The boy shook his head. “No.”
But he followed Marlowe anyway, along the crooked street and up a dripping alley, keeping as best they could to the shallow puddles, passing along under the dripping weeds and mosses hanging from the lintels and arches. He was no longer sure where they were.
It was a dead city, a London of stillness and loss, and the streets were labyrinthine and littered with the detritus of lives once-lived. Marlowe led him down a crooked set of steps, slick with a moss so black it shone almost blue in the weird light, and then he stopped under a kind of aqueduct and pointed. And there it was.
A white tree, bare of leaves, was growing up out of the muck in the middle of a fountain. Where its bark peeled away in thin paperlike strips, the new bark was a bright bloodred beneath. In its shadow stood an old-fashioned hand pump, made of wood, and on the far side of the square a sinister house, tall and narrow and crenelated with crooked balconies leaning out over the empty air. It had no door, only a broken opening in one wall.
“Of course,” muttered Charlie. He ran his hand over his hair in disgust. “We got to go in there? Of course.”
Marlowe was looking at him strangely. “Your hand, Charlie,” he said. “It’s shaking. Look.”
But Charlie just stuffed it back into his pocket. “Don’t you mind it, Mar. It’s fine.”
“Does it hurt?”
Charlie didn’t answer. There were spirits gathering, thickening, off to the left of the square. He checked to be sure the way ahead was safe and then he hurried across, Marlowe half running beside him. At the stoop of the old house the boy pulled at his sleeve, catching him up.
“I know what you want to say,” Charlie told him. “And you’re not wrong. But we just got to get this glove Berghast wants. We’re so close, Mar. You want to have to come back, do this all again?”
Charlie watched Marlowe think it through and then the boy gave him a quick reproachful glare. Then they went inside, taking care not to brush up against the slick stone lintel.
The house would have been dark but for the broken windows leaking that same eerie gray light. They stopped to let their eyes adjust and it was then Charlie saw they weren’t alone. At the base of the stairs a vague column of air was coalescing. A spirit. He set a warning hand on Marlowe’s shoulder. The spirit flickered, sharpened into the translucent figure of a woman, then twisted away again into air. Then it was a woman again, a woman in a bustled gown, her back to them. She made no sound but her agitation was clear. Slowly, she drifted across the room, as if underwater, and it seemed to Charlie that everything stilled and it was like he was standing in a cold street peering in through a window and then the spirit turned her face and Charlie saw her clear.
It was his mother.
Or, rather, his mother as she might have been, must have been, once, in those years before her loss and her hardship began. Her face flickered through its ages. Charlie fumbled for the wall, felt the cold ooze of the wallpaper under his hand. He was shaking. He knew every line of that face, he knew her every weather. The skin like dark eggplant and the tight hair drawn back into a bun. Her high cheekbones. Her sad brown eyes.
She seemed to be speaking to someone on the stairs, a second figure, though she made no sound, and then a second column of air was twisting, taking form, and a man emerged, pale, black-haired, slender as a shadow and with an old-fashioned frock coat. He descended and took her hands in his own and spoke to her in an urgent way, though Charlie could hear nothing. And he understood, at once, that here stood his father.
The face kept shivering and fading and taking on substance as it spoke. But Charlie stared at the thin lips, the little teeth, the creases at the corners of the man’s eyes from long-smiling. He had a soft jowly face that was strange on such a thin frame, as if he ought to be heavyset. His hair was long. The big pink shells of his ears stood out.
Charlie couldn’t think; he couldn’t breathe. He watched the two of them shudder and drift and go through a low doorway into the back of the house and he followed. The house was in a state of advanced decay and water ran in rivulets down the walls and the floorboards felt soft under Charlie’s weight. There was a crib in the back room, a crib with a baby swaddled in it. He didn’t understand. It was himself he was seeing, he knew it, and yet how could his spirit be here too, if he was alive and in the flesh and present and watching? Slowly his father twisted a ring from his mother’s outstretched hand, his ring, Charlie’s, the very one he wore on his own finger now, and then he watched as his father leaned over the crib and pressed the ring into the baby’s tiny curling fist, and Charlie felt his vision blur.
And then his father raised his eyes, and stared at Charlie, directly at Charlie, with a look of dark confusion, and his mother turned and stared at him too, appalled, and then Charlie felt Marlowe’s hand on his arm and the spirits both shivered and turned translucent and wisped away as if in a wind and there was nothing, no one, they were gone just as if they’d never been.
Charlie’s heart was pounding. His cheeks were wet.
That was when he saw, behind where the ghostly crib had stood, a door.
* * *
“This is it, Charlie,” Marlowe whispered. “This is the way.”
Marlowe was standing at the open door, looking back at him with big solemn eyes. There were stairs beyond. Charlie turned and turned in place, peering around at the rotting house. Something was missing. He was having trouble shaping his thoughts.
“Charlie, come on.”
It was a narrow back stairwell, a servants’ passage through the house. They climbed the stairs to the second level and carefully edged around a hole in the floor and went down a hall and climbed more stairs to the third level. They kept to the seams of the stairs and they passed the third floor and kept climbing to the very top. And at the top they found the attic door. Charlie had a powerful sense of wrongness. They’d found the Room.
Marlowe, too, gave a little shiver. But he didn’t hesitate; the little boy went through into the attic the way a person holds their breath and jumps into cold water.
The attic didn’t look like much. A narrow room under a peaked roof. Beams had collapsed in one corner with a part of the outer wall gone so that gray fog and the silhouetted roofs of the city were visible through the hole. Charlie’s footfalls clinked as he ducked his head, walked slowly in. A balcony door hung askew on one hinge. Rubble, collapsed masonry, the splintered bits of some long-smashed furniture all littered the room. Then Charlie froze. Slumped against the far wall was the body of a man.
It had been there for a long time. It was dressed in fashions from decades past, like some of the portraits in the upper halls of Cairndale. The dead man’s skin had dried to paper and the eyes under their lids had sunk down into the skull and the mummified throat looked ropy and thin. And on one hand, shining darkly, as if it would absorb all the light it could find, was the wood-and-iron glove Berghast had sent them to find.
Charlie went over to the body, pulled the glove free. The little teeth inside snapped the hand at the wrist. Charlie shook the glove. The hand fell out in pieces among a sifting of dust. He stared, fascinated. The pieces of wood sewn into it gleamed, like black glass. The glove was heavy, and beautiful, far more beautiful than the replica Berghast had shown. Charlie’s own hand, he saw, had stopped shaking.
“How long do you think he’s been here?” said Marlowe. “What happened to him?”
Charlie frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to.”
“Can I see it? Charlie?”
But Charlie was still holding it, staring into the deep unreflective black plates of wood and iron, and he could only tear his eyes away with a struggle.