“So you think they’re gonna do her?”
“No, I didn’t say that. But this is some pretty serious shit, Shelly. If we’re real damn lucky, it’s not so serious that we can’t put it to rest by visiting Mr. Ass-for-brains Joey Bittern and—”
“She’s just a kid,” Sheldon says again.
“Some rules, nobody gets to break,” Soldier says, watching the half-glimpsed houses and marshy fields and the trees that seem to appear out of nowhere rush past the hearse and vanish in the night behind them. “Some rules you don’t even bend. And this isn’t anything you don’t already fucking know.”
The Beatles make way for Jefferson Airplane, and Sheldon looks at the radio in disgust, but doesn’t reach for the knob.
“Grace Slick is a fat cow,” he says.
“Not in 1967 she wasn’t.”
Sheldon mutters something under his breath and stares straight ahead at the rain-slick road, the yellow dividing line, the stingy bits of the night revealed in the headlights. And Soldier’s starting to wish she’d asked for another driver, beginning to wonder if Sheldon’s up to this run.
“Someone does something like this,” she says, “I don’t care if it’s just some kid or one of us, Madam Terpsichore or the goddamn Bailiff himself—”
“You’ve made your point,” Sheldon tells her, and then he turns the wheel as the road carries them deeper into the marshes leading away to the Eagle Hill River and the Atlantic.
“You just don’t mess around with shit like that,” Soldier says, knowing it’s time to shut the fuck up about the kid and let him drive, time to start thinking about the shotgun in the back and exactly what she’s going to say to Joey Bittern when they reach the old honky-tonk at the end of Town Farm Road.
“I just don’t think it’s right,” Sheldon Vale mumbles so softly that she barely catches the words over the radio and the storm and the whir of the tires on the road.
“Whole lot of crazy shit ain’t right,” she replies, then begins singing along with “Don’t You Want Somebody to Love?” while Sheldon drives the hearse, and Soldier tries hard not to think about whatever is or isn’t happening to Sparrow Spooner back in Providence.
III
In the night Above, the dying storm hammers cold-rain nails and gusting wind down upon the quaintly ancient and indifferently modern rooftops of sleeping Providence, filling metal spouts and concrete gutters far past overflowing, choking sewers, drumming at windowpanes, and wearing away sidewalks and slate shingles and gravestones bit by infinitesimal bit. Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she’s grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible.
But there’s still magick left in her, the wild, incalculable sorcery of all storms, great and small. She wields invisible gale-force tendrils that whip and weave themselves through the groaning limbs and branches of an enormous oak tree that has stood watch at the Old North Burial Ground since a forgotten late-summer day in 1764 when it was planted here by Mercy Tillinghast, widow of Colonel Peter Mawney, planted here that something strong would stand to mark his life and her grief, something to shade the family plot from the wide Rhode Island sky. But now two hundred and forty-six summers have come and gone, and the tree, like the storm, is an old, old creature. The wind does not so much kill it as help it to die, helping it to finally lie down as its roots at last pull free of the soggy ground. It falls across the graves of Colonel Mawney and his wife and their children and grandchildren, shattering headstones and driving broken limbs deep into the earth.
Eighty-five miles north and east of the cemetery, Sheldon Vale comes to the end of Town Farm Road and kills the Caddy’s engine, and the changeling named Soldier stares eagerly, anxiously out across the night-and rain-shrouded marshes.
And back in Providence, in the world Below, deep within the labyrinth of catacombs and chambers excavated by the ghouls all those long millennia before the first white men came here, like this storm, from lands far across the sea—down there, the sound of the tree falling is the rumbling grandfather of all thunderclaps. The children assembled before Madam Terpsichore and Master Shardlace (who have been joined now by Master Danaüs and Madam Mnemosyne) look up towards the ceiling of the chamber, and more than a few of them cry out in surprise or fear or a little of both. Madam Terpsichore raises her scarred and shaggy head, waiting to see if the layers of earth overhead will hold. It would be almost ironic, she thinks, if the evening’s proceedings were to be interrupted by so simple, so random a thing as a falling tree. They might die here, all of them, ghul and pup and changeling brat, victims of a universe with less than no concern for their petty laws and taboos and ideas of justice.
“Be still, all of you!” she growls, perking her ears, flaring her nostrils, listening as the rumbling, root-cracking, wood-splintering cacophony quickly subsides, as dust and loosened bits of dirt and stone sift down and settle over her wards. She counts her heartbeats, waiting for the collapse, for a crushing, smothering burial they would all deserve, venturing so near the surface on a night like this. But apparently they’re not meant to die tonight, and the ceiling of the chamber holds, braced up by strong pine timbers and brickwork arches. Terpsichore whispers a hurried, grateful prayer and crosses her heart three times.
“Luck favors fools,” she sneers and bares her teeth for Master Shardlace, who has finally come slinking out from behind his sycamore roots to grovel before Danaüs and Mnemosyne.
“This is a very serious matter,” Master Danaüs grunts, and brushes dust from his fur.
“So is my life, dear sirrah,” Madam Terpsichore replies. “So are the lives of my students—”
“A matter to be settled swiftly,” Danaüs continues, as though he has not heard her or doesn’t care, “before further and greater damage is done. Damage we can’t undo.”
“Yes, yes,” Shardlace simpers. “That’s exactly what I was telling her only a moment ago. That’s what I was saying, precisely.”
Terpsichore turns and snaps her jaws at Shardlace, half wishing for a fight, for a fair and incontestable chance at his bare throat. But Shardlace only whines and withdraws once again.
“Surely,” she mutters. “Then let’s have ourselves done with it.” And Madam Terpsichore yanks away the burlap hood covering the head and shoulders of the mortal man who has been led through the stormy night, across the wide cemetery, and down into the chamber by the pair of changeling couriers who found him hiding at the center of a circle of salt and hen’s blood, mumbling the Twenty-Third Psalm, inside his tiny apartment at 7 Thomas Street. The man is bald, and his eyes are the color of clay. When he sees her face, the bald, brown-eyed man doesn’t scream, but his lips tremble, and he shuts his eyes tight. Master Danaüs stands on his right and Madam Mnemosyne on his left, and the two changelings who brought him here are waiting near the rear of the chamber, should he try to run.
“This is him?” Madam Terpsichore asks, and she barks out a dry laugh. “This pathetic…this man is the fearsome magician who has so inconvenienced me and mine? Is this a joke, Danaüs? If so, it’s a poor jest, indeed. He’s no more than a drowned rat, near as I can tell.”
The man’s clothes, a white T-shirt and blue jeans, are soaked through and streaked with mud, and rainwater drips from his long salt-and-pepper beard and off the end of his nose. Sparrow Spooner, still kneeling at her mistress’ feet, glances at the bald man and sees that he’s lost his left tennis shoe. It’s hard to tell what color his sock might be for all the mud.
“Sparrow, is this him?” Madam Terpsichore asks, staring down at the changeling girl. “Is this cringing, sodden rat standing here before me the man with whom you have
spoken of our secrets?”
“He said—”
“We’ll get to that, child. I simply asked you if this is the man.”
“Yes,” Sparrow Spooner replies, “that’s him.” And she immediately goes back to looking at the man’s muddy feet.
Madam Terpsichore nods once, then tells the man to open his eyes. When he doesn’t, she leans forward and whispers in his ear, “Would you prefer, rat, that we open them for you? It would be a pleasure, and thereafter there would be no danger of my having to ever ask you again.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” the man says unconvincingly, and Madam Terpsichore grins and licks her lips.
“Open your eyes, witch.”
The bald man breathes in deeply, exhales the musty, mushroom-scented air, and then opens his clay-colored eyes. He stares into the devouring black-hole pupils of the creature that will be his judge and, most likely, his executioner before this stormy night has finished. He struggles against his terror and panic to fashion a still place somewhere deep inside himself, a mental sanctuary that he fills with an arbitrary litany of mathematics and hermetic symbols, a familiar, impromptu order to stand against the suffocating chaos of his fear.
“Is this not what you’ve worked for, what you wished for, Mr. Higginson?” Madam Terpsichore asks the man, leaning so close that her stiff gray whiskers brush painfully against the tip of his nose, and he flinches. “Isn’t this why you’ve seduced our poor darling Sparrow into betraying us all?”
“She came to me,” he replies, trying too hard to sound courageous, trying harder still not to shut his eyes again.
“Yes, rat, she did. She came to you; she allowed herself to be lured to you, and for that, I promise, she will be punished. But you laid the trap, Mr. Higginson.”
“I…I know…what you are,” the bald man stutters. “I’d seen so much already. The child, she was…was only a means of further affirmation.”
“You, sirrah rat, know nothing!” Madam Terpsichore snarls and places the tip of one clawed index finger lightly against his left temple, pressing only hard enough to draw a thin trickle of blood. “Even now, when you believe that all your careful, exhaustive researches, your divinations and discoveries and unholy dreams have at last been justified, that you have been rewarded with some half-imagined truth; even now you still know nothing, nothing whatsoever.”
“I know that you’re real,” he says, the words slipping recklessly from his lips. “Yes, I know something…I know about Iscariot and Narcissa Snow, about William Wellcome, and, by the gods, I know a few things about Richard Pickman, too.”
“You will not dare repeat those names, Mr. Higginson,” Madam Mnemosyne admonishes. “Those names are not spoken here, not ever.”
“I’ve even seen one of Pickman’s paintings,” Elgin Higginson continues undaunted, because he can’t imagine he has anything left to lose. Beads of sweat and rainwater roll down his brow and sting his eyes. “Did you really think you’d found them all? That you’d destroyed them all?”
“Enough,” Master Danaüs barks and then shoves the bald man so hard that he almost loses his balance and falls. “The child should offer her testimony now. There’s nothing more to be gained by listening to this man.” Mesdames Terpsichore and Mnemosyne nod and murmur their agreement.
“Yes,” Madam Terpsichore says. “Sparrow Spooner, who has passed unscathed through her first two trials, who was chosen by the Cuckoo even before her birth and has been among us for all her short life, will speak now, as is her right and duty.” And the ghoul looks down at the child kneeling beside her.
“What else do you want me to say?” the girl asks and glances nervously up at the bald man.
“Only what you have already told me and Master Shardlace—how this man, by duplicity and deceitful magicks, drew you forth from the warrens, from whence you were forbidden to leave before your Confirmation, and how he then tricked you into divulging secrets entrusted to you by the Cuckoo.”
“But I’ve already told you,” Sparrow says, still looking up at the bald man, at the rivulet of blood creeping down the left side of his face. “That’s him. He’s the one.”
“Yes, dear, but you now must tell us in his presence.”
“I don’t see why,” the changeling mutters and turns away. All of them are watching her, waiting—all the other students, her ghul masters and mistresses, and the odd bald man from Above who let her walk with him beneath the sun. “There’s nothing that I haven’t already said. Nothing important.”
Madam Terpsichore exchanges a quick glance with Master Danaüs and then drops down onto her skinny haunches, her aged knees and anklebones cracking loudly from the sudden exertion. She places a hand beneath the child’s chin and gently turns Sparrow Spooner’s head until she’s gazing into the girl’s eyes again.
“Do not forget that your own fate will be determined this night,” Madam Terpsichore tells the changeling. “The decision has already been made to spare your life, but a penance may yet still be uttered that will make you regret our mercy.”
When Sparrow Spooner opens her mouth to reply, the ghoul slaps her so hard that her ears ring, and she bites her tongue. Madam Terpsichore’s claws leave five parallel gashes in her pale flesh, ragged crimson wounds that will become scars that the changeling will carry all her life, however short or long that might prove to be.
“Now, do as you’ve been bidden,” Madam Terpsichore tells her, and when the girl begins to sob, the ghoul raises her hand as if to strike her again. “Don’t you dare cry, Sparrow Spooner. I shall not abide that human weakness in my sight.”
“Leave her alone,” the bald man says, and he takes a step towards Sparrow Spooner. “If you want to hurt someone, hurt me.”
“Don’t worry, rat,” Madam Mnemosyne replies, pulling him back, showing him almost all of her yellow teeth at once. “We shall do that, momentarily. But there is an order to these things. Do not be impatient for your undoing. It’s coming.”
“We’re waiting, child,” Master Danaüs says irritably.
His eyes are like fire, Sparrow Spooner thinks. His eyes are like spoonfuls of fire.
And then she wipes her nose and does as she’s been told, because she’s seen enough in the eight years since the Cuckoo delivered her to the warrens dug deep beneath College Hill and Federal Hill, beneath Swan Point and the Old North Burial Ground and St. Francis Cemetery, to know that the ghouls hate the contrivances of human speech too much to waste their breath on idle threats. She faces the bald man named Mr. Higginson, the man who bought her frozen lemonade and taught her seven new words for green. The man she showed a particular mausoleum on the west bank of the Seekonk River. The man she drew a crude map for and answered questions she knew she shouldn’t. The man she daydreamed might one day become her father.
“I’m sorry,” she says to him, and then Sparrow Spooner tells the ghouls everything they want to hear.
IV
At the windy nub end of Town Farm Road, where the asphalt has turned to gravel and mud and potholes, Sheldon Vale and Soldier sit in the hearse, listening to the rain falling hard against the roof of the Caddy. Sheldon lights a Marlboro Red and passes it to Soldier, and she takes a deep drag and keeps her eyes on the place where the uneven edge of the road vanishes into tall brown marsh grass and cattails.
“So, you really think they’re gonna kill her?” Sheldon asks.
“Fuck, will you shut up about the kid? Right now, the kid ain’t our problem.”
“What if they know we’re coming? What if—”
“Sheldon, shut up a second and listen to me,” and then she takes another pull off the Marlboro and holds the smoke until her head begins to buzz, then exhales through her nostrils. “They don’t know jack shit, okay? I scried this one myself last night. I scried it fucking twice, okay, and they don’t know bupkes,” Soldier says, silently daring Sheldon to make a crack about her less than stellar magickal abilities.
“All the obfuscation lines are in place,” s
he continues, “and they’re working like gangbusters. Trust me. Those assholes are sitting in that dive playing fucking New York stud, drinking beer, talking trash, and they don’t know we’re coming.”
Sheldon lights another cigarette for himself and sighs. “You know I get the shakes,” he says. “That’s all. Give me a minute and they’ll pass. Give me a minute and I’ll be right as rain.”
“I swear, Sheldon, it’s beyond me how you ever made it through the trials.”
“It wasn’t a pretty sight, I’ll tell you that,” he says, and laughs, then stares out the driver-side window, looking past his reflection at the chain-link fence and NO TRESPASSING signs where the Ipswich town dump begins.
“You ought to cut the lights,” Soldier says and taps her Marlboro against the rim of the ashtray. “You’re gonna kill the battery, and I’m in no mood to have to walk all the way back to town through this shit.”
Sheldon shrugs and switches off the headlights. The rainy night swallows them at once, and Soldier gazes out at the marsh again, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.
“I’ve never gotten the shakes,” she says. “Not even once. The Bailiff, he told me I would, but it never happened.”
“Yeah? That’s ’cause you’re such a coldhearted little bit of jam.”
“Fuck you, Shelly. It just never happened, that’s all,” and then Soldier considers asking him to turn the radio back on, but she doesn’t. There’s no more time for music. No more time for anything but the job. Time to be quiet, to focus, time to get her act together and find the frequency of this night. That’s how she always thinks of it, the frequency of the night, like turning the dial past static and white noise and all the crap you don’t want to hear, turning the dial until you find just the right station.
“I still can’t believe Bittern thought he could get away with this,” Sheldon says. “I mean, I know he’s not the brightest bulb in the pack, but Jesus…”
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