CHAPTER 40

THE ALP IN THE ATTIC

The breath-stealer had made a bad mistake. It knew it as soon as it saw the man with the terrier for the second time. It looked out of the narrow garret window, jammed in beneath the dripping eaves of the high building, and saw him in the flat space between the mismatched roofs of the buildings below, searching among the pigeon coops by the light of a lantern. The coops were empty now, only feathers showing where the dead pigeons had been.

It was the light moving among the wet roof tiles that had caught the breath-stealer’s attention and raised it from the floor on which it had been resting as it listened to the sound of the woman breathing in her sleep and the baby gurgling in the cot across the room.

The breath-stealer should have moved further away: it knew that. It would have done so had it not been so weak on arrival in the city. It would not have been so enfeebled had it not been forced to take such a circuitous route to get there from its home in the high forests fringing the high karst plateau known to the local Austrian valley dwellers as das Steinerne Meer, the Stony Sea. Travelling from the Berchtesgaden mountains to the real sea had not been hard, but the boat it had hidden on had been held up for so long, first by contrary winds in the Kattegat and then by not one but two unseasonal storms in the North Sea, that by the time it entered the Pool of London and took its place amidst the bewildering multitude of other cargo ships, the Alp was exhausted.

“Alp” was the name given to its kind in the folklore of its native forests, Alp not only being a word for the adjacent limestone peaks, but also being the old word for the male variety of mara: like the mara it was a night-rider, an incubus who took the strength from sleeping beings by pressing on them.

It was not, however, the insubstantial spirit that folklore would have it: the Alp was flesh and blood and entirely human in shape if not habit. That shape was, like its face and hair, entirely unremarkable: in fact it was so unremarkable as to be instantly forgettable. It was of middling height, mild and regular featured, hair not quite dark and not especially fair. There was a faint greyness to its skin but nothing too striking, and its age was indeterminate, as was its sex. It could have been a youngish man or a slightly older woman. Though it was dressed in man’s clothing, its hair was long enough to overhang its ears; it was what would have been called a “twixter” on the streets below, had anyone on those streets noticed or remembered it for long enough.

When weak and as debilitatingly reduced in power as it had been on arrival in London, it was its habit to recoup its vitality by preying on small animals and birds, building its strength by taking their breaths for its own before moving on to larger hosts. There was a particular intense, distilled quality in the final exhalation of a dying creature which it especially prized, which explained the coops full of dead pigeons. As the Alp watched Hodge and Jed move among the empty coops, it remembered the dry snap and pop of the pigeons’ breastbones as it had pressed the life out of them, forcing the small lungs to empty their essence into its mouth, between the lips it held clamped over their struggling beaks. It had glutted itself on last breaths, and should then have gone far away to rest and let their power restore it to its usual state of health.

Instead it had heard the baby cry in the attic opposite and seen the woman move across the window to comfort it, and so had decided to lie up with her. Waiting until the penny candle had been extinguished, it had used a fair portion of its newly acquired vitality to leap across the courtyard and swing itself up the building and into the room. It had sung quietly as it stepped over the window, a low wordless tune which was calming and soporific and unworldly in equal measures.

The woman had stirred a little in her sleep as it had climbed onto the horsehair mattress, but its hands had soothed her by stroking her face as it knelt carefully on her chest and concentrated on making itself heavier and heavier until her breath began to become ragged, at which point it had clamped its mouth over hers and inhaled. It freed her mouth to allow her to inhale, but bent and sucked every third exhalation. As it did so it felt strength returning, and though her eyes opened and stared sightlessly at it, like someone in a drug-fogged waking slumber, its own eyes were twisted sideways, fixed on the surprisingly plump baby in the cradle across the room.

Youngest breaths were the purest breaths, and it watched it with the greed of a gourmand at a feast, saving the most delicious sweetmeat until the end.

The woman had remained in a comatose state for two days, days during which the Alp had regained its strength from her exhalations, and stopped the baby from crying by taking it from the cot and allowing it to latch on to its mother’s breast at the first sign of hunger. Like any parasite, the Alp knew its own survival relied on keeping its hosts healthy–at least until it was time to move on to new ones.

It had known it would have to move eventually, for it had not come to London unbidden or upon a whim. It had been sent for, but it would have failed in its purpose had it presented itself to its client in anything less than the full measure of its strength. But it had certainly made the mistake of sleeping too close to where it fed, and it would now have to move.

It began to sing its low lullaby under its breath as it turned back to the room. But this time its light steps did not take it to the bed.

It wetted its lips and walked towards the cot.

Hodge let Jed sniff his way around the perimeter of the roof. He could see the dog was on to something.

“Where’d it go, boy?” he said. “What you got?”

Jed scrabbled up the wet slope of the roof and stood with his front paws on the ridge, his nose searching the breeze.

“Stops there, does it?” said Hodge. “Can’t be, ’less it flew off, whatever it was.”

Jed’s back suddenly stiffened and his tail went straight and quivery. Hodge lowered himself so he could follow the dog’s eyeline towards the gaunt building overhanging the roof trough they were standing in.

He was still trying to make out what the dog was looking at in the small windows under the eaves when he heard the woman scream.