A loud bang like a hammer on stone numbed Crawford’s ears, and the rushing figure did a ragged backflip, spasmodically ripping at the ground even as it still slid heavily toward them; Gabriel’s second shot stopped its slide, and his third and fourth shots shook the creature violently. Faint echoes of the shots were batted back from the distant Cumberland Terrace housefronts.
Crawford stared, the wind cold on his wide eyes — the thing’s limbs were retracting; it was shrinking inside its flapping cloth coverings even as it thrashed furiously.
The frozen ground seemed to shiver, and for a moment the ringing in Crawford’s ears seemed to be a remote chorus climbing through impossibly high notes to inaudibility.
Gabriel fired his revolver twice more at the heaving pile of cloth; bits of thread and sprays of black dirt flew away from the ragged holes.
The man who had been walking with the thing was running up now, but he was running a good deal more slowly than the creature had, and he was still twenty yards distant. He was carrying a black angular case, and Crawford wondered if he were a doctor. Far too late, he thought.
Crawford looked back at the women. Both were standing and staring at the subsiding cloth-covered mound. McKee caught his eye and actually grinned, tensely.
Crawford found that he couldn’t smile. His face was stinging with sweat, and his hands were shaking.
Gabriel lowered his pistol, panting hoarsely. He glanced at Crawford beside him and nodded. “Garlic in the bottle?”
Crawford could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears, but he nodded.
“Not useless, if you could have got it open in time.”
“Is it dead?” Crawford asked, sure that he was speaking too loudly but wanting to hear his own voice.
“No,” said Christina, stepping up beside her brother. “It will have burrowed into the earth, I imagine.”
“Injured, though, definitely,” said Gabriel. He wiped his mouth with his free hand.
“Can you reload?” asked Crawford, nodding toward the man who was striding toward them now. It was, Crawford saw, an old man in a black Chesterfield overcoat and a black silk hat, and the object he was carrying was a violin case. All Crawford could make out of his face was a white beard and dark features — but he recognized him.
Apparently McKee did too. “I don’t think you’ll need to shoot him,” she said, though she had not yet put away her knife.
“It takes me half an hour to reload this,” Gabriel muttered. To Christina he added, “I
The old man paused on the far side of the now-motionless lump of cloth on the frosty grass, and with the toe of his boot he flipped most of the fabrics aside. Underneath was a mound of fresh-churned dirt.
He looked up at the four people on the other side of the mound, and for a moment his scarred lips seemed to be sneering; then his lean brown face flexed in a wolfish smile.
“She’ll be a thing like a crab now,” he said. “No use digging for her; you won’t catch her and she’ll still weigh upward of two hundred pounds — you’d never lift her.”
“Who the bloody hell are you?” demanded Gabriel, still visibly shaky. “And what
Edward Trelawny shook his head impatiently. “Don’t waste my time. You know what it was, or you wouldn’t have had a gun loaded with silver bullets, now would you? Nothing else could have done that to her. Well, gold may be a better electrical conductor, but I doubt someone like you could afford gold bullets.” He laughed. “As to who I am, it’s better you don’t know, and I don’t want to know who you are. Even a captured mind can’t reveal what it’s never learned, right? If you all have any brains, you don’t know each other’s names either, but I suppose you haven’t any brains, walking around in a damn clump out here like red flags in front of a bull. Are you
He made a tossing motion toward Crawford and McKee. “You two especially! You killed her Judas Goat last night — you might have had the sense to lay low.”
“By daylight—” began Crawford weakly.
“I knew you were a fool the first time I laid eyes on you, sitting in that ring of failed poets. Daylight. She’s mighty hampered in daylight, but not immobile. She’d have torn
Christina surprised Crawford by stepping forward and saying, “You can call me Diamonds.”
“Hah!” said Gabriel. “At that rate I’m Hearts.”
Christina gave McKee a frail smile. “A childhood game,” she said. “We have a sister we called Clubs and a brother we called Spades.”
“You,” said Trelawny, pointing at McKee, “I’ll call Rahab.”
McKee blinked and frowned, and Crawford guessed that she wasn’t entirely pleased to be given the name of the Biblical ex-prostitute who betrayed Jericho to the Hebrews; but she nodded.
She pointed at the violin case in the old man’s hand. “Are you a musician?”
“Not me, no.” Trelawny turned to Crawford and went on, “You’re a medical man, I heard, so I’ll call you Medicus. In fact, you look uncannily like a medical man I knew in Italy years ago, but we’ll let that go.”
“If you like,” said Crawford. His father
“And call me Samson,” Trelawny said. “My spiritual hair has almost completely grown back, I believe. I hope.” He glanced at the scattered cloths and the mound of dirt on the grass, and then looked up at all four of them. “You’ve left me unchaperoned, for a few days at least. It may be that we can help one another. Where were you walking to, so carefree?”
Christina nodded toward the long wall at the north end of the lawn. “The zoo cages outside the wall,” she said, “on the north side of the outer circle just below the canal. They’re for cassowaries and zebras, and they’re empty in the winter. If we could find one around the back where nobody’s likely to be, on a day like this, and get into it, with cold iron bars on all sides—”
“Ah!” said Trelawny. “I could see from the start that you’re the only one of your lot with any sense, Diamonds. The iron bars, yes, they should hide our auras just as a Faraday cage deflects electric fields — block our radiances, keep the other big one from sniffing us.”
“The other big one,” said Gabriel.
“We can discuss it when we’re caged,” said Trelawny, “like a pack of sickly cassowaries.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was not daring … to bring Miss B. to Cefn Ila, and set her up to be worshipped there. But society was justly scandalized by the spectacle of this shaggy Samson carrying the diminutive form of Delilah to and from his carriage at the foot of Shanbadoc Rock — his Delilah was not even pretty, if the memories of my informants are to be trusted.
WHAT IS ‘THE other big one’?” asked McKee.
They had found a row of empty and unlocked cages well west of the offices of the superintendent and ducked into the farthest one, pulling the barred door nearly closed behind them. Bare trees hid them from most of the park.
“If anyone
