by Peter Oxley
N’yotsu stared back at him, not saying anything, his eyes giving nothing away.
“Only one chance,” continued the other person. “I can help you. You can still do so much to help, so much to further the cause…” He turned and looked at me, and I found myself reeling in terror at what I saw. Everything was muddled about his face, as though he was standing on the other side of a waterfall and glaring at me with pure evil, but the waterfall was red, the red of running blood, so much blood.
The world swam and I fell backwards into the thick mud again, which grabbed at me and pulled me, sucking me in and never letting me escape…
I woke up with a shout, gratefully sucking in air in the cold room and earning myself a glare from Dr Smith. “Is everything all right?” he asked curtly.
I looked around. Everything was the same as it was before: the beds, the lamps, the polished floor and whitewashed walls. The doctor and N’yotsu didn’t seem to have moved either, and I wondered how long I’d been out for. “Nothing,” I mumbled, “just a dream.” The memory of what I had imagined swam back into my mind, in particular the bits involving N’yotsu and the other person, the strange-looking one who’d been talking to him. “Has anyone else been in here while I was asleep?” I asked.
“No,” said the doctor. “Just us. Why?”
“I just… nothing.” I suddenly needed to get out of that room. I got off the bed and walked to the door. “I’m just going for a quick walk,” I said. “I won’t be long.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” said Dr Smith wearily.
Chapter 14
I marched into Max’s lab, slamming the door behind me when they didn’t look up.
“Kate,” said Max. “How is N’yotsu?”
“No change, I think. I don’t like that man.”
“What man?”
“The doctor. Dr Smith. I don’t trust him. He’s always busying around people.”
Max put down a piece of paper and picked up another one. “Kate,” he said slowly, “he’s a doctor. That is what they do.”
“I’m not a child,” I said, “so don’t talk to me like one. I know what doctors do. I’m just saying that there’s something about him I don’t like. He’s been sticking his nose into everyone’s business too much. And why’s he so keen to get you out of here, eh?”
“He believes that some fresh air will be good for my on-going recovery, which is hardly a novel idea. I am pretty sure that any doctor in the country would say the same; it is just that my particular circumstances and our needs are not conducive to travel at this moment in time.”
I stared at him. “So you’re saying you’re on his side?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“There are no ‘sides’ in this, Kate,” Max said. “Or rather, we’re all on the same side.”
I opened my mouth to tell him about my dream but then thought better of it. I didn’t think Max would take too kindly to it, probably dismissing it as some childish flight of fancy. “What are you lot up to?” I asked. “Found a way of curing N’yotsu yet?”
“I am afraid not,” Max said. “As you know, I have been working on this for a long time now. I was hoping that our friends here would be able to provide some fresh insights, but so far…” He shrugged.
There was a knock on the door and I opened it to see a soldier standing there. “A letter, Miss,” he said, holding out a piece of paper.
“Thank you,” I said, handing the letter to Max. “What does it say?”
He read it. “It’s from Gus. He says he’s all right and we’re not to follow him.” He looked up at the soldier. “Where did this come from?”
“It was delivered on the early morning post, come in by train to Clapham Junction first thing.”
Max turned to Lexie. “What do you think? Given what we know, can you extrapolate where Gus was when he sent the letter?”
She peered at the letter over his shoulder. “Do you have a railway map and timetable?”
He nodded and pointed to a pile in the corner of the room. “You will find the latest Bradshaws over there.”
Lexie grabbed a thick book and pored over it for a few moments, her lips moving as she worked through something or other. “Based on when we know he left and when the letter arrived, plus the route that the mail train would have taken, I believe he posted it in Basingstoke yesterday morning,” she said.
I went over to see what she’d been looking at but could see nothing aside from a few maps and a load of numbers and words.
“That was my inference also,” Max said, nodding as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“How did you work that out?” I asked.
“Mathematics,” she grinned.
I stared at her, not sure if she was making fun of me. “Really?”
“Yes,” she said. “You see, the letter came into Clapham Junction, meaning it must have been brought in on the London & South Western line. We know when he left London—two days ago—and that he was on foot, and likely to have remained as such, which gives me an outline area of the distances he could have travelled. In his enhanced, demonic form I understand that he can run roughly three times as fast as a normal person, but the lack of sightings would suggest he is only travelling at night. As a result, we can estimate that he would have travelled approximately these distances over the period of one, two, three or four days.” She drew circles with her finger as she spoke, each one bigger than the last and covering a greater area of the map. “The mail would travel at this speed,” she gestured again, “meaning that I just needed to see where all of these inputs overlap. Here.” Her finger ended up on a word I didn’t know starting with ‘B’.
“Basingstoke?” I said slowly and then smiled when she nodded. Max and Gus had given up on teaching me my letters some time ago, but the odd lesson had stuck. Of course, the rest of the word had been a hopeful guess.
“If he was there,” said Max, “then it is very likely that he was heading towards either Portsmouth or Southampton, assuming that he intends to travel to France.”
“Which is probably the case, going on past behaviour,” I said, on safer ground at last.
“Indeed,” said Max. “Which is why you need to go there, ideally before the army.”
“Who, me?” I asked.
He nodded and then cocked his head as Dr Smith muttered something from behind him. I blinked: I hadn’t seen the man enter the room.
“All of you,” said Maxwell, nodding. “You, Lexie and Joshua. I cannot go, and I do not want you travelling on your own, regardless of how formidable you are.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Yes, Joshua should come but Lexie should stay with you.”
“Why him and not Lexie?”
“He’d be handy if I get in trouble,” I said.
“Have you met him?” snorted Lexie.
I ignored her as I continued: “It don’t make sense for both of them to come with me. What about all that stuff you lot were doing?”
“Our studies have hit the proverbial dead-end here, and if new variables come up when you are on the road then there would be considerable benefits to you having Lexie and Joshua with you to help solve them. Both of them have different strengths; Lexie in particular could be very useful.”
Lexie put her hands on her hips. “But Maxwell, what about my thoughts on utilising the frequencies to erect a barrier—”
“As I said, we have hit a dead-end,” said Maxwell, cutting her off with a raised hand.
“But…” she started and then frowned as he turned away from her.
“I really think…” I said, then tried to deal my last card. “I won’t leave N’yotsu. Not when he’s like this.”
“I will stay here and keep an eye on N’yotsu,” Max said. “There’s nothing you can do apart from comfort him, and I am more than capable of performing that function.” I bit back a laugh as I tried to figure out whether or not he was joking. Amazingly, he wasn’t. “The more important task for you is to bring Gus bac
k to us safe and sound, before the army have a chance to riddle him with their beloved .577 bullets.”
We sat in silence as our carriage rocked slowly over Battersea Bridge, weaving our way through the endless stream of people, carts and animals, most of them passing in the other direction. Joshua and Lexie stared out of opposite windows like a pair of quarrelling lovers. I would have found it funny if I wasn’t going to be spending the next few days cooped up with them.
I could tell Joshua hated the fact that his sister had once again come along for the ride, getting in the way of him and his chance to do his own thing. Lexie, on the other hand, clearly resented me for my clumsy efforts to stop her joining us.
“Don’t worry about keeping me company,” I said to them. “I know you’d be happier with your books than sitting staring into space with me.”
“I don’t need books to distract me,” said Lexie. “I prefer to observe the mathematics at work all round me, and play with the concepts in my head.” She frowned. “Why did he not listen to me?”
“Who?”
“Maxwell. He knows that I am getting somewhere with my work looking into the frequencies that the Fulcrum phenomenon is giving off. And yet he described it as a dead-end.”
“Maybe it is,” said Joshua. “He has been looking into this for a lot longer than you have.”
“No,” she said. “There is nothing wrong with my calculations and he knows it, so why did he dismiss them so readily?”
“How can you be so sure you’re right?” I asked. “Max is pretty good at these things.”
“So am I,” she huffed, turning her back on us to sulk silently out of the window.
I grinned at Joshua. “How have you been getting on with Max? He been helping you with your magical learning?”
He turned that shy smile on me. “It has been fascinating, finally being at the heart of things, and he has so many books. But the opportunities for practising magic have been limited I’m afraid.”
“Why?” I asked. “Max boring you with his inventions?”
“Not at all,” he said. “We have simply been focusing more on the mathematical and scientific side of things and so I’ve not had much chance to explore magical possibilities. I have mainly been studying the literature that he has amassed over the years.”
“Your turn will come,” muttered Lexie. When she felt me staring at her, she added: “Soon Joshua’s knowledge will be the more important. Who knows how much of what the rest of us know will still be relevant?”
She turned back to the window and I shrugged at Joshua.
“So your Ma seemed happy enough for you to be doing magic and stuff rather than having a proper job running your foundry,” I said to him. “Why’s that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know much about your family, but surely she’d see being a factory manager as more worthwhile than mucking around with books and whatnot?”
“With most parents in our social circle, you would be correct,” he said, “but Mother has always been quite different. Once Father died and took with him all his expectations that I would carry on the family business, she was happy for me to follow my own interests. And we still own the foundries so will keep receiving the income. Although that is of course diminishing all the time, thanks to the effects of the Fulcrum.”
Lexie smiled as she turned back to us. “That’s not the whole story, though, is it? Tell her the real reason you didn’t take over the family business.”
“It wasn’t really for me,” he said in a small voice, looking down.
“Joshie doesn’t have the right temperament for managing people. Especially not those who are stronger willed than him,” said Lexie. “By which I mean most people.” She smiled slyly at her brother.
“I am simply not cut out for that line of work,” he said quietly.
“They walked all over him,” she said. “Father said it was all due to first impressions and putting your foot down, and Joshie didn’t really excel at either, did you?”
My heart went out to him as he blushed and stared at the floor. “Well, we all have different things we’re good at,” I said. “There’s plenty you can do that I can’t.”
He blushed even more and I wondered whether I’d somehow managed to hurt his pride. After a few moments of silence he looked up. “You have experienced plenty that I would love to hear about,” he said. “The confrontations with Andras and the other demons, for instance.”
“Ah, well,” I said. “You’re better off speaking to the others: they were more involved in the ins-and-outs of what happened. I was just there to pick up the pieces.”
“But you were there in the Aether as well,” he said. “What was that like?”
“Very black,” I said, remembering that huge dark place, filled only with the horrible mist that clung to everything. And then there were those creatures: I shuddered as I remembered them slowly pushing against the doors to our small room, hungrily trying to claw their way inside. I never saw them but Andras’ words had been enough for me, what the demon had said when we were all trapped together in the Aether, listening to the sounds outside our hiding place.
“Concepts such as time and death do not hold here in the same way that you have always known them,” Andras had said. “Many of the creatures outside this room have been stranded here for millennia, never ageing, never dying. Never knowing the blessed release that you will eventually crave. They would rip you apart and you would know nothing but an eternity of pain. It will consume you and you will become one of them.”
I drifted back to the here-and-now to see them both staring, waiting for me to go on. “Not much else to tell you,” I said. “It’s not a place I’d go back to in a hurry, though.”
“Was it really that terrifying?” asked Lexie. “I mean, I asked Augustus about it once and just the thought of it… well, he looked like he’d seen a ghost.”
“Yeah, well, Gus was hit hardest of all by it. He says he saw and heard stuff from that place…” I got hold of myself, remembering who I was talking to. Max might have taken them totally into his confidence, but that wasn’t to say the rest of us should. “Look, it’s not my place to speak. If Gus wants to talk about it, fine, but I’m not going to do it for him.”
“Fair enough,” said Joshua. “But then there was the time that you fought against the army of golems?”
“Oh yeah,” I grinned, happy to be on safer ground. “Big ugly things made of clay. Apart from Derek, that is. Derek’s lovely.”
“Derek?” asked Lexie.
“Kate managed to replace the Shem in one of the golems, the words that animate and control them, turning it from an enemy into an ally,” said Joshua.
“I swapped around some bits of paper in his head, yeah,” I said. “That was kind of fun. I still see Derek around; he’s working down the docks.”
Lexie laughed and clapped her hands. “Derek? What a wonderful name!”
“I thought so,” I said. “The others thought I was touched in the head.”
“And he’s still in London?”
“Yeah, at the new Royal Victoria Docks,” I said, waving my hand towards the east. “We can go and visit him when we get back if you want.”
“And what about N’yotsu’s spells?” continued Joshua. “For example when he pushed that demon through solid concrete?”
“Yeah, that was weird,” I said, not quite sure there was anything I could add to all he’d clearly read.
“And Andras? When you all confronted an actual demon, a Marquis of Hell, that must have been terrifying?”
A door slammed shut in my head before that leering face could fill my mind with poison again. I looked out the window so they couldn’t see the fear in my eyes. “Enough talking,” I said.
After a while I managed to doze off, waking up to see Lexie draping a blanket over her sleeping brother. I watched them for a moment, the way she looked at him as she gently folded the cover over his chest and legs, and felt a stab in
my heart as I remembered all the times that I had done the same for my own brothers. Before they…
I shuddered as I fought against the bad memories. Lock them away, Kate, I told myself.
Lexie looked up. “You’re awake,” she whispered.
I nodded, stretching and rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “You know,” I said, “I thought you were a stuck-up, selfish spoilt rich kid. But you’re not, are you? You really love him?”
“He’s my brother,” she said, then frowned as the rest of what I’d said registered. “And I’d like to think I’m not stuck-up, selfish or spoilt. Do you really think I am?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think you are. I’m starting to think there are some ways we’re actually pretty alike.”
“You’re rather a tough character,” she said. “I’m not sure the others could survive long without you.”
“Glad someone noticed,” I smiled. “You seem to have a harder edge to you than he does.”
“Comes from growing up in a man’s world, with a Mother who was determined I was not going to be another useless breeder.” She blushed when I looked at her with a question on my lips. “It’s what Mother calls the girls who are brought up to have no opinions or use beyond being a wife and mother, a breeder of the next generation for their ignorant husbands.”
I smiled, liking the sound of the word. “Your Ma sounds like she don’t have a very high opinion of men.”
“She doesn’t. Father always used to turn a blind eye to it: he needed the family money, you see, and then he was too afraid to do anything but agree with her. When he passed, Joshua bore the brunt of her ire.”
“Doesn’t sound very fair,” I said, looking at her brother. “He seems a decent enough sort.”
“He is,” she nodded. “Although he could do with being a bit tougher at times. I think Mother hoped that she could bring him out of himself.”
“And did she?”
She glanced at him, checking that he was still sleeping. “You should ask him,” she said quietly.