The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

state—was she drugged? Had she been beaten? He knew he had only until Miss Poole was finished with the blonde woman—who was
she
, he wondered?—until their vicious intent was worked irrevocably upon Miss Temple.
    * * *
    Miss Poole stepped to a small rolling side table—intended, Svenson knew, to hold a tray of medical implements—and took up a glass-stoppered flask. With a knowing smile she uncorked the flask and took a step to the front row of the gallery, holding the open flask up for her spectators to sniff. One after another—and always to Miss Poole’s delight—the elegant masked figures recoiled with immediate disgust. After the sixth person, Miss Poole stepped back to the brighter light and her blonde charge.
    “A challenge to the most sturdy of sensibilities—as I believe all of you that have smelled this mixture will attest—yet such is the nature of our science and our need that this lovely subject, a veritable arrow in flight toward a target of
destiny
, has been made to consume it not once, but daily, for twenty-eight consecutive days, until her
cycle
is completely prepared. Before this day, such a task could not have been accomplished save by forcibly holding her down, or—as it has actually been managed—hiding tiny amounts of the substance in chocolate or an aperitif. Now, witness the strength of her new-minted will.”
    Miss Poole turned to the woman and held out the flask.
    “My dear,” she said, “you understand that you must drink this, as you have in these past weeks.”
    The blonde woman nodded, and reached out to take the flask from Miss Poole.
    “Please smell it,” asked Miss Poole.
    The woman did. She wrinkled her nose, but showed no other response.
    “Please drink it.”
    The woman put the flask to her lips and tossed off the contents like a sailor quaffing rum. She primly wiped her mouth, held her body still for a moment, as if to better keep the substance down, and then returned the flask.
    “Thank you, my dear.” Miss Poole smiled. “You’ve done very well.”
    The audience erupted into fervent applause, and the young blonde woman shyly beamed.
    The Doctor looked ahead of him on the catwalk. Bolted to an iron frame suspended from the ceiling—and in reach, for he realized that the catwalk’s sole purpose was to tend them—hung a row of metal-boxed paraffin lamps, as in a theatre. The front of each box was open, to aim the light in one direction, and fixed with a ground-glass lens to focus the light onto a more precise area. For a moment he considered—if he were able to climb out unseen—the possibility of blowing out each lamp and throwing the theatre into darkness … but there were at least five lamps over a fifteen-foot length of the iron grid. He could not reach them all before he was seen and most likely shot. But what else could he do? Moving as delicately and as quickly as he could, Doctor Svenson crawled through the curtain and into view of anyone who happened to look up.
    Miss Poole whispered in her blonde charge’s ear and then led her closer to the audience. The young woman sank into a curtsey, and the audience politely applauded once more. Svenson could swear she was blushing with pleasure. The woman rose again and Miss Poole handed her to one of the Macklenburg soldiers, who offered an arm with a click of his heels. The blonde woman draped her arm in his and with a distinct brightening of her step they disappeared down one of the rampways.
    From the same rampway emerged two more Macklenburg soldiers propelling between them a third masked woman in white. Her feet dragged in awkward steps and her head dipped—she was either drugged or injured. Her brown hair unspooled behind her back and around her shoulders, obscuring her features. Again, despite his best intentions, Doctor Svenson found his gaze falling to the lady’s body, the white silk clinging across the curve of her hips, her pale arms sticking from the balled-up sleeves.
    At their entrance, Miss Poole whipped around in annoyance.Svenson could not hear what she hissed to the soldiers, nor what they deferentially whispered in return. In the moment of disturbance he looked to Miss Temple, the hideous mask in place across her face, twisting ineffectually against her bonds.
    Miss Poole gestured to the new arrival.
    “It is a different sort of case I present to you here—perhaps one emblematic of the
dangers
attending our great enterprise, and of the
corrective
power of this work. The woman