Page 44

It weighs almost nothing. I loosen the knot with my thumb and tip the contents into my palm.

Teeth.

Not one. A whole fistful of them, knocking softly together as they spill across my skin, some yellowed with age, others still carrying dark scraps of tissue around the roots. One blackened molar rolls from my palm, and I lunge to catch it before it disappears between the floorboards, nearly scattering the rest in the process.

I hurriedly tip the lot back into the pouch, pull the string tight, and shove it back inside.

All right. More than one tooth. That’s not necessarily sinister. He said he was studying them, so that’s perfectly reasonable.

I ought to leave it there, but I reach into the satchel instead. My fingers brush the edge of something broad and stiff beneath the vials, and after a little awkward tugging I manage to drag out a thick leather ledger that looks older than my grandmother. Dust catches beneath my nails as I set it down, the binding worn smooth and the parchment inside yellowed almost brown at the edges.

I glance once towards the hatch.

Still talking…

Hesitantly, I open it. Names fill the pages in narrow columns, written in a neat, narrow hand, with a date beside each one. Patients, perhaps. Deaths. Some peculiar physician’s record he has kept while wandering from parish to parish…

Then I actually read the dates, and my heart jumps.

1232 — York.

1347 — Messina.

1348 — Florence.

1499 — London.

I stare at them for several seconds, certain I’ve misunderstood something. Perhaps the first number is not a year. Perhaps the ledger belonged to somebody else before him, though the handwriting has not changed by so much as a stroke between one century and the next.

No man lives that long.

I turn another page. Then another. English gives way to Latin somewhere in the older pages, then to words I cannot read at all, written in unfamiliar scripts that are still unmistakably the same hand. Strange little marks sit beside certain entries, repeated often enough that they must mean something, though I have no idea what. My fingers move faster through the parchment. There are hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps.

Then I reach the last one written down…

Fletcher, Alice.

I turn back through the most recent entries, suddenly careless of the brittle parchment beneath my fingers. Mason, John. Miller, Stephen. Fletcher, David. I follow the column down once, then go back and drag my finger over each name more slowly.

But there’s no William Mercer. If this book records the people the demon has killed, and Billy isn’t among them, where is he?

“Are you consulting my texts for a second opinion on the patient downstairs, Ophelia Harrow? Or have you quite finished invading my privacy?”

The words drift up from somewhere much closer than the cellar below.

Every hair along my arms lifts.

I stop breathing and turn, very slowly, towards the open hatch.

There, just above the opening, is Iscairn’s mask. The amber lenses are already fixed on me, catching what little light reaches the hatch, while one gloved hand slowly rises from the darkness and curls around the top of the ladder.

Then his head tilts.

The ledger slips from my hands, landing open across the boards with a thud. I’m already scrambling backwards, skirt tangling around my legs as I fight my way upright. Pain shoots up my thigh, buckling my knee, and I have to catch the edge of the table just to stay standing.

It costs me precious seconds.

Behind me, his boots hit the wood.