He took a deep breath. His face went under.
He descended into the dark.
The CRIMES of JACOB MARBER
?
1874
29
MAN, CHILD, MONSTER
Twilight, under a deepening sky.
Jacob Marber stood in his shirtsleeves and waistcoat in a slow river in the outer reaches of Scotland, watching the light fade from the silver-black water, knowing he did not belong, not among the living, not anymore. The strange smoke granted him by the drughr was coalescing in his skin, a part of him and yet not, like the breath of the dead.
He had wandered in the dead world for so long, month after month, that the world of humankind felt strange to him now. Small, too brief. He was no longer innocent but he had not yet done the worst he would do either. The water felt cold at his thighs, shocking after so long away, and the darkness in his skin tingled. He shuddered. This world of theirs, he thought. And turned away.
For he’d found his brother. In that other world, he’d found him. Just as the drughr had promised. And now there was no unfinding, no going back, he had to live with what he had seen. It had solved nothing. Redressed nothing. Like a ripple of air, like a sadness folding over itself, Bertolt had come to him at the edge of the darkness three times, over three nights, summoned by Jacob’s own grief. He looked still a boy, the very age he’d been when he died, his soft cheeks pallid, his dusky hair leeched of color, and Jacob had crumpled into tears seeing a face he’d loved and not hoped to see again. He’d begged, he’d pleaded, he’d told stories of their childhood in Vienna, of the nuns at the orphanage, of the factory, of their days on the streets. And on the third night he’d told in a quiet voice the story of Bertolt’s own death, glimpsing for a moment a flicker of recognition. But then it was gone, as quickly as it appeared, and his brother just wavered, a curl of air, his eyes empty.
And the drughr had told him: He has forgotten you; it is too late. There is no saving him now.
Jacob breathed softly, remembering. From where he stood in the river he could see the road and the bridge in the dusk. He was watching for any sign of pursuit, but there was nothing, no one. No one had found the carriage in the trees, the dead horses, the dead driver. No one was coming.
He waded out of the river, his trousers clinging coldly. His frock coat was hanging on a bush. He raised his face as he heard a familiar voice in his head.
It is nearly time, Jacob. You are prepared?
On the mudbank crouched the drughr, animallike, savage, not in the form he had come to know her by, not a pale and beautiful woman, but hulking, and shaggy, fanged in shadow. She was staring at her own reflection in the water, fascinated.
Behind her, huddled in the low bracken, were the two children she had asked for. The two children he had brought her. He could sense her eagerness.
“Is there no other way?” he said quietly.
She did not reply.
The children were maybe thirteen, fourteen years of age—a boy and a girl, siblings maybe—intercepted on their way to Cairndale. They would be talents, of course. Located and sent north from Mrs. Harrogate in London, just as he’d used to do, as he’d done when he found the Japanese girl, the dustworker Komako, and that little invisible urchin. Remembering that, he felt a faint twinge of regret, of sadness. Then it was gone. He’d deliberately not asked the names of these kids, nor anything about them. He didn’t want to know. He knew he should feel sick, seeing them, knowing what the drughr would do to them. But he didn’t. They seemed curiously insubstantial, as if he could see time passing through them, like light, as if they might dissolve at any moment. Truly, he had been in that other world too long.
He was bonded now to the drughr. She was a part of him, as he was of her. That is how he thought of it. He could feel her desires, her fears, just as if they were his own, or almost so, just as if they were the shadow sides of his own longings. He felt, for instance, her raw hunger for the two children, for the power in their talents. She wasn’t strong, in this world. Not yet. She would absorb the two children in her feeding. Drain them. And then she would do what she needed to do: weaken the glyphic’s wards at Cairndale so that Jacob could smuggle the baby out.
You are certain you can get inside?
“I have it arranged,” he replied.
The child is everything, Jacob. You must bring him to me. You must not fail me.
Jacob met her eye and nodded.
Him, meaning the baby. The boy without a name, the shining boy. The child whom Henry Berghast had stolen and was keeping now at Cairndale, locked away, to use, as Jacob feared, for his own sinister purposes. He didn’t know all that child could do but he knew enough to fear its life would be an awful one and though he felt very little that was human and pitying he did feel for the baby, had felt for him, had held him in his arms and stroked his soft cheek and he’d felt it, a kinship, something close to love, and he’d thought: You are like me. We are the same. And he’d promised that baby right then that he would not suffer a childhood like Jacob himself had suffered.