The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [340]
As he called out “three!” he pulled hard on the crowbar with Lucius, and the rest of us shoved. The frame of the old door began to crack and splinter almost right away, and a few more good blows and yanks destroyed the right side of the structure completely. With a kick Marcus burst the door open, and then we all stepped to either side very fast, so that Miss Howard could train her gun immediately on—
Nothing. There was no sign of life in the little entryway to the house, and the steps against the right-hand wall led up into darkness what showed a similar lack of human activity. Miss Howard led the way in, still keeping her Colt trained on the darkness, and then the rest of us followed, frightened, yes, but also starting to feel tremendous disappointment.
“She can’t,” the Doctor whispered. “She can’t have slipped away again …”
Inching our way into the dark house, we began to spread out, Lucius producing his revolver and taking a couple of steps up the stairway. He would’ve gone farther, followed by Mr. Moore and Marcus—but then we heard the sudden sound of a door slamming in the sitting room. There was only one such structure in that area, I knew that from my last visit:
“The basement door,” I whispered, and then the three men on the stairs came back down. Again on Marcus’s count, we all burst into the sitting area, led by Miss Howard and Lucius.
But the room was too dark to reveal much of anything, at first, except the general outlines of the furniture nearest to us and the entrance to the kitchen hallway at the back. Which was why the voice, when we heard it come out of the shadows, was all the more frightening:
“It doesn’t matter, now,” said Libby Hatch, very quietly. “You’ve found your way into the house—but you’ll never find what you came for.”
Lucius opened his mouth, seeming like he wanted to announce to the woman that she was under arrest, but the Doctor touched his arm, and spoke in a calm voice: “Listen to me, Elspeth Franklin—you need not face death—”
But Libby Hatch only spat and cursed, “Damn you all!”
Then we saw the sudden movement of a shadow in the hallway, going toward the kitchen. It was nothing more than the briefest blur, and it was followed, much to our increasing confusion and frustration, by the sound of feet climbing upwards.
“Stairs,” the Doctor said. “There are back stairs!”
“I sure as hell never saw ’em,” I said.
“She may have had a concealed passageway built,” Marcus offered, “when she had Bates reconstruct the basement.”
“One which will no doubt prove as difficult to enter as the chamber below,” the Doctor agreed with an agitated nod. “Quickly, then—Marcus, you, Lucius, and Moore get downstairs! See what you can do to break into the chamber! Sara, you and Stevie come with me!”
With the sounds of the brawl still echoing out on the street, we all exploded off in our assigned directions, the men heading down the basement steps and Miss Howard and I following the Doctor up the staircase, past the second floor and on to the third. There we found a steel ladder what led to a hatchway in the ceiling. Miss Howard led the way up it and, opening the thing, tried to quickly jump out onto the roof.
We might have known better than to go chasing an enemy as clever as Libby in such an obvious way. Being the last one up, it was hard for me to see exactly what happened next, but the Doctor later related it to me. Once she’d stuck her head out of the hatchway Miss Howard got pistol-whipped hard, a blow what forced her to let go of her Colt (which fell back