‘Did you taste the dough to make sure it was ready for baking?’ Something seemed wrong to him about the silence. He turned round, and saw Freshpenny smiling at him with a funny, knowing look that made him feel dreadful, as though he was going to be sick.
‘Well,’ he asked. ‘Did you taste it?’
‘There was no time,’ his partner replied, still smiling. ‘When I saw I had to do it all myself, I clean forgot.
‘But . . .’ Fabian turned back to the door. Where was the noise? The celebration? His head throbbing worse than ever, he pulled the door open and looked into the street.
‘I’ll ride out in the morning to the city, and find a shop for us,’ said Freshpenny from behind him. Speechless, Fabian stepped out to look down to the town square. Not one single cobble could be seen. In every direction there was a new multicoloured coating of cloth and leather and skin, which belonged to what looked at first glance like a sea of peacefully sleeping people.
He flinched as his partner’s hand clapped him on the shoulder.
‘Rest tonight, dear friend,’ said Freshpenny. ‘Tomorrow it begins for us again!’
When she had finished the story, the old woman looked down at the pair of us by the fire and beamed, proud of herself for remembering it correctly. She also saw that while listening to it the two of us had thawed a great deal, and she looked extra pleased, as if the story had magical powers of healing. Glancing up I was surprised to see Uncle and her husband leaning against the wall and listening too. They must have stolen back in as the story reached its climax.
Uncle now stepped forward and thanked her for looking after us.‘. . . But I can’t let them stay under your roof for another minute. If the police found them here, you’d be in the worst sort of trouble.’
All the pleasure and warmth seemed to drain from the old woman’s face as she nodded in reluctant agreement. The husband was more business-like, and showed us straight to the hole in the wall, which was still ajar. Uncle gestured for us to follow, but Benjamin was shaking his head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I won’t go. I’ve got to get back to my parents – they’ll think that I’m dead!’ Everyone in the room saw the madness of this except for him. As he saw us all regarding him with the same reproachful look he got more stubborn, and began to retreat to the front door.
‘Benjamin, please!’ I said.
‘Benjamin,’ said Uncle warningly, ‘if you go out there, there’s a good chance you will be dead. The police are out in force on the streets tonight, hunting a boy who looks like you. You’ve seen them yourself! Although you don’t know me, you must trust me, if you can. I know where we can go to wait until the storm passes.’
‘Please,’ I begged him. But something stopped him from listening. Perhaps the firelight caught Uncle’s face at a sinister angle, and the strange secret tunnel in the wall was disturbing. Maybe the magical power I’d displayed (and hadn’t explained) scared him, and the terrible sequence of events we had witnessed built up in his mind so he couldn’t bear the thought of anything except getting home. He retreated further and further until he was at the door, then he unbolted it and dashed out. Uncle jumped forward to catch him, but it was too late. Wind and rain whipped in through the open door and he had already vanished. Wearily Uncle locked it again.
‘Stupid boy,’ said the old man sadly.
‘Come on,’ said Uncle to me, and turned to the old couple. ‘Time for us to leave you in peace and safety.’
The old man rejected my thanks for taking us in. He said he hoped that anyone in his position would have done the same, and that I would certainly show the same kindness if ever I had the opportunity. I agreed without hesitation.
In a moment Uncle and I were in the secret tunnel. We had shut the panel behind us and could hear the table being squeaked back into position. Uncle struck a match and lit a candle from his pocket, leading me forward. I was silent, trying to make out what was around us, and feeling the strange but enjoyable weirdness of walking behind a wall, like a ghost.
‘What is this place?’ I asked.
‘You don’t need to know just now, Daniel. I suppose it’s a kind of emergency system that some people in Tumblewater use to get around. People who aren’t allowed to show their faces in the street.’
This must be what he had half-mentioned earlier with Codger and Mr Jaspers.
I didn’t want to push him if he didn’t want to tell me more, so I told him of my adventures with Gora the witch, my theft of the box and my narrow escape with Benjamin. When I had finished, he said, ‘My God, Daniel. I wonder how many lives you have left – you did well to rescue that boy; that was a good thing to do.’ There was something strained in his voice, as though he wanted to say more, but I didn’t know how to make him. He stepped carefully over several puddles in the narrow passageway, going slowly, before speaking.
‘I didn’t know you had seen that girl in the window,’ he said. ‘But I know the legend well. If Prye somehow knows you saw her then everything makes more sense. No wonder he’s chasing you! And now the policeman’s seen your face, and knows you stole the box. So there’s no doubt it’s you they’re after.’
We both fell silent. There was something neither of us was saying: Prye had tried to have me arrested under the ticking of the Animoul’s clock – when I was sure he’d come to stare at me with his own eyes – before the business of the silver box. Before I’d told anyone I’d seen the girl. Both of us knew I was holding something back, but now I felt Uncle trusted me to explain to him when the time was right.
He broke the silence. ‘You’ve reminded me there’s someone I know who told me a tale about the witch. It’s the sort of tale you have to be sitting down for, though. Remind me to tell it to you later, if I forget.’
I said I’d love to hear it. ‘What about those people in the sewer, though?’ I asked. ‘Do you know about them?’
He stopped as we reached a corner, and held the candle out in one direction then the other, trying to remember the way. Then, as though he finally heard my question, he turned round and held the candle between us.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know those people. Many of them I helped to escape down there. This passageway we’re in now, and the tunnels those poor people live in, are part of the same network. We call it the Underground, and I truly hope you never have to live there – it’s the place of the forgotten people, the dispossessed, people who are officially dead. Now, Daniel,’ his voice became softer and in the flicker of light his look intensified, ‘I can’t tell you more than that – and this is when you have to be brave. All of Prye’s resources are being used to catch you now, even though we don’t know why. We will do everything we can to keep you hidden. But if you are caught, they will make you speak. This is why I can tell you no more for the moment.’
I followed him in silence after that, my feelings swirling between paralysing fear and swaggering pride.
Prye is after me! I am important enough to have made him angry! And he hasn’t caught me yet! I would think to myself, before my mind’s eye tried to conjure up the terrifying instruments with which they would ‘make me talk’.
Coming to the end of the passage, we had to climb down through a hole in the floor into a tunnel that had been dug out of the earth, and which dripped constantly from the ceiling, making the candle go out time and again so we had to pause while Uncle relighted it. At the other side (Uncle explained we were passing beneath a busy street) we came up into a cellar and through a hole in the opposite wall, into another deserted house where we went up one staircase and then rapidly down another. I was more thrilled and scared by this secret, deserted route at every turn, and told Uncle so.
‘Oh, it’s not deserted by any means. That’s just the storm – everyone has found somewhere to hide. Tumblewater always floods during a storm, and underground, you can imagine, that’s very dangerous indeed. We will have to use these passages again later, and you’ll see then. They’re not deserted at all. Now,’ he said, coming up to
a door set in the clay-earth wall and knocking on it with a coded pattern of long and short raps, ‘if I give you a dozen tries, you’ll never guess where we are.’
The door was opened by a scared, wide-eyed man who I’d seen before, but couldn’t remember where. He left us and disappeared for a moment and I recollected who he was just as the door was filled by my landlady, Nuala, who held an oil lamp over her head, stared at us and tutted severely.
‘Look at the pair of you,’ she sighed.
This time Uncle let me go first, and hung back, shy of conversation with her, but muttering into my ear: ‘Running Turvey House is only half of what Nuala does – it is her Overground occupation. To us in the Underground she is seamstress, dressmaker and all-round wizard with clothes and disguises.’
Nuala had been walking ahead of us through the corridors of a basement much larger than anyone would have suspected from looking at Turvey House from the outside. She opened a door and showed us into a large underground dressing chamber, which was lined on every side by racks and boxes of clothes and costumes of every colour and description.
‘I see much has changed since I packed young Daniel off to school this morning,’ she said to Uncle, as though he had got me into trouble, but I jumped in and explained everything. Afterwards, her look was much more serious, and she regarded my tall protector with real pride.
‘So we are to disguise the lad, is that it?’ she asked. Uncle nodded, and Nuala addressed herself to me. ‘You’ve come to the right place. We’ll soon have you so that you wouldn’t be known by the man whose nose you cut off.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Just a phrase,’ she said, already flicking through clothes and pulling out things for me to try on.
‘The police are searching for a boy with blond hair,’ said Uncle. ‘So we have to make him look as much the opposite of that as we can.’
‘Let’s do the hair first, then,’ said Nuala. ‘My, it’s fair!’
‘Well, thanks,’ I said.
‘Hmm, maybe it’s just cleaner than any I’ve seen for a long while,’ she mused, peering at it and ruffling it with her hand as though something of value might drop out. ‘Well, let’s start with this, then.’ She started to massage a thick oily liquid into my hair. ‘This should make you dark-haired for six months or more,’ she said, ‘but I’ll give you a little tub of it so you can put some on when you need to. Your hair was wild and curly before, so that makes a big difference.’
Her little warren of clothes was a marvel. In what I first thought was just a dingy basement packed with rags, I saw there was a brilliant system in place which contained (ready to be pulled off the shelf in a moment) every type of garment, of every quality, salvaged from bins and dustcarts and tips, now washed, mended and waiting for the right owner. I began to realize that Nuala deliberately dressed herself simply, to leave the best clothes for others, and had a passion for getting every aspect of a look just right.
In the corner of her shop there was a workroom with a system of pots on shelves and boxes hammered into the wall, holding ribbons and threads and needles and buttons and fabric. This was all kept in perfect order by her assistant, a red-haired girl called Josephine, who (bearing in mind I was just a muck-covered boy) proved very shy on my several attempts to say hello, each time burying herself deeper in the stitching of a lady’s jacket collar.
‘That makes him look fat,’ said Nuala, standing back, as I tried on my sixteenth jacket.
‘For God’s sake, woman, make him look fat!’ said Uncle. ‘We want him to look not like himself. Tie a dozen pillows round his waist, by all means!’
‘Don’t be sharp with me,’ said Nuala, putting pins between her lips as she made adjustments to the jacket. She stood back again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Definitely not. You don’t understand, do you, Uncle? I can make him look like an earl, a washerwoman or an escaped madman if you like, but I won’t make him look unstylish. Now, Josephine,’ she said, gesturing the girl over. I had to stand as another jacket was pulled on over my arms. I tried to smile my thanks over my shoulder at Josephine, but she was already back at her desk, needle in hand.
For the first time that I’d tried anything on, Nuala failed to dismiss it at once and it was left to Uncle to speak first.
‘Yes!’ he said.
Nuala narrowed her eyes and looked at me with her head on one side, unsure. ‘Daniel,’ she said, ‘pull that collar up.’ I did so.
She smiled.
Uncle beamed. ‘It’s perfect,’ he said.
I looked down at what I was wearing and saw an ordinary black overcoat and beneath it a threadbare black jacket and black trousers.
‘I look like an undertaker!’ I complained.
‘Not a bit of it,’ said Nuala. ‘Undertakers are well dressed. In that, you look like someone who’s been a teacher at a poor school for ten years, and unmarried. With the collar pulled up your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.’
‘She wouldn’t anyway,’ I said. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Exactly,’ said Uncle. ‘We have our disguise!’
I was getting very tired, and my chosen clothes – none of which fitted, and all of which were quite uncomfortable – were finally agreed upon. At last, as Uncle and Nuala settled down for a chat about mutual friends and Josephine served them both with tea, I slipped away and found a box of off-cuts and discarded rags where they couldn’t see me, crawled into it and dozed. But Uncle wouldn’t let me rest for long. In what felt like less than a minute, he was barking at me to get up and come with him.
‘Remember what I told you!’ he said, annoyed. ‘Nuala’s at risk every minute you’re here. Come on.’
‘You mean I can’t go upstairs to my own bed?’ I asked, outraged. I had only snoozed so as not to interrupt them, and to get Uncle to talk to Nuala a bit more. The idea that I couldn’t sleep here seemed ridiculous.
‘Of course you can’t,’ said Uncle. ‘This is the first place the police will look – they could call at any moment. Remember that Mr Pisk knew you were staying here, before he led you to the pawnbroker? That means Prye does as well. Don’t underestimate him.’
‘All right,’ I said, feeling as though I was being lectured quite often today. ‘There’s no need to be so serious just to impress your girlfriend.’
He looked chronically embarrassed for a second and clipped me round the head harder than he needed to (at which I shouted ‘GET OFF!’), but Nuala wasn’t paying any attention to us.
As I reached the door, I looked back at the little underground dressing room, sorry to leave this cosy, friendly place. Nuala pulled the door open, and I gave her a kiss goodbye on the cheek.
‘Your turn,’ I said to Uncle, and he kicked me in the ankle.
‘For God’s sake,’ Nuala sighed. ‘Now listen, young man, don’t go getting yourself caught by police or in any other sort of mischief, because now I’ve disguised you it’ll only be your fault if you do. And, Daniel – I want to see you back here soon so you can tell me a story of your own.’
I promised, and we said goodbye. Then Uncle and I were back on the ‘road’ (a narrow corridor), squeezing past groups of people coming the other way, going down a staircase and along an incredibly cold passage, which went through the back of a sequence of deserted houses.
‘Uncle,’ I asked eventually, ‘how did you end up involved in the Underground, as you call it? What was your crime?’
Uncle smiled in the way that adults smile when they are far from happy. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I was a very young man, younger than you. I still am a young man, although I have to make myself look older with this beard and these clothes, for my own safety.’
When we reached the end of the third house, we came to a sturdy wooden door and Uncle rapped on it with his funny sequence of knocks again. It opened after a short pause, and a golden light poured out, accompanied by a cloud of smoke on which seemed to drift the smell of pastries and the sound of laughter. It was some sort of secret inn, an
d a sense of unexpected contentment warmed my heart more than I had thought anything could. We were welcomed in, given drinks and sat down before I knew what was happening. I didn’t speak, but looked around me in a happy daze.
Uncle handed me a pastry from a plate that was being offered around, and said: ‘Welcome to the Crackey Inn, Daniel.’
He was greeted by almost everyone who passed our table, stopping to thank him for something, or ask his advice, or pass on gossip about a mutual acquaintance. After this had happened half a dozen times he suddenly jumped up and called out to a man who hadn’t seen him.
‘Daniel,’ Uncle said, excited, ‘I had hoped to introduce you to this man at some point – how lucky to stumble across you, Harry!’
‘Don’t talk too loudly about luck around here – it’ll make you unpopular,’ said the man into his pint pot as he sipped from it. He shook my hand.
‘Harry has an incredible story to tell,’ said Uncle. ‘The one I was going to tell you myself later on, but now you can hear it from the horse’s mouth.’ Harry clearly wondered why he should be telling his story to a slip of a lad like me, but Uncle whispered something in his ear and he decided I was to be trusted. He took a deep breath. Telling the story obviously troubled him.
‘I’m a carpenter,’ he said. ‘One day a few months back I had to visit a house to fix a table. It belonged to this little old lady who showed me up to the landing where the table was, and left me there. Now this place was piled up with junk and rubbish so I thought, all right, I’ll do it quick as I can, and be out of this weird place.
‘I hammered in some supporting planks underneath and put in a couple of extra legs that would hold it up for a while . . .’
I started to grow a bit awkward, wondering whether Uncle had stopped this man to give us a lesson in carpentry. But then he said something that made me listen.
‘I knocked on the nearest door to tell her the job was done. No reply. Pushed it open, and . . .’ He trailed off, shaking his head. Uncle and I exchanged glances. ‘The walls were fifty foot high.’
Grisly Tales from Tumblewater Page 15