Chapter Fourteen #2
This close, Sam could make out details on Mr. Pearse: the ragged cut on the bridge of his nose, which was swollen, as if he’d hit something hard.
The bruising beneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t been sleeping.
The eyes that weren’t actually black, but grey as mist, the pupils so blown they were ringed only by a thin layer of iris.
The others, well. There would be no lying to God about whether they were dead or not.
Their skin marbled in a way that put Sam uncomfortably in mind of meat, the flesh bloated, the coins closing their sunken eyes a mercy.
Yet Sam could still make out the soft features of Mr. Hayes, the lump of a book in his pocket.
The Duke’s wire-framed spectacles and silver rapier.
His fierce, thin brows, which had been furrowed in concentration for as long as Sam had known him, relaxed.
The Viscount’s silver-chased ivory-handled revolvers.
Without the customary amusement animating his round cheeks, Sam could almost convince herself it wasn’t him.
Almost. The world closed its hand around her throat as she took their final photographs.
“Mr. Pearse, can you hear me?” Van Helsing asked. The man stared straight through him, not even blinking as a droplet of blood from a cut on his nose rolled into his eye, limning the white in red.
“Tried that one,” the publican called.
“I’m sure you did,” Van Helsing said flatly, before turning to Mr. Pearse again, his voice louder now, as if the problem were with the man’s ears and not what was between them. “Who did this to you?”
“That one too,” the publican said again.
Van Helsing rounded on him. “Are you planning on offering commentary the whole time?”
“Just thought you should know,” the publican said, all innocence. “You being private investigators and all.”
Van Helsing made a frustrated sound in his throat and turned back to Mr. Pearse. “How did you end up in the sea cave?”
“Oh, hadn’t thought of that one,” the publican said. “Wait, no, I did.”
“Did someone attack you?”
“Didn’t ask that one, actually,” the publican said thoughtfully, before confiding to the nurse, “It seemed a bit obvious.”
Van Helsing sounded, by this point, thoroughly exasperated. Sam should channel while he was distracted. But she glimpsed her shadow and stilled.
“Isn’t there something else you could be doing?” Van Helsing demanded of the publican as Hel peered into Mr. Pearse’s eyes, some sort of additional, smaller lens fitted over her spectacles. Heathcliff’s nose was working overtime.
The publican folded his arms over his chest. “Now, I don’t seem to have anything on the schedule. Not anything better than this, at any rate.”
“Mr. Pearse,” Hel said. “Sit up.”
The man sat up so fast, Van Helsing and Sam both stumbled back.
“What did you do?” Van Helsing demanded. He turned to Mr. Pearse. “Lie down again.” But the man sat unmoved, as if he’d been cast in bronze.
Hel grabbed a hunk of brown bread from the bar, where it sat drowning in soup, and folded his hand around it.
“Mr. Pearse. Eat the bread.” And the man ate, his mouth working, his throat swallowing.
But there was no savor to it, and when a bit of soup leaked from the bread, he did nothing to stop the trickle down his chin.
“Mr. Pearse,” Hel said at last. “Slap yourself.”
A slap rang out in the room.
“Jesus, Mary, Joseph!” the publican swore.
A growing sense of horror curled in Sam’s gut.
The feeling that something was wrong with Mr. Pearse in a way that would never be right again.
Hollow, she thought, he was hollow, a skin that might be filled with anything.
She thought again of Mr. Bishop, the way his face had, for a moment, seemed a mask that hid something else, something darker that bulged beneath his flesh.
“Mr. Pearse. Explain yourself,” Van Helsing said, catching on. But the stranger remained quiescent.
“I’ve heard of this sort of thing before,” Hel said.
“People who ran across raths to escape a storm and were never the same after. Sometimes they’re fairy struck.
Sometimes they’re substitutions, rotted logs sheathed in a glamour of themselves, while the stolen dance through the skin of their feet beneath the hills.
Either way, they only ever do what they’re told, and only if you tell them by name. ”
Sam had heard stories of such things, now that she thought of it—an English gentleman in the days of the Napoleonic Wars, whose wife had been replaced with a so-called stock, only to die in three days. A healthy child, withered out of nowhere.
“Can you make him talk?” Van Helsing asked.
“I don’t think he can,” Hel said. “Have you seen Dr. Ure’s and Dr. Frankenstein’s experiments with galvanism? They use electricity to bring a man to a mockery of life, make him move, his face twisting through lifelike expressions. But it’s just reflexes. It’s all that’s left of him.”
“The fairy doctor will fix him,” the publican said. The unspoken if he can be fixed hung in the air behind him like a ghost.
Sam heard an eerie scream. Banshee, she thought, her whole body tensing. She glanced outside, only to see a flash of rust amidst the rising mist. A fox, she told herself. She ought to have known better. Banshees didn’t scream for just anyone. They certainly wouldn’t scream for her.
Van Helsing frowned. “But I thought the Wild Hunt took him. Shouldn’t he be dead?”
A break in the clouds let soft moonlight fall through the open door. Sam turned back to the men and caught her breath. In the silvery light of the moon, the men’s brows shone with that same selenic sigil she’d seen on Mr. Enfield. Except this time, Sam wasn’t the only one who could see it.
Van Helsing swore. “What the hell is that?”
“Tattoos,” Hel answered. She closed the door, and the strange eyes winked out as if they’d never been. She opened it again, and the eyes opened with them. “An alchemical ink that reacts to moonlight.”
“Mr. Enfield had it too,” Sam said. “I thought I was seeing things, but—”
“It seems our victims have more in common than we thought,” Hel said.
“The Duke and the Viscount were members of the Vespertine?” Van Helsing said, sounding surprised, as if he’d thought better of them.
“I wasn’t aware there was ever any doubt,” Hel said. It made perfect sense: They were wealthy, noble, and members of a Society that dealt with the unnatural. Sam simply hadn’t wanted to see it. “Why did you think they were chosen?”
The wind moaned, setting St. Brigid’s crosses to rattling in the eaves, drawing Sam’s attention back to the door, but there was nothing there—not even a fox. Just the evening mist settling over the village like a veil.
“But then, why is Miss Harker haunted?” Van Helsing said. “She’s not a member of the Vespertine.”
“The fact that they’re all Vespertine might be correlation rather than causation,” Hel said. “They are all of them wealthy, Protestant, Unionist men as well.”
“Miss Harker isn’t all of those things either,” Van Helsing said, consternated.
Not mist, Sam thought, her heart growing cold as it began to thicken.
Fog.