"Palace Macabre Ch.4" by H. Coyne

"He drew me in among the hidden things."

My body woke me several times in anticipation of my seven a.m. appointment. Getting used to the bathroom fixtures and the placement of things made me only a few minutes behind, but the small tardiness was noted by Vivaldi when I met him outside my door.

He stood in the hall, perfectly still. I had a strange vision of him waiting there all night, staring and sleepless. His black shark eyes beheld me and the whole room unblinkingly.

"It's 7:03, Miss Anya. We'll have to cut thirty seconds out of touring six rooms today."

"I'm sorry." I laughed to ease the moment, 'But I don't think thirty seconds will cause any detriment."

"Let us hope not. It would be a pity for you to miss anything."

I looked around the black and white hall, "True. It is a extraordinary place." And I meant it.

He seemed to soften slightly in his posture, "Then we are in agreement. Come, we'll see the catacombs."

I balked at this, "True catacombs? May we shave all three minutes off that portion? I have seen enough dead to last me a lifetime."

Vivaldi glided in front of me as a guide, "It is the maze of small libraries. Atticus says, they are full of dead men on shelves but in a different form. So he calls them the catacombs."

"Oh good. This house seems strange enough to sit on true catacombs, which are none too pleasant"

"Have you seen true catacombs, Miss Anya?"

"No. Only in pictures"

"Are pictures much like being there?"

"Not really. Looking at pictures of a Cathedral is nothing like staring out its windows."

"If you've never been and pictures are a poor substitute, then how would you know if catacombs are awful?"

I murmured an answer to try and recover, "Sheer intuition I suppose. They are full of dead bodies."

"Interesting." The angelic voice didn't color the statement with any discernible emotion. His every sentence so far had seemed only an observation, and I could not tell whether to take offense at his comments.

The walk down to the catacombs was quiet. A narrow, spiral staircases bored into the depths of the manor. There was barely enough room for Vivaldi, but he seemed to float down the steps despite.

 Looking up from the stairs led the eyes straight to a round window in the ceiling. I felt as if I had bypassed the house and dropped in from the clouds onto the steps.

"The catacombs cover much of the first lower level." Vivaldi was beginning his tour without me. I caught up as he opened the first door. "The books are divided into smaller libraries instead of a great one. It goes by type of work. We begin with the poets."

The round room was light and airy, with tight rows of books perched on white shelves, interspersed with marble busts. A tattered, fringed dais squatted in the center of the pale blue floor. One end of the room opened into a gazebo. It was artfully overgrown with moss and creeping white flowers that spilled from overturned jugs. I noticed a great pot of Basil engraved "Isabella" and a clump of lilacs dedicated "To Eliot". Names were hidden among the flowers on slabs of stone or painted on the rocks. "Lost Love" hid among the violets, "Blake's Heaven" was a stone amidst wild roses.

"What a wondrous place." I sat down on a bench in the gazebo, quiet with delight. Vivaldi watched me, his white face tilting slightly.

I had not expected something so wonderful so soon, and it seems neither had Vivaldi.

"You enjoy this room?"

"I do, very much so. It is hard not to."

"This is the only catacomb of its kind. The others don't have gardens."

"One is charming enough."

He drew himself back into the house and into the first hallway. I followed obediently, but took in a few more drops of the room.

The rest of the library was rich and like an English lodge. Round and rectangular dark wood rooms with old prints of hunting scenes hanging above stuffed shelves. Soft, old couches and chairs were tucked away in corners or placed in the center. It was all lived in and loved, but very much a place for evenings and rainy days. The sensor light switches were all that belied a modern touch, but even those were hidden behind bits of decorative brass.

Vivaldi's histories were brief but belied an extraordinary knowledge of the house and its contents. When I asked if a book was present, he could give me its description down to the year and publisher without looking at the shelves.

The final library, and the largest, was a rectangular room given over to fiction. Unlike the others, it had tall, draped windows and a fireplace.

When I first saw her, I felt a strange awe. She was regal, beautiful and severe, like the blade of an artisan's sword. She stood from her seat to return a book, and a curtain of gold curls unfurled down her back.

"What are you doing down here, Vivaldi?" she asked.

The major domo was the closest to agitated I had ever heard him. He began an answer several times before responding, "Your grandfather wanted me to take the new caregiver on a tour."

I stepped forward, "I'm Anya. I take it you are Dr. Stradi's granddaughter."

"Afraid so," her smile was dazzling, but it felt more like she was baring her teeth, "Enjoy the catacombs. I do. It's away from the buzz of the house."

"I hope to. May I ask what you are reading?"

"Ah, an intellectual perhaps. Nothing you'd care for, little Anya. A small French book, Juliette. About a girl and her voyage of discovery."

"It sounds interesting enough."

She came intimately close, I could feel the subtle heat of her body. Her eyes were like broken green glass, and fixed on me. She purred, "Does it? Perhaps you'd care a look. But I think its companion Justine is much more your story."

She loosely touched a piece of my hair, "What's a little thing like you doing here, Anya? Hoping to discover something?"

Vivaldi's clear voice cut through the spell, "Lucrece, we have places to go."

Lucrece laughed, releasing me, "Vivaldi, with his schedules. Be off with you then. I'll be seeing you around Anya. We'll have to chat.."

I felt like I was being shaken awake, "Ah yes. Nice meeting you."

Vivaldi pressed on, and I trotted to catch up, "She's beautiful."

"More than beautiful." He tried to recover what this admission revealed, "Many things in this house are."

I tried to keep up with his driven pace back up the stairs.

"Where are we going next, Vivaldi?"

"The kitchen. From there you can see the gardens and orchard out the windows."

"Is that where all the food comes from?"

He computed this a moment before reciting a canned list, "Poultry, beef, dairy, sugar, flour, oil, toothpaste, soaps and whatever is needed for the lab, in addition to any special orders, such as lotions or paints come by ferry every two weeks. When the weather is good. In roughly sixteen days there will be minor squalls, so the deliveries will be adjusted."

"Who pays for all of this?"

Vivaldi was quiet, so I began to repeat my question, but he cut me off.

"Dr. Stradi, our guests or their trustees, the prisons."

"Why the prisons?"

By then we had reached the kitchen doors, so Vivaldi began his tour once again. We surveyed the gardens and orchards through the window. Dark figures moved through the orchards, perhaps dogs or servants in bulky jackets. I was furnished with orderly lists of all the gardens contained and their seasons. Vivaldi had made the booklet for me, but I overlooked this courtesy. I was too entranced by the figures. They lumbered and darted, unlike a coordinated man or a precise machine.

"Who tends the trees?"

"Sometimes machines, sometimes not."

"Who's there now?"

"It's apple season. Perhaps Bernt."

This told me nothing, and Vivaldi didn't care. For an A.I., he was very withholding.

Our tour moved from the kitchen to the wing with my room. It consisted mostly of painted bedroom doors and small drawing rooms, if anyone was inclined to be social. By the lonely appearance of the place the guests were introverted.

At the edge of the wing was a large, informal classroom with black and whiteboards and scattered tables with all size and shape of chairs. Some were monstrous and tattered, others the slightest footstools.

Vivaldi led me from here to the opposite wing, where he said the main ballroom was, and the chess room.

In the middle of our walk I heard the soft strains of a song, haunting and sweet. It was like a music box, but less tinny, sounded out with bells and strings.

 Above our heads, over the lintel of a door was a platform. An automaton, like those made hundreds of years before whirred to life. A pair of bright brass hands opened to reveal a spinning copper rose. It stopped mid-twirl and began to bloom with subtle whirs and clicks.

Vivaldi swept past me, "I'm afraid our tour will have to continue tomorrow. For the next hour I ask you to stay in your room. Lunch will be brought to you."

I lingered to watch the blooming rose, but Vivaldi's cold metal hand forcefully closed around my wrist. It was the first time he had ever touched me, and he did not measure his force well.

I fought to hide my wince, "Please not so tight, Vivaldi."

The automaton's golden voice almost betrayed feeling as he apologized, "I did not intend to startle you with my urgency. But the song says dogs are to be let loose early. I need to check why, and you do not get your bio scan in the system until the end of this week."

"Why are there dogs?"

Vivaldi dismissed me again and pulled me back to my room,"Lock the door for the next two hours."

I spoke to him from behind my bdroom door, "I thought you said only for an hour?"

"You ask many questions, yet you lack wisdom."

I had been ignored and disregarded enough by him that morning. I slammed the door on his emotionless face. Most agonizing of all, I felt it meant nothing to him. Nothing I could do would wound that artful cluster of metal and wire. He was impervious, and in the true sense of the word, heartless.

 Otto brought me lunch eventually, and that evening I joined Dr. Stradi for dessert. He was busy in the labs until then.

His jovial presence comforted me. Time with the bland Vivaldi and in my room made me lonely. The house and its inhabitants were deaf and unyielding to my entreaties. In the empty hours, there was nowhere to go, no one to speak with, but The Doctor reminded me that there was still breath and life here.

In the midst of our conversation, my thoughts strayed to the major domo. "Dr. Stradi," I asked "What is Vivaldi's personality program? I'm unfamiliar with A.I. for the most."

The Doctor set down his spoon and looked at me kindly. "Oh, lovely Anya," Dr. Stradi rumbled with a bit of a chuckle, "I'm afraid that's no program. Vivaldi is alive."

My breath caught. "I don't understand. He doesn't move like a man, he is not built like one. And his mind moves quickly."

"That, my dear, is Vivaldi's mystery. He is a bio-mechanical. Pieces living and manufactured." The Doctor kept talking, but he was staring at a memory replaying in the vacant space as he did.

"Vivaldi came to me from projects darker and more ambitious than my own. He is still a part of them, unlike the others who are from the same place. Those others fear him, but they will not say why. He was mostly done when they gave him to me, and yet not. This place cultivated an inborn grace in him." His thoughts awoke to the present, "But it is rude of me to gossip and speak of other's lives. Know that Vivaldi is his own creature, despite his ties to service."

I collapsed into my chair. It was the first straightforward answer of the day, and I found myself unprepared for all it alluded to.