The Dark Volume Part 5

Miss Temple tucked the book under the pillow and blew out the candle. She stepped onto the landing and again straightened her dress, wondering if Mrs. Daube might be prevailed upon in the morning to curl her hair, a thought that quite unbidden brought a smile to her face. She descended the stairs breathing in the smells of food and a crackling fire, the hardening of her heart so normal a sensation as to be but scarcely noticed.

MISS TEMPLE found Mrs. Daube in the kitchen, pouring a very dark gravy from a pan on her stove into a small pewter cruet. The innkeeper had set a modest table with two places. But Eloise was not there. Mrs. Daube looked up at Miss Temple, her eyes kind and bright.

"There you are! The other lady said you were resting, but I am sure a hot supper will do you nicely."

"Where is Mrs. Dujong?"

"Is she not by the fire?"

"No."

"Then I'm sure I do not know. Perhaps she is speaking to Mr. Olsteen."

"Why would she be doing that?" asked Miss Temple.

"Perhaps to apologize for his needless searching for you?" said Mrs. Daube with a smile, as she placed a bowl of steaming vegetables onto the table, next to a brown loaf dusted with flour.

"Where would she be?" asked Miss Temple. "They are not upstairs."

"Will you sit?" asked Mrs. Daube. "It is much better eaten when ready."

Miss Temple hesitated, both annoyed and relieved at Eloise's absence, but then she considered that time with Mrs. Daube was an opportunity of its own. She slipped past with a trim smile to a chair on the table's far side, where she could speak to the innkeeper without turning.

"Here you go." Mrs. Daube set a meager chop on a heavy Dutch blue plate before her. "The end of last week's mutton. I make no apologies, for you'll get no better in Karthe. There have been no stores come north these last five days-as if we have not the needs of finer folk. One vexation after another. I am not sure I ever got your name."

"I am Miss Temple."

"I am poor with names," said Mrs. Daube, tartly. "It is good I am an excellent cook."

Miss Temple occupied herself with the pewter cruet, the bread, and a wooden bowl of what looked like mashed turnips with some sc.r.a.pings of nutmeg-a grace note that indeed bettered her opinion of her hostess.

"I believe you have recently seen a friend of Mrs. Dujong and myself," Miss Temple observed, pasting a smear of b.u.t.ter across her slice of bread. "A rather daunting person, in a red coat and dark gla.s.ses?"

Mrs. Daube shifted two pots to different places on the stove, making room for an iron kettle. When she looked back to the table her lips were thinly pressed together.

"The gentleman, if I may call him such, is not one to slip the mind. Yet he paid for one meal only and went on his way. We barely spoke ten words, and most of those with regard to pa.s.sing the salt."

"Would Mr. Olsteen have spoken to him?"

"Mr. Olsteen had not yet returned from the mountains."

"What about Franck?"

"Franck does not speak to guests."

As if the young man had just been brought back to mind, Mrs. Daube turned to a small door to the side of the stove that Miss Temple had not before noticed, draped as it was with a hanging piece of cloth, and shouted like a sailor, "Franck! Supper!"

No answer came from the hidden room.

"This bread is delicious," said Miss Temple.

"I'm glad to hear it," said Mrs. Daube.

"I am quite fond of bread."

"It is hard to go wrong with bread."

"Especially bread with jam."

Mrs. Daube felt no need to comment, jam not presently available on the table.

"And what of our other friend?" Miss Temple continued.

"You have a great many friends for someone so far from home."

"Doctor Svenson. He must have pa.s.sed through Karthe at most two days after the Cardinal."

"Cardinal? That fellow-all in red, and with those eyes? He was no churchman!"

"No no," said Miss Temple, chuckling, "but that-in the city- is what everyone else calls him. In truth I have no knowledge of his Christian name."

"Do Chinamen have Christian names?"

Miss Temple laughed outright. "O Mrs. Daube, he is no more from China than you or I are black Africans! It is merely a name he has acquired-from the scars across his eyes, you see."

Miss Temple happily pulled her own eyelids to either side, doing her best to approximate Chang's disfigurement.

"It is unnatural," declared Mrs. Daube.

"Horrid, to be sure-the result of a riding crop, I believe-and it would indeed be difficult to call the Cardinal handsome, and yet-for his world is a harsh one-their ferocity speaks to his capacity."

"What world is that?" asked Mrs. Daube, her voice a bit more hushed. She had stepped closer, one hand worrying the scuffed edge of the table.

"A world where there are murders," replied Miss Temple, realizing how much pleasure she took in disturbing her hostess, and that it was all a sort of boasting. "And people like Cardinal Chang-and Doctor Svenson, and-though I know you will not credit such a thing-myself have done our best to discover who has been doing the killing. You did meet Doctor Svenson, I know it. Mrs. Dujong found one of his crushed cigarettes upstairs-it is proven he was here."

Miss Temple gazed up at the woman-older, taller, stronger, in her own home-with the clear confidence of an inquisitor not to be trifled with. She set down her knife and fork, and indicated the empty chair opposite her. Mrs. Daube sank into it with a grudging sniff.

"Karthe does not take to strangers, much less those that walk about looking like the devil himself."

"How long after Chang arrived did the Doctor-"

"And then came the murders-of course men from the town went looking, even your other friend, the foreign Doctor."

"He is a surgeon, to be precise, in the Macklenburg Navy. Where is the Doctor now?"

"I told you-he joined the party of men to search. I'm sure I don't know what's taken them so long to return."

"But where did they go-to the train?"

Mrs. Daube snorted at this ridiculous suggestion.

"The mountains, of course. Dangerous any time of year, and even more so after winter, when what beasts that have survived are ravenous."

"Beasts?"

"Wolves, my dear-our hills are full of them."

Miss Temple was appalled at two such violently complementary thoughts-the missing men and a propensity for wolves-existing so placidly next to one another in the woman's mind.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Daube, but you seem to be saying that Doctor Svenson left Karthe with a party of men, traveling into the wolf-ridden mountains, and has failed to return. Is no one worried? Surely the missing townsmen have families."

"No one tells me," snapped Mrs. Daube sullenly. "Merely a poor widow, no one cares for an old woman-"

"But who would know where they went?"

"Anyone else in Karthe! Even Franck," the woman huffed. "Not that he's breathed a word to me, though one would only think, after my generosity-"

"Did either of you mention this to Mrs. Dujong?"

"How am I expected to know that?" she snapped, but then grinned with poorly hidden relish. "But I can guess how the likes of him would enjoy frightening her with stories."

Miss Temple shut her eyes, imagining how news of the Doctor's vanishing must have been taken by Eloise.

"My goodness, yes," Mrs. Daube went on, "ever since the first strangers-and then your man Chang-"

"Wait-what first strangers? Do you mean Mr. Olsteen and his fellows-or someone else?"

"The Flaming Star is extremely popular with travelers of all sorts-"

"What travelers? From the north like us?"

"I'm sure I do not know," the woman whispered, "that is the very mystery of it." She leaned over the table with a conspiratorial leer that revealed the absence of an upper bicuspid. "A boy-the same that died-came running from the livery to say a room would be wanted, the finest we had. But then the fool ran on before we knew for who or how many. Every effort was made, rooms cleaned and food prepared- such expense!-only to have not a single soul appear! And then your man Chang arrived-not from the stables, for he had no horse-and the next day, before I could switch that lying horse groom raw, I was told both he and his shiftless father had been killed!"

"But ... you don't actually believe that wolves, driven down from the hills, could have stalked into the streets of this village?"

Mrs. Daube, apparently revived for having voiced her pent-up discontent, took it upon herself to dunk a piece of bread into the turnips and spoke through her chewing.

"It has not happened since my grandmother's time, but such a dreadful thing is possible. Indeed, my dear, whatever else but wolves could explain it?"

TWO MINUTES later, the sharp knife in her hand, Miss Temple again strode down the main road of Karthe. The air was cold-she could see her breath-and she regretted not having a wrap, impulsively refusing the musty brown cloak offered by Mrs. Daube (ingrained as she was to reject any brown garment out of hand). The moon had dropped closer to the shadowed hills, but still shone bright. She felt sure Eloise would have sought the murdered stable boy's hut, and all too soon Miss Temple found herself, unsettled, at its door-no longer hanging open, a sliver of yellow light winking out where it met the floor.

The door was latched from within and would not open. Miss Temple knocked-the noise absurdly loud in the night. There was no answer. She knocked again, and then whispered sharply, "Eloise! It is Miss Temple." She sighed. "It is Celeste!"

There was still no answer. She pulled on the handle with no more success than before.

"Mr. Olsteen! Franck! I insist that you open this door!"

She was getting chilled. She rapped on the window shutters, but could not pry them apart. Miss Temple stalked to a narrow pa.s.sage that ran between the cottage and the stone wall of its neighbor, straight through to the rear of the house. She swallowed. Was it likely that Eloise had gone instead to the stables? Where were the two men? Had they done something to Eloise, luring her to such an isolated place? Or was it someone else entirely in the house? Someone with a corpselike, ravaged face?

She took another breath and entered the pa.s.sage, slipping from the moonlight like a ghost, her feet rustling through gra.s.s thick with dew, wetting her dress and swatting at her ankles. This wall held no windows, and she heard nothing from inside the house as she went. Miss Temple made sure of her grip on the knife and slowly, like a drop of grudging honey into a cup of tea, leaned around the rear corner.

A waft of evening wind nearly smothered her with the fumes of indigo clay.

She swallowed, throat burning and eyes blinking tears, but forced herself to look once more. Behind the cottage was a patch of gra.s.s strewn with an odd a.s.sortment of wooden hutches-abandoned now but once housing chickens or rabbits-all brightly illuminated by a square of yellow light thrown from the house, from the very window she had peered through in the rearmost room, its frame and gla.s.s now fully shattered, as if by a brutal series of kicks. Miss Temple studied the snapped remnants of the panes that dotted the window's edge like a sailor's meager teeth, and realized they were bent back into the room. The force to smash the window had come from outside.

She crept closer. The window was too high to see through-but there had to be a rear door if there was a yard. She padded past the window and found it behind the hutches, made of hammered-together planking and hanging feebly from a pair of rusted hinges. Her first pull on the handle told her it was held by a chain from within, which made sense-if the door was open, why would anyone kick in the window?

Reasoning that between rattling the chain and calling out for Eloise at the front door she had already alerted anyone inside as to her presence, Miss Temple noisily dragged one of the hutches over to the window, gingerly tested its strength with one foot, and then carefully climbed up. From this height she could just see over the battered sill. On the floor lay Franck, curled away from her on his side. Set down in the center of the room was a lantern, its bright beams glittering the shards that covered the floor.

More gla.s.s stuck out in brittle needles across the length of the sill-she could not possibly climb through without injuring herself. She exhaled, happy for a good excuse not to ruin her dress, and then, remembering her first visit, looked down at the center of the frame. A dark, sticky stain had soaked into the wood. She sniffed at it and was rewarded with the loathsome mechanical odor of indigo clay. But Miss Temple frowned and sniffed again, shutting her eyes to concentrate-salt... and iron. She opened her eyes and grimaced. Mixed into the noxious blue fluid was blood.

MISS TEMPLE leapt off the hutch and strode back to the rickety door. With a satisfying thrust she shoved the knife blade between the planking and the frame and tugged upwards, catching the chain. She jerked it upwards again, exclaiming with irritation as a sliver of wood caught on her hand, and dislodged the chain from its post. In an instant she stood at the room's threshold, holding her nose with one hand and licking a bead of blood from the other. The man on the floor was quite dead. Gla.s.s crunching beneath her boots, Miss Temple moved cautiously into the middle room, stacked with furniture, aware that it afforded ample nooks for concealment and ambush. She did her best to peer underneath along the floor, but found her attention taken by details she'd not noticed before-heaped clothing, a box of battered toys, a folded Sunday jacket, shoes. With an uncomfortable swallow she went on to the final room-darkest, being farthest from the lantern-which remained as empty as ever. Though it gave her no pleasure, she returned to the body.

Miss Temple set her knife on the floor, needing both hands to turn Franck, but as his face rolled into view she covered her mouth and wheeled away, fighting nausea. The hired man's features were pale as paste and his eyes stuck despairingly wide, but his plaintive expression was not the source of Miss Temple's horror. Steeling herself, she carefully peeked back, then spun away again, waving the indigo fumes away from her face, a p.r.i.c.kling tang of bile in her mouth. Miss Temple had never seen anything like it-Franck's throat was gone. She could see the gleaming ridges of his spine.

She forced her eyes away from the wound to the rest of his body, doing her best to imagine how Doctor Svenson would proceed. Were there other scratches or cuts-as there surely must be to credit an animal with the killing? Miss Temple found nothing... and then, more than this, she realized that she was not-as she surely ought to have been-standing in a spreading pool of the poor man's blood.

In point of fact, there was no blood anywhere. How could that be? Could he have been killed out-of-doors and then thrown through the window? It was possible-but still, such a ma.s.sive wound must flow even then, and there was not a drop that she could see, not even on the fellow's shirt. With trepidation, Miss Temple knelt and extended the knife, using the tip to peel back the dead man's collar.

In a crease of skin between his battered neck and shoulder was a tiny crust of blue flakes... of dark blue gla.s.s.

THE MURDER had been done by an insertion of blue gla.s.s, freezing the flesh around it without the slightest spray of blood. Then the killer must have taken the time to pry out-with a knife? with their fingers? -every morsel of flesh that had been alchemically transformed, leaving an appalling wound no one would think to question.

Miss Temple lurched toward the dim front room. But how had Franck come to be here by himself? And what had he seen to make his death necessary? And where were Eloise and Mr. Olsteen? Miss Temple had a.s.sumed the three to be together-had the others simply fled? Or had Franck come alone? But then where was Eloise-in the company of the broad-shouldered huntsman with whom she was far too taken...

And how was it that the front door was still latched? Even if Franck had been killed outside and then thrown through the window, the window showed no evidence of anyone returning through it back to the yard-the gla.s.s splinters were proof enough of that. Yet both doors were latched from the inside, indicating that whoever latched them to begin with... must still be inside...

The noise of a wooden chair sc.r.a.ping against a floorboard pierced her thoughts. She wheeled toward the middle room. The sc.r.a.pe was redoubled as a bureau was pushed, and then the end table that must have been atop it clattered-was thrown!-to the floor, bouncing into view with the shocking force, in the tiny still cottage, of a cavalry charge. Miss Temple screamed. Behind her the table was kicked aside. She heard footsteps-heavy, stomping-tore the latch free and wrenched on the handle as a sickening wave of indigo fumes reached around her shoulders like a pair of clutching hands. The door was open. Miss Temple leapt through it.

THE DOOR of the Flaming Star yawned open when she reached it. Something was wrong. Miss Temple burst into the common room, shouting for Mrs. Daube, for Eloise, to no answer. She clawed the latch in place on the door and then launched herself up the stairs- s.n.a.t.c.hing Chang's book-no sign of Eloise, but Olsteen's door was open and his bags ransacked and scattered across his room. She careened to the kitchen, calling again, her breath coming raw and her head palpably beginning to swim. She was not well. She ought to be in bed with tea, with someone kind in a chair reading ridiculous items from a newspaper as she slipped into sleep. But instead Miss Temple rounded the corner into the kitchen and skidded off balance into the wall as her boot slid through an overturned bowl of turnips. The table lay on its side, the food was strewn everywhere amidst sharp blue-white chips of broken plates and upended dripping pans. The door to the yard hung wide and Miss Temple rushed to it. Behind her the front door rattled against the vicious kick of what sounded like a plow horse.

Mrs. Daube was on her knees in the gra.s.s, gasping for air. Strewn all around her, tangled and wet, lay linens and clothing, as if a willful child had sorted through a week's worth of laundry only to toss whatever he did not fancy to the ground. Miss Temple dug her hand under the innkeeper's arm, trying to haul her up.

"Mrs. Daube-you are in peril-"

The woman did not seem to hear, or even note being moved. She muttered and shook her head, a bead of clear saliva suspended from her lips.

"Mrs. Daube, this way-have you seen Mrs. Dujong?"

Dragging the innkeeper, Miss Temple kicked through the balled-up sheets toward a gate at the far end of the yard. Another kick roared from inside the inn, and then a third-a savage battering the door could never bear.

"Mrs. Daube! Please! Have you seen Eloise? Have you seen Mr. Olsteen?"

At last the innkeeper looked up, eyes wide and black, blood at the corner of her mouth. "Mr. Olsteen?"

"Do you know where he is?"

"She... she came back-"