Page 8 of Written in Red

He stepped over to the side of the opening where the moving bit of the wall sat inside the real wall. “These two stones here that are the same size—?” He looked over to make sure she spotted it.

She nodded.

“Just behind them is the latch that releases the moving wall. Shift the latch upward and in, and you’ll feel the wall shift. Then it’s a matter of pulling it back in place.”

“Is it heavy?” She bent a little around him to eye the wall inside the wall.

“A little, but I don’t think you’ll struggle.”

He moved aside, and she took his place. She focused as her small, delicate hands searched for the latch. He’d never paid much heed to ladies’ hands before. But hers he found fascinating.

After a moment, her brows lifted and she smiled a little. Then she pulled the wall into place.

“There is a stone that sticks out a bit on the false wall,” Mercury said. “Push that in. That will lock it.”

She did so. “I remember how you opened it yesterday. I think I can do that.”

And she did. Several times. The ghosts continued making noise in the tunnels. Mercury didn’t doubt that the other groups of specters were taking their assignments just as seriously.

This was going to work. Mercury would make certain of it.

4

“At least allow me to dip the quill in ink for you.” Mercury had been watching the quill on the table in his room twitch about for a full ten minutes, just as had happened the evening before.

The quill grew still. Mercury took that as agreement and dipped it in the inkwell. He set it on the parchment, waiting for the message he hoped would soon be written there.

It simply twitched more.

“Will you confirm if you are, indeed, the Reluctant Recluse attempting to either get my attention or write me a note?”

The quill twitched a few more times, but not in any communicative way. Even with ink, it didn’t make so much as a nonsensical scribble on the paper.

“You can clearly move lightweight things. Is it that you cannot control how they move?”

It grew completely still.

Mercury had never had anything resembling a conversation with his impossible Invisible attachment. Invisibles could only be seen by the people to whom they were attached. Well, those people and a certain enormous ghost called the Violet Giant. But Mercury couldn’t see, hear, or even sense his. At all.

Blast it all. This was the most promising attempt at communicating that the Reluctant Recluse had made yet, and it wasn’t working.

“If you do settle on a more productive means of communicating,” Mercury said, “I would appreciate knowing whether you know why I cannot see or hear you. I certainly don’t know the answer.”

The quill didn’t so much as flutter. He hadn’t ever heard of ghosts growing weary when moving things. Indeed, he’d not ever had the impression that they expended any effort in doing so.

Mercury turned slowly, eyeing the room for any other items moving without explanation. The Reluctant Recluse had, in the past, moved loose feathers and pages of a newspaper. It seemed he was limited to things that were very lightweight. But nothing else was moving.

It seemed the ghost was done trying for the time being.

The door handle shifted and the door opened. The Scholar floated inside, a book hovering beside him. When at Aventine, the Scholar never left his secluded room at the top of one of the towers. This was odd, indeed.

“Has something happened?” Mercury asked, bracing himself for yet another crisis.

“I have been reading in my most recently acquired book.” The Scholar motioned toward it.

“This is the book you stole from the Vanns’ home in London?”

“I prefer to think of it as having rescued the book from imprisonment in a place of ignorance.”