Tall Tales From Pitch End

by Nigel McDowell

  ‘Marshall!’ the Temperate announced. ‘Arrest the Widows of Pitch End! The Atlas boy’s mother is amongst them!’

  The fire faded. Bruno lost sight of the Widows. He could go no further. How could he leave his mother to the whim of the Elders?

  ‘What are ye waiting about for?’ It was the same voice, same whisper that had ordered him earlier and had, Bruno guessed, taken out the light bulbs. ‘Ye can’t help yer mam now. She’ll be grand, she can look after herself.’

  Bruno waited, fresh insults thrown around him by Pitch Enders –

  ‘Those Widows are always lurking about, saying nothing! Not natural!’

  ‘What have they to hide behind those veils!’

  ‘Who even asked them to wear them? Who gave them permission!’

  ‘Bruno,’ said the whisper close to him, ‘ye have to go. I’ll open the door, then ye have to go through, right?’

  Bruno didn’t answer. But sure enough the doors to the Discussion Chamber were opened within a minute and new light reached in to dispel the dark – the brilliance of the Faerie Fort.

  ‘Stop him!’

  Temperate or Marshall? Maybe both. Bruno ran – out of the Discussion Chamber, beyond the Faerie Fort to the double doors that held the town hall shut in usual times. Bruno couldn’t stop. Running too quick he flung himself against the doors. They refused to move. Bolts, bars, a large lock.

  He heard naked footsteps hurrying across stone but with no visible owner. He knew what he’d hear next –

  ‘Stand back from the door, quick-smart!’

  Bruno moved away a little, eyes on the entrance to the Discussion Chamber and cowering as the bars and bolts were rushed back and three gunshots chased one another into the lock. It sprung off, shattering to scatter itself across the floor. The doors eased open and wind rushed past to filch more dead leaves from the Faerie Fort.

  A sudden impact on his shoulder made Bruno cry out, feeling something sharp bite down. He turned, saw a flash of silver and heard his own voice issue from the mouth of Temperate Thomas’s Cat-Sentry as it clung onto him, claws moving deeper – ‘Come back, Da! Come back! Please come back to me!’

  A blast – another gunshot that exploded the Cat-Sentry on his shoulder as spectacularly as the lock, reduced to bits barely as big as crumbs. Bruno stood stiff with shock, hands feeling his face, hoping all of him was still there. ‘Ye could’ve killed me,’ he murmured, though still not knowing who he spoke to.

  Bruno felt hands push him on, firm as the Temperate’s Talent, towards the open double doors. ‘Head for the lighthouse, and ye’ll be safe there. I’ll be after ye, not far. Run on and don’t be stopping for anyone, ye hear me? Don’t let anyone see ye.’

  ‘But how can I stop people seeing me if—’

  ‘Just think it,’ interrupted the voice, ‘and that’ll be enough. No one can see ye if ye don’t want them too. Go!’

  And Bruno fled into welcome dark, the sanctuary of night.

  XIII

  The Emerald Ghost

  ‘Anybody about in here?’

  Bruno had decided to be brave and speak, but maybe he spoke too soon. (Speaking when I should be silent, he thought, silent when I should be speaking – just like Miss Hope always said.) He’d done as he was told, run without stopping – shedding his second shoe along they way – and was standing on the threshold of the twelfth lighthouse of Pitch End. He bit his lip and waited for anything that might be lurking. The injury on his shoulder itched, wanting attention, but he didn’t touch where the Cat-Sentry’s claws had gone in – he was afraid of what deep damage he’d find.

  Bruno just breathed but couldn’t think right, waiting with Pitch End at his back, the rainfall a shroud to soften its lights and rages. Then he heard something behind, a sound like a stumbling on the rocky rough track that led across the outcrop to the lighthouse. Bruno stepped forwards to pull shut the lighthouse’s small, heavy door and with its sudden slam sending echoes into the high, hollow reaches of the lighthouse, he felt more alone than he’d done before. A feeling short-lived –

  ‘Did ye have to slam it so loud? And ye nearly took me arm off with it!’

  Bruno heard footsteps, a deep breathing through nostrils. He stepped back against the door and said, ‘Who are ye?’

  ‘The Emerald Ghost,’ said the voice (same as he’d heard in the town hall, that had told him to flee to the lighthouse). There was laughter, and the voice said again, ‘I think I spooked those fools in the town hall good and proper, eh?’

  Bruno couldn’t decide whether it was a boy or girl. He didn’t reply, just stood repeating the word, ‘Ghost,’ to himself. His hand touched the cold door for support.

  ‘Any food in here, do ye think?’ asked the voice. ‘Must be something for eating, I’m bloody starving!’

  There was movement in the dark and the longer Bruno stood the more was revealed: three windows, crescent-shaped, their sills showing the thickness of the lighthouse’s walls, moonlight outlining the steps of a dark staircase in the centre, corkscrewing upwards. A tall cabinet like the dresser they had at home, but with shelves empty. And around the edges, stacks of paper. For what? Bruno thought. He stepped forwards and his knee struck a large wooden table. Something rattled across its surface, fell. Bruno reached down for it and came back with a pencil. It was one of dozens on the tabletop, some loose, some bound together.

  ‘Maybe in here there’s something.’

  The low doors of the dresser sprang open.

  ‘Some Rebel meeting place this was!’ said the voice, as more paper dislodged from inside the dresser by unseen hands. ‘No provisions, not even an apple for eating!’

  ‘Why can’t I see ye?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘Too dark,’ said the voice.

  ‘Didn’t mean that,’ said Bruno, quietly, then louder: ‘I meant how come I couldn’t see ye in the town hall?’

  ‘Didn’t want ye to,’ said the voice. ‘Best not to let ye see me properly, I thought. Ye’re too easy to work out, Bruno. Ye’d have just looked right at me or something, given the game away!’

  Bruno stepped forwards again and asked, ‘Well, how did ye get here as quick as me?’

  ‘I know rightly-quicker ways,’ was the reply, and Bruno heard a smile in the voice. ‘Oh yes, rightly-better than anyone else in Pitch End! But I can’t tell in case ye get caught and tell that Temperate all the secrets.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Bruno, frustration obliterating any other feeling. ‘Maybe the truth is ye’re just too scared to show yerself!’

  Any searching through the dresser ceased. The voice said, ‘Did ye say scared?’

  And then Bruno did see. Allowed was how it felt: a slow divulging, vague then resolving into a pair of narrowed eyes, a deepening frown, moving fast towards him like a defiant returning ghost refusing mortality … a girl cast in an emerald cloak with matching hood, a mass of blond hair like coils of wire standing out from her scalp, and as Bruno wondered at her reality he felt pain in his belly as she arrived at him, poking him hard with one finger.

  ‘Don’t ever call me scared, right?’ she told him. The same finger she’d poked him with came close to his face, folding into a fist. ‘Got it?’

  She took a shotgun with a foreshortened barrel in hand and aimed it at Bruno.

  ‘Louise,’ said another voice, making both Bruno and the Emerald Ghost start, and turn for the source. ‘I’d appreciate it if ye weren’t blowing Bruno’s head off, seeing as we need all the allies we can be getting, things developing as they are.’

  There was a rasping noise, light that flared then diminished and then a person that Bruno could immediately see. The voice belonged to Pace-the-Witherman.

  ‘Bruno,’ said Pace, ‘this is Louise Green. One of the last remaining Rebels.’

  ‘Pleased to meet ye,’ said Louise, and like another person entirely she smiled and offered Bruno her hand. He took it, shook it, and she skipped away to continue the hunt for food.

  Pace moved forward
s, avoiding the central spiral stair. He had the appearance of an unwilling guest with poor news. Loosely, his mouth held a pipe shaped like a buxom mermaid.

  ‘Ye alright?’ Pace asked, smoke escaping with each syllable.

  Bruno nodded, but wasn’t sure whether the Witherman had seen. He returned the pencil to the table and his shoulder shot with pain. Pace moved quickly towards him, quicker than Bruno had ever witnessed. His hands – more delicate than Bruno had ever witnessed – touched the wound from the Cat-Sentry.

  ‘Well that’ll need seeing to,’ said Pace. He chewed on his pipe, and then called, ‘Louise! Get me a needle and thread. At the back of the dresser there’s a compartment, ye’ll find things in there.’

  Pace dragged a chair out of the dark and pushed it under Bruno.

  ‘Sit,’ said the Witherman. ‘Ye’ve had a lot of shocks tonight, I’m thinking.’

  And only then, at the sight of Pace’s sympathy, his care, did the fullness of the night’s events come to Bruno. He wished for something like sleep, a blank relief.

  ‘At last!’ he heard Louise exclaim. A crunch: teeth sinking into apple.

  ‘Louise,’ said Pace, ‘the box, quick-smart.’

  Quick across the room came Louise, apple in one hand and a small wooden box in the other. She gave the box to Pace. A symbol stained its lid, one that Bruno didn’t need to fully see to recognise.

  ‘This,’ said Bruno, bringing out his father’s medallion. ‘This is the symbol of the Rebels. Gumbly had one of these medallions. It was the symbol on the crate he brought back, the one with that book in it.’

  Pace sighed. One of his gnarled, weather-bitten hands shifted into his shirt, bringing back yet another medallion.

  ‘We were all with Dr Jonathan Bloom,’ said Pace. ‘Yer father, the Withermen, all Rebels, all fighting agin the Elders. It was Dr Bloom that was giving the four Withermen – Waghorn, Grave, Gumbly and meself – these.’ Pace hooked another shivering finger around half of his buttonless shirt and pulled it wide, revealing the cracked clock face, handless like Gumbly’s, implanted lopsidedly over his heart. Bruno heard: tick, tick, tick –

  Pace let his shirt fall closed. He settled the box with the Rebel symbol on the table and from inside took a long, sharp needle, already threaded, and a match.

  ‘Why did he put the clocks in yer chests?’ asked Bruno.

  ‘Official version told to the Elders,’ said Pace, as the match was struck, the needle dipped into the flame, ‘was so it would keep us Withermen just working on, never tiring, never dying, always there to look after the dead. That was near twelve turns ago, before Rebels and all the fighting. And Temperate Thomas liked that idea alright. No objection, like he had no objection to those clockwork Cat-Sentries Dr Bloom came up with. Be looking away now, Bruno.’

  Pace held the needle ready but not steady, a slight quiver in the silver thread. Bruno watched it, wouldn’t look away.

  ‘Good,’ said Pace. ‘Look if ye can, if ye have to. Not a bad way of being.’

  Pace pressed the needle to Bruno’s shoulder. Pain like none he knew made Bruno shut his eyes, no decision then, and his hands gripped the sides of the chair, bare feet arching. He struggled to hold onto waking, trying not to topple or cry out.

  ‘My da,’ he said, hoping for a distraction, but no past pain could replace the present one.

  ‘Aye,’ said Pace, his fingers working on the wound, gently tugging. ‘Yer da was a Rebel too. One of the fiercest.’

  ‘But he was killed,’ said Bruno. ‘Murdered.’

  Pace made a noise between a snort and sniff.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ he said. ‘Nic Delby was yer da’s best friend, had been since they were younger than you. It was the Elders that made out Delby killed yer father. No more killed him than I did.’

  ‘Delby ran away though,’ said Bruno. ‘All the Rebels, they just went.’

  Louise returned, ‘Damn wrong! We never went away!’

  ‘Louise and the other Rebels are in hiding,’ Pace told Bruno, ‘up in the Elm Tree Mountains.’ He raised his voice a little. ‘How’s the army coming along, Louise?’

  ‘Coming along grand,’ said Louise, ‘just need a few last things.’

  ‘Or a lot of little ones, eh?’

  Louise said nothing for a moment, then, ‘I’m trying me best! It’s not easy to be getting into the town hall for a good snoop around!’

  ‘Well, Bruno,’ said Pace, ‘I think ye’re just about’ (the Witherman leaned close and Bruno heard a small snap) ‘done.’ Pace picked the bitten-off thread from between his teeth and returned the needle to its box.

  Bruno dared adjust his shoulder, a small shrug – the pain was almost none. He reached, touched it, feeling the small, neat line of stitches.

  ‘Ye’ll live,’ said Pace. ‘Now, we have to decide what’s next. Coz one thing we know – ye’re no longer safe in Pitch End. Nor me neither, not if they’ve got Gumbly.’

  ‘I saw them,’ said Bruno. ‘In Old Town, they were going to take the clock out of his chest.’

  ‘Thought they might,’ said Pace. ‘He should never have come back to Pitch End. He was unstable enough at the best of times, but this morning at the harbour …’ Pace didn’t finish.

  ‘He was missing,’ said Bruno. ‘Maybe he was trying to escape?’

  Pace made the same sound as earlier – amusement in a sniff-snort.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘Gumbly didn’t go out to sea for escape. Him and all on The Wintering went on Elder orders. See, last time I ever spoke to Gumbly, he told me something secret. He said that Temperate Thomas had offered the crew of their boat a load of money and praise and all kinds if they succeeded on a special job he had for them. He ordered them to go to a certain place out at sea, and they were to drop their nets and be dragging them along the seabed. Any fish they caught had to be thrown back. What they were looking for was something else. Anything with a certain symbol on it. Doesn’t take a lamplighter to see which symbol they were told to be looking for, does it?’

  ‘Looking for things that belonged to the Rebels,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Too right,’ said Pace, taking the pipe from his mouth, jabbing it in the air as he spoke. ‘See, Temperate knew that when the Single Season War was ending, Dr Bloom wanted to make sure no one ever found The Book of Black & White. So the Rebels left by night, took to the sea, taking the book with them.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Bruno. ‘What’s in the book that’s so bad?’

  Pace didn’t look at him. Louise, little more than a shadow, was close, but when Bruno looked to her she turned to face one of the half-moon windows, checking the sea, its black thoughts.

  ‘Like I was saying about Gumbly,’ whispered Pace. ‘He was nervy enough as it was, but this morning it was worse. Like he’d gone mad. Like he’d seen things he shouldn’t. Memory and imagining can drive a being mad, that’s what Dr Bloom used to say.’

  Bruno watched him.

  Pace smoked his pipe in earnest. ‘Ye’ll see soon enough, Bruno,’ he said. ‘But we need to concentrate on getting ye to safety now.’

  ‘My mother,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Ye can’t be helping her,’ said Pace. ‘Not yet anyway. But she’s strong enough. She can fight, look after herself as well as any Widow.’

  Bruno wanted to disagree, couldn’t think of anyone less able to ‘fight’ than his mother and the other Widows.

  Pace turned to Louise and asked, ‘Did ye get what I towl ye to?’

  ‘Course!’ she replied, turning back to them, moving in. ‘Nothing the Emerald Ghost can’t be getting if she needs to!’

  And from under her emerald cloak, Louise revealed –

  ‘My Owl-Sentry!’ said Bruno.

  ‘Good girl,’ said Pace, taking the Sentry from Louise. ‘Now’ (he handed Louise the box with the Rebel symbol) ‘there’s matches in there. Ye know what to do. Something that’ll distract.’

  Louise nodded, then said, ‘A diversion!’ She mounted the staircase and climb
ed, ran, the whole thing shaking and creaking under her rush.

  ‘Ye were rightly-smart ye know,’ Pace told Bruno, cradling the Owl-Sentry. ‘Keeping things safe inside this old thing. No Enforcer nor Elder would’ve thought to examine something so meagre.’

  ‘How did ye know about it?’ asked Bruno.

  ‘Yer mam told me,’ said Pace.

  Bruno wondered how much his mother knew, how much she’d hidden herself. How much he didn’t know her.

  ‘Take what ye need from inside,’ said Pace, handing the Sentry to Bruno. ‘But most of all – yer father’s pocket watch. Ye’re gonna need it.’

  ‘But where am I gonna go to? The Enforcers and everyone are after me, Temperate Thomas. If he finds me I’ll—’

  ‘Be in no worse trouble than ye are now,’ said Pace.

  Bruno half-turned away, but could find no solace in the dark, walls too close, everything overtaking him. He held the Owl-Sentry to his chest.

  ‘I haven’t asked for any of this,’ he found himself saying. ‘It’s just happening. Just because of things other people did.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’ asked Pace.

  ‘There’s no choice,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Always a choice,’ said Pace. ‘Let me show ye.’

  Bruno turned back to face the Witherman.

  ‘Ye can choose,’ said Pace, ‘to try and escape, get to safety. To fight back agin the Elders. Or ye can choose to stay in Pitch End. Now do ye want to see what ye’ll be doing for the rest of yer life if ye choose the second thing?’

  Light blazed from above, rushed like water down the walls, washed over their feet, the room around. And Bruno was shown: the stacks of paper he’d seen in the half-dark were bound like books, lengths of red leather in readiness beside. Pace picked one and handed it to Bruno. ‘Read,’ the Witherman told him. Bruno saw:

  The Wrath

  By Jack Pitch

  2nd Edition

  (With Rightly-Decent Additional Advice By Temperate Thomas II)

  ‘Making new copies of The Wrath,’ said Pace. ‘Writing them out by hand to be given to all Pitch Enders, with some extra little pearls added by the Temperate.’