forest now. And through the glass the town’s dirt roads lay tinged by moonlight alone, not sodium light from streetlamps.
His own hands now grasped the proof of supernaturalism.
The ramifications didn’t occur to him; no deep thinking accompanied his validation. Those considerations would come later. Instead, he simply looked—and marveled at—the utterly impossible.
The town house that would one day be owned by Letitia Rhodes—and whose taxes would be paid by Fanshawe himself—stood dreary and dark and weather-stained. In the closest pillory, a pitiable woman hung, her waste-blotched hair hanging nearly to the street. A sentinel in a tri-cornered hat, and with a star-shaped badge on his chest, walked rounds down Main Street, a lantern in one hand, a billy club in the other. Several horses stood still as statues while tied to their posts. From the entrance of the church, a man alighted, no doubt the bell-ringer. He walked straight from the church to the tavern across the street.
Fanshawe pulled back the focus, then swept the entire, decrepit town. Tonight, not a single window stood lit—
—save for one.
He brought the glass to bear, and closed the focus.
A figure was waving at him, from a top-floor window of the Wraxall house. By now, Fanshawe was not surprised to see that it was the very room he would rent three-hundred-plus years later—clearly a room of indescribable horrors. And just as the room was no surprise, neither was its current occupant, the Van Dyked and emerald-eyed Jacob Wraxall, dressed in a long-tailed vest and ruffled linen shirt; around his neck hung the exact same pendant his likeness wore in the portrait. The cunning grin on the necromancer’s face made Fanshawe realize this:
On past nights, it had indeed seemed as though Wraxall and/or his daughter were personally addressing him through the glass, but this he’d dismissed as paranoia. Now, however, he knew it was nothing of the sort.
It seemed as though Wraxall had somehow predicted Fanshawe’s use of the glass tonight. Next, Fanshawe remembered the wretched sorcerer’s epitaph:
It occurred to him that any man who could make such a looking-glass might well be able to read the future and quite a bit else.
Fanshawe adjusted the glass’s focus to the confines of the window. Candlelight wavered from within. Wraxall maintained the sly grin, but the disposition of his eyes changed, signaling to Fanshawe to be attentive…
In the window’s eerily-lit frame, Wraxall raised a hand, showing a scrap of folded paper. His other hand raised an over-sized black book with what looked like gold flake on the cover. Fanshawe thought back to his first intrusion into the hidden attic chamber and the large book kept in a traycase…
Wraxall turned the book over in his hand, opened the back cover, then inserted the folded piece of paper. His smile sharpened when he reclosed the book.
Fanshawe kept staring.
Wraxall may actually have even winked back at him. Then he turned and began to climb the rope ladder, taking the book with him.
The now-familiar drone of Fanshawe’s resolve filled his head like engine-noise. He ran full speed to the inn, forewent the elevator to take the stairs two at a time up to his floor, and barged breathless into his room. He locked the door and within minutes had slid off the trapdoor, dropped the ladder, and was up into the attic room that had been known to no one but Fanshawe for over three centuries.
His vigor raised clouds of dust as his feet scuffed over the blood-scribed pentagram. Fanshawe hacked in the floating grit; he was delirious to move on and plow forward. His hand shook when he found the bookcase and then the book itself that had triggered his memory.
Fanshawe let the invaluable book clunk to the floor, then rushed back down the ladder. He felt giddy when he sat at the complimentary desk and carefully unfolded the parchment. His heart raced.
The short passage commenced:
“Oh, for pity’s sake!” Fanshawe grumbled aloud. “Your lips aren’t gonna tell me anything! You died three hundred years ago!”
But he read on:
“Finally! The Bridle!” Fanshawe exclaimed, then hoped the volume of his voice hadn’t awakened anyone. But he wasn’t quite sure what to make of the arcane “instructions.”
He looked at his hand. “Black heart and bleeding hand?”
A few more lines of the occultist’s writing remained.
Fanshawe’s eyes peeled open as he easily translated.
And the rest:
That was all.
Fanshawe darted back into the attic, grabbed one of the flasks of Witch-Water, then drifted back out into the night.
—
CHAPTER ELEVEN
