The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [23]
“Sir?” Alan Charterhouse said querulously.
“We should question the maid, again,” Beckett said. “Maybe they got a hold of her key, somehow.”
“Sir?”
“What is it, now?” Beckett asked without looking up. The boy said nothing. Beckett glanced to where the young cartographer had sat down in the corner, then did a double-take that practically snapped his neck. The boy had gone as white as a sheet, and his eyes were bulging like they’d fall out of his head.
“What is it?” Skinner asked. “What’s wrong?”
Alan had one of the cylinders from the gramophone in his hands. He was running his super-sensitive fingers over the grooves in it. “Have…have you listened to these, sir?”
Beckett approached and knelt beside him. He’s knees creaked violently as he did so. “No. Why?”
“I can read recording cylinders, by touching them.” He looked down at the wax cylinder in his hands. “This…it’s not music sir,” he turned to the coroner, clearly terrified. “These are from the flight recorder on the Excelsior.”
Seven: the Excelsior
Beckett wasted no time. He immediately grabbed Alan Charterhouse by the collar of his coat dragged him outside at speed, through the crowd that was still milling in the street, and practically threw the young man into the coach.
“Forget it,” he said, over the extended finger that he jabbed in Alan’s direction. “Forget everything. Forget what you saw here. Forget that we even came for you.” He slammed the door shut. “Take him home,” Alan could hear the man shout to the coachman.
The ride back home seemed even longer. Alan watched the crooked shadows that haunted the streets of Trowth grow longer and deeper. The city still made Alan uneasy, despite his years living there, and his familiarity with it. It was the cold late afternoons that were the worst, when icy night air had yet to dispel the perpetual murky overcast of the city, so that everything seemed unnaturally dark. It made Alan long for the summers he’d spent south, in the low counties, pacing out distances between rocks in his cousins’ fields, or trying to build sundials in the garden.
Trowth was a cold city, and dark, but above all it was a frighteningly still city. Even in the country, miles away from the crowds and population, there seemed to be more noise, more movement, than in Trowth. It was a city whose every narrow window and crooked shadow seemed to hide invisible eyes, threatening eyes that gave the city’s lonely inhabitants cause to pitch their voices low, to keep to their homes and public houses and to stay off the chasm-bordered streets at any dark hour.
Even the parades and markets, or the angry muttering crowds that followed men like Edgar Wyndham-Vie were subdued. Above all in Trowth there was a sense, even among the oldest families that had lived on the shores of the Stark for a hundred generations, of having stumbled into a private garden late at night. The sense of being one loud noise away from attracting the garden’s owner. The Trow, the legendary giants that had abandoned their homes on the Stark at least a thousand years before human beings had come, seemed to have never fully left.
That eerie feeling of presence was the first thing that travelers to the city remarked on, and it was so ubiquitous that the residents of Trowth hardly seemed to notice it anymore. There were still times, though, when the sense of sharing a place with—or worse, having usurped it from—something awesome and terrible was very strong, and it could set the entire city’s teeth on edge.
Alan turned back to his book, and tried to read in the failing light. The truth was that he was getting tired of the Ted East stories. He’d discovered them a year ago, when his father had bought him Ted East, Agent of the Crown for his birthday. Alan had torn through the twenty-two two-penny novels in six months. He practically worshipped the fictional Ted East, with his old-fashioned