Page 27 of The Devouring Time

Chrysalis? What does he mean by that? Is it some sort of trade name for Chrono-Flav Syrup, or something far more sinister?

I keep my face neutral, while Adrian takes his cues from Davis and nods approvingly. “So I see.”

Pleased, Davis leads us through yet another door, this one unlocked. It opens onto a space perhaps two-thirds the size of the pharmacy upstairs, what must be a final door at its opposite end. The room appears to be a laboratory of some sort, filled with tables, beakers, distilling apparatus, scales, and other equipment whose use I can’t guess.

Unlike an ordinary laboratory, some of the tables have elaborate runes and symbols painted carefully on them. The smell of incense lingers in the air, and rather than white coats, long robes hang from the hooks on the wall.

“Now this, Mr. Miller, is where the magic happens,” Davis says with a wink. “Literally!” He laughs at his own joke.

Is he some sort of madman? Maybe he and Hart have some sort of shared delusion, or…

I remember the rain turning to ice, the car holding our pursuers skidding helplessly off the road, the feeling of somehow being responsible for the unseasonable weather.

Emerson standing in the fog, eyes full of hateful green fire.

“Very impressive,” Adrian says.

“Oh, and look!” Davis hurries over to a machine with a long nozzle, an open box of Chrono-Flav Syrup beside it. Plucking out one of the empty containers that’s presumably waiting to be filled by the machine, he turns it over so we can see the bottom.

Stamped into the ceramic is the same symbol from the tapestry in Hart’s hidden room: an hourglass with a death’s-head hawkmoth superimposed on it.

“Just in case,” Davis tells Adrian with another wink, though just in case of what I can’t imagine.

“Very clever,” Adrian says, and Davis beams at him. No wonder the insurance company hired him as an investigator; he seems to know just how to respond, even though he’s as much in the dark as I am.

Davis carefully replaces the syrup container. “But I shouldn’t keep you waiting. You must be wanting something warm to chase out the chill of this wretched weather. Will the others be joining us?”

Others? Hart, perhaps, or Myers back from whatever the hell he’d been doing in Massachusetts.

“No.” Best to keep my answers as short as possible lest I give myself away.

“You wanted to talk to me alone?” he asks hopefully.

“Yes.”

Seeming barely able to contain his excitement, Davis unlocks what must be the last door, unless the basement runs beneath the street above. The room beyond isn’t large, but I have to hold back a gasp when I see it.

All four walls are plastered and painted in brilliant white, while the arched ceiling is a deep blue spangled with golden stars. Two long tables run along either side, with comfortable-looking wooden chairs behind them. Down the center of the aisle between the tables, a line of seven symbols have been inlaid in the concrete floor. It takes me a moment, but I realize each is a different fragment of the hourglass-and-moth symbol, all of them combining in the final mosaic. Beyond that, against the far wall, is a chair I can only describe as a small throne.

Davis closes the door behind us, then turns to me and bows deeply. “Welcome back, my lord,” he says, gesturing obsequiously to the throne. “As always, your rightful seat awaits.”

Part Three

19

I stand frozen, thoughts chasing themselves in circles.

Davis knows who I am. He called me “my lord.” He wants me to sit on a throne in his bizarre basement room, all the while implying I’ve been here and done that before.

The chairs, the symbols, the robes, his strange glee…am I in a cult? More—am I leading a cult?

But no, Hart lured me, drugged me, possibly with something Davis provided. Why would they then give me an important role in their delusionary group?

I don’t understand what’s happening to me.

When I don’t move, Adrian bows as well, echoing Davis’s gesture. He wants me to keep playing along. Without any better ideas, I walk as if in a dream to the end of the room and sit on the throne. It’s horribly uncomfortable, but that’s the least of my worries right now.

I look straight ahead down the aisle, trying to imagine other people sitting in the chairs, perhaps wearing robes like the ones in the laboratory. I wrack my brain for any flicker of recognition, of memory, but there’s nothing.