The pain in my side was burning, and I stumbled more than walked through the circle.
I had many fears about what it might be like on the Other Side. The most prominent one being that we might get rushed by ghosts right away, so I had as firm a grip on my rapier as I could muster.
I wasn't prepared for the silence though. I knew I had gone psychically deaf, and the Orpheus glasses only helped me See, so I wouldn't be able to Hear the ghosts – I just hadn't realised that that meant that I wasn't able to hear anything.
It made sense though. We were, after all in their domain. Nothing here was alive, other than us. No birds, no bugs, no cars on the street to give any sort of ambient noise that I had taken for granted.
It was ice cold.
Once, I had stayed in a walk-in freezer for an entire night, waiting for the ghost of a butcher to turn up. Ten hours in that freezer and the cold I felt was nothing compared to the frigidness that pierced what little of my face and my hand that was exposed.
It was more than that though.
It was as if the cold pierced my very soul, telling me how wrong my presence was. Like the place itself was trying to kill me – to force me to fit in.
It was a chilling thought. Pun unintended.
I took a look around the room. Having stripped it earlier, it was odd to find it even more bare. Or 'bare' wasn't the right word. There were actually more items in here than there were in the land of the living.
The room was barren.
That's the word I was looking for. The frostbitten replicas of the furniture, that we had already removed from the room in the real world, were completely devoid of life. As if the wood it had been crafted from had never even been a tree. Not even dust mites lived here.
I took a deep breath, wincing a bit at the bite in my side, but the pain wasn't as bad as I'd expected which was a good thing since it was difficult to make a proper assessment of the wound under all these layers.
"How long do you reckon we need to hide here for?" I asked.
Tony frowned.
I let out a groan. "Oh no. I know that look. What is it?"
"Well," he winced, "Sir Rupert's presence complicates things. Had it simply been Winkman and his band of idiots, they wouldn't know what happened. They wouldn't understand it. But Sir Rupert will surely recognise what this is. If he's smart, he'll trap us here by –"
A snap sounded, followed by the thunk of the chain hitting the floor.
"- cutting the chain that was supposed to lead us back," he finished with a heavy sigh.
I counted to ten.
Then I counted to ten again.
And I counted to ten a third time, before I let my temper get the better of me.
"Great. That's just great! And you couldn't have realised this sooner?" I snapped. "We could have jumped out a window instead! Or hell, getting murdered back there! Surely it would suck even slightly less than dying here!"
Tony took it without complaint. He leaned against the wall and rubbed his face.
"How could I have been so stupid?" he asked, hopefully rhetorically because I sure didn't have an answer for him. "I led us all in here to die."
"So, we're really trapped in here?" Lucy asked in dismay.
"Maybe not," Holly interrupted. Her eyes were narrowed, and she was tapping a finger against her own chin. "We came through here, but who's to say we can't exit somewhere else?"
I scoffed. "What, you want to build another circle? Can't exactly do that without Sources and the only other ones who actually know how to do it, are the enemies."
"That's what I mean!" she countered, starting to build some excitement. "This gateway might have closed, but we know of another one! Right there!"
She pointed out the window and my heart sank.
"The Strand?" I asked incredulously. "You want us to go through the city – through heavens know how many ghosts and walk directly into enemy territory?!"
"Brilliant, Holly!" Tony exclaimed. "You're absolutely brilliant!"
I jerked over to look at the idiot but pulled something. I hissed in pain from the wound in my side.
"Quill! Are you all right?" Lucy asked and started tugging at my clothes. "He got you, didn't he?"
I batted her hands away lightly. "It's fine, I'm fine," I protested.
"Holly is right," Lucy decided. "We need to get you medical attention.
I sputtered a bit more in protest and looked at my last hope of salvation.
The blubbery and impassive face of George Cubbins.
He simply shrugged.
As if we had been having a discussion between Chinese take-away and pizza for dinner.
"Fine," I conceded. It wasn't as though I couldn't see the point to their plan, I just… wasn't in a hurry to wade through ectoplasm high enough to reach my shoulders.
We were slowly making our way downstairs, all with our rapiers out and in tight formation.
At first, it hurt to move, but little by little, I managed to find a rhythm that didn't tear at the wound in my side. It wasn't too bad. I'd certainly had worse.
Everything in the house was as dead as Jess' room was. All the furniture was in its right place, even though I knew a lot of it was in pieces in reality. Everything was dull and barren, as if people had never even lived there.
Which I supposed they hadn't. We were the first living things this place had ever seen.
Everything just felt wrong – wrong – wrong.
A small gasp escaped me as we reached the kitchen to find a lone figure casually leaning against the kitchen sink.
He raised an eyebrow at me and smirked.
I hadn't even though of him as we passed but here he was, shining brighter than anything else. He was so solid – so vibrant that even we seemed faded.
"Ghost," I breathed with a little disbelieving laugh.
He rolled his eyes. His mouth was moving, but of course, I couldn't hear what he was saying.
Lucy cleared her throat and looked back at me. "He uh – he thinks you make a bold fashion statement."
She broke into a small fit of giggles, which made the ghost's mouth twitch.
It was so odd to see him so… human.
He sneered a bit at our swords, but didn't make a move against us, even though I don't doubt he could kill us all if he really wanted to. A powerful Type Three and we were on his turf – we wouldn't stand a chance.
For all Lucy talked about the Ghost's homicidal tendencies, he didn't really seem that interested in killing anyone even though his eyes narrowed when he looked at Cubbins.
He began explaining something to Lucy but seemed to be suddenly yanked away.
She was rattled when the ghost was gone.
"Right – so, they took him. Sir Rupert and Fittes they – they took the Ghost. She ran a hand through her hair, but Tony took the hand before she could rip into it.
"We'll get him back," he promised her gently. "We got him back before and we can do it again. But first we need to get out of here."
I looked at my feet. I didn't need to see the look of adoration on her face as she looked at him.
Not yet.
"So, are we ready to go?" Holly prompted, like an angel sent from heaven.
"As ready as we'll ever be," I grumbled.
We slowly moved out of the house and the wrong feeling followed me as we made it out onto the street.
The silence was deafening out there.
No cars – not even the distant rumble of traffic I was used to.
There were trees, but they had no leaves that the non-existent wind could rustle.
The light was eerie, as if the whole place were cast in a perpetual twilight, but where the light was coming from, I had no idea.
The sky was a dull black with no moon or stars. There were no streetlamps, and we didn't cast any shadows.
It made everything seem more fake. No light and no shadow, making everything seem two-dimensional.
The street seemed deserted, but I knew better than letting my guard down. We all did.
As we started moving, I noticed that it wasn't just the streetlamps that were missing. It was everything iron.
Actually, it was anything that could hurt the ghosts even a little bit.
No iron fences, no dried out lavender bushes, none of the little fountains that some people had in their gardens to have water running across them.
Not even the little silver trinkets some people had hanging in their windows.
We moved as a unit, back-to-back, inching our way towards the Strand.
At this rate it would take us days to reach the place, but who knew – time moved different here if Lucy and Tony were to be believed.
My breathing hitched when I saw the first ghost.
It was right at the bottom of Portland Row, standing in the doorway, looking at us seemingly impassive. There was a hunger though, in those unseeing eyes and I gripped my rapier tighter.
"Let's keep moving, shall we?" Tony suggested and no one argued against him.
The streets were cracked with frost. Some places the cracks were more than a foot across.
It made me wonder how things even appeared here. Who had even paved the roads to begin with? How long ago?
I had a feeling that dwelling with that sort of questions would only give me a headache.
On the plus side, I was starting to feel slightly better as we went along.
The wound in my side didn't bite quite as much and by the time we reached [insert street] it had dulled to a slight twinge, and I figured that it had probably been the hit that had gotten to me previously.
Walking about certainly wasn't fun, but it had become manageable.
Cubbins wasn't doing too well though and the others seemed a bit out of breath.
"Maybe we should take a break," I suggested.
Immediately, Lucy was at my side with a worried frown.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. I'm more worried about you lot actually. Cubbins looks like he could turn into custard at any moment right now," I pointed out.
Cubbins flipped me the bird, but it lost some of its effect as he had been leaning over with his hands on his knees and sounded like an asthmatic walrus.
Meanwhile, the injury to my side had dulled to a throb.
We hunkered down near a small shop with a cracked window to catch our breaths.
Holly, Cubbins, and Lucy were sitting on the sidewalk and Tony stood, leaning against the wall with a concerned frown.
"Where are they all at?" he asked distractedly.
Holly looked at him with confusion. "Who?"
"The ghosts. We're half a mile and a bit from the Strand but we're still in the city centre. It should be crawling with ghosts. We should have been fighting nonstop. With as many as we are, we're leaving quite a vapour trail behind us."
Indeed, a thick mist was hanging in the air where we'd been, but I had a hard time seeing the big issue right then and there.
I scoffed a bit. "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Tony. If we had been fighting until now, we wouldn't have made it this far."
He conceded my point with an uncertain nod.
"Let's get moving," Lucy prompted, changing the subject. "We're getting drained by this place and resting isn't doing much. Let's just push through this last leg and we can rest once we're out."
"Sure. There's going to be plenty of rest when they kill us once we come out at Fittes," Cubbins remarked, and Lucy gave him a shove.
He staggered a bit when he managed to stand, but I steadied him before he could fall on his face, much to my own surprise.
Wordlessly, we got moving.
We were slowly closing in, which was certainly a good thing. Noise had started filtering through the hood of my cape.
The frost that had gathered on the capes sounded almost like urgent, whispers coming from all sides, layered over a crunching sound.
If no ghost showed up, there was still a high probability of succumbing to the cold.
Once, at school I had seen an experiment. My teacher dipped an orange into liquid nitrogen and dropped it on the floor where it had shattered into a hundred pieces.
I couldn't help the morbid thought that maybe that was how we would end up if we stayed here.
Shattered into pieces with body parts strewn all over the streets of a dead city.
I wrinkled my nose at the mental image.
Sometimes my brain really hated me.
Nonetheless, I pushed harder which ended with me at the front of the group which unfortunately put me first in line to the bizarre vision we stumbled upon at the intersection between Bow Street and Exeter Street.
"What are they?" Holly whispered.
It was bizarre, but strangely beautiful.
Like an opening into another dimension. There was a silver fence around it that felt wrong somehow, and ghosts were congregated around it.
"It's some kind of portal," I vaguely registered someone saying.
It made my head feel strangely light and a buzzing sound filled my ears, drowning out whatever the others were saying.
It felt irrelevant.
Looking at the portal made me feel slightly warmer.
Safer.
I hadn't even noticed that I had started walking until Tony grabbed my arm.
"What are you doing, Quill?" he asked me with a shrewd look.
I shook my head to get rid of the buzzing.
"I – I don't know," I tried, not quite knowing how to describe the weird longing feeling it gave me. "Let's just move on," I suggested.
He gave me a sceptical look but nodded and we started moving.
I felt myself dragging my feet though and I kept looking back.