“The serpent Apep,” whispered Romanelli, “whose body lies in the deep realms of the keku samu where pure darkness becomes an impenetrable solid. It senses that there is a soul on this boat that… doesn’t qualify for emergence into the dawn.” Romanelli was smiling. “But I don’t need you any longer anyway.”
Unable even to prop himself up on his elbow anymore, Ashbless watched the absolutely black head blot out every other thing above him. The air became bitterly cold as the thing bent down closer, and when it opened its vast jaws he thought he could see negative stars shining in a remote distance, as if Apep’s mouth was the gateway to a universe of absolute cold and the absence of light.
Ashbless shut his eye and commended his soul into the care of any benign god there might still somewhere be.
A thin screaming drew his attention outward again, and he looked up for what he hoped would be the last time… and saw the disintegrating figure of Doctor Romanelli falling upward into the vast maw.
Just to be sure, Jacky stared into the dark west, where the broad Thames curled to the south past Whitehall before straightening out westward, and then she looked east again.
She smiled with relief. Yes, the sky was definitely paling. She could see the dark arches of Blackfriars Bridge against the tenuous pre-dawn glow.
She relaxed and sat back on the low stone wall, aware now that it was chilly out on the mud bank above the Adelphi Arches. She pulled her coat closer about her shoulders and began shivering. Hopeless as this vigil is, she thought, I’ll nevertheless wait here until somewhat after dawn to see if Ashbless might drift out here—it’s just conceivable that he wasn’t dead when he fell past me in the deep cellar, and that he reached the subterranean river and was well along it before the dreadful … solidification began.
She shuddered and glanced for reassurance at the waxing eastern light, and then allowed herself to remember the ascent from the deep cellars.
She had taken Coleridge’s hand and cautiously begun to pick her way back up the lightless corridor when she noticed the silence. Not only had the distant wailing stopped, but the subtly complex resonances in the air, the echoes of the perpetual breeze through all the cubic miles of subterranean corridors and chambers below them, had ceased.
She’d pressed against the right-hand wall as they went past the place where she knew Horrabin’s corpse lay—and she nearly screamed when a startlingly deep voice spoke to them out of the darkness.
“This is not a place for people, my friends,” it said.
“Uh… right,” squeaked Jacky. “We’re leaving.” She heard a heaving and thudding—and several metallic clinkings—and when the voice spoke again, it was from over her head. “I’ll escort you,” it said heavily. “Even dying from the pinpricks of the clown’s little men, Big Biter is a protector few would care to cross.”
“You’ll… escort us?” asked Jacky incredulously.
“Yes.” The thing sighed ponderously. “I owe it to your companion, who freed my brothers and sisters and me and gave us the chance to revenge ourselves on our maker before we died.”
Jacky had noticed that the thing’s voice was not echoing, as though they stood in a room instead of a tunnel.
“Make haste,” Big Biter said, moving forward, “the darkness is hardening.” The peculiar trio made their way to the stairs and plodded up them. At the first landing Coleridge wanted to rest, but Big Biter told him there wasn’t time; the creature picked Coleridge up and they continued.
“Don’t hang behind,” their escort cautioned Jacky.
“I won’t,” Jacky assured it, for she realized that now there was no sound or echo from the corridor they’d vacated, or even from the flight of stairs they’d just ascended. What was it, the eyeless Sisters had said to her half a year ago? The darkness is hardening, like thick mud, and we want to be away when it turns as solid as the stones… we mustn’t be caught forever in the stones that are hardened night! Jacky made sure she matched Big Biter’s pace, and was glad he moved so quickly.
When they finally got to the top and stepped into the bright torchlight of the kitchen hallway in Rat’s Castle, a couple of Carrington’s men took a step toward them, then took two steps back when they saw the creature that was carrying Coleridge in its heavy arms. Jacky looked up at Big Biter and almost recoiled herself.
Their escort was an amphibious giant, with long black catfish tentacles around its face like a caricatured beard and hair, and eyes like glass paperweights, and a pig-like snout, but by far his most striking feature was his mouth: it was a twelve-inch slash across his face, which he could barely close because of the rows of huge teeth in it. He wore an ancient coat, the front of which was shredded and wet with red blood.
“These vermin won’t interfere with you,” Big Biter said quietly. “Come on.”
He set Coleridge down and walked with them to the front door. “Go now,” he said. “Quickly. I’ll watch until you’re out of sight, but I’ve got to get back down the stairs before the darkness hardens completely.”
“All right,” said Jacky, gratefully breathing the relatively fresh pre-dawn air of Buckeridge Street. “And thank you for—”
“I did it for your friend,” rumbled Big Biter. “Now go.”
Jacky nodded and hustled Coleridge outside and down the dark street.
They’d made it back to Hudson’s Hotel without mishap, and when they’d gotten into Coleridge’s room Jacky had flopped him onto the bed. The man was asleep before Jacky had gotten to the hall and gently closed the door behind her. She’d seen the laudanum bottle on the bedside table, and she believed she understood now why Carrington’s restraining measures had proven ineffective on the elderly poet. How could Carrington have known what a tremendous tolerance for opium Coleridge had developed?
Then she had walked down to the Thames, by the Adelphi Arches where the subterranean tributary emptied into the river, on the chance that Ashbless, or whatever remained of him, might emerge from the tunnel.
The sky was a bright steely blue in the east now, and a tattered string of clouds above the horizon had begun to smolder and glow. The sun would appear at any moment.
There was a turbulence in the water in the still deep shadows below the arches, and Jacky glanced down just in time to see a ghostly, semi-transparent boat surge out. As it emerged into the dawn grayness it became simultaneously incandescent and more transparent, and it receded away toward the eastern horizon at such a speed that Jacky was momentarily certain it was only a hallucination born of total exhaustion; but a split second later she became aware of two things: the first red sliver of the rising sun had appeared over the distant London skyline, and a man was splashing about in the water a dozen feet out from the bank, having apparently fallen through the ghost boat when it became insubstantial.
Jacky leaped to her feet, for she recognized the man, who was now swimming a little dazedly toward shore.
“Mr. Ashbless!” she shouted. “Over here!”
Just as the snake boat had passed between the two poles—each supporting a pharaoh-bearded head—that flanked the last archway, Ashbless felt a tremendous swelling heat burst up inside himself, stunning the beleaguered shred that was his consciousness, and until he splashed into the icy Thames he was blissfully sure that this was death.