He felt drained, like he hadn’t slept in weeks. He didn’t know what was the matter with him. The creature glided forward, her face a slow smokiness, all depth and dissipating clouds and drifts of shadow, fascinating, bottomless, like staring into a loch lit from far within by some eerie luminescent life, almost visible, so that he had to force himself to look away.
He is suffering, Jacob. He is still a child, as he was when he died. And he is alone and suffering. Unless …
“Unless what?”
The drughr’d removed her gloves.
Hold out your hands, she said. Turn them.
Her own hands were blackened, twisted like the hands of the dead. With her fingertips then, slowly, she brushed his palms. He flinched. She was touching him. It felt eerie, insubstantial, like an exhalation or a sigh, but it was a touch all the same. His shock turned to fear. All at once the drughr, that apparition, that figment, gripped his wrists and a searing pain ripped up his forearms. Her grip was strong. He staggered, shaking, a deep unmoored sickness washing over him, but she did not let go, she held him at arm’s length as if an agreement were being sealed though he’d agreed to nothing, and his hands were on fire and an agony crackled in his knuckles and wrists and he could not stop himself and he cried out.
She let go.
He stumbled back, cradling his wrists, clawlike. His hands and forearms were stained a dark inky stain, as if he’d bathed them in quinine. It looked as if they were tattooed in swirls and patterns, but the tattoos were moving, shifting languidly inside his skin. His knuckles were deformed, his thumbs elongated and monstrous, his fingers yellow and cracked.
“What’ve you done?” he whispered in horror.
The coin is struck, Jacob Marber.
She gestured to the corner of the narrow cabin. The lantern at its beam swayed slowly. Jacob’s heart felt heavy and hurting in his chest. His ruined fingers twitched, almost of their accord, and a small curl of dust on the floor lifted, suddenly, and came to him, and as he turned his hands he felt it, a forcefulness, a cold power in him that wasn’t in him before. In wonder he worked the dust and to his astonishment it folded over itself and grew, it grew denser, darker, as if it were multiplying in front of his eyes, dust but not quite dust now, something else, dimming the lantern on its iron hook and blacking out the hammocks and filling the little cabin with a swirling, inky darkness.
The dust is a part of you now, Jacob, came the drughr’s voice. He could no longer see her for the thickening air. I sense a beautiful hunger. Feel it, feel what you are capable of.
And he did; he could. He felt elated, as if he could do anything, as if through sheer will he could bring a darkness into the world.
He made a fist, the ink in his skin clouding and coming apart and drifting together again, like smoke, and then the dust was sucked down under his monstrous curled fingers in a swift whorl and was extinguished. The dust was in him, an electrical current.
Jacob studied his malformed hands. He felt different, older. “This can bring my brother … back?”
That is only a taste, she said. That is only a beginning.
He wet his lips. Suddenly he remembered Coulton, and felt a pang of guilt, and glanced back at the door as if it might open any moment. His friend would never understand. He lowered his voice yet further. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what I must do.”
The lantern creaked above them. He could hear the water sloshing gently at the bulkheads. Something was happening to the air behind her, as if it were fraying, rending open.
The journey is long and the nights are short, murmured the drughr. You must be willing to come with me. You must leave all this and follow. For you are not strong yet.
“I will be,” he said. “I’ll get strong.”
The strange opening in the air widened, large enough for him to step through. The drughr’s reply, when it came, was a whisper.
Come, then; come, and make a difference in the world.
The INSTITUTE
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1882
17
THE GOOD WORKS OF CAIRNDALE MANOR
Alice Quicke awoke in a strange bed, her knuckles bruised. She didn’t know whether it was morning or afternoon. Her clothes and hat lay folded and stacked on a night table beside her. Outside, she could hear the eaves dripping with rain, the sound of children’s voices.
Her left side ached when she breathed in, where Jacob Marber had impaled her, but when she felt gingerly for it with her fingertips she could find no wound. She tried not to breathe. Just squinted up at the rafters, wincing, struggling through her haze to remember.
There’d been the windy roar of the train, yes, as it pulled away from that monster, smoke ribboning off Jacob Marber’s upraised fists. And Marlowe, cradled in her arms. Later, a dreamlike wait at a railway platform somewhere, while conductors fussed about, frantic, and huge gleaming locomotives snorted on the tracks. And she remembered a second railway carriage, at night, and then an old Scottish barouche with collapsed springs, stinking of cigars, its wheels banging over bad roads. Then … this. A dim room, high-ceilinged, sparsely furnished. Flagstone floors, the walls papered in a faded green Japanese pattern. She didn’t know where she was.