Candleman

by Glenn Dakin

  ‘What – what is this?’ growled a worried voice from the tunnel ahead.

  ‘Is it him?’ a second voice asked.

  ‘I don’t know! You first!’ the other urged.

  Theo felt the girl push him from behind. He stumbled forwards, his long white fingers outstretched. The two men gaped in fear.

  ‘Noooo!’ The first Foundling screamed and staggered backwards, knocking the other man off balance. The two brutes grabbed at each other, tottering on the brink of the foul waters. Then, with desperate cries, both men plunged into the smoking depths.

  ‘Ree-sult!’ said not-Clarice, and she raced ahead into the darkness.

  Chapter Seven

  Not-Clarice

  ‘What do you know about the Candle Man?’ asked Theo. He had collapsed, exhausted, into a silk-covered beanbag chair, in not-Clarice’s attic room. After their escape from their pursuers in the network, she had swiftly headed back to the surface and taken him to a narrow but elegant old house in a tree-lined street not far from Buckingham Palace.

  ‘Nothing,’ said not-Clarice quickly. ‘Who’s he? One of the fairy-tale stories Mr Nicely is always reading you?’

  There was a playful, mocking tone in her voice that Theo didn’t quite know how to deal with.

  ‘Why did you ask me to take my gloves off and run at those men?’ Theo asked.

  Not-Clarice drew back a lily-patterned curtain and frowned at the gloomy view of the gaunt mansions across the road. It was now a dismal afternoon, only two o’clock but the dreary cityscape seemed to be already yearning for dusk. A faint mist softened the shapes of the stark winter trees.

  ‘Well, they kept putting it about that you had a hideous disease. I thought we could make that work for us.’

  Theo fell silent.

  ‘Hungry?’ asked not-Clarice.

  ‘Have you got millet and greens?’ asked Theo hopefully.

  ‘No,’ replied the girl, smiling. ‘I’ll go and see what there is. You rest.’ She disappeared downstairs and Theo admired her exotic world. There was a painting of a beautiful woman in a long fashionable gown. An ebony sculpture of a cat. A half-eaten box of dark chocolates. To Theo these things were every bit as strange as the skeleton in the Watch Tower and the canals in the network.

  Theo sank into his luxurious beanbag and gave a miserable sigh. Life had been awful at Empire Hall, but outside it was plain scary.

  Not-Clarice came back up with a plate of blue cheese, crumbly biscuits and pink cake. She had also made hot tea – which no sensible person would ever do. The dangers of that over-stimulating brew had been made very clear to Theo at Empire Hall.

  ‘If you don’t say anything, then I’ll be able to talk to you,’ Theo said, feeling a draught from the window and hugging his knees.

  ‘You mean, pretend I’m Clarice,’ said not-Clarice.

  Theo nodded shyly. ‘It’s nice of you – I suppose – to rescue me,’ he said, breaking off a tiny corner of biscuit to nibble. ‘But things seem to have gone wrong. Magnus is too old and Sam is strange and disturbing to be with.’

  Not-Clarice laughed at this.

  ‘We can’t contact the Council,’ Theo continued, ‘so we can’t find out who I am, or what to do next. That’s pretty important as I have a terrifying condition and I really shouldn’t be running around free in the outside world. Soon, for the first time in my life I will have gone twenty-four hours without being in the Mercy Tube. It’s all looking a bit grim.’

  He took a deep breath. He was just making things worse. It was appalling manners to keep talking about yourself – the least important person in the world. He stuffed a pink cake in his mouth and swallowed greedily. ‘And now I’m with you,’ he added, ‘and the only thing I know about you is who you aren’t.’

  The girl sighed and rose to switch on a lamp. Theo noticed that she dressed in fine materials – her dark dress and jacket seemed new and splendid, like things had always been at Empire Hall. Not-Clarice might be part of the secret Society, but she clearly came from a different world to Sam and Magnus. Everything at the cemetery keeper’s cottage had been chipped, tatty, old or smelly. Certain things didn’t quite seem to fit together to Theo, and he wanted a few answers.

  ‘Are we safe here?’ Theo asked.

  ‘After the Watch Tower turned out to be not so secret after all, I thought it best to avoid anywhere connected with the Society of Unrelenting Vigilance,’ she said. ‘In case we’ve been betrayed by someone. This is just a room a friend keeps for me. He’s away,’ she added vaguely.

  ‘If you’re not Clarice, then who is?’ asked Theo.

  ‘Well, Clarice is,’ the girl replied. ‘She’s my twin sister. I’m Chloe. We were separated when we were only toddlers – after our mother died. Clarice, who was born deaf, went into an orphanage and was chosen to serve the Society of Good Works. It was a great opportunity for the Unrelenting Vigilance. They adopted me and brought me up a fine lady.’ She grinned at this to show Theo she was making light of a longer story. ‘It meant they could swap me over with Clarice sometimes and get a look at their enemies.’

  ‘But why are the two Societies enemies?’ Theo butted in.

  Chloe swigged the extremely dark tea.

  ‘It all goes back to Victorian times. A very devious man, known as the Philanthropist, set up the Society of Good Works. This organisation pretended to be a charity, but really it was just a front for a bunch of creepy villains. The Society taught orphans to steal, widows to be assassins and sick beggars to pass illnesses on to their enemies. Even the police fell under their power. They had London in a grip of terror.

  ‘In the end, some of the victims of the Society of Good Works – the people who had suffered at their hands – got together to form a secret alliance: The Society of Unrelenting Vigilance. Since then we’ve been watching – striving – to stop this so-called charity from doing its evil work.’

  Theo’s head was spinning. Had he really grown up in the heart of a sinister society? He felt anxious and miserable.

  ‘I – I don’t think Dr Saint is just evil,’ Theo said quietly, as if frightened of being heard and contradicted. ‘He – he’s certainly a very clever man – with brilliant ideas.’ Theo stopped.

  Chloe didn’t reply. She was cheerfully brushing her hair, as if preparing to go out again.

  ‘I suppose I haven’t really known enough people to compare him with,’ Theo added sadly.

  Chloe gave Theo a sympathetic look. ‘I tried to find out what makes him tick,’ she said. ‘Our Society took certain carefully chosen moments to swap me over with Clarice and get a peep inside Empire Hall.’

  Theo felt a tingle of enlightenment down his spine. He knew at last he was getting to some of the Mysteries.

  ‘So sometimes you were looking after me!’ he gasped.

  ‘Once or twice,’ she said.

  ‘What did you find out?’

  ‘Not much,’ Chloe replied. ‘Even though they thought I was deaf, they never gave anything away. At Empire Hall they speak in a kind of code all the time. “Looking after poor Theo” meant locking you away.’

  ‘Because of my illness,’ Theo said.

  ‘Yes,’ mused Chloe, frowning deeply. She looked at Theo. ‘Do you think there’s anything wrong with you? Or was it all just a trick, an excuse to hide you?’

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ Theo said. His mind was racing. If he touched people, they melted. Did that count as an illness? Could he really trust this strange girl, who wasn’t Clarice, and her odd friends who had spirited him out of his old life and plunged him into a frightening new one?

  ‘All right,’ Chloe sighed. ‘It’s tricky. I admit this probably isn’t looking like the greatest rescue ever. Magnus will find a way to contact me when he’s safe. In the meantime, there’s something positive we can do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Find out if you really do have the lurgy – or if your guardians are just a bunch of liars.’

  There was a beep f
rom the street outside.

  ‘Here’s our taxi,’ Chloe said.

  Theo had been in a taxi before, with Mr Nicely. It was one of the best things in the world. The London he usually only saw in picture books came dizzyingly to life as the cab navigated through the afternoon traffic. Glowing shops and bustling streets gave way to the hush and solemnity of wealthy mansions as they approached their destination.

  ‘Why is Sam disturbing?’ asked Chloe, smiling.

  Theo gazed out of the window into an increasingly thick and nasty fog.

  ‘He … he’s one of those people who wants to be happy,’ said Theo.

  ‘I see,’ said Chloe. ‘And that’s wrong, because …?’

  ‘The pursuit of happiness makes people selfish,’ said Theo. ‘It causes friction in society and leads to a morbid fear of death.’

  ‘I see.’ Chloe wrapped a big cream-coloured scarf round her face and Theo couldn’t see if she was smiling or not.

  ‘If people really enjoy life they won’t ever want it to end,’ he added, remembering some lectures from his guardian.

  ‘Wow! The Society of Good Works really did its work on you,’ she muttered.

  ‘And Sam throws jelly beans in the air and catches them in his mouth,’ added Theo.

  ‘That is bad,’ sighed Chloe.

  They were deposited at the tall shining metal gates of a stately red-brick building in a quiet square off Harley Street. Chloe had to peer closely at a damp-speckled brass nameplate, because the murky fog was getting thicker. She pressed a buzzer.

  ‘It’s just like that ghastly mist we found seeping out of the central canal in the network,’ said Chloe.

  ‘Maybe it followed us up here,’ Theo remarked. For him, fantastical things were just as possible as real things; he had never been encouraged to distinguish between the two.

  Soon, a distorted voice invited them to identify themselves.

  ‘We have an appointment to see Sir Peregrine Arbogast,’ Chloe shouted into the security intercom. ‘It’s Chloe Miles and Luke Anderson.’

  The electric gate swung slowly open. They crunched up the gravel drive of the enormous house. Thick evergreens towered overhead, dripping dirty fog.

  ‘I’m giving you a pretend name,’ Chloe said. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘My name is pretend anyway,’ said Theo. ‘In case of what?’

  ‘Think of it as a game.’

  A wrinkled, overly made-up secretary showed them through into a large marble waiting room, with an enormous stuffed owl on a plinth in the middle. There was a beautiful relief carved into the stone wall of Noah’s Ark and the animals coming in two by two. Theo frowned.

  ‘Funny,’ he remarked, gazing at the picture. ‘Most of the animals in that scene are the ones that never made it on to the ark – like the giant sloth and the unicorn.’ Suddenly he grinned. ‘Oh look, there’s a sivatherium.’

  ‘Can we focus a bit here?’ asked Chloe, who had never heard of a sivatherium. ‘We’re going to meet the great Sir Peregrine Arbogast and he’s going to examine you.’

  ‘Is he an Unrelenting Vigilance?’ asked Theo.

  ‘Shush!’ urged Chloe, alarmed. ‘No, he isn’t. And don’t mention them again. Sir Peregrine is a respected expert on unusual conditions. I pulled a few strings to get him to meet you, as he’s a sort of semi-retired recluse. Be careful what you say to him.’

  ‘Why do we have to see him?’ Theo asked anxiously.

  ‘Well, if you really have got a terrible disease we need to know as soon as possible … so I can avoid catching it,’ Chloe said.

  Theo’s heart sank. Chloe was more worried about herself than him. She didn’t seem to understand what a critical moment this was. Suppose this expert found out that Theo could kill people, and called the police to take him away? Suppose it turned out that everything Dr Saint had said was right, and Theo had to go back into the Mercy Tube tonight?

  ‘Luke Anderson,’ called a nurse’s voice from down a dark corridor nearby.

  Theo arose, feeling as if he had just been summoned for execution.

  Chapter Eight

  Person Thirteen

  ‘Bow down before me, you wretched creature!’ Dr Saint stood by the Memorial in the centre of the Empire Hall gardens and peered through the filthy smog at the small dark figure lurking on the edge of his sight.

  The vapours had done their work. The forbidden substances locked in their rusting underground silos for over a hundred years had been released into the network’s canal system, where they had combined, smouldered and crawled to the surface to provide London with an experience it had not known for many long years – smog.

  ‘I am not fit to bow before you,’ said the creature in a sad voice as it made a deep, if rather lopsided bow. ‘Only to serve you and be gone from your sight. Why have my people been released?’

  ‘The Society of Good Works is preparing the day of Liberation,’ Dr Saint said, ‘when all who were betrayed and forgotten shall be released into honourable service.’

  ‘Freed to be slaves!’ cackled the figure suddenly. ‘It’s like the good old days!’

  ‘The lost, the pitiable and the vile have ever been the concern of my caring Society,’ remarked Dr Saint. ‘And there are none more deserving to be reviled than the smoglodytes – denizens of the foul fog.’

  The child-sized figure grinned and stepped closer, not knowing whether it had been complimented or criticised. Through the murk Dr Saint could see the smoglodyte’s loathsome form. It had a bare, ugly head like a swollen fungus, a big, crooked gash of a mouth, slit-like eyes, and transparent skin through which a soft skeleton and pumping innards could be glimpsed. The creature lolled out its long tongue and tasted the toxic mist.

  ‘A delicious air today!’ it said. ‘But it comes at a price. What must my people do?’

  ‘An act of great charity – seeking a poor, stolen child and rescuing him from whoever has taken him.’

  Mr Nicely appeared in the fog holding up a photograph of Theo’s face and several items of clothing. Seen through the vapours they created the bizarre illusion of Theo’s presence. The smoglodyte approached Theo’s articles like a wary dog. Other shadowy faces appeared from the mist, gathered close and reached up with eager fingers as if to absorb every detail of the articles.

  ‘Act quickly!’ ordered Dr Saint. ‘Infest this city as you did of old. Pry into every corner until you find this person! Go now, you miserable vermin!’

  The figures dissolved into the dirty air. Dr Saint turned to Mr Nicely, who was looking at his employer in a curious way.

  ‘You have to know how to talk to these people,’ muttered Dr Saint, brushing past him.

  Theo and Chloe entered Sir Peregrine’s old-fashioned consulting room. It was almost in darkness, with blinds covering the tall windows. The air was filled with a nasty odour and Theo was surprised to realise there were dirty dinner plates and stained cups in little piles all over the room. On the windowsill was a row of dead plants, and fallen leaves lay curled along the top of the radiator.

  Sir Peregrine Arbogast was a huge, saggy-faced man with scant hair on his head and heavy eyelids. He wore a thick grey three-piece suit with a broad waistcoat – from which one button was missing – and a greasy, claret-coloured necktie. His face had an oily yellow complexion.

  Chloe took off her big coat and hung it over the back of her chair. Underneath she was wearing a plain black dress and a string of pearls which made her look very respectable and almost glamorous, thought Theo. At least it made her look slightly less like someone who ran around sewer tunnels and burnt buildings down, which was probably important when arranging meetings with top doctors.

  ‘Enchanted,’ said Sir Peregrine, nodding vaguely at Chloe. He didn’t look enchanted though – his eyes looked tired and dull. ‘I don’t often take cases like this any more, but since you obviously have such impressive connections …’

  ‘All lies and illusion,’ Chloe said sweetly.

  ‘Well, the
best connections are,’ commented the old surgeon heavily. He flicked through a card index, then seemed to forget what he was doing it for.

  Person thirteen, noted Theo. He had now met Dr Saint, Mr Nicely, Clarice, Robber number one (Foley), Robber number two (dead), Sam, Magnus, Mr Norrowmore (if skeletons counted), not-Clarice (Chloe), two Foundlings (possibly dead), a secretary and now the doctor.

  Thirteen was not an unlucky number to Theo. Because his life had been entirely dominated by three people in three rooms, he only hated the number three and anything, by association, that turned up in the three times table. Thirteen wasn’t one of these contaminated numbers, so he felt strangely hopeful at meeting Sir Peregrine, person thirteen.

  ‘Are – are you all right, Mr Arbogast?’ Chloe asked.

  The old doctor had been staring into space blankly, but snapped out of it and looked at his visitors. ‘I’m sorry,’ he sighed. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Do you know,’ he added, scrabbling about in an ancient leather bag for some instruments, ‘when people cannot sleep, they begin to lose the faculty to separate fantasy from reality?’

  ‘Perhaps there isn’t any difference,’ Theo said.

  Sir Peregrine stopped and looked up at the patient as if seeing him for the first time.

  ‘Perhaps there isn’t any difference,’ he repeated to himself as if to sound out the merit of the words.

  ‘I’m sorry, you’re catching me at a bad time,’ he added quickly, rubbing the white bristles on his chin. He stood up and stumbled on more cups and plates which had been stacked behind his desk.

  ‘You should fire your cleaner,’ said Chloe cheekily.

  ‘Never let them in here!’ he rumbled. ‘Privacy is all-important …’ His voice trailed away and he stood staring into space again. There was another awkward silence.

  ‘Perhaps we’ve offended you,’ said Theo. ‘I notice that Chloe didn’t use the correct mode of address for a Knight of the Realm. I think that got us off to a bad start. Maybe we should leave.’ Theo stood up but Chloe forced him back down in his seat.