The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

at a station. He could see no one on the platform. The black car was still closed—or re-closed, he had no idea if it had been vacated or not. The station house itself was dark. As the train did not seem about to move on, he reasoned they had to be at the end of the line, at Orange Canal. Chang laboriously swung his leg over the side of the wagon and climbed down, tucking the stick under his arm. His joints were stiff, and he looked up at the sky, trying to judge by the moon how long he’d been asleep. Two hours? Four? He dropped onto the gravel and brushed himself off as best he could—he knew the back of his coat was blackened with coal dust. There would be no chance to brazen his way past servants looking like this, but it made no difference. The situation was beyond disguise.

    As so often happens, the return trip to Harschmort seemed much shorter than his flight away from it. Small landmarks—a dune, a break in the road, the stump of a tree—appeared one after the other with almost dutiful dispatch, and it was a very brief half an hour before Chang found himself standing on a hillock of knee-high grass, gazing across a flat fennish pasture at the brightly lit, forbidding walls of Robert Vandaariff’s mansion. As he advanced he weighed different avenues of approach, based on the parts of the house he knew. The gardens in the rear were bordered by a number of glass doors which would offer easy entry, but the garden was above the hidden chamber—the inverse tower—and might be closely watched. The front of the house was sure to be well-occupied, and the main wings only had windows high off the ground, as per the original prison. This left the side wing, where he’d smashed through a lower window to escape, which also seemed to be where much of the secret activity had been found before—Trapping’s body, at any rate. Should he try there? He had to assume Mrs. Marchmoor had warned them of his possible arrival, despite not finding him on the train. They would expect him, to be sure.
    The fog broke apart at a rise in the wind, laying the ground before him more open to the moonlight. Chang stopped, a pricking of suspicion at the back of his neck. He was mid-way across the pasture, and could suddenly see that in front of him the grass had been flattened in narrow trails. People had been here recently. He stepped slowly forward, his eyes noting where these trails might cross his path. He stopped again and sank to one knee. He extended his stick ahead of him and pushed aside the grass. Just visible in the sandy dirt was a length of iron chain. Chang dug the stick under it and lifted, pulling the chain free of the sand. It was only two feet long, with one end bolted to a metal spike driven deep into the earth. The other end, he noted with a weary kind of dread, was attached to a metal bear trap—or in this case, man trap, the vicious circle of iron teeth stretched apart and ready to shatter his leg. He looked up at the house, then behind him. He had no idea where else they had placed these—he didn’t even know if this was their beginning or his progress so far just luck. The road was well away—and getting to it didn’t offer any safer route than going forward. He would have to take a chance.
    Not wanting it broken, he wormed the tip of his stick under the rim of the trap’s teeth and edged it within reach of the small sensitive plate. He rapped with the tip on the plate and the trap went off with vicious speed, snapping savagely through the air. Even though he expected it, Chang was still startled and chilled—the trap’s action was just shockingly brutal. He screamed, cupping his hand around his mouth to propel the sound toward the house. He screamed again, desperately, pleadingly, allowing it to trail off in a moan. Chang smiled. He felt better for the release of tension, like an engine venting built-up steam. He waited. He screamed a third time, still more abjectly, and was rewarded by a new chink of light in the nearest wall, an opened doorway and then an exiting line of men carrying torches. Keeping low, Chang scuttled back whence he had come, aiming for a part of the pasture where the grass was high. He threw himself down and waited for his breath to settle. He could hear the men, and very slowly raised his head enough to watch them approach. There were four men, each with a torch. With a sudden thought he pulled off his glasses, not wanting the lenses to reflect the torchlight. The men came