Jacob Marber was standing at the very front of the aisle, a figure of darkness, breathing hard. Some of the passengers had got to their feet. Soot and smoke were coming off him, like a singed thing, like a thing drawn out of the fire only moments ago. His black gloves looked too long to be right and he’d lost his hat and his black hair was wild and standing out from his head. He made no move to come closer. His beard swept down before him like some Old Testament judge. Alice couldn’t see his eyes.
“Get behind me,” hissed Coulton.
He wrestled out of his jacket, rolled up his sleeves like a pugilist entering a street fight. His yellow waistcoat was tight at his shoulders and paunch. His neck, Alice saw, was very short and thick. And then he seemed somehow to ripple and condense, as if his skin were hardening, and she saw the middle of his waistcoat split, and his shoulders thicken. Something was happening.
“You should’ve stayed gone, Jacob,” he called.
Seeing Coulton thicken there, seeing Jacob Marber wavering like some monstrous shadow, Alice had never felt such fear. It was sheer absolute terror. It seized her stomach, almost causing her to clutch at her belly in pain. She felt the boy clinging to her arm. But then Coulton took a step forward, and Jacob Marber opened his mouth as if to scream, and his teeth were black and a darkness filled his mouth like blood. And that was when Alice saw the thing appear on the wall behind him.
It could have been a sooty fingerprint, a dab of tar. But it began to grow inside the wood like a drop of ink in water and seeing it she started to tremble. It ate away at the wall, spreading fast, an absolute darkness, and then Jacob Marber raised his open hands like a preacher calling for some terrible sign and drew them slowly forward as if pushing against a great current and all at once that blackness poured toward them over wall and ceiling and floor, blacking the windows, snuffing out the lights, a shadow all consuming and alive and overtaking all those who sat in that carriage.
The car was shuddering. Passengers cried out, doubling over in horror. Alice had her Colt Peacemaker out but her hand was shaking and she had to grip it with her other to steady it and then she fired. She fired again and again into the darkness where Jacob Marber had been until all the chambers were empty and only a clicking came. It made no difference. The darkness came on.
Still she stood, going through the chambers uselessly, and only Coulton’s hand on her arm, heavy and cold as a bag of sand, drew her back to herself.
“Go!” he shouted. “Go!”
His face was weirdly dense, as if his features had been overtaken by his flesh, and from deep in their sockets his eyes glittered out, small and hard as river stones.
And then he turned, and doubled up his swollen fists, and threw himself into the darkness.
* * *
Margaret Harrogate’s first bullet went wide, punching through the wall of the mail coach. Walter was too fast, impossibly fast, scrabbling up the wall and across the ceiling. She watched the sudden penny of daylight open in the splintering wall, where the bullet had gone, like a flower of light, and she thought, strangely: How beautiful it is.
And then Walter was upon her, clawing, tearing, ripping.
She could feel the wet slash of her wounds. The revolver fell, was knocked scraping across the floor of the carriage and came to rest up against a mailbag. Walter was eerily light, so light Margaret could have lifted him with one arm, and she was not a strong woman by any stretch. And yet despite this his strength was immense, and she struggled and kicked and only just managed to get an elbow up under his chin, holding his long knifelike teeth away from her throat. With a sharp twist, she threw him off.
He landed on his back, flipped over, scrambled on all fours toward her. She was crawling for the revolver, trying to grab it, when he seized her ankle and she felt his long claws drive through the leather of her boot, into her leg.
They struggled in near silence, only the hard breathing and the slap and scuff of bone on wood. There was blood on the side of Margaret’s head, in her hair, her arms were on fire. But she kicked out at his face, once, twice, feeling her heel connect with something that crunched, and then she was free and got to the revolver and whirled around and fired five quick shots in succession, directly into Walter Laster’s chest.
The force of the impacts hurled him backward, hard up against a mailbag, in a tangle of webbing.
Margaret got shakily to her feet. Her left arm wasn’t working right. There was blood getting in her eyes from somewhere and she wiped her face with her wrist, the sleeve torn and flapping. She stared at the litch, pale, thin, hunched, unmoving where it lay.