Shadowghast

by Thomas Taylor

  When we reach the end of the pier, Mrs. F is almost her old self again.

  “Thank you, my dears,” she says. “I’ll take myself home from here. No need to fuss. I just need to take the weight off my boots, that’s all.”

  There’s a poster advertising Caliastra’s Ghastly Night show taped to one of the ornate lampposts beside the entrance to the pier. One corner is flapping in the wind, and Mrs. Fossil reaches out to it. But instead of tearing it off, as I expect her to do, she smooths the tape back down.

  “I wish the doc had been there to see it,” she says. “What an amazing show!”

  And with a wave, she heads off into the winding streets of Eerie-on-Sea, back to her Flotsamporium.

  “It may be just a magic trick, Herbie,” Violet says, “but it has certainly changed Mrs. F. Caliastra has yet another fan, by the looks of it.”

  The sun emerges briefly and bathes the cobblestones in a moment of unexpected warmth. And suddenly, as I watch Mrs. Fossil go, I’m struck by a memory of seeing Caliastra and her troupe in the lobby of the hotel, when they first arrived. What was it I noticed then? Something strange about the light? And why do I feel I’ve just seen it again? I rub my eyes, but when I look back, the sun is gone, and Mrs. F has turned a corner and vanished.

  “Herbie?”

  “Let’s go back to my Lost-and-Foundery,” I say. “I need to tell you something.”

  “That settles it,” Vi says when I finish telling her about the strange thing that happened to me in the amusement arcade.

  We’re sitting in my Lost-and-Foundery, in the warmth. Violet is curled up in my big tatty armchair—Erwin purring like an engine on her lap—while I try to look professional inside my enormous beanbag.

  “Settles what?” I ask, as this is hardly the reply I was expecting after telling my Space Invaders story.

  “Caliastra is behind all this,” Violet cries angrily, causing a break in Erwin’s purring. “She’s doing something, Herbie. Causing all this strangeness, with her lantern and her tricks. And if she’s hurt Jenny, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

  “But, Vi, what if it’s not Caliastra doing these things?” I say. “What if she’s also a victim of strange events? We don’t really know what’s happening, do we?”

  “You just don’t want to see it, Herbie,” Violet replies bitterly. “She’s bewitched you. I wish she’d never come here.”

  “But . . .”

  “No, Herbie!” Violet thumps the arm of the chair. “Caliastra said herself she’s been in contact with Sebastian Eels. So far, all the strangest adventures we’ve ever had in Eerie-on-Sea have been connected with that man.”

  “Except”—I thump back, though only on the beanbag—“Sebastian Eels is dead, Vi.”

  “I know,” Violet admits, sinking back in her chair. “But someone’s been in his house. I bet that’s where the Shadowghast lantern has been all these years. I wonder what else is hidden in there, what other dark secrets Caliastra has access to. What if Caliastra is taking over where Sebastian Eels left off? What if Eerie-on-Sea has a new villain to deal with?”

  I respond with a Pfft.

  Pfft is the sound you make when you want to suggest that something is ridiculous but can’t think of a way to say it in actual words. Only, I’m not very good at making the Pfft sound and just succeed in getting a bit of dribble on my chin and making Erwin glare at me with a single ice-blue eye.

  Violet gets up, putting the bookshop cat in the warmth of her seat.

  She runs up to my cubbyhole. When she comes back down, she has Clermit, the clockwork shell, in her hands.

  “I know you think I see adventures everywhere, Herbie,” she says, “but it feels to me as if we’re on a new adventure already. Doesn’t it feel like that to you?”

  And she tosses Clermit to me.

  I catch him and hear the bright ring of the complex clockwork mechanism inside.

  “You really think winding him up will help?” I ask.

  Violet shrugs.

  “There’s definitely one thing he can help us with, at least,” she says.

  “What’s that?”

  Violet is already heading for my cellar window when she replies.

  “He can help us break into Sebastian Eels’s house.”

  It’s a bit later, and Vi and I are standing in the doorway of the boarded-up town house of Sebastian Eels. It’s dusk, and the gloom of late October fills the air. A few people are hurrying home, not wanting to be caught out after dark. In the window of a nearby house, we glimpse one of Mrs. Fossil’s manglewick candles, casting a ghastly shadow on the curtains.

  A low-hanging branch—scrappy orange leaves still clinging to it—grows over the little walled garden at the side of Eels’s house. Violet and I have climbed over this before. In the darkness, I hope no one will notice us climbing over it again.

  “You really think Clermit can help?” I say to Vi as we crouch, a few minutes later, among the nettles and brambles of the overgrown garden. I feel the weight of the clockwork shell hidden under my cap.

  “The back door is locked,” says Vi, pointing to the door in the gloom. “The key is in the lock, but on the inside.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I tried to get in earlier,” Violet says, her eyes flashing. “While you were busy watching magic shows and playing arcade games, I was trying to find Jenny.”

  I’m about to protest, but Violet’s already speaking again.

  “How did you once describe Clermit, Herbie?” she asks. “Like a windup Swiss army knife? Well, I think that’s exactly what we need to get this door open.”

  I look at the locked door. I’m not sure how even Clermit can get the key for us. But then I look up and see the gap in the boards over the third-floor window, where they’ve blown loose.

  “Your Clermit helped us before, Herbie,” says Violet. “It’s time you asked him to help us again.”

  My Clermit?

  I lift my cap on its elastic and carefully withdraw the shell from his hiding place. In the small light that remains in the sky, I see him gleaming white and iridescent on my palm.

  Clermit was once in the possession of Sebastian Eels but switched sides, and even saved my life. I promised him—in so far as you can promise a miraculous windup contraption anything—that I’d get him back to his rightful owner one day. But in the meantime . . .

  I fish around in my pocket, pull out Clermit’s brass winder key, and fit it into the little brass-lined hole in the side of the shell.

  “Ready?” I ask Violet.

  She nods.

  I give Clermit three good windings-up.

  Tic-tic-tic-TIK, tic-tic-tic-TIK, tic-tic-tic-TIK.

  At first, nothing happens.

  Then, with a juddering motion—and a sound like a single annoying grain of sand being ground to dust between two delicately engineered cogs—a brass leg emerges from inside the shell.

  And then another, and another.

  Soon Clermit is standing upright on my hand.

  “Hello there!” I grin, delighted to see the little thing working again. “How are you feeling?”

  By way of an answer, a fourth appendage emerges, one that ends in a little pair of scissor claws. The scissors waggle from side to side and make a single decisive snip.

  “I think that means he’s OK,” I say to Vi.

  “We need to get into this house,” Vi tells Clermit impatiently. She points to the lock.

  The clockwork hermit crab sways on his tripod of brass legs, as if looking at the lock with an invisible eye. Then he looks back at me.

  “Please?” I say.

  In a moment, and with a whir of gears, Clermit springs from my hand. He scuttles up the front of the door and probes the lock. When this amounts to nothing, he drops down, runs to the base of the tree, and clambers up the trunk with the help of his steel blades.

  “What’s he doing?” Violet asks. “Herbie?”

  “I think . . .” I reply. “Yes!
He’s going to jump.”

  Sure enough, we see the tree sway as the clockwork hermit crab clambers into its topmost branches. He swings himself back and forth, to gain momentum, and then leaps . . .

  And hits the wall of the house with a clatter.

  He starts to fall back but manages to dig two of his four sword arms into the mortar. He regains his balance and begins to climb.

  “Whoa!” I say.

  Jabbing into the wall with his blades, Clermit makes his mechanical way to the third-story window above us, where the boards have blown loose. For a moment, the moonlight glints on his gleaming shell. Then he slips into the house and is gone.

  “What’s he doing?” Vi whispers after several long minutes have passed in silence and the last light of day melts from the sky.

  I don’t reply. I’m beginning to have a bad feeling. Clermit is one of the eerie things of Eerie-on-Sea, after all, and he’s changed sides once before.

  “Listen!” Vi hisses then. “I can hear something. Sounds like . . .”

  “A lock being turned!” I finish. I’m just about to add that I knew all along we could count on good old Clermit, when Violet interrupts.

  “But it’s not this lock. It’s coming from the street. It sounds like someone’s opening the padlock on the front door of the house!”

  As silently as we can, we pull ourselves back onto the branch and lean over the wall. Sure enough, a shadow is at the main entrance to Sebastian Eels’s house. There’s a click, and then a creak, as the big black doors open and someone goes in.

  “Who was that?” I ask.

  “Couldn’t see,” Violet replies. “Come on!”

  Violet swings over the wall and drops silently into the street.

  “What?” I cry, though it’s pretty obvious what Violet is going to do. I feel a knot of fear in my innards as I lower myself behind her.

  I’m just in time to see Violet creep up to the front door of the house, push it quietly, and slip inside.

  The atmosphere inside Sebastian Eels’s house is cold and unlived-in. There’s a bad smell in the air as if something was left out of the fridge months ago and has developed an interesting personality of its own. Everywhere is dark, of course; though, as we stand together just inside the front door, we hear the scrape of a match and see a flare of light on the upstairs landing.

  “Are you sure about this?” I manage to whisper into Violet’s hair.

  “The only thing I’m sure about,” comes a whisper back, “is that I haven’t seen Jenny since this time yesterday, Herbie. And now I’m really scared something bad has happened to her. Come on!”

  “Couldn’t we just . . . ?” I begin, but apparently, we can’t, because the only reply I get now is Violet groping for my hand, grabbing it, and then pulling me toward the great ornate staircase. We manage to climb it, despite the gloom, without once creaking the antique wooden steps. Something brushes against my face and I swipe it away. It’s a cobweb.

  I’ve been to this house only once before, back when Sebastian Eels was still alive. Vi and I broke in on that occasion, too—on important Lost-and-Founder business, you understand—and searched the villain’s study. But we were caught in the act and had to run for our lives. As we climb the stairs now, I feel some of the fear of that day return, especially when we hear the mysterious figure entering that very same study.

  As if he knew exactly where to go.

  But as we approach the study, I see, through the open door, something that stops me in my tracks: there, gleaming white and iridescent at one end of the ornate marble mantelpiece that dominates the room, sits Clermit.

  Just sitting there, as if it’s where he belongs!

  I grab Vi’s arm and point.

  Maybe we were too hasty to trust the clockwork hermit crab. Maybe it really is Sebastian Eels’s creature, after all. A terrifying thought jumps into my brain, setting all my alarm bells ringing.

  “You don’t think . . . ?” I whisper to Vi. “You don’t think Eels himself could be . . . ?”

  Violet glances at me fearfully, her eyes glinting in the light from the room. It looks as though the same horrible thought is troubling her, too.

  “It can’t be him,” she mouths silently, “can it?”

  Can Sebastian Eels really have returned from the dead?

  Inside the room there is a rustling and clattering as the mysterious person hunts for something. We can hear him—and it certainly does sound like a him—muttering impatiently and cursing.

  Violet puts her finger to her lips and creeps forward. Where the door hinges, there is a gap big enough for us to look farther into the room.

  “Blast it all!” we hear from inside, along with the unmistakable sound of desk drawers being rifled and then slammed shut. “It’s not where she said it would be.”

  We put our eyes to the crack.

  Inside the room, we see someone’s silhouette against the light of a kerosene lamp on the vast mahogany desk. And we see immediately that it isn’t Sebastian Eels. The silhouette is of a short, stout man . . . with a homburg hat.

  “Mr. Mummery!” I say, a bit too loudly.

  Mr. Mummery, theatrical agent to the magician Caliastra, looks up sharply, as if he has heard me. Vi and I go deathly still and quiet. After a moment, the man returns to his search of the desk, but he soon gives up.

  “She must have left it in the inner chamber, after all,” he grumbles. “I told her, but no—madame knows best. Just as well I memorized the code, isn’t it?”

  And with these strange words, Mr. Mummery steps away from the desk and comes to a halt in front of the study bookshelves. He hangs his hat on a nearby hook.

  “Now, let me see . . .” he says, cracking his knuckles and facing the shelves. Then, hesitantly, he presses one of the books.

  The book slides in a finger’s width, and from somewhere inside the shelves, we hear a soft click.

  Mr. Mummery presses another and another, till soon half a dozen books are pushed in.

  “And just one more . . .” he says as he jabs a final book with his pudgy forefinger.

  We hear a deep, metallic CLUNK from somewhere in the fabric of the building. Then a stony, grinding sound as Mummery grabs the bookshelf with both hands and pulls the whole thing toward him. It swings to one side, revealing a secret doorway.

  Mr. Mummery takes the kerosene lamp from the desk and steps inside.

  “I didn’t know about that!” Vi whispers.

  “Neither did I,” I whisper in reply. “But I think that’s kind of the point with secret chambers.”

  Ahead of us, through the bookshelf door, we cannot see much beyond the flicker of shadows and light. But after only a moment, we hear “Aha!” as Mr. Mummery finds whatever it is he’s looking for and hurries back into view.

  He has a stuffed notebook in his hands, held closed with a rubber band and filled to bursting with cuttings and loose papers. He places the notebook on the mantelpiece beside Clermit, along with the lantern, and then pushes the bookshelves closed with both hands.

  For one crazy moment, I actually think about darting forward while the little man is busy, snatching the notebook, and taking my chances at a running escape. I even make a movement in the direction of the mantelpiece. It’s the kind of thing I’d never have dared to do before Violet showed up in my life.

  Vi puts her hand on my arm, to hold me back. Maybe that’s something she’d never have done before meeting me.

  And that’s when Clermit makes his move.

  With a slow and precise movement, Clermit the clockwork hermit crab carefully extends one of his appendages—the one with the little brass scissors—and snips the rubber band that holds the notebook closed.

  The book bursts open and papers spill out everywhere.

  “Oh, blast it!” splutters Mr. Mummery as he finishes shutting the secret door with a CLUNK. All the books that he pressed to open it pop silently back out into place. With a grunt, the theatrical manager bends over and begins scraping t
ogether the spilled papers.

  What he doesn’t notice, though, as he scrabbles around on the floor, is that Clermit has dragged toward him one of the papers—one that remained on the mantelpiece—and has pulled it into his shell.

  “This is no way to organize anything!” Mr. Mummery moans as he shuffles the papers back into the notebook and glances nervously at his watch. With some difficulty, he slides the bulging notebook into his jacket pocket. “First thing we’ll do when this is over is get all these papers properly indexed. Damn these writers and their sloppy ways. Even the dead ones!”

  And with this, he extinguishes the lantern and plunges the house back into darkness.

  Violet and I scoot back away from the door. In a moment, we’re some way down the corridor, pressed against the wall. We can hear Mr. Mummery groping his way out onto the landing and making his cautious way downstairs.

  “And when this place is legally ours,” he continues, “we can finally turn the blasted lights on!”

  Then we hear the front door close, followed by the scraping sound of the metal bar being replaced and the padlock snapping shut.

  “That was close!” I exhale and slide down the wall till my bottom meets the floorboards. “But he might as well have caught us, for all the difference it makes.”

  “What do you mean?” Violet asks.

  “I mean, we’re locked in, Vi,” I say. “The front door is bolted from the outside.”

  “There’s always the back door,” she replies. “The key’s in the lock, remember?”

  “What are we waiting for, then?”

  “Herbie, we came her to find answers,” Violet replies, in her taking-charge voice. “So, let’s find some. Do you have your flashlight on you?”

  I do, and I feel a bit silly for not having switched it on already. I pull the keychain out of my pocket and turn on the tiny beam. It illuminates a small corner of the corridor and Violet’s determined face.

  “Good,” she says. “Now, come on.”

  Together we enter the study.

  And see that Clermit is no longer on the mantelpiece.