Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

“She can’t,” the Doctor whispered. “She can’t have slipped away again …”

Inching our way into the dark house, we began to spread out, Lucius producing his revolver and taking a couple of steps up the stairway. He would’ve gone farther, followed by Mr. Moore and Marcus-but then we heard the sudden sound of a door slamming in the sitting room. There was only one such structure in that area, I knew that from my last visit:

“The basement door,” I whispered, and then the three men on the stairs came back down. Again on Marcus’s count, we all burst into the sitting area, led by Miss Howard and Lucius.

But the room was too dark to reveal much of anything, at first, except the general outlines of the furniture nearest to us and the entrance to the kitchen hallway at the back. Which was why the voice, when we heard it come out of the shadows, was all the more frightening:

“It doesn’t matter, now,” said Libby Hatch, very quietly. “You’ve found your way into the house-but you’ll never find what you came for.”

Lucius opened his mouth, seeming like he wanted to announce to the woman that she was under arrest, but the Doctor touched his arm, and spoke in a calm voice: “Listen to me, Elspeth Franklin-you need not face death-”

But Libby Hatch only spat and cursed, “Damn you all!”

Then we saw the sudden movement of a shadow in the hallway, going toward the kitchen. It was nothing more than the briefest blur, and it was followed, much to our increasing confusion and frustration, by the sound of feet climbing upwards.

“Stairs,” the Doctor said. “There are back stairs !”

“I sure as hell never saw ’em,” I said.

“She may have had a concealed passageway built,” Marcus offered, “when she had Bates reconstruct the basement.”

“One which will no doubt prove as difficult to enter as the chamber below,” the Doctor agreed with an agitated nod. “Quickly, then-Marcus, you, Lucius, and Moore get downstairs! See what you can do to break into the chamber! Sara, you and Stevie come with me!”

With the sounds of the brawl still echoing out on the street, we all exploded off in our assigned directions, the men heading down the basement steps and Miss Howard and I following the Doctor up the staircase, past the second floor and on to the third. There we found a steel ladder what led to a hatchway in the ceiling. Miss Howard led the way up it and, opening the thing, tried to quickly jump out onto the roof.

We might have known better than to go chasing an enemy as clever as Libby in such an obvious way. Being the last one up, it was hard for me to see exactly what happened next, but the Doctor later related it to me. Once she’d stuck her head out of the hatchway Miss Howard got pistol-whipped hard, a blow what forced her to let go of her Colt (which fell back down to the floor at the base of the ladder) and rendered her unconscious right away. With surprising strength-increased, to be sure, by the desperateness of her situation-our enemy hauled Miss Howard’s body up and out of the hatchway, laid it out on the tar-covered roof, and then trained a pistol of her own on the Doctor.

“You, of all people, should know that I’ll use this, Dr. Kreizler,” I heard Libby Hatch say. “Now get up here-and move very slowly.”

As the Doctor climbed on up, I saw that I had a moment where I’d be out of view; so I scrambled down and fetched Miss Howard’s gun, shoving it into my pants and covering it with my shirt so’s to make it look as if I was still unarmed. Then I hurried back up the ladder, hoping to make Libby think that I hadn’t had time to make the play.

It worked. Once the Doctor was up on the roof I saw Libby’s golden eyes-wide and crazed by this point-move into the hatchway and fix on me. “You, too, boy,” she said, obviously not knowing I was now armed. “Get up here!”

I followed the order, making sure to keep my movements slow and easy enough so as not to shake the Colt loose. When I’d got clear of the hatchway, Libby slammed it closed and, pointing the gun first at the Doctor and then at me, used her free hand to drag Miss Howard’s body over on top of the hatch cover, a move what would make it tough for anybody to open the thing from below. Standing up straight, Libby kept moving her gun back and forth from me to the Doctor, trying to decide what to do and looking more unbalanced and wild than I’d ever seen her.

“Which one, which one,” she mumbled. Then she grabbed the Doctor’s arm and stuck the pistol to his head. “Put your hands in the air. You do the same, boy, and then stay very still, if you want to keep the Doctor’s great brain in one piece.”

Looking over to see that Miss Howard, though out cold, was still breathing regularly, I raised my hands halfway up: any higher, and I would’ve revealed the Colt tucked into my pants. Believing that both the Doctor and I were going to do what she told us, Libby seemed to relax a little: she used one hand to straighten first her hair and then her dress, which I noted was the same red-with-black-lace job what we’d first seen her in. At that point her look of craziness gave way to something what might’ve almost passed for regret.

“ Why ?”she asked, looking at the Doctor.

“I should have thought that would be obvious,” he answered, keeping his hands up.

Before Libby could answer, a particularly loud round of hollering and screaming came rising up from the street, and she turned toward it. “Do you hear that?” she said. “That’s your fault- all of yours! None of this had to happen!”

“If we’d left you free to continue murdering children, you mean?” the Doctor asked.

“Murdering them?” Libby answered, now looking positively injured. “All I did, all I ever tried to do, was help them!”

The Doctor gave her a sideways glance. “I believe you mean that in some way, Elspeth Franklin,” he said quietly.

She nodded once, her golden eyes filling with tears; then she stamped a foot suddenly and angrily. “If you believe that, then why have you been hounding me like this?”

“Listen to me, Elspeth,” the Doctor went on. “If you surrender yourself, there may be a way to help you-”

Libby’s voice grew cold and mean: “Of course-in the electrical chair , you lying bastard!”

“No,” the Doctor insisted, still quietly. “I can help you. I can try to make the authorities understand why you’ve done these things-”

“ But I’ve done nothing !”Libby hollered, full of new desperation. “Can’t you see that?” She paused, studying the Doctor’s face. “No. No, of course you can’t. You’re a man . What man could understand what my life has been like-why I’ve had to make the choices I have? Do you think I wanted any of this? It wasn’t my fault that it happened!”

I figured the only way I was going to be able to make a move for the Colt was to try to get the woman even more upset and off balance than she already was: so, though I knew the Doctor wouldn’t have approved, I began to taunt her. “Yeah? What about the kid you buried with the dog? Whose fault was that ?”

“You be quiet!” she seethed, turning to me. “You’re not even a man-just a boy ! All you understand are your own damned needs, your own damned wants ! A woman probably worked herself raw raising you, and how did you ever repay her, except by spitting in her face? By disobeying, by whining, by-” Tightening her grip on her pistol, Libby glared at me hotter than ever with those gold eyes. “You want to know about the boy in the grave, do you? I didn’t ask for him, and I didn’t want him. I had a beau-a respectable boy, from a family that had a place in our world-the kind of boy I could have brought home to my mother, to show that I could-that I could-” Her voice starting to wander, Libby glanced down at the tarred roof for an instant. “He would’ve done anything for me. And I did do anything for him-but then his family found out, and they wouldn’t…” Quickly, she looked back up. “And I was left with his lying, dirty seed in me! It wasn’t wrong, to prevent the disgrace! What could it have been but a bastard-something else, something more , that I’d done wrong ? So I did what was right -but I couldn’t even tell anyone!”