Fuck. The smog, a classic yellow-tinged pea-souper that smelled of burning coal and sulfur, was getting thicker. The Bond hurried towards the hitching rail where he’d left the stolen cab. Entirely predictably, it was gone: not just the horse and hire-trap, but the hitching rail too. He squinted into the murk, eyes watering as he searched for what he knew to be there. There’d been a pub, and there still was, but the signboard was … was it the same one? Navigating by pubs in the late Victorian East End of London was like navigating by fire hydrants in Manhattan. As he looked around, the Bond gradually realized that he was on the wrong street: he’d lost situational awareness again and taken a wrong turn, become lost inside Whitechapel.
The Bond was not a neophyte navigator. He’d hiked through mapless jungles in Central America and trackless mountains in Afghanistan. He wasn’t a slave to satnav and GPS, like so many contemporary civilians: he’d been orienteering since he was old enough to tie his own bootlaces. But navigating Whitechapel in 1888 was another matter. The whole point of a rookery was that it was unmappable, with seventeenth-century streets crossing medieval routes cleared by the Great Fire of London that subsequently got filled in and fractally overgrown. People lived in a rookery because they could afford no better or they didn’t want to be findable. A surveyor who ventured inside without a police escort would likely wake up several miles away with a splitting headache, minus his charts, instruments, wallet, and clothing—if he ever woke up. And this version of Whitechapel was just wrong, like the dream of an architect delirious on absinthe, specifying angles that didn’t add up properly.
Another police rattle clattered behind him and the Bond took off into the mist and night again, furious and hunted as he searched for something, anything, he recognized and could orient on: a church, a pub, a hitching rail.
Behind him, the silvery chatter of windchimes in the fog tinkled louder.
“That was lovely, dear,” said her mother, lining up her knife and fork to bisect her empty plate neatly. She covered her mouth, trying and failing to suppress a yawn. “I’ll just … I think I need a lie-down.”
“You go right ahead,” her father said indulgently. “Evie and I will do the washing up.”
Mum was really out of it. She hadn’t been herself for months, but this was by far the worst she’d been in Evie’s presence. When she came home she didn’t ask Evie why she hadn’t come to church with her, or how her flatmates were, or … anything, really. She just smiled vaguely, recited grace, and ate her food, swaying tiredly in her chair. Her body was sitting at the table but her mind was elsewhere. Evie had never been any good at aura work, but even she could tell there was something wrong. It wasn’t a zombie-like absence; it was somehow Stepfordian to Evie’s mind. It was as if her mother’s soul was a candle wick that had been pinched between finger and thumb so that the flame was out, only a burning ember at the tip bespeaking the possibility of reillumination. I hope Dad knows what he’s doing, she told herself.
Mum yawned again, this time without covering her mouth. Her eyelids were closing, lifting slightly then falling again. She made no move to stand up, but the swaying was growing more pronounced.
“Evie, would you mind helping your mother upstairs?” Dad asked. “Otherwise I think she’ll fall asleep at the table.”
“Yes.” Evie stood, and helped her mother up from the chair. Mum mumbled something that might have been a gargled Thanks, then shuffled towards the stairs, her head nodding. Evie got her up to the landing and into the bedroom, terrified that she might face-plant on the carpet at any step. Finally, they were there. “Why don’t you lie down, Mum?” she suggested.
“Yes, I’ll just…” Her mother sat on the edge of the bed, then slowly toppled backwards until she sprawled crosswise atop the covers. A moment later she began to snore.
Evie removed her mother’s shoes, then tried to turn the sleeping woman. Mum turned out to be unexpectedly heavy. “Dad? Dad!”
Heavy thudding on the stairs. “What is it, Evie?”
“A hand, here? She’s totally zonked. I can’t move her.”
“Let me.” Dad slid his arms beneath his sleeping wife and gently took her weight while Evie swung her legs up on the bed. “Oww.” He straightened up and rubbed the small of his back, breathing heavily. His brows wrinkled as he stared at the sleeping woman, as if she was a puzzle he couldn’t solve.
“Dad.” Evie found herself holding his hand. “It’s going to be all right.”
“No, no it isn’t.” For a moment he sounded distraught.
“But Dad—”
Her father leaned over her mother’s head. “Attend,” he told Evie, slipping into the didactic, professorial manner he adopted for her lessons in magecraft. “Your mother is infected.” Using his thumbs at the sides of her jaw, he gently levered her mother’s mouth open. “Observe.”
Evie only just made it to the toilet. She never again ate a Sunday roast.
When she finished, she rinsed out her mouth in the sink, and lingered in front of the bathroom mirror staring at her face, seeing half her mother’s features reflected back at her. Her hands were trembling, not with fear or anger, but with a less familiar emotion: hatred.
She joined her father. “What the fuck is that thing?” she snarled, wiping her runny nose on the back of her sleeve. She pointed past her mother’s sagging lips, at the silvery articulated shield nestling in her lower jaw like an armored parody of a normal tongue: “How did it get in there?” She reached for it, but Dad caught her hand.
“There is a species of deep sea isopod, Cymothoa exigua, that is called the tongue-eating louse. It crawls into a fish’s mouth and attaches itself to the tongue. It’s a vampire—it severs the blood vessels
