"How can you know?"
"Just a hunch. I think he came down through the trapdoor as I did, entered the room, and moved over there to the desk." He pointed to the northwest corner. "Look at the chair. It,s been dusted, and there are a few books there, too."
"The only new things in this room."
Reuben examined them. Detective novels, classics - Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain.
"He camped here from time to time," said Reuben.
On the floor to the right of the chair in the shadows stood a half-full bottle of wine with a screw top. Common California vintage, but not a bad one, just one that came with a screw top.
Behind the desk was a row of leather-bound ledgers on a high shelf, with yearly dates inscribed on the spines in faded gold. Reuben slowly removed the ledger for 1912, and opened it. Sturdy, made-to-endure, parchmentlike paper still intact.
There was the enigmatic writing in ink, Felix,s secret writing, waves and waves of it across page after page.
"Could this be what he wants above all?"
"It,s all so old," Laura said. "What secrets could it contain? Perhaps he wants it only because it belongs to him? Or to whoever shares this language."
Laura pointed to the long table that was draped with cloth. Reuben could see the tracks in the dust leading back and forth from it to the door. There was a mess of tracks around it.
He knew what he would find. Carefully, he peeled back the cloth.
"The tablets," he whispered. "All the ancient Mesopotamian tablets. Marrok collected them and brought them here." He rolled the cloth back gingerly, unveiling rows and rows of fragments. "All preserved," Reuben said, "probably just as Felix wanted." And there were the man,s diaries, a good dozen notebooks like the one that Reuben had first seen on Felix,s desk, in neat stacks of four each. "Look how carefully he put these things here."
What if the secrets of this transformation went all the way back to the ancient cities of Uruk and Mari? And why should they not? The Chrism - that,s what we,ve called it for ages. The gift, the power - there are a hundred ancient words for it - what does it matter?
Laura was moving along the northern and eastern walls, studying the books on those shelves. She,d come to a plain darkly stained door.
She waited for Reuben to open it. Same old brass doorknob as the others. It opened easily to reveal a door opposite with a latch. This door, too, opened with a creak.
They found themselves in one of the inside bathrooms of the north hall. The door was faced entirely with a long rectangular mirror framed in gold.
"I should have realized," Reuben said.
But there had to be some other way into the second floor at the southwest corner, he was certain. Where the first Felix Nideck had slept right after the house was built.
He found it, a door into a linen pantry, faced in bare wood and blocked by a row of shelves. It was a simple thing to remove the shelves, and they soon found themselves at the southwest end of the south hallway, right before the master bedroom door.
They made other small discoveries. A loop of heavy iron-threaded rope hung from the trapdoor, enabling one to pull it down from the inside. Old lamps throughout the big room were empty. Some of the tables were fitted with small sinks, fully plumbed with faucets and drains. There were gas pipes running beneath the tables and gas burners. The entire laboratory had been well equipped for its time.
They soon discovered that there was a door in each corner of the room, one leading into a bathroom behind a mirror quite similar to the one they,d already found, and the last one on the southeast side leading into a closet.
"I think I understand what might have happened," said Reuben. "Someone began experiments here, experiments to determine the nature of the change, the Chrism, whatever these creatures call this. If these creatures have longevity, truly great longevity, think what modern science must have meant to them after thousands of years of alchemy. They must have expected to discover great things."
"But why did they stop the experiments?"
"Could be a thousand reasons. Perhaps they relocated the laboratory somewhere else. There,s only so much one can do scientifically in a house like this, isn,t there? And they wanted secrecy, obviously. Or maybe they discovered that they couldn,t discover anything at all."
"Why do you say that?" Laura asked. "They must have discovered something, in fact, many things."
"You think so? I think the specimens they took from themselves or others simply disintegrated before they could learn much of anything at all. Maybe that,s why they turned away from the whole endeavor."
"I wouldn,t have given up that easily," said Laura. "I would have sought better preservatives, better techniques. I would have studied the tissues for as long as they held together. I think they moved their headquarters someplace else. Remember what the guardian creature said about pluripotent progenitor cells. That,s a sophisticated term. Most normal human beings don,t know terms like that."
"Well, if that,s so, then Felix wants his own personal records, his own possessions, and those tablets - whatever those tablets mean."
"Tell me about them, please," she said. "What are they exactly?" She approached the half-draped table. She feared to touch the tiny dried clay fragments that looked as fragile as dried dough.
Reuben didn,t want to touch them either, but he wished for all the world he had a bright light to shine on the tablets. He wished he could make out an order to the way in which Marrok had laid them out. Had there been an order to them on the shelves in Felix,s old rooms? He couldn,t remember any discernible order.
"It,s cuneiform writing," he said. "Some of the earliest. I can show you examples in books or online. These were probably unearthed in Iraq, from the earliest cities ever documented in the world."
"I never realized these tablets were so tiny," she said. "I always thought of them as large, like the pages of our books."
"I,m eager to get out of here!" Reuben said suddenly. "It,s suffocating me. It,s grim."
"Well, I think we,ve done enough for now. We,ve learned things that are quite important. If only we knew for sure that Marrok was the only one who,d been in this room."
"I,m sure of it," said Reuben. Again, he led the way as they turned off the lights behind them and went down the stairs.
In the darkened library, they built up the fire again, and Laura sat close, hugging herself for warmth, and Reuben sat far back against the desk, because the warmth was too much.