“Wait here,” Stalker told the other men, and then motioned Hudson on ahead.

In another few minutes Hudson and Stalker stood in a dining room with dark red wallpaper and heavy black drapes over the two windows. Hudson saw that the dining table had legs carved to resemble leaping dolphins, and suspended from the ceiling above it was a black wrought-iron wagonwheel chandelier holding six burning candles. On the table were four more burning tapers, two placed before the silver platter and utensils table setting at one end and two at the other. Hudson noted that both settings included knives, and both were very sharp-looking indeed. That particularly interested him, since he’d not been allowed a razor to shave with, and here were blades that could cut a man’s throat as quick as a wish.

“I’ll take your coat,” Stalker said, and waited as Hudson shrugged out of it. “Sit there.” Stalker tapped the high-backed chair that faced the other high-backed chair. Included with the setting at the other end was a small silver bell: the master’s voice. As Hudson obeyed, Stalker used that same tapping finger to touch the knife. “You’re already salivating over this. If I were you, I’d be a polite dinner guest. A blade won’t get you answers any faster, and besides … you might need it for your food. Professor?” he called toward the staircase they’d passed on the way in. “Shall I stay?”

“No.”

A shadow had moved not from the direction of the staircase, but from a far corner of the room draped in darkness.

As Hudson watched, the shadow became a man.

“Thank you, Stalker,” said Professor Fell, “but I’m sure Mr. Greathouse will be a polite dinner guest. Just hang his coat in the hallway as you leave. And go get something to eat at the tavern, the catch was good today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hudson didn’t bother to watch Stalker leave the room; he was fixed upon his first sight of the notorious, powerful and infamous Professor Fell …

… who today looked like nothing more than a frail, weary and completely harmless man of sixty or so who happened to be up past his bedtime.

“Greetings,” Fell said, with a slight nod. He wore a silk robe of purple trimmed in gold and a purple silk skullcap. “I am pleased to see you’ve recovered.”

“Were you pleased to put me in that condition?” Upon arriving here by coach and under armed guard—how long ago?—he and Berry were separated, half-a-dozen men had held him down while a bitter-smelling cloth was held over his face, he recalled coming out of the fog to feel a needle jabbing him in the prominent vein of his right arm, and after that came the nightmares of excruciating terror. Among them was the sense that venomous spiders were not only crawling over him but growing inside him, and the feeling that his body continually burst into flame, burned him to a skeleton, and then charred him again when his flesh grew back. In that state, he remembered that hearing someone speak his own name was like the sound of a death sentence from a vengeful God.