It was a bolt-hole, a secret room built centuries ago, to keep Catholic priests safe in a time when they were being persecuted by the king. Berghast had long since converted it to his own purposes. Only he and his manservant, Bailey, knew of it. It was damp, this deep under the ground, and cold, the walls carved out of the very rock itself.
He unlocked the door, shone the lantern into the dark. There came a soft clink of chains; a clicking noise, almost like the wings of an insect. A figure was suspended by its arms, on the far wall, its head drooping down onto its chest. The smell was terrible.
“Mr. Laster,” said Berghast softly. “May I call you Walter again?”
The litch raised its face, blinked its liquid eyes. There was a black intelligence in them, something quick and cruel and no longer human. It watched him.
Berghast hung the lantern from a hook in the ceiling and looped his thumbs into his waistcoat and regarded the creature. Then he went to a small table in the corner and picked up a dish. It held a black gumlike substance: opium.
Walter gave a quiet whimper, watching.
But Berghast did not want him to suffer. No, such suffering—and Berghast’s eyes, his every gesture radiated his sorrow—was the last thing he wanted for poor Walter. No, what Henry Berghast wanted most of all was for Walter to end his own suffering. Or, rather, to let Berghast end it for him. All Walter had to do was give himself over to Berghast’s questions, all he had to do was tell him what he wanted to know, and his suffering would end. It would be so easy, surely—
All this Walter’s quick loathsome gaze took in; Berghast saw it flicker and vanish, like a lizard under a rock.
“So Jacob wanted you to be taken by Mrs. Harrogate,” he said, by way of beginning the night’s session.
“No.”
“But that is what you told me last time. Is it not?”
Walter licked his lips. He said, shakily, “Jacob knew she would … bring us. To you.”
“It wasn’t because of the child, then? He didn’t send you to kill the boy?”
Walter was whispering something under his breath, something Berghast didn’t catch.
“Walter?”
“Walter Walter little Walter…,” the creature echoed in a whisper.
Berghast studied it in impatience. “So he did not send you to kill Marlowe, Walter?”
Walter shook his pale hairless head. Berghast saw the thin red lines of blood where the iron cuffs had rubbed his wrists raw. “Jacob … knows. He knows where we are.… That’s why we’re here, yes. He wants this.”
“Oh, Walter,” Berghast murmured sadly. “You believe he wanted this for you?” His gaze took in the grim cell, the chains, the opium unsmoked in its little dish, with a profound disappointment. “I think not. No. You are here because Jacob has abandoned you. No other reason. Jacob has left you to perish because you are no longer of any use to him. But you are of use to me. It is I who had you rescued, I who had you brought here. It pains me to say it, of course, but your Jacob does not love you. Not anymore. You have failed him, and he despises you for it.”
Walter coughed, the needlelike teeth flashing in the lantern light. His whole body shuddered with the effort. “But he is coming … he is coming here.…”
“He cannot. You know that he cannot.”
“The voices…,” Walter whispered. “They talk to us, they tell us…”
Berghast took a step closer. He could see the clawlike fingers, the deep gashes in the litch’s hairless torso, the terrible wet red lips. And the teeth. This was a creature that would rip him to pieces the first chance it got. “What do the voices tell you, Walter?”
“He knows they are coming for him. The women. Jacob knows.”
“Who do you mean?”
“Mrs. Harrogate. And the other.”
Berghast frowned. This was unexpected. Always, just as he was prepared to consider everything out of the litch’s mouth madness and delusion, some strange quick detail of truth would emerge and leave him marveling.
He decided to change his approach. “It must be so distressing for you,” he said in sympathy. “Jacob doesn’t know how much he needs you. If only you could give him something, something he desires, something that would show him. Then he would come for you, then he would not abandon you. What would you give him, Walter, if you could? What is it Jacob most wants?”
Walter raised his head. His eyes were calm and intelligent and reflected the lantern’s glow. “Cairndale,” he whispered. “We’d give him Cairndale, yes. And then we’d give him you.”
* * *
Charlie didn’t say a word the entire walk back through the dark manor. There was too much. All the strange account of the orsine’s history and the drughr and the terrible news of Marlowe’s mother and what had happened to her, and the island before that, and the Spider, and that heavy toothed glove of Berghast’s. He and the kid cut across the courtyard in the cool air and then back inside, up the big stairs under the stained glass windows, past Mr. Smythe’s door. And still they never said a word. They could hear Mr. Smythe’s snoring through the wall. Charlie cast quick worried glances over at Marlowe but the boy was lost in his thoughts, troubled, or sad, or just disappointed. Charlie didn’t blame him. Berghast was a disappointment, as an adopted father, as a mentor. He remembered what Ribs had warned him, as he got off the rowboat, but he didn’t say it to Marlowe. He didn’t need to. They didn’t speak as they undressed, they didn’t speak as they washed down their necks and faces, they didn’t speak as they climbed into bed and folded their arms up under their heads and stared, identical, up at the dark ceiling. The curtains were stirring, as if something were in them.
“Mar?” Charlie said at last, in a low whisper. “You okay?”
It was a stupid question, and he regretted asking it as soon as he said it. He turned in his sheets, he looked across. He still had the silver ring on the cord at his neck, the ring his mother had forced into his hand as she lay dying, and he rubbed at it now, brooding. “Your father, he—”
“He’s not my father, Charlie.”
Charlie nodded in the darkness.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Marlowe added. “I don’t trust him either.”
“Okay.”
“It doesn’t mean what he said isn’t true.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what he wants us to do.”
Charlie swallowed. “Yeah. But it doesn’t mean we should, either.”
He saw the little boy’s pale face in the darkness. His eyes were open. He couldn’t imagine what the boy must be feeling. All his eight unlucky years he’d been passed from adult to adult, like a bad debt, and it was that man, that unkind, clinical, cold man who’d started it all. Charlie felt a tight fury rising in him, at the unfairness of it all.
“Hey,” he whispered. “If you want to go into that orsine of his, I’m with you, Mar. I’m not saying otherwise. All right? But we don’t have to do this. There’s always other options.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. We could leave. Just go. You and me.”
The kid looked miserable. “I think Mr. Thorpe wants me to go through,” he said quietly. “I think he … needs me to. He’s dying, Charlie. What Dr. Berghast said is true. I saw it.”
Charlie blinked. “What’d the Spider say to you, anyhow?”
Marlowe turned his face, folded himself up onto one elbow. He seemed to be thinking about it. “It wasn’t like words,” he murmured. “It was more like … pictures, moving. In a fog. I … I think it was what’s going to happen, Charlie. Or what might happen. I don’t know.”
“What’d you see?”
The little boy’s voice was just a whisper. “Nothing about what we went for. The disappeared kids, I mean. I tried to ask about it, but…” He paused. “I saw Alice, Charlie. She was dead. Jacob Marber’d killed her. I saw you, too, but you had that symbol, the one from your ring, and it was glowing in your hand. In your palm. Like the glove we saw but you weren’t wearing the glove, and like it was on fire. And I saw Mr. Coulton, but he was like that other man, Walter, from Mrs. Harrogate’s. The one who attacked you. All white and his hair all gone and his teeth sharp—”