Christina rapped on it. “Gabriel? It’s Christina—”
Trelawny gripped her shoulders and moved her aside and opened the door. A moment later all five of them stood beside Gabriel’s four-post bed, panting.
Gabriel was sitting up in the bed, blinking in evident astonishment. A small window beyond him let in the gray daylight.
“Trelawny,” he muttered sleepily, “and — and the prostitute—”
Crawford exhaled sharply and started forward, but Trelawny threw an arm out sideways to block him. “No time,” he snapped at Crawford, and to Rossetti he said, “The lady is this man’s wife, you pig.
Crawford was staring angrily at the befuddled goateed face of Gabriel Rossetti, but he felt Christina shiver violently beside him; and in the same moment Johanna moaned and sat down on the carpet. The bird in McKee’s handbag emitted a shrill squeak.
“We’re — too late,” gasped Christina. “Algy has blooded the statue.”
At this Gabriel turned toward the table beside his bed, and he gave a wordless cry of dismay and snatched up a glass from it.
Water or gin splashed on his blankets as he held it up in front of his face.
“Is this empty, ’Stina?” he demanded. “I can’t see.”
“There’s only water in it,” she answered harshly. “Salt water, I suppose. Algy has—”
And then there were suddenly two new figures blocking the window on the far side of the bed, and Crawford snatched up Johanna and turned toward the door.
The door slammed shut before he could reach it. He shifted the girl in his arms and tried the knob, but it wouldn’t turn and the door wouldn’t shift at all, and he turned to face the two shapes.
The one closest to the window he had seen before: its head was a yard-wide flat disk with a mouthful of teeth that extended around the rim as far as he could see, and it had no eyes; the other was clearly the skeletal gray boy Johanna had described three nights ago — his temple and cheek were lit by the window at his back and were as hollowed as a skull’s.
Gabriel roared in fright and rolled out of the bed onto Christina’s feet, taking the blankets and the bedside table down with him; Christina lurched backward into Crawford, and salt water splashed across the carpet. Johanna scrambled out of Crawford’s arms and looked around the room wildly.
The room shook, as if at the impact of Gabriel hitting the floor; Crawford hopped to keep his balance.
The flat-headed thing’s mouth opened, all the leathery way across, and the remembered whispery voice said, “My daughter, I have brought your bridegroom to you. Consummation, now, at last — and then, soon, the offspring.”
The dead boy made a hissing sound and flexed his long fingers in the gray light.
Crawford glanced at Johanna, who had retreated into the corner by the fireplace and was gripping a poker; her eyes were wide, and her lips were pulled back from her teeth. The floor still seemed to be swaying, and Crawford stumbled as he stepped in front of her and lifted a long fire iron.
But McKee had pulled a jar of minced garlic out of her handbag, and now twisted it open; the smell instantly filled the room.
“Sulfur,” she said hoarsely, “and the agent that stops you binding to our spiral threads, you — shit wagon!”
The dead boy’s fingers closed into knobby fists and he made a hooting sound, but the wide-mouthed creature flickered, in one moment seeming to be Gabriel’s wife and in the next the mustached man Crawford had seen in the skull chamber under Highgate Cemetery seven years ago.
McKee whirled the jar in an arc, scattering wet yellow shreds across both figures; and immediately they lost all form, becoming churning black shapes; and a moment later the window exploded outward and they had funneled away through it.
Crawford rushed to the window and squinted against the rainy breeze. Two hunched figures in flapping black were hurrying away down the street below, both huddled under a ragged white parasol. Even as he watched, they diminished in size far more rapidly than their pace could justify, and then they seemed to merge with the river-side trees and disappear.
The floor was steady.
Crawford heard a clank behind him and turned to see that Johanna had dropped the poker. He dropped the fire iron he was holding, and then Johanna was in his arms.
“Were you going to
“I was—” Gabriel disentangled himself from the bedclothes and stood up. He was barefoot, wearing a long nightshirt, and he quickly picked up a pair of trousers from the floor, and then squinted around as if wondering where he might get dressed. “I was going to pulverize it today. I—”
Trelawny had found a pencil and an envelope, and he scribbled something and then shoved the envelope into Crawford’s hand.
“Come sundown,” said Trelawny, “he’ll be back, stronger, and he’ll block your garlic then. Here’s where you can get the shoes for your daughter.” He gave Christina a ferocious glare. “You must go with them. They’ll explain why on the way.”
Christina nodded wearily, her anger at Gabriel exhausted. “I know why. Yes, I–I must go with them.”
To McKee, Trelawny barked, “You know the crossing sweeper who takes only a ha’penny?”
“Yes.”
“Pass through the eye of his needle.”
“Shoes?” said Gabriel, still holding his trousers and peering from the broken window to the empty glass on the carpet and back.
“Go back to bed,” said Trelawny. He turned the knob, and the door opened readily now.
CHAPTER TEN
And when your veins were void and dead,
What ghosts unclean
Swarmed round the straitened barren bed
That hid Faustine?
THE CAB TOOK Crawford, McKee, Johanna, and Christina almost all the way back to the church, but McKee had the driver let them out a couple of streets east and south of it, at the stone circle in the center of Seven Dials.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever been here,” said Christina breathlessly as Crawford led them, running and pausing, through the ever-shifting maze of horses pulling carriages and wagons.
“I should hope not,” said McKee, pulling Johanna up onto the Earl Street curb.
Crawford opened his umbrella and handed it to Johanna, who was yawning as if to pop her ears. “I can still feel his attention on me,” she said.
Christina was panting. “So can I.”
The overcast sky had a faintly brassy color from the haze of coal smoke, and the streets between the wedge-shaped buildings that ringed the circle were in deep shadow. Even in the rain the pavements were crowded — disreputable-looking young men in shapeless caps and old women in shawls slouched near at hand under the shop awnings, and men in overcoats hurried past under umbrellas. Johanna’s pink velveteen coat and McKee’s blue silk dress stood out in the drab crowd.
McKee stood up on her toes to look around among the bobbing hats and umbrellas all around them, and at last she said, “I see him,” and started forward, still holding Johanna’s hand.
