Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

Xonck vomited onto the tar. The Contessa struggled to her feet, her hair in disarray. The soldiers at the ruined doorway fanned onto the rooftop, and as they did so Svenson saw a figure rise through the fingers of still-flaming wood, the black chimney smoke behind her like an infernal curtain blotting out the sky.

Charlotte Trapping stepped onto the rooftop, looking with disdain at the disheveled Contessa and her ruined brother, then wrinkled her nose at Svenson and Chang, their arms still in the air.

“Collect them,” she cried over the roar, a note of pleasure running through her poised demeanor like a seam of silver through cold stone. “If any one so much as raises a finger… kill them all.”

WHEN MISS TEMPLE opened her eyes the tiny hold was still dark. She lifted her head from a burlap sack of beans she had pulled onto the bale of wool (the moist wool being raw and still smelling of sheep) and rubbed absently at the imprint its rough surface had pressed into her cheek. The barge was not moving. They had arrived. She sat up fully and restored Lydia's case to her lap from the crevice it had found between the bales. She bundled up her dress and wiped her face with her petticoat, then smoothed it down again. A very small amount of light crept in through an imperfection in the hatch cover, but it did not tell her whether it was safe to emerge.

Miss Temple felt better for sleep, though her dreams had been unpleasant. She had been once more on the roof of the sinking airship, but the sea was made of shifting plates of blue glass, and as it licked her feet she had felt them freeze and stiffen. Elöise had been there, but then Elöise had become Caroline Stearne, her neck still cruelly gashed, the ruby wound and her black hair making her skin appear achingly pale. As if to amplify this impression, Caroline had reached behind her bloody shoulders and undone the buttons on her black dress. Miss Temple had squirmed at this impropriety, but then Caroline's torso was bare, the dress draped around her hips like a funereal willow. Miss Temple swallowed, rooted by Caroline's sorrowful beauty, the gentle curve of her belly, soft, hanging breasts, nipples the color of raw meat, and the white flesh above them flecked with dried blood. Miss Temple felt her frozen toes beginning to snap. She tottered, knowing that to fall would mean death. Caroline had changed back to Elöise, but with the same body and the identical wound. It was suddenly vital that Elöise reveal some secret, but her ruined throat would hold no air. Each attempt to open her mouth was mocked by the puppetlike gape of the open gash below it. In a sudden spasm of dread Miss Temple reached up for her own throat and felt the tips of her fingers enter the cold incision carved across it…

She frowned, plucking at her hair with both hands, remembering rather more of the dream than she cared to. While she did feel restored—more physically capable, at least—this improvement was accompanied by a palpable increase in her own hunger. Not any hunger for food—though it had been some time since she had eaten, and Miss Temple would not have refused anything wholesome (save mutton)— but an erotic hunger calibrated precisely to the urges of her blue glass memories. At the same time, her sleep had placed some small distance between her and the black influence of the Comte d'Orkancz's book of death. She could taste ash in the back of her throat when she swallowed, but the impulse to despoil things lay not so heavy on her will.

Miss Temple swallowed again (having done so once to gauge the acrid taste, she could not prevent herself from repeating the gesture) and quietly shuffled off of the bales to the ladder, climbing until she touched the hatch cover. She heard nothing, and so pushed gently with the top of her head. The cover was quite heavy and did not budge until she pushed with her hand as well, when it lurched a sharp half-inch, the sudden scrape horridly loud. She peeked through the tiny crack, but could see nothing. Miss Temple raised the hatchway another two inches, waited, then raised it more, waited again, then finally raised it enough to make any further pretense of secrecy absurd. The deck was empty. She shifted the hatch cover to the side and carefully clambered through, keeping her dress and petticoats free of her feet in case she needed to run.

The lantern whose dim light had penetrated the hold hung some yards away, and in its glow she saw they were docked at the edge of the canal. Beyond the canal's bricked border lay a cleared grassy sward and a thick, dark wall of trees whose high branches stretched over the barge, the moon and stars only visible through their whispering canopy.

Miss Temple crept to a short mast half-way up the deck, the furled sailcloth at its side making a thick column to hide behind. She heard the clomp of a heavy bundle dropped onto a wooden surface, and then laughter. In the glow of another lantern loomed a knot of men hauling boxes from another hatch. But they were too far away—and then Miss Temple realized her own barge had been tied directly behind another of identical width, and that it was her very good luck to have emerged just when the crew of her own vessel had chosen to plunder their unguarded neighbor. Miss Temple seized the opportunity and scuttled to her barge's gangway. She looked once more at the men, heard the thud of another box dropped on the far deck, and picked her way down the planking, each footfall silent as a fox. She padded across the grass to a gravel road, crouching low until she reached a turn that hid her from the bargemen. Miss Temple stood straight and exhaled. The dark color of her dress and hair would hide her in the night.

The gravel road terminated at a high square building. The tall windows blazed in the darkness like a star come down to earth.

The closer she came to the bright building, the more she heard what sounded like the low roar of a fire, and the metallic clatter of pots and pans. The sky above the building was covered with cloud, yet it took Miss Temple some minutes to realize that the cloud came from the building, for it rose not from a single chimney stack, but in a long curtain the width of the entire structure. Once the massive scale of the industry at work became plain to her, the low roar became legible as the hum of turbines and engines, and the kitchen racket as the remorseless clanking of mill machines.

It was no great leap for Miss Temple to connect the destruction of the Comte's laboratory at Harschmort with another factory so vividly alive. Yet when she shut her eyes and opened her mind to the sickly pool of his book—which she did there on the road, despite her abhorrence, for she knew the knowledge might save her life—she detected no inkling of such a place whatsoever. But how could these works exist without the Comte's knowledge? Miss Temple walked on, dizzied again. She had seen her father's sugar works and the great coppers cooking rum—the stink of burning cane stayed with her to that day—but this would be her first modern mill. She did not expect to enjoy it in the least.

DID SHE expect to enjoy anything anymore? It was a puling thought, more suited to a helpless lady in a play than Miss Temple's sturdy character, and yet at the core of the complaint lay something very real. She might appreciate incidental niceties—scones, for example—but these seemed merely appetite, an animal's need. Did not pleasure depend on an architecture of perspective—on contrast and delay, withholding and loss? Did not true enjoyment rely on facing the future? Did a cat possess such understanding? Did Miss Temple—in truth, in her soul?

It was a difficult prospect to swallow, walking alone in the dark. What of substance had she ever wanted— genuinely , not taken by rote from the expectations of others? A husband? Roger was gone, and even if there had been someone to replace Roger (not that she was any sort to stick her affections so quickly from one place to another), what then? What sort of lover—the very word was an unchewed bite she could not swallow—could she possibly be when at the first intimation of desire she vanished beneath a sea of depravity? What man would possibly have her once they glimpsed the dark lusts staining every cranny of her mind? She saw herself lying exposed on what ought to have been her marriage bed, eyes nakedly aflame with knowing desire— he would cast her away in disgust! How could she convince anyone else of her innocence when she could not convince herself?