From time to time Alice would lift the corner of the door curtain, glance out into the corridor. But there was no movement, nothing. No conductor came by. No Coulton.
Behind her, Charlie Ovid had pulled back the outside window curtains a bit and Alice could see they were passing through the outskirts of some gray industrial city, brick walls stained with soot, iron railings twisted into pained shapes. She caught a glimpse of dozens of smokestacks, churning a brown smudge into the sky. Dull sooty rooftops. Then they were rising again, up, out of the city’s edges, northward.
Coulton should have been back by now, that was the truth of it. It was eerie, how quiet the entire carriage had gone. At last she heard the sound of the corridor door clattering open, the sudden rush of the tracks, and then the muffling as the door again snicked shut. Heavy slow footsteps. But they were coming from the front of the train, from the porter car and the locomotive beyond. She frowned, changed to the facing seat. Cautiously she lifted the curtain to see.
And dropped it, almost at once, in horror.
It was him.
A sooty darkness smoldered off his black coat, his hat, his black gloved hands. He was long and thin, with broad shoulders, and he wore a thick black beard, trimmed along the cut of his jaw like a barber. But his face was averted, and she could not see his eyes. He was dipping his head, peering into the compartments, and as he came forward the carriage itself seemed cast into gloom. Charlie and Marlowe had gone still, staring at her, at the look on her face, probably, and she met their eyes and she didn’t try to hide it. Her heart was hammering in her chest.
“It’s him,” whispered Marlowe.
She didn’t answer. She looked around, scanning their small compartment, the webbing overhead, the mahogany panels in the door. Her gun was gripped in her hand and she looked at it and then slid it into the pocket of her oilskin coat. She went to the window, fumbled the sash, wrestled the pane all the way down. The curtains sucked out and snapped along the outside of the train. She stuck her face out, into the roar of the wind, her hair flattening behind her. She squinted.
There was a conductor’s handrail running the length of the car, and narrow protuberances that could be used for footholds. It’d have to do.
She ducked back inside the carriage, her head reeling. “Quickly, now,” she said. “We need to get farther back in the train. Now.”
Charlie looked at Marlowe, alarmed. “He’s not climbing outside any train, Miss Alice. He’s too little.”
But she was already buttoning Marlowe’s coat fast. She looked a long moment into the boy’s face and then she nodded, satisfied by what she saw there. “You hold on to me and don’t let go. All right? I need you to close your eyes and not to open them until we’re in the next carriage. Just like we did in the hotel. Can you do that?”
Marlowe glanced fearfully at the locked door. A thin black smoke had started to seep in around its edges.
“Marlowe?” she hissed.
“Okay.”
She folded her hat and stuffed it into her free pocket and closed up her coat and then she tied her hair out of her face. She put her hands on Charlie’s shoulders. “You can do this, Charlie.”
Charlie Ovid nodded. “It can’t hurt me any, falling off a train,” he whispered.
The compartment rattled around them. She heard a soft rap at the door. Even as they moved to the window, she knew there was no time. Where the hell was Coulton?
Alice picked up Marlowe against her chest, little arms interlocked around her neck, and she climbed out, out into the dizzying roar of the air, the full blast of it nearly knocking her sideways. She gripped the conductor’s rail over the windows, inched back along the carriage. The wind was at their backs, shoving them onward. The gravel and railroad ties rocketed past, a blur under her. Charlie swung his long legs out after her, quick, lithe.
She could feel Marlowe trembling, his little face crushed into her chest. “It’s okay, it’s all right, it’s all right,” she kept murmuring into his ear.
As they clambered across the windows she peered into the compartments. They were all, somehow, impossibly, empty.
She was nearly at the back of the carriage when something hard and black banged and ricocheted past her, away. She glanced back. Jacob Marber clung to the outside wall of the carriage, at the front. His silk hat was gone. As she watched, astonished, he began to creep, slowly, gloved hand over gloved hand, sidelong toward them, his soft shoes slipping as he went. His hair was blown forward over his face obscuring it in the wind but she could feel it, somehow, his malevolent gaze, the way his eyes were fixed on Marlowe and Charlie.