The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (5 page)

I dreamed of a simpler life. I dreamed I was with Penelope, my dead love, and Amelia, my dead daughter, in a house in the suburbs. It was the same house where I’d once found a demon pretending to be a normal man, raising a family. I’ll leave that detail for you to analyze.

The thing about this dream was Penelope and Amelia were alive in it. Amelia was young, maybe five or six. The child I never got to have.

Penelope and I walked Amelia to school in the morning and then made love in our bedroom in the afternoon. I drifted off to sleep after and woke to Penelope standing beside me, dropping cherry blossom petals on my naked body. She had a smile on her face like she knew this was a dream and that our time together was limited. I pulled her back down to me, and we made love again among the petals. That night, I read fairy tales to Amelia in her bed. They were the ones that the Brothers Grimm had lost in the flood that ruined most of their records. Then we slept the sleep of the peaceful and the mortal. In the morning I woke to the smell of bacon and coffee. I opened my eyes as Penelope came into the bedroom with breakfast in bed.

Only it wasn’t Penelope holding the tray of food. It was Morgana.

“Wake up, my pet,” she said. “There is a mystery to be solved.” She looked down at the tray and frowned. “Really? This is what you dream about?” she asked. She shook her head and tossed the tray into a corner. “Humans. You are all so dull and predictable.”

I threw myself to my feet and went past her, down the hall to Amelia’s room. I opened the door to find her gone. The books I’d read to her were scattered on her torn sheets. The pages that were open were blank now.

“You won’t find her there,” Morgana said behind me. “You won’t find her anywhere.”

“Leave her out of this,” I said, staring at the empty bed. “She’s done you no harm.”

“I can’t leave her out of this,” she said. She walked past me, into Amelia’s bedroom. She picked up a brown stuffed bear and smiled at it. Then she plucked out one of its eyes and ate it like a candy. “She is your only reason to live now.”

“This is about us, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re trying to get back at me for all those things I’ve done to you over the ages.”

“I have gotten back at you,” she said. “I own even your dreams now.” She popped out the bear’s other eye and ate it.

“If anything happens to her. . . .” I said. I didn’t know how to finish it. Amelia was all I had left of Penelope now.

“If anything happens to her, it will be because you have failed as a father,” Morgana said. She drew her hand over the bear’s empty eye sockets and closed its eyelids. She handed it to me and then walked into Amelia’s closet. The door slammed shut behind her. I knew when I’d been dismissed.

I looked down at the bear. Its fur was matted with blood now. When I pushed back its eyelids, the sockets were full of cherry blossom petals.

And you probably thought you had bad dreams.

I woke to find a raven perched on the edge of the crate I was sleeping on. It held a piece of bacon in its beak. When it saw my eyes open, it dropped the bacon beside my head and then waited for a response. Its eyes were white with cataracts.

“I don’t suppose you brought coffee too?” I said, sighing. I didn’t feel rested at all after that night.

The raven croaked once, very loudly. Enough to make me swipe at it like an alarm clock. It leapt into the air and flew over to the top of an iron maiden leaning against a wall. It made some more noises that I felt inside my skull.

“All right, all right,” I said, sitting up. “Tell him I’m on my way.”

The raven made a low chuckling sound this time and took flight again, down the same tunnel where the twins had disappeared the last time they’d wandered through.

I ate the piece of bacon and tried to get Morgana out of my head. I hated her for ruining my dream of Penelope and Amelia. But I also longed for her even more than I longed for Penelope. Once again I looked at the ring fused to my finger and thought about how to get rid of it. I had an idea, now that I was back in London, but first things first. I had to eat breakfast.

I got up and combed my fingers through my hair and tried to brush the creases out of my clothes, which were still a little damp from my dip into the Thames the night before. Then I went down the tunnel and up the stairs at its end, to meet the Raven Master.

There have always been ravens at the Tower of London. That probably has something to do with all the bodies that used to pile up around the place. The ravens were wild once upon a time, but then someone somewhen got the idea to domesticate them. I don’t know why. Now there are always a few kept on hand for the tourists, their wings clipped so they don’t fly away with the others that come to visit from time to time. The lore is they bring good fortune to the empire as long as they remain at the Tower, but I’ve never known ravens to bring good fortune to anything, not even other ravens. The British can never let go of their traditions, though, even when it leads to heads being chopped off. Actually, chopping off heads is a fine British tradition of its own. So the ravens are here to stay.

I climbed a staircase most people didn’t know about inside one of the towers—most staff probably didn’t even know about it, for that matter. The secret staircase let me skip the whole tourist experience, which was just fine with me. I’m not really one for lineups and security guards just to look at museum pieces. Not unless I’m on a mission to steal one of those museum pieces, anyway.

The stairs ended in a trapdoor, which was open. I climbed through, into the chamber at the top of the tower. It was a small room lined with open windows and a cupola over my head to protect me from the elements. Not that it mattered today. I could see blue sky and a few wisps of clouds through the windows, although I had to look past the ravens to do so. There were dozens of them, sitting in the window frames or perched on the wooden beams overhead. They were all watching me. As was the Raven Master, who sat on a stool near the trapdoor.

There are the raven masters the tourists see, the ones who wear the fancy costumes, feed the birds and pose for the cameras. Then there is the Raven Master. He wears robes of all black and no one sees him unless he wants them to. But he sees everyone, thanks to the ravens. And he’s the only one who truly speaks their language.

There was another stool waiting for me, and a small table covered with scraps of food. More bacon, and some pieces of charred toast, some hard-boiled eggs, a couple of strawberries. All of it bore the marks of birds’ beaks, which told me how the meal had got up here. There were no plates or utensils. The Raven Master ate like his flock. He even looked a little like the birds. He was lean, almost skeletal, and had a hooked nose that could have passed for a beak. And he had a way of studying you that was definitely more avian than human. As if he were thinking about plucking out one of your eyes and swallowing it down. His eyes were riddled with cataracts, just like the raven that had woken me.

“I didn’t expect to see you back here so soon,” he said, his voice as raspy as a raven’s. “Not with this lot in charge.”

He meant the Royal Family, and that was the other thing that made the Tower such a good hiding spot for me. The Raven Master was its unofficial warden, and he swore no allegiance to anything but the Tower itself. The Royal Family meant no more to him than any of the other royals that had preceded them. His flock was the only thing he cared about besides the Tower. We got along because I’d kept ravens well fed on battlefields around the world for many centuries. I guess they’d spread the good word about me.

“I’m in a bit of a situation,” I said. I sat on the stool and grabbed a handful of the bacon and one of the eggs and dug in.

“You wouldn’t be here otherwise,” he said. He reached down to his side and picked up a thermos and handed it to me. “Tea,” he said. “The real thing. Not that swill you drink in your Americas.”

“They’re not my Americas,” I said. I poured myself a cup and drank it down.

A jet passed through the sky outside on its way to Heathrow. The ravens and the Raven Master all cocked their heads to watch it through the windows.

“So, what mischief are you up to?” he asked.

“I have an errand to run in the city,” I said, “and then I have to stop a play from killing people.”

“People don’t have enough reasons to kill each other?” he asked, looking down into the courtyard below, where so many executions had taken place over the years. “Now they’re using plays as an excuse?”

I shook my head and forced down some of the burnt toast. “They’re not doing it,” I said. “It’s the play itself. One of those
Macbeth
curses run amok.” I didn’t see any reason to hide things. Any help I could get would also be help for Amelia.

He just cocked his head in a different direction, as if considering that.

I leaned back against the wall, sated if not full, and sipped some more tea. The raven who’d woken me sat in a window nearby. He looked as ancient as the Raven Master. I looked at him and he looked back at me with those white eyes of his.

“Can he even see anything with all those cataracts?” I asked.

“He sees all the things and places we can’t with those eyes,” the Raven Master said. “He brings back the most interesting baubles from wheres and whens that have never been and cannot be.”

I decided not to help myself to any more of the bacon. Who knew where it had come from? I looked out over the city instead. The traffic was starting to back up now, and the sidewalks were filling with people. The workday was starting. It was a good time to lose myself in the crowd.

“I should be leaving,” I said. “Thanks for the breakfast.”

The Raven Master nodded. “You have fed us enough times over the years that you are always welcome to feed with us,” he said.

I looked around at all the birds, who were still watching me. “It’s a loyal flock you have here,” I said.

“Ravens never forget an enemy,” the Raven Master said, “and they never forget a friend.”

“I hope I stay on their good side then,” I said. I went back down the stairway and out into the city of London, where it really wasn’t safe for me to be.

Now that I was dry and fed well enough for the moment, it was time to take care of a pressing piece of business. I needed to get Morgana’s ring off my finger so I could stop dreaming about her and focus on other things. Like saving Amelia. There was only one person I could think of to help me with that.

Scratch that. There was only one
being
I could think of to help me with that.

I went down into the Underground—the transit Underground, that is, not one of London’s other undergrounds—and took a train east for a time. Eventually I got off and walked the rest of the way to my destination from the station, enjoying the blue sky and the birds calling to each other and the wind in my hair. It was a good day to be alive. A shame it wouldn’t last. It never did.

I made a brief stop to buy a bottle of scotch, then carried on until I reached the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium. I went in through the front gate, no doubt looking like just another mourner on his way to visit a lost wife or child. It was a look I didn’t really have to fake. But that’s not why I was here, of course.

Once on the grounds I made my way to the crematorium building where all the hard work of getting rid of bodies is done. The first door I tried was unlocked. After all, who’s going to break into a crematorium?

It’s probably best not to think about that question too much.

Inside the building, I picked up my pace. I’d definitely get noticed as someone who didn’t belong if I crossed paths with anyone in here. And I was trying to get rid of a problem with this little trip, not add a new one.

I took the first stairway I found and went down, into the building’s basement. It wasn’t anything like the pastoral grounds outside now. Down here it was all stone walls and flickering lights overhead. And the sound of a power saw cutting something down the hall, and through that, the sound of someone singing.

“I remember, I remember, the house where I was born,” he sang in a deep, rasping voice I recognized. “The little window where the sun came peeping in at morn.”

I followed the voice, past doors marked Caskets and Holding Area 1 and Holding Area 2 and Embalming Supplies and Lost and Found. I tried not to let my mind wander into that last one.

“He never came a wink too soon, nor brought too long a day, but now I often wish that night had borne my breath away.”

The door at the end of the hall was open, so I went inside. It was a large chamber with a conveyer belt running through most of the middle of it. The conveyer belt went into the incinerator, where the crematorium went about the business of turning the people back into the dust from whence they’d come. A good method of getting rid of bodies, by the way, if you should ever need to dispose of troublesome evidence. A lot easier than leaving them bundled in blankets in the basement of the Tower. The incinerator wasn’t lit right now, which made the room bearable. It could get hellishly hot in here when business was good.

The rest of the room was a jumble of things: wooden caskets piled haphazardly in one corner, a metal table covered in coroner’s tools in another—saws and hammers and that sort of thing. An easy chair and a cot near the incinerator, and a small bookshelf jammed with paperbacks. An empty bottle of scotch and a lone glass sat on one of the shelves. It was very homey.

There was a body in a cardboard coffin on the conveyer belt, and another body standing beside it. Except the second one wasn’t a body—he just resembled one. His skin bore the pallor of death, as well as more stitches than most autopsy victims. He looked up from the dead man when I entered the room. He held a saw in one hand and the left arm of the corpse, which he’d just torn free, in the other.

“But now, I often wish that night had borne my breath away. . . .” he sang, and then his voice trailed off when he saw me.

“Hello, Frankenstein,” I said.

I know what you’re going to say. Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, not the creature he created. It’s a classic mistake to confuse the two. Well, Frankenstein is what the creature has decided to call himself these days. Who am I to argue with him?

Frankenstein stared at me for several seconds and then dropped both saw and arm to the ground and rushed at me. I stood my ground.

“Cross!” he rumbled and swept me into his arms in his best attempt at a bear hug. He was getting better at this whole human thing. “You are alive!” he said.

“Today, yes,” I said. “But I make no promises about tomorrow.”

He let go and stepped back, gazing at me. “You drowned in the sea,” he said.

I had to think about that one for a moment. There had been so many deaths over the years, and more than one of them had been a drowning.

“With that big ship,” he prompted. “The one they turned into a movie.”

“Oh, right, the
Titanic
,” I said. I’d snuck on board by impersonating a . . . well, it’s probably enough to say my plan to rob the first-class cabins didn’t end that well. “I floated back to the surface and things turned out all right,” I said. Nothing like resurrecting in the middle of the night drifting alone in the ocean, with no land or other people in sight. At least I’d had the stars for company. “How did you hear about that anyway?”

Frankenstein smiled and glanced back at the body. “I have my sources,” he said.

“I imagine you do,” I said. “You mind if I close the door?”

“My home is your home,” he said. He pointed at the chair. “Please, sit.”

So I closed the door and sat in his chair and felt the residual warmth of the incinerator behind me. Frankenstein sat on the edge of the bed and smiled at me. I had a feeling it had been a while since he’d had visitors. Of the living kind anyway.

I gave him the bottle of scotch I’d bought and he took it with an even larger smile.

“You have always been very thoughtful,” he said.

“I just drink a lot,” I said. I looked at the arm and the saw still lying on the floor. “Spare parts?” I asked.

He nodded and held up one of his arms. “This one is wearing out,” he said. “I need to replace it. That one has a nice tattoo on it.”

I saw that it did. A woman riding a bomb. Well, she could keep him company for a while.

We weren’t that different, Frankenstein and me. I needed grace to survive; he needed fresh body parts. We were both freaks of nature. And we were both dreadfully misunderstood.

“So how have you been?” I asked him.

“I have been busy with work,” he said. “People never stop dying.”

“It’s always a growth industry,” I said. I looked at the bookshelf. It was mainly philosophy books: Nietzsche, Locke, Hume, the classics. But there were a few other cultures represented: the Tibetan Book of the Dead, some Buddhist sutras, that sort of thing. “Tackling the big questions, are you?” I asked.

“That is Victor’s influence,” Frankenstein said, smiling that lopsided smile of his. “He is curious about matters of the soul.”

“Aren’t we all,” I said.

He cocked his head, as if listening. “And consciousness,” he said. “He wants to know where it begins and where it ends.”

I could see how Victor Frankenstein might be preoccupied with such matters. After he had died, his creation now sitting before me had taken the brain from Victor’s body and put parts of it into his own head, sewing their brains together. I’d never asked Frankenstein how exactly he’d managed that. Some things are better not known. But he’d managed to keep Victor alive, in memory if nothing else, and the two of them were the same being now. So that was something.

“And what have you learned about consciousness?” I asked.

Frankenstein shook his head at me. “That it is not worth thinking about,” he said.

I looked at his books again. “What about where you came from?” I asked. “Do you ever wonder about that?” I’d thought about the question a lot in relation to my own origins.

“Victor made me,” Frankenstein said, patiently, as if he were talking to a child.

“Sure, he stitched you up,” I said. “But where did the rest of it come from?”

“The rest of what?” Frankenstein said, frowning.

“Your. . . .” I struggled to find the right word. “. . . life.”

We could have been brothers, Frankenstein and me. We were both strange creations, brought into existence under mysterious circumstances. I’d woken up in a cave in the middle of nowhere, with no idea of who or what I was other than the few memories Christ had left me, he’d woken up on a table in Victor’s lab, with who knows what going on in his mind. Both of us monsters.

“Life doesn’t come from anywhere,” Frankenstein said. “It is just always there.”

“Tell that to all the people in the cemetery outside,” I said.

“Death is just a different state of life,” Frankenstein said. “Victor understood that when he made me.”

“You’re starting to sound like a mad scientist,” I said.

“I was alive before I was who I am now,” Frankenstein said. He touched different parts of himself: his arms, his legs, his chest. His head. All taken from different bodies. “When those others died, the life did not leave. It just. . . .” Now it was his turn to struggle for words. “Went to sleep,” he finally said. “Victor woke it again, only this time in my body.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. This was one of the Big Questions, after all.

“I remember it,” Frankenstein said. “Don’t you?”

Okay, so maybe we weren’t so alike after all.

“I’m going to need a drink for this one,” I said. I nodded at the scotch. “Do you mind?”

“You are my guest,” Frankenstein said, handing the bottle back to me. He really had been working on his manners.

So I poured some scotch into the lone glass and took a long sip, and then another.

“You were saying?” I said.

Frankenstein stared at the dead body on the conveyer belt, a look on his face as if he were remembering something long since forgotten.

“I wasn’t me then,” he said. “I was the others. Although I wasn’t really them either, when I was dead. When we were all dead. We were no one. We just were. And we waited, forgotten in the ground.”

“Waited for what?” I asked.

Frankenstein looked back at me. “Why, to be again,” he said. “What else?”

“Carry on,” I said and took another sip of the scotch. It was too early to be drinking, but if sitting in the basement of a crematorium talking the secrets of life with Frankenstein doesn’t call for a drink, I don’t know what does.

“I longed to be again,” Frankenstein said softly, looking at the incinerator now. “That is what I remember. I was not, but I longed to be. And then Victor dug me out of the ground in all those pieces and made me be. And now I am someone. And I have other someones for friends.” He tapped his head with a finger and smiled at me. “We are alive and life is everywhere and we all are.”

I finished the rest of the glass, taking that in. His understanding of life and death was far different than mine, but that didn’t mean it was any less valid. It’s a big universe and we are all multitudes and all that.

I put the empty glass back down on the shelf. “I’d love to keep talking philosophy and the meaning of life with you,” I said, “but I’ve got a rather pressing problem that I think only you can help me with.”

“You need to dispose of more body parts,” Frankenstein said, nodding.

“I told you not to bring that up again, but yes,” I said. I held up my hand and wiggled my ring finger. “I want you to take this finger.”

He stood and came over to take my hand. He looked at my finger like a jeweller appraising a stone. “It’s very nice, but the ring is curious,” he said.

“It’s cursed,” I said. “I can’t get it off.”

He looked at me again without letting go of my hand.

“And the nature of this curse?” he asked.

“Nothing, really,” I said, shrugging. “It makes you fall in love with a certain faerie queen.”

“Love,” Frankenstein said and sighed.

Maybe he wouldn’t mind a little undying love to take his mind off his eternal loneliness, but I wouldn’t wish the ring on him. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Well, except for maybe Judas. I daydreamed about that for several seconds, before I suddenly felt jealous about the idea of Judas wearing Morgana’s ring.

“Why haven’t you removed it yourself?” Frankenstein asked, turning his attention back to the ring.

“I’ve tried,” I said. “I don’t have the skill required.” That wasn’t exactly the truth, of course. I couldn’t pull the ring off, no matter how hard I tried. Perhaps I could have cut the finger off and regrown it, but I’d never been able to work up the motivation to do that. I blamed it on the enchantment.

Frankenstein made a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a grunt. Or maybe a groan. “But you think I have the necessary ability.”

I nodded at the arm on the floor. “You do have a way with bodies,” I said.

He let go of my hand and shuffled over to the table of coroner’s tools. He hummed a little to himself while selecting the right tool. Then he came back with a small, circular bone saw.

“I imagine this will hurt a lot,” he said, taking my hand in his again.

“Trust me, it can’t hurt worse than it already does,” I said, although I wasn’t entirely convinced of that.