“What the fuck is this place anyway?” complained Del. “I counted paces. We should be next door by now!”
Imp was poking around the lower shelves, replete and bulging with leatherbound hardbacks. “Look what I found.” He bent down and, with a grunt of effort, heaved a book out of a row of identically bound volumes. He laid it on the leather-topped reading desk in the middle of the room, directly beneath the warm beam of sunlight that filtered in through the skylight. Dust rose as he leafed through it. He took an uncharacteristic degree of care. “Encyclopaedia Britannica … tenth edition? That’s, uh—” he puzzled over the roman numerals for a bit—“published in 1902. My great-grandparents could have owned this.” He looked up. Rebecca was staring at him. “What?”
“I thought you only read graphic novels these days?” She sounded as if she felt personally betrayed.
“I can read if I want to! I used to read lots!”
“Children,” Doc intervened, “what we have here is a puzzle and a problem and can I suggest we discuss it downstairs, maybe over a can of beer?” He side-eyed the two closed doors at the far end of the library. Doors that he’d noticed Game Boy eyeing with a worrying degree of curiosity. They were a peril and a provocation. “It would be really easy to get lost in here,” he explained. The thought of Game Boy haring off into who-knew-what liminal spaces made him sweat.
“That’s an excellent idea!” Imp wasn’t far behind the curve of his thoughts: “We need a strategy, and a plan for exploration, and a map and a key and a ball of string to find our way back if we get lost! I shall work on an exploration plan forthwith! But I really think we jolly well ought to go downstairs right now.”
“There are no games up here.” Rebecca turned to Game Boy. “Can you even survive?”
“There’ll be something,” he said confidently. “There’ll be a games room, you’ll see! And it’ll be full of 1970s games consoles and pinball machines!” But he still followed Imp back down the hallway and up the staircase and past the avocado suite of mundane contemporanea.
Doc didn’t have the heart to point out the other thing he’d noticed down on the skirting board, the thing that Imp had also clocked. The electricity sockets in this room all had round holes, rather than the more normal rectangular cross-section ones. He’d seen round-pin sockets in a documentary about home life during the Great War. They’d gone out of use in the 1940s. There was no phone signal here. Nor were there LED and halogen lights, automatic machinery, or (beyond the first few rooms) modern electrical appliances. Where might it all end—with gaslight and coal fires, or all the way back to Roman hypocausts?
Eve found the whole idea of a cursed concordance of a book of spells fascinating. But not as fascinating as the fact that Rupert had gotten wind of it and was willing to trust her—her!—with its acquisition.
Rupert had kept Eve on a tight rein for years, ever since the day he’d laid his cards before her and told her how things were going to be. That day he’d taught her that in order to win at the high-stakes games of the elite, it was not enough to be right: you had to be powerful and ruthless enough not to have to play by someone else’s rules. This had been a hard lesson to stomach. True, over the years since then he’d given her progressively more autonomy. But the rope around her neck was still a rope, whether it was woven from hemp or silk. The benefits of every project she masterminded accrued to Rupert, while the penalties for failure were hers alone to bear.
As part of her penance these past five years, Eve had single-mindedly studied Rupert for weaknesses she could exploit. If she tried to escape him prematurely, he could make a single phone call that would condemn her to life as a fugitive or even, these days, have her executed: his real hold was not any kind of geas or spellwork, but a dossier of cold, hard crimes she had committed in his service. But knowing he held one end of her noose had made him complacent. Rupert had come to rely on her for too many services, minor and major. In the process, she’d become intimately aware of certain aspects of his business that he should not have trusted to anybody, let alone to one who served out of fear rather than love.
It was Eve who had commissioned the architectural drawings and managed the planning process and hired the contractors who dug out the second subbasement beneath the Knightsbridge apartment. It was Eve who, working with the head of security, had arranged for the secret tunnel with the pits and the quick-drying cement. It was Eve who had helped Rupert’s strange co-religionists—never say cult—convert the old home theater room into a shrine with an altar that required drainage and running water. And it was Eve who carried out his acquisition, over a multi-year period, of a collection of texts on the subject of witchcraft and magic that started with the swivel-eyed lunacy of the Malleus Maleficarum, worked through the bloodthirsty magnificence of the Codex Yoalli Ehēcatl, and included not less than six pretenders to the title of Al Azif, the Book of Dead Names.
Frankly, it had come as no surprise whatsoever to Eve to learn that her employer was an ecclesiast in the Cult of the Mute Poet—an esoteric religious order that, because of the sanguinary nature of its devotions, had a pronounced tendency towards secrecy. These days cultists
