Walter coughed, the needlelike teeth flashing in the lantern light. His whole body shuddered with the effort. “But he is coming … he is coming here.…”
“He cannot. You know that he cannot.”
“The voices…，” Walter whispered. “They talk to us, they tell us…”
Berghast took a step closer. He could see the clawlike fingers, the deep gashes in the litch’s hairless torso, the terrible wet red lips. And the teeth. This was a creature that would rip him to pieces the first chance it got. “What do the voices tell you, Walter?”
“He knows they are coming for him. The women. Jacob knows.”
“Who do you mean?”
“Mrs. Harrogate. And the other.”
Berghast frowned. This was unexpected. Always, just as he was prepared to consider everything out of the litch’s mouth madness and delusion, some strange quick detail of truth would emerge and leave him marveling.
He decided to change his approach. “It must be so distressing for you,” he said in sympathy. “Jacob doesn’t know how much he needs you. If only you could give him something, something he desires, something that would show him. Then he would come for you, then he would not abandon you. What would you give him, Walter, if you could? What is it Jacob most wants?”
Walter raised his head. His eyes were calm and intelligent and reflected the lantern’s glow. “Cairndale,” he whispered. “We’d give him Cairndale, yes. And then we’d give him you.”
* * *
Charlie didn’t say a word the entire walk back through the dark manor. There was too much. All the strange account of the orsine’s history and the drughr and the terrible news of Marlowe’s mother and what had happened to her, and the island before that, and the Spider, and that heavy toothed glove of Berghast’s. He and the kid cut across the courtyard in the cool air and then back inside, up the big stairs under the stained glass windows, past Mr. Smythe’s door. And still they never said a word. They could hear Mr. Smythe’s snoring through the wall. Charlie cast quick worried glances over at Marlowe but the boy was lost in his thoughts, troubled, or sad, or just disappointed. Charlie didn’t blame him. Berghast was a disappointment, as an adopted father, as a mentor. He remembered what Ribs had warned him, as he got off the rowboat, but he didn’t say it to Marlowe. He didn’t need to. They didn’t speak as they undressed, they didn’t speak as they washed down their necks and faces, they didn’t speak as they climbed into bed and folded their arms up under their heads and stared, identical, up at the dark ceiling. The curtains were stirring, as if something were in them.
“Mar?” Charlie said at last, in a low whisper. “You okay?”
It was a stupid question, and he regretted asking it as soon as he said it. He turned in his sheets, he looked across. He still had the silver ring on the cord at his neck, the ring his mother had forced into his hand as she lay dying, and he rubbed at it now, brooding. “Your father, he—”
“He’s not my father, Charlie.”
Charlie nodded in the darkness.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Marlowe added. “I don’t trust him either.”
“Okay.”
“It doesn’t mean what he said isn’t true.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what he wants us to do.”
Charlie swallowed. “Yeah. But it doesn’t mean we should, either.”
He saw the little boy’s pale face in the darkness. His eyes were open. He couldn’t imagine what the boy must be feeling. All his eight unlucky years he’d been passed from adult to adult, like a bad debt, and it was that man, that unkind, clinical, cold man who’d started it all. Charlie felt a tight fury rising in him, at the unfairness of it all.
“Hey,” he whispered. “If you want to go into that orsine of his, I’m with you, Mar. I’m not saying otherwise. All right? But we don’t have to do this. There’s always other options.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. We could leave. Just go. You and me.”
The kid looked miserable. “I think Mr. Thorpe wants me to go through,” he said quietly. “I think he … needs me to. He’s dying, Charlie. What Dr. Berghast said is true. I saw it.”
Charlie blinked. “What’d the Spider say to you, anyhow?”
Marlowe turned his face, folded himself up onto one elbow. He seemed to be thinking about it. “It wasn’t like words,” he murmured. “It was more like … pictures, moving. In a fog. I … I think it was what’s going to happen, Charlie. Or what might happen. I don’t know.”