Printer's Devil (9780316167826) (29 page)

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.”

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 wonder 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.

Reaching forward, he grasped it by the handle to assess its weight. This must be the sword Mog found in the chest, he said
to himself, remembering the story I’d told him about how I’d scared off the man from Calcutta.

He put it back, and sat down on the beam, dangling his legs over the edge. If he’d kicked out, he could have struck the biggest
of the bells with his foot. He uncorked the rum bottle and took a small swig, closing his eyes as the burning liquid went
down. But it made him feel better. Peering down, he could see the tower like a shaft falling away beneath him, to the platform
he’d stood on a few minutes earlier. Just above him were massive beams to which the bells were attached, suspended from thick
ropes to enable them to swing
and chime. And decorative windows in the very top of the spire afforded him a view, six or seven feet above his head, of clouds
pouring like smoke across the three-quarter moon. He leaned back against the wall by the little hidey-hole, adjusted the gun
in his belt which was digging uncomfortably into his thigh, and soon found himself so comfortable and so tired that his eyes
closed and his head sank, gradually, onto his shoulder.

I had no inkling who was holding me, their arm clamped over my mouth, and it was clear they weren’t going to reveal themselves
until I stopped kicking. I was quite astonished to find myself not being beaten up: I’d expected worse, in fact. All that
seemed to be happening was that a voice, which knew my name, was whispering to me not to shout out and not to panic.

“Mog,” it hissed, “you must listen. I’m not going to hurt you.”

When I stopped struggling, and he released his grip, I managed at last to turn and find out who the mysterious assailant was.
I got quite a shock when, in the shadow, I recognized the extremely thin man I’d met in the Three Friends, who had told me
the bosun’s address. What on earth was he doing here? I asked him as much.

“It’s a long story,” he whispered; “it’s going to take some time to explain.”

Something was fishy.

“You used to have a stammer,” I said.

“St-st-stammer c-c-comes and-g-goes,” he gulped.