Vanished g-4

by Kat Richardson

  It reminded me so much of my first encounters with the Grey after I’d died for those two fateful minutes that I was disoriented and a bolt of unaccustomed fear shot through me. I stopped and looked around, trying to get my bearings for where or when in the Grey I was, slowing the racing of my heart and telling myself this was not the first time. There wasn’t a monster waiting to snap me up in its grinding jaws or a vampire with an agenda waiting to plunge a knot of Grey into my chest and give me a “gift” I never wanted. Not this time.

  The path ahead was very narrow—just about wide enough for two people to walk abreast, but no more—and the buildings loomed over the street in a drunken, tilted fashion. Some of them were brick and stone and others were faced with plaster over wood or something much rougher. The smell of horse droppings and garbage filled the air, and I could hear a chattering of distant voices coming from several directions.

  I’d “slipped”—inadvertently stepped sideways through space and time to emerge someplace I had no control over because the Grey had wanted me so badly. I’d learned to control that slippage long ago, so I wondered why it was happening now. The narrow alley gave no clue.

  I crept forward, noticing that my feet were just a little above the ground. I wasn’t entirely in the visible plane of time but physically in another with a higher street level while I could only see this one. I moved down the alley, which opened a little into a small courtyard for about half a block. The court was lined with narrow, ramshackle houses on one side and a stable yard on the other—which explained the odor. Twilight already held sway in this slice of the past, and I could see a candlelit window at the end of the alley with the preternatural clarity of something magical afoot. It was so blatant that I had to assume something or someone wanted me to see whatever unearthly thing had happened by its long-ago light. I sighed and shuffled across the road I couldn’t see to the tiny house on the south end of the darkened alley.

  I looked in through the window and saw a young man and an older one sitting at a worktable in an old kitchen. Both the men were bearded and had dark hair that flowed from under close-fitting caps and hung over their collars. They wore robes of some kind that looked like daily clothes, not costumes or ceremonial vestments. An iron pot steamed on a hook over the fire in an open hearth. A third man slumped in a shadowy corner farther from the fire, looking either deeply asleep or dead drunk. A clutter of bottles sat on the table in front of him, so I was betting on the latter.

  The oldest man put a slab of marble on the table between himself and the younger man, pushing aside a collection of bowls and bottles and what looked like surgical instruments. He stood up and fetched a ladleful of whatever was bubbling in the pot and poured it slowly onto the marble so it steamed off the cool stone.

  “Quick, work it together,” he ordered the younger man. “Don’t let it run off the stone.”

  The younger man plunged his hands into the steaming mess and exclaimed in pain. “Ah! It burns, Master Simeon!”

  “Of course, Ezra. It’s just been boiling. It will cool swiftly, but it must be worked together first.” Simeon returned the ladle to the pot and sat back down, helping Ezra keep the runny glop on the marble, scraping, turning, poking, and squeezing it together until it had cooled into a soft, steaming lump the color of shale.

  “You must have all four elements to create life: earth and water, air and fire,” the older man lectured, oblivious to the heat of the material they worked with.

  “Is it not blasphemy to create life—to play at godhood?” Ezra asked, keeping his eyes on the stiffening pile of goo.

  Simeon spit on the floor. “This for your blasphemy. Dabbling in magic is forbidden as it is. But this is not truly life, boy. Only a shadow that lasts a mere instant. A semblance.”

  Ezra scowled as he worked, not seeming satisfied with the excuse but not arguing, either. A vulpine intelligence gleamed in his eyes.

  They rolled the lump into a cylinder and Simeon turned it over to Ezra. “Pinch it into form but leave openings in the chest and head.”

  Ezra, his hands reddened and blistered, formed the cylinder into a rough human shape about as big as his hand. He pushed his fingernails into the clay to create gaping wounds in the head and chest of the figure.

  “This is the water and earth,” the instructor said, watching his student work. Then he handed the young man a small knife. “Breath comes last, but for now we need the fire of life. I think a bit of ear will do.”

  Ezra looked startled. The older man pointed to the drunk at the end of the table. “His, you fool. Not yours.”

  Nervous, Ezra crept up on the sleeping man and pinched at his right ear.

  “Don’t shilly-shally! We must finish while the clay is hot! He shan’t feel a thing—he’s too gone in drink,” his instructor chided. “Just nip off the lobe and have done!”

  With a swift, guilty swipe, the younger man sliced off a chunk of the sleeping man’s right earlobe. The drunk squalled like a branded calf. Then he shook himself, blinked, and dropped his head back onto his chest, unconscious again. Ezra scurried back with his prize, blood spattered on his hands and the sleeves of his robe.

  His instructor pointed at the clay figure. “A drop or two in the head and the chest. Then your ring. And close it up quickly.”

  “What? My ring? Why?” Ezra objected.

  His master pinched him on the arm with a vicious twist. “Do as I say! Quickly, quickly!”

  Ezra did as he was bidden, squeezing the little bit of earlobe over the pits in the figurine’s head and chest before wrenching the small silver ring from his pinkie and dropping it into the chest cavity. He pinched the clay closed, making the figure look as whole as possible.

  “It needs a face, nincompoop,” Simeon chided. “You can’t breathe life into it if it hasn’t got a mouth or nostrils.”

  Ezra shaped a rough face onto his doll, featuring an oversized nose and hollow eyes over a small slash of a mouth. The older man muttered some words and circled his finger counterclockwise over the little figure. In a moment the effigy turned brick red and a small white cloud of steam puffed from it.

  “Ah, fire. Indeed. Well done,” the teacher added offhand.

  Ezra beamed.

  Simeon looked at the little red figure. “You’ve made the nose big enough to breathe the whole stink of London into. Well, no matter—this shan’t walk abroad for long. Now speak the words, breathe them into it.”

  “The. Name?”

  “No, dunderhead!” the older man shouted, cuffing Ezra over the ear with a sharp clap of his hand. “You’re the one who was so concerned about playing at God. You’ve far too filthy a soul to speak the Name and live. Call down a very apocalypse upon the lot of us, you would!” He pointed with the knife at something carved into the tabletop. “Those words, boy. Those. And only those! Don’t get any be-damned ideas above yourself—talent or no, you’re still only a bloody apprentice. Drink the wine there, then speak. And don’t touch the golem with your muddy hands while you do it—you’ll undo the stoking of the fire.”

  Ezra scowled, but he took a swig of wine from a nearby wooden cup—which made him sputter for a moment and turn a bit blue. Then he leaned forward and whispered into the little figure’s face. His breath left his mouth as sparkling white vapor and wreathed around the inert little man of red clay before it seemed to be sucked into the figure’s mouth and nose. Ezra leaned back, his eyes huge as he stared at the thing on the table. The golem had changed color and grown hair. Now it looked like a tiny version of the drunk at the end of the table, except this one had a complete right ear.

  Master Simeon circled his finger over the homunculus again, clockwise this time, murmuring more words that froze in the air as crystalline shapes before they dissolved and spiraled down into the clay figure in a stream of blue smoke.

  Ezra shuddered until he doubled over and heaved up the wine in a red mess that shattered on the packed dirt floor like thin glass. Icy mist rose off the shards while they melt
ed in the heat of the fire and the wine soaked into the ground. The wine-red mud heaved and rippled with tiny stalagmites that fell away in a moment.

  “Oh,” the younger man moaned. “I don’t feel well.”

  “That’s because we used the blood of a drunkard. What the one feels the other feels.” Simeon grinned like a wolf. “But as he’s an accomplished souse and you’re a blushing lily who barely tastes the seder wine, it’s not surprising you feel wretched.”

  “How does it work? And when will it stop?” Ezra asked, swallowing hard.

  “Your ring, boy. It is the channel. Your dear possession or your likeness joined in the clay to the blood or meat of the man knits together both your sensations in the golem. Watch.”

  The hand-high man on the table sat up and looked around. Simeon waved the knife in front of its face.

  “What do you see, creature?”

  The drunk at the other end muttered, “Knife.”

  Ezra drew a sharp breath, staring into the middle distance as if he, too, saw a knife where none could be.

  The sorcerer poked the creature with the knife. “And what do you feel?”

  Ezra yelped. The drunk whimpered in his sleep.

  “Cold,” said the golem.

  “It—he doesn’t feel pain?” Ezra stammered, rubbing his belly in the same spot where Simeon had stabbed the figurine.

  “Of course not. It is not a man, only an homunculus of clay.” He rose and walked to stand over the sleeping drunk, raising his eyebrows in speculation. Then he jabbed his knife point into the man’s arm and jerked it away again.

  Both the drunk and the student shouted in pain and alarm. Simeon eased the irritated souse back to the floor and sent him back to sleep with the soporific contents of another bottle. Then the sorcerer returned to the table and resumed his seat. “If I were to stab you, he would not notice—it’s not your blood that ties you together, but the ring,” Simeon said. “I can wield my knife against this little creature much more easily than torturing the real one—unless I wanted to. But if we removed the ring, you would feel nothing.”

  Ezra narrowed his eyes and looked speculative. “Without the ring I feel nothing and the golem is but a mindless slave who knows no pain. We could raise an army of these things—”

  Simeon gave a harsh laugh. “All the size of your fist. And they’d last no longer than an hour or the first rain. You need a great deal more material than a mere drop or two of blood to make one as large as a man that walked a week or more.”

  Ezra cut a glance at the drunk, his eyes gleaming.

  “Do not think you can divide him up like a beeve at the market,” the older man snapped. “You need the man living, for the image to live. Dead men power nothing, nor do they speak. You must be content with this.”

  “Surely, we can do better. I can think of a way, I’m certain. ”

  The worlds shuddered again and the light in the window faded as I fell through chilly layers of time.

  CHAPTER 22

  Crashing out of the temporacline, I skidded into a small courtyard in the normal world, where the sun hadn’t begun to set. I stumbled against a brick wall and into a short passageway to a street where, back in the sunshine of the normal, I stopped to catch my breath. A sign on the wall beside me read WHITE HORSE ALLEY on one corner and COWCROSS on the other. I remembered passing Cowcross.

  I looked right and left and glimpsed the grand entrance to Smithfield Market down to my left. The road nearby must have been St. John Street before it split and made St. John Lane by the priory gate. So the Underground station would be to my right and up Cowcross, according to my map. But there was no White Horse Alley on the map and the sign on the wall nearby seemed more of a historical marker than an active street sign. I suspected that White Horse Alley had been gone for a long time.

  I walked on to Farringdon Underground Station and spent a while figuring out where in the layers of the station’s platforms I needed to go to catch the right train going the right way. Having lived all my life on the West Coast of the United States where subways are a rarity, wrapping my brain around the overlapping complexities of the London Underground took a bit of faith and hope—two things I’m not that good with. I eventually sussed out that I needed to take a Circle line train towards Aldgate, which would go east for a while before it turned and went west closer to the Thames with a stop at Temple Underground—right across the street from my hotel. Confusing if you tried to reason it out, but plain enough if you just trusted the map.

  As I stood studying the map and figuring out the fare, floods of commuters bustled in and out of the station while a public address system reminded them about long-distance trains to outlying parts of England. They weren’t as pushy as Seattle commuters, but they were in just as much of a hurry. They paid me very little heed—almost like ghosts but much heavier when they stepped on my feet—swimming in a human tide as slick and rapid as salmon looking to spawn with the occasional “sorry” or “ ’scuse me” tossed into the air as they passed. I joined the swarm and went down to the Circle line platform.

  The platform ceiling was a brick vault held up by painted iron columns, and even modern lighting left the ends a bit gloomy. So I wasn’t surprised to see ghosts and squiggles of Grey energy wandering loose over the sizzling yellow lines of the electrified rails. Down at the far end a blur of white sent off a broken-mirror glitter. My mysterious shadow was here, too, and sick of creepy enigmas for one day, I fixed my gaze on it and strode down the length of the platform to catch up to whatever was making that freakish gleam.

  As the station wall drew nearer, I could see only one source the gleam could have come from: a man, seated on the floor in the farthest corner. He wore old-fashioned trousers that had once been white under a vestlike thing and a long coat both made of some kind charcoal gray material that looked a bit like ratty crushed velvet. The light show was his aura, which, up close, looked like a wavering heat mirage. As I got within talking distance, he pushed back into the shadows a bit more—they seemed to ripple and close partway around him like a cloak—and kept his head down. Shoulder-length filthy blond hair streaked with white fell forward in clumped strings, hiding his face.

  “I was expectin’ a boy,” he said.

  “What?” I snapped, cocking my head to peer at him sideways, a trick I’d learned to filter out the chaff at the cusp of the Grey. Under my gaze he seemed to flicker and fall in and out of focus, and the curiously colorless energy around him looked like a hole in the world. My concentration narrowed to him alone and the ghost chorus of London I’d started to ignore swelled in my head like a forming wave.

  “I expected someone stupider,” he elucidated in an odd drawl. “More balls, less brain, considering the nature of this fool’s errand. I’d have thought a girl’d have better sense.”

  “Who the hell are you?” It was pointless to pretend he wasn’t something otherworldly and therefore ignorant of what I did. Nothing else in the Grey seemed to be, so why not this strange man, too? But I had no idea who or what he was.

  “Marsden. Mole catcher, as used to be, but never chasin’ moles for Edward Kammerling—as are you.”

  “You think I work for him.”

  “As you’ve come from seein’ Jakob—and not many others would bother knockin’ on his master’s door as wasn’t Kammerling’s agent—yeah, I think you do, girl. The master’s gone away and them as took ’im wouldn’t have much cause to return for his menial wi’out laying that gruesome creature in a hot, dry grave. Jakob is still cursin’ you for wrenchin’ out ’is arm. That was a nifty trick you pulled comin’ over off the wall like that.”

  “Yeah, everything I need to know I learned from Donald O’Connor,” I sneered, instantly suspect of his flattery.

  “Who?”

  “Haven’t you ever seen Singin’ in the Rain? It’s a movie. Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor. ”

  He spat a laugh. “No,” he said, and turned a little my way. “It’s not the eyes, y
’know. ”

  Ineluctable fear lanced through me. I couldn’t seem to breathe right and what air flowed into my lungs felt thickened with knives of frost. My head swam and my body chilled and burned by rapid turns as if with malarial fever. I eased back a step, poised to run.

  He raised his head. The hair fell back and he turned his face to me—a once-beautiful, eyeless nightmare of a face. His skin was pale and powdery, stretched over exquisite bones that pressed forward as if they wanted to escape from the confining flesh. Reddened, flaccid eyelids hung over orbless sockets rimmed with ragged scars, one lid not quite closed and showing a hint of the gouged hollow behind it. Yet I felt his stare from those empty eyes, a phantom gaze as sharp as an ice pick. I jerked back, teetering at the edge of the platform.

  Marsden sprang forward and snatched my hand into his cold, rawhide-hard grip, yanking me forward to safety as a train rushed into the station. The Grey rocked and swayed for a few moments, flashing disco lights around me.

  “You’re bloody naive, my girl,” Marsden whispered into my face on a breath that smelled of lilies and ash. “Though you’ve more bottle than I’d have credited—damned if you don’t.” He chortled and let me go. “This is my train. I’ll find you tomorrow where there aren’t so many of the wrong eyes to see us.”

  I turned to watch him step onto the train. It was a phantom steam engine pulling a handful of old-style carriage cars, and though it looked too insubstantial to hold anything not already a wisp of smoke and memory, it lurched forward as Marsden got aboard and it started off. I jumped back from the platform edge as, with a blast of sound and wind, the normal train rushed in and displaced its ghostly predecessor.