“I want… what you said. To move up.” In truth, she wanted security – to be free from the worries about money that had defined her father’s existence on the farm. She wanted freedom from precarity. But if Sanford thought she wanted more than that – if he saw in her a kindred spirit fueled by poisonous ambition – she would exploit that misapprehension. “I always knew there was more to life than just working hard and dying alone. There has to be. There are secrets. You know them. I want to know them, too.”

  “The thing about secrets is, there are always more of them,” Sanford said. “The word ‘occult’ means ‘hidden’ – and if we could uncover all those secrets, they wouldn’t be hidden anymore, would they? But I do know a few things. You could learn them, too. And reap the benefits. You are on the cusp of ascending to the next level – to becoming a Sister of the Dark. Would you like that? To gain access to a whole new understanding of reality?”

  “I would like nothing more.” And access to your account books, if possible, Diana thought. There was no way Sanford’s business dealings were unimpeachably honest. A man who would break natural law and summon monsters wouldn’t feel beholden to follow mortal law, and that might be an avenue to bring him down.

  “I thought so.” Sanford smiled indulgently. “I just need your help. Proof of your loyalty, and usefulness.” He tapped the files on the table. “These are notes regarding some of our members, plus one or two prominent individuals who are not part of our Order, but who are nevertheless worthy of attention. I have grown… troubled… by some of these people, of late.”

  “In what way?” Diana asked.

  “They are behaving peculiarly. These two, for instance, Colonel Mott and Doctor Undercliffe, are both Initiates, and unlikely to ever rise any higher, as they lack the curiosity necessary to become Seekers. They’ve hated each other for decades, something about an insult delivered to one of their sisters at a cotillion when they were at university together – I can’t be bothered to remember the details. They are formal with one another, if they interact at all, but last week I saw them sitting in the Initiate’s lounge, heads together, talking like old friends. Neither one was drinking, either, though I sometimes think they both joined us just for access to the Lodge’s liquor cabinet. When I strolled over to them, they reverted to their old ways, stiffening up and glaring daggers, but it was clearly pretense.”

  “Perhaps they are in the midst of a reconciliation?” Diana said.

  “Perhaps,” Sanford echoed. “But consider Doctor Kulten. He is an emeritus professor at Miskatonic University, once a scholar of the ancient epics, but long since in mental decline. He sometimes escapes the attentions of his nurse and wanders onto the porch here and stands, confused, on the threshold. Yet not two days ago I found him in this very room, attending one of our regular meetings, and speaking with a level of erudition and authority he hasn’t possessed in ten years or more.” Sanford shook his head. “Something strange is happening to our members, and I’ve heard whispers of curious behavior on the part of other eminent citizens. Personality changes, mainly.”

  Diana blinked, but schooled herself to show no other reaction. This Kulten had regained his memory? Abel’s comet had demonstrated remarkable feats of memory, apparently… could there be a connection?

  Sanford went on. “Most people are creatures of habit, and when there are significant deviations from those habits, it makes me curious. There are many possible causes for such changes, but I’ve ruled out the involvement of the Yith, and of Kamog and similar entities–”

  “I’m sorry?” Diana said. She thought she’d seen mention of the Yith in one of the texts she’d read, though she couldn’t recall the context, and Kamog she’d never heard of at all. Maybe these oddities weren’t related to the comets. Maybe there were more strange things in the world than she could comprehend.

  Sanford sighed. “Yes, of course, those are matters known only to higher ranks than you have yet attained, Seeker. Suffice to say that I have explored the most obvious explanations, and remain uncertain of the cause for these changes, if indeed these situations are related. If these changes portend a threat to the Lodge, I have to be cautious. But it occurred to me that you know many of the people involved, through your shop, and they are unlikely to see you as a threat, since, forgive me, you are a tradesperson. You could contrive reasons to enter their homes, delivering dresses and scarves and the like, and observe them, eavesdrop a bit, and look for clues that might offer an explanation for their recent… peculiarities.”

  “You wish for me to become a spy?” she blurted.

  “You are a Seeker,” Sanford said. “The name of your rank indicates your function: to pursue knowledge. I want you to pursue this knowledge for me.”

  “I… of course, master. Where should I begin?”

  “I think with Mrs Cornelius Berglund.”

  “Cornelia?” Diana said, surprised.

  “I always wondered if Cornelius married her just because he found the similarity in their names amusing,” Sanford said. “Given his hideous propensity for puns and wordplay. It’s a mercy for his students that he left the university. I can’t imagine having to listen to him prattle week after week in a lecture hall…” He shook his head. “But Cornelia. Yes. She bears closer examination, and her husband does as well.”

  “I saw her just last week,” Diana said. “She was inquiring about some French silk scarves I received. She seemed normal enough to me.”

  “She was seen driving a car yesterday,” Sanford said. “She does not drive. Perhaps the matter of these scarves will give you a pretense to visit her home?”

  “Of course. May I ask… why do you wish to begin with her?”

  “Cornelius is helping me with a delicate matter.” Sanford’s expression clouded. “I would be vexed to discover he’s been compromised, and unable to fulfill his duties. I have no reason to think anything is amiss with him… but if his wife has changed, it seems reasonable to assume that he might have, too.”

  “I didn’t realize the Berglunds were members of the Lodge.”

  “They are not. Occasionally I find it necessary to seek outside help. Cornelius has connections I needed.”

  Diana wanted to inquire about the nature of that help, but she knew it was pointless. Sanford would never share more than he wished to. “I’ll get started right away.” She would investigate on her own behalf more than Sanford’s, though. If she found something she could use against the Lodge, or something that could help Abel in his fight against the comets, she’d keep it for her own use.

  “Good. And do be cautious. I’ve seen no sign that the… altered individuals are dangerous, but until we understand more about what’s happening, it’s best to assume they are.” He patted her hand. “Go forth, Miss Stanley, and seek.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Thing in the Basement

  Like much of Arkham, the train station had once been a grand old thing, and looked even worse now because you could see remnants of its past glory. As Ruby disembarked, she wrinkled her nose at the sight of the main depot, like a castle gone to ruin. The tracks were flanked by huge stone towers of no obvious purpose, looming over the trains freshly arrived from Boston and about to head to Kingsport, like monuments from a fallen civilization. Look upon my works, ye mighty, she mused.

  Ruby only had a single valise, but she caught the eye of a porter anyway, a young man with an open face. He hurried over, favoring one leg. Poor fellow had a limp, and still had to haul people’s bags. At least her request wouldn’t require much effort from him: “Could you call me a cab, sir?”

  “There should be one waiting on the curb,” he said. “Not too much demand on a Sunday afternoon.” He led her through the station, cheerfully peppering her with inquiries about whether she’d been to Arkham before, and what brought her here, and how long she’d be staying: “No, this is my first time; I’m visiting a cousin; just for a few days.” She had, of course, been to Arkham before, but she’d taken pains to look like an entirely different person on this trip: her hair color was different, and she was dressed like a country mouse, all drab and gray and without a whiff of discernible style. On her last visit to the city, she’d been rather more stylish, but she’d also stolen something valuable from Carl Sanford and the Silver Twilight Lodge, and she had no desire to be recognized.

  The porter led her to the curb, where a couple of grimy yellow taxis idled, and introduced her to the cabbie, a sleepy-eyed Irishman with a tam-o-shanter jammed on his head. She gave the porter a coin and slipped into the back seat while the driver stowed her bag in the trunk. It was a good thing she wasn’t in a hurry. She’d seen snails move faster. “Where to, ma’am?” he asked once he settled himself behind the wheel.

  That “ma’am” was a good sign – she’d used makeup to alter her appearance, aging herself up just a touch, nothing dramatic, and she’d done her best to walk like someone with aching knees. “Over to French Hill,” she said, and gave him an address.

  He grunted and pulled away from Northside Station. Soon they were trundling down narrow streets, close enough to the Miskatonic River for Ruby to catch glimpses of the brown water through gaps between rundown old warehouses. They trundled down to the Peabody Avenue bridge, and then across the water. Ruby looked out the window, east, toward the small island in the river. She couldn’t recall its name – if it even had one – but she’d heard strange rumors about it on her last visit: that in the old days, a witches’ coven met there, and consorted with the devil. The island looked like nothing but a drab clutch of trees to her, with a few broken stone pillars poking out here and there, but with all the things she’d seen, and stolen, who was she to deny such possibilities?

  They made it to southside, where the streets were in better shape, and there were a lot more shops than warehouses. There were nice neighborhoods on the north side of the river, too, especially around Independence Square, but French Hill had that height advantage, allowing its residents to lord it over the rest of the populace.

  The cab took her up and over the hill and stopped on a steeply canted street, in front of the address she’d given. Ruby paid the man, thanked him, and pretended to search through her handbag until the taxi had driven out of sight. She hadn’t given the driver the address of the house she was visiting, of course. Such caution was more than habit for her at this point – it was more like instinct.

  She strolled a couple of blocks, turned down another block, took the next right, and then stopped in front of her destination. The house was by no means a mansion, but it was quite nice, two stories tall, painted white, with neat blue trim. The small front yard was crowded with statuary in brass and stone.

  Her client, Cornelius Berglund, was the scion of a once-wealthy family fallen on hard times a generation or two back. In order to make a living, he’d sold off their ancestral home and most of their furniture, silver, and art. In the course of so doing, though, he became something of an expert on antiques, and had pivoted into a career as a dealer, initially in Colonial-era artifacts, but later antiquities from overseas. He wasn’t scrupulous about how he acquired his wares, and Ruby had asked around about him. Through mutual friends, she met a thief who’d acquired a silver tea set made by Paul Revere for Berglund, who vouched for the man: “He paid what we agreed, and he didn’t ask me any questions. I’d work for him again.” That was good enough for her.

  She intended to have words with Berglund, though, about his inaccurate intelligence regarding the lawyer’s schedule. Ruby didn’t like running for her life, and she intended to make Berglund pay her extra for the trouble. She glanced around to make sure she was unobserved – it was Sunday morning, and everyone was still asleep or at church, she suspected – and went up the steps to the front door. Before she could raise her hand to knock, the door opened, and a handsome woman of middle years greeted her with a smile – the lady of the house, presumably.

  She was in a fine blue silk dress and elbow-length gloves, rather nice for just swanning about at home, and Ruby wondered if she was on her way out somewhere. When she smiled, she revealed lipstick on her teeth. “You must be the young lady Cornelius was expecting! Why, he didn’t think you’d be here for another day or two at the earliest.”

  Berglund had told his wife about her? Well, actually, that made a certain degree of sense – trying to keep a visit from a strange young woman secret might lead to more trouble, if she caught wind of it. “I had an opening in my schedule,” Ruby said. She also had a policy of refusing to follow any preset schedule. Never be where anyone expected you to be, when they expected you to be.

  “Come in, come in! I’m Cornelia. You’re in the antiques business, too? Brought some bauble for Cornelius to appraise, as I recall?”

  Cornelia and Cornelius? The world had such things in it. “I dabble,” Ruby said, stepping over the threshold. Ruby automatically began to inventory the house for any precious objects that might be worth coming back for later, or telling one of her acquaintances in the business about in exchange for a cut. The main room of the house didn’t offer much of interest – some mediocre canvases on the walls, tending toward harbor scenes, and some ugly statuary that reminded her of similar pieces she’d passed over during her last visit to Arkham. Otherwise the furnishings were firmly conventional, solid wooden furniture showing off uninspired New England craftsmanship, and a scattering of colorful but unexceptional rugs to warm up the hardwood floors.

  Cornelia took Ruby by the elbow, an unasked-for intimacy that Ruby decided not to shake off for the sake of the business arrangement. She led Ruby through the dining room and into the kitchen. Ruby had expected to do the exchange in some pretentious study with her employer dressed in a suit, trying to impress her, but Cornelius Berglund was sitting at a cloth-draped table in the kitchen. He was wearing shirtsleeves, with a large mug steaming before him. At a glance, the mug appeared to contain plain hot water, which was a whole new level of abstemiousness in Ruby’s experience. More interestingly, there was a swollen bruise under his left eye, and a large bandage wrapped around his left hand. It was hard to imagine this stolid sixty-something man with unfortunate muttonchops getting into a fistfight, but Ruby couldn’t imagine how else you’d come by a shiner like that.

  “Miss Standish,” he said, and that was bad, because he shouldn’t know her real name; he’d met her through a mutual connection who’d obscured her identity. Coming to Arkham under her real name would have been a profoundly bad idea.

  She’d learned to trust her instincts, and her instincts were telling her to beat feet, but when she turned, Cornelia was blocking the doorway, beaming at her affably. Ruby was calculating whether she’d be able to bull-rush her way through the woman when Berglund said, “I’m sorry. That was rude. We can use your other name if you prefer – Edna Glasby, was it?”

  “How did you find out my name?” she asked levelly.

  He waved that away. “I am a man of many connections and resources. I am always careful to find out who I’m really doing business with. There aren’t that many young lady – cat burglars, is that the term? – who operate on this coast, and none of them are named Edna Glasby.”

  “Edna’s a hot new prospect with a lot of potential,” Ruby said. “You should have given her a chance.” She sighed. “Listen, if you did your research, you know I don’t love spending time in Arkham, so let’s just do our business and get it done. I have your ruby, if you have the rest of my money.” She opened the top of her handbag, as if to draw out the jewel, but instead put her hand on a pearl-handled derringer, a gift from an old girlfriend. If Berglund was any kind of a shrewd operator, he’d know he could just sell her to Carl Sanford, and keep the ruby for free. This had just turned into an entirely different sort of transaction, and she’d be lucky to get out without spilling blood.

  “I will gladly pay you, but I will pay you even more for information.” Berglund opened the lid on a wooden salt cellar and spooned a generous heap of crystals into his mug, gave it a stir, and took a sip. Who on earth drank hot salt water? Was it some kind of old home remedy?

  “I’m not in the business of information, Mr Berglund. I acquire things. How about we just–”

  “The Silver Twilight Lodge,” Berglund said. “You’ve been there, in the vaults. You’ve stolen from Carl Sanford, and gotten away with it.”

  That was enough. Ruby took one step back and one to the side and drew out her pistol, pointing it at Berglund, but with Cornelia in easy range, too. “I am going to walk out of here now, and you are not going to follow me.”

  “We just want information,” Berglund said. “We’ll pay you.” If he was bothered by the gun, he didn’t show it.

  Cornelia took a step toward her, and Ruby said, “Hold it! I’ll shoot him.”

  Cornelia looked at Berglund, head cocked. “You’d kill my husband? That’s fine. I have another one.”

  That threw Ruby enough to make her brow wrinkled, though not enough to make her aim waver. “What are you talking about–”

  A door at the other end of the kitchen swung open, and a man who looked exactly like Cornelius Berglund stepped out. This Berglund was dressed in pajamas, and he carried a claw hammer with something dark and red on the head. As Ruby gaped, she saw a drop of blood fall from the hammer and spatter onto the tile. “You’ve got a twin?” Ruby swung the gun in an arc, unable to cover all three of them at once.

  “A twin?” the Berglund at the table said. “Yes, I suppose so. But only recently.”

  Berglund’s double with the hammer chuckled. Though he wasn’t quite a double – one of his eyes was noticeably lower than the other, and his nose was crooked, not like it had been broken, but like it had grown wrong in the first place. There was also a lot more hair coming out of his ears, long and coarse as cat whiskers.