“Let me guess,” Gloria said. “You’re here to force me at knifepoint to take you to Mr Tillinghast.”

  “I intended to ask politely first,” Altman said. “Though the knife was meant to be visible during the asking. So, not quite knifepoint. Just… knife adjacent.”

  She brought out a bizarre contraption that looked like a piece of lab equipment, or perhaps an hourglass, on a wooden stand. “My Silex siphon. Isn’t it a beauty? They started making these ten years ago, can you believe it? But with the war and all, they didn’t take off with the public right away. I suppose you still boil your coffee on the stove, Mr Altman? Let me assure you, filtration creates a far superior brew. You will be astonished. Ideally you should grind the beans fresh for every pour, but I ground too much this morning, and that’s almost fresh, so I might as well use them up…” Gloria turned to the stove and began heating a kettle.

  “I appreciate the hospitality, but I’m afraid, after we’ve had our coffee, I’ll need to take you with me.” He closed his hand on the knife and prepared to fling himself to the floor if Gloria moved with any speed. Letting your adversary have access to a pot of boiling water was a good way to get all the skin on your face bubbled off.

  But she turned slowly, and faced him, arms crossed over her bosom. “You should call your employer for an update. My phone is just over there.” She pointed. Altman didn’t turn to look.

  “Why should I do that?”

  “Because I’ve seen Carl Sanford more recently than you have, Mr Altman. You were sent to find me, and I was sent to find him. Your employer didn’t let me into his Lodge. He spoke to me at the gate, like I was the Fuller Brush Man interrupting him at dinner time! He’s terribly rude, isn’t he, your Mr Sanford?”

  “He… has a lot on his mind,” Altman said.

  Gloria sniffed. “So does Mr Tillinghast, but he’s always polite, and as I represent him, I am polite, too. I would have invited you in, if you’d waited on my doorstep like a reasonable person instead of letting yourself in. Though you didn’t damage the door. I appreciate that. At any rate, I have already arranged a meeting between our respective principals, so there’s no need for you to wave your blade at me. You go make your call to confirm, and I’ll get the coffee ready.”

  Altman nodded. “Hand me your purse first?”

  “Rude,” she said, but she obliged.

  He checked the purse and found everything you’d expect to find in a handbag, and nothing you wouldn’t – no gun, mainly. Then he rose, backing up, keeping his eyes on Gloria until he was out of range of boiling water or a hurled kitchen knife. He’d searched her kitchen, and the rest of the house when he arrived and was confident she didn’t have a gun stashed away anywhere else, either, or at least, not where she could get it quickly.

  He picked up the phone and spun the dial. He still wasn’t used to this direct calling business, with the automatic exchange – he always expected to hear an operator when he picked up the handset, like the old days. But the automatic exchanges were preferable for the sort of business he did anyway. You could never be sure an operator stopped listening after she connected you, after all.

  He reached the Initiate who was serving as Sanford’s secretary this evening and told her who he was and what he wanted. A few moments later Sanford picked up and began speaking immediately. “Altman, good, you can come back. I found Gloria without you, and there’s a meeting arranged for the morning. I’ve got a couple of Seekers following Gloria, and we’ll pick up Tillinghast, too, tomorrow. Once we’ve got a proper handle on his whereabouts, we can consider our options to eliminate him. Come on back to the Lodge.”

  “All right…” Altman began, but the connection died. Sanford had hung up on him. Rude, indeed, he thought.

  He put his knife away and returned to the counter, where Gloria placed a delicate china cup brimming with coffee before him. “At least have a taste of this before you run back to your master.” Gloria sipped at her own cup, then smiled at him across the brim. “Tell me, Mr Altman. Do you think of yourself more as a loyal person, or as a practical one?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Men of the World

  After Ruby returned and gave her report, Sanford dispatched a couple of Initiates to watch the deserted shop throughout the night. If Tillinghast appeared, one of them was supposed to race back to the Lodge and inform him immediately. He had a late meeting with Altman to discuss strategies, then went to bed in his rooms at the Lodge, where he slept fitfully, and had unquiet dreams.

  No alarms or alerts disturbed his slumber. He woke with the dawn, had his breakfast in his private dining room, checked in with the warden and with Altman, and then sat in his office, impatient and unable to concentrate. He should have told the Initiates watching the shop to send him regular updates instead. Finally, at 9 am, he called Altman and had him bring the Bentley around. The trip from French Hill to Diana’s old shop in the Merchant District wasn’t a long one, but they paused before they reached their destination, a block to the west, because he recognized one of the Order’s cars, with two Initiates sitting alertly in the front seat, parked in front of the wrong address. “Go see what those fools are doing!” he snapped at Altman, who pulled over the car and obliged.

  Altman leaned into the driver’s window, scowled, and looked down at a piece of paper the Initiate showed him. Altman shook his head, sighed heavily, and returned to the Bentley. “They wrote down the wrong address,” he said as he slid back behind the wheel. “Right street, wrong number.”

  “But I wrote down the address for them!” Sanford exploded.

  Altman’s eyes met Sanford’s in the rearview mirror, and he shrugged. “Maybe they copied it down for some reason. Maybe the ink got smudged. Either way, they’ve been watching the wrong place all night. I told them to pack it in. Shall we head for the proper shop?”

  Did I write down the wrong address? Sanford thought. Surely not. He’d been tired, certainly, and distracted, but he was good at the details. No, no, it had to be Tillinghast again, his continuing campaign of disorientation, to make Sanford doubt himself. But how? How had he done it – wait. The card. The card! Sanford had copied down the address from the card Dyer gave him, and perhaps the card was enchanted, and had altered the street number between his first look and his later one, and Sanford simply hadn’t noticed, and jotted down the number as written without realizing it had changed. Yes. That was it. It must be it. The alternative was… was not to be borne. “Yes, yes, onward,” Sanford said.

  They traveled another block, then parked on the street. There were a few people out and about, doing their shopping, but none of them seemed to notice that Huntress Fashions had changed. The picture window was now blocked off with a black curtain on the inside, and the window in the front door was soaped over.

  Altman and Sanford emerged from the Bentley and walked up to the shop. A notice on the front door, neatly printed, said, “By appointment only. Entrance in rear.”

  “He wants us to come in from the alley?” Sanford said. “Why?”

  “Privacy?” Altman speculated.

  “Or it’s an ambush. You go first, and make sure it’s safe.”

  Altman nodded and disappeared around the side of the building, while Sanford tried in vain to see anything beyond the edges of the curtain in the front window. Altman returned a moment later. “It’s all clear. And this is definitely the right place.”

  “How do you know that?” Sanford followed him toward the back alley.

  Altman said, “You’ll see.”

  “I don’t want to see, I want you to tell me–” But then Sanford saw.

  The unassuming back door of Diana’s shop had been replaced with a door of ornately carved and polished dark wood. A square window of white stained glass was set at head-level, with a green triangle that contained an eye in the center. Some sort of occult symbol, but Sanford couldn’t immediately place it. There was a copper doorknob, but Sanford was loath to touch the thing. A brass plaque set into the bricks beside the door said:

  Tillinghast Esoterica and Exotics

  Rare Books and Curios

  By Appointment

  “He set all this up overnight?” Sanford said. “Ruby reported none of this!”

  “She could have missed the back door and the plaque,” Altman said. “If she went in the front. He might have put up the curtain and all in the wee hours.”

  “Or Ruby is in league with my enemies,” Sanford said darkly.

  “Or that,” Altman agreed. “But I’m not sure why she’d lie and say the place was empty, when you were going to see it occupied in a few hours anyway.”

  Sanford nodded. Tillinghast might well try to turn Ruby against him… or Tillinghast could be trying to make Sanford think his people were traitors. Sowing distrust could be just as effective, in the long run, and it was a lot cheaper.

  “Try the door,” Sanford said.

  Altman turned the knob, and didn’t catch fire, or get electrocuted, or dissolve into a slurry of deliquescing flesh. The door swung inward. Hadn’t the old door opened outward? Altman stepped inside, and a moment later said, “You have to see this, sir.”

  Sanford entered and found himself profoundly disoriented. He’d been in this shop before, when it was Huntress Fashions, but Tillinghast had transformed the space. The back room was no longer separated from the front, but opened into a single space, the dark wood floors scattered with rugs, and brass lamps glowing softly here and there. Tall shelves hid the walls, and even the curtained front window, and those shelves were filled with books and scrolls and curiosities that serially snagged Sanford’s attention until he forced his gaze away. Glass museum cases dotted the open spaces, with even more precious objects under glass. “This seems wrong,” Sanford said, gazing up at the ceiling. “The interior dimensions don’t seem to match the shop as I remember it.”

  “You’ve got some spaces in the basement that don’t strictly adhere to the laws laid out by Euclid,” Altman pointed out. “Is it so surprising that Tillinghast can toy with space, too?”

  “But you have no idea the resources I expended to make those little wrinkles in reality possible,” Sanford murmured. “To use such power for a shop…” He had begun by underestimating Tillinghast, and revised his opinion of the man considerably upward in recent days, but was it possible he was still undervaluing the strength of the man?

  Sanford moved through the shop, toward the long counter at the back. The counter was a glass case, with marvels within, but there was something else on top of it, a glass dome like a bell jar, and beneath it…

  “The Grail of Dreams.” A man appeared behind the counter, emerging from a dark curtain that Sanford hadn’t even noticed. He was a bit older than Sanford, and the word that came to mind was “elegant,” from his perfectly cut gray suit to his perfectly manicured white beard to the perfect emerald stickpin in his tie. “A lovely piece, isn’t it? It came into my possession only recently. I’m Randall Tillinghast.”

  “Carl Sanford,” he said, and knew he should be taking this moment to thoroughly assess his adversary… but he couldn’t take his eyes off the Grail of Dreams. It was a large goblet carved of shimmering black stone and looked almost exactly like the replica Sanford had acquired… but this one seemed to bend the light around itself, subtly distorting the very air in a way that couldn’t be accounted for by the mere curvature of the glass dome that covered the relic. He stepped close and flicked the dome with his fingernail. “I recently made arrangements to acquire this very object. You were quicker off the mark.”

  “We are men of similar tastes, it seems,” Tillinghast said with understated bonhomie. He raised an eyebrow and nodded. “This must be your associate, Mr Altman. Gloria has told me so much about you. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance in person at last. I’m pleased to meet both of you.”

  “Are you?” Sanford tore his eyes away from the grail, though he’d wanted the object for decades, since first reading about it in certain forbidden texts. The translations regarding this object were all a bit suspect, but the overall thrust was that the grail could make your deepest dreams become reality. With power like that, Sanford would be able to turn anyone to his cause, and his influence would be unparalleled. And now this man, this interloper, had the grail instead. Did Tillinghast even know the true power of what he possessed? If he did, would he have it on display so casually?

  “I am… reasonably pleased to make your acquaintance.” Tillinghast made a great show of looking at the watch on his wrist. “You are slightly early, which is, I suppose, better than slightly late, but neither is really ideal. Still, I can make accommodations for the vagaries of life. May I offer either of you refreshment?”

  “No.” Sanford met the man’s hooded, somehow reptilian eyes. “What are you doing in Arkham, Tillinghast?”

  “This and that.” Tillinghast leaned over the counter, casual as any shopkeeper passing the time with a chatty customer. “Meeting with you, just now. And may I say, what an honor it is! You are the great Carl Sanford.” His voice was filled with reverence. “The magus of the Silver Twilight Lodge, the most modern and powerful of secret societies. Your direct influence extends up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and your network of connections and allies and sycophants covers this continent and much of Europe besides. You are a renowned summoner – I’ve even heard it said that you possess your own shoggoth, an example of that protean species from the Antarctic? They say you consort with wise women from beyond the stars, and that the foundations of your Lodge extend deep into the earth and onward into realms beyond. You are renowned not just as a scholar and master of the esoteric arts, but as a collector of relics and artifacts from ancient civilizations – even prehuman ones. As a humble collector of esoterica myself, well, it’s truly a pleasure to be in the presence of such a luminary.” He straightened and pressed his hand to his chest as he made this final pronouncement.

  “How do you know all that?” Sanford demanded, shocked at the man’s easy recital of some of his greatest secrets.

  “Oh, people talk.” Tillinghast waved a hand airily. “There’s no such thing as secret knowledge if more than one person knows about it. Surely you know that as well as I do. As soon as I set my sights on Arkham, everyone said, ‘You simply must meet Carl Sanford, nothing of any consequence happens in Arkham except by his leave.’ But, if I may… that’s why I wanted to meet you, sir. My associate Gloria tells me that you were most eager to meet me, and asked her to set up a meeting for that purpose. Not realizing the gift I had her present already contained an invitation.” He shook his head ruefully. “It was all a bit of a farce, I’m afraid. The sort of comic misunderstanding that could have been easily avoided if I’d only been a bit more forthcoming with my employee. I have learned my lesson there.” He spread his hands wide and looked solemn. “But here we are, at last, with our mutual desire for a tête-à-tête satisfied. May I ask, then, why you wished so ardently to make my acquaintance?”

  Sanford resisted the urge to reach across the counter and grab the man by his tailored Italian lapels. “I came to tell you to leave Arkham immediately, before I have you removed.”

  Tillinghast cocked his head and affected bewilderment. “Have I offended you somehow, sir?”

  Sanford clenched his fists and growled. “You came to my city and interfered with my business. You charmed my harbormaster, you stole that grail, you sent a madman to pilfer the Pnakotic Manuscripts–” He almost added, “You asked Ruby to spy on me,” but he wasn’t supposed to know that, so he sputtered into silence instead.

  Tillinghast sighed, like a put-upon parent dealing with a recalcitrant child. “To respond to these allegations in order… I did not realize he was your harbormaster, and I see no reason we cannot share him. I am happy to assist you in your endeavors, where that assistance does not work against my own interests. As for the grail, I wanted it for my own reasons, and while it’s true that I scooped it out from under you, that sort of thing happens all the time in business. I am sure there will be many future business dealings where you get the best of me instead. So it goes. With regards to the Pnakotic Manuscripts, I wished to check something in my own copy against the earlier translation the university held, but the archivists rebuffed me, so I had no choice but to take other measures. Once I was finished, I gave the manuscript pages to you as a gift, which hardly suggests I bear you any ill will, sir.”

  “You are meddling in my affairs,” Sanford said. “My dear friend Sheriff Engle would be interested to hear about your little exploits down by the docks.”

  Tillinghast brightened. “Ah, yes, the sheriff! I met him, not long after I came to the city. Did you know he’s an avid hunter? Birds, mainly, I think. I gifted him with a bird call I picked up from an estate sale. It used to belong to the last priestess of Artemis, and it has the most remarkable ability to summon prey of any kind, not just waterfowl! He was most grateful.”

  Sanford couldn’t speak. The sheriff was a longtime loyalist, bought and paid for, and Tillinghast had compromised him, too?

  “There’s no need for us to threaten one another.” Tillinghast plucked a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at a spot on the glass counter, as if his mind was only half on this conversation. “We are both men of business, and men of the world. Let us simply tend to our individual affairs, and when our interests overlap, we can address any complications on a case-by-case basis. I’m unsure why we should ever come into conflict, however. We have so little in common. I am but a humble shopkeeper, a buyer and seller of trinkets, and you… what is it you do again? Manage a social club, or something of that sort?”

  Sanford seethed but held his tongue.

  Tillinghast shrugged. “Well. I’m sure your work is very important, and I don’t want to impose upon your time. We are both busy men, and if we need to communicate in the future, I can always send my Miss Dyer to talk to your Mr Altman–”

  “What is it you want here?” Sanford demanded. “Why have you really come to my city?”