The face kept shivering and fading and taking on substance as it spoke. But Charlie stared at the thin lips, the little teeth, the creases at the corners of the man’s eyes from long-smiling. He had a soft jowly face that was strange on such a thin frame, as if he ought to be heavyset. His hair was long. The big pink shells of his ears stood out.
Charlie couldn’t think; he couldn’t breathe. He watched the two of them shudder and drift and go through a low doorway into the back of the house and he followed. The house was in a state of advanced decay and water ran in rivulets down the walls and the floorboards felt soft under Charlie’s weight. There was a crib in the back room, a crib with a baby swaddled in it. He didn’t understand. It was himself he was seeing, he knew it, and yet how could his spirit be here too, if he was alive and in the flesh and present and watching? Slowly his father twisted a ring from his mother’s outstretched hand, his ring, Charlie’s, the very one he wore on his own finger now, and then he watched as his father leaned over the crib and pressed the ring into the baby’s tiny curling fist, and Charlie felt his vision blur.
And then his father raised his eyes, and stared at Charlie, directly at Charlie, with a look of dark confusion, and his mother turned and stared at him too, appalled, and then Charlie felt Marlowe’s hand on his arm and the spirits both shivered and turned translucent and wisped away as if in a wind and there was nothing, no one, they were gone just as if they’d never been.
Charlie’s heart was pounding. His cheeks were wet.
That was when he saw, behind where the ghostly crib had stood, a door.
* * *
“This is it, Charlie,” Marlowe whispered. “This is the way.”
Marlowe was standing at the open door, looking back at him with big solemn eyes. There were stairs beyond. Charlie turned and turned in place, peering around at the rotting house. Something was missing. He was having trouble shaping his thoughts.
“Charlie, come on.”
It was a narrow back stairwell, a servants’ passage through the house. They climbed the stairs to the second level and carefully edged around a hole in the floor and went down a hall and climbed more stairs to the third level. They kept to the seams of the stairs and they passed the third floor and kept climbing to the very top. And at the top they found the attic door. Charlie had a powerful sense of wrongness. They’d found the Room.
Marlowe, too, gave a little shiver. But he didn’t hesitate; the little boy went through into the attic the way a person holds their breath and jumps into cold water.
The attic didn’t look like much. A narrow room under a peaked roof. Beams had collapsed in one corner with a part of the outer wall gone so that gray fog and the silhouetted roofs of the city were visible through the hole. Charlie’s footfalls clinked as he ducked his head, walked slowly in. A balcony door hung askew on one hinge. Rubble, collapsed masonry, the splintered bits of some long-smashed furniture all littered the room. Then Charlie froze. Slumped against the far wall was the body of a man.
It had been there for a long time. It was dressed in fashions from decades past, like some of the portraits in the upper halls of Cairndale. The dead man’s skin had dried to paper and the eyes under their lids had sunk down into the skull and the mummified throat looked ropy and thin. And on one hand, shining darkly, as if it would absorb all the light it could find, was the wood-and-iron glove Berghast had sent them to find.
Charlie went over to the body, pulled the glove free. The little teeth inside snapped the hand at the wrist. Charlie shook the glove. The hand fell out in pieces among a sifting of dust. He stared, fascinated. The pieces of wood sewn into it gleamed, like black glass. The glove was heavy, and beautiful, far more beautiful than the replica Berghast had shown. Charlie’s own hand, he saw, had stopped shaking.
“How long do you think he’s been here?” said Marlowe. “What happened to him?”
Charlie frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to.”
“Can I see it? Charlie?”
But Charlie was still holding it, staring into the deep unreflective black plates of wood and iron, and he could only tear his eyes away with a struggle.
“Yeah,” he said, forcing himself to sound nonchalant. “Yeah, of course. Here.”
And he gave it to the boy with a shrug and turned away. But in his heart he had a feeling like he shouldn’t let it go, like he should keep it close, wear it for safety, because only he could understand how precious it was, only he could keep it safe.
But this feeling passed after a moment, and then it was like it had never been. He drifted over to the broken door, went outside onto the balcony. The air was cold. Both his hands were trembling now. In the square below, the spirits were denser and their veil of mist parted and closed again and the dark wet rooftops of the city seemed to go on forever. He wondered if there were other worlds besides this one, if there were worlds beyond worlds. Anything seemed possible.