“Ma’am, if you’re going in I suggest—”
Eve levitated a fistful of glass marbles and smiled at him. He shut his mouth with an audible click. “Stand guard. Nobody enters. Clear?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She crossed the threshold, feeling a prickly chill run up her spine as her sight dimmed for an instant. “I’ll cover the approaches from inside.”
“You do that.” She entered the hallway, then paused to listen. There were doors inset with panes of glass at the end of the hall, but there was also a staircase spiraling up into the gloom. Offices, she thought. Where are the offices? Up or down?
She pushed through the darkened door, then pulled out her flashlight. Parquet floor, a wood-panelled wall with a transom and inset window, more doors. One of them stood ajar, affording a glimpse of white tiles and a familiar whiff of bleach. There was a gilt title above the small window: RETURNS. An itchy sense of unease told her that either there was no librarian on duty, or if there was, she really didn’t want to meet him.
Upstairs, she decided. She darted back to the staircase. “Going up,” she quietly called to the Gammon. He didn’t stir from his position behind the door, submachine gun held ready and eyes vigilantly focussed on the alleyway.
Dammit, Imp. She skidded on the landing halfway up—her boots filthy, probably ruined by the icy muck splashed halfway up her ankles—then caught herself on the banister rail, a knobbly yellowed ivory thing that reminded her of the artistic style of H.R. Giger. Finally she reached the top step and paused, reconsidering. If it’s Imp’s gang we’re good, but if it’s somebody else—a handful of marbles lacked a certain something in the deterrence department, however lethal they might actually be. She slowed, wishing she’d taken the Apache gun or borrowed the Gammon’s spare pistol. Not that she needed a firearm if she wanted to poke holes in people: but folks tended to stop and listen when you pointed a gun at them. And right now Eve was all about making people stop and listen, rather than performing highly inadvisable summoning rituals in a liminal space haunted by the ghost of Leather Apron.
The landing at the top of the stairs had smaller doors to either side, but directly ahead of her a big pair of double doors with glass windows promised something more. A dim radiance flickered behind them. She switched off her flashlight, then approached, lurking in the darkness, listening.
“—Hell designed this place? It’s creeping me—” A woman’s voice.
“Naah, it’s just ossuary kitsch.” Eve took a deep breath of relief: the speaker was Imp. He continued, “If you want to see the real thing, you need to visit the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic: it’s got a great website. I reckon these are just plaster replicas, there’s no way you could get your hands on that many skeletons in London without somebody noticing—”
What? Eve blinked. She glanced up at the shadowy lintel above the door, at the chandelier dangling from the shadows above the stairwell. Emboldened by knowing it was her brother’s crew on the other side of the door, she flicked her flashlight at it. No, it wasn’t an H.R. Giger homage, not in the late nineteenth century: the graceful chandelier was festooned with chains of human vertebrae, lamp-holders set in bouquets of skulls, braced by arms of … well, arms. Eve switched the flashlight off. Creepy but not dangerous, she decided, and pushed the double doors open.
“Imp?” she called: “It’s me! We need to talk.”
The library was made of bones.
Imp cringed as he looked up at the room’s vaulted ceiling, arching two stories above his head. Cornices and ornamental moldings of femurs and skulls; roof beams exposed like the rib cage of a dead giant, chandeliers of … bones, more bones, bones atop bones, everywhere bones.
The wooden bookcases seemed to be safe at first glance—once living, now dead, bone becomes brittle and ceases to be a decent structural material—but they were fretted with a veneer of sliced fingerbones and surmounted by a display of maxillaries and mandibles. And the closer he got to them, the more realistic they looked.
“Guys, I don’t think these are fakes.” Doc’s whisper was a loud library-hushed voice. “What is this place?”
“A club library.” Imp scuffed his shoe on the black-and-white tiled floor, leaving a dark trail. “Shit.” He looked around, counting bookcases. “We must be looking at two or three hundred shelf-meters of books on this level alone.” There was a narrow walkway around the waist of the room, reached by a cast-iron spiral staircase in each corner of the library. It provided access to the higher shelves, for the room was walled in books to a height of perhaps five meters. Above the uppermost shelf a row of oval windows like so many eye sockets kept vigil over the outside world.
Doc was already poking at one of the shelves. He pulled out a leatherbound volume and opened it. “Hey. Engravings? Engravings of—” He did a double-take. “Interesting, I didn’t know it was legal to print this kind of stuff back then.”
“What kind of—” Game Boy crowded him—“porn? Hey, it’s hot man-on-man love.” He looked worried. “I think.”
“What was this place again?” Wendy asked.
“If I had to guess, going by the books I’d say it’s the private collection of a rich dude sex club.” Imp peered at the nearest bookcase, then slid a slim volume out. “Mm, Catullus, but not as we know him. Heh. I mean, the Victorians were really uptight in public about morality, but in private—”
“The bones,” Game Boy reminded him.
Imp shrugged. “Death and sex, two big taboos that taste great together.”
Game Boy winced.
“So this is club dead sex.” Del sounded annoyed. “You want me to search all this necroporn, bro? What’s the title of the book, anyway?”
“It, uh, doesn’t have a title,” Imp admitted. “It’s something with
