Chapter Two

C rane checked the carriage clock again. Apparently time was standing still; certainly the hands had not moved perceptibly since he last looked.

"Have a drink," recommended Merrick, who was finding minor tasks around the room. Crane didn't know if he was keeping an eye out for suicide attempts or just equally nervous about the arrival of the promised shaman.

"You have a damn drink, this is your fault," he said unfairly. "God knows what this character will be like." It won't work. You're going to die. You deserve it.

"What do you call an English shaman then?" asked Merrick. "Did Mr. Rackham say?"

"We were speaking Shanghainese. I've no idea. Warlock, probably, or something equally ridiculous."

"But Mr. Rackham—"

"Yes, yes. He said he was real, he said he was good, he said he would come at half past seven. I don't have anything else to tell you, so stop asking." Brute. Ingrate. You ruined his life too.

"Twitchy, aren't you?" Merrick observed. "My lord."

"Oh, shut up."

Crane stalked round the room, too on edge to sit. He had always found hope harder to deal with than despair. Despair didn't get disappointed. And if you hoped, you were always a suppliant, begging for crumbs, and Crane did not take pleasure in supplication. Quite the reverse.

But somewhere in the roiling misery a thread of hope refused to die. If this was truly an English shaman... If this was a shaman problem, not his father's blood legacy... If his mind was still his own...

The doorbell rang. Merrick almost ran to answer it. Crane very carefully didn't follow. He stood listening to the exchange in the hall—"Mr. Rackham asked me to call. I'm here to see Lucien Vaudrey,"—and waited for the door to open.

"Your visitor, sir." Merrick ushered the shaman in.

He was incredibly unimpressive. Short, for one thing, barely five feet tall, narrow shouldered, significantly underweight, hollow-cheeked. He had reddish-brown hair cut unfashionably close, possibly against a hint of curls. His worn suit of faded black was obviously cheap and didn't fit terribly well; bizarrely, he wore cheap cotton gloves. He looked like a clerk, the ten-a-penny kind who drudged in every counting house, except that he had tawny-gold eyes that were vividly glowing in his pale rigid face, and they were staring at Crane with something that looked extraordinarily like hate.

"I'm Lucien Vaudrey," said Crane, extending his hand.

"You're Lord Crane," said the visitor, not extending his. "I had to be sure. But you're a Vaudrey of Lychdale, aren't you?"

Crane looked at the naked hostility in the other man's face and posture, and strolled to a conclusion, since he hardly needed to jump.

"I take it you've encountered my brother, Hector," he said. "Or possibly my father."

"Both." The little man spat the word out. "Oh, I've encountered your family alright. It's something of an irony to be sent to help one of you. "

Crane shut his eyes for a second. To hell with you, Father, if you're not already there. You won't rest till you've destroyed me, will you? He struggled to control his voice against the anger, the crushing despair. "And your purpose in coming here tonight is to tell me that any member of my family can go to the devil? Very well. Consider me told, and be damned to you."

"Sadly, I don't have that luxury," said the visitor, upper lip curling into what was probably meant as a sneer but ended up a snarl. "Your friend Mr. Rackham demanded a favour on your behalf."

"Not a terribly impressive favour," said Crane, his own sneer calling on eight generations of earldom, as well as the gaping hole in his chest where hope had been. They had waited four days for this man during which he had had another attack. Everything had depended on this last throw of the dice. "I understood he was sending a shaman, not a pint-sized counter-jumper."

The other man dumped his battered carpetbag on the floor and clenched his fists. He took a belligerent stride forward, aggressively close to Crane, so that he was staring up into the much taller man's face. "My name is Stephen Day." He jabbed a finger into Crane's chest. "And—"

He stopped there, mouth slightly open. Crane very deliberately pushed his hand away. Day didn't react, the hand held in midair. Crane raised an eyebrow. "And?"

Day's reddish brows twitched, drew together. His tawny eyes were staring into Crane's, but not quite focusing, his pupils wide and black. He tilted his head to one side, then the other.

" And? Did you by any chance meet Mr. Rackham in an opium hell?" enquired Crane coldly.

"Yes," Day said. "Give me your hand."

"What?"

Day grabbed Crane's hand with both his gloved hands and stared at it. Crane pulled back angrily. Day kept his left-hand grip, but raised his right hand to his mouth, and dragged his glove off with his teeth. He spat it onto the floor, and said, "This will feel strange," as he seized Crane's hand with his bare skin.

"Christ!" yelped Crane, trying again to pull away, this time with alarm. Day's grip tightened. Crane looked down with disbelief. Aside from a jagged scar running across his knuckles, Day's hand looked perfectly normal, if rather large for his small frame. Lightly dusted with dark hairs, gripping and turning Crane's fingers, but everywhere Day's skin touched his, he could feel a tingling flow, like a thousand tiny cold pinpricks, alive, electric, streaming into his blood. He gritted his teeth. Day's thumb gently brushed over the inside of his wrist, and he felt the skin rise into goose pimples.

"What the hell is that?"

"Me." Day released Crane's hand long enough to remove his second glove, also with his teeth, then grabbed it again. "Well, someone wants you dead. How long has this been going on?"

"About two months." Crane didn't bother to question what the man meant. The fizzing sensation was getting stronger, rising through his fingers into his wrists, prickling at the wound under the bandage.

"Two months ? How many times have you attempted suicide?"

"Four," said Crane. "Three times in the last fortnight. I think I'm going to succeed soon."

"I'm amazed you've failed to date." Day scowled. "All right. I am going to deal with it, because I owe Mr. Rackham a favour, and because this is not something that should happen to anyone, even a Vaudrey. My fee is ten guineas—for you, twenty. Don't argue it, because I would measure your remaining lifespan in hours rather than days right now. Don't provoke me, because I will not need much provocation to walk away. You'll need to answer my questions fully and frankly, and do what I tell you. Is that clear?"

Crane looked at the other man's intent face. "Can you stop what's happening to me? "

"I wouldn't be here otherwise."

"Then I accept your terms," said Crane. "Are you really a shaman?" The pulsing counsel of grey despair was beating at his mind, a large part of him wanted to kick the little swine downstairs, and the smaller man's roiling anger did not inspire confidence in his goodwill, but Crane's hand was electric with the current flowing through Day's fingers, and those tawny irises were almost completely obliterated by huge black pupils. Crane had seen Yu Len's eyes dilated in the same way, and a tendril of genuine, terrified hope was unfurling once more through the darkness.

"I don't know what a shaman is." Day looked Crane up and down, head slightly cocked, squinting. "Sit, and tell me about it."

Crane sat. Day pulled up a footstool and knelt on it, looking intently at—through?—Crane's head.

"I came back to England four months ago, after my father's death," Crane began.

Day's eyes met his for a second. "Your father died two years ago."

"Yes. I came back here four months ago. Spent the first couple of months ploughing through the mess my father made of his affairs. No problems." He refrained with an effort from jerking his head back as Day put a hand up next to his face, fingers moving oddly. "I went down to Piper two months ago when I could no longer put it off. You're acquainted with my family, do you know the house?"

"Not to visit." Day's gaze and tone were remote, and his fingers were twitching the air around Crane's face, picking and flicking at nothing.

"Well. I was in the library at Piper, working on the account books, and I was overcome by this appalling sense of misery and shame and self-loathing. Horror. Despair. It was dreadful. But it stopped as abruptly as it started, and, since Piper is not a happy house, I put it down to a strange mood. And then the next night, I sat down with a whisky and a book, and the next thing I was fully aware of, Merrick, my man, was shouting at me because I'd tried to hang myself from the bell rope. I have no memory of doing that, just of Merrick dragging me down."

Day's eyes flicked up to Crane's again. "Then?"

"I left," Crane said with a sardonic twist of the lips. "Ran away back to London. And—it's absurd, but I almost forgot about it. It seemed like something that happened to someone else. I was entirely myself again. Then I had to go back down to Piper a couple of weeks ago. The first two days were fine. But the next evening...same thing. I tried to cut my wrist that time."

"Where?"

Crane indicated the point on his wrist. Day exhaled through his nostrils. "Where in the house ?"

"Oh. The library."

"Was the first time in the library as well?"

"Yes."

"Has anything happened outside that room?"

"Not in Piper. But after we got back, last week, it began to happen here. I tried to cut my wrist six days ago, and again last night."

"Location?"

"This room."

Day sat back on his heels. "Do you recall the times of the episodes?"

"The evening, always. Time tends to feel a little vague."

"Mmm. Now, I need you to think carefully about this. Have you, since your return from China, ever spent an evening in the library at Piper without one of these attacks?"

Crane considered that. "I don't think so."

"And before the first attack here, had you spent an evening in this room without an attack?"

"Yes, several. "

"And, after these episodes, did your mouth taste of ivy?"

Crane felt a cold prickle run down his spine. "Yes," he said, as calmly as he could. "Or, at least, bitter green leaves. Strongly. And, ah...the very first time I felt it, the room smelled of the same thing. Stank of it."

"Yes, it would. What did you bring back from Piper?"

"Bring back?"

"An object. A box. Furniture. A coat with something in its pockets. Something came from the library at Piper on or after your last visit and it is here now. What is it?"

The mansion flat was a self-contained set of rooms in one of the new buildings on the Strand. Crane had had it fitted with the basic items of furniture and he, or rather Merrick, had hung the walls with scrolls and paintings brought back from China, but he'd never planned to stay here for long. It had seemed sensible, frugal by his standards, to bring decent pieces from Piper, now all of it was his.

"We have quite a few things from Piper," he said. "A couple of pictures, the wooden chests—"

"Since your last visit down?" Day interrupted.

"Some of it, I think. I'm not sure. I don't pay a lot of attention to these things. But I know a man who does. You might as well come in," Crane went on without raising his voice.

Merrick opened the door with some dignity. "My lord," he said. "We brought back a number of items on our most recent return, Mr. Day. That picture was, I believe, in the library at Piper." Day leapt up to inspect it, running his fingers over the frame, ignoring the image. "There were also a number of books, sir. They have been placed on these shelves."

"Together?" asked Day, staring at the crowded shelves that covered an entire wall.

"No, sir."

"Blast. "

Day moved over to the shelf and spread his hands out over the spines of several books, fingers twitching slightly. "Nothing is leaping out at me. Lord Crane, I suggest you leave before it happens again and let me try to find it on my own."

"Find what ? Do you know what's happening to me?"

"It's a Judas jack." Day turned a thick book over in his hands. "No question about that. We're looking for something about the size of an apple. Wooden. You brought something back with this thing in it, and it's in this room somewhere. Now, Mr. Merrick, please take Lord Crane out of this building, and keep him away for a couple of hours. He should not be here in the evening till I find this thing, and it's nearly eight already."

Crane and Merrick both glanced automatically at the clock. Merrick said, hesitantly, "My lord, that ain't the library clock from Piper, is it?"

Crane's brows drew together. "It looks like it. Ugly thing. But you brought it, you should know."

"I didn't bring it. It turned up here. I thought you brought it."

"No," said Crane, with care. "No, I don't recall doing that."

Day looked at the carriage clock that stood on the mantelpiece. It showed one minute to eight. He flexed his hands before reaching out and picking it up.

"The back's locked," he observed. "It's big enough. And...a clock, and it happens at the same time... Lord Crane, leave. Get out. Mr. Merrick, get rid of him now ."

"Yes, sir—oh shit," said Merrick as the clock began to strike and Crane took a horrible, sucking breath.