The Hollow Ones(56)

“My love,” said Blackwood, tears bursting from his eyes upon seeing her, having convinced himself on the harsh ride back that it had been Orleanna he had seen floating over John Dee’s residence, the ghost of her dead body seeking him out for one last farewell.

He gripped her head to his chest, feeling it damp with fever. He wept a bit, then suddenly stopped, fearing for his sanity. What did it mean that he had hallucinated her image? Had their scrying unwittingly unleashed a plague of mind fever?

Blackwood lowered his face into hers, leaving a light kiss upon her lips. In that moment, he wished to fall ill like her. He wished them to be united always.

He startled as he straightened, finding his wife’s doe eyes open but distant, unseeing. Vacant.





Mr. Lusk let them off near the intersection of 72nd Street and Central Park West. Odessa followed Blackwood, entering an unmarked side door. A narrow service corridor led to another door, through which she found herself standing at a bank of old, ornate elevators.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Are we in the Dakota?”

The Dakota was famously the oldest luxury apartment building in Manhattan, and among the most exclusive. Elevator doors opened and they boarded alone.

When the doors closed, Odessa said, “This is where John Lennon lived when he was shot.”

Blackwood watched the arrow count off floors on the dial. “Oh, yes—the singer. I remember him…”

“The singer?” Was he playing dumb?

“I believe his wife sought me out once. An interesting sort. She wanted to know if this building was haunted.”

“Was it?”

“It still is.”

The doors opened, and Blackwood walked to an unlocked door almost twice Odessa’s height. The entrance foyer was floored with smooth, dark marble, the walls papered a velvet claret with an inlaid William Morris pattern. Blackwood strode straight through into the next room, a wide parlor with street-facing windows looking out on Central Park. The ceilings were towering, easily fourteen feet high, the ash moldings meticulously ornate. A cyclopean stone fireplace stood opposite the windows; an elaborate carved panel flowed from the mantelpiece and into the walls. The figures—they looked like antiquities—were naked, writhing bodies, both male and female intermingled with what seemed to be clouds of flames.

The patterned floor was mahogany. There was barely any furniture, nothing comfortable to sit upon, a parlor without chairs. Other than a long, heavy table, its surface entirely covered—indeed buried—by unrolled, unfolded maps of ancient cities, countries, and ocean routes, the room was made of books.

Not only were the walls lined with bookshelves and filing cabinets, but the entire floor was a maze of piles of books, arranged in different forms and sizes: some of them as high as six feet or so, some of them arranged in an almost pyramidal base.

“This is your home,” said Odessa, a question hidden in the form of a statement.

“This is my Manhattan home,” said Blackwood.

He stepped through a door into a long hallway. She counted four more doors ahead, on either side. She had been inside many New York apartments; none were arranged off a common hallway, none were this spacious.

“How long have you lived here?” she asked.

“The building was constructed in the 1880s.”

She believed him, eyeing the detail of the European trim along the chair rail running the length of the hallway. “Right, so how long have you lived here?”

He fished a key out of his jacket pocket, inserting it into a door lock. “This was the only building this far north and west on the island then. The city has grown up around it. The park, too. The city of London has always seemed fully formed, but from here I have watched a metropolis get up on its feet rather like a new fawn. The building was constructed with electric lights already installed, powered by its own dynamo. I rather like electricity. The building went…I believe the term is co-op…some years ago. Do you know what that means?”

“Sure,” she said.

“I do not.”

This mystery evidently did not trouble him, as the key turned in the lock and he swung open the door. Another wide room, a library. The shelves bulged with aged book spines and unbound manuscripts of old, flaking paper, as well as folios and parchment scrolls. These were rare books indeed, most with Latin or French titles, like Ethici philosophi cosmographia…Mysteriorum liber primus…A Booke of Supplications and Invocations…De Heptarchia Mystica Collectaneorum…

The room smelled milky, of vanilla and almond, from the breakdown of chemical compounds in the old paper. “There is no way you’ve read all these,” she said, tired of asking him questions, always feeling off-balance.

He did not rise to her challenge. “My library travels with me,” he said.

“Travels? Where?”

“I have other residences.”

“Okay…how do you travel anywhere without a passport?”

“Mmm, yes, that, ” he said, conceding the point. “It is more trying every year.”

He opened yet another door, this one opening into what would in any normally grand residence have been perhaps a formal dining room. But here, arranged upon a long mahogany serving table and on shelves and inside locked glass cabinets on the walls, were…?

“What are these?”