He seemed to think about this. “The thing at the hotel scared me.”
She gave him a long careful look. “We’ll be on the ship in an hour. And we’ll not see him again after that.”
“Yes, we will,” he said.
The boy had a way of doing that, of speaking with certainty about things that had not happened yet, and Alice found it unnerving. What she saw when she looked at him was a small, defenseless child, and her heart, which had never much cared for babies or love or human connection, was struck afresh and left singing with pain. But she felt at the same time a new kind of disgust, nervous at what he could do. She was not a religious person and did not ascribe spiritual causes to the gift of his healing, for she could not conceive of a god who would create a world so full of suffering. There were naturalists in Washington that believed all creatures were a part of a pattern of development, that people were once like the apes, gradually changing their characteristics. When she looked at Marlowe she saw the mystery of it all. Alice remembered how her mother had used to say there were wonders in the world and that most people were afraid to see them. Look with your heart, not with your eyes, she would murmur, running her cold fingers through Alice’s hair. She said all that was needed was a little faith and the marvelous could be found. Do you believe? And Alice would say, very solemnly: I believe, Mama, I believe it, I do.
All her life such memories would flicker inside her, a second flame. It was the knowledge of a world beyond this one, of the impossible made possible, if only she would see it.
Just because you cannot see it, daughter—her mother would whisper angrily—does not mean it is not there.
Well, she’d seen it now. And she believed.
* * *
They went on board with the crowds in the early light, porters rolling trunks up the ramp, stewards in crisp white uniforms nodding to them gravely as they passed. Gulls wheeled in the gray, shrieking and filling the air with their cries. It was a gleaming new ocean liner and they’d taken a second-class stateroom and their little bits of luggage were already on board. The corridors were packed with men smoking cigars, women laughing into their gloves. Marlowe kept close. She felt the strange looks of the passengers at her men’s clothes. She was still moving gingerly on her leg, feeling strange. In the stateroom she changed into a mauve dress and bustle, feeling awkward and hating the tight pinch of it, and Marlowe just sat quietly watching through the porthole as the ships in the harbor slid past.
When it was time to cast off they went up on deck with all the others and stood at the railing and watched the crowds gathered there. The sky was filled with clouds of gulls; the pier was packed. She could feel the engines thrumming through the floor. There was a bang and then streamers began to fall and at the same moment the ship’s horn blared, deafening, and the crowds roared.
The boy was peering at something. It was a man, at the back of the crowds, almost invisible. He stood in the shadow of a warehouse, the darkness smoking up off him. Tall, his features obscured by a black scarf. He wore a silk hat and a long black coat and black gloves on his hands, and he was staring directly at the boy with an expression of pure hatred.
But the ship had already cast off, its great oceangoing turbines groaning in reverse, the city’s oily waters churning up over the huge ropes where they were being cranked, dripping, on board. Alice twisted and leaned out over the railing to keep the stranger in view. She knew who he was. He’d started forward now and was shouldering powerfully through the onlookers and well-wishers toward the ship even as the gap widened and the streamers fell and fell and the band on the quarterdeck struck up a waltz, and in the roar she lost sight of him on the platform. And then there was only a sea of faces, hundreds of them, innocent, ordinary, their gloved hands flickering as they waved, and the skyline of New York beyond, and the dark stranger had vanished in the smoke from the ship’s engines, drifting blackly out over the pier, thinning, gone.
8
MONSTERS IN THE FOG
Walter Walter Walter wake up Walter wake up—
Walter Laster squinched his sore eyes shut. Through his lids the brightness was blinding.
—the boy Walter the boy what happened to the boy you didn’t finish what you started Walter—
So.
Cold.
He was so cold.
He shook his head, his cheek and left ear clumpy with muck, and rose up into the white light of the day like a creature arisen from the earth. He was squinting and peering about him. The river. The Thames. He was in filth at the edge of the Thames, in a deep thick gluey mud that was not like mud at all.
—the boy the boy the boy the boy—
The boy, yes.
He needed to find the boy.
He heard a low whistle and some laughter and turned. Mud larks, they were. Kids. Three of them, with their ragged trousers rolled up past their knees, their grubby faces raw and flushed in the chill, snot shining on their upper lips. He hopped and waded and fell over and clawed his way back upright. The kids, laughing, scattered. One threw a rock at him.
There’d been a bridge in the rain. He’d been drowning, yes. Drowning a long time. Days? He was barefoot and his feet ached from the chill and his clothing was stiff and caked with an evil-smelling yellow mud. Farther along the shore he saw a solitary figure in a long patched coat and hat, picking his way over the shallows, and Walter trudged steadily toward him. He was trying to remember something important. What was it?
You know what it is Walter you know what it is—
The figure glared in suspicion as Walter got close. It was an old man, bewhiskered, sunken-cheeked, rancid, mean-looking.
“Get off, youse,” the old man hissed, waving a ragged arm. “Find your own bits.”
Walter seized the old man by the collar. The old man was flailing there in the white daylight, under that white sky, with the great walls of the embankment rising up over them, and he just wanted the man to stop, it was too much, so he ground the old man’s face into the muck, deeper, deeper. The limbs thrashed, went still. Then he rolled him over and studied the mud-encrusted face, the staring eyes. He scooped the muck out of the toothless mouth. Last of all he unlooped the sack from the shoulder, peeled the dead man out of his coat. He left the body there staring up at the sky. He trudged over and picked up the floppy hat and put the coat and hat on and then he made his way up to a sewer tunnel some twenty yards along.
The tunnel was tall enough to stand upright in. Foul matter was running in a slow-moving river along the middle and the walls were encrusted and slick. His eyes liked the darkness.
O come to us Walter come to Jacob he is coming Jacob is coming for the boy—
Jacob. His own friend. He wanted the boy for Jacob, that was it. Yes. The tunnel turned and divided into two and he heard a faint rustling from the easterly direction and climbed a short ladder and found himself on a platform, above a deep sewage-filled cavern. The far wall seemed to be moving and then he saw it was seething with rats.
Thirty feet on he came to a passageway. There was a flickering light within, a single candle guttering in a dish, casting everything into strange relief. It was an old cistern, with slots in the walls, most filled with the groaning half-stirring shapes of the sleeping poor. He stood a moment in the doorway, caked in muck. He saw the three children from the riverbank hunched in a corner, eyeing him warily, not laughing now. He stumbled to an empty slot, where a scumbled blanket lice-ridden and filthy lay in a tangled mess, and he lay himself down. He just wanted to sleep. That was all. Sleep.