John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

“Oh, well said, Taffy. Well said. There is hope for you yet.”

The man whistled, and poked his umbrella at his snakes. They wound up the shaft of the umbrella in two spirals, and rested their heads, facing each other, along the stirrup-shaped handle.

“Oh dear. Now I am not going to be able to get my umbrella open. I do hope it doesn’t rain. I always hate the weather in England,” the man said, moving toward the window. I now saw his face. He wore an eyepatch over one eye. There was something metallic in his mouth. It looked like his tongue was made of gold.

With no further ado, he put the pie plate on his head, flung open the sash, and stepped out onto the windowsill. A white vibration, like little wings beating too swiftly to be seen, flickered into existence around his ankles. He shot up into the night sky like a rocket.

Because I could see my door from where I was, I now knew (assuming no space warps got in the way) about how far I would have to crawl to make the corner around the Common Room, and how far it was from there to the girls’ dorm. I could even guess about how many crawl-steps it would take, using the distance from my hip to the shoulder as a unit measure.

Well, it took longer than I thought. I also assumed that, if Vanity had not actually built these tunnels out of her own imagination, the designer had meant them to be used. Which meant he expected people to be crawling or duckwalking, perhaps in the dark. Surely he would make the latches to open the secret panels easy to find, easy to manipulate. And yet he would probably not make them intrude into the corridor way where someone could trip on them. Where would he put the latch?

There were grooves cut in the floorboards on which my hands and knees rested. They were evenly spaced every few feet and, for every ten grooves, a double groove. When I came upon a triple groove at about the place my calculations told me the panel to my room was, I put out my hand and found the huge W-shaped hinges right there in the frame.

Feeling around, I detected four latch mechanisms. These were little boxes, one at each side of the frame. They were connected by a cruciform of short arms to a metal boss or nub in the center. This was the nub that covered the peephole. To open the door one had to slide aside the circular flap of metal covering the peephole, then pull the flap upright and rotate it. In other words, the door latch, when folded flat, covered the peephole. It was impossible to open one of these doors without first having the opportunity to see what was waiting on the other side.

I don’t remember crawling into bed. I don’t remember whether I tried to wake the drugged Vanity or not. I do remember it was cold.

I dreamed that night that I was Secunda once more, and that Quentin was a toddler. We were sitting on the stairs that led to the kitchen, and I had some food Cook had given me: slices of apple, sections of banana and cucumber, some dates, and slices of hard-boiled egg with salt. I was trying to teach Quentin his letters. I was giving him a bite of whatever fruit or what-have-you whose letter he could tell me. Unfortunately his favorite letter was ‘W,’ and I did not have any fruits whose name started with that, until Cook (who, when I was small, was a giant) came looming over me like a starched white pillar of cloud, with a mushroom-shaped paper hat far, far above.

Cook stooped over and handed me a bowl with slices of watermelon in it.

I knew (because it had happened in real life) that Quartinus and Primus were about to come running around the corner, and that Quartinus would steal the watermelon slices out of my bowl, and that I would run him down. He would throw the slices into the dirt under the bushes rather than give them back, and I would drub him until Primus told me not to beat my juniors. Quentin would cry.

But, at the moment, before all that happened, it was a beautiful scene, and little Quentin’s face (smeared with bits of banana and egg) lit up like sunshine when I told him he had to spit the seeds. I remember how I pulled him up to sit in my lap while we ate watermelon, just as if I were the Mommy he didn’t have.

One of the eggs in my bowl chipped and cracked and hatched open. Through the broken pieces of shell I could see an endless darkness, streamers of stars and constellations, and, very tiny, in the center of the egg, a castle made of silver crystal and rainbow mist.

A small voice said, “The Son of Sable-vested Night sends greetings to the fair Princess Phaethusa, daughter of Helion the Bright, one of those who yet remain, who knew and ruled the world ere King Adam’s reign.

“Nausicaa must stand upon the boundary stone, and grant passage to the power from Myriagon, your home. Recall that thoughts are all recalled by thought and thought alone; undo the magic of mere matter, and the night of no-memory shall break. I grant you shall recall this when you wake.”

I was expecting to be bruised all over, maybe bleeding internally, maybe dead that next morning. None of that happened. I do not know what the symptoms of fourth-dimensional shock are supposed to be, or how anyone can live who has had snow pressed into the fluid cells and internal cavities of every major organ, but apparently my body adjusted rather quickly.

The morning was miserable nonetheless. Usually there is time in the morning for Vanity and me to talk and swap tales. This morning, however, I was tired and she was still sleepy and dopey from the drug. When I tried to tell her all the things that had happened last night, she murmured a few confused questions. She was under the impression Quentin and I had gone off to a waltz party in the Great Hall, that he had kissed me, that I had stolen his walking stick, and that a strange drunk had thrown himself to his death out of the window of the Common Room.

Usually it was Mrs. Wren who got us up, dressed in our uniforms, scrubbed and ready for breakfast. Today, for some reason, it was Sister Twitchett, the school nurse.

There the two of us were, queued up (as queued up as two people can be) in our starched shirts and neckties and plaid skirts. (I hate those skirts—why couldn’t I wear jeans to class? What I wore on my legs did not affect my brain.) And I was grinding my teeth in frustration. I hated Dr. Fell at that moment with a red hate that was sour in my stomach.

Not only had he kidnapped Quentin, maybe killed him, but Dr. Fell had doped up Vanity so that she could not concentrate when I tried to tell her the news I was bursting to tell her. What is the point of news if you cannot tell your friends? My favorite thing in life was to find out how people would react to things. Now there was no reaction.

Down the corridors we marched, down three flights. We passed the Entrance Hall. Someone (maybe me?) had left the front door open, and snow had blown in to stain the front carpet. The dirt Vanity and I had spilled from the potted plant in the alcove the night before last had not been cleaned up yet.

Both these little signs of decay made me wonder. The corridors were also unwontedly silent. The grandfather clock showed that we were being brought to breakfast somewhat later than was our wont. Where was everybody?

Vanity was looking a little more chipper and bright-eyed after our march through cold halls. Maybe the exercise woke her up a bit. By the time we were escorted up to where the three boys were waiting in their blue blazers, ties crooked, and yawning, Vanity was alert enough to whisper to me, “I thought you said he was missing!”

There was Quentin, looking sadder and more introspective than usual. There was something dark and grim in his features, an expression I usually associate with Colin. But it was an unrelieved sort of darkness, without the sarcastic smile and savage humor, which Colin struck like sparks in his dark.