Unhonored (19 page)

“Ellis,” Jonas asked, urgency in his voice, “where are you taking us?”

“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘the devil to pay'?” Ellis asked him in return.

“Yes, of course,” Jonas answered, still perplexed.

“But do you know the origin of the term?” Ellis grinned.

“What does that have to do with anything?” Alicia blinked, trying to follow the conversation.

“‘The devil to pay' is an old sailing phrase,” Ellis said. “My father was a doctor but he loved sailing. He never went to sea, but he loved visiting the Boston docks and telling me everything he had read about or learned from the sailors who he treated from the ships. He told me that the ‘devil' was the seams between the planks of the old sailing ships. To ‘pay' a seam was to caulk it with tar and hemp rope.”

“Fascinating,” Alicia said flatly as she shrugged. “So?”

“You said we needed to find a devil and that's what we're doing,” she responded, then called out loudly again. “Ahoy, Captain!”

“Go away…”

Ellis jumped slightly at the sound. It was a creaking voice that had spoken to her and just a few feet above her head.

“Go away!”

Ellis looked up.

Above her was the bow of the
Mary Celeste.
The bowsprit was gone, but there was now a large figurehead whose shape emerged from the wood of the keel. It began at the torso and was, remarkably, the bare-chested figure of a man. The arms swept backward from the shoulders, ending just above the elbow where the arms merged with the hull. The head, however, hung down and gazed with despair back toward the keel. It was a hideous figurehead for a ship: a tortured seaman trapped as part of the ship on which he served.

Even with its head bowed down and turned away from her, Ellis recognized the figurehead.

“Manners, Captain,” called Ellis upward softly.

“Ain't interested in manners,” the carved statue called back.

“A trade, then, Captain Walker?” Ellis said in gentle response. “Surely you wouldn't pass up a trade?”

The gaunt form raised his head. He had a hound-dog face though its features appeared to be made of weathered wood, cracked like long vertical scars up the face. There was an eternal sadness about his dull eyes as he looked back at them.

“Ye have nothing that I'd care for,” the captain called back. “Away with ye.”

“I have one thing,” Ellis replied.

“And that be?”

She turned and gestured toward Jonas.

“I have a soldier,” Ellis said. “And he can find the Gate.”

The figurehead Captain Walker shook and as he did the length of the hull groaned and creaked ominously behind him. “What good is that to me now?”

“Because I can free you,” Ellis said, then swallowed.
I hope that I can free you.

“You know who holds me here?” Isaiah quieted down as he spoke.

“Yes,” Ellis said clearly. “And I need to see him.”

“You won't be back,” Isaiah said, shaking his creaking head, drops of tar falling from his eyes in his pain. “He won't let you.”

“We will be back for you, Isaiah,” Ellis said to the wooden figurehead above her. “Of anyone you know in the Tween, you know that I will come back for you.”

“You left
her
behind,” Isaiah said with a mixture of hope and accusation.

“Yes, I left her behind.” Ellis nodded. “And I came back for her, didn't I?”

The figure at the prow of the
Mary Celeste
nodded with a slight smile. He pulled back his head, his mouth opening into a terrible, silent scream. As he did so, the hull planks began to bend. On either side of the bow, they separated with a popping noise from the keel, pulling back and exposing the ribs of the hull behind them. Then the ribs themselves separated from the keel, as though a chest cavity were being pulled open to expose the lungs and heart beneath.

Ellis took a step back.

Warm, golden light spilled out from behind the spreading of the shattered hull. Ellis could see a twisting hall beyond lit with unsteady, electric bulbs. It appeared to be a wrenched ship's corridor that wound into the bowels of the broken, derelict ships.

“You know he is waiting for you,” the figurehead said.

“I know,” Ellis said as she stepped over the broken bow of the
Mary Celeste
and into the twisting corridor lit with the flickering, yellow light beyond.

 

19

LIBRARY

Ellis stepped cautiously down the hallway. It reminded her strongly of a luxurious ship she had visited with her father as a child in Boston Harbor, only now the gleaming white paint was splintered and the bright brass fittings twisted with the torquing of the hallway frames. There was a handrail of polished oak that ran bent and warped between the fittings, which she followed down the hall. Broken doors to staterooms on either side stood ajar and beckoned her with bright colors and even the soft strains of phonograph music could be heard from a few. Ellis ignored the temptation, afraid that if she did not have the railing to lead her back, she might become irrevocably lost in the labyrinth of the broken ships. She kept her hand on the railing and continued farther into the gathered ruins of the ships.

Jonas stepped carefully behind her over floorboards that occasionally lay shattered beneath their feet. With each passing moment, more memories of their life together in the world … itself a strange thought … grew clearer in her mind. The impression she had was that it had been a difficult life made somehow stronger and more meaningful, she thought, by the tragedies they had endured together. That life had forged a bond between them that she was only now beginning to understand and even appreciate. Yet wasn't he responsible for her separation from Jenny in the first place? Hadn't he selfishly and obsessively waited for her at the Gate only to pull her into a mortal life that she had not chosen for herself? She was uncertain, now that she knew what he had done, whether he was acting in their mutual interests or primarily on his own.

“What is this place, Ellis?” Jonas stepped softly behind her with an amazed Margaret and a rather fearful Alicia trailing behind.

“I don't know exactly,” Ellis replied.

“But milady created it, did you not?” Margaret spoke as though it were both an assertion and a question all at once.

“I believe I did, after a fashion,” Ellis commented as she turned the corner at an intersection of hallways into another passage identical to the one they had just left. It was increasingly apparent that they were in some form of a maze.

“But this is madness,” Jonas said. “You've never been in such a place and I doubt very much if you have ever even imagined anything like this.”

“You're asking me what rules I'm following.” Ellis smiled to herself at the thought that Jonas did not understand the nature of the place he had taken her from a lifetime ago.

“Yes.” Jonas nodded. “I suppose I am.”

“Well, I hardly know them myself although given what I've learned of my life here before, I must have been rather adept at them in the past.” Ellis came to another intersection and led them to the right this time. “I don't try to form a place with my thoughts so much as a purpose. It feels easier to let the exact form follow its own direction than to try and force every detail. The Tween seems to conform to our hearts rather than our minds on a level deeper and more complete than conscious thought. It then presents the Day in whatever form that will be the most meaningful to whoever's Day it represents.”

“I thought Merrick created this Day,” Alicia said from the back of the group.

“Merrick was rushed into using a Book of the Day that was not his own.” Ellis came to another side corridor and considered it for a moment, then continued straight ahead. “It
is
still Merrick's Day…”

“But it was
your
Book!” Margaret said in wondrous delight.

“Exactly,” Ellis agreed as they approached a turn in the corridor.

“So you have some say in the formation of Echo House even if it isn't your Day?” Alicia was so shocked by this thought that she momentarily forgot their terrible surroundings.

“Yes, it appears that I do.” Ellis nodded.

“But that's cheating!” Alicia exclaimed.

“No, just more rules; my rules, it would seem,” Ellis corrected. “Make no mistake, however, this is
still
very much Merrick's Day. I've been able to change some of the places in Echo House into places that seem to serve our purposes although, in truth, the forms sometimes make no sense to me.”

“Nor to me,” Jonas said, pointing ahead of them as they turned the corner in another corridor. “But it seems we have arrived somewhere.”

The double doors before them were fitted with panes of frosted glass etched in an art nouveau stylizing of a woman stepping out of a well with a scourge in one hand and a mirror in the other. Words arched over the figure read
Vérité
sortant du puits armée de son martinet pour châtier l'humanité.

“Whatever is that supposed to mean?” Alicia demanded.

“It means ‘Truth rises out of her well to shame mankind,'” Ellis translated for the shaking woman. “What do you say to us rising out of the well?”

Ellis reached forward with both hands, grasped both door handles and pushed both doors open wide. She stepped in with Jonas just behind her. Alicia clung to Margaret's arm with a viselike grip despite the best efforts of the lady's maid to extract herself. As they stepped into the room, the doors quietly shut behind them.

It looked as though the hulls of seven enormous ships had been gutted and turned on their end to form a single monstrous room. The keels all rose to meet overhead at their bows, creating a domed roof fifty feet over their heads. The timbers that formed the horizontal ribs were exposed, marching upward from the scrubbed planks of a fitted hardwood floor beneath Ellis's feet. The entire space was harshly lit by numerous electric chandeliers that hung suspended from the keels of each hull.

There between each keel and set upon the horizontal rib beams were books.

Thousands of books.

Books filled every niche between the ribs, their courses rising nearly to the very peak of the room.

To one side of the impossible library, a ridiculously tall ladder stood against one of the book stacks. Atop it, a single figure sat, its back against the books as it perched on the uppermost rung. Its long claws were black and sharp, struggling to maintain its grip on the book into which its face was buried. But the hands were brick red as were its arms where they were exposed beneath the rolled-up sleeves of its white shirt and the torn gray waistcoat whose buttons were undone. The man's trousers were torn open and shredded at the knees, exposing sinewy legs matching the same brick red of its hands and ending in cloven hooves as black as its claws. A twisting tail of the same color wrapped around one of the legs of the ladder between its rungs, its bone-barbed end flicking listlessly as the creature buried its face in the book.

Alicia released Margaret, cowering at once against the closed door.

“Ellis, I think we need to leave.” There was an urgency in Jonas's whisper.

“Not at all,” Ellis replied in a clear, strong voice that echoed back toward her from the dome overhead.

Margaret winced at the loudness of the sound in so quiet a space.

“We've only just arrived here and would not wish to offend our host.” Ellis turned around, her face rising toward where the demonic creature remained with its face buried in its book. “And we certainly would not wish to offend our host, would we, Dr. Carmichael?”

The demon perched atop the ladder lowered his book suddenly and stared down at Ellis. His face was now more angular than she remembered and his skin tone now matched the deep red of the rest of him. His eyes were an uncomfortable yellow color with a reptile-like slit instead of the expected pupil. The ears were distinctly pointed. Still, despite it all, Ellis recognized the general features of the creature and the wild shock of white hair he preferred combed backward from the forehead between two sharp horns protruding from his head.

There was no denying that the demon atop the ladder was Dr. Carmichael.

“Ah, Miss Ellis.” The demon smiled back at her with sharp, pointed teeth though there was venom in his eyes. “What a delight to see you again … goodbye and go away.”

The demon Carmichael returned again to perusing the book.

“We've come calling,” Ellis insisted.

“Not taking visitors, Miss Ellis,” Carmichael called back from behind his book. “I am distinctly not at home!”

“That's Dr. Carmichael?” Alicia screeched. “What happened to him?”

“Ah, Alicia Van der Meer, I see that you are as astute and quick-witted as ever,” Carmichael sneered as he slammed closed the book and gazed down from his perch. “What happened to me, indeed? Perhaps you could ask your friend, Miss Ellis Harkington, how it is that I appear in such a state?”

“Why should we ask her?” Margaret insisted. “What has she to do with the likes of you?”

“The
likes
of me?” Carmichael howled in sudden rage. The demon threw the book in anger from the top of the ladder, slamming it into the books on the opposite wall and causing a minor cascade of volumes. He leaped from the top rung, causing the ladder to shift dangerously.

Ellis and Jonas took several hasty steps back as Carmichael plunged toward the floor. Suddenly, leathery wings unfolded from the torn back of the demon's waistcoat, arresting his fall just before he hit the ground. Carmichael crouched from the impact and then stood before them, his wings quivering in his rage behind him as he faced Margaret, who had hastily retreated against a stack of books.