The Kingdom of Bones by Stephen Gallagher

Author:Stephen Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307382801
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2007-09-24T18:30:00+00:00

Splinters flew. Bullets were thudding into the seats around him. The Silent Man had stepped forward and taken aim, and he was emptying his revolver in Tom Sayers’ direction. Sayers knew that he’d been recognized. He threw himself down.

Up on the stage, Louise did not move. She barely flinched as the theater echoed with a tattoo of pistol shots. Those who’d been halfway out were diving to the floor or scrambling for the exits; those who had not yet left their seats were jumping up out of them now. There was panic, with little sense of how best to achieve safety. Sayers was aware of at least one man clambering onto the stage.

The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had begun, all chambers emptied. None had touched Sayers, but a rising cry from the other side of the stalls suggested that at least one of the bullets had found a living target. Up on the stage, Whitlock had grabbed Louise and was dragging her toward the wings.

There was a rumble from above. Sayers looked up and saw the descending safety curtain; someone backstage had tripped the counterweight release, and the five-ton sheet of asbestos and metal was coming down like a guillotine.

Sayers took a leap at the end of the runway and pulled himself up onto the stage. “Iron flying in!” he roared in warning to anyone within earshot. Once the fire curtain was down, there would be no way to move between the auditorium and the backstage area. And anyone standing in the wrong spot when it fell would be crushed, or worse.

The “iron” hit the stage within a second of his passing under it, the weight of it shaking the boards and sending a booming echo through the cellarage below. Dust rose from the wood as if from a beaten carpet.

If the stage had been boxed in for magic, as Stoker had said, then Whitlock and his cronies would now have only one way out. But where would their exit be located? Sayers had never played the Egyptian Hall or brought a company here, so he could only guess. He guessed stage left, trying to remember the layout of the building as he’d seen it on the way in.

When he reached the back of the wings, it was to find the pass door closed, with the inert body of the Silent Man sprawled before it. Another man was standing over him, looking down at the body while barring any exit from the stage with the Silent Man’s revolver in his hand. Sayers did not recognize him until he looked up and spoke.

“My God, Sayers,” Sebastian Becker said. “Tell me what I’ve walked into.”

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