Vampire a Go-Go(33)

Allen stood perfectly still another five minutes, then slowly unwrapped himself from the flag. The room was nearly pitch black, a feeble glow of light from beneath the door. He felt his way forward and tried to recall the layout of the place from the guidebook. The special treasure room was beyond the service window and down a short hall.

His knee smacked sharply into a desk, and Allen swallowed an expletive.

Any cartoon cat burglar would have invested in a flashlight. But Allen was a grad student specializing in the Brontës. How incredibly useless. He bumped his other knee into a different desk.

“Fuck!”

He clapped his hand over his mouth, held his breath, listening. No security guards. No blaring alarms.

This is stupid. He went to the wall, felt along until his hand passed over the light switch. He flipped it on. No windows. Nobody would see the light.

He went to the door next to the service window and tried the knob. Locked. He yanked on it, nudged his shoulder against the door experimentally. Very locked.

Okay. An experienced cat burglar would have had a flashlight and some tools. Maybe he could look around the room, find something to jimmy the lock. The hinges. Maybe he could knock them out somehow, take the whole door off. He was an intelligent guy. He just needed to figure this out. He glanced at the service window.

It was open.

He hopped up on the counter, swung his legs around, and dropped into the little room beyond.

A chair, a desk, a phone. A small TV with a cold-war antenna. Something that looked like a card catalog, but it was in Czech. Only one other door, so that had to be it. He tried the knob. Locked. No surprise.

He searched the desk, then the shelves. He ran his fingers along the ledge above the door and hit something metallic; he knocked it off, and it clanged on the tile. He got on his hands and knees, searching, crawling under the desk until he found it-a dull copper key.

Allen unlocked the door and entered a short hall. This cat burglar stuff was child’s play. He found another door, open this time. He pushed it open, and its hinges squealed with ancient rust. He entered. This time it was a little harder to find the light switch-a black push button installed sometime between Hitler and Khrushchev. He pushed it, and dim lightbulbs in wire cages overhead spread halfhearted illumination through the long room.

Imagine any old university library, with shelves floor to ceiling. Now imagine nobody had dusted the place since moveable type had been invented. Add a sort of musty basement smell. Now pile old papers on all these shelves. Label everything in Czech.

Might as well be looking for the fucking Holy Grail.

Okay. Where to start. Find a system. Maybe not the system, but something to get walking in the right direction. That was the key. Even the most half-assed library has some kind of order, even if it’s something that evolved by accident. He couldn’t read Czech, but names and dates would be recognizable. He picked up the first stack of papers he could reach.

They fell apart in his hands.

I hope that wasn’t important.

The conditions here were appalling. Allen considered his library experience quite good; he’d always admired the ones that had taken special care to restore and preserve their special collections. The items in here seemed to have been dumped in any old manner, happily forgotten. Allen supposed that since material in here dated back to before the first library in America had even been built, he could maybe cut them a little slack. Much of this material had been low priority during the Soviet occupation, and it was only in the past decade that professionals had begun to sort through it all.

Okay, find something less fragile. Get your bearings.

He scanned the shelves, found something bound in leather, lifted it carefully and opened it in the middle, to find pages filled with tiny, uneven scrawl. He presumed it was in Czech, but it might have been some other language. He searched for a date, turned each page with care. Finally he found it, at the top of a page-1897. He replaced the manuscript, continued a few paces down the aisle. He repeated the procedure, paged through eight manuscripts until he found the next date: 1765. Was he going in the right direction, or was it arbitrary? He checked two more manuscripts ten feet down the aisle-1760 and 1746. He jogged farther down. False starts ate away the time. So many manuscripts were illegible. Slowly he marched backward through the centuries.



1701.

1640.

1598.



He’d arrived. Could it really be this easy? Allen indeed had a knack for research, an almost preternatural talent most of his professors envied. His eyes seemed to gravitate to the right passage. An instinct for cross-referencing. Imagine a superhero whose mutant power was prying out a library’s secrets. Perhaps in his youth he’d been bitten by a radioactive librarian. That was Allen. He should have worn a cape.

He needed to give himself a ten-year margin of error in each direction. He sorted through the stacks, looking for anything in English. His heart leaped when he found something in his own language, and he rapidly consumed each line with his eyes until he discovered it was the log of a stained-glass-window maker who’d come to trade techniques with the glassblowers of Prague. He almost replaced the manuscript on the shelf, but some instinct urged him to keep reading. A clue. The window maker had been staying at Rudolph’s court. If this log had been among the materials transferred to the monastery from Prague Castle, then Allen might be close.

More manuscripts, accounting ledgers, private journals, letters. Very few manuscripts in English. His eyes blazed over words, phrases, diagrams, dates, a maddening blur of script. The dust sent him into fits of sneezing on multiple occasions. He wiped sweat from his brow, smearing himself with dust and grime.

Some luck! He found a number of manuscripts in English and pored over them.

… should get a new shipment of fruit as soon as…

… My Darling, how I miss you. I should be home in spring…

… Roderick’s experiments continue to worry me…

… The German ambassador was a delightful fellow, but his pig-faced wife…

Wait.

Allen backed up to the previous manuscript. The handwriting was ugly and slanted, just barely legible. He read with growing excitement. Yes! This was it, the alchemist’s journal. The diary of Edward Kelley. Allen Cabbot held it in his hands, the account of the alchemist who’d helped discover the philosopher’s stone. It had been here in the monastery the whole time, hidden for more than four centuries.

It had taken Allen just over three hours to find it.





THIRTY-SEVEN




“This is getting us nowhere,” Penny said. “We can’t just keep wandering aimlessly through Prague.”

They walked along one of the city’s small parks, their footfalls echoing along the cobblestones. The street was deserted.

“I thought he might go back to the Globe,” Amy said. “He can send email there. He hasn’t been in the city long enough to know any other places. And he didn’t go back to his dorm room.”

“He’s not that stupid,” Penny said. “Anyone looking for him will check the dorm. He knows that.”

“I’m out of ideas. If you’d just let me contact my people, they could help search for him. We have resources.”

“Not any more than you’ll let me contact Father Paul. We had a deal. Can’t you cast a spell to find him?”

Amy shook her head. “It’s not as easy as it sounds, you know? Casting a spell isn’t like wiggling my nose on Bewitched. I need materials, a safe and quiet place to cast. Witchcraft is a subtle and complex art.”

“I think Allen was right,” Penny said. “I don’t think you really have any powers at all.”

“Don’t start!”

Penny sighed. “Listen, I think I can do something that will help, but you’ve got to promise not to freak out.”

“Why would I freak out?”

Penny took Amy’s hand, led her behind a row of thick hedges, out of sight of the street or any houses. “Sometimes people freak out.”

“I’m in the Society,” Amy said. “Freaky stuff is my business.”

“Just don’t freak out.”

“Stop saying that!”

Penny began to unbutton her shirt. Amy raised an eyebrow. Penny took off the shirt, gooseflesh rising on her white skin. She reached back to unclasp her bra.

“Okay,” Amy said. “Now you’re freaking me out.”

“Just watch for anyone coming.” Penny took off the bra, her small, pert breasts bouncing into view. She bent, pushed her skirt down, kicked off her shoes.

“Is this a sex thing?” Amy asked. “Because I don’t go that way.”

“Last warning,” Penny said. “Don’t freak out.”

Jackson Fay emerged from the terminal with his carry-on bag slung over his shoulder. He immediately spotted the two girls waiting for him on the other side of customs.

He approached them, smiled. “Hello, Clover. Sam.”

“We got your message,” Clover said. “There’s a taxi waiting outside.”

“Well done,” he said. “I’ll have questions.”

“We’ll fill you in.”

Fay looked around. “Where’s Amy?”

“We had to scatter,” Clover told him. “We think she’s with Cabbot. She checked in to say she was safe but refused to give her whereabouts. She said the situation was awkward. It’s… suspicious.”