“Walter. The litch.”
Alice went to the door and locked it. Then she pulled down her traveling case, unwrapped her revolver from out of its oilcloth, opened the little leather satchel she carried the cartridges in. She loaded it carefully, trying to steady her thoughts. Walter Laster: that’d be the one Mrs. Harrogate was riding with, in the rear coach. The man Coulton had dragged in, the night before.
“Mrs. Harrogate said he’s dead. Dead and not dead.” Charlie’d started to breathe sharp fast breaths, almost panting in his fear. “We’ve got to get out of here, we’ve got to go. We can’t stay. I seen him, he’s got these long teeth, and he can crawl on the walls like a spider, and his skin, it’s all white—”
Charlie started to shake the door hard, so that the glass rattled in its bracket.
“It’s locked, Charlie,” she said, trying to calm him. “No one’s getting through. Mr. Coulton will be back soon, it’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” Charlie said, giving up on the door. “You don’t know what he is. He’s not a person.” His voice was rising now in pitch. “Nothing ever hurt me, Miss Alice. Ever. But he did. He hurt me.” Charlie unbuttoned his cuffs, rolled up his sleeves. On each forearm were four deep, infected-looking claw marks. “Mrs. Harrogate said he was already dead. What kind of dead does that?”
“The kind that needs a little more encouragement, I guess. Like a bullet through the eye.” Alice looked at Marlowe. “Is that who you were talking about? Walter Laster?”
Marlowe’s eyes were big. “No,” he whispered.
“Who, then?”
“The other one. The man from the hotel.”
Alice went very still. “Jacob Marber’s on the train?”
The little boy nodded. His voice was barely more than a whisper. “And he knows we’re here too.”
* * *
They waited. The minutes ticked by, Charlie and Marlowe looking increasingly scared. But Coulton didn’t come. There was a thick, muffled kind of silence in the side corridor beyond, as if the railway carriage were emptied, as if all its passengers had fallen into a deep sleep.
From time to time Alice would lift the corner of the door curtain, glance out into the corridor. But there was no movement, nothing. No conductor came by. No Coulton.
Behind her, Charlie Ovid had pulled back the outside window curtains a bit and Alice could see they were passing through the outskirts of some gray industrial city, brick walls stained with soot, iron railings twisted into pained shapes. She caught a glimpse of dozens of smokestacks, churning a brown smudge into the sky. Dull sooty rooftops. Then they were rising again, up, out of the city’s edges, northward.
Coulton should have been back by now, that was the truth of it. It was eerie, how quiet the entire carriage had gone. At last she heard the sound of the corridor door clattering open, the sudden rush of the tracks, and then the muffling as the door again snicked shut. Heavy slow footsteps. But they were coming from the front of the train, from the porter car and the locomotive beyond. She frowned, changed to the facing seat. Cautiously she lifted the curtain to see.
And dropped it, almost at once, in horror.
It was him.
A sooty darkness smoldered off his black coat, his hat, his black gloved hands. He was long and thin, with broad shoulders, and he wore a thick black beard, trimmed along the cut of his jaw like a barber. But his face was averted, and she could not see his eyes. He was dipping his head, peering into the compartments, and as he came forward the carriage itself seemed cast into gloom. Charlie and Marlowe had gone still, staring at her, at the look on her face, probably, and she met their eyes and she didn’t try to hide it. Her heart was hammering in her chest.
“It’s him,” whispered Marlowe.
She didn’t answer. She looked around, scanning their small compartment, the webbing overhead, the mahogany panels in the door. Her gun was gripped in her hand and she looked at it and then slid it into the pocket of her oilskin coat. She went to the window, fumbled the sash, wrestled the pane all the way down. The curtains sucked out and snapped along the outside of the train. She stuck her face out, into the roar of the wind, her hair flattening behind her. She squinted.
There was a conductor’s handrail running the length of the car, and narrow protuberances that could be used for footholds. It’d have to do.
She ducked back inside the carriage, her head reeling. “Quickly, now,” she said. “We need to get farther back in the train. Now.”
Charlie looked at Marlowe, alarmed. “He’s not climbing outside any train, Miss Alice. He’s too little.”
But she was already buttoning Marlowe’s coat fast. She looked a long moment into the boy’s face and then she nodded, satisfied by what she saw there. “You hold on to me and don’t let go. All right? I need you to close your eyes and not to open them until we’re in the next carriage. Just like we did in the hotel. Can you do that?”
Marlowe glanced fearfully at the locked door. A thin black smoke had started to seep in around its edges.
“Marlowe?” she hissed.
“Okay.”
She folded her hat and stuffed it into her free pocket and closed up her coat and then she tied her hair out of her face. She put her hands on Charlie’s shoulders. “You can do this, Charlie.”
Charlie Ovid nodded. “It can’t hurt me any, falling off a train,” he whispered.
The compartment rattled around them. She heard a soft rap at the door. Even as they moved to the window, she knew there was no time. Where the hell was Coulton?
Alice picked up Marlowe against her chest, little arms interlocked around her neck, and she climbed out, out into the dizzying roar of the air, the full blast of it nearly knocking her sideways. She gripped the conductor’s rail over the windows, inched back along the carriage. The wind was at their backs, shoving them onward. The gravel and railroad ties rocketed past, a blur under her. Charlie swung his long legs out after her, quick, lithe.
She could feel Marlowe trembling, his little face crushed into her chest. “It’s okay, it’s all right, it’s all right,” she kept murmuring into his ear.
As they clambered across the windows she peered into the compartments. They were all, somehow, impossibly, empty.
She was nearly at the back of the carriage when something hard and black banged and ricocheted past her, away. She glanced back. Jacob Marber clung to the outside wall of the carriage, at the front. His silk hat was gone. As she watched, astonished, he began to creep, slowly, gloved hand over gloved hand, sidelong toward them, his soft shoes slipping as he went. His hair was blown forward over his face obscuring it in the wind but she could feel it, somehow, his malevolent gaze, the way his eyes were fixed on Marlowe and Charlie.
“Charlie!” she shouted. He was maybe ten feet behind her still. “Charlie, hurry!”
Jacob Marber’s long coat snapped forward around him in the roar, like a ribbon of darkness, reaching for them.
* * *
The baggage coach in the rear of the train was hushed, dim. Two raised air vents in the ceiling let in the only light, a faint trickling gray daylight. Margaret Harrogate crept slowly past the trunks and dark stacks of traveling cases, the shapeless bundles of goods in sacks, all tied off behind webbing, listening all the while to the faint clatter of the railway ties under the floor and for some sound, any sound, else. She held Coulton’s gun cocked at her side.
In the middle of the coach she stood very still, glancing quickly behind her. Nothing.
“Walter?” she called out softly. “Walter, it’s Mrs. Harrogate, dear.”