AS BEFORE-THE NIGHT ST. IVES TOLD HIM the story about the hand. “You wonder about it, don’t you, boy?” St. Ives asked, and tapped an ash. “How I came by the hand-and how I came to lose my own.”
“Y-yes,” Lloyd found himself saying. “There’s no hiding there’s a story behind it.” Yet there was something different about this scene.
“Well put, lad.” The gambler nodded. “And well spoken. Like a gentleman. But I fear if I tell you the truth you will think me mad. Still, you have been an excellent partner. I believe you deserve my trust and may reward me with your discretion.” St. Ives lowered his voice and glanced around to see if any other passengers or crew were within earshot. He had not been wearing a hat the night before, but now he was-and a very stylish hat, too.
“A little over ten years ago I used to be the secretary to a very rich man in the East. He valued my memory and my head for calculations. That may be hard for you to imagine, given your skills, but I took the bait. Phronesis Larkshead, or so he called himself then. But that was not his real name, I am sure. Owner of the Enigma Formulary and Gun Works in Delaware. An inventor, a wire-puller. A formidable figure.
“He had the tinge of some sort of acid burn on his face and wore a flat-brimmed hat pulled down low, with a veil, which he claimed offered protection from all his ‘substances.’ He always kept his skin covered as much as possible in a dark suit without buttons. I used to fancy that his body was riddled with unnatural signs and scars. My initial belief was that one of his experiments had backfired on him. He was forever fiddling with new combinations of chemicals-schemes for weaponry. And other things. Weirder things. He was far, far ahead of his time, was Mr. Larkshead. He had designed and built a mechanical manservant. A sort of butler named Zadoc. What it was powered by I do not know, he would not reveal it-but it was not steam. The device had an almost blank, bland face, but I suspected he had other faces baking. How the thing could see or navigate I have no idea. This was the first of many things I wish I had not discovered, but my fascination got the better of me. His estate was like nothing you can imagine. He called it the Villa of the Enigmas.”
“Go on…” Lloyd said, feeling the hairs on his neck rise. This was like what had happened before-but not the same. Not the same.
“Well… I know this will sound like utter flapdoodle, but he had a colony of live ants from the jungles of South
