“I realise that. Thank you for your good opinion.”
“Well, really—” Leonora looked round sharply at a rustle from the walls. “My damned cousins. They do eavesdrop, the nosy bitches. Avoid names. So what happened to him? Did he overdo the opium?”
“No, he was murdered.” Crane saw Leo’s eyes widen. “Just not by me.”
“By whom, then?”
“Presumably someone else he was blackmailing.” Crane looked round in his turn at a rattling, scratching sound. “I don’t know about eavesdroppers but you definitely have mice.”
“How horrid,” said Leonora, who had once killed a cobra with her bare hands. “Are you serious, though? He’s dead? Oh God, that’s…wonderful. That’s marvellous! Thank heavens.”
“Thank a killer. It wasn’t terribly pretty, Leo.”
“Oh. No, I suppose not. Well, I’m sorry— No, I’m not. I can’t pretend to be. I think really we have to consider it something of a stroke of luck, don’t you? Eurgh.” Her noise of disgust was directed, not at Rackham’s demise, but at the wall. “Listen. The damned things are scuttling up and down all along the other side of the skirting board. How filthy. And I don’t even think it’s mice,” she added, with distaste. “It sounds more like rats.”
“Rats,” Crane repeated, and the hairs all over his neck and arms rose up in response to the wave of fear. He rubbed his thumb and finger together gently, as Stephen did, and felt—imagined? Felt?—a strange greasiness in the air.
“—because it really isn’t. Lucien, are you listening to me?”
“We have to go.” Crane turned his head, watching the walls. “Now. Out.”
“What? Why?”
“Rats.”
“Darling, they’ll hardly come in,” said Leonora with amusement, and stared at him as he grabbed her arm. “What on earth are you—” Her gaze flitted beyond him and she gave a squawk. “Oh, how disgusting.”
Crane turned and saw the rats coming out of the wall.
They looked like the usual vermin, grey-brown, matted, pink-clawed, but they were fighting their way out of a crack in the skirting, not with the desperation he’d seen in rats fleeing a fire, but with a mad aggression that brought the word rabid to mind. The first tumbled through into the room with another rat’s nose butting hard against its bare fleshy tail, and as it found its feet it looked up at the two horrified humans, and opened its mouth in a yellow-toothed hiss.
Crane lunged for a fire iron. “Unlock the door. Now!”
“But it’s just a fucking hell!” said Leonora, as the rat grew. It swelled visibly in front of them, eyes bulging black, claws convulsing, huge incisors gnawing the air. Leonora made a high keening sound in her throat as the rat’s muscles bulged and inflated under the scabious skin. She bolted to grab the key from the side table, even as Crane brought the poker down hard on the rat’s deforming, bubbling skull. It hit the floor at the second the key did, slipping out of Leonora’s shaking hands, but that meant nothing, because there were five more of them in the room now, each growing monstrously, terrifyingly fast.
“Open it, Leo!” Crane caught the second rat in the jaws with the poker as it sprang, and brought the iron down on the third rat’s spine as it leapt past him towards Leonora, but that wasn’t enough or anything like it to stem the relentless tide. There were more of the things pouring into the room, lunging towards Leo, two on her now, teeth and claws ripping and scrabbling at her dress as she struggled with the key in the lock. Crane slammed the poker down on a monster’s head until he felt bone give, grabbed another rat two-handed and hauled it off the heap of squirming animals, flinging it away. It rebounded off a table, which crashed to the floor taking a bowl of flowers with it, and leapt straight back at Leonora.
Stephen, Stephen, where are you when I need you?
Leonora was screaming, blood blooming through her muslin dress, as she wrenched the door open. A rat landed on her back. She shrieked with agony, fighting her way forward, and Crane waded into the stinking furry mass and pushed at the door, almost closing it on her as she crawled out. He pinned another of the monstrous creatures against the doorframe with his foot to stop it following Leo and, as she disappeared through the gap, slammed the door on it repeatedly till the foul thing went limp.
His back to the door, he was confronted with fifteen or so dog-sized rats. They looked at him with bulging, mad eyes, unmoving, and Crane stared at them with a strange fatalistic calm, which turned to absolute astonishment as they all simultaneously turned and rushed back to their tiny hole of entry in the skirting board, shrinking as fast as they had grown.