She stayed there. I moved down another step, trying not to trip on the hem of the scratchy lace gown Rhea had lent me. And to identify some weird, hulking shapes in the gloom, which didn’t look like anything I’d ever encountered, human or otherwise. And which finally resolved themselves—
Into a bunch of old Victorian display cases.
Okay, I thought.
Hadn’t expected that.
They reminded me of the ones stuffed into the spare bedrooms and storage areas upstairs, along with the rest of the discarded furniture. Some were big, some were small, some had flat glass tops like coffee tables, others had rounded coverings like deli cases. A few even had strange, custom made covers, with towers that looked like bird cages on either end, or great glass teepees, because the Victorians collected some crazy shit.
According to my old governess, who had lived through the era, the cases could contain basically anything, from elaborate African masks to Chinese lacquerware, from European stamp collections to brightly colored butterflies, from ancient potsherds to eighteenth century painted fans. The main thing had been to one-up the neighbors, no matter the cost, which was why some social climbers even bought Egyptian mummies to unwrap at “mummy parties,” looking for jewelry that might have been buried with the corpse. And if there wasn’t any, they could just sell the remains on to artists, who made a fashionable “mummy brown” pigment out of them.
The Victorians were weird.
Of course, this was the Edwardian period, when people were getting rid of that tacky old stuff. Except for the Pythian Court, it seemed. I didn’t see any mummy cases stacked around, but who could tell? The place was packed.
“Those are some of the treasures given to the Pythias through the millennia,” Rhea explained, still obediently on the step behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder. “All these were gifts?”
She nodded. “Most were given in gratitude for a helpful reading, or out of respect. Others . . . well, the waiting list to see the Pythia was often so long that some sought to queue-jump by giving gifts to the temple.”
“And they were accepted?”
“Of course.” She looked slightly shocked. “A gift cannot be refused. It would be considered . . .”
“Sacrilegious?”
“Discourteous. Usually the offerings were gold or silver, or grain and wine for the temple staff in ancient times. But many more precious things were given by petitioners who wanted to make an impression. The outer room of the library is a museum of sorts, of the most interesting of these gifts.”
“Wait, did you say outer room?” I asked, because this thing alone felt like it ought to be larger than the house upstairs.
“Yes, the library is quite extensive,” Rhea said proudly. “You can see some of the halls to the reading rooms around the periphery.”
I assumed that was a joke, because I could barely see my hand in front of my face. But then VampVision helpfully clicked on, despite the fact that I hadn’t asked it to. And it didn’t have a problem with the dark. I could suddenly see a huge round room with a bunch of display cases clustered under a high ceiling, with a circle of columns standing guard around the outside.
I could see something else, too.
I didn’t know what was in those cases, but it sure as hell wasn’t stamps.
Many were as dark as the room, quiet and still. But a few glowed with light in my mind’s eye, spilling out of the glass and moving over the floor, columns and walls. It lit up a bunch of wide, square doorways under the colonnade—the halls that Rhea had talked about, I guessed. And large pieces of statuary, some broken, some gleaming whole and perfect in the low light, scattered here or there.
It looked like the museum was run by King Midas, because half the statuary wasn’t made out of marble. It gleamed a dull silver or, in a few cases, pure gold in the strange light, and must have been worth a fortune. But that wasn’t what caught my eye.
In fact, nothing the light showed me was more interesting than the light itself.
Most of the lit-up cases cast abstract shapes around the room, making it look like a seventies’ disco if there had been one that preferred sepia tones. Only they were less strobing the darkness than sluggishly moving around it, like the 2-D blobs that old lava lamps cast on a wall. That would have been weird enough, but some were doing something else, too, something I couldn’t see clearly until I went down another step.
And saw actual images, here or there, among the moving blobs. Because some of the cases were doing more than just putting on a light show. They were splashing the darkness with what looked like pieces of old-fashioned newsreels.
Really old.
A couple of Greek hoplites clashed swords on a pillar for an instant, the ring of metal on metal coming faintly to my ears; a pair of lovers on the floor clasped each other in a passionate embrace, while a torch-lit city glimmered darkly behind them; and several half naked gladiators wrestled on the ceiling, neither seemingly able to overcome the other.
I went down another step, confused but fascinated, and the images flooded with color, like that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy enters Munchkin land. They also sped up, going from slow motion to regular speed, which along with the color change, made them look much more real. Frighteningly so.
One of the gladiators picked up a knife off the ground and slashed the other’s throat, the arc of crimson blood causing me to flinch back, because it looked 3-D; a soldier with a spear jabbed at some kind of tentacled monster before being picked up and literally ripped in two, his head still screaming even as his torso was cast aside; a terribly old woman, perhaps a Pythia, sat under a tree, her face as gnarled as the rough old bark behind her, from what I could see of it under a deep hood. Until she suddenly looked up, meeting my eyes with empty bloody sockets, because hers had been gouged out.
“There must be three,” she said, cackling, as I stumbled back a step.