Upstairs in her room at the hotel she could not sleep. She folded her hands behind her head and watched the colored lanterns from the circus track across the ceiling. Thinking about Jacob Marber and what she had glimpsed in Coulton’s face as he told her. Not fear exactly. Something darker and altogether more strange.
There was no sleeping after that. She dressed and sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on her boots and went out. The circus was strung with candle fire in jars of red-and-green-colored glass and there were townsmen in suits long out of fashion milling about in front of the big top and wives in hats with cloth flowers pinned into place calling their children close. A clown handed out flyers from a linen sack. Inside the big top a trombone and bass drum started up. She turned from that and in her mud-spattered coat and man’s trousers drifted past and away as if in a darkness of her own making and gradually the laughter faded. At last at a stenciled tent she stopped and lifted her eyes and read the name on the sign.
She almost walked on. But whatever was in her would not leave it be. A shill selling tickets from a roll at the door studied her from his stool, hands motionless, cigarette at his lips.
Inside stood a group of men in hats and frock coats watching two girls dance. There was no music. The girls wore negligees and had black leather ribbons wound about their wrists and arms. As they danced, their hands turned in slow circles and the ribbons on their forearms moved also. It was then Alice saw they were not ribbons but snakes. The men assembled watched the snake dancers with great seriousness as if what happened there before them contained some truth about a future not yet written. When the girls were done a man with long hair braided down his back came out and bent low and attached a chain to the piercings in his nipples and with his hands on his knees lifted an anvil and duckwalked it across the stage. Then one of the snake dancers walked down among them with a wooden box of liquor bottles and glasses clinking on a cord around her neck. Under its powder her face looked haggard and used.
Just then the woman Brynt strode through the crowd. The figures parted before her, sullen, wary, and she loomed hulking over Alice and stared down at her, massive arms bare, the tattoos crawling over her skin in the firelight like strange runes.
“I want you to know,” she said huskily, “he’ll be ready to go in the morning. I won’t keep him. It’s good and right for a boy to be with his own. I’ll not stand in the way of that.”
There was a shine in her eyes belying her words and Alice felt a sudden sickness, seeing it, seeing her, the pain she was clearly in. Alice knew that grief.
“I’ll get him there safely,” she said.
Brynt grunted. And then she turned and was gone.
Later the boy, Marlowe, was brought out. He sat on a ladder-backed chair in front of the men and set his little hands on his knees like a child at his lessons. He waited. The men were quiet. The shill went along the walls, snuffing out the lanterns one by one until all the tent lay in darkness.
What a thing it was, blood and bone. The shining appeared faint at first and blue and seemed to grow out of the very air itself. Then it brightened. It was in the boy’s skin. He sat utterly still, holding his left arm in his right hand, crackling with blue light while the darkness in the tent began to thrum. Alice could not look away.
The boy was not as he had been. Slowly his skin turned translucent so that she could see the inner workings of his blue lungs and his blue bones and the blue crisscrossed threads of veins all underneath his face and throat. He glared out with eyes black and hard and reflective as obsidian. She swallowed to see it, the hairs on her arms prickling. One April afternoon in Chicago when she was six she had been caught in a thunderstorm and she had felt something like it then, the electricity helixing all around her. Her mother had run out to her that day and bundled her inside with her swollen knuckles and had toweled her dry while the wood in their basement room hissed in the stove and lightning flashed in sheets over the lake. A scent of burning cedar. Rose-hip tea from Boston in chipped mugs. The oil and grease smell of her mother’s skin, which Alice had not smelled in a quarter century. That. She was crying. She stood in the darkness of that tent and wiped at her eyes with the insides of her wrists. She saw in the blue glow the faces of the men gathered there were also wet with tears and she raised her eyes.
The shining boy grew brighter. And then brighter still.
4
MAN OF MANY DARKENINGS
Walter was hungry. So hungry.
Through the dark crowds and noisy carriages of Whitechapel the basket sellers walked, girls and women with long white throats, with ragged shawls like shreds of shadow. Walter lurked in the alley, watching them go. Sniffing the night air as they passed, the warm-blood smell of them. His flesh was gray and hairless, his red lips were wet. In his pockets, his fingernails were sharp as knives.
None of them knew that he watched. He liked that. But he was hunting one in particular, one among the many. A woman with burns on her body. She wasn’t to know he was coming.
The crowds, shoving, shouted past. A hot-pie seller hollered his wares. Walter was trying to remember, but it hurt him to remember. There was a woman who had a weapon, or was a weapon, or something. She could hurt his dear Jacob, and it made him afraid. Walter came out at night because that is what Jacob wanted, his dear Jacob, his good Jacob. Because in the cold night fogs, reeking of sulfur, few would see him as he was.
Walter Walter Walter Walter—
But he didn’t know which woman it was. The basket seller he’d followed this night had yellow hair and a gaunt face and scars all across her chest and throat like she’d rolled in fire. Was she the one who would hurt his Jacob? The crowds parted; Walter watched her weave across the street, heavy skirts trailing in the muck. The crowds closed in again. He must ask her. He must find her and make her tell him what she knew. He clambered onto a stack of crates in time to see her stagger between two lantern-lit doorways, drunk maybe, then into an alley of darkness.
—go Walter go find her make her show you what she’s hiding—
Walter moistened his lips. He looked all around. Then, scuttling down, he detached himself from the shadows and slipped unnoticed through the crowds, his collar turned up, his hat pulled low.
The dark alley called to him like a song.
* * *
Walter awoke, gasping. Where was he? Last he remembered he’d been crossing the night docks in Limehouse, and before that he’d been in a drinking house near the abattoir, but he could not remember anything more. No, that wasn’t true. There’d been a jetty in darkness, the slosh of the Thames, a flower seller crying in an alley. He opened a gritty eyelid: brown peeling walls, sleeping bodies in the dim corners of the room. In his fingers he was still holding a pipe, cold now, the black gum of opium long since smoked through.
Walter Wal—
He staggered to his feet, holding the wall for support. He had to get back, he had to get back to the room he rented for a ha’penny a week, under the crumbling ruins of St Anne’s Court. The floor was wet. He looked down. Someone had taken his shoes.
—ter Walter what did you bring us Walter Wal—