The Dickens Mirror (8 page)

“Not like someone you’d read about,” she said. They’d talked about this before, when the dreams had begun. Back then, the other Tony had seemed like a boy in a fairy tale or serial: something flat as paper, with no more substance than a thin character in a bad novel. Yet with each dream, this other Tony had drawn closer, in the same way that the fog, so relentless, crept ever nearer. “He was fleshed out. A person.”

“Yeah, and I think
he
noticed it, too, because he
did
something. Changed things up somehow.”
Mirror
—the word popped into his
brain on a thrill—
that’s it
. “He’s always been hazy; can’t quite ever make him out. But this time, he wiped away mist or fog or something like that from a mirror, and then, all of a sudden, I could see out of his eyes. I wasn’t able to do that before and …”

“What?” she said when he broke off. “Tony?”

“What in God’s name are we talking about?”
I’m sick; I’m going mad, that’s it
. He pressed the heel of a hand to his forehead. “Rima, there
is
no other Tony. This
has
to be the rot. I’m infected. It’s burrowed into my brain.”

“No. Tony, the last time you let me
draw
, I could tell. Rot feels different.”

“How many rotters you actually drawn from? Two? Three? No more than a half dozen before you realized you couldn’t help. Checking for squirmers doesn’t count.” So far, they’d been lucky enough to avoid a rotter with a bellyful.
Oh, but the day is coming. Eventually, our luck’s going to run out
. “Maybe, in me, the rot’s up to something new.”

Perhaps the rot had taken root in his brain, and this was how it would be: he going slowly insane as squirmers wriggled and munched and hollowed him at his core. Even worse, what if he didn’t snap out of it next time? He might kill her without meaning to.
I should leave, take myself away while there’s still time
.

He felt movement, heard the Dutch pot slosh, and then she was stretching out alongside, careful not to touch. Eyes still shuttered, arm over his face, he said, “You shouldn’t.”

“Be quiet. Don’t tell me what I ought and ought not do. Aren’t things bad enough?”

“Yes.” There was something strangely comforting about speaking into the dark before his eyes. “But they’ll get worse, and you know it. Forget the rot and the fog. Horses are all gone.
There are no more dogs, no cats. No one’s seen a bird since the Peculiar made it to the Tower.” The raid on the zoo, with its turtles and snakes, gazelles and hippos, an elephant, had been well before the toffs and Parliament and their good King Eddie decided to abscond in the middle of the night. None such as
him
had so much as a mouthful; the price for a quarter pound of civet had been three pounds, sixpence, which was more scratch than he’d seen in his entire life. Only those families with money, and there were plenty in those days, actually supped on zebra in raisin sauce, or a duck-and-hippo cassoulet, which he’d gathered was some fancy name for bean stew. Although he’d heard that the toffs complained about elephant. Said it was tough and too greasy, so much bowwow mutton. While a few animals had been spared—the lions, a few tigers, several monkeys, and a great black bear—that was only because some scientists thought monkeys were too close to people, and killing lions was too difficult. And where were those poor creatures now? Starved to death, still in their cages, behind a dense milky shroud? Or had they somehow
become
fog?

No one knew. Once the fog lowered, not a soul came out again, and no one was stupid enough to wander in.

“All that’s left is what vermin we can catch and what hordes we find. But how many more of those, you think?” Deep in his heart, he also thought they weren’t very far from consuming the dead. (In another, even more inaccessible part he didn’t let himself stare at for long, he thought some people were already there. Meat was meat.) But then it was a choice between heat and food, wasn’t it? Freeze to death with full bellies, or starve away to skin and bones on a warm brick floor. He moved a shoulder in a shrug. “Can’t be limitless. Soon there won’t be food to be had for love
or money. It’ll be whoever’s left, and the Peculiar boxing us in on all sides.”

“Well, until then, we do the best we can,” Rima said. “That day may be a long while off. It’s
been
like this for as long as any of us can remember. Who’s to say this won’t go on forever?”

What she said was true. Everyone’s memory held the same black absence at the core. No one could recall a time before the coming of this weird, suffocating fog—the Peculiar—that was denser than any London Particular before it. (Pea-soup thick, a nauseating mixture of coal soot and smoke and fog, the Particulars had been bad enough, like to choke a fellow or turn spit brown and stain garments piss-yellow. But
this
fog was
peculiar
, like nothing anyone had ever seen, and the name stuck because it was so apt.) The doctors thought the Peculiar was responsible for all the holes in their memories, too.
Noxious fumes and debilitating miasmas
was what they said, fancy words that said nothing at all but carried weight and felt important.

There were days, in fact, when Tony was convinced that he’d only just now come alive; that this was the first day of his life. He had a
history
, of sorts. Well … as much of one as any foundling left in swaddling clothes on Coram’s doorstep. He knew things. Staffers from the orphanage, for example. That Coram’s cutlery had lambs stamped into the metal, and they got roast instead of boiled beef on Sundays. He remembered a book he and Rima loved, all about the Isle of Mull off Scotland; they would take turns, spinning a future in words of high cliffs and a blue sea and a cottage with a good stone croft for sheep and always snow for Christmas; of the monster in its deep, dark cathedral cave on Staffa and how they might listen to it roar at night. He could recall the summer one boy, Chad, had gotten it into his head to
take a dip in the Thames round the old Battersea Bridge, only to be pulled under by the current.

He recalled all that—the book, the talk of a future, that boy—or thought he did. But damme if there weren’t days when his past felt flat and as insubstantial as air: no real
feeling
or true memories. That was what the Peculiar was doing to them all.

Yet, so far as he knew, he was the only person with nightmares. (These days, the least little bit of news rippled through Lambeth like lightning, so he’d have heard if anyone else had them.) Was that the fog’s doing? He wasn’t sure, but he felt a deep foreboding.
Something’s about to happen, and whatever it is, I think it’s nearly here
.

Then what? He should leave. Protect Rima.
Yes, but go where?
As far south or east or west as he could, until he reached the fog’s edge?
Or go to Westminster or Tower, any of the bridges, and walk into the Peculiar, let it take me?
Just the thought froze his blood. Who knew what waited inside all that?

“Rima, this is getting out of control. This other Tony … it feels like he’s
bleeding
into me.” And yet even that wasn’t quite right.
Not bleeding:
stealing
from me, emptying me out
. The image of some parasite, latched on his mind, sent another stab of cold terror through his heart. “How long before he takes over and I
don’t
wake up as me anymore? Or what if he hollows me out, and I don’t ever wake again? What if I”—his throat tried to fist—“if I really h-hurt you? K-kill …”

“Stop.” A light flutter of her fingers over his lips. “Don’t blame yourself for what you can’t help. You were having a nightmare, Tony, and that is all.”

“But your dreams aren’t like mine.” When she didn’t respond right away, he drew his arm from his eyes. Shadows swarmed
over her features, though her eyes were somehow even deeper and more limitless than before. “Rima?
Are
they?”

“No.” She didn’t say it cautiously. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have bad ones. Sometimes, I think it’s the fog trying to … to talk to us, perhaps. Or maybe it’s only reaching a finger into our minds, trying to decide if …”

“What?” When she said nothing, he skimmed a tentative thumb over her chin. A brief touch, nothing more, and still a clean, clear arrow of desire—more potent even than his fear—struck his heart through.
Stop
. Swallowing, the taste of dying blood still strong on his tongue, he took his hand back.
Surrender to that and you’ll kill her for sure
. “What do you mean about the Peculiar talking to you?”

She sighed. “I don’t know what I mean. I’m just …” Her hand slid onto his chest, and he gasped as he felt her—oh so fleeting—reach beyond the shell of his skin. “Please, Tony, let me help you. Just a little. I promise,” she whispered, though he could barely hear her over the groan that her touch pulled from his throat, “I won’t draw too much. Only enough to strengthen you. Please let me do this for you, please.”

For a second, he wanted to surrender. So good,
so good
 … better than a moist cloth or cool drink of water. He couldn’t describe what she truly did, but when she laid on hands and drew out sickness, it felt the way he imagined the sun would over high cliffs edging the sea: a burst of warmth that bathed his face and chest and body and left him as languid and drowsy as a lizard. For a time—shorter and shorter these days—nothing hurt, and he wasn’t afraid and allowed himself to see a future when there would be enough food and no fog and sweet relief and their cottage with its stone croft and … 
Rima, Rima
, he heard himself
moan again … 
Rima, there’s only Rima, please take it, draw it out, draw as much as you can bear and …

“S-s-stop.”
The word came out ragged and rough. Clasping her wrists, he pulled her fingers from his chest. “I c-can’t let you, Rima. I
won’t
. You can’t possibly take it all away, and it only makes you weaker and … no.” He tightened his grip when her mouth opened in protest. “Don’t. Don’t tell me that you’ll take just a bit and stop yourself before it’s too late. You want to help me now?” It took all of his self-control not to crush her to him. Instead, he turned and showed her his back. “Go away. Get some sleep, Rima. It’ll be morning soon, and always more work.”
More bodies for us rats to gather
. “And promise me, Rima, you have to give me your word: don’t touch me while I sleep. Don’t try to draw this sickness or whatever it is from me.”

“It is my choice. This is mine to give.”

“And mine to refuse. Rima …” He could hear his voice try to break, and he swallowed. “Rima, it will kill you.
I
will.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t want to find out, because if that happens … I might as well slit my throat right now. I won’t be responsible for that. You can’t ask me to.”

For a long moment, she was silent. She also didn’t move. He waited, eyes staring, his ears tingling as the others slept and, beneath, the furnace chuffed and thrummed like a gigantic hidden heart.

Finally, there came a stir of fabric and then the slash of her breath across his jaw. “Damn you, Tony.” And he thought she really was crying this time. “Damn you to hell.”

“That’s not a promise.”

“No,” she said, “it’s not.” But she went back to her side.

That Other Rima

DAMN HIM
.
RIGID
with anger, Rima lay with her hands balled. Above the background cough of the furnace below, the air prickled with the sighs, soft moans, and musical murmurs of the others. She strained to parse out Tony above the rest. Normally, after a nightmare, sleep was a fugitive, which meant that between hours of toiling through snow by day and wrestling with the demons in his mind every night, Tony was hardly resting at all. Every morning—well, such as it was in daylight that was leaden and short-lived, the sky as likely to gray and blacken several times over—Tony’s eyes were sunken even deeper in his skull. He was dwindling to nothing but tough, knotty muscle and sinew, what with the dreams eating him alive.

Well, not tonight
. Because she
had
lied … well,
omitted
. Before he’d thrust her hands away, she’d made a very small
suggestion
that sleep could come for him, and soon. Whether that would work, she hadn’t a clue. This was the first time she’d tried.
But damn him, I
will
help, whether he likes it or not
. Spreading her hands, she studied the lick and dance of shadows cast by the dim and ruddy light
along her slim fingers.
What use are you if I can’t? Two lolly daddies, that’s what, if you can’t draw away his suffering and lend him strength
.

Sighing, she folded her hands to her chest. She’d also lied about something else. Tony’s nightmare? She’d had it, too. She’d seen another Tony, in agony and covered with blood, so much blood, and then there had been a bright, distant leap of fire and then a monstrous …

BANG
.

Rima’s eyes fly open. An explosion? The image of that bright burst sheeting her vision
—fire, explosion, Tony, TONY!
—is still so vivid. God, has the other retort gone up? Floundering to her knees in a puddle of frayed burlap, she holds her breath and listens, nerves still jangling. But there’s nothing. No shouts or screams, only the background chuff of the furnace and the soft
shush
of many people, deeply asleep. On the side opposite, she hears Tony drag in a long, muttering breath. A word or two in there:
mom
and … something about a cat? She loses it after a moment as Tony settles. Beneath her, the bricks are warm and still.
No shudder
. Not that an explosion’s required for a wall to buckle or a roof to cave these days, but for right now, the floor is still solid.

She draws in a deep, steadying breath. The air smells of soot and roasted flesh, but she holds it a moment before letting go.
Just another dream
. But she’s lying to herself, and knows it. This has not been
just
another nightmare of some weird doppelgänger. She concentrates, trying to dredge up more detail besides that explosion. Before, all she got was a bizarre mélange: visions of a broken-down tenement, strange metal carts that rumbled along
smooth roads with no cobbles, some sort of gigantic dustbin, much cleaner than any dustheaps she knew, but which the girl in
her
dreams thought of as
Goodwill ghost-bins
. (What could
that
mean? Ghosts that weren’t harmful but all Christmas cheer? It was a puzzle.) There was a woman, too—
Mother
, the word was a whisper over her brain;
Anita
—with bad teeth, sores on her mouth, and scabs beetling her arms. The girl was afraid of Anita, and it worked the other way around, too. Something about a … a knife?
Yes, and it cut. I felt it
. With a fingertip, she traced a thin phantom grin over the tender skin below her jaw.
Right here. The other Rima’s mother thought that Rima was evil and tried to kill her
.