‘What sort of room was it?’ I asked.
‘A ballroom, like you’d find in a palace. You could have ridden a coach-and-four from one end to the other and given all of the horses good exercise. Huge pictures hung on the wall showing floods, tempests, the beginning of the world. The ceiling was painted with clouds and angels, like you could see up to heaven, and it was so far up it might as well have been.’
Harry’s voice stopped and he looked at us, afraid that we wouldn’t take him seriously.
‘I think I’ve been to the house you’re talking about,’ I reassured him.
‘I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I was going bonkers,’ he said. ‘So I went down the stairs careful as you like and saw that the old woman was talking to this guy wearing a hood. You couldn’t see anything of him but his nose which had a birthmark on it like a splodge of ink. She was paying him and he was fishing little paper parcels out of a sack around his shoulder. She was sniffing each one closely before putting it in her pocket. I got the feeling I was seeing something I shouldn’t and went back up the stairs.
‘Well, what was I supposed to do next? There was two more doors at the end of the landing, next to the table. Right and left. I knocked on the left one and opened it.’ He paused for a second, and took a deep breath. ‘There was uneven floorboards and a stove in the corner giving off strange smells. Skinned furs – wolf furs, I think they were wolf furs – hung from the ceiling. I was in a small hut, and I went to the door at the back of the room.
‘Beyond that door, as far as you could see, was a field of tall wheat, stretching on for what seemed like forever. A great wind hurried through it constantly, combing it, like waves through the sea. And in the middle of the field you could hear two children chasing each other, a boy and a girl, hidden by the grass.
‘Beautiful and strange as a dream it was, but I went back into the little wooden cottage. There was magic going on here, and suddenly I feared the door wouldn’t let me back where I had come. I’ve never had such a turn, I’m telling you. Getting all worked up, I stole a big knife from a block of wood beneath the wolf furs, and went up to the door with the life half frightened out of me. But the door led back to the corridor again, thank God, and I went down the stairs in a flash. No sign of the two oldies – now there was a younger woman waiting, kind of blonde and good looking, with coins in her hand to pay me.
‘I should have got away all right, but she saw in my eyes I was scared, and she knew that I must have seen something I shouldn’t. She started to get angry and shouted at me in a language I didn’t know. I just wanted to get my arse out of there – ’scuse my language, young man, but you see the occasion calls for it – so I showed her the dagger.
‘The second she saw it, she went deathly pale,’ he said, ‘and stood back, letting me escape.’ He patted his pocket, and then brought the dagger out to show us.
It looked medieval or even earlier – savage, even. It was just a jagged spike of iron sticking out of a rough wooden handle. As I took it from him, I felt how incredibly light it was, and saw it was rusty and blunt as well. I couldn’t believe Gora had been scared of such a thing.
Harry sighed and relaxed now his tale was told. ‘Afterwards I sought out others who had come across her, in all her disguises, listening to every story I could about her, and I made myself an expert on that witch. I don’t care if people think I’m a loony. But I know more about her than anyone alive. Like about her and the Creature – the Slurgoggen, the Slumgullion.’
‘The Slumgullion!’ I said. ‘She mentioned it to me! She said how unafraid of it she is.’
‘Really?’ Harry asked. ‘Interesting she says that. Why doesn’t she leave her house, seeing as she can disguise herself, if she’s not afraid? Why tell someone who knows nothing about it – why say to you, Daniel, that she’s not afraid? I wonder if that’s really the truth.’
Uncle was fascinated. ‘Go on, Harry,’ he said. ‘Why?’
Harry leaned in and spoke quietly to us. ‘She made him,’ he said. ‘Centuries ago he was a man. Her lover. And he broke her heart. So she turned him into the ugliest creature she could imagine so he could never be loved again. After swimming in the deep for hundreds of years, and waiting for death to release him, he came to realize he was cursed with eternal life as well. So he swam back to land, and detected her scent in the water here. Now he waits in the river for his chance to see her again, and break the spell.’
Uncle shifted uncomfortably in his seat and again murmured something in Harry’s ear.
‘Of course, I’m getting distracted,’ he said. ‘Now, I get the feeling your interest is something to do with the girl she captured away from Prye?’
‘The girl I saw!’ I said. ‘Gora’s got the girl?’
Uncle nodded. ‘She is Prye’s prime obsession. He wants her. And if you know something about her whereabouts, he wants you too. You know something, don’t you, Daniel?’
I nodded and said quietly, ‘I think I know who she is. But I can’t be sure – I need to check something first.’ The men looked amazed for a second, and then Uncle reassured me.
‘I won’t pry – sorry, Daniel, excuse the pun – it’s your business. You tell me in your own time. Let’s hear the rest of what Harry has to say.’
‘It was Gora who trapped the girl in the first place,’ Harry went on. ‘But she couldn’t make the girl fall in love with Prye – that’s the one thing her magic could not control. Gora and Prye fell to fighting because of this, and he refused to pay her. So they became enemies: she disguised herself and kept the girl hidden, and his spies try fruitlessly to find her hiding place. If you want to free the girl, it’s the witch you’ve got to deal with.
‘Now, listen to this, Daniel. She can disguise herself as any woman, anyone at all, so you might end up close to her without knowing it – and I hope you do, my lad, because then you might have the chance to stick this dagger in her, which I’m going to give you now. But remember this. Do not let her put a ring on your finger. If you do, you will be lost entirely, and in her power forever. Promise me?’
I nodded, struggling to accept this new responsibility.
Harry handed me the dagger under the table, looking around him in case anyone thought he was acting suspiciously (and making himself look much more suspicious by doing so). Without arguing I slipped it inside my coat. I thanked him for everything he had told me, and especially for the dagger. He shook my hand, looking as though a burden had been lifted from him. Perhaps he also felt guilty that the responsibility had passed to me, because he finished his drink quickly, made his apologies and was gone hardly a minute later.
On our own again, I was just taking a few sips of my drink and starting to relax after the night’s adventures (while running my hand over the dagger inside my pocket), when Uncle stood up and gestured me to follow him. I was feeling giddy, not just from my drink, and from Harry’s tale, but because the sense of jubilation all around us in the Crackey Inn was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I was reluctant to leave – it was exciting to be welcomed among grown-ups (my disguise was clearly working), and everywhere I looked I saw people telling each other stories.
Those telling the stories seemed completely caught up in the tales they were telling, and the listeners were so enjoying the funny bits, and so engrossed in the scary bits, that I could hardly bear to tear myself away.
But follow him I did, through the laughing, eating, shouting mob, to a low door in the back wall. On the other side was a room so much darker I couldn’t make out anything in it.
‘What’s through here?’ I asked.
‘It’s the back parlour,’ he said. ‘Quieter. From here, we can watch the flood that always comes with the storm. It’s quite a sight.’
Uncle pushed me towards a chair, and sat next to me. There was a low, glowing fire of blackened orange coals in front of us and he held his hands over them.
‘What’s out there, Sorboy?’ Uncle asked loudly, apparently into the
fire.
A dismissive moan came from the window where a wide-shouldered man stood leaning against the frame. ‘It’s really starting now,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a bad one, too. Is that you, Uncle?’
‘It is,’ said Uncle, rubbing his hands together and putting them back over the glowing coals. Looking around I could see about half a dozen people in the glow of the fire: a group of lean-faced, villainous-looking men sitting round a small table, two chubby gents in chairs side by side, and near me a sharp-faced old woman chipping at a piece of woodwork in her hands. The woman gave me an apparently careless glance that hid a moment’s shrewd examination, and went on working at the wood with her knife. Behind these there were a few others scattered about in the gloom. A man stood behind a bar made from two barrels and a plank, silently refilling the cups that people held up for him.
‘What’s your business, then, lad?’ asked Sorboy from the window.
I started to say that I didn’t have one. The idea of being a surgeon had been so fixed in my mind that I kept forgetting what had happened that very afternoon. ‘I . . . I collect stories,’ I said. The two fat men, who had been slightly stupefied by the warmth and the beer, snapped out of their doziness.
‘What do you do with them when you collect them?’ one asked.
‘Yes,’ said the other sarcastically, ‘what exactly do you do with them?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I mean to get them published so that people can read them. I’ve been hired by a publisher for that purpose.’
‘Oh,’ said the first man. ‘What a good idea.’
‘Yes,’ said the other, glancing uncertainly at his friend, ‘a very good idea, I should say. You are to be congratulated, sir.’
‘I haven’t done it yet,’ I said. I walked to the window and peered out under Sorboy’s arm. ‘What are you staring at?’
‘You see where the ground should be?’ he asked.
The window looked out into a small street not more than ten feet across with houses crowded close together. Not an inch of road was to be seen. Instead, it was a shallow stream, running fast. It even tumbled over obstacles as if they were the stones you’d find in a real stream, making the illusion more complete.
‘That’s the start of it – whoa! Here goes. A wall’s fallen in somewhere up the hill.’
With a whooshing sound a great foaming wave came down the street and broke against the doorways. It turned over on itself as it slipped down the gulleys between houses and as it settled, the water a foot deeper than before, I saw the swell of detritus the wave had dragged with it – lumps of wood and paper and rags, and a wash of cloudy mud.
‘I wonder if we’ll wake up and find the whole hill has moved downstream,’ I said to myself.
‘Don’t joke,’ said Sorboy. ‘There’s much worse to come. Someone for God’s sake close that door and keep the racket from the next room out. Let’s forget about the flood, and give Daniel a story for his collection. After all, the stories in the Underground are the best.’
The woman by the fire nodded. ‘They are,’ she said. Sorboy sat in a chair next to her and others moved a little closer to the fire. For a few moments there was silence except for the whishing sound of the flood outside, as everyone fell into their own reflections. The woman broke the silence without turning her head from her little woodwork, ‘Rudy knows a good one.’
One of the villainous-looking men looked up. When he began speaking, I found he had a calm, educated voice and spoke in a level tone that held everyone’s attention.
‘I do know a good story. It’s a long one, but I like it, and it’s about a rich sort of a chap coming to no good. Which is the kind I always like.’
There was a murmur of approval from everyone in the room, including those hidden in the darkness. The barman handed over pots and tankards to upheld arms, and spots of gold showed in the corners of the room where men puffed on their pipes, as Rudy began.
‘It’s a show-offy sort of a name for a story, but that’s the name it had when it was told to me. So here’s the tale of . . .
Mr Ephraim Bartle was a man who made the most wonderful clocks. He made stopwatches and alarm clocks and great big oak-panelled grandfather clocks that chimed like church bells. He prided himself on the materials he used and was sure that his were the finest made, most accurate clocks in the country . As his fame grew (as a clockmaker’s will, if his clocks are as sturdy and reliable and beautiful as his were), he sought out ever more exotic types of wood and metals to improve upon his best work, and created magnificent timepieces that adorned the rooms of the royalty, all the dukes and duchesses and famous artists and actors and musicians in the land. Before too long his surname, Bartle, became the word one associated with a beautiful and valuable clock – even though Bartle is a rather ugly name.
So Mr Bartle, or just Bartle, as his friends called him, reached a position of wealth and high standing among the bigwigs of society. And such a knack and passion had he for clockmaking that he achieved all this before his twenty-fifth birthday. Almost every night he was asked along to the birthdays of earls, invited to the opening nights of theatrical spectaculars and that sort of thing. But the more he saw of it, the more he became bored of the high life, and he yearned to get back to his work, and do even greater things.
One day, feeling rather jaded after yet another extravagant party the night before (where he had been forced to drink much champagne, and put up with lots of chattering girls who were only interested in his fortune), he found himself in front of his most brilliant clock. It was a twenty-foot-tall, diamond-encrusted timepiece of such outrageous opulence that it was almost rude. In fact, now he looked at it, he decided that it probably was rather rude – in its showiness, its cost and its beauty. The thought made him shiver with delight. It had been bought by a prince from a foreign country and he was giving it one last look before the deliverymen wrapped it up and carted it away.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘now I have made the finest clock that there can ever be,’ and after watching it being placed into an enormous wooden crate he set off for a walk into the city, feeling rather sad for himself because now there was nothing left for him to achieve in life. He called in on an old friend and enjoyed a cup of tea and a long chat about childhood acquaintances, and when he left found himself surprised to step out into darkness.
‘How funny,’ he said. ‘But it’s only five o’clock.’ He started to walk home, but after a few turnings found himself in a district of tall, overhanging buildings, and realized he was lost, because he never visited this part of town after dark. Not wanting to admit his mistake, he kept on walking and soon found himself more lost than he had ever been in the city, standing in a cobbled street of very old, dark houses, which leaned to and fro quite dangerously, as though one of them might fall over at any moment. He took out his watch again and, by the light of the moon, saw that it must have stopped at five o’clock many hours ago.
‘Drat it!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why do they all have to stop! Why can no clock be perfect?’
So despondent was he at the thought that even his greatest clock would one day stop ticking, no matter how conscientiously it was wound every day, and so miserably did he stare up at the full moon as though he might be able to tell the time from its perfectly circular face, that at first he did not hear the voice.
‘There is such a thing,’ it said, ‘as the perfect clock.’
‘What? Who’s that?’ Mr Bartle said, turning round. He saw a very little old man standing in the doorway of a very little old house, which leaned so crazily Mr Bartle was afraid to go anywhere near it.
‘Say that again, old man – what do you mean?’
‘I said there is such a thing,’ repeated the tiny man, quietly, ‘as the perfect clock.’ And with that he turned and walked slowly back into his house, leaving the door open.
Bartle felt unable to resist following him in. He had to duck to get in the door, and then he found himself in a tiny drawing room, so tiny that he was alm
ost bent double. The mysterious little man had settled into a chair and was staring rather distantly through his tiny glasses, the eyepieces of which were no larger than a penny.
‘Do you know how old I am?’ the man asked.
‘Of course I don’t,’ said Bartle, annoyed to be distracted from the subject of clocks.
‘One hundred and thirteen years old,’ said the man. ‘And I’ve many, many years left in me yet. My father died last winter, and he was one hundred and eighty-two. And my grandfather died the winter before that, only a handful of years shy of his two hundred and fiftieth birthday.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ said Mr Bartle, trying to settle into a corner of the room without breaking anything. ‘But you mentioned something about clocks.’
‘You want to talk about clocks,’ said the old man, smiling. ‘You know, I can tell what you’re saying by reading your lips. I’m quite deaf, in fact. So long as you look straight at me when you speak, I can understand you. But clocks, yes, of course. My boy, you see the mantelpiece behind you?’
Bartle turned and saw a very plain stone mantel above a minuscule fireplace, in which seemed to be burning just two lumps of coal.
‘Yes?’ he said, turning back round.
‘Well, do you see the timepiece in its centre?’
Blinking, Bartle looked closer at what he had dismissed as a grubby and funny-looking shell or rock, perhaps plucked from a beach many years ago.
‘That’s a clock?’ he asked, incredulous.
‘Aye, it is, and the finest clock in the country, even counting the fancy things that people make from gold and pearls for every dandy and millionaire who wants one. No disrespect intended.’
‘None taken,’ said Bartle quietly, looking more closely at the object. One could not be offended by the old man because he was clearly insane. This clock was quite the ugliest thing he had seen for years. It was made from a bulbous grey shell, out of which poked two thin splints of twig, one with a piece of string tied to it, the other with a dirty green pearl at its end.
Grisly Tales from Tumblewater Page 16