by Zizou Corder
‘Yes, but what boy?’ Janaki replied. She’s tenacious in these matters.
‘The boy who came this morning, while you were in the back.’
She waited a while for me to say something more. Obviously, what I had said was not enough.
‘Yes, but what boy was he?’ she returned, after a while.
‘He was…’ It was becoming embarrassingly apparent to me how very foolish I had been. ‘He was avoiding some foreign security outside, and seemed to have business with us, so I let him in downstairs.’
‘Could he have entered your study though?’
I felt a little warm about the forehead.
‘I – er – yes,’ I said.
She was just looking at me.
‘I admitted him. To my study. And left him there.’
Disbelievingly.
‘So he could well have…’
Why did you leave a strange security-avoiding boy in your study with a valuable book? I could see the question in her mind, in her thoughts, forming on her lips, but she is a respectful girl, and she did not say it. ‘What kind of boy was he?’ she said instead.
‘Slender, poor-looking, ashy-haired, blue-eyed, prominent upper lip…’
‘Did he look as if he’d never had a decent meal in his life? Like he was grown in a dark cellar? Sticky-up blond hair and tattoos on his forearms?’
‘Er – yes!’ I said.
‘I saw him!’ she said. ‘Not long ago, in the square! He was sitting about under a tree. Come!’
I am not a quick mover, but I did my best. Janaki, with the bounce of youth, was already up the stairs, down the stairs, out the door and on the pavement, running hither and thither like a worried dog, looking for the lad and asking passers-by if they had seen him.
A man eating his sandwiches had – heading for Green Park, he said.
‘Come back in and we shall call the police,’ I suggested, but Janaki pointed out that there were a great many police already down there as a result of the murder and we should just go and address ourselves to them directly.
As I said, Janaki understands modern manners. Within moments of a policeman saying to her, ‘You can’t go through here, miss, there’s been an incident’; we were in a canvas hut talking to a long, bustling woman in a dark suit and several sinister-looking men with curious taste in facial hair and that peculiar little bulge in the neck that denotes the presence of a subdural communication system.
‘We believe we know the identity of the dead man,’ Janaki said.
They stared expectantly.
‘He came to visit me last night,’ I said sadly. ‘He brought a book for me to take care of, and it has been stolen, and he is dead. It is most unfortunate.’
‘His name is Ernesto de Saloman,’ Janaki continued. ‘He was last staying in Paris. He is a bibliophile.’
‘The book was stolen by a youth named Joe English,’ I said. ‘About fourteen, unusually pale, with tattoos. It’s an odd manuscript, bound in vellum… um… possibly a diary of some kind…’
‘A young girl calling herself Jenny Maple came very early this morning trying to reclaim the book, using a forged letter, but we didn’t give it to her.’
The police people stared at us as if in shock. You’d think they’d never been given help with their enquiries before.
CHAPTER 6
Continuing the Story According
to Lee Raven
At Stratford Place, just by the Bond Street tube, down underground, there is an old stone room which was a reservoir, they say, from when water was taken from the Tyburn in medieval times and run through a conduit like an aqueduct, all across the city for people to help themselves. On special occasions they’d stop the water and run wine through. They did that for Edward I coming home from the Crusades, and for Henry IV’s wedding, and everybody got drunk for free.
It’s just sitting there now, under some building behind Oxford Street. It was going to be a museum once, Dad said, but the building’s owner wasn’t interested. You can still get to it, from the Tyburn, if you’re little. Bit of a clamber. I managed to cut my thumb. Not a lot of fun.
That’s where I went, to sit and wait for Finn. There was an old ventilation shaft at the front and a drop of yellow light coming down from a grid several levels up. Strange to think that London was down here, then. When you see how the level of the ground has gone up, like when you see ruins and stuff, where does it come from? All that extra earth? Is it a big compost heap? Is it from worms? Is there some network of holes underground, where stuff has been taken from to be spewed up on the surface?
I’m kind of expecting to see old ghosts of monks and drunk peasants and stuff. Dare say Finn’ll get up here before dark anyway. The manhole to the surface here is down in the basement area of one of the buildings. Bit public. He’ll have to wait till it’s safe.
You may be wondering how I know about conduits and monks and stuff, if I can’t read and won’t go to school. That’s because you’re making a basic mistake. I ain’t stupid. I just can’t read. I can learn anything, anywhere, any time. I learned a lot off the telly – history channels and that – and I keep my ears open. So don’t go thinking I’m stupid.
One good thing is you don’t get hungry down the shores. Food is the last thing on your mind.
I’d taken off my trousers and boots and socks and hung them from the ladder in the neck of the sewer, with the lid back on, so their stink didn’t stink me up, and I scraped myself clean as best I could on the stone walls and rubbing myself with gritty dust. The fresh air was beautiful to me. I was standing under the shaft up to the real world and gazing up till my neck ached. I climbed the metal bars up the manhole shaft and felt the cover from beneath, and listened to the heels of the people as they clacked along the pavement way above me, and the rumble and clank of traffic nearby, and they had no idea I was down here.
Finn didn’t come.
I knew when the light turned orange and came from a different direction that it was a street light, and it was evening. He’d be along soon. Safer after dark.
He didn’t come.
I slept, hunger beginning to sneak in through my dreams, expecting at any moment the rattle of his skello in the pickhole, the clang of the manhole cover. I was half woken when something like a rat ran over my foot, but I can sleep anywhere, I’m good at sleeping.
In the morning it felt like the rats were inside me. Never mind the stink, I was ravenous.
No Finn.
I set myself to think.
I could put on my filthy trousers (they might at least be dry by now and I could brush them down), and open the manhole from within with the skello, and take the risk of there being nobody above, and return rather earlier than I had planned to the overworld.
Or I could wait.
What if he didn’t have another skello? He’d be able to get one, wouldn’t he? Or he’d knock and I’d open it from down here.
I dragged my stiff limbs together and went to peer up the ventilation shaft. The street light was still on, but there was some kind of daylight as well. Dawn. If I was to go, now would be a good time. The West End would be as empty as it would ever be, not that that was any guarantee of any emptiness at all.
I crept up the manhole shaft and listened. For minutes it was quiet. Then trot trot trot trot, someone came clacking by.
I was hungry. And thirsty.
I went to the manhole to the sewer and reclaimed my trousers and boots. While there, I took the opportunity for a whazz directly into the hole. One thing at least was convenient.
I decided to wait it out. I didn’t want to find myself wandering the West End in daylight, just like I was yesterday only a bit further from the heart of the action and stunk up from being down the shores. I’d stick it out and Finn would come.
It wasn’t till mid-morning that it occurred to me to look at the Beano book again, to keep myself amused. I’d used it as a pillow the night before, so I went and got it and I took it to the bottom of the v
entilation shaft and positioned it and myself in the scrap of light that wavered down, smiled at Plug on the cover, and opened it.
I looked at the Dennis the Menace again first. Then there was some Beryl the Peril, a Little Plum, the Bash Street Kids. I looked at the writing and I didn’t mind too much not being able to read it, because there was nobody there telling me I should read it, or I could read it if I tried harder, or I was a stupid useless lump of ignorance for not being able to read it. The letters danced around the way they usually did, and I couldn’t really make them out, as I usually couldn’t, and it all meant nothing to me. But I loved the pictures, and I could tell what was going on even if I couldn’t read the jokes in the speech bubbles. I could half hear my mum’s voice from long ago saying, ‘And Danny’s saying, “Come on, fellows!”, and Teacher’s saying, “Oh no! Foiled again!”’
I was smiling to myself, curled up with the book, when I realized that I could hear the words. I wasn’t remembering them. They were there – in the present.
They weren’t just in my head. I could hear them.
I thought: hunger, tiredness, stress. Bad air. Not surprising really. Hearing things. Probably someone up on the street. Voices very peculiar in shafts. Echoes and so on. Could be Finn!
I carefully put the book down and scrambled back up to the manhole. I listened out, silent and alert.
Nothing. A blackbird trilling away, far off. The unmistakable quiet hum of dawn in a big city.
OK.
I came back down to where the book lay, its pages lifting gently in the breath of draught from the ventilations shaft. I picked it up, took it on to my lap and curled myself up again. The shadowy dawn light fell on its pages. I let my eyes settle again on the page, the faded old reds and yellows, the funny faces and knobbly knees, the stupid chases and the silly dogs.
And it started again…
There was the voice, in my head or outside it, giving me the words.
Was this what reading was like? Hearing someone else’s words in your head? For a moment a pang of envy flew through me like a blade. You could have all that, just by looking at writing…
But no – it wasn’t that. I wasn’t reading. The letters were still blurring and fluttering about, I still couldn’t see any of the patterns that I know other people see and make sense of. I wasn’t reading. I was hearing. A low, quiet voice, not much louder than my thoughts, was telling me what was written in the speech bubbles. I looked at a bubble and the voice spoke. I looked at another and it spoke again, telling me something else.
I closed my eyes quickly. The voice stopped.
I opened them and looked around. There was no one there. Well, of course there wasn’t – I knew that.
I considered looking at the page again.
Maybe not.
I looked.
After a moment, it started again.
It was as if… something was reading to me.
It was so lovely. It was the loveliest thing that I had seen or known since… since I don’t know. It was like having Mum, and a best mate, and me, and all being together, and safe, and it was funny… it was lovely.
I went through the whole book like that and then I must have dozed off again.
And that was when it got very peculiar.
I went to sleep with an old Beano Annual on my lap.
I woke holding on to something else entirely. It was an old book. It was smallish, fattish, and covered in vellum, like Mr Maggs had showed me before. Pearly white. Only this had kind of carving in it – etching, you might call it, only that probably ain’t the right word. It may have looked old but it didn’t feel it. It felt kind of flexible; kind of warm in my hands. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked either.
I was half asleep. I kind of stared at what I was holding, and I blinked, and then I thought, Oh, I’m still asleep, good dream! And I did that thing where you try to slip back into sleep because you don’t want to lose the dream.
But it wasn’t a dream. You don’t feel the warmth and the weight in a dream.
So then I sat up, and I looked around a bit, to see if I had maybe put the Beano somewhere else and this book just happened to have been here in my hands all along and I hadn’t noticed. But I knew that wasn’t the case.
Where the Beano Annual had been, right in my hands, with Plug on the cover and Mum’s Dennis the Menace story inside, there was now an antique tome.
OK.
I didn’t know what to say, really. What do you say when something impossible happens before your eyes?
You say, ‘There must be an explanation,’ that’s what you say. And you try to find one.
So I tried to find one.
And all I could think was – even when it was the Beano, it was reading aloud to me.
And I stared at this item in my hands and I whispered, ‘What the flaming crike are you?’
I dared not be holding it – but it was already there in my hands. I don’t know quite how to explain this, but it felt, somehow, kind of like it was alive. Not bouncing around and running away, but – well, if you ever held a baby when it’s asleep, or an animal. You know it’s not dead. This book was not dead.
I stroked the pearly cover gently. It didn’t respond exactly, but…
It occurred to me that this item I had nicked was something – how shall I put this? – out of the ordinary. Inconceivable, even. Weird. Magnificent.
Well.
There was only one thing to do. So I did it. I opened the book.
What did I expect? More Beano pictures? No. Ancient illuminations in gold and crimson, with mysterious writing in foreign languages? Maybe. Spells to turn my enemies into Surinam toads? Creatures to leap out at me? Magic worlds to draw me in? A beautiful maiden in a strangely realistic picture who turns her face to me with tears in her eyes and soundlessly weeps and begs me to rescue her?
I don’t know what I expected. My mouth was dry and I didn’t even believe what had happened so far.
I opened the book.
The pages were blank.
Well – they had nothing written on them, and no pictures. But they were – how can I put this? – they were like the branches of the cherry trees on the streets in March, before the leaves come out in the early spring. You look at them and you can see they’re kind of bursting with the leaves they are about to have, the little buds so tight and dark and just about to go… BADAAAH! And spring is going to bust out all over with all the blossom and the greenness and everything…
That’s what these pages looked like. Creamy rough-smooth paper, pulsating with…
I touched it. There was a kind of tremor, almost like it was breathing.
‘Well, hello,’ I said.
The page gave a little ripple under my fingers. And then – the voice again.
‘Once upon a time,’ it said.
Once upon a time!
I held it up, as if I were reading it, and I gazed at the empty page.
‘Once upon a time,’ it said gently. The voice was really good. The kind of voice that, whatever it’s saying, you turn and listen.
The story was about a little boy called Hercules, who was the strongest child in the world. He held serpents by the neck, their fanged mouths dripping venom…
Every now and again one of its pages turned over – not like when they were flapping in the breeze, but as if someone was turning them. But I wasn’t. I wouldn’t know when to turn.
I breathed slowly, and sat, and listened, and accepted. A book is telling me a story. First it had read me the Beano, now it is telling me this. OK.
‘The Nemean Lion was born of the Moon,’ it continued. ‘One furious night she loosed him on to the slopes of Mount Taygetus…’
Inside my head, I saw the young lion leaping from the moon, landing on a green and rocky mountainside. It was clearer in my imagination than any cartoon or film. I closed my eyes, and the voice and the words worked magic in me. I could see the lion, smell the warm night, feel the sharpened rock between my fingers
as Hercules rose to slay the lion…
Hercules was fighting the lion on a Greek hillside when our reverie was shattered.
The clang of the manhole cover came echoing down the shaft. Finn!
The last thing I wanted was to tear myself from the story and the voice. But I had to.
I shook my head back to reality. Well, as best I could. I closed the book swiftly and carefully – ‘Sorry,’ I whispered – and laid it on my coat to keep it from the dusty floor, covered over with a sleeve. I wasn’t ready to explain it, that was for sure. I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to.
Seeing Finn clambering down the metal ladder filled my heart with normality and joy – and, five minutes later, he’d filled my belly with toasted cheese and salami sandwiches and blueberry yoghurt and chocolate milk and oranges, which was even better.
He had done me proud. A big bag of food, bottles of sherbet and water, clean trousers and a T-shirt, pair of waders, an oxygen puffer, a mask, a torch and a sleeping bag.
‘You’re going to have to stay here for a while,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back. There’s such a fuss you wouldn’t believe! You’re in the papers again – the police want to talk to you about the dead bloke and parrently you nicked some ancient manuscript off Mr Maggs that belonged to the bloke in the lake – oh, his name is Ernesto de Saloman – and also the Asteriosy thing, but they say you’re not to worry about that, they just need to interview you about the murder…’
It was rather a lot to take in – especially given my peculiar experiences with the book. But I hadn’t lost all my sense. ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, in disbelieving tones. ‘What, they’d let me off dipping Asteriosy if I just put myself in their hands long enough to say I don’t know bog all about Mr Ernesto and here’s your book, I never wanted it anyway?’
‘That’s what they’re saying,’ said Finn.
‘Yeah, well, Ravens don’t go to the police,’ I continued. ‘And even if the police did mean it – fat chance – I don’t suppose Romana Asteriosy’s security would think of things that way…’
And anyway… the book. I may have not been that interested in the book before, but that was before…