It had been weeks now of grubby rooms, of hotel grime and half-cleaned sheets. Alice was getting tired. But she took Marlowe down to the crooked streets near the harbor, where the huge passenger liners docked, and there she found a shabby little rooming house, meant for sailors maybe, or maybe for passengers paying steerage. An old wooden house, three stories, with gabled windows and a shingled roof mostly in one piece. Its hall was narrow, high-ceilinged. It might have stood in that spot more than a century, was once perhaps a respectable house in the years before the Revolution, before the city grew up all around it. Alice entered the dim office, the oil lamps above the wainscotting casting everything in a weak orange glow, hearing the floor creak under her like a ship, and wondered at the thousands who had walked those very same floors.
The dread only increased when she tried to let the room. The man who ran the place was old, and hunched, and he walked with a stagger, carrying an oil lamp in his one hand, a ring of heavy keys in the other. His slimy hair overhung his collar. There were patches on his elbows.
“Where’s your husband, then?” he said to her, suspicious.
Alice met his gaze. Her boots had stepped in a stream of green muck from the chandler-works next door and, carefully, she wiped them clean on his carpet. “He’s dead,” she said.
The man just grunted, studied Marlowe. “This your boy? I run a respectable house, I do. And there won’t be no visitors, neither,” he muttered.
Alice frowned at the implication. She could break his nose in six places before he could blink, but she couldn’t do a thing to stop his foul thoughts.
“Will you take our money or not?” she said calmly. “We need three nights.”
“You pay in full, up front.” When she didn’t argue, he gestured for them to follow.
And Alice, still with a feeling of dread in her, thought: It will do.
It was a single room at the top of the house, and when the man had opened the curtains, and turned back the moth-eaten blankets, and opened the door of the wardrobe cupboard so that the long clouded mirror reflected the daylight, he left them alone. The walls and floor were so thin, she could hear him go crookedly back down the hall, descend the stairs, cross the long corridor below and go back to the first floor.
She looked at Marlowe and he looked at her. “It’d be a palace for a mouse,” she said.
He smiled.
There was much to be done. They spent the following days standing in lines at the docks, stamping their feet for the tiredness, or filling out paperwork for the customs offices, or finding a cabman to come up to the rooming house and collect their few pieces of luggage for the sailing. The docks were crowded, ropes and hoists and great flats of crates being loaded onto barges from warehouses, and police officers drifting grimly among the laborers, and families just in from Staten Island, huddled, miserable, wary. Alice led Marlowe through all of it, that bad feeling just getting stronger and stronger. It was almost like someone was following them, she thought. It was that kind of a feeling. But whenever she ducked into a doorway, or stopped at a dry-goods window to study the street reflections, there never was anyone.
On their last night in New York she didn’t sleep. She lay beside Marlowe in the bed, listening to his breathing, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness. In a few hours they’d be climbing the gangway, finding their cabin, sailing out of the harbor. Away. It was after midnight; she’d heard the tolling of the sailor’s chapel streets away, marking twelve bells. There was a water stain yellowing the plaster overhead from some leak long years before. It made her think of Mrs. Harrogate, the birthmark on her face. Soon, now.
And that was when she sensed it.
It wasn’t a sound, not exactly. It felt more like a shadow going over the sun, a sudden drop in temperature, and she frowned and turned her face on the pillow and lay very still.
And then she did hear something. A soft creaking in the corridor below, as if someone were taking pains to be silent. She got out of bed, pulled on her trousers, her shirt, her boots. Then she stood listening. The shuffling was coming, slowly, up the stairs to the third floor, their floor.
Swiftly, quietly, she started shoving their few possessions into their traveling cases, scooping up Marlowe’s clothes, the little traveling mirror she carried. She shut the lids, buckled them fast. She looked around her. She went to the window and opened it onto the cold night, feeling an anger rising in her. Last of all she took out her Colt Peacemaker and eased back the hammer and turned the oil-smooth chambers slowly and then she pocketed it.
“Marlowe,” she whispered.
She shook him and he opened his eyes in alarm. She put a finger to her lips, looked at the door.
The rooming house was absolutely silent. Impossibly silent. There was no faint sound of snoring, of coughing, the low murmuring of other residents. It was this—the stillness of it—that had alerted her. Marlowe was already putting on his little shoes, wrongly, struggling into his coat. She went to the door, leaned her ear up against it.
Then they both heard it. Footsteps, clear, calm, unhurried, coming down the hall toward their room. Alice pressed a hand against the door, stepped back to arm’s length, and aimed her revolver at chest-height directly at the door. The footsteps stopped.
Nothing moved. No sound.
Something, someone, a man, cleared his throat in the darkness beyond. A creeping horror came over her then, a feeling of anxiety, of dread. And she blinked her eyes rapidly to clear them and saw, weirdly, a black smoke seeping through the crack under the door, and dissipating, and then seeping through all four sides of the door, growing denser, darker. The door rattled softly as it was tried. Alice felt a sudden cold terror.
Just, she thought.
Fucking.
Go.
Go! She grabbed Marlowe’s arm, dragged him across to the open window. “For God’s sake,” she hissed. “Hurry!”
She climbed up onto the sill and lifted their two small traveling cases onto the roof and then she picked up Marlowe under the arms and hoisted him out.
Whoever was outside their door must have heard. They started banging on it, kicking at it. The room was thick with a black smoke, it smelled of soot, of dust, and Alice held her handkerchief to her mouth and turned to go. Then she whirled back, ran across to the nightstand, took out from the drawer their tickets and documents for the passenger liner. She was making noise now, clattering across the room, not caring. The door thumped in its frame.
The roof was sloped and Marlowe was crouched on his heels clutching his knees to his chest and Alice grabbed him in one arm and their two cases in the other and she tottered and stumbled her way up to the crest of the house. She hurried along to the chimney, half slid down to the eaves on the far side, then threw their cases across the small gap to the building next door. Then she cradled Marlowe’s head against her shoulder.
“Close your eyes,” she whispered.
And she jumped.
She landed badly on her left knee and folded sideways and then got up quickly, looking back. She couldn’t see any sign of pursuit. It was madness. This roof was flat and there was a wrought iron fire ladder and Alice hurried the boy down it, into the street. She could see from there the dormer window of their rented room and she stared hard up at the darkness. There was no one there. And yet a faint smoke was seeping into the night; and then, against the darkness of the room, a greater darkness stepped forward, a black silhouette in the shape of a man, and it watched them go.
For she was already seizing Marlowe by the hand and limping on her bad knee, limping at a half run into the darkness, into the night, away.
* * *
Her knee wasn’t broken, there was that. But it was swollen, the skin mottled and purple and weirdly soft, like a monstrous eggplant, and it would take no weight.
She crept with Marlowe up to Washington Avenue and crossed limping between the sleek black carriages, theater traffic, but glancing back all the while, and in a small park behind a statue of some dead American Revolutionary she halted, slid down into the wet grass with her throbbing leg outstretched in front of her.
She was trying to catch her breath, looking off into the darkness, trying to think. She gave the boy a hard look. “Did you ever see anything like that before? Ever?”
He shook his head, his blue eyes wide.
She knew the kids they collected were different. Talents, Coulton called them. And she knew that person—that thing—back there was anything but normal.
“Don’t you lie to me, Marlowe,” she said tightly.