Mister Creecher (24 page)

‘He’s just a man in a costume,’ shouted someone at the back.

‘Yeah,’ said another. ‘It’s a trick!’

Within seconds, the whole tent was shouting that Creecher was a fake and that they wanted their money back. Browning tried to calm the crowd but he was jostled and pushed, and would have fallen had Bradbury not stepped in.

‘Friends!’ shouted Browning. ‘Friends! I assure you, there are no tricks or fakes at this carnival!’

A small mop-haired boy approached the cage with a long stick and began to poke Creecher with it. Someone in the audience pointed him out and everyone turned from Browning to watch this new entertainment.

Creecher endured these attentions in silence, turning only once to glare at the boy. But the boy took this as an invitation to continue his assault with even greater vigour.

A ripple of laughter broke out. The rest of the crowd soon joined in. Billy looked at Browning. This was certainly not expected and, for the first time, he saw a troubled look break out across the carnival owner’s face.

‘For God’s sake,’ he muttered to Bradbury. ‘He’s an ogre. He’s meant to terrify people, not make them laugh.’

But then, almost on cue, Creecher turned on the boy and snatched his stick, pulling it into the cage with one hand, while trying to grab the boy with the other. The boy’s parents just managed to pull their son away, before the giant’s hands reached his throat.

Creecher roared with anger and stood up, lurching forward, shaking his chains, pulling them off and throwing them down on the floor of the cage.

As soon as the crowd saw that he was free, they rushed for the exit, screaming and shouting, knocking each other over in their haste to escape. Browning watched them go, grinning.

‘Excellent,’ he said, turning to Billy. ‘What a performance! Shaking free of the chains was a stroke of genius. We must get the big fellow to do that in every show.’

But Billy had seen that look on Creecher’s face before. That was no performance. The boy – and Browning – had had a lucky escape. It was time to leave.

Creecher, of course, did not argue when Billy suggested that they should make the rest of the journey on their own, but Browning put up less resistance than Billy had thought he might. Perhaps he, too, had realised just how close they had come to a terrible incident.

Browning knew a man who was taking narrowboats north and who, for a fee, would take Billy and Creecher with him. He even took care of the money himself, saying it was the least he could do. Although Billy had been given a small wage along with all the other crew, Creecher had been happy to accept just food and a steady supply of books and journals, a selection of which he carried with him now.

‘I hope you find what you’re looking for on your travels north, my friend,’ said Browning, shaking Creecher’s hand. ‘But if not, then perhaps you will return to the carnival.’ But it was said with little conviction. They all knew that this was the end.

With that, they were off. Lily and Milly called their farewells and waved excitedly as Billy walked away. Creecher grinned and Billy blushed. He looked back to see Bradbury’s painted face scowling at him. There would be no fond farewells from him.

Frankenstein and Clerval had been headed for Matlock, but there was no need to follow them there. If they’d stuck to the itinerary, then they would already be on their way to Keswick in Cumberland, where they apparently intended to stay for some weeks.

Billy and Creecher walked through the wide streets of Manchester towards the meeting point with the bargeman. Creecher wore his long coat with the collar pulled up, and his wide-brimmed hat shaded his face. Striking cotton workers stood about in sullen groups. They looked pale and tired. The few that noticed Creecher gazed in wonder, tugging at their neighbour’s coat sleeves to point after them. But Billy and Creecher had already slipped into the shadows and disappeared, like dreams at dawn.

‘Lord have mercy!’ said the bargeman, when he saw Creecher.

‘It’s all right,’ said Billy. ‘It’s all make-up. We didn’t have time to change.’

‘Hah!’ said the bargeman, holding his chest. ‘Thank God for that. Frightened the life out of me. But he’s huge, though.’

‘Not really,’ Billy replied. ‘It’s all special boots and so on. Tricks of the trade.’

The bargeman nodded and leaned forward to get a better look at Creecher’s face, grimacing as he did so and pulling back almost immediately.

‘We’ll stay out of your way in the hold,’ said Billy. ‘You won’t even know we’re here.’

PART III.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

It was June now. It had been months since they had left Oxford. It was warmer, particularly at night, but the skies were still mainly overcast and glowering. Billy wondered again if Creecher carried this weather with him.

They had travelled north along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and then onwards up the Lancaster Canal until they reached the end of its course. Navvies laboured noisily to forge a new canal route to Kendal.

Through a combination of walking and riding in the back of wagons and carts when they could, Billy and Creecher continued their journey into the high country of Westmorland and Cumberland.

Creecher would read to Billy whenever they stopped to make camp: one night it might be a novel of high adventure, another a long and mournful poem. Billy preferred adventure, but knowing how much Creecher enjoyed his poetry, he listened to whatever the giant was reading with equal attention.

The wide, open spaces seemed to allow Creecher room to be the giant he was. These northern folk were suspicious of all outsiders, and yet they appeared to accept Creecher as just another example of how strange the world beyond their boundaries could be. Or most of them did, at least.

Creecher still had the power to terrify and unnerve at close quarters and in daylight, but they tended to restrict their travels to the night, dusk and dawn, when he possessed the ability to melt into the shadows.

They had thought to break their journey with bouts of highway robbery, but realised it would be impossible as the country became more wild and open. There were simply not enough people to rob, and those few they had stopped had little or nothing to steal.

So they had taken instead to asking for rides. Initially they offered to pay, but very quickly they discovered that no payment was expected.

Billy would sit up front with the driver if there was room, and Creecher would go in the back, where his size was less obvious. It was from one such wagon that they now alighted.

Billy thanked the driver as he and Creecher jumped down. The driver waved back and flicked the reins, encouraging the horses in the direction of the town which nestled in the valley below at the foot of a long hill, down which the rough road precipitously snaked.

‘Could we not have gone a bit further?’ asked Billy.

‘That is not our destination,’ said Creecher, who was already climbing over a drystone wall and striding off into the bracken. ‘You heard the driver – Keswick is this way. And Frankenstein is in Keswick.’

‘I know. But he also said it’s miles away. We could have picked up another wagon.’

‘Too small a town,’ Creecher replied. ‘Too many people.’

Billy knew the giant was right. There would be no way of hiding Creecher in a town that size. In such a confined space, he would only horrify and alarm.

Billy struggled to keep up with Creecher as he strode up the hill. He marvelled at how light-footed the giant appeared, despite his great size. He was like some animal which had been long out of its true environment and now delighted in being able to roam freely.

‘It is good to be in hill country,’ he called over his shoulder, as Billy bounded after him. ‘The air smells better here.’

And he was right – though Billy would have liked to have more of that air in his lungs. He panted and gasped and his muscles burned.

But now Billy shared Creecher’s urge to get to the summit and, after a brief rest, he set off again with renewed vigour, challenging himself to keep pace with the giant – a challenge he almost met.

He clambered over the final crag as ravens croaked above him, flipping and tumbling like acrobatic shadows. The summit was a kind of flattened plateau, studded with wind-polished boulders, as though hammered home by a god.

Creecher stood ahead of him, resting one dusty boot on a boulder and staring off into the distance. Billy walked tentatively forward. He felt a reverence here, a sense of awe he had never felt in a church – though, to be fair, he had only ever entered a church to pick pockets.

A mist moved in the valleys, the peaks of hills bursting through here and there like islands in a swirling sea of cloud. Billy had never seen anything like it in his life.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Creecher replied. ‘It is.’

And, all at once, Billy realised that he had never said the word ‘beautiful’ in his life before. It was a word that had lain unused in his mind, like a family heirloom – too ostentatious ever to be sullied by the likes of him.

He said the word again, quietly this time, only to himself, savouring the syllables as though they were an untried delicacy.

Billy and Creecher could have been the only two living creatures in the world, or so it felt to Billy. It was as if they stood at the dawn of a new world, a world as yet unformed, brimming with limitless possibilities.

Creecher turned to Billy and smiled. For once, Billy did not find the effect disturbing. He didn’t know whether he was simply getting used to Creecher, or whether this landscape had produced a more human expression from the giant. But in that moment he didn’t care. He looked out across the mist and whooped with joy. A buzzard soared up above them and mewed plaintively, as though in response.

Billy and Creecher clambered over a crag and down through drifts of scree, slipping and sliding as the shards of slate stone moved under their feet. They continued through bracken and rowan and mountain ash until they arrived at a cleft in the hillside, into which a stream had worn its way through layers of ancient rock, smoothing them like gemstones.

They were both hot from walking and stank like the hold of a fishing boat, so when a deep pool presented itself, Billy, without a moment’s hesitation, stripped off and jumped in.

The cold water slapped his bare flesh and made him yelp, but he sank into its embrace, letting the chill waters wash over him.

He emerged, gasping, to see Creecher finish disrobing and preparing to join him. The sight of the giant’s naked flesh was startling, and it was then that Billy noticed what had troubled him all those months ago when he had first seen Creecher’s bare torso. He had no navel.

Of course, thought Billy. What need did he have for that scar of birth, when he had not been born in that sense? No umbilical cord had been cut at his entry into the world.

Even though he had accepted the facts of Creecher’s origins many weeks before, the sight of that smooth stomach, with its translucent flesh, brought a chill to Billy that the coldness of the water could not entirely be blamed for. As Creecher lowered himself slowly into the pool, Billy was overwhelmed by the surety that he did not want to share those dark waters with the giant.

He climbed out and tried not to make eye contact with Creecher, so that he might not know if his eagerness to leave had been noticed.

Instead, he looked at himself in the black water. Was that really him? His shoulders were broad where they had once drooped. He raised a hand to his arm as though it belonged to someone else, and marvelled at the firm muscles that met his touch.

The pale and sickly, thin and spindly Billy that worked the streets of London had metamorphosed into another, stronger version. Months on the road had changed him. He had seen little of the sun those last months, yet still his face was a healthier shade than it had ever been, and it had broadened like his shoulders. It was not a handsome face especially, but it was a long way from ugly.

Billy looked around for the giant, but Creecher was nowhere to be seen and the surface of the water was as untroubled as a sheet of glass.

It was some moments before Billy caught sight of him. He was at the bottom of the pool, curled up on the stones like an unborn babe. His eyes were open and there was a look of utter tranquillity on his face.