Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  Nathan rattled it, knowing already that it would do no good.

  On the other side of the gate a tiny slum-boy was sitting, his trousers rolled up past the knee, his feet thick with dirt. He watched Nathan struggle with the lock, his eyes as wide as the gaps around the gate were narrow, eyes so wide they were either side of his head, like a sheep or a cow’s.

  A way behind there were voices, a few men, good humoured. Nathan tried to concentrate, to feel the Itch inside him. The boy stood and walked forward until he was an arm’s length from the gate. Nathan shut his eyes. The voices were coming closer, but there was no edge to them, as if they had given up on him, or were talking about something else altogether. He tried to find that emptiness inside himself. When that failed, he tried to find his mother.

  ‘You need a key for that,’ the boy said.

  ‘Quiet.’

  The boy sat down. ‘You need a key, that’s all.’

  ‘Quiet!’

  The voices stopped, as if obeying him. Then they came back, louder, harsher, and they erased all sense of anything from down within.

  ‘Mum said you need a key for that.’

  ‘That’s him!’

  Nathan gritted his teeth and thought of his mother, eyes blacked, waiting at the fire. He thought of the creaking and panting from behind the curtain. He thought of his father straining to choke out a worm.

  There it was. Raising hairs on his arms.

  He thought of Bellows, nose in the air. He thought of the Fetch, whip coming down. He thought of the Master – don’t Spark. He reached down and put his hands on the metal; where his fingers touched it, the metal smoked. Hobnail boots rattled the cobbles behind him. Fifty feet? Possibly closer.

  ‘Don’t know what you’re doing,’ the boy said, ‘but Mum said you need a key for that. Hey!’ The boy poked him, and Nathan opened his eyes. The boy’s little face was long and narrow. His eyes glistened.

  ‘Get back!’

  ‘You don’t tell me what to do,’ he said and came even closer instead. The men came closer too.

  Nathan felt the Itch rise to Scratching, but it was no good.

  The boy’s eyes were wide. Bulging. Easily burned out if the Spark flared. And then what? Dog food. Worm food. Mulch.

  Nathan sighed and took his hands from the gate. He let them drop to his side.

  Before they got to him, Nathan threw the bag of coins through the gate.

  ‘Give that to your mum,’ Nathan said.

  The boy looked at the pouch. He wiped his mouth. ‘I haven’t got no mum no more. She’s dead,’ he replied.

  XII

  ‘So, whatever we get for him, it’s going straight to the smokehouse, right? No arguing?’

  ‘Why would I argue?’

  ‘You’re doing it now! Smokehouse, right?’

  ‘Yeah, but after we knock off, right?’

  ‘Obviously. We knock off, slip out, and whatever we get for him we take to the smokehouse, right?’

  ‘How much will we get for him?’

  ‘How should I know? Do I look like a bleeding fortune teller? Ten bits?’

  ‘Should do it.’

  ‘Should do it nicely. So, where’s the purse?’

  ‘It’ll be on him somewhere.’

  ‘Of course it’ll be on him somewhere, where else would it be? Get it, that’s what I’m saying, from wherever he’s stashed it.’

  ‘Where’ve you stashed it, filth?’

  They were dragging Nathan, one arm each, back up the hill. Their grip was so tight it made the rat bite pulse painfully. Though he tried to keep his feet flat to the ground, it didn’t slow them up in the least. They stank, the pair of them, like dray horses stink after carting barrels around all day – musky and sweet – and now their hands were in and out of his shirt and jacket.

  ‘I haven’t got it! I’m not him!’

  ‘You’re him, alright. And you have got it. Now where? You haven’t stashed it somewhere nasty, have you?’ The pair of them stopped dragging. The taller one rubbed a black-nailed hand over his mouth and chin, while the shorter one’s face pinched tight in disgust.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve done something horrible like that. He’s not done something horrible like that, has he?’

  ‘Well if he hasn’t, where’s the money?’

  ‘I haven’t got the money.’

  ‘Look, urk, you have got the money. Shall I tell you why? Because we came to find you, and we found you, and that little crowd gathering up there can see that we found you, and if we found you and you haven’t got the money…’

  ‘We won’t be going to the smokehouse?’

  ‘Worse than that, you silly sod. If we found him, we must have found the purse. Right? And if we found the purse, we have to return it to its rightful, right? And if we don’t return it to its rightful, that makes us thieves, right? So we get nicked, right?’

  ‘And we don’t go to the smokehouse.’

  ‘Of course we don’t go to the bleeding smokehouse! We go to the bleeding gallows. Get it? So, he has to have the purse. You have to have it, see? So where is it?’

  ‘I haven’t got it.’

  The shorter one’s hand went to his brow and he rubbed his temples with his fingertips, hard, so that the skin went white beneath them and left faint traces on his skin. ‘I don’t know how much clearer I can make it for you.’

  ‘Shall I take a look round the back?’ The taller one started to reach over.

  ‘I promise, I don’t have it. Search me. I gave it to a boy on the other side.’

  ‘Accomplice? Oh, lord. They’re never going to believe that. Never. They don’t have a very high opinion of slum muck like you. They don’t reckon your intelligence. Like rats. Or cockroaches. And us? We’re one up from that. The moment this gets to a beak, they’ll string us all up. Lord! I knew I should I have sat tight.’

  ‘So we ain’t going to the smokehouse?’

  ‘Shut up about the bloody smokehouse!’

  As they argued, Nathan reached down for the Itch. The rat bite stung, and their grip made it hard to feel anything else, but he was sure he could find it, if they just let him concentrate.

  As it happened, he didn’t need it. ‘Gentlemen. Got yourselves into a bit of a pickle?’

  It was Gam Halliday. He was leaning against a corner no more than ten feet away. It was hard to tell where he had come from. He might as well have spawned directly from the wall beside him. Nathan shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘What do you want?’ the tallest of the men said.

  Gam smiled broadly. ‘What I want is for you two fine upstanders to let my friend here come and play with his little mates. Right?’

  ‘This ain’t no time for play, boy. We’re taking him in to be strung up. He won’t be playing with anyone ever again. Although, let’s face it, some of them might have a bit of play with him, before they put him out of his misery.’

  Gam pursed his lips, strolled forward, nonchalant, unhurried, for all the world carefree. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘So how about you let him go?’

  ‘No,’ they said together, and turned their backs on him.

  ‘It’s up to you, lads, but I don’t fancy your chances.’

  They turned back, with expressions that suggested whatever welcome Gam might ever have had was run out. ‘Get lost. We’ve got enough to worry about without some little slum urk getting stuck in.’

  ‘Well, that’s exactly where you’re wrong, isn’t it? I’m exactly the little slum urk that you need.’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’

  ‘Let me make this easier for you gents to understand – and we need you to get the gist pronto, as I’m sure the crones, withered and brittle as they might be, aren’t entirely dim-witted and are going to get sus in short order, putting the mockers on all of us – there’s no way out of this for you, except one. You take a slashing, and you let my boy loose.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s he saying?’

 
; ‘Not clear enough for you? Keep my boy, and they string you up as accomplices to theft when they see the purse is gone. Let him go and they string you up as accomplices because he took the purse with him and you let him go. Alternatively, if you succumb to a couple of swipes of my barber’s razor, once they’ve needled and threaded you, you’re home free. So, what’s it to be?’

  The two men watched him, mouths hanging a little open, as if he was some esoteric preacher, or speaker in tongues.

  Gam sighed and slashed in one wide arc across both men’s faces, widening their mouths and reddening a semicircle a foot or more in front of the pair of them.

  He grabbed Nathan by the wrist. ‘Don’t say I never warned them. Come on.’

  Nathan didn’t pause. Now he was running again, straight back the way they’d come, shoulder to shoulder with Gam. ‘You could have killed them.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  Nathan went for the gate, as he had done before, but Gam had other ideas, and when they were still some fifty feet distant, he diverted Nathan into an alley behind a row of shops, crammed waist-high with empty crates and piles of discards. Halfway down, Gam suddenly dropped out of sight. Nathan slid to a stop, and stared at the space where Gam had been, but there was nothing. And then, at ground level, Gam’s head appeared. ‘What are you waiting for? Get down here before you’re collared. I can’t slash everyone’s faces, can I?’ Gam was looking out from a metal-rimmed square cut into the cobbles of the street, just big enough for Nathan to slip into. When Nathan didn’t immediately do as he was asked, Gam grabbed his ankle and dragged him. ‘What’s the matter with everyone today?’ Gam said, ‘Aren’t I speaking clearly?’

  XIII

  The iron ladder was rough with rust, and when Nathan reached the bottom his hands were red. He took off his handkerchief, glanced at the rat wound sidelong, and quickly wrapped it back up for protection. He wiped the other hand on his trousers, but that seemed to push the rust in rather than take it off.

  Now, with the manhole covered, he turned on Gam. ‘What are you doing here, anyway? You’re always around. You’re following me, aren’t you?’

  Gam pulled the brim of his hat down, picked up his oil lamp from where he’d left it earlier, and smiled. ‘Fancy yourself much? You reckon I slink through the shadows, waiting to get a glimpse of your skinny arse? Well, on this occasion, the answer is yes, I have been following you. I’ve been following you for weeks. Lucky for you.’

  Nathan would have stormed off, but where was there to go?

  They were standing on the bank of a broad, underground canal, running under an archway of glistening green bricks that moved in the uneven light of Gam’s oil lamp. The canal was not only running with rainwater, but with ordure of all kinds: butchers’ waste, run-off from tanneries, frothing liquids of God only knows what origin, all mixed into the sewerage. Amongst this, if that wasn’t bad enough, churned the worst sorts of dead-life: pointless, useless, disgusting things, flourishing in the filth, briefly grounding on a stick or on a floating firebird feather before dissolving into globs of mucus-like spittle. The stench made Nathan draw his lips into his mouth and clamp them there between his teeth and when he breathed, he did so only through the very corners of his mouth, and through his red hand, which also blocked his nostrils. The tang of iron was barely perceptible – an accent, nothing more, in the nose of a very robust vintage.

  Gam smiled. ‘You get used to it. When I first found this place, I thought I could smell it through my skin, it was so strong. Now’ – he took a lungful of air as if he was breathing a dawn mist – ‘I don’t even notice it. Can’t smell anything at all any more, as it goes. Or taste anything neither. Come on.’

  ‘Just leave me alone, Gam.’

  ‘No, Nathan. I’m not going to leave you alone. I’m going to follow you, and follow you, and follow you until you join my gang. If you don’t join my gang, I’m going to follow you anyway.’

  Gam set off and Nathan, after a brief glance back up the ladder, came after him. ‘Why? There’s hundreds you could choose from.’

  Gam didn’t stop, but he called back. ‘There’s no-one like you, Nathan.’

  The canal was about thirty feet wide and the bank alongside it another ten on both sides. Despite the contents of the flow, the ground was clean of the Living Mud, probably washed down by the rain. Rats, when there were any, restricted themselves to swimming and ducking in and out of holes in the bank. Gam strode along, his feet kicking out with each step, his elbows jutting out to either side, one thumb in his waistcoat pocket. Nathan hurried to keep up with him.

  ‘Is this your hideout?’

  ‘What? You must think I’m a real scumbag. And that, Natty, coming from you, is saying something. This place is nothing more than a roadway, a convenient means of getting across the city without drawing attention to oneself. I wouldn’t set up here. Anyway, when it rains, the water comes down here so fast it’d clear us out in a second. No, Natty boy, Gam’s gang lives in rather more upmarket environs.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You’ll see, if you keep following. If you’re not interested, of course – and precedent suggests you aren’t – follow the main pipe down; you’ll find it exits into the dirt not a hundred yards from your slum dwelling. A brief trot and you’ll be home to the loving arms of your mother. Providing they aren’t wrapped lovingly round someone else, that is.’

  There was nothing obvious on the wall, but Gam stopped there anyway. He traced the outline of something with his finger. ‘Or you can come with me. Your choice.’

  When he found the right place, wherever that was, he pushed. A brick to one side slid in as if it was greased. Gam squeezed his hand into the hole and fingered about, until, with a click, a door in the wall opened up. ‘Easy.’

  Behind the door there was tight room, just wide enough for both boys to stand shoulder to shoulder, but it was a squeeze to get the door shut. When it clicked part of the floor shot back and there was a spiral staircase, curling down into the earth. ‘After you.’

  Nathan peered down but didn’t move.

  ‘Go on, I’d hardly waste the effort saving you if I was going to do anything bad now, would I?’

  It was dark. As he turned the steps Nathan had to duck his head and hunch over to the side to keep moving. The stone was wet and smelled faintly of graveyards and cloisters. It was rough beneath his feet and beneath his fingers and, occasionally, against his cheek, like fine sandpaper. It crumbled to the touch, just a little. No wonder, then, that the steps were worn, curved deeply where the foot fell. If it hadn’t been for the restricted space and the fact that he had his hands and shoulders and elbows and thighs against the wall, he felt that he might have slipped. ‘How far does this go down?’

  ‘Why? You afraid of getting trapped down here? Getting you in the chest is it? Making you want to pant? Don’t worry, delicate little flower, you’ll be out before you know it.’

  And he was, because in only a few steps they walked into a broad corridor.

  Where the spiral staircase had been sandstone, this place was lushly carpeted, lit by luminescent panels of rock laid into the walls. The carpet was spotted black with damp, and the mustiness of it filled his lungs, but it was carpet nonetheless, and otherwise clean. Above the dado, suspended from the picture rail, were hanging pictures – oils in flaking gilt frames of men of serious countenance with tightly buttoned jackets. A more disparate collection of faces could not be imagined – some mustachioed, some bearded, some with broad smooth cheeks and brown eyes, others with cauliflower noses and wattles, others still fresh and blonde and barely in their majority, but they all wore the same shining black jackets and carried a cane topped with a goat’s horn.

  ‘Handsome bunch, aren’t they?’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Gentlemen’s club. This was their clubhouse.’

  ‘What kind of a club would want a clubhouse down here?’

  ‘You might well ask, young Treeves. Come on, it’s eas
y walking, but don’t hang too far back; it’s like a labyrinth down here.’

  Everywhere was the emblem of the ram’s horn – on the pictures, in the print of the wallpaper, in the decorations on the edges of things – repeated until it became so familiar only its shape was visible: a coil, a twist, half a spiral, mirrored, reversed, repeated. The pattern was in the line of carpet that ran down the centre of the stairs and was continued as it met a wider expanse of hallway, off which three doors led. Above the central door was a real ram’s head, stuffed, shadows claiming and releasing the cracked and bleached horns as the torches flickered in the sewer breeze.

  ‘That one’s locked,’ said Gam, ‘No amount of fiddling will open it.’

  He went to the left door and turned its brass skull handle. The door swung in. Almost at once the sizzle of bacon frying came in and with it came laughter and talking.

  ‘Lunch is served!’

  XIV

  The walls of the room were almost entirely covered by books on shelves, and those parts that weren’t books were the pipework, ladders, chimneys and oil lamps that made the place liveable. Quite why books required such consideration, Nathan couldn’t guess. Perhaps it was the books that had built this place, and here now they lived, in ordered seclusion, down beneath the rivers of muck above. Gam walked ahead of Nathan, stopping to take volumes randomly from the collection, disturbing their rest, until he had a pile which reached up to his chin. ‘A boy’s got to educate himself,’ he said, and went over to the fire.

  Here there was an armchair, high-backed, upholstered in studded red leather, with a table and reading lamp beside it. Gam put the books on the pile on the table to be read and picked up two he’d dumped into the seat. ‘I never burn ’em until I’ve read ’em,’ he said, and threw the finished books onto the fire.

  There were two children beside the fire, warming themselves. One of them Nathan didn’t know, but he did recognise the girl. Her bonnet mostly covered the bristles that crept through from beneath the skin of her shaven head, but it was her – the girl who had clung to him so tightly at the Master’s manse. She stood up and hefted a huge skillet from its makeshift range – an iron fireguard balanced between two stone gargoyles, flames flicking up from the books and a stack of varnished chair legs, crackling and spitting away. She held the handle of the pan in both hands and walked from the hips for as many steps as she could manage then smashed it down on the long reading table that stretched for the best part of the room. It sizzled and hissed as the hot metal met the polish, branding a perfect circle of white next to countless others.