The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

the marble. The latch caught and she quickly dropped to her knees again and with both hands drove the wedge back under the door. She leapt after Mrs. Dujong, her pale feet soft and moist against the metal steps.
    Being a spiral staircase, as the steps reached the iron column in the center they became quite narrow, and so because she was smaller Miss Temple felt it only fair she take the inside going down, half a step behind Elöise but holding on to her arm—as Elöise with her other hand held on to the rail. The metal staircase was very cold, especially so on their feet. Miss Temple felt as if she were scampering around the scaffolds and catwalks of an abandoned factory in her nightdress—which was to say it felt very like one of those strange dreams that always seemed to end up in unsettling situations involving people she but barely knew. Racingdown the stairs, still genuinely amazed at this dark metal tower’s very existence—
under
the
ground
—Miss Temple wondered what new peril she had launched them into, for the pitiless tower struck her as the most unlikely wrinkle yet.
    Was there someone behind—a noise? She pulled Elöise to a stop, patting her arm to indicate urgency and silence, and looked back up the stairs. What they heard was not footsteps from within the tower, but what seemed very much like footsteps—and scuffles and snippets of talk—
outside
of it. For the first time Miss Temple looked at the tower walls—also welded steel—and saw the queer little sliding slats, like the ones sometimes seen between a coach and driver. Elöise slid the nearest open. Instead of an open window, it revealed an inset rectangle of smoked glass through which they could see … and what they saw quite took their breath away.
    They looked out and down from the top of an enormous open chamber, like an infernal beehive, walls ringed with tier upon tier of walled prison cells, into which they could gaze unimpeded.
    “Smoked glass!” she whispered to Elöise. “The prisoners cannot see when they are spied upon!”
    “And look,” her companion answered, “are these the new prisoners?”
    Before their eyes, the upper tier of cells was filling up like theatre boxes with the elegantly dressed and masked guests of the Harschmort gala, climbing down through hatches in the cell roofs, setting out folding chairs, opening bottles, waving handkerchiefs to one another across the open expanse through fearsome metal bars—the whole as unlikely, and to Miss Temple’s mind inappropriate, as spectators perched in the vault of a cathedral.
    So high were they that even pressing their faces angled down against the glass did not allow them to see the floor below. How many cells were there? Miss Temple could not begin to count how many prisoners the place might hold. As for the spectators, there seemed to be at least a hundred—or who knew, numbers not being her strongest suit, perhaps it was three—their mass emitting a growing buzz of anticipation like an engine accelerating to speed.The only clue to the purpose of the gathering, or indeed the cathedral itself, was the bright metal tubing that ran the height of the chamber, lashed together in bunches, emerging from the walls like creeping vines the width of a tree trunk. While Miss Temple was sure that the layers of cells covered the whole of the chamber, she could not see the lower tiers for all the metal pipes—which told her sensible mind that the pipes, not the cells, had become the main concern. But where were the pipes going and whatever substance did they hold?
    Miss Temple’s head spun back, where a grating shove echoed down to them like a whip crack—someone was opening the wedged door. At once Miss Temple took Elöise’s arm and leapt ahead.
    “But where are we going?” hissed Elöise.
    “I do not know,” whispered Miss Temple, “take care we do not get tangled in that coat!”
    “But”—Elöise, annoyed but obliging, shifted the coat higher in her arms—“the Doctor cannot find us—we are cut off! There will be people below—we are marching directly to them!”
    Miss Temple simply snorted in reply, for about no part of this could anything be done.
    “Mind your feet,” she muttered. “It is slippery.”
    As they continued their descent, the noise above them grew, both from the spectators in their cells and then, with another sharp scraping exclamation of the door being forced, from their pursuers at the top of the tower. Soon there were hobnails