Page 55

“—of the body.”

Lefevre threw herself back against the door when she saw me, her hands flat against the wall to either side of her, hunting the handle.

“How?” Smith looked down at his hammer, puzzled, as I stood.

“Magic!” This from Lefevre, almost a shriek.

“Of course it’s magic, you idiot.” Smith rubbed his thumb on the hammerhead and then tasted it. “Witchcraft. Old…old magic.” He frowned. “A curse…”

“You tried to murder me…” Up until that point, even with the one-eyed man, even with the possible kidnapping, nothing had been quite so violent, so homicidal. I’d known something bad was going on. I’d known there was danger. But not hammer-to-the-temple level. “You tried to fucking murder me.”

The fact that my survival was an inexplicable miracle hadn’t yet penetrated my skull, rather like Smith’s hammer. All I knew was that my head hurt about as badly as if I’d been hit in the head with a lump of iron, and that rather than being sensibly scared, I was as angry as I’d ever been.

“Old magic.” The director, ignoring me, held his hammer up above him in both hands as if it were some holy relic. “I invoke the protection and aid of the order. I invoke the protection and—”

I don’t know what exactly he was hoping was going to happen, but I doubt very much he expected that the side of his head would slam down onto his shoulder, breaking his neck with a loud snap, followed by his chest and belly essentially unzipping from the inside.

But that pretty much sums it up.

A huge, writhing worm, with a mouth the same diameter as its thigh-thick body, and ringed with inward-pointing teeth like a nightmare shark, thrashed its way out of the falling ruin of the director’s body, tearing through clothes and skin. Blood and less pleasant fluids went everywhere, as if a lawn sprinkler had been set to turbo and plugged into a slaughterhouse vat. I expect a blood-spatter expert would simply write “swallowed a hand grenade” on their crime scene report and leave it at that.

The thing wasted no time in lunging toward me, its yawning mouth large enough to bite my whole face off in one go, and quite possibly the rest of my head too.

I acted on instinct, but where the instinct came from, and why I had never done it before, I can’t tell you. The feeling was similar to when I had punched Gar, and while I failed to hurt him, I did seem to break everything else nearby.

This time, I brought my two fists together in front of my face, smashing the side of one into the side of the other, harder than seemed safe or even sane. This time it was as if the whole room were set into a block of crystal, and then dropped a sufficient height to shatter. That was the best I could do.

The windows fell from their frames, none of the pieces larger than a fifty-pence piece. Not blown out or sucked in, just broken where they were. The walls and ceiling showed deep cracks in patterns not dissimilar from those on a boiled egg after you smack the shell with a spoon half a dozen times.

The worm’s lunge fell short, and it coiled one way then the other, making near circles of pain, dozens of broken teeth gleaming in the gore it vomited across the floor. I thought the screaming was coming from the worm, but it proved to be Lefevre. She lay on the floor beside Mum’s bed, awash with crimson but without visible wounds. Something was wrong with her, though. Broken bones. Lots of them.

I was a crack in the world.

The only thing in that room to remain undamaged, including me, was my mother, soft in her drugged slumber.

I looked away from her in time to see the last few segments of the worm writhing away through a dark and dripping hole in the wall. A hole that hadn’t been there moments before. A hole that looked disgustingly similar to the one where Gar’s eye should be.

Exhausted and feeling more delicate than any fourteen-year-old should—fourteen going on ninety-nine—I crawled toward the hole and its revolting occupant. I had zero desire to touch the thing, and no way of gaining purchase on the slimy flesh, but just letting it go, letting it leave me in the midst of all…this…seemed wrong.

I looked around for Smith’s hammer, but by the time I’d found it, the worm had vanished down its tunnel. I guess you’d call it a wormhole…On hands and knees I peered after it, seeing only darkness.

Already the hole seemed to be slowly shrinking. It would be as gone as the worm soon, making the truth seem an ever more outrageous lie.

Without warning, I saw light down the wormhole. I guessed that the worm had plopped out of the far end, leaving the tunnel clear. The view was narrow and distant, but I was looking at a sign, blue and white like a roadside traffic sign. Great Ormond Street Hospital. There were other words too, but those were the only ones large enough to read. Great Ormond Street Hospital. For some reason the first letters stood out. G.O.S.H.

“Rose!” It hit me all at once, and although it was the absolute last thing I wanted to do, I threw myself forward, arms outstretched as though I were diving into a swimming pool, or at least something much nicer than a dripping, contracting wormhole.

I wriggled forward through the disturbingly fleshy tunnel. With barely room to inflate my lungs, I could propel myself by my toes and not much more. The walls moved against me, making me retch. Fortunately, the worm’s slime let me slip out of the far end before the final contraction severed the connection from here to there.

I found myself crawling out of a hedge on the opposite side of the road to the sign. The GOSH sign. The picture Rose’s mother had drawn of her bore that legend, GOSH. And now the worm was here, bound on escape or revenge or both.

I could see dozens of people walking on both sides of the street, and cars stacked up in both directions, gleaming in the late-afternoon sun. The worm could be anywhere, in anyone. I didn’t understand the terms and conditions of its power, but obviously it wouldn’t be a very long-lived adversary if it had to wriggle its way across London streets.

I’d met Rose in a book, and in the bookshop, spelled out in letters. I guessed if all that could happen, then I didn’t have any right to say she couldn’t also be in a hospital bed. Finding her would be the problem. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for children was a lot bigger than Mum’s little one in Birmingham. Plus, while the psychiatric hospital had a measure of inward-facing security, GOSH would have a shit ton of outward-facing security. Enough to give me pause, even though I was a kid myself.

I stood, confused and directionless, ignored by passersby. By rights I should be covered in blood, attracting attention from everyone, but in some disgusting manner that I really didn’t want to think about too much, my passage through the wormhole seemed to have cleaned the great majority of it from me, though my clothes bore large, suspicious stains.

I still carried the strangeness and awfulness that I’d felt both when the hammer had hit me and when I had hit back by doing…whatever that was…I didn’t feel right. As if everything in me had been taken out and put back slightly out of place, slightly misoriented. I held myself very still because things felt a little better if no part of me moved.