The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [98]
“Get out, get out,” Agnes cried, pushing past him, reaching for that foul semblance of a man.
Quire took a faltering step or two backwards, his legs weak, almost buckling. Agnes tore the face from the wall, and inside Quire’s head, deep within his ears and his mind he thought he heard a rasping wail of loathing.
The face sloughed through Agnes’ fingers, its skin liquefying into a stinking dark discharge. Melting and falling from her grasp to the floor in gobbets of corrupted matter. She shook her hand, spilling drops of softened skin. With her other hand, she pushed Quire firmly in the centre of his chest.
“Get out, son,” she said more quietly than before, but still fraught. “We’re seen.”
They went quickly, stumbling over the rubble of the years, cracking shoulders against the door frames in their haste, blundering in the now suffocating gloom of the place. Pursued, Quire felt, by something terrible at his back, wanting him, reaching for him.
Out into the passageway, rushing for the dismal light of the doorway and the courtyard beyond it, that had seemed so grimly miserable at first but now looked like salvation and sanctuary. Staggering as he veered, Agnes on his heels, into the vaulted tunnel beneath the brooding mass of the tenements, and running through it, footsteps echoing, and into the West Bow.
Bright light burst upon them as they emerged on to the street, dizzy with relief. The sun was dazzling, disorienting. Quire breathed deep, a man starved of air, coming up from dark waters. It tasted sweet, after the stale must of Weir’s house; it tasted of life, not death. Only then did his morbid terror begin to recede.
A squall of children went past, chasing a rolling hoop down the street, laughing and shrieking. A woman bargaining with a street vendor turned to look after them and smiled. Shopkeepers gathering water in pails from the wellhead down at the foot of the West Bow, where it opened out on to the Grassmarket, paused to watch the happy gang spill past them. Quire trembled. He felt himself suspended between two worlds—the radiant bustle of the city, and the black pit of decay behind him—and did not know which was real.
“What was that?” he asked Agnes.
The witch of Leith had her hands on her knees. She was bent over, panting, looking for a moment as if she might empty her stomach out on to the cobblestones. But she mastered herself, and stood straight once more. She wiped her hands on her skirts.
“That was the foulest of magics. The blackest. A sentry.”
“A sentry,” Quire echoed numbly.
He clenched his fists, opened them and clenched again, forcing down the fear. Gathering himself.
“Whoever set it there saw us.” Agnes grunted. “Looked through it, and saw us. You’ve someone in this nice city of yours practising the most bloody, evil business. I’d do whatever I could if it meant an end to it, but my wee glamours’ll not help you. You need a different kind of help altogether.”
“I know who I need,” muttered Quire. “His name’s Durand, and he’s the only one might tell me what I need to know. I just don’t know how to lay my hands on him. Not yet.”
XXIII
Durand
Mathieu Durand looked out through the tall window on the uppermost landing of Ruthven’s house. He stood far enough back from the glass that he was confident he could not be seen from the street. There was no light burning up here at the top of the house, and the night outside was dark enough to hide him from any curious eye.
But there were no answers out there to the doubts and fears that assailed him.
He withdrew, backing away from that wall of glass. He walked towards the top of the long, many-flighted stairs. His feet were loud on the bare boards. The upper floors of Ruthven’s house in Melville Street were, in the main, places of echoes, and of dusty voids. There were no rugs or coverings on the floors; the walls of even the grandest rooms were bare of paintings or hangings