Vanished

CHAPTER 22

Crashing out of the temporacline, I skidded into a small courtyard in the normal world, where the sun hadn’t begun to set. I stumbled against a brick wall and into a short passageway to a street where, back in the sunshine of the normal, I stopped to catch my breath. A sign on the wall beside me read WHITE HORSE ALLEY on one corner and COWCROSS on the other. I remembered passing Cowcross.

I looked right and left and glimpsed the grand entrance to Smithfield Market down to my left. The road nearby must have been St. John Street before it split and made St. John Lane by the priory gate. So the Underground station would be to my right and up Cowcross, according to my map. But there was no White Horse Alley on the map and the sign on the wall nearby seemed more of a historical marker than an active street sign. I suspected that White Horse Alley had been gone for a long time.

I walked on to Farringdon Underground Station and spent a while figuring out where in the layers of the station’s platforms I needed to go to catch the right train going the right way. Having lived all my life on the West Coast of the United States where subways are a rarity, wrapping my brain around the overlapping complexities of the London Underground took a bit of faith and hope—two things I’m not that good with. I eventually sussed out that I needed to take a Circle line train towards Aldgate, which would go east for a while before it turned and went west closer to the Thames with a stop at Temple Underground—right across the street from my hotel. Confusing if you tried to reason it out, but plain enough if you just trusted the map.

As I stood studying the map and figuring out the fare, floods of commuters bustled in and out of the station while a public address system reminded them about long-distance trains to outlying parts of England. They weren’t as pushy as Seattle commuters, but they were in just as much of a hurry. They paid me very little heed—almost like ghosts but much heavier when they stepped on my feet—swimming in a human tide as slick and rapid as salmon looking to spawn with the occasional “sorry” or “ ’scuse me” tossed into the air as they passed. I joined the swarm and went down to the Circle line platform.

The platform ceiling was a brick vault held up by painted iron columns, and even modern lighting left the ends a bit gloomy. So I wasn’t surprised to see ghosts and squiggles of Grey energy wandering loose over the sizzling yellow lines of the electrified rails. Down at the far end a blur of white sent off a broken-mirror glitter. My mysterious shadow was here, too, and sick of creepy enigmas for one day, I fixed my gaze on it and strode down the length of the platform to catch up to whatever was making that freakish gleam.

As the station wall drew nearer, I could see only one source the gleam could have come from: a man, seated on the floor in the farthest corner. He wore old-fashioned trousers that had once been white under a vestlike thing and a long coat both made of some kind charcoal gray material that looked a bit like ratty crushed velvet. The light show was his aura, which, up close, looked like a wavering heat mirage. As I got within talking distance, he pushed back into the shadows a bit more—they seemed to ripple and close partway around him like a cloak—and kept his head down. Shoulder-length filthy blond hair streaked with white fell forward in clumped strings, hiding his face.

“I was expectin’ a boy,” he said.

“What?” I snapped, cocking my head to peer at him sideways, a trick I’d learned to filter out the chaff at the cusp of the Grey. Under my gaze he seemed to flicker and fall in and out of focus, and the curiously colorless energy around him looked like a hole in the world. My concentration narrowed to him alone and the ghost chorus of London I’d started to ignore swelled in my head like a forming wave.

“I expected someone stupider,” he elucidated in an odd drawl. “More balls, less brain, considering the nature of this fool’s errand. I’d have thought a girl’d have better sense.”

“Who the hell are you?” It was pointless to pretend he wasn’t something otherworldly and therefore ignorant of what I did. Nothing else in the Grey seemed to be, so why not this strange man, too? But I had no idea who or what he was.

“Marsden. Mole catcher, as used to be, but never chasin’ moles for Edward Kammerling—as are you.”

“You think I work for him.”

“As you’ve come from seein’ Jakob—and not many others would bother knockin’ on his master’s door as wasn’t Kammerling’s agent—yeah, I think you do, girl. The master’s gone away and them as took ’im wouldn’t have much cause to return for his menial wi’out laying that gruesome creature in a hot, dry grave. Jakob is still cursin’ you for wrenchin’ out ’is arm. That was a nifty trick you pulled comin’ over off the wall like that.”

“Yeah, everything I need to know I learned from Donald O’Connor,” I sneered, instantly suspect of his flattery.

“Who?”

“Haven’t you ever seen Singin’ in the Rain? It’s a movie. Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor. ”

He spat a laugh. “No,” he said, and turned a little my way. “It’s not the eyes, y’know. ”

Ineluctable fear lanced through me. I couldn’t seem to breathe right and what air flowed into my lungs felt thickened with knives of frost. My head swam and my body chilled and burned by rapid turns as if with malarial fever. I eased back a step, poised to run.

He raised his head. The hair fell back and he turned his face to me—a once-beautiful, eyeless nightmare of a face. His skin was pale and powdery, stretched over exquisite bones that pressed forward as if they wanted to escape from the confining flesh. Reddened, flaccid eyelids hung over orbless sockets rimmed with ragged scars, one lid not quite closed and showing a hint of the gouged hollow behind it. Yet I felt his stare from those empty eyes, a phantom gaze as sharp as an ice pick. I jerked back, teetering at the edge of the platform.

Marsden sprang forward and snatched my hand into his cold, rawhide-hard grip, yanking me forward to safety as a train rushed into the station. The Grey rocked and swayed for a few moments, flashing disco lights around me.

“You’re bloody naive, my girl,” Marsden whispered into my face on a breath that smelled of lilies and ash. “Though you’ve more bottle than I’d have credited—damned if you don’t.” He chortled and let me go. “This is my train. I’ll find you tomorrow where there aren’t so many of the wrong eyes to see us.”

I turned to watch him step onto the train. It was a phantom steam engine pulling a handful of old-style carriage cars, and though it looked too insubstantial to hold anything not already a wisp of smoke and memory, it lurched forward as Marsden got aboard and it started off. I jumped back from the platform edge as, with a blast of sound and wind, the normal train rushed in and displaced its ghostly predecessor.

I breathed in sharply, startled, and looked for any sign of the man, but he was gone. I waited through the next arrival just to be sure he hadn’t been crushed by the multiple tons of electric subway train, but there was nothing to show he’d been there at all.

I felt a little queasy about stepping into the bright red train when it next arrived—just in case something else went Greywards in the next fifteen minutes—but I got aboard and hung on to a pole in the increasing crush of commuters all the way to Temple. I was relieved to finally step out into the fresh air and see my hotel standing there looking quite dully dignified and ordinary. The temptation to run in, repack my bags, and get the hell out of London was strong for a moment, but I backed off, went around the block, and checked for observers and tails before I finally headed inside through one of the side doors to the courtyard.