It was Oskar’s flesh giant.
He went calmly among them, ripping them loose, lifting them away in the shelter of his arms. Roots snaked out, snagged at his arms, so that he had to keep slowly and methodically pulling them away, as if picking threads from a sleeve. There were just too many roots.
As Charlie came free, he saw Marlowe get to his feet.
“Please let my friends go,” said the child, hoarsely. “Please. You promised.”
There came a pause; for an instant Charlie was afraid the glyphic would attack Marlowe too; but then, with a soft rustling noise, the roots retracted, one by one, slithering back into the walls and floor. The glyphic seemed to sink upward, into the writhing mass of roots, until it was lost to view; and then Charlie was tumbling, gasping, free.
On his hands and knees, he raised his face. The others were already staggering back into the tunnel, climbing over the roots, wheezing. Komako held her throat. Ribs was no longer invisible. The glow of the lantern was a corona of light on the walls as it receded. But Marlowe hadn’t moved; he stood dazed, small hands loose at his sides.
Charlie stumbled over. “What happened, Mar? What did he promise?”
The boy peered up at him, eyes shining in the tunnel dark. “I … I saw Alice,” he mumbled. “The Spider, he showed me—”
“What? Is she in danger?”
“Oh, Charlie,” whispered the boy. “We all are.”
And then Charlie was lifting him, carrying him as he fled back up the tunnel, back through the narrow opening in the collapsed stones, all the long way back toward the crypt, and the monks’ skulls, and the natural darkness of the true night.
* * *
Henry Berghast closed the journal he’d been writing in and wiped the nib of his pen dry and sat back. Through his study windows the night deepened.
So.
They had gone to the island.
It was perhaps not entirely a bad thing, he reflected. They would have questions, questions he could answer. He rubbed at his eyes, nodded. The coal fire in the grate was burning low, and the gas sconces cast strange coronas of light up the walls. In its cage, a bonebird clicked, shifting its footing on a perch. Its wings rattled.
He unlocked a drawer in his desk and took out a roll of paper and smoothed it flat. Overlapping circles and lines, arrows, notations in his own spidery hand. It was a copy of the huge ink canvas on his wall. Here was his life’s work: a map, a map he’d been composing for thirty years. A map of the world beyond the orsine.
Time was running out. He had given up on his experiments, had started to fear he would fail completely in his pursuit of the drughr. But then the glyphic had located the boy, after so many years lost, and he had seen that the child would be useful, more than useful; the child might even make it possible for himself—for pitiful Henry Berghast, weak Henry Berghast—to complete what he’d set out to do.
He rolled up the copy of the map, locked it away. “Bailey,” he called in a sharp tone.
The manservant appeared, his long face impassive, his gray eyes glittering and intelligent. “Sir?”
“Our recent guests, the new boys. Do you know them by sight?”
“Indeed, sir.”
Berghast turned in his chair, he peered at his own reflection in the window. His eyes were lost to darkness. “Bring them to me,” said the reflection.
25
NIGHT CREATURES AND OTHER SORROWS
The creature was pale and hairless with long knifelike teeth and it stood in the open door, absolutely still, like a thing shaped from clay. Only its eyes moved, watching the night fog of Wapping.
It was barefoot, but that in itself was unremarkable, in a corner of the city where bodies lay in any state of undress, and the living were often confused for the dead. In ragged rough-spun trousers and an uncollared shirt and a gray mud-spattered gentleman’s coat, it could have been any kind of person fallen on hard times. But its mouth was lost to darkness, entirely lost; and there was about it a sense—an aura—of absolute calm that didn’t fit with the fallen or the destitute. It needed nothing. The door behind it hung by a hinge, splintered and broken; and half-visible from behind a chair lay a cracked pair of wire spectacles, and the outflung arm of Ratcliffe Fang, his blood congealing like black wax on the floor.
The litch was just leaving. But it paused to pick up a battered old bowler hat from where it had fallen from the body, and with an eerie delicacy it turned it, turned it, as if lost in reverie, and then dreamily put it on.
Only then did it step out, into the murky night, and turn north. Despite the fog it walked quickly and decisively over the mud and trenches of filth. But it’d pause from time to time, and crouch smoothly to sniff the air, before again standing and pouring forward. All the while it was trying to remember something, something important, but it could not do so.