by Jan Siegel
‘Don’t be impertinent with me, young man. What’s your name? Petal? Know what we would have thought of a name like that when I was a boy. Still, times change. Thank God I’m done changing with ’em. See here, young Petal, we’ve got to get this sorted out now. Till Goodman turns up, the place needs a caretaker. No offence – you seem like a decent chap, even if you are a bit of a wop – but it’s got to be the Tudor girl. Tudors have always handled our affairs: it’s traditional. Goes back a long, long way. Almost to – well, the Tudors. Story goes, there’s some connection with Bluff King Hal, don’t know what. Got the hair, haven’t they? They’ve always been solicitors, managed things for us. That’s the Tudors. Sharp as a thorn, dry as a thistle. Tudors and Pyewacketts. So where is she?’
‘You mean,’ Jas read from the document in front of him, ‘Penelope Anne Tudor, great-granddaughter of Graham Tudor? The... other executor?’
‘That’s the ticket. The new generation. Parents killed in a car crash or something, so it has to be her. Only one left. All the old families are running out, dying off. Bloody depressing. Soon, the whole country’ll be in the hands of young upstarts like you.’
‘My father,’ Jas said, forgetting himself, ‘is a direct descendant of the last Maharajah of Bharatpore. We too are a very old family.’
‘Shame you have to do the lawyering,’ said Mr Pyewackett. ‘Ought to be living in a palace, riding on elephants and all that. Standards declining everywhere. About Penelope Anne –’
‘There’s a problem.’ Jas lapsed from his aristocratic heights. ‘The thing is –’
‘Got the name right, didn’t I? I checked pretty carefully.’
‘It’s not that. The thing is –’
‘There you are then. Get her in here.’
‘The thing is, she isn’t a lawyer. She’s still at school. She’s only thirteen.’
For a moment, the dead man looked nonplussed. His eyes might have widened, but without eyelids it was difficult to tell. Instead, they seemed to pop. From close up – and the far side of the desk was rather too close – this was an alarming sight. Jas swallowed again, and wondered if this was really happening. Nothing in his years of training had prepared him to deal with a corpse, especially one that was still up and talking. He wished the teeth didn’t rattle so much. It was as if Mr Pyewackett punctuated all his sentences with distant gunfire.
‘She was only six when you died,’ Jas continued, hanging on to some shreds of legal sanity. ‘As fellow executors, this firm contacted her guardian and – er – assumed sole responsibility for... Even now, she’s rather young to become involved in these matters. Five years short of her majority.’
‘Piffle!’ Mr Pyewackett leaned forward, jabbing at the desktop with an emphatic finger. Corpse-dust rose in a little cloud and the final joint wobbled dangerously. ‘You send that girl round to see me. Doesn’t matter if she’s thirteen or thirty: she’s a Tudor, she’ll take care of things. Send her round. I can’t be doing with all this nonsense. I’ve got my death to get on with.’
He strode out, hesitated in the corridor, and came back for his finger-joint.
Then Jas was left alone with a little drift of skin-flakes on the desk and a lingering smell of decay, slightly tinged with aftershave. Even so, it was several minutes before he got up to open the window.
Infernale
BEFORE THERE WAS a door, there would have been trees. Two trees growing close together, their branches interlacing into an arch, an arch leading nowhere. Small animals would have avoided the place and birds flown round it, but once in a while some careless or desperate creature, fleeing from a predator, might have vanished between the tree-trunks. Later, when men came, they cut down the trees and built the first door, perhaps just a couple of posts and a lintel made from crudely-shaped stones, with a rough image of one of the oldest gods set above it, as a guardian or a warning. Some said it was the gate to Hell, others, a portal to Fairyland, but few were reckless or foolhardy enough to put it to the test. Of those who did, none returned in the lifetime of kith or kin, but occasionally, a century or more later, a figure would appear with a face from long ago, white-haired, wizened, bewitched to the edge of madness, or mysteriously still young, rootless, muttering of people and places unknown.
Eventually walls came to shield the door, and the gap was closed with boards and rivets and spells, and a knob was set at the centre of the door that should never be turned. Then there were more walls and higher, corridors encircling corridors, rooms guarding rooms, and always the doors led elsewhere, and the passageways became a maze, and none knew what was inside. Sometimes the walls were torn down, or burned to the ground, but the foundations always remained, and the walls would be raised again in a different style, adapting to the changing moods of history, until rumour said they could rebuild themselves, shape-shifting to blend with the neighbourhood. For there was a neighbourhood, a city that grew until it engulfed the place, and it became a house among houses, hardly to be told apart from the others in the street.
The house had, if not an owner, at least a denizen. Legend claimed that when the first door opened he looked through, and saw himself, and the shadow of that bond darkened the house forever. He could not enter, because he was already there, in too many forms, in too many ages; his power and his will crept through every portal, and only the walls came in between. He did not make the house – such things are not made: they are snarls in the fabric of the universe, places where reality is twisted and fractured. But it grew to reflect his many faces, to enmesh his many webs, and those who knew of him said it must be guarded constantly, though they had no clear idea why, or against what.
It was put in the charge of a single family, an ordinary family, at least to begin with, until something infected them from the walls, a treacherous germ of magic or madness. They became eccentric, obsessive, unusually long-lived. But the house was safe in their care, sealed off from the world, and from him. If it had any purpose, it was forgotten. Those who were drawn to it, the curious and the adventurous and the vulnerable – the chosen few, Gifted or cursed – might find a way to enter, from the outside or within, but no one saw them come or go, and the doors seemed shut forever.
However, Time flies – it is well known for that – and at whiles even the immortals cannot keep up. An hour was yet to come when the forgotten Purpose would be remembered, and the doors would open, and all those who were lost in the mazes of the house would come crying into the world...
London, twenty-first century
PENELOPE ANNE TUDOR sat in the beige-tinted office while Jas Patel told her his story. Even though the story was carefully edited for her consumption, she found it exciting, although she had no intention of showing it. She was a pale girl with a scattering of ghost-freckles on her cheeks and forehead and straight reddish hair scraped back into a ponytail. Her mouth was small and serious, her other features tidy rather than pretty: grey eyes, neat little nose, small ears. She wore glasses for study and no makeup. In her severe school uniform – grey with maroon piping – she still looked like a child. Jas felt what little confidence he might have had evaporate at the sight of her.
He had been told she was a student who invariably got A-stars and hoped to become a lawyer in the tradition of the family. But she didn’t look like someone who could deal with a walking corpse and, unsure how to broach the subject, he steered clear of it. Perhaps Mr Pyewackett would welcome her in a very bad light, or wearing a mask. Possibly she would think he was merely ill. Very ill. After all, children were supposed to believe what they were told, weren’t they? He had tried to discuss the situation with a colleague and had been informed, in an undervoice, that the company handled some rather unusual cases, and on the whole it was best not to talk about it. Then he had contacted Mr Hayle, who had livened up at the first mention of Andrew Pyewackett.
‘Good old Andy. Bit of a dry stick, mind you, bit of a sharp tongue, but a thoroughly good chap. Good old Andy. Can’t believe he’s still alive.’
<
br /> ‘He isn’t,’ said Jas, but it failed to register with Mr Hayle, and there was no point in making an issue of it.
‘Mr Pyewackett,’ he told Penelope, ‘may seem a little... strange... to you. In fact, he’s at death’s door, which can make people rather... but I hope you’ll manage to be – er – polite to him.’
‘I’m always polite,’ Penelope said. ‘My grandmother’s very particular about it. I’ve never met anyone who was dying before. Is he very old? I looked him up in the file while I was waiting to see you and they’ve got his date of birth down as 1859. That must be wrong, mustn’t it?’
‘Typing error,’ said Jas, chickening out. ‘Are you quite sure you can handle this?’
‘It’ll be an interesting experience,’ Penelope said judiciously. ‘I expect it to be very beneficial for my education.’
Any thirteen-year-old who uses words like ‘beneficial’ is slightly scary. Jas said, in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere: ‘Do they call you Penny?’
‘No,’ Penelope said baldly. After a minute she added: ‘Some people call me Pen.’
She looked like a Pen, Jas thought, not a Penny. As in ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’
He said: ‘Well – er – Pen, Mr Pyewackett is expecting you at four o’clock tomorrow. I think it’s preferable he tells you everything himself. It’s Number 7A, Temporal Crescent, Hampstead. Don’t go to Number 7 by mistake. That’s the main property, but it’s – locked up. Mr Pyewackett is nervous of intruders.’
Mr Pyewackett hadn’t appeared to be nervous of anything, but then, being dead would do that for you.
‘I’ll find it,’ Pen said, with the quiet self-possession which appeared to be characteristic of her. She seemed to have no sense of humour, no natural frivolity, no girlyness. While it is impossible to see if someone has an imagination, Jas thought Penelope’s unimaginativity was as obvious as her hair colour. He had always considered himself a serious sort of person, hard-working and conscientious to a fault, but she made him feel like a lightweight for whom legal practice was a jolly little game.
He almost thought he had been more comfortable with the corpse.
After she had gone he succumbed to guilt because he had told her so little, but consoled himself with the hope, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Mr Pyewackett would have the tact to cover his face, not to mention the rest of his anatomy, when Pen came to tea.
OUT IN THE street, Pen waited until she was a safe distance from Whitbread Tudor Hayle before she allowed herself to smile. The knot of excitement and happiness inside her was so tight she couldn’t possibly unravel it all at once – she was far too grown up to skip or dance for joy, had probably been too grown up for such behaviour since she could walk. But the tension demanded some kind of release, so she smiled, and smiled, her pale face alight. She had a real job, a legal job, as if she was a fully-fledged lawyer, instead of a thirteen-year-old who wanted to take her GCSEs early because they were so easy, and spent her spare time reading case histories, and arguing on the Internet about famous miscarriages of justice. She had already decided to specialise in crime, breaking with family precedent, but she knew criminal cases were a long way in the future and the thrill of her first job outweighed all other considerations. It was the most magical thing that had ever happened to her, except she didn’t believe in magic. Unlike her friends, she didn’t read fantasy books – in fact, she read very little fiction at all since she couldn’t see the point of it, though her grandmother had ensured she had a basic knowledge of the classics. But Pen preferred facts. Had Jas told her he thought she had no imagination she would have agreed with enthusiasm. School reports said she had an analytical mind, and she did her best to live up to it. Pen’s best was very good. In her view, imagination just got you into trouble.
At home, Pen told her grandmother all about it, showing the eagerness she would never reveal to contemporaries. Orphaned at the age of two, she had no memory of her parents and had been brought up by her mother’s mother, Eve Harkness, a veteran of flower-power and hippydom, now in her sixties and grown more conventional with time. She was on the small side, still slender, with grey-blonde hair in an elfin cut, worry-lines in her forehead, smile-lines in her cheek. Something about Pen’s story made her uneasy, but then, when you are responsible for a budding teenager, practically everything makes you uneasy, so she tried to ignore it.
‘You have to go and see this man who’s dying? I thought... the firm got in touch with me about five years ago. I had the impression he was already dead. Anyway, I don’t think you should be attending deathbeds, not at your age.’ She sounded slightly shocked, as if Pen had said she would be visiting a brothel madam or an East End gangster.
‘I’ll be all right,’ Pen said. ‘Death isn’t contagious, after all.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s okay,’ Mrs Harkness said, doubtfully. ‘I don’t see what harm can come of it.’
Much later, Pen would remember her words.
THE NEXT DAY, just before four, Pen was walking along Temporal Crescent. She had expected it to be a terrace and was surprised and rather impressed to see all the houses were detached, set well back from the road with adjacent garages and bits of tree and garden behind looming walls. Each front door came with a pillared porch and was approached by at least two flights of steps, flanked by stone urns sprouting tasteful vegetation. The red eyes of burglar alarms gazed balefully from every façade and the ground floor windows were covered with painted iron grilles. Pen found Number 7 by deduction, since it preceded Number 8, but it was set even further back, the garden walls surrounded it completely, and all she could see of it was a glimpse of the roof and the second floor. There were no steps, no front door, apparently no way in at all. Every house must have a door, Pen thought, but she couldn’t see one, even when she peered round the side. Number 7A was a much smaller building, perhaps originally a servants’ lodge, set against the wall skirting the main property. This at least had a door, with the number on it.
Pen rang the bell.
The door was opened by a butler. Pen had never seen one, but even for a girl who read little fiction the man was instantly identifiable. Butlers are like dragons and demons and other creatures not commonly encountered everyday: you may never see them, but you know exactly what they look like.
‘Miss Tudor?’
‘Yes,’ said Pen. It made her feel very grand to be called Miss, but she, too, could do impassive.
‘Come this way, please.’
In the hall, he offered to take her coat and the small rucksack she used for school, but she declined. The rucksack contained pen and paper, in case she needed to take notes, and the coat, which was civilian issue, hid her school uniform.
They went upstairs and stopped outside a door.
‘Mr Pyewackett,’ the butler explained, with a diplomatic air, ‘has not been accustomed to the company of young people for some years. Neither of us have. I hope you will be able to make allowances.’
Perhaps he hates children, Pen thought, trying to understand whatever nuances the butler was failing to convey. But then, why make a thirteen-year-old your executor? Of course, by the time she came to do her executing, he would be dead, so it would make little difference to him anyway.
She said: ‘I’m sure I shall.’
The butler opened the door and stood aside for her to enter.
She found herself in a large dark room which, at first glance, resembled a Victorian deathbed scene. Heavy velvet curtains excluded all daylight and there was a fourposter at the far end surrounded by a quantity of dribbly candles and a low-wattage electric lamp. Her host was propped against a mound of pillows like a conventional invalid, but there all resemblance ended. Scattered across the quilt were several books at different stages of being read, a half-eaten packet of Hobnobs, a small tray with stained coffee-cup and saucer, and a couple of used hankerchieves, not paper ones but big squares of spotted silk. What looked like a vintage television set stood on a table beside the
bed, and Mr Pyewackett was engaged in changing channels by stabbing at the controls with a very long, very thin bamboo pole, the other end of which had a snuffer for extinguishing the topmost candles on a chandelier.
‘Look at that!’ he said. ‘I can switch channels without moving from my bed. Don’t need to get up, don’t need to ring for Quorum. Clever stuff, hey?’
Pen stared at him. She saw the lidless eyes, the withered face, the detachable teeth. His few remaining strands of hair had gone on growing after death and were splayed across the pillows like a net of cobwebs. He wore a sumptuous brocade dressing-gown and a silk cravat, and the bones protruded from his finger-ends as if from a pair of worn-out gloves.
Pen said: ‘–!’
‘What’s the matter? Never seen a dead person before?’
‘N-no...’
‘When I was your age, I’d seen half a dozen. Used to get taken to view the corpse every time some relative popped off. Had to kiss m’ grandfather when I was eight years old – they’d baked him in embalming fluid. Disgusting. Couldn’t throw up, either; wasn’t done. No stamina, young people these days. Not asking you to kiss me, am I?’
Pen made an indeterminate noise.
‘It’s that boy Petal, isn’t it? Didn’t really fill you in? Should have thought you’d have realised I’d be dead, since you’re supposed to be dealing with my Will. No need to bother with Wills and probate and stuff when a chap’s still alive.’
‘Mr Patel told me you were dying,’ Pen said carefully, after a brief struggle with her vocal cords, ‘not that you had actually... died.’
‘Silly boy. Pussyfooting round the subject. The firm ain’t what it was in your great-grandfather’s day. Still, we’ve cleared that up now. Sit down. Quorum! get the girl some tea. Hobnob? Got to get this over in time for The Weakest Link. Always watch that.’