Two horses harnessed to an old four-wheeled clarence cab were clopping down the street in their direction, and Trelawny waved the driver toward the Crawfords.
“It’s got a roof — and four walls!” the old man yelled.
“Right,” snapped McKee, stepping into a patch of yellow streetlamp radiance in the cab’s path and waving her arms. “We
The cab swerved to a halt, and McKee had opened the door before the old vehicle had stopped rocking on its springs, and she boosted Johanna inside and scrambled in herself and reached out a hand for Crawford.
Crawford was two steps away and hurrying forward when the thing struck.
CHAPTER THREE
Unripe harvest there hath none to reap it
From the watery, misty place;
Unripe vineyard there hath none to keep it
In unprofitable space.
THE ABRUPT ROAR of it was like mountains crashing together at the end of the world, and the sheer sudden air pressure of the sound blew Crawford’s hat away and drove him to his knees.
The cab slid away sideways across the shaking pavement, and the cab horses bolted, pulling the slewing cab after them in terrified acceleration down Tottenham Court Road.
Crawford rolled through the snow to the gutter, and he found himself staring straight up into the sky.
The stars were perceptibly moving outward from around a dark shape that was leaning down toward him; a number of wings or limbs radiated out from the central blackness of it, and it was rushing toward him at astronomical speed.
Instinctively he raised his arms to block it, and then he was seeing the thing over the top of the bottle that he still gripped in his hand.
The terrible roaring stopped so suddenly that Crawford almost felt weightless, and the bottle in his upraised hand was glowing now, blue and green and gold. He blinked against the dazzling light, but his view of the sky was now blocked by a broad figure in a black robe and a wide hood, facing away from him.
“I’m Clubs,” said the figure in a clear, resonant voice, and Crawford dazedly realized that it was a woman — a nun, in fact.
Beyond her he saw a flickering in the sky, and the air seemed to shiver and surge.
“I belong to your family,” the nun went on, “but not to you.”
For a moment the air was still — and then a gust of wind whipped down the street, so strongly that it rolled Crawford over onto his face.
He hugged the bottle and scrambled to his hands and knees and scuttled across the pavement to an iron fence, and when he dimly realized that he was trying to crawl between the close-set iron bars he sat back, coughing and shivering violently, and quickly swung his gaze in every direction.
The sky was empty except for stars. More lights were on in nearby windows, but nobody had yet burst out into the street to see what the terrible noise had been, and though it should have frightened all the horses in this dozen streets, several cabs were wheeling along the street sedately enough. By the dimming glow of the bottle he still held, Crawford saw the round-faced nun standing near him in the street, and she smiled.
“Poor man,” she said, and then as she sighed, he was able to see windows and walls across the street through the space where she had been.
Crawford got weakly to his feet, gasping and still shivering, for the cold wind had found his sweat-damp shirt and hair. Cabs and carriages whirred past, the horses’ hooves clattering on the icy road, and the drivers were all too bundled up in hats and scarves to even glance at where Crawford stood.
The bottle had stopped glowing. He raised it against the glare of a streetlamp, and the furry little thing still bobbed inside.
He lowered the bottle and peered away through the traffic down Tottenham Court Road. The coach with his wife and daughter in it had at least apparently not capsized; and McKee knew where he would be going next.
Looking the other way, Crawford saw the high wheels of a hansom cab rolling in his direction.
He stepped out and waved, and the driver reined to the curb, but the man frowned at the sight of Crawford’s disheveled clothes and bottle.
“It’s not — liquor,” Crawford managed to say. “Oh hell — five shillings if you’ll take me to the — to the Spotted Dog in Holywell Street.”
That was the way to Chichuwee’s underground chamber, and McKee would know to meet him there.
HE REMEMBERED TO HAVE two pennies in his hand when he pushed open the door of the Spotted Dog, and he laid the brown coins on the counter of the little window in the entry hall and took his dented tin card before stepping through the open doorway into the remembered wide kitchen. And for nearly a minute he just stood on the flagstone floor and let the warmth sting his face and hands.
Under the glaring gas jets between the ceiling beams, men and women stood around the black iron stove in the corner or sat with plates on the shelf-like bench that ringed all four walls, and as he shuffled farther inside Crawford wondered if any of them might have been here on that night fourteen years ago when McKee had brought him to this place.
Again the room’s warm air smelled of onions and bacon, and this time he crossed to the door in the far side of the room and hung his coat on one of the hooks in the hall beyond it, then shambled back into the kitchen, still holding the bottle, and joined the queue by the stove. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast at a seaside pub in Southend, and McKee and Johanna would probably be arriving here soon.
He looked down at himself — the knees of his trousers were torn, and black stains mottled the front of his white shirt. With his free hand he tried to brush his hair flat.
A gritty voice behind him said, “When you going to open the bottle, then, eh?”
Crawford turned and saw a toothless old fellow already taking hold of the bottle Crawford held.
“It’s not liquor,” said Crawford hastily, pulling it away. “It’s a, a laboratory specimen, in formaldehyde, a…” He glanced at the thing. “A platypus. A … baby one.”
“A baby patty-puss!” exclaimed the old man, vastly impressed. “Can you shake it out?”
“No,” Crawford said desperately, “it would — crumble on exposure to air.”
“Those things dance, I’ve heard,” put in a haggard-looking girl in front of him. “Make it dance.”
“A dancing panda-puss!” said the old man, nearly beside himself now with excitement.
“Won’t make much of a dinner,” advised another man. “It’ll render down even more when they cook it. Two bites and it’s gone.”
“It’s a nun!” exclaimed a thin young girl in old leather trousers and a stained apron, who had crouched to peer at the bottle. “It’s a baby nun! You can’t cook her!”
Crawford was sweating in his damp shirt now. Why couldn’t Christina have kept the damn thing in an opaque jar? He frowned and looked worriedly toward the street door. And what the hell had become of McKee and Johanna?
“It’s not a nun,” he said dizzily, “and I’m not going to cook it.” Several pairs of bloodshot eyes were still looking at him hopefully, and he added, “And it doesn’t dance.”
One by one, the people ahead of him in line were served plates of some steaming stuff, and when it was his turn to stand in front of the stove he paid four pence for a plate of half-burned ham and potatoes with strings of onion all over it. A man next to the stove was tilting mugs under the open tap of a beer cask, and Crawford paid another tuppence for a filled mug, which he gripped in the same hand that was holding the ghost bottle. He found an empty stretch of the bench and sat down. Some of the people in the room were still staring at him, hopefully or
