The Peculiar (18 page)

Mr. Jelliby peered in through the broken window. The interior was very dim. He could just make out wooden crates rising in cliffs and towers toward the roof. In the shaft of light from the hole in the window, he also saw that the floor was scarred black, as if from fire.

He hissed loudly for Bartholomew. “
Psst.
Bartholomew? Bartholomew! Come on!”

Bartholomew threw one last glance around the quay. Then he too came darting down the alley.

“We're going in,” Mr. Jelliby said. He lifted the hook and began breaking more of the window, scraping the glass away with its tip. When there was a hole large enough to crawl through, he pushed Bartholomew up onto the ledge and then climbed up after him. They both dropped down into the warehouse.

Everything echoed inside. The space was vast and dark, and every shuffle, every breath flew up to the roof on metal wings. When they heard the sounds again, they were eerie and far away, as if other things were sliding through the trestles, whispering.

Bartholomew took a few steps forward. An odd smell tickled his nose. Hooks were faintly visible in the gloom above, pulleys and long chains. Somewhere at the far end of the warehouse he could hear water lapping against stone.

“It's a loading dock,” Mr. Jelliby said. “The warehouse runs right into the Thames. The dead changelings . . . They must have been dumped into the river here.”

Bartholomew shivered and stepped closer to Mr. Jelliby.
Hettie.
He looked around, straining to see something in the blackness.
Is she here somewhere? Is anything here?

Suddenly he clutched Mr. Jelliby's arm, so tightly the man jumped.

“What in—!” he said, but Bartholomew didn't loosen his grip.

“Someone's here,” he said in a small voice. He raised a finger, pointing toward a narrow gap that ran like a passageway into the wall of crates.

Someone
was
there. Far back in the shadows stood a plain wooden chair. A figure was reclining on it. It sat very still, slung across the chair. One hand hung down limply, fingertips brushing the ground.

Mr. Jelliby's heart skipped a beat. He tried to swallow, couldn't. He signaled for Bartholomew to stay where he was.

“Hello?” Mr. Jelliby called out, taking a step toward the figure. His voice tolled in the darkness, cold and hollow like a watery bell.

The figure in the chair remained motionless. He looked almost to be sleeping. His legs were stretched out in front of him. His head was thrown back over one shoulder.

Mr. Jelliby took several more steps and froze. It was the doctor from the prison in Bath. Dr. Harrow of Sidhe studies. His eyes were open, staring, but they were no longer blue. They were dull and sightless, gray as a sky of rain. Dr. Harrow was dead.

Mr. Jelliby backed away, horror and revulsion gripping his throat.

“Who is it?” Bartholomew whispered from behind him. “Mr. Jelliby, what's—”

Mr. Jelliby turned. He opened his mouth to say something. Glass shattered on the floor.
The window we climbed through.
He spun toward it. The window was empty, but something had been there a moment ago. A few bits of glass tinkled to the floor.

“Bartholomew?” he hissed. “Bartholomew, what was that?”

“Something came in,” Bartholomew whimpered. He was looking around frantically, trying to distinguish shapes in the shadows all around.
“Something's here.”

Just then, an orange glow lit the edge of a stack of crates. It grew steadily, spreading across the surface of the wood. Then a figure stepped into view. The glow came from a pipe. The pipe was pinched between the scabbed lips of the old sailor. He had followed them.

The sailor shuffled along slowly, head to the ground, the glow of his pipe flaring with every breath. Then he stopped.

Something shifted in the darkness behind him, and suddenly he went limp like a flag when the wind has died. A writhing mass of shadow mounted his shoulder, pin-prick eyes sparking out of the dark.

Child Number Ten,
a voice said inside Bartholomew's head.

The pipe fell from the sailor's mouth, but not before Bartholomew caught a glimpse of the thing that had spoken. What he saw made his skin crawl. The parasite on the back of the lady's head, the shadow in the attic, the shape racing across the cobbles in Old Crow Alley—now it was a mass of rats. It had no feet other than the scuttling claws of rats, no hands but what it twisted together out of fat brown rats' tails. Its misshapen face seemed to be stretched across their matted hides like a mask.

Mr. Jelliby snatched Bartholomew's arm and pulled him down behind a huge iron winch, just as the creature's gaze swept toward them.

“Hide,” Mr. Jelliby mouthed. Bartholomew nodded, and they both sidled back into the ravine of crates.

No use running, boy. I can feel you.

Bartholomew kept his eyes on the ground and walked. Whoever it was propped up on the chair at the end of the passage, he didn't want to know anymore. He could smell the death in the air and it terrified him.

Naughty boy with the iron coal scuttle. Should be out cold like the rest. Is Arthur Jelliby with you? It would save me much trouble if he were.

Bartholomew's arms began to throb. He looked down and saw red light bleeding through the thin fabric of his sleeves. The lines were glowing again.

Ahead of him, a crate stuck out further than the rest. He dashed around it and slid down, eyes shut. Mr. Jelliby tried to drag him back up, but Bartholomew shook his head.

“You have to go,” he whispered. “It'll find me no matter where I hide. It's got me marked. Get my sister, Mr. Jelliby. Get her, and I'll try to find you later.”

Do I hear whispers? Little lying whispers sneaking in the dark? Didn't your mummy ever tell you it's not nice to whisper behind other people's backs?

Mr. Jelliby looked at Bartholomew gravely. He nodded once. Then he patted Bartholomew on the shoulder, and with a final halfhearted smile, crawled toward the slouched shape of Dr. Harrow.

Oh, but of course,
the voice rasped.
Your mummy is sleeping, isn't she. Don't worry, she will wake up in a few days' time, absolutely starving and practically dying of thirst. And she'll think she slept a thousand years, so changed will the world be. Her darling children. Children Ten and Eleven. How she'll
miss
them. Because they will
be changed, too. Oh, yes. Quite changed.

Bartholomew closed his eyes even tighter and pressed his cheek against the rough wood of the crate.
Mother won't miss us,
he thought
. She won't have to.
Claws rattled on stone somewhere close.
We'll go home, Hettie and me. We'll go home, we'll go home, we'll go home. . . .

“No,” the voice spat. It was no longer in his head. It was on the other side of the crate, sharp as nails. A hand, fingers of knotted rat tails, curled around the edge. Then a face appeared, teeth bared. “No, Bartholomew Kettle, you will not.”

 

A little hunchbacked gnome stepped into Mr. Lickerish's study and bowed, sweeping so low his bulb-brown nose was only inches from the rich carpet.

“
Mi Sathir
will permit me to speak, yes?
Mi Sathir
will listen? A great black cat has been found in the warehouse below. It is a very strange cat with too many teeth. It has a bottle round its neck. We suppose it is from the greenwitch, yes?”

“Ah,” said Mr. Lickerish, allowing a smile to creep across his features. “My lunatic little witch has been busy then. I was beginning to worry we would have to wait yet another day. Bring it to me. The bottle, I mean. Shoo the creature away.”

Almost half an hour was counted by the brass hands of the clock before the gnome reappeared. His face and hands were traced with scratches. He was clutching a perfectly round glass bottle to his chest. The bottle was filled with a dark liquid. Eyes fastened to the ground, the gnome scuttled up to the desk, deposited the bottle, and without a word, backed out of the room.

Mr. Lickerish waited until the lock clicked. Then he picked up his handkerchief and began to polish the bottle with it, smoothing the thick glass until it shone. The liquid inside was very beautiful. It was not black or blue or purple but something in between. He held it up against the lamp to admire the colors. He peered closer. Something was floating inside the bottle, something barely visible at the center of the liquid.

His eyes went wide. It was a feather. A perfect metal feather, its quill still hung with the broken cogs of a clockwork sparrow.

 

Bartholomew and the rat faery were traveling up into the sky in a steam-engine elevator. It ran up the cable that anchored the airship to the warehouse, pistons banging. The elevator had no walls—only railings and a metal grille floor—and the higher it went the colder the air became. The wind flew through Bartholomew's hair, straight through his cloak and shirt, icy-cold against his skin. The rat faery's hand was coiled around his wrist. It was just as cold as the wind.

“You might have lived, you know,” the faery said, drawing the tails so tight they pinched. “You escaped me in Old Crow Alley. You escaped me in Bath, and in the police station. And then you came all the way to London, all this way after your sister. Just to die.”

I'm not going to die,
Bartholomew thought.
And neither is Hettie.
But he didn't say anything. He shut out the rat faery's voice and pressed himself back from the railing. The elevator was so high up. He could see all of London laid out below him, a black smoldering carpet of roofs and chimneys, sprawling away for miles. In the distance, the spires of Westminster. A little closer, the great white dome of St. Paul's like the thumb of God.

Bartholomew looked up to where the airship was slowly looming. It was so vast, its black canvas swallowing the sky. A huge cabin hung below, grand as any house, two floors high with rows of mullioned windows reflecting the somber clouds. Written in curling silver letters on the prow of the cabin, beneath an ornate explosion of sculpted black wings, were the words
The Cloud That Hides the Moon
.

Bartholomew clenched his teeth to keep them from chattering.
What a silly name for an airship.
He closed his eyes. Mr. Lickerish had better be keeping Hettie up there.

By the time the elevator pulled into the belly of the airship, he could barely feel his fingers. The luxury of the place wrapped around him like a fur coat. The air turned warm. The wind was gone. Paneling and woodwork glimmered all around, gas lamps lending them a coppery sheen. Indian carpets covered the floor. On the ceiling, a great mural had been painted of a black bird—a raven or a crow, Bartholomew didn't know which. It held a bottle in its beak, and a child in its talons, and there was a little wooden door in its feathered breast. Bartholomew stared at it.

“Stop your gawping,” the rat faery snapped, jabbing him up a sweeping staircase. “Don't act like you've never seen this place before.”

The staircase brought them into a narrow corridor, brightly lit. The rat faery pushed Bartholomew down it. At the very last door they stopped. The faery knocked once and, without waiting to be invited, entered.

Bartholomew's eyes widened. It was
the
room. The beautiful room with the painted lampshades and the bookshelves, the ring of chalk on the floor, and the clockwork sparrows. The same one he had stumbled into from the whirling black wings. Only this time someone was sitting behind the desk. A wiry white faery dressed all in black, eating a brilliant red apple.

The faery looked up sharply as they entered. Juice ran down his chin, and flecks of the apple's red skin clung to his lips.

“I have him, Lickerish. Now what of Melusine?”

The Lord Chancellor said nothing. He touched a handkerchief to his lips and fixed his eyes on Bartholomew, watching him keenly.

The rat faery pushed Bartholomew toward the desk, dozens of tiny mouths nipping at his shoulders, the backs of his legs, compelling him on. Still the Lord Chancellor said nothing. He folded the handkerchief. He set it aside. He picked up a tiny metal feather and began twirling it slowly between thumb and forefinger.

When Bartholomew was only inches away, Mr. Lickerish stopped. “Ah,” he said. “Here you are again.”

Bartholomew gritted his teeth. “I want my sister,” he said. “Give her back. Why can't you open your stupid door and leave Hettie be?”

The feather snapped in two. “Leave Hettie be?” The faery politician breathed. “Oh, I'm afraid I could never do that. Hettie is the most important part. Hettie
is
the door.”

CHAPTER XVIII
The Peculiar

M
R
. Jelliby was pretending to be a corpse. He sat on the chair, drowned in shadows, not daring to move, not daring to breathe, waiting for Bartholomew and the rat faery to leave.

A minute later and he knew it had fallen for his trick. He lifted one eyelid. The faery's voice echoed in the vastness of the warehouse, then was lost in an explosion of mechanical clanks and hisses. Mr. Jelliby opened both eyes wide and stood up. Edging around one of Dr. Harrow's shoes, the scuffed and muddied tip of which just stuck out from a crack between two crates, Mr. Jelliby stole out of his hiding place.

He had not gone ten paces when a booming noise sounded above him. Dim light flooded the warehouse, as a great portion of the roof slid open, baring the sky and the airship hanging in it. Night was approaching. A gear-work elevator was rising, swinging gently on the anchor cable. The elevator was not closed in, and Mr. Jelliby could still see its two passengers clearly. The rat faery stood, arms and legs and appendages that had no name wrapped around the railing. Next to him, crouched on the floor, was Bartholomew.

Mr. Jelliby darted out from among the crates. He could see the inside of the warehouse clearly now, dank and dripping, the mountains of crates touched with moss, cranes and hooks hanging down over the dark water that lapped at the far end. At the center of the warehouse, a pair of leather shoes sat. They were small—children's shoes—and blackened. Scorch marks radiated from them like a charred sun. Their soles were nailed to the floor. Close by, the huge heap of the elevator's cable dwindled away, uncoiling into the sky. The elevator was already thirty feet above Mr. Jelliby, and getting farther away by the second.

Rushing forward, he gripped the cable with both hands.
Just don't look down,
he thought. If the rat faery saw him, he didn't suppose it could do much. At least not until Mr. Jelliby arrived in the airship.

The cable pulled him into the air. The cold metal bit into his hands. He tried to support himself with his feet, but the tips of his shoes kept slipping and he had to claw with all his might to keep from falling.

Higher and higher he rose, through the open roof and into the sky. The warehouse shrank away beneath him. The wind growled, cold and fierce, swinging the cable. His fingers went from stiff to unfeeling. Above, the elevator whirred, and he caught snatches of the rat faery's voice jeering at Bartholomew.

He closed his eyes. He didn't dare look down at the city. But he didn't dare look up either. If he saw how much longer he had to endure before reaching the safety of the airship, he thought he might give up then and there. He pressed his forehead against the cable, feeling the sharp frost against his skin.
Safety.
There was nothing safe where he was going. Mr. Lickerish was almost certainly up there, along with who-knew-how-many of his faery minions. Even if Mr. Jelliby survived the journey, he would only have gone from bad to worse.

The air became colder still as the dirigible cast its shadow across him. He opened his eyes. The airship was huge, filling everything, a giant black whale swimming in the sky. Mr. Jelliby had taken Ophelia on a pleasure flight in an air balloon once. He remembered how they had both stared at it in wonder as they approached it across Hampstead Heath. Its colors—the colors of a tropical bird—had been poison bright, brighter than the trees and the grass and the blue summer's day. So bright that it had been impossible to look at anything else. It could have fit inside this one's cabin.

Mr. Jelliby's arms felt ready to snap. He could feel every cord in them, every tendon and muscle straining against his bones. The cable pulled him higher, up and up. He could make out the vessel's name now, picked out in silver filigree on its prow.

The Cloud That Hides the Moon.

His shoulder gave a violent twitch. For a horrible moment he thought his arms would simply give way and he would fall down, down, down into Wapping.
Moon?
This was the moon? The moon in the sparrow's note. The moon Melusine had been speaking of. She hadn't been mad. It was an airship.

A hatch began to open in the underbelly of the cabin. Mr. Jelliby caught a glimpse of a hall, all aglow with warmth and yellow light. The elevator rose into it and came to a halt. The cable stopped too. Three hundred feet above London, Mr. Jelliby looked around him uncertainly.

God in heaven.
His eyes swiveled up to the hall. The rat faery had dragged Bartholomew out of the elevator and disappeared. The hatch started to close.

“No,” Mr. Jelliby gasped, and his lungs scraped as if coated with ice. “No! Stop!”

But even if someone in the airship had heard him, they were more likely to give the cable a sharp shake than to rescue him.

He began pulling himself upward, inch by inch. The hatch was closing slowly, but it seemed so far away, miles and miles up. He could barely feel the pain in his arms anymore. They just felt dead, solid. . . .

No.
He set his jaw. He wasn't going to die up here. Not frozen to the cable like some foolish insect. Fifteen more feet, that was all. He could manage fifteen feet. For Ophelia. For Bartholomew and Hettie.

He struggled on, hands and legs and feet all trying to push him upward. The hatch continued to close. If it shut completely there would be nothing but a small hole where the elevator cable went into the hall. Not nearly large enough for a man.
Five more feet. Four more feet.
Only a little longer. . . .
With a final surge of strength, Mr. Jelliby forced himself through the opening. The metal cut into his ankles, clamping. He jerked his feet up with a cry, scrambled away, lay shivering and gasping on the floor. The hatch clanged shut. Then all was still.

He would have liked to just lie there. The carpet was soft against his cheek. It smelled of lamp oil and tobacco, and the air was warm. He would have liked to just sleep there for hours and hours, and forget about everything else. But he willed himself to get up, and blowing on his chapped hands, hobbled toward the stairs.

Keeping himself pressed to the wall, he stumbled up them. A corridor was at the top. It was long and brightly lit, strangely familiar. He saw no one and heard nothing but the hum of the engines, and so he crept down it, pausing at each door to listen. He felt sure he had been here before. Sometime not so long ago. He came to the end of the corridor. The last door looked newer than the rest, smoother and more polished. And then he knew. Nonsuch House. The lady in plum flitting down the gaslit corridor. The faery butler's words when he had caught Mr. Jelliby.
“Come away from here this instant. Come back into the house.”
The hallway was in the airship. That day of the ale meeting he had unwittingly wandered into Mr. Lickerish's secret place. Somehow they were connected, the old house on Blackfriar Bridge and the dirigible in the sky. Some faery magic had knitted them together.

Voices were coming from the other side of the door. The voice of Mr. Lickerish. The voice of Bartholomew, quiet but firm. And then another door began to open some ways up the corridor.

Mr. Jelliby spun, fear welling in his chest. He was trapped.
No place to hide, no place to hide.
The hall was bare, just lamps and paneling. The doors were all locked.
All but one.
One had a key in its keyhole. He ran to it, twisted the key. A well-oiled bolt clicked open. He slipped in just as a small brown gnome emerged into the corridor.

The room in which he found himself was pitch black. Drapes had been pulled across the window and all he could see was a splinter of red light from the setting sun, bleeding in.

Someone else was in the room.
He realized it suddenly, paralyzingly. He could hear breaths—small soft breaths close to the floor.

His hand reached for the pistols on his belt, and he cursed silently when he remembered they weren't there. He pressed his back to the door, fumbling for something to turn on the lights. His fingers found a porcelain dial and he turned it. Lamps flared to life along the walls.

He was in a small sitting room. It held a wardrobe, and a Turkish sofa, and a great many carpets and tasseled pillows strewn across the floor. And there was a girl. Curled up on a cushion of jade-green silk was a changeling. She had a sharp, pointed face. Branches grew from her head. She was asleep.

Mr. Jelliby's hand fell from the dial. “Hettie?” he whispered, taking a few steps toward her. “Is that your name, little girl? Are you Hettie?”

The child did not stir at his voice. But it was as if she could sense she was being watched, even in her dreams, and after a heartbeat or two she sat up with a start. She looked at Mr. Jelliby with wide black eyes.

“Don't worry,” he said, going down on his haunches and smiling. “Bartholomew's here, too, and we've come to rescue you. You needn't be afraid.”

Her face remained taut. For a moment she just stared at him. Then, in a small frantic whisper, she said, “Put out the lights. Quickly, sir,
put them out
!”

Mr. Jelliby looked at her, confused. Then he heard it, too. Footsteps snapping quickly along the corridor. Not the dancing footsteps of Mr. Lickerish, or the shuffling ones of the hunchbacked gnome. Something heavy and strong was out there, coming straight for the door to the sitting room.

Mr. Jelliby leaped up and wrenched the dial all the way around. The lamps fizzed out, and he flew across the room, plunging into the drapes that hid the window. Someone stopped outside the door. A hand was laid on the key. Then it was taken away again and there was a pause. The door banged open.

Mr. Jelliby could just see a figure come into the room before the door closed again. Whoever it was did not turn on the lights. But the figure had a lamp. A small green orb floated in the darkness. It made a ticking noise,
snick-snick-snick
, like a clock. It expanded slightly. Suddenly the lamps blazed again. There stood the faery butler, his mechanical eye fixed on the far side of the room, a slight frown creasing his brow.

“Little girl?” he asked, in his oozing, whining voice. “Little girl, tell me something. Can you walk through walls?”

Hettie didn't look at him. “No,” she said, and burrowed into her pillow.

“Oh.” The faery butler's frown darkened. “Then why was the door unlocked?”

 

Mr. Lickerish extended one long finger and touched it to Bartholomew's chin. Then he crooked his finger sharply, jerking Bartholomew's face up with it. Bartholomew gasped and bit his tongue to keep from crying out.

“Changelings are of both worlds, you see,” Mr. Lickerish said. “A child of man with blood of the fay. A bridge. A door. Don't suppose I will explain my plans to you, though, because I shan't. You're far too stupid to understand them.”

“Just tell me why it has to be Hettie,” Bartholomew said, twisting against the rat faery's grasp. He knew this was the end. He would be lucky to leave the room alive. There was no point being timid anymore. “Why wasn't it one of the others? Why wasn't it the boy from across the way?”

“The boy from across the way? If you mean Child Number Nine then it was because he was a flawed, degenerate creature just like the eight before him. Descendants of low faeries, the lot of them. Sons and daughters of goblins and gnomes and spriggans. The door did open for them. It did work. But it was such a small, weak door. And it opened inside them.”

The fire crackled in the hearth. Mr. Lickerish laughed softly and released Bartholomew's chin, settling back into his chair. “Perhaps you heard that the changelings were hollow? Surely you did. The papers made such a fuss over it. What did they have to be shocked about, I wonder. Some faery, going about his business in the Old Country unsuspecting as you like, found himself suddenly confronted with a heap of steaming changeling innards. They were not enough, those other nine. They were too common. Too faerylike, or too human. But Child Number Eleven. Hettie. She is the daughter of a Sidhe. She is perfect.”

Bartholomew swallowed. “I'm her brother. He's my father, too. I'll be the door.”

“You?” The faery politician sounded as if he were about to laugh. But then he paused, and gazed at Bartholomew. Bartholomew thought he saw surprise in those black eyes. “You
want
to be the door?” the faery asked. “You want to die?”

“No,” Bartholomew said quietly. “But I want Hettie to live. I want her to go home. Please, sir, I'll be the door, just let Hettie go.”

Mr. Lickerish looked at him a long while. A smirk played at the corners of his mouth. Finally he said, “Oh. What a foolish thing to want.” And then, turning to the rat faery, “Take him back down to the warehouse and dispose of him. I thought he might be dangerous. He is not dangerous. He is not even strong. He is simply peculiar.”

The rat faery peered at Mr. Lickerish, rats slithering and squeaking. “Melusine,” he said quietly. “What of Melusine?”

“The warehouse, Jack Box. Now.”

The rat faery pushed Bartholomew toward the door.

“Where is Hettie?” Bartholomew shouted, struggling against the rat faery's grip. “Where's my sister?”

But Mr. Lickerish only took a great malicious bite out of his apple and gave no reply.

 

Mr. Jelliby remained perfectly still behind the drapes. The swaths of black velvet wrapped around him, stifling him, smothering him with their odor of old wax and withered petals. Sweat broke across his forehead and the drapes stuck to his face, hot and itching. He pressed himself farther back into the window well, all the way until he felt the cold panes against his cheek.
Drat.
The door had been locked from the outside. It was dead proof someone else was in the room.

On the other side of the drapes, the faery butler's green eye began to flick back and forth along the walls, clicking and buzzing as it focused on everything. The wrinkle in the carpet, the indents in the pillows, the fingerprints on the porcelain dial . . .