Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

The gate's clasp was sticky—he could imagine Xonck wiping his mouth on a sleeve, the slick fluid brushed onto the metal—but there was no lock. Chang looped the mare's reins around the gatepost to examine the situation unencumbered: there was no bridge, nor any tow-path to a bridge farther down. Chang peered into the black swirling water, seeing his own reflection with distaste. There was no further sign of Xonck, nor of Xonck's horse, which meant the beast had not been abandoned. Had they swum across? The drop from the facement to the water was perhaps two feet—easy enough to leap into, but to climb out again? Chang glanced back at the mare, contentedly watching him with her placid brown eyes, and shuddered. He pushed up his glasses and squinted at the far bank. Was it possible? Xonck was a gentleman, and could ride even a crazed horse to its limit.

Directly opposite the wooden landing was another just like it, and a continuing path. Chang dropped to a crouch. Beneath the other landing was some sort of ironwork, hanging down… after a moment of feeling especially dim he craned his head below his own landing and found a cast-iron lever. Chang pulled it and jerked back as the bridge speared forward across the black canal, slamming into the far couplings with enough force to skewer a wild boar. He stood and studied it with dislike: the bridge was but a yard in width and did not look to hold a man, much less a horse. Yet on the center plank, smeared by retraction and extension, gleamed another patch of blue.

The mare crossed as blithely as it had borne his ignorance. It took Chang three attempts to regain the saddle, but she stood patiently through them all.

THE NARROW path wound uphill through trees, to meet a more proper country road covered with leaves. Chang did his best to place the direction of the road by the fading light, and orient that direction with reference to the factory—or where he, without having paid special attention to the map, conjectured it being. He clapped his heels, spurring the mare to a trot. He would only discover if he'd made a mistake in the brief time before the light was gone. He needed to hurry.

The path veered deeper into the woods and he began to pass ruins—broken boundary fences, road markers, the remnants of walls—all echoing the gnawing discomfort of his body. The path skirted a tumbled gatehouse, but Chang could detect no sign of the manor it once had guarded. He detected no sign of Xonck either, and so rode on, still hoping to reach De Groot's factory. And who would he find there? And what did Chang expect to do? Destroy the machines? See to it that Xonck's illness consumed him? That the Comte's legacy disappeared? Chang felt a fresh spark of irritation that he was so very out of his element, while the Doctor and Elöise might be—who knew, perhaps not two stone's throws away—settling in with cups of tea before a warm fire, the woman blinking shyly as Svenson did his level, failing best not to stare at the single button undone at the top of her black dress. Chang clutched tightly at the mare's mane and snarled, nearly slipping again.

When he looked up, something caught the corner of his eye. Stopping the horse, he pushed his dark glasses down his nose, for the curling plume of white smoke blended so cleanly into the color of the dying sky that he could not at first be sure if it was fire or cloud. Chang clumsily slid from the saddle and walked the mare off the road. He looped the reins over a low branch, saw with satisfaction that there was thick grass around the tree for the horse to eat, and then rolled his eyes at his own solicitousness.

THE GROUND fell steeply toward a trickling watercourse, edged on either bank by a trough of rich black mud. Chang slid down through a moist layer of last year's leaves—doing his best to avoid snapping twigs or low-hanging branches—along the tight, muddy valley to where the smoke seemed to rise. He had assumed it was a campfire— woodsmen or hunters—but was surprised to meet the crumbled remnants of an outlying wall, netted with vines that seemed intent on pulling the stones back to the torpid earth. Over the wall lay an abandoned garden, thick with high-grown weeds. Beyond the garden stood the roofless frame of a redbrick house, the windows empty… yet out of its still-standing chimney rose the white plume.

Crossing the tangled garden in silence was impossible, so Chang crept around the wall, sinking to his ankles in the black mire. The watercourse fed an unkempt pool lined with stonework and once fitted with a mill wheel, now toppled half-rotted to one side. The pool's surface was thick with green scum, like the spittle of toads, and the air above it beset by hovering insects. On the bank near the ruined house lay a small flagged yard. The stones would allow a silent approach.

Chang studied the back of the house: two windows with a doorway leading out between them. One window had been covered with planking, and the other draped with oilcloth. He looked up at the smoking chimney—most likely it was a refuge for gypsies, or a rough lodge for hunters… had it not been for the lack of any sign of another horse, he would have thought it a perfect refuge for Xonck. Chang advanced to the oilcloth-covered window and listened.

The last thing he expected was the sound of a woman in tears.

There, there…” It was the voice of a man, hesitant and low. “There, there…”

“I am fine, thank you,” the woman whispered. “Do sit down.”

A scrape of a chair and then silence. Chang reached for the oilcloth, pausing as he heard footsteps.

“A cup of tea,” announced a clipped new voice. Another woman. Chang could hear the fatigue and impatience beneath her simple words. “One for each of you.”

“Thank you,” said the man, and at once he whimpered.

“It is hot,” the second woman snapped. “Take it by the handle! It is lemon verbena.” The woman sighed bitterly after a sip of her own. “Too weak.”

“It will do perfectly well,” said the first woman. Chang felt a spark on the back of his neck. He knew her. Why was she crying? And who was the man?

“I'm sure it will have to,” responded the other, tartly. “I am not used to making tea at all, of course—still less in such a pot, on such a fire. Any more than I am used to any of what has happened to my former existence! Though what has truly changed after all? Am I not still a shuttlecock batted back and forth by the more powerful?”

To this opinion the other two had no answer.

“I do not mean to compare my losses to yours,” the woman went on. “Whatever your losses might be, I'm sure I do not fully comprehend them—who comprehends anyone? —but from what you have told me and what I have in the meantime guessed—I am not wholly without deductive powers—I do not know why you find yourself still so distraught . Indeed, Elöise, it is most difficult to bear.”

“I am sorry.”

“It has been some time . No matter what you say about memory and forgetting , all of which you take so seriously—of course a measure of seriousness does credit to a person, but not an excess—yet here we are, flown from what seemed a perfectly fine cottage, because of you . It is nearly dark—I suppose we shall sleep here! I myself am enduring all manner of outright tiresome privations.”

“Of course you are.”

“I am . And yet you are the one in tears! They are pernicious !”

Elöise did not answer. It was obvious to Chang that the other woman was as terrified as she was arrogant.

“And who was he again? That fellow?”

“Doctor Svenson,” replied Elöise softly.