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Soot crumbled away around him. He'd chosen a chimney far from the part of the mansion where Burton had seen the light, but if anyone passed by the room below, they would certainly hear the susurration of the powder landing in the hearth and would enter to investigate.

Nevertheless, he kept going, and cheered himself up by thinking about the delectable floggings Vincent Sneed had treated him to not many days previously. Where pain was concerned, Algernon Swinburne was a connoisseur. Unfortunately, the hurt from his many wounds, which now started to trouble him, was of an entirely different order from a birch or belt to the buttocks. It wasn't nearly so pleasurable!

He stopped and rested, suddenly shaken by an unanticipated wave of fatigue.

How much farther to go? There was no chink of light other than the square opening above but he felt sure that the hearth wasn't far below.

"Come on!" he mouthed silently. "The meeting must have started by now!"

Down, down, down into darkness.

His feet crunched onto ossified wood; he slipped and a metal grate clanged beneath his boots.

"Damn!" he breathed.

He felt around, found an opening, and climbed through, his ankle catching a rack of fireplace tools, sending them crashing to the floor. He winced as the clanging echoed in the unlit room, sounding as loud as the bells of Big Ben.

He shuffled forward, his hands held out in front of him, feeling for any obstruction. He found none until he encountered a wall. Following this, he came to a door, groped for the doorknob, and pulled. With a guttural creak, the portal opened to reveal more darkness beyond.

He knew that the lit room Burton had seen was somewhere off to his right and toward the back of the mansion, so rather than move in the direction of danger, he turned left and, with a hand against the wall, he crept along what he presumed was a hallway.

A few moments later, his fingers ran across another door. He opened it. Pitch black beyond.

"I'll keep going," he told himself, and passing the room, he tiptoed on to the next. It was locked, but the one after that wasn't, and when he pushed open the door, he saw a vague rectangle opposite. He crossed the room, the bare boards complaining beneath his feet, and found himself standing before a curtain-shrouded window. A yank at the material caused it to collapse into a dusty heap at his feet. Moonlight momentarily blinded him. He blinked and looked down at himself: he was completely black.

As Burton had suggested, the window was solid, though its panes were caked with dust, and looked as if it had been fitted relatively recently; the hard wood was not at all worm-eaten and the catches, which were of an ingenious and intricate design, seemed very modern. For a few minutes they resisted his exploring fingers, but then came a click, and he slid the window up and climbed through it. Dropping to the ground, he ran along the side of the building until he came to the front steps. A shadow loomed from beneath one of the griffins.

"Algy?"

"This way, Richard."

He led Burton back to the window and they climbed into Darkening Towers.

Burton pulled his lantern from his pocket and twisted it into life. Its light crawled across dirty walls, illuminating peeling paper and cracked plaster and an old portrait hanging askew. Items of furniture, hidden beneath dust sheets, stood against the walls.

Dulling the lantern's glare by holding the clockwork device inside his coat, Burton crossed to the door and passed into the hallway, with Swinburne at his heels. He saw that the floor was thick with dust aside from a trail of sooty footprints that disappeared into the third door along. Beyond that, they proceeded into intricate passages that wound through the mansion with a seeming disrespect for logical design.

Brushing aside cobwebs and stepping carefully over the rubble of collapsed wall and ceiling plaster and pieces of broken furniture, they moved in silence, ears straining for any sound.

"Wait!" hissed