Catherine Fisher - Darkwater

Breathless, Sarah jumped down.

“Go inside,” Azrael snapped.

The hounds were racing away. Far off in the woods the crashing pursuit brought rooks flapping out of the treetops like dark snow.

“Don’t hurt him,” she whispered.

Azrael smiled. “What do you think I am?”

Hopeless, she said, “That’s just it. I don’t know what you are.”

He leaned down. “Don’t you? I warned you. I don’t like trespassers. Now go in. This is Hallowe’en, remember?”

He turned the horse away, and she knew he had been laughing at her. She ran up the steps, fast. In the wood the hounds erupted into a hoarse baying.

They had found the scent. Someone yelled in terror.

She pushed past Scrab in fury.

“Get out of my way,” she muttered.

eleven

November fell like a dark curtain.

Martha said there had never been such a Hallowe’en, not in living memory. Along the cliffs red fires had blazed—balefires, the old men had called them, glimmering and gone. The wind had roared over slate-roofed cottages in the combes, and the villagers had barred the doors and huddled over the fires, listening and sleepless. “Like all the hounds of hell riding down the sky,” she said with relish, not noticing Sarah’s stare.

Barns had blown down. One pinnacle of the church tower had crashed, found in the morning embedded point down in the soft earth of a recent grave.

There had been the usual sightings. John Trevisik swore he had seen his drowned brother looking in at the scullery window. At the inn at Mamble someone had rattled the door handle late at night and stumped angrily around, swearing and yelling. When the innkeeper had nervously unbarred a shutter and peered out, no one had been there.

Sarah had listened to it all in silence, her thumb scraping absently at a burn mark on Martha’s table. Jack came through. He stopped, awkward.

“How is it at the big house? You’re looking well, Sarah.”

She knew that. She was clean, ate well, wasn’t so scrawny. Her hair was well-brushed and shiny; she’d bought another new dress and a finer pair of boots.

“I like it, Jack,” she said, not looking at him.

His open face clouded. “Aye. I thought you would. We’ll not be seeing you here much more.”

Her father asked no questions. Each time she saw him he seemed grayer, more discontented, his cough getting worse and worse. It upset her so much that last week she hadn’t gone to see him at all.

On Hallowe’en, Azrael had been out all night.

In the morning he’d been tired but cheerful, perfectly polite. Scrab had told him he was a damned fool for wearing himself out. He had said nothing about the dark hounds and she wouldn’t ask. But since then, there had been no sign of the tramp. Nothing. In the village no one had seen him. It was as if he had disappeared from the face of the earth.

The weather turned colder. Withered leaves drifted down; wood smoke rose from the orchards.

Sarah lived in a coziness of rooms, of meals with Azrael, enthralled by his talk of astronomy, spirits, angels; his old tales and abstruse lore, speculations about the conjuring of demons, the possibility of mermen. He told her nothing about himself, easily changing the subject each time she asked. She worked hard. She took notes of all his experiments, learned strange chemical symbols, stayed up late to watch flasks of mysterious liquids change color.

He fascinated her. Day by day she fell more under his quiet spell; the urgency of his desire for the secret of transmutation moving into her own mind, so that she lay awake at night thinking of mixtures of elements they hadn’t tried, variations of heating and compression. And yet under it some fear of him lurked. He wanted her soul, the tramp had said. To damn it, or to save it? Or was he just crazy, a lonely man possessed with an impossible quest?

And all the time her father’s cough seemed to rattle through her dreams.

Finally, one bleak afternoon in the library, even the books were not enough. She dropped her pen, letting it blot, then leaned her arms on the open pages of dark print, resting her head on them.

She couldn’t sit here. It was too silent. Not even a clock ticked in its dusty remoteness. She felt stifled, and suddenly, to her own surprise, she longed for Martha to talk to, or Jack, or even some of the children from the school. But, then, she’d made herself above them, just like she’d said she would.

Only it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

She jumped up and stalked out, walking from room to room like a restless shadow.

Who was telling the truth—Azrael or the tramp? One of them was lying to her.

She wandered out of the library wing and along the upper landings, recklessly throwing open all the doors. Bedrooms. Closets. A bathroom. All clean, well-kept. All empty.

She ran up the south stairs to the servants’ attics and they were the same; small white rooms, neat in a row.

The terrible silence of the house oppressed her. Its statues seemed frozen, its paintings cruel and stern. The curtains hung absolutely rigid, as if a breeze had never touched them, as if the whole life of Darkwater was suspended, like a chemical in solution, waiting for some explosion to happen. On impulse she dragged up the sash of a window, wrenching it open with all her strength. Cold wind gusted in, refreshing in its dampness, loud with the screams of gulls.

She leaned out, breathing the misty rain. All across the fields and out to sea, gray curtains of it hung, veil beyond veil. It reminded her of something she had almost forgotten. Azrael’s secret door. She had never found it. She turned and walked past her own room to the tapestry at the corridor’s end. Kneeling, she felt the corner again, this time with infinite care, jamming her fingernails into cracks and tugging hard. Nothing moved. There was no panel that she could find. Nothing. Except, as she turned away, something out of the corner of her eye, that she had to crouch down to see.

A few white spots of dried candle wax on the floorboards.

Sarah touched them, with a wry smile. They were tiny but quite hard, and they meant that someone had stood here for a few seconds, the candle askew and dripping in some draft. It was enough. She hadn’t dreamed it. And if she could find out where the door led, it might help her know more about what or who Azrael was.

After a moment’s thought she turned and marched down to the vast kitchens, where chickens turned on a spit under the sooty hearth, and Scrab sat at the table wrapping apples in sacking.

She stood right in front of him.

“Who is Azrael?” she demanded.

His small eyes looked at her in disgust. “Yer master.”

He tossed another apple in the box.

“And where does he come from?”

He grinned then, the inflamed spots red under his greasy hair. “Elsewhere. ’E’s the one what ’olds all the cards.”

“Cards?” She caught at the word. “What cards?”

Scrab scratched irritably. “Restless today, ain’t we! Flighty. And there was me thinking you ’ad all you ever wanted.”

Above him a bell jangled on the wall. LABORATORY was written under it in gilt letters.

Scrab didn’t look up. “Wants yer.” He tapped an apple so that a fat grub fell out, and he picked up the pale squashy thing in his fingers. As she went out, she was sure he was going to eat it.

Azrael was bent over the workbench, absorbed in the contents of a glass flask. He had been nervous and on edge all day. His expensive coat was stained with splashes. “Do you know what this is?” he said at once.