Eidolon Read Online Free Page B

of
formaldehyde. Rooms opened off to either side, but in the shadows, I made out
only an impression of bulky furnishings and mirrors shrouded with cloth.
    Miss Lester led the way up a sweeping staircase near the
center of the house. Up and up, through the three main floors then to a smaller
staircase, which surely went to the attic. An iron gate barred the stair.
    Miss Lester unlocked it and went through without a backward
glance, forcing us to follow. As I’d suspected, the door at the top opened out
into an attic room. Rather than being used to house servants or to store excess
furniture, the single, enormous room contained only a bed, a shrouded mirror,
and a man.
    He sat in a wheelchair, his body twisted with age. Thin
white hair clung to his scalp in patches with liver-spotted skin visible
beneath. He didn’t look up or move at our entrance.
    What the hell? How could anyone leave an old man, an
invalid, alone in this freezing room without even a candle for company? The
cruelty seemed monstrous, even if his faculties had deserted him entirely.
Surely, this was what Nivens had meant when he said Miss Lester wouldn’t wish
police involvement. If they discovered her heinous treatment of her
grandfather, there would be an inquest and scandal, for certain.
    Did she think me too jaded to care? If so, she was wrong. I
would—
    The light of Miss Lester’s candle fell over the man’s
features. He had the look of the truly ancient, wrinkles so deeply graven it
seemed his skin sagged off the skull beneath. Glittering eyes stared at nothing.
His mouth hung slackly, and yet something malevolent infused his expression. I
took an instinctive step back, before realizing the source of my revulsion. His
face might have served as the model for the suggestively human countenance of
the talisman.
    “These gentlemen have brought your talisman back to you,
Grandfather,” Miss Lester told him. “One of them is Dr. Whyborne. You interred
his great-grandfather, who died of gangrene, if you recall.”
    “H-How do you know?” Whyborne asked, sounding shocked.
    “It’s our business to know all the dead of Widdershins,” she
replied.
    I had the sudden, horrid feeling she could tell me how
anyone buried within the cemetery had died, no matter how old or new the grave.
And, perhaps, whether or not the body still rested there peacefully.
    The terrible old man offered no response to her statements,
but she didn’t seem to expect one. “Please give him the talisman, Mr.
Flaherty,” she instructed. “You may simply place it there in his hands.”
    I stared at the two upturned hands lying on loosely on his
lap, the fingers gnarled by age until they resembled claws. I had the
nauseating vision of them closing around my wrist if I drew too close.
    “Why don’t you wish to touch it, Miss Lester?” I asked,
stalling for time.
    “I am of Grandfather’s blood. Handling the talisman after
sundown would be…inadvisable…for me. As it would have been for my idiot
cousin.” Her mouth thinned. “And that is all the answer you shall have. I hired
you for your discretion, Mr. Flaherty. I’m sure Dr. Whyborne will tell you it
isn’t polite to ask too many questions here in Widdershins.”
    I held out my hand to Whyborne for the talisman, not wishing
to put him in any closer contact with the old creature in the wheelchair than
need be. He passed it to me. Even though he’d carried it in his pocket, where
the heat of his body should have warmed it, the talisman felt icy cold against
my skin.
    I stiffened my spine and stepped forward. The strangely
glittering eyes shifted avidly under their lids as I held out the repellent
object, and followed its progress as I dropped it into the open hands from what
I hoped was a safe distance.
    The claws slowly curled around their prize, but the ancient
made no other move. A breath I hadn’t realized I’d held escaped my lungs.
    “Thank you,” Miss Lester said. “You may go now. I will send
full payment