Ghostly Echoes (Jackaby #3)(47)

Charlie came around the corner. He was dressed again, and standing on his own two human feet. Toby stuck close to him, leaning into Charlie’s legs for comfort. Charlie put a hand on my shoulder, and I leaned into him, too.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what they were looking for. I haven’t found anything actually missing, as far as I can tell. It all just seems malicious. It was her—the woman—Pavel’s accomplice. It had to be. She came back just to taunt Jenny.”

“Mrs. Hoole,” Charlie said. “She’s been taken.”

“Not taken,” I said. “She left. I don’t know what to think about the widow Hoole anymore! I have a hard time believing she’s a part of this madness, but frankly I’m having a hard time believing any of this madness is happening at all!”

Owen Finstern pushed his head in the doorway. “My machine is what’s missing,” he said. He pressed past us and paced an uneven circle around the ravaged laboratory. “They took my machine!”

“They don’t have your machine,” said Jackaby, his back to the inventor.

“And you know that for certain?” He squinted at Jackaby.

Jackaby turned and glared. “They don’t have your machine,” he repeated.

“Where were you during all this?” Finstern asked, turning back to Charlie. “Hiding from them?” He narrowed his eyes. “Helping them?”

Charlie kept his composure. “I was out.”

“You’re a wanted man. I saw the posters. Where did you—?”

“Shut up.” Jackaby pushed past the inventor and out toward the front of the house. “We’re leaving. All of us. Now.”

“Sir?” I said. “What’s the plan?”

“Lawrence Hoole is the plan. He’s our freshest corpse and the most likely to know who made him into one. We are getting answers for Miss Cavanaugh if we have to drag them back from the depths of Hell to do it.”





Chapter Twenty-Five


Rosemary’s Green was two or three acres of rolling fields dotted with trees and bushes. A few humble houses stood nearby, a quiet neighborhood toward the outskirts of town. One wide stretch of the perimeter shared a fence with the churchyard and its rows and rows of granite gravestones. On the far side of the expanse rose untamed hills. I was unsure how anyone knew exactly where Rosemary’s Green ended and the wilds began. This place was on a threshold of its own, with the world of men behind us and proper nature ahead—singing birds and buzzing bees to the right, and a stony, silent boneyard to the left.

There was something quietly stoic and important about Rosemary’s Green, as if the whole expanse were one giant mossy cathedral. Jackaby pressed forward over the grass. He moved with focus and purpose.

“Do you know what we’re looking for, sir?” I asked.

“I think so. I’ve been here before,” he said. These were the first words he had spoken since leaving the house. “I investigated this field the month I arrived in New Fiddleham. Lines of force for miles around intersect near the southwest corner, but I could never discern anything further. Having come together, the channels of power simply stopped. I’ve always suspected something of significance lay just beyond my reach here, but I’ve never had the means to penetrate the barrier. There are very few things in this world I cannot see. I suspect, Miss Rook, that we are approaching a portal to the Annwyn.”

“The Annwyn?” Finstern perked up. “I know the Annwyn. Welsh?”

Jackaby looked back over his shoulder, surprised. “That’s right.”

“I know all the stories,” Finstern said. “And about the sídhe mounds in Ireland, too.”

“Huh.” Jackaby looked legitimately impressed. “That’s a rather unexpected facet of your education.”

“I am a skeptic, but I am a scientist first. Never dismiss the possibility of forces beyond our comprehension. I’ve read the Mabinogion and the old Arthurian legends. I’ve been to Stonehenge. You can never exclude that which has not yet been proven. That’s the essence of inquiry. The Annwyn is an intriguing theory. Interdimensional overlap, a converging of realities.” His darting eyes lost focus for a moment as he stared at the trees in front of him. “If you had lived my childhood, Detective, you might have sought for other worlds as well.”

“My childhood brought the other worlds to me,” Jackaby replied. “Whether I wanted them or not. You may have had the better end of that deal.”

“Pardon me, sirs,” I piped up. “There are those of us present who have not spent our lives developing a lexicon of obscure mythologies.”

“The Annwyn is one of many names for the infamous other side,” Jackaby said.

“So, the afterlife?”

“No. Not exactly. But I believe that our entryway to the underworld might lie behind a barrier of another sort. There are worlds beyond ours—the domains of creatures who once shared the earth openly with us. There are places where the veil is thin and a few places where it has been rent clean through, but it stretches to all corners of the globe.”

Finstern twitched. “Globes are spherical. No corners.”

Jackaby ignored him and continued. “The Annwyn exists all around us, but it is one of very few things that even I have never seen.”