Shadowsea

by Peter Bunzl

  Praise for Peter Bunzl’s

  “Vivid and gripping.”

  Kiran Millwood Hargrave

  “A gem of a book.”

  Katherine Woodfine

  “A stormer of a plot.”

  Abi Elphinstone

  “A glittering clockwork treasure.”

  Piers Torday

  “A blend of Philip Pullman, Joan Aiken and Katherine Rundell.”

  Amanda Craig

  “A thrilling Victorian adventure.”

  The Bookseller

  “Marvellous fun.”

  New Statesman

  “Prepare yourself for the adventure of a lifetime.”

  Jo Clarke, Book Lover Jo

  SECRETS NEVER STAY SUBMERGED FOR LONG

  Swept into the bright hustle-bustle of New York, Lily, Robert and Malkin discover that danger lies beneath the city’s surface. For there are chilling goings-on… A strange boy held captive who needs their help, and a shadowy professor with a treacherous plan. Searching for clues, Robert and Lily are plunged into deep water… But will they uncover the deadly truth in time to survive?

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Peter Bunzl’s Cogheart Adventures

  About this book

  Map of New York, 1897

  Dedication

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  A Thrilling and Treacherous Cogheart Adventures Quiz…

  A dictionary of curious words

  More books in The Cogheart Adventures series

  Cogheart Adventures Quiz Answers

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  About the author

  Copyright Page

  First there was darkness.

  Then patches of watery green light.

  Then fish, whole schools of them.

  With luminous fins bright as knives, glowing scales that shimmered like armour.

  They swam past the shadow of a submarine base that clung to a cliff edge beside a fathomless trench, which stretched like a scar across the ocean floor.

  The base was the shape of a giant rusted wheel, with spokes that ran from the exterior to its centre. Parts of it were unfinished – the ties that bound it to the seabed still under construction. Fixed with rope and cable in place of iron trusses, the base bobbed slightly in the current. Rising from the hub was a tower with a turbine at the top, turning slowly.

  Through the tower’s only porthole, a blond boy of thirteen with bright, inquisitive eyes could be seen sitting on the cabin floor. The boy was humming a tune to himself – a tune that matched the buzzing in the walls – as he worked on a miniature wagon. Jam-jar lids made up the wagon’s wheels, flattened cans its carriage. It had pencils for axles and wire for its yoke.

  When he was done, the boy plucked a white mouse from his pocket and tied it to the wagon. He placed the mouse on the floor and geed it along like a long-whiskered, pink-snouted pony. The mouse tottered forward on tiny red paws, pulling the wagon behind it.

  After a moment it broke into a run, skittering beneath a table, where two adults, a man and a woman with the same blond hair and inquisitive eyes as the boy, sat working.

  The boy chased the mouse under the table and followed it out the door.

  Hot on its heels, he ran down the passageway.

  The mouse crossed grates and vents and wove beneath pipes, sticking close to the walls. It clattered its cart past damp bulbous diving suits that stank of the sea, tumbled across galleys and mess halls where crew members sat eating.

  Still the boy chased it.

  Finally it ran through a crack where a door stood slightly ajar.

  In the room beyond, row upon row of mice scrabbled about in cages.

  The white mouse stopped in the centre of the spotless floor.

  The boy crouched, mouth half-open, stretching out a hand to pick it up.

  A swish of a skirt.

  A shiny leather shoe stepped across his path.

  The boy glanced up. “Hey, Aunt Matilda!”

  A gaunt-faced woman with short slicked-back hair, wearing a white lab coat and goggles pushed back on her head, was putting on a pair of rubber gloves. “That’s Professor Milksop to you.”

  Professor Milksop scooped up the mouse and dropped the cart unceremoniously on the floor. “This rodent’s valuable. You should never have taken it from the lab.”

  “He looked sad,” the boy said. “I named him Spook, on account of his colouring. He looks like a Spook, don’t ya think?”

  The boy glanced at the mouse, scrabbling in the professor’s hand.

  It squeaked softly.

  “Don’t be naming them,” the professor said. “Name a thing and you start to have feelings for it.” She turned away and made a sharp, jerking motion with her hands.

  The squeaking stopped.

  “Go back to your quarters now, Dane. You shouldn’t be here. Could be bad for your health.”

  The professor kicked aside the cart and headed for a second, lead-lined door at the far end of the room. A door marked:

  Above these words was a picture of a snake curled in a circle, eating its own tail.

  Dane rubbed away a stinging tear as he watched his aunt go.

  Then he narrowed his eyes and stared at the door.

  “No,” he said softly. “I won’t.”

  He stepped forward and gently pushed against the sign, peering round the door’s edge.

  In the room beyond, a large white laboratory, a mechanical nurse with a red cross on her chest was adjusting a square metal machine on a table. A phonograph on a wheeled stand in the corner played ghostly opera music from a wax cylinder.

  “Ready to wake the dead, Miss Buckle?” Professor Milksop joined the mechanical at the table and examined the four glass lenses arranged on the front of the square machine.

  Miss Buckle frowned as she checked a tangle of copper wires that emerged from the rear of the machine. They stretched out to a control box and socket inside a lead-lined observation booth on the far side of the room. “Is that one of your jokes, Professor?” she asked. “I can never quite tell. My clockwork doesn’t easily compute humour…”

  “Forget about it.” Professor Milksop laid Spook in a tray on the table in front of the machine and adjusted a blue glinting shard of diamond inside its workings. Then, when she was satisfied all was ready, she pulled down her goggles and stepped away from the machine into the lead-lined booth. Miss Buckle followed her.

  Dane peeked further round the door, watching Professor Milksop through the observation booth’s porthole window as she shut herself and Miss Buckle in. Then the professor pressed a series of buttons on a control box.

  Soon, the machine on the table hummed to life as a tidal wave of electricity buzzed through it.

  Miss Buckle peered out through the porthole and saw Dane sneaking into the lab.

  “STOP!” she shouted, half at him, half at her mistress.

  But it was too late…

  Crackling strands of blue lightning were already shooting from the four lenses of the machine. They waved around the lab like a tangled ball of angry, energetic sna
kes. Their lightning strands latched onto Spook’s body, engulfing it.

  The little mouse writhed and jerked in rhythm, then opened its eyes, wiggled its whiskers and crawled back onto its feet like a newborn.

  Soon the lightning found Dane…

  Winding round him like a nest of vipers…

  Biting electrically into his skin.

  His body spasmed.

  His feet danced a random rhythm.

  Silver scales burned his eyes.

  His limbs scissored and jiggled.

  He fell to his knees…

  Keeled over on the floor…

  And was still.

  The arms of lightning crackled onwards, through the open door, arcing along the passageways of the base…slipping serpent-like around each crew member in turn and dancing them to the same jerky death.

  Soon there was only darkness once more. And two last shadows: Professor Milksop and Miss Buckle, who ran from the open doorway of the observation booth and kneeled down beside Dane.

  Sparks flew off Miss Buckle’s metal body as she shook Dane by his shoulders. “Master Milksop!” she called, her mechanical voice wavering. “Wake up!”

  Professor Milksop kept her distance. She didn’t want to get an electric shock.

  “Dane,” she asked. “Are you still in there? You still alive?”

  Lily woke on Christmas morning to find herself not at home, as she had been dreaming, but on a top bunk in the cabin of a sleeper zep that was crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

  She blinked her green eyes and rubbed her freckled face until she felt entirely awake. Then, with her fingers, she began combing out the worst of the knots in her tangled fire-red hair.

  Under the thrum of the airship’s purring engines she could hear the beat of her Cogheart: a mechanical heart of cogs and springs that her papa had given her. It sat ticking in her chest like an overwound carriage clock. Because it was a perpetual motion machine, the Cogheart might go on for ever. Lily didn’t quite understand what that meant, but she knew one thing: without it she would not be alive today. Nor would she be taking this trip.

  Papa, whose name was Professor John Hartman, was lying in the middle bunk beneath her. He wore a nightgown and nightcap and snored softly in his sleep. His feet stuck out the end of the bed, for he was quite tall, even lying down.

  Robert Townsend, Lily’s best friend in the whole wide world, comrade in arms, first-class clockmaker and her co-conspirator in all things adventuresome, was asleep on the bottom bunk wearing blue-striped pyjamas. A coal-black cowlick of hair curved over his forehead like an upside-down question mark.

  Malkin, Lily’s pet mechanimal fox, most trusted confidant and a red furry-faced know-it-all, lay next to Robert, curled up beside his pillow. Lily was only relieved he wasn’t sleeping on Robert’s head, which he sometimes did.

  Malkin, of course, was frozen still. That was how mechanicals looked at night, when they were run down, before you took their winding key and wound them up again in the morning.

  Christmas Eve had been most diverting. The three friends and Papa had set out from Liverpool Airstation on the Firefly airship, for what promised to be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure: a four-day flight to New York.

  The Firefly was the grandest ship in her class and had all the modern conveniences of the most up-to-date sleeper zep in the Royal Dirigible Company’s Transatlantic Fleet. There was a control room where the captain and navigation crew worked. A radio room where they sent and received telegrams. An officers’ mess where the crew relaxed. A galley kitchen that serviced a dining room where two mechanical waiters in white silk jackets served breakfast, lunch, dinner and afternoon tea, with two different types of cake and sandwiches with the crusts cut off. A port and aft side promenade for exercising. A writing room. A thirty-four-foot passenger lounge, which had extra-light tubular-metal cushioned chairs and a duralumin grand piano.

  And nestled on top of the zep was a magnificent viewing platform called the Crow’s Nest, which was accessed via a spiral staircase that wound through the centre of the balloon.

  It was rather like travelling in a floating hotel. And Lily loved it.

  In New York they would be staying in a real hotel, which she hoped would be just as good. They were due to arrive on the twenty-eighth of December. Robert’s mother and sister, Selena and Caddy Townsend, would join them at the airstation.

  Since June, when Selena and Caddy had last seen Robert, the pair had been travelling across the states with their vaudeville act. Selena had written to her son and then to Lily’s papa to invite Robert and the Hartmans to meet them in New York for New Year’s Eve.

  Luckily, Papa had been planning a trip to America himself. He’d been invited to speak at the Annual American Conference of Mechanists and Electricians in January at Hardwood University, near Boston. Or was that Aardvark University…? Something like that, anyway. To be honest, Lily hadn’t been listening to that part. Papa took his speech with him everywhere he went. Every few hours, in between his holiday reading, which was a hefty book on Shakespeare, he’d been practising snippets of his speech on Lily and Robert and Malkin. Just the thought of it was enough to make Lily feel like falling back to sleep.

  She finished combing her hair and crawled down to the end of her bed. There was a stuffed stocking that she hadn’t noticed before, beneath her thrown-aside blanket. It must’ve mysteriously arrived in the night.

  She eagerly examined the stocking, then climbed down the cabin’s wooden ladder to shake Robert awake.

  “What is it?” he asked her, sleepily rubbing his eyes and crawling out of bed.

  “Santa Claus has been!” Lily whispered. “We have stockings!”

  She took Malkin’s key from round his neck and began winding him with it. The fox’s gears and cogs clicked into action and he shook himself awake.

  They glanced up to find that Papa was yawning and wide awake too. “It’s rather early for gifts, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “We’re in the middle of the ocean,” Lily said. “We are neither on British Time nor American. So it is neither early nor late. In my opinion, that is exactly the right time for presents!”

  “All right then,” Papa said, getting up and putting on his dressing gown. “I suppose you can open them.”

  Gleefully, Robert and Lily fell upon their stockings to see what Santa had stuffed them with.

  There was an orange and three whole walnuts in each. Plus a brightly-striped twist of paper that contained a handful of lemon drops, barley sugars, chocolate drops, caramel creams and humbugs. Lily hated eating humbugs, especially on airships, but she would be able to swap them with Robert later.

  “There’s more.” Papa reached up into the luggage rack and, from inside his suitcase, produced three finely-wrapped presents – one for each of them.

  Lily opened hers first. It was a real magnifying glass, like the kind used by her favourite detective: Sherlock Holmes.

  “To help you solve mysteries,” Papa explained.

  She tried out the lens by examining the patterns of the carpet. Every minute detail blew up magnificently, even the worn-away threadbare parts.

  “It’s perfect. Thank you.” She put the magnifying glass away in her pocket.

  Robert opened his present next. Papa had got him a beautiful compass in a gold case. “So you always know where you are,” Papa explained as Robert examined it. “I found it in a second-hand shop in the village. I think it was made by your father.”

  “It was. Thank you.” Robert ran his thumb over the maker’s mark on the side of the device: T.T. for Thaddeus Townsend.

  Tears pricked at his eyes. This was only the second Christmas without his da, but it was the time of year when he missed him most of all.

  Last but not least was Malkin. He tore the wrapping from his present with his teeth to reveal a bright green jacket, knitted by Mrs Rust, their clockwork cook and housekeeper back home. Mrs Rust was a legendarily awful knitter, but she didn’t look to have made such a ba
d job of this. Lily wrestled the jacket onto Malkin, with relatively little complaining and gnashing of teeth on his part.

  “There,” she said when she was done, imagining the look of pride on Mrs Rust’s face. This was the first Christmas they’d spent apart since Papa made Rusty. Lily missed her so much, and the three other mechanicals Papa had built and created to look after her – Captain Springer, Mr Wingnut and Miss Tock. The four clockwork servants were like family and Christmas didn’t feel the same without them.

  At least she had Malkin and Robert and Papa.

  The fox grizzled at the jacket, pulling it this way and that until it sat comfortably across his back. “How do I look?” he asked.

  “Rather smart,” Robert replied.

  The scruffy tail part that sat over Malkin’s backside was a bit of a mess – it tangled with his wagging brush. But on the whole, the jacket gave him a raffish air.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have gifts for any of you,” the fox announced. “But I shall give you each a lick on the cheek and hopefully that shall suffice.”

  This he promptly did and they laughed at him warmly.

  They spent the rest of the morning playing charades in the cabin, before dressing excitedly for the lavish Christmas feast, which was to be served to all the guests in the airship’s dining room.

  “Lead on, Macduff!” Papa said when they were ready.

  “I think you’ll find it’s ‘Lay on, Macduff’.” Malkin hopped into a little picnic-style basket with handles, which Lily rushed to pick up.

  “What are you doing?” Papa asked.

  “Joining you for dinner,” the fox said.

  “Mechanimals aren’t allowed on deck, you know that.”

  This was true, unfortunately. It was a rule on public airships that all mechanimals were to be stowed away in travel trunks in the hold for the whole duration of the journey. But Malkin couldn’t abide such treatment, and neither could Lily.

  The fox fidgeted in the basket, getting comfortable. “It’s Christmas Day. A time of goodwill to all creatures great and small. You can at least allow me this little indiscretion.”

  “Fine,” Papa relented. “So long as you stay hidden.”

  They closed the cabin door and followed Papa along the passage. Lily couldn’t wait to eat Christmas dinner with her two best friends, and the thought of doing so on an airship made a bubble of joy rise inside her, higher than the zep’s balloon itself.