He didn’t understand, and then he did. “Oh. Children? Why, are you worried about it?” As soon as he asked it he felt foolish; of course she’d be worried. He recalled his own midnight dread, as he’d climbed into the railway carriage with Henry Berghast, all those years ago.
“Listen,” he said, kneeling down. Sometimes he forgot she was just nine years old. “It’s a place where you’ll be safe, Komako. There’s other children, yes. You’ll make friends and you’ll lose them and maybe you’ll even find someone you like more than that, when you’re older. There’re teachers and classes and books for reading and you’ll learn about dustwork and what it is and what it can and can’t do. It’s a big old house and there are fields and the dirt is red like blood and the grass is greener than the water in Tokyo harbor. You’ll see. And there’s a lake for swimming in the summer, and an island with ruins on it.”
His voice faltered, remembering. The warm air smelled of salt, of sunbaked wood. Deckhands were running up the shrouds and barefooted along the booms, furling sails, tying them back. They were shirtless and sun-blackened like figs. Their shadows leaned far out over the water.
“What about you?” said Komako, in a small voice.
He blinked. “Me?”
“Will you be there, too?” she asked. “You won’t leave me?”
Jacob reached a slow arm out, and laid it around her shoulders, and she didn’t flinch, or tense, or draw away. They stood like that in the light of the setting sun.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he lied.
* * *
That night, in his slung hammock, in the narrow cabin he shared with Coulton, he dreamed of Bertolt. It didn’t seem like a dream. He was in the long ward at Cairndale. All the beds were vacated, their mattresses and ticking upended and left leaning against the wall, all but one. Daylight came in a white glow through the muslin curtains. His brother lay in bed, his flushed face turned into the pillow, hands unmoving and pale on top of the bedsheet. He was the same age he’d been when he died. So small. A nurse whom Jacob did not know walked swiftly down the room, her heels clicking, and stopped at Bertolt’s bed. She lifted a wrist and after a moment dropped it and then leaned across to open Bertolt’s eyelids. The room got brighter, and then brighter still. And then Jacob awoke.
He’d sweated through his nightshirt. He turned blearily and saw Coulton’s hammock hanging like an emptied sack and his friend nowhere. The lantern on its hook on the beam had been left burning low. Jacob swung his feet out, slid to the floor, rubbed at his face.
The drughr was standing in the corner.
“For God’s sake,” he hissed. His heart was hammering.
The invisible girl, she was watching you earlier, it said. You did not see her. You must be more careful, she is too curious.
“She’s not the only one,” he said pointedly. “Where’s Coulton?”
Mr. Coulton will not be back for some time.
But Jacob scarcely heard her. Something about the way she was standing reminded him of something, a memory from long ago, from his childhood in Vienna. And then he remembered.
“I know you…,” he said suddenly. “I’ve seen you before. When I was little—”
Yes. In the Stephansplatz.
“Under the cathedral arches, that day Bertolt fell in the street. That day the horse kicked him.”
Also the day you both first entered the orphanage. I saw you climb the steps; I saw the nuns take you inside. You looked back at me. Do you remember?
He shook his slow head. He was trying but couldn’t.
Also in the railway carriage, when Henry Berghast took you out of Vienna. I was seated across the aisle, at the window, watching you. You kept looking at me.
“I remember that,” he whispered.
I have always been with you, Jacob. I have always watched over you. You are precious, a great power is in you. Think of all the good you could do, the people you could help. If only you will let yourself become what you are meant to be.
“Bertolt always said tomorrow was a new start. What we were going to do hadn’t been done yet.”
But it has already been decided. What you will do, what you will become. Sometimes it is decided for us.
“I … I don’t know.”
You were meant for this. You were meant to help him. To find him.
He felt drained, like he hadn’t slept in weeks. He didn’t know what was the matter with him. The creature glided forward, her face a slow smokiness, all depth and dissipating clouds and drifts of shadow, fascinating, bottomless, like staring into a loch lit from far within by some eerie luminescent life, almost visible, so that he had to force himself to look away.
He is suffering, Jacob. He is still a child, as he was when he died. And he is alone and suffering. Unless …
“Unless what?”
The drughr’d removed her gloves.
Hold out your hands, she said. Turn them.
Her own hands were blackened, twisted like the hands of the dead. With her fingertips then, slowly, she brushed his palms. He flinched. She was touching him. It felt eerie, insubstantial, like an exhalation or a sigh, but it was a touch all the same. His shock turned to fear. All at once the drughr, that apparition, that figment, gripped his wrists and a searing pain ripped up his forearms. Her grip was strong. He staggered, shaking, a deep unmoored sickness washing over him, but she did not let go, she held him at arm’s length as if an agreement were being sealed though he’d agreed to nothing, and his hands were on fire and an agony crackled in his knuckles and wrists and he could not stop himself and he cried out.
She let go.
He stumbled back, cradling his wrists, clawlike. His hands and forearms were stained a dark inky stain, as if he’d bathed them in quinine. It looked as if they were tattooed in swirls and patterns, but the tattoos were moving, shifting languidly inside his skin. His knuckles were deformed, his thumbs elongated and monstrous, his fingers yellow and cracked.
“What’ve you done?” he whispered in horror.
The coin is struck, Jacob Marber.
She gestured to the corner of the narrow cabin. The lantern at its beam swayed slowly. Jacob’s heart felt heavy and hurting in his chest. His ruined fingers twitched, almost of their accord, and a small curl of dust on the floor lifted, suddenly, and came to him, and as he turned his hands he felt it, a forcefulness, a cold power in him that wasn’t in him before. In wonder he worked the dust and to his astonishment it folded over itself and grew, it grew denser, darker, as if it were multiplying in front of his eyes, dust but not quite dust now, something else, dimming the lantern on its iron hook and blacking out the hammocks and filling the little cabin with a swirling, inky darkness.
The dust is a part of you now, Jacob, came the drughr’s voice. He could no longer see her for the thickening air. I sense a beautiful hunger. Feel it, feel what you are capable of.
And he did; he could. He felt elated, as if he could do anything, as if through sheer will he could bring a darkness into the world.
He made a fist, the ink in his skin clouding and coming apart and drifting together again, like smoke, and then the dust was sucked down under his monstrous curled fingers in a swift whorl and was extinguished. The dust was in him, an electrical current.
Jacob studied his malformed hands. He felt different, older. “This can bring my brother … back?”
That is only a taste, she said. That is only a beginning.
He wet his lips. Suddenly he remembered Coulton, and felt a pang of guilt, and glanced back at the door as if it might open any moment. His friend would never understand. He lowered his voice yet further. “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what I must do.”
The lantern creaked above them. He could hear the water sloshing gently at the bulkheads. Something was happening to the air behind her, as if it were fraying, rending open.
The journey is long and the nights are short, murmured the drughr. You must be willing to come with me. You must leave all this and follow. For you are not strong yet.
“I will be,” he said. “I’ll get strong.”
The strange opening in the air widened, large enough for him to step through. The drughr’s reply, when it came, was a whisper.
Come, then; come, and make a difference in the world.
The INSTITUTE
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1882