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The boy had had more than his usual share of questions, and the village bell had rung midnight in before Silas swept up into the black. He landed in a deserted quare just inside Streatham. He called no place home, but London was both more and less home than the graveyard and its belfrey; here, as everywhere, he was a stranger, but here everyone was a stranger.
He found the woman he was looking for in Mela's All-Knite Knitting Place (or possibly Palace), squeezed between a laundry and a shop that looked as though it would sell crystals and smell faintly of cannabis. The door of the Knitting Place was locked, though a dim shaft of light shone past the edge of the curtain. Silas rapped three sharp raps, and heard shuffling. A tiny bell tinkled as the door was flung open and a woman squinted out into the darkness, first right, then left, and finally up, into Silas's face.
"Oh, it's you," the woman said, giving a harsh slur to the words. "And who'm I speaking to, then?"
"I'm looking for a person who knows things," Silas said. That was her reputation, that she was 'the woman who knows things,' though Silas's source had had trouble explaining exactly what kinds of things she knew.
"A person who knits things, you mean," she said, and stepped back to let him in.
The shop was like the woman's hair, a forest of strings and tangles, and like her dress, a riot of color. Yarn hung from the low rafters and pooled in the floor and sat piled in skeins, soft and still as dozing guinea pigs.
The woman stomped up behind him. "What's your business, then?"
"It concerns a child--"
"Oh, the one in the graveyard," she said, nodding sagely. "You'll be needing to come this way." She trundled past and he followed her to an eye amidst the storm, a cleared space with two stuffed armchairs and a bushel basket between them. She plopped into one chair and nodded him toward the other. "Might have known you'd be coming," she said. She peered into the basket and selected a ball of yarn, gray and yielding as fog. "This lot came in last Tuesday, and I couldn't figure what to do with it." Then another, spidery black. "Tell me about the boy."
When he paused to collect his words, she suddenly grinned, lolling a purplish tongue from between stained teeth. "No one'll hear you. Promise." She flicked a hand to the yarn around them. "Catches the sounds of the world, you know. No buzzing gets out of this spider's web."
He began with the night Bod had come crawling through the graveyard gates into Mrs. Owens's arms, but the woman waved the account away. "Know all that. What about friends? He have friends?"
He told of the girl Scarlett, whose brief friendship with Bod he had only learned the details of after it was over. The woman's needles clicked as he talked.
"You dinnit approve of her," she said, stating a fact rather than asking a question.
"She was dangerous to the boy."
"World's a dangerous place." She eyed him from under whiskery eyebrows.
Silas would not be goaded by truisms. "Yes," he agreed.
"Got people like us in it."
"Yes," he said again, though his first glance had told him she was not of his kind, and he knew there was no member of the Guard of her description.
"Not monstrous people, though some'd say we were."
"Doubtless."
"You hungry?" she asked, eyes suddenly sparrow-bright. "Got some things I don't want anymore."
Few who knew what he was had ever cared to make the request, and few who'd want such a thing knew to ask. Still, it was not entirely unprecedented. "Dear lady," he said, allowing a hint of reproof in his voice to make up for what he didn't say, "whatever you want to be rid of, it shouldn't be given away lightly."
"Been remembering long enough, haven't I? Years and years. World's an ugly place--you know. You know what sorts of things happen to a girl when she's naive and fresh-born into things. Lot of nastiness. And then she goes years before she can even tell anyone about it, because it takes her that long to find someone who'll bind her a tongue to make up for the one that got stolen." She snorted down at her knitting. "Won't miss a bit of it."
"If you know what sustains me, you know also how it must be taken."
"Need me to be sleeping. But you can talk me to sleep. Can't you?" There was a bit of a little girl's uncertainty in her plea.
"Can you tell me what I wish to know?"
"Not sure yet." Needle clicked against needle. She smirked. "You dun't believe me. You dun't think I can help you, but you're careful, metic'lous. You never skip a step. That's no special knowing, mind--I can see it all over your face."
"Then you are careful yourself, and observant," he said. It had been many a long year since anyone has seen anything in his face; he was not convinced that she had now.
She paid no heed to the flattery. "You're his friend."
It was an inadequate word. It suggested schemes and laughing conversations and daylight. "I am his guardian."
"Caretaker," she mumbled, and then gave Silas a hard look. "He's not just some foreseen disruption in the way of things, you know."
"Isn't he," said Silas. What little of his attention had strayed was now collected again and entirely focused.
"He's a boy! Not just a walker between the live people and the dead. He dun't tiptoe that boundary, he scampers down it, hands pulling folk in from each side." She gave him another yellowed grin. "He'll cause no end of trouble to some folk."
"Indeed." It matched the hints and shadows of hints that he'd heard, but it gave them a form he didn't like.
"But he's still a boy," she said, as though answering his concerns--and perhaps she was. "You see you treat him like. He's got the dead, but they're not enough." She gave him a one-eyed squint, waiting.
He might have told her that he knew these things, that he'd worried more than a few nights over the life of a boy raised by ghosts. It was a good life, he thought, or promised to be, but it wasn't what he would have chosen. He might have told her about the late-night markets he visited, choosing the foods he'd seen live people choose, occasionally watching Bod eat them and enjoying the boy's pleasure in a new flavor or a rediscovered favorite. He might have said something about this chase he was on that seemed now to signify more than the safety of one small boy, although that safety had become a more personal concern than any he usually had for the Guard.
He might have, but he didn't, because he suspected she knew it all already, or enough of it to suit herself. Instead, because she was still giving him that glinty one-eyed stare, he nodded, the promise implicit.
Apparently satisfied, she grunted and glanced down in her lap. "Got it!" She lifted the handful of the soft gray stuff that she'd knitted, interlaced with stitches of black. "There's your answer."
"Oh?" The mass was shapeless, yielding him no clue. "I'm afraid you'll have to explain it to me."
She huffed a sigh. " 'Ere, take these two bottom corners, and pull."
He did, and, flattened, the black threads knitted into the gray were suddenly a pattern: a vast, bay-spanning bridge in a fog. He hadn't been there since shortly after it was constructed, but he recognized it still.
"That's where you oughta be looking," she said. "You'll find the next thing you want before you can say Jack Robinson. Jack Robinson," she repeated vaguely.
He was inclined to believe her. "Thank you, madam," he said. "You've been most helpful."
"Help me, then?" Again, uncertainty in her voice, pleading.
"Very well," he said, rising to stand beside her. "Close your eyes."
She did.
"It is late," he said softly. "No one is likely to bother you. You'd like to drift off for just a bit now." Slowly her hands relaxed in her lap. "You needn't remember this. You needn't remember me."
Her eyes snapped open. "You're not so alone as you think you are. You remember that, Silas."
For a moment they only gazed, one solitary figure to another. "He'll not forget you," she mumbled as her eyelids fell shut again. In a moment she began storing lightly.
While she slept the little death, Silas knelt before her chair and lifted her wrist to his lips. Teeth that an observer would have sworn were too dull for this work pierced the skin. With the first savor of blood came a sensation like an electric shock, and then all her waking and dreaming thought stretched before him. He threaded though a scape of memory quite as cluttered as the woman's shop, though some of the furnishings were worn beyond use or simply insubstantial with age.
It was in a far dark corner, like a cabinet with a broken lock, that he found what she wanted to forget. He saw lies, and imprisonment, and a tongue cut out and quivering on the tile. He saw her hands tell their first story, her own, though it had been woven then instead of knitted. He swallowed it all, and as he did the memories melted together, dissolved until they were no more than another night's meal.
He left her there, her arm resting on her knee and her skin whole again, her breath easy. He tucked the piece of yarnwork away and made his way to the front door again. He shut it behind him and gave it just a glimmer of Fading, so that no one would try it before she woke.
In his pocket were the Golden Gate Bridge and a name: Jack Robinson. There are other gates than this, he recalled saying once. The corners of his mouth lifted in something that couldn't be called a smile, was barely even an expression, but that would have convinced any sensible, ill-meaning person who saw it to turn around and spend the night peaceably in bed.
And then he was sliding skyward, back to the village and its graveyard, and the one small child to whom he was not, perhaps, quite so much a stranger.