Camera Obscura (31 page)

 
 

Coming out of the vision her skull burned with pain. Her eyes were holes poked through with sharpened sticks dipped in acid. The fragment of jade, full of jagged edges, burned like a star in her eye socket. Retching, nothing came out, and she wondered when she had eaten last. The taste in her mouth was of the sour drink she had given Wild Bill.

  Coffee, she thought. She needed strong, black coffee.

  Wrapping herself more tightly in her long coat, she strode across the dark streets. The pain receded, slowly, but did not go away. She wondered if it would always be there, now – growing in strength slowly, the closer she approached its source. Somewhere in the city the statue waited, and planned. The voices were always there now, just on the edge of hearing, growing stronger all the time. They said only one thing she fully understood.

  Their time was coming.

  She should be going after the voices, after that thing that somehow scanned and briefly animated the dead – the thing that was patiently gathering information, patiently planning something terrible–

  And yet the voices sounded so
lonely
. It was hard to feel the urgency, even when the fragment sent shards of sharp pain into her mind, even when the voices spoke of
ninety-six percent
completion
and
initiation procedure checksum correct
, even as the percentages grew closer and closer to a hundred–

  It was the Phantom who worried her, who
scared
her. The Phantom she hated – for what he did, for what he had become: for what
she
had become, perhaps.

  
Holmes
. The name kept reverberating in her mind. Now she had a name to put to the phantom in her mind. A name, and a place: a boarding house, close enough to the white city, yet on the edges of the black.

  In an all-night diner she ordered coffee and grimaced as she sipped it. Staring through grimy glass windows at the rain outside… the place was awash in smoke and flickering lights, and sawdust covered the floor. A newspaper lying on the next table spoke of Sitting Bull arriving for the presidential visit at the Fair. She picked it up and leafed through it. There was a feature about the wheel. A man named Ferris had built it. A notice about a picture show. The newspaper was full of nothing but the Fair. She sipped her coffee and turned the pages until she reached the
Classifieds
section. Staring at it, she realised she could not even read the words. She needed to eat…

  She ordered a meat patty in two slices of a bun. It came slathered in tomato sauce, with cold, greasy fried potatoes on the side, a portion of coleslaw – it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

  Wiping her lips with a paper napkin, she felt better. The voices had quietened somewhat, sank into the edge of hearing. Inside the dark diner no one paid her any attention. A Buddhist monk sat alone in one corner, his back to the wall, peacefully asleep. Two Africans were playing cards with a cigar-smoking Cossack. It was quiet, and she was just another alien, here.

  She picked up the paper again.
Classifieds
. Pages and pages of ads. She went through them.

  
Prof. A. Huff, Practical Phrenologist. Examinations and delin
eations of character and talents with marked chart to your fancy.
Students taught this noble science.

  
Colling's Electric Belts will cure all diseases that flesh is heir to; my
belts run one year without refilling which can be done by anybody, or
I will make them as good as new for nominal sum. Send for pamphlet.

  
Mrs W. Weir, Telegraphic medium, controlled by the late Mrs Breed
of Austria, the wonderful rapping medium, sittings daily; also a pow
erful magnetic healer, treats all kinds of chronic and acute diseases
successfully. Every day except Sunday.

  All of which were unhelpful, to say the least.

  Lists and lists of advertisements for accommodation. She scanned through them, her eye hurting as she tried to make out the small type in the smoky darkness of the diner. Jade pulsed behind the other, the eye that was no longer there.

  Yet at last she found it. For a moment her fingers touched the rough paper almost lovingly, the tips stroking the newspaper edge. There, it could only be the one she sought:
Dr H.H.
Holmes is offering a place of quiet refuge in the bustling city. Close to
Fair and all amenities, gaslight in every room: perfect for the single
visitor. Long- and short-term accommodation available.

  
Dr
Holmes?

  But people always trusted doctors. Didn't they?

  She stared at the advertisement, at the address printed below. And she thought – could it really be that easy?

 

Englewood, the streets dark and quiet, shops shuttered, streetlamps glowing like fireflies, casting little light. The air was cold. It had stopped raining, but the puddles lay heavy on the ground, and mud splattered Cleo as she walked.

  Too easy, she thought. Too easy.

  And yet she could not turn back.
There is a path we must fol
low
, she thought. Beyond reason, beyond law. Her gun arm twitched. Behind her eye the jade fragment twisted and turned, sending short, sharp shocks of pain into her head. Restless. It was sensing the Phantom, she realised – the proximity of one jade fragment to another.

  And so he, too, must know she was coming.

  She had little doubt he had anticipated this, was expecting her.

  Let him.

  She stood across the road from the building and knew that soon she would kill a man.

 

What could be said of that place, of Dr Holmes' castle? It was a dark, imposing two-storey building. On the ground floor were shops; a Chemist,
Holden's
; a sign advertising
Used Jew
ellery
; another for
Jobs Available: For Young Ladies of Suitable
Skills
. Where the ground floor had display windows the first was a façade of dark stone.

  Cautiously, Cleo approached the closed doors.

  She smashed the window with her gun hand. Shards of glass fell like tears on the floor. She pushed her way in then, up dark stairs, and onto a long, cold corridor. Doors lined it, all closed. Nothing stirred. There were no windows. She kicked open the first door.

  A girl lay in the bed. Young, she slept peacefully, or so it seemed at first. When Cleo approached her the girl didn't stir. She put two fingers to the girl's neck, cautiously. A weak, tooweak pulse. She tried to shake her awake, but the girl did not open her eyes.

  Something was making her slow. Dimly, she became aware of a sound, a hiss of air. She scanned for it. A hidden nozzle, high above her. Gas, she thought. Gas was being pumped into the room.

  She picked up the girl, dragged her across the floor. Once in the corridor she shut the door behind them. Her head slowly cleared. She shook the girl again, and this time she opened her eyes.

  Milady's gun arm was pointing directly at the girl's head. The message she wanted to get across could not be subtle. She said, "Get out of here."

  "The doctor…" the girl whispered.

  "What?"

  "You won't hurt the doctor…?"

  "Get out of here! Now!"

  Not waiting for a response, she moved to the next door and kicked it open. Another sleeping form – approaching it she knew it was too late. When she put her fingers against the girl's neck there was no pulse, and the skin was cold.

  "Get out!" she shouted now and, running down the corridor, fired into the air. She kicked open doors, dragged semi-conscious girls out to the landing. "Run!"

  He wouldn't be up there, she knew. Where she found windows she burst them open, and the cold air washed in like medicine. The girls finally began to go, some running. Two more asked about the doctor, pleaded with her not to hurt him.

  And two more never stirred from their beds. The last one had been dead longer than the others, she saw. When she opened the door there was no hiss of gas, but the air smelled of a rotted sweetness. The corpse on the bed had been dead for a while. She watched the silver strands move like eels across the girl's skin. The girl's eyes opened, then, and stared at her.

  And the corpse smiled.

  She fired before she was conscious she was doing it, and the girl's head plopped back against the pillow, and her eyes closed. The smile faded, and the girl looked sad now. He had been gaining power, she thought. She raced out of that room, looking for a way down, knowing it would be concealed, all the while the alien fragment in her skull thrashing and the pain echoing through her bones, a pain that was a part of her now.

  A maze… he had built himself a maze, and she was trapped inside it. Doors led nowhere, corridors twisted and turned and opened back on themselves. She knocked on the walls, searching for hollows, found a secret passageway, followed it, but it terminated in a brick wall. She retraced her steps but somehow the path was different now, and a door led into a new room, and as she stepped into it the door closed behind her with a clang. The room was windowless, bricked-up on all sides. The door was metal. There was no lock.

  Stupid! Stupid! she thought. The gas was pumping into the room. Behind her eye, the jade fragment moved. Use it, she thought. Exhaling slowly, she reached within herself, and out–

  Into a cellar crawling with shadows, the kiln burning, and the Phantom, raging – a keyboard of wood and chrome was before him and he worked at it, pulling levers – a map of the building stood before him like a screen.

  A puppet-master, she thought. But his puppets were running away, and there was little he could do.

  Looking at the map through his eyes, as the Phantom closed and opened doors and sealed exists, turned on hidden pumps of gas, rooms in which the walls seemed to close in, and there–

  A chute, she saw. One of many. The building was such that some rooms had a hidden chute built into them – leading directly to the cellar…

  He could kill in a locked room and the corpse would simply disappear.

  Later, the kiln would do the rest…

  She pulled back. On her hands and knees now, no air remaining, but she found it, a hidden lever in the wall, and when she pulled it the empty bed tilted forward and a trapdoor opened in the floor.

  Not waiting, not wanting to think, she lowered herself through the trapdoor and let go.

 
 

 
 

"Cleopatra."

  There was venom in the voice.

  She said, "Tômas."

  The fire burned between them.

  She had come down shooting. The bullets echoed in that closed, dank chamber.

  But he had been ahead of her.

  She had landed heavily, rolled – only then noticing the overwhelming heat, the open door of the Phantom's kiln.

  "You shouldn't have come."

  "I'm beginning to think you are right."

  He moved like shadow. Conventional bullets could not harm him. The room was small, her eye stinging – but she could see him clearly through the jade, a figure made monstrous by the shadows.

  And yet, this time, she wasn't afraid.

  They met mid-room. The Phantom leaped into the air, tracing a parabola as he soared high, bouncing off the wall to come at her. But she too was ready now.

  She was no longer human, she knew that now. The jade had changed her, shaped her, that alien machine with its own, unknown purpose working through her. She flew to meet him, sailing through flames, and her hand caught his throat as he came for her.

  Squeezing, and he landed a fist like a metal globe on her chest, but she held him still as they both fell. No guns, no bullets, but person to person, in single unarmed combat. She smashed her gun arm against his skull.

  He twisted – impossibly – his legs rising to meet her face. She had to let go, pull back to avoid the full brunt of his attack and, laughing, he was free again, bouncing gracefully from a wall to come back at her, all the while the fire burning, burning in that room of death.

  "I've killed your like in this room more times than you can imagine," he said.

  "You've been a busy boy," she said.

  "I've been a bad boy," he said, and laughed. Had he always been insane? Once he must have been a valuable agent for the Council. Once…

  And now?

  "I will kill you," he said, "and then go for the statue. I know what it does. I know what it wants. I have been listening to it for a long time."

  "What does it want?" she said. He came for her, through the air, but she was no longer where she was, turning and catching him from behind with a kick that sent him flying at the wall–

  His face smashed into the bricks. When he pulled back she could see the indentation in the wall, but the Phantom was unharmed.

  "It wants this world," he said. "The world and everything in it."

  "For itself?"

  "For its masters… and when they come, I shall be rewarded. I shall rule!"

  "They should have put you in Charenton a long time ago," she said.

  "But they put
you
in the asylum instead," he said, smirking. She watched that hungry, elongated skull, and knew he was insane, and had to be stopped.

  "You shouldn't have listened to the voices," she said, coming at him. He leaped up and they met in mid-air, and this time his kick found purchase and she felt the air going out of her as she sailed back and smashed against the wall near the door.

  The door!

  It was getting hard to breathe in the room.

  "They were lonely," he said. "They'd been lonely for a very long time."

  "And now they have you?"

  But she knew he was wrong. The voices did not care about Tômas, did not care about her. She thought of the Shaolin, keeping the statue for countless years, of old, lonely Master Long and the child he had once been. She thought of the corpses animated, however briefly, by that alien machine. She thought of the voices.

  They were barely aware of them as individual entities, she realised. They had been some sort of information-gathering machine and, awakened, they studied the world. Everything that happened was just a by-product of that impersonal, detached survey – the Phantom and she were insignificant particles in that great schema of the machine.

  She went low then, and he went high, and she grasped his leg and yanked him down from the air, bringing him crashing down hard on the floor, and then she put her gun arm to his head and fired, at point-blank range, and heard him scream.

  When he pulled away his fist lifted her off the ground and, too quickly, he turned. His skull was ruined, and his mouth opened in a scream of rage, but no sound came. Her back hit the wall. She lifted her gun arm again, trying to aim but, too quickly, he whipped around. No! she tried to shout, but he had opened the door and was gone through it – too quickly!

  She heard the lock close from the outside.

  It took her a moment to realise she was trapped in the Phantom's cellar.

  She rose slowly to her feet. She hurt in numerous places. She felt ravenously hungry, too, as if her body had been expending energy beyond its natural ability, and now needed to compensate for it. And she knew she was no longer the woman who had first met the Phantom, there in the undermorgue of Paris, in what seemed a lifetime away.

  For it
had
been a lifetime. And she was a different person now, a different thing.

  She went to the kiln. And she pushed it.

  She had never had such strength, but her conviction lent her power, and her desperation drove her. She knew this place could not, should not exist. She kicked the metal with her artificial leg and again she pushed, hearing the strong foundations groan, the heat burning her–

  But she would not burn.

  With the last of her energy she jumped, flying at the wall, leaping from it, back at the kiln. The impact jarred her body, and she fell numb to the floor–

  But the great, obese, obscene object had succumbed. Slowly, it toppled over.

  And the fire burst out.

  Blinking tears, she pushed herself up, feeling as if she were drowning. Her gun arm shook as she pointed it at the door. She fired, through the flames, watching wood fly. When she kicked the door it fell back. Cold air rushed inside, touching her cheeks like a mother's hand. She ran, and the fire pursued her.