Gordon Dahlquist - The Dark Volume

The door opened and Miss Temple suppressed a gasp. If the other occupants of Stäelmaere House had seemed unwell, the man before her looked as if he'd spent a fortnight in the grave. While his body may have once stood tall and thin, now it was skeletal. His stiff topcoat tented like a bedsheet hanging from a tree. His pale hair hung lank and unkempt, and there were clumps of it on his lapel. Miss Temple flinched against the foulness of his breath.

“Mr. Fordyce,” said Phelps, his gaze turned to the wall.

“Mr. Phelps.” The voice was moist and indistinct—Miss Temple heard it as “Fauwlpth” —as if the man's tongue had lost the ability to shift within his mouth. “The Lady will follow me…”

Fordyce stepped aside and extended a brittle arm, his gloved hand and white cuff divided by a wrist wrapped with a rust-soaked twist of cloth. Miss Temple entered a dimly lit ante-room. A single silver candelabrum flickered on a small writing desk. The room's massive windows were curtained tightly, and when the door was closed behind her the darkness deepened that much more.

“Etiquette,” slurred Mr. Fordyce, “demands you not speak… unless the Duke requests that you do so.”

He crossed to the candelabrum and raised it to the level of his face, the orange glow dancing unpleasantly across the man's mere scattering of teeth. In his other hand he held the canvas sack.

“In the Duke's presence, you are no longer required to keep to your knees. You are free to do so, but such deference is no longer enforced.”

He led her across a carpet littered with tumbled books and cups and plates that clinked or snapped beneath Fordyce's feet, never once looking down, nor minding the wax that dripped freely from the candelabrum. She walked with a hand over both her mouth and nose. The reek of the man extended to every corner of the apartments. What had happened? What sort of disease might be so eroding everyone within the confines of Stäelmaere House? Would she too succumb to its effects?

Fordyce knocked discreetly at a heavy door, meticulously carved from ebony wood. She was just realizing that the carving was actually a picture—an enormous man, flames coming off his body like the sun, in the act of swallowing a writhing child whole—when Fordyce opened the door and coughed hideously, as if gargling a piece of his own disintegrating throat.

“Your Grace… the young woman…”

There was no reply. Miss Temple darted forward, before the rancid man could take hold of her arm, into an even dimmer chamber, hung with high tapestries and even larger paintings—dark oil portraits whose faces loomed like drowning souls staring up through the sea. The door closed behind her and the room was silent, save for her own breath and the thudding of her heart. A faintly glowing gas-lit sconce, shaped like a tulip, floated in the gloom near a large straight-backed chair. In it sat a very tall man, staring into the darkness, his spine as rigid as the wood he leaned against. She recognized the collar-length iron-grey hair and sharply forbidding features that would not have seemed amiss on an especially intolerant falcon.

“Your Grace?” Miss Temple ventured.

The Duke did not stir. Miss Temple crept carefully closer. The smell here was different, the noisome, waxy reek smothered in jasmine perfume. Still he did not move, not even to blink his glassy eyes. She took another hesitant step, slowly extending one arm, and at the tip of that arm a finger toward his nearest hand, large-knuckled and knotted with rings. When her finger touched the clammy skin, the Duke's face snapped toward her, a movement as sharp as a cleaver cutting meat. Miss Temple yelped in surprise and leapt back.

Before she could gather words to speak, her ears—though not her ears at all, for she felt the noise erupt within her head—rebounded with brittle, sliding laughter. The glass woman emerged through a gap in the tapestries, wrapped in a heavy cloak, her hands and face reflecting the gaslight's glow.

“You are alive!” whispered Miss Temple.

In answer, the unpleasant laughter came again—like a needle dragged across her teeth—and with a sudden flick of intention Mrs. Marchmoor—the glass woman—caused the Duke to turn his head just as sharply away.

Miss Temple ran for the door. It had been locked. She turned to face the woman—the glass creature —the slick blue surface of her flesh, the impassive fixity of her expression belied by the wicked amusement in her laugh, and the subtle curl of her full, gleaming lips.

She had seen three glass women paraded by the Comte before the gathered crowds at Harschmort, each naked but for a collar and leash— like strange beasts from deepest Africa captured and sent to Rome to astonish a dissolute Emperor. The last of the three, Mrs. Marchmoor—a courtesan, born Margaret Hooke, the daughter of a bankrupt mill owner—was quite obviously no longer human . But was she sane?

“At your feet,” hissed the voice inside Miss Temple's skull. “Bring it to me.”

The canvas sack lay on the carpet, where Fordyce must have set it.

“Do it. No one will come. No one will hear you.”

Miss Temple walked forward with the sack and set it onto the desk with care. Then, glancing once into Mrs. Marchmoor's unsettling and predatory blue pearl eyes, she shucked the canvas away without touching the surface of the blue glass, exposing it to the air.

“Explain.”

“I took it from Francis Xonck,” said Miss Temple, with a sort of shrug that she hoped conveyed that this had been no particular challenge for her. “I can only assume he took it from the trunk of books on the airship.”

Mrs. Marchmoor floated closer to the book, gazing intently into its depths.

“It is not from the trunk…”

“But it must be,” said Miss Temple. “Where else?”

“The book itself perhaps, but not what lies within—the mind … is new …”

Mrs. Marchmoor extended one slender arm toward the book, the cloak falling away to either side, the fingers of her hand uncurling like the stalks of some unclassified tropical plant. Miss Temple gasped. At the point where the woman's fingertip ought to have clicked against the cover like a tumbler striking a table top, it instead passed directly through, as if into water.

“Glass… is a liquid…” whispered Mrs. Marchmoor.

At the first intrusion of her finger the book began to glow. She slowly inserted the whole of her hand, and then, like the curling smoke from a cigarette, twisting, glowing azure lines began to swirl inside the book. Mrs. Marchmoor cocked her head and extended her fingers, as if she were tightening the fit of a leather glove. The lines wrapped more tightly around her and glowed more brightly—yet Miss Temple was sure that something was wrong. Then the gleam went out, and Mrs. Marchmoor retracted her hand, the surface of the book top never once betraying a single ripple at her passage.

“Can you… can you read it?” asked Miss Temple.

Mrs. Marchmoor did not respond. Miss Temple felt a harsh pressing at her mind, cold and uncaring, and stumbled backward in fear.

“Simply ask me!” she squealed.

“You will lie.”

“Not when I know you can enter my mind as easily as one sticks a spoon in a bowl!” Miss Temple held out her hand. “Please—I have seen what you have done to the people in this place—I have no desire to lose my hair or see my skin split by sores!”

“Is that what I have done?” asked Mrs. Marchmoor.

“Of course it is—you must know very well!”

The glass woman did not respond. Miss Temple heard her own quick breath and was ashamed. She forced herself to swallow her fear, to pay attention, to think . Why was her enemy silent?