Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller by Eric Christopherson

thus likely capable of hitting me through the dark with that bullet, or with his second or third shot.
    Another concern was that a lit lantern overturned in this setting of aged glut—with its snowpack of dust, its decay and desiccation—risked a fire. Nay, a monumental conflagration! That Noah had dropped the lantern without incendiary result while making his escape meant nothing, for the deadfall trap's stir had extinguished the lantern's flame as a giant's breath might a birthday candle.
    “The statue?” Cormac said in a weak voice to Howard.
    “We'll find it,” he said. “When Willie gets back, or if Brady—”
    “Howie!” came a muffled voice from somewhere distant overhead. “You down there?”
    “Brady?” Howard called, lowering his mask. “Where the hell you been? Did you—”
    “I lost the little bugger! It's blacker than a pint of Guinness up here!”
    “Son of a bitch!” Howard said. Cormac repeated the oath under his breath.
    “Thought I had him cornered!” Brady said. “But he disappeared somehow!”
    “Well, get your ass back down here! Now!'
    “That's just it, I can't!”
    “What d'ya mean?” Howard's gaze shifted for an instant from me to the ceiling.
    “Can't find the staircase! I'm lost!”
    “Lost? So just follow the sound of my voice!”
    “Okay, then!” The two miscreants proceeded to shout each other's names, back and forth, one after the other, every few seconds.
    “You're getting warmer!” Howard said after a time.
    I pondered Noah's next move. Unbeknownst to the robbers, a secret exit to the street could be found somewhere within this vile labyrinth. On the day that he'd appeared at my law firm, Noah had used it to evade the authorities who'd come to evict him. But its location was unknown to me.
    Could Noah access his secret exit without drawing the attention of the robbers?
    Would he? To fetch the police?
    Or would he instead scurry up to his sister's room? To hide with her perhaps?
    My hope was for the latter option. If the police came pounding, then I had no doubt the remaining hostages would be executed before the robbers sought to flee. Cormac had threatened as much already—and before the killings. Now we were witnesses to murder, Miss Buxton and I, twice over, a child's and a police officer's no less.
    Needless to say, prudence meant assuming that Noah Langley would summon the law, and so I resolved to attack the captors—or to escape them with Miss Buxton—just as soon as I'd formed a feasible plan.
    “How's it coming?” Howard asked me.
    “A pen would help,” I said. “To take notes.”
    To Miss Buxton, who was still tending Cormac, he said: “You. Find him one.” He swung his gaze back to me. “What've you learned so far?”
    I swallowed hard. “Give me a moment more.”
    “I don't like the sound of that.”
    “Just a moment more, I think I've made a start at last . . .”
    I focused on Noah's writing with true purpose now—not in desperate hope that I might actually crack the code, but merely to concoct a lie Howard would believe, to allege a pattern I'd found in Noah's scrambled scribblings, a little specious progress to help ensure the progression of the lives of the hostages.
    Brady's “Howard!” grew louder, nearer. Howard's “Brady!” became “Mickey!” for sport, then “Paddy!” then “Piker!” then “Green nigger!” and so on.
    Meanwhile, Cora gamely sifted through the rubble for a fountain pen, whilst I hit on the idea of identifying the most common symbol in the notebook and declaring it to be the letter, E , which is the most commonly used letter in the English language. I was about to declare my bogus finding when Cora, who was by now searching on her hands and knees, suddenly froze.
    “What is it?” Howard asked. She glanced at him, at me, back to Howard.
    “The Laughing Buddha.” She pushed aside a bundle of old newspapers to reveal where it lay half-buried between a pair of moose antlers.
    “Good work, Doll. Bring