Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller by Eric Christopherson Page A

it here.” Howard turned the statue upside down to survey the coded inscription written on its base. A moment later, he tossed it high in the air and shot it to bits on the way down. “Langley!” he cried to the ceiling. “You're dead! You hear me? Dead!”
    “Dead, dead,” echoed the antechamber.
    To our party he said in a bitterly measured voice: “There was nothing on it. No writing, no markings of any kind at the bottom of the statue.”
    “B'Jaysus!” Cormac said. “We've been hoodwinked!”
    Howard tossed a piece of the splintered statue over a corseted department store dummy and into the darkness beyond. “It was all a ruse to spring his trap on us. The sneaky little bastard. I really will kill him for this. Wring his scrawny neck with my bare hands.”
    “Not until—” Cormac began.
    “Yes, of course,” Howard said. “Not until.” He went back to calling out: “Brady!”
    “What about the codebook?” Cormac thumbed toward where I held it open in my lap. “A crock of shite too?”
    “Most probably.”
    “We need that wee bastard. To make him talk. But how do we nab him now?”
    “Only one sure way I can think of—nab the sister upstairs.”
    “Right,” Cormac said and coughed. “He turns himself over to us, or”—he grimaced in pain—“or she gets it. Then he tells us where the coins are, or they both get it.”
    “He's got a head start,” Howard said, “and he knows every inch of this dump, but it can't be easy transporting a cripple. We get up there fast enough, we'll hear ole Noah dragging his sister across the floor. But if we don't, then they'll settle into some hidey hole and wait us out. We'd never find them.”
    A gong rang, the sound gentle but not dim. I'd heard it once before in Noah's presence.
    “What's that?” Cora said just before the gong rang a second time.
    “Noah's sister, Elizabeth,” I said. “It's how she summons her brother. She pulls a cord in her bedroom and it rings down here. There's a series of pulleys and cranks buried in the walls. When the house still had servants it only rang in the kitchen, where there's a lever to indicate which room pulled the cord. But Noah, who used to be an engineer of some kind, rigged up the system so that a gong rings throughout the building, so that he can hear her summons from any room in the house.”
    “She must've heard the great crash when the trap was sprung,” Cora said, “and the gunshots. She's worried about her brother now.”
    “Excellent!” Howard stood, dusted himself off. “It means he hasn't got to her yet. It means there's still time for us to catch up to them before they can disappear into hiding.”
    From high above us on the staircase we heard footsteps descending and Brady's voice. “Finally, the fecking stairs!”
    “Stay put, Brady!” Howard called. “We're coming up!” He aimed the gun at my chest and cocked the hammer. “Well, some of us, anyway.”
     
    Walking the Point
     
    Instinct, or the life force within me, swept the gas lantern off its perch without consideration for the potential consequences. At the same time, I pitched forward in a somersault to avoid gunfire. I was still in a ball of motion when I noticed the revolver hadn't thundered and that a curtain of darkness hadn't fallen as I'd intended.
    A spark from the lantern—and perhaps a bit of spewed kerosene—had almost instantly set ablaze one of the old newspaper bundles. It was bright as a campfire circle by the time I came to a stop on my fanny and saw Howard seeing me. For a moment lasting an eternity I was sure I was dead. But to my surprise, he uncocked the hammer of the revolver and lowered the weapon to his side.
    “Notify Ringling Brothers. We have ourselves a one-armed acrobat.” He dropped his mask below his chin. “I wasn't really going to shoot you dead, Trenowyth. At least not yet.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I've thought of another use for you, now that it's a good bet that codebook you've got is a