Mariah Mundi

by G. P. Taylor

  ‘But Perfidious Albion, what happened to him?’

  ‘Doesn’t mean it was true, could be a trick of the cards,’ she argued.

  ‘He had the postcard I sent to him, I saw it in his hand.’

  It was then that three dark letters edged in bright gold appeared in the corner of the shimmering card frame. In the soft glow from the fire they spoke the letters together as a word appeared: ‘A – S –K’.

  ‘It wants us to ask something, Mariah. What shall we say?’ Sacha spoke quickly, her heart excited as she fumbled her words.

  ‘Say nothing, I don’t like it. It’s not good,’ Mariah cut back quickly, not knowing how to stop the cards from performing their trickery.

  ‘You’re just a stupid boy frightened of his own shadow. If it is a trick, it’ll do us no harm. If it can see the future than we have something that’ll make us rich …’

  ‘Rather die poor than have this chasing me forever. It can’t be good – it’s not right.’

  ‘Right or wrong, it’s dancing before our eyes and it wants us to ask it a question.’ Sacha thought for a moment and tried to edge Mariah out of the way of the cards that danced before them. ‘Is Felix alive?’ she blurted before Mariah could stop her.

  The Panjandrum shuddered. One by one the cards fell from the air and landed in a neat and growing pile on the floor. A final card hovered above the floorboards as if suspended by an invisible piece of string or magician’s charm. Mariah wafted his hand above the card, hoping it would snag against that which caused it to dance in the air. And then the deck burst into life – several cards leapt from the floor, chasing each other higher into the room like a flock of geese that circled the ceiling. More and more began to dance this way and that, like an army brought to life, before they too leapt high in the air and flew to become one large mass that blanketed the ceiling.

  Mariah looked up: it was as if the night sky had crept inside the room and pinned itself to the coving of the lime-plastered roof above. Deep blue stars twinkled and winked brightly, and a glowing moon slowly crossed the firmament. Then, without any call or expectation, all grew dark again. The far side of the ceiling began to glow with a bright red light. Steam billowed crisp and white as far away a young boy took shape, one of many hunched and sweating in a long dark hole, the floor strewn with a covering of milky pearl-stones. From beneath a mantel of matted hair, two bleary, tired eyes stared out as blue, bloodless lips mouthed silent words.

  ‘It’s Felix!’ Sacha shouted. She leapt to her feet and jumped towards the apparition above her. ‘I can see you Felix – you’re alive.’ The boy didn’t reply; his stare was fixed, lips mumbling, deaf to her words. ‘Where are you?’ she asked impatiently, her voice whining.

  The words jarred with Mariah. He saw from her eyes that she thought the boy to be special, and that in some way he occupied a sincere place in her heart. ‘He’s a million miles away from here, can’t you see?’ he shouted back at her as he pushed her away. ‘I want this to stop. Felix is dead and this is a lie. Look at him – sat on a bed of pearls and looking half starved. If that isn’t a wicked trick of these cards then what is? Should never have taken them from Perfidious Albion. I want them to stop, NOW!’

  ‘Tell me where he is,’ Sacha said urgently, ignoring Mariah as she spoke to the cards. ‘Please,’ she pleaded. ‘TELL ME!’

  ‘NO! Stop it now!’ Mariah shouted above her as he pushed her out of the way. ‘We don’t want to know. Felix is gone. Never to be found.’

  The cards twisted their shape, imploding with each second to the shape of a golden orb that pressed closer and closer.

  ‘It’ll crush us,’ Sacha shouted as Mariah dived to the floor and scrambled to find the box of instructions.

  ‘Stand back and say nothing more,’ he shouted, and he rolled under the bed with one hand clutching the sheet of paper.

  Sacha stood alone. The orb hovered in front of her, sparking blue and gold flecks of bright light that danced like the candles on a Christmas tree. Through the thin veneer of gold, she looked down upon the world as if she were a swirling corbie, brooding from its nest. Far below she could see the sunlit rooftops of the Prince Regent. As if cracked like a gigantic egg, the building was split open as floor by floor was revealed to her eyes. She was taken deeper and deeper. Spiralling down, she circled until the black rocks of the deep foundations opened up before her. There, nestling in the hollow earth, was a dark cavern, the floor littered with oyster shells and creamy droplets of pearl, and in a sunken corner was a gathering of children, huddled together as a dark beast flicked its scaled tail back and forth, swishing a rain of sparkling shingle.

  From beneath the shielding of the bed, Mariah clung to the commands that were etched in black upon the sheet of paper he had plucked from the floor. It struggled and twisted to free itself from his grip as if it had a mind not to be read. The black etching now appeared to smear itself within the paper, each word slowly beginning to smudge beyond recognition. Quickly he came to the final three words that faded before his eyes: ‘Za-yin – Za-yin – Za-yin!’ He shouted them aloud as they melted out of sight.

  A crack of lightning cut through the air to the heart of the orb. The vision exploded, throwing Sacha against the wall as she still stared deep into its heart. The Panjandrum fell from the air, the cards scattered like gale-blown leaves across the floor.

  Mariah heard her muffled scream and looked up from his hiding place. Sacha struggled to gain her breath as the Joker smothered her nose and mouth, clinging to the contours of her face like a grasping hand. Several cards held her tight against the wall, piercing her clothes and pinning her to the plaster as if they were a conjuror’s daggers. Her arms were tethered tightly, locked by a cluster of cards on each wrist that shackled them to her. He could see the life draining from her as she fought against the smothering, her lungs about to explode.

  Like a springing cat he jumped to his feet and pulled at the Joker. It melted through his fingers, sticking to Sacha’s face, squeezing her mouth firmly shut. Mariah saw a look of panic radiating from her eyes. She began to slump down the wall, held only by the embedded suit of Spades that stuck her like iron nails to the wall. He pulled at the Joker again. It stuck to his fingers, holding his hand fast against her skin.

  ‘Za-yin – Za-yin – Za-yin!’ he shouted again and again as he tugged at the card with his other hand. Sacha’s eyes rolled to the back of her head and she slumped forward, unable to breath, her lungs crushing her heart as the veins in her soft white neck visibly pulsed with its penultimate beat. ‘Za-yin – Za-yin – Za-yin!’ he screamed the command, pulling frantically against the liquefying card.

  With a sudden and ear-splitting squeal, Sacha gulped at the air. Mariah fell back towards the small fireplace, his hand clasping the now stiffened Joker. It grinned at him, teeth clenched and eyebrows raised. One after the other the suit of Spades fell from their holding places and tiny spirals of plaster dropped to the floor.

  ‘Quickly!’ Mariah shouted as he attempted to grab with his hands as many of the Panjandrum cards as he could. ‘Catch them before they can do more harm – the box is the only safe place for them.’ Sacha looked on as Mariah scurried about picking up the cards and pushing them into the stiffened case, then wrapping them in the sheet of commands. ‘Help me!’ Mariah snorted as he gathered the cards, got to his feet and placed the box beneath the bed.

  Sacha didn’t move. She gripped to the wall plaster with her fingernails. ‘Old Scratty …’ she said slowly, her eyes fixed to the wooden chair that lurked in the shadows in the far corner of the room. ‘She’s here …’

  Mariah looked to the chair. There in the shadow, lit only by a small chink of light that seeped in through the circular porthole cut into the roof, was Old Scratty. She was sitting bolt upright, a slight smile etched on the lips of her white china face as if she had watched all that had taken place. The doll was leant slightly to one side, as if resting her wearied self against the back of the chair. Her hands were
stuffed in the pockets of her smock, sleeves rolled back to expose the white sea-washed wood.

  ‘How did she get here?’ Mariah asked as Sacha began to pull the barricade away from the door.

  ‘She wasn’t there before. I looked at the chair and it was empty – no one was there, no one.’

  ‘She must have been, Sacha. Dolls just don’t appear,’ Mariah said doubtfully as he looked at the manikin. It was then that he saw the silver bangle upon her wrist. The metal tarnished to almost black and the straw figures etched deeply into the silver looked as if they were veiled in dark smoke. A sudden thought flashed across his mind as an image of the Kraken appeared again in his memory. ‘That bracelet – I saw one just the same on the wrist of the Kraken.’

  ‘Take it from her, then we can see,’ Sacha said, not wanting to move an inch nearer the smiling doll.

  ‘You take it. I don’t want to touch her.’

  ‘We can’t leave her here. Bizmillah will wonder where she’s gone,’ Sacha replied as she pushed Mariah towards Old Scratty.

  ‘It’s how she got here that bothers me. She wasn’t in the room until the Panjandrum blasted everywhere. She just appeared, moved on her own, just like she did in the cellar,’ Mariah blurted angrily. ‘That’s the thing – dolls like her can’t move on their own. She’s got wooden arms and a painted china pee-pot for a head. Don’t tell me she could have got here by herself.’

  ‘And don’t tell me that cards can dance in the air and pin me to the wall, smothering the life from me,’ Sacha snapped back. ‘We both saw it and it was me that Joker tried to kill.’ She paused for a moment, drawing her breath, her voice calming. ‘I know where Felix and the others are being kept. They’re not dead … Just before the explosion I looked into the depths of the earth and Felix was in a cavern under the Prince Regent. That’s what the cards showed me.’

  ‘And that’s why they tried to kill you, so you couldn’t find him,’ Mariah said as the thought crystallised in his mind. ‘If the cards are right, then Perfidious Albion is in trouble …’

  ‘And Felix is trapped.’ Sacha looked hopelessly at Mariah. ‘We have to help him.’

  ‘They’ll know that the Panjandrum cards are here,’ Mariah went on, ignoring what she had said. ‘He had the postcard of the hotel. They’ll come looking here and find me. Isambard Black!’ he said quickly. ‘I should have known. He said on the train he had been waiting for someone. He was waiting for Perfidious Albion, he talked about tricks and magic and …’

  Old Scratty interrupted. Her long wooden arm clothed in its black smock sleeve clattered against the wall, its hand hanging limply by her side. Mariah saw that Scratty’s wooden fingers clasped a large metal key. He stepped to the manikin and carefully unravelled each of the stiff jointed fingers, thinking that at any moment she would spring to life. The silver bracelet slipped suddenly across her wrist, scraping against the wood.

  ‘It is the same as the Kraken’s,’ Mariah said as he looked up at Old Scratty’s face. For the briefest of moments he was sure that the smile had slipped from her face and that she gave the mildest look of anguish as he spoke the Kraken’s name. Then a single tear fell from a blind eyes and rolled across the white china cheek, as if he had spoken the name of someone long missed.

  ‘You here to help us, lass?’ Sacha asked Old Scratty as Mariah plucked the key from her fingers and held it to the light. ‘Is there a door for this key, Old Scratty?’

  The doll’s right hand suddenly fell from her lap, a finger pointing to the floors below.

  ‘Let me see,’ Sacha insisted as she grabbed the key from Mariah and looked at the thick shavings of rust flaking from its surface. She sniffed it intently and with the tip of her tongue tasted the metal. ‘Seawater,’ she said brightly. ‘This has been tide-washed many times.’

  ‘Deeper than the cellar?’ Mariah asked.

  ‘Deeper and more dangerous,’ Sacha replied as she stroked the long locks that hung raggedly from Old Scratty’s head.

  [ 17 ]

  Pagurus

  MARIAH opened his eyes and stared at the empty chair. The call of sea hawks heralded daybreak and the sound of the crashing surf of the morning storm echoed around the towers of the Prince Regent as it washed against the steaming sands. Sacha huddled against him, wrapped in the coarse hair blanket, not wanting to leave his side, fearing the shadows and the power of the Panjandrum. She held the rusty iron key in both hands, cradling it as if it were some great prize snatched from another.

  He looked to where Old Scratty had been and smiled to himself. The manikin had vanished, slipped from their lives as they slept. Old Scratty had gone as silently and surreptitiously as she had appeared. Her white face had been the last thing he had stared upon as he fought against the onset of sleep. As the oil lamp had faded and its light had thinned to a whisper, they had spoken of what to do next. Sacha had told him over and over what she had seen as the golden orb had exploded. She had described in the minutest detail how the earth had opened before her eyes and she had plummeted from the sky and into the depths of the cavern. Mariah had hoped that it was but a chimera, a fanciful dream. In the cold grey light of morning the events of the dark hours became a faded memory. It was only the sight of the Panjandrum on the hearth of the fireplace that reminded him of the reality of what had gone before. The Joker smiled a thin fretful smile, as with one eye it appeared to stare at the sliced plaster hanging from the wall where Sacha had been pinned like a rag doll.

  ‘She’s gone,’ he said softly as he tried to wake the girl from her deep slumber. ‘Old Scratty has vanished again, not a trace …’

  The wind-blown chiming of the steeple-house clock warned of the seventh hour. Its clatters danced above the pounding surf and the calls of seabirds. Sacha lifted her head and peered out of tired eyes rimmed with the desire to sleep on until the late of day.

  ‘Morning?’ she asked as she pulled the blanket up around her head and snuggled against the pillow, hoping that the daylight would vanish once more and time would return to night. She looked at the empty chair. ‘Gone?’ she asked not waiting for an answer. ‘Was any of it real?’ Her thumbs rubbed the flaking metal of the old iron key.

  ‘It happened – that’s for sure,’ Mariah said as he rubbed the sleep from his face and tousled his hair. ‘But whether it was real …’ There was something about his voice that echoed the thoughts of his mind. What he had seen in the glow of the fire and on the steps in the town had somehow remained on the edges of reality. It tapped gently on his consciousness like the lamplighter’s staff rattling the wicks of the fireheads.

  ‘Do you think she –?’ Sacha asked, unable to finish the question as her thoughts raced ahead of her words. ‘ Could she –?’

  ‘Better not ask. Old Scratty turns up whenever you think about her. I know we’ll see her again. She wants us to find something.’

  ‘Or someone,’ Sacha said quickly, wanting it to be Felix.

  ‘One thing,’ he went on slowly. ‘The bracelet was the one the Kraken had when he saw me and Charity fought him off. Trouble is … the trouble is, Charity didn’t tell me where he had been and why he was skulking around in the dark. Just came out of nowhere – said he’d followed us.’

  ‘Do you think he knows?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid he does. I think he knows everything.’ Mariah looked to the Panjandrum. ‘I want to hide these so no one will find them. Soon they’ll come looking. If they have Perfidious Albion then they’ll come for me. He’s bound to crack and tell them who he gave them to and all about the postcard. I’m going to have to move on. I can’t stay here much longer.’

  ‘Throw them in the sea and lie till your teeth fall out. That’s what my father did. He burnt the secrets of the armoury when a Frenchman sailed into the harbour. Threw the ashes down the old well in the castle. He thought we were to be invaded. Oh, the look on his face when they sailed away after firing a couple of cannon. Red as a baboon’s ar–’

  ‘You need a good memory to
be a liar. Better I just go back to London,’ Mariah said sharply as he picked the Panjandrum from the fireplace and stuffed them into his pocket.

  ‘You’ll do what you have to do,’ Sacha snapped as she got from the bed, pushing it away from the door. ‘I’ll be finding Felix myself, no problem in that. I have the key and somewhere there’ll be a door to fit it. If Old Scratty is right then Felix won’t be too far behind.’

  ‘But you can’t go on your own,’ Mariah said as he reached out to stop her. ‘You don’t know what’ll be waiting.’

  ‘Then come and don’t run away,’ Sacha replied as she pulled her arm from his grip and opened the door. ‘It’s beyond us now, can’t you see? It’s as if there’s a wheel turning and you and me are on it going around and around. You can’t go now, whatever happens.’ She held the key in front of his face. ‘This is our future, Mariah. Yours and mine, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. Old Scratty knew, that’s why she found us. Whatever is going on in this place has to stop. We can’t go to the police, they’ll never believe us.’

  ‘We could try – tell them about the murder last night and the Kraken.’ Mariah sniffed.

  ‘And they’d believe that?’ Sacha asked mockingly. ‘I’m a Fenian. I’ve been running from things for most of my life, and I’m not going to run from this. If I stand alone, then I stand alone.’

  ‘What about Captain Charity?’ Mariah asked impatiently.

  ‘He’s not here. It’s just you, me and a cellar full of secrets. If you’re in, Mariah, then we have to be gone.’ Sacha didn’t wait for his reply as she stepped through the door and into the small corridor. She pressed the button to summon the steam elevator and stood back against the wall listening to its groaning as it slowly pumped itself higher and higher. Mariah followed sheepishly, his hands pressed deeply into the pockets of his coat.

  ‘What shall we do about Bizmillah?’ he asked anxiously as the elevator steamed closer.