“Where is this? Is it far?”
“It ain’t but thirty mile north of London,” said the clerk. “Quaint little village, it is.”
The train was departing in the dark and she hurried down to the platform, not seeing the monster anywhere. Then she sighted him, climbing up the platform steps, vanishing into a clerestory car. Brynt shouldered her way through the crowds, hauled herself up. She tried to find a seat in third class that allowed her to peer out the window and that was near an exit. The carriage was nearly empty but for a man in tweed slowly peeling an onion with a little knife, and a governess with her ward seated with hands in their laps, neither speaking. The little boy made her think, with a twinge, of Marlowe.
At Horsechester the monster got down, smoldering with darkness, that black scarf obscuring his face still, and ignoring the alarmed stares of the other travelers he strode away, out of the little station in the predawn light, along the cobbled streets of the bucolic town. Brynt, grim, hungry now, hurried after.
He set out across the country, a dark solitary figure in city clothes. The sun was bleeding in the east. Brynt moved warily, anxious. She couldn’t imagine his purpose. They were following the railway tracks across the countryside, and at a blind curve around a low grassy hill, she saw the man stop suddenly. He stood in the long grass, his arms dangling at his sides. Brynt, fifty yards away, sank down in the undergrowth.
There were insects buzzing in the grass. The breeze was cool. The morning sky turned blue, without cloud. Trains passed at intervals. The afternoon came, darkened into twilight. And still the monster stood.
Brynt would shift her position from time to time, first her legs cramping, then her back. The night turned cold. She slept badly. She was half-afraid when the night at last started to fade that she’d find the monster gone. But he wasn’t; he still stood on the knoll, a shadowed figure overlooking the tracks, patient, unmoving.
It all made her very uneasy. Then in the early morning, under a blue sky, she saw the smoke of an approaching train beyond the curve, above the trees. Something felt different to her, though she couldn’t say what. Soon she could hear it, the steady mechanical thrump of its rush, and then she heard the shriek of its whistle, alarmingly close, and she turned suddenly back and saw the monster had walked down the cut and up onto the tracks.
The train came into sight around the curve, a passenger express, tearing past at unbelievable speed, a great fury of fire and smoke and gleaming green and gold lettering. Brynt’s heart was in her throat.
The figure, she saw, was standing in the middle of the ties, staring down the thundering train, his long black coat twisting around him. Calmly and deliberately he unwound the scarf from his face.
The train came on, its whistle shrieking.
He opened his arms wide.
Brynt got to her feet.
He didn’t move, didn’t leap away. And then—in a tremendous burst of black smoke and soot—the locomotive tore through him, tore through where he’d been standing, smoke pouring out around it like a great dark wing, then curling back into its airstream and enfolding the train and its coal car and its ornate wooden passenger carriages in darkness, before gradually dissipating out into dust, and Brynt saw the monster was gone, just gone, as if totally obliterated, and the whole screeching length of the train was roaring through the space where he’d been with sparks flaring in the wheels and the engine casing shuddering and the great brakes grinding down to a stop some fifty long yards farther on.
She started running.
* * *
At 23 Nickel Street West they’d all risen sleepy and irritable and stumbled through their ablutions and a meager breakfast downstairs and then out into the waiting carriages. Miss Quicke was the first awake. Margaret had been cautious and hired a second coach where Walter, smuggled darkly inside, would ride; but Charlie saw, and she saw that he saw, and his expression was all fear and betrayal.
The train departed on time. They were maybe an hour outside of London when it happened. The carriage jerked, groaned to a long shuddering halt. There was a crash of trunks and cases falling to the floor, a long squeal of brakes. Margaret grabbed at the windowsill for support, alarmed, and looked sharply at Walter. But he was still drugged and drowsing on the facing seat, gray and sickly-looking in his ropes, and he didn’t so much as stir. She checked the knots, just in case. Then she went to the window and pulled aside the curtains. They occupied a sleeping compartment near the back of the train, just in front of the baggage carriage. She had also engaged a second compartment, clear at the far end of the train, at the very front, for the children and Coulton and Miss Quicke to ride in.