15.7

 

“Wait! I’ll come with you.” Paul picked up his hammer and cold chisel and answered “You never know,” when Roisin gave him an inquisitive look.

“Me too.” Steve stood, reaching for his spectacles, which Paul was still wearing, and putting them on. He looked like an old American prospector with his cheap glasses and unkempt beard and hair. He shook his head to Paul’s offer of the carver’s hammer and patted his other pocket. “I’ve got my cross.”

“And that’ll work, will it? Against something that knocks on a door?”

“We won’t know until we try, will we?” Steve took out the artifact but left it wrapped in its old cloth. He winked at Roisin. “It could be the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It’s scare the willies out of them.”

Since they were in more light than they’d had down in the lobby, Roisin could see the cloth was intricately woven with lettering she recognised as Jewish. “What’s it wrapped in?” she asked.

Steve glanced down. “Part of the Torah. Specifically, the section naming the angels and the carting out of demons. It keeps the artifacts from taking over the house.”

“You make them sound alive.” She suddenly realised what their conversation had made clear. “Sorry. They are alive, of course.”

“Everything is.”

Paul had reached the top of the stairs and looked down. From his left, Roisin could clearly see a humanoid shadow projected onto the frosted glass insets of the jammed-shut front door.

The knock sounded again. Three slow taps.

Measured.

Deliberate.

Steve pushed her gently to one side and peered down the stairs, the eye behind the missing lens closed to aid concentration to the one looking through his magic lens. He stopped, one hand on each of their shoulders. “Don’t move.”

Roisin whispered back, “Who is it?”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t know, but it’s one of the Meek. Can’t you tell?”

“Meek?”

“The soulless. Weren’t you listening? Anyway, I thought you could see the soul fragments inside people and objects.”

“Obviously, I can’t see something that doesn’t have them.”

“That’s my point, though. There’s obviously something there, because we can see it, but since there are no fragments, it must be soulless.”

Paul nodded beside her. “That’s logical.”

“Thank you, Doctor Spock, for pointing out the obvious. Have you not noticed that some people give off very few prisms? Fragments, whatever?”

“Not really, unless they’ve been stripped of the ones they had, and then they’re the soulless anyway.”

Roisin shook her head. “Unless they’re so close to dying they have no more to spare.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Not been around many dying people, have you?”

“Not as such, no. I’ve been around dead bodies, though, and some of them are still throwing off fragments.”

The knock came again.

Three slow taps.

Measured.

Deliberate.

Too soft to be urgent, too steady to be accidental.

Steve didn’t move.

Roisin didn’t breathe.

The sudden pull against her ribs took her off balance, and she would have tumble down the stairs had Paul not grabbed her arm , narrowly avoiding impaling her with the steel chisel. It pulsed again, hard enough to make her flinch. It felt like a hand pressing against her sternum from the inside, urging her toward the door.

Steve whispered, “Let me past.”

Roisin nodded, though her legs felt unsteady. She twisted to be perpendicular to the stairs and beside her, Paul did the same, letting go of her arm in the process. Steve squeezed through the gap and went down several steps, holding the cross in front of him like before. The air around the door had thickened again, the faint pressure returning — not as strong as before, but present, like a tide beginning to rise.

Steve stepped forward.

The knock didn’t repeat.

Instead, a voice came through the door — muffled, trembling.

“Roisin? It’s me.”

The assistant.

Roisin exhaled shakily. “She came back.”

Steve didn’t relax. “Who?”

“She’s the assistant at the gallery where the paintings are. She’s all right. She helped me before.”

“Are you sure?” Steve glanced back at her. “Or did she just seem friendly to find out where you live?”

“No, She’s nice.”

“What’s her name?”

“It’s…er… I don’t think she’s ever said, actually.” Roisin frowned. “I remember asking, though.”

“There you go then. She probably avoided the question. If she did tell you, it was something you didn’t recognise as a name. A string of nonsensical syllables, or a sound like the wind through a chicken bone.”

“That seems… oddly specific.”

“I’ve met one or two of them in the past.”