The boy looked at him, afraid.
“But Mr. Thorpe weakens by the hour. If he dies, the orsine will rip apart; and there will be no way to contain the drughr. Have you any idea how many of my friends she has devoured? It is because of her my talent faded. I will not fail. And you,” he said, rising to his full height, “you must be the lure, Marlowe; you must draw her to me. She will come if you call to her.”
“How will I know what to do?”
He made a fist. “It will be as easy as closing your hand. It is in your nature. Come, see.” He picked up a candelabra from his desk and he led the child to a looking glass above the pier table by the door. “What do you see?”
And the child, weak, afraid, looked in at his reflection. A drughr looked back. Slowly, as they watched, the horns and thickened skull shrank back into the boy’s own shape.
“You will know what to do,” said Berghast, almost tenderly, his big hand resting on the child’s shoulder, “because an abomination lives inside you. It is a part of you. And you cannot choose it away.”
* * *
He was here. His Jacob had come.
Walter crouched in his cell, feeling the blood well up out of the meat in his palm where his thumbs had been. His face and chin tasted like sour iron, there was wetness everywhere, and pain, such pain, washing over him in waves.
But Jacob was near, Jacob had come.… Nothing else mattered.
Except that he hadn’t yet done what Jacob had asked. He hadn’t yet stalked the glyphic, he hadn’t yet torn the glyphic’s throat out for his own dear Jacob, no. He stood painfully feeling his knees creak and gingerly he paced the length of the lightless room. He’d slipped the loose shackles over his bloodied hands once he’d bit his thumbs off and nothing now would stop him.
He clicked his needlelike teeth. He closed his eyes, and he saw.
Jacob, his dear beautiful friend, Jacob. Walking slowly in the twilight along the perimeter of Cairndale, tracing a hand over the stones in the crumbling wall. The soot and dust smoldering up around him like a living smoke. The wards were weak, yes, even with the glyphic still alive, and Walter watched with his mind’s eye as Jacob reached out and pushed his two hands against the invisible barrier, and it compressed softly, like rotten wood, it shivered under the pressure. It was no dream. He saw Jacob gather some strength into himself and then a slender crack appeared in the air before him and widened and split and then there was a tremendous roar and the stone wall burst inward and Jacob Marber, beautiful, shining, powerful, stepped grimly onto the grounds of Cairndale.
Oh, but there was another with Jacob, a second, a companion, skittering along crablike through the breach. Who was this? Walter felt a stab of envy and decided, yes, he would help his dear Jacob, that other litch was not good enough for Jacob, no, it would have to be removed. Eliminated. Gutted. Yes. For Jacob’s sake, only to help his dear Jacob, yes.
But first: the glyphic. He must do as he’d been told. He could feel what was coming, the closeness of it, he knew there would be fire and bloodshed and horror and his lips tingled with the idea of it. At the cold door he pressed the shell of an ear to listen. The great deep underground of Cairndale was immense, and absolutely still. It was almost time. His blood was singing inside him.
Someone, yes, would be coming down the stairs soon.
And then Walter would be free.
* * *
Deep in the warm root tangle of the earth the glyphic felt his life loosening, unfurling bit by bit like the fingers of a hand, opening. He’d felt the shattering of the wards in his very skull, a sharp obliterating pain, and he’d known in that instant that Jacob Marber had come back. He had foreseen it and dreamed it and now here it was. But he was simply too weak now, too frail, to hold both the orsine closed and the wards along the walls at strength. And Jacob Marber had known it.
The warm darkness was all around. It was his own death he was seeing now. There had been a time far in the past when he had imagined he would feel sadness, and a later time when he’d thought he’d feel relief. He felt neither. A change was moving inside him like his own blood. He had lived so long on this earth that the lifetimes of men and women were to him as days and he regarded them as a child will an insect. He thought of the sunrise over the great ships of the Spanish Armada and the forest of masts that he had witnessed setting out across the channel and how the sunlight was like rigging and the trumpets at Valladolid were filled with longing. And he thought of the burning monasteries in Essex in the time of the invaders and the longboats that crept up the rivers, shields lining their walls, the dragon-headed prows cutting the air. The fear in the villages then. And he remembered the late dances in the formal gardens of Edinburgh in the time of King James, and the first hot-air balloon sailing over Glasgow and the Clyde and the last maypole on the village green in those days when he still walked above-ground. And the sunlight catching on the ice shards hanging from the gallows in Greenmarket and the cloud of steam that rose from the mouths of the newly dead when they were cut down at the dawn of the eighteenth century. And the blush in the cheeks of a newborn he’d held in Sicily once like the rosy color in a late-summer peach and the wonder in that while the exhausted mother slept in the straw behind him. And the way a child looked at him in the harbor at Alexandria as he climbed down the gangway and into the haze. All this, all this and more, would vanish from the world with his ceasing, all the ineradicable beauty that lived now only inside him would be lost, moments as fragile as coins of light on water, and this more than any other part of it made him feel alone and sorrowful and frail. For in all this feeling there was, he thought in his slow treelike way, the last remnants of what had made him human once, so that he was, still, one of them.