The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

by Chris Wooding

  His caution forgotten in his haste, he ran across the room and slid down the ladder, blundering through the darkness in pursuit of his target. Down the stairs, towards the door that had been left open in the Cradlejacks wake, he—

  A shrieking, and something cannoned into him from the side—some howling, whirling thing that scratched and flailed and spat. He yelled in surprise as it bore him to the floor, struggling beneath its grasp; but it attacked in frenzy, and was too wild to be effective. Scrambling out, even before he knew what was really upon him, he had its arms pinioned behind it. His cheek blazed from a deep scratch, and he ached from numerous other bruises that had been inflicted upon him.

  Not the Cradlejack, though.

  “What manner of thing are you?” he asked, though he didn’t really expect a reply. The creature that had attacked him had gone limp in his grasp, breathing shallowly, eyes glazed and half-lidded.

  It appeared to be a girl, but Thaniel knew well enough that appearances were deceptive in the Old Quarter.

  She moaned softly and collapsed.

  THE IRREPRESSIBLE MISS BENNETT

  MEET DOCTOR PYKE

  A NAME FOR THE GIRL 2

  Wych-hunters came in all shapes and sizes. It took a certain something to make a person feel the need to pit themselves against a near-unmatchable foe. For some it was the challenge they craved, the need to excel; for others it was because they believed they were doing a service to the world. Some were motivated by religion, some by vengeance. Some were born into it, some carved their own niche. Some were attracted by the money, some by the danger. Almost all of them had their reasons, and even those who seemed normal on the outside nursed secrets within, secrets that made them crave the job that nobody else wanted.

  The only reason Cathaline Bennett needed was that she was odd.

  The streets were awakening as she walked along Crofter’s Gate at dawn. Market stalls were beginning to open; beggars were shuffling to their favourite spots. Smells of roasted chestnuts and jacket potatoes were beginning to rise from the street vendors’ dark iron oven-carts. Cabs rattled this way and that, scarcely heeding pedestrians as they clopped and clattered over the cobblestones.

  The house that she lived in with Thaniel Fox stood under the foreboding gaze of St Lukes Cathedral. It was a grandiose, terraced affair, with a door and a bay window on its ground floor, and two more windows above it. The top floor had several tall studio windows, intended to maximize the light. A black iron railing guarded its precious few square metres of flagged front yard. Dull green in colour, with beige stone sills and steps, number 273 Crofter’s Gate was not a pretty place, merely a functional one. The cathedral loomed high and stout over the surrounding buildings, a Teutonic mass of curves, arches and spires, dark and frowning in the dawn light. Gargoyles leered from the corners of the towers, pawing towards the dwellings below, scratching at the streets that surrounded the cathedral.

  Cathaline reached the front door and let herself in. The warmth that greeted her as the door opened told her that Thaniel was home; the soft sobbing was something else altogether.

  She stepped inside, shutting the door behind her.

  “Thaniel?” she called.

  “In here,” came the reply from the living room.

  She followed his voice to its source. A fire was burning and the gas lamps were still lit, despite the approaching morning, creating little focus-points of light that faded to ruddy darkness at the edges. The room was full of deep greens and browns, wood-panelled, with a thick rug before the hearth and several hard, uncomfortable armchairs arranged round it. A dining table of heavy teak sat on one side of the room. The sturdy curtains were drawn against the outside.

  Kneeling on the hearth rug was a girl, probably Thaniel’s age if she was any judge, even though Cathaline could only see her from behind at the moment. She had long, blonde hair, muddied and clumped, and she wore a thin white dress that was torn and dirty and smudged with blood in places. She was drinking from a brown ceramic bowl of what smelled like beef soup. Thaniel knelt next to her, looking up as his friend came in.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  Cathaline Bennett had been Thaniel’s mentor during the latter years of his apprenticeship as a wych-hunter, and a friend ever since. Thaniel suspected she was nearing the end of her twenties, but it was extremely difficult to tell, as she acted with such youth and immaturity that she might have been ten years younger than that. She was tall, a little too tall in proportion to her body, giving her the slightly graceless quality of a newborn foal. Her face, neither pretty nor ugly, was nevertheless infused with an inner radiance that lit her features from within and made them mesmerizing to watch. Her hair was cropped to a nape-length bob, an impossibly daring and eccentric cut in a time when women were supposed to be feminine and demure, but it was made even more shocking by the two dark red streaks that ran through the black, from scalp to tip.

  She was wearing an odd assemblage of clothing; a dark crimson pigskin jacket over a black blouse, and black trousers of heavy-stitch cotton with red edging. A smile curled the edges of Thaniel’s mouth. Trousers, on a woman! Cathaline was beholden to nobody’s rules, and that appealed to him. He looked up to her, maybe even more than he had done to his late father, Jedriah Fox—London’s greatest wych-hunter.

  “I found her in the Old Quarter,” he said, calmly. “She will not tell me her name. She will not speak at all.”

  “How did you get those scratches, Thaniel?” Cathaline asked, walking over to them.

  “I was hunting a Cradlejack, and—” Thaniel paused at his friends sudden look of alarm. “It was not that that scratched me. It was her. She is mad, I think.”

  Cathaline knelt down on one knee next to the girl, the glow from the fire warming one side of her face. Now that she could see the waif, she could see the glazed, distant look in her eyes as she stared into the fire. The girl looked terrified, as if she was watching something just beyond the snapping flames that they could not see. Occasionally, she took a mechanical sip of soup from the bowl clenched in her hands. Cathaline gently brushed a strand of hair back from the girl’s muddy face, to better see the cuts and grazes there. There was no response to her touch. “Thaniel, where do you find these girls?” she sighed.

  Thaniel smiled at her. “You do not approve?”

  “I think you could do better,” she replied. “You’ll never find yourself a suitable young lady running with the wych-kin in the Old Quarter.” She stood up and looked down at the girl. “What about her? Is she hurt?”

  “I did not see anything that looks like it might be an animal-or wych-scratch,” Thaniel said. “I think these are from falling over several times.”

  “Has she been like this the whole time?” Cathaline asked. “So quiet?”

  “She was quite manic when I met her. I scared her, maybe.” Cathaline rubbed the back of her neck with her hand. “Well, you have that effect,” she said. “Anyway, here I am, though I’d rather be in bed. You had better tell me what happened.” Thaniel explained the events of the night, how he’d been on a regular patrol when he’d come across the Cradlejack that had been plaguing the area round Chadwick Street, how he’d chased it back over into the Old Quarter and how he’d tracked it to its lair, where he’d found this girl.

  “And you’re sure the Cradlejack didn’t scratch her?” Cathaline prompted, after Thaniel had finished. Cradlejacks were one of the rare types of wych-kin that could pass on their condition by scratching or biting another person. And if it had scratched the girl, and she had scratched Thaniel...

  “I have dealt with Cradlejacks before, remember? I have been bitten before, and I fought it off. I am immune.”

  “I was thinking about me,” Cathaline said, pacing the room. Whatever it was that turned a person into a Cradlejack was like an ague or a fever; you either fought it off and were for ever immune, or it got you. Cathaline had never been caught by a Cradlejack.

  “I’m sure she has not been scratc
hed,” said Thaniel, running a hand through his fine blond hair and returning his eyes to the girl.

  After the soup, the girl became suddenly drowsy, and her eyelids and head became ponderous and heavy. Thaniel led her upstairs, where he put her in his bed, and she was instantly asleep. He checked the windows were secure and fastened, and then locked the door behind him. Better to be safe, until they knew what they were dealing with.

  When he returned to the living room, Cathaline was sitting in a chair, warming herself before the fire while she ate soup with hunks of black bread.

  “Do help yourself to my soup,” Thaniel said. Cathaline raised a hand in thanks.

  “You think the girl is mad?” she asked.

  Thaniel nodded, chewing his lower lip absently. “Mad she may be, or possessed; or maybe only scared out of her wits. I’ll go and see Doctor Pyke at the asylum, and ask if he is missing any patients.” A wrinkling of his nose indicated how distasteful he found that idea. “I did not want to leave her alone. Will you stay with her for a while?”

  “Do I get more soup?” Cathaline asked.

  Redford Acres Asylum stood on the outskirts of London, brooding alone on the side of a low hill, surrounded by a stretch of fields through which a single road led. It was a wide, squat building, devoid of ornamentation—a solid rectangle of stone with tiny square windows evenly dotted across its face. Everything about it radiated dour strength, like a craggy cliff or a thunderhead in the sky.

  Where the road curved through the fields, there were tall gates of wrought iron set into a great wall; the metal in the centre of each had been twisted into the initials RA. A surly-looking gentleman in a flat cap and brown jacket asked Thaniel his business and let him in, pulling the gates apart with a screech. As the cab moved on, Thaniel saw him return to the gatekeepers hut and pick up the earpiece of the telephone.

  The driver of the hansom cab scowled at the building and hurried his horses on, obviously eager to be gone. They crunched to a halt on the gravel of the driveway, before the great stone portal that was the main entrance. Doors of dark mahogany glared at them. The driver looked about nervously, and his face fell when Thaniel told him to wait; he had been hoping for a quick exit. Somewhere above, a thin scream cut through the day, sounding alien in the grey light and making the driver jump.

  The doors were opened just as Thaniel was climbing down from the cab, and there was Doctor Pyke. He was a pinch-faced man, with a narrow, pointed nose on which was perched a pair of small, round spectacles. His hair was greying to white, and had been receding back from his forehead at a steady pace. His frame was as lean and scrawny as his features, but his blue eyes were bright and sharp behind their round windows and heavy lids.

  “Ah, Master Thaniel Fox!” he said, his face creasing into a grin. “Your company is always welcome. My gatekeeper informed me of your arrival.”

  Thaniel clasped his hand and shook it. “Good to see you again, Doctor,” he said, though he could not make his tone convincing.

  “Well,” Pyke said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them. “Let us not stand out here, dismal day that it is. Do come inside.”

  He ushered Thaniel into the foyer of Redford Acres. It was a high-ceilinged chamber, with a curving staircase running up one wall to a balcony, a black-and-white tiled floor and a carved desk, behind which sat a pert-looking receptionist with black hair in a bun. Thaniel had always been struck by how misleading the foyer was; it was clean, efficient, pleasant. The majority of the building was none of these things.

  Pyke chatted with Thaniel as he led the way upstairs to his office. It was a small study, the walls lined with folio edition books, and a green leather chair behind a desk which was covered in neat stacks of files and dominated by a book of phrenology and a model of a human skull, with different sections neatly marked off and named.

  He invited Thaniel to sit and then took his position on the other side of the desk, in front of a tall, rectangular window that let in the steely daylight. Thaniel never liked Pyke; the man always made him uneasy. He supposed it was partly the job Pyke did. A person couldn’t work in an insane asylum five days a week without it affecting them just a little. It affected Thaniel, certainly.

  Pyke was one of his fathers old acquaintances, for his job had meant that he had been forced to visit Redford Acres many times. Not all wych-kin were like the Cradlejack; there were some that trailed insanity in their wake, and only the strong-minded could resist them. Some of the people now languishing in the dingy cells of Redford Acres had been put there by Jedriah and Thaniel themselves. Just being within the walls of this place made him edgy.

  “So, young man, I understand you wanted to see me about something?” Pyke said, steepling his fingers on the desk before him and gazing at Thaniel with his piercing blue eyes.

  A haunting wail sounded through the room, quiet but anguished, reverberating eerily Pyke didn’t blink.

  “One of our more troubled souls. There never seems to be a way to shut the sound out, you know. You get quite used to it after a while.”

  “Doctor Pyke, I came to see you to ask you a question. In confidence, of course.”

  “In confidence?” said the elder man, his eyes sparkling with amusement. “Oho! I see I am in some trouble!”

  “Not at all, sir. But your reply could be perceived as damaging to your reputation, if it should reach the wrong ears.”

  Pyke became a little more serious, leaning back in his chair and opening his arms, palms up. “Out with it, then.”

  Thaniel drew a breath, hiding his unease behind a long-practised shield of efficiency. He hated this place. He could almost feel the prisoners, languishing in their torment, locked in cells, tortured by their own private demons.

  “Doctor Pyke, how is the security in Redford Acres?”

  A fleeting expression of irritation crossed Pyke’s face, as if to say: you came here to ask me that?

  “I only ask,” Thaniel continued, before Pyke could reply, “because last night I came across a girl who was in a considerable state of madness. My first suspicion was that she may have been touched by a wych-kin, but it is not an easy process to determine if insanity is natural or wych-borne. Then I thought that she may have escaped from this facility, and—”

  “Well, I can assure you, she has not!” Pyke snapped, faster than his namesake. “Our security here is top-notch, and not one patient has left these grounds without first being cured by us.”

  “I apologize, sir,” said Thaniel, bowing his head. “I had to check before I attempted the Rite to determine the source of her madness. But sir, let me assure you, if someone had escaped and you were to tell me, I could bring her back to you safely and none would be the wiser.”

  Pyke looked like he was about to bark something at the boy again, but he calmed suddenly. “Ah, forgive me. I did not mean to be short with you. I slept little last night. No, my friend, let me assure you, no patient has gone missing from Redford Acres, now or ever. However, I can check with some of the other asylums further afield, if you wish. Do you have the girl?”

  “Yes,” Thaniel replied.

  “Do you think it might be a good idea to bring her to me, so that I can hold her for you? It may be dangerous for the untrained to look after her.”

  Thaniel thought of the dank corridors, the rusty cell bars, the screams and howls and tears and cackles that lay beneath the respectable facade of Redford Acres. “She seems content with my care,” he replied diplomatically. “Best not to upset her.”

  “Very well. Does she have a name, perhaps?”

  “She does not speak.”

  “Ah, well,” Pyke said, giving him an apologetic smile. “Most likely some crazed waif. You say you found her in the Old Quarter? What does she look like, so I can inform my fellow doctors?”

  Thaniel paused for a moment.

  “She is about twenty-five years old, with black hair and dark brown eyes,” he lied.

  Pyke wrote it down on a notepad. “I will ask abo
ut for you. Now, Master Fox, it is always a pleasure, but I must be getting back to work. I will see you out.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Thaniel.

  Thaniel and Pyke exchanged pleasantries as they descended the stairs, and Pyke watched him from the doorway as he climbed into his cab. He dosed the door with a final wave as the cab driver shook the reins and the horses jerked into life.

  They rattled and bumped down the driveway towards the gate, but Thaniel paid no attention. He was deep in thought.

  He had never said that he found the girl in the Old Quarter. So how did Pyke know that? It was a natural assumption, he supposed; after all, he had said he was out hunting when he found her, and most wych-hunting was done in the Old Quarter, for that was where the wych-kin were. But still, it did not quite sit right with him.

  He dismissed it for now. More urgent was the question of the girl’s identity.

  When he returned to Crofter’s Gate, it was late afternoon. He looked in on the girl, and found her still asleep, though her turning and thrashing in his bed had muddied and tangled the sheets around her. Cathaline had fallen asleep on a chair in the living room. She had put Wards all around Thaniel’s bedroom. Thaniel smiled. Cathaline may have seemed flighty, but she was one of the best in London. There was no sense taking chances with the girl.

  Thaniel was dog-tired, having not slept since the previous evening, so he stoked the fire and curled up on the rug. That night, he decided, they would see if the girl was any better and determine what to do with her if she was not. But for now, he dreamed.

  Thaniel had no need for a timepiece. He had the enviable ability to decide what time he would awaken, and he would wake up exactly three minutes before that. It was one oddity among many. He supposed he was abnormal in several ways, he thought, as he washed his face in the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. How many people could claim to be a wych-hunter at seventeen? How many could afford to live in their own home, even if it was bought by his father?