Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

landing with the pistol.

The silence was broken by a footstep above him in the attic. Svenson cocked the pistol and searched for the way up, nearly tripping on it: a ladder, flat on the floor. Whoever it was above him, they’d been marooned.

Svenson eased back the hammer and stuffed the pistol into his pocket. He picked up the ladder and looked above him for the hatch, only noticing it—the thing was quite flush with the ceiling—because of the bolt that held it shut. There was a wooden lip to rest the ladder against, and Svenson wedged it securely in place and began his tentative climb, eased by the darkness—he could not exactly see how high he was, nor thus how far there was to fall. He kept his gaze resolutely above him and reached out—nerves dancing with dismay at holding on with but a single hand—to undo the bolt. He pushed back the hatch and nearly lost his balance recoiling from the chemical stench. This was a good thing, as his instinctive shrinking from the smell caused his head to duck just out of the path of a sharp wooden heel. A moment later—taking in the swinging heel and the woman swinging it—Doctor Svenson’s foot slipped on the rung and dropped through it—a sudden descent of two feet until his hands caught hold (and his jaw smacked into a rung of its own). He looked up with distress, rubbing his stinging face. Looking down at him, hair in her face and a shoe in her hand, was Eloise.

“Captain Blach!”

“Have they hurt you?” he rasped, working to restore his dangling leg on the ladder.

“No…no, but…” She looked to something he could not see. She had been crying. “Please—I must come down!”

Before he could protest, she was out of the hatch and nearly on top of him. He half-caught, half-hung on to her legs as they descended, finding the floor himself just in time to help her do the same. She turned and buried her face in his shoulder, hugging him tightly, her body shaking. After a moment, he put his arms around her—timidly, without exerting any untoward pressure, though even this much contact set off a wondrous appreciation that her shoulder blades could be so small—and waited for her emotions to subside. Instead of subsiding, she began to sob, his greatcoat muffling the sounds. He looked past her, up into the open hatch. The light in the room was not from a candle or lantern—it was somehow more pale and cold, and did not flicker. Doctor Svenson took it upon himself to pat the woman’s hair and whisper “It’s all right now…you’re all right…” into her ear. She pulled her face away from him, out of breath, swallowing, her face streaked. He looked at her seriously.

“You can breathe? The smell—the chemicals—”

She nodded. “I covered my head—I—I had to—”

Before she could erupt once more he indicated the hatch. “Is there anyone else—does anyone need help?”

She shook her head and shut her eyes, stepping away. Svenson had no idea what to think. Dreading what he would find, he climbed the ladder and looked in.

It was a narrow gabled room with the roof slanted on each side—perhaps a child of seven could have stood without stooping in the very center. Across the floor near the window were the slumped shapeless forms of two women, obviously dead. Equally clear, though he possessed no explanation, was that their bodies were the source of the unnatural blue glow animating the grisly attic. He crawled into the room. The smell was unbearable and he paused to replace the handkerchief over his face before continuing on his hands and knees. They were from the train—one was well-dressed, and the other probably a maid. Both had bled from the ears and nose, and their eyes were filmed over and opaque, but from within, as if the contents of each sphere had become scrambled and gelatinous under extreme pressure. He thought of the Comte d’Orkancz’s medical interests and recalled men he had seen pulled from the winter sea, whose soft bodies had been unable to withstand the crushing tons of ice water above them. The women were of course completely dry—nothing of the kind could explain their conditions…nor could any disease of the arctic account for the unearthly blue glow that arose from every visible discolored inch of their skin.

Svenson bolted the hatch behind him and climbed down, laying the ladder on the floor. He coughed into his handkerchief—his throat was unpleasantly raw, he could only imagine what hers felt like—and then tucked it away. Eloise had crept to the stairs, sitting so she could look into the shadow of the floor below. He sat next to her, no longer presuming to place an arm around her, but—as a physician—scrupling to take one of her hands in both of his.

“I woke up with them. In the room,” she said, her voice a whisper, ragged but under her control. “It was Miss Poole—”

“Miss Poole!”

Eloise looked up at Svenson. “Yes. She spoke to us all—there was tea, there was cake—all of us from so many places…come for our different reasons, for our fortunes—it was all so congenial.”

“But Miss Poole is not in the attic—”

“No. She had the book.” Eloise shook her head, covering her eyes with a hand. “I’m not making any kind of sense, I’m sorry.”

Svenson looked back at the attic. “But those women—you must know them, they were on the train—”

“I don’t know them any more than I know you,” she said. “We were told how to get here, not to speak of it —”

Svenson squeezed her hand, fighting down each impulse of sympathy, knowing he must determine who she really was. “Eloise…I must ask you, for it is very important—and you must answer me truthfully—”

“I am not lying—the book—those women—”

“I am not asking about them. I must know about you. To whom are you a confidante? Whose children is it that you tutor?”

She stared at him, perhaps unsure in the face of his sudden insistence, perhaps calculating her best response, and then scoffed, bitterly and forlorn. “For some reason I thought everyone knew. The children of Charlotte and Arthur Trapping.”

“There is too much to tell,” she said, straightening her shoulders and pushing the loosened strands of hair from her eyes. “But you will not understand unless I explain that, upon the disappearance of Colonel Trapping”—she looked at him to see if he required more information but Svenson merely nodded for her to go on—“Mrs. Trapping had taken to her rooms, receiving the calls of no one save her brothers. I say brothers, for it is the habit of the family, but in truth the brother she wanted to hear from, to whom she sent card after card—Mr. Henry Xonck—did not once respond, and the brother with whom her relations are strained—Mr. Francis Xonck—called upon her throughout the day. On one visit, he sought me out in the house, for he is enough of a family presence to know who I am, and my relation to Mrs. Trapping.” She looked up again at Svenson, who opened his expression into one of gentle questioning. She shook her head, as if to gather her thoughts. “Who of course you don’t know—she is a difficult woman. She has been shut out of her family business by her older brother—she gets money, understand, but not the work, the power, the sense of place. It haunts her—and it is why she was so determined her husband should rise to importance, and why his absence was so distressing…indeed, perhaps more than the loss of her man was the loss of her, if you will permit me…engine. In any case, Francis Xonck took me aside and asked if I should like to help her. He knows my devotion to Mrs. Trapping—as I say, he has seen her reliance on my advice, and he is a man who misses nothing—of course I said yes, even as I wondered at this sudden attention to his sister, a woman who despised him as a corrupting influence on her already corrupted husband. He told me there would be secrecy and intrigue, there would even—and here he looked into my eyes—I would not be telling this to a soul, Captain, were it not—what has occurred—” She gestured to the darkened house around her.

Svenson squeezed her hand. She smiled again, though her eyes were unchanged.

“He looked at me—looked into me—and whispered that I might find advantage in the affair myself, that I might find it…a revelation. He chuckled. And yet even as he played at seducing me, the story he told was very dark and horrid—he was convinced Colonel Trapping was being held against his wishes—because of scandal it was impossible to go to the authorities. Mr. Xonck had only heard rumors but was too visible himself to attend to them. It was part of a much larger set of events, he said. He informed me that I would be expected to reveal secrets—compromising information—of the Trappings, of the Xonck family—and he authorized me to do so. I refused, at least without first consulting Mrs. Trapping, but he insisted in the gravest terms that to alert her to even this much of her husband’s predicament was to strain the marriage to the breaking point, to say nothing of what it must do to the poor woman’s nerves. Still, it seemed shameful—what I