Lungdon

by Edward Carey

  “Deliciously unsettling … stories don’t get much weirder.”

  —School Library Journal (starred review, Heap House)

  LUNGDON

  written and illustrated by

  EDWARD CAREY

  70 BLACK & WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS

  * * *

  The Iremongers are at large in London, the ruins of Foulsham left burning behind them. They need a new home and they intend to find one. Londoners are beginning to notice bizarre happenings in their city–loved ones disappearing, strange objects appearing and a creeping darkness that seems to swallow up the daylight. The Police have summoned help, but is their cure more deadly than the feared Iremongers? What role will Clod play: returning son or rebel? Heartbroken child or hero? And where are all the rats coming from?

  The interlocking fates of the odd and marvelous Iremonger family are now to be unraveled and disclosed in the thrilling conclusion to the Iremonger trilogy. Will servant girl Lucy Pennant and young Clod Iremonger be reunited? Will the Heaps, their ramshackle ancestral home, continue to stand? Will their birth objects, discarded items—a door knob, a tea strainer, a bath tub plug, a match box, what-have-you—given to them at birth with lives and histories of their own, continue to exert their uncanny pull? All will be revealed about Clod and his dark world in Lungdon.

  ALSO BY EDWARD CAREY:

  Heap House (Iremonger Book 1)

  Foulsham (Iremonger Book 2)

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com,

  or write us at the above address.

  Text and Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Edward Carey

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1292-8

  Contents

  Also by Edward Carey

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Curtain Up

  Part One: Outside Looking In

  1: Report From a Bedroom Window

  2: London Gazette I

  3: Observations From a Perambulation

  4: London Gazette II

  5: The House Across The Street

  Part Two: Inside Looking Out

  6: An Iremonger in London

  7: Botton?

  8: Blood

  9: Sharp As

  10: An Aunt Called Night

  11: In The Dark

  Part Three: Inside Out

  12: Water

  13: Secrets of a Room

  14: Buried in Filth

  15: Her Majesty’s Ratcatcher

  16: Moving Streetlamps

  17: Amongst New Companions

  18: The Factory of Light

  Part Four: Outside In

  19: John Smith Un-Iremonger

  20: Under The Cloche

  21: Long Line of Londoners

  22: Counting Objects

  23: Following The Trail

  24: He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

  25: The Tale of a Common Rivet

  26: The Very Latest Piece of London Statuary

  27: The Boy Who Talked To Objects

  28: A Conference of Lights

  29: A Cry The Night Before a Battle

  Part Five: Upside Down

  30: London Gazette III

  31: The Parties Assemble

  32: 8th February 1876

  33: How The Iremongers Opened Parliament

  Curtain Down

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Matilda

  This common seat of cruelty, this dirty city, this earth of stone, this sty of men, this un-Eden, un-paradise, this fortress built by men to kill men with infection and foul deed, this unhappy populace, this little people, this stone of coal set in a suffocating stench, this cursed plot, this city, this slum, this Lungdon.

  Oylum Iremonger, 1825

  To look down upon the whole of London as the birds of the air look down upon it, and see it dwindled to a mere rubbish heap.

  Henry Mayhew, 1852

  I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?

  Charlotte Brontë, 1853

  London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

  Henry James, 1909

  CURTAIN UP

  I Saw a Little Woman

  Statement of a London Photographic Man,

  31st January 1876

  There is evil come to my city.

  I saw it yesterday morning. I took a picture of it. And here it is.

  I’m often perched at my balcony in Onslow Square. I like to take a picture of my surroundings, of the people who live here, of general London life. Commonly the people are something of a blur when I take them down in pictures, because people will keep moving. In truth – in so many ways – I prefer the taking down of objects than people, so much more reliable you might say – but people, oh people they are always moving, so that when I take them with my machine and commit them to a plate, oftentimes they appear foggy, like a ghost of themselves. Well then, that’s to explain my picture somewhat, when I saw the evil.

  It was morning, I do swear it – there was sunlight, weak but present. More than enough for me to see clear. I had my apparatus up and ready on its tripod and all was primed. I was about to take a picture of the square before me, only I became distracted by a loud clacking noise, coming nearer and gaining in volume. It was, I ascertained after a time of listening, the noise of feet, of hard shoes clacking upon the cobbles, making a terrible din. The smacking noise came, as I say, ever closer, and then at last comes into view the source of the perturbation. It was a woman, an uncommonly small woman, not a child though, certainly a woman, and this little woman wore tough black boots and was otherwise quite attired in black and she marched like she had a purpose into the square and stood by the railing somewhere between the pavement and the garden, all business and determination. She was dressed, as I say, all in black and she was little, as I also say – undersized, strangely so, like there was something quite wrong about her from the start. She looked about her briskly.

  And then did I see it.

  The evil, I say.

  The woman put her head back. Her jaw seemed to snap right open in a most unnatural way, so that the little woman’s mouth was stretched uncommonly wide. Her jaw it clicked open like the jaw of some strange creature, and there was the sound of a great snap that echoed around the square. Then, you see, I had all about me and let my camera fire, there was a burst of phosphorescence as I let my camera use its eye and take it all down. And though the picture is a little blurred you can still see it, I say, especially when the pertinent part is blown up after developing. The awful truth. For then, oh then, from the wide-open mouth of this little woman in her sharp boots, came from somewhere deep in her throat a blackness, a great blackness, more and more blackness. A darkness, like a strange small weather grown out of a single human, getting bigger and bigger, like Aladdin’s djinn out of the lamp. Soon the whole square was dark as night, and all further streets quite blackened with it.

  Soon I could not even see my hands in front of my fac
e.

  Soon all was so thorough and complete dark.

  Like every candle in all the world had been put out of a sudden.

  Then I heard her again, the boots, the sharp boots, the click and the clack of her walking, of her feet hitting the cobbles and she was going further and further away. And all the darkness was left behind.

  But I have this picture.

  Of a little woman spewing out the night.

  Of this evil come to my city.

  Part One

  Outside Looking In

  Miss Eleanor Cranwell and a Music Stand

  1

  REPORT FROM A BEDROOM WINDOW

  From the Journal of Eleanor Cranwell,

  aged thirteen, 23 Connaught Place,

  London W

  3rd February 1876

  There has been no light. Not for days now. We all live in darkness and pretend it is the most natural thing.

  I admit very readily that there were days before when no light ever broke through onto London, but this darkness has been longer, and it has been darker. The gas is lit on the street at all hours, but it fails to illuminate much of anything. The only way to see what is before you is to set a candle to it, and always you are aware of the thick darkness all around that wants to put it out. It has been like this ever since the new family moved into the house across the street.

  No children play in the street, not since they came. And even adults rush from the place as if they fear it terribly, as if the street itself is damned.

  Well perhaps it is.

  I think I’m the only one at the window these days, all the other glass up and down the street is shuttered up or the curtains have been drawn and remain so. It’s as if the eyes of the street are closed, and no one else is watching.

  But I’m watching. I’m watching that house. I shan’t ever stop.

  Our street, our Connaught Place, is not the grandest address by any means. The best perhaps that can be said about it is that beyond the thickness of our south walls lies the great expanse of Hyde Park and space and green, though the whole park has been covered in a thick black fog for some time now, and, so Nanny says, it is so dark that it is as if the world has ended at the Bayswater Road.

  It has been so ever since they came. It is colder and harsher, the weather itself feels unkind, all the walls are frigid to the touch and they drip at times, so that much of the wallpaper through the house has grown blisters. And all of it, all of it, since they came.

  It is a very secret family that arrived here on the night that Foulsham – the borough of rubbish – caught fire and was burnt to the ground. That fire was so fierce that it smoulders still. How many people were killed that night I do not know. It must have been so terrible to be there, but somehow the papers never talk of how many died. That was the night the family moved in, when a whole borough was wiped out and all that was left were ashes. Who mourns for them, I wonder? I do not suppose that it is a coincidence that the family arrived that night of all nights.

  No one ever comes out of the front door. I think they must leave sometimes but the place looks so shuttered up. Twice only, to my excitement, in the deep of night, I have seen a young man with something flashing on his chest like a medal and with a shining brass helmet on his head, rushing out of the servants’ door on some business, and both times he was with a rather greasy fellow just behind him, as if that following person were not really a man at all but a shadow made somehow solid. I saw them only for the briefest of seconds when they came under the faint glow of the gas streetlamp. But when I tell Nanny or Mother, I am instructed to stop imagining things, to cease being so bothersome.

  ‘There is no one in that house,’ Mother tells me. ‘It is quite boarded up as you see. The Carringtons have had it shut up while they remain in the country to recover from their sudden illness. We hope that they are feeling better.’

  ‘There are people there, Mother, I’ve seen them.’

  ‘Stop it, Eleanor, I haven’t the time.’

  It’s always more dirty around that house than any of the others along Connaught Place. It never used to be like that. It’s as if the dirt likes the house, as if it were somehow dirt’s home. I wonder what it is like inside. I never minded overly much about it when the Carringtons lived there, but now I find myself wondering about it most particularly.

  I have begun to think that it notices, this new night of ours. It is watching. In fact I am sure of it. It is not just that it is dark outside – this new darkness is a thick darkness, it’s black clouds, it’s gas, it’s something alive. You must shoo it from a room.

  I generally keep a pair of bellows with me when I’m at home, and I pump my bellows and I see the clouds of night marshalled and bullied by my bellows-wind. If I work the bellows hard, I can gather the night up and send it all into a corner where I see it writhe. I watch it panic. At last it rushes itself of a sudden out through a keyhole or under a door, or hides under my bed – then creeps out again to look over my shoulder when I’m sat at the window keeping my notes. Wherever it has been it leaves behind a slight stain. It darkens and discolours all.

  I have begun to wonder if the night might actually report on me, on all of us. I do think little pieces of night rush back over the street and into the house there to tell tales. The night is surely thickest over there. And that house is darker than any other. It is there that the long night comes from, I’d swear to it. From there it gets everywhere. It’s in our hair, on our skin; it’s in our pockets and our thoughts; it’s on the mantelpiece and behind the door. Before putting on shoes you must turn them upside down and beat the night out of them. If you do that, sure enough a little black cloud comes trickling out. Stamp on that cloud. Stamp on it quick.

  We have all been breathing the night in.

  It does things to people, the new night. I have noticed it in my family, in the people all about us. In my things, even. This is what I have seen. Here is my tally:

  1. Great Aunt Rowena (Father’s maiden aunt who lives around the corner from us in Connaught Square, she who is the most wealthy of all our family, and who Mother is always encouraging me to be nice to, though really I need no encouragement). Great Aunt complains increasingly of a stiffness. She never was exactly a fluid person to begin with but now she insists that her stiffness is overcoming her and that she barely bends at all. I thought little enough of this when Great Aunt Rowena last invited me over to tea. She’d set all her dolls out for us to play with, but then – at her beckoning, in a quiet moment when we were alone together and Pritchett her maid had gone away to fetch some more biscuits – I did cautiously knock upon one of her legs. The sound was almost terrifying; it was just like wood. ‘Oh, Aunt,’ I cried. ‘I’m as stiff as a post,’ she said. ‘Yes,’ I said and, very earnestly, ‘Oh yes you are indeed!’

  2. My school desk in the school room, which always used to have four legs (as is most common with desks) now has five. I cannot say how it grew that other leg. Nanny says it has always been there but I know otherwise.

  3. Father’s shaving brush, which always had handsome soft bristles on one side of it, has started to grow dark, thick, spiky hairs along its handle.

  4. Uncle Randolph (Mother’s wayward brother – Father always refers to him in this way) is no longer engaged to Olivia Finch (I never liked her much myself). She has gone from London and is believed to be on the Continent. Mother said she ‘let him down terribly’ but I think I know the true reason. Uncle Randolph has fallen in love with a milk jug, which he keeps with him always. I have seen him whispering to the milk jug when he thinks no one is there, I even heard him calling it ‘My darling, my Liv-love,’ which was the ridiculous name he had formerly reserved for Olivia.

  6. Mrs Glimsford (our housekeeper) has become flat-footed and she never used to be.

  7. The brass fire extinguisher in the cupboard on my landing is getting taller. It has grown four inches.

  BUT MOST OF ALL:

  8. I do believe the music stand in my bedroom w
as once a servant from next door.

  Oh, the poor music stand. That first night when the secret family moved in, I sent Martha out to fetch the unhappy thing. Now I stop myself, I catch myself as I write all this down. I pause for breath, and I wonder –

  Could that really have happened? A person become a music stand?

  I look at the music stand standing here beside me and cannot quite believe it. I try very hard to remember that night. I saw them walking down the street, such a strange group of people, like a circus troop, but no colour to them, only greyness and grimness. And the worst of it all was the tall old man in the long black hat.

  The servant went up to him, to warn him about the Carringtons’ cholera and in return he took one look at her and at the flick of his fingers changed her from a person into … into an object, into this music stand. What a thing to happen! Oh! I stop again. And write this prayer.

  I SO WANT IT ALL TO HAVE BEEN A DREAM. PLEASE MAY IT BE ONE. PLEASE GOD.

  But I know it is not a dream.

  I have inquired next door, at number 21, about the servant.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’ came the butler, a Mr Ogilvy I believe.

  ‘You had a servant, she was a maid of some sort.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Quite short, I believe, with rather full cheeks.’

  ‘Do you mean Janey, Janey Cunliffe?’

  ‘I suppose I do. May I see her please?’

  ‘No you may not.’

  ‘Is she not inside? Is she too busy with her duties perhaps?’

  ‘What do you know of Janey Cunliffe, miss?’

  ‘Nothing really, only I should like to talk to her.’

  ‘Well and so should we, we have much to say to her in fact. Leaving her position with no warning. Sent out to do a small errand, and she never comes back. And some of the silver missing too, and an ormolu clock, well, well, yes indeed we should very much like to speak to Miss Janey Cunliffe. Very much.’