The sun beat down on us as we made our way across what felt like the entire length of the city before we came to the Inkling District. The Inkling was a channel that wound lazily eastward through New Fiddleham, looping north and south in wide arcs as though it were dodging the buildings that had grown up around it. When all of this had been farmland, the Inkling might have provided irrigation for row after row of healthy vegetables. Today it served the far less noble duty of rushing the city’s waste out of sight and out of mind, and the townspeople had affectionately dubbed it the Inky—not an imprecise descriptor on its worst days. The Inkling District was a collection of businesses and factories tucked into the widest loop of the snake.
The air was thick and heavy, and it tasted like wet clay and coal fires. The sky was cut with streaks of black from the smokestacks of the factories around us. It was already past noon by the time we had marched through the rows and rows of tall brick buildings and finally approached our destination. The Buhmann building had a gothic fa?ade, broad and imposing with black spires running along the rooftop. Billowing steam from a street vent puffed whirling clouds into the air in front of it, giving the building a haunted atmosphere.
“That sewer line runs directly under the building,” Jackaby observed as we passed through the steam cloud, “and I would wager it empties out very near to where the professor’s body was found.”
“I wouldn’t bet against you, sir,” I said, not feeling any better about entering the ominous building. It looked like precisely the sort of place where a living body might go if it wanted to become a dead one.
A fence ran along the perimeter, but the front gate hung ajar, and Jackaby and I stepped through without obstacle. The Buhmann building’s double doors were ten feet tall and set with big brass handles in the shape of a double B. They were unlocked and weighted, swinging open with only a low creak at Jackaby’s tug.
The inside of the structure was less than abandoned; it was barren. There were no old bookshelves or deserted desks. Granite floors lay bare from the front door to the far end of the building. Where one might have expected a broad foyer to give way to hallways and offices, the whole structure was simply hollow. Windows ran along the exterior at about the height one might expect a second floor to sit, but there was not so much as a landing to reach them. Through their dusty glass the afternoon sunlight seeped in, sickly and sallow by the time it spilled onto the floor below.
More eerie than its jaundiced light or staggering emptiness was the building’s familiarity. “This is it!” I said, with a sudden realization. “Pavel was here, and Carson and all the rest. This is where they took that tintype of the pale man. ‘For posterity,’ it said. This is it, I’m sure of it! Look at those pillars against the wall, and the shape of the windows.” I had pored over Jenny’s file enough times to commit the photograph to memory.
“Interesting,” said Jackaby.
“Well, sir?” I said. “Do you see anything I can’t?”
“Constantly,” said Jackaby. It wasn’t exactly arrogance—but by the same token, it wasn’t not arrogance. I waited for my employer to explain his paranormal perception of the cavernous room.
“Anything . . . supernatural?” I asked.
“No. Yes.” Jackaby rubbed his eyes. “Everything. The walls, the floor, even the ceiling . . .”
“What?” I said.
“Ha!” He shook his head and spun in place, marveling at the dark, dusty cobwebs hanging over us. “It’s been scrubbed clean, every inch.”
I looked around. “This might be why you and Jenny rarely see eye to eye about housekeeping,” I said.
“Not scrubbed clean of dust or droppings,” he said. “There are plenty of those, of course.” I decided not to look too closely for confirmation about the droppings. “Scrubbed clean of magical residue. I can’t pick out any unique otherworldly auras in this space.”
“Couldn’t that just mean that this place doesn’t have any?”
“Hardly. When you were young, did you ever spill red wine on your parents’ carpet?”
I blinked. “Er—yes? I knocked a bottle of merlot off of the table once.”
“And what did your mother do to clean it up?”
“Nothing. My mother never did the cleaning. She always had a maid handle that sort of thing.”
“Precisely—white vinegar! Nothing better for a stain. Except that the carpet is never quite like it used to be, is it? Even if you can’t see the red anymore, there’s always something about that spot. It’s a little too clean for the rest of the rug, and it keeps that lingering vinegar smell, right? Now a healthy suspension of sodium bicarbonate might help with that, but there’s always something left behind.”
“You know a lot about cleaning carpets for someone whose floor looks like a topical map of the East Indies.”
“I know the Viennese waltz, too, but I don’t waste my time doing it every day. Focus, Rook. Someone has layered this space with an essence of natural spirits.”
“They cleaned the whole building with alcohol?” I said.
“Not that sort of spirits—actual spirits. There are countless varieties of fairy folk, oddlings, and minor deities residing in the world at any given time. Most are confined to the other side of the veil, but nature spirits are especially prevalent on our side. They are largely innocuous. I see them perpetually, so I tend to ignore them, the way you might take no notice of dandelions in a field or clouds in the sky—but in their simplicity they are also a pure source of magic.”
He gazed around again, breathing in the dusty air. “There is no reason for an industrial building in the middle of the city to reek of nature spirits in exactly the same way that there is no reason for a carpet to reek of vinegar. Someone or something has been here, Miss Rook, and they went to great lengths to scrub themselves from my sight—which means they knew that I would come looking. Whoever was here, they are far more aware of me than I am of them.”
I swallowed. The already meager sunlight drifting through the dirty windows seemed to dim as if responding to the mood. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I would not care to find myself back here after dark. “Perhaps we should be heading home, sir,” I said. “It’s getting rather late and we have a long walk ahead of us.”
The streets of New Fiddleham were never empty, but by the time we had made our way out of the Inkling District, the usual bustle of afternoon traffic had ebbed, giving way to the quiet trickle of evening life. Our shadows grew longer and longer as we walked, and the tired sun leaned heavily on the rooftops. I tried to distract myself from my aching feet by running over the moving parts of the case in my mind. Jenny and Howard Carson, the McCafferys, the Hooles—Pavel was the one thread that seemed to tie all three couples together—but loose ends stuck out at every turn.
We passed through a neighborhood of tired old buildings, the sort that had once been big family estates, but whose ostentatious halls had long since been divided and repurposed into overflowing tenement apartments. Networks of creaking stairs and landings now hid most of the regal architecture. A man in an undershirt puffed cigar smoke from an open window and spat onto the pavement two stories below. Jackaby was striding past at his usual lightning pace when a sound caught our ears.
“Grab him. Grab his hands! Hold still, you little—”
My employer froze mid-stride. His head turned slowly. The voices were coming from a slim alleyway between the buildings.