“I am loath to admit that its appearance is not of my choosing,” he said. “Hoffmann’s power is such that he determines his own semblance, even in the minds of others. Believe me, it’s a damn annoyance. And I don’t much care for the music either.”
The warmth of the bed in the third archive was gone from Unwin’s senses—only the cold light of the carnival was real to him now; that, and the rain thumping against his umbrella and spattering his shoes. His socks were getting wet. His socks were always getting wet, even in his sleep.
“There,” Lamech said.
Unwin followed his gaze to a squat building with a wide set of stairs leading to a windowed gallery. Inside, the carnival landscape appeared reflected and fractured along seemingly endless corridors—a hall of mirrors. Lamech himself was replicated dozens of times over, his body distorted or broken into pieces: an arm here, a leg there, his gut over there. Unwin had no reflection, but for a moment he glimpsed another form moving among the panels: a hat, a gray raincoat, the ember of a cigar.
Lamech jogged quickly toward it, puffing a little, and Unwin was at his side. By the time they reached the building, the image was gone. Lamech put one foot up on the bottom step and leaned on his knee. They waited.
“Hoffmann probably caught him as soon as he set foot in there,” Lamech said. “All he has to do now is stay asleep to keep him prisoner. But it’s worse than that, much worse. The longer Sivart is trapped, the less his mind is his own. Hoffmann will learn all that he knows, subsuming his identity along with his thoughts. In the end, Sivart will be nothing, a vegetable. Or a witless pawn subject wholly to the magician’s will.”
Sivart reappeared. There were many copies of him, all tiny—he must have been deep inside the hall of mirrors, and what they saw was an image a dozen times reflected. He seemed to see them, too, because he crouched and tilted his hat back.
“Travis!” Lamech called. “Can you hear me?”
The miniature Sivarts all stood straight and took their cigars out of their mouths. Unwin thought he could see the mouths moving, but he heard nothing except the rain and the creaking of the big wheel. He and Lamech leaned closer. Something changed in the glass then, and Unwin’s vision blurred. He closed his eyes and opened them, but the problem was not with his eyes.
The reflection of the carnival at their backs was moving, fading in some places as it brightened in others. Parts of the landscape receded into the distance, while other parts zoomed closer.
Unwin no longer heard the sound of the rain on his umbrella. The hall of mirrors had enclosed them. Lamech, in his confusion, spun around once and stepped backward into a transparent wall. “What?” he said, and then, as though he were on a telephone with a bad connection, “Hello?”
“Ed Lamech,” the many Sivarts called, moving again, some of them disappearing as others materialized. “What brings you down here at this time of—” He stopped a moment. “Aw, heck, buddy. Is it day or night? I lose track.”
“It’s good to see you alive, Travis. I’m giving someone a tour, that’s all.”
“They’ll pay you for anything, huh?” The Sivarts ducked around corners, and some of them grew. He was drawing closer. “Who you got with you?”
“Someone who can help us, I think. Help you, Travis—maybe get you out of here.”
“That’s great, Ed.” Sivart’s tone had turned suddenly sour. “I’m glad you’ve still got my back.”
Lamech swept his hat off. “I told you not to go. You’ve put us all in jeopardy. Here in Hoffmann’s mind, one of the Agency’s top men!”
“Now you’re just flattering.”
“We made a good team, Travis. But I’m in some pretty deep water here. Deeper than you know. It’s dangerous for me to be in this place.” Lamech was feeling the walls with his hands, batting at them with his hat. He found an opening between two mirrors and moved through it; Unwin followed him.
“They call this a fun house,” Sivart said. “But I tell you it’s worse than anything we’ve sent the crooks to. He comes in now and then to check up on me. And when he does, it’s like having the top of my skull screwed off and a flashlight shone in. It hurts, Ed. You should have told me what I was up against.”
“I tried, Travis. I tried.”
Several more of the Sivarts vanished. There were only a few of them now. He was close, but Lamech could not find his way to him.
Sivart and his reflections said, “You know how he did this? He learned it from Caligari, that crazy little guy who brought the carnival here. You remember: ‘Everything I tell you is true, and everything you see is as real as you are.’ What did that mean anyway?”
“No,” Lamech said, “the technique came out of the Agency. Somebody stole the secret and brought it to Hoffmann. Greenwood, probably.”
“That’s just the story. Bunch of smoke. Truth is, we’re dabbling in something a hell of a lot older. This goes back, back to the beginning, maybe. It came in with the carnival, and your boss got hold of it somehow. We’d all have been better off without it.”
“How do you know this?”
“You don’t think I got caught right away, do you? I saw it firsthand. Not the way the Manual said to, though. I jumped in at the deep end, went right for the spooky stuff. I wanted to know what makes him tick.”
Lamech was out of breath. He stopped walking and put his hands on his knees. “Well?”
“Nobody taught him to do the voices,” Sivart said. He was pacing back and forth, his reflections multiplying and converging while he spoke. “He was born like that. Grew up in a little village out in the country, immigrant family, hardworking folks. He stole bread by impersonating the baker’s wife, calling him out of the shop with her voice. Clever boy, see? Later he hid in a church balcony and pretended to be an angel, tricked the minister into altering his sermons. Convinced him to put in strange things about overturning the order of the world, no salvation but in topsy-turvydom, et cetera. When they figured out what was going on, they put the kid down as some kind of devil. Probably would have killed him if the carnival hadn’t taken him in.”
Something was wrong. Sivart was shaking as he spoke, and when the face of one reflection was visible for a moment, Unwin thought he saw tears. Lamech noticed, too. “Travis,” he said, “we don’t have time for this.”
Sivart tore the cigar out of his mouth and threw it on the floor. “It could be important, Ed. Will you listen to me for once? Hoffmann was just a boy when his mother gave him to the carnival. And that monster Caligari taught him but never taught him enough. So Hoffmann thought he’d figure it out on his own. He sneaked into the old man’s mind one night, trying to learn his secrets. Caligari caught him and kept him there. Tortured him, wouldn’t let him wake up. Worst of all, he knew that Caligari had kept something from him, would always keep something from him. He would never share the secret that made him powerful.”
Lamech looked calm now, as though he had arrived at an understanding of some kind. “Sounds to me like Hoffmann needed a lesson, Travis. Sounds like he was getting ahead of himself.”
There were only two Sivarts now. They both turned away and threw their hands in the air. “What do you know? You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Anyway, you better let me in on the plan. Who is it you’re recruiting? I hope he’s good.”
“Under the circumstances,” Lamech said, “it’s probably better that I not tell you.”
The Sivarts were quiet for a time. Then they stood straight, stretching to crack their necks. When they turned around, their eyes were closed and they were grinning. “What circumstances, exactly?”
“I know who you are,” Lamech said.
The Sivarts took a deep breath. There was a squelching sound as the face of the nearer loosened and crinkled around the edges. It slid off and fell to the floor, folding like an omelette where it landed.
Unwin stepped back. Down in the third archive, he heard himself whimper into the pillow.
The face that had been masked was squarish, du
ll, bored-looking. Enoch Hoffmann opened his eyes and rolled up his sleeves. The biloquist was wearing his pajamas now, blue with red trim.
The real Sivart fell back against a transparent wall, a marionette whose strings had been cut. He looked groggy, exhausted, invisibly bruised. Had his mind already turned to dust? No: he coughed and grimaced at Lamech, managing a little wave.
“I ought to strangle you,” Hoffmann said to the watcher. His regular voice was as Sivart had described it in his reports—high-pitched and whispery, barely a voice at all, empty of feeling even when it threatened.
“You’d have to wake up first,” Lamech said. “And you’re not going to do that, are you? Now that you’ve finally caught him, you can’t bear to let him go. You’re as much a prisoner as he is.”
The magician was ignoring him; his gaze was fixed on the spot where Unwin stood. Hoffmann came toward him, and Unwin felt as though his damp clothes had frozen solid. The corridors stretched, so that the magician seemed to approach from a great distance, with the inevitability of a nightmare. The look on his face was unreadable—it might as well have been carved into a block of wood. “Who is it you’ve brought with you?” he asked.
Unwin stepped aside at the last moment, and Hoffmann walked past him. He reached around a mirrored wall and came back clutching the wrist of the woman in the plaid coat. Hoffmann yanked her to her feet; she let out a cry and stumbled forward, her cap coming loose. She regained her balance, then stood straight and straightened her coat.
“Hey, kiddo,” Sivart said, getting to his feet.
Lamech put his hat back on. “Where did she come from?”
Sivart snorted. “She followed you, fancy-boots. Ed Lamech, meet Penelope Greenwood. She’s better at what you do than you are, knows everything you’re thinking, and can hurt your feelings without saying a word. Self-taught, too—a real wunderkind. Enoch, I believe you’re already acquainted.”
Hoffmann, for the first time since he made his presence known, appeared shaken. His lower lip was trembling as he gazed at the woman in the plaid coat.
“Dad,” she said to him, “we need to talk.”
Lamech was looking at Sivart. “Greenwood? She and Hoffmann? Travis, why didn’t you ever report this?”
Hoffmann gestured vaguely toward Lamech. The watcher put up his hands and started to speak, but whatever he said was lost as his hat grew to twice its size and swallowed his head. He tore at it with both hands, but the brim was stuck under his chin and his shouts were muffled by the heavy felt.
Hoffmann took a step toward the woman in the plaid coat, arms outstretched. “I searched for you,” he said. “I tried so hard to find you.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to be found.” She picked a piece of lint off her coat, avoiding his eyes.
“Your mother took you from me.”
“You let her get caught,” Penelope said. “The job was more important to you.”
Sivart knelt down to pick up his cigar, listening to their argument as though to a story he already knew. And Unwin realized that Sivart did know this story, because he had played a role in it. Hoffmann and his daughter were talking about November twelfth, about the day Sivart caught Cleopatra Greenwood at Central Bank and sent her out of the city. I won’t tell you what we talked about, he had written. I won’t tell you what happened just before I put her on the train. This is what they had talked about: Miss Greenwood’s little girl. They were making arrangements that day in the terminal. They were deciding how to get Penelope out of the city, away from her father.
“That isn’t what I came here to talk about,” Penelope said. “I want to tell you about my new job. It’s all underground, more than you know about. They have you beat, Dad. You remember Hilda Palsgrave? She used to do the fireworks for the carnival?”
Unwin drew a breath, a real one. Hilda, the giantess Hildegard: Sivart had met her the same day he met Caligari, had spoken to her while she mixed black powder for her rockets. Now she was chief clerk of the third archive. How had one of Caligari’s old employees come to be with the Agency?
Hoffmann was incensed. “You’re both working at the Agency? Working for him?”
The overseer, Unwin thought. The man Miss Greenwood had said was something worse than Enoch Hoffmann.
Though that was hard to imagine just now, as Lamech fell to the floor, rolling and twisting, beating at his hat with his fists. This, Unwin thought, was how Lamech’s life was to end: suffocated by his own hat. He could not stop it from happening. And when Lamech died, the recording would end. He did not have much time.
“Penny, Penny,” the biloquist whispered, almost singing her name. “We lost each other so long ago. Where have you been? Your eyes, when you were born, like little mirrors; terrifying! Caligari saw you and claimed you for his own. But you’ve come back to me just in time. I need your help. We’ll work together, like we did before.”
Sivart laughed. “Sure. We all know how well that went.”
“November twelfth was a fluke,” Hoffmann snapped.
Sivart waved his hand dismissively, but the woman in the plaid coat was listening with evident interest. She and Hoffmann stood looking at one another. He was nearly a foot shorter than she was, almost forlorn in his rumpled pajamas.
“Kiddo,” Sivart said to her. “Don’t listen to him.”
Penny ignored him. “We need to talk,” she said again to her father. “Alone.”
With a nervous glance at Lamech, Sivart snatched his own hat off his head. But Hoffmann was not preparing any new tricks. “I’m not taking my eyes off him,” he said.
“What do you think he’ll do?” Penelope asked. “Rummage through the junk in the back of your brain? Find out you’re one of the bad guys? Let him wander for a minute.” She gave Sivart a meaningful look and added, “We’ll have him back here soon enough.”
Hoffmann was frowning, but he sighed and said, “All right.” He snapped his fingers, and behind him a single mirror dissolved into mist. The stairs down to the carnival were just beyond.
Sivart shrugged and put his hat back on. Then he puffed at his cigar a few times, until the ember burned red again. “You kids have fun,” he said, and with a last look at Lamech’s writhing form he went briskly from the hall of mirrors.
Unwin followed him. Outside, the eldritch light of the carnival had grown brighter, almost fiery, and the rides were chugging and whirling at breakneck speeds. The air smelled of popcorn and fresh sawdust, and the music of the hurdy-gurdy roared. Sivart leapt onto the turning platform of a carousel, and Unwin hurried after him, grabbing hold of a horse’s reins to steady himself. Sivart debarked on the other side and jogged away into the outer reaches of the carnival.
The detective was moving purposefully, as though according to some prearranged plan. Could he and Penelope Greenwood have conspired in advance to allow him this reprieve? Unwin did not know how far he could follow. He was already pushing at the boundaries of what Miss Palsgrave’s machine had recorded, and he felt a tug at the back of his skull. This dream was nested like one of those dolls that contain themselves a dozen times over. But if the chief clerk of the third archive had been observing the dream, might she have shifted the focus from one mind to another, changing frequencies as Lamech said she could? Yes: the closer Unwin kept to Sivart, now, the better the recording maintained its coherence.
Sivart had reached the edge of the carnival. There at its border was a small, almost perfectly square building, its windows reflecting the fairground’s glow. The detective went up to the steps and put his hand on the doorknob, then shut his eyes and wrinkled his brow. “Okay,” he said to himself, “easy as spinning a radio dial.” He turned the knob and threw the door open with a flourish.
On the other side was Unwin’s bathroom.
Sivart went in and looked around. He yawned, stretched, then took his coat off and flung it over the shower curtain. “This is more like it,” he said. He turned on the hot-water faucet and undressed, then reached up into his coat pocket
and pulled out a small bottle of smoked glass. This he unstoppered, sniffed, and emptied into the water. The tub filled with bubbles. When the bath was ready, he tested the water with one toe and got in. With his hat down over his face, he began puffing on his cigar, dropping ashes into the tub. The only spot of color in the room was the ember of the cigar, and it burned so hot it made the steam over the tub glow red.
Unwin stretched his legs beneath the covers of an underclerk’s bed in the third archive of the Agency offices. In his dream of Lamech’s dream of Hoffmann’s dream of Sivart’s dream, a dreaming Unwin opened his bathroom door, a fresh towel over his arm, his robe cinched tight around his waist. Sivart scrubbed his feet with a long-handled brush, and the other Unwin said, “Sir, what are you doing in my bathtub?”
Sivart told the other Unwin not to use his name. Somebody could be listening in. He accused him of being forgetful. He said, “I’m going to tell you something that you’re going to forget. Ready?”
“Ready,” the other Unwin said.
“Okay, here it is. You’re awfully worried about getting everything right. I’ve seen what you’ve done to my reports. I’ve read the files. You edit out the good parts. All you care about are details, and clues, and who did what and why. But I’m telling you, Unwin, there’s more to it than that. There’s a . . . I don’t know”—he waved his cigar in the air—“there’s a spirit to the whole enterprise. There’s mystery. The worse it gets, the better it is. It’s like falling in love. Or falling out of love, I forget which. Facts are nothing in comparison. So try, would you? Try to leave the good parts alone?”
“Sorry,” Unwin said, “what were you just saying? I was thinking of something else.”
“Never mind. Just remember this: Chapter Eighteen. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Say it back to me: Chapter Eighteen.”
“Chapter Elephant,” Unwin said.
FIFTEEN
On Skulduggery
If you are not setting a trap, then you