Marlowe took a soft step out into the street, staring. He could see them too. “They’re spirits, Charlie,” he whispered. “Look. They’re pretty.”
And they were: like twisting ribbons of breath, but shaped, and always moving, their blurred faces shifting and shuddering, one moment the face of a little girl, then that face blurring into an old woman’s, then back. And Charlie, somehow, understood. Spirits, Dr. Berghast had said, were memories, memories and forgettings; these were the faces of a life lived, memories made real, but at the same time never staying, never pausing, without any present to hold on to. There were hundreds of them, thousands maybe, all hovering very still in the street. A city of the dead, Berghast had called it.
They were facing the building. They were facing the mouth of the orsine, a great vast crowd of the dead. It was like they could sense the world of the living beyond, like they were drawn to it. Charlie shivered.
“Can they see us?” Marlowe asked. “Do you think they know we’re here?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got to be careful.”
“There’s so many, Charlie.”
“Yeah.” All at once the sadness of it overwhelmed him, and he had to look away. “Hey. How’re you feeling, Mar?”
The little boy furrowed his brow. “I feel … like I’ve been here before. Like I know this place.”
“Your hands aren’t shaking?”
“I’m okay, Charlie.”
“We’ve got to go fast, anyhow.” Charlie glanced up the street, at the specters swirling past. They were so beautiful. But something about it didn’t feel right; he didn’t like how easy it was to get lost in them. “Come on,” he said, and started in the other direction, creeping carefully around the dead.
But all up and down the overgrown street, there were spirits adrift, a wall of mist rising like heat shimmer over the setts, and finding a way around them was not easy.
When they’d reached the end of the street, Charlie turned, looked back. The fog of the dead was densely packed around the orsine. As if waiting.
They hurried on. They skirted the dark puddles as best they could. Always in the shallows lay strange objects, like memories, a fading old tintype, a child’s shoe. Charlie was afraid of getting lost but he didn’t know what else to do. The city was like the London they had been in, but also not, crisscrossed with alleys and courts that he was sure didn’t exist on the real Nickel Street. The buildings shimmered in places, sometimes looking new, sometimes crumbling, sometimes gone entire and in their place buildings of ancient wood. It was like the city was a dream of all its own pasts too.
Charlie led Marlowe down to the great river. The far bank was lost in fog. Where Blackfriars Bridge should have been, there was only embankment, and a slick, crooked, wooden stair leading down to a jetty. The water looked strange, black, thick like ink. Charlie turned in place, confused, and peered the length of the river. There were no bridges at all.
Instead he saw, crawling across the surface, small watercraft, moving sluggishly, poled by solitary cloaked figures in their sterns. If any passengers were aboard, they were spirits—invisible at such a distance—but the ferrymen themselves were solid, in black hoods, and cold-looking, and cruel, and Charlie drew Marlowe quickly by the shoulder away from the edge. He remembered Berghast’s warning: There are worse things in that world than Jacob Marber.
He checked the map to take their bearings and peered past the cathedral, its dark mossy dome, and then led Marlowe unsteadily east along a street filled with watercress. Their footsteps splashed softly as they went. The gas lamps on the street corners were lit and shining in a corona of feeble light and Charlie felt again the strange almost-familiar feeling.
They turned down a covered alley and brushed past the hanging plants and waded across a watery court, the cold water reaching past their knees, and then a cobbled lane rose up out of the water and they stopped and wrung out their clothes and tried to get dry.
All the while the mists of the dead drifted past the mouth of the alley.
“How long have we been walking?” Marlowe asked, in a low whisper.
But Charlie didn’t know. The light never changed. There seemed no day and no night in this world. He scraped a soft moss from a stoop with his shoe and then he sat and ran a hand over his face. He was tired. In the alley where they’d stopped there was a rusting ironshod wheel leaned up against a wall and a broken window with shards jagged as teeth. It was a cooper’s shop; a sign hung over the door, blurred with weeds and grime. As he sat he took out the ring that had belonged to his mother and held it in his palm and stared at it.
And that was when the bad feeling came over him.
He didn’t understand it. It was a feeling of pure fear, of panic. His heart was racing. He gripped the ring in his fist and looked over at Marlowe and saw the same terror etched into the boy’s features and then he looked off at the mists and listened. He got to his feet and Marlowe did too and quietly, quickly, he tried the door of the cooper’s shop. It opened easily, and in the darkness beyond he could see nothing. He and Marlowe splashed softly in, closed the door, held their breaths.
What was it? Charlie could feel his blood moving loudly in his skull. He had a hand gripping the door handle, holding it shut, and his gaze was fixed on the broken window to his right. Marlowe was in the standing water, clutching his elbows, shivering.
And that was when they heard it: a scraping out in the alley, like a metal bar was being dragged, coming closer. Something big and dark passed the window. There was a low snorting sound, as if a beast of some kind were rooting around where they’d been only moments before. Then a clanking, a splash; and the scraping noise gradually faded away until there was only silence, the slow dapping of water someplace in the darkness beyond.
Marlowe breathed and breathed. They stayed like that a long time, just waiting, in case something more was coming. But nothing did; and at last they went back out into the alley.
“What was it, Charlie?” Marlowe whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“You should write it into the notebook, like Dr. Berghast said to. Do you think it heard us?”
Probably, he thought. But he just looked at Marlowe and said, “It didn’t hear us.”
“I don’t want to be here when it comes back.”
He nodded at that. “Let me see your hands.”
The little boy pulled back his sleeves and turned his wrists and Charlie looked. There was no sign of trembling or discoloration yet. He knew Berghast had said Marlowe was immune but he wasn’t about to entrust the boy’s welfare to the very man who’d sent them in here. He grimaced and took out the map and looked at it and peered around. The mists looked closer, the strange twisting figures ribboning away in them seemed almost to be looking for them. It was time to get going. At the mouth of the alley there was a sign nailed into the wall: FANNIN STREET. He reached into the satchel for the map. He couldn’t see any Fannin Street anywhere.
“I reckon it’s this way,” he said, stuffing it back away. “It’s got to be. Come on.”
The dark buildings of the city loomed. They saw no sign of the creature from the alley. There was only the faceless dead in their turnings, and the water, and the cold.
The light never changed. They slept when they got tired, in the rotting second story of a tenement, somewhere north of the river. They were cold and damp and their feet were soaked clean through and they took off their shoes and dried their tender skin as best they could. It was a room with an old bedframe and no mattress, but the walls were nearly clear of fungus, the windowpane intact. They had no way of making a fire in the fireplace and no food to eat and they lay down shivering in the gloom. Time passed.
“You better put it away, Charlie,” said Marlowe sleepily. “You’re going to lose it.”
Charlie opened his eyes. He was turning his mother’s ring in his fingers again, tracing the twinned hammers on its face. He blinked. He hadn’t realized.