John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

The severed head, riding in the crook of an elbow, looked wry. “Madame, it was love who enabled me to walk alive out of Hell; and, once I knew the secret pathways back to the world of daylight, even my murderesses could not keep me buried. My every song is devoted to you, now and ever. You, only you, make sorrows possible to bear.”

With his other hand he reached up and unslung his guitar.

I was curious to see how he would manage to strum and to finger a guitar while at the same time holding his head, but at that moment, the Lady Cyprian gestured upward, and I thought she was pointing straight at us.

Quentin and I shrank back. But all she said was: “Lights! The chandelier is too low for cavorting, especially should good Pherespondus jump and skip!”

The man in the blue robe floated up to the level of the balcony, light as a thistledown, his hair and shining cloak weightless and rippling in midair. Wings of azure were unfolding from his back, each feather the color of the summer sky, but apparently they were just for show, as he did not flap them but merely spread them out, like an eagle on a heraldic emblem.

By some miracle, he came up to the far side of the balcony, facing away from us and toward the pulley mechanism that controlled the chandelier chain. A cloud of opaque white smoke also billowed up from underfoot, and a dozen arms (clad in impeccable blue pinstriped suit sleeves with white cuffs) reached out of the smoke to give him a hand.

We crawled backward as quickly as silence allowed, and were in the alcove and up a dozen stairs before the winged man turned his head. At that point, there were tatters of cloud between him and us.

I say “crawled” but it was more like one long, carpet-hugging leap. The whole journey seemed to take only the moment between heartbeats and, considering how my heart was hammering at that time, that moment must have been a short one indeed.

We sat there, not breathing, waiting to hear if the winged man would raise the alarm. But the only noise that came was the rattling and groaning of the chandelier chain, as the massive iron frame of the lights was hauled upward.

Quentin looked at me, then nodded toward the top of the stair, where the roof exit was. I nodded back. It was time to retreat.

He crept quietly up the stairs, gesturing for me to stay back.

I was furious when I saw him wave his hand behind his back at me. Me, two or three years his senior! It was somewhat patronizing of him to assume that, because I was the girl, I had to go second; and I knew he probably picked this moment because we dared not talk, so I could not question his silent order. He had also turned his head toward the exit above, so as not to notice my rude gesture by which I answered him.

And I wasn’t going to push past him on the narrow stair; that might make a noise, too.

He squinted out into the night, looked around carefully. He actually—I am not kidding—he actually raised his walking stick like a periscope, and turned the little brass jackal head this way and that.

Then, satisfied, he rose to his feet and stepped out onto the roof.

Immediately, he seemed to explode with light. I blinked, dazzled. It was only a flashlight beam, but it had caught him from the knees up. From the angle, it looked as if the beam were coming from below, over the edge of the roof.

Quentin’s back and his left hand were still in shadow. He was blinking and raising his right hand to shield his eyes.

He extended his left hand toward me and dropped his walking stick. I caught it before it clattered on the stairs. Then with his now-empty left hand, Quentin pointed at me, and made a thumb gesture like a hitchhiker. Go back. Get away.

Dr. Fell’s voice came up from over the edge of the roof. “Well, well, if it is not our young Mr. Nemo. I was told to expect someone else, but I suppose you will do. Come down, young man! I am to take anyone I find to Headmaster Boggin’s office, but I suppose, since he is occupied, we may have time to visit the infirmary and discover from whence comes your amazing resistance to your medication. You are the last person I would expect to be able to negate my effects. I see certain magnetic anomalies around your person: these are merely material effects which material science has long since learned how to comprehend and negate. Observe.”

A beam of blue light from the ground came up over the edge of the roof. Quentin stood goggle-eyed at what he was seeing; the source of the blue light, I assume. There seemed to be little sparks or flickers of smaller particles flicking forward through the light, like dust motes. The beam played back and forth over Quentin.

By that point, one very quiet stair at a time, I had reached the bottom of the alcove again. There was a nook behind the potted plant where even someone standing on the balcony would not be able to see me.

I sat down there with my head down, clutching Quentin’s walking stick. I felt glad that I hadn’t been caught. That thought made me feel like a miserable coward.

I huddled into a smaller ball when, some minutes later (though it seemed like hours), I heard the happy talk and laughter from below give way to charming music of violin and guitar.

Time seemed to stop when I heard that music, and all my grief fled away, as if a light shone through my heart, and no darkness could be there.

The music seemed eternal to me, as if it came from a higher, finer sphere, and made all this, what we call “reality,” seem flat.

A type of numbness came over me then, not of any limb or organ I could name or point to. I had a sense that there was a part of me that was being squeezed or strangled. I cannot explain it any clearer than that.

It is not as if I had not heard Miss Daw play before. I had, every day, and twice on Sundays. I knew her hand on the violin; I knew she could bring emotion out of the inanimate wood and catgut that infused and inspired every soul in earshot.

But this was different. Perhaps it was because this type of cheerful, voluptuous music was not normally what she played. Perhaps she was playing more strongly than was her wont, for an audience with stronger spirits than mine, and she let appear a strength and a magic in her songs she kept cloaked when around us. Perhaps when she played for me in class there was a deliberate policy guiding what she exposed me to, how quickly or slowly she allowed her influence to seep into the haunting songs.

Or perhaps it was because she was in duet with the headless man. His guitar notes floated up, and, above and behind the melody and harmony, his soul seemed expressed in song; and his soul spoke of escape, of release, of flight to the light beyond the dark places of the world.

For whatever reason, I was now aware of a quality in her music that I had never noticed before, not consciously. It was like ice. It stunned something in me, made it numb.

I tucked the walking stick under one arm and put my fingers into my ears. It did not help. I had to get away, and quickly.

I am sure the wisest direction to flee would have been straight up stairs to the roof. From there, I could go down by the scaffolding.

I had two reasons against it. First, I did not know where the scaffolding was in relation to the windows of the Great Hall. I might be plainly visible walking down the workmen’s scaffold. Second, even though I should assume Dr. Fell left his post to go do something horrible to Quentin—Quentin whom I had abandoned to his fate—I could not shake the eerie feeling that the door to the roof was still being watched.

I had been in this building before, on several occasions, despite that it was never used for classes. The balcony went in a circle around the base of the dome and opened up into two corridors opposite each other, which ran the main length of the building. At the end of either corridor was a staircase. In both cases, the foot of the stair ended in an antechamber, which also held the main doors outside. Unfortunately, in both cases, the antechambers opened via a short corridor through an archway directly into what was now a ballroom, with no doors blocking the way. If only for a moment, I would be visible to the people in the room.