Page 71 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
“What are you waiting for?” said Ms. Haas. I remembered this but I did not remember it. “Put the mask on and move quickly.”
I did as instructed, and some will not quite my own led me swiftly through the not quite familiar corridors of that strange tower. On the broken steps of a twisting stair, I met a slender, aristocratic man with a wild look in his eyes. Castaigne. I should have been surprised to see him but could not recall why.
“The guards are dead.” He caught my arm. “This way.”
He took me higher to a narrow ledge overlooking the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.
“When you get back home”—he pulled a silver whistle from around his neck—“tell our friends that the Repairers are ours.”
I briefly considered protesting that I really did have no connectionto Carcosan counterrevolutionaries but felt that now would be a spectacularly bad time to mention that particular detail.
Raising the whistle to his lips, Mr. Castaigne blew a shrill note that tasted of blood and ichor.
“You have been incautious, Citizen Castaigne,” a voice said. The masked and hooded woman from what I had thought was a dream emerged from a doorway that I was not sure had been there moments before.
“Citizen de Luca.” Mr. Castaigne turned his pistol on me at once. “I have identified the traitor and am proceeding with his execution by winged messenger.”
He pointed towards the horizon and I saw, approaching with great speed, one of the corpse-like, bat-like, mole-like beings that seemed to serve a variety of purposes within the Carcosan regime.
“A commendably quick lie, Citizen,” returned the woman. “But a lie nonetheless. You have disappointed me, Castaigne, and my disappointment is never earned twice.”
The flying creature was closer now, almost close enough that I could leap to it, though not so close that such a course of action would prove more than nominally survivable.
Castaigne produced a pistol from his jacket and pointed it at the stranger. “There’s still time. The party is not what it was meant to be, but we can save it.”
“So naive. There is nothing to save.” Behind Miss de Luca, a figure in ragged yellow robes began to coalesce out of the fog. “The party, the monarchy, what came before, and what will come after, they are all just... masks.”
The grim calculus by which I had been balancing the inherent perils of remaining on the ledge against those of pitching myself bodily into space, in the hope that some winged monster would break my fall, tilted sharply in favour of the latter option. I sprang with as muchstrength as I could muster out into the empty air, aiming as far as possible for the ape-bird-mosquito creature that was bearing down upon us. It shrieked in predatory delight as its talons closed about my outstretched wrist, its alien voice mingling horribly with Mr. Castaigne’s scream of terrible and despairing apprehension. The beast swooped low as it carried me away over the spiderweb streets and shark-tooth roofs of the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.
“Mr. Wyndham. Wake up.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
A Process of Elimination
I opened myeyes and found myself staring at the ceiling of my own bedroom at 221b Martyrs Walk. My left wrist ached sharply where the winged creature’s talons had dug into it and in my right hand I held a delicate white mask.
“I doubt we shall have further use for that,” said Ms. Haas, plucking the object from my unresisting fingers. “Although one can never be entirely certain with these things.”
I blinked up at her in some bewilderment. “Am I still dreaming?”
“The distinction is often less relevant than you might imagine, but by most conventional standards, no, you are not dreaming, and yes, you are back in what it is useful to think of as the real world.”
“What... how... I mean...”
Ms. Haas perched herself on the end of the bed, wiping the blood from her eyes. Her physical condition had deteriorated remarkably since I last saw her. I suspected she had been neither eating nor sleeping as she should have, and her movements seemed pained as I had never seen before. “Do you mean how did we get out of Carcosa, and indeed, were we ever truly there in the first place?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Carcosa is a strange place. Like a rainbow on an oil slick it exists on the border between delusion and reality. One may enter or leave bya physical portal or by more dangerous and less reliable dream-paths involving certain meditations, incantations, and hallucinations. While it was vital that we enter physically in order that we might be functional on arrival, there were rather more options available to me when it came to the matter of extraction.”
Sensible of the impropriety inherent in lying down before a lady, I endeavoured to sit up and realised that I was too fatigued to do so. “I’m not sure that explains how I went from a Carcosan holding cell to my own bed.”
“Yes, well, your physical incarceration did rather rule out the portal option. Short of bombing the tower, there was no way I was getting your body out of there. So we had to dream our way to freedom, a task that could only be accomplished with the intervention of an unnameable god, best never invoked. I suspect I shall have a headache for some days.”
“The guards were all devoured”—I laid my head back on the pillow, shut my eyes, and then immediately opened them, fearing what I might see—“by a spectre in yellow.”
“That’ll be him. Best not to talk about it, or think about it, or remember it.”
