He recalled that he had loaned her money at one time.
“Keep it,” he said curtly. “I just want to pay my respects to Oatie.”
“I remember that!” she exclaimed, giggling toothlessly. “It’s been a while since anyone gave the poor old soul a thought. I think the door’s locked — here. You can leave the key in the lock; I’ll send a boy after you to fetch it back.”
Trelawny grinned and caught the tossed key, then strode toward the back of the place. Oatie Granwell had been a scissors-and-knife sharpener who had died in 1836, and after his wake had been held in the back room of this place, people had for years continued to use “paying respects to Oatie” as an excuse to leave by the back.
When Trelawny unlocked the door at the far end of the room and swung it open, he saw that the entire rear chamber was gone — he was standing in a dark alley by the loading bay doors of the Royal Vic. Quickly he sprinted across the pebbled pavement to a remembered set of stairs, and when he had climbed them to the narrow unlit first-floor balcony, he was relieved to see that the old beam still spanned the ten-foot gap between this balcony’s railing and the roof of a bakery next door. He hopped nimbly up onto the rail, and then stepped carefully across, disdaining to hold his arms out for balance.
And on the bakery roof he was pleased to find that he remembered the path between the skylights; even in daylight they were hard to discern, being as black with soot as the rest of the roof surface, and he knew from experience that an unaware pursuer would inevitably put a foot through one black pane or another.
From the coping on the far side of the roof he leaped across a four-foot gap to the next building, a boardinghouse, and a couple of groggy drinkers sitting by the stairway shed looked up at his booming arrival on the roof, but they made no objection as he stepped over them and clattered away down the interior stairs.
When he stepped out through the south door of the place, he was in New Street, and the only light now was the faint glow behind him in the foggy sky over New Cut; by memory more than sight he found the recessed doorway of Number 12 on the far side of the street, and he groped his way up the dark stairs within.
At the top of the stairs he paused on the landing, straining his eyes to see in the near-total blackness.
This morning in his house in Pelham Crescent he had glanced at the mantelpiece and noticed that the ace of spades had fallen over inside the glass dome he thought of as his Byron bell jar.
In 1824, in Greece, Trelawny had clipped a lock of hair from Lord Byron’s corpse, and after the Rossetti woman’s funeral in 1862, he had glued a strand of the hair to the playing card so that the card was held nearly upright, and then he had set a lit candle beside it and sealed the glass dome over it all. The candle had soon used up all the vital air in the confined space and gone out, leaving the card and Byron’s hair in an atmosphere similar to the primeval Earth’s.
And at some time during the last day or so — he did glance at the bell jar pretty regularly! — the strand of Byron’s hair had contracted, pulling the card over onto its face.
Byron had been bitten by Doctor Polidori in 1822, in Italy. Trelawny reckoned that the hair was a link to Polidori, a tripwire … and it seemed that the Rossettis’ uncle had recently tripped it, in spite of the assurances of Christina and Maria that their uncle had been banished for good. Inefficient women!
If Polidori was up and active again, then Polidori and Miss B., wherever she was these days, could resume their seven-year-interrupted effort to bring another earthquake to London. And it would be partly Trelawny’s fault, he having invited Miss B. back into the world.
On the other hand, it could be that human hair just naturally shrank over the years. He had to make sure.
Long ago he had told the Rossetti sisters about the woman who lived in this house, over the dolly shop.
If she was still alive, if she still lived here, she would surely be approached by Polidori, if in fact he was resurrected.
By touch he established where the corners of the landing were. He was directly in front of her door.
He took a deep breath and knocked.
“Go away,” came a woman’s languorous voice from within.
Trelawny smiled in the darkness. “You’ve invited worse things in, Gretchen.”
“My God, Trelawny? You must be a hundred years old. Go away, I’ve got company.”
Trelawny tried the doorknob — it turned, but the door rattled against an interior bolt.
“Let me in, Gretchen,” he said.
“Write me a letter,” came her muffled reply.
Trelawny stepped back and drew the revolver from under his waistcoat, then lifted a boot and kicked the door near the knob. Wood cracked and the door flew inward and banged against some article of furniture.
Trelawny’s nostrils flared at a mingled scent of roses and clay as he took two quick steps across the wooden floor inside, spinning to scan the whole room over the sight bead at the end of the gun’s barrel.
By the dim glow of a red-shaded lamp he saw two figures reclining on a sofa by an open window on the street side of the long room. One was a woman in a filmy gown, and the other — Trelawny felt his heart begin thumping in his chest — was a pale man with curly hair and blood gleaming on his lips and chin under a disordered mustache.
The man wore a tight-fitting black coat and trousers, ragged at the hems and torn at the elbows and knees, but it was difficult in the faint light to be sure how big or far away he was. Trelawny was careful not to look into the man’s eyes.
Trelawny swung the barrel to point at the man’s chest, but the woman had stood up and blocked the shot.
“Will you kill me, Edward?” she asked, nearly laughing.
“Yes,” he said. “It’ll go through you to him.” But he couldn’t clearly see the figure of the man now, and Trelawny knew he had lost what he sometimes called the elephant of surprise. He blinked away sudden sweat.
The man behind the standing woman seemed to flail long arms, as if trying to stand up, or fly. “Who is it?” he said in a shrill voice like a drill bit twisting in green wood. “I see steel. I smell silver.”
The pistol grip was suddenly very hot in Trelawny’s right palm; but he held it more tightly and aimed it at a point below the woman’s ribs that seemed to cover the broadest part of what might be the man’s chest—
But in the moment when he pulled the trigger, the barrel was jerked upward, and the gun fired into the ceiling.
Momentarily deafened by the confined explosion and blinded by the lateral flares from the gap between the barrel and the cylinder, Trelawny leaped back into the doorway; he managed to juggle the hot gun in his nearly sprained hand and not drop it, but his retinas were hopelessly dazzled by the after-glare.
Over the ringing in his ears he heard the man’s creaking voice cry, “It is the bridge man!”
Trelawny swung the gun barrel toward the voice, but a clatter at the window and the rippling, receding flutter of wind in cloth told him he was too late — the creature had flown away out the window, having probably abandoned its vulnerable human form even before the gun had gone off.
Trelawny had been holding his breath and now exhaled, feeling every day of his seventy-seven years, and he realized that he had been strongly hoping that it had been some natural effect that had knocked over the card in the Byron bell jar.
The woman had moved up between Trelawny and the lamp, and he could see well enough to make out her slim form against the glow. He almost thought he could see the lines of her bones through her translucent pink flesh. She shook her head angrily, then stepped past him into the hall.
“Nothing, nothing!” she shouted. “Back to your holes, idiots!”
She shoved Trelawny aside as she came back in, and he had no trouble hearing her slam the door.
“Why didn’t he kill you?” she demanded furiously.
“He doesn’t dare,” said Trelawny, still blinking toward the window. He walked around the couch to it and leaned out over the sill, looking first up into the night sky and then down among the shadows of the street, but he saw no motion at all, and all he could hear over the ringing in his ears was the muted crowd noise from the New Cut Market a street away.
He pulled the window closed and latched it, then turned back toward the room.
Gretchen was sitting at a table near the lamp, and she pointed at a chair on the other side. Trelawny crossed the room and cautiously lowered himself into the chair, still holding the pistol in his burned hand but pointing it now at the floor. He peered at her and saw fresh blood gleaming on her bare throat. In the red light the
