Kamala’s gaze returns to the darkened corner. She gasps as Basil’s face stares back. Her vision becomes hazy, as if a veil covers her eyes, and she struggles to blink the image away. As her vision sharpens, the mirage evaporates.
Basil. His failings caused this. He is responsible. He should pay the price.
She curses him for having left, for having created the vacuum that permitted Lubos’s ascendance, and, it seems, the sure death of Our Fiery Home. She curses him for causing the savagery she’s had to endure. She curses him for his silence now, for not bursting into the Room of Contrition to end her so-called atonement. She curses him because, if he were here right now, he would surely step to the front of the line and inject her with his own venomous seed, just like all the others.
She corrects herself: He would find crueler ways to mistreat her. Or he would break her bonds and carry her off in his arms. His mercurial mood would determine his course of action.
Another burst of stinging warmth.
Her insides absorb the gluey muck. She closes her eyes and imagines her limp body falling into a cushion of warm, dark nothingness.
Chapter 26
Ashes
Thunder rumbles in the distance as the first drops of rain lick my face. Let the rains come, so I can rinse the stink and smoke from my body, wash the misfortune from my life. As I observe the wreckage of the blacksmith’s on Monument Bridge, doubt riddles every choice I have made.
My right foot throbs, likely broken, a casualty of either my carelessness or my stubborn luck—likely both. My stomach stirs, having done away with the bread from this morning. My savings, swallowed up by the fire. The rains soak me to the bone. I wander, pitiful. Broken. Failed.
London has beaten me.
I retreat to a dry place beneath an awning. A pool of rainwater drenches my feet. I swear, just one more quandary, no matter how slight, and I will leap from the balustrade to become one with the Thames. A figure approaches, and I recognize the same constable who had kicked me—in the same foot that now likely bears the calamity of a broken bone. I step out from beneath the awning and walk as hurriedly as I can.
The constable does not follow.
“I am alone,” I whisper, as if to remind myself of my plight.
Even if I wish to return home to Berwick, I can no longer afford the trip.
Hours pass, my mind swimming in regret.
Darkness has sunk its teeth into London by the time my feet return to the brick of the bridge. The blacksmith’s smolders, now little more than a ruined shell. The rains have extinguished the fire, though plumes of white smoke rise from the pile. I pick through charred timber and warm stone, to see if I can salvage something—anything. I step into the thick of it, pushing aside timbers, toppling stone. My skin turns black with wet ash, but I find nothing. Other miscreants have already picked the site clean, I suppose, or the fire burned hot enough to melt metal, my coins having rejoined the earth as liquid copper and silver.
The cool dusk air seeps through my wet clothes. I hug myself, trying to stay warm, but I cannot drive off these damned shivers. My body begs me for a few hours of shuteye in a dry and quiet place. Perhaps my prospects will look brighter in the light of a new day.
The steeple of Saint Botolph’s Church at Owlsditch appears through the murk. Candles burn yellow in a second-floor window.
I follow the street and turn left at the corner.
Away from the light, I skulk toward the church. My hand caresses the stone of the gable wall, moist and grainy beneath my touch. Three small windows line the bottom floor, where the foundation meets moss and cobblestone. Iron bars bisect two of the three windows, but the third is unguarded—the iron bars pried back. As my fingertips glance the rain-slicked glass, the window creaks open. It will be a tight fit, but I can squeeze. The street has no witnesses who might betray me. I slide my feet through the opening. As I lower the rest of me, I lose my grip on the slippery jamb and tumble to the cellar floor. The window slams shut behind me.
My knee aches from the fall—yet another insult to my weary frame. I crouch on the floor and wait for a response to my clamor. None comes. I am safe, someplace dry. I waste no time stripping the clothes and stockings from my chilled skin.
The air has its own weight, its own scent—nothing like what I’d expect of a church cellar. It smells like the surety of all things turning to dust. Standing naked in darkness, all my bits exposed, I imagine malevolent crawlers as bunkmates: colossal rats, bats clutching the walls, weevils making tracks on the grubby floor.
Lightning illuminates the rain-streaked windows. Only then do I see my surroundings. Several wooden tables. A slab, carved from marble or some other heavy stone. Chairs stacked from floor to ceiling. A pile of neatly folded linens.
I place a makeshift bed sheet on top of a wooden table and heave myself onto its surface. My feet peel away from the clammy floor, and I curl into a ball, pulling the linens atop me. I know my sleep will be fitful, but at least it will be sleep.
* * *
My eyes open at the first suggestion of daylight—almost dawn. I have slept, dreamlessly, all night.
Something is wrong. My skin prickles, my body alerting me to unseen danger. First the smell, a combination of sweat and dead meat. Then the sounds of scraping, slithering. The flash of movement in the lifting dark. The impossible weight atop me. Coarse hairs and cool scales stroking my skin. Knife blades against my throat.
Old Billy has found me.
“I watch,” says the gravelly voice. “I find.”
Old Billy speaks! He speaks the language of the King!
His claw traces patterns on the skin of my throat, my naked belly, and points farther south, and then teases back up again.
“Let me go,” I beg him. “Please.”
“What you seek?”
“Nothing. I seek nothing.” The words spill from my mouth in yelps.
“No hunt me,” Old Billy says. “No stalk me.”
His use of the word me chills the marrow in my bones.
“Anything! Anything you say!”
Old Billy slips off the table, pulling me along with him. Before I can protest, I am dangling, Old Billy holding me aloft by an ankle. Instinct does its work, and urine wets my chest and face, puddles on the floor.
A heavy reptilian tail makes S-curves in the air. Old Billy takes his free hand and grabs me by the throat. The upside-down world goes right side up.
“Home,” Old Billy says, beating his chest.
“I … I don’t understand,” I gasp, choking.
“Leave.”
“As soon as you release me, I am gone.”
“Go far. No Lundy. Lundy mine.”
My brain waits to respond, trying to understand.
“Leave London?” I ask. “I will! I will!”
“You stay. Next time you burn,” he tells me. “Like blacksmith-y.”
His words puzzle me. Seconds pass before his meaning penetrates the mucus of my crippled brain: The creature started the fire. The creature burned the blacksmith’s to the ground. The creature destroyed my savings, admittedly meager, dooming me.
I strike Old Billy across the face. My hand bones break.
Old Billy’s fingers tighten around my throat, and he tosses me backward as if I were an empty sack. I smack the wall and drop to the floor, my skull taking the brunt of my fall. Bones crack and crunch. In the dim light I see Old Billy in full for the first time. His face is almost human. Horns spike toward the ceiling, and immense fangs fill his hideous mouth. He has hooves where feet should be. He stands taller than any man I have ever met. Such a thing should not exist beneath God’s Heaven, yet here it is, made flesh.
“Stay here, you burn good,” he tells me. “Stay here, you burn forever.”
Old Billy retreats into a darkened corner and then crouches beneath one of the tables. I wait there, sprawled on the floor, expecting him to advance and tear out my throat. But I see nothing, hear nothing but pebbles falling, though th
e carnivore’s stench lingers like a patch of London fog. As sunlight paints the windows, I see what I could not have noticed the night before: a gaping tear in the wall, just big enough for Old Billy to slither through and sleep off a night of murder and mayhem. Outside I hear wagon traffic, and I realize I have survived an encounter with a flesh-and-blood devil.
I spent a full day looking for Old Billy, every instinct wrong. Only dumb luck led me into his lair: the cellar of a church at the foot of Monument Bridge.
My eyes remain fixed on the hole in the wall as I fumble for my clothes, still as wet as they were when I removed them. My hand struggles to close, the bones having shattered against Old Billy’s stony jaw. I could exit the way I came in, through the window, but I will not risk disturbing Old Billy. Instead I wander the room in search of a proper route. I find my escape in the form of a door, blocked by a heavy oak bookcase. With all the care I can muster, I slide the bookcase away from the door and slip out, then ease the door closed behind me.
“Breathe,” I tell myself.
My legs tremble as I ascend a small staircase, only four to five steps, leading into the belly of the church. I am too numb from the run-in with Old Billy to consider a way out. As I slip through the back room, a gray-haired priest startles me, and I him. He wastes no time arming himself with a bronze staff, intent on braining me.
“We have nothing for you here,” he says. “Back to the street, cadger!”
“Forgive me,” I try to explain, suddenly aware of my dishevelment. “I’ve lost my way.”
I hold up my empty hands to show him I mean no harm. “You mean to rob us again,” the priest insists. He waves his staff like a weapon. “You’ll hang!”
I should explain I have no intention of robbing him. Instead I back up and spill through another door. Imagine my surprise when I slip on the stone at the foot of the altar, the whole church opening up in front of me. I get to my feet, fall off the riser and sprint down the empty aisle toward the exit. A jolt of pain stings my foot with each step. I slam into the heavy oak door and tumble down a stone staircase, into the mud-drenched street.
The sun hangs low in the bright sky, not a cloud on the horizon. I nearly cry at the sight of so much blue. I stand on the church steps, half-naked, and weave my limbs into cold, wet, mud-caked clothes. As I turn to eye the church at my back, I fully expect to see Old Billy clawing at one of the cellar windows. For a moment I wonder if I dreamt it all. I know better.
Monsters do exist.
I wander from the bridge, away from Saint Botolph’s, back toward the baker’s. Perhaps I will return to the church in an hour, take the constable with me, and venture into the cellar to show him where Old Billy sleeps. That alone should be good for something—if not the full twenty pounds, then at least half. Old Billy’s last words to me—“You burn forever”—chill my plans.
My belly voices its concern, again. My organ’s cavity is as empty as my pockets, as barren as my hopes for the future. I have only one option.
I limp back to Alice’s apartment, only to find the exterior door locked. She gave me a soft place to land—so soft—and I crave the touch of her youthful bosom against mine. I wait outside an hour, two hours, as I have no place else to go. The only thing I have left to offer is my time.
Perhaps I should make a life with Alice and her ambition, her resourcefulness, her magic tongue. My bride in Berwick is a world away, and I am a new man here. I can become someone else entirely, simply start over and let London’s coarse hairs harden me. If I can convince Alice to admit me, I would have a place to rest my weary head. I would have a roof, protection from the elements and shelter from Old Billy. By way of a compromise, I would never again leave the house once the sun has set.
For now I will do what I have done, simply wander, my belly empty and head free of the ridiculous idea to subdue a demon that even the lawmen cannot deter.
For now I must stay in London, no matter my promise to Old Billy. Just one riddle to solve: Do I stay the same man or become someone my bride would not recognize?
My feet guide me back to Monument Bridge, past the burnt shell of the blacksmith’s, past the bakery and the public house, within sight of Saint Botolph’s at Owlsditch. My mind feeds me memories of Alice’s warmth beside me, her sour breath on my neck.
“Emmitt!”
I know the voice, that of my love from Berwick. My polluted mind plays its tricks.
“Emmitt!”
Closer now.
I turn to the sight of her walking toward me.
My bride.
From Berwick.
From a world away.
Another illusion, I know. I rub my eyes, to cure me of their lies. London’s poison has infected every part of me.
Her face is a blur.
Then, she is upon me, her arms around my neck.
“You’re real,” I say.
Somehow, she has found me. I melt into her. Her nails find sore spots on my back. I sink until my knees buckle and take me to the cobblestone. She joins me, and her tears flow into mine. She must think this reunion has overwhelmed me. What she cannot know, will never know, is that each tear of mine represents a sin against her, the salt of my guilt. At once I am mourning two deaths: that of the man I once was, and that of the one I know I will never be.
“Emmitt,” she says, cradling me. “What’s … what’s become of you?”
Her glee regresses to worry, as it should, because I wish to end my life at this moment, right in the middle of Monument Bridge. No merciful god will come to take me away, I realize, so my thoughts naturally turn to a baser concern: Can she smell the day-old sweetness of Alice’s honeypot on my breath, in the whiskers of my beard, or have the rains cleansed me of her fragrance?
“Is there somewhere we can go?” she asks.
I manage only tears.
“I knew I shouldn’t have come!” she squeals. “I have traveled all this way only to find … this? Say something! Emmitt!”
“It’s just,” I tell her calmly, quietly, “I’m so delighted to see you, my dear.”
“Have you gone mad?”
“I have never seen a better day, darling.”
“Oh, Emmitt. Are you well?”
“It’s been so long, and …”
“Emmitt, I’m weary. I didn’t expect my journey to take quite so long, to be quite so difficult. Is there somewhere we can go? Somewhere away from this … this noise and stink?” She waves the air away from her nose.
“How did you find me?”
“Your posts, dear. I followed your posts. Though I aimed for London Bridge, the coachman dropped me here. Monument. Call it fate.”
My mind races.
“You’ve come all this way,” I remind her. “You have much to see.”
“We’ll have plenty of time for that. I’d rather rest. Where can we go?”
Where indeed.
“Emmitt, I have some news.”
“Your mum. Yes, dearest, a pity. I regret you had to send her off without me.”
“No. Not that. I didn’t come here alone.”
Her hands move to her belly.
“You’re …?”
I cannot bear to finish the sentence.
Apparently neither can she, because she only nods.
Only then do I register the fullness of her face, the swell of her belly against the fabric of her gray Brunswick gown.
“How far along are you?”
“When did you leave Berwick? Nearly seven months have passed between us, by my best guess.”
Her assessment astounds me, as it seems a year or more of my life has withered away since I saw her last. My mind replays my final night in Berwick, when I led my bride out of bed by the hand and pressed her against the wardrobe so I could enter her. As I stabbed away, I thought not of what I would be leaving behind but of the riches I would surely find once my boots touched London’s hallowed soil. She begged me in whispers to “be quick with it” while her dying mother groaned for a swif
t end to her misery from the other side of the wall. I obliged by spilling my seed as quickly as I could, not that I had much say in the matter. Now, seven months later …
“I’d like to remove myself from this filthy street,” she says. “Where can we go, dear? Where is home?”
I am caught.
I get to my feet, wondering how many coins rattle around in my pockets. I have none, I remember, my savings destroyed by Old Billy and his spiteful fire.
Alice. She has that place all to herself. I can sneak back, choke the life from her and dump her body into the Thames. Everything of hers then becomes mine. Becomes ours.
No.
But if not that, then what? Give up Old Billy in hopes of reclaiming a small fortune? Memories of my encounter with him—his rancid breath, his claws around my throat, the bitterness of my own urine—expose the folly of my plan. I imagine leading a pair of constables into the church cellar to wake up Old Billy, the episode ending with the hairy bastard ripping us all to pieces.
No constable would believe me anyway.
“Let’s get you something to tuck into,” I tell my bride.
“Emmitt, I’d like to lie down.”
“In time, my dear. First a bite, and then …”
Again, I do not finish the sentence, only because I have no clue how to end it. I walk her to the door of the pub and fish for any coins that might have fallen into my pockets. She places a gloved hand on my chest.
“I have money, Emmitt,” she says. “A little, anyway.”
“I’ll be back soon,” I tell her.
“But we’ve just found each other.”
“I must … I must arrange for transportation home. You must be exhausted. I wouldn’t dare ask you to take another step.”
She smiles, her tension easing. I check the sky, figuring I have five hours until nightfall. I bend toward her and peck her on the cheek.
“Have a bite, dear. I’ll return before you have a chance to miss me.”
I limp away from my bride and the child budding inside her, holding her gaze until the sea of Londoners consumes her.
Burn, Beautiful Soul Page 23