The Book of Dead Days

by Marcus Sedgwick

  “Do you think it’s strange to risk so much?”

  Neither Boy nor Willow answered.

  “I was blind. Love had made me blind, and I thought a night—even an hour with her would be enough. And I was arrogant, and certain that in fifteen years I would find a way out of the pact. How clever I was then! How stupid!

  “As the years passed I grew older and wiser and doubt began to grow. I had spent all my money, and never again will I summon those powers to help me get more.”

  Willow was about to ask Valerian the woman’s name, but Boy spoke first.

  “And Kepler’s been helping you find a way out?”

  Valerian nodded.

  “So why didn’t you ask him for help sooner? Why wait until the last few years?”

  Valerian spoke to Boy, but his gaze went right through him.

  “Kepler and I had fallen out at the time of my making the pact. We . . . disagreed over something. We did not see each other for maybe ten years. But many things can be forgiven in time, and when I went to see him again he agreed to help me find the book.”

  “What did you disagree about?” Boy asked.

  A shadow crossed Valerian’s face. He chose to ignore this question, but some intuition told Willow it had something to do with the woman.

  “My time is up,” he said. “My only chance lies with the book. I had heard of it, and when I told Kepler about it he spent many months finding out about it. His knowledge of ancient libraries is second to none. He gathered references to the book—a mention here, half a line there—until we learnt that if it still existed, it was probably in our very own City. Then we truly began to believe we might actually find the thing itself.

  “It is a book full of such ancient and powerful knowledge that we believe it contains some spell or other way of breaking the contract I am under. Kepler firmly believes that it contains the answer. From his researches he discovered that it is not just pages with writing, information to be learnt, the mundane and the extraordinary. No, it is more than that. Kepler believes that the book is itself a magical device, and each person who looks into it learns something different—something about only themselves, the thing uppermost in their mind, the thing they most want to know . . .

  “For five years we have been tracking it down. About a year ago we thought we had it. We were mistaken. Then a few months ago it was promised to us, and again we were tricked. Across the years many people have struggled to claim possession of it.

  “I was relying on things happening more quickly than they have, but maybe there is still time. Maybe. Kepler was sure it would yield an answer. And despite . . . the things that occurred between us, he is my one salvation in all this.”

  He broke off.

  Willow watched him.

  “Valerian?” she asked, brushing more flakes of snow from her hair.

  “What?” His voice was faint.

  “The woman. The woman you did it all for. What happened to her?”

  Valerian lifted his head and his cold stare ran straight through Willow.

  “She?” he said. “She . . . rejected me. Despite the enchantment, somehow she still rejected me. I never saw her again.”

  There was silence.

  Willow still wanted to know her name, but could not bring herself to speak. Boy wondered how someone could risk so much, face such horrors, enter such a pact, all for someone who would cast them away, but Willow, looking at Boy, could feel differently.

  To risk everything for someone—that was something she understood.

  “Boy,” she said, quietly, “I’m cold.”

  “Come here,” he said, and put his arm around her.

  8

  Silence fell over them as the cart plowed on through the snowbound forest.

  Boy felt a mixture of emotions, and none of them good—fear, horror, sadness, hopelessness. Willow felt pity, and dread.

  And Valerian? Who knows what deep and dangerous thoughts ran through his disturbed mind?

  Dead to everything around them, they plodded on through mile after mile of snow-laden silver birch forests. Dimly, it seemed to Boy impossible that there could be so many trees and that it could snow for so long. And yet the trees went on forever and so did the snow.

  Willow kept a firm grip on the blanket spread across them. The rhythmic stagger of the cart lulled Boy into a half-sleep, in which the waking world and his troubled imagination fought for control. He plunged into a bizarre sequence of mind-pictures in which he was back in his favorite kind of place: a small, confined darkness. Yet there was horror somewhere nearby, something that wanted to be bad to him. He scurried deeper into the cramped black spaces until he felt safer only to feel the hunting presence coming closer and closer once more. In his perverse dreamworld he could feel himself being pulled further away from himself, until at last there was an answer and he became the small dark space himself, and in doing so was free.

  And Valerian?

  There was nothing. He slept as they went on through the paper-white trees, and the soft, deathly snow.

  And yet . . . and yet, then there came the end to the trees.

  Dusk was only an hour or so away when they emerged from the forest at last. Far off in the distance stood a wretched little village.

  “Linden!” The driver spat.

  Then, in a cracked and bleak voice, he began to sing, rousing them from their fitful sleep.

  “In the morning you should think

  You might not last unto the night,

  In the evening you should think

  You might not last unto the morn.

  So dance, my dears, dance,

  Before you take the dark flight down.”

  As he finished his dirge, they pulled into Linden. It was just a handful of houses, an old water mill and the odd barn. For some reason, however, it had an imposing and ancient church that towered in the dusk like a manmade mountain of cut stone.

  There, past a rickety fence, lay their goal—the churchyard.

  The driver pulled the horse to a stop.

  “We shouldn’t need long,” Valerian said to him.

  “I don’t care how long you need,” said the driver. “We can’t go back tonight.”

  He got down and started to unhitch the horse from the cart.

  Valerian turned to argue, but the old man cut him off.

  “If you don’t get out of there before it’s unhitched you’ll fall off,” he grunted. “And by the look of your arm I don’t think you’d want that.”

  Defeated, Valerian scrambled down, grimacing with pain as he reached the ground.

  “Is it getting worse?” asked Willow.

  “Do you have any left?” asked Boy, and Valerian pulled a final, somewhat larger bottle of Kepler’s magic drug from his pocket.

  “That’s all,” he said forlornly. He turned to the driver, who was leading his horse over to one of the barns.

  “Where are we to stay, then?”

  The driver didn’t look back as he called, “You should have thought of that before you set out.”

  He led the horse into the barn and the door closed. There was a time, Boy knew, not too long ago, when Valerian would have fought the driver, compelled him to do his bidding. But now Valerian was broken, nearly spent.

  They looked around the village. Even in the fading light they could see it all from where they stood.

  There were three houses, each standing by itself on a patch of land with a low wooden fence. Each had a variety of little shacks and outhouses clustered behind it, and vegetable gardens that ran down to where the fields proper started.

  There was the water mill. It had a large millpond upstream, frozen solid and now covered in snow as well. The entire millrace seemed to be frozen, though water must have been moving underneath the icy surface. The wheel was still frozen fast, and long fingers of icicles hung down from the blades that in summer would have ducked powerfully into the water.

  There were two large barns, into one of which the coach
driver had vanished with his horse. The other was a little smaller. And there was the church.

  There was no one around, though they could see firelight inside some of the windows and could hear the sounds of a village preparing to rest at the end of a winter’s day. A dog barked behind one of the houses. A rickety door slammed. They felt utterly alone.

  “I don’t like the countryside,” said Willow.

  “Hmm,” said Valerian. “It can be a little . . . quiet.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Boy. “Where are we going to sleep?”

  “We’re not,” said Valerian. “The first thing to do is find what we came here for—the book. Then we’ll get a horse and take ourselves back.”

  “You mean . . . steal one?” asked Willow.

  “If we have to,” said Valerian. “I’ll be damned if I spend the night in this hole.”

  He realized the other meaning of his words and fell silent.

  9

  It did not go well.

  They made their way to the churchyard.

  “We’ll need to find a spade,” said Valerian. “There’ll be something in the mill. . . .”

  He tripped and fell forward, landing on his knees.

  Willow and Boy knelt beside him.

  “Don’t fuss!” he snapped, and they jumped back.

  He struggled to his feet, but this time when Boy and Willow each put a hand out to help him, he did not argue.

  They staggered to the churchyard, where they leant Valerian against the wall on a low buttress that ran around the outside.

  He shook his head.

  “You’ll have to do it,” he whispered. He drank the first of his last bottle and pulled a face. “You two will have to do it.”

  Boy and Willow looked at each other.

  “Dammit!” cried Valerian. “I can’t move for pain. I can’t walk and I certainly won’t be able to dig. You’ll have to do it.”

  They nodded in unison.

  “Boy! Go to the mill. They must have some sort of shovel for moving the corn. Girl! Start looking. Remember, Gad Beebe is the—”

  “Of course I remember,” said Willow. “I found the name for you!”

  She glared at Valerian, who hung his head. He lifted his hand and waved them feebly away.

  “Come on,” said Boy quietly.

  The light was failing fast but there was just enough to see the names on the gravestones, though Willow had to scrape the snow off a few of them to be able to read the name of the grave’s occupant.

  Before Boy returned with the spade, Willow had made a full circuit of all the stones in the small yard.

  Boy found her standing in a far corner of the graveyard.

  “Which one is it?” he asked, clutching a long-handled wooden spade.

  She shook her head.

  “He’s got it wrong,” she said. “It’s none of them.” Boy stared at her.

  “I’m too afraid to tell him.”

  “You must be wrong. Let’s have another look.”

  “Boy—”

  “We can’t tell him that,” said Boy. He looked over at Valerian slumped against the wall of the church. “Let’s have another look.”

  Boy felt a strange sense come over him as they searched the stones. A sense of being outside himself, of not needing to be there in the snowy village deep in the countryside. Yes, he was cold and hungry and miserable, but it was something more than that. It felt as if he was in the wrong place, going the wrong way.

  Though they searched the graveyard until the light was nearly gone, Gad Beebe’s last resting place was not to be found.

  When they got back to Valerian the snow had stopped but it was very, very cold. He looked old and on the point of freezing.

  His eyes read their faces as they approached and they were spared the job of having to tell him.

  “He’s not there, is he,” Valerian said. His head dropped.

  Boy, still clutching the spade, opened his mouth.

  “Don’t say ‘What are we going to do?’,” Valerian said without looking up, “because I don’t know.”

  “We need to get inside somewhere,” said Willow.

  “Yes,” Boy said. “Let’s get inside somewhere.”

  “What about the church?” suggested Willow.

  “Very well,” said Valerian hoarsely. “Help me up.”

  Gratefully, Boy and Willow pulled and levered Valerian into a standing position. It seemed that his legs had practically frozen solid where he leant against the church. Boy put the spade under his arm for him to use as a crutch, and they crept slowly forward.

  Once again they staggered through the graveyard, taking the path to the church door. It was not locked and they pulled Valerian out of the bitter, biting wind.

  The heavy oak door swung behind them, pulled shut by a counterweight. A massive church silence descended.

  They settled Valerian on a pew at the side of the aisle. There were candles burning all around the altar and in other alcoves. Having been lit for the festival, they would be kept alight for twelve days. Willow was mightily glad to see them.

  “Come on,” she said to Boy, and started to collect them two at a time. They took about two dozen thick and tall goose-white candles back to where Valerian lay on the pew, and placed them on the flagstones in front of him. The effect of the flames from the tallow candles was impressive, like a small fire, and slowly Valerian came back to life.

  Using the spade as a prop he pushed himself upright, until he was sitting more or less vertically on the pew.

  “Well,” he said, “let me ask you two a question. What are we going to do now?”

  “Don’t joke,” said Willow.

  “I’m not,” said Valerian. “Everything I have tried has failed. I have been foiled at every twist and turn. All my decisions have turned out badly and now we are sitting in a freezing church in the middle of nowhere with no way of getting home and even if we did . . . my prospects are not good. So, I think that you may as well decide what we do next.”

  What is there to do? thought Boy miserably.

  “We ought to find something to eat,” he said. “We could ask at one of the houses. The driver must be staying in one of them. Maybe he’ll help us.”

  “Him?” said Valerian. “That swine!”

  “Well,” said Willow, “we can’t just sit here.”

  She looked at Valerian, who was staring into space behind her head.

  “Non omnem videt molitor aquam molam praeterfluentem!” he said.

  “Valerian!” Boy cried. “Stop it! You’re scaring me!”

  But Valerian rose to his feet and pointed at the wall. “ Non omnem videt molitor aquam molam praeterfluentem!”

  “Stop it!” Boy shouted.

  “No! Look! Non omnem videt molitor aquam molam praeterfluentem. ‘The miller sees not all the water that goes by his mill.’ Willow and I have seen that before!”

  There on the wall behind them was a huge shield, a coat of arms, painted onto the stone. Its central image was a waterwheel, just like the sort frozen solid in the winter’s night outside the churchyard. Emblazoned across the top was the motto Valerian had read.

  “Look!” said Willow. “There!” She ran over and pointed to the name beneath the crest.

  William Beebe.

  “Beebe! This is his family crest!” said Valerian. “It must have been a wealthy family. He’s not buried outside at all. He’s in here somewhere! Look! There’s another!”

  He pointed.

  A little farther down was the same coat of arms, with another name. Daniel Hawthorn Beebe.

  “Quick!” Valerian cried, his strength miraculously returning. “Quick!”

  But Boy was already scampering down the church.

  Joseph and Sophia Beebe.

  John Israel Beebe.

  And then, there it was.

  Gad Beebe.

  “Here!” called Boy. “It’s here!”

  Willow ran to him, Valerian not far behind.
r />   “I can’t believe it!” said Valerian. “He really exists! Or he did exist, anyway. To see the name, written!”

  “But where is he?” asked Boy. “He can’t be in the wall.”

  Valerian turned and looked down at Boy, pulling one of his most devilish smiles. Then he raised a finger in front of boy’s face and turned it slowly so it pointed straight at where Boy was standing.

  “Indeed,” he said. “He’s under your feet.”

  Boy shrieked and jumped back. By the light from Willow’s candle they could see an inscribed stone in the floor.

  “Fetch that spade, will you, Boy?” said Valerian. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Boy brought the spade over.

  “When was he—you know—put here?” he said.

  “I have no idea,” said Valerian. “Why?”

  “Well, I was wondering what sort of—what we might find.”

  “Ah! Well, let’s have a look at the date.”

  Valerian knelt down, wincing as he did so.

  “Bring that candle a little closer, will you? Good. Now. There we are. Years ago, so no need to worry. It won’t be too foul. Anyway, it’s the book I’m after, not the man.”

  Still Boy dithered.

  “Get on with it,” said Valerian icily.

  Boy shoved the tip of the spade along the crack between the stone with Beebe’s inscription and its neighbor. He levered it back and pulled. He went flying backward as the spade splintered on the stone, which had not moved.

  Boy picked himself up.

  “Are you all right?” Willow asked.

  “Never mind him,” said Valerian. “We’ll have to find something else to prize it up. Quick. Someone could come at any time.”

  They found a tall, heavy candlestick, its massive spike exposed when Willow removed one of the candles.

  Putting the metal spike into the crevice, Boy and Willow both leant on it with all their weight. There wasn’t as much leverage as with the spade, but the candlestick was strong, and with a sudden lurch the slab lifted an inch or two.

  “Quick!” said Valerian. “Get something under there!”