Something was happening to the old ones, too. They were changing, their talents manifesting. Three of them ran forward at a speed impossible given their age—no longer frail, swift now—and she stared in fascination as two of them seemed to thicken, grow larger even as they ran, their heads down like battering rams. The third, an old man in a nightdress, was increasing in height, his legs and arms lengthening, so that he had soon outpaced the other two and he was reaching a gigantic hand down as if to flatten Jacob Marber where he stood. An old woman, standing back, seemed to levitate up off the ground, almost to hover, and there was a strange white light like starlight shining from her. The others, too, were transforming, though Alice couldn’t make out exactly how.
Something was wrong with Marber though, that much was clear. The great darkness around him, his dust, twisting up in a cyclone from his fists, seemed to hurl itself outward against the onrushing giant and the two muscled runners and then be sucked back in, surrounding him again, and she could see he was struggling. Then the giant too was pressing down with his big palms against the dust, leaning into it, forcing it slowly back down, and Alice started to think, to hope, that perhaps Harrogate was mistaken, perhaps they all were, perhaps the old talents were stronger than any had given them credit for.
It was then she noticed two things: one of the eight, frailer than the others, leaning into a cane and standing some distance away, with his head bowed; and a quick crawling thing, pale and almost unseeable in the eerie firelight, skittering crablike over the grasses toward him. She knew Coulton at once; and she lifted her revolver in a smooth reflexive motion and took aim, but it was almost like he’d felt her attention, her focus, for in that instant he skittered sideways, setting the old talent between them. And a moment later Coulton had leaped up, all claws and fangs, and driven the frail old figure ferociously into the earth.
She shot anyway, squeezing the trigger calmly, and the shot went wide; she’d been hoping to scare the litch off the old man, but it made no difference; and when Coulton next raised his face she saw a dark bib of blood and gore overrunning his chin and staining his throat and the front of his ragged shirt.
Whatever the old man had been doing was now undone. Jacob Marber, with a sudden explosive force, hurled the gigantic talent backward, and then a cloud of dust overwhelmed the others so that Alice could no longer see them.
It was the speed of all of this, the speed at which it all happened, that amazed her most. It seemed only a matter of minutes since he’d appeared. She glanced wildly over at the kids and saw they too hadn’t had time to move, to do anything, and only stared in horror as that black storm of dust overwhelmed everything in its path.
“What is happening?” barked Miss Davenshaw.
“Where are they?” the Japanese girl cried out. “Do you see them?”
But no one did. There was only a great roaring storm of dust, cycloning over the field. For a long moment nothing happened. And then, striding forth out of the maelstrom, his eyes fixed directly on them, came Jacob Marber, the litch like a hound at his heels. The old talents were dead.
“We need to go,” Alice said sharply. She spun around.
It was only then she realized Mrs. Harrogate was gone.
* * *
Charlie had watched Mrs. Harrogate wheel herself silently backward and away, off into the darkness, heading down toward the loch, the long knives like crescents of darkness in her lap. When Alice turned in surprise he didn’t answer, he didn’t speak up, tell her what he’d seen, where she’d gone. He didn’t have to. They all knew.
But what Charlie was thinking, what he couldn’t stop thinking about, was the spirit dead in that other world, listless, shimmering, gathered rank-upon-rank in a great thick fog on the far side of the orsine. Waiting. As if drawn to the heat of the living. His recollection of it was hazy but he had a sense of being swarmed, of a terrible cold seeping into his chest, of an unslaked hunger. He did not know what his world would be if they came through.
It wasn’t a clear thought and it was gone as fast as it came because Alice was shoving him, shoving all of them, back toward the manor.
“Go, go!” she was shouting. “Hurry!” She was waving back the other students too. And then all were scrambling through the kitchen, past the big copper vats of stew and soup, cold now, maybe fifteen kids in total, spilling out into the dining room, crockery smashing in their wake as they hurtled past, into the foyer, up the stairs. Charlie glimpsed Mr. Smythe and his wards hurrying in the other direction but they were too far to call out to and anyway there wasn’t time.