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By Root 1704 0

toward me. My capacity for fright had been suppressed and I did not panic, but I did renew my struggles and discovered the yellow-green radiance to have a viscous consistency that hampered movement. Yet the shadow moved through it easily, as if born to that medium . . . though its movement may not have been so facile. I saw that it was spinning ass over teakettle—slowly, mind you, with an ease and grace that caused me to think it had done this many times before. I estimated, judging by its path, that it might miss me, but it did not. As the thing tumbled by, a portion of it grazed my hip, or better said, passed through my hip. It failed to disrupt my course in the least—there was no painful collision—but I felt numbness spread from my hip down my left leg to the knee, and I had an overwhelming sense of joy that may have been the residue of that brief contact. Not a meat joy, not an emotion bred by pleasure or by appetites fulfilled, but a blissful feeling, an ecstasy I would associate with purity, the sort of thing saints claim to experience when communing with God. The joy soon dissipated, however, and with it went my calm. Terrified, I thrashed about, attempting to break free from whatever held me fast. I continued to struggle until the light abruptly dimmed to the ordinary darkness of a London rooftop and I fell.

When I regained consciousness, the fog had thinned to a mist through which I could see a salting of dim stars. Jane kneeled beside me, her face smeared with coal dust, streaked with tears. She could not tell me what had happened, having been down in the hole the entire time, but according to her, everything I had experienced had taken place in a matter of seconds. At length she helped me to stand. My leg was still numb, and I had aches and pain resulting from the fall, though I could not have fallen far, because nothing was broken. All of the attractors were twisted and crumpled, like shriveled silver weeds—since most of them had been shut down, I guessed that a wash of energy from the one we destroyed had resonated with some core element in the machinery of the other three. Richmond lay facedown in the dust a dozen feet away. I hobbled over to him, dropped to my hands and knees, and asked if he was all right. He stirred and made a feeble sound.

“Are you able to stand?” I asked.

He turned his head so that I could see his face—his eyes were closed, blood trickled from his nostrils, but his color was good, his pulse strong. I encouraged him, telling him that we had succeeded, but received no reply.

“Tell me what to do,” I said. “Should I fetch Bladge to help me carry you?”

He yielded a throaty squeak and opened his eyes. They were Christine’s eyes, hazel irises alive with agitated motion, twitching to the left, then to the right, like the dial of a combination lock that had jammed. All the muscles of his face were taut with strain, the tendons of his neck cabled. He sought to speak once again, making a horrid, guttering noise.

I recoiled, as did Jane, who had been peering over my shoulder. Richmond stared, though not at me—he was looking to my left at something that no longer existed in this world.

“Help him!” Jane reached out a hand to him, but withheld her touch. “Can you not help him as you helped me?”

I was loath to shake him, afraid that whatever injuries he had suffered might be affected; but I felt I had to try, although I knew to my soul that Christine had finally recognized her brother, and now that they were reunited, for better or worse, they would never be parted again.

A WEEK AFTER the events I have related, the body of Sir Charles Mellor was discovered on a mud flat alongside the Thames. The corpse was badly decomposed, and this made it impossible to determine the date of death; but it was obvious that he had been dead for quite some time, and there can be no doubt whatsoever as to the cause: seventeen stab wounds to his neck and torso. His murderer has never been brought to the bar, but I am persuaded to believe that Richmond, half mad and desperate to avenge Christine, acted upon the information