Darkwater

by Catherine Fisher

  He looked at her closely. “Maybe he’s won already.”

  “Don’t be stupid!”

  “Then come with me now. I’ll take thee home. To thy father.”

  The tramp stepped forward. The dog barked, nervous. She didn’t know anymore whom she was angry with. She didn’t know what to do. Bewildered, she saw suddenly that it was night, purple and mothy. The sun had long gone. It was All Hallows Eve.

  “No,” she breathed.

  “Tha must! Don’t go back to the house, girlie! ’Tis what he wants!”

  She thought of her father. The slovenly cottage. Cleaning the privies at the wretched school. And then all the books fell into her mind, the rows of chained, forbidden knowledge, and Azrael sitting by the fire feeding his cat with warm crumbs, saying, “To change metal into gold, Sarah, think of that! Think of the wonder of that!”

  The dog yelped, a sharp warning.

  “I can’t,” she muttered.

  The garden crackled with movement. The bears had gone, as if they had slithered off their pillars; now she could hear a rustling all around her. Shadows merged into lithe shapes, panting, gathering. The tramp swung the sack hastily over his shoulder. “Come with me. The chance won’t come again.”

  “I can’t.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”

  He looked at her, close. “’Tis worse than that. You do believe me. But you’re still not coming.”

  She couldn’t answer.

  Dogs howled. The uproar rang from the wood, and the tramp swore and plunged the cold pipe in his pocket. “God help me,” he muttered, “I’ve heard that hell-sound before. Come on, girlie, unless you want to suffer for all eternity!”

  “Leave me alone! Just go!” she yelled, almost crying with fury. “Quickly!”

  He ran.

  But from the wood the hounds were racing, black shapes lean and lolloping. The tramp crashed through the hedge, clanging the gate behind him. All the night was a sudden bedlam of noise, a breathless panting. As she stood rigid with terror the hounds came at her, streaming around, closing in, sniffing her dress, growling, a savage, spectral pack, tails upright. Cold rose from them, icy wisps of smoke. The red coals of their eyes burned into her. She felt sick, almost faint.

  “Sarah!”

  Azrael was coming. He rode over the lawn on his pale horse, forcing a way through. Reluctant, growling, the pack split before the trampling hooves; one dog leaped up at him and he kicked it down.

  “Put your foot in the stirrup!” he yelled.

  She reached up and grabbed; he pulled her quickly and she swung up behind him, clutching his coat.

  Around them the hounds were a snarling blackness. Another growled and leaped up, its teeth snapping at her hand, and broke into a sudden earsplitting howl that made Sarah sure the horse would rear and throw them. But it snorted, and shook its head, and Azrael urged it on so that they galloped over the lawns, across the empty flowerbeds, up the steps to the door, where Scrab waited in a swirl of mist and candlelight, all the shadow hounds streaming after them.

  Breathless, Sarah jumped down.

  “Go inside,” Azrael snapped.

  The hounds were racing away. Far off in the woods the crashing pursuit brought rooks flapping out of the treetops like dark snow.

  “Don’t hurt him,” she whispered.

  Azrael smiled. “What do you think I am?”

  Hopeless, she said, “That’s just it. I don’t know what you are.”

  He leaned down. “Don’t you? I warned you. I don’t like trespassers. Now go in. This is Hallowe’en, remember?”

  He turned the horse away, and she knew he had been laughing at her. She ran up the steps, fast. In the wood the hounds erupted into a hoarse baying.

  They had found the scent. Someone yelled in terror.

  She pushed past Scrab in fury.

  “Get out of my way,” she muttered.

  eleven

  November fell like a dark curtain.

  Martha said there had never been such a Hallowe’en, not in living memory. Along the cliffs red fires had blazed—balefires, the old men had called them, glimmering and gone. The wind had roared over slate-roofed cottages in the combes, and the villagers had barred the doors and huddled over the fires, listening and sleepless. “Like all the hounds of hell riding down the sky,” she said with relish, not noticing Sarah’s stare.

  Barns had blown down. One pinnacle of the church tower had crashed, found in the morning embedded point down in the soft earth of a recent grave.

  There had been the usual sightings. John Trevisik swore he had seen his drowned brother looking in at the scullery window. At the inn at Mamble someone had rattled the door handle late at night and stumped angrily around, swearing and yelling. When the innkeeper had nervously unbarred a shutter and peered out, no one had been there.

  Sarah had listened to it all in silence, her thumb scraping absently at a burn mark on Martha’s table. Jack came through. He stopped, awkward.

  “How is it at the big house? You’re looking well, Sarah.”

  She knew that. She was clean, ate well, wasn’t so scrawny. Her hair was well-brushed and shiny; she’d bought another new dress and a finer pair of boots.

  “I like it, Jack,” she said, not looking at him.

  His open face clouded. “Aye. I thought you would. We’ll not be seeing you here much more.”

  Her father asked no questions. Each time she saw him he seemed grayer, more discontented, his cough getting worse and worse. It upset her so much that last week she hadn’t gone to see him at all.

  On Hallowe’en, Azrael had been out all night.

  In the morning he’d been tired but cheerful, perfectly polite. Scrab had told him he was a damned fool for wearing himself out. He had said nothing about the dark hounds and she wouldn’t ask. But since then, there had been no sign of the tramp. Nothing. In the village no one had seen him. It was as if he had disappeared from the face of the earth.

  The weather turned colder. Withered leaves drifted down; wood smoke rose from the orchards.

  Sarah lived in a coziness of rooms, of meals with Azrael, enthralled by his talk of astronomy, spirits, angels; his old tales and abstruse lore, speculations about the conjuring of demons, the possibility of mermen. He told her nothing about himself, easily changing the subject each time she asked. She worked hard. She took notes of all his experiments, learned strange chemical symbols, stayed up late to watch flasks of mysterious liquids change color.

  He fascinated her. Day by day she fell more under his quiet spell; the urgency of his desire for the secret of transmutation moving into her own mind, so that she lay awake at night thinking of mixtures of elements they hadn’t tried, variations of heating and compression. And yet under it some fear of him lurked. He wanted her soul, the tramp had said. To damn it, or to save it? Or was he just crazy, a lonely man possessed with an impossible quest?

  And all the time her father’s cough seemed to rattle through her dreams.

  Finally, one bleak afternoon in the library, even the books were not enough. She dropped her pen, letting it blot, then leaned her arms on the open pages of dark print, resting her head on them.

  She couldn’t sit here. It was too silent. Not even a clock ticked in its dusty remoteness. She felt stifled, and suddenly, to her own surprise, she longed for Martha to talk to, or Jack, or even some of the children from the school. But, then, she’d made herself above them, just like she’d said she would.

  Only it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  She jumped up and stalked out, walking from room to room like a restless shadow.

  Who was telling the truth—Azrael or the tramp? One of them was lying to her.

  She wandered out of the library wing and along the upper landings, recklessly throwi
ng open all the doors. Bedrooms. Closets. A bathroom. All clean, well-kept. All empty.

  She ran up the south stairs to the servants’ attics and they were the same; small white rooms, neat in a row.

  The terrible silence of the house oppressed her. Its statues seemed frozen, its paintings cruel and stern. The curtains hung absolutely rigid, as if a breeze had never touched them, as if the whole life of Darkwater was suspended, like a chemical in solution, waiting for some explosion to happen. On impulse she dragged up the sash of a window, wrenching it open with all her strength. Cold wind gusted in, refreshing in its dampness, loud with the screams of gulls.

  She leaned out, breathing the misty rain. All across the fields and out to sea, gray curtains of it hung, veil beyond veil. It reminded her of something she had almost forgotten. Azrael’s secret door. She had never found it. She turned and walked past her own room to the tapestry at the corridor’s end. Kneeling, she felt the corner again, this time with infinite care, jamming her fingernails into cracks and tugging hard. Nothing moved. There was no panel that she could find. Nothing. Except, as she turned away, something out of the corner of her eye, that she had to crouch down to see.

  A few white spots of dried candle wax on the floorboards.

  Sarah touched them, with a wry smile. They were tiny but quite hard, and they meant that someone had stood here for a few seconds, the candle askew and dripping in some draft. It was enough. She hadn’t dreamed it. And if she could find out where the door led, it might help her know more about what or who Azrael was.

  After a moment’s thought she turned and marched down to the vast kitchens, where chickens turned on a spit under the sooty hearth, and Scrab sat at the table wrapping apples in sacking.

  She stood right in front of him.

  “Who is Azrael?” she demanded.

  His small eyes looked at her in disgust. “Yer master.”

  He tossed another apple in the box.

  “And where does he come from?”

  He grinned then, the inflamed spots red under his greasy hair. “Elsewhere. ’E’s the one what ’olds all the cards.”

  “Cards?” She caught at the word. “What cards?”

  Scrab scratched irritably. “Restless today, ain’t we! Flighty. And there was me thinking you ’ad all you ever wanted.”

  Above him a bell jangled on the wall. LABORATORY was written under it in gilt letters.

  Scrab didn’t look up. “Wants yer.” He tapped an apple so that a fat grub fell out, and he picked up the pale squashy thing in his fingers. As she went out, she was sure he was going to eat it.

  Azrael was bent over the workbench, absorbed in the contents of a glass flask. He had been nervous and on edge all day. His expensive coat was stained with splashes. “Do you know what this is?” he said at once.

  “Acid?”

  “Aqua regis. It can dissolve gold.”

  She came through the musty, cluttered room. “And?”

  “Sarah, I may finally have succeeded!” He gazed at her, pale with excitement. “After all these lifetimes, Sarah! All this work! I started with the basest ingredients, but they’ve been purified and distilled, endlessly filtered, until now they’re almost quite new, the faults strained and burned out. A painful process for them sometimes, I know, but we’re so close!”

  “Them?” she said slowly. “You sound as if you’re talking about people. As if it’s people you’ve been changing.”

  He smiled, coy. “Do I? Well, it’s true the sages said that real gold is that which is created in the soul. The turning away from evil, from pride.”

  “The soul again.”

  “It’s a subject that interests me.”

  “The Trevelyans were proud,” she said. “I wonder where their souls are.”

  “Do you?” He held her gaze for a moment, then turned abruptly. “Look,” he whispered.

  She bent over the strange apparatus, sniffing its sour smell. The vessel was one Azrael called an alembic, and in the dish on the top was a tiny crust of brass-colored metal, cold and brittle.

  “Is that gold?”

  “I pray so.” He seemed too nervous to keep still; putting the flask down he paced over to the fireplace and put both hands to it, leaning on the marble mantelshelf. Looking down into the fire made his face a mask of shadows and red light. “Whether it is or not, is up to you.”

  “Me!”

  “Pour the aqua regis onto it. Carefully. If it dissolves, its gold. I will have done what generations have only dreamed of.”

  He was watching her intently in the mirror. The cat was staring too, its green eyes tense. Sarah shrugged and picked up the flask, oddly uneasy. Outside, the rain pattered on the windows.

  But just as she went to pour he said, “First. Is there anything . . . you want?”

  She looked at him. “I’ve got everything I want.”

  “Are you sure? Think hard, Sarah. Think of your father. Of Martha, of all the villagers. Think what you could do for them.”

  The flask was heavy. Her hand trembled. Azrael stepped forward. “We could make an agreement,” he whispered.

  But instead of answering she asked a question. “What happened to the tramp?”

  “Who?”

  “The tramp. You know.”

  “He ran off.” He seemed irritated. “Never mind him! Please Sarah . . .”

  “He told me things. He said you deliberately destroyed my grandfather.”

  Azrael’s gaze went dark. “Indeed.” For a moment he was silent, watching her. “And you believe him?”

  “I don’t know whom to believe.”

  “He’s not the first to make such claims,” Azrael said sadly. “I have always been misunderstood. But I told you what really happened.”

  “And he warned me.”

  The cat spat. Azrael turned. “Warned you?”

  “Not to make any bargains with you.”

  He shook his head, his smile hard. “You already have. You work for me.”

  Sarah’s fingers were tight around the smooth glass. “I know.”

  “And you really think I would ruin your family? For what?” He waved a hand. “For this? I have estates of my own, Sarah.”

  “So you keep saying. But I don’t know anything about you. And you’ve got too many things that should be mine.”

  She looked at the flask, then put it down on the table quickly. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I think you’d better do this yourself.”

  She walked to the door, and glanced back. Azrael had picked up the flask. All the excitement seemed to have drained right out of him. Bitterly he poured out one drop of acid.

  The crust of metal stayed exactly as before.

  She turned and went out. She didn’t want to see his disappointment.

  That night she waited in the library, reading. She read feverishly, as if all the words of all the people from the books could block out the loneliness she felt. She should never have come here. But it was too late now. She was changed. She could never bear to go home, not back to the cottage. Because this was home. Every day she felt that more strongly. It was so easy to wander the empty house and feel that it was hers. That was the thought that kept intruding, around the edges of the words.

  Turning a page, she heard a door creak.

  She looked up.

  Footsteps walked stealthily down the corridor.

  At last!

  She slid to her feet; opening the library door she saw Azrael at once in the shadows of the landing. He was climbing the south stairs quickly, the cat a lithe slither at his feet. She slipped out silently.

  Above her, on the walls, his candle threw bizarre shadows. They moved around him like a host of attendant spirits, the cat streaking ahead.

  Keeping well back, determined,
Sarah followed him.

  She slid from doorway to doorway, lurking behind great vases. On the stairs she tiptoed on the crimson carpet. She knew where he was going. Down the dim corridor past her bedroom, the cat sniffing at the closed door. Azrael’s shadow stretched long and eerily over the paneled wood. Then he stopped.

  Crushed in an alcove, her fingers tight on a velvet curtain, she watched, intent.

  Azrael pulled the tapestry aside. He lifted the candle and she saw only the wall, but he touched some part of it and the whole panel seemed to spring forward, and she saw it really was a door, ingeniously hidden. He drew out a bunch of keys; they clinked in the silence.

  After one quick look down the corridor he unlocked the door and went through, leaving it ajar. For a long moment she waited, seeing again the weird red glow that flickered through the slit, and then she moved swiftly after him, slipping through the tapestry folds and easing the door wide.

  There were stairs, going down.

  She had to be careful; after a while tiny stones scattered under her feet. The stairs were stone, and crumbling. They made a great curve, and she tiptoed down and down until she felt sure she was below the cellars, below the house itself, and still the steps descended and far down ahead of her the roar and grumble of the Darkwater grew loud. It echoed, as if there were caves down there, and the strange misty glow in the air was a steamy heat, and the stench of some powerful sulfurous miasma came up to her.

  Ahead, far down, Azrael’s dark shape turned a last knob of rock. She lingered, waiting in tense excitement, seeing how a sudden redness lit him, as if huge fires burned down there.

  And then a voice in her ear said slyly, “I’m glad yer still up, Miss Nosy. There’s someone here to see yer.”

  Azrael turned. In the echoing roar he stared up at her and his face was a dark amazement and then a fury that chilled her.

  “Get her out!” he snapped, and Scrab grabbed her hand and pulled her hastily up the stairs, an endless scrambling breathless climb until they tumbled out into the corridor hot and trembling.