“Bertolt, what’ll we do?” Jacob asked him one winter. They were freezing by then, starting to get too big for the sweep work, their knees and backs bruised and bleeding.
“We’ll find something,” said his brother. “There’s always a way.”
“What? What’ll we find?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll find it.”
Then two weeks later his brother suffocated in a chimney when he got stuck and the sweep boss left his little body unclaimed in a dirty alley and Jacob understood the only thing kids like them ever found was suffering and pain and death. And Jacob, in a rage he’d never felt before, had stalked the boss to a card table in a club in the dark hours of the morning and strangled him with the dust, strangled him until his eyes nearly burst from their sockets. He was ten years old.
He was alone after that, hiding, starving, afraid. That was the winter Henry Berghast found him, just as if he’d been searching for him all his life, the same winter he made the long journey, by railway and by coach, across Europe, across a slate-gray sea, to the chilly white halls of Cairndale.
Jacob was thinking about all that as he left Coulton, and went through the paper screen, to the adjoining room. The air was hot, unmoving. The sleeping mat had already been laid out on the floor, the strange hard round Japanese pillow at its end. He could hear Coulton clearing his nose, coughing roughly, moving about. He took off his shirt, unbuttoned his trousers, raked his hair back from his face. He didn’t think he’d sleep.
The woman came to him that night, again, a brooding shadow in the corner of his dream.
“You’re back,” Jacob began, slowly, as he always began. “What … are you?”
And came the familiar reply: Are we not all we can imagine, Jacob?
But the words seemed hurried this time, as if she were impatient with the question. She lurked, shrouded in her usual darkness, but radiating a new and disturbing tension.
We are running out of time, she said suddenly, and folded her hands behind her.
Slowly, as if from a long way off, Jacob closed his eyes, opened them. He tried to shake his head. “This … is not a dream. I am not dreaming, am I?”
I wish there was more time. I must speak plainly.
“Yes—”
You are special, Jacob, you are not like the others. You have always known this. You will one day do great things, you will bring a great goodness into the world. You will help many people. And it will begin with Bertolt.
“Bertolt—？”
He is suffering, even now. His spirit is suffering.
Jacob rubbed at his face, disbelieving.
But there is a way to help him. Only you can do it, only you are strong enough. He can be brought back.
“What do you mean?” he whispered. “What do you mean, brought back—？”
Death is just a door. The orsine at Cairndale is the key, Jacob. Henry Berghast keeps it closed, his glyphic keeps it closed … but you must find a way to open it … The woman in the darkness seemed to pause. I’m not what you think, Jacob. Remember that. There are those who will tell you I mean you harm. But you know—you can feel—that it is not so.
“Wait. If the orsine is opened, the dead will come through—”
The best lies have truths inside them, Jacob. Henry Berghast is not to be trusted. He will tell you the orsine means destruction. It is not so. I want to help you, I want to help Bertolt. But you must let me.
He felt a dread go through him at that, even inside the dream, a cold and terrible foreboding, as if the words were a threat somehow, a promise of malice. And then he woke up.
The inn’s timbers creaked around him. He lay on the tatami, drenched with sweat, listening to the darkness, to the absolute silence of the city outside. His heart was beating very fast. He wet his lips, feeling the dream fade. He opened his eyes.
There in the corner loomed the woman, radiating malice, impossibly tall and crooked like a shadow stretching across the ceiling, her face shrouded in darkness.
“JACOB!” she screamed at him, wild and fierce and horrifying.
He cried out, and scrambled instinctively for a weapon, anything, but there was nothing, and when he looked back, the woman was gone, the room was empty.
He was alone.
* * *
Frank Coulton knew how losing felt and he also knew what it was to be the last man at the table. He was thirty-four years old and a physical wreck, his lungs bad in the morning from a lifetime of smoking and his back bad in the night from everything else. He was losing his hair, would be bald in a few years. He had auburn sideburns that he’d grown out into a butcher’s beard, and hands so thick and fat from punching that he looked sometimes like he was wearing gloves. He was stout of stature and thick-necked like a bull and he liked his waistcoats brightly colored. But he’d been alone more than not, and he didn’t always know how to be with other people. He’d been a gambler, a riverboat operator, a soldier for the Union army; he’d been an apprentice bookbinder, and a carpenter in the great libraries of London and Boston. He’d had a whole lot of nothing good, and not a lot of something bad; and if you asked him either way, he’d take the something over nothing every time.