Freaks

by Kieran Larwood

  “There’s more of us here,” Till explained. “Eight others. We all got taken by the monster. We’ve tried to escape, but there’s no way out.”

  “There is now,” Sheba said. “I just have to get these ropes off.”

  “It’s no good,” said Till. “The cages are locked. And they comes to check on us all the time. If they think we’ve been trying to escape, they beat us.”

  “Who are they?” Sheba asked.

  “We call her the Night Lady,” said Till, “the one what wears black. Her and the big man with the painted face. And sometimes there’s another. A man with white hair and spectacles. He doesn’t hit us, though. He just prods us and measures us with his devices.”

  Sheba absorbed this information. “Have they said anything to you? Told you why you were taken?”

  Till shook her head. “They don’t speak much to us. The Night Lady just laughs when we cry. Then she gets the painted man to hit us. It’s better if you don’t make a sound.”

  “I’ve heard them talking, though,” another voice called out. This one came from the black murk at the far end of the chamber. “I been here the longest, see. Back when there was just me, I heard them talking together. About something they wanted. A prize, they said. In Hyde Park.”

  Sheba recalled the conversation from the Paradise Street house again. Are you sure you will be able to get it? the doctor had said. They have it very well guarded. . . . Whatever they were after was in Hyde Park. She was about to ask what was so special about the place when she remembered Mama Rat’s newspaper. The Great Exhibition was in Hyde Park.

  Were they going to rob the Crystal Palace? What for? She racked her aching head for what she could remember of the exhibits. The crystal fountain? No, too big. One of the sculptures? Or a machine? None seemed worth all this trouble. Something Mrs. Crowley most desired, she had said. What did grown-ups most desire? Money? Fame? Gold? Jewels . . .

  “Was it a jewel?” she asked hesitantly. “Did the woman mention a diamond?”

  There was a moment’s silence from the cages, then one of the voices spoke.

  “She might have,” it said.

  “I think she did,” called another.

  The Koh-i-Noor. That had to be it. Mrs. Crowley was after the world’s biggest diamond. Maybe she was going to make the children steal it.

  “We have to get out of here,” Sheba whispered to Till.

  “But I told you,” Till whispered back. “There’s no way out. The cages are locked.”

  “Not for long,” said Sheba. She began to wriggle and turn her wrists, ignoring the burning and chafing, trying to loosen the rope so she could get her hands free. In her panic, she could feel the wolf inside her growing. But instead of suppressing it, she let it in, welcoming the extra surge of strength and ferocity it gave her.

  The rope ripped hair from her arms and blistered her skin, but she kept pulling and pulling. Eventually she felt it begin to loosen a little. A bit more and she could squeeze a hand free.

  A booming clang echoed from somewhere beyond the chamber. It was followed by voices, distant at first, but growing rapidly closer.

  “They’re coming!” Till hissed, dashing to the back of her cage. “Sheba, they’re coming!”

  There was the shrill sound of squeaking hinges, and the grating of ancient wood on stone. Somewhere a door was being opened. Sheba strained to see, and was instantly blinded by a flare of searing light. Falling backward, hands pressed over her face, she thought there had been some kind of silent explosion, but as she peered through her fingers she could see it was only the light from a lantern.

  There were three figures. Without much surprise, she recognized Mrs. Crowley, the painted man she had called Baba Anish, and the frizzy-haired doctor. She could smell the doctor’s twisted medical stink, and the pungent incense of the other. A cruel, curved sword hung at his side, and he had freshly painted his face with glistening black whorls. His eyes were rimmed with black and his long, matted locks were coiled on the top of his head in a swirling bundle. He looked even more hostile than when Sheba had last seen him. Perhaps he was angry that they had speared his machine.

  She also noticed the dark passageway they had stepped from. Where did it lead? Back to Paradise Street? I knew there was a reason for her staying there. The fact she had been right didn’t give Sheba much satisfaction now.

  Mrs. Crowley paused to light a torch on the wall. Now Sheba could see they were indeed in a large chamber made of heavy stone. Ribbed arches supported the roof. They looked ancient, crumbling. A row of cages stretched around the wall, each one holding the small, shivering body of a child. To her left was what had to be the tunnel entrance, glowing dimly. Down there, just the length of a short dash, were the river, her friends, and freedom. But it might as well have been a hundred miles away.

  Right in front of the cages was a wide pit. Steps led down to a muddy bottom, where the mechanical crab sat in a mud-spattered pile. Hooked chains on pulleys dangled over it. Sheba could clearly see Sister Moon’s whaling harpoon jutting out of the crab’s back. She had thrown it perfectly: Its barbed tip had sunk straight into the machinery inside. Even now smoke was slowly leaking from the machine while thick oil poured out to pool around it like clotting blood. It looked dead, if that could be true of something that had never really lived. It was broken, at any rate. If Sheba hadn’t achieved anything else, at least it wouldn’t be snatching any more mudlarks from the river.

  “A harpoon? I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Crowley said. Her lisping voice echoed around the stone room, making Sheba jump. “Has the thing been badly damaged?”

  “I can’t get it to work anymore,” said Baba Anish. “And without the puppet man—”

  “Those interfering freaks!” Mrs. Crowley slammed her lantern down on the floor, cracking the glass. It was the first time Sheba had seen a dent in her cool exterior. “I thought you said you’d warned them off? Didn’t you beat their leader hard enough?”

  The painted man shrugged. Sheba wondered who they meant by “leader.” Then she realized it was Plumpscuttle. If she hadn’t been so scared out of her wits, she might have laughed.

  “Where is the one you captured?”

  Baba Anish pointed to Sheba’s cage.

  Mrs. Crowley walking toward her was like a shadow peeling itself from the wall and becoming solid. Under the featureless veil, Sheba imagined a face twisted in rage. But instead of cowering back, Sheba rose on her knees, snarling and showing her white little fangs. She could smell the chemical odor of the woman quite strongly now, and beneath it that familiar odor she couldn’t quite place. A flower of some kind? A perfume? It was definitely something she had smelt before. But where?

  The veiled woman paused outside the cage, and seemed to be staring at her again, just like she had in the graveyard. It was a different kind of stare to the ones Sheba usually received. More intense. She could almost feel the woman thinking as the seconds of silence ticked by.

  She’s probably deciding on the best place to kick me, Sheba thought. But when Mrs. Crowley spoke, her voice was calm. She sounded almost amused.

  “It’s the little girl, is it? The rat woman’s ‘daughter,’ if that is to be believed. Were you the one snooping around my house, or was it one of your . . . malformed friends?” The woman almost spat the word, making Sheba wince.

  “It was me,” said Sheba. Let her take whatever punishment this horrid woman would give, if it meant the others would be left alone.

  “On your own? I hardly think so. I suppose you expect me to believe you threw the harpoon that ruined my machine as well?”

  “No, but I followed the trail.”

  Mrs. Crowley looked again at the crab. The bottle hanging from the harpoon end still trickled drops of phosphorus onto the rusty carapace.

  “Very ingenious,” said Mrs. Crowley. �
��But for all your cunning, it only got you as far as this cage. I would call that a failure, wouldn’t you?”

  “I know what you’re planning,” Sheba said. “That’s not a failure.” It probably wasn’t the best thing to blurt out, but the woman was making Sheba angry. Even as she spoke she could feel her snout jutting out and her ears tweaking into points.

  Mrs. Crowley gave a tinkling laugh. “Come on, then. Let’s hear it.”

  “You’re going to steal the Koh-i-Noor from the Great Exhibition!” Sheba shouted. “You’re going to make the children take it, so they get the blame!”

  She half expected Mrs. Crowley to scream in frustration. Instead, the woman turned her shrouded face to where the two men stood. The three looked at each other for a few seconds, and then the doctor and Mrs. Crowley burst out laughing. Even Baba Anish allowed himself a smirk.

  Sheba was left speechless. What was so funny? Had she got it wrong?

  “I suppose there’s a hint of truth there,” Mrs. Crowley said when she had stopped chuckling. “It would be nice to see the look on your face when you realize how close you came. Pity that won’t be possible, what with you being dead. Unless you think we can use her, Doctor?”

  The bald man shuffled over to her cage and peered at her through his spectacles, which were so thick that his eyes seemed to swim behind them, like two blue goldfish in their bowls. One of his gangly hands shot through the bars and grabbed the crown of her head. Sheba could feel his fingers squeezing and prodding at her skull.

  “No, I’m afraid the material would be too tainted,” he said at last. “It might hinder the properties of the formula.”

  Formula? What was the man talking about? And what did her head have to do with it? Sheba was frantically trying to make sense of what was going on.

  “Curse it,” said Mrs. Crowley. Her lisp had almost turned to a hiss in her anger. “We shall have to hope what we’ve already got will be enough. We have no time to collect any more: Everything is in place for tonight. I have even arranged for several of the guards to be elsewhere. You had best start moving the children.”

  The doctor nodded and went to fetch a ring of heavy iron keys from the wall. Sheba heard herself snarling and growling in frustration. She had only just found the children and now they were moving them somewhere else. But where? And how?

  “Baba Anish,” Mrs. Crowley called. “These sideshow freaks are obviously more trouble than we anticipated. Fetch those murderous thugs you have been recruiting, and pay them a visit. I want them all dead before tonight’s proceedings, just in case they try to get in the way.”

  “No!” screamed Sheba. The thought of her friends being harmed made her fling herself at the cage bars over and over. “Leave them alone, you evil witch! Leave them alone!”

  “And as for this one . . .” Mrs. Crowley paused on her way out of the chamber. She seemed to be considering something. Finally she shook her head, pressed a hand to her brow. “Stake her out in the tunnel. The tide is coming in. It should make short work of her.”

  “Yes, memsahib,” said Baba Anish. He moved toward Sheba’s cage, the black patterns on his face seeming to move like snakes in the lantern’s light.

  “Oh, and, Anish?” Mrs. Crowley called back from the door. “Be careful. She bites.”

  When Baba Anish first tied her to the iron stakes he had hammered into the tunnel floor, Sheba thought she might be able to pull them out after he had gone. The ground was only river mud and pebbles, after all.

  She soon found she was wrong. The stakes were long — long enough to reach through the soft mud and bite into something harder and less yielding. She tried heaving at each of the pegs that held her arms and legs in turn, but to no effect. Not even when she got scared and felt the usual surge of wolfish strength. They wouldn’t budge.

  Next she tried screaming. The river wasn’t far away — she could hear it. Someone must be passing the tunnel. Surely they would hear her and come to investigate?

  Sheba yelled until her throat was raw.

  Nobody came.

  So now she lay on her back, looking up at the slimy brickwork above her. Water was steadily filling the tunnel now. She could feel it seeping under her legs. Maybe only a couple inches at the moment, but rising rapidly. It looked as though she was going to meet her end here, slowly covered by the stinking Thames water, while a few miles away her friends were chopped into pieces by Baba Anish and his Ratcliff Highway friends.

  The bodies of Plumpscuttle’s Peculiars might be found — they’d probably get a mention in the newspaper — but she would lie forever in this damp and lonely tunnel. Maybe in two hundred years or so someone would find her bones and wonder why a little girl had been tied down and left for the eels to eat.

  She was quietly thinking morbid thoughts to herself, letting her tears trickle down to join the pool of water beneath her, when she felt something move by her foot. The eels had come to eat her already! Sheba shrieked and tried to jerk her leg away, but couldn’t. She raised her head, hardly daring to look, and expected to see a slimy head with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth and blank eyes.

  Instead, there was a huge black rat sitting on her shoe. Its fur glistened with river slime and its beady eyes sparkled in the half-light of the tunnel. She hadn’t even thought about the rats. The riverside must be thick with them, and they wouldn’t bother waiting for her to die before they began feasting. Being eaten alive by rats would really hurt.

  “Go away,” Sheba tried to shout. But it came out of her hoarse throat as a pathetic croak.

  The rat gave several loud, piercing squeaks — and more rats scuttled down from the tunnel mouth. Soon there were five of them perched on Sheba’s legs. The end had come, then, and there was nothing she could do. But just before she squeezed her eyes shut, preparing herself for the first nibble, she saw the first rat do something extraordinary: It put its little paws on its hips and rolled its eyes. Sheba even thought she heard it make something that sounded like a “tut.” She felt a tiny flicker of hope.

  “Bartholomew?” she said slowly. “Judas, Thaddeus, Simon, and Peter?”

  The rats squeaked and chattered. Sheba had never thought she’d be so glad to see a pack of rodents.

  “Do you think you could get me out of here?” she asked. “The others are in danger. I have to get back to them!”

  The rats instantly dashed to the ropes at her arms and legs and began gnawing. Sheba lay very still as their yellow teeth chewed and chomped. After a few minutes, she felt her left leg spring free. It wasn’t long before the other leg followed, then her hands. She sat up, rubbing at the burnt skin around her wrists, while the rats clustered around, looking up at her with their bright little eyes.

  “Thank you so much,” said Sheba. “That’s twice you’ve saved my life now.” If they weren’t quite so slime-covered and generally revolting, she could have kissed them. Instead she gave them what she hoped was a grateful smile.

  “I have to get to Brick Lane,” she said. “I don’t suppose you can show me the quickest way?”

  The rats instantly scampered off down the tunnel, waiting for Sheba at the entrance. With a groan, she forced herself to stand and began to stagger after them. Her bruised body wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep, preferably after a warm bath and change of clothes, but she had to warn the others before Baba Anish came for them.

  As she limped out of the tunnel that had so nearly become her tomb, she prayed she would be in time.

  Back at Brick Lane, the Peculiars were sitting morosely in the yard, when there came a frantic hammering at the gate. Sister Moon opened it a fraction, blade at the ready, and saw a furry, shaggy blob of mud with frantic orange eyes and a cluster of rats at its feet. It took her a moment to recognize Sheba.

  “You’re alive!” Moon shouted, pulling her into the yard and hugging her tightly, despite her
coating of stinking mud. “Sheba, we so worried!”

  The rest of the Peculiars jumped up and clustered around, cheering and clapping. The rats dashed up to Mama.

  “Well done, my boys! My clever beauties!” she cried.

  “There’s no time!” Sheba shouted, pushing Sister Moon away. “Mrs. Crowley’s servant is coming here right now! He’s coming to kill us!”

  “But what happened to you?” Gigantus asked, his craggy face creased with worry. “Where have you been?”

  As fast as she was able, Sheba blurted out everything that had happened to her: following the crab machine’s trail, being caught, finding the mudlarks, discovering Mrs. Crowley’s plan, and finally being staked out in the tunnel. She barely paused for breath. “And Baba Anish is coming here to get you, now.”

  “Well, we’ve seen no sign of him,” said Gigantus. “And he doesn’t stand much chance against all of us on his own.”

  “He’s hiring some thugs,” Sheba remembered. “He’ll probably be here any minute.”

  “Right, that’s it. . . . I’m off,” said Monkeyboy. He made to run for the yard gate, but Gigantus caught hold of his tail.

  “None of us is going anywhere,” the big man said. “At least not until tonight, when we go and put a stop to this woman’s plans once and for all. If this makeup-wearing idiot wants a fight, then he can bring it on.”

  “But he’s going to kill you!” Sheba wanted to give Gigantus a shake, but knew it would be like a flea trying to budge a mountain.

  “Maybe we should leave,” said Mama Rat. “We could use the time to get to Hyde Park and stop Crowley in the act.”

  “That sounds like a brilliant idea,” said Monkeyboy.

  Sister Moon agreed, and to Sheba’s relief Gigantus reluctantly nodded. They all headed back into the house to grab what they might need.

  Just as they were making their final preparations, a hideous groan came from the front room. Plumpscuttle. He was finally coming around.