Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

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“It is like the Institute,” Svenson whispered to Chang, who nodded, still focused on the corridor ahead. They had advanced, walking close to the inner wall, just so the staircase door was no longer visible behind them, when a scuffling noise beyond the next curve caused Chang to freeze. He held his open palm to indicate that they should stay, then carefully moved forward alone, pressed flat against the wall.

Chang stopped. He glanced back at them and smiled, then darted forward in a sudden rush. Miss Temple heard one brief squawk of surprise and then three meaty thuds in rapid succession. Chang reappeared and motioned them on with a quick toss of his head.

On the ground by another open door, his breathing labored, blood flowing freely from his nose, lay the Macklenburg Envoy, Herr Flauss. Near his feebly twitching hand lay a revolver, which Chang snatched up, breaking it open to check the cylinder and then slamming it home. While Doctor Svenson knelt by the gasping man, Chang extended the weapon for Miss Temple to take. She shook her head.

“Surely you or the Doctor,” she whispered.

“The Doctor, then,” replied Chang. “I am more useful with a blade or my fists.” He looked down to watch Svenson briskly ransack the Envoy’s pockets, each search answered by an ineffectual gesture of protest from the injured man’s hands. Svenson looked up, behind them toward the staircase—footsteps. He stood, abandoning the Envoy. Chang pressed the pistol into Svenson’s hands and took hold of the Doctor’s sleeve and Miss Temple’s arm, pulling them both farther down the corridor until they could no longer see the Envoy. Svenson whispered his protest.

“But, Cardinal, they are surely inside—”

Chang tugged them both into an alcove and pressed a hand over his mouth to stifle a cough. Down the corridor Miss Temple heard rushing steps…that suddenly fell silent. She felt Chang’s body tense, and saw the Doctor’s thumb moving slowly to the hammer of the pistol. Someone was walking toward them, slowly…the footsteps stopped…and then retreated. She strained her ears…and heard a woman’s haughty, angry hiss.

“Leave the idiot…”

Chang waited…and then leaned close to them both.

“Without getting rid of the body, we could not enter in secret—at this moment they are searching the room, assuming we have entered. This alone will halt whatever is happening inside. If we enter now, there is a chance to take their rearmost by surprise.”

Miss Temple took a deep breath, feeling as if she had somehow in the last five minutes become a soldier. Before she could make sense of—or more importantly, protest against—this wrong-headed state of affairs Chang was gone and Doctor Svenson, taking her hand in his, was pulling her in tow.

The Envoy remained in the doorway, raised to a sitting position but still incapacitated and insensible. They stepped past with no reaction from Herr Flauss save a snuffle of his bleeding nose, into a dim stone entryway with narrow staircases to either side to balconies that wrapped around the room. Chang swiftly ducked to the left, with Svenson and Miss Temple directly behind him, crowding as quietly as possible out of sight. Miss Temple wrinkled her nose with distaste at the harsh reek of indigo clay. Ahead of them, through the foyer, they heard the Contessa.

“He has been attacked—you heard nothing?”

“I did not,” answered the dry, rumbling voice of the Comte. “I am busy, and my business makes noise. Attacked by whom?”

“I’m sure I do not know,” replied the Contessa. “Colonel Aspiche has cut the throats of each likely candidate…thus my curiosity.”

“The Duke is away?”

“Exactly as planned, followed by those selected for book-harvest. As agreed, their distraction and loss of memory have been blamed on a virulent outbreak of blood fever—stories of which will be spread by our own adherents—a tale with the added benefit of justifying a quarantine of Harschmort, sequestering Lord Robert for as long as necessary. But that is not our present difficulty.”

“I see,” grunted the Comte. “As I am in the midst of a very delicate procedure, I would appreciate it if you explained what in the depths of hell you are all doing here.”

Miss Temple did her best to follow the others up the narrow stairs in silence. As her head cleared the balcony floor, she saw a domed stone ceiling above, lit by several wicked-looking iron chandeliers that bristled with spikes. Miss Temple could never see a chandelier under the best of circumstances without imagining the destructive impact of its sudden drop to the floor (especially if she was passing beneath), and these instinctive thoughts, and these fixtures, just made the Comte’s laboratory that much more a chamber of dread. The balcony was stacked with books and papers and boxes, all covered by a heavy layer of dust. Svenson indicated with a jab of his finger that she could inch forward to peek through the bars of the railing.

Miss Temple had not been to the Institute, but she had managed a powerful glimpse of the hellish platform at the base of the iron tower. This room (as the walls were lined with bookshelves it seemed to have once been some sort of library) was a strange mix of that same industry (for there were tables cluttered with steaming pots and boiling vials and parchment and wickedly shaped metal tools) and a sleeping chamber, for in the center of the room, cleared by pushing aside and stacking any number of tables and chairs, was a very large bed. Miss Temple nearly gagged, covering her mouth with her hand, but she could not look away. On the bed, her bare legs dangling over the side, lay Lydia Vandaariff, her white robes around her thighs, each arm outstretched and restrained by a white silk cord. Her face shone with exertion, and each of her hands tightly gripped its cord, as if the restraint were more a source of comfort than punishment. The bedding between Lydia’s legs was wet, as was the stone floor beneath her feet, a pooling of watered blue fluid streaked with curling crimson lines. The embroidered hem of Lydia’s robe had been flipped down in a meager gesture toward modesty, but there was no ignoring the flecks of blue and red on her white thighs. She looked up at the ceiling, blinking.

Slumped in a nearby chair, a half-full glass in his hand and an open bottle of brandy on the floor between his legs, sat Karl-Horst von Maasmarck. The Comte wore his leather apron, his black fur slung over a pile of chairs behind him, and cradled a bizarre metal object, a metal tube with handles and valves and a pointed snout that he wiped clean with a rag.

On the walls behind them, hung on nails hammered carelessly into the bookcases, were thirteen distinct squares of canvas. Miss Temple turned to Chang and pointed. He had seen them as well, and made a deliberate gesture to flatten his hand and then turn it over, as to turn a page. At the St. Royale, Lydia had muttered something about the rest of the Annunciation fragments—indicating that she had seen them collected. Miss Temple knew the squares of canvas represented the entire reconstituted work, but she had not expected the Comte to hang each painting face to the wall, for what she saw was not the complete blasphemous image (which she was frankly by now more than a little curious to see), but its canvas backing—Oskar Veilandt’s alchemical formulae as they traveled across every piece, for which the painting was but a decorative veil, a detailed recipe for his own Annunciation, the unspeakable impregnation of Lydia Vandaariff by way of his twisted science. Around each canvas were pasted scores of additional notes and diagrams—no doubt the Comte’s own attempts to understand Veilandt’s blasphemous instructions. Miss Temple looked down at the girl on the bed and bit her knuckle to keep silent…

She heard an impatient sigh below her and the flicking catch of a match. Miss Temple scooted forward on her belly and gained a wider view of the room. With a tremor of fear she saw, almost directly beneath, the Contessa’s large party. How had they not heard them in the corridor? Next to the Contessa—smoking a fresh cigarette in her holder—stood Francis Xonck and Crabbe, and behind them at least six figures in black coats, carrying cudgels. She glanced again to Chang and Svenson and saw Chang’s attention focused elsewhere, underneath the opposite balcony. Glittering in the shadows, as the orange flames from the Comte’s crucibles reflected off her skin, stood the third glass woman, Angelique, silently waiting. Miss Temple stared at her, and was just beginning to examine the woman’s body with the new understanding that it was the object of Chang’s ardent affection—and in fact, its consummation, for the woman was a whore—which meant…Miss Temple’s face became flushed, suddenly jumbling her memories from the book with thoughts of Chang and Angelique—when she shook her head and forced her attention to the rather agitated conversation below.

“We would not have bothered you,” began Xonck, his eyes drawn with some distaste to the spectacle before them, “save we are unaccountably unable to locate a workable key.”

“Where is Lorenz?” asked the Comte.