Ring. Sister. Piano (Book 4 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Seven: Strange, Wonderful and Bloody Alterations

Cambridgeshire, 1882: 

The man who called himself Doctor Faustus finally stopped talking. Alice had been pacing about his cluttered little cave as he spoke, stifling the urge to interrupt him.

She wanted to know this story. She sensed there was something in it besides the old man's spooky rhetoric. But that didn't mean she wasn't going to question it with every ounce of her scientific training.

"How do you claim to know all this?" she said, halting her steps and rounding on him. "Particularly the thoughts and feelings of this 'Myrrha' character?"

"'Twas our pact," said Faustus. "My knowledge for hers, hers for mine. She took into ownership my journals, and I, her memories. With hers, I learned much of conjuring. With mine, she learned much of Eve. They say Faustus sold his soul to the devil, but I did no more than this. Yet in so doing have I imperilled more souls than mine own."

Alice glanced at Val, but she didn't find her own curiosity mirrored there – just her face, in the woman's shiny breastplate, though it was already getting steamy and begrimed with the closeness of this place.

Val had been listening intently. Her skepticism had crumbled – and her shoulders slumped – when she had seen the dragons. Alice could see that, between the old man's delighted, dastardly speech, and Val's gloomy acceptance of it, she was going to have to be the sole representative of sanity. Again.

"Very well," she said, half-closing her eyes. "Tell us about this pact. What was in your journals, that Myrrha wanted them so badly?"

The old man sat up, with an audible creaking of bones. "There can I satisfy you in every particular, for I had copies made."

He scuttled to one of his piles of refuse and rummaged there, muttering under his breath. Every paper he drew out was damp and curling – some were even furry with mould – but Alice repressed a shudder, in the interests of scientific enquiry.

Finally, he took out a sheaf of paper slightly whiter than the others, crammed from corner to corner with an almost indecipherable script.

Alice had seen Tudor secretary hand, with all its curious flourishes and abbreviation-marks, in the Faculty Archives, and marvelled that anyone had the time or the patience to decode it. This appeared to be genuine. Still, the paper looked suspiciously new for a sixteenth-century document, and she couldn't help saying so.

"Yea, my good Darwin," said the old man. "I must of necessity re-copy my journal every decade, else would the paper moulder and decay. Yet are these but copies of a copy. The originals reside with she whose story I have already begun to relate to you."

There was silence, followed by a rather smug smile from the old man. "Wilt be seated, kind ladies?"

"We haven't been kind yet," said Alice, glancing at the stuffed hessian sack on a rock which presumably served as his armchair. He was ushering her towards it as though it was the finest seat in the house.

"Ah, but I have great hopes of ye," said Faustus, with a smile that had the same grimy gleam as Val's breastplate. "Wilt have something to eat? I would not see two such fine ladies pass without offering them a trencher at my table."

Alice looked for his table, to no avail. The truth was, she was hungry, but she doubted she could eat anything that the old man would consider fit for human consumption, any more than she would be seen dead in his tattered cloak.

"What do you live on?" she asked, looking about her. She wouldn't have put it past him to scrape the green mould off the clock-face and eat it from under his fingernails. "Mushrooms? Dragon eggs?"