Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling

by Michael Boccacino

“A political prison.”

  I stopped, disgusted.

  “Is that what the rebellion is working against?” asked Henry.

  “That is the rebellion at work. In times such as these the question of right and wrong becomes a complicated one.” The cleric led us down the side of a hill behind the building, to an empty seashore of tepid waves, with a rickety boathouse perched at the end of a dock. He went inside and came out pulling a small rowboat through the water by a dirty cord.

  “In you go,” he said. Henry got into the boat first and then helped me off the dock. The hunchback cast us off and lumbered through the vessel, nearly capsizing it, to sit at the front. He looked back at Henry. “Oars,” he said.

  The former master of Everton took the oars and cut across the dark water, through a sea of green-black islands with rolling hills and barren trees that scratched into the air with clawed branches. I sat back and looked up at the stars in the velvet sky. Nothing moved among the trees and hills of the empty coastline, whose barrenness could not match the unease I felt watching Henry push us across the surface of the water, our destinies entwined as we moved blindly beyond the confines of our story, away from master of the house and governess, simply two people searching in the night for two lost children, and perhaps for themselves.

  There was land on the horizon, black and cold in the moonlight with a thin spire of smoke climbing above its charcoal shores. The lamp of a crumbling lighthouse turned atop a precarious heap of rubble and cracked walls.

  As we neared, the rocky coast gave way to a deserted shoreline of squalid cottages, a sad little town of molding walls and broken-toothed windows, huddled together against the lip of a demolished harbor. Nonetheless, it was not unoccupied. The smoke we had seen from the sea was coming from the chimney of a hut at the end of the lane, its windows glowing with the promise of fire.

  The hull of the boat scraped against the shoreline, and Henry hopped into the water to drag the dinghy onto the beach. He extended his hand and helped me over the side. The hunchbacked cleric followed, leading us from the beach onto a path of ruined, uneven cobblestones. We walked silently down the narrow road to the house and knocked on the door.

  A woman answered. She was shapely and round, with buttermilk skin and red ringlets of hair. The hunchback whispered something to her, and she opened her arms in greeting.

  “Welcome. Please, come in.” She led us to sit in front of the hearth.

  The hut was small and decorated for Christmas. The frail tree in the corner of the room was gray, even by firelight, and clung to the sparse ornamentation perched on its branches. There were other guests seated next to us, old, broken, and decayed, staring deeply into the flames.

  A cauldron hung above the embers, its bubbling contents hidden by brown, sticky foam. The woman brought us three coarse wooden bowls. She took a ladle from the wall and dipped it into the kettle. The head of the brew dissolved, and we could see something moving beneath the surface.

  “No thank you, we’ve already eaten,” I lied, starving, though the cleric heartily devoured his bowl of brown. The eyes of the other guests never left the flames. The woman sat at a table by the door to peel carrots. She placed one into a small cage that swung above her head, the animal inside gnawing at the stick as white, gelatinous foam dripped from its maw. It might have been a ferret, but the slaver had smeared its fur so that it was an indistinguishable mass of pelt and teeth. I slipped my hand through the crook of Henry’s arm.

  “There is trouble tonight,” said the woman without looking up from her task.

  “What do you mean?” asked Henry.

  “The one who will take you is late. He is never late.” She smiled as she fed the caged creature another sliver of carrot. We moved closer to the hearth, joining the others as they lost themselves in the fire. I imagined that the flames formed the walls of a house, and inside a small family of embers burned away their bright little lives to keep it intact.

  Henry broke into my reverie. “I still haven’t the faintest idea what we plan to do.”

  “You escape with the children, and I will sort out Mr. Whatley.”

  “Alone?”

  “Hardly.” I turned to him, widening my eyes in an effort to end the conversation. I was unsuccessful.

  “Why must you be so cryptic?”

  Annoyed, I put my lips to his ear and whispered sharply. “I have little experience traveling through rebel undergrounds, but I would imagine that they are not safe for private conversation.” I motioned to the others seated beside us, all of them nearly catatonic save for one man who stood suddenly, kicking over his chair.

  The woman with the red hair shouted at him. “Pipe down there.”

  But instead of reseating himself, the stranger leaned his head back, the surface of his skin gathering like beads of melted wax traveling up his face, a strand of it pulling away from his body, a thread of flesh rising into the air to attach itself to the ceiling.

  Our hostess gasped a single word: “No . . .”

  His body blasted apart with a wet tearing sound, sinewy tendrils erupting out of a husk of red meat to embed themselves in the walls and ceiling, scrambling around the room in search of prey. Where it touched the other guests, their flesh became its flesh, merged together and absorbed into an ever-expanding mass, none of the victims dead or dying, simply devoured whole.

  As one of the tendrils made to slide around my leg, the hunchbacked cleric threw himself in its path, the thing entering his back and swelling around him. I did not have time to cry out, for Henry pulled me through the door, and together we ran into the night, looking back just long enough to see the hut crack and collapse, the plaster and rock consumed into the growing girth of the beast.

  The town came to life, screaming. Doors opened all around us, voices calling out for their loved ones as they ran into the streets; creatures and creatures in human skins, sobbing and shouting, pushed into each other. A young man ran past us carrying a glass bottle of jet-black liquid, a swatch of cloth sticking out of the opening. He lit it and chucked it at the monster in the demolished hut, but it fell short and landed at the base of the structure. At first I thought he had failed, but then the ground split open with a bone-chilling crack and began to fall away, creating an abyss where there had not been one mere seconds before. The creature scuttled for purchase at the edges of the chasm, but it had already grown too heavy for its own good and descended into the darkness below. The crowd of onlookers cheered momentarily, but then the rift continued to expand. Houses and whole streets succumbed to the schism, the edges of the earth flaking away into the void below.

  Henry and I followed the crowd into a forest on the outskirts of town, winding between the trees until the chaos was behind us. When we were far enough from the townspeople that we would not draw unwanted attention, we collapsed against one another.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “He saved me,” I said incredulously.

  “Who?”

  “The cleric. Why would he do such a thing? He barely knew me.”

  Henry put my hand into his. “We should keep going.”

  “Where?”

  He pointed behind me to a wide road. It had once been paved over, for the edges of the thoroughfare were crusted with pieces of crushed red brick, but the center of the highway had been worn to dirt from good use. It was the largest road that I had ever seen. It went on for as far as my eyes could see, and it was wide enough to accommodate twenty carriages riding beside one another.

  Henry helped me to my feet, and we scampered down the side of a hill to reach the large expanse of road, but before we could leave the forest a person stepped into our path. He had a flat, open gash of a face, and a body that would have been snakelike had it not been for the heavy, muscular appendages that trailed along both sides of his torso. The person called out to us. “Hello, my friends!”

&n
bsp; We stared at the man wordlessly.

  “My companion and I are faced with a bit of an imposition. We’re travelers like yourselves, you see.” Another person appeared behind him. He was taller than any man, with arms and legs like very strong sticks, and half a mouth, with no bottom jaw but many long, sharp teeth. “We’ve lost the third member of our party.”

  “I wish we could help you, but we must be on our way,” I replied.

  “But you can help us,” said the man who was almost, but not quite, like a snake. “Our friend was with you, the large gentleman in the hut. You were ever so quick to part with him.” The two highwaymen leered at one another. I tried to run, but the stick man grabbed ahold of me and threw me to the ground, my head throbbing in pain though I refused to let him see it by meeting his gaze.

  “Eager to leave us as well?” said the snake. “We should be insulted. It’s a good thing Mr. Ashby is asking for you alive.”

  “A good thing indeed.” The stick man’s breath was dry and sour.

  “But still . . . he would be ever so cross with us if we grabbed the wrong person. Best make sure you’re human, after all. Blood will tell, as they say.” He removed a long, thin knife from his jacket and cut away my cloak. He was about to do the same to the rest of my clothes when Henry leapt onto his back and began to strangle him with his arms. The snake man shrieked and dropped his knife to the ground, while the other swatted Henry through the air and into the forest.

  The highwaymen congratulated themselves and hovered over me, unaware of a shadow moving behind them, black and dangerous, shifting along the ground, alive. As it passed over the stick man, his limbs shattered into thousands of bloodless little pieces and the back of his head was knocked through his mouth.

  The snake man shrieked at the sight of his fallen companion, and he took off down the road. But the moon was high, and the shadow stretched after him as well. It embraced him so tightly that he stopped moving and fell to the earth, his skin peeled away in one swift motion. His flesh followed with a moist rip. But as this was The Ending, neither of the highwaymen could die even if he so desired. The stick man quivered in a fetal position on the ground and attempted to slurp the contents of his head back into his mouth. His partner, all bloody pulp and bone, pulled himself up the road, gathering his flesh and skin.

  The shadow subsided as it lifted Henry from the floor of the forest and set him into a wagon near the side of the great road. As it approached me, it took the shape of a middle-aged man, impish and dark-featured, with a slender finger pressed against his sly lips.

  “Duncan!”

  Whatley’s manservant brought me to my feet and climbed into the driver’s seat. He did not wait for me to join him before whipping the side of the animal that pulled the wagon. The squat, headless thing with hundreds of fleshy flaps of skin squirmed forward like so many caterpillars, but it proved very fast as it took off. I quickly retrieved the knife that had been dropped by one of the highwaymen and barely had enough time to jump into the back of the vehicle as it started forward. I tucked the weapon into the folds of my dress.

  “Why did you come for us?” I hardly expected an answer, but Duncan reached into his coat pocket and extracted a parchment envelope with a blue wax seal. I tore it open and read the two words written in Lily Darrow’s handwriting: Trust him. I handed it to Henry.

  “He did save our lives,” he said. That was hardly sufficient, but given what few options we had, I reluctantly turned to face the back end of the wagon. We twisted down through the dark hills of The Ending, the wagon lumbering along the hard, beaten earth between patches of broken brick.

  We passed by great houses and manors with candlelit windows and oddly shaped figures scuttling about behind them. I wondered if the boys would remain unchanged after having lived among such strangeness. There were other orchards, and a lone clock tower on a small island at the center of a lake. Henry and I soon settled into the quiet rhythms of the wagon. We took turns sleeping while the other remained alert, but no one passed us by. We were completely alone.

  The hills grew taller as we continued, and the road sloped upward along the side of a mountain. There was movement in the valley below. Shapes in the darkness bounded after one another, their ridged backs glistening with sweat in the moonlight. Barbed tentacles lashed cruelly at tender undersides, and talons tore through flesh and fat and bone. Blood was thick on the ground, black as midnight.

  Duncan did not bother looking down at the carnage below, and the creatures seemed to be paying us little if any attention, for we went down the other side of the mountain without trouble.

  I realized Henry and I had started holding hands, but I could not recall when it happened, or why. I felt so many things all at once—fear, anger, exhilaration, doubt—each of them vying for my attention, surging through my body in alternating waves of anxiety and relief, to the point that I shut them all out and focused instead on the fact that I was glad to have Henry by my side at that moment. With my other hand I felt for the last relics of my former life, which I had rescued from the burning cinder of Everton.

  Jonathan. I fell asleep despite my anxieties. My body demanded rest, and I dreamt that I went to a traveling carnival with my family.

  We drifted from tent to tent, from the jugglers to the fortune-teller and finally to the magic man. He stood on his collapsible stage, a man in black making doves appear from his throat and fire dance at his fingertips. He called my mother from the audience and placed a sheet over her body. With a clap of his hands she disappeared. Then he took Jonathan, who vanished in a flash of light. My father was the last person chosen from the audience. The magic man placed him in a chair and levitated him into the air and out of sight. I clapped and clapped when the show was over. I waited at the entrance for my family to return, but then the gypsies packed up their tents and drove away in their caravans, leaving me alone on an empty hill.

  “Charlotte.” My eyes fluttered open. Henry’s face hovered above me. I sat up and realized that I recognized the landscape. There was the orchard and beyond it, the House of Darkling alight with activity. There were other carriages on the road now, all of them in a long caravan to the front entrance by the Star Fountain. Duncan avoided this, steering us through the tall black iron gates, past human-shaped guards who waved us through without a second glance, and around the back to a servants’ entrance, where arm in arm, Henry and I entered into the House of Darkling.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Man in Black

  The lower floors of the manor were characterized by crooked hallways and room upon room of sweating, anxious servants, all of them frantic to respond to the panels of angry, chiming bells that heralded the needs of the hundreds of guests upstairs. Duncan did not allow us to linger, urging us onward until we were expelled from the inner workings of the house into the wing where the children and I had slept during our visits. To my surprise, he opened the door to my own quarters and pushed us inside.

  A woman stood in the center of the room, her back to the entrance. She was dressed in a white gown that flowed from an ivory bodice of lace down the curves of her body into a pool of silk on the floor. A veil hid her face, but Henry knew her all the same.

  “Lily . . .” he said breathlessly.

  “Henry?” She sounded weary and sad, but her voice left her entirely when her eyes turned to meet her husband’s. He took a single step forward, then another, and another, as if approaching a dream, careful to hold it for as long as possible before it slipped away. When he reached her he pushed back the veil to stroke the side of her face. She trembled, closing her fingers around his wrist. They stayed in the same pose, a silent conversation playing out in their mutual gaze, which remained uninterrupted by any further physicality. They simply looked into one another.

  I could not help but feel a slight twinge of jealousy at the sight of them together, even as I reminded myself that they were still husband and wife
. A shadow passed over Lily’s face, and she became very melancholy.

  “I’m afraid you might be too late.” She motioned to her wedding gown.

  Henry seemed to see it for the first time and backed away in confusion. “You can’t be. You mustn’t.”

  She ignored him. “I sent Duncan to fetch you after we last spoke, so that you could see the children safely home. They do not belong here.”

  “Neither do you. Come with us,” I said.

  “We tried that once before, don’t you remember? They’ll never release me. I’m the only one in The Ending who has ever died. They worship me, and Whatley will marry me.”

  “You deserve peace, my love,” Henry interjected.

  “This is exactly what I deserve,” she said bitterly. “I am glad you came, Henry. I had so wanted to see you one last time.”

  “I don’t understand. Why didn’t you summon me here with the boys? Your death broke something inside of me, Lily. I would have been here in an instant.”

  “That’s exactly why I tried to keep you away. I went so far as to tell the children there was a spell keeping this place connected to Blackfield, and if they spoke to you of their time here, it would be forever broken. I was afraid, Henry. To say good-bye to the children was my duty as their mother. Their hearts will mend. I couldn’t bear to see yours break all over again.”

  I felt a pang of foolishness at my own gullibility, but it was washed away by all the other emotions that swept over me during this exchange.

  Lily must have seen this, for she closed her eyes and summoned the strength to turn her husband away. “They’ll be coming for me soon. I think you had better leave.”

  “We can help, Lily,” I said.

  “How? What could you possibly do?” When I did not respond, she turned away from us once more. “Take the children back.” Her voice cracked as she spoke, and she nodded to Duncan. He went to the wardrobe and extracted two black cloaks, draping them over us. The hoods hung low before our faces, like shrouds.