The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

by Chris Wooding

  “That’s ridiculous!” Maycraft declared.

  “Unfortunately not,” Thaniel said. He was gently swinging the globe on the end of its chain, letting it describe small circles in the air before him. “Wychcraft is not a science; rather, it is ninety per cent guesswork and ten per cent superstition. You wonder why the wych-kin are driving us out of our city? It is because it has taken us this long to even begin to learn how to beat them. Trial and error, sir. And every error means another wych-hunter has an appointment with Old Boney. Ah,” he said, suddenly pausing in his explanation, “here is a case in point, Inspector Maycraft.”

  The globe had begun to glow from within, a dim yellow-white light that shone out through the gold webwork that cradled it.

  “That is a simple scientific trick,” Maycraft said. “Many chemicals react together in that way.”

  “True enough,” said Thaniel. “But the third element is the Cradlejack itself. The closer we are to the creature, the brighter this orb will glow.”

  They stepped out of the carriage somewhere in Chelsea, just north of the river. Neither of them were especially familiar with this part of London, and the fog had closed down on them again, making it difficult to spot landmarks or even street signs unless they were very close.

  “I will wait here for you, Inspector,” the driver declared, loading a long-barrelled rifle atop the carriage and eyeing his mares protectively. They were a little too close to the Old Quarter for comfort, and wolves loved horsemeat.

  Thaniel held the globe out before him, allowing it to swing on its chain. It had been getting steadily brighter as they headed south.

  “What makes you think it will be here, in all of London?” Maycraft asked, more out of a wish to stump the young boy rather than any need to know. Thaniel confounded him with an instant response.

  “Cradlejacks are territorial. I found this one’s lair down near Lambeth. It will have abandoned that one, but it will not have moved far. The most direct route from Kensington is through Chelsea, and fast as they are, they have to move in secret and stay hidden. I believe we are a little ahead of it now. It will be coming through this way soon. All we have to do is intercept it.”

  “You’re sure its the same one you found?”

  “Cradlejacks are thankfully rare,” he said. “I am sure.” Maycraft drew his pistol as Thaniel watched the globe swing on its chain, noting that it swung further to the west, as if drawn there by a magnet. “Well, as long as a bullet in the heart can stop them, I’m game,” he declared brashly.

  “That’ll stop them quite effectively, sir,” Thaniel said. “This way.”

  They hastened through the streets of Chelsea. The public houses and inns had closed for the night, but there were still drunkards and revellers staggering over the cobbles with half-drained bottles of rotgut or whisky. They lurched out of the fog with alcohol-reddened noses, attracted to the bright light that Thaniel held like inebriated moths. One sight of the pistols that the two hurrying figures carried turned the drunkards away, however. A few ladies of the night were prowling the alleys, looking for customers, but they recognized Maycraft and stayed silent as he passed.

  Every so often, Thaniel stopped and consulted the globe, but it usually swung in the direction that he was going anyway. He seemed to have an instinct for it, that was for sure. This thin, fine-featured boy with his washed-out blue eyes and floppy centre-parting of blond was far more proficient than his appearance suggested. Maycraft’s work had brought him into contact with wych-kin often, and wych-hunters with them. They were notoriously of odd character. It took a special type of person to devote themselves to exterminating wych-kin, even with the astronomical wages that Parliament offered them for doing such a dangerous job. But this boy had a steely calm about him that was unusual. Maycraft had met Jedriah Fox many a time; there were few in the city who had not heard of London’s greatest wych-hunter. This boy was a chip off the old block.

  They headed along the banks of the Thames, hurrying past the alley where Stitch-face had ended the life of Marey Wool-bury two nights ago. A zeppelin droned somewhere distant, a vast sentinel of the city, too far away to be seen in the omnipresent murk.

  There it was, suddenly; the high-pitched, maniacal laughter of the Cradlejack, sounding as if it was coming from all around them. Thaniel froze; Maycraft, too.

  “It is closer than I thought. I must not have put enough reagent in,” Thaniel muttered, almost under his breath, as he held up the globe. “It should have been brighter than this.”

  Ah, so you do make mistakes, thought Maycraft, with a small twinge of satisfaction.

  The globe swung to their left, towards the Thames.

  “It’s in the water?” Maycraft queried.

  “Maybe,” Thaniel said. “That is probably how it gets across from the Old Quarter. If we hurry, we may catch it.”

  They ran along the street until the railing at their left gave way to a set of stone steps, descending along the wall that lifted the road above the muddy banks of the river. The tide was low, and the shadows of grounded ships hulked in the gloom beneath them, waiting for the water to rise and lift them once more. They went down, the tapping of their boots swallowed by the mist, their hands clammy and their breath visible before them.

  Maycraft made a faint sound of disgust as his boots squelched into the wet, freezing mud, much deeper than he had expected, and vile ooze dribbled in around the laces and through the eyeholes. Thaniel had made a similarly unpleasant discovery, but he had at least expected it and was not perturbed.

  “I hear no splashing,” Maycraft said quietly, as they waded through the muck and filth. “Perhaps it has already crossed.”

  “Perhaps it knows we are chasing it, and it lies in wait,” Thaniel suggested as an alternative.

  Now the bulk of the ships loomed over them like dark leviathans, tall and imposing at this level even though they were only small fishing boats and trawlers. A faint line of lights marked the top of the embankment, the street from which they had come. Down here, the world was a shifting white netherworld of shadows. Maycraft wished he had thought to bring a lantern, then imagined it would have been no good anyway. The moon was full, at least. They had that small mercy.

  The mud banks were eerily silent, the suck and plunge of their boots unforgivably rude in the softly stirring air. Thaniel glanced occasionally at the bright orb that hung from the chain in his hand.

  “It is here,” he said. “It is too close to have made it over to the other side.”

  Maycraft looked around as they trudged into the shadow of a tall deep-sea trawler, leaning wearily over them.

  “You think it might have—” Maycraft began to say, but his question was cut off by a shrill cry from above, and the thing plummeted from the deck of the ship on to Thaniel. The boys pistol fired wild, the globe fell from his hands and smashed, and he was driven into the choking dirt by the weight of the crazed wych-kin atop him. Unable to react fast enough to repel his attacker, he felt the sweep of a claw towards his cheek, but he pulled his head aside and the Cradlejack missed by millimetres. Maycraft shouted then and the creature looked up in sudden alarm.

  Maycraft had his pistol levelled at the thing, but the sight of it caused him to hesitate momentarily. Once, it had been a man. Now it was a scrawny, parchment-skinned creature, thin and lank, wearing tattered rags and with its hands and bare feet tipped with long, savage fingernails. Its eyes had the same horizontal hourglass shape that he had seen in Johnaten Turner, and its teeth—as its dry, cracked lips skinned back in a snarl—were tiny and viciously pointed.

  A gun roared, but it was not Maycraft’s. Thaniel had brought his pistol to bear under the creatures atrophied belly, and squeezed the trigger. The creature leaped off him, howling and hissing, thrashing in the mud, scrabbling away. Maycraft ran to Thaniel, reaching down an arm to pull him out of the sucking bog that he had been crushed into.

  “Shoot it!” Thaniel cried as he came free. “Make sure it is dead!”


  And, indeed, though it bled from a gut wound and it still suffered from the point of Johnaten Turners blade across its forearm, it was running away across the mud flats towards where the edge of the Thames lapped.

  “Shoot it!” Thaniel urged again, struggling to his feet. “If it gets to the water, it’ll be gone!”

  Maycraft levelled his pistol, his arm held straight and one eye closed, sighting down the barrel. The Cradlejack was already only a faint silhouette in the mist, and he could hear the splashing of its feet as it reached the shallows.

  “Damn the thing, its too far away,” Maycraft said, knowing that he would only be wasting a bullet.

  Thaniel raised his own pistol and fired, feeling the recoil jolt all along his arm. He caught it dead in the back, between its knife-like shoulder blades. It squawked, a faintly pathetic sound of surprise, and then there was the noise of its body falling forward into the water. It lay still for a moment, face down and spreadeagled, until the current buoyed it up and carried it along the river towards the sea, leaving a slowly dissipating trail of dark red behind it.

  Thaniel flexed his arm. “Not far enough,” he said.

  “So I see,” Maycraft replied, gauging the distance that Thaniel had fired and thinking what a truly remarkable shot he had just witnessed.

  CATHALINE’S ATTIC

  A RITE IS PERFORMED

  PLANS ARE MADE 6

  The first light of dawn was creeping across London as Thaniel and Cathaline returned from the Turner house, their cab forging through thinning tendrils of fog. The hours before the sun came to warm the streets were bitter with cold and eerily flat and dead, yet they were more familiar to the wych-hunters than the bright light of midday.

  “Somethings troubling you, Thaniel,” said Cathaline, as they rode the jolts and bumps inside the cab.

  Thaniel turned to look at her, then back out of the side at the patient streets, waiting for the day to arrive. “I will not take her to Pyke,” he said after a moment. “Mad or not, he will not have her.”

  “My, Thaniel, you are getting protective,” she said with a secret smile.

  “Do not mock me,” he said, and his voice was sharp.

  Cathaline laughed, her black-and-red hair shaking as she tipped her head back. “You always did take yourself too seriously.”

  Thaniel gave her a poisonous glance and then ignored her.

  “Listen, Thaniel,” she said. “I know you want to save her somehow. You couldn’t save your mother, and you couldn’t save Jedriah, and you feel you—”

  “Cathaline,” he snapped. “Don’t.”

  She splayed her hand before her and examined the tips of her fingernails. “I don’t want you hurt, Thaniel. She may be mad. You have to accept that.”

  “I have talked with her, and so have you. She is sane, but there is something...” he trailed off. “If I thought she was mad, I would not have left her alone.”

  “She took enough sedative to keep her under until this time tomorrow,” Cathaline pointed out. “You need not worry on that count.”

  And yet Alaizabel was there when they arrived, with her back to them, her long, corn-coloured hair just visible from behind the high backrest of the chair she sat in. A fire burned low before her. She did not acknowledge their arrival, not even when they greeted her from the doorway. Cathaline gave Thaniel a quizzical frown.

  Thaniel, puzzled, walked around to where he could see Alaizabel’s face, and his heart jumped when she suddenly turned to look at him with a sharp movement of her head.

  “Who are you?” the girl snapped, and Cathaline looked up suddenly from where she had been busying herself at the back of the room.

  Thaniel was stricken with horror. Alaizabel looked old. No, no, that was not right. Her skin was as smooth as ever, her features as small and childish, her hands pale and slender, but it was the manner of her body that had changed. She hunched forward towards the fire like a bent-backed crone. Her head protruded, tortoise-like, from her shoulders, bobbing on the end of a stiff neck. Her face seemed to have sagged, her features pulled downward in a severe expression, and her hands were bunched into arthritic claws. She was wearing only the soft purple nightgown that Thaniel had provided for her.

  “Who are you? Who are you, I said!”

  It was her voice, too. Alaizabel’s voice, undoubtedly, but the vowels and pronunciation were completely different. He could not place the accent, but it was harsh and archaic.

  “You know who I am, Miss Alaizabel,” he said, as Cathaline came over, sensing that something was most definitely wrong.

  “Know who you are? I’ve never seen you before! I’m no Miss Alaizabel.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “Thatch, I am. That’s all they’ve known me as for nigh on sixty years now, wife and widow. Who are you? Where am I? Eh? Where am I? Speak up!”

  “Thatch?” Thaniel repeated, still shaken by this sudden turn of events.

  “Thatch, aye. You must be a simple boy, so slow of wit. Yes, so slow.”

  Thaniel let the insult pass him by. He sat down on one of the hearthside chairs. Cathaline sat down on another one. The fire snapped quietly, forgotten.

  “See, now they sit at my fire without so much as a by-your-leave or even names to call ’em by!” Alaizabel crowed. “What’d you bring me here for, eh? What about my purpose, eh? Eh? Wasting my time. I have powers, you know! Powers!”

  “What is your purpose?” said Cathaline carefully.

  “Show me your mark, eh! Show me your mark! You’re not of the Fraternity, are you? Where’d this girl get to? Where, I say? Oh, my head! Why must I suffer so? Why must I battle? Who are you?”

  Thaniel and Cathaline exchanged a glance, each one gauging what the other was thinking, each one hoping that they had not heard what they had just heard.

  The Fraternity.

  They were about to say something when Alaizabel spoke again, addressing Thaniel, her voice grating and loud.

  “She wasn’t supposed to still be here! See! See the mark! Oh, don’t you understand, you slow-witted boy?”

  At that, Alaizabel suddenly lurched out of her chair and reached behind herself, tearing open the buttons that ran up the back of the nightgown she was wearing with a short, savage tug. It came open to the base of her spine, exposing her shoulder blades and a narrow expanse of soft flesh. Thaniel had been too surprised to avert his eyes as he would normally have done; and by the time he had recovered himself enough, he had already seen the tattoo, the dark circle just above Alaizabel’s coccyx, and he was unable to look away. The many-tentacled thing, etched in ink on her skin. There was something terrible about it, and it disturbed the eye the way that Wards did, though it was not any kind of Ward that he had ever come across.

  “See?” she said. “The mark! Where’d this girl get to, eh? Why am I not about my purpose? Why does my head throb so?”

  A moment later, she slumped back down into the chair, screwing her eyes up tight.

  “Ohhh, my head,” she moaned, clutching at the sides of her skull and leaning forward, her flaxen hair seeping between her fingers. She trailed off into silence, her breathing suddenly slowing... and then with a deep inhalation of air, she sat heavily back in her chair and her eyes flew open, and it was Alaizabel again.

  The change was almost physical, and immediate. No longer did she bend or stoop; her movements were smoother, not hampered by the tautness of joints and old muscles. She was young again, supple, and her voice when she spoke was back to the crisp elocution that Thaniel had come to recognize and enjoy.

  For a moment, a fearful confusion swam in her gaze as it locked with Thaniel’s. Then she glanced around the room, taking into account the fire and her two companions, then her own semi-dressed state. To be in a nightgown was bad enough; to have the back hanging open was both mortifying and terribly distressing. She shrank back into the chair, hugging herself.

  “I was asleep,” she said, unable to think of anything less obvious to say “No,�
� said Thaniel. “You weren’t.”

  Cathaline’s attic was a long, spacious room, formerly an artist’s studio for Thaniel’s mother. It occupied the upper storey of 273 Crofter’s Gate, and unlike Thaniel’s room, it reflected its owner perfectly. It was wide and expansive in aspect, with space to spare and no walls or barriers to fence a person in. Everything was open and visible from everywhere else, from the miniature table to the rickety four-poster bed under the skylight. The mid-morning sun pummelled its way into the attic now, having marshalled itself into a dazzling brightness, and the tall windows on the north and south of the building captured it all and drank it greedily, filling the room with illumination.

  Like its owner, the room was chaos. Nothing matched; everything was thrown together and left to find its own level. A stuffed falcon’s tail protruded from the mouth of a stuffed alligator which was hanging from the ceiling, spinning back and forth when a breeze stirred it. An untidy heap of books was strewn haphazardly next to a bookcase, which was nearly empty, as if it had been too much effort to slot these books—many of which were as valuable as a month’s rent on a London townhouse—back into their niches. Dark, sinister steel pentagrams and black tallow candles sat on shelves next to dolls and teddy bears. The four-poster bed possessed a strangely pathetic grandeur, bedraggled and moth-eaten and belonging in a place much more elegant than this.

  “This is it!” Cathaline declared triumphantly, pulling out a grey, hidebound tome with a seemingly unintelligible scrawl embossed in gold on its spine. She scampered over to where Thaniel waited on a low wicker settee and sat cross-legged before him, laying the book open between them.

  “What kind of language is that?” he asked, eyeing the strange, flowing script that swam across the page.

  “Sanskrit,” she said absently, already deep in perusal. “I know I saw something like that in here...”

  She had gone for the book in a frenzy of activity almost the moment that Thaniel had put Alaizabel back to bed with a fresh sleeping draught. It was late for both of them—being mid-morning, they were usually thinking about sleep soon—but like a greyhound set after a hare, she had pursued her new purpose with characteristic vigour until she had found it.