Noah swallowed, summoned her courage, and allowed the power of the labyrinth to infuse her.
Grace rose from her bed, and nurses started back, shocked.
She stumbled, clutching to the back of a chair for support. “Damn these legs!” she said. Grace’s face tightened in concentration and her form seemed to glow for an instant, then she straightened and, although still weak and uncertain on her feet, was nonetheless stronger than she had been a moment ago.
She looked at the nurses. “Can you help me? If someone could take out this feeding tube from my nose…and I need a coat, and perhaps some shoes, and I need to get to St Paul’s very, very quickly. Does anyone have a car?”
The ward sister, a marvellously stern woman called Sister Marr, had experienced many crises and challenges during almost forty working years on the wards of St Bart’s and, although slightly put out by the girl’s apparently miraculous recovery, was determined not to let the strangeness of the request unsettle her before the junior nurses.
After all, a lifetime’s reputation was at stake.
“Is this absolutely necessary, Miss Orr?” Sister Marr said.
“Absolutely vital,” Grace said.
“Well then,” Sister Marr said, “I do not have a car, but I can requisition an ambulance for you.” She looked Grace up and down. “After all, you still look as if you need it.”
Grace smiled, so sweetly it took the nurses’ breath away.
“Sister Marr,” she said, “you are a saint.”
They danced about the perimeter of the labyrinth, their movements graceful yet charged with a powerful sexuality. About them, unknowing, the congregation sang a hymn, and the slow, measured beat of the hymn penetrated into the magic surrounding Jack and Noah, and they danced to its rhythms and tempo.
The golden bands about Jack’s arms glittered as his arms moved slowly through the dance, his face kept turned to Noah.
He kept hold of the dance and the labyrinthine power which consumed him only with the most extreme effort. The lack of the final two bands was beginning to exhaust Jack, and he could feel, flickering at the edges of his consciousness, a dark and hungry presence.
As Noah danced, she allowed single flowers to fall from the posy she carried, and they drifted here and there about the labyrinth, apparently falling at random, yet somehow forming a pattern all of their own.
Something sinister started to rise from the dark heart of the labyrinth.
Sister Marr sat in the back of the ambulance and stared at the girl who sat opposite her. Someone had found her an ancient hound’s-tooth check coat, and she had it wrapped tight about her body.
The coat was meant for a large man, and it was so bulky about Grace Orr that it highlighted, rather than hid, her painful thinness.
No one had been able to find shoes to fit the girl, and so her legs emerged from under the hem of the coat like white, knobbly sticks, her bare feet overly large for her skeletal limbs.
Every so often the ambulance rocked as it rounded a corner, and Grace had to brace herself against the partition that divided the driver’s cab from the back of the vehicle.
“Who the hell are you, Grace Orr?” said Sister Marr.
The girl smiled, and Marr was struck by how lovely her face was, despite being crowned by a head of hair that had been terribly decimated by the surgery on her skull.
“I am the White Queen’s sister,” she said.
The flowers that Noah had scattered about the labyrinth began to move, sliding towards the entrance. Jack and Noah continued their dance, but now they were approaching each other, gravitating, like the flowers, towards the entrance to the labyrinth.
As they came to within ten paces of the entrance, the flowers rose one by one, weaving themselves into the form of a gate.
And as the Flower Gate rose, so the darkness at the heart of the labyrinth slid along the labyrinth’s paths, towards the gate.
The ambulance drew to a halt outside the west door of St Paul’s, and Sister Marr asked Grace if she needed help.
Grace smiled again. “You have already been a wonderful aid, Sister Marr. Thank you.”
And then she was gone into the evening gloom, hobbling slowly on bare feet up the steps towards the doors, the coat clutched about her.
Noah looked at Jack with desperate eyes. The Dance of the Flowers was almost done, the Flower Gate within a few inches of being completed, and something loathsome approached from the dark heart of the labyrinth. This was to be expected…to a point. The entire purpose of a Game was to protect a city from evil by trapping such evil within the heart of the labyrinth. When the Game was opened, it began to attract the evil that naturally gravitates to the life and vibrancy of any city into its heart. Then, when the Game was closed with the Flower Gate, the evil would be trapped within the labyrinth for eternity—or so long as the Game lasted. During the final Dance of the Flowers, when the Kingman and Mistress of the Labyrinth raised the Flower Gate, Noah knew that it was to be expected that the evil within the dark heart should panic and try to escape.
But it shouldn’t be able to escape very far from the dark heart through the corridors of the labyrinth, and it most certainly shouldn’t, as this creeping darkness was, be inching closer and closer to the entrance.
Already tense, Noah began to feel panic chip away at the edges of what little composure she retained.
Jack? Jack? What is happening?
The Sunday Evensong congregation watched, incredulous, as the thin, battered girl with ragged hair and dressed only in a hound’s-tooth coat shuffled on precarious legs up the centre aisle of the nave.
She was looking intently at the space under the dome, a frown on her face, and the further she advanced up the aisle, the faster became her pace.
And the more precarious. Several people half rose from their seats as the girl occasionally stumbled and almost fell. But as she regained her balance, they sank down again.
In his pulpit, the reverend delivering the sermon stopped speaking and stared over the rims of his spectacles, mouth agape.
No one thought to stop her.
“Jack?” Noah whispered. “Jack?”
He didn’t respond. He was staring through the weave of the gate towards the approaching miasma of evil, and his face was grey and pale, as if he was holding onto life by a mere breath.
That evil is coming for him! thought Noah. Jack was vulnerable without the final two bands, and the rising blackness knew it.
The Flower Gate was almost complete, the final five or six flowers now slowly raising themselves from the floor towards the top bar of the gate.
As they did so the creeping evil reached the gate where it seethed momentarily as if confounded, then formed itself into a gigantic hand that reached slowly, slowly, for the handle of the gate.
“Jack!” Noah screamed.
The girl reached the marble floor under the dome. Her face was now screwed up in such tight concentration that her eyes had virtually vanished. One hand was still clutched desperately in her coat, holding it against her, the other reached forward, as if for salvation.
She took another step forward, then another, tottering badly, then she reached out her hand and brought it down as if on someone’s shoulder, saying in a tone as clear as a temple bell on a snowy night, “Jack. Don’t. Stop this now.”
And then all hell broke loose under the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
NINE
London
Sunday, 29th December, 1940
At first Noah wasn’t sure what had happened. Jack suddenly reeled back, as if someone had grabbed him from behind.
Jack. Don’t. Stop this now.
Simultaneously the enchantment of the Dance of the Flowers was broken as Noah and Jack lost all concentration, and the gate collapsed into a tangled heap of flowers scattered over the floor of the cathedral.
As the Flower Gate crumbled, the huge black hand that had hovered behind it closed momentarily into a fist, then leaped forward, past the heap of flowers, towards where Jack was only just managing to regain his balance.
Then Noah saw the pathetic figure that stood behind Jack, and she shouted out with all her strength, “Grace! Grace! Get back!”
Jack reeled around, only realising at Noah’s shout that someone stood beside him. His eyes widened—Grace!
“Hello, Jack,” she said softly.
He started to lift a hand, reaching for her, but before he could touch her, before he could say anything, before he could even smile at her, the black hand that had emerged from the heart of the labyrinth lunged forward and grabbed Grace, fully enclosing her in its massive maw.
There was a single moment when both Noah and Jack leaped for the hand, still hovering in the space between them, and then it was gone, Grace with it, and Jack and Noah found themselves standing on the marble floor under the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the entire Evensong congregation staring at them.