The Book of Dead Days

by Marcus Sedgwick

  With his foot Boy slid the handle of the spade under the flag.

  Still cold, and not having eaten since leaving the City, everything they did now exhausted them. They rested for a moment, panting after the exertion.

  “What are you waiting for?” Valerian growled. “Get on with it!”

  Wearily, they lifted the candlestick and shoved the top end as far as it would go under the small space they’d created.

  Again they pushed down and the slab lifted some more.

  “Lean to the side,” ordered Valerian, and they did. The slab rolled along the top of the candlestick and away from the hole. Repeating this motion a couple more times freed the stone completely.

  “Now dig,” said Valerian, pointing at the patch of earth they had exposed.

  Boy picked up the broken spade. Most of its face was still usable and he began to lift out the earth.

  It came away surprisingly easily, and before even a few minutes had passed the spade hit the top of something else wooden.

  Valerian could hardly contain his frustration. He hovered by the hole, grunting and cursing as Boy and Willow pulled at the dirt with their bare hands.

  “Why do we always end up doing this?” muttered Willow as she and Boy once again scraped in grave soil.

  “Shut up and dig,” said Boy.

  And then it was done. They had exposed the surface of the coffin.

  “Oh no!” said Boy. “Not again!”

  “What is it?” asked Valerian, his voice tense.

  “The box is broken.”

  He leant down and with one hand was able to pull up the top section of coffin lid. Just like the one in which Valerian had nearly met his end, the top third of the lid had been broken, snapped off to leave a jagged edge of flimsy wood.

  Boy threw the wood to one side and looked into the hole. Willow gasped. Inside lay a skeleton, mostly clean. Mostly.

  Its arms were folded across the tatters and rags of its chest.

  And that was all. There was no book.

  “It can’t be!” cried Valerian. “Look further in! At the feet!”

  Boy didn’t move. He looked down at the skeleton and knew he could not make himself get that close to it.

  “Do it!” shouted Valerian.

  “I—I—” Boy stammered. “I can’t.”

  Valerian kicked the candlestick hard so it skittered away into some pews.

  “I’ll do it,” said Willow. She held up a candle and peered into the depths of the grave.

  She stood up. “Nothing.”

  “Tricked!” Valerian said bitterly. “Yes. Yes. This looks rather like a dead end.”

  10

  “Can’t you just run away somewhere?” asked Boy. “Hide? Until after New Year’s?”

  “If only it were that simple,” said Valerian, “I would already be on the other side of the world. The force with which I made my pact transcends time and space. It will come for me wherever I am on New Year’s Eve. The day after tomorrow.”

  They were sitting in the church, by the candles, trying to keep warm.

  “But there is something,” said Valerian suddenly. “How could I have forgotten . . . the motto? The Beebe family motto! Willow, I said we have we seen it before! Where?”

  “At Kepler’s house. In the basement. But why?”

  Valerian stood up.

  “Why?” he said slowly. “Because Kepler must have known about Gad Beebe. He knew about his family motto. Perhaps he already has the book! Come!”

  “What?” cried Boy. “Where?”

  “Back to the City. To find Kepler. We must find him! He knows something. Find him and we may find the book.”

  “Do you think he was here?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so, but he knew about Gad Beebe. Now we just have to work out where he’s gone.”

  “But how will we get back?” asked Willow.

  As she spoke the clock in the tower of the church above them began to strike midnight.

  “Willow,” said Valerian, “it’s time to steal a horse.”

  December 30

  The Day of Unfailing Coincidence

  1

  But things were not to turn out that way.

  “No!” Willow said for the fourth time, and Boy worried about what Valerian might do to her.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t just take someone else’s horse!”

  But Valerian did nothing. It almost seemed he was soft with Willow. Boy watched, amazed, as she argued in the persistent snowfall outside the village stable.

  “I have no money left!” shouted Valerian. “We must get back to the City and there is no other way.”

  Finally Boy at least managed to get them to have their argument inside. In the stable they saw why they had found no trace of the driver—his cart had gone and so had the beast.

  But they could make out the shapes and smell of two young horses.

  “These people have nothing!” cried Willow. “You can’t take their horses from them!”

  “And if I don’t, I’ll be dead,” Valerian said, but it seemed there was less strength in his words than there might have been. Boy wondered if his arm was affecting him. At times he seemed delirious with pain.

  “That’s not their concern, is it?” Willow said.

  “No,” said Valerian, sounding exhausted. “No, it’s mine.”

  He stared into Willow’s eyes and there was a standoff. Boy held his breath, and in the silence of the snowstorm they heard an angry cry.

  It came from the direction of the church.

  Boy stuck his head through the door and just as quickly pulled it back in.

  “They’ve found our mess!” he hissed. “In the church! There’s at least three of them and they’re coming this way!”

  Valerian looked at Willow.

  “When this is all over I’ll come back and buy them a dozen horses,” he said. “I promise!”

  Boy grabbed her arm.

  “Willow! Come on!”

  It would never even have occurred to Boy that it might be wrong to steal the horses. In the way he’d grown up first on his own and then with Valerian, he’d learnt that if you needed something, and you could get it without getting caught, you took it. Willow thought differently, and he could tell she was very serious about it.

  “Willow!” he cried again. “We must!”

  “All right!” she said at last. “Do it! But you have to promise! A dozen horses!”

  “Yes, yes,” Valerian said. “Come!”

  Boy pulled the stable door open to find a group of four or five villagers.

  They were large men, and their burning torches and pitchforks and scythes looked ghastly in the darkness and the swirling snow.

  Boy backed into the barn, trying to think fast but failing.

  “Now!” Valerian called.

  He spurred his horse forward, but when the animal came close to its masters it stopped. One of the villagers put his hand up to the horse’s cheek and whispered to it. The horse rose on its back legs and let out a loud whinny. Valerian slipped from the horse’s back and fell into the thin straw on the stable floor.

  As he hit the ground he howled with pain and then blacked out.

  Two men stepped forward, and Boy saw the cart driver behind them. Another villager lowered an old but sturdy pitchfork at Boy, pointing its three prongs at his throat. The man was strong and broad, with a weather-worn, dirty face.

  “Now,” he said, “my fine City boy, what have you done to our church?”

  “I?” said Boy.

  The villager swung the pitchfork, hitting Boy across the side of the head with the handle. Willow rushed over as he fell next to Valerian.

  “You’ve killed him!” she screamed.

  The man spat in the straw.

  “Not yet,” he said. “He’s breathing yet.”

  With relief Willow saw it was true. She looked about her. Boy and Valerian both lay, out cold, in the foul-smelling straw of a barn in a village miles awa
y from the City. Around her stood a gang bent on revenge, and she knew there was nothing she could do.

  2

  Dawn rose on the morning of December 30, but Boy and Willow did not see the day break. Valerian did not see anything.

  Boy had come round from the blow to his head quite soon, and immediately been sick in the straw. He put his hand to his head, and felt blood and broken skin. He had a murderous headache.

  The villagers had escorted Willow and Boy back to the church, and had carried Valerian none too gently with them.

  They took them to the hole in the church floor, Gad Beebe’s place of interment. Seeing it again, Willow was shocked by what they had done, the violation they had caused.

  “You did this?” grunted a man with sunken cheeks.

  Boy was too fearful to speak after his last try. Willow couldn’t see that there was any point in denying it, but couldn’t bring herself to admit to it either.

  Then Pitchfork Man spoke.

  “What are we going to do with them?”

  “Kill them now,” said one.

  “We ought to send for the Watch,” said a taller man, who seemed nervous.

  “That will take days,” said Pitchfork. “Let’s drown them in the millrace.”

  “It’s frozen, you fool! It’ll take hours to make a hole big enough.”

  And so they argued, and eventually decided to lock their prisoners in the crypt while they decided what to do.

  The sunken-cheeked man pushed Boy and Willow ahead of him, waving his scythe. At the far end of the church, in a corner of the nave, was a low archway. Four steps led down from it to a metal grille.

  Sunken Cheeks unlocked the gate to the underworld.

  Boy and Willow hesitated, but when he lowered the tip of his scythe at them they slunk into the dark. Beyond the grille a dozen more steps curved around, taking them back under the body of the church itself. At the bottom, they stopped in complete darkness.

  There was a noise like a scuttling animal, then a flash of sparks behind them—a burning torch had been thrown down the stairs so there was light to carry Valerian down.

  He was dumped roughly on the floor.

  “Heavy, he is,” said one, and they left. The nervous one turned and bent to take the torch back with them.

  “Please!” said Willow. “Please leave us some light!” She tried to make herself sound as pitiful as possible, but that wasn’t hard. The man looked at her and was reminded of his own daughter sleeping safely in her bed in the farmhouse.

  Without a word he handed her the torch and followed his friend back up the curving steps to the church.

  Boy rushed after him, but the gate was already shut and locked.

  “Please,” he begged through the metal grille of the crypt entrance, “please can we have a blanket for Valerian?”

  Their footsteps disappeared up the four stone steps and they were gone.

  3

  The crypt was a cramped room with a vaulted ceiling low above their heads, which made it feel as if they were sitting inside a treasure chest. In the center stood a large stone sarcophagus, and along each of the longer walls were three cists capped with headstones commemorating the person whose bones lay inside.

  On one of the shorter walls was an iron bracket, and Willow put the torch there so that they could see a little better. Boy returned from the metal grille at the top of the steps.

  “It’s not good,” he said. “It’s locked tight.”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s not like they need to stop people getting out of here, is it?”

  “No,” said Willow. “It’s to stop people getting in. To stop them . . .”

  “Stealing bodies,” said Boy, finishing what she could not.

  “Boy,” cried Willow suddenly, “what are we doing? What have we got into?”

  “You, you mean,” said Boy. “I was always a part of this. Whatever he does, I do. You had a choice.”

  Willow looked at Valerian.

  “Let’s see what we can do for him.”

  They lifted his head and folded the wide collar of his coat out, then rested his head back on it. His arm was worse. There was a distinctly unpleasant smell coming from it. They pulled his coat tight around him.

  “Where’s that last bottle?” said Willow.

  Boy fished in Valerian’s pockets and pulled out the last of Kepler’s potion.

  Lifting Valerian’s head again, they tipped a small amount of the thin green liquid into his mouth.

  Automatically he swallowed, coughing.

  Boy sniffed the liquid before shoving the cork back. He pulled a face. As Willow was busy trying to lower Valerian’s head, a burning curiosity came over him. Holding his nose, he took a small swig of the stuff.

  He choked but swallowed. Immediately fire spread through his body. The taste was awful, but it was soon replaced by a wonderful feeling of strength and power and lightness. He felt better than he had in days, in ages.

  His body no longer ached. He felt no hunger, no pain, no fear. He looked at the bottle in his hand and then at Valerian, who already showed signs of stirring.

  Willow turned round to Boy. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.” He smiled at her. He was amazed to feel calm, confident, even glad.

  “Well,” he said, “what are we going to do?”

  Willow crumpled. “What can we do?” she wailed. “We’re locked in a stone hole, under a church, in a god-forsaken village miles from home. Valerian has two days left unless maybe we find the book, and we still have no idea where it is!”

  She stopped.

  “Don’t we?” said a voice behind her.

  Valerian looked up at them from the stones. He raised himself on one arm, then lifted himself back to his feet. Willow was amazed by this, but Boy knew the secret of Kepler’s green liquid.

  “Boy!” said Valerian, fishing in his pocket. “Where’s my bottle?”

  “Here,” said Boy, bringing it to him. “We just fed you a little of it. We thought it might help.” He couldn’t hide the smile on his face as he saw Valerian on his feet again, and as Valerian took the bottle back from him with his good arm, he smiled back.

  Boy felt good, strong and happy.

  Valerian looked at the bottle. It was half empty.

  “You were right,” he said, “but there is little left. Still, it is time we were about things.”

  He put a hand out to Boy’s cheek for a moment, then seemed to remember himself and instantly pulled it back. It happened so fast that Boy wondered if he’d imagined it.

  “But what can we do?” said Willow.

  Valerian turned to her, his bad arm swinging loosely at his side.

  “Come now, Willow, it’s not like you to be weak! It’s usually the boy here.”

  Boy laughed. He didn’t even mind Valerian making fun of him. He felt good and that was all.

  Valerian began to circle the crypt. He prowled, a smile growing on his face.

  “There is more to this church than we know,” he said. “There has to be—it is far too big a place for a tiny hole of a village like Linden.”

  He rested his hand on top of the sarcophagus.

  “Listen!” he said. “Listen! Can you hear it? Listen!” hissed Valerian, wobbling slightly on his feet. “No! Look!”

  He pointed at the wall of the crypt, the short wall opposite the one where Willow had placed the torch.

  There again were those mysterious words.

  Non omnem videt molitor aquam molam praeterfluentem.

  “The miller . . . ?” began Boy.

  “. . . sees not all the water that goes by his mill,” finished Willow.

  “And outside the churchyard, there stands . . . Boy! What?”

  “A mill!” he said confidently.

  “Exactly!” declared Valerian.

  “I don’t understand,” cried Willow. “What does it mean?”

  “It means,” said Valerian, “it means i
t is more than a motto! Place your ears to the sarcophagus and listen!”

  “The—the what?” asked Boy.

  “The sarcophagus, Boy! You do know what a sarcophagus is, don’t you? From your Greek! Eater-of-bodies. Flesh-eater. Sarco-phagus.”

  Boy looked blankly at him.

  “The stone coffin, Boy!”

  Willow stood on tiptoe to put her ear flat against the lid of the sarcophagus.

  “I thought I heard something as I lay on the floor. It’s faint, but you can hear it better through that.”

  Boy ran over to Willow. It was true; you didn’t even have to put your head close to the stone box to hear the sound of water flowing somewhere underneath.

  “Valerian!” Willow said. “Valerian! Look! Is this . . . ?”

  She was staring at a pattern engraved in the lid of the coffin.

  “Yes. The pattern that Kepler had dug into his cellar floor, repeated here on the lid of this supposed grave!”

  Indeed, the lid of the sarcophagus was deeply cut with a manic pattern of lines crossing, recrossing, intersecting and splitting. Without remembering exactly, Willow could recognize it.

  “What is it?” Boy asked.

  “These marks,” she said. “It’s what the doctor had dug into his floor and filled with water. Water that flowed by the aid of a machine. And above it on the wall were those words.”

  She pointed.

  “Ah!” Boy said. “The mill outside—not all of the water goes past it. Some goes here. So the miller . . .”

  “. . . sees not all the water that . . .”

  “Exactly!” cried Valerian. He stared at them, a little mad, a little proud, waiting for the moment to deliver his final piece of wisdom.

  “See that long line that comes out of the pattern, straight down the length of the sarcophagus lid?”

  They nodded.

  “What would you say that is, at the end of it? That symbol?”

  There was a circle with short lines radiating out from it.

  “It’s a mill wheel!” said Boy.

  “Just so!” said Valerian. “Now, you two, lift the lid and let’s be away from here!”

  Willow turned to him.

  “I am not dealing with any more corpses,” she said. “Is that clear? I’ve had enough!”