Play dead

ELEVEN

The basement was a vast and silent cavern, cool even in high summer-corridors crosshatching corridors, carved lintels threatening headroom from above each passageway, stone walls unencumbered by paint or memory. Its corners were clean, damp, sunless.

The enormous space was divided into more than a dozen rooms. When Faerwood had been built, around 1900, the basement was used primarily for storage. There was a coal chute, of course, the boiler, an oil heater, a forest of rusted iron support columns.

The original owner-an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad named Artemus Coleridge, a man who hanged himself from an attic roof beam in the house in 1908-had seven children, and it was in the wide expanse of the main basement that they played their outdoor games in winter, their contests illuminated by scores of gas lamps, hundreds of candles. To this day Swann found small mounds of melted paraffin and blackened wicks in the unlikeliest of places.

As an adult Swann could not picture this house full of happy children, not in this place of his ruined childhood, but as a boy he had often stalked these rooms, imagining voices and bright laughter, conjuring unseen friends, gamboling with ghosts.

Originally there had been only one set of stairs leading to the basement, from a small pantry directly off the main kitchen, a direct route to both the wine and root cellars.

All that changed when Joseph Swann's father bought the house, and the transformation of Faerwood began. Now there were more than ten ways to enter the lower level.

One basement room-perhaps the smallest at a mere six feet by seven-was his dressing room. On one wall was a large mirror, ringed with yellow globe lamps. In the corner was a tall collector's cabinet, its many drawers containing a lifetime collection of items dedicated to the art of makeup. One of these drawers held prosthetic devices used for both concealment and diversion. One was devoted to scabs, wounds, and scars. Another, Swann's favorite, contained hair and character effects. Some of the wigs and mustaches were more than fifty years old, among them some of the finest ever produced.

Yet even the finest of prosthetics and wigs were useless without the true secret of makeup-application.

The tools of this trade were laid out precisely on the clinically clean table-brushes, combs, sponges, pencils, and crayons, along with tubes and jars of powders, matte foundations, paint, glitter, lipsticks, and the increasingly important neutralizers and concealers. Now that he was nearing forty, Swann lamented, he found himself turning to the concealers more and more.

His wig already in place, Swann applied the last of the spirit gum to his chin, and opened the clear plastic box that bore his prized human- hair goatee. He held the beard in place for a few seconds, then smoothed it to the contours of his chin. He had applied the black eyebrows earlier, and settled into his right eye the steel-rimmed monocle made of clear glass.

He stood, slipped on the cutaway coat, adjusted the shoulders, the waist. He tapped the remote in his left pocket, turning on the music. Bach's Sleepers Awake began to softly fill the outer rooms.

Moments later Joseph Swann opened the door, and stepped onto his secret stage. KATJA SAT CROSS-LEGGED in the box, her eyes vacant, distant.

The Sword Box was painted in a lustrous red lacquer. It measured approximately four feet tall, two feet wide, two feet deep. It rested on a short, polished-steel pedestal. The inside was a glossy black enamel.

The box was fitted with a drain hole at the bottom, a portal that fed the iron pipe that emptied into the sanitary sewer running beneath the rear of the house.

Swann emerged from the darkness, his white shirt and scarlet tie a magnificent contrast to the blackness of the room. He stepped into the spotlight, just to the left of the box.

A few feet away watched the eye of the camera, an unblinking silver portal in the gloom.

He glanced at the open box, at Katja's face. She looked young again, in need of tending. Alas, it was too late for that. He reached out, touched her cheek. She tried to shy away, but she could not move, not in the confines of the magnificent Sword Box.

Joseph Swann was ready.

Upstairs, in a room secreted from the rest of Faerwood by a false wall at the top of the grand staircase, secured by steels doors, a television flickered, a monitor carrying this live performance.

"Behold the Sword Box," Swann began, looking directly into the lens, out at the world, into the hearts and minds of those who would soon see this and thus be tasked to solve his puzzle. "And behold the lovely Odette."

He slipped the box's front panel into place, secured it with a quartet of thumbscrews, then turned to the table next to him, the table bearing seven gleaming swords, all keened to a razor sharpness.

Moments later he drew the first sword. In the quietude of the basement the steel sang, finding each threshold, each doorway, each memory, a silver whisper floating through a maddening maze of dreams.