CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Unquiet Death at Ghastly Grim
Edie fell one floor and was saved by a combination of thick snow and a henhouse.
At least she imagined it was a henhouse, because it squawked alarmingly when she hit it and rolled off into the alleyway.
It was still clucking in outrage as Edie ignored the fact that she was winded and her shoulder felt dislocated, as she ran off into the snow. Somewhere in the distance a barrel organ was playing and a church bell was cheerily tolling the hour as Edie thudded through the snow, the arms of her straitjacket flapping wildly behind her as she tried to put as much distance as she could between her and the House of Pain.
The street was dimly lit by occasional oil lamps, and Edie ran from pool of light to pool of light, checking behind her as she did so. The houses hunched over the street with drooping eaves and second and third floors that overhung a narrow thoroughfare, as if ready to pounce.
She was very conscious that her footsteps were the only ones in the virgin snow. She wasn’t going to be hard to find. She ran out into a wider street, where the surface had been churned up by the passage of carts and cabs, hoping her footprints would be hidden in the general confusion.
She didn’t, however, want to run in the middle of any street for long, because she was too visible. She also had a strong sense that she was being watched; but when she whirled to look behind her, she saw no one in the road, and only blackness stippled with falling snow above her. The sense of being seen became an unbearable itch that needed to be scratched, so when she saw a chance, she leaped across the strip of virgin snow and into a narrow alley, leaving, she hoped, no clues as to where she’d left the general melee in the middle of the street.
She looked back and noted with satisfaction that she’d left no trace at all. She ran along the side of the alley, keeping in the shadows, then turned a sharp corner, only to come to an even sharper halt.
Straight across the street was a church, and beside it a small churchyard. The high wall surrounding it was topped with ornate multibarbed spikes that poked through the soft topping of snow like a thornbush. There was an arched stone gateway, also topped with spikes, above a black iron gate that stood ajar.
Edie normally stayed well clear of churchyards, but there were two reasons that she started across the street, heading for the gate. First, there was a mash of footprints and wheel tracks leading into it, so her footprints would be lost among them. And secondly, she heard the chilling noise of dogs baying, coming closer. Her plan was to get through those metal gates, close them, and wait behind their safety for her pursuers to pass. She knew without a doubt that the barking came from the mastiffs from the House of Pain.
As she approached the gate she looked up and saw that it was decorated with stone skulls. There were two on each side, buried to their eye sockets in snow, impaled on savage barbs. There were three in the center of the arch, resting on bones. The central skull wore a laurel wreath like an ancient Roman, which made it look even more ominous, like the Emperor of Death.
It was too late for her to stop now, because the baying was closing in, and there was nowhere else to hide. She ducked through the gate and pushed it shut. The latch clunked, but there was, she noted, no way to lock it. She griped the obsidian blade and listened, ready to fight.
The dogs were suddenly silent. Edie hoped this was because they had taken a wrong turn and run on. She crouched in the shadows of the wall and looked at the graveyard behind her. It was a cramped space, hemmed in by the blind-eyed backs of houses on two sides, and by the square tower and side of the church on the other. It was a mad jumble of snowcapped gravestones, as if the bodies beneath were stacked four or five deep. The spaces between the stones were far too small to leave room for the full length of a coffin between them.
There were no lights in the houses, but there was a dim flicker from within the church. She saw a narrow door in the base of the tower. Without thinking, she slipped through the closely stacked ranks of gravestones.
She heard a voice and froze.
“What a busy night.”
“A busy night indeed, Majesty.”
The voices had a hollow, doomy quality to them. They sounded dry and were accompanied by a bony clacking.
“One goes out, one goes in.”
“No rest for the wicked, Majesty.”
“No rest for the good either. Not with the resurrection men abroad in the night.”
Edie realized with a chilling certainty that she was hearing skulls talking to each other on the other side of the arch. The three central ones on the outside face of the stonework were, of course, invisible to her, but the two skulls on top of the wall were outlined against the night sky. And she knew what resurrection men were. She’d always listened in school, even when making it look as if she weren’t. Resurrection men dug up dead bodies and sold them to surgeons to cut up.
She looked down and realized that the muddy footsteps and wheel tracks in the snow were just the kind to have been made by people digging and wheeling something away in a barrow. That explained why there was such a churn of markings leading into a graveyard at night.
One of the end skulls swiveled on its impaling barb and looked at Edie.
“She’s listening, Majesty.”
“Impossible. Unless . . .”
“Exactly.”
“Ask her.”
“Are you a glint, girl?” said the skull that Edie could see.
She nodded.
“She says yes, Majesty.”
“I didn’t hear her.”
“She nodded. She’s hiding.”
“Tell her there is much hidden in the boneyard of Ghastly Grim, but that none of it is alive. Tell her to go.”
“You must go,” said the skull.
“Please stop talking!” Edie said urgently, ears straining for the sound of hounds or footsteps beyond the prattling chatter of the skulls.
“What does she say?”
“She’s arguing, Majesty.”
“She can’t argue with me.”
“You can’t argue with the Majesty.”
“I’m not arguing. I’m asking.”
This was the noisiest deserted churchyard Edie had ever been in. She backed up to the narrow door and tried it. It was locked.
“She’s trying to get in the church.”
“Will you please be quiet,” Edie hissed again, stepping around a newly opened grave. She hunkered down behind a gravestone. She noted the name carved across it. It read: Aemilia Bowles. “Please stop talking.”
“No. We always have the last word.”
She was really regretting her decision to seek refuge in this “quiet” graveyard.
“Okay,” she said urgently. “Have it. Just be quiet.”
“She says have it, Majesty.”
“Tell her we don’t need her permission to have it. We have it by right, for we are Death!”
Edie boiled over. “You’re not Death,” she said. “You’re a bunch of chattering stone skulls that can’t keep their mouths shut.”
“She says . . .”
“SHUT UP. You are not Death—”
There was silence. Then another voice said quietly.
“No. But I am.”
It was the Walker. Edie could see the two dogs silently pawing the other side of the gate.
Only now did she remember to look down at her hand holding the heart stone. She had been gripping it so tightly that she hadn’t seen the warning light blazing from it.
Something large leaped to the top of the wall and crouched there, and where the dogs were panting, this thing was breathing in short, choppy shrieks of hunger. In excitement, it clapped its stubby wings together over the hunched mass of its torturously enclosed body.
It was the Icarus.
All the energy seemed to drain from Edie as she slid down behind a grave marker, realizing that now the Walker had her and would have George, and the Gunner was probably dead, and it was all over. And even though she knew she was done for, she used the last piece of her energy to scrabble away the snow and mud at the foot of the gravestone she was hiding behind and stuff her heart stone deep into the earth.
And then she stood up and kicked the earth in on top of it and stamped it down, hoping her legs were hidden as she did so.
And she saw the Walker come through the gate, knife in one hand, the other covering one of his eyes.
And she dropped her head and closed hers.