by Tim Powers
A prolonged metallic squeaking followed this, and Jacky caught Harriet’s arm and whispered, “Hold up, I know this one.”
The man with the puppet struggled to his feet. “You fired your gun,” he said in a nasal voice. “And we’re three and you got your legs off.”
A low little wheeled cart rocked into view from the right, and on it sat a burly man with no legs, his face entirely hidden by a bushy dark beard and a big pair of spectacles and a cap pulled low over them. His massive arms flexed as he braked by pressing his hands against the gravel.
“I’ve got another gun,” he said; then he raised his hands and clenched them into big fists. “And I can break the legs off all three of you. Come and see if I can’t.”
The man stepped back and tucked his unsavory puppet under his coat. “Are you with Horrabin’s beggars’ guild or Captain Jack’s?”
“Captain Jack’s,” said the legless man, “but one of Horrabin’s lot probably sniffed this uproar too, and may shortly appear. Neither guild is happy with trespassing shade-dealers.”
The three men darted venomous glances at Jacky and Harriet, but after a moment’s hesitation they began walking away east on Cannon Street, and soon they were swaggering as if to show that they hadn’t been intimidated.
The man on the cart wheeled around to face Jacky and Harriet. “And you two fools! Are you trying to get killed? You know how the shaders pluck awakened ghosts from haunted folk?”
“Hullo, Skate,” said Jacky, in her deeper voice.
The man pulled the spectacles off his face and peered. “Mother of God, young Jacky is it? When did you turn stupid? Parading around Eastcheap wearing a wide-awake ghost! Boy, you—”
“It wasn’t wide-awake till this girl’s dead husband tried to set her on fire!” protested Jacky. “Mine is ashes in a little flacon around my neck, and when I tried to extinguish her, it got heated up in her ghost’s flames.”
Skate hooked the spectacles on his nose again, then hastily took them off. “Yours is plenty lively now—it’ll be kicking and blowing for days, I expect. And you,” he said, squinting at Harriet, “why have you got your dead husband onstage?—especially if he wants to burn you up?”
“I was trying to hopscotch him off by the London Stone,” said Harriet defensively.
“Ach, idiot child, that hasn’t been a good trap-door since the stone broke in two in the Great Fire—though it’s still good enough to wake the lads up, worse luck.” He shook his head. “Through the devil glasses you both shine like dishes of burning brandy. You can’t walk the streets—the flash of you will draw more fellows like your man there with the mummied head on a puppet, and I don’t actually have another gun.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “You don’t dare leave footprints—even hopping on one foot’s no good, as your friend found out.” He sighed and shook his head.
Jacky touched the vial hanging outside her shirt, and it was still too hot to tuck in against her skin under the fabric. Kicking and blowing for days? she thought in alarm.
After a pause, Skate said, “There’s no help for it. Have you got two shillings?”
“Yes,” said Jacky. “They’re rightfully the Captain’s, though. I got ’em doing the thimble and pea trick in a pub.”
“I’ll acquaint Captain Jack with the circumstances,” said Skate. “You’ve got to—”
“What do we need two shillings for?” interrupted Harriet.
Skate glared at her. “There’s no way you two can swim a mile upriver at this hour, wouldn’t you agree? Your only hope is to find a coach—wheels make no footprints, I can tell you that—so run now to St. Paul’s, you’ll be able to find a coach on the Strand. Take it to the horse ferry below Westminster Palace. There’s probably a barge moored there, by what used to be Thorney Island in long ago times—you’ve heard of Nobody’s Home?”
Jacky shook her head, but Harriet drew in her breath. “Is he real?” she asked. “And does he really take blood for pay?”
“So I’ve heard,” said Skate. “But I’ve known people go to him and come back no worse. Those shaders or their kind, on the other hand, will leave you dead.”
Jacky glanced up and down the moonlit street, trying to see if a waving shadow lurked in some recessed doorway. “Who is he?” she asked.
“Nobody, who else?” said Skate impatiently. “The barge is his home. Go!”
Skate wheeled his cart to the wall of St. Swithin’s as Jacky and Harriet began running west through the patches of moonlight and darkness, and when Jacky glanced back over her shoulder she saw the legless man swing the spectacles against the London Stone.
“Thimble and pea?” asked Harriet breathlessly when the two of them had waved down a stray hackney coach by the broken statue of Queen Anne in front of the cathedral, paid the driver and told him their destination, and climbed in and pulled the door closed. The leather seats were still warm, and the interior of the coach smelled of very recent perfume and cigar smoke.
Jacky yawned, more from nervousness than because of the late hour, and she flexed her hands gingerly. “I put a pea under one of three pewter thimbles on a table, and slide them around, and then chaps bet on which thimble the pea is under. But I switch in a hollow pea made of India rubber, and I can hide it flat between my fingers and make it appear, or not, under any thimble. They lose their money. What do you mean, he takes blood for pay?”
She heard the driver flip the reins, and then she was rocked back in her seat as the horses stepped briskly forward and the coach lurched into motion.
“You say your Doggy Joe fellow is real,” said Harriet, “not just a frighty tale—maybe Nobody is too. Folks say he lives on a boat, and can shuffle ghosts up or down. I’ve heard he’s a ghost himself, which likely makes it easier.”
“But why blood?”
“I don’t know,” said Harriet, more loudly to be heard over the grinding of the wheels on the pavement, “Ghosts like blood?” She touched her neck. “I’m glad you knocked me down. Even so I’ve got blisters and I can feel a good deal of my hair’s gone.”
Neither of them spoke then, and for several minutes they simply huddled in their coats and watched rows of dark buildings shift past like derelict galleons on an outgoing tide.
The Strand widened as the coach rattled past St. Clement Dane’s on its island in the middle of the road, and Jacky told herself that she had not just seen a cluster of dark, waving figures between the pillars of the western portico. Clouds had again eclipsed the moon, and outlines and relative distances were obscure.
“Why hopscotch?” she asked quickly.
“Well, hopscotch there, by the stone,” replied Harriet. “In times past, anyway. It’s supposed to wake up your ghost, so he’s right clinging to you, and then you hop him through the seven squares of Purgatory, saying his name at each square, and then jack him right out at the top. He’s supposed to disappear—not set you on fire.” She shook her head. “It’s a sin, too, unnatural, like you’re trying to force God’s machinery. You got to do it on one foot, so you’re touching the ground some, but not all the way. I wonder if it’s still a sin if it doesn’t work.”
Jacky thought it probably was, but didn’t say anything.
They alighted from the coach in front of a pub called the Portman Arms at the corner of Wood and Millbank Streets, a hundred yards down from the ornately Gothic south wall of the Palace of Westminster. The pub’s windows were dark, and the warehouses on the east side of the street looked abandoned. Jacky forlornly watched the coach rattle away north, back toward streets with occasional lighted windows, and shivered.
A very dark alley between two of the warehouses led away in the direction of the nearby river, and Harriet waved toward it.
“The horse-ferry is that way,” she said, her soft voice barely audible in the cold wind that funneled down the street.
Jacky eyed the dark gap unhappily. “Maybe our ghosts have gone back to sleep again, now that we’re so far away. We could wake up the landlord at the
Portman, just get a room.”
Harriet reached out and touched the glass vial hanging on Jacky’s shirt, and then jerked her hand back. She quickly looked up and down the patchily-moonlit street, and she stiffened when she looked north, toward the palace.
“To the river,” she whispered, “fast.”
Jacky glanced north as she hurried after her companion, and she broke into a sprint when she saw two dark figures up at that end of the street, moving toward them as smoothly as billows of smoke.
The alley echoed to the fast knocking of the girls’ footsteps—ghosts can see footsteps! thought Jacky—and the air between the close brick walls was heady with the scents of tobacco and cinnamon. When they burst out into the moonlight again, between two docks that stretched out over the black water, Jacky was panting and glad of the fresh breeze in spite of its biting chill.
Harriet was looking up and down the dark pebbled shore, her hair whipping around her face. A couple of barges were canted over against scaffolding up on the slope, a set of steel tracks led down the slope and right into the river, a row of stout posts stood up in the shallows—but Jacky couldn’t see any particular barge that might be Nobody’s Home, and over the wind she could hear flapping and echoing whispers from the alley behind them.
“There!” cried Harriet, pointing north and breaking into a run.
Jacky followed without having seen what her companion might have pointed at, and the breath whistled through her teeth as her boots pounded over the clattering wet stones. Her hat flew away, unnoticed. For a moment the two girls were hunched over in fish-reeking darkness as they dodged pilings under one of the docks, and then they were out under the cloudy sky again and a low vessel was visible anchored in the shallows to their right, with dim green light showing at three portholes barely above the water line.
Harriet ran splashing straight out into the water, so Jacky followed, hooting in whispers at the icy chill of the water surging up quickly from her ankles to her thighs. She peered ahead at the vessel—it was a low wooden barge with a smokestack and no masts, perhaps twenty feet long from its blunt bow to its raised stern, and she could now see a ladder amidships that hung down into the water between a couple of the portholes. Canvas-bag fenders hung at the bow and stern.
Harriet had lunged forward and was swimming now, and Jacky gritted her teeth and did the same, rigidly keeping her head above the rippling water. She craned her neck to look back—two wavering man-like shapes hung where the waves lapped the stones.
At the ladder, the two girls clung to a rung above the water, panting and shivering. “Why are you,” gasped Harriet, “so desperate to—lose your lover’s ghost?”
Jacky just shook her head miserably, freezing in the water but dreading the wet climb up into the cold wind.
“I mean—” Harriet’s voice came out in spasmodic rushes, “he doesn’t want—to burn you up—does he?”
“I—don’t want to have to—burn him up.”
Harriet waited another moment, then resolutely climbed up the ladder. Jacky followed, gripping the rungs with numbed hands, and when she pulled herself up to the gunwale she heard Harriet say, “Permission to—come aboard—sir.”
Jacky rolled over the gunwale and fell onto the deck and hugged herself in the momentary shelter from the wind; the flintlock pistol in her belt dug into her stomach, and it occurred to her that it wasn’t going to be useable any time soon. She could see Harriet crouched beside her, and, focusing past her, a short man standing on the deck a few yards away in a slouch hat and a long oilskin coat. In the intermittent moonlight Jacky saw the gleam of spectacles on the man’s round face.
The face looked up, toward the shore, and then down again at the two girls on the deck.
“Permission yes,” the man said softly.
Below deck the main cabin was in the stern, and the ceiling was high enough for them to stand up straight, and wide enough so that the three occupants weren’t crowded together. A big upright boiler in the stern radiated welcome heat from the closed iron door of its firebox, and the smells on the warm air were a peculiar mix of chocolate and the juniper reek of gin; and two lamps with green glass panes shed an underwater glow over everything.
Jacky looked around the cabin nervously. A narrow linen tent was set up against the forward bulkhead, between two low doors; closer to hand, a wooden table was bolted to the deck, and on it, beside three octavo-size leatherbound books, stood a clay jar with Greek letters pressed into its sides and a small hole near the bottom; and railed shelves at every height held an assortment of books and glass jars and mismatched shoes.
Jacky was avoiding looking at their host, and when she glanced down at the puddles she and Harriet were leaving on the deck she noticed a line of seven foot-wide squares and a wide circle painted in white, or possibly pale green, on the polished boards. Hopscotch again. The pattern might have extended farther, for the circle at the far end of the squares was right up against the skirts of the tent.
“Oftentimes, more than you suppose,” the man said in a quiet uninflected voice as he shrugged out of his oilskin coat and hung it and his hat on a bulkhead hook, “swimming is the way to this. Clothing that’s wet should be put in there,” he said with a wave toward the low doors forward, “and dry ones put on.”
At last Jacky lifted her head and looked at him. He was hardly more than five feet tall, and his nondescript flannel shirt and corduroy trousers didn’t look new. The spectacles seemed to make his eyes appear smaller and more distant than they could really have been, and his face was round and smooth under wisps of fine fair hair that looked green in the peculiar lamplight. It occurred to her that it was an entirely unmemorable face—if she were to meet him again she wouldn’t be sure it was the same man.
Whenever Jacky shifted her position on the gently rocking deck, she was freshly and uncomfortably aware of her cold, sodden clothing, and “dry ones” sounded wonderful, but she began, “What we want—”
The man held up a pale hand, then nodded toward the clay jar on the table. “A clepsidra there, a water clock. Into it can be put a ghost, so refreshment of the water keeps in your house his spirit. Into those books, as well, if one reads them every month. Or lamps he’ll bide in, while the oil goes replenished.”
Jacky looked anxiously at the two green lamps mounted at shoulder height on the port and starboard bulkheads, and the man was faintly smiling at her when she looked at him again.
“But it’s not for keeping the ghost that you’ve come, I think. It’s expulsion through,” he said, glancing at the hopscotch pattern on the floor, “Purgatory. Forever away from here.”
Jacky touched the vial that still hung around her neck—and it was as hot as ever. “No, I want to keep mine. I just want him put back the way he was before tonight. Not…waked up and following me.”
“Was?” said the man.
Jacky stepped closer to the boiler firebox and held her hands out to the radiated heat; the gin-and-chocolate smell was beginning to make her feel sick. “Like in your aspidistra,” she said, nodding toward the water clock. “I just want his spirit near me, so I can feel him with me still, but doing no more than putting his rhymes into my head when I’m sleepy, like before. Not…banishing him. I just want you to cool the ashes of his dottle again.”
“That means ashes from a pipe,” spoke up Harriet, moving to stand beside Jacky by the firebox, “not his head.” Jacky nodded and touched the hot glass vial hanging on her shirt.
“Who is your ghost?” the man asked Jacky. His voice was no louder, but it seemed to echo as if he spoke from some distance down a tunnel.
“His name? Colin Lepovre. He was my fiancee. A poet.” He kept staring at her, so she added, “He was murdered by Dog-Face Joe, if you’ve heard of him?—can switch bodies with people?—and has to do it a lot because each body he takes for himself starts to grow fur all over it?” The man nodded again, still with no expression, so Jacky went on, forcing her voice to be level. “Dog-Face Joe took Colin�
�s body, and switched Colin into a cast-off body—one with fur all over it and a, a stomach freshly full of poison.”
“Were you once in a different body yourself?”
Jacky blinked at him. “What? No. Why—oh hell. The moustache is a fake.” She touched it, and found that it was already askew on her upper lip; she pulled it off and shoved it into a pocket. “I’m a girl.” Somehow she had thought this magician, or whatever he was, would have known that.
“Ah.” He stared into her eyes for several uncomfortable seconds, then looked away. “Pardon—living bodies are not prominent in my vision.”
After another pause, Harriet said quietly, “I’m a girl too, just for clearness sake. And I want my ghost all the way gone, like you said.”
The man nodded. “Compelling them can be done.” He waved in the direction of the shore. “Thorney Island this was once, straddled away from the mainland by branches of the Tyburn, a stream under pavement now. On the island King Canute eight hundred years ago ordered stopping to the tide—that is, the ghosts in the river. The river didn’t stop, but the ghosts did. Still they do, here.”
Jacky turned around to warm her back and stare at the man. “Are you Nobody?”
“Who else?”
“You take blood, in payment for your services?”
“A drop.” He shrugged. “Two drops, maybe three.”
Jacky bared her teeth and rolled her eyes—she recalled Harriet saying, it’s a sin, too, like you’re trying to force God’s machinery—and finally she stamped on the deck. “If I don’t do this,” she said, her voice catching in her throat, “will he follow me, face me?” She hoped that if tears spilled down her cheek they’d be mistaken for river water. “Speak to me?”
Nobody pointed a pudgy finger at the vial on her chest. “Yes. You saw him, I think. Nearby now he waits for you.”
