CHAPTER 41

I wasn’t sure how or where we entered the prison itself. The walls just gave way to rooms and proper corridors crossed at strange intervals by low tunnels for ventilation or sewage. The cells at our end were the dankest and foulest confinement I’d ever seen outside the “hole” at Alcatraz. Most of them were empty in the time we’d tumbled into, but even in the past, the place boiled with ghosts and the gelid air stank of waste and water and human despair. The song of London’s Grey had become a dirge.

We scrambled through the labyrinth of the prison’s lowest pit, where real, solid brick vaults and ghostly doubles stood in the earth to hold up a structure soaked in the uncanny and the horrifying. Low brickwork doorways led to low-ceilinged cell blocks of whitewashed brick. Marsden motioned us forward at every turning with frantic gestures and the cocking of his head this way and that, listening.

Explosions and screams rocked the building, and we found ourselves rushing through panicking crowds of prisoners. The impression was so thick and strong, even Michael responded to their press and their terror. The memory of fire broke out behind us.

“It’s burning!” Michael yelped, his own exhaustion and fear pulling him into the verges of hysteria where the Grey flickers into the visible like campfire smoke images.

Marsden turned back to him with a furious expression. “Hush!”

The warning came too late; something had heard and filtered itself from the murk of history and the memory of smoke, flowing fast across the teeming vault of the cell block toward us as it solidified into the shape of a gaunt man. The stink intensified as he came closer—not just the stench of the prison but of corruption and bodily rot—homing in on us like a hunting hound.

“Bloody hell,” Marsden breathed. “It’s the wraith. Bloody butcher Norrin. We’re in it now.”

The wraith cut through the crowd of ghosts like a sword. It wasn’t quite like them but something more eternal and horrible with a greater solidity in its accumulated bulk of evil. So this was what Alice had been sending me to: a spirit old, solid, and wicked enough to do someone like me serious hurt. Anyone with a hint of sensitivity would feel it, whether they were touched with the Grey or not. Someone descending into it by close association with the likes of Marsden and me couldn’t help but know it was there. Michael retched in the swirling darkness beside me and stumbled back. I put myself between him and the barely corporate monster that approached.

But it wasn’t interested in me. It fixed its attention on the other Greywalker, blocking our path—unless we wanted to go through it and I certainly didn’t.

“Peter, Peter,” the wraith sang in a voice that chilled my spine. “I knew ye’d come back, y’lyin’ pig swiver. Ah, but what happened to yer pretty blue eyes, eh? I told ye I’d pluck ’em out for ye if y’didn’t care for the sight o’ me. But y’did for yerself, didn’t ye? I should punish ye for that. But ye’ve brought me some other pretties, too? Ah. That’ll keep yer lying throat uncut a while longer.”

The wraith turned burning eyes on Michael and me, picking us from the crowd of alarmed ghosts who ran from the memory of flames. An unearthly gleam danced along the fine edge of a blade in his hand. His thumb brushed lightly across the tang, and the reflection of light turned scarlet as his face stretched into something lupine and horrible.

“Keep yer distance, Norrin,” Marsden spat back at him. His lank white hair swung over his face as he turned, making shadows dance in his ravaged eye sockets. “They’re not for the likes of you.”

“No? But y’know I like a bit of fun whether ye will or no, Peter.”

The knife flashed as Norrin lashed out sideways, never shifting his gaze. I dodged back, shoving Michael away. The boy grunted and stumbled sideways, coming clear of my body. Norrin sprang at him, mouth gaping into a black chasm lined with rows of ripsaw teeth.

Michael rolled.

The blade glinted red and rang a quivering crystal note on the fire-lit mist of the Grey for a moment, slicing through the fabric of magic like a razor as the unearthly Norrin snapped and howled.

The keen edge nicked through Michael’s sleeve near the shoulder. Michael gasped and clapped his other hand over the shoulder. His eyes were wide with shock.

Marsden and I both jumped for the wraith as the phantoms of panicked prisoners rushed through us with the feel of an ice storm. Norrin twisted in our grasp, slippery and lithe as an oiled snake. Looking deeper into the Grey, I saw him as a hollow frame of bright energy lines without the usual tangled core of a soul. He was difficult to hook my fingers into as his apparent surface sparked and fizzed like an overloaded electrical circuit.

I glanced at Marsden as we struggled to hold the thing, but he didn’t seem to have any better grip on it than I did. Norrin swore and stabbed at us with his knife, his face oozing into the shapes of eldritch beasts and monsters.

The eerie blade bit in like the real thing. I could feel blood running down my chest where the eldritch knife had sliced me. It really was a ghost that could kill me! Or at least enough to make whatever tweaking and shaping Wygan had in mind possible. That chilled me, but I dug in and tried to get my fingers into the weave of the wraith’s energy shape, which resisted like callused flesh.

Marsden wrapped his arms around the writhing form and squeezed. The ghost shape compressed a little and Norrin shouted, “I’ll have yer liver, y’bastard!” as he fought to escape.

“We can’t break it. You’ll have to run. Go on!” Marsden urged me. “Get to the door and get out. Take the boy!”

I let go of Norrin and turned back to haul Michael to his feet. He came along, dazed and stumble-footed as I dashed for the nearest door that looked to lead out. But the door was locked and the terrified prisoners who had escaped their cells—or never been confined at all—swarmed around it, clawing at it frantically. The heavy iron-bound portal wouldn’t yield to me, either.

I looked back over my shoulder toward Marsden.

The other Greywalker doubled over and twitched as Norrin drove a blow into his gut.

“Marsden!” I shouted, alarmed; if the ghost’s knife could draw my blood, what did it do to him? They seemed to have prior history and maybe there was a connection the wraith could use against him.

“Key,” he gasped, the sound carrying to mortal ears through the cacophony of phantom horrors.

I scowled, closing my hand in my pocket on the hard metal thing Purcell had pressed on me. But I had no chance to question as Michael grabbed my hand, forcing me to look at him.

“The key. That puzzle thing. Maybe it works here.”

My dad’s—No, my key. How many gates could it open? Was it some kind of lock pick after all? I rifled through my pockets in haste, stabbing my fingers on sharp odds and ends until the cool, bent shape of my father’s puzzle came to my grip. Casting anxious glances over my shoulder, I scrambled through the puzzle’s solution, but it didn’t click into place and glow. I tried it again, shaking, trying to breathe steadily and not give in to my own exhaustion and the fear that rose off the ghostly crowd like a stench.

I could feel the flutter of temporaclines at the door. I could have simply slipped away on one, leaving Michael and Marsden to their own devices. The boy might be safe enough without two Greywalkers nearby to warp the thin veil between the worlds into a hellish reality around him. But Marsden had brought us to the slice of horror we found ourselves in, and I wasn’t sure that my disappearance would drop Michael back into the normal. If not, he’d be helpless in the memory of the burning prison and alone with Norrin once Marsden couldn’t hold the phantasm back anymore—and he was failing fast.