The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

encouragingly.
    “Well, Mr. Bascombe’s work is very important.”
    She nodded vigorously. “I know it!”
    “Though it must—I can only imagine, of course—surely some would find it a touch…unsettling…to have such
intrusions
into their house.”
    She did not answer, but smiled at him stiffly.
    “May I also inquire—the recent loss of your father—”
    “What of that? There is no sense—no decent sense to dwell on—on—on—
tragedy
!”
    She persisted in smiling, though once more her eyes were wild.
    “Were you with him in the house?”
    “No one was with him.”
    “No one?”
    “If there’d been anyone with him, they’d have been killed by wolves as well!”
    “Wolves?”
    “What’s worse is that the creature’s not been found. It could happen again!”
    Svenson nodded gravely. “I should stay indoors.”
    “I do!”
    He stood, gesturing to the ante-room with the staircase. “The others…are they…upstairs?”
    She nodded, then shrugged, and finished the second slice.
    “You’ve been very helpful. I shall inform Roger when I see him…and Minister Crabbé.”
    The woman giggled again, blowing crumbs.

    Svenson walked up the stairs, realizing that he was searching for Elöise. He knew Miss Temple was not here. In all likelihood, Elöise did not want to be found—that is, she was his enemy. Was he such a sentimental fool? He looked back down the stairs and saw the Bascombe woman cramming another piece of cake into her mouth, tears streaming down her face. She met his gaze, cried out with dismay and dashed awkwardly from sight like a silk-wrapped scuttling dog. Svenson thought about stopping to find her for perhaps one second and then continued up the stairs. His hand drifted again to his revolver. His other hand absently bounced against the black book in his other pocket. Was he an idiot? He’d forgotten completely about it—the lack of light to read, probably—but it was the surest thing to explain what Elöise—and everyone else—was doing there.
    He reached a dark landing and remembered that this and the following floors were completely dark from outside. Tarr Manor was an old house, subsisting solely on lanterns and candles, which meant there was always a near sideboard with a drawer of tallow stubs for contingencies. The Doctor stumped down the hallway until he found the very thing, and snapped a match to the candle. Now for some place to read. Svenson glanced at the labyrinthine passages and doorways and decided to stay where he was. Even taking this long went against a nagging fear that something might be happening to the women even now. He remembered Angelique. What if Lorenz, who clearly lacked the Comte d’Orkancz’s esthetic scruples, was upstairs even then, unscrewing one of his glass-packed metal flasks?
    Svenson controlled his thoughts—he was working himself up to no purpose. Two minutes. He would give the book that much.

    It was all the task required. On the first page was the quotation he’d had read to him on the train. And on the second page, and the next, and throughout the entirety of the book, printed again and again in small script, one great continuous flow of the identical passage. He looked on the inside and back covers, to see if Coates had written anything…and saw that he had, a series of numbers, jotted in pencil and then ineffectively erased. Svenson held the candle close, and turned to the first of the pages listed, 97…it seemed like any other page, with no special sign or significance that he could see. An idea gnawed at him…he looked at the first word at the top of the page—could these add up to a message? Some kind of basic code? Svenson took a pencil stub from his pocket and began to jot notes on the inner flap of the book. The first word of TWO: Cardinal was “the”…he looked at the next number in Coates’s list, THREE: Surgeon…the first word was “already”…Svenson quickly flipped the pages.
    He frowned. “The already remake realms vessels into…” did not seem like anything sensible. Perhaps it was itself a code—he tried to puzzle it out: “already” meant the past…so “already remake” might mean their progress so far…but why bother with “the” at the beginning? Weren’t coded messages supposed to be economical? Svenson sighed, looking at the book with as much insight as if it were a Hungarian newspaper, but feeling just within reach of the solution…he tried the last words of each page, but this