Chapter Twenty-Three

Ryan slept fitfully. The passing of the hours had become an enigma to him, and when he woke for the fifth or sixth time he'd completely lost touch with how late or early it was.
There had been a dream where he was in the ruins of a great metropolisperhaps Newyork. It seemed a center for travel, and there were dozens of commercial transport wags, filling with passengers. Ryan had known that he wanted to get to a ville in the Shens, but he couldn't remember the name of it. And the destination boards on the fronts and sides of the wags were all blank.
He had asked bustling men and women which was the right vehicle to catch for the Shens, but they'd all pushed by him, faces averted, intent on their own business.
Finally he'd taken the nearest wag, but it had been empty, with shuttered doors and windows and no way of communicating with the driver.
He had awakened from that jolting darkness to the blackness of the bedroom that Norman had showed him and Krysty late the previous night.
"Krysty?" he whispered, reaching to his left side, where he knew she'd been sleeping.
But the space was empty, the sheets cold.
Ryan drew the SIG-Sauer, cocking it automatically, the click sounding unusually loud.
A door creaked open to the right of the big, high bed. "Why the blaster, lover?"
He eased the hammer down and replaced the heavy automatic under the pillow. "Woke and you weren't there."
"Went for a pee. Found it hard to sleep. Something about this place makes me uneasy, Ryan."
"Yeah, I felt it, too. Got locked into a classic anxiety dream about getting lost on a journey."
"I was walking across a heather-covered land and it got evening and something was coming after me. Pretty ghosty. Goes with the look of this house."
Ryan had been sitting up and he lay down again. "When you get a chance, pass the word to the others to stay on orange. Something I don't like about the Family."
"Only met one member, so far."
"Yeah, well, that's enough to go on. Just tell the others to be careful and not to go around on their own."
"Sure." She slipped back into bed and made him jump by putting her cold bare feet on his thigh.
But she quickly grew warmer.


BREAKFAST WAS little better than the supper had been.
Servants knocked on every door at seven-thirty, just after dawn, waking everyone with the news that the food would be served in the dining hall in thirty minutes.
The house was so large that there had been a room for each person, on the second and third floors, opening off long, shadowy corridors.
There was also a fourth floor, but J.B.'s hasty recce the previous evening hadn't found a way up there.
"Think there's also a cellar," be said as he helped himself from the buffet on the ornate mahogany sideboard, picking from a wide and generous selection of magnificent silver chafing dishes, each set over a small spirit burner to keep the food piping hot.
"Open the wrong door in a cellar here and you'd probably fall straight into the gorge," Mildred commented.
"Where is the Family?" Doc asked. "Are we never to meet our hosts?"
"Time enough and time in plenty," replied Norman, who, Krysty told Ryan, appeared to be wearing precisely the same clothes he'd worn the night before. Indeed, the little man looked as though he'd never been to bed.
Not even Elric Cornelius appeared to join them.
The breakfast was a miserable experience. The room seemed even colder than the night before, and most of the shutters across the ornate stained-glass windows were still closed, giving it a gloomy atmosphere.
Runny eggs managed somehow to be blackened around the edges. Thick slices of fatback bacon had seen so little of the frying pan that sharp bristles were untouched. The bread was acceptable, but several of the pots of preserves had layers of green-white mold sitting comfortably on top of them. And the butter was rancid.
Every one of the seven companions knew that a basic rule of survival in Deathlands was always to eat whatever you could, whenever you could. But it was a struggle.
Johannes Forde seemed oblivious to the poor quality of the cooking and ate as if he'd eaten nothing for a month, tucking into a triple helping of a thick chowder. The others had avoided it, put off by the greasy, phosphorescent scum that floated on top and the leprous look of the chunks of meat that squatted here and there, like small, starving toads.
"Good, Norman," he called to the diminutive butler. "Chicken or pork?"
"Neither, Johannes."
"Then it's gator."
"No."
"Cottonmouth? I always hankered after a good rattler stew to break my fast."
"Coffin worm," Norman squeaked, clapping his hands delightedly. "Delicious, I'm told. Not that a team of the wildest stallions would drag me within a spoon's breadth of it."
Forde put a brave face on it. "Well, if that's coffin worm, then it's damned good coffin worm."
"What's a coughing worm, Dad?" Dean asked, his eyes wide with fascination.
"Coffin worm, son."
"Well, what is it?"
Norman answered the boy. By the time he'd gotten about three parts of the way through his explanation, Forde had turned a delicate shade of yellowish green and run from the room, hand clapped over his mouth.
"A piece of rotting fish is placed in a wooden box, about a foot square. Maggots are introduced. They come from the trout farm of the ville. Once they are busy, the box is sealed. As soon as the fish is gone, the maggots begin to devour one another. Survival of the nastiest. They reduce in a mathematical progression. Do you know what that is, young Dean? No? It means that there might be 256 maggots at their busiest. One eats another and there's 128. Same thing happens and there's 64. You get the idea?"
Dean nodded, turning his head to watch the rapid exit of the movie maker.
"Eventually there's two real big coffin worms alive in the box. Biggest eats the weakest and we cook the winner."
Mildred closed her eyes and swallowed hard. It had crossed her mind that the waspish little butler might have been playing an unpleasant practical joke on Johannes, but she guessed that he wasn't.
To distract herself she stared at the big arched windows, with a watery sun breaking past the shutters.
They were of superb quality, and she knew that they had to have dated from before skydark, perhaps close to the end of the twentieth century.
None of them were the traditional Christian design, with a suffering Jesus and mourning apostles.
These showed more modern scenes, finely detailed, in rich scarlets, purples and greens. Mildred's forehead wrinkled as she realized that many of the windows showed laboratories of all kinds of scientific experiments, bearded men with gentle, grave smiles and radiant women in shining white coats, measuring silver and golden liquids into beakers and test tubes.
Above several of them was inscribed the number 47 in ornamental Gothic script. Mildred knew that the number rang a bell somewhere in her memory, but she couldn't quite set her mind to locate it.
To her greater surprise, she recognized some of the cryonic and cryogenic equipment that she had so often used herself in what laymen called "freezing" experiments.
And there was one more detail that fascinated her more than all the rest put together.
Largely concealed by internal shutters, one of which had come unbolted, was the last of the stained-glass windows. There appeared to be another of the godlike scientists, or whitecoats, as Doc so bitterly called them, holding his arms spread wide as if bidding farewell to an angelic host of figures who were streaming away from him, bathed in what Mildred guessed was supposed to be a celestial glow.
The odd thing that she couldn't see too clearly, because of the half-open shutter, was that all of the heavenly throng appeared to have gleaming white hair.


THE EARLY-MORNING SUN and its promise of a fine day faded quickly away under a belt of low cloud that moved in from the west. It seemed to fill the valley and hang over the bayou, making Bramton itself invisible.
With the cloud came the rain, starting with a light drizzle that strengthened and settled into sheets of remorseless gray rain that fell vertically and was obviously set in for the whole day.
It made any kind of expedition beyond the walls of the mansion out of the question.


NORMAN WAS MORE than solicitous, gathering them together in a big lounge, filled with silk-covered sofas and deep chairs, covered in a magnificently rich material, though Krysty managed to whisper to Ryan that they all looked rather ragged and faded.
"We have all manner of entertainment for guests." He sighed, placing his fingertips together in an exaggerated steeple effect. "Though some have not been used for many months. Nay, for many years."
A spinet sat in one corner of the room, and Mildred wandered over to it. She ran her fingers across the keys, getting a mix of discords and missing notes.
"Dear me!" Norman exclaimed. "I must arrange for the tuner to call when next he passes by."
There were a number of paintings hung on the walls, and Doc strolled around to examine them, finding the works mostly poor reproductions of minor-league pictures, with muddy colors and flat detail.
"Now, we have all manner of card games," the butler said. "Sets of Scrabble and Monopoly. Both very popular in predark days. They come with instructions."
"Books?" Krysty asked.
"A library is in the next room along. Through those doors there, my dear flame-headed goddess. Oh, forgive me, but flattery gets you everywhere."
"No vids or games or stuff?" Dean asked, sitting with shoulders slumped in the traditionally sulky position of the bored eleven-year-old.
"I fear not." Norman brightened. "But we do have some fine jigsaw puzzles. 'Showing His Paces' and 'The Landlord's Birthday' are two of my favorites. Along with 'The Monarch of the Glen' and 'Rounding the Horn.' You might like those, young fellow."
"Sure. Real hot pipe. Hope my brain doesn't boil with the excitement."
"Can we tour the house?" Ryan asked.
Norman sounded flustered for a few seconds. "Oh, dear me, I think that Perhaps you can visit any part of this floor and the two above it. But not the top floor and attics or the cellars. They are all a tad dangerous and are kept locked."
"Outside?"
The little man considered Jak's question for several seconds, head on one side, ringed index finger poised against his chin. "I don't see"
"Can't you ask one of the Family?" Ryan said tetchily. "It's not that hard a question to answer, is it?"
"Oh, no, it's not. But you must realize that the lives that are lived here are not what some people might consider ordinary lives."
"Noticed that," Krysty commented. "Where are they this morning?" Her eyes narrowed. "In fact, Norman, just how many members are there of the Family?"
He simpered prettily. "I fear that I've somewhat lost touch. They come and go. Perhaps more than four and less than ten would not be far off."
"Thanks for nothing," the woman muttered.
"Outside?" Jak repeated calmly. "We go outside?"
"I can see no harm in that. But I urge you to keep clear of the ville. There have been foolish tales over the years and we are not the best of friends."
"So, we can walk in the grounds, if we want to?" J.B. pressed, turning to stare out of the mullioned windows. "If the rain lays off."
"Doesn't look like will," Jak said.
"I am sure we could rustle up some oilskins. Oh, listen to me! Rustling oilskins. I love that silky sound, don't you? So sensual, I think."
Ryan turned away, steadying himself against the back of what he imagined was one of the large chairs. "Do we ever get to meet anyone except for Elric?"
"Of course. The members of the Cornelius Family have always been night birds, preferring the hours of darkness to the glaring light of the midday sun."
"Only 'mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun,' " Doc said, puzzlingly.
Norman gave a faint smile and half bow, then carried on as if the old man hadn't spoken.
"So, they are all resting in their in their own beds. It is more than my job's worth to go and wake any of them. Perhaps at supper time ?"
With that he turned on his heel and clicked quickly away across the dusty hardwood floor, slowly pulling the heavy door shut behind himself.
Ryan fumbled his way around the padded chair and sat. Despite the thick glass, draperies and shutters, he could still hear the steady hissing of the rain.
"Going to be one exciting day," he said.
"I could get a book out of the library and read to you," Krysty offered.
"Yeah."
"Or you can sit there all day and be bastard ill-tempered and miserable, lover," she snapped.
Ryan sighed. "Sorry. Go get a book."