Clara was visibly shaken by this account. “I thought I was the only one who knew she was there,” she said.
“More to the point, do you know who she is?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Clara said, and picked up the story she’d been diverted from earlier: the tale of how she’d come to leave the Tabula Rasa.
The library beneath the tower, she explained, was the most comprehensive collection of manuscripts dealing with the occult sciences—but more particularly the legends and lore of the Imajica—in the world. It had been gathered by the men who’d founded the Society, led by Roxborough and Godolphin, to keep from the hands and minds of innocent Englishmen the stain of things Imajical; but rather than cataloguing the collection—making an index of these forbidden books—generations of the Tabula Rasa had simply left them to fester.
“I took it upon myself to sort through the collection. Believe it or not, I was once a very ordered woman, I got it from my father. He was in the military. At first I was watched by two other members of the Society. That’s the law. No member of the Society is allowed into the library alone, and if any one judges either of the other two to be in any way unduly interested or influenced by the volum they can be tried by the Society and executed. I don’t thin it’s ever been done. Half the books are in Latin, and who reads Latin? The other half—you’ve seen for yourself they’re rotting on their spines, like all of us. But I wanted order, the way Daddy would have liked it. Everything neat and tidy.
“My companions soon got tired of my obsession and left me to it. And in the middle of the night I felt something . . . or somebody. . . pulling at my thoughts, plucking them out of my scalp one by one, like hairs. Of course I thought it was the books, at first. I thought the words had got some power over me. I tried to leave, but you know I really didn’t want to. I’d been Daddy’s repressed little daughter for fifty years, and I was about ready to crack. Celestine knew it too—”
“Celestine is the woman in the wall?”
“I believe it’s her, yes.”
“But you don’t know who she is?”
“I’m coming to that,” Clara said. “Roxborough’s house stood on the land where the tower now stands. The cellar is the cellar of that house. Celestine was—indeed, still is— Roxborough’s prisoner. He walled her up because he didn’t dare kill her. She’d seen the face of Hapexamendios, the God of Gods. She was insane, but she’d been touched” by divinity, and even Roxborough didn’t dare lay a finger on her.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Roxborough wrote a confession, a few days before he died. He knew the woman he’d walled up would outlive him by centuries, and I suppose he also knew that sooner or later somebody would find her. So the confession was also a warning to whatever poor, victimized man came along, telling him that she was not to be touched. Bury her again, he said, I remember that very clearly. Bury her again, in the deepest abyss your wits may devise—”
“Where did you find this confession?”
“In the wall, that night when I was alone. I believe Celestine led me to it, by plucking thoughts out of my head And putting new ones in. But she plucked too hard. My mind gave up. I had a stroke down there. I wasn’t found for three days.” “That’s horrible—”
“My suffering’s nothing compared to hers. Roxborough had found this woman in London, or his spies had, and he knew she was a creature of immense power. He probably realized it more clearly than she did, in fact, because he says in the confession she was a stranger to herself. But she’d seen sights no other human being had ever witnessed. She’d been snatched from the Fifth Dominion, escorted across the Imajica, and taken into the presence of Hapexa-mendios.”
“Why?”
“It gets stranger. When he interrogated her, she told him she’d been brought back into the Fifth Dominion preg-nant.”