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Mordew

Page 19

by Alex Pheby


  And now a party of ghosts, ten, fifteen – it was hard to make out since each was visible behind the other, and the walls and paintings behind them, and sculptures and suits of armour in between, and they were always moving, passing in front of and behind everything. Regardless of how many of them there were, they watched Nathan but stayed at a safe distance.

  One wraith was smiling, wooden teeth wired into wooden gums, and its tongue was wet between the upper and lower set. Its eyes were wide and staring, delighted by something that was lost on the living people there. After a little while it spoke. ‘We have been waiting for this moment so long, Master.’

  Nathan wanted to go to it, like Prissy had, but Anaximander put himself in the way and Sirius resumed his growling. ‘Do not speak to it,’ Anaximander said. ‘The words of the dead fall heavily on the ears of the living, and their desires and ours rarely marry.’

  The ghost laughed, its teeth rattling in its jaw. There was the smell of the grave, sweet and musty. ‘Master,’ the ghost whispered, ‘why has it taken you so long?’

  All around were ghosts, all men, uniformed, bearing the emblem that adorned everything in that place, but each of them differed in the style of their uniform – some were more elaborate and some less, some were more tightly fitted, some looser, some had ruffs and tassels and frills and others wore sparer lines and tighter cuts. Suddenly, they moved towards Nathan, coming in reverse order of their antiquity, it seemed, the more simply dressed edging closest, the most ornate giving way and remaining back.

  ‘Nathaniel Treeves, you return at last,’ one said, though Nathan could not tell which. ‘What has delayed you all these long years?’

  ‘Have you forgotten your promise?’

  ‘What promise?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘What promise? Brothers, he has forgotten indeed. The promise must be honoured.’

  ‘I don’t know what promise you mean.’

  ‘Master.’

  The ghosts crowded around Nathan and he searched for the Spark. It lit the room blue, pained his arm, but the ghosts faded, though their voices remained.

  ‘Master. Sulphur.’

  ‘Master. Spark.’

  ‘The promise.’

  Sirius was chasing through the room as a happy dog chases his tail, but he was not happy – he seemed to see ghosts everywhere, in everything: the flickering flames of a candle, a discarded boot, piles of fabric. Nathan knelt, stroked the scruff of his neck as he came near, rubbed along his back, scratched his haunches. Though the dog quietened briefly at each touch, he would not remain comforted.

  Nathan stood again and, with his hands around his mouth, he shouted out, ‘Ghosts! I’ll keep your promise. Go back to sleep – I’ll wake you when I need you.’ As he said it, he felt it was meaningless, but the moment the last word faded, Sirius came and lay at his feet, calm and panting.

  ‘He is impressed,’ Anaximander said. ‘It is no easy task to dismiss phantoms. It is an indication of great power.’

  Nathan nodded, but didn’t quite know what to say.

  Prissy glowered at the lot of them. ‘Never mind all that – Gam’s not here and we need to find him.’

  ‘It is a problem easily resolved,’ Anaximander said. ‘Simply give my companion an object on which your friend’s scent has been left. Sirius will be able to track him anywhere in the city.’

  Prissy passed Nathan the last book Gam had been reading, and the dog inhaled its odour.

  ‘He says your friend is near at hand. Above.’

  Nathan looked around at the den and without hesitating said, ‘Let’s go.’

  XXXVII

  They found Gam in the gin-house in a large backroom reserved for gamblers. He was sitting glumly, sipping at an empty glass, one hand on his knee.

  The presence of the dogs in the place was much remarked on, even before Anaximander spoke – they were fine specimens, very likely favourites even against the most seasoned of the dogs wagered on by the patrons – and now, with an exhibition of Anaximander’s ability to speak, a crowd had gathered around them, reaching, prodding, cooing appreciatively. This was sufficient distraction to allow Nathan to go to Gam in relative privacy, but Prissy went first, barging past whoever was too drunk or morose not to be attending to the dogs.

  ‘What have you got to say for yourself, Gam Halliday?’

  Gam looked up from the table, breaking his long, close inspection of the table’s woodgrain. ‘Where’s Joes? Did they go back to the den?’

  Prissy slapped Gam hard across the face. The sound briefly turned the heads of the gin-house patrons, but when they saw nothing more unusual than an everyday slapping, they turned back. ‘What do you mean? They’re dead, aren’t they?’

  A strange expression played across Gam’s face – surprise, puzzlement, disappointment, fear all at once, then fading into sadness, weariness, guilt. His sound eye welled, but it was the empty one he rubbed. ‘They fell. There was nothing I could do.’ He looked down again at the table, as if the varnished curves were the only thing he wanted to see.

  ‘How could they fall? Weren’t you holding them?’

  ‘They fell; what do you want me to say?’

  Prissy grabbed Gam by the chin. ‘They’re dead, Gam. They broke their back and then there were two of them, both next to each other. Dead.’

  Gam let his chin be held, for a moment, but when he saw Nathan he pulled away. ‘And what did you do about it? Nothing?’

  Nathan shook his head.

  ‘What did you expect him to do?’ Prissy watched Gam’s face and the misery in it seemed to puncture her anger. She pulled a chair over from a man who’d got up for more drink and sat at the table. ‘So what happened exactly?’

  ‘They were spasming about up there; I lost my grip and they fell. I tried to save them, but it didn’t work.’

  Prissy crossed her arms and turned away.

  ‘You don’t believe me? Why? They were my only… they were like family – good family. Anyway, I don’t answer to you. You’re not my mum. You’re not my bleeding conscience.’

  Back in the crowd, someone had made a bet that Anaximander couldn’t count to fifty, which he had immediately done, at speed, and now he was attempting to multiply the number of inches in an ell by the number of pints in a gallon. While he was doing this, scratching marks with his paws in the sawdust, a gin-drunk slipped a harness and muzzle over him, cawing with cracked lips as he buckled the straps. Neither Anaximander nor Sirius reacted to this, a sign the drunk failed to appreciate.

  ‘Gam,’ Nathan said, ‘what’s going on?’

  Gam sat for a while, then stood up. ‘I don’t answer to you, either. I’m going back to the den.’

  ‘Not without answering you aren’t.’ Prissy grabbed his arm.

  Anaximander provided the answer to the arithmetic he’d been set, but none of the gathered knew whether he was right or wrong, and there was much confusion when the bookmakers were approached by those holding slips.

  The dog thief, whose nose was as swollen and pitted as a clove-studded orange, dragged at the rope he’d attached to the harness.

  ‘If your hope is to kidnap me, then it is a vain one,’ Anaximander said. He lurched vigorously to one side and the man’s arms were pulled from their sockets, his reflexes not swift enough to allow him to drop the rope in time. He seemed now to adopt a permanent shrug, much to the amusement of the other gin-house patrons, except a few among them who were this man’s comrades, and these leapt onto Anaximander’s back, hoping to bear him away.

  Sirius weaved his way through the crowd to Nathan, grabbed at his trousers. Gam was muttering angrily under his breath, but when Prissy put her hand on his shoulder, he shut his eyes, rubbed at his eye socket, and began to tremble.

  Anaximander, through the press of bodies, raised himself up to stand on his hind legs, leaving the men dangling from his neck, and rounded down onto one who had fallen to the ground, putting his whole weight onto his spine, which cracked as brittle twigs crack in the
autumn. Then the room was sprayed with blood as the dog burrowed with his great paws through the man’s clothes, through his skin, through his ribs, into his organs, as easily as any dog digs in the earth whether it be for truffles, or to unearth a burrow, or just for the pleasure of making a hole. The men who had leapt onto Anaximander, seeing how things were going, scattered into the crowd.

  When the man was dead, Anaximander stopped. The whole place was in a mess of blood, and the gin-wife came from her place near the cellar steps. ‘I won’t have my premises made a bloodbath of!’ she shouted, and the patrons hung their heads in remorse. ‘Whose animal is this?’

  ‘Madam,’ Anaximander said, ‘I recognise no owner. That said, I apologise for the perturbation my presence has caused to the orderly running of your establishment.’

  She was clearly surprised to hear him speak, but a gin-wife is a type of woman who will see many surprising things in the pursuance of her trade. ‘Apologies are cheap, and easy to make,’ she said, unfazed. ‘Clearing up blood on the other hand takes effort. What do you say to that?’

  Anaximander nodded. ‘You speak truthfully. If I had the hands for cleaning work, I would use them. Since I have not, is there any other service I might offer?’

  The gin-wife pulled at a long, grey chin hair, smiled, then gestured to the back.

  ‘Companion,’ Anaximander called. ‘I will return when my obligation is met.’

  Sirius dodged through the crowd, though after the previous display, everyone seemed very keen to let him pass. He whined a little when he got to Anaximander, sniffed at him.

  ‘Fear not. I am equipped for any eventuality.’

  This did not seem to placate Sirius. If anything, it made him worse. Nathan edged over and put his hand to his collar, stroked his neck.

  Anaximander spoke to Nathan. ‘A free dog must act honourably in the world; this is something Sirius and I must both learn, and I intend to lead by example. Please, Nathan Treeves, look after Sirius in my brief absence, and allow him to look after you. I will return soonest.’

  With that he disappeared off with the gin-wife into a backroom.

  Sirius, his companion gone, pulled away from Nathan, and for a moment the boy felt the fear he had experienced on the rooftop, heard the gnawing of faces. Sirius reared up, making Nathan step back, but when he came down with his paws heavy on Nathan’s shoulders, paining his arm, he did not bite. He stared instead, looking deep into Nathan’s eyes.

  Such was the dog’s weight that soon Nathan’s arm could not bear him, and the pain showed on his face. Sirius, recognising this, seemingly, got down and licked at Nathan’s hand, slobbered at his wound, keening a little.

  This did not help, but neither did it hurt, and when he went back to the table where Gam and Prissy had been, Sirius let him lead him by the collar. Both of the children had gone, and in their place were two men so drunk that the air around them seemed to shimmer in a heat haze. Not wishing to join their blurred conversation or suffer the tang of liquor that accompanied every word, Nathan and Sirius went outside.

  XXXVIII

  Gam and Prissy weren’t outside either, so Nathan went home, with Sirius beside him, intending to loop round to the den afterwards.

  The Promenade seemed that much dirtier, that much more dishevelled and drab. The people were weaker and closer to death than they ever had been before. Nathan walked upright, Sirius by his side, and when there was someone creepy or suspicious behind the next pile of lashed-together wood, or the sound of a beating leaked out into the street, he didn’t shrink as he might have once. Nor did he sneak through the shadows, hoping not to be seen. Rather he marched forward as if there was nothing to trouble him, as if nothing could trouble him.

  The people regarded him differently too. It was they who avoided his gaze, who slipped back into their hovels rather than cross him, who pulled their filthy children close to them as he came by.

  Sea fret rolled down the streets and he didn’t shrink at this either but acted as if it wasn’t there at all, ploughing through it, making it part for him, as if the sea itself had better watch out.

  But when he came near to where his parents sheltered against the world, all that left, and he felt six inches shorter. Even the presence of Sirius wasn’t enough, and he felt the gap between his shirt collar and his neck, and the gap between his trousers and his socks, shivering his flesh and hunching his shoulders. Every angle of the collapsed tumble of planks, every slit of light leaking from candle flames, and every sniff of burning wick belittled him, enervated him, drew him back into himself. By the time he arrived at the door and heard his father’s coughing, he felt tiny, like a baby left on a hillside to freeze in the sleet.

  The dog seemed to sense this, or something like it, and he came closer, offered solace. Nathan couldn’t take his comfort, though, suddenly didn’t feel worthy of it. How would he explain Sirius to his mother? What if the dog leapt at his father? Even in affection he would kill him.

  Nathan ordered Sirius to wait, still unsure whether he would obey, but the dog sat in the Living Mud and the boy walked the last few yards alone.

  He pulled aside the curtain, and was relieved at the emptiness inside, no jacket on the back of the chair, no boots standing together at the doorway, steaming wool socks folded over the sides, no quickly stifled grunt or awkward shuffling. His mother was alone beneath the sheets. He went past without waking her, went to where his father lay. He was worse, it was obvious. The medicine Padge had given him was nothing after all – some concoction of aniseed and turps. Or the lungworms were too established, filling every inch of him. He was like a desiccated flower, a wisp of something blown up on the wind, an egg husk on the beach. Nathan inched forward, holding his breath as if the pressure of moving air might dissolve him to dust and leave the sheets to fall together.

  His father’s eyes were open, dry from not blinking, his lips apart, dry from not putting them together, his expression one of intense concentration. When Nathan went into his eyeline this concentration was broken. He doubled up like a flick-knife, his mouth screaming soundlessly, choked on an obstruction he would never have the strength to clear. The blue greyness of his skin darkened in a second, and it must have been a trick of the light, the flickering of the candle flame, but Nathan could see the worms beneath the thin skin, wriggling and writhing, moving vigorously, with more right to call themselves alive than the shell that contained them. They were waiting for the time when they would dominate, when they could push this frail weakness aside and come forth in their own right and spawn, bursting into a spray of spores that would be carried on the mist to whichever body was too weak to assert itself against them.

  His mother was standing behind him. He didn’t need to turn to know she was there, her perfume announced her: thick lavender, astringent enough to catch the corner of his eye, but not enough to cover up something else – an undertone of dirt and tears. ‘It isn’t working, Natty.’ She put her hand on his shoulder, oval nails red with lead paint, black where the colour chipped at the ends. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without him.’

  She pressed up against Nathan, looping her arms together across his chest, pulling him into her. He pulled away.

  His father was curled in on himself now, like a woodlouse without its shell, circled against attack but with nothing to defend itself.

  ‘Do it, Natty.’

  Nathan turned at last. She was smaller than he remembered her, as if she was a long way away, or seen through a lens. Her silk slip was torn at the shoulder and her eyes were freshly blacked.

  ‘Have you been busy?’

  She flinched but was not shamed. ‘Do it!’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You know.’

  He did know. He knew, and in his gut, he could feel it rising. At the backs of his knees he could feel it, and in his bad arm. The hairs rose on his neck.

  He turned and then there didn’t seem to be a decision to make: a worm, the size of a thread of black cotton, was on his f
ather’s cheek. It entwined itself between the stubble there, making its way towards his father’s eye even as he strained to rid himself of it.

  Nathan grabbed his father by the shoulders and Sparks like those that had opened the safe, like silverfish, came easily, without prompting, as if they knew better than Nathan did what he had to do. From his fingertips they rushed, with little pain, impossibly blue in that dank, mould-blackened hovel – the dawn sun rising over a pit, sapphires in mud – and sought out his father’s mouth. The first one slipped inside, a second burned to ash the thread on his cheek. Then all of them invaded the brittle body.

  It looked as if his father would allow it. He closed his eyes, and his muscles slackened – the pressure was releasing, the Sparks relieving him simply by their presence. Nathan grit his teeth as his arm suddenly objected, but more Sparks came, thousands of them, lighting every corrupted, worn-down surface of that place, casting shadows that danced around like the afterimages of marsh lights. He felt inside his father, found the worms – the dense, writhing mass of them – and he scorched them, stripped them of their earthly forms, made of them lungworm ghosts that blew away in the winds of the other side, too ineffectual even to haunt this place.

  But then from deep within his father there came a growl, like the grinding of rocks in an earthquake. It built even as the lights flickered, seeming to compete with them for attention. Nathan didn’t stop, he forced more of the Sparks inside, no matter how much it hurt; he could move them easily, as if they were mercury on a tin plate that he could tilt here and there, watch the beads of it coalesce and circle the rim, faster and faster, burn his father clean.

  The sound stopped. There was his father, in front of him, above him, and his hands were around Nathan’s neck. They were thin as paper, cut-out hands, tissue-paper glover’s guides, but they gripped with force, and when Nathan brought his own hands up to pull them away, the Sparks were gone, skittering to the ground, dying there, like the sparks made when a farrier makes a horseshoe, glittering for a second then nothing. Nathan pulled his father’s hands from his throat. His father was missing a finger – his index finger – there was now just a stump, red-black with freshly congealing blood.

 

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