Free Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller by Eric Christopherson Page B

Jiggled and shook that Heaven-soft flesh reserved by women of propriety for husbands and babes and no others.
    “You cad!” I said, and so too Patrolman Cox. I stepped toward the scoundrel, only to be halted by the point of Willie's buck knife at my buttons.
    Howard smirked at me from his position of safety, still clinging indecently to Miss Buxton. “No telling what a lady may sequester in her bosom.”
    Miss Buxton did not, as one would expect, cry. Nor did she even cringe, but stood erect throughout the ordeal with an expression of fortitude.
    This made no little impression on me. I decided she was, despite all manner of wayward notions, a woman of character, and resolved to deliver her free of our collective nightmare, come what may to my own rotting, half-wanted husk.
     
    The First Casualty
     
    Approximately 7:00 PM
     
    Noah led the way up the basement staircase, followed in single file by Cormac, Miss Buxton, myself, Willie, Patrolman Cox, and lastly Howard and his ever-pointing revolver. We proceeded along a new trail, a shortcut, according to our little junk sherpa, leading back to the antechamber. The acrid basement smells to which we'd all adjusted—It's rather miraculous what depravities a human being may adjust to, eh, Doctor!—were replaced by fresh nasal assaults.
    A dreadful blast met us in a hallway outside the kitchen's double-door entrance. One of the doors was tilting off its top hinge and three quarters open. From the darkness within, death washed over us, mammalian, aquatic, botanical.
    We hurried along our path. I am not a spiritualist, yet I sensed vague traces of the miscellany's former owners. Our path led through an interior parlor, where crackled a small fire in a great hearth. Wordlessly, we formed a semi-circle in front of the flames. To either side of the fireplace and glowing in the pale light stood floor-to-ceiling fluted Corinthian columns gilded in 22-carat gold, if I've any eye for that sort of thing, and I do.
    An axe leaned against the wall, and the landscape of clutter at our backs I took to be mainly fuel for the fire: a broken wagon wheel, broken crates and barrels, broken bedroom furniture, also a stack of three rough pine coffins of the kind loaded daily on the Fordham Street dock, bound for Potters Field on Hart Island.
    “A peek inside, eh?” Cormac said, lifting the lid to the coffin stacked on top.
    “If he's burning corpses for heat,” Willie said, “I. Don't. Wanna. Know.”
    Noah offered no defense of himself, his mind elsewhere, his eyes focused on a tattered old wingback chair near the fire with his own body shape, I think it was, permanently embedded in it. Cormac took his peek, dropped the coffin lid with a bang, and aimed startled eyes at Willie.
    “Have it your way, brudda.”
    I'd seen milder over-acting at movie matinées , yet I still found myself fearing what Cormac had seen. By now, I think it's fair to say, most of us feared to learn anymore about the Langley family. No one else opened that lid, nor even asked Noah how he'd obtained the coffins.
    Howard shooed us away from the fire to resume our trek. As I passed by the axe I contemplated using it to split him down the middle length-wise, to finish the job his center-parted hair had started. But then I remembered that I only have one arm now. I forget sometimes.
    We reached the antechamber and could hear noises ahead, an intermittent clatter. Although echoes were scarce inside the mansion—given dense matter's habit for strangling sound—the antechamber was two stories high with empty walls above us and a domed ceiling, so the noise reverberated here.
    It proved to be Brady's doing. We found him re-barricading the entry door, per Howard's instructions, with piles of Langley objets d'junque . The door and its sidelights, i.e., the tall narrow windows of leaded glass flanking it, were no longer visible, only the transom overhead.
    “What about the newsie?” Howard asked.
    “I got him, I got him,”