He looked over, saw Marlowe’s little face watching.
“I never told you,” he said slowly. He looked away. He wanted to say nothing more but then he was talking and it was like he just couldn’t stop. “I found him, Mar. My father. There was a file in Berghast’s study. His name was Hywel. He was at Cairndale when he was young, just like us. A strong, like Mr. Coulton was. Ribs said there’s this group living in London, exiles. Talents who’ve lost their powers. She said it’s sad to see. That’s what happened to my father. He ended up down there with them, alone.”
“He wasn’t alone,” said Marlowe, with a quiet conviction.
Charlie, shivering, rolled over. “Yeah, he was. But it’s okay. It was all a long time ago.”
“He wasn’t alone, Charlie. He had you.”
Charlie swallowed a knot in his throat, unhappy. He was so tired. “I don’t know where he got this stupid ring,” he added. “He gave it to my mama when they got married. It was precious to her. It came from Cairndale, obviously. I don’t know, maybe they give them out when you lose your talent.”
“I don’t think they do anything nice if you lose your talent,” said Marlowe quietly.
“Maybe he won it in a card game. Or stole it.”
Marlowe nodded, his eyelids heavy.
“I won’t ever know though, will I? Not for real, I mean.” The ring felt cold in his fist, unusually heavy. He did something strange then, he worked it free of the leather cord and slid it onto his finger. It glowed like a strip of silver light in the gloom. He didn’t remember it fitting his finger so well before.
“Thing is,” he murmured, “you waste all this time dreaming of where you came from, cause you know no one comes from nothing. And you tell yourself, if you only knew, then maybe you could see a reason for how you got to be the way you are. Why your life looks like it does. But there isn’t any reason, not really.” He worried the ring at his knuckle, feeling the bite of it.
“My father died a long time ago,” he said, without pity. “I never got to know him. I don’t even know what he looked like. He died, and then my mama died, and I was left all alone even though I was just a little kid. And that’s just how it is. There’s no changing it, and it doesn’t mean anything.”
“You got me though,” said Marlowe sleepily.
* * *
It might have been the cold that woke him.
He was still wearing the ring. He sat up. Marlowe was standing two feet away, staring at the far wall. The fog had entered the room and was thickening there and Charlie scrambled to his feet.
“Mar!” he hissed, all his senses suddenly alert. He backed up, stumbling against the damp wall, glancing from side to side.
But the little boy hadn’t moved. “Do you see her too, Charlie?” he whispered.
He wasn’t sure what he saw. He was trying to make out the shapes in the half-light, frozen, staring, gathering his fear around himself like a blanket.
Marlowe didn’t seem afraid at all, filled instead with sadness. “It’s Brynt, Charlie,” he murmured. There was wonder in his voice. “Look. It’s her.”
And he remembered then the enormous woman on the train, her arms and throat inked, her silver hair in a braid like a berserker out of legend, who had wrestled the litch down to its knees, who had held it fast and thrown herself off the speeding roof in order to save them all. And he remembered too Marlowe’s words to him that first night at Mrs. Harrogate’s flat, in London: Brynt’s my family. And he looked at the little boy with pity in his heart.
“Has she said anything?” he whispered. “Did she say what she wants?”
For he was thinking again about Dr. Berghast’s warnings, that the dead were not as they had been in life, as if the man had known what they would find.
Marlowe seemed afraid to breathe. “I think … I think she just wants to see me.”
Now Charlie could see her too, the dark mist twisting and moving always, a huge figure, her arms tattooed with mysterious symbols, her face sorrowful, her eyes like twinned stars burning brightly in that mist. She was no longer human, that much was clear. Her features kept shifting, as if water were moving swiftly over her, and Charlie found looking at her dizzying. She seemed to be staring at Marlowe, staring with a fixed intensity. There was no love in it, no gentleness. An ache was rising in Charlie’s throat; whatever she was now, this was not the Brynt the boy had loved.
He was colder now, much colder, and he saw his breath plume out before him in the ruined room. He reached out for Marlowe but the effort was strangely difficult. He looked around him. The fog had drifted thinly around them and now it was thickening and he saw faces flicker in the mists, lightless eyes, mouths that seemed open in some silent scream. He could hear a low hiss, like the whispering of hundreds of voices, indistinct but filled with want. He tried to cry out, but he couldn’t.… The room was darkening.… He was cold, so cold.…
“Charlie!” Marlowe was shouting, from what seemed very far away. “Charlie! Charlie!”
And then a blue light was glowing through the mist, burning it off, the tendrils of fog dissipating and retreating before it, and he saw Marlowe with his palms outstretched, shining, and the boy was struggling to get him upright, and the two of them were stumbling over to the doorway and down the stairs and out into the street and away.
* * *
He didn’t remember much of what happened next. There were flashes of images: a crumbling court, an alley under brick arches, a submerged street. He kept seeing the faces of the dead, their eyes, the longing in them.
He came back to himself sometime later, on the stoop of a tenement building on a crooked street. He could hear Marlowe kicking about in the damp room behind him, as if looking for something. The weird light in this other world hadn’t shifted, hadn’t changed at all. He sat up, feeling a clear cool hunger in his belly. His head was hurting. He looked at the fog of the dead drifting down the street and he wondered what would happen if he walked out into it, if he let himself get lost. Would his body lie in this world uncorrupted? Would he rise up out of it, a figure of translucence and already fading memory? He wondered then if this world meant God and all he had been told about heaven and the true order of the world was wrong or merely hidden by a greater veil and then he blew out his cheeks and rubbed his hands over his trousers as if to reassure himself that he was still alive. And that was when he saw his right hand.
It was trembling. He remembered Berghast’s warning and folded his hand into his armpit and frowned with worry. He knew what it meant: Marlowe would have to go on alone.
After a time he heard Marlowe behind him. There were dried tears on his cheeks and his deep blue eyes looked red. “Charlie! You’re okay.”
“Yeah. You?”
The boy frowned bravely. “Brynt’s gone.”
“Yeah.”
“But she knew me, Charlie. She knew who I was. I could see it.”
Charlie looked at the kid, he shifted his hips. He didn’t like seeing the hope in his face. He slid his trembling hand in his pocket, and stood.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, we got a room to find.”
He started walking, tired, footsore. But Marlowe didn’t follow. The boy was biting his lip with a haunted expression and there was about him something different, something changed, and Charlie looked once in the direction he’d been going and then turned and trudged back to the boy.
“Mar?”
Marlowe peered uncertainly behind him. “It’s this way, Charlie. We got to go this way. I can … I can feel it.”
Charlie raised his eyes in that direction and for just a moment he thought he glimpsed in the fog beyond the huge translucent spirit of Brynt, her eyes glinting, but then it was gone, whatever it was, and all that was left was that strange shifting curtain of mist.
“You’re sure?” he said.