Something shifted then, behind Berghast; he half turned away, and Margaret glimpsed Marlowe kneeling with both hands gripped hard on Berghast’s bare arm. The boy was shining with a terrible brilliance, his skin translucent so that she could see the shape of his skull and his hollow sockets and the bones and veins in his arms. His teeth were clenched. The shine erupted.
And she saw Berghast’s skin begin to boil where Marlowe gripped it.
She didn’t understand what she was seeing. It did not seem possible. But Berghast stood suddenly and threw the child backward so that his head struck the rock floor and all at once the light in him died and he looked boneless and strange.
Berghast’s own skin was shining.
“Why are you doing this?” Margaret cried, filled with a sudden helpless rage. “I came to warn you. I thought you’d try to protect them, all of them. Henry, I believed in you! All these years, I helped you! My Mr. Harrogate helped you! But you’re just a—a monst—”
“I am not,” he said. “There is a greater purpose to this.”
He pulled her upright, twisting her wrists back so that she feared they might break. Then he let one go and brought his own knife up.
“Henry—” she said.
But he slid the blade painfully into her belly, paying her no mind. It went in slippery and without any give all the way to the hilt, and she gasped at the slow grinding hurt of it, her whole body filling with amazement.
“I am not a monster,” he said again, looking into her eyes, forcing her to look into his own. “I take no pleasure in this.”
And then he pulled the knife free and left her.
* * *
Charlie carried the dripping heart out of the crypt.
All around him a blue light shone. He held the glyphic’s heart swaddled in his shirt like a newborn, feeling the warm slick of it, his cupped hands cradling it as he went.
Far across the loch, Cairndale was on fire. He watched the scaffolding of flames. His arms and legs were scratched and bloodied but the scratches were already closing and when he could breathe again he staggered around the ruined monastery and entered the dark monks’ quarters and crept down the stone stairs. He had to sink the heart into the orsine.
The blue shine below was blinding. He stumbled at the edge of the underground chamber, wincing. The orsine was too bright. But as he turned his face aside he saw, lurking around the walls, strange gray figures. The light seemed not to register in their grayness, nor the darkness; and they turned their faces to Charlie where he stood, and he knew them. They were different, no longer beautiful, no longer ribboning with memory; but he knew them. The spirit dead.
Suddenly they swarmed him. They made no sound. But they moved at an incredible speed, and he felt the first one’s touch with a tremble, as he tried to cradle the glyphic’s heart. For it was as solid as anything in this world; and its touch glowed with that same blue fire; and he felt his own flesh begin to bubble and melt in agony.
And then a second, a third, was upon him, and as the spirit dead pressed in close, Charlie couldn’t hold on to the glyphic’s heart any longer, and it slid from his grasp, and suddenly the dead let him go and were swarming the small glowing blue heart. They were eating it.
“No—” Charlie fell to his knees, horrified. The dead paid him no heed, and soon the heart had been devoured entire. It was gone. Their mouths and fingers were stained with black slime.
It was then Charlie lifted his eyes and saw something was trapped in the orsine, a huge gluey giant straining against the orsine’s surface. It looked thickened and elongated and covered in tar. And then he saw Dr. Berghast leaning out over the orsine, the artifact glove heavy at his side, his other hand plunged elbow-deep into the sticky thigh of the figure, as if gripping it, as if holding it in place. But something was happening to him, he was shivering, there was a low blue shine in his skin that looked almost like how Marlowe would look, sometimes, and Charlie understood. Berghast was draining the drughr’s power.
The rip in the orsine was still widening. The dead were standing again, arms at their sides, watching the orsine. Charlie had failed, failed everyone, he had lost the glyphic’s heart and now the orsine would never be sealed.
And that was when he saw, huddled half in darkness, the unmoving bodies of Mrs. Harrogate, and his only friend, Marlowe. They were lying near a pillar and it looked like Mrs. Harrogate had somehow dragged Marlowe there. He could see a long smear of blood where she’d crawled and when he got to her he saw the blood in her belly and knew she was dying. Marlowe’s left wrist had been cut and he was covered in his own blood and his face was very white. Charlie was too late.