"Go, " said the voice of the Cenobite. She could see them no longer; they were already lost behind the blood-flecked air. Accepting their invitation, she opened the door, while behind her Frank began to scream.
As she stepped onto the landing plaster dust cascaded from the ceiling; the house was growling from basement to eaves. She had to go quickly, she knew, before whatever demons were loose here shook the place apart.
But, though time was short, she could not prevent herself from snatching one look at Frank, to be certain that he would come after her no longer.
He was in extremis, hooked through in a dozen or more places, fresh wounds gouged in him even as she watched. Spread-eagled beneath the solitary bulb, body hauled to the limits of its endurance and beyond, he gave vent to shrieks that would have won pity from her, had she not learned better.
Suddenly, his cries stopped. There was a pause. And then, in one last act of defiance, he cranked up his heavy head and stared at her, meeting her gaze with eyes from which all bafflement and all malice had fled. They glittered as they rested on her, pearls in offal.
In response, the chains were drawn an inch tighter, but the Cenobites gained no further cry from him. Instead he put his tongue out at Kirsty, and flicked it back and forth across his teeth in a gesture of unrepentant lewdness.
Then he came unsewn.
His limbs separated from his torso, and his head from his shoulders, in a welter of bone shards and heat. She threw the door closed, as something thudded against it from the other side. His head, she guessed.
Then she was staggering downstairs, with wolves howling in the walls, and the bells in turmoil, and everywhere-thickening the air like smoke-the ghosts of wounded birds, sewn wing tip to wing tip, and lost to flight.
She reached the bottom of the stairs, and began along the hallway to the front door, but as she came within spitting distance of freedom she heard somebody call her name.
It was Julia. There was blood on the hall floor, marking a trail from the spot where Frank had abandoned her, through into the dining room.
"Kirsty..." she called again. It was a pitiable sound, and despite the wing-choked air, she could not help but go in pursuit of it, stepping through into the dining room.
The furniture was smoldering charcoal; the ash that she'd glimpsed was a foul-smelling carpet. And there, in the middle of this domestic wasteland, sat a bride.
By some extraordinary act of will, Julia had managed to put her wedding dress on, and secure her veil
upon her head. Now she sat in the dirt, the dress besmirched. But she looked radiant nevertheless, more beautiful, indeed, for the fact of the ruin that surrounded her.
"Help me," she said, and only now did Kirsty realize that the voice she heard was not coming from beneath the lush veil, but from the bride's lap.
And now the copious folds of the dress were parting, and there was Julia's head-set on a pillow of scarlet silk and framed with a fall of auburn hair. Bereft of lungs, how could it speak? It spoke nevertheless-
"Kirsty..." it said, it begged-and sighed, and rolled back and forth in the bride's lap as if it hoped to unlodge its reason.
Kirsty might have aided it-might have snatched the head up and dashed out its brains-but that the bride's veil had started to twitch, and was rising now, as if plucked at by invisible fingers. Beneath it, a light flickered and grew brighter, and brighter yet, and with the light, a voice.
"I am the Engineer, " it sighed. No more than that.
Then the fluted folds rose higher, and the head beneath gained the brilliance of a minor sun.
She did not wait for the blaze to blind her. Instead she backed out into the hallway-the birds almost solid now, the wolves insane-and flung herself at the front door even as the hallway ceiling began to give way.
The night came to meet her-a clean darkness. She breathed it in greedy gulps as she departed the house at a run. It was her second such departure. God help her, her sanity that there ever be a third.
At the corner of Lodovico Street, she looked back. The house had not capitulated to the forces unleashed within. It stood now as quiet as a grave. No, quieter.
As she turned away somebody collided with her. She yelped with surprise, but the huddled pedestrian was already hurrying away into the anxious murk that preceded morning. As the figure hovered on the outskirts of solidity, it glanced back, and its head flared in the gloom, a cone of white fire. It was the Engineer. She had no time to look away; it was gone again in one instant, leaving its glamour in her eye.
Only then did she realize the purpose of the collision. Lemarchand's box had been passed back to her, and sat in her hand.
Its surfaces had been immaculately resealed, and polished to a high gloss. Though she did not examine it, she was certain there would be no clue to its solution left. The next discoverer would voyage its faces without a chart. And until such time, was she elected its keeper? Apparently so.
She turned it over in her hand. For the frailest of moments she seemed to see ghosts in the lacquer. Julia's face, and that of Frank. She turned it over again, looking to see if Rory was held here: but no. Wherever he was, it wasn't here. There were other puzzles, perhaps, that if solved gave access to the place where he lodged. A crossword maybe, whose solution would lift the latch of the paradise garden, or a jigsaw in the completion of which lay access to Wonderland.
She would wait and watch, as she had always watched and waited, hoping that such a puzzle would one day come to her. But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.