Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

Miss Temple watched with some alarm and a certain animal appreciation as Chang placed his boot in the knitted hands of Doctor Svenson, and then launched himself at the overhanging archway. With the barest grip he slithered up to where he could wedge his knee onto the shingles, shift his weight, and then reach as high as the edge of the wall itself. Within moments, and by what Miss Temple felt to be a striking display of physical capacity, Chang had swung a leg over the wall. He looked down with what seemed to be a professional lack of expression, and dropped from her sight. There was silence. Svenson readied his revolver. Then the lock was turning, the door open, and Chang beckoning them to enter.

“We have been anticipated,” he said, and reached out to take the bag from her.

Under its pall of shadow, the garden was a dreary place, the beds withered, the patches of lawn brown, the limbs of the delicate ornamental trees hanging limp and bare. Miss Temple walked between stone urns taller than her head, their edges draped with the dead fallen stalks of last summer’s flowers. The garden bordered the rear of a large house that had once, she saw, been painted white, though it was now nearly black from a layered patina of soot. Its windows and rear door had been nailed shut with planks, effectively sealing it off from the garden. Before her, Miss Temple saw the greenhouse, a once-splendid dome of grey-green glass, streaked with moss and grime. The door hung open, dark as the gap of a missing tooth. As they walked toward it, she saw that Doctor Svenson was studying the garden beds and muttering under his breath.

“What do you see, Doctor?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon—I was simply noting the Comte’s choice of plants. It is the garden of a dark-hearted herbalist.” He pointed to various withered stalks that to Miss Temple looked all the same. “Here is black hellebore, here is belladonna…foxglove…mandrake…castor beans…bloodroot…”

“My goodness,” said Miss Temple, not knowing the plants Svenson was listing, but willing to approve of his recitation. “One would think the Comte was an apothecary!”

“To be sure, Miss Temple, these are all, in their way, poisons.” Svenson looked up and drew her eye to the door, where Chang had entered without them. “But perhaps there is time to study the flower beds later…”

The light in the greenhouse bore a greenish cast, as if one were entering an aquarium. Miss Temple walked across thick Turkish carpets to where Chang stood next to a large canopied bed. The curtains had been pulled from the posts and the bedding stripped away. She looked down at the mattress with rising revulsion. The thick padding was stained with the deep ruddy color of dried blood, but also, near the head, marked with strange vivid spatters of both deep indigo blue and an acid-tinged orange. Taking her rather aback, Doctor Svenson climbed onto the bed and bent over the different stains, sniffing. For Miss Temple, such intimacy with another person’s bodily discharges—a person she did not even know—extended well beyond her present sphere of duty. She turned away and allowed her eyes to roam elsewhere in the room.

While it seemed like the Comte had vacated the greenhouse and taken with him anything that might have explained his use of it, Miss Temple could still see how the circular room had held different areas of activity. At the door was a small work table. Nearby were basins and pipes where water was pumped in, and next to the basins a squat coal stove topped by a wide flat iron plate for cooking either food or, more probably, alchemical compounds and elixirs. Past these was a long wooden table, nailed to the floor and fitted, she noted with a fearful shiver, with leather straps. She glanced back at the bed. Doctor Svenson was still bent over the mattress, and Chang was looking underneath it. She walked to the table. The surface was scored with burns and stains, as was—she noted when her foot snagged in an open tear—the carpet. In fact, the carpet was absolutely ruined with burns and stains along a small pathway running from the stove to the table, and then again from the stove to the basins, and then, finishing the triangle, from the basins to the table directly. She stepped to the stove, which was cold. Out of curiosity, she knelt in front of it and pried open the hatch. It was full of ash. She looked about her for some tongs, found them, and reached in, her tongue poking from her mouth in concentration as she sifted through the ashes. After a moment she stood up, wiped her hands, and turned quite happily to her companions, holding out a scrap of midnight blue fabric.

“Something here, gentlemen. Unless I am mistaken it is shantung silk—is it possible this was the woman’s dress?”

Chang crossed to her and took the piece of burnt cloth. He studied it a moment without speaking and handed it back. He called to Svenson, his voice a trifle brusque.

“What can you tell us, Doctor?”

Miss Temple did not think the Doctor noticed Chang’s tone, nor the distressed tapping of his fingertips against his thigh, for Svenson’s reply was unhurried, as if his mind was still occupied with solving this newest puzzle. “It is unclear to me…for, you see, the bloodstains here…which do, to my experience with the varied colors of drying blood, seem to be relatively recent…”

He pointed to the center of the mattress, and Miss Temple found herself prodding Chang to join her nearer to the bed.

“It seems a lot of blood, Doctor,” she said. “Does it not?”

“Perhaps, but not if—if you will permit the indelicacy—if the blood is the result of a natural—ah, monthly—process. You will see the stain is in the center of the bed—where one would expect the pelvis—”

“What about childbirth?” she asked. “Was the woman pregnant?”

“She was not. There are of course other explanations—it could be another injury, there could be violence, or even some kind of poison—”

“Could she have been raped?” asked Chang.

Svenson did not immediately reply, his eyes flitting to Miss Temple. She bore no expression, and merely raised her eyebrows in encouragement of his answer. He turned back to Chang.

“Obviously, yes—but the quantity of blood is prodigious. Such an assault would have had to be especially catastrophic, possibly mortal. I cannot say more. When I examined the woman, she was not so injured. Of course, that is no guarantee—”

“What of the other stains? The blue and the orange?” asked Miss Temple, still aware of Chang’s restless tapping.

“I cannot say. The blue…well, firstly, the smell is consistent with a strange odor I have smelt both in the Institute and on the body in Crabbe’s kitchen—mechanical, chemical. I can only hazard it is part of their glass-making. Perhaps it is a narcotic, or perhaps…I do not know, a preservative, a fixative—as it fixes memories into glass, perhaps there is some way in which d’Orkancz hoped to fix the woman into life. I am certain he sought to preserve her,” he added, looking up into Chang’s stern face. “As for the orange, well, it’s very queer. Orange—or an essence of orange peel—is sometimes used as an insecticide—there is an acidity that destroys the carapace. Such is the smell of this stain—a bitter concentrate derived by steam.”

“But, Doctor,” asked Miss Temple, “do not the stains themselves suggest that the fluid has come—been expelled—from the woman? They are sprayed—spattered—”

“Yes, they are—very astute!”

“Do you suggest she was infested?”

“No, I suggest nothing—but I do wonder about the effects of such a solvent with regard to the possible properties of the blue fluid, the glass, within the human body. Perhaps it was the Comte’s idea of a remedy.”

“If it melts an insect’s shell, it might melt the glass in her lungs?”

“Exactly—though, of course, we are ignorant of the exact ingredients of the glass, so I cannot say if it might have proven effective.”

They said nothing for a moment, staring at the bed and the traces of the body that had lain there.

“If it worked,” said Miss Temple, “I do not know why he has burnt her dress.”

“No.” Svenson nodded, sadly.

“No,” snapped Chang. He turned from them and walked out to the garden.

Miss Temple looked to Doctor Svenson, who was still on the bed, his expression one of concern and confusion, as if they both knew something was not right. He began to climb off—awkwardly, his coat and boots cumbersome and his lank hair falling over his face. Miss Temple was quicker to the door, snatching up her flowered bag where Chang had left it—it was shockingly heavy, Marthe was an idiot to think she could carry the thing for any distance—and lurching into the garden. Chang stood in the middle of the lifeless lawn, staring up at the boarded windows of the house—windows that in their willful impenetrability struck Miss Temple as a mirror of Chang’s glasses. She flung down the bag and approached him. He did not turn. She stopped, perhaps a yard from his side.