Soot was still trickling down on top of me, dislodged by Nick’s movements, and it was filling my mouth now, too, coating my tongue like foul sand. I was feeling so dizzy I was sure I couldn’t hold on much longer.
The thuds seemed to stop. Nick had stopped moving and we hung there, in the airless darkness, clinging on for dear life. Had the men gone? I was no longer really aware of anything except my own discomfort and inability to breathe. I was going to die. We were both going to suffocate. I reached up in a panic for Nick’s ankle.
But I couldn’t find it, and my fingers couldn’t find their handhold again, and anyway I no longer had the strength to hold on. I slid painfully down the filthy bricks, falling rapidly, plunging out into the fireplace amid a rainstorm of black dirt.
I had to hold my fists against my eyes because they were hurting, grit-filled, impossible to open without pain. After a few seconds I realized I could feel something soft and wet around my face; and as I reached up to investigate I found the unmistakable shape of Lash’s head and the cold dampness of his nose. He was whimpering slightly with pleasure and relief at having found me.
“Lash!” I whispered, thrilled. “How did you get down here?”
I could hardly believe it, but there seemed to be no one else there to greet me; no gleeful villains closing in to wring my neck. And there was, I realized, no fire. The men must have put it out before it took proper hold.
In a second Nick had slithered down too, and was whispering into my ear in the darkness. “Are you all right? What happened?”
I coughed, as quietly as I could.
“Don’t worry,” I said, wiping my eyes, “I don’t think I’m hurt.”
“I thought someone had pulled you from underneath,” said Nick. Then, with sudden surprise, as he felt a damp muzzle in his palm: “Lash?”
“He was here waiting for us,” I said. “He must have escaped. Did you chase the nasty men away, Lash old boy? Good dog!”
Nick stood up. There was silence in the house. Dust and soot were billowing around us. It was pitch dark now, the crazy shadows and leaping yellow light of the oil-fire killed.
“They’ve gone.”
We stood, listening, for a long time, just to be sure. As our eyes got used to the darkness we could make out the back door, wide open; moonlight coming in between the thick foliage of the trees outside and through the panes of the grimy windows.
“It sounded as though they were killing each other,” I whispered, still blinking to clear the soot from my eyes.
Nick crouched down to examine something by his feet. He reached out a hand and dabbed it on the ground.
“Look,” he said.
His hand had come up wet. He showed it to me, doing his best to keep it away from Lash’s sniffing nose; but there really wasn’t enough light to see, and it was only by the smell that I, too, could identify what he’d found.
“Blood,” I said, scared.
Nick said nothing.
“Do you think they got him?” I asked. “They’ve killed somebody, haven’t they, Nick? Do you think it was Damyata?”
He was still silent. At first I thought he hadn’t heard me.
“I said do you think — “
“Did you say Damyata?” he interrupted me, in a quiet voice.
“Yes. Do you think it — “
He leaned forward and took me by the shoulders. “What do you mean, Damyata? Where did you get that from?” He was still speaking very quietly, but there was an urgency in his voice which was almost anger, as though I’d said something to hurt him. His breath was in my face. I was confused. I’d obviously never mentioned the name to Nick before, but I couldn’t understand why it made him so upset.
“The man from Calcutta,” I said.
“What makes you say Damyata?” He was insistent, barely restraining himself. I could feel his hands trembling as they held me by the tops of my arms. Something I had said had shocked him, and I didn’t know why.
“Because that’s his name, I think,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t — I don’t, really, it’s just a guess. I heard — I heard somebody say it.”
“I fear,” Nick said, after a long sigh, “it will not be possible to reach Damyata now.”
Now it was my turn to freeze. Where had I heard that before?
“I can say no more, and I am feeling weak,” said Nick. “Please God this letter reaches you.”
At first I thought he must have hit his head as he came down the chimney. It was as though someone else were speaking, but using Nick’s voice. He was still holding my shoulders, but he’d relaxed his grip; he seemed to have gone into a kind of trance. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck as he continued to talk. I didn’t like this. I clutched Lash’s neck tighter. “Nick,” I pleaded.
“And that you do not think too ill of me to grant some mercy to the gentle, perfect creatures who accompany it,” Nick was saying, refusing to be interrupted. He seemed to be talking complete nonsense, and yet there was something familiar about the words. “My dear, Good-bye, and with all the remaining life in my body, I thank you. Your undeserving Imogen.”
“Nick!” I said, in a panic, “Stop it! What are you talking about?” I was really frightened now, and the mention of my own name sent a shiver through my entire soul. It was this house. He was possessed by the man from Calcutta’s magic.
“Nick!” I said again.
There was what seemed an interminable silence before he lifted his head to peer into my face. “You don’t know what that is, do you?” he said.
“I — I’ve heard it before,” I stammered. I was trembling. I wanted him to tell me what was happening.
“That’s my mother’s letter,” he said. “The only thing I’ve got from her. My mother’s letter, Mog. I’ve had it my whole life, and I know pretty much every word of it, but I’ve never heard anybody else say the word Damyata before.”
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“I’ve never known,” he said. “And I still don’t. Why did you call the man from Calcutta Damyata?”
My head was swimming. I didn’t know. I’d seen the name, heard the name … “It will serve Damyata right,” I said, dredging my memory. “Coben said it — at the inn the other night. And I’ve read it. And I’ve read the words you just said.” Many of the things which had happened in the last few days had seemed unreal, but none of them quite as unreal as this. Somehow, this was the strangest, most inexplicable, most awful moment of all.
But now I felt Lash stiffen, and sure enough there came the low sound of voices from the garden again. Nick sprang to his feet. “Mog!” he said in a clenched whisper, “my Pa!”
I joined him at the window, holding tight to Lash to stop him from growling and giving us away. Dark figures were running through the back garden and out into the lane. The branches of the willow flailed as two men wrestled with one another beneath it.
Another fight — or the same one, still going on. We stood transfixed as they rolled into a shaft of moonlight lancing between the neighboring houses. On the grass, the bosun knelt over his opponent and delivered a short series of powerful blows with his fist. There was no more sound from the house or the garden; and after a few seconds the bosun stood up, a silhouette, a purposeful and terrifying bulk.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I whispered, pulling Nick away from the window. “Let’s try the door at the front, come on.”
In the darkness we half-fell over the loose bricks and fallen, blackened timbers in our desperation to be out. The front door was heavy, and hard to open because there was so much rubble piled up against it. After we’d kicked the trash out of the way we managed to pull it open just far enough to launch ourselves through: me first, Nick behind.
“Come on!” I remember saying, before hurling myself down the steps and tumbling onto the dirty cobbles below, Lash’s grubby shaggy limbs getting mixed up with mine as we sprawled on the ground.
Out
here in the street, everything seemed strangely quiet, and completely still, as though oblivious of the violent activity at the back of the mysterious house. My blood was pounding in my ears, and I felt around for Nick’s hand to drag him off up the street to safety.
My arms flailed around in thin air. “Nick!” I whispered.
There was only myself and Lash in the street.
I stood up. Above me, at the top of the steps, the door of the house slowly creaked shut. A dreadful silence was coming from inside: a silence of death and shock which seemed to infect the night air all around. Nick hadn’t come out. I stared up at the huge dark door and knew I had to go back inside. I began to feel my legs giving way, and I clutched at the railing in front of the house.
It was all too obvious what had happened. Nick had been intercepted, a familiar pair of tough seaman’s hands wrapping themselves around his sides like iron clamps as he’d tried to follow me through the gap in the door. He had been so close. I went back up the stairs and tried to push the door open; but it was shut tight, the rubble kicked back hard against it to stop anyone coming in. Desperately, I ran, with Lash beside me, down the street and down the back lane towards the back of the house. I no longer cared who we met; I had no thought for my own peril in the face of the bosun. My only concern was to find Nick. Emerging at the end of the lane, I was just in time to see the gate swinging shut at the back of the overgrown garden, and beyond it the bosun bundling Nick into a waiting cab, which moved off with a shudder like the throes of death.
The house and garden were deserted. The little back door gaped open. Beneath the tree a man lay motionless.
My whole life seemed to sink through the soles of my feet and drain away into the earth. To let Nick be caught by the bosun, after all this! It was no use chasing the cab: it was almost out of sight already, and my body felt so weak it refused to move fast enough, or move at all. I sank against the wall, clutching at Lash to bring him close. It was all over. It was all hopeless. All the help Nick had given me in my crazy, fruitless chasings, and how did I repay him? I remembered how I’d had to persuade him, time and again, that the adventure was worth the risk. And now we’d blundered into a chaos of violence — of murder — all against Nick’s will. He’d been right all along, and I’d been stupid and childish and reckless, and now the villains had escaped, and he’d been seized by his father, and heaven only knew what his father might do to him now.
The conversation we’d had before I escaped from the house was still ringing in my head. Nick had frightened me; but somehow I suddenly felt closer to him than I ever had. Something had changed: and the mysterious words he’d spoken about Damyata and Imogen haunted me, as though they mattered more than anything we’d yet encountered together. Furthermore, Nick himself seemed to matter. And, for all I knew now, I’d lost him.
Big wet blotches of black soot like paint covered my hands as I cried. I buried my face in Lash’s neck; my sobs broke the awful silence, and it was a relief. Somewhere nearby, a window sash rattled. Lash lapped dutifully and cheerfully at my salty, sooty face; but never, in all the years I could remember, had I felt so helpless.
I was about to test my legs to see if they’d let me stand up, when somebody grabbed me from behind. Instinctively, I lashed out; but an arm folded itself around my face and I was pulled back into an immobilizing wrestler’s hold. “Shut it. Don’t scream,” said a quiet voice in my ear as I was dragged backwards into the garden, “don’t make a sound.”
13
THE LURK
The bosun didn’t say a word to Nick as they rattled through the streets in the hackney cab. Every time the lad tried to raise his head it was pushed roughly back to the floor by the bosun, who was wearing an expression of grim satisfaction on his unshaven face. This time, he obviously thought, he was winning. Nick later confessed that, crushed on the floor of the cab, barely able to breathe, he’d been sure the bosun was taking him to the river to drown him like an unwanted kitten.
But it was on the seedy corner by the Three Friends that he was finally bundled out of the cab into the rancid night air. The bosun took a few quick glances around him in all directions, and pushed Nick roughly over to a low wall where they both crouched, out of sight of the inn. This was where his father opened his mouth for the first time.
“You sees that church there, boy,” he snarled softly, twisting Nick’s earlobe between sharp fingernails, and turning his head up to look at the blackened old spire. “You talk to me, boy, and tell me you sees it.”
“Yes, Pa,” gasped Nick, though his eyes were watering far too much for the spire to be anything more than a long dark blur.
Suddenly he felt the barrel of a gun pressing its hard circle against his neck.
“Up there,” came the bosun’s voice, still deadly quiet, “that’s the lurk, Nick. That’s ’is lurk. I smelt ’im out.”
There was a revolting bubbly sound as the bosun sniffed hard, then spat copiously into the dirt at his feet. Nick said nothing, not daring to move a single muscle while the gun dug deep into the flesh beneath his ear.
“I could shootchoo,” the bosun said, as though suddenly realizing, and relishing, the option. “Shootchoo dead, boy, soon as spit.” His words seemed to be making so little sound Nick wondered if he was imagining them. “In that lurk, boy, there’s a partickler enemy o’ mine. The biggest felon what’s ever crossed me. I wants ’im dead, Nick. ’E’s up there, Nick, up there where the bell is. I smelt ’im. I seen ’im. I knows.”
Dripping with sweat, Nick flinched as the gun-barrel bit into him harder still.
“You crawls, boy,” the bosun was saying, “you crawls and you wriggles, fit to be a rat. In ’ere, out o’ there. Well, now you can crawl for me. Crawl up in that lurk and shake out the worm. Bang ’im out!”
And as the bosun laughed and grunted in quiet enjoyment, Nick found himself led to a tiny doorway in the base of the church spire, in the blackness of the building’s shadow, separated from the oily light of the Three Friends by a quiet, reeking graveyard.
“You show me,” growled the bosun, “you can do your Pa some duty. Precious little use you been to me all these years, Nick lad. Precious little. Precious little loyalty, precious little duty, not what you’d rightly say a son owes a father. Well now’s yer chance, lad. Do me this, and show me why I shouldn’t blow you out.” Hot breath filled Nick’s face and he saw his father’s yellow teeth and gums just inches away, shining dimly with strands of spit. “You shoot me that Coben, Nick boy, or I shootchoo.” The crazed, inhuman expression on the man’s face was meant to be a grin. “Up in the bells, Nick!” He pushed open the door in the church wall and flung Nick inside.
It was a while before he could see anything; but by feeling around, Nick soon found he was in a very narrow space with a stone wall in front of him and some very steep steps, almost like the rungs of a ladder, to one side.
“Up in the bells, Nick!” came his father’s voice again; and as he peered back out of the little door Nick found his arm grasped roughly and the butt of a gun pressed into his hand. His fingers closed around it and his father pushed him backward with a gentle grunt.
He was going to be trapped in there, with nowhere to go but up, and a murderer waiting for him in the pitch blackness a hundred feet above his head.
“No!”
He flung himself back at the door, but it was already closed against him, the bosun’s muffled snorts condemning him to the musty darkness.
“No, Pa, no!”
He banged on the door, panic-stricken, in the dark. He couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face.
“Pa! No! Let me out!”
But there was no sound from outside. Either the bosun had walked away, or he was standing there saying nothing. It was a waste of time shouting.
Clutching at the space around him, Nick made contact with the wooden steps again; and as he felt his way up he could feel an extremely narrow hole in the ceiling into which they disappeared. There was no wonde
r his father had enlisted his help: the space was far too small for the great bosun to crawl into, even if he’d stopped eating for a month.
In fact, if Coben really was hiding up here, Nick couldn’t fathom how he’d managed to get through the hole either.
Tucking the bosun’s gun into his trouser belt, he pulled himself slowly upward, hitting his head several times on the jutting beams, making him swear. He had no idea what he was going to do. He couldn’t possibly kill Coben, even if he found him. It was far more likely that Coben would kill him before he got the chance. But he’d do anything rather than face his father again.
It was a long, slow climb in the darkness: at each step he reached out above his head to ensure that nothing was lurking there waiting for him. “If I’d been able to think straight,” he told me later, “I wouldn’t’ve kept climbing. If I’d really known where I was going, I’d’ve sat there at the bottom and waited for help.”
At length, however, he found himself standing on a little platform with a narrow slit-like window in the stone wall above him, which cast a slender ray of moonlight inside. He was in the hollow tower. For the first time now he could see the bell ropes, as still as if they were woven from solid lead, hanging down through a hole in the platform. Above him, they soared to the top where, in the dim dispersing light, he could make out the great round bottoms of the bells, black and bulbous and silent. There was nothing to suggest Coben might be up there. No sight, no sound, to give him away.
The stairwell continued upward from the platform, in the darkest corner of the tower; and Nick continued to climb gingerly, taking care to make as little noise as possible. Before long he found he’d climbed on a level with the bells, and their shapes filled the cavity like giant, sleeping creatures, the more awesome in slumber because of the enormous noise they could unleash when they were disturbed. Tucked in behind the bells was a tiny little cubbyhole, with an old blanket lying on the floor, its end trailing over the beams to dangle by the bell ropes. This had obviously been used as a hiding place by someone, and recently. A shiver ran through him. But no amount of fear could distract him from the instinct, developed over years of thieving, to size up his surroundings and notice things he might need to know: signs of danger, routes of escape. Crouching to peep in, he saw two other things. A half-empty bottle of rum. And, propped against the wall, a long, curved sword.
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