What’s your plan?” She peered down at him. “I mean, is Mrs. Quincy going to get this thing out of my hand, or what?”
Stanton looked up at her.
“That may not be within her range of abilities,” he said. “But if she will consent, I hope she will contact Professor Mirabilis and ask him to pay us a visit.”
“But isn’t he all the way back in New York? That would be weeks waiting here. She didn’t seem that hospitable.”
“No, it wouldn’t be weeks,” Stanton said. “Mrs. Quincy has a Haälbeck door.”
“A what?”
Stanton gestured to a door that Emily had taken, at a glance, for a closet. On closer examination, however, she realized that it was far too fancy to lead to a musty room full of mothballs. It was extravagantly inlaid from panel to frame.
“This door?” Emily went over to it.
“Don’t touch it!” Stanton leapt to his feet. “There’s no telling what that stone in your hand would do to Mr. Haälbeck.”
Stepping past her, he touched the frame of the wood, closing his eyes. Under his breath, he murmured, “Greetings, Herr Haälbeck,” and then grasped the ornate wrought silver handle and opened the door. It opened onto a papered wall.
“Locked,” he said. “Just as I expected.”
Emily looked at him. She let out a long sigh that suggested oceans of abused patience.
“Haälbeck doors have terminal points in many different locations. If it weren’t for the stone in your hand—and the fact that Mrs. Quincy very wisely keeps the door locked—we could walk through this one right now and be in New York. Or Chicago, or London, or Bombay, or any one of hundreds of different locations.”
“Really?” Emily said. That did sound quite useful. “But that doesn’t explain why you were so concerned that I might do harm to whoever this Mr. Haälbeck is.”
“Have a look at the wood of the frame,” Stanton said.
Emily did, not quite understanding what the door frame had to do with the mysterious Mr. Haälbeck, but resigned to the fact that Stanton was going to explain it to her, probably exhaustively. The wood was a strange color—gold with a bluish tinge, like oak that had been stained with huckleberry juice.
“It is uchawi wood. It comes from Africa. It has an extremely high capacity for storing mantic energy. Each of the Haälbeck doors is made from this wood, and the frame of each door contains a small piece of the wood in which the spirit of a German Warlock named Haälbeck resides.” Stanton pointed to a place on the upper left-hand corner of the door frame, where a small piece of old-looking wood had been inlaid as part of a pretty star pattern. “There’s the piece that contains Mr. Haälbeck.”
Emily wrinkled her nose.
“You’re telling me that that little piece of wood contains his whole spirit?”
“Spirit, essence, soul, whatever you prefer to call it. And no, his spirit is not just in that little piece of wood. It’s spread out among all the other little pieces of wood that were taken from the Haälbeck timber to make Haälbeck doors.”
Emily settled herself back onto the horsehair couch.
“All right, what is the Haälbeck timber?”
“The year was 1789.” Stanton clasped his hands behind his back and assumed a professorial stance. “Herr Gustav Haälbeck, a Warlock with a mercantilist bent, was determined to make his fortune by creating a teleportational portal through which items could be shipped over great distances. Traditional magical teleportation requires a very large amount of mantic energy, and he was working with a large trunk of uchawi wood, trying to find a way to make it hold enough energy to fuel a stable portal.
“His preliminary experiments were unsuccessful. Even uchawi wood could not hold sufficient quantities of mantic energy. So Haälbeck began to experiment with the structure of the wood itself, altering it to make it more mantically attractive, so that more power could be stuffed into it, so to speak.”
“And he succeeded?”
“All too well. He imbued the wood with too much attractive force, which resulted in a violent and involuntary metempsychosis …” Stanton paused at the look of bewilderment on Emily’s face. “Put simply, it sucked his soul right into it, much against his will.”
Emily stared at Stanton, wide-eyed. “His soul got sucked into the wood?”
“Yes,” Stanton said. “And that piece of wood became known as the Haälbeck timber.”
“How … unfortunate!”
“Well, every cloud has a silver lining. Haälbeck’s spirit imbued the Haälbeck timber with an immense amount of power—more power than anyone has ever since been able to contain