filled with angry dark things that waited behind some sightless angle invisible to human eyes, hunting for a way out into the world of men. When his fingers brushed the wood of the wall, it felt warmer than it should have, charged with unholy power. The whole house was turning into a giant battery, a hideous talisman of the forces released there.
He turned his mind quickly from it and sought in the thick dark air of those turning corridors, those closed-in rooms, for other sounds. He heard the slow, untroubled draw of breath from Gall’s room—a panting, adenoidal snuffle from Baldur’s. Then soft, shallow, and even, the breathing of von Rath sounded in a closed and seemly sleep.
At his low whistle Leibnitz and Sara left the shelter of the woods, crossed to the fence, set props, slithered under, took the props, and moved across the yard to join him with surprising agility and speed. Rhion pulled the door shut; his pulse was hammering and a cold tightness in his chest had driven out all tiredness or thought of sleep. There was no turning back now. The only way out was through.
“Here.” By the reflected glow of the yard lights beyond the windows, Sara led the way to the old dumbwaiter shaft. “Can you manage, Papa?”
“Fifty years I am learning the wisdom of great men, the Torah and the Talmud and the names of the angels of each sphere of the world and the numbers by which the Lord rules the universe, and now at my age I find I should have studied to be Tarzan instead.” He glanced at the neat footholds recessed into the shaft wall and the rope hanging down into darkness. “How many steps are those?”
Sara shrugged. “I don’t know. Twelve or thirteen, I think.”
He waved his hands and addressed the ceiling. “She doesn’t know. If it’s twelve it computes to three, which is fulfillment and the realization of goals, but if it is thirteen it computes to four, an astronomic squaring that implies legally constituted authority which around here is not something we want to be dealing with...” His voice faded into a mutter as he climbed gingerly down the shaft. “I should have known that when the sum of my birth’s Gematria computed with this year’s date to give me 3,255, I should have known then to watch out...”
Sara rolled her eyes ceilingward, and followed.
The cellar was pitch black. Sara fumbled her flashlight from the deep pocket of her trousers, but Rhion caught her hand and shook his head, then, remembering she couldn’t see the gesture, breathed, “No.”
“A light’s not gonna call more attention than the sound of us tripping over boxes.”
“I’ll guide you.” Their voices were barely a flicker of sound in the stillness, but nonetheless made him uneasy. They were close, so close. It seemed to him now that in the silence von Rath must hear, even in sleep, the thudding of his heart.
A rat skittered through the dusty coal bin as they passed it; ghostly sheets of spider floss lifted from the old drying racks with the breeze stirred by their passing. Rhion led them down the long abyss of the cellar, past the crouching, crusted iron monster of the sleeping furnace, his ears straining for the faintest sound from above.
But there was nothing. Only the faint underwhisper that had begun to grow in the house itself, the angry, buzzing murmur of its restless ghosts.
This has to work, he thought desperately, his hands cold in the warm strong grip of Leibnitz’ fingers, the hard little clutch of Sara’s. This is our last chance. Please, God, let it work.
But the gods of his own universe and of this one hated wizards. It figures.
They shifted the boxes as quietly as they could, and while Rhion and Leibnitz stood between the flashlight glare and the stairs that led up into the main part of the house, Sara went to work on the lock.
“This also you learn in America?”
Sara opened her mouth to retort and Rhion cut her off hastily with a whispered “Will you stand guard?”
“What, you’re not going to give her a tommy gun?”
“Papa, I’m telling you I’d trade Mama’s silver candlesticks for one right now.”
Rhion pulled the scandalized scholar through the door before he could reply, and closed it behind him. For a moment they stood, sealed into the darkness; then Rhion took a stub of candle from his pocket and, with a guard’s steel lighter with its Deaths-Head engraving, called flame to