prayers did he dare confess the reason. The Purge excited him—it roused his blood and his manhood - and he had no doubt that Charlotte had responded to this heat, even though he’d made no outward show of it. He promptly accepted her offer, and at her suggestion they agreed to meet at the Tower on the last evening of the old year. He brought a bottle of champagne.
‘We may as well enjoy ourselves,’ he said, as they headed down through the remains of Roxborough’s original house, a floor of which had been preserved and concealed within the plainer walls of the Tower.
Neither of them had ventured into this underworld for many years. It was more primitive than either of them remembered. Electric light had been crudely installed -cables from which bare bulbs hung looped along the passages - but otherwise the place was just as it had been in the first years of the Tabula Rasa. The cellars had been built for the express purpose of housing the Society’s collection; thus for the millennium. A fan of identical corridors spread from the bottom stairs, lined on both sides with shelves that rose up the brick walls to the curve of the ceilings. The intersections were elaborately vaulted, but otherwise there was no decoration.
‘Shall we break open the bottle before we start?’ Bloxham suggested.
‘Why not? What are we drinking from?’
His reply was to bring two fluted glasses from his pocket. She claimed them from him while he opened the bottle, its cork coming with no more than a decorous sigh, the sound of which carried away through the labyrinth, and failed to return. Glasses filled, they drank to the Purge.
‘Now we’re here,’ Charlotte said, pulling her furs up around her, ‘what are we looking for?’
‘Any sign of tampering or theft,’ Bloxham said. ‘Shall we split up or go together?’
‘Oh, together,’ she replied.
It had been Roxborough’s claim that these shelves carried every single volume of any significance in the hemisphere, and as they wandered together, surveying the tens of thousands of manuscripts and books, it was easy to believe the boast.
‘How in hell’s name do you suppose they gathered all this stuff up?’ Charlotte wondered as they walked.
‘I daresay the world was smaller then,’ Bloxham remarked. ‘They all knew each other, didn’t they? Casanova, Sartori, the Comte de Saint-Germain. All fakes and buggers together.’
‘Fakes? Do you really think so?’
‘Most of them,’ Bloxham said, wallowing in the ill-deserved role of expert. ‘There may have been one or two, I suppose, who knew what they were doing.’ ‘Have you ever been tempted?’ Charlotte asked him, slipping her arm through the crook of his as they went. ‘To do what?’
‘To see if any of it’s worth a damn. To try raising a familiar, or crossing into the Dominions?’
He looked at her with genuine astonishment.
‘That’s against every precept of the Society,’ he said.
‘That’s not what I asked,’ she replied, almost curtly. ‘I said: have you ever been tempted?’
‘My father taught me that any dealings with the Imajica would put my soul in jeopardy.’
‘Mine said the same. But I think he regretted not finding out for himself at the end. I mean, if there’s no truth in it, then there’s no harm.’
‘Oh I believe there’s truth in it,’ Bloxham said.
‘You believe there are other Dominions?’
‘You saw that damn creature Godolphin cut up in front of us.’
‘I saw a species I hadn’t seen before, that’s all.’ She stopped and arbitrarily plucked a book from the shelves. ‘But I wonder sometimes if the fortress we’re guarding isn’t empty.’ She opened the book, and a lock of hair fell from it. ‘Maybe it’s all invention,’ she said. ‘Drug dreams and fancy.’ She put the book back on the shelf, and turned to face Bloxham. ‘Did you really invite me down here to check the security?’ she murmured. ‘I’m going to be damn disappointed if you did.’
‘Not entirely,’ he said.
‘Good,’ she replied, and wandered on, deeper into the maze.
2
Though Jude had been invited to a number of New Year’s Eve parties, she’d made no firm commitment to attend any of them, for which fact, after the sorrows the day had brought, she was thankful. She’d offered to stay with Clem once Taylor’s body had been taken from the house, but he’d quietly declined, saying that he needed the time alone. He was comforted to know she’d be at the other end of the telephone if he needed her, however, and said he’d call if he got too maudlin.
One of the parties she’d been invited to was at the house opposite her flat, and on the evidence of past years it would raise quite a din. She’d several times been one of the celebrants there herself, but it was no great hardship to be alone tonight. She was in no mood to trust the future if what the New Year brought was more of what the old had offered. She closed the curtains in the hope that her presence would go undetected, lit some candles, put on a flute concerto, and started to prepare something light for supper. As she washed her hands, she found that her fingers and palms had taken on a light dusting of colour from the stone. She’d caught herself toying with it several times during the afternoon, and pocketed it, only to find minutes later that it was once again in her hands. Why the colour it had left behind had escaped her until now she didn’t know. She rubbed her hands briskly beneath the tap to wash the dust off, but when she came to dry them found the colour was actually brighter. She went into the bathroom to study the phenomenon under a more intense light. It wasn’t, as she’d first thought, dust. The pigment seemed to be in her skin, like a henna stain. Nor was it confined to her palms. It had spread to her wrists, where she was sure her flesh hadn’t come in contact with the stone. She took off her blouse, and to her shock discovered there were irregular patches of colour at her elbows as well. She started talking to herself, which she always did when she was confounded by something.
‘What the hell is this? I’m turning blue? This is ridiculous.’
Ridiculous maybe, but none too funny. There was a crawl of panic in her stomach. Had she caught some disease from the stone? Was that why Estabrook had wrapped it up so carefully and hidden it away?
She turned on the shower, and stripped. There were no further stains on her body that she could find, which was some small comfort. With the water seething hot she stepped into the bath, working up a lather and rubbing at the colour. The combination of heat and the panic in her belly was dizzying her, and halfway through scrubbing at her skin she feared she was going to faint and had to step out of the bath again, reaching to open the bathroom door, and let in some cooler air. Her slick hand slid on the door-knob however, and cursing she reeled round for a towel to wipe the soap off. As she did so she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her neck was blue. The skin around her eyes was blue. Her brow was blue, all the way up into her hairline. She backed away from this grotesquerie, flattening herself against the steam-wetted tiles.
This isn’t real,’ she said aloud.
She reached for the handle a second time, and wrenched at it with sufficient
