But now ahead Alice could see it, the pale figure from High Street, the litch. It was standing raggedly with its lean arms at its sides and its hat doffed and hairless head bowed, almost as if it were listening for something. For a moment she feared they’d been sighted. But then it turned, peering around as if to be certain it was unobserved, and the fog thinned just at that moment, and Alice saw its features, and she froze. The auburn whiskers were gone, the thinning hair was gone, but still she knew that face.
It was Frank Coulton.
Beside her Mrs. Harrogate caught her breath. “Oh God,” she whispered.
And then the creature that had once been Frank Coulton put back on the bowler hat and clambered spiderlike up the wall and leaped lightly over and down the other side and was gone.
Alice’s face was white with shock. “It was him,” she said. “It was Coulton. I thought he died—” She turned angrily on Mrs. Harrogate. “You said he died!”
But the older woman, shaken, could say nothing.
Just then the keywrasse poured like smoke from between her ankles, and Alice watched it scamper up the high wall, impossibly fast, and pause at the top with its spine peaked and its tail high. It turned all of its eyes down toward them, as if to check that they would follow.
Alice turned in place, looking for a way up. There was a rickety ladder leaning against a wagon and she kicked it down and dragged it across and leaned it up.
A litch.
The ladder didn’t quite reach.
Coulton’s a litch.
She spat. She rubbed her knuckles and glared to keep from thinking about it; and then, with her oilskin coat crackling out behind her, the fog like a living thing all around, she set the grip of the lantern in her teeth and started to climb.
26
HOUSE OF DOORS
A figure in a black cloak was waiting for them on the dock when they rowed back from the island. The glow of his lantern was like coins of light on the dark water. No one spoke; only the soft splashing of the oar blades, the creak of the locks cut the stillness. It was Dr. Berghast’s manservant, stone-faced and grim; and he lifted the lantern in his fist and shone it from face to face.
At Charlie he stopped; at Marlowe he stopped.
“You two,” he said in a voice as deep as a bass drum. “Dr. Berghast will see you. Now.”
He said no rebuke about their being out, about their clear trespass. And yet his displeasure was plain. Charlie felt Ribs’s lips near his ear.
“Shit,” she whispered.
Komako was looking ashamed. He knew she’d be blaming everyone for their going but it was her idea too, she was willing too. He remembered what she’d said to him, when they were alone: I know what it looks like here.… But nowhere’s safe, not really. Suddenly he wondered if it wasn’t shame in her face, but something else. Fear.
He reached out to steady Marlowe. But Ribs wasn’t finished. “Don’t you believe all what he tells you,” she whispered. “Old Berghast, I mean. Slick as oil in peat, he is.”
“Ribs, I don’t even know what that means,” Charlie muttered out of the side of his mouth.
“Come,” the manservant barked.
He felt her cool fingers brush his wrist. “Just you be careful, Charlie Ovid.”
He clambered out of the boat, leaving it rocking at the gunwales. Marlowe reached for his hand, and together they followed the manservant into darkness.
* * *
Komako watched them disappear off into the night. Then the three of them made their slow way back, trailed by Oskar’s giant, Lymenion. No one spoke. In the quiet dark, Komako was troubled. She’d seen something—no, she’d been shown something—while in the grip of the glyphic.
She was finding it difficult to make sense of it. They trudged grimly back up into the dimly lit halls of Cairndale and slipped into their favorite hiding spot, at the end of a deserted corridor, under a big window that looked out across at the east wing. They could see a light on in Berghast’s study.
“I saw something,” she said at last. She looked up, looked at Oskar and Lymenion and at Ribs, who had materialized in the gloom. “On the island. The glyphic showed me something. I tried to ask about the disappeared kids and the carriage, but I don’t think it made any impression. But he’s dying. The glyphic’s dying, and he showed me a kind of, I don’t know—memory, maybe. Of Dr. Berghast, feeding him some kind of … medicine. I think it’s what he’s making in his laboratory. I think he’s keeping the glyphic alive. And I saw the orsine collapsing in on itself. Cairndale was in flames.” She frowned, shaking her head. “It was awful. I don’t know if it was the future, or if it happened a long time ago, or if it was just what the glyphic was afraid might happen.” She ran her hands over her braid, confused. “If the glyphic dies,” she said slowly, “then the orsine will open. Anything will be able to get through.”
Oskar was nodding at her, nodding as if he understood. “The—the dead will come through.”
“You saw it too,” she said.
“No,” he whispered. “I mean, I saw some of that. I saw he was dying.…” Oskar’s eyes grew wet. “I—I don’t know how, I just sort of saw it, you know? And—and I saw how afraid he was. That’s what I mostly saw, Ko. The Spider’s fear. But there was something else, too. A shop front. It had ALBANY CHANDLERS written on it. And—and—I knew it, Ko. I knew where it was. It was the Grassmarket, in Edinburgh. Mr. Coulton and I stayed near there when he first brought me over, before we came on to Cairndale.”
“Albany Chandlers. It’s in Edinburgh?”
Oskar nodded. “Do you think … do you think the missing talents are there?”
“Maybe.”
“Why else would the glyphic show that? I mean, if not—?”
Komako wet her lips. She did a mental checklist of what was in play, ticking each off on her fingers. “We’ve got the glyphic dying. Dr. Berghast is trying to keep him alive, but it can’t be forever. We’ve got the dark carriage and the disappeared kids. It’s coming from some chandler’s in Edinburgh, looks like. And we’ve got the files on the disappeared being taken from Dr. Berghast’s office. Someone here at Cairndale has to be working with the carriage.”
“You reckon it’s all connected?” murmured Ribs. “You reckon Berghast knows about them missing kids? He had their names in that book—”
“No,” said Komako firmly.
Oskar’s watery eyes brightened. “Maybe it’s—it’s—it’s not as sinister as it looks,” he said. “Maybe Dr. Berghast does know about it, but the kids aren’t being hurt. Maybe it’s for their own protection.”
Ribs snorted. “Protection?”
“Maybe they’re in some special kind of—of—of danger. From Jacob.”
“More than Marlowe?”
Oskar blushed, fell quiet.
“Rruh,” growled the flesh giant.
Komako tugged at her braid, troubled. “Ribs? What’d the Spider show you?”
But Ribs had a strange expression on her face, half-anger, half-disgust. “Hm?” she said, her freckled nose upturned.
“Your vision. What did you see?”
“Oh, lots. Lots an lots.” Ribs nodded. “Plen-ty.”
“And? Would you care to enlighten us?”
Ribs picked at a scab on her elbow, her brow furrowed. “Oh, well … there were that chandler’s. Yep. In Edinburgh. An that bit about Berghast doctoring to the Spider, I seen that too. Whew. There were just, uh, lots of things, yep.”
No one spoke.
Then Komako said quietly, “You didn’t see anything, did you?”
Ribs scowled. Her voice fairly cracked in disbelief. “Why am I the one what never gets shown nothing? He bloody well picks you and—and Oskar, but he don’t show me nothing? What’s a matter with me?”
“Maybe he couldn’t see you,” Oskar said helpfully. “Because you were invisible?”
She gave him a poisonous look. “It were a rhetorical question!”
“Rrh,” mumbled Lymenion.
Ribs glared at the flesh giant. “What. The Spider talk to you too?”
Komako smiled, despite herself. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We don’t have much time. We need to find out what this chandler’s is.”
“What’re you saying?”
“We need to go to Edinburgh.”
Oskar blinked nervously. “Edinburgh! But we—we—we can’t get through the wards.… Not without permission.”
“Actually…” Ribs rubbed at her red hair, reluctant. “Me and Ko found a opening, a while back. I reckon it’s still there. It’s a gap in the wards, Oskar. Just near right big enough for all of us to crawl through. Even old Lymenion.”