“I don’t know. I don’t have any precise reason. I guess I’m just doing what all good generals do and working out precisely what my weapons are.” He paused, drawing on his cigarette. “But think…here we are, surrounded by so many Mistresses of the Labyrinth. It just helps, I guess, to know that there are two Kingmen. Three, actually, with my father.”
FOUR
Epping Forest
Friday, May 10th 1940
Jack was walking home through the forest, so completely absorbed in the exciting news that Noah could sense the weakness that he was completely shocked when the figure of a tall, slim, dark-haired woman appeared before him on the forest path.
“Grace?”
As soon as the word left his mouth, Jack knew it wasn’t Grace. Her hair was too long, and he’d never seen Grace wear a long black dress.
“Of course not,” said Catling. “How could you possibly confuse us?”
“How indeed,” said Jack. Had Catling witnessed everything that had happened within Faerie Hill Manor?
“You’ve been visiting with Harry,” said Catling. “Noah was there, too.”
“Yes,” said Jack, watching Catling with careful eyes.
“You’ve made the Great Marriage with her.”
“Yes.” Jack was trying hard to retain his composure. Catling must want to know why they didn’t move to complete her, and he started to formulate excuses in his mind.
Catling moved forward, scurried forward, and Jack took an involuntary step backwards. “Was the sex good, Jack? Was the fuck worth the wait?”
“Yes,” Jack said, his voice quiet, his eyes still. “It was.”
Catling studied him keenly, her eyes narrowed. “Then you must be in a very good mood.”
“I was until but a moment ago.”
“What’s up, Jack?”
“In what sense?”
“What are you planning?”
“Can I be honest?”
“Please do.”
“I’d like to find a way to destroy you, but it is proving damnably elusive.”
“Then complete me instead.”
“I’ll need to fetch the bands of Troy to do that.”
“Then fetch them, Jack.”
“They’re in the Faerie, and—”
“I know full well where they are. Four are in the Faerie and two are in the Otherworld. What I don’t want to hear are your excuses for not fetching them. Jack, I am going to be honest with you here. I know you and Noah wish to destroy me, so you’re desperately grubbing about, trying to find a means. Ah, let me rephrase that. I am sure you have a means—a Kingman and a Mistress of the Labyrinth can always unwind what they have created—but you can’t figure out a way past the hex I’ve put on Grace. So you’re trying to find the means to destroy me that won’t also result in Grace’s death, as well as that of the Faerie, and everything else she has touched, and so on and so forth. Am I right thus far?”
Jack didn’t respond.
“Yes,” said Catling. “I am right. Now, I am a reasonable person, and I know I’ve put you and Noah in a spot—poor Grace, pitiful Grace—but reasonableness can only go so far before it is quite overtaken by impatience. After all, I have waited an awfully long time for completion…I don’t want to have to wait too much longer. So here’s the deal, Jack. You take all the time you want, but know that the longer you take, the more people will suffer—”
“The murders. You’ve set the imps to murdering—”
“And that will stop once I am completed, Jack. I’ll be in such a good mood I’ll corral those imps once and for all. But it will get a great deal worse if you don’t complete me. It is up to you, Jack, and your conscience.”
Catling gave a small, terrible smile. “Just think…every death that results from your pitiful, fruitless hunt for a means to destroy me and save Grace shall rest on your conscience. If you think it is okay for a few more women to die terribly as either Bill or Jim rips their bellies apart…” Catling shrugged, “then you will have to live with it. And if your conscience can deal with those murders, then maybe I’ll escalate it a little further. Take the horror into new fields, so to speak. I can’t force you to complete me, Jack, but I can make this land suffer terribly for your tardiness.”
She paused, letting her words sink in.
“I’m sure Grace is worth all those lives, right? All the terror and suffering the innocent will endure?”
Then she vanished, and Jack was left staring, his stomach churning.
Catling seethed through the spaces under London, finally giving her anger full rein.
Jack was looking for a way to destroy her.
Oh, she knew he would, had been certain from the moment that Noah turned bad that Jack would eventually turn as well, but she hated it that he was trying to find a means to undo her.
Where would he be without her? A shifting pile of cold grey bone dust by now, that’s where. Everything he was was due to her intervention.
And he’d become too strong. Too strong.
Catling was vulnerable. She needed to feed, needed to grow strong. Needed to be sure that she could outmanoeuvre whatever he threw at her and, knowing Jack, it would be the unexpected.
She needed to know what he was doing.
Catling found the imps loitering in Covent Garden, shadowing a young woman carrying a basket of vegetables.
“Well?” she said, so startling Bill and Jim they almost stumbled from the footpath into the way of a passing lorry.
Its horn blaring, the lorry thundered past as Catling pulled them both to the relative safety of the footpath.
“Leave the girl for the moment,” Catling said. “You can always find another later. Victims are a dime a dozen in this city. I want to know what you’ve discovered. What is Jack doing, wandering all about London?”
Jim and Bill exchanged a glance, then looked back to Catling.
“He’s looking for a weakness,” said Bill. “Something to pry open and make you bleed to death.”
“And has he found it?”
Bill smiled. “No. All he has found is strength, but he is too foolish to see that.”
Catling visibly relaxed. “I am too strong for him.”
“Aye,” said Jim, “that you are.”
“He is weak,” said Catling. “He has a conscience.”
“Very foolish,” said Jim.
“His conscience will drive him into my arms eventually,” said Catling.
“Absolutely,” said Bill.
“You still enjoying the murders?” said Catling. “No doubt about it,” said the imps simultaneously, their faces splitting in wide grins. “Good,” said Catling.
FIVE
London
Late May, 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
I had been feeling so much happier, almost positive, and then doubts crept back in. I was unsettled and depressed by the Great Marriage. I had told myself—and Jack—that it was because I didn’t want him destroying that fragile balance of our world and that I didn’t want him destroying my parents’ own peace, but as the days and then the weeks dragged on after May Day I had to admit to myself that there was more to it. I couldn’t bear the thought of my mother sleeping with Jack, and my aversion to the idea had nothing at all to do with whether or not Jack would destroy any fragile balances, or what my father felt about it.
Jack and Noah had looked so happy atop The Naked, and all I could think of was how Jack had spent thousands of years trying to correct the mistakes of their first lives together and win Noah back. Why should he give up now?
My mother returned the next day. She appeared radiant. It was not just the smile on her face, but myriad small things: humming a tune as she sorted through clothes that needed to be dry-cleaned; staring out a window for long minutes at a time at nothing in particular with a smile on her face; falling into lengthy silences at mealtimes, also with a small smile on her face, when normally she would chatter on about anything.
My father did a very
bad impression of not noticing.
Then came the little surprise she dropped at Faerie Hill Manor. That hit me on two levels. I was shocked, appalled and, most of all, intensely jealous, that she intruded so blithely into something that until now only Jack and I had shared. And I was shocked, appalled and desperately frightened that she, too, thought that Catling’s trap was, in fact, a Catling weakness. Instantly, so it seemed, Jack’s hitherto open mind (if open only a sliver on this matter, but it had been open) slammed shut. Yes, he agreed happily, it was a weakness. Noah had confirmed it.
Noah was his lover and the love of his life; she had shared thousands of years with him, and she was a goddess and a Darkwitch and a Mistress of the Labyrinth, and never, never, never could I compete on all those levels.
Of course he was going to believe her before me.
No wonder she had intruded so blithely.
Noah tried to smooth it over with me, in the kitchen. Considering the humiliating little scene I had put on, she was actually very nice. She promised to keep an open mind, but I knew that there was nothing I could do. Jack and Noah were so intimate (I don’t mean that only in the sexual sense, but intimate because of all they had shared and on so many levels), and I so much the outsider…well, once they had jointly made up their minds on the issue, then I had no hope.
It didn’t help that I had no proof, either. Sure, I was a Mistress of the Labyrinth, but I had nowhere near the experience in the labyrinth that Jack and Noah had. I had nowhere near the experience in life that they had. All I had was that deep misgiving that the shadow hanging over London was connected with Catling, and was somehow a vile trap that would ensnare us all, but I had no proof.
I was scared that Jack would ask me to stop helping him. After all, he had my mother on his team now. While I continued my work, walking about London, discovering what I could, I tended to avoid Jack.
I didn’t want to know how well he and my mother did.
I didn’t want him to suggest, gently, that maybe he and my mother could manage by themselves now, thank you for all your trouble.
On the last Friday in May I was out later than usual. I had been wandering through Southwark, walking almost to Rotherhithe, and had lost track of the time.
I had also lost myself. I didn’t have any maps with me, and I’d managed to stray into the wharf area—a warren of alleys and laneways, each indistinguishable from the other. It was dusk, gloom had enveloped the entire area, and I had no idea where I was. I couldn’t even work out the location of the river. I knew it was close, because I could hear the water and the occasional faint sound of barges and tugs, but no matter what turning I took, I could not catch sight of it.
I thought I would ask someone directions, but although half an hour ago the area had been bustling with lorries and handcarts and sailors and overalled women hurrying about, now the entire area was strangely deserted.
Rotherhithe shouldn’t have been deserted. Not during wartime. It should have been bustling, even though it was coming on to full night.
There were no streetlamps.
No people.
No means to find my way home.
Power seeped about me.
Increasingly wary, I drew back against a wall, hiding in the darkness of the overhang of a warehouse.
I looked up. It was a clear night, and I could see the barrage balloons that hung over wharves and river.
I could also sense the shadow, more powerfully than ever before.
Suddenly, although I saw nothing, I sensed the shadow gathering its strength, as if for a leap, then felt it rushing towards me.
I gave a soft cry, hating myself for it, and scrambled desperately along the wall, hoping to find a doorway, an entrance, anything to get out of the way of the—
“Hello, pretty lady.”
Fear jolted through me. A man had come up behind me, grabbing me by the right elbow and pulling me against his body.
“What’s a lovely thing like you doing out and about, hmmm, when a murderer is wandering the streets?”
There was something about the way he said “murderer”, something in the vicious, cold jesting tone of voice, that made me realise…oh gods, oh gods, oh gods…
All my brave words to Jack were for nothing. I had never felt more terrified in my entire life than I did right then. Maybe he could not murder me—after all, Catling needed me alive—but what he could do…I had heard what those girls had suffered, what had been done to them, what—
Another man loomed before me, his hat pulled so low I could make out nothing of his face save a well of darkness and some bright, gleaming teeth. He grabbed at my left arm, and then, no matter how I struggled, began slowly, lasciviously, unbuttoning my coat.
There were two of them! No wonder the women hadn’t stood a chance!
The next moment his hand ran over my dress, over my breasts, over my abdomen, down to my groin.
I tried to kick him, but he responded by kicking my legs out from under me, so that the only thing keeping me upright was their grip on my arms.
The first man, still holding onto my elbow with one hand, produced a knife in his other.
I screamed. Then again, and yet once again. Someone must hear me, surely!
The second man laughed, low, soft, sibilant, and tore my skirt away.
My gods, they were going to rape me first.
At that point I wished I could die. Surely it would be easier to just hold my breath, or suffocate myself against the coat of the man to my right.
The other man ripped away my petticoat, then I felt his cold fingers slide under the waistband of my drawers.
I wanted to scream again, but I was beyond it now.
His fingers slid low, rasping against my inner thigh.
“We were thinking,” he whispered, now so close his mouth was almost against mine, “that we could whip a thing or two out, eh?—and who would miss it? It’s not as if Jack needs it, right?”
I couldn’t believe it. What did they know about Jack?
“After all,” whispered the other—Oh Christ, I could feel his cold tongue in my ear!—“he has Noah now, right?”
Now the second man’s hand rose up under my blouse and gripped one of my breasts, so painfully I whimpered.
“We’re so happy we found you wandering about the streets, little girl,” he said.
“We’d like to know what you’re doing,” said the other man.
Not man—imp! Suddenly I knew who they were! I remembered that moment, so many years ago, when they’d stood over me in my parents’ bed, and wrapped Catling’s hex about my wrists.
“What is sweet little Grace doing, wandering the streets, eh?” said the other imp, and squeezed my breast with such renewed spite that I cried out in pain.
“Tell us, little Grace.”
“Tell us, Grace, or you’ll feel this cold blade sliding into regions that until now only Harry has enjoyed.”
I could barely force the words out. “I came down here to see a friend…I got lost…I—”
They wouldn’t let me finish. I felt the flat, icy blade of the knife against my bare belly, then felt it turn, slowly, slowly, so that its edge bit into my skin.
I tore myself away. I don’t know how I did it, but I tore myself away and stumbled up the street, hearing the soft, sarcastic laughter of the two men behind me.
Ten minutes later, clutching my coat about the ruins of my clothes, I hailed a cab back to the Savoy.
In Rotherhithe the imps pulled their clothes straight, and Jim slipped the knife back into the sheath he had hung at his belt.
“D’you think we took it too far?” he said.
Bill leered. “I’d say we didn’t take it far enough.”
“We were told not to hurt her too much,” said Bill. “I think a rape would have got us into hot water.”
Bill grunted. “Perhaps we’ll be asked to scare her again,” he said. “Then we could notch up the fright a little further, eh?”
Jim laughe
d softly, his hand creeping back to caress his knife. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s hope.”
“Don’t get your hopes too high,” said their dark mistress, appearing so suddenly beside them that the imps jumped back in consternation.
Her mouth twitched very slightly at their fear. “You scared her well and truly,” she said.
“We did!” the imps exclaimed together.
“But will she stay scared?” the woman whispered, then vanished.
SIX
St Margaret’s Parish Hall
Friday, 14th June 1940
Jack had been concerned about Grace for weeks. He had sensed the withdrawal in her after the night of the Great Marriage, and that withdrawal had only got deeper as time passed. He knew she was upset about his involvement with her mother, and suspected that she was jealous that Noah could now sense the weakness where before it had only been Grace and himself.
Jack hadn’t so much as laid eyes on her for almost three weeks, and had the distinct impression she was avoiding him. He was worried that Grace was tired of helping him, or that she believed that he would prefer Noah’s help to track down the extent of the shadow.
Preferences aside (and Jack was not entirely sure that he did want Noah before Grace), Noah wasn’t much help. Yes, she could sense the shadow, but she couldn’t discover any more about it. She could see what others had discovered, but she was not capable of discovering more than that on her own.
Jack could do that. Grace could.
Noah could not.
Jack had spent many sleepless nights trying to work out the significance. He’d sensed the shadow the instant he set foot back in London. Grace had sensed it immediately as well. Both she and Jack could, by slow exploration, discover new elements of this weakness, slowly building up a greater understanding of it.