House of Corruption (24 page)

Kiria watched it go. She registered how tightly her corset squeezed against her ribcage, how hard it was to breathe, how brightly the spots around her eyes began to glimmer. She had about three seconds, she guessed, before she would faint.

24

Reynard’s nerves registered cold mud oozing into his right nostril and ear and mouth. He did not move. He could not feel his body. Where were his feet? He could not feel them. Numbness ached with a dull, prickling sensation.

He opened his mouth to breathe and rank, oily water poured over his tongue. He retched, spewing the fermented water. He coughed bile in sticky threads from his lips.

It was dark. To his right stretched the sea. To his left lay a stout, rocky cliff topped with a line of dark, dilapidated buildings. He pulled himself from the shore, along the posts of a wooden dock, his bare feet sucking through thick mud. He regarded his hands as they brushed over wood and sharp bumps of barnacles, fingers black with filth, over his naked belly and up his neck to his face. He touched his nose and mouth and behind his ears, reminding himself the details of his own shape.

Alive?

His soles and palms hurt, the flesh rubbed raw. He swallowed and his throat constricted, his ragged breathing leaving thin, vaporous trails in his wake. From a metal pipe along the shore came a trickle of water; he scrubbed his hands and face and neck, the water stinking of offal, the sharp coldness forcing feeling back into his limbs.

He considered the tenements huddled against the shore. Many shoreline villages held families who relied upon the ocean, men from North Africa or the East who fished in the early hours. There were no gaslights here. The only light came from pinprick glimmers in the far distance, ships set upon the black horizon.

Naked he slipped up onto the dock and into the crooked streets, skulking from corner to corner, huddling and shivering. He tried to reconnect the fragmented memories of the last...hour? Day? Week? How long had it been? With every bare step upon the cold flagstones his heart shrank at the realization—

What have I done?

He leaned against a wall, heaving, spewing water and bile. He knew he had changed again but could scarcely believe it. He was naked, slipping among the slums like vermin.
He
was vermin. He stank of slime and fish and excrement and blood. His fingers felt up his arm and over his shoulder, finding an ugly pink gash the length of his thumb.

How did I get these
?

Dead skin freckled his arms and shoulders like dried blisters, caused by the expansion and deflation of his physical body. He crouched against an alley wall and picked at some of the larger pockets, peeling them away, scrubbing the dead sheath of flesh with his broken fingernails until he bled.

He broke down and wept, bitterly. He pulled his knees to his chest and clutched them, rocking slightly, and with each upswing he cracked the back of his head against the brick wall behind him. After three blows a sharp, piercing headache shot above his left eye.

What have I done?

She did this to me.

Miserable whore!

You did this to yourself
, he thought, as if another’s voice spoke from a distance.
She tempted you, lured you—but you, you, you YOU YOU YOU
—

No
, came another part.
It was that woman
.

Woman
.

He remembered the smell of roses, the feel of lace on his—

—
Kiria?

He fled down the alley, along dark and quiet streets, keeping sight of the coastline, hoping the buildings would end and he could disappear into the wilderness and die in some hole. Let the beasts eat his flesh. It would serve him right to be consumed by them.

A metallic jingle caught him short.

He slid behind a rotting rain barrel as a door opened on the far side of the street, one of many single-level flats visible in both directions. A plain man in a threadbare overcoat and wool hat started down the sidewalk. Reynard walked him leave. When he was out of sight, Reynard rushed across the street and tried the doorknob. Locked. With a fist he punched a hole though the adjoining window.

He slipped inside. The flat was like many for the poor: a small kitchen and a single room for everything else. Entire families would squeeze into hundreds of such flats in Marseille, a mother and father and six children all sleeping and eating and living in the same ten-by-twenty foot space with only a rickety radiator and a coal stove for cooking. This man, a fisherman perhaps, had it lucky. By the looks of things he lived alone.

Reynard washed up from the kitchen sink. He scrubbed the blood and filth off his body as best he could, working quickly, fearing the front door might open. He searched the man’s bedroom, finding a woolen shirt and pants and socks, two sizes too big but adequate. He slid his feet into a large pair of worn leather shoes. In the kitchen he found cheese and stale bread and a half-eaten tin of sardines, stuffing the lot into his mouth, chewing as fast as he could. He drank water until he was filled, splashing the wet coldness over his face again and again and again. He could not feel clean.

A noise echoed from outside, the clip-clop of hooves. He slipped to the door and flattened himself against it. If the police tried to open the door he would open it first. He would push past them. He might knock their guns aside and give himself enough time to—

To do what?

He could never return to Marseille. The woman had not only violated him in the deepest sense, taken everything of worth—his dignity, his self-control. As he considered it—
I can never return home
—made the hate rise hot in his body. When he thought of Marseille he would forever think of a dying girl in that desecrated tower, the filth and mud of the coastline slums, the woman’s awful laugh as she fell.

I will kill her
.

The hooves faded. Reynard released his breath and stuffed his pockets with anything of use he could find. He grabbed a scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil. He scribbled a note and, just before disappearing back into the dark streets, left it on the kitchen table:

Forgive me
.

***

Night turned to day, to night, to day again.

A rapping came at Savoy’s room at the
Hotel Vauban
—a postal carrier, delivering an envelope with no return address. The envelope was badly creased and dirty, and the postal carrier expected a few centimes due to insufficient postage. Inside was a single sheet of paper written with scrawled handwriting:

Home
.

Savoy closed the door, drew the shades closed, and removed a match. He burned both the paper and envelope—this was something the police did not need to see—and buried the ashes in the wastebin. He gathered up his luggage, left a note with instructions for Grant, and went downstairs to catch a hansom. He headed for the train station.

Three miles outside of the village of Aix-en-Provence waited the remains of a once sizeable estate—a two-storied whitewashed house with a covered porch and many windows. Here and there stood palm trees and Roman statues and fountains where water once poured into stony pools. Today the fountains were dry, the statues chipped and weathered and crusted with moss. Ivy choked the house’s ruined face, the windows either broken or boarded over.

Savoy lashed his horse and cart at the hitching rail and ascended the weedy steps, taking a long look at Reynard’s ancestral home. He walked through the front doorway—the door was long gone—and padded through empty rooms with floors littered with pebbles and broken plaster and animal droppings. Much of the wallpaper had fallen, but here and there the walls held impressions where a painting or bookcase or chair might once have been.

He returned outside and skirted the house’s perimeter, passing through overgrown bushes into a fallow garden where plants and fruit trees and berries now grew wild. He followed a little stone path that curved around dead flower beds to a grove of olive trees. There, nearly lost in the grass, a dozen tombstones stood in an uneven line, the names and dates moving further back in time.

“All dead.”

Savoy twitched. In the shadows beneath the trees, Reynard knelt beside one of the more recent markers, brushing off moss and grit from the stone. He wore ragged, plain clothing and oversized shoes. Pale stubble marked his jawline and upper lip. To Savoy he seemed empty, transparent, the haggard look of a man who had lost too much weight, too much light.

“Don’t look at me that way,” Reynard said.

“I’m sorry. It’s just...”

“We are all dead,” Reynard continued. “Seven generations are buried here, my grandfather being the latest. He had his body shipped back so it might lie with the others. There was never a desire to build a crypt. They all wanted to become part of the earth. It had given them so many good things. The grapes that used to grow here, the olives. I remember the smell of olive oil and vinegar and wine in that house. It smelled like that every day, Arté. Roses, and azaleas, and mint.” He shook his head. “But we are dead.”

“The soil is still good,” Savoy said. “A little work and it can be itself again.”

“Words.”

“Is it not true?”

“It is too far gone,” Reynard said. “It is too late.”

“It is never too late, Renny.” Savoy smiled.
Are we still talking about the house?
“Will you tell me what happened?”

“Is Kiria—I mean, is Miss Carlovec...is she safe?”

“Yes.”

“And Mister Grant?”

“He is fine,” Savoy said. “Though the poor boy does seem to get the worst of it.”

Reynard brushed away the dirt from his knees, emerging from the shade as he vigorously rubbed his hands together. “I could do with a hot bath and a change of clothing. I trust you brought my luggage.” He inhaled deeply, waving nonchalantly at the remains of his old home. “It was better to imagine what this place used to look like, rather than see it like this. No point in coming back, really. I never much liked Marseille. The more I think about it, the more I want to leave New Orleans. Move my base of operations further inland, like Chicago or Saint Louis...”

“Reynard, I—”

“Farther away from the sea.” Reynard started toward the empty house. “We may find better luck sailing from Genoa, or taking a train to Rome for the Suez this time of year.”

“Lasha?” Savoy asked.

“She is alive.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No. So we best get to it, shall we?” Reynard’s hands padded at his chest and hips, digging into empty pockets. “I seem to have misplaced my matches. Do you have any tobacco?”

Savoy paused. “I’ve my pipe.”

“May I?”

“Have you started smoking again?”

Reynard smiled with hard eyes and Savoy acquiesced, giving Reynard his matchbook and packet of Colonial Fields tobacco. Reynard took both. Savoy offered his pipe but Reynard waved it away, removing a slip of rolling paper from his pocket. He filled it with a pinch, sealed it up, and with a match lit the end of the makeshift cigarette.

Savoy led the way, Reynard lingering. Reynard did not look in the house’s direction, did not seem to notice his own smell, the ragged state of his clothes. He did not seem to notice much of anything as Savoy turned the corner of the house and Reynard disappeared from sight behind him. He reappeared after a few moments, smiling with an empty expression like a ghost.

Savoy did not know what to say. He supposed nothing
could
be said. There was no precedent. For all he knew, Reynard’s curse had returned in full force—like a man sworn off opium, overdoses, and poisons himself.

Are you poisoned, Renny?

The two men ascended the cart. They did not speak. Savoy did not think again about the makeshift cigarette. He did not see Reynard take two puffs to encourage the tobacco to burn, did not see him flick the burning paper into the house.

He did not see the cigarette land on a pile of dry weeds and branches heaped against the wall, did not watch the cinder smolder and burst into flame. He was not there when the fire grew like a hungry animal, spreading, licking at dry peelings of wallpaper to crawl up into the plastered ceiling. He did not see the smoke as it filled every ruined chamber, up steps to lonely hallways where Reynard once played. Fire spread from room to room and, when they were miles away, the old villa became a maelstrom of fire.

Only the tombstones watched the old house burn.

25

Time passed, lost its way, and disappeared.

Lasha awoke to the sound of her own tears, her pillow soaked with moisture. Had her dreams been less potent she would have pulled the sheets to her chin and dismissed them; yet she dreaded sleeping, hated even more the thought of waking. She rolled to her back and stared at the folds of the netting above her bed, the room pitch-dark and heavy with the stink of rotten fruit and dust and mold.

“It is time,” came a voice.

Had she the strength to scream, she would have. The woman stood in the dark beside the open door with her hand upon the latch. She was a wraith, her red hair loose down her back, her hollow face both pale and ruddy like a painted cadaver. The fabric of her nightdress fell off her shoulders and spilled like cobwebs over the full shape of her breasts and hips.

“Come, child,” she said.

“Leave me alone,” Lasha whispered.

“Do not make this harder on yourself.”

Lasha clutched her wrist and the skin throbbed underneath the bandage. She was thirsty. She gazed over her four-poster with its mosquito netting, the rosewood sidetable, armoire and washstand, objects as oppressive as if stone and iron surrounded her.

“I feel sick.”

“That will pass,” the woman said.

“Why not kill me now, instead of a little bit each day?” Lasha said. “Why...” She outstretched her arm to flash the offending bandage. “...do
this
?”