And then she heard it. Footsteps overhead. A darkness emerged onto the third floor, walking slowly, flecks of shadow swarming around it. Brynt started to run, taking the stairs two at a time, dragging the boy along behind her. But now the darkness was coming, impossibly fast, it reached out a long, long arm and there were fingers, pale, and curled, and strangely elongated, and all the light seemed to be sucked up into that hand. Marlowe screamed. The shadow had no face; and where the mouth should have been, all was—
Brynt sat up. She felt the blanket tangled in her bulk, the sweat on her face cooling in the dimness. Starlight was pouring in through the high, narrow window. She brushed the hair from her face.
Marlowe.
He wasn’t in his bed. She lurched down out of the bunk in a panic, the circus wagon creaking and shuddering under her weight, and thrust her way through the ragged curtain. Marlowe was eating a biscuit with butter at the narrow table, a book of engravings open in front of him. They were Doré’s engravings from Dante’s Inferno, eerie souls twisting in torment, a gift from the reverend long ago, the only book in the wagon aside from the Bible. She felt her heart in her chest slow.
“You all right, honey?” she said, in a forced voice. “What’re you doing?”
“Reading.”
She eased herself down beside him. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“You were talking again,” he said. “Was it that dream again?”
She looked at him. She nodded.
“Was I in it?”
Again she nodded.
The starlight was silver in his black hair, in the sleeves of his sleeping gown. He looked at her with dark, serious eyes. His face was so pale, he might have been one of the dead. “Did I help you this time?” he asked.
“Yes you did, honey,” she lied. “You just keep on saving me.”
“Good,” he said sturdily, and folded himself into her arms.
She ran a hand through his hair. The last time she had suffered the Dream like this was the week the reverend had died, in that damp moldering room in Spitalfields, more than a year ago now. He had held on for two years after that dark week, when Marlowe’s mother had vanished in the fog, Brynt trying to look out for the both of them all the while, the little boy and the dying man, angry at Eliza half the time, afraid for her the rest. She always kept thinking maybe Eliza would come back but she never did. The child never spoke of that night, hardly spoke of his mother at all, in fact, and then only at bedtime, when he was sleepy. Of course Brynt knew Eliza Mackenzie Grey was not his mother, not really, but the poor girl had saved the child from abandonment and cared for him no matter how hard it got and loved him as if he were her own flesh and blood. If that wasn’t mothering then Brynt did not know what was.
But now the Dream was back. Brynt sat with Marlowe at the night table and felt a kind of tingling in her fingertips, almost like a foreboding, almost as if the weather were about to change, and because of this she knew something was coming, something bad, and they were not ready.
* * *
Marlowe wasn’t like other children.
Brynt knew that, of course she knew that. For one thing, obviously, there was the glowing. His skin would start shining that eerie blue color and he’d get this quiet look in his eyes and there was no trick in it, none at all. Not that Mr. Beecher or Mr. Fox knew the truth of it—a performer was entitled to their own secrets, their own tricks, after all. Most likely they assumed the kid was painted in some sort of luminescent paint, iridium, maybe, like she’d seen spiritualists use on their ridiculous ectoplasm, back in drawing room seances in England. Never mind that the shining was stranger than that, more beautiful, as if it went right through a person, as if you could see through his skin to the bright veins and bones and lungs and everything.
He’d said to her once, while she was painting her own face for the night’s stage, that he was afraid of what he could do. “What if I can’t stop it, Brynt? What if one time I can’t?”
And that was the other thing about him: the way he seemed to worry so. It wasn’t like any eight-year-old she’d ever known. “Can’t stop what, honey?” she’d asked.
“What happens to me. The shining. What if one night it just gets worse?”
“Then we can use you to find things in the dark.”
He’d looked at her in the little mirror with such a serious look on his face.
“You just let me worry for the both of us,” she’d said. “All right?”
“Mama used to say I could choose what I did. That it was up to me.”