But Berghast didn’t answer. She watched him peer around at the lanterns alive in the darkness, their reflections in the black water of the loch. Slowly, his face filled with satisfaction.
“She’ll not get far,” he said softly.
* * *
Two miles away, in the darkness, Susan Crowley was stumbling and falling and getting back up, the baby snug inside her cloak for warmth, the only sound the gasp and frightened moaning that she herself made as she ran.
Cairndale was already far behind her. And somewhere back there was that man, that monster, Jacob Marber, who had stolen the child out from under her, and too Dr. Berghast, with his sinister unblinking eyes and his hungry manner. Oh, the poor babe. Dr. Berghast wished to send him away, to hide him from the world. He’d be safe only when she’d got him away, she knew, when she’d taken him out into the world away from that horrid manor with its talents and nefarious purposes. The poor creature ought to choose its own way in the world, choose who it wanted to be. And there’d be no choosing at Cairndale.
She stopped, listening. Her heart was pounding. She could hear no sound of pursuit but she knew they’d be coming. She’d left in a panic, throwing her cloak over her old clothes, ill-dressed for the weather and with no food at all. Well, she’d borne worse than hunger, hadn’t she? So be it. There was no moon and that was maybe a good thing, even if it meant she had to keep to the middle of the mucky road as she went, her skirts heavy and clumped with mud. She was too afraid of losing her way to care. All around her in the gloom the strange wild blackness of the Scottish landscape pressed in.
Toward morning a farmer stopped for her, and she and the baby rode on into the Edinburgh markets huddled among sacks of vegetables. If he disapproved of her traveling unaccompanied he said nothing. She’d had the foresight to take the little money she’d kept at the back of her dresser and with this she purchased a third-class ticket south into England at the Princes Street Station, and she and the baby rode at the back of the railway carriage with their faces averted. There was a bubble of sadness around them that made them nearly unapproachable.
Long gray days, bleary with lack of sleep. The baby was hungry, the baby was tired. Susan fed him and washed him and changed him as best she could. Sometimes she would stroke his cheek and he would stare up into her eyes or reach out and grab her nose or poke her chin and she would smile gravely. She had lost one baby; she would not lose another. There was such innocence and such eagerness for the world in him. She didn’t know what to do, where to go. She had a vague notion that Dr. Berghast would hunt her on the railways, that he would send his people after her, and so in Leicester she got on a passenger train heading east to Norwich and from Norwich she traveled south to Cambridge and sometime later when the money had nearly run out she snuck the baby aboard a freight train heading west again.
It was in that freight car, late one night, while the rain came down outside, that the baby started to shine with a fierce exquisite blue light, that same blue shining she had seen engulf Jacob Marber. She didn’t know what to do, how to stop it. She was afraid her milk wasn’t coming in right, that it hadn’t been for days now. She was so tired. She opened her blouse to feed him, felt him begin to suck. She tried to close her eyes against the shine.
But then a terrible blazing pain erupted in her chest. Her skin started to boil. She cried out in agony and tried to pull the baby away, but it was too late, she was already falling backward, into the straw, the pain washing over her in waves, everything going black.
The train rattled and clattered on.
The baby, shining in the straw, started to cry.
Just then, outside across the passing fields, a brown-haired girl burst from the trees. She was clawing her way up the embankment in the rain, throwing herself forward for the door of the freight car, dragging herself gasping up. Dogs erupted out of the tree break, far behind.
And a man in a tall hat stood his horse in the dusk and raised a rifle to his shoulder and took aim.
INTO SMOKE
?
1882
32
THE MAN ON THE DEAD STAIRS
Charlie Ovid was descending, the knife in his fist.
A water that was not water was all around him and his shirt was suspended in it and he held his breath until his lungs nearly burst and he could not hold it any longer. Then he was gasping, breathing somehow; a ghostly blue light played upon his skin, the walls. He could make out stairs, a banister carved of wood, printed wallpaper. The stairs turned and turned as they descended.
Marlowe was nowhere.
But Charlie could hear a sound, like water in a pipe, all around. When he was thirteen and living along the Sutchee River in Mississippi he would go down on Saturday evenings after a week in the hot fields and lie in the quiet water and his head would sink so low that his ears were underwater. Going through the orsine was like that, exactly like that, like all at once his ears were filled with the sound of the pressure in his own skull, and it was his own blood he was hearing, frighteningly loud, but muffled somehow too. Except it wasn’t just in his ears now, but all around him, in his whole body.