Cornelius turned to him, his expression an ecstasy of wonder. ‘He is singing. Can you hear him?’
Vincent gripped Cornelius by the shoulders. ‘Can’t you feel it? In your heart? In your lungs? This is a deadly sound!’
Indeed, the voice was resonating horribly within him: all the tiny particles that made him up – the atoms, the molecules – were shivering. Vincent could feel the vibration worrying at his damaged lungs, tearing old scars.
‘Cornelius,’ he gasped. He was clutching his friend now, where at first he had been trying to pull him away. ‘Cornelius …’
Cornelius frowned. Through the fog of his bliss, some small understanding seemed to reach him.
‘Are you in pain?’ he asked.
Vincent gagged. It felt as if a clot had formed in his throat. He coughed, and Cornelius’ waistcoat was spattered in blood.
Dimly, Vincent felt strong arms grab him. From far away Cornelius shouted, ‘Hold fast!’ He felt himself being dragged up the steps towards the creature. Horrified, he tried to resist. Cornelius shook him. ‘Trust me!’
They stopped side by side with the creature. Squinting up into the blinding luminosity of its face, Vincent thought he could make out features: the ridge of a heavy brow that seemed to wrap the entire skull; the long, shadowed arc of nostrils. But details came and went in blistering waves, and he could not be certain of what he saw. The Bright Man’s proximity seemed to unravel his reason.
‘Mind his wings!’ Cornelius stretched forward, reaching for the latch, and Vincent looked up into the living archway of the creature’s tentacles, lacing and unlacing, restlessly testing the ceiling and walls.
Careful not to come into contact with the creature’s poisonous flesh, Cornelius slowly opened the door against the Bright Man. As ever, it showed no resistance to physical force, but the pitch of its voice changed, its grief becoming puzzlement as it was pressed against the wall.
‘Quickly, Captain! Do not let it touch you.’ Cornelius shoved Vincent up the steps ahead of him. ‘Go on! I will follow.’
Outlined against the light, he slipped through the door after Vincent and began pulling it shut behind them. The Bright Man’s tentacles seemed reluctant to retreat, and they probed the gap like the arms of some incandescent sea anemone. But Cornelius was merciless. Slowly he closed the door, forcing the arms to recoil, until finally the last glowing filament withdrew, the latch clicked, and they were once again in darkness.
Darkness but not silence. To Vincent’s horror, the creature’s voice rose in despair, once again unpicking the substance of his lungs. Agonised, he began an uncoordinated ascent of the tunnels. Then Cornelius’ arm was around his waist, and they scrambled together until they reached the stairs, then climbed until they could no longer hear that anguished song.
‘I can stop now,’ gasped Vincent. ‘I can stop.’
Cornelius released him and Vincent sank to his knees. The moisture pooling on the steps soaked the fabric of his trousers. His hands splashed into warm water as he rested his forehead against the stone.
Heedless of the damp, Cornelius sat beside him, gazing back the way they’d come. ‘It was trying to get out,’ he said, amazed.
Still breathless, Vincent nodded. He could feel the damage to his lungs beginning to reverse itself: the creature’s healing aura counteracting its destructive power, now that he was beyond the range of its voice. ‘The girl,’ he managed. ‘It must be the girl …’
The flat discs of phosphorescence that were Cornelius’ eyes widened in understanding. He turned to Vincent in delight. In the darkness, the glowing planes of his slim, mobile face were even more expressive than in the light. ‘But of course,’ he whispered. ‘It was attempting to commune with her.’
Vincent grinned. ‘Shall we go see how she fares?’
Cornelius stood in a rush. Helping Vincent to his feet, he began hurrying him up the stairs. ‘I do hope, Captain, that she retains her wits longer than the last seer. It is always such a chore to deal with the insane.’
The Children
HARRY FIGURED THAT Mama had come in during the night and laid their overcoats on the bed the way she often did when the weather was cold. It was so darned cosy. Dash was a solid length of sleeping warmth to his right. To the left, Leo was snoring like a hog. Somewhere beyond those two, his other brothers, Nat and Will, would be adding their warmth to the congregation, all of them pressed like sardines into their narrow little bed. There was no sound of their parents moving about yet, nor of Gladys in her cot by the fire – perfect peace for once in the Weisses’ crowded apartment.
There was no way Harry was going to wake up yet.
Dash sighed, a great gusty blast of air right down the back of Harry’s neck. ‘Aw, sheesh, Dash! What the heck’ve you been eating?’
At that moment Leo yawned a similarly vile gust of stench into his face, and Harry’s memory came rushing back: Joe, the carriage, Tina. He recalled the frantic storm of their arrival; the carriage driver’s frenzied departure; his own half-frozen squirm from beneath the tarpaulin; crawling to the safety of a hay-filled horse stall; unconsciousness. And now …
Harry opened his eyes to a gaping mouthful of teeth, a huge tongue, the pulsing gullet of the largest dog in the world.
The dog yawned into his face once more, flung its foreleg across Harry’s chest, and lay its grizzled head on Harry’s shoulder. On Harry’s other side, another similarly massive dog took a moment to gaze into his eyes before settling back down.
Harry lay motionless in his pile of hay, staring up at the web-festooned rafters of the stable as the two huge dogs commenced snoring on either side of him. He listened to his heart hammer in his ears, and tried to take long, calm breaths.
Where was he exactly? What had happened to Joe? Where was Tina? He remembered very little of the journey except the bruising rattle of the carriage and the pain of the cold. He glanced down at the fists he had clenched on his chest. Carefully – without disturbing the dogs – he flexed his fingers. They hurt, but he could feel them. He had only the dimmest sensation of his toes.
A scuffle of sound drew his attention to the top of the stall’s dividing wall and Harry was startled to find himself looking into the eyes of a small child. It was a boy of perhaps ten years of age, lying along the top of the wall. He was gazing down at Harry, his chin resting on his hands as if he had been watching for quite some time.
‘Hello,’ whispered Harry. ‘Are these your dogs?’
The boy pursed his lips but did not answer. He was a very handsome child, blond, with bright-blue eyes and clear, healthy-looking skin. He was dressed in a smart little outfit of brown wool knickerbockers and a waistcoat, with a clean white shirt beneath. He kicked his booted feet behind him as he looked Harry up and down. ‘You are not a stick-man,’ he said eventually.
‘Um …’ Harry shifted beneath the weight of the sleeping dogs. ‘Can … can you call off your dogs?’
‘He speaks most peculiar.’
This comment came from a corner of the stall, and both
Harry and the boy shifted their attention to its source. A small girl sat on a pile of hay, her knees drawn up to her chin, her hands clasped delicately around her legs. Though perhaps a year or so younger than the boy, she was the female image of him, right down to the questioning tilt of her blonde head and the wide blue innocence of her eyes.
‘He’s not from the village,’ she said.
The boy returned his attention to Harry. ‘Is he a stick-man, though?’ he asked.
‘Everyone who’s ever come before have been stick-men,’ said the girl.
‘Or stick-women. Or stick-children.’ The little boy smiled when he said this, and something in the quality of his expression made Harry’s stomach clench a little tighter.
‘Stick-women and children and men,’ sang the little girl. She jumped to her feet in a flounce of pale-blue skirts. The movement made Harry flinch, but the girl simply scrambled up the wall and sat by the boy’s legs,
swinging her little feet to and fro. ‘Stick-children and women and men,’ she sighed. ‘So very easy to break.’
‘He does not look easy to break,’ murmured the boy.
The girl giggled. At her piping laugh, the dog at Harry’s shoulder jerked awake. Harry felt it tense as it registered the presence of the children. The second dog whimpered. Laying their ears flat, both animals lowered their heads, eyeing the children with what could only be translated as fear.
Say now, thought Harry. I’ve had my fill of this.
He went to rise. The boy held out his little hand. ‘You stay right there,’ he said.
The hell I will! thought Harry. But to his horror, he found he didn’t move. It wasn’t even as if he’d tried and failed to succeed. He just didn’t stand up. He wanted to, he kept meaning to, but his body simply didn’t, and so he remained right where he was.
The boy lowered himself from the wall and hunkered down by Harry’s side. The dogs jerked, as if to lurch to their feet, but the child laid his hand on the nearest one’s neck. ‘Stay,’ he murmured. The animals stayed.
The child looked Harry up and down, taking in every detail of his clothes and face and hair. He stroked the dog’s powerful shoulders as he did so. The dog trembled beneath his touch.
‘Did you wander in?’ asked the girl from her perch atop the wall.
‘All stick-men wander in,’ the boy informed Harry. ‘A long time ago, stick-men were always wandering in. Whole families of them, like scarecrows, crying and begging for food.’
The little girl pouted. ‘But Vincent and Pap always drive them on before we get a chance to play.’
‘Not always,’ corrected the boy. ‘Sometimes we find one.’ He smiled down at Harry.
The little girl hunched her shoulders in glee. ‘Then we keep it,’ she said.
‘We haven’t found a stick-man in ages,’ breathed the little boy. He unbuttoned Harry’s jacket and began to root in his pockets. ‘I don’t think you are a stick-man, though. You’re too fat; you’ve too many things.’
Harry watched in helpless silence as the child took his pocketknife, examined it, laid it aside. He watched him take his pocket watch, and his last shining tuppence; watched as the boy’s small fingers undid the buttons on his waistcoat. He felt the unnatural heat of small hands through the fabric of his shirt as the firm flesh of his stomach and chest was examined.
‘You’re very muscly,’ observed the boy.
On the wall, the little girl hugged herself and kicked her legs. ‘Will I fetch my scissors?’ she asked. ‘Will I fetch Mama’s needles and pins?’
The boy met Harry’s frantic eyes. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You may speak if you like.’
Harry’s head lifted from the ground in fury. ‘You touch me again, kid, and I’ll beat you to a bloody pulp! Give me my damned watch back!’
The girl broke into gales of laughter. ‘Oh, I adore the way he speaks! Say something else, fat stick-man!’
‘Let me up off this floor, you brats, or, I’m telling yah, I’ll—’
The boy leaned close. Harry recoiled at the cold, cruel curiosity in his wide blue eyes.
‘You’d what?’ asked the boy, genuinely interested. ‘What would you do?’
‘He’d beat us to a bloody pulp,’ the little girl reminded him quietly.
The boy rose to his feet and stood with his hands on his hips. ‘A bloody pulp is not difficult. All it takes is a big rock and some time.’
‘Or a hammer,’ said the little girl. ‘Hammers are fun.’
Harry gazed up at them both, fear a bright taste in his mouth. He tried and, once again, failed to rise.
The boy grinned. ‘Don’t move, fat stick-man. I’ll be back in a moment.’ He disappeared from view. Harry tried to turn his head, to keep the boy in sight, but his body simply did not respond, and he found himself stuck gazing up at the girl. She had shifted position, twisting her body as she watched her brother wander around the carriage house.
‘No, not that,’ she said. ‘It is much too heavy – how would you carry it?’
Out of sight somewhere, the boy grunted in agreement. Something clunked as he laid it down.
Harry concentrated on his treacherously motionless hands, willing them to move. If he could manage to control just one arm, just one, then he could punch the little bastard right in his face. I’ll show you what ‘bloody pulp’ means, he thought. Come on, it’s all a matter of will. Come on!
The little girl said, ‘Ooh, I like that one! Let’s try that!’
Harry’s heart began to race. His fingers twitched against his chest, but that was all. With a spike of despair, he remembered how impervious Mickey the Wrench had been to the carriage driver’s suggestions, and how little difference it had made in the end.
I can’t even get my ass up off the ground! he thought. These kids can’t be more than ten, and I’m about to let them cut me to pieces.
Furious, he tried again to clench his fist. One punch. One goddamned punch was all he needed.
The sound of metal trailing across cobbles rang out in the stillness. On either side of him, the dogs whined.
‘Can I try first?’ said the little girl.
‘No,’ said the boy. ‘But you can have his eyes.’
Something inside Harry screamed at that – some hectic, terrified thing. He tried to jerk into action. His body betrayed him with stillness. ‘You’ll be sorry if you hurt me,’ he cried. ‘You’ll regret it.’
The sound of trailing metal grew loud as the boy re-entered the stall. ‘Look what I found!’ he exclaimed, as if expecting Harry to be pleased. It was a pitchfork, its prongs thin and sharp and wicked.
‘Let me! Let me!’ cried the girl, and she fell from the wall in a tumble of skirts. One of the dogs began a high, terrified moaning, and the little girl scowled, all her laughing sweetness gone. ‘You be quiet, you dirty, dirty dog!’
Harry almost wept at the expression on her face. The huge dog howled in terror.
A thickly accented, Irish country voice spoke by the stall door. ‘What are you two doing? You know you’re not allowed to play with Himself’s dogs.’
The children turned in sulky resentment to a man whose mud-caked boots Harry could just see from the corner of his eye.
‘What have you got?’ asked the voice.
‘It’s just a stick-man, Luke.’
‘There are no more stick-men. You know that. The Hunger’s been over for nigh on half a century.’
The boots came closer. Harry looked up into a tanned, weather-beaten face, whiskered cheeks, and suspicious eyes under heavy brows.
‘Help me,’ gasped Harry. ‘The pitchfork.’
‘Maybe he’s a tramp, Luke,’ suggested the girl.
The man regarded Harry with reserved curiosity. ‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘Can we keep him?’
The man looked uncertain. Then he nodded.
‘No,’ said Harry. His fingers twitched again, jerking against his rapidly beating heart.
The man was already turning away. ‘Just let yon dogs be,’ he said. ‘And don’t tell your pap I let you keep the tramp – I got enough grief over what ye done to that rabbit.’
‘Don’t!’ cried Harry. ‘You’ll be in trouble!’
The man turned back, apparently entertained at the idea.
Grinning, the little boy crouched by Harry’s side. ‘And who would we be in trouble with, tramp? Who are you, that anyone would care?’
It was an action so natural to Harry, so often practised and re-practised, that it was over before he’d even thought of it: his left hand fluttered, drawing the audience’s eye; his right picked the child’s pocket; and with a flourish, Harry produced his own tuppence from behind the boy’s ear.
It was the simplest of tricks, childish in its mundanity, but it made the boy gasp in wonder. The man sank to his haunches by the boy’s side. The little girl clapped her hands over a giggle.
‘I am the Great Houdini,’ said Harry. ‘L
ord Wolcroft hired me. I’m for the Christmas show.’
THE MAN CALLED Luke dragged Harry by the scruff of his neck through a weed-clogged stable yard and around to the back of a huge and austerely beautiful house. Multipaned windows watched him stumbling past. Granite cherubs peered impassively from distant eaves.
Reflected in the windows, Harry could see the boy following behind, a picture of sweetly childish manliness in his little suit, trailing the pitchfork. Its metal tines sang against the ground, leaving twin tracks in the clean white gravel of the path. The girl skipped along, twirling Harry’s penknife in her hand. Harry tore his eyes from her and twisted his head against Luke’s unnaturally strong grip, looking up into his face.
‘They were gonna torture me with that pitchfork. You were gonna let them.’
The man grunted. ‘Sacrifices must be made. Even Abraham had to give something in exchange for Isaac.’
They rounded a corner, and came up the side of the house. The tines of the pitchfork shrilled against the uneven flagstones of a sun terrace. On Harry’s right, through high glass doors, he could see a library. On his left, a sunken garden held blood-red roses to the cloudy sky. There was something wrong with this picture, but Harry’s brain refused to move past the sound of the pitchfork.
‘The children’s games make the Angel stronger,’ muttered Luke. ‘Seems to be I’m the only one as will admit it.’
Harry stopped listening. This man was quite obviously deranged. They neared the front of the house, and he could see a broad sweep of lawn, edged with fluttering trees. This rolled down to a small lake, partially swallowed by a bank of fog. Harry’s eyes jumped from feature to feature, judging distances, escape routes, hiding places.
There was a woman on the lawn, tall and ornately dressed, grimly pushing a pram towards the house. Tina was standing by the front steps. All her attention seemed fixed on the lake at the far end of the lawns. The old actress from the theatre was with her, her eyes on the woman with the pram, who was now passing onto the drive.
‘Missus!’ yelled Luke. ‘This one claims he belongs to the show!’
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