Doctor D’Arco, Sorcerer of London

21. The Fog of the Lake

Chapter 21

The Fog of the Lake

“Surrounded?”

My breathless voice sounded uncertain in my own ears: should I feel triumphant or terrified, I wondered, to be encircled by the unseen disprites of Crystal Palace Park? And how should I know from Victor, whose violent rise to my defense, when I thought that I sensed something uncanny drawing toward us down the forking trail, evinced both the readiness of his strength and the thrill of our peril?

“Do not fear them,” Victor answered, the sensation of his voice in my mind low and steady. “We have not been alone since we entered the treed passage of the Grand Central Walk. What you felt was the first presence to draw so near, and as your tone was urgent, I wished to take no chances.”

“I’m sorry for the false alarm.”

“Do not be. And do not apologize: better a false alarm than no capacity for feeling at all. Yet you remind me that a crossroads is perhaps not where I should stand with you for long. Come with me.”

“How far away from us is the nearest disprite?” I asked him as we walked the lakeside path to the left, his great shadowy form between me and the water. I imagined his choice of sides was significant: the darkening trees behind the hedgerow at my left hand, foreboding though they seemed, were evidently the lesser threat compared to the still lake that lay past him to my right.

But with another turn, I became less certain. There was water now to either side of us, the silver haze along its surface slipping low across our path, and for a moment I caught my breath: an eerie form seemed to spring from the gathering darkness on the trail ahead, and though I soon observed that it stood as still as stone, I can scarcely be blamed for my well-founded anticipation of the uncanny—for mistaking at first this strange sculpture for some eldritch creature of the mist.

“When you asked, it was the Woman in the Water—that is what she calls herself in recent times, relegated to haunting this man-made mere after the fouling of the Thames. The form you saw crouched at the lakeside swam beside us at my right. She has never troubled me, but I do not entirely trust her. Not one to concern herself with the niceties of asking questions before she strikes.”

“And now, sir?”

He gestured with his cane to the sculptures ahead. “Tell me about these Irish elk we approach.”

“An immense bull elk: a prehistoric beast, the likes of which I do not think still walks the world—no, two; I see another standing sentinel behind him—with antlers like great branching hands, sculpted in a stance proud and erect, painted a pale golden brown. Made of some manner of concrete I suppose. Their mates recline in the grass beside them.”

“There are four of these creatures?”

“Yes, sir—no, I am mistaken. There are five. I had missed at first the buck-fawn with his small antler spikes.”

“Good,” he replied inside my mind. “Very good. But do not let the buck-fawn from your sight.”

Before I thought of what I did, I looked up at Victor—with an expression of perplexity, I am sure, if any could see my veiled face—and then, realizing my error, back to the five sculptures of prehistoric elk which we now passed by.

And then I blinked—and shivered. There were now only four.

The buck-fawn was gone.

“Victor,” I whispered, “there were five of them…”

“Yes,” he nodded, still looking ahead as we walked, “look to your left. Turn slowly. You are in no danger.”

I held my breath as I turned my head, not daring to stop in my tracks, not daring to break my stride?—

A young golden elk walked at my side, his new antlers short and straight, his misty hooves tapping in a sprightly staccato (why did I not hear them until now?) on the cold ground yet leaving no trace behind him. The small buck-fawn—no taller than a dog at the shoulder; lighter, it seemed, than the air itself—looked up to me with nearly a human expression, round brown eyes and a pensive mouth, and when I gently extended my hand he sprung ahead and disappeared into the mist.

“I don’t suppose the rest are coming too?”

“The rest of the ancient elk? No,” Victor replied, some measure of amusement in the tone of his voice in my head, “no, I do not think so. You were correct in both of your counts. There were five elk: four statues, and one disprite.”

“Then I saw one of the spirits.”

“Yes. Though I believe, like Absolon, he made himself visible to you.”

“Had any others been here—any other mortals, I mean—would they have seen the buck-fawn just as well?”

“I suspect not, but it is difficult to say. I have only my own perception, and what you tell me of yours. I do not make a habit of bringing mortals to this place at dusk.”

“Your previous apprentices?”

He slowly shook his head.

I sensed his reticence, and said no more.

We walked on together down the lakeside trail, side by side into the gathering darkness. Sometimes the pathway grew wider, sometimes it narrowed again; in some places the close-growing evergreens veiled the lake, and yet in others the cold nakedness of winter trees afforded a better view, a reminder that we were never far from the unsettling expanse of the still water. I kept my eyes on the trail ahead: it seemed a thin river of cold light, brightened by silver mist and the faintest dusting of snow.

But even as we walked, the vision of it slowly faded in the last of the evening’s failing light.

As far as I could tell, Victor carried no lamp with him. Nor did I. I wondered if I was meant to see in the dark somehow, or if he had mastered such a feat—and if so, I thought to myself, I should take his hand and let him lead me through the night. It would not be the first time I trusted him to lead me through darkness.

My eyes had revealed to me nothing of the other world but the mist, the Woman, and the buck-fawn, after all. I supposed that despite our hopes, I did not have the Sight, or not in the way he thought that I might. But that is not to say that I was possessed of no other senses. I thought that I heard things, now and again, but there was little that could not be explained as the ordinary animals of the evening emerging for their nocturnal business, stirring in the thickets and the landscaped undergrowth—or the faint sounds of singing in the distance, now nearer, now further away. They sounded as if they were belated carolers, or beggars asking for any wassail left over from Twelfth Night. But I did not know if we were near enough to any place suited for caroling—even if the season had not already come and gone—and I knew of no carols whose melody ran in such strange strains of vanishing beauty.

And I knew very well the nature of what I felt in the cold air: a distant, dim sense of the vastness of the worlds below, so unearthly in its atmosphere that the eldritch shadow of Doctor D’Arco seemed in that moment some last bastion of half-humanity, the most familiar thing in all the dying twilight of the world.

I stumbled as we crossed a stone footbridge into deeper darkness, my foot catching on a mild decline in the path—but I scarcely had time to right my balance before Victor’s iron grip caught me fast by the upper arm.

“Thank you,” I whispered as we stopped, and even in the dark I could feel the gravity of his gaze upon me. “You wouldn’t happen to have a candle about you?”

Did his hand linger as he released me? Maddeningly, I cannot say. He was not quick to let me go, but just as I began to assign meaning to his touch, he drew his hand away—unhurriedly, rather thoughtfully—and beneath the black fabric of my dress, the cold of a winter’s night drained my skin of his warmth.

“No,” he replied in my mind. “Something more.”

He gripped the scorpion pommel of his walking-stick, and with the cane’s tip he traced a circle around the both of us in the earth of the pathway, marking it swiftly at its four compass points with quick-carved sketches of arcane signs I could hardly make out in the dark.

“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves,” he intoned aloud beside me, the sheer depth and power of his voice seeming to move the very air, “and ye that tread the sands with printless foot—Good Neighbors, grant me light! May the friar’s lantern burn for me tonight. Ego sum ego solus! ”

And as if this final phrase in Latin (I knew enough, at least, to recognize the language) were some incantation of command, he struck the ground with the end of his walking-stick and waited.

He did not wait long. A breath of winter wind rushed by us, stirring in his cloak and my dress, and before us over the path—as far ahead as the eye could see, before the way disappeared behind a bend—a faint, ghostly fire flared to life, if fire indeed it was. It was too dark to be any means at all of illumination—a deep, shining purple, far too close to black to have any business being luminous—and yet it glowed somehow from a point in its own inner light, pulsing with a gleaming fog that spread towards us through the mist yet cast no shadows.

“An ignis fatuus ,” the sensation of his voice slipped into the back of my mind, answering my question before I could so much as ask. “Nightfire. The friar’s lantern, leading stray travelers home. The will o’ the wisp, leading them astray again.”

“Is it your magic?”

“No. I have summoned it—or, more precisely, I have as a friend put in a request, and they answered. Can you see now?”

The dark, glowing orb of mist illuminated nothing—the world, it seemed was no brighter, no lighter than without it—and yet, by some means I could not explain, the pathway ahead into the night was no longer obscured by darkness. I could see where to place my feet, and Victor by my side, and the few scattered flakes of snow drifting down upon the earth.

“Yes, sir. I cannot say by what means, for the world looks no brighter, and yet so long as I keep its fire within my sight, I can see somehow—as if my eyes themselves have grown accustomed to the night.”

Victor grunted, satisfied; he struck through the circle with a few sharp chafes of his black boot, quickly concealing its form, and we walked on.

The will o’ the wisp grew no nearer, but floated on ahead: always at the corner of the eye, there and yet not, glowing like the violet ghost of a candle flame when one looks too long into the light and then suddenly away.

I could just make out the hulking form of a prehistoric beast on the island across the water to our left, bear-like and yet lizard-like, still as stone, a great silent giant out of man’s dream of the young world. It was a thing of wonder in itself, seen in the rare, spectral unlight of the ignis fatuus , and it should not have stirred in my breast the first drops of the sinking poison of disappointment. And yet, for all the eerie magic of the moment, I must admit that it did precisely that: here we were, approaching the bridge of time—the wooden footbridge over water beside the artificial reconstruction of the exposed layers of the earth—and about to enter into the heart of the man-made prehistoric lakeside, the site of the antediluvian menagerie in all its savage, sinuous glory. Here we were, walking the double threshold between time and time—between day and night, the age of monsters and the age of man—and for all that I sensed of the faerie-world slipping in through the hour’s slackening seams, pricking at the edges of my nerves, with too few exceptions the unseen mysteries of the earth remained unseen indeed to my eyes.

It was poor magic to fixate on my own failing, and thereby only make it more true. Nonetheless, the fact remained: I did not have the Sight as I had hoped.

“What do you see now?” I heard Victor’s voice in the back of my mind, and I wondered if on top of all else he meant now to taunt me. Yet there was nothing in his tone to suggest such a thing.

“Nothing uncanny but that ghostly, violet mist of the will o’ the wisp. That, the Woman in the Water, and the buck-fawn, and the fog of the lake spreading over the path—that is all I have Seen, sir, in all this time.”

“ All ,” he repeated back to me with a sardonic chuckle.

“And what could my predecessors See by this point? Rothfield, and whoever came before him?”

“My previous apprentices? Absolutely nothing.” He sobered suddenly, as if to punctuate the point, and stopped in the center of the bridge’s span to turn to me. I halted as well. He was framed by the display of geological strata behind him, crafted stripes of stone that seemed to suggest to the beholder a descent through the layers of the ages of the earth.

I wondered how many layers down lay the faerie-hollows, and how many more to the great warring cities of the earth’s core.

“Rothfield could not See until the magical injury to his eye,” Victor continued, “and the sudden onset of his Sight racked and appalled him. I had an apprentice who began to develop the first stirrings of his Sight after five years. Another who grew eventually into a fine sense of feeling but could never See with his eyes at all. And yet you ,” he paused for emphasis, the sensation of his voice in my head strengthening into the same defiant pride that I had in his library mistaken for wrath, “have the temerity to be discontent, to expect to See more , even as you claim to me not only to be able to navigate by the glow of the ignis fatuus but to See the true color of the thing itself.”

“What do others see,” I asked him after a brief silence, “when they look at it? They must see something , surely. In every legend I have read, it lures unwary travelers away to the other world.”

“Yes,” he replied, “because it generally appears to them as a real candle flame, or the light of a common lantern. As the suggestion of something human—not as the wandering spirit you have witnessed.”

Indeed, I thought that the will o’ the wisp drew closer now, as if waiting for us. Beneath my veil, I felt the hairs that strayed from their pins prick up on the back of my neck. Could I discern, beside the sculpted dinosaur on the island, a small face watching us through the mist—or was it merely that my mind’s eye had grown desperate in my disappointment? Did a shadow shift ahead of us beside the great tree that rose from the path? I knew beyond question that I felt something akin to Absolon’s art, earthy yet ephemeral, and not for a moment did I doubt that some manner of disprites were about us, watching us in the night.

“I’m so close, sir,” I whispered to him slowly, closing my eyes with a sigh, as if in some slender hope that opening them again would reveal the creatures that hid in the very breadth of my gaze. “I cannot tell if I have begun to See them—to See more of them, I mean—or if it is only the abstraction of my own frustration that projects them in my mind. Either I have nearly the Sight, sir, or else my own thwarted will engenders ghosts.”

I opened my eyes again: no more disprites to be seen, but Victor’s fiery eyes were fixed on me with a long, considering look. I wondered if beneath the scarf and the steel mask he had set his jaw—a strong jaw, I imagined, roughened by the thick, black whiskers I had glimpsed beneath the brim of his genteel top hat—and I wondered at the low, quiet growl in the back of his throat as he exhaled, as if for a rare moment, at odds entirely with the decisive force of his nature, he were beset by some tormenting indecision.

I breathed his shadow into my body as I felt it close in around us, the air thick and quivering with his tension. I watched the great shoulders rise and fall, the muscular hand on the scorpion pommel of the cane grow taut within its black leather glove.

He did not turn away.

And then something changed. All of a sudden I felt an uncanny alteration in the nature of the world, almost some shift in time itself; the cold air about me warmed and shed its winter chill, and for a moment I wondered if I were going to swoon again?—

I blinked. The golden buck-fawn bounded out of the mist, out of the empty air, his dancing hooves tapping tracelessly on the planks of the wooden bridge by my side, as if he had never left me. I could not tell whether the few drifting flakes of snow fell on him or through him, or whether they ever reached the ground at all.

Either way I felt no fear, and the frigid touch of snow seemed a foreign notion.

It felt little like a swoon, and more like being in Victor’s arms.

“What have you done to me?” I willed my mind into his with all my strength, asking with no accusation, no malice—only a breathless whisper, as silent as the snow.

“Nothing,” I felt his voice in the back of my head: a deep rumble, tense with the exertion of force restrained, like the first roll of thunder before a coming storm. “Nothing that I understand.”

“The young elk came back to me?—”

“Stand before me, turn around, and give me your hands,” he commanded me, the sound of his words in my mind firm with urgency—though they softened then, and slowed, as if he had caught himself. “As we did before.”

I nodded to him, slowly but resolutely. No sooner had I turned away from him, facing the water and the path ahead, than I felt the heat and power of his strong body press against my back; my hands scarcely had time to hang cold and waiting at my sides before he seized them in his firm, warm grip, the black leather of his gloves tightening around the black lace of mine.

And then, before my eyes, the world came to life.

There was the buck-fawn beside me, and there in the lake the Woman in the Water, her floating hair splayed over the still surface—and now the face beside the stone beast belonged to a small young man in a loincloth, plucking idly at a silent harp as a gust of wind blew his tousled hair across his horns; now the shifting shadow on the path ahead became a wild-eyed imp half my height, with a red tongue and a body like a wolf standing upright on its long heels. He bared his thin fangs and sniffed the air, as if never had he seen such a sight as we.

And there were more—far more—shining dancers in a ring half-hidden amid the trees; a pair of snake-tailed bats wheeling in the wind; ghostly shapes, human and yet not, teeming in the roiling mist—in instinct I leaned back against Victor, innately seeking mortal touch even as I strained my eyes to See more of the terrible wonder of the world.

I felt his grip tighten around my hands. A swift shear of wind eddied dry leaves across our feet, and the strains of distant song I once had heard seemed to grow nearer, nearer still, until I heard the strings of the horned youth’s harp, the strange singing of the circling dancers, the voice of the wolfish goblin-man as he threw back his head in a spectral howl and vanished into the fog.

The night wind blew Victor’s long cloak about me, and it occurred to me then that I no longer had any impression that I might swoon again—I felt his dark shadow, his heat; I sensed the deep, masculine warmth of his scent—but either I had become resilient to the perturbation of his sorcery, or else he had taken care not to overwhelm me beyond the fortress of his hall.

Perhaps it was the wind, or the sounds of the disprites, or the muffling quiet of his black scarf, but I heard him speak no spell.

“I can See, sir,” I whispered, neither wishing nor daring to turn away from the sights before me. A creature like a black fox on hare’s feet darted across the path below the ghost-glow of the ignis fatuus . Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the luminous dancers leave their circle to walk in a line along the crest of the man-made rock strata, their laughter like the titter of birds still awake after the rising of the moon. “But save for your shadow,” I added in hushed tones, “I feel so little of your art.”

When at last he spoke again, his voice was slow and deep in the back of my mind, but tense and measured and too precise. “You felt none ,” he said. “No sorcery of mine.”

“I thought—when I frustrated myself, and felt so close to Seeing—I thought it was your art through me that awakened my Sight?—”

“No.”

“When you took my hands? Like we did before?”

I felt him exhale slowly and shake his head. “You did not need my art.”

I needed only your touch.

The thought sped through my mind before I could catch myself, before I could seize the very notion and thrust it down to drown it in the silent depths of my heart.

And then my very heart itself seemed to sink. Had he sensed me? In the grip of some instinct that slipped its conscious reins, had I pressed into the unfathomable mind of Doctor D’Arco the last and only thing I had ever meant to conceal from him?

And was it now too late?

A man and woman appeared from around the bend of the path ahead, well-formed and nearly of mortal height, clad only in garlands of leaves; as they considered us from a distance, I noticed that he stood on bowed lizard-legs, and that the pulsating pineal organ on her forehead glowed yellow like a cat’s eye.

The dancers from the trees sat down on the ledge of the artificial strata to watch us, elbows on knees and curious half-human faces resting in hands.

The Woman rose slowly from the water, her hair trailing like dark kelp.

Was it too late?

Was my vow of strictest celibacy broken at last by a single errant thought, and were these the demons drawn in by the intimation of my desire?

Was this to be the end, so sudden and so soon, of what had never truly begun?

I pressed my body back closer against Victor’s: I knew only this to do, and nothing of what to say.

You did not need my art , he had said to me a moment ago, and it was all I could do to turn the words over in my mind, again and again until they nearly lost meaning, as I felt his hands release mine and the chill of a winter’s night return to my skin. He could not have meant—surely he could not have meant—to suggest that same, impossible notion that had crept unbidden into my own brain.

But whether it was touch, or art, or some other force unnamed, it waned now, and with it my Sight. I watched the vision of the garlanded couple fade, the Woman in the Water begin to dissipate into mist, the buck-fawn and the watching dancers dim.

If this were to be the end, perhaps he thought it for the better—for some mistaken presumption of my own good—if I did not See what was to come. And if he thought as much, he did not know me. My breath fogged in the cold air as I sighed: not even so much for an untimely end, nor for fear of a strange death or of what should come thereafter, but for the disappointment that perhaps he did not know my nature after all—that I had placed us in this peril only for my own fond self-deceit, and that my mind and my heart were more occult to him than the entire eerie host of the hollow hills.

Yet when I closed my eyes, my heart filled with heat—no soothing, drowsy warmth, but the shock of a sudden quickening, like a drowning man seizing a first life-giving breath: slowly, firmly, his powerful hands gripped my shoulders from behind, holding me against his body, drawing me into his black cloak and the stifling heat of his shadow.

I did not mean for my left hand, where it hung at my side, to brush across his thigh.

“Now,” I heard his unmistakable voice in my ear as I felt him arch over my shoulder, the crisp white gentleman’s shirt against my back, the side of his black scarf pressing my veil against my cheek. He was insistent, implacable, yet neither his touch nor his tone was harsh, and despite the pounding of my heart I thought somehow that he was protecting me, shielding me with his broad back and shoulders from some unseen force behind us. “Now,” he whispered in a strange, encouraging tone of expectant wonder, his deep voice haunted and intense, “tell me what you See.”

The teeming world rushed back to me, and now it was all that I had Seen before and more besides: all its uncanny beauty, its promise of terror, its inhuman joys and wistful sorrows. I enumerated to him again all that I had told him before, this time in more vivid detail as every spirit seemed to grow more tangible, more alive before my eyes; for each description, Victor replied with a slow nod and a quiet affirmative grunt, satisfied and yet unable to relax, his strong body taut as if with anticipation of the next.

“Now the ghosts are breaking from the mist,” I continued, realizing that the rhythm of my breath had hastened to match his, “to the lonely strains of the harper’s strings.”

“Do not fear them.”

“No, sir.” I felt his warm grip tighten around my shoulders—only his own instinct, perhaps—the restless reflex of his urgency—and whatever I meant next to say drifted away on the heat that rose through me.

“Continue.”

“Another couple joins the first,” I managed, endeavoring to master myself. “He has a gargoyle’s face, something like Absolon’s; the woman wears heavy ox-horns and a robe that must be made of stars. The buck-fawn still dances beside me, now pressing his nose to my right hand as if he seeks my attention. I can nearly feel the cold touch?—”

But my left hand, it occurred to me with a terrible, sinking thrill, was still resting against the side of Victor’s thigh, close enough to feel solid muscle through the fabric of his trousers—I dared not draw his attention by moving my hand away—I could not bear to move it now?—

“—There is more, sir,” I recovered, buying myself time and distraction. “Pale moths circle the lightless ghost-fire of the ignis fatuus .” I focused to slow myself, realizing I was speaking more quickly than my accustomed manner. “A trio of what I suppose could be called elves emerges from the greenery on the island, and yet I cannot say for certain whether they come from amid the reeds or are the reeds themselves. The very night is alive, sir—anywhere my eyes linger reveals another animate spirit—I should not be surprised if the stars themselves dive down through the veil of clouds to surround us, watching us like all the others.”

“And how does it feel?”

I caught my breath, wondering belatedly if my fingers had curled against him in the reflex of my mild shock.

“How does what feel, sir?”

“The sense of them,” he replied, and I felt him draw a long, deep breath. “How does it feel to See? To look upon our Good Neighbors as they look with the same interest upon you? To meet them in this place? You do not seem to be particularly disturbed.”

“No, not particularly, sir.” I allowed myself to relax a little, the tension in my shoulders to melt a little into his hands, softened by relief and disappointment. “For all the uncanniness of it, there is something sad about it, somehow—and yet not entirely without hope. I cannot but feel how much has been lost—and all the more to meet them here , not in some ancient forest nor on some wild moor, but haunting a human pleasure-garden built by the same Londoners who drove them from their old abodes. A sort of revenge, I don’t wonder, and if I were in their place I should like to do the same.” His hands shifted, only slightly, but I found that I waited until they settled again. “I do not doubt that these are the people who choose to stay while their brethren flee beyond the limits of the city—some stay to fight, like Absolon did, and some perhaps only to remember. They have a self-aware and rather grim sense of humor, I think, to gather in the midst of these man-made likenesses of monsters that have vanished from the green world beneath the moon, as if at once to know and to defy the notion that they themselves are to follow. And yet despite all, they remain, and there is magic in the world still.

“Their sense of humor and of pride is a bit like your own, sir,” I continued. “It does not amaze me anymore to know that you walk among them. And yet you do not feel quite as do they—they have their own magic, but they do not have your shadow.”

“Because the shadow , as you know it, is the province of the mortal sorcerer alone—the fruit of the union between the arcane art and the human soul. The Sight quickens it. Take my hand,” he let go of my shoulders and stepped beside me, looking at once down to me and ahead to the spectral will o’ the wisp as he extended his black-gloved hand, “and walk with me. Once around the lake,” he continued, his voice no longer in my ear but in the back of my mind, “and then to the carriage, and home.”

Home . As I set my hand in his, I let my fingers slip into the spaces between his own, closing my eyes for a moment as the warm strength of his grip surrounded me. His home was a catacomb cathedral, a hidden castle beneath the earth; mine was a small, cold guest-bedroom in Hargrave’s mansion. There was no indignity in the latter; on the contrary, I felt more ennobled dwelling there alone—freer, more alive, more myself—than ever I had in my husband’s house.

But home was here, too, somehow, in the low mist between the darkening trees and the haunted lake. Perhaps, uprooted from all that I once knew, thrust by my own impetuous will into the unseen and the unknown—perhaps now all the places I walked and took my daily meals, and studied and practiced and slept, were so uncanny that the weird had become familiar, and the ordinary world (should I have the misfortune to revisit it) now would feel foreign to my estranged soul.

Or perhaps it was simpler yet than that, I thought to myself as we walked together, hand in hand down the lakeside path and through the mysteries of the night. Perhaps home was?—

I caught myself too late: the thought had already crossed my mind. Home was with him. Even here, even now, caught up in the beauty and monstrosity of the hidden world.

“You will retain your Sight,” I heard his voice in my mind, as if in belated explanation, “as long as you suffer your hand to remain in mine.”

“Yes, sir.” Sight or no Sight, I could not conceive of withdrawing it—of breaking this spell. To our left, across so narrow a channel of the lake that they seemed nearly within arm’s reach, the greatest of the prehistoric statues stood stern and silent in depths of time, and their frozen hulks of sculpted spines and scales were glaringly inanimate beside the nameless spirit-creatures that crept beneath and around them, watching us as we passed, whispering to one another with voices like water. But as history for the stone beasts stood still, so too did the limits of time at once weigh upon and lighten my heart: once around the lake , hand in hand, and then the magic of the moment would end—but until then I was promised these few minutes, these few steps at his side, as if we walked together in a strange, shared dream.

“Look behind us,” he whispered, his grip tightening around my hand to draw my attention.

“What should I look for?”

I thought I felt him smile. “Look.”

He stopped, and as I turned my head to look back over my shoulder, I could not help but squeeze his hand in return: the buck-fawn strode behind us, and behind him trailed a glowing procession of the creatures of the dusk—some walking, some dancing, some creeping, after their natures, and now and again another alighted from the mist or crawled up out of the earth to join the others on the winding path.

“The hosting of the disprites,” I whispered to Victor, hearing the wonder in my voice in my own ears, “like in the old songs. But why are?—”

“—Let us lead them, you and I,” he interrupted quietly, “while we can, and while the night is young.”

As we walked, there were no sounds of footsteps but our own, and after but a few moments passed I thought even that the spectral voices behind us grew dim. Perhaps it was only that too much of my attention had become diverted from the sound: to our right a low hill rose up out of rough-hewn stones, crowned by the twisting roots and branches of a pair of towering trees, and this of all was the first thing that night that truly frightened me. I recognized it at once for a hollow hill—a faerie-mound or old green grave, a gateway between our world and the world below, neither a place for the living nor for the restful dead—and then, with a shudder, where once I saw only stones I began to See the door.

A thin mist slipped out from beneath it over the rocky threshold, chilling my feet as we drew closer, and around the rustic arch of its edge I sensed a faint, lightless glow.

“Look to the sculptures and the island,” Victor whispered in my mind. “Do not look to the door.”

“What would happen, sir?”

“Do not look to the door,” he repeated, the impression of his voice firm and tense. In so few moments, something had changed in him—the fleeting pleasure at leading the procession of the disprites was gone, stripped down to wariness and resolve. “I have not seen it revealed before, not even to my own unaided Sight. Had I known, I would not have risked you here. But to turn back now, to reveal any misgiving, would be worse than to continue past it. Keep your pace. Stay close to me.”

I felt as if I scarcely had a choice, so magnetic was the gravity of his shadow as it closed in around me, darker and denser than the night. His grip on my hand grew unyielding—vise-like, even fierce—and I was reminded once more of the witching hour when first we met, pursued through the tunnels beneath the spiritualist shop by some unseen creature whose footsteps sounded like hooves of a horse.

Was it indeed Victor’s shadow alone that darkened the atmosphere about me? I kept my eyes to the island, as he had said, but I thought that the dusk between the great forms of the stone beasts grew bleaker, and that a black fog began to roll across the twisting forms of the serpentine sculptures in the water by the bank. I did not wonder at such a thing—this blinding night-fog of London was no stranger—but not since that midnight had I walked abroad at the hours to experience it again.

All that was missing now was the sound of those hooves.

And then, to my grim amusement, I found that the memory had revived them in my mind—indistinctly at first, and then so vividly that I nearly thought I heard them with my own ears: the steps of horse’s hooves somewhere behind us, sharp and hollow as if over stone and then heavy on the trail, in the slower, sparser rhythm of an animal that walked on two legs instead of four.

I blinked my eyes, and shook my head to clear my mind as I walked.

No use.

I could not rid myself of the sounds of the hooves, thick and dull, as if the creature trod the same dirt path where we had walked only moments ago.

Subtly, I felt Victor pull me closer. The shadow of his sorcery grew darker yet, and I felt in it a first stirring of fury, a sense of old embers rekindling, though the deep shiver that ran down my spine was as frigid as the snow.

We were being followed.

There was no question in my mind.

We were being followed by the same thing that had stalked us underground.