The Watchtower

him his seat back, Will got in the carriage on the road side, shooting the black bird another glance as he did so. Fifty feet across, he guessed, though if so, that made it likelier apparition than bird. He felt the unnerving sense, as he ascended the steps, that the bird’s moon shadow was concentrated on him. As if a living being could concentrate its shadow by will, the way a magnifying glass could concentrate the sun’s rays to set a twig aflame. To what purpose, he couldn’t fathom. But he hurried the final few steps into the carriage’s shelter, bothered by the image of fire. He could only imagine what sort of fire the bird’s shadow might set: maybe dark silver in color, and with flames that felt like ice!
    Upon reentering the carriage, Will was struck by an odor that hadn’t been in it before. At first it was not unpleasant, a smell of singed roses as if a garden had caught on fire, a domesticated scent with a flavor of the savage. But a hint of ash threaded through the scent soon became sulfurous, and this mix of the fragrant with the foul was oppressive. Will began to breathe through his mouth, then became aware of a proferred hand above his lap. He turned to the newcomer, who was smiling affably enough, and took the man’s hand, but in that instant, strange things started to happen to the hand he took. The flesh seemed to peel away to a shimmer of delicate bones, the spaces between them glowing, and in the moments before Will fearfully withdrew his hand, he thought he was grasping whirls of tiny motion, not even bones left, spinning orbits colliding with his own with little zings of electric shock. That gave his own hand a buzzing, painful sensation, even as it then recoiled away from the newcomer’s.
    As if his atomsight had now become atomtouch! But then the sensation trailed away and the newcomer’s hand, to appearances, returned to flesh.
    All of it had happened so swiftly … but he had looked down and seen his hand holding virtually nothing, he was sure of it—not even the veneer of a hand, just its atoms—before he pulled away with a shudder.
    “Charles Roget,” the newcomer identified himself.
    “Will Hughes,” Will said softly. The man’s name was French, but the accent was peculiar—more Italian than French—and contained a trace of mockery. Mockery, perhaps, of Will’s fear. Only a fiend would mock so, Will reflected. That didn’t mean he wasn’t sitting next to one.
    They rode on, the occasional lit dwelling becoming more frequent, indicating London’s dawning proximity.
    Then Roget snapped his fingers as if he’d forgotten something, leaned forward in his seat, and said casually to Will, “Charles Roget’s my Christian name, but in the street they call me Lightning Hands.”
    Will was in no mood for repartee. But, fearing that even no response might incite the man to chatter, he turned toward him and murmured listlessly, “Is that so?”
    “If it weren’t so, why would I say it?” Roget answered sharply. He leaned forward farther, flapped his arms forward, and his hands over his knees, then splayed the fingers on both hands downward toward the carriage floor. The finger splaying was done with profound slowness, as if it carried some hidden meaning. Will gazed at him wonderingly, then Roget snapped his fingers and tiny, iridescent lightning bolts flamed downward from his fingertips and scorched a small area of the carriage’s lavender-carpeted floor, turning it a pink-tinted ash black that the subsequent bolts further illumined, reminding Will of the ash-tainted rose smell earlier.
    Will felt a strong urge to fling open the door and hurl himself out of the carriage while it was in motion. He’d hit the ground rolling, he imagined, and—
    Roget put a lank left arm around Will’s shoulders in a comradely way that was the faintest bit improper and brought Will closer to him. “I’ve spent decades studying the ways of lightning,” he said confidentially—as if Will were his oldest friend. “In them lie the secrets to many of the world’s ills, I believe. Disease, pestilence, decay—why perhaps even to that final ill—death. I believe that in the power of lightning might lie the secret of immortality. Would that be of interest to you, young sir? Immortality? Now that would be a true miracle, wouldn’t it?”
    “ Miracle is a word I associate with heaven. And our Savior. I’m not sure you’re using it correctly. What you speak of sounds like the work of