Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling (24 page)

A woman answered. She was shapely and round, with buttermilk skin and red ringlets of hair. The hunchback whispered something to her, and she opened her arms in greeting.

“Welcome. Please, come in.” She led us to sit in front of the hearth.

The hut was small and decorated for Christmas. The frail tree in the corner of the room was gray, even by firelight, and clung to the sparse ornamentation perched on its branches. There were other guests seated next to us, old, broken, and decayed, staring deeply into the flames.

A cauldron hung above the embers, its bubbling contents hidden by brown, sticky foam. The woman brought us three coarse wooden bowls. She took a ladle from the wall and dipped it into the kettle. The head of the brew dissolved, and we could see something moving beneath the surface.

“No thank you, we've already eaten,” I lied, starving, though the cleric heartily devoured his bowl of brown. The eyes of the other guests never left the flames. The woman sat at a table by the door to peel carrots. She placed one into a small cage that swung above her head, the animal inside gnawing at the stick as white, gelatinous foam dripped from its maw. It might have been a ferret, but the slaver had smeared its fur so that it was an indistinguishable mass of pelt and teeth. I slipped my hand through the crook of Henry's arm.

“There is trouble tonight,” said the woman without looking up from her task.

“What do you mean?” asked Henry.

“The one who will take you is late. He is never late.” She smiled as she fed the caged creature another sliver of carrot. We moved closer to the hearth, joining the others as they lost themselves in the fire. I imagined that the flames formed the walls of a house, and inside a small family of embers burned away their bright little lives to keep it intact.

Henry broke into my reverie. “I still haven't the faintest idea what we plan to do.”

“You escape with the children, and I will sort out Mr. Whatley.”

“Alone?”

“Hardly.” I turned to him, widening my eyes in an effort to end the conversation. I was unsuccessful.

“Why must you be so cryptic?”

Annoyed, I put my lips to his ear and whispered sharply. “I have little experience traveling through rebel undergrounds, but I would imagine that they are not safe for private conversation.” I motioned to the others seated beside us, all of them nearly catatonic save for one man who stood suddenly, kicking over his chair.

The woman with the red hair shouted at him. “Pipe down there.”

But instead of reseating himself, the stranger leaned his head back, the surface of his skin gathering like beads of melted wax traveling up his face, a strand of it pulling away from his body, a thread of flesh rising into the air to attach itself to the ceiling.

Our hostess gasped a single word: “No . . .”

His body blasted apart with a wet tearing sound, sinewy tendrils erupting out of a husk of red meat to embed themselves in the walls and ceiling, scrambling around the room in search of prey. Where it touched the other guests, their flesh became its flesh, merged together and absorbed into an ever-expanding mass, none of the victims dead or dying, simply devoured whole.

As one of the tendrils made to slide around my leg, the hunchbacked cleric threw himself in its path, the thing entering his back and swelling around him. I did not have time to cry out, for Henry pulled me through the door, and together we ran into the night, looking back just long enough to see the hut crack and collapse, the plaster and rock consumed into the growing girth of the beast.

The town came to life, screaming. Doors opened all around us, voices calling out for their loved ones as they ran into the streets; creatures and creatures in human skins, sobbing and shouting, pushed into each other. A young man ran past us carrying a glass bottle of jet-black liquid, a swatch of cloth sticking out of the opening. He lit it and chucked it at the monster in the demolished hut, but it fell short and landed at the base of the structure. At first I thought he had failed, but then the ground split open with a bone-chilling crack and began to fall away, creating an abyss where there had not been one mere seconds before. The creature scuttled for purchase at the edges of the chasm, but it had already grown too heavy for its own good and descended into the darkness below. The crowd of onlookers cheered momentarily, but then the rift continued to expand. Houses and whole streets succumbed to the schism, the edges of the earth flaking away into the void below.

Henry and I followed the crowd into a forest on the outskirts of town, winding between the trees until the chaos was behind us. When we were far enough from the townspeople that we would not draw unwanted attention, we collapsed against one another.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“He saved me,” I said incredulously.

“Who?”

“The cleric. Why would he do such a thing? He barely knew me.”

Henry put my hand into his. “We should keep going.”

“Where?”

He pointed behind me to a wide road. It had once been paved over, for the edges of the thoroughfare were crusted with pieces of crushed red brick, but the center of the highway had been worn to dirt from good use. It was the largest road that I had ever seen. It went on for as far as my eyes could see, and it was wide enough to accommodate twenty carriages riding beside one another.

Henry helped me to my feet, and we scampered down the side of a hill to reach the large expanse of road, but before we could leave the forest a person stepped into our path. He had a flat, open gash of a face, and a body that would have been snakelike had it not been for the heavy, muscular appendages that trailed along both sides of his torso. The person called out to us. “Hello, my friends!”

We stared at the man wordlessly.

“My companion and I are faced with a bit of an imposition. We're travelers like yourselves, you see.” Another person appeared behind him. He was taller than any man, with arms and legs like very strong sticks, and half a mouth, with no bottom jaw but many long, sharp teeth. “We've lost the third member of our party.”

“I wish we could help you, but we must be on our way,” I replied.

“But you can help us,” said the man who was almost, but not quite, like a snake. “Our friend was with you, the large gentleman in the hut. You were ever so quick to part with him.” The two highwaymen leered at one another. I tried to run, but the stick man grabbed ahold of me and threw me to the ground, my head throbbing in pain though I refused to let him see it by meeting his gaze.

“Eager to leave us as well?” said the snake. “We should be insulted. It's a good thing Mr. Ashby is asking for you alive.”

“A good thing indeed.” The stick man's breath was dry and sour.

“But still . . . he would be ever so cross with us if we grabbed the wrong person. Best make sure you're human, after all. Blood will tell, as they say.” He removed a long, thin knife from his jacket and cut away my cloak. He was about to do the same to the rest of my clothes when Henry leapt onto his back and began to strangle him with his arms. The snake man shrieked and dropped his knife to the ground, while the other swatted Henry through the air and into the forest.

The highwaymen congratulated themselves and hovered over me, unaware of a shadow moving behind them, black and dangerous, shifting along the ground, alive. As it passed over the stick man, his limbs shattered into thousands of bloodless little pieces and the back of his head was knocked through his mouth.

The snake man shrieked at the sight of his fallen companion, and he took off down the road. But the moon was high, and the shadow stretched after him as well. It embraced him so tightly that he stopped moving and fell to the earth, his skin peeled away in one swift motion. His flesh followed with a moist rip. But as this was The Ending, neither of the highwaymen could die even if he so desired. The stick man quivered in a fetal position on the ground and attempted to slurp the contents of his head back into his mouth. His partner, all bloody pulp and bone, pulled himself up the road, gathering his flesh and skin.

The shadow subsided as it lifted Henry from the floor of the forest and set him into a wagon near the side of the great road. As it approached me, it took the shape of a middle-aged man, impish and dark-featured, with a slender finger pressed against his sly lips.

“Duncan!”

Whatley's manservant brought me to my feet and climbed into the driver's seat. He did not wait for me to join him before whipping the side of the animal that pulled the wagon. The squat, headless thing with hundreds of fleshy flaps of skin squirmed forward like so many caterpillars, but it proved very fast as it took off. I quickly retrieved the knife that had been dropped by one of the highwaymen and barely had enough time to jump into the back of the vehicle as it started forward. I tucked the weapon into the folds of my dress.

“Why did you come for us?” I hardly expected an answer, but Duncan reached into his coat pocket and extracted a parchment envelope with a blue wax seal. I tore it open and read the two words written in Lily Darrow's handwriting:
Trust him
. I handed it to Henry.

“He did save our lives,” he said. That was hardly sufficient, but given what few options we had, I reluctantly turned to face the back end of the wagon. We twisted down through the dark hills of The Ending, the wagon lumbering along the hard, beaten earth between patches of broken brick.

We passed by great houses and manors with candlelit windows and oddly shaped figures scuttling about behind them. I wondered if the boys would remain unchanged after having lived among such strangeness. There were other orchards, and a lone clock tower on a small island at the center of a lake. Henry and I soon settled into the quiet rhythms of the wagon. We took turns sleeping while the other remained alert, but no one passed us by. We were completely alone.

The hills grew taller as we continued, and the road sloped upward along the side of a mountain. There was movement in the valley below. Shapes in the darkness bounded after one another, their ridged backs glistening with sweat in the moonlight. Barbed tentacles lashed cruelly at tender undersides, and talons tore through flesh and fat and bone. Blood was thick on the ground, black as midnight.

Duncan did not bother looking down at the carnage below, and the creatures seemed to be paying us little if any attention, for we went down the other side of the mountain without trouble.

I realized Henry and I had started holding hands, but I could not recall when it happened, or why. I felt so many things all at once—fear, anger, exhilaration, doubt—each of them vying for my attention, surging through my body in alternating waves of anxiety and relief, to the point that I shut them all out and focused instead on the fact that I was glad to have Henry by my side at that moment. With my other hand I felt for the last relics of my former life, which I had rescued from the burning cinder of Everton.

Jonathan
. I fell asleep despite my anxieties. My body demanded rest, and I dreamt that I went to a traveling carnival with my family.

We drifted from tent to tent, from the jugglers to the fortune-teller and finally to the magic man. He stood on his collapsible stage, a man in black making doves appear from his throat and fire dance at his fingertips. He called my mother from the audience and placed a sheet over her body. With a clap of his hands she disappeared. Then he took Jonathan, who vanished in a flash of light. My father was the last person chosen from the audience. The magic man placed him in a chair and levitated him into the air and out of sight. I clapped and clapped when the show was over. I waited at the entrance for my family to return, but then the gypsies packed up their tents and drove away in their caravans, leaving me alone on an empty hill.

“Charlotte.” My eyes fluttered open. Henry's face hovered above me. I sat up and realized that I recognized the landscape. There was the orchard and beyond it, the House of Darkling alight with activity. There were other carriages on the road now, all of them in a long caravan to the front entrance by the Star Fountain. Duncan avoided this, steering us through the tall black iron gates, past human-shaped guards who waved us through without a second glance, and around the back to a servants' entrance, where arm in arm, Henry and I entered into the House of Darkling.

CHAPTER 19

The Man in Black

T
he lower floors of the manor were characterized by crooked hallways and room upon room of sweating, anxious servants, all of them frantic to respond to the panels of angry, chiming bells that heralded the needs of the hundreds of guests upstairs. Duncan did not allow us to linger, urging us onward until we were expelled from the inner workings of the house into the wing where the children and I had slept during our visits. To my surprise, he opened the door to my own quarters and pushed us inside.

A woman stood in the center of the room, her back to the entrance. She was dressed in a white gown that flowed from an ivory bodice of lace down the curves of her body into a pool of silk on the floor. A veil hid her face, but Henry knew her all the same.

“Lily . . .” he said breathlessly.

“Henry?” She sounded weary and sad, but her voice left her entirely when her eyes turned to meet her husband's. He took a single step forward, then another, and another, as if approaching a dream, careful to hold it for as long as possible before it slipped away. When he reached her he pushed back the veil to stroke the side of her face. She trembled, closing her fingers around his wrist. They stayed in the same pose, a silent conversation playing out in their mutual gaze, which remained uninterrupted by any further physicality. They simply looked into one another.

I could not help but feel a slight twinge of jealousy at the sight of them together, even as I reminded myself that they were still husband and wife. A shadow passed over Lily's face, and she became very melancholy.

“I'm afraid you might be too late.” She motioned to her wedding gown.

Henry seemed to see it for the first time and backed away in confusion. “You can't be. You mustn't.”

She ignored him. “I sent Duncan to fetch you after we last spoke, so that you could see the children safely home. They do not belong here.”

“Neither do you. Come with us,” I said.

“We tried that once before, don't you remember? They'll never release me. I'm the only one in The Ending who has ever died. They worship me, and Whatley
will
marry me.”

“You deserve peace, my love,” Henry interjected.

“This is exactly what I deserve,” she said bitterly. “I am glad you came, Henry. I had so wanted to see you one last time.”

“I don't understand. Why didn't you summon me here with the boys? Your death broke something inside of me, Lily. I would have been here in an instant.”

“That's exactly why I tried to keep you away. I went so far as to tell the children there was a spell keeping this place connected to Blackfield, and if they spoke to you of their time here, it would be forever broken. I was afraid, Henry. To say good-bye to the children was my duty as their mother. Their hearts will mend. I couldn't bear to see yours break all over again.”

I felt a pang of foolishness at my own gullibility, but it was washed away by all the other emotions that swept over me during this exchange.

Lily must have seen this, for she closed her eyes and summoned the strength to turn her husband away. “They'll be coming for me soon. I think you had better leave.”

“We can help, Lily,” I said.

“How? What could you possibly do?” When I did not respond, she turned away from us once more. “Take the children back.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, and she nodded to Duncan. He went to the wardrobe and extracted two black cloaks, draping them over us. The hoods hung low before our faces, like shrouds.

Lily handed me a silver skeleton key without looking in my direction. “You may find passage back to Everton in Mr. Whatley's study. But for myself there is no other choice.”

“That is where you're wrong.” I tucked the key away into the folds of my dress. “There is an alternative to The Ending.”

“Death offers his gift but once, if at all. Now, please leave me. The ceremony will begin soon and you had better find the children.”

We pleaded with her, but she ignored us and continued to prepare for her wedding. I pulled Henry grudgingly out of the room, but as we left he spoke to her one last time.

“I love you.”

She observed us in the reflection of her vanity mirror but remained silent as she watched us leave. I thought I noticed tears in her eyes, but Duncan was already weaving us through the house, carefully out of sight of the other guests, who lingered on the periphery of Darkling, voices raised, cutlery scraping together, heels clacking against tile; ghosts who lived just beyond the edge of sight.

When Duncan entered the dark room, I stopped and touched his arm. “We need to find the children,” I whispered. He observed me drily, the smile on his face slipping for a moment as he pushed his finger into the eye socket of one of the marble faces, opening the door to the circular chamber enveloped in concentric rings of silk veils. A boy sat on the metal chair, his feet dangling just above the floor.

“There you are,” he said. “I was worried you weren't”—his face fell as we pushed back our hoods, the words dying on his lips—“coming.”

“What on earth are you doing here?” I asked him. James hopped down from the chair and approached us with caution and very adult suspicion. He was dressed in a black suit with a gray vest, a red cummerbund circling his waist. Yet even disregarding the finely tailored clothing, he held himself differently than the last time I'd seen him. He did not look any older despite the years that had doubtlessly passed for him since our separation, but nevertheless there was something changed in him.

“You came back,” he said to me.

“I never meant to leave.”

“But you did.” He hugged his father in a mechanical gesture without any emotion.

Henry did not seem to notice. “My boy,” he said. He smoothed out the curls of his son's blond hair with unguarded sentimentality, but James pulled away, his face contorted in confusion.

“I'm not a child.” He shuffled back to the metal chair in the center of the room, where he removed a smoke-colored phial from his pocket. It was labeled
INFIRMED
.

“James, put that down!”

“Do you even know what it is?” Though he appeared to be only five, he spoke with all the stoic assurance of an adolescent.

“Someone's death.”

“Not just anyone's.” He held it to the dim light, picking at the stopper in a distracted way. “I remember the night she died.” He looked to his father. “You don't think that I do, but you're wrong. You left me alone with her to talk to the doctor, and she started to make a sound. There were noises coming out of her; she was gasping, and her eyes were wet, like she was drowning from the inside out. I think she was crying.

“I tried to give her a hug, but she jerked away from me, like I had hurt her. So I just stood by her side. I heard the doctor say that she was blind by then, but I felt like she could see me because she grabbed my hand. She pulled me close and tried to whisper something, but she couldn't speak right. The words were all broken. But then she said it again and again, and I realized that what she said was ‘I want to die.'

“One night I asked her about it, if she remembered me there and if I helped make it easier. I wanted her to know that I cried when she was gone, but it only upset her and she ran from the room before she could answer. I haven't asked her since.”

“And that's her death?” I gestured to the phial still in his hands.

“I think so. I found it hidden in her room. I was waiting to open it, and tonight seemed appropriate. Duncan was going to help me.” He held it out to his father. “Would you like to try it instead?”

Henry went very pale, and a bead of sweat dripped from his brow. Yet he did not reach out to accept the phial. “No, thank you, James. I think we both experienced enough of your mother's death firsthand.”

The boy nodded and handed the glass container to Duncan, who secreted it away in the folds of his jacket.

“Are you taking us home?” James's green eyes found my own, and I could barely hold back tears of guilt.

“Yes, of course we are. I'm so sorry, James. It's my fault you were trapped here alone.”

From the expression on his face I was certain that he felt pity for me. “We weren't alone. Mother was here, and Mr. Whatley.” I noticed he hadn't corrected me, but then he had no reason to. It
was
my fault that the door between Everton and Darkling had been closed, but that he had confirmed it made the changes wrought in him since the last time we had been together all the more clear. He had grown up.

“Did Mr. Whatley hurt you?” I asked, looking over his face for any signs of abuse.

“No, not at all. He protects us.”

“From what?”

“His friends.”

I found myself in the strange position of feeling gratitude to the master of Darkling. Fortunately Duncan chose that moment to usher us all out of the chamber and back into the claustrophobic darkness of the other room. We pulled our hoods over our faces and followed him in silence, James taking his father's hand as we began to encounter the other wedding guests, mysterious figures garbed in cloaks identical to ours, human-shaped creatures much like Whatley, Samson, and all the rest of their circle.

Duncan escorted us into the medieval banquet hall that Lily had shown us on one of our prior visits, but instead of containing the mysterious ever-changing door that had tormented Susannah, it was now filled with row upon row of hospital beds, all of them occupied by poor creatures in varying states of decline.

The patient nearest to us might have once resembled an oversized earthworm, but it had been torn into pieces, its stumps bound in white gauze and placed along the length of the bed, struggling to squirm together in sequential rhythm despite the fact that they were no longer part of the same whole. Another victim was riddled with perforations in its head and torso, and thick metal spokes had been placed into the gaps of its flesh to brace the body against complete collapse. There were no doctors or nurses to tend to the wounded, only a dark-haired boy who stood at the other end of the room, struggling to help place what was left of Dabney Aldrich into a human-shaped suit.

Paul wiped a streak of sweat from his brow and scowled at his little brother. “I told you not to visit me here, James.”

“Come along, Paul,” I said.

He gaped at us, not understanding until we came close enough for him to see beneath the shrouds of our cloaks. He gently laid Dabney back onto the bed. The other boy's face was just as angelic and beautiful as it had been before, but beneath his neck his human body was matted with the pieces of his actual one, bound together in bandages in a hopeless effort to give him something of a human shape.

Paul ushered us to a far corner of the room, away from his patients. “You've been gone for so long. I didn't think we'd ever leave,” he stammered, rubbing the back of his head with his hands as if he were trying to decide something.

“What on earth are you doing here?” asked his father.

“The night of the engagement marked the start of the war. Someone had to tend to the victims, the ones damaged beyond repair. Their families either are in worse shape or have disowned them.” He gestured to Dabney, and I recalled the haughty dignity of Mrs. Aldrich. I could not imagine her having the compassion or the patience for long-term care. “I've stayed by their sides and helped as best I could.”

“That's very brave of you,” I said to him.

“No, they're the brave ones. They endure without the hope and mercy of death. I only manage to find strength in their resolve.” His eyes shifted to me for a moment, wordlessly referencing our conversation by his mother's gravestone all those months before.

Dabney stirred on his bed. “Paul.” His voice was a weak shadow of what it used to be. Still, the elder Darrow boy lifted him upright and helped dress the remains of his body for the wedding as we looked on in discomfort. When he was done, Paul placed his friend in a wheelchair. The other boy reached out and took his hand. “Are you leaving us?” he asked.

“I'm taking you to the wedding, just as you wanted, my friend.”

Dabney smiled and stared off into space as Paul wheeled him out of the makeshift infirmary.

“Is Mother coming with us?” Paul whispered. Henry and I exchanged glances. “We can't leave her here.”

“And we won't. Leave everything to me,” I said with a note of finality. I replaced the hood of my cloak as Duncan led us to the dining hall, where the guests had been informed that the wedding was about to begin.

A
thousand wedding guests in hooded shrouds began to file into the ballroom, lavishly decorated for the event. Silver cages filled with firebirds hung from the ceiling. Sad, languid music was being orchestrated on a twenty-foot-long harp that took a dozen people to play it, some of them standing on ladders.

The Darrows and I sat down with Dabney while Duncan bowed to us and retreated to the far end of the hall. Across the aisle Olivia chattered flirtatiously with some of the younger guests, throwing her head back gently in a demure scoff, pleasantly scandalized by some rude observation. Her eyes flittered over us but did not stop. She gazed at her father with an expression carefully guarded by a well-practiced blank smile that did not show in her eyes as he took his place at the front of the aisle, smirking victoriously.

The music died out and the room became hushed in silence. The harp players began to strum their instrument until the notes resembled a wedding march. Lily Darrow stood at the entrance to the ballroom, dressed in her elaborate white wedding gown. She strode down the aisle. When she reached the section we were sitting in, she turned to us with a weak smile.

“Don't do it, Mother,” James whispered to her loudly enough for everyone to hear. Lily looked from the children to Henry. Mr. Whatley grew increasingly impatient at the end of the aisle. She turned back to the task at hand, and Mr. Whatley glowered at the boys triumphantly. I removed the small, thin knife that I had taken from the highwayman and hidden in the folds of my dress.