Free Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller by Eric Christopherson

don't believe me I could show you where . . . where I store the bottles in the wine cellar.”
    “An ear it is, Howie, the whole lug.” Cormac gripped Noah in a headlock and raised his buck knife. Miss Buxton gripped my arm. Noah, squealing, kicked his assailant—to no effect.
    “Hold up!” Howard said. “Hold up! We kill him by accident, we'll never find the coins, not if we take a year to search.”
    “He's faking!” Cormac said though he released Noah.
    “Look at him,” Howard said. “He's so thin. Like a POW. He could be telling the truth. No, there has to be another way.”
    “One of them?” Cormac said, thumbing at the other hostages behind him.
    Howard weighed the option before shaking his head. “Mister Langley doesn't give a damn about any of them.” His eyes took in Noah. “Do you?” Noah shrugged. I couldn't tell whether it was a shrug of uncertainty or agreement. Howard's eyes searched the basement. “No, it's not people he cares about, at least not strangers or bare acquaintances . . .”
    Howard turned from the group and ambled along the trail, whistling that popular new tune, How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree') , cats hissing and scattering, until he'd nearly reached the workbench, when he turned and ambled back to us. He picked up the monkey wrench he'd left behind on top of a broken-hinged ice box and employed it to bash out the motor car's left headlight.
    “No!” shouted Noah, lunging with both hands for the wrench. Howard shoved him backwards so hard the old man crashed into a wall of junk and slid to the floor of the trail, a lobster crate tumbling down upon his head. Howard raised his weapon for another whack at the motor car. Noah cried: “No! Please don't! Please!” Tears stained his cheeks, his beard aglitter with bits of glass from the broken headlight. “I implore you, Sir, to consider the sentiment! The sentiment of a son for his father! The vehicle, you see, contains something of my father's spirit. I'm convinced of it. And whenever I wish to commune with his spirit, I come here. That's no motor car to me, but a temple! A temple! Please, do not desecrate it anymore! Oh, please, Sir!”
    Howard bashed out the other headlight. “The coins!”
    With a piercing wail, Noah threw himself down on the floor, abjectly hugging one of Howard's legs. “I swear to you, we haven't got them! We haven't! You must believe me, Sir!” Willie pried Noah's arms loose of Howard, who stepped knee-deep into the detritus surrounding the vehicle so as to take close aim at its windshield. With the wrench raised high above Howard's head, set to come crashing down, Noah cried: “Enough! You were right! We have the coins! The gold Croesids! They're here in the house! I'll take you to them! I'll take you to them! So help me, God, I'll take you to them!”
     
    A Resolve on My Part
     
    Noah dabbed at his tears with a white silk handkerchief leant to him by Miss Buxton. He seemed oblivious to the rhinestones in his beard and sprayed across the chest of his red flannel suit from when the headlights had busted to bits. “I'll need my note pad,” he said, nodding to the rows of sand-filled fire pails beside the staircase.
    Willie retrieved the item from where it had been discarded in dried cat dung atop one of the pails and handed it over. Howard snatched it away from Noah and leafed through the pages.
    “What's this got to do with it?”
    “It's a record of where I've hidden the more valuable collections throughout the house,” Noah said. “You're not the first to attempt a break-in, after all. Only the first to succeed.”
    “Are you trying to tell me you don't remember where—”
    “I'm not much of a curator,” he said. “What I am is an ardent collector, as my father was, and my sister too, until her health failed. You've no idea how ardent. On the other hand”—his eyes canvassed the basement—“perhaps you've an inkling by now. And being sixty-three years