Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller by Eric Christopherson Read Free Book Online Page A

motor cars myself, I couldn't very well part with this one, given the sentiment involved, as well as its surpassing beauty. And who knows that I won't need to travel somewhere far off one day, in some kind of emergency, so it's always here, waiting on me.”
    “How'd you get the car in here?” Howard asked. There was only a bulkhead door leading outside, barely visible from the tonnage of trifles stacked in front of it.
    “And after you've answered how,” I said, “perhaps you could address why?”
    But the attention of our host had been drawn by now to Patrolman Cox, who had begun heaving junk hither and thither in an attempt to expose the gas and electric meters. (How he had determined that they were located behind the furnace, I don't recall.)
    “Careful with those boxes!” Noah cried. The patrolman, at a burly six foot two, or even a bit more, and in the prime of his life, made rapid progress with the excavation, stirring dust into the air, which reeked of mold and cat urine.
    Oh, that reminds me: I've neglected to mention the two dozen mongrel felines—part Persian, part Siamese, part Satanic—surrounding us from their junk pile perches, hissing at us and hoisting their bendy backs into Japanese bridges. We had all put our gloves back on to reduce the amount of skin exposed to their claws and teeth. Noah's shushing sounds and “Kitty, kitty” calls had soothed the cats somewhat and had even coaxed a few down to the floor to rub against his legs.
    “Well, what are you two waiting for?” Patrolman Cox asked the Edison men when he'd exposed their meters. “Put your wrenches to work, and let's be off.”
    As the workmen loosened the meters, with Noah hovering between them, increasingly agitated, I recalled a Daily News story on the Langleys that I'd read the week before with a sense of amusement I no longer felt. The story mainly recounted neighborhood gossip about the family, the more outlandish legends and rumors, including that Noah stored a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost automobile in his basement.
    Nearly right , I thought now, and wondered what else the article had right, or nearly so. Priceless artifacts buried beneath the debris? Including the mummy of an Egyptian king in a bejeweled sarcophagus? That a ghost haunted the mansion? And could often be heard howling or wailing into the night? The aforementioned vampire theory?
    Suddenly, the only legend or rumor that I felt I could wholly discount was the one maintaining that Noah lived alone with the corpse of his dead twin, Elizabeth, having myself heard that call bell ring whilst speaking with Noah during a previous visit.
    It may sound foolish to you, Doctor, that I seriously pondered such absurd notions as ghosts and mummies and vampires, even for an instant, but consider the absurd environment. The Langley household was one not unlike a waking nightmare, and I am too poor and unskilled an author to limn its full effects on the human mind—its full and immediate effects, I might add.
    “Damn thing's rusted on here,” Willie said of the gas meter a moment or two before he dropped his wrench, startled, and sprang backwards into a stack of sawhorses, shouting a vile expletive (a four-syllable rebuke of carnal intercourse with one's mother, if you must know).
    “Hell and damnation!” Howard said when he saw what Willie had seen. “Would you look at that thing!”
    He pointed to the top of a wooden crate at eye level beside the furnace, where a kitten with two tails, three hind legs, and a head as lumpy as a rotting grapefruit pawed at a spider web.
    “It must be the result of inbreeding,” I said. Indeed the entire Langley mansion struck me as a world turned in upon itself, like a tumor, the grotesqueries inevitable.
    Noah pronounced the freak kitten harmless so long as one didn't attempt to pet it, or to pick it up, and Willie and Howard went back to work, though neither man took his eyes from the animal long.
    With a final grunt and twist of the wrench