Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse (17 page)

A gold matchbox. Belonging to someone. Now whose matchbox was it?

‘Is this yours?’ she asked Fanetta, who had come to her door.

‘Not mine,’ the maid said. ‘I just came to tell you the bathroom’s across the hall from the night nursery. There’s hot water this time of night or very early in the morning. I put the fruit in my window. It’s cool there.’ She turned to leave. ‘If you don’t want that matchbox, I’ll take it.’

‘No,’ mused Mary Ann. ‘I think I’m supposed to give it to someone.’ She put the matchbox in the pocket of her uniform and lit the candle by her bed, surprised to find that the warm, yellow light made her want to weep with pleasure. There was too much red light in Cattermune’s House, and this warm glow made her remember the yellow sun of some other world.

‘Give the matchbox to Cattermune, for his birthday.’ Fanetta laughed. ‘That’d be a kick.’

‘Why? Why would it be?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Cattermune gets big things for his birthday. Maybe he’d like something little for a change.’ She drifted away, humming to herself. ‘Just don’t put your name on it. That way, if he doesn’t like it, he won’t know who gave it to him.’

Mary Ann, obscurely moved by this suggestion, set it aside for the time. There was a long flannel nightgown among the clothing in the armoire. She put it on and crawled into her bed, forgetting Cattermunes and matchboxes and everything connected with them in a long timeless, lightless slide into sleep.

Green was roused early, dragged from his bed in the footmen’s dormitory and chivvied into a line waiting to take care of sanitary and grooming matters. Half an hour later, a long file of identically dressed figures submitted to inspection by a haughty individual identified as Cribbs, an under-butler, who took pleasure in advising Green that he was not an important figure in the affairs of Cattermune’s House. There were, Cribbs said, a steward, two butlers, four under-butlers, two wine stewards, twenty footmen, a housekeeper, two under-housekeepers, forty housemaids, a kitchen staff of thirty, plus the nursery staff and personal servants and a staff for the stables and gardens comprising several dozen individuals. In addition there were tutors, seamstresses, costume makers, musicians, artists, dancing masters, game keepers, librarians, decorators, carpenters, assorted grooms, and several masters of the hunt. All of these in service to the thirty or forty Cattermunes currently present at Cattermune’s House.

Though there’ll be more, for the fete,’ sniffed Cribbs. ‘There’ll be sixty or seventy of the family here by then.’

‘Where are they now?’ asked Green daringly. His words fell into a ghastly silence.

‘About,’ said Cribbs. ‘Where is none of your business.’ He began to read off assignments for the day. During the morning, Green was to station himself in the gaming rooms, where he was to attend to the needs of any family member who might go in that direction.

The gaming rooms were on a lower floor, underground, without a window or a breath of air. Dice tables and card tables were scattered about, cluttered with the accoutrements of gaming – decks of cards, dice in their cups, chips printed with strange symbols.

Morning wore away to noon. Green was replaced by another footman and went to have his lunch. After lunch, he was assigned to man the small library, and he headed in that direction, fighting sleep.

The small library was in the direction of the abandoned wing in which Green had first found himself. It looked out upon a quiet stretch of sward surrounded by bleak cypresses and centered upon a reflecting pool in which pallid lilies bloomed, ghostlike in the still light. Green stationed himself in a corner, almost hidden behind a bookcase and the fall of drapery from the nearby window.

‘How do you stay awake?’ he had asked another footman at lunch. ‘There’s nothing going on!’

‘Pinch yourself,’ said the other as he left. ‘Or play with yourself. Or imagine what the Cattermunes would do to you if they caught you asleep.’

Green had some difficulty with this, inasmuch as he had not yet even seen or heard a Cattermune – a deficiency which was almost immediately remedied.

A noise in the hallway brought Green’s head up. Someone or something massive entered the room, saying in a heavy, furry voice. ‘Ah, no one here. Come in, Cornutes, come in.’ There was the sound of someone else coming in, the noise of two people moving about, a chair scraping on the floor, then another, before the voice spoke again. ‘I don’t want to miss the gaming, so you must not keep me long. Now, what was it?’

‘Just wanted to reassure you. So far so good, Cattermune,’ said another voice, a lighter voice, though one similar in its furry quality. ‘I checked the placement of the thing, as you suggested. You did brilliantly. The daughter of the man you gave it to is old and dying, and any knowledge of the thing will die with her. Meantime, the supply of immigrants is more than adequate and seems to be increasing. You didn’t need to have been concerned. Nothing’s going to go wrong.’

‘Of course nothing will go wrong,’ said the heavy, furry voice with enormous self-satisfaction. ‘I was never concerned, though I suppose it never hurts to check. I told the family they could trust me in this matter. The sacrifices were heavy, but within hours our waiting will be over. Finality will occur. Cattermune’s House will be immortal!’ There was a gelatinous chuckle in the furry voice.

‘Clever of you! Though there were some …’

‘Ah, well, it was a dreadful risk at the time. And it took the sacrifice of fifty of our family to create the thing. I told them what the benefits would be, but they weren’t what one might call willing. I suggested a lottery, but they’d have none of that, so I ended up picking them out myself. I’m sorry that your mother had to be among them, Cornutes, but she would go on nagging at me. And several of your littermates, too. She’d got to them. And then before we were through, it took the blood of another fifty to break through to the world. And then, finally, it took fifty years to implant, fifty years to become permanent. A long, hard process, but there was no shorter way.’ The heavy voice sighed, again with satisfaction, as a man might who had completed a hard task to his own total satisfaction.

‘What would you have done if it had come back somehow? If the man you gave it to had returned it?’

‘Oh, if it had been returned, I would simply have placed it in the world again. It would have taken another fifty lives, another fifty years, but still, whatever the cost, it would have been well worth it. However, there was little chance of that. The man I gave it to – he wouldn’t have returned it. I read the man well. A fool. An irresponsible fool. The risk was that his daughter would return it, but even there – she delayed.’

‘Yes. She delayed.’

‘And now you say she has grown old and is dying. When she dies, all knowledge of the thing dies. When she is gone, someone will take the anchor and put it away, or sell it, or, better yet, melt it down to make something else, perhaps a dozen other things. That’s why it was made of gold, so that it will be kept, somehow, in some form. There’s no way it can get back here. It will be divided up and scattered about in the world, no one will ever put it together and bring it back! The House of Cattermune will be tied directly into a source of supply and the future of the House will be assured!’

‘Players,’ said the lighter voice. Green could hear the sound of hands being rubbed briskly together, a swish, swish, swish of flesh on flesh, celebrating.

‘Players, yes,’ purred the heavy voice.

‘Binkers,’ said the other, with a kind of bubbling snigger. ‘Binkers unlimited.’

‘That, too,’ replied the other voice with a deeply gelatinous and shivering laugh. ‘Come now, you’ve kept me from the gaming long enough. You uncle Cadermon bilked me at dice last night. Tonight I will have my revenge.’ And he laughed again.

Green, in his hidden corner, for no reason that he could identify, shivered with an uncontrollable aversion at the sound of that voice.

Arti Zahmani answered the door herself, unsurprised to find Makr Avehl on the doorstep since he had called from the airport to say he was on his way. His face under the porch light was drawn and tired-looking. She scarcely noticed.

‘Where are they?’ she blurted. ‘Where is my daughter? Where is Dagma? She was too weak to get out of bed without help. Haurvatat is having an absolute fit. The doctor knocked me out for simply hours. I suppose you know Aghrehond is gone as well! Where are they, Makr Avehl?’ The tears she had been fighting began to run down her cheeks and she made an ugly, gulping noise.

He put his arms around her and patted her back, trying to calm her. ‘At the moment, we don’t know where they are, Arti, and if you distress yourself in this fashion, you can’t help me find them. Try to calm down.’ Even as he said it, he knew how futile and silly he sounded. How could she calm down?

‘You must know something? You were already on the way when I called Alphenlicht!’

‘Aghrehond called me, Arti. He left one of his usual enigmatic messages. And Therat had a feeling. She’d been musing over a strange reading from the Cave of Light, and suddenly it came to her that what was usually interpreted as a harmless set of symbols was in fact rather threatening. She and Ellat insisted that all three of us get here as quickly as possible. Until I talked to you from the airport, we had no idea that Marianne and the others had disappeared, but I am sure that it is somehow connected with whatever it is that your aunt Dagma asked Marianne to do.’ He reached out to take Arti Zahmani by the shoulders, shaking her gently. ‘We can’t do any good by going to pieces, now settle down.’

‘This whole thing is ridiculous,’ Arti cried, barely controlling her hysteria. ‘Dagma was asleep when Marianne got here. Marianne had luncheon with us. We talked about all the plans for the baby. Then Dagma woke up, her nurse came down to tell Marianne, and she went up. After about half an hour, Dagma’s bell rang, and she asked for Aghrehond! Aghrehond! Why? Then you called, and we looked for him, and they were gone. All of them.’ She shivered and began weeping. ‘I don’t understand it! Haurvatat is ready to kill someone, probably me.’

‘Nonsense, Arti. Just because it’s mysterious is no reason to believe it’s necessarily dangerous. Marianne and the others may be perfectly all right. Have you touched anything in Dagma’s room?’

‘You said not to, so we didn’t. Not after we talked to you.’

‘Then let’s start there. Will you show me the way?’

‘Oh,’ she started, coming to herself, the well practiced routines of the hostess for the moment derailing her anxiety. ‘Of course, Makr Avehl. I’m sorry. Up here.’ She turned to lead the way up the curving stairs and down the wide corridor to the door of Dagma’s room.

The room bore evidence of a hasty and cursory search. The covers of the bed were thrown back. The closet doors stood open and hangers were disarrayed, as though someone had looked behind the clothing hanging there. A sheet of thick, creased parchment lay half under the coverlet. On the floor at Makr Avehl’s feet was a tiny carved gem and a pair of dice. He picked them up, inspected the dice, grunted and pocketed them while closely examining the tiny animal he had found: a rhinoceros cut from gleaming rose-colored stone. Rhodolite, he told himself, recognizing the color. A rhodolite rhinoceros. ‘Ah,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Interesting. Alliterative. Accidentally, or as part of something very complex? Therat may know. And very fine work to be trodden underfoot. Now why is that?’

He sat heavily upon the bed and turned over the folded sheet, seeing that it was parchment, believing that it was hand drawn. ‘Personally drawn,’ he corrected himself. ‘Who knows if the one who drew it had hands or not.’ When he had mused over it for some time while Arti stood at the window – alternately staring at him and staring out, as though the missing ones might materialize upon the lawn or at the end of the drive – he folded the parchment and secreted it in his inside jacket pocket, dropping the carved animal in after it before taking Arti by the hand and leading her downstairs.

‘Will you stay to dinner?’ Arti asked him. ‘I was afraid you were going to disappear, right in front of me.’

‘No, no, Arti. Not me. Where’s Haurvatat? In the city? Even as upset as he must be?’

‘
Because
he’s so upset, Makr Avehl. He was sitting around here driving me mad. I told him to go consult someone, anyone, for heaven’s sake. Marianne and Dagma and Aghrehond have been gone for two days now. Well, one day and part of another one. And you know as well as I do that they aren’t the only ones. This business of mysterious disappearance is gaining epidemic proportions. My neighbor down the road vanished a week ago Wednesday! And her son and daughter at the same time, only teenagers. A man who serves on a charity board with me disappeared last Sunday! I’m beginning to read about it every day in the newspapers! And it’s all around here! Not New York or Chicago or London. No, here, in Virginia! Hundreds of people gone, disappeared, no one knows where.’

‘Shh, Arti. Hold it together, dear. We can’t do any good by falling apart. Do you have a maid who usually cleans Dagma’s room?’

‘Yes, of course. Her name is Briggs.’

‘May I see her, please?’

The maid, when summoned, proved to be stocky and plain-featured, with an open countenance and a confiding smile. Makr Avehl laid the parchment out on the desk in the library and invited her to look at it. ‘Have you seen this before?’