Oskar shivered.
“Okay,” he said, trying to sound brave.
Only Ribs seemed not to be listening. She’d gone back to muttering, scowling to herself. “Not like I even care, stupid Spider an his stupid visions.…”
Scratching miserably at the windowsill with her nail as she whispered it.
* * *
After leaving the others, Charlie and Marlowe were led back across the grass to the manor, and along a corridor and through a door and up a stairwell, and then along a second corridor, this one punctuated by doors every twenty feet, until they reached Dr. Berghast’s study.
“Touch nothing,” said the manservant. “Dr. Berghast will be with you shortly.”
Charlie, for his part, saw little worth the touching. It was the same room he’d been in just a few days earlier, but cozier somehow, less frightening. A great lump of coal was burning in the fireplace; the sconces along the walls were lit, casting the room in a golden hue; leather armchairs were arranged in front of the fire. The air was warm, sleepy, smelling faintly of cigar smoke. In one corner stood the wooden file cabinet, locked. In the other stood a birdcage, the silhouette of a bird unmoving on its perch. The strange ink painting of crosshatched lines and circles hung in the gloom. Marlowe stepped gingerly over the Persian carpet and stood in front of it, staring. In the very center of the room loomed Dr. Berghast’s desk: sleek, dark, empty but for a tray with a decanter of wine on it, and a solitary glass still half-full. Charlie saw no sign of the journal.
It might have been a cozy room, that is, if not for its particular strangeness: the doors. Nine in all, all of them shut, all of them carved out of the same ancient heavy-looking oak, covered in strange scrolling marks, as if shipworms had eaten their way through. So many doors gave the study the feeling of a deserted railroad station, or of a post office after hours—a place that should have been full of bustle, interruptions, hasty exits. Charlie peered around, uneasy. He hadn’t noticed them all, that night he’d snuck in. Then he saw the birdcage more clearly and stepped closer to see. The things inside were not birds—living concoctions of bones and brass fittings, they turned their skulled heads side to side, as if regarding him from their eyeless sockets. He shuddered.
Marlowe though, silent, sat on the big sofa and just swung his little legs and picked at his hands and waited. Charlie knew the kid would be anxious, that it was his adopted father they were to meet; what was in the boy’s heart he couldn’t imagine; and he wanted to say something, to ask if he was okay, offer some reassurance, but then all at once it was too late, for the door they’d entered by opened briskly and in walked Henry Berghast.
Charlie froze. Marlowe raised his face, a half-hopeful shine in his eye.
But the man walked right past him, right past both of them, giving them scarcely a glance. At his desk he pulled out a notebook, he unscrewed the lid of a fountain pen. For several minutes he sat, writing quietly. And yet all the while Charlie sensed how the man was aware of them, was observing them, weighing their silence coolly and finding them wanting. At last he looked up, frowning.
“Well,” he said.
And that was all.
Charlie knew him, of course, had seen him lurking in the dark windows while they trudged to the outbuildings, had glimpsed him at the ends of corridors, moving quickly, had seen him deep in conversation with the old talents in the courtyard some mornings. But never close up; never so near that he could feel the man’s electricity, the intensity coming off him, like a low hum. Berghast was tall, taller than Charlie even, and broad-shouldered, with big hands. He wore an expensive black frock coat, an immaculate white collar, as if he had just come from dinner. His beard was white, his eyes the gray of a river in winter, bright and reflective and piercing, his hair thick and long at his collar. There was an aristocratic air about him; he looked like a man who was used to remaking the world in his image. Charlie immediately felt afraid.
Dr. Berghast interlaced his hands on his desk. He was as still as an adder. “It is late, boys,” he said quietly. “You will be hungry.”
Both Charlie and Marlowe shook their heads. Across the room the bonebirds clicked and rattled.
Slowly, fiercely, Dr. Berghast’s eyes slid to Charlie. “You are the new haelan,” he said. It was not a question. “I am Dr. Berghast. Tell me, how do you like Cairndale?”
Charlie swallowed. “I like it, sir.”
“And yet you seem incapable of obeying its rules. You trespass after curfew, you come to my rooms in a state of undress. Your nightshirt is filthy.”