by Alex Pheby
‘But Joes,’ said Nathan, ‘they were your friends.’
Gam started to sob. It was so odd to see him reduced in this way, to a child, that Prissy and Nathan felt like children suddenly too – small and weak and ineffectual. Perhaps Gam sensed this, because all of a sudden one expression was replaced with another, and he stopped sobbing, as if his sadness was supplied through a tap which he could turn off. ‘He promised me you’d bring him back, Nathan. “Don’t worry, Gam,” he said, “Nathan will fix it.” Why didn’t you fix it?’
‘He tried,’ Prissy sighed, ‘but it didn’t do no good.’
Gam nodded. ‘No. Course not.’
‘I’ll make sure he pays, Gam.’ Nathan said. ‘Padge will pay for this.’
Gam shook his head gravely. ‘No. That’ll be my job.’
XLII
Sirius tensed, the fur on the back of his neck bristling, the set of his muscles across his chest tightening, his eyes taking on a faraway look, as if the objects of his vision were not those in front of him. His lips drew back in a snarl, fangs revealed, furrows across his snout, then he turned and reared up, placing his paws on Nathan’s chest, heavy enough to weigh him down, to buckle his knees.
Prissy ran over and pulled at the dog, pushed at him, but he paid her no attention. He fixed Nathan with a glare, mouth open and working, as if he was trying to speak. With Anaximander gone there was no one to translate for him.
Nathan raised his hand and stroked Sirius at the neck, softly. The dog went down and grabbed Nathan by his belt, growling, pulled him to the door. Nathan stilled Prissy with a look, and she stepped back, stopped trying to free him. He stroked Sirius’s mouth, looked him in the eye. The dog loosed his grip.
A dog’s face is not expressive in the way a man’s is, but it is also not so different. There is, particularly in the eye, something human, as if a man is trapped inside a dog’s body, or as if a dog is a very corrupted sort of man – deformed arms, deformed legs, deformed skull. Nathan could see the dog’s intent, and Sirius could see that he was understood, in part, or at least that Nathan was willing to hear him, even if he could not speak.
Sirius released his belt, and Nathan opened the door. The dog bolted through it, and Nathan followed, gesturing to Prissy and Gam that they should come with him.
They ran back towards the slums, Sirius looking back over his shoulder, circling to urge Prissy and Gam on whenever they fell behind, galloping ahead when they both drew level. Then Prissy stopped and no matter how much Sirius fussed she wouldn’t move. Gam rested on her shoulder, wincing, grateful for the rest. She was pointing, her face puzzled. ‘Can’t be.’
Nathan looked where they were staring – up the hill, into the Merchant City. Where the devil-head chimney emerged, not far from the Temple, there was a plume of red smoke, unmistakeable. They were too far to smell the camphor, but there was no doubting the signal – Red smoke: Emergency, come quick.
‘It can’t be.’ Nathan said.
‘It has to be,’ Prissy cried. ‘Joes!’ She ran, without looking back, and Gam went with her, limping, barely able to follow.
Nathan held the medicine in his hands. He paused, but there was no decision to be made. Sirius barked twice, once at the retreating figures of Gam and Prissy and once again at Nathan, and then they both went into the slums, back to the Mews.
Nathan saw immediately what was troubling Sirius. The silhouette was unmistakeable – the prow of his huge nose cutting through the air, the high funnel hat tilted back as if in the most consistent of winds, the cravat bunched at the throat, and spindly arms, long and restless, all pounded by the driving rain: Bellows.
He was not alone. Nathan counted five of them, at least – eyeless gill-men, bent-kneed and loping, searching hard, twisting through bonfires barely lit in the downpour. Bellows sampled the air. They were in that part of the slums where gin was stilled, but they were not looking for it; they would have found it easily enough if they had been. They were after something else.
Nathan crouched behind a stack of rotting wood.
Sirius was still growling, half his attention on Bellows, half on Nathan.
Bellows was sniffing, raising his nose high. Nathan was not close enough to see the nostrils flare, but he could hear the breath draw in like wind blowing across a bottle top. The gill-men passed Nathan as he hid, rummaging in the litter of the runnels that passed for streets. Nathan’s home was close, no more than a short sprint, but Bellows stood directly in his way, and now the strange man seemed determined not to move.
A long arm, a bramble branch, shot up into the air, rain bouncing along its length, and the gill-men froze. Bellows reached into his jacket with his other hand and pulled out a great white handkerchief. It was as big as a tablecloth and he put it to his face and snorted into it, bending as low as the gill-men. When he snapped up, he folded the cloth in two sharp movements, slipped it back where it had come from, and pointed off, decisively, in the direction of Nathan’s hovel.
On Nathan’s back the Itch started regardless of his arm. They were making for his home.
The gill-men went first, with Bellows watching, and they were so rapt that Nathan could easily follow unobserved.
The Itch grew, reaching across his back and round to the front, across his ribs. What did they want? What did their Master want?
He risked coming closer, Sirius at his side, and as he did the ever-present percussion of the sea on the Wall gave up a sound. Bellows was muttering: ‘Disgusting. Vile. Inhuman.’ He was sniffing and muttering. Both hands went up to the huge nose and stroked and soothed it as if it were a fractious child. ‘Unbearable. The reek.’
The Itch was building; soon no amount of suppression would deny it. Nathan brought the distance to Bellows closer.
‘Rank!’
Nathan was suddenly grabbed from behind.
‘Why do you follow, slum-thing?’ The gill-man was buttoned up to the chin, so his slits were invisible, but there was no hiding the lack of eyes. Another gill-man had Sirius, wrapping around the dog, sinuous as a snake. The Itch invaded Nathan’s teeth now and if he’d intended to speak, he wouldn’t have been able to.
The gill-man ran his hands over Nathan’s face. ‘You are a street thief; I can feel it. You would do injury to Bellows? Steal his watch chain?’
The gill-man held tight with one hand and slipped his other fingers into Nathan’s mouth. ‘I can feel the content of your thoughts, your criminal intent.’ The fingers were oily, like eel skin, but strong: more than enough to resist Nathan’s bite, more than enough to choke him.
The Itch was behind his nails and in his bones and screaming at a pitch like a thousand crystal wine glasses vibrating in unison. It shook his arm, trembled in his wound, quivered the ache of his infection. Sirius barked, but his captor silenced him, choking the sound, crushing the air from him. Nathan held his own breath and looked the gill-man in the eyes, where they should have been at least. They were grey, filmed over, dull and pupil-less. The slits, where a man has his nose, gaped.
Sirius went limp, but it was a ruse, because when the gill-man stood, thinking him dead, the dog whirled and tore a strip of flesh as wide as his jaw from its shoulder to its waist, revealing its organs, which he promptly clawed into the Mud.
Nathan, no longer able to deny it, filled the other with the Spark, through shut eyes and teeth gritted in agony.
Bellows was at the entrance to Nathan’s shack, the other gill-men standing protectively at his side. He stiffened, like a dog who has caught sight of a dead bird and is indicating it to a hunter. One hand went up and rested on the planks, the other wafted air towards his nostrils.
Then he went inside.
Nathan came two steps forward, briskly, crackling with the power which filled him like a fever, and Sirius went too. The gill-men were watching after Bellows and did not see them. It would have been very easy – Sirius with his teeth and claws, Nathan with the Spark – but then Bellows was out, rubbing his hands together, slapping
them. He indicated to the gill-men the direction in which they should leave, and they did, taking the Mews away by the most direct route to the Glass Road.
Nathan watched them go for the briefest time, beginning his run before they were out of sight, but he didn’t care – if they found him, they found him, and damn the consequences.
Inside the shack, his father’s corpse lay on the bed. It was so little different in appearance to his living body, that when Nathan blinked back his tears, he wondered if he was dead at all, and then the lack of him was made worse – the sense of his absence – it came strong and dizzying. He sat down.
Sirius sniffed, circled, puzzled perhaps by the similarity in smell between Nathan and his father, perhaps by something only he understood.
From his jacket pocket, Nathan took the medicine Padge had extorted from the pharmacist and laid it in his lap.
His mother came and placed her hands on his shoulders. She stood there for minutes, not saying anything, her hands gripping softer and tighter, like waves approaching and receding, while Nathan stared. What was there to look at? Wasn’t this day always going to come?
Nathan turned to look at her.
She took his face in her hands.
‘No-one can hold you back you now, Nathan. No-one.’
XLIII
The rain had stopped, and the bonfires were newly stoked with fat, burning and spitting, when Nathan and Sirius left the shack.
They went into the sewers, which lit up around them, the walls clearly curved where once they had dwindled off into darkness. They were constructed from hundreds and thousands of bricks laid out in lines, where once they had been made of nothing – blackness and filth and the sound of water dripping, the flickering of candlelight, indistinct details seen in snatches. Now the whole structure was tinted blue and laid out before them, stunning in its complexity and perfect in its symmetries.
Nathan’s arm was too painful to ignore. He unbuttoned his shirt, slipped it carefully over his shoulder. It was purple, blotched, and beneath the surface the veins snaked, thick and blue and pulsing. Sirius touched it with his nose, licked it, but Nathan flinched so he backed away. Where the rat had bitten him there was a welt, hot and red like a volcano in miniature. When touched it erupted with pain, seeped lava pus, so he gingerly fingered the skin around it, as if by approaching from the periphery he could avoid its fire.
He shut his eyes. There was no way he could go on like this. Every time he Scratched the Itch the Spark made it worse. Now it was so painful he could scarcely breathe from it.
He raised the Itch to the surface. If he could fix his father’s lungworm, even a little, perhaps he could fix this. The Itch came up from within him, from his bowel, finding the pain and joining with it. He did not let it build, but Scratched it early, so that if it was a mistake he could stop if the pain was too much. Sirius whimpered, and Nathan did not open his eyes. Instead he felt the power, and he could sense the blue motes gathering on his skin. Again, they knew his intentions better than his conscious mind knew them, and they gathered on his wrist and inched, as if uphill, up the slopes to the crater, to the rat bite.
Nathan gasped as the first one reached the summit, entered, but he didn’t let the hot ache of it stop him, or the motes didn’t let it stop them. They flowed into the lava, grinding against his nerves, scraping through the bad flesh of his forearm. Tears gathered behind his closed eyelids, and he was biting down so hard that it made his ears ring, then more of them came, in a rush, against his will, pitching the agony so high that he let out a cry which Sirius matched with his barking.
Then the pain stopped.
He breathed, deep and slowly, each breath infinitesimally healing. As it decreased by degrees, he felt something, the lack of something, a feeling of absence, the absence of the dull, cramping ache that had been there constantly in the last few days.
It was a while before he had the strength to open his eyes, but when he did, he was not frightened. He had expected to see his arm, whole and healthy, had hoped to be pleased with what he had achieved. Instead, here was his arm, in outline, completely transparent to the shoulder, as if it was made of perfectly flexible glass. Inside there were transparent glass veins, transparent glass bones, transparent glass muscles. When he moved and flexed and articulated the arm, liquid as clear as water pumped through the glass arteries. He put one hand on top of the other and it did not obscure the view.
Sirius saw the arm and growled at it until Nathan put his other hand to the dog’s head and scratched behind his ear.
There was no pain in this arm, but nor was there any substance. He tried to touch Sirius with it, and it passed right through.
Nathan pressed forward, towards the entranceway, and the light grew, sparkling off the rippling flow, picking out the mortar between the bricks, the roughness of its texture, and glinting off the brick glaze.
When he came to the doorway it was obvious, so obvious that he couldn’t believe it had ever been difficult – impossible – to find without knowing it was there.
They went down into the clubhouse.
Nathan stood in front of the entrance to the library and at his feet Sirius growled. There was light leaking into where they waited from the gaps between the door and the door frame, muffled sounds, but it was neither of these things that told Nathan what was on the other side.
Sirius was a magic dog. He had, Anaximander had said, an organ sensitive to magic, given to him by the Master, and now he was growling because this organ told him there were ghosts near. Nathan had no such organ, but he felt them too – dead people, spirits.
No one can hold you back now, Nathan. No one.
He reached down and felt the risen fur on Sirius’s back. At Nathan’s touch, the dog stopped growling, looked up and whined. It was almost there – an understanding beyond words, passing between the boy and his dog – almost but not quite.
Nathan raised his transparent hand. Things were changing now, since his father had died, and who was to say what might happen next. He could sense the ghosts; he could feel how it might be possible to speak to Sirius. Could he see beyond a closed door?
He shut his eyes, thought hard, but then the door opened and there was Prissy. She jumped when she saw him, but quickly recovered and dragged him in by the jacket.
‘They’re back,’ she said.
There in the library were Joes – two of them, side by side, hands held. The room was filled with the red smoke signal still smouldering in the fireplace. They were pale and as translucent as his arm.
Their expression was unreadable, but there was something sad in it, something troubled. They moved in tandem, perfectly synchronised, as if Nathan had banged his head and was now seeing double.
‘I’ve tried to say sorry, but they won’t listen.’ Gam went up to them, stood between them, waved, but they didn’t react to him.
‘They’ve been like this the whole time,’ Prissy said. ‘They keep saying the same thing.’
Nathan stood in front of Joes, but their gaze went past him, through him. ‘It’s a trap – don’t do it,’ they said. The Joes on the left repeated that it was a trap, the Joes on the right not to do it.
Sirius came to Nathan’s side, his teeth bared, and the direction of the Joes’ attention changed. One of them – the girl, possibly, though they were identical in every way – pulled away, fearful. The other – the boy? – turned and began to run in place, never making any progress.
‘It’s a trap, don’t do it.’
Gam and Prissy didn’t understand them, but Nathan did. Wasn’t this what his father had always told him?
But now his father was dead. Joes were dead.
No one can hold you back now, Nathan. No one.
Nathan raised his ghostly arm, let the Spark fill it, and, with a gesture, sent the ghosts back to where they belonged.
In the light of the fire, Gam was a pitiful sight: his skin was bloodless, except where he was bruised, and filthy, except where he was streaked wit
h tears.
Nathan recognised his friend’s frailty, but he did not feel it in himself. Quite the opposite. He turned to Prissy. ‘Is he okay? We need him for a job.’
She shrugged, looked away from Nathan as if she didn’t know him. She moved her foot from where Sirius’s tail was swishing. ‘What’s happened to your hand, Nat?’
Nathan held it up, turned it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Answer my question first. Is he fit for a job?’
Prissy frowned, backed away from Nathan as if she was scared, retreated towards Gam. She got behind him, put her hand on his shoulder, but he pushed her away. ‘I’m finished,’ Gam said, ‘useless.’
‘Not yet.’ Nathan lit the room with blue light. ‘One more job,’ he said. ‘The biggest yet. Big enough to make up for everything.’
Gam shook his head. ‘I’m not up to it.’
Nathan made the slightest of gestures, a hint at a brotherly caress, raising his hand to Gam’s cheek, making it shine, and the Sparks came flying, not angrily, but with succour, attending to his superficial injuries, making the cuts whole and scouring the deeper wounds of any putrefaction or nascent gangrene. With Nathan’s father dead, there was nothing stopping them, no counter force repressing him or his will. ‘I need you,’ Nathan said.
Gam stared at the Sparks, horrified at these maggots of light invading his skin. When they went for his ears, he began smacking at them, as if he was putting out a fire. ‘Get these things off me!’ The Sparks went into his mouth as he spoke – where they met bare gum, tooth buds sprouted – and they went into his eye socket. The nerve, so long scarred over and dead, came alive. Gam put his hands up, awestruck, it seemed, judging by his expression. ‘Please, Nathan! Stop. It’s too bright.’
But Nathan didn’t stop. He understood now, the Spark speaking to him in a way it never had before, or in a way he had never been able to hear, his father’s influence deafening him to their purpose. They could change things, make things better, repair what was broken, fulfil the purpose of things that were whole. What had been a simple itch was now a desire, full of possibility.