There was a heavy click as the door unlocked itself.
How curious, she thought, before remembering that she was supposed to be quiet. Everything was a little fuzzy to her, and her memory was not so good at the moment. She seemed to surface into lucidity for a few seconds at a time, and then be submerged again, as if she was a rock on a beach and the tide was surging in and out over her. During one of these moments of clarity, she was struck by a thought that surprised even herself.
If not for that sedative, you would have no power over me.
At that, the old woman seemed to shrink in her mind, as if afraid of being struck, but a moment later, she had rallied and all was as it had been before. Alaizabel’s voice had been strong then; now it was dull again, her edge blunted by the sedative.
She is in fear of me, Alaizabel thought blankly. I am stronger than her.
Then she was walking along the dark landing, the chill house raising goosepimples beneath her purple nightgown. She could sense that the old woman—Thatch, that was her name—was trying to be stealthy, but her aged bones robbed her of such fine control and she creaked along the wooden boards. It was yet only just past sunset; the boy and Cathaline would be asleep.
!!Oh, I’ll deal with them, I’ll deal with them!! shrilled the voice of Thatch inside Alaizabel’s skull. !!Their time will come, soon and shortly!!
The stairs dipped down before her, set at right-angles to the landing, tight and steep. A faint illumination crept guiltily up the steps from below, where windows were letting in the glow of the gaslights outside. Shakily, she set foot on to them, and began to descend.
Thaniel’s eyes opened, and he was instantly awake.
Sleeping in a chair was not a comfortable way to spend a day. His neck ached abominably on one side where it had been pulled taut by the weight of his head as it lolled on his shoulder, and he was embarrassed to find that a drool of saliva had run out from the corner of his mouth and wet his cheek. Wiping his face with his sleeve, he looked about the living room. The fire had long since died to ash, and darkness had returned to London once more. He stood, flexing his back, and reflected what a burden it was to be a gentleman, having to allow their guest to occupy his bed.
Alaizabel. The thought made his expression grave. There was much they all had to discuss tonight. She was in more trouble than they had first believed.
A creak on the stairs made him halt midway through tousling his hair back into shape. He looked warily at the closed doorway that led out into the hall where the stairs were. A sudden sense of déjà vu assaulted him; he had dreamed that sound, he remembered. That was what had awoken him. He had been dreaming of his father—saw him walking up a long stairway away from him. Thaniel had been unable to climb the first step to follow him. Though it looked only small, when he tried to get up it he found it was taller than a mountain. Then his father had stepped on a rotted plank, and the loud creak had jolted him awake.
His sleeping mind had incorporated the sound he heard into his dream. There really was someone on the stairs.
He had stepped to the door, and had his hand on the doorknob when he noticed something else. There were voices coming from beyond it.
Pausing, he listened. They were frustratingly hard to hear, and impossible to make out. It was a low murmuring that came to his ears, as of someone muttering to themselves; two or three voices, difficult to distinguish. Occasionally he caught half a word, which his imagination completed for him, and sometimes there was laughter, a hiccuping sound that began low and rose to a high pitch before cutting off. It sounded as if there were people in the hallway, talking and plotting in hushed tones. Underpinning them were susurrant hisses, loud stage-whispers that were nevertheless just too quiet to be made out.
Thaniel stepped away from the door. His coat was draped across a nearby chair, with his pistol laid atop it. Swiftly, he crossed the darkened room, his feet soundless on the stone floor, and retrieved the weapon. Glad now that he had slept fully clothed, he returned to the doorway and pressed himself to it. The muttering continued, rising and falling, and the laughter came again, bursting out of the quiet with such maniacal volume that he shied away from the wood in surprise. The sound could have been coming from directly next to his ear. It possessed a distressing quality, an edge of something not sane. The murmuring was unabated by the sudden mirth. He fancied he could hear his name spoken here and there, along with dark promises and half-heard suggestions of what they would do to him in his sleep.
The stairs creaked again, nearer the hallway now. Whoever was out there was coming down from upstairs.
Alaizabel, he thought, fearing suddenly that someone or something had been up there with her, and it spurred him to place his hand back on the doorknob and pull the door open, his pistol held straight-armed and ready to face what was beyond.
The hallway gaped, an aching empty twilight, only the fog-hazed gaslights that sifted through the windows providing him with sight. The muttering was louder now, though still unclear, and that terrible shrieking laugh came again. To his left was the front door, heavy and oaken. To his right were the stairs; he could only see the bottom three from where he stood. He stepped out, unwilling to give in to the fear that had seized him, and angled the muzzle of his weapon up the stairs.
Alaizabel was there, frozen, like a cat discovered by the glow of a lamp. Her eyes reflected the faint light strangely, two burning pinpricks of white in the centre of her shadowed face. She watched him as she might watch a predator, coiled as if to run. The muttering filled the hallway, but it was coming loudest from behind him, outside the front door.
He lowered his pistol. “Alaizabel?” It did not even occur to him to think how she had escaped her room.
Alaizabel seemed to hesitate, then she descended the rest of the stairs. She was making an attempt to walk upright, but he could see that she had adopted the same bent-backed and infirm posture of before. The hairs of his neck were raised, and icy spiders scampered down his back.
The mark, he thought, and he raised the pistol again. “Thatch?” he challenged.
Alaizabel hissed at him suddenly, her face turning into an ugly snarl of malice, and she sprang past him with an agility that took him off-guard, knocking his gun-hand aside as she did so. She was a blur of shadow as she passed him, grabbing for the handle of the front door, twisting the key in the lock and wrenching it open.
“No!” Thaniel cried, throwing his weight against the oak at the same moment as she tugged it open. For a fraction of a second, his eyes skated over the vision of the muttering thing that lurked beyond, and a screaming howl of unearthly malevolence blasted through the hallway like a hurricane, blowing his hair back from his face and overturning the vase and the telephone on a small table by the banister. Something vast and shapeless lunged at him, but the door slammed shut, torn out of Alaizabel’s hands, and the maelstrom died as abruptly as it had begun, leaving only a thin, keening wail of thwarted hunger which faded into the distance, until all was silence once more.
Thaniel slumped against the door, his eyes screwed shut as if to deny the vision that he had seen, sparkling blotches crashing and blooming on the inside of his lids. His pistol was raised blindly towards where he guessed Alaizabel was, warding her away in case she should try to get past him. He could feel tears running in halting trails down his face, and the front of his brain burned, bludgeoned with the shock of the horror he had witnessed.
“Thaniel?” came her voice, and it was that of Alaizabel, not Thatch. It trembled, fragile and lost.
He opened his eyes, and she was kneeling before him, a metre or so to the left of where his pistol pointed, her face a picture of mingled fright and concern for him. He heard her gasp, and her fingers flew to her mouth.
“Your eye...” she said.
He let his arm fall limply, his pistol hanging from his wrist. His eyes burned like the rest of his face.
“Thaniel, your eyes!” she repeated, suddenly grabbing him and pulling him to his feet.
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“Do... do you remember? Do you remember anything?” he said weakly as she propelled him up the stairs towards the bathroom.
“Look!” she urged, with an edge of desperation to her voice, and he looked into the mirror she had steered him to. He could only gaze numbly at what he saw.
His eyes had almost no white left in them. They were so thickly veined with red that there was no space for it. Practically every capillary had burst.
From the inner corner of each eye ran channels of watery red, tears shot through with streaks of blood.
A doctor was called, on Cathaline’s insistence, even though Thaniel declared that he was fine. He peered into Thaniel’s eyes and advised them that they should wait until the morning to see if it improved. The capillaries had ruptured most severely, but they would heal fast; it was no more dangerous than a savage poke in the eye, which was cause for concern, but not for panic. He should stay away from too-bright light and alcohol for a time.
“Wait till morning!” Thaniel repeated in disgust, after the doctor had gone. “By the morning, we shall be gone from here.”
“Gone?” Alaizabel asked. “Gone where?”
“To the Crooked Lanes,” said Cathaline. “We have a...” she hesitated, “friend there who may be able to help us.” Alaizabel was fiddling with the charm around her neck. It was once Thaniel’s mothers, a beautiful flat spiral of gold filigree, spinning inward, with tiny jade stones set in the gaps between the filigree, and a sapphire at its centre. She gasped when Cathaline gave it to her, protesting that she could not accept a gift like that, but Thaniel replied: “You will wear it, Miss Alaizabel, or we shall all end up dead.”
“I want to know,” she said suddenly. “You must tell me what is happening. I cannot abide being pushed around like a pawn without knowing why I am treated so.”
Thaniel turned to Alaizabel, wondering if she could take any more shocks tonight. Her face, however, was a picture of determination. She wanted answers, any answers, for she could not bear the anchorless limbo that she had been in ever since she could remember.
“Very well,” he said, and told her everything. About the mark and its purpose, about the spirit inside her, and about what she had said about the Fraternity when Thatch had been speaking through her mouth.
“The Fraternity,” she whispered. “I know that name, somehow.”
“Nobody knows how much of what we hear is truth, how much rumour,” Thaniel said. “Most people have never heard of them at all. The Fraternity is a league of men and women dedicated to helping their own. Lawyers, politicians, bankers, aristocrats, doctors, newspaper editors... it is said that they number in the thousands. The rich, the powerful. Men and women with influence.”
“It’s also known to just about every wych-hunter that there is a coven at their core,” said Cathaline. “The heart of the Fraternity is a cult. Anyone who’s tried to prove that has generally wound up in the Thames, however; but we know. It’s our business to know.”
“Why... but how is it that they are not stopped?” Alaizabel asked.
“Who would stop them?” Thaniel replied, rubbing his eyes. “Their doings are kept out of the press. They own judges, police commissioners, solicitors. They are the power in London, but most of London doesn’t even believe they exist.”
“And now they want me?” Alaizabel asked.
“They want what’s inside you,” said Thaniel, touching her arm gently.
Alaizabel’s head dipped, and when she spoke next, it was soft and frail. “I do not understand any of this. What did I do, to find myself this way?”
“That is what we have to find out,” said Thaniel.
“Then I put myself in your hands, Thaniel Fox,” she said, “for I have no-one else to turn to.”
The darkness sank into London, the night deepening and clotting, and the three of them felt the weight of their unseen enemy outside their door. They slept in shifts and waited for the dawn.
PART TWO:
STITCH-FACE
CHARITY STREET
THE GREEN TACK MURDERS 8
Priscena Weston was a God-fearing woman; but there was one thing she feared more than the Almighty at this moment, and he was somewhere in the alleys behind her.
The fog was back, filling up the streets as if it had never left, laying its clammy touch upon the stones. The moon, somewhere above, was hidden behind its own layer of cloud, and invisible. London was still tonight, waiting for the dawn, praying that the things that crept under cover of the mist would be gone by then. It was bitterly cold, for the temperature had dropped further towards the heart of winter; frost cracked its way inward from the edges of windows, and there was ice as clear as water where the moisture from the fog had gathered and frozen. The pubs and inns were empty now, and only the distant grind of a factory slit through the quiet.
Pris was used to the calm of silence. She had been almost entirely deaf since she was four, when her drunken father clapped his hands around her ears and perforated her eardrums. But there was no calm now for her. Though the streets were like a grave, there was noise inside her skull. Her blood roared at her from within her head; the hissy, muted rasp of her breath passing in and out was deep and savage; her heart thumped a rapid, thunderous rhythm in her chest.
Somewhere behind her, Stitch-face was following.
For fifteen years he had stalked the people of London, prowling the areas on the northern banks of the Thames. For fifteen years he had been a threat that mothers used to make their children behave—“To bed now, or Stitch-face will get you!” Few of those threatened were wise enough to know that it was only women that Stitch-face killed, never men and never children. Some said he was half-wych, the offspring of Black Annis, who one night took a man in his bed as she was sucking his breath from his lips and left him lifeless, but herself heavy with seed. Certainly, if Stitch-face was only a man, then he had been diabolically clever at avoiding the attentions of the Peelers. A reign of terror that had lasted for a decade and a half, and still there was no clue to who he was except the few sightings from those who had survived his attentions, which had gained him his nickname.
And now she herself had seen that dread mask, the gaping mouth in the patchwork of grey sackcloth, a death-gasp beneath a beautiful head of lady’s hair, fine and brown with a straight fringe. He had been standing in the fog-choked alleyway between Charity Street and Shrew Lane. Arms crossed, a long coat buttoned around him, it was as if he had been waiting for her all night. And she had run, and though she could not hear his footsteps, she knew that he had followed. Of all the people in London, Stitch-face had chosen her tonight, and she was fleeing for her life.
The area around Charity Street was a lunacy of tumbledown alleys, switchbacks and dead ends. A stray bomb from the Vernichtung had collapsed most of the structure, and the industrious residents had set about rebuilding it with no thought to what went where and how. The houses leaned in on each other, nudging the sky—when it could be seen at all—into a narrow strip between their roof gutters. Lights burned in a few of the windows, blurred smudges of warmth in the chill cloud that had settled over London.
She ran, her panic making her careless as she flurried through the fog. Every few dozen metres, she glanced over her shoulder at the blank face of the misted street. Once, she fancied that she saw a darting silhouette in the haze behind her, but then the greyness swallowed it up. Lamp-posts flashed past her, uncaring, heedless of her plight.
In her head, silence, but for the pounding of her internal workings. She was sealed off from the world outside, the fog dulling her eyes and her hearing long dead.
Something ran into the road in front of her, froze, and ran back to the shelter of the steps where it had come from. A cat, alarmed by this newcomer. She had barely time to notice it before she was suddenly falling, her right leg shooting uncontrollably out at an angle.
Ice, she thought, and then she smacked into the cobbles of the road and her vision exploded with white fireworks.
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The pain was not enough to stop her. Whimpering, she pulled herself up, feeling her lip and jaw already beginning to swell. She’d been running down the road rather than the pavement because the cobbles provided better grip for her boots; but even that had not been good enough, this treacherous night.
Looking frantically over her shoulder, she saw Stitch-face standing there, his dark shadow just visible in the fog. He was waiting for her to keep running.
With a cry, she threw herself at the door of the nearest house, one with lights in its windows. “Help me!” she called, hammering on the door. “Help me, for the love of God! Stitch-face is here!” But though the words made sense to her, she had not heard her own voice since she was four, and the sounds she made were almost indecipherable. She shouted again, the sound muffled in her head, but she could not force the meaning of what she said past the clumsiness of her tongue.
Stitch-face began to walk towards her, approaching slowly, gaining definition with every step he took out of the mist. With a slurred noise of frustration, she ran to another house, pounding on that door, too. Perhaps these people thought they were being pestered by a lunatic; perhaps they just did not want to involve themselves. Either way, they pulled the curtains and left the door securely bolted.
She shrieked in fear and looked back at Stitch-face, who was calmly walking towards her with the assurance of a cat toying with a mouse. Now she could see that ghastly death-mask again, framed in that beautiful long wig; and she could see the long, wide-bladed knife in his left hand, polished to a gleam.
She ran again, panicked prayers reciting themselves silently on her lips. Hadn’t she been devout these past years? Hadn’t she always been a good churchgoer? Why her? Why did he choose her?Even after she had been cursed with a chronic drunkard of a father, the man who took her hearing before finding his death at the bottom of a gin bottle; even after her mother had been taken by consumption; even then, her faith had never wavered. She’d had nobody to teach her—her parents were both atheists, worshipping the twin gods of alcohol and laudanum, respectively—and yet despite everything, despite the fact she had more reason than most to rage against the hand that God had dealt her, she was an exemplary parishioner, a devout Catholic, and—she liked to think—a good-hearted woman.