I: Liverpool. A Mapped Cryptid.
The first time the Caster Enigma Coalition—those of the purple berets—tried to kill Blake, Bòcan Pavilions had been in London for just a few weeks. It actually took them quite a long time to find us again. I was sixteen-and-a-half years old by then, but I’d been with the Pavilions long enough that I knew everyone and everyone knew me. Perhaps most telling: I knew Blake well enough to know some of his secrets.
But not because he ever personally revealed anything about himself.
I had another source.
A dead one.
Long before we got to London, the journey south from The Minch to Liverpool in the north of England was uneventful—Whitnail said the Blue Men, the storm kelpies, were gone, had retreated, but I didn’t care. For three days, I tried my best to stay below deck, partly seasick, mostly heartsick. I didn’t speak much to Whitnail, though he checked on me often, and I didn’t speak to Blake at all. I came up once when we committed Hugh’s body, wrapped in bed linens, to the sea. There was nothing else I wanted to do. The open waters of the North Atlantic might have held appeal to a farmer’s son, but I suspected it would look like nothing more than an indescribably large grave to me. Somewhere under those waves, swaying at the edge where sunlight from the surface faded to gray and then to black, Hugh could be floating alongside us. He could be dragged underwater in our wake, as much restrained by the bondage of his makeshift burial shroud as by death itself, longing to return to our fold.
Missing him made me miss my family. My mam.
But there were distractions. Liverpool was unbelievable. It was more modern than I could even imagine, and compared to the oat farm of the MacCamran clan, it was a different world altogether. Trams and automobiles jockeyed for space in urban traffic—horses were rapidly headed from labor on the streets to racing on the tracks. Trains and buses were routine means of travel, not novelties. Traffic lights were a new thing, and I stopped and watched them change for a full ten minutes the first time I saw them.
In fact, Liverpool will always be my City of Firsts. In time, I would become jaded to the latest and the greatest, but in the winter of 1937–1938, while every performer and laborer from the Bòcan Pavilions holed up in hotels and boarding houses all over the city for the duration of the winter, waiting to launch our next tour in the spring, I lived off a steady, if meager, allowance to explore this new frontier. I began to visit booksellers with some regularity, and I discovered I could not get enough to read. I felt starved for literature, and I was eager to sate that, if not myriad other appetites.
You’ve heard the expression, “The greatest thing since sliced bread”? Well, I’d never seen pre-sliced bread for sale anywhere, ever, until we reached Liverpool, and it was notably popular—a recent culinary wonder, alongside Kellogg’s Cornflakes. I encountered both for the first time in the same meal at a hotel pub with Whitnail, who attracted a great deal of attention when we were out and about. People whispered behind their hands and menus, and brazen children would occasionally run up to him, touch him, and sprint away giggling. Whitnail was very much aware of the scrutiny.
He touched his white ponytail.
“Is it my hair?” he asked.
It was so hard to tell when he was trying to amuse me.
I was housed in the Shaftesbury Hotel on Mount Pleasant in the room next to Blake; I saw an advertisement for the hotel that read it was suited for “commercial men, having first class Stock Rooms.” That was certainly not me, a commercial man, but Blake fancied himself as first class, and as a result, I saw him only a few times a week. At first, I chalked up his absences to what Whitnail had implied in the past was debauchery of varied sorts, but at length, I learned how he was actually spending his time, and it wasn’t pleasant, though it was not at all surprising.
In my room, very late one night after we’d been in Liverpool for a few weeks, I opened my spellbook and looked at the two mapped cryptid cards I had. Two. Before we’d reached The Minch, I’d imagined I’d have a score or more, and I’d be wise in the ways of casters, perhaps even ready to return to Loch Ness for another go at the monster living in its depths that the German boy, my “arch-enemy,” had thwarted. As it was, I’d only managed to map Bloody Mary and a kelpie. I’d not even tried to map a snipe yet, and they were ubiquitous to the point of annoyance. I briefly considered heading out to the garden or the chapel memorial near the hotel to find one and have it done with.
And then it occurred to me: the kelpie was Blake’s previous protégé.
It would have memories of him.
It could tell me those memories.
Trembling, I put my fingers down on the card in my spellbook. I’d not been instructed yet how to pull forth the essence of a mapped cryptid, but I was convinced there was an intuition that would drive me. I’d seen Blake perform this trick numerous times on stage; he hardly seemed to even concentrate. I closed my eyes and tried to feel something, anything that would suggest I was in contact with a mysterious essence encapsulated within the confines of the magic cage I touched. My own essence was part of it as well, two drops of ocean water blended together, a keeper and the kept, a—
A watery voice that sounded like someone gargling said, “Who are you?”
It turned out not to be so mystically difficult after all.
I opened my eyes, and there on my hotel bed sprawled a bluish form with a long, narrow, unnatural face. It was roughly my height, based on how it filled the bed, and while its feet were partially webbed between the toes, it still possessed enough human features to be recognizable… assuming you’d known him before the kelpie transformation overtook him. And I recognized him as the kelpie who had come into our tent as we camped at The Minch. The night Hugh died.
“I’m Abraham,” I said, “and you’re Arthur.”
He said, “I used to be. I’ll be known by a new name soon, among the Blue Men.”
He sounded as if he were drowning when he spoke; I wondered if I should have gone down the hall and brought him out in the bathtub that the whole floor shared. “No, you’re not going to change anymore. This is who you are now.”
When he looked confused, I knew I had no explanation that would satisfy him. A litany of ethical questions flooded my train of thought, momentarily derailing it. I had never discussed with Blake the morality of mapping autonomous, intelligent, self-aware beings and then calling them forth to serve, willingly or otherwise. Worse, he had never discussed it with me.
Before Arthur could articulate his confusion, I said, “Where are you from, Arthur?”
“Shetland,” he said. “You?”
“Queensferry.”
“Oh, right. I know about the Burryman in Queensferry.”
I said, “My oldest brother was the Burryman two years in a row. He dinna care for it, though. He said it was uncomfortable, walking around with a thousand burrs stuck all over his body. Even his face, if you’ve ever seen it. And the children ran away from him—thought he was scary. And he was absolutely steaming by the time the day was done because they gave him whiskey at every pub. It’s good luck to water the Burryman.”
“That’s good work if you can get it.” He looked around my hotel room and then down at his own body. He looked, I was sad to think, like the proverbial fish out of water. “What has happened to me? What’s it all with you then?”
“I thought maybe we could talk about Blake for a bit.”
“Who, Blake Loughty?” he said, pronouncing it LAW-tee. “How do you know…?”
But I didn’t hear his entire question. To say that I was gobsmacked would not do justice to the word. I asked him to repeat Blake’s family name, just to be certain I’d not misheard, but I hadn’t—Loughty it was, an extremely rare Scottish name.
My mother’s maiden name.
First, I felt foolish for not having bothered to ask anyone at all about Blake’s name in the months I’d been part of the Pavilions. Once that thought came and went, I turned somewhat cruel—I made an incoherent excuse to end my conversation with Arthur, and I simply put my hand back on the kelpie card and willed him away. With the exception of the final whiff of stagnant seawater, he was gone as if he’d never been. And though his revelation hung like an albatross around my neck—I had but recently read Coleridge for the first time—I banked his most significant question: What has happened to me?
I went downstairs in a daze. At the reception desk, the pageboy gave me a pen and a few sheets of paper. For hours after that, deep into the night, I wrote a letter to Mam. It rambled and accused. It demanded answers about her relationship to Blake. I wanted to know everything she’d not told me—an unspecific tall order. But in truth, I wasn’t as upset to discover that Blake the Black might be kin as I was to discover that this information might have been withheld from me. Did it matter? I asked myself. No, it didn’t change anything.
But yes.
More than anything else, by the time I finished writing and had assigned the address of the Shaftesbury Hotel as a place she could write back to, I’d come to a conclusion that I needed time to wrestle with. I wouldn’t call forth Arthur the kelpie for more information until I decided if what I was thinking was right or wrong.
I was thinking that if I were part of Blake’s clan—a MacCamran on my da’s side and a Loughty on my mam’s—then I felt a whisper of allegiance to him. I wondered if he’d taken me on as a protégé because we were kin. If so, was he kin to Arthur as well?
And I wondered as well: Was his dispute with the casters wearing purple berets, those who wanted him to stop his show, my fight as well?
I decided yes, then no, and then resolved to talk more to Arthur before making a decision. I could only imagine what else he might be able to tell me. But like every other contradiction that suddenly sprang into life once I began to speculate about Blake Loughty, I actually couldn’t imagine what Arthur knew. That’s how horrible it was.
II: A Letter from Home. Ghosts.
When my mother wrote back to me, I felt as if I had to read between the lines to grasp everything she seemed to be trying to tell me. Or perhaps I was looking for more than was there. Just the same, I was left annoyed but curious.
Abrams, my son, she wrote.
I understand your surprise and unhappiness that I did not share with you my and Blake’s history, and that he has continued to keep it from you now. Our thought was not to burden you with a familial obligation when you were in the midst of leaving your family on the farm behind. I wanted you to feel uninhibited so you might grow to be a powerful and, one hopes, compassionate caster.
Blake is my brother in blood, but not much more. Cordial but not close. He had designs on his life that were vastly different from mine, though we started off alike. But after the Great War, he was no longer interested in fishing or raising sheep. He was wed, and she was bonnie, Cora was. They had children together, but Blake was no longer fit for fatherhood. He’d seen things in Belgium and Italy while he was with the Gordon Highlanders during the war, the things you and I see as well: cryptids.
They were irresistible to him, and once you have discovered a mystery, how can you turn away from every clue? He tried, the heavens know. He isolated himself and his Alphabet family, for that’s what they called themselves, so as not to be tempted, but I’ve no doubt at all that it only took one silly little snipe to set his wheels turning again.
He had cause to take you on to teach you about cryptids. Not just a familial commitment of some sort, but a real reason, though it is not one I feel is mine to reveal. It is enough to say he suffered a loss, and when word reached me about what had happened, I thought that the time would soon come when you, because you could see the creatures that the world doesn’t see, could comfort him.
Had not Whitnail already told me about the existence and subsequent death of Blake’s protégé—and had we not already reached The Minch and encountered that shape-shifting kelpie once called Arthur—this evasive secretiveness on my mother’s part would have possibly been dangerous. Blake himself had never told me about his previous protégé, nor that the lad died trying to map the kelpies. In fact, he’d gone so far as to tell me that the kelpies weren’t even real. Yet to the kelpies we went, just the same, on the pretense of catching a boat. Couldn’t we have met it somewhere less populated by Blake’s dead memories? And in the weeks since Hugh’s death—my mournful watershed moment in Scotland—we’d not discussed it at all. I knew what would happen: I would rage, he would evade, and nothing would change.
I preferred our stalemate—another Hugh reminder; I would never play chess again after his passing—as it was. I patted myself on the back for feeling wise beyond my young years in thinking that Blake would reveal our kinship to me when he was ready, and until then, I could find ways to preoccupy myself.
My mam spent the rest of her missive to tell me about how well the harvest had gone and that my brother Isaac’s wife Beatrice was with child and how my sister Agnes had written from the continent to say that her French neighbors gossiped incessantly about the Spanish Civil War and Japans attack on China and the unpleasant ideological tales emerging from Germany. She didn’t mention my da’ or my other brother Elijah. She closed, however, with a suggestion that made me forgive any clandestine motivations she might have had for not telling me more about Blake.
If you like, I will take the train down and spend Boxing Day with you.
In the months the Pavilions had traveled Scotland, I often wished she might make the trip to come see me, but I knew there were reasons she didn’t. Now I knew about Blake, and it seemed likely that dynamic impacted her decision as well. Now, though, she had volunteered to travel the 400 kilometers or so to see me, and I had only one response to that. I dashed a single-sentence letter to answer.
Please hurry, Mam.
***
Blake and I settled into a routine that winter that was surprisingly gregarious: If we steered away from discussion about family, the Minch, kelpies, Arthur, and Hugh, we were golden. Given that we were both staying at the Shaftesbury through the spring, we inevitably encountered one another, and though I was a hick having a grand time in the metropolis, I engaged him about my non-existent education with sufficient regularity. I didn’t want to act as if it no longer mattered so long as he was paying for me to enjoy Liverpool, nor did I want to apply pressure to a topic that could easily circle around to how he managed to get his last protégé killed. It was fitting that the Pavilions were on a break—I was learning to walk a tightrope.
In the latter half of my life, people have often asked me about my travels around the United Kingdom. If I ever mention Liverpool, I get the inevitable question, which—for the right audience—has a much more interesting answer than just begging off by saying the Pavilions stayed there at least two years before the first of the four lads from Liverpool was even born. Did I ever meet them? No, of course not.
But…
Long before the rest of the world had heard of it, Penny Lane figured in my tutelage. No. 44 Penny Lane. Where the ghost of a young girl had haunted the home since Victorian times.
“What, we can map ghosts?” I asked Blake when he came to me in my room just after teatime. He was dressed for travel—the evenings were cool, and he was wearing a black double-breasted winter coat and the black fedora he wore onstage. He tossed me a shorter gray coat I’d never seen him wear before.
“Some of them,” he said, grinning that Machiavellian smile I’d come to associate with him and Errol Flynn. “They’re actually the perfect definition of a cryptid, aren’t they? ‘A creature believed to be real but which no one can prove actually exists.’ They’re also everywhere, in haunted houses and the White House and Buckingham Palace. So, yes, we can map them—if you know where to find them, how to find them, and what they’re called.”
“Oh, is that all it takes?”
“And,” he added as I dressed, “if you’re not feart.”
I smirked at him. “After all the shite you give me about losing my accent, you still haven’t shaken your own, eh?”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “Well, we’ve always been kinsmen, haven’t we now?”
I knew what he meant, but I also knew what I knew about him. I followed him down the stairs and out onto the corner of Upper Newington, and shortly—after he sent me back for my spellbook, which I’d not touched since my initial contact with Arthur the kelpie—he flagged us down a hackney carriage. On the way to Penny Lane, he described the situation to me.
A thirteen-year-old girl had died nearly fifty years before, and in all that time, her spirit had refused to move on from No. 44 Penny Lane. When I said I had never believed in ghosts, Blake said, “The time for disbelief is long over for you. You’re living in the new world now.”
The trick with mapping any ghost, he explained, was to know enough about them to pick up what little remained of their essence. By definition, he said, most of it was gone; the residue that was left behind was not the entirety of the dead one, but was enough to map if you could estimate what was still present. To find a ghost took a great deal of information, he explained. In this particular case, he had done his homework some time ago.
“Her name,” he said, ticking off his fingers, “why some of her has stayed behind, and what she’s waiting for that you’re going to lure her in with. That’ll be enough here. I’ll get her to show herself so you can map her.”
Adelaide, he said, she was called. She was waiting for her mum.
“But mum’s not coming,” Blake said. “We are.”
It was full dark by the time we reached the residential neighborhood where No. 44 Penny Lane stood. It was an apartment above a business, as was much of the street, no gaps between them as if they were one vast building, and as many of the shops had only recently closed, the street still had a half-dozen or so pedestrians. When we exited the hackney, Blake held us back from standing directly in front of the address. In the darkness, he pretended to check his pocket watch as if we were waiting for someone.
“Look up at that window,” he said while he wound his watch. “That’s where she’s been seen the most often. She sits there and combs her hair.”
I looked, and there was nothing there. The line of windows down the street each looked the same to me.
“Not to worry. All well and good,” he said. “Let’s get you ready, and then we’ll see to having her join us.”
He had me place a card not far from the door of the closed business—a greengrocer at the time—and then we retreated again to wait for the last of the evening pedestrians to take their leave.
Blake said, “Get your book ready, and don’t wait once she appears—she can disappear in a flash. But you should have more than enough time while she stands on the sidewalk and watches for her mother to come home. She’d been waiting at least a minute or two when the carriage hit her.”
A ripple of nausea overcame me. A memory from not so long ago came with it, a boy’s voice asking a question: What has happened to me? I opened my spellbook and tried to mentally prepare myself to open a gate and map her, but the nausea gripped me tighter.
“Blake,” I said, but then I had to put my head down to keep from being sick. I squeezed my eyes shut as Blake unexpectedly rubbed my back. I wanted to be comforted, but my sudden confession came out as a sickness of its own kind, and we were both surprised.
I said, “I don’t want to map this ghost. Can we not do this?”
I expected resistance—here he was, after weeks of no guidance, trying to lead me to another opportunity, and I was trying to beg off—and perhaps even a lecture. But Blake surprised me in a different way. “Tell me why.”
I thought of Arthur again; Blake had no idea I’d mapped his earlier protégé. What has happened to me? “I am feart.”
“I’m here to protect you.”
I believed him. “You can’t protect me from this. I don’t want to know her. If I map her, if I call her essence to me, she’ll want to know. And I don’t want to tell her. I can’t. She’s a child.”
“What will she want to know?”
“How she died.”
We stood there at the edge of the sidewalk without speaking for some time while Blake contemplated this and while I thought about how I should respond when he pushed back against me. There were no streetlamps along the street, so we stood in the darkness, braced against a chilly breeze, my spellbook still open to the page where I might soon store a fragment of Adelaide, who decades later would be known as the Penny Lane Poltergeist. The other people were all gone from the pavement; it was just us. Lights in the windows above the street were the only indications that we weren’t alone on the entire planet.
Finally, he spoke. “Is this about Hugh?”
It wasn’t. “Yes.”
Blake often struck me as detached from his humanity—I thought for the longest time that he must typify the superior caster, distancing himself from emotional connections to his mythic prey—but that night, I could see understanding in his face. A softening, a sympathetic—even empathetic—sense. I thought it possible he was thinking about losing Arthur to the kelpies, as I was.
He walked over to where we’d placed my card, picked it up, and returned it to me. As I put it back in my spellbook, he said, “We can let Adelaide go.”
As if summoned by the utterance of her name, the wavering outline of a little girl in a long loose dress appeared before us, her back to the building, leaning over to look down the length of Penny Lane. She stroked her long hair with both hands along her left breast as she waited. She rocked up and down on her flat black shoes, though I could see the sidewalk through them. Not a sound uttered from her; she was a silent echo from decades earlier.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“We just wait a moment.” Blake spoke softly as if fearing he might scare her away.
A minute later, the child raised her hands and recoiled as if to ward off a blow. Her head snapped in an unnatural direction such that I could suddenly see her face and the shock in her eyes, and she began to fall down. Before she reached the ground, the ghost disappeared again.
It was actually the horse that had hit her, Blake explained. It broke her neck, and then the carriage rolled over her. He must have sensed my despair then, however, because he spared me any further descriptions of a little girl’s death.
We had to walk a number of blocks before we were able to hail another hackney carriage to take us back to the hotel. Neither of us spoke, but until I put my head down to sleep that night, I easily imagined Adelaide’s voice, surprised to see me, confused about her surroundings, her first words to me a question: What has happened to me?
“I’d like to stop mapping coherent beings,” I told Blake the next morning. “It’s too much for me if they know things.”
And for a length of time, we did, indeed, stop. When we finally tried again, though, it would cost me dearly.
III: Boxing Day.
It rarely snows in Liverpool, but its absence did nothing to diminish the city’s anticipation of Christmas and Boxing Day. My City of Firsts came through for me like billy-o, ensuring I’d never forget what a grand season it was. The decorations were lavish to say the least—festive colored lights for city blocks at a time so bright you could read by them, wreaths by the score, and gigantic lighted Christmas trees all around the downtown area. Whitnail and I spent many an afternoon wandering through Blackler’s on Great Charlotte Street, a quite large multistory department store with a massive domed glass ceiling, where children queued up to see “the real” Santa Claus.
“A cryptid who will be remembered long after Nessie in Loch Ness is forgotten,” Whitnail said to me as we ignored sideways glances or outright staring at the tall albino and I investigated “Gifts for Boys.” Too many were just clothes, I thought. Blackler’s owners knew nothing about boys.
I was aghast. “Santa’s a cryptid?”
“Yes. A myth, at least. And unmappable.”
He was shamelessly wearing a cheap Santa hat at the time, captured in my mind’s eye as a still photograph, and as with much of what he said, I thought he might be having a silent laugh at my expense. But as with the stocking cap, he was never embarrassed to make himself the object of amusement, either. We secretly “joined” a group of wassailers outside the Bon Marché store, and in the very last stage of singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Whitnail bellowed out older lyrics—“twelve bulls a-roaring” or “ten hounds a-hunting, nine hares a-running”—which led to the complete disintegration of the song before it could wind its way back to the partridge in a pear tree.
I laughed as we ran. Whitnail smiled.
But as my mother’s arrival on Boxing Day neared, I would often revisit my recollections of meeting Blake for the first time months earlier. He had asked my mam if I had my own spellbook, and she’d answered no, but she would give me hers. He then asked if she was “banking on kinship” to have her book work for me—suggesting to me that if you didn’t have a spellbook at your disposal, you could theoretically use one that belonged to a relative.
Say, an uncle.
Who had, at that same first meeting, shown me a card from his own spellbook that struck a chord of both awe and terror in me: a winged monster with tentacles for a face and vile eyes that glowed with malice. It had struck me as so bloated and massive, so hateful and sadistic, and so unstoppable that mapping it to a card was like trying to contain another being’s will to murder. Blake had asked me if I wanted to know what it was, and my affirmative answer had been dismissed—you’re not ready, he’d judged.
But perhaps I was ready now, and perhaps I didn’t need Blake to show it to me either. If our joint bloodline was what it took to share spellbooks and cards, then I could call forth its essence without his participation or even his guidance. Such an idea, however, made me physically ill from dread and cowardice when I thought of that particular cryptid. Still, I promised myself I would ask Mam about the possibility, though I would temper my interest in that sole, terrible card and redirect the discussion to the other cryptids Blake had mapped.
She came in on a roundabout route, first arriving from Scotland in Hull to the east of Liverpool, then coming across to Manchester and taking the Manchester line to the Lime Street Station. I was impressed by her ability to navigate public transportation; though it would inevitably be a necessity, I have always preferred to walk, drive myself, or skip travel entirely, in that order.
The crowds at the station were overwhelming—I’d spent Christmas Day at the Shaftesbury, where I’d been sought out and greeted by many of the employees of the Pavilions. I stayed in the restaurant as long as the waiters would allow, and after that in the lobby on a sofa by the decorated Christmas tree, virtually hidden in tinsel, so I wouldn’t miss anyone. To those who expressed any pity for me that I wasn’t with family for the holiday, I assured them Boxing Day would make up for it.
Blake and Whitnail passed through the lobby together, headed out into the city. They both told me happy Christmas, but the moment was awkward—they clearly didn’t want to invite me, and I clearly didn’t want to be invited, so we did a verbal dance and finally went our separate ways.
But the next day, midmorning, when I saw my mam come off the train in the Lime Street Station, one hand holding her hat on, the other clutching a sizable handbag, I couldn’t have been happier. In fact, as I ran to meet her, dodging through the crowd like a pro footballer for Arsenal, I realized this was the happiest Christmas I could remember in my entire young life. And with one exception, it would remain my happiest for my entire life, period.
It had only been six months, but it felt much, much longer, and I was bursting with stories to tell her and questions to ask. She laughed and hugged me, and where once I might have been embarrassed to be embraced by my mother in such a public setting, now it was comfort that I desperately desired. The mysterious sanctuary your mother provides, I long ago understood, is a secret that cannot be mapped.
She declared that she had deep pockets for this trip, and she knew, without question, that I’d not been eating well or often, regardless of what I protested. So, we adjourned a few blocks away from the station to the Midland Adelphi Hotel, a luxurious hotel that catered mostly to travelers from England to the States and which Jules Verne had modeled his submarine interior on in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I shared this with my mother, and she smiled.
“So you’re reading a great deal, then, are you?” she asked. “You said so in your letter.”
“Voraciously,” I said, secretly hoping she wouldn’t know the word and would be impressed by my expanding vocabulary.
We exchanged gifts: I had spent three dollars at Blackler’s and bought my family a recently released board game called Monopoly that was popular that season, and Mam gave me a new book, wrapped in old Inverness Courier newspaper, that she said had just been published but seemed destined to be one casters might gravitate to. I turned it over—the slipcover’s landscape drawing in green and blue continued on the back—and smiled appreciatively if not entirely enthusiastically.
“What’s a hobbit then?” I asked.
She smiled back. “You’ll find out. Maybe there’s a cryptid by that name in your future.”
The meal was exquisite and madly expensive beyond my means. The waiters who appeared at our table every few minutes with water and bread and inquiries as to our dining pleasure unnerved me, and I felt during the entire experience that I shouldn’t touch the pristine white tablecloth for fear of soiling it with Abraham dirt. But the true luxury was telling my mother about the places the Bòcan Pavilions had visited. I told her about Bloody Mary and both attempts to map her. I told her enough about Hugh to ensure the details of his death would truly convey my despair, but when I told her we had traveled north to The Minch to catch a ship south, she cleared up the mystery for me as to why we went north when we intended to go south.
“He must’ve gone home. He crossed The Minch, then, did he?” she asked. “Blake’s Alphabet family lives out on the islands, in Stornoway.”
“No, he didn’t. We had an unpleasant encounter with kelpies in The Minch.” I thought about where to begin as I asked, “What does that mean, ‘Alphabet family?’”
“It was a cute thing he and his wife, Cora, called the four of them because of how their names worked out,” she said. “A, B, C, D—Arthur, Blake, Cora, and Deirdre.”
IV. Goodbye to Mam, Goodbye to 1937, Goodbye to Liverpool
She stayed the whole day, my mother did, and when I hugged her goodbye at the train station very late that evening, I was already grieving her absence and wondering when I would see her again. But I was grieving for another reason entirely as well: Blake’s loss of a son, my cousin Arthur.
I felt shattered, as if I’d lost someone dear myself, as if I were suffering the loss of Hugh a second time. It instantly became of paramount importance that I not reveal to Blake that I had mapped his dead son, taken by the kelpies. I remembered his instruction to Whitnail that they would have to kill the kelpie that had come to our tent in the night—and if he did not know the kelpie was his son, he surely heard Whitnail order Arthur by name back to the sea.
I could not pretend to understand all that I was learning, but I resolved to discover the answers. I had to sort out what to say, but I intended to approach my mapped kelpie again.
I’ve forgotten most of what we talked about during her visit, though I remember forcibly setting aside my misgivings about Blake’s poor son, his father’s protégé, while we talked. I showed her my room at the hotel, though I didn’t show her my spellbook, the one she had given me—I was afraid she would see Arthur’s youthful features in the kelpie on the card on the first page.
She seemed to know nothing about the purple beret casters who had shown up at Blake’s performances in Scotland, and since they’d not discovered us to the south in England, I didn’t pursue it any further with her. She was equally evasive with me about family matters, though I politely asked after everyone and said I hoped they’d enjoy the board game I’d gifted them for the holiday. I didn’t want to let it rest there, though.
“Da’ doesn’t ever talk about me, does he?” I asked.
She hesitated, considered lying, and then said, “No, my Abrams. He doesn’t.”
I nodded. I didn’t need to ask why. But even my da’s rejection couldn’t diminish the brightness of that Boxing Day for me, though it did give me pause. We talked of other things—no, I said, I’d not mapped a snipe yet, and by the heavens, maybe I never would, stupid little duck pretenders—but that reminded me of something I’d heard.
As she boarded the train to go north again, up and into the middle of the night, I said to Mam, “Would you tell Da’ I asked if he was all right?”
When she nodded, I said, “And would you tell him a joke for me? These two Scottish ducks are flying across the sky. One of them says, ‘Quack.’ The other one says, ‘Fek, I’m flying as quack as I can!’”
She smiled, so I said so softly that I almost couldn’t hear myself, “And will you write and let me know if he laughs?”
***
She never said.
***
I waited until Hogmanay, the very last day of the year, New Year’s Eve to the Brits, before I called up Arthur the kelpie from my spellbook again. I’d been downstairs in the common area with Blake and Whitnail and Lydia our sword swallower and Nu our Burmese Giraffe Girl and a new recruit, a teenage girl whose knees bent the wrong way, making it easier for her to walk on all fours instead of upright. Her name was Nellie, but she went by the stage name the Horse Girl, and the two names would inevitably be combined to “Whoa, Nelly.” That New Year, though, welcoming in 1938, she was still unknown to the shameless gawkers who’d pay to stare, so we all sang Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne” together, many of us in Scots, all of us drunk on ale. We were having a rousing time all evening with the serving lasses, who kept telling us “ale” was vulgar and bitter was classy. Just the same, the ales kept coming.
When the mantle clock at the bar began the Westminster chimes for midnight and the singing began, I slipped away, up the stairs to the third floor where my room was. I put on the lamp, opened my spellbook, and drunkenly slammed my palm flat against the kelpie card.
When Arthur appeared, sprawled on the floor at my feet, I didn’t hesitate. “Arthur,” I said, hearing my voice outside my head and far away, “I want to know how you died.”
***
Chaos Theory and the Three-Body Problem were completely unknown to me at the beginning of 1938—I was destined to remain a student of literature, not science and mathematics. The more poetic description, the butterfly effect, had not yet been introduced into the vernacular—but I believe I accurately describe the ripple of the next two years when I say asking that one question of Arthur impacted how events unfolded in September 1940 when Blake the Black of the Bòcan Pavilions gave his final performance in London.
Arthur’s answer was as veiled as cryptids themselves are: “I fell into the sea, and the kelpies took me.”
It was not enough of an answer for the inebriated me. “Were you on a boat?”
“No.”
“So, you were on the shore?”
“No.”
“Where were you when you fell into the sea, Arthur?”
“I was on the cliff.”
“And after you fell, the kelpies grabbed you?”
“After I hit the rocks.”
I was at a sudden loss of what to ask next, so I dismissed Arthur’s essence and rejoined the revelries in the Shaftesbury’s common room. By dawn, my mind was muddled so that I slept without dreaming for more than twelve hours. I rose at sundown, took tea for breakfast, and tried to shake off the effects of our celebration. It turned out to be difficult. For weeks after, in fact, my circadian cycle was a bloody mess. I became something of a night wanderer, and being severed from the daytime activities of seeing the city, shopping, dining, and socializing, I spent many hours reading and many more hours in contemplation. I wrote down questions, sometimes with a corresponding name of whom to ask. And when those questions applied to Arthur, I secluded myself in my room and called his essence forth again and again.
“Were you at The Minch to map kelpies?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me more?”
“Yes. We were not at The Minch to map kelpies.”
Whether because of his state as a mapped cryptid or simply because he was obstinate, Arthur rarely elaborated on his answers, and I learned over time not to ask yes/no questions.
It was a chaotic period for me, as my thoughts were a constant maelstrom of reactions and suppositions. I struggled to focus; subtlety was not my strong suit as a young man, and I approached the question of Arthur as if he were the Gordian Knot and I, Alexander the Great. I would confront Blake with our unacknowledged joint pedigree, demand answers to the passing of his son Arthur, require an explanation of his mysterious acrimony with the purple beret casters, and while I was at it, question Whitnail about his own background. In a moment of truly pathetic selfishness, I thought I might attempt to guilt Blake into giving me one of the mapped cards by citing our common blood (so I could use it) and his failure to offer me any gift for Christmas (never mind that I also gave nothing to him).
We are all bravest in our imagination after the time for confrontation has passed. I said nothing of the sort.
The Irish Free State, so-called since the year I was born, ratified its second constitution while we were in Liverpool and became Ireland. The military mights in both Germany and Italy expanded into other parts of the world—Ethiopia and Austria, respectively. The Spanish Civil War raged on. The Japanese and the Chinese were at war. And I took note of none of it. I’d not paid attention to the changing world, though my mother wrote to me about it from time to time.
To my credit, however, by the time the Bòcan Pavilions were ready to gather again and head out on our tour of England, I had discovered Count Basie (“One O’Clock Jump” could not go undanced to), had read The Sound and the Fury (incomprehensible) and Ulysses (equally incomprehensible, made all the more frustrating when Whitnail told me in his monotone, “I enjoyed it. I feel I am more Dedalus than Bloom. How about you?”), and knew what a hobbit was.
It was a distinct pleasure to be reunited with everyone, back to the familiarity of tent stakes and carny games, crowds of customers prepared to be shocked, mystified, or thrilled. In addition to Nellie, our so-called “Horse Girl,” and Nu the Giraffe Girl, Blake brought to the Pavilions two new acts: Chansey, a clown with a singular tuft of hair in the middle of his otherwise bald head and who shaved his eyebrows off and had sharpened all of his teeth to fangs, was an absolute terror, in my opinion. He could fold both of his feet behind his head and walk across the room on his buttocks while juggling. The other act was called The Eldritch Eye—a magic act. The Eye would stand on stage, turn his back, and brush his hair aside to reveal an “eyeball” growing on the back of his neck. With this, he said, he could see objects that the audience held up. It was quite a realistic-looking eye, and the Eye would even don a blindfold to “prove” he wasn’t somehow using mirrors to see whatever was displayed. It felt gimmicky to me, but the audiences ate it up, especially when the stakes were raised by offering a ticket refund to anyone who could “blind” the Eye—that is, anyone whose displayed item the Eye could not identify.
I wrote to my mother one more time before leaving Liverpool to tell her she could no longer send correspondence to me at the Shaftesbury. I told her the tour would take us all over England, culminating with an extended stay in London by the beginning of fall. As I was closing, I hesitated, and then decided it would be some time before I had to explain the brevity of my postscript.
P. S. Blake’s son, Arthur, is dead. He died while apprenticed to his father. I hope you did not know this when you handed me over to Blake.
V. Crossing England. What Arthur Said Happened.
Our carnival headed northeast from Liverpool and, over the course of the entire summer, we crisscrossed the country, visiting cities, towns, villages, and even the occasional hamlet, if the incorporating township’s people assured us that we’d be welcomed and rewarded there. As most hamlets lacked churches, it was a risky gambit for Blake to perform his act, or even for the less supernatural-like productions to face a crowd that might see us as demonic.
“Nothing drives fear like faith,” Blake said late one night as he escorted me to a small old graveyard in East Anglia in search of a cryptid called Black Shuck—a large black hound with glowing red eyes that was said to portend death for those who saw it. We had followed it, weaving among the tombstones in the rain, to a dilapidated chapel on the graveyard grounds, where it had vanished through the wall and was presumably inside.
“And fear drives faith,” I ventured as I took a crowbar to the padlock on the chapel gate.
“Someone should write a book,” Blake said. “Maybe you, Shakespeare.”
As the lock came off, I pushed the gate open and, wrinkling my nose, turned to Blake. “Gah. It smells like wet dog in there.”
He nodded. “Then we’re in the right place.”
“Is this the same dog that haunts the Baskervilles in that Sherlock Holmes story?”
“I don’t know. Where’s that?”
I thought about it as I found a blank card in my spellbook and took it out. “Dartmoor, Devon, I do believe.”
Blake snorted and made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “We need to teach you some geography. That’s so far south in England that you’re almost in France, Arthur.”
I had become far more distressed by the pet name since learning of the true Arthur’s fate, but I was no longer prepared to fight Blake over it. Instead, I’d become passive-aggressive about the whole matter. “But what about the English Channel?”
Something growled at us, low and angry, in the dark depths of the chapel as Blake whispered, “Don’t be cheeky, my boy.”
In the weeks that followed adding the Black Shuck to my spellbook—my third mapped cryptid—we traveled near and far in search of mystical creatures and equally mythical customers. The Bòcan Pavilions prospered in England, as did I. I mapped a peryton—a winged deer-like cryptid—and a furfur—a winged deer-like cryptid that I could only tell from the peryton because the furfur was twice as big and had human arms.
In Yorkshire, I mapped a terrifying thing, another black doglike monstrosity called the barghest, that was accompanied by the death of someone I’d come to know. I have told of this event in a few other places, so I’ll not dwell on it again here except to say that I imagined another checkmark of regret in my spellbook. There are times when the mapping of a cryptid comes with a price, one a caster will pay each time that card’s essence is recalled.
My birthday was spent in between cities, sleeping in a very cheap inn (where I was bitten by bedbugs for the very first time. “The cryptids of the mattress,” Whitnail said, and I knew he was joking that time). I had told no one I was turning sixteen, so it passed uneventfully.
In early July, we managed to piggyback on Birmingham’s centennial celebration of the city’s Borough Charter, which ran for nearly two full weeks. Their gala was held in Aston Park, so we set up in Victoria Park, less than thirty minutes away on foot.
It was a particularly successful stand; the people of Birmingham were in a jovial frame of mind and were quite liberal with their coins. We had done well enough that Blake had dispensed bonus pay to everyone, and all of us were keen to spend it before we left for our next stop.
As we were packing down and getting ready to move on, two things happened that changed my own happiness, one disquieting and the other a sudden source of alarm.
I was loading one of the trucks in the hot summer sun—mad dogs and Englishmen, I thought, but I’m a Scot—when I turned long enough to take a swallow of water and saw them across the park: two purple berets, hovering at a distance from our vehicles but clearly watching us. By the time I ran over to where they’d been, near to the Grove Lane entrance, they were gone.
But they’d found us just the same.
I alerted Blake, who just nodded as if it were expected, and Whitnail, who simply said, “How could they not?”
The latter event came about during the first exchange I’d had with Arthur in many weeks. Much of the time on the road, I shared either a tent or a room with Blake, and I had no desire to reveal the cryptid essence of his boy to him. So it was a rare occasion that I had an opportunity to have the tent to myself while Blake made whatever rounds he pursued in Birmingham on that final evening.
I had followed the dialogue with Arthur down a winding path through other discussions when I finally asked the right question. We had talked about his family, my aunt and cousins, and I’d carefully asked about Blake’s habits.
“He’s a bit obsessed with cryptids,” Arthur assured me.
I asked, “Why were you at The Minch if not to map kelpies?”
“We were going across to go home.”
I couldn’t remember the name of the town where Mam said they lived. “To your mother and your sister?”
“Well, I missed my mum anyway.”
I tried to think of a logical question, an informative one that wouldn’t be answered so simply. “How did you encounter the kelpies?”
Arthur seemed emotionless up to now, but at this question, his entire body seemed to go stiff. “They sank our boat. Others died—the captain died. The kelpies tried to catch us. But we escaped.”
I tried to steer him away from this upsetting memory. “All right. Then what happened after that? How did you fall off the cliff?”
He said, “Can I go back now?”
I blinked in surprise. “Back? Back where?”
“Wherever it is that I am when I’m not with you. Where I don’t have to think about anything.”
I didn’t understand what I’d asked; if I had, I might have just put my hand back on his card and let Arthur return to my spellbook. Instead, I asked, “It’s all right by me if you don’t know how you fell.”
Arthur looked down at the floor of the tent. It was late. I could hardly see him in the shadows, but I couldn’t conceptualize that a cryptid might be tired. But as I was about to abandon the conversation and put him away again, he said, “I was pushed. From behind.”
I tried to swallow, but my throat had gone dry. “Who pushed you?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Then, he said, “But I think it was my da’.”
I wanted to be sure of what I’d heard, so I asked him to say it again.
He wouldn’t.
I touched his card again, and when he was gone, I closed my spellbook. I felt frenzied, almost panicked. I lay awake until Blake returned in the middle of the night, softly whistling to himself, and until he finally climbed into his bunk and slept, I struggled to determine, given what I had just learned, if I hated him now.
VI. The First Attack.
I had a tiger by the tail.
I could not let go.
I tried to talk to Arthur a few more times about the subject, but for a mapped cryptid that belonged to me and was supposed to be at my beck and call, he was surprisingly resistant. I briefly considered shattering the card with our essences in it, but that struck me as immature and possibly even self-destructive.
Our travels continued, but I was becoming disillusioned. Perhaps Blake had taken me on with the sincere intent to guide me. Perhaps it was due to a sense of family obligation, or maybe he did so out of guilt or shame for what had happened to Arthur. But it was becoming clear to me that our relationship was undergoing a fundamental shift. By Northampton, I was fairly certain I was wasting my time serving as protégé to a man who found more time and energy to cavort the nighttime streets in every town we visited and less on mentoring my ability to see and map cryptids.
By Oxford—where the intelligentsia were far less susceptible to the supernatural implications of Blake’s act and where I heard him called a philistine, requiring me to ask one of the men in the audience what the word meant—I had decided to leave the Bòcan Pavilions.
As with many decisions made by young people at that time, it came with more bravado than foresight. When I thought about it, I didn’t know where I would go. Certainly not home. I wasn’t likely to be welcome there. I considered the States, but it might as well have been the moon, for all the means I had to get there. Possibly the continent, if the tensions there settled down. I also knew I’d have to go it alone—more than ever, I missed Hugh and his magnetic friendship, as I was sure he’d have come with me.
When we rolled into London that fall, prepared for only few performances before we would repeat our Liverpool sabbatical for the winter—this time in a city that would see a record-setting snowfall by Christmas—I thought that perhaps I would declare my independence of the Pavilions by staying in the capital when the carnival left town.
***
“You said others died, Arthur. It was a while ago, but do you remember telling me this? Who else died?”
“The captain of the boat we were taking across the Minch. His name was Mac.”
“All right, then.”
“And my little sister Deirdre.”
***
London was to Liverpool as a flower is to a garden. The London Zoo was of particular fascination for me, as it struck me that many of the animals were surely cryptids. They were not; everyone could see them. I saw cricket played, and with an abundance of bookshops, managed to read every Agatha Christie Poirot book. It was also where I was given a gas mask. I had to ask why; I simply wasn’t maintaining upkeep on world events. I certainly tried: I bought a few editions of The Illustrated London Times, enough to learn who Neville Chamberlain was, but I could think of many other ways to wisely spend two shillings, so I stopped.
Whenever I crept up on thinking about Arthur and his little sister and their ending, I would distract myself: moving pictures, theater, cheap dining, secondhand books, and disbelief. Yet I could think of no reason why Arthur would lie—or if he even could lie, given his state as mapped essence, a question I had planned to pose to Blake after our final performance before our winter break.
It was a hodag night; that is, Blake the Black astounded the audience by summoning, seemingly from thin air, the spiked dog-like creature with horns, claws, and a punched yet colorful face only a mother hodag could love. Children in the front rows fled to deeper rows, looking over their shoulders so as not to miss the performance. A few women screamed and flung themselves into the arms of their beaus. Whitnail’s intro had been sufficiently dramatic that eyes followed him as he left the stage, and Blake was in fine form.
Then, two men suddenly stood up in the audience, one closer to me, the other on the far side of the grand tent. Both wore purple berets. Both held out revolvers at arm’s length, pointed at the stage. And both fired at Blake.
The hodag flung itself into the air between him and the gunmen, and the bullets ripped into its greenish form. People screamed and began to run, though utterly directionless, a terrified swarm of bees fleeing just to be fleeing. I was blinded by the movement all around me. Whitnail was gone. Into the chaos, more shots rang out. The hodag made a sound, a growling howl that grew shriller and narrower. The grand tent’s canvas walls buckled, stretched to their breaking point by the people who pushed against it, shouting for escape, unable to find the flaps.
I saw Whitnail rise above the scattering audience as he took to the stage and moved toward Blake. He sank from sight for an instant and came back up with the hodag, and as he pivoted and thrust the wounded cryptid forward as a shield, another bullet struck it, and the hodag disappeared.
It ended in less time than it takes to say so. The purple berets had managed to escape with the crowds, and so moments later, the grand tent that could hold hundreds was empty except for the three of us—Blake, Whitnail, and me. Blake knelt to gather scattered fragments of his shattered hodag card. Whitnail stood facing the empty, overturned chairs of the audience, his head and eyes flicking back and forth between the tent’s two exits. We could hear police whistles somewhere out on the Pavilions’ grounds.
“You didn’t see anyone,” Blake said. It was not a question. “This is a private matter between the CEC and us.”
I looked to Whitnail, who spoke so softly, I imagined I was the only one who could hear him. “Caster Enigma Coalition.”
“No peelers,” Blake said, referring to the constables who were undoubtedly coming. “They might find the two shooters, but they’re small fish. Not big enough to fry.”
“There were other witnesses,” I said.
He pocketed the fragments of his shattered card and stood up. “We are not among them.”
“I don’t understand.”
Blake’s smile was more wicked than I’d ever seen it before. “Think, Arthur. We wouldn’t want to discourage them, now, would we?”
***
“You said your sister died on The Minch.”
“I told you before. I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I don’t know what to do with you, Arthur. I’m sorry.”
“You said you knew my da’. Ask him. But I have to tell you: I am not a cryptid. I’m a teenage man.”
“Yes. Yes, you are.”
***
I tried only once, before the coming of that December’s catastrophe, to press Whitnail on what he knew about the earlier incident at The Minch and, unrelated, what he could tell me about Blake’s passive approach to dealing with the Caster Enigma Coalition—the purple berets, in my mind. We were walking through Trafalgar Square. Snow was already on the ground, but the pigeons had not elected to move on. We stopped by one of the lions on the pretense of gathering up political tracts that had blown between its paws.
I said, “Arthur fell into The Minch, didn’t he?”
Whitnail found a sudden fascination for the pigeons. “Yes, he did.”
“Did Blake push him in?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“But you know he fell in?”
Whitnail said, “I know the Monkey King is immortal, but I do not know the nine means by which he attained it.”
“The Monkey King is real?”
“Simply because you see a piece of the puzzle does not mean you can envision the picture it is a part of,” he said instead of answering my question.
It felt like talking to Arthur all over again, so I changed the subject. “Did you ever expect the purple berets to be crazy enough to try to kill him?”
Whitnail started to lie down in the snow; people were starting to stare. “Make angels with me.”
“Why don’t you want to tell me?”
He moved his arms up and down in the snow and his legs back and forth; given his size and overall appearance, it was surprisingly frightening. He stopped and stared up at me with no discernible expression on his face. “If I tell you, you will ask me no more?”
“Aye. Yes.”
He sat up. “Very well. They are retaliating for what he did to the kelpies. He risks making casters appear evil when people should not know they exist at all. And they fear he will do it again.”
***
“Arthur, what did Blake do to the kelpies?”
“I don’t know. I think I might have been dead by then.”
***
Since I knew he would hold fast to refusing any additional questions I might ask, I made snow angels with him.
VII. The Halifax Slasher. Spring Heeled Jack.
December came. The world would never look the same to me again, come January.
Since the shooting, Blake and I had maintained a level of formality and courtesy that no one my age at the time should have been even attempting. I’d grown up with brothers; I was in a perpetual state of emotional agitation, which was easily vented when you had siblings who didn’t mind riling you up. Blake, however, riled me up in an entirely different way: civility and secrecy.
It wasn’t long until Christmas, and London was as magnificent as Liverpool. I wandered its streets, often taking in the lights and decorations, but that evening, when Blake came to me, he had another motivation for taking to the streets. Together, no less.
“It’s been a year since you tried to map certain kinds of cryptids,” he said, leading me out into the cold streets. I was renting a room at the Prince’s Coronet Hotel, which was in dire need of a linen policy, while Blake was staying at the luxurious St. Ermin’s, not far from the Houses of Parliament. This contributed to our cool communication. “Let’s map a cryptid for your spellbook. A decidedly human cryptid.”
“No ghosts,” I said.
“Trust me,” he chuckled as he took us out into the streetlamps, the holiday lights, and the darkness, “Spring Heeled Jack is spirited, but he’s not a ghost.”
***
We were in dank, cold alleys in a part of London I had actually been warned to steer clear of. The roofs were lower, and the smells stronger. No one shoveled any walkways, so we trudged through snow and gloom to the darker corners that Blake described as “Jack’s haunts.”
Along the way, he told me about the previous month’s incidents in Halifax. Multiple people, primarily, had been attacked north of London in the town of Halifax by a wild-eyed man wandering the streets after dark with a mallet and a razor. But the Halifax Courier had published a report that it was all a hoax, that the “attacks” had been either deliberate lies or self-inflicted for the sake of attention.
“That’s what everyone says, anyway,” Blake said, “that the Halifax Slasher is a fake.”
“Is it actually a cryptid?” I said with unconcealed excitement. Blake was scanning the rooftops with a hand over his eyes to keep the snow from them.
“No,” he said. “It’s actually a clown. Our clown. Chansey.”
“Oh, fek.” I could see Chansey’s singular tuft of hair, missing eyebrows, and his chiseled fangs. That he was a slasher made perfect sense to me. “How do you know?”
“He told me.” Blake pointed with his own excitement. “There he is. Right there. Do you see him?”
En route, he had described to me how Spring Heeled Jack looked and moved, and upon first sight, it was all accurate. Jack ran across the flat roof of a shuttered pub, a dark cloak flowing out behind him. His hair was wild and pointed, his eyebrows and mustache so bushy that they almost blocked his facial features, and both his eyes and his smile were maniacal. But most fascinating was how he ran—each stride was unnaturally long and high, as if he were bouncing across the roof’s tiles. He’s over a hundred years old, Blake had said. I didn’t know what that was in cryptid years, but he was mighty spry for someone who’d been around since before the Victorian Era.
Blake said, “Give me a card. I’ll put it on a brick wall halfway down toward that fence at the other end. You go around to the back of this pub, climb up, and chase him this way. He’ll bounce down and over the fence, and when you catch up, you can map him.”
“Wait,” I said. “But I can’t bounce. I won’t be able to ‘catch up’ with anybody, let alone—”
“You are in the best shape you’ll ever be in your entire life,” Blake said, pushing me toward the street. “If you were a hundred, I’d say send him an invite to tea. But you’re not, so Bob’s your uncle. Go.”
I was thinking of another protest when Blake suddenly shouted, “Jack! Over here!”
I sprinted to the alleyway behind the pub.
I scrambled up a stack of wooden crates and balanced myself on a questionable downpipe as I jumped for the roof; it was only a single story. I heard a distinctive clack, clack, clack of Jack’s heels scurrying across the tiles in my direction. When I pulled my head above the gutter, Jack froze, scowling at me.
“Ratbag,” he snarled.
“Fiction,” I muttered, pulling myself up.
Jack cackled before he turned back and launched himself toward the other side of the roof. I was on the roof a few seconds later.
I was quickly on his springing heels, breathing hard as I struggled to extract my spellbook from the bag I had slung over my shoulder. When he vanished over the roof’s edge, I tried to remember if I was about to jump down onto pavement or dirt. Either way, I braced for a teeth-jarring impact and tried to remember to tuck my knees so I wouldn’t injure my legs or ankles.
I misjudged, almost landing on him. Jack had hesitated at the iron fence, seeing Blake at the far end of the alley. When I came falling toward him, he turned the other way toward the opposite end of the alleyway, out into a shabby park covered in snow and lined by dead trees. I cleared him completely.
But I did not clear the fence.
It was iron with steeple-like points on the top of each spire. Had I fallen another half a meter closer, I would have driven my throat into one of those points. A half a meter shorter, and I would have slammed Jack into the dirt, contrary to mapping him. As it was, I saw what was coming and desperately jerked my head back to avoid the impact.
The single sharp point that took me through the eye tore through my eyelid as I tried to twist away, but my movement kept it from spearing straight through my skull and piercing my brain. There was no sound at the moment of impalement, at least none that I could hear over my own heart-stopping scream. The pain was so incredible that every single thought was ripped out of my mind as if harpooned by the fence. The top of my head went completely numb before exploding with the kind of headache that makes you cry and want to squeeze your temples until the agony bleeds out through your forehead.
I went down hard on my back, flipped backward by the impact, banging my head in the dirt. I couldn’t stop screaming long enough to call for help from Blake. I was sure he’d seen what happened. He must be coming, I kept thinking. Where are you? I’m going to die, Blake.
I was crying—tears were running down my face. On one side. From one eye. From the other, a mucus swimming in hot blood ran down my head and into my ear. I could not open my eye on the right side of my face, and I could keep my eye open on the left.
Blake knelt over me. I could smell his breath, and that was how I knew it wasn’t Blake after all.
“Sorry, mate,” Spring Heeled Jack whispered in my dry ear. “No harm meant.”
I felt his hand, the fingertips rough, touch my head and smooth it. I heard Blake shouting as if underwater. I felt myself losing coherent thought, like those moments just as you fall asleep when time stops.
“Cheers, Polyphemus,” he added, and then he was gone.
I was still conscious enough to remember that Polyphemus was the name of the cyclops in The Odyssey, and I was insulted, but I was out before Blake reached me.
