“Sure,” said Merlin. “We’re coming up to where we need to turn around again. Keep your eyes down. If you do see the Shuck, don’t look directly at it.”
“Okay,” replied Susan. “Uh, when I say actually answer questions, this isn’t one of those situations where if I know too much you have to kill me, is it?”
“You already know too much,” said Merlin. “But you’re not at risk from me. Or mine. Though I’m afraid your life might never be the same.”
“Oh,” said Susan.
“Some of it might be an improvement,” said Merlin carefully. “Depending on your actual relationship with your ‘uncle’ Frank. Eyes down, turn around.”
Susan tried to keep her eyes down, but even so she did catch a very fleeting glimpse of something terrible within the fog, a massive, misshapen, twisted thing with eyes like open wounds and a vast, constantly dripping maw—
“Eyes down! Keep walking!”
“I am, I am,” Susan said, shuddering.
“It’s dropped back. And it really can’t get us on the path,” said Merlin. “Let’s imagine we’ve met . . . er . . . somewhere . . . and we’re having a chat. So, what were you doing in that house?”
“Frank was one of Mum’s friends from years ago,” said Susan. She opened her eyes again, a little, looking through slitted eyelids. “I thought he was a boyfriend . . . he always sent me presents at Christmas, signed ‘Uncle Frank.’ I never actually met him until I came up to London today. I mean yesterday. I knew straight away that I’d made a mistake. Coming to see him, that is. I was about to sneak out when I heard you come in . . . what did you do to him, anyway? And why?”
“To cut to the heart of the matter, I touched him with a silver object inscribed with Solomon’s spell of unmaking Harmless to mortals . . . humans . . . but Frank was what we call a Sipper. A blood drinker—”
“A vampire!”
“No, they don’t exist, though almost certainly Sippers are the basis for the legend. They do bite, but nearly always at wrist or ankle, not the neck—because they don’t want to kill—and they’re very small bites. They let the blood flow and sip it. No big hollow teeth nonsense; they lap it up like a cat. Triangular-pointed tongues. One of the signs that gives them away.”
“And you hunt and kill them?”
Merlin sighed.
“No. We usually leave them alone, provided they behave themselves. In fact, there’s a Sipper who works for us in accounts, and . . . uh . . . our infirmary. Sipper saliva has powerful healing properties.”
“So why stick Frank with your hatpin?”
“You recognized it as a hatpin?”
“I’m an art student. Jewelry is one of my things, though I’m mainly a printmaker. Or I will be an art student, when term starts. That’s why I’m looking for my dad now; I have about three months before I have to buckle down, as Mrs. Lawrence says.”
“Who’s Mrs. Lawrence?”
“My sixth-form school art teacher. She helped me get my place, and says I’m not to waste it.”
“Which art school? Get ready to stop and turn around.”
“The Slade.”
“You must be good, then.”
“My etchings, I believe, are worth coming up to see, as they say. And I can draw. Though it’s not really the rage at the moment. Being able to draw, that is.”
“It must be satisfying to make things. Turn.”
They turned. Susan caught a strong waft of the carrion stench and almost gagged, but she also realized that talking was distracting her. Quickly, she gabbled out the first question that came into her head.
“If we’re safe on the path, can’t we sit down?”
“No,” replied Merlin. “It only has the virtue of the old straight track if we’re moving on it. If we stop, it’s simply a patch of ground, and both the fog and the Shuck will have us.”
“So,” said Susan. “Are you actually a wizard?”
“Well, I’m mainly a bookseller.”
“What?!”
“Really. A bookseller. I handle incoming deliveries for the most part, unpacking, shelving. Not a lot of the actual selling. The right-handed generally do that.”
“The right-handed?”
“It’s a family business, of sorts. Perhaps clan would be a better word. We’re either right-handed or left-handed. Though it can change. ‘One for the books, one for the hooks,’ as we like to say.”
He held up his gloved left hand, stark in the moonlight.
“As you can see, I am of the left-handed moiety.”
“But what does that mean? What’s the hook business?”
“It’s obscure, to be honest. I mean, we’ve never really used hooks. Swords, daggers, hatpins . . . but the left-handed St. Jacques—”
“Sanjucks?”
“San Jark. The family name. French. Though we’re not French and it’s not really our name, it’s something pinned on us by the first Elizabeth; she was confused, and it kind of stuck. Anyway, we left-handed types do most of the active stuff, running about, fighting, and so on. The hook part might be a bitter reflection that, back in the seventeenth century, a number of us ended up strung up on hooks by various religious parties.”
“But what . . . I mean, this Sipper thing . . . and the Shuck and the fog . . . what is going on?”
The last few words burst out of Susan almost like a scream. She’d managed to hold in the bizarre mixture of panic and puzzlement but it was threatening to break free.
“Yeah, I realize it’s a shock. But your best chance of survival is to stay calm and stay with me. Ah, how can I put this? The world you know, the ‘normal’ human world, is the top layer of a palimpsest—that’s a many-times overwritten parchment—”
“I know what a palimpest . . . palimset . . . I know what one is even if I can’t say it.”
“Well, there is another world beneath the everyday human one, and under certain conditions or at particular times, the Old World comes to the top, or elements of it become the primary world, as it were. And there are . . . environments and creatures or individuals who exist on multiple levels at the same time, either due to their nature, or because of some—I guess you’d call it magical—intervention. We booksellers fall in the latter category, both left- and right-handed, and for various reasons we’ve ended up . . . policing, I suppose . . . the interaction between the various more mythic levels, collectively known as the Old World, and the New World—the prosaic human world—what you might fondly call ‘reality.’”
“But what does bookselling have to do with all this?”
“We have to make a living.”
“What!”
“Most of the old mythic levels are sequestered and most Old World entities are bound, or the ones that aren’t behave themselves anyway. We rarely have to intervene. In between, we sell books. There are some other reasons, too; it’s rather complicated. . . . You ready to turn?”
“Uh, yes, I guess.”
They turned about again. This time Susan didn’t bother shutting her eyes, though she kept looking straight down. She could tell from the disgusting drain smell that the Shuck was close, but it bothered her less now. Merlin’s calm, light conversational tone had somehow cut through the fear, as had the rhythmic tramping up and down on the path.