“The store has never done this before.”
He keeps his silence.
“The three cats you saw in that other miniature may still be there.”
“Two cats. It was my brother who said he saw three, but in the real house, not in the model. Anyway, they fled from the window seat as I looked in at them. I never saw those cats again.”
“That was your last day in Theron Hall. You never had a chance to see them again.”
“I didn’t understand what they were. I probably never will.”
“They’re unfinished business,” Amity says.
Snow falls and snow falls.
“The store has never done this before,” she reminds him.
Broderick’s stands here within Broderick’s, and both turn with the turning world.
“We’ll have a birthday dinner tomorrow,” Amity says. “And then we’ll consult your cards.”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know. You could have left this city long ago, gone far, someplace they’d never look for you.”
“I think their kind is everywhere. No place to hide.”
“Whether that’s true or not, you’ve stayed in this city because something calls you back to that house.”
“Something that wants me dead.”
“Maybe so. But something else, too.”
“What would that be?” he wonders.
“I don’t know. But you do. Deep down, you know. Your heart knows what your mind can’t quite comprehend.”
Snow falls and snow falls.
14
Nine-year-old Crispin on the afternoon of September 29, the feast of the archangels …
Two minikin cats on a tiny window seat in small-scale Theron Hall react as one, bolting away from the giant boy who peers in at them. They scamper through the modeled drawing room, into the hallway, gone.
He might have hurried window to window in search of them, but before he can do so, he remembers what happened on the night when Mirabell disappeared. The sight of the cats is a purgative, flushing from him all delusion, all spells and enchantments. Everything he has forgotten — or has been made to forget — returns to him in a flood of memories.
How he pretended to sleep when Nanny Sayo stood by his bed. How he sneaked into Mirabell’s room. The rose petals in the bathtub, the silver bowls, the missing toys, the empty closet. His sister’s plea blooming like a shellburst in his mind:
Now his legs grow weak. He drops to his knees beside the scale model of Theron Hall.
He recalls also hurrying through the mysteriously deserted house, the servants neither working nor in their rooms, no one to help him. The south stairs winding down to the locked basement door. The voices beyond. Chanting.
In memory, he turns to climb the stairs. Towering over him is Cook Merripen in a black silk robe. Holding a thermos from which he has unscrewed the lid. This might be the same thermos in which Nanny Sayo left chicken noodle soup for the boy when he was ill. The cook slams Crispin back against the locked door. The boy cries out, the thermos tips, and a torrent of something warm and vile gushes out of the insulated bottle and into his mouth. It tastes like chicken soup but rancid, the noodles slimy. Crispin chokes on it, tries to spew it back, but is forced to swallow. As his vision clouds and darkness spills through his mind, the last thing he sees is the hate-distorted face of Merripen as the cook says,
Having collapsed entirely on the floor of the miniature room, further weakened by the very recognition of his weakness in recent days, shamed by his gullibility, torn by guilt over his failure to help his sister, he weeps for a while … until his weeping begins to sound pitiable. Soon it is worse than pitiable — like the wretched complaint of a wounded and helpless animal.
The whimpering boy he hears is a boy he doesn’t want to be, a boy who is not the truest Crispin that he is capable of being. Shamed anew but for different reasons, he gets to his hands and knees, and then to his feet, swaying but sure-footed.
He has known since waking this morning that this is September 29, the feast of the archangels, but with his new clarity of mind, he suddenly knows what the date portends.
“Harley,” he says, and when he speaks his brother’s name, his tears seem to dry in an instant.
At 3:37, the afternoon is waning, but there is still time. They are two now, two little bastards, piglets to some. If Crispin is worth anything, if he has the potential to be the boy he wants to be, then he will deny them their feast, disrupt their celebration, and leave Theron Hall with his brother unharmed.
At all costs, he must appear to be clueless, neither suspicious nor afraid. He hesitates in the miniature room until his legs are sturdy under him and his hands have stopped trembling.
Crispin descends to the second floor and proceeds directly to Harley’s room. He is dismayed but not surprised to find that his brother isn’t there.
The boy’s toys have not disappeared. His picture books are here. His clothes have not been removed from his closet. Time remains to rescue him.
In Harley’s bathroom, perhaps a triple score of candles flicker in glass vessels. In the opposing mirrors, legions of flames burn in ranks receding to infinity.
Two silver bowls have been left on the floor.
A film of water glistens in the bottom of the bathtub. No rose petals here. Instead, stuck to the enameled surface are a few kinds of sodden leaves, some of which might be basil, for that is what he smells.
On July 26, the celebration was held in the late hours of the evening, after nine-thirty. Most likely the same schedule will be followed this time. With perhaps six hours until that event, Harley is alive but being held somewhere.
From his brother’s room, Crispin dares to take the north stairs to the basement. At the bottom, the door is not locked. He opens it, steps into darkness, and switches on the hallway lights.
For a long moment, he stands listening to a silence deeper than any he has heard before, as though the basement is not part of the house but is, instead, part of a ship drifting in deep space, far beyond the light of any sun, in a vacuum through which no sound can reach it.
Fear creeps the chambers of his mind, but his duty to his lost sister and to his still-living brother is a leash by which he brings the fear to heel.
The corridor separates the front of the building from the back. Toward the front, the west, are two doors. The first opens to a hundred-foot-long swimming pool, and the second serves the heating-cooling plant.
Harley is in neither chamber.
On the east side of the hallway are two doors. Behind one is a storage room, and Harley is not there, either.
Judging by the dimensions of the storage room, the space behind the next — and final — door must be about eighty feet by thirty-five. This huge chamber is accessed not by a simple metal fire door like all the others, but by a cold slab of stainless steel hung on a continuous barrel hinge. It is locked now, as always.
When he raps one knuckle against the door, it sounds solid enough to stand against battalions with sledgehammers, an impossible challenge for a nine-year-old boy.
If Harley is in there, he is lost. Leaning his forehead against the steel, however, Crispin convinces himself that the boy is not yet in this mysterious room. He is certain that he would know if his brother was this close and restrained; he would surely feel some of Harley’s despair.
He turns out the lights and retreats to the ground floor.
