Chapter 40 - The Midnight Auditing
The heat inside the conservatory hit me like a physical wall.
The air smelled of burning ferns, scorched damp earth, and ancient coal gas. The glass panes above were rattling violently in their cast-iron frames as underground pressure from the burning mine shafts pushed upward through the bedrock.
Clara was standing in the center of the rotunda, beside an enormous bronze fountain shaped like a timber crane.
She wasn't trying to escape.
She was standing over an open iron trapdoor in the stone floor, clutching a heavy steel wrench she had pulled from a utility cabinet.
"Clara, step away from the valve!" I shouted, coughing as the acrid smoke burned my throat.
"Thirty years, David!" she screamed, her eyes wide, wild, and entirely consumed by madness. "Thirty years I preserved this dynasty! I killed Arthur so the state wouldn't carve this mountain into national parks! I gave Julian his empire! I bought Vanessa her respect! And you destroyed it all because of an eight-year-old’s birthday cake!"
"You destroyed it yourself, Clara!" I shouted back, stepping carefully across the cracked flagstones, dodging the plumes of steam hissing from the floor. "You taught your family that people don't matter. You taught them that cruelty was strength. Vanessa kicked that cake because she thought being a Blackwood meant you could break anything you wanted and laugh about it!"
"It *does* mean that!" she shrieked. "And if I can't have the Blackwood name, no one will!"
She slammed the heavy wrench down onto the emergency gas release valve set into the stone floor.
*HISS.*
A roaring jet of pressurized natural gas erupted from the pipe, instantly igniting against the hot embers drifting up from the sub-floor tunnels. A wall of yellow flame roared ten feet into the air, blowing out thirty feet of antique stained glass in an ear-shattering cascade of multicolored shards.
The shockwave knocked Clara off her feet, sending her skidding across the slick stone toward the open trapdoor leading into the burning tunnels below.
She screamed, her fingers catching the rim of the iron frame, her legs dangling into the fiery black abyss beneath the conservatory floor.
"David!" she cried out, her voice stripped of all arrogance, all malice, leaving only the pure, primal terror of a dying woman. "David, help me!"
I sprinted through the wall of blistering heat, shielding my face with my canvas coat.
I reached the edge of the pit and dropped to my stomach, extending my right hand down into the smoke.
"Take my hand!" I shouted.
Her bleeding, soot-stained fingers brushed against mine. Her eyes met mine through the swirling sparks—and for a split second, I saw the ghost of the young girl who had grown up in this manor with my grandfather, before greed and generational rot had eaten away everything human inside her.
"Hold on!" I gripped her wrist, my muscles screaming as I tried to pull her up against the updraft of heat.
Clara looked down at the fire below her, then looked back up at me.
Her grip suddenly loosened.
"The music box, David," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the roar of the flames. "Check... the bottom of the music box."
"Clara, don't let go!"
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"It was never Julian," she whispered, a strange, terrifying peace washing over her bloody face. "And it wasn't me."
Her fingers slipped from my grasp.
