The litch was thrashing wildly in her grip, flipping about, its claws flailing. Alice saw it writhe and clamber around the woman’s arm, quicksilver fast, fluid as a weasel, and get on her back and start tearing at her flesh. Alice could see gobbets of meat coming off in the creature’s claws and the big woman was twisting, reaching up, trying to get a grip on the thing. Then she had it, and she dragged it over her head and smashed it onto the roof. But when she leaned back, it was clinging to her arm, and came up with her, its teeth snapping. It leaped again off her and forward, as if to get to Marlowe, and the huge woman, Brynt, threw herself forward and again caught it by one ankle.
Alice was trying to get a clear shot at the creature but couldn’t. And then the woman raised her face and looked at Alice. They locked eyes for only an instant. There was nothing in her face, no expression at all. The litch was snapping and twisting, trying to get free. The big woman grabbed its leg with her other hand also, no longer holding on to anything, and she threw all her weight sideways.
“No!” Alice cried out.
For a long impossible moment the litch hung on. The woman, Brynt, was banging hugely against the side of the carriage. The litch snarled and looked at the boy with desperation, but Brynt’s weight was too much, and then the creature that was Walter Laster was ripped bodily off the roof and the two of them, woman and litch, were blown out over the gap and were gone.
“Brynt!” Marlowe was screaming. “Brynt!”
Alice grabbed the boy, struggling in her arms.
Through his windblown hair she saw Jacob Marber, striding now over the carriage roof, purposeful, at speed, coming for them. A darkness fell over the sun.
* * *
Margaret Harrogate opened her eyes in agony.
Every part of her body hurt. There was torn paper sticking to the blood on her hands and her belly and something was wrong with her legs. She tried to stand, wobbled, fell back. Tried again. Groaned and peered woozily around.
Walter was gone.
The coach was quiet. In the dimness, she could feel through the floor the rear trucks rattling at speed over the tracks. She got to her knees, clutching her belly, then got to her feet. She stumbled for the door. She had to find Walter. Had to warn Coulton, warn the children.
Somehow she climbed over the couplings, into the baggage coach. It too was a mess. And somehow she staggered through that, making her slow agonizing way, and crossed the couplings again in the roaring wind, and entered the side corridor of the carriage where she’d drugged and tied Walter up, back in that fog-lit station in London.
That seemed like a lifetime ago. The carriage she found herself in, now, was in ruins. Doors were splintered open, ripped from their frames, windowpanes were shattered. Wind whistled through. There were bodies lying in the corridor, throats opened, blood greasy and black underfoot. Halfway down the carriage she slid in some congealed mess and just caught herself, gasping in pain.
Some of those lying there weren’t quite dead and they moaned or cried softly to her as she passed. But she didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, not until she’d reached the crowded third-class carriage and glimpsed the rows of passengers still in their seats, asphyxiated, faces leeched and gray, their eyes bulging from their sockets, some of them still clutching their belongings to their chests.
She found Coulton lying facedown in the aisle, his skin white and chalky, shriveled, like a hand left too long in the bath, as if all the blood had been drained from him.
“Oh no, no, no, no,” she whispered, cradling his head in her lap. The blood from her own wounds was getting on his skin, on his face. She closed his eyelids, leaving a bloody thumbprint on each. That was when she heard a scraping sound above her, and she looked up, uncomprehending, and something crashed mightily and the carriage shuddered and rocked side to side, and then she understood. They were on the roof.
She got painfully back up, made her way forward to the platform. The wind ripped at her. She fumbled across to the next car and gripped the railing hard, her teeth clenched, and looked up. She could see Walter, scrabbling and clawing at someone, a huge woman, her shredded skirts rippling out around her there in the wind. She heard Alice Quicke shouting from above the forward carriage, and she tried to think.
Then her eyes fell on the coupling between the cars, the chain rattling there.
It was, she knew, their only chance. She leaned out, tried to unscrew the turnbuckle. It didn’t move, didn’t even budge. The carriages were grinding and clattering together, the ties roaring past underneath in a blur. She heard Walter scrabble up above, heard the big stranger cry out, and then both plunged off the side of the roof, and Margaret gasped in pain and fell back.
It was no use.
She could feel the cuts in her stomach. There was blood all down her front. The wind was in her ears, in her eyes, stinging.
And then, as if from a long way off, Margaret Harrogate slowly grit her teeth, and got back to her feet, and leaned out and pulled at the coupling for all she was worth.
* * *
Alice pulled the trigger.
She watched the bullet go into Jacob Marber, strike him full in the chest, saw him shudder and spin sideways in the wind and then straighten and keep walking, steadily, quickly, toward them.
She fired again, and again, unloaded her weapon, and each time the bullets seemed to strike him and be absorbed by the dark core of him and just pass on and through, somehow, though it made no sense and broke every law of nature Alice had ever trusted in. Marber didn’t react at all, just kept coming on, the air darkening in front of him.
Charlie had crawled to the far end of the roof, clinging to it, and was hollering at her. Alice tried to shove Marlowe after him but the boy wouldn’t go, just peered up at her, his face smooth. It was like something had happened inside him, seeing that woman Brynt.
“Go, Marlowe,” she cried. “Go with Charlie! Go!”
She glanced back at Jacob Marber. And that was when she saw it: a long curved scythe of darkness, like a tentacle of smoke, rising up out of the monster and then thrusting itself forward, toward her, and she couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, and she felt something pierce her side, punch through her ribs with a searing pain, and then she was lifted impossibly up off her feet and held suspended there in the rushing wind, impaled by that darkness.
The pain was more than she’d ever known. She was clutching at the darkness, clawing at it, gasping. And that was when Marlowe reached up, and put both his hands on her ribs, his thumbs folded inward, shining suddenly. His skin was blue, transparent, brighter than she had ever seen it. And she felt the wicked point of the scythe withdraw, and all at once she fell onto the roof and crumpled. The darkness, whatever it was, was helixing around Marlowe now, getting sucked sideways by the wind but re-forming and spiraling all around and he just stood in the middle of it, hands upturned, his little face looking back at Jacob Marber.
Marber was nearly at the edge of the roof, nearly at the gap, not even fifteen feet from them. And Marlowe suddenly held out both his little hands, so small, defenseless, as if to warn the monster back, as if to tell it to stop.
Alice stared, stunned. And the darkness that was circling him all at once hurtled toward Jacob Marber, and surrounded him, and underneath it all the darkness was somehow glowing with that same blue shining until the man was lost utterly in the light and there was only a vague outline of a figure, struggling there, as if trapped in blue amber.
And then Marlowe collapsed.
There came a loud whump, and the blue light arced out and away, and Jacob Marber, on his knees, raised his slow face. His eyes seemed to be bleeding darkness. His expression was twisted in a rictus of pain and fury. He got to his feet. Alice crawled forward, her side ablaze with pain, and she cradled the boy in her arms.