Ribs’s freckled face crinkled into a grin. “It’s a gift.”
Shyly, Oskar cleared his throat. He was staring hard at his finger and the string on it. “I don’t like the—the—the Spider,” he mumbled. “He scares me. But Miss Davenshaw says it’s like a—a web. She says everything’s connected. The Spider, he, he can feel when something on the web moves. The—the vibrations of it. That’s how he finds the talents. When he’s sleeping. Maybe he can find Brendan and Wislawa and all the other disappeareds?”
“Sure. In his stomach.”
“Ribs—”
“I mean, that’s what he—he does, isn’t it?” Oskar went on. “He finds things? Kids, like us? He’s the one who found Charlie and Marlowe.…”
“Mr. Coulton found me,” said Charlie.
“Yeah, genius,” said Ribs. “But how’d he know where to look?”
“Oskar’s right,” said Komako firmly, tugging at her braid. “Even if the Spider isn’t involved, maybe he could help us. If we knew even just where to look, we could get some answers. None of us are safe here. That’s what the journal means. It means all those we’ve noticed gone missing, they’re all connected somehow. We’re not wrong. And if they can disappear, so can we. We need to go talk to the Spider.”
“Isn’t that exactly what Miss Davenshaw told us not to do?” said Charlie, coming back to himself.
“Yep,” said Ribs. She raised one hand. “So. Who wants to go?”
Komako raised her own. Then Oskar, Lymenion a moment later.
“Charlie?” said Komako.
“Charlie,” whispered Ribs. “Charlie…”
Charlie blew out his cheeks, his face troubled. “You really think the Spider’ll even talk to us?”
“We just got to ask nice, like.” Ribs winked. “An he knows loads of stuff.”
“When would we go?” he said.
“Tonight,” said Ribs.
“Tomorrow,” said Komako.
Near the fire, Oskar was staring at his lap. In the facing armchair, his flesh giant stared at its lap too, its oozing shoulders slumped in mimicry.
“Tomorrow?” whispered Oskar, miserable. “Isn’t that a bit … soon?”
It was then a voice piped up from across the dim room. The coffered door was open; little Marlowe stood in his nightshirt, watching them, his face spookily pale, eyes deeply shadowed. “I want to go too,” he said.
“Aw,” muttered Ribs. “Where’d he come from, then?”
“Mar?” said Charlie. “How long you been standing there?” He got up and went to the boy and closed the door and kneeled in front of him. “What’re you doing here anyhow? You get one of those dreams again?”
The boy nodded. He peered past Charlie, right to Komako, and he met her eye, and she looked away without being able to say why.
The thing was, Marlowe was so small, it nearly broke her heart. She looked at him and knew what she was seeing was her own little sister, Teshi. It didn’t matter that Teshi would be twice as old by now, if she’d lived. She still felt Teshi’s hand in hers, remembered how she’d hold out her arms to be picked up, and how Komako would hoist her up onto one hip, and how she’d sit some mornings behind Komako and run her little fingers through her hair, softly, like a warm wind. The way she’d smile before she even knew what Ko wanted. The way she’d yawn, with her whole face, her tiny little teeth exposed. All of it.
“I want to go with you, to see the Spider,” Marlowe said again. He set his jaw, stubborn. “Don’t leave me, Charlie. You said you wouldn’t.”
No one spoke.
The flesh giant raised its faceless head. There was something pitiful in it, something sweet. It breathed noisily, snuffling.
“Rrrh,” it rumbled.
* * *
Charlie was tired the next morning. All of them were. But if Miss Davenshaw noticed, she said nothing. She did close her book however with an exasperated bang, when no one seemed able to answer her questions, and stand at her desk and inform them to follow her. She took up a candle in a dish—not for her benefit, of course—and led them down into the shadowy cellars under Cairndale. The air was chilling; the candle guttered and righted itself; the stones smelled of decay. Broken webs drifted at their passing. Charlie kept brooding about the Spider, and his own file in Berghast’s study, the eeriness of it all. Wondering what the creature would reveal.
They were in a wide flagstoned passageway, the walls slumping in places from the press of the soil over centuries. Their footsteps left tracks in the dust. Though she was blind, Miss Davenshaw walked swiftly, almost angrily, and Charlie wondered if her talent, whatever it was, granted her a kind of sight. She was dressed in a long green dress that swept the dirt and she wore her hair in a steely bun and her throat was long and pale and decorated with a single black ribbon.
The others had come down here before. Charlie heard Ribs’s voice in his ear. “See, Oskar don’t mind this,” she murmured. “But you ask me, the jar babies is just about as disgusting as a slug in a pie.”
“Do not dawdle,” called Miss Davenshaw, impatient, as if she’d heard, and the darkness took her voice and whispered it off away.
She led them to a small storeroom lined with shelves and on those shelves jars and displays of human deformities, all of them fetuses. She set the candle down on a wall bracket and the light flickered and cast weird shadows over all. Marlowe moved closer, took Charlie’s hand in his own.
“What, exactly, are we?” said Miss Davenshaw primly. “What is the nature of this creature, man? Are we made in God’s image? Hm? Go on, look at the shelves, do. Consider what you see. Here, we leave squeamishness at the door.”
When the others walked slowly along, peering into the greasy jars, Charlie and Marlowe did the same. There were babies with singular eyes, leaning as if asleep against the walls of their jars; there were babies with stacked knots of flesh where their skulls should be, babies with outsized heads, babies with two heads, even one with a single head and two bodies. In the candlelight they seemed almost to move.
“What is the correct term for these specimens, Miss Ribbon?”
“Teratologies, Miss Davenshaw,” said Ribs meekly.
“Indeed. You will see here terminal craniofacial specimens, as well as conjoined twins, and cyclops syndromes. All of them monsters, in the eyes of medicine. But if we are to understand what we are, we would do well to consider how we come to be. What you see here follows its own rules of logic. These are not chaotic nor arbitrary malformations. Each of these aberrations swerve from the normal development in the womb in repeated, and predictable, ways. The womb bakes us, just as an oven bakes a cake; and if the recipe is flawed, or the ingredients poorly mixed, the result is not what we desire.” Miss Davenshaw clasped her hands in front of her, she turned her blindfolded face toward them. “You are each of you different, in precisely this manner. But it was not a breakdown in the recipe but the addition of some other ingredient, which led to your talent. Look closely and feel pity. Difference, children, is not monstrous. It is nature at work.”
Charlie looked. Pity welled up in him.
“And what of this?” she added. She gestured to a shriveled creature, half monkey, half fish. It looked mummified and fierce, its flesh drawn back off its fangs. “It is a mermaid, they say.”
“It is a hoax,” said Komako. “Someone just sewed a monkey and a fish tail together.”
“A hybrid, my young ones, would be an aberration indeed. Dogs with wings. Great cats with the heads of eagles. And so on. But these do not exist. Miss Onoe, what are the causes of the monstrous, as related by the alchemist Paré?”
Komako wet her lips. “The first is the glory of God,” she said. “The second is his wrath. The third, too great a quantity of seed. The fourth too little a quantity. The fifth…” She frowned, annoyed with herself.
“Mr. Czekowisz?”
“The fifth is the imagination,” said Oskar shyly.