A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Four: Hell's Architect

8 hours ago:

There was a lot to come to terms with. There were a lot of threads to sort through – and they were all tangled tight about him, trying their hardest to saw through his flesh.

What Jack had actually said or done while sorting through these threads was a mystery to him. He would have the occasional moment of clarity – where he would wake up, drenched in sweat, and just know that he had killed Ellini. It was the kind of thought that stopped all other thoughts, and he would stare blankly into its recesses for a long time, feeling the cold strike into his bones.

But something must have been directing his steps while he was semi-conscious, because, during one of those moments of clarity, he found himself lying on the floor in a bare, unfurnished room, with moonlight streaming onto him through the leaded windows.

Unwittingly, he thought of Ellini's habit of lying on the bedroom floor, just outside the squares of sunlight. And it was as if someone had stomped on his stomach. He rolled onto his side and curled up around the pain, trying to contain it. He felt as though it would rip him to shreds if it burst free.

And, as the world swam back into focus, he realized where he was. It was the cursed room – the empty apartment in which Lily Hamilton had hanged herself, and which her landlady had never been able to let out since.

Dimly, he tried to ascertain whether he was injured, but the pain was too ubiquitous to tell. If there were certain parts of him that hurt more than the rest, he couldn't pick them out. He couldn't move his fingers much, and his knuckles were puffy and raw, but there was no blood. Presumably, he'd been punching solid objects – maybe even windows – on his way here. He pictured a trail of intermittent fist-marks on every wall between Broad Street and the High. It brought something like a smile to his lips.

Was it sympathy that had led him here? These drab, papered walls must have soaked up a lot of angst in their time, and misery loves company. He wondered if Miss Hamilton had stared up at the ceiling exactly as he was doing now, panting with despair, waiting for the next fit to take her.

He wondered what Ellini had stared up at, in her last moments, and the thought tipped him over the edge again. It had been the damp, sagging Oxford skies, hadn't it? No perfect Indian dark, with stars so bright you could see them pricking through the roof of the tent. Those horrible Oxford skies had hemmed her in right up until the end.

She'd had the music perhaps, from that pianist she loved to listen to – the man who had comforted her when he hadn't.

There was nothing left to throw up by this point, but Jack stiffened and retched anyway, watching as the world blurred out of focus. He wasn't going to shut his eyes. He would only see worse things if he did that.

When the blurred shapes in front of him started to re-solidify, he realized he was looking up at the window again. But it took a few more minutes of dull, dead-eyed staring before he realized what it was that had caught his attention.

The amulets were still there. They had removed all the furniture, but they'd left the amulets hanging in the window, as though they thought the room would get even more cursed if proper precautions weren't taken.

They were the usual assortment of metal discs and crystals. Lily Hamilton had been a shop-girl, hadn't she, so there would have been no money for anything fancy. Most of them were lacquered and gaudy. They reminded him of the painted plaster statues you saw for sale at Catholic shrines.

But one of them was a dagger. Not shaped like a dagger, but a proper dagger, with a handle of bone or ivory, and a blade that was almost blinding in the moonlight. It was the only thing in the window that wasn't painted or rusty.