by Kim Newman
The cloak was heavy. Weighted, like a Thuggee strangling scarf? Or simply made to be worn by a strong man. The hem trailed like a coronation gown, so he must have been tall.
Beneath the scent of rot was a doggy musk.
She didn’t like it but wasn’t compelled to shuck the cloak.
It felt like armour. If it had a charm, it wasn’t predicated on the wearer pursuing a just cause. Quite the opposite.
Perhaps only those who would do ill could benefit from its aura of protection?
She should take the thing off – cut out the patch over the heart with silver scissors – and burn it in the cold grate.
But she didn’t.
The unpleasant taste of blood had been in her mouth ever since she sank her teeth into Stephen Swift’s hand. It was stronger now and different. Sweet, not salt. Cream, not copper. Delicious, even.
The door was not locked, but warped by damp.
She wrenched it open and stepped onto the second-floor landing.
Something fell off a nail driven into the door. With better reflexes than she thought she had, she caught it with her hand. Her fingers stung. It was an old crucifix – a ceramic figure of Jesus fixed to a wooden cross. She let go but kept it afloat with her mind. That stung too, so she let the trinket fall. Others like it were stuck to all the doors. Someone in the throes of religious revelation had bought a job lot. Nails were bent, hammered in haste. Crucifixes hung at different heights.
Her instinct was to raise the cloak to shield her eyes from the blessed presences.
A few steps along the landing, her torch died. No amount of shaking or thumping brought the light back.
But her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She could see tolerably well in this dark.
The flared collar of her borrowed cloak rubbed her ears.
She listened hard and heard animal scratching.
Evidently, she could hear better inside the house too. Not having fog in her head was a boon.
What she took for dusty gauze hung across her path turned out to be ceiling-to-floor cobweb curtains. Among the husks of insects were the bones of rodents.
The spiders here were hungry.
She used her mentacles to sweep through the webs, which silently fell apart.
She came nose-to-snout with a snarling, rearing, stiff-haired white wolf. Big as a prize bull. Glass eyes the size of oranges. Breadknife fangs.
The landing was arranged around a staircase that was too grand for a town house. More like something for a theatre or a palace.
The floors above were dark. What artificial light there was came from below.
She heard murmuring downstairs too – and could pick out words.
‘Cats… rats… bats… fats…’
She was several steps down before she noticed a thick chalk line on the carpet. Without thinking, she had been following it.
The line seemed new-made.
She was reminded of something… but didn’t want to think of it.
Fetch the haunches for the kitchen, child… Don’t dally in the passage to the Ice Cellar, and whatever you do never linger by the Wrongest of the Wrong Doors, for you don’t want to see what’s behind it… You don’t want to see the face of the Broken Doll!
She stopped and shook her head.
A roost of bats took flight in her mind.
And she thought clearly at last. She looked again at the chalk line.
She’d known Villa DeVille was a trap, but did Primrose Quell really have the bare-faced cheek to give an intruding boob instructions on where to tread to be best positioned under a falling piano? Draycott’s must take Amy for a specimen of genus dimwittiae.
In her bat-mantle, she felt intrepid.
Boldness, always boldness.
What was the other thing?
Miss Rust?
There was no teacher of that name.
She trod lightly and continued down the stairs.
The murmuring sounded louder. It was as much muttering.
‘Cats… rats… bats… fats…’
The words pulsed in her head like the beating of her heart.
She still tasted blood. And was thirsty.
A girl lay on the first floor landing. The chalk line went round her, as if made after she’d fallen. Her eyes were rolled up to show only the whites. Blazer and skirt covered in arrows. Bobbed, dark hair. Overdone make-up. A slight upper-lip malformation gave her a permanent snarl.
Amy’s toe-prod didn’t rouse the sleeping blighter.
She had seen this girl at the Off. Tie knot loose, top buttons undone. An immodesty infraction at Drearcliff Grange. Practically a uniform requirement at the House of Reform. The Draycott’s girl had lost – or snipped off – her top two shirt buttons. She couldn’t cover up if she wanted to.
Fire, Amy remembered. Jennifer Fire.
Strictly, only the Captains had to be present at the Off, but the whole Drearcliff team lined up – to keep watch on Miss Gossage when pickpockets were about and mark Haldane lest she find some new way of losing the Great Game before it started. The diffident Humble College Captain – Geoffrey Jeperson, by name – put in an appearance. His striped blazer, straw boater and flimsy scarf were unsuitable for the weather. After wishing all the teams a jolly good innings, he beetled off.
Primrose Quell was there, in a black trench coat and Silver Arrow beret. This Fire doxy hung close by. Taking out a comb to fix her hair, she let everyone see the bone handle was whittled into a serrated blade. Kali pegged Jennifer Fire as the team ‘trigger woman’, ready to shiv any mug who got too close to her Captain.
Fire had her comb in her hand, gripped by the tines. No blood on the blade.
Someone had nobbled her. Swooped and knocked her out.
She thought of Light Fingers. But the Moth Club was in SW2.
Dyall? Amy couldn’t remember Poppet putting anyone to sleep.
One more Draycott’s girl out of the game. Good.
Dr Swan advised giving a sleeping dog a swift kick in the tail region. This time, Amy favoured Miss Gossage’s more traditional approach.
Amy rearranged Fire’s shirt and straightened her blazer. She would never be demure, but it seemed not cricket to leave her sprawled en déshabillé. The poor thing was most likely only badly brought up. As she fixed Fire’s tie, Amy noticed the strong pulse in her throat.
She was thirsty again, but not for tea.
What was wrong with her this evening?
She went down the steps, treading the chalk line…
To the Ice Cellar.
She thought of Wrong Doors. And what waited beyond.
She smelled paraffin and saw light from the hallway.
The chalk line did not lead down the hall to the front door but round to a side passage.
Poppet Dyall sat on the bottom step, chin in her hand, elbow in her lap. Charlotte Knowles squatted on the floor, hugging her knees with one arm. She was the murmur-mutterer. The girls were handcuffed to each other, trapped by balusters.
Miss Memory turned to Amy. Her mouth worked strangely as she babbled, as if her jaw had been dislocated and set badly.
‘The Count DeVille… he made girls ill… he drank his fill… was slow to kill…’
Amy cast a long shadow on the stairs. The collar gave her batwing ears.
She knew who’d worn this cloak before her.
Over forty years ago, he’d rented this house, and others around London. He’d called himself Count DeVille, though he had other names.
Knowles should have remembered. Obviously, she’d been reminded.
Where someone like the Count rested, his shadow remains. Even when he’s far away and long gone to dust, his stink can’t be washed out. Not by bell, book and candle or silver arrows and penny-stall crucifixes.
Amy’s flesh crept where the heavy cloak brushed her bare neck and wrists.
And she was thirsty.
Had she been fluenced?
With her new wings, she crawled from a cocoon.
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It wasn’t all thirst. She saw in the dark. She had sharp ears.
She was strong too. Stronger than when Stephen Swift had her in the Duck Press. How many Swifts were there in this house? She needed this strength.
She did not take off the cloak.
She tried to clear her head. She coughed.
Dyall turned and shrugged. Poppet was stuck and could do nothing about it.
Knowles knocked her head against the stair pillar.
‘He cooked the cats to feed the rats… He killed the rats who served the bats… He bled the bats to make himself fats… for this is the house where Drac bit.’
This was fiendish.
How long had Knowles been shackled to Dyall?
Had their captors known what that would do?
Amy knelt by Miss Memory, who tried to shrink into an alcove under the stairs.
Amy had a headache. Dyall was getting to her too.
She couldn’t afford to be got to. By Poppet, by the Sausage… even, she knew with cold certainty, by the cloak. And, most of all, not by what waited beyond the Wrongest Door in the Purple House. That person – if person she truly was – was a white absence in Amy’s mind. If looked at directly, she wasn’t there – but, like Count DeVille, she could not be got rid of. When Amy concentrated on other things, that person crawled out of shadows like a broken-legged lizard. She was the unwatched kettle, coming to a boil with a rattling hiss.
What Amy did – who she was – came from thinking. She wasn’t as clever as a Brain-Box – though she wasn’t enlisted in the Sisterhood of the Dims either. She was gifted with mental Abilities. She must find a way of shielding her mind. A magic balaclava for Kentish Glory. Or a super-scientific snood.
Knowles shook her cuffed wrist at Amy.
Addled as she was, she knew what would help her.
Amy tried to get a mentacle inside the handcuff lock and fiddled. Nothing clicked.
‘The key is in a dish over there,’ said Dyall. ‘Out of reach. That Quell girl said we were to be tantalised.’
Relieved to have an excuse to get even a few steps away from Dyall, Amy found the dish on a sideboard. Cheap china in the shape of a smiling fish – stamped with ‘A Gay Gift from Whitby, Yorks’. She reached in and an insect the size of her hand crawled onto her wrist.
In normal circs, she’d have been delighted.
A species new to London W1.
An armoured ground cricket. Bradyporus montadoni or bradyporus macrogaster. Native to south-eastern Europe or Turkey. Eggs brought to Britain in the Count’s boxes of Transylvanian soil.
She set it down gently to be off about its business.
It sat ill to let such a tasty morsel go free.
Drat the cloak! Amy was not about to start eating bugs.
She found the key and undid the cuffs.
‘Poppet,’ she said, ‘would you go and sit by the front door and read, please.’
‘I haven’t got my magazine. Devlin made me leave it outside.’
‘That was an Indian sign for me,’ Amy said. ‘To let me know you were here.’
‘Did you bring it with you?’
‘Ah, no.’
‘Pity. Sally the Stowaway was just about to be discovered by the pirates.’
She saw waves of dark light coming off Dyall – that was new, something to do with the cloak? – and started losing track of her thoughts.
She must get the meat for the kitchen. Cook would be angry if she dawdled.
Several tea chests were piled in the hallway, lids prised off. One was packed with books and pamphlets.
‘You can find something in here,’ Amy suggested.
Poppet walked to the chest, trailing light streamers… and Amy instantly felt better.
Haldane and Devlin were in the house somewhere.
Quell was here – Dyall had mentioned her! – with two or three other Draycott’s girls. Wrong ’Uns. Worse than the Knout or the Glove.
There was a toby about somewhere too.
‘Ugh,’ said Poppet, throwing away a pamphlet, ‘railway timetables! I’ll bet half these trains don’t run any more.’
She lifted a heavy book and opened it.
‘Necro-nommi-con des Mortis,’ she said, mouthing syllables she didn’t understand. ‘Printed in squiggle language. Not even French. No use trying to read that.’
She tossed the book – which Amy saw was old, and perhaps valuable – away. It landed with a thud like a fat man falling down and going oof. Poppet dug deeper into the chest.
Amy hadn’t noticed how addicted Dyall was to reading. She supposed the girl was on her own so often she’d picked up the habit. Teachers made her sit in the far corner of the classroom and read by herself. If they didn’t, they’d never get through lessons.
‘The Turquoise Book,’ said Poppet, riffling through a slim paper-bound volume. Amy thought its pages might be scented. ‘This is in English… and has pictures. Ooh look, a rude lady… and two very rude gentlemen… and I think that’s a chap with the hind parts of a goat…’
She wasn’t sure Dyall should be exposed to such reading matter – even if it was fifty years old. She’d heard of The Turquoise Book from a short-lived uncle. A periodical much prized by sophisticated collectors, apparently. Mother gave Uncle Bainbridge the yo-heave-ho when she found out he’d invited Amy to browse in his Library of Sauce.
But, at present, Amy was relieved the nuisance Unusual was distracted. Poppet sat cross-legged on the doormat and turned pages. The illustrations were covered by membrane sheets that had to be peeled off.
Knowles’ muttering slowed and stopped.
Amy snapped her fingers in front of Miss Memory’s face.
Knowles rolled her eyes – showing whites, like Jennifer Fire – and lolled, asleep.
Amy thought of putting the cloak over her, but worried she’d come back from the Ice Cellar to find Knowles biting Dyall’s neck.
Besides, she didn’t want to take it off yet… If she fell as a paladin, could she rise in a darker mantle? Not Kentish Glory, but acherontia atropos – Death’s-head hawkmoth.
With rotters like Blackfist – who was perfectly foul to Light Fingers’ parents while putting them in prison – and spoiled brats like Clever Dick entered in the lists as paladins, what was the difference?
Could a person be a Wrong ’Un in a just cause?
She left Miss Memory and Poppet and followed the chalk line.
The side passage led to a small open door. A large crucifix was nailed above the lintel. Sad china Jesus, crowned with scratchy thorns, drops of red nail polish on his glazed face. The sight of the Christ stabbed her eyes.
She hid behind the cloak as she stepped under the cross.
Wooden stairs led down to the cellar. The chalk line was thick. She was about to set foot on the next step when she saw something glistening at knee-height. A thin wire stretched where it would trip her. The kind of low tactic she expected from Draycott’s.
She knelt and breathed on the wire. Nothing.
She extended a mentacle and twanged it.
A stone cherub fell off a perch. It put a dent in the stairs and would have done the same to her head if she’d been under it.
Amy looked into the dark stairwell. Ropes were slung on the walls for handholds. Convenient for anyone of a mind to set more booby traps. Steps could be rigged to give way. She could tumble headlong and break her neck.
Something occurred to her. She was amazed she hadn’t thought of it before.
A girl who can float shouldn’t be afraid of getting hurt in a fall.
XIII: What Amy Found in the Cellar
THE LINE LED down the stairs. Whoever chalked it must have used more than one stick.
According to Miss Borrodale, authoress of A Girls’ Guide to Booby Traps, the point of the wire-strung-across-the-path trick was sometimes to be noticed. The proverbial booby, thinking herself clever, would carefully lift her foot over the wire then step heavily on a concealed detonator.
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Unlike the average paladin, Amy had the option of not putting her weight anywhere iffy. Doing her best to copy Stephen Swift’s aerial stride, she rose over the tripwire and walked down to the basement without touching stairs, walls or the guide ropes. ‘I like to think none of my pupils will have to be buried in a bucket,’ Fossil told the Remove at the beginning of her course on navigating life’s little traps.
In an end-of-course test, deadly devices were placed around the Conservatory, with custard pies instead of high explosive. Amy and her classmates got thoroughly splattered – but did learn their lesson. Next year, Miss Borrodale promised to teach them to set traps for other boobies. A few classmates – Light Fingers and Kali, especially – were worryingly enthusiastic about opening that chapter.
The weight of the cloak inclined her to stay vertical rather than assume her diving pose. It also lent her a propellant push when descending. Was this why many paladins wore cloaks, capes or long-skirted coats? Amy worried her Kentish Glory wings were too easy to trip over or get caught in doors. But many a screen swashbuckler sported a swishable cloak. She and Frecks had swooned through Blood and Sand, in which Rudolph Valentino twirled a half-length cape to distract bulls as he crept up on them with a long thin knitting needle. He hardly ever got gored. A cloak could be disguise, shield, diversion, concealment or weapon.
The stairs led to a low vaulted space with an earth floor. The cellar was divided into many chambers. Was this the feature the Count DeVille noticed in the estate agent’s brochure? A private crypt would be handy for him.
Long boxes were piled all around, with their lids off. Someone very untidy or very determined had poked into all the packing cases. Expensive coffins – once shiny black with red-silk lining, like the cloak – were in poor condition. Layers of dirt had been carelessly shovelled in. One overflowed with bulbous, sickly white mushrooms. Others were littered with crumbled vegetable matter and scraps of dried old biscuit, garlic flowers and Roman Catholic wafers.
She understood another use for her borrowed finery – resting on a bed of native soil without ruining your nightie.
The cloak was inside her head like Miss Gossage’s buzzes, wheedling and whispering.
Reasons not to take me off…