A quiet, thrumming inside him.
A quiet so terrible it left a high thin ringing in his ears.
There was water, and then there was not. As if the water had dissolved into air, into shadow. The stairs led down to a large foyer, dimly lit. A door with sidelight windows encased in polished wood, an oiled bench, a pier table with a cut flower wilting in its vase. The walls were covered in a strange green slime, a kind of mold maybe, and the carpet underfoot oozed water at every step. The light was strange, particled, grainy, and gray. He raised his face, slowly, slowly, as if underwater, and he saw Marlowe watching him from the doorway. The kid said something, but it was muffled, garbled, and Charlie could not understand.
“Marlowe,” he tried to say, but it sounded like it was coming from far away.
There was something familiar about the foyer they were in. Marlowe turned, dreamlike, and opened the door and stepped outside. He crossed through a carriage house and slipped past a rusting iron gate, leaning crazily from one hinge, and out into the street. The cobblestones were overgrown with lush green weeds. There were dark puddles in the roadbed and water dripping from the eaves. Charlie walked out and turned in place, amazed.
It was a city but it seemed abandoned, given over to nature, so that bushes and trees could be seen growing out of the marshy street. All around lay a thick fog, the buildings vanishing into it. There were old hansom cabs leaning unused in the muck, some overgrown with moss. In a puddle near his shoe Charlie saw a scattering of coins, a rotting leather boot.
“Charlie,” said Marlowe softly.
He turned, surprised. Marlowe was breathing heavily, as if he’d been running. His voice sounded normal, only just a little muffled. He put a hand on the child’s shoulder, strangely moved. It seemed like a lifetime since he had heard anyone’s voice.
“What is this place?” he murmured.
But even before Marlowe spoke he’d looked up at the gloomy facade of the building they’d come out of, and he’d known. He’d known it with a cold shock: it was Nickel Street West, in London. They were standing in front of Mrs. Harrogate’s building, which he’d fled from that night when the litch hunted him.
“It’s London, Charlie,” Marlowe whispered. “We’re in London.”
And it was true, they were. But it was also, at the same time, not-London. Charlie knew it as sure as he knew anything at all. All around lay long green weeds, dripping water, black toxic puddles no deeper than his ankles. A wall of white fog was drifting all around them. He remembered what Berghast had said about the fog, the spirits of the dead, and he drew Marlowe back inside the gate. The stillness, the absence of people, and horses, and rats, all made it feel eerie and wrong. Charlie swallowed. He looked at the gritty brown bricks, the green of a velvet window sash overhead, the yellow and slick black of rotting wood beams. The city had no smell: that was the strangest thing of all. Just a faint charred tang, that sat in the nostrils like grime.
The fog drifted past, away. He took out the map from the satchel and turned it, trying to find a landmark.
“I think … I think we go this way, Mar,” he said.
When he looked up, he became aware of shapes moving in the fog: narrow, shimmering columns of air. Not in the fog. They were the fog.
Marlowe took a soft step out into the street, staring. He could see them too. “They’re spirits, Charlie,” he whispered. “Look. They’re pretty.”
And they were: like twisting ribbons of breath, but shaped, and always moving, their blurred faces shifting and shuddering, one moment the face of a little girl, then that face blurring into an old woman’s, then back. And Charlie, somehow, understood. Spirits, Dr. Berghast had said, were memories, memories and forgettings; these were the faces of a life lived, memories made real, but at the same time never staying, never pausing, without any present to hold on to. There were hundreds of them, thousands maybe, all hovering very still in the street. A city of the dead, Berghast had called it.
They were facing the building. They were facing the mouth of the orsine, a great vast crowd of the dead. It was like they could sense the world of the living beyond, like they were drawn to it. Charlie shivered.
“Can they see us?” Marlowe asked. “Do you think they know we’re here?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got to be careful.”
“There’s so many, Charlie.”
“Yeah.” All at once the sadness of it overwhelmed him, and he had to look away. “Hey. How’re you feeling, Mar?”