The boy frowned bravely. “Brynt’s gone.”
“Yeah.”
“But she knew me, Charlie. She knew who I was. I could see it.”
Charlie looked at the kid, he shifted his hips. He didn’t like seeing the hope in his face. He slid his trembling hand in his pocket, and stood.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, we got a room to find.”
He started walking, tired, footsore. But Marlowe didn’t follow. The boy was biting his lip with a haunted expression and there was about him something different, something changed, and Charlie looked once in the direction he’d been going and then turned and trudged back to the boy.
“Mar?”
Marlowe peered uncertainly behind him. “It’s this way, Charlie. We got to go this way. I can … I can feel it.”
Charlie raised his eyes in that direction and for just a moment he thought he glimpsed in the fog beyond the huge translucent spirit of Brynt, her eyes glinting, but then it was gone, whatever it was, and all that was left was that strange shifting curtain of mist.
“You’re sure?” he said.
The boy shook his head. “No.”
But he followed Marlowe anyway, along the crooked street and up a dripping alley, keeping as best they could to the shallow puddles, passing along under the dripping weeds and mosses hanging from the lintels and arches. He was no longer sure where they were.
It was a dead city, a London of stillness and loss, and the streets were labyrinthine and littered with the detritus of lives once-lived. Marlowe led him down a crooked set of steps, slick with a moss so black it shone almost blue in the weird light, and then he stopped under a kind of aqueduct and pointed. And there it was.
A white tree, bare of leaves, was growing up out of the muck in the middle of a fountain. Where its bark peeled away in thin paperlike strips, the new bark was a bright bloodred beneath. In its shadow stood an old-fashioned hand pump, made of wood, and on the far side of the square a sinister house, tall and narrow and crenelated with crooked balconies leaning out over the empty air. It had no door, only a broken opening in one wall.
“Of course,” muttered Charlie. He ran his hand over his hair in disgust. “We got to go in there? Of course.”
Marlowe was looking at him strangely. “Your hand, Charlie,” he said. “It’s shaking. Look.”
But Charlie just stuffed it back into his pocket. “Don’t you mind it, Mar. It’s fine.”
“Does it hurt?”
Charlie didn’t answer. There were spirits gathering, thickening, off to the left of the square. He checked to be sure the way ahead was safe and then he hurried across, Marlowe half running beside him. At the stoop of the old house the boy pulled at his sleeve, catching him up.
“I know what you want to say,” Charlie told him. “And you’re not wrong. But we just got to get this glove Berghast wants. We’re so close, Mar. You want to have to come back, do this all again?”
Charlie watched Marlowe think it through and then the boy gave him a quick reproachful glare. Then they went inside, taking care not to brush up against the slick stone lintel.
The house would have been dark but for the broken windows leaking that same eerie gray light. They stopped to let their eyes adjust and it was then Charlie saw they weren’t alone. At the base of the stairs a vague column of air was coalescing. A spirit. He set a warning hand on Marlowe’s shoulder. The spirit flickered, sharpened into the translucent figure of a woman, then twisted away again into air. Then it was a woman again, a woman in a bustled gown, her back to them. She made no sound but her agitation was clear. Slowly, she drifted across the room, as if underwater, and it seemed to Charlie that everything stilled and it was like he was standing in a cold street peering in through a window and then the spirit turned her face and Charlie saw her clear.
It was his mother.
Or, rather, his mother as she might have been, must have been, once, in those years before her loss and her hardship began. Her face flickered through its ages. Charlie fumbled for the wall, felt the cold ooze of the wallpaper under his hand. He was shaking. He knew every line of that face, he knew her every weather. The skin like dark eggplant and the tight hair drawn back into a bun. Her high cheekbones. Her sad brown eyes.
She seemed to be speaking to someone on the stairs, a second figure, though she made no sound, and then a second column of air was twisting, taking form, and a man emerged, pale, black-haired, slender as a shadow and with an old-fashioned frock coat. He descended and took her hands in his own and spoke to her in an urgent way, though Charlie could hear nothing. And he understood, at once, that here stood his father.