The Book of Dead Days

by Marcus Sedgwick

  Some rather elaborate block work made climbing the building as easy as walking up stairs, and soon he was crouching against the glowing glass of the Dome itself.

  He looked down at what lay within, and his jaw dropped. He had listened intently to what the old woman in the pillar had said about the Master of Burials and his animals, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw now.

  13

  Darkness was settling over the winter cityscape as Valerian and Willow got to Kepler’s house. On the way Valerian chatted almost casually to Willow, mostly about Kepler, about how he had been born of noble family but had turned his back on his aristocratic lineage for the pursuit of knowledge. Valerian looked up at the darkening sky. “The end of the twenty-eighth,” said Valerian mournfully. “Three days . . .”

  Valerian rang the bell. Kepler’s house was narrow and tall, by no means as large as Valerian’s, but in a far better state of repair. This was a much cozier neighborhood, of terraced houses for the well-to-do if not the rich.

  “No light within,” said Valerian, frowning.

  “Shall I knock?” asked Willow, but Valerian put out his good hand to stop her.

  “He must be out,” said Valerian, but there was no certainty in his voice. “But . . . he goes out no more than I do. Try the bell again.”

  Willow stepped forward. “Valerian!” she whispered. “The door is open!”

  “Careful, child,” said Valerian. He shoved the door further open with his boot, and they listened hard for a minute. The street behind them was empty and quiet. They took two steps into the hall and then pushed the door shut behind them.

  “Kepler?” called Valerian in a stage whisper. “Kepler? Are you there?”

  There seemed to be no one in the house.

  “I think we can risk a little light.”

  Willow started to hunt in her pockets for a match but was puzzled to see Valerian step over to the wall to turn a small metal knob set into the wall itself.

  Immediately a dim, flickering light sprang up in a chandelier above their heads.

  Willow let out a small shriek.

  “Valerian! Your magic is real!” she cried.

  “No, Willow, no,” said Valerian. “This is not my magic, but Kepler’s genius. He has greater knowledge than anyone in the world of electrical phenomena. He has installed an automatic system of electrical light in his home. He says one day all houses in the City will have the same. He’s mad, of course, but you have to admire his invention. My simple chemical lights at the theater are child’s toys compared to this.”

  Valerian walked into a room leading off the back of the hall and turned another knob, throwing light across what was clearly Kepler’s study.

  Willow followed, openmouthed.

  “There’s a large array of electrical cells in the cellar,” explained Valerian, but this was lost on Willow. She marveled at the lights on the walls.

  “There’s no flame!” she said with disbelief.

  “No,” said Valerian, “but please concentrate.”

  “Where is he?” asked Willow, dragging her gaze away from the magical lights.

  “We must search the house. Something is wrong.”

  Valerian winced as he spoke.

  “Damn this arm!” he moaned. He rummaged in his deep left-hand pocket and pulled out another of the small bottles. It was at least his third, and pulling the cork with his teeth, he finished it off.

  “Disgusting!” He spat, setting the bottle down on Kepler’s desk. “You start at the top and work down, room by room. If you see any more of those,”—he glanced toward the bottle—“bring them with you.”

  Willow didn’t move. “Valerian?”

  “What is it?”

  “Do I have to go upstairs by myself?”

  “Yes. You’ll be quicker than me. Don’t tell me you’re getting scared like Boy? Go. I’ll be down here.”

  He turned to the desk and began to open drawers and flip through books. She saw him look with interest at a piece of paper covered in writing and diagrams, which he folded roughly with one hand and put in his pocket. Then he went on rummaging.

  Willow didn’t understand how that would help find Kepler, and wondered who was really the more scared of what lay upstairs. But she turned and, with her heart in her mouth, set off for the upper floors.

  14

  Willow thought about using the electrical light system, but it was probably dangerous. Seeing that Valerian was poring intently over papers at Kepler’s desk, she lit the stub of the candle from the cemetery expedition with a match she had found beside the fireplace.

  She reached out a shaking hand to the first door she came to. Taking a deep breath, she turned the knob and pushed the door gently, and waited. Nothing. Holding the candle out in front of her she moved slowly into the room. A bedroom. There was no one there, nothing strange.

  As she went through room after room and found nothing extraordinary in any of them, she began to calm down. This was just a normal house, the home of an educated man, with normal things in every room. Only the strange electrical switches on the wall showed that it was anything other than totally commonplace. She noted that the bed was made in what she assumed was the main bedroom, with clothes in neat piles on boxes, and everyday things sitting just where they should be.

  There was no sign of violence, or robbery, or even untidiness anywhere.

  Mystified, she went back to the study to find Valerian.

  He was not there.

  She swung around as if she was about to be attacked from behind at any moment.

  No one there.

  “Valerian! Valerian, where are you?”

  She noticed a small door standing open in the far wall of the study. It was a secret door; she could see that it was made to look like part of the wooden paneling of the wall when it was shut.

  Had it been open when they first came in? She crept across the room, trying not to make a sound.

  Valerian, she thought angrily, where are you?

  When she reached the small doorway she was not surprised to see a tiny flight of steps that turned immediately and led down, she presumed, to the cellar.

  “Valerian!” she called.

  Curse you, she thought.

  Still holding her lighted candle, she put her foot on the first step and began to descend. Two more steps, and she noticed there was light coming from below, that strange yellow electrical illumination.

  She blew out her candle and went down.

  She stopped abruptly at the bottom.

  Valerian stood with his back to her, perfectly still, staring at the floor.

  Around the walls were ranks of clay troughs, piled one on top of the other, so that there was almost no wall space left uncovered. In the top of each Willow could see metal plates, and from these came copper wires, which trailed crazily all around the stuff. There was an awful smell of some chemical. Willow supposed this was the source of the weird lighting.

  But Valerian was staring instead at the floor space in the center of the cellar.

  He turned and saw Willow. “No?”

  “There’s no one,” said Willow, coming forward.

  “Look at this.” Valerian nodded at the floor.

  It took her a moment to work out what she was looking at.

  The floor of the cellar was made of packed earth, rammed as solid as brick. In its dusty surface someone had dug a crazy pattern of trenches, each a few fingers wide and maybe a few deep. They crisscrossed and joined and snaked along and turned corners and struck out at odd angles, seemingly at random.

  And they were filled with water. At least, Willow assumed it was water—it was hard to tell in the dim light. Whatever it was, it was liquid, a little murky from the packed soil channels through which it ran. For it was not still; somehow, it was moving.

  Willow turned, and Valerian anticipated her question.

  “There’s a small device at the far end, pushing it around. It is powered by the cells, just like th
e lights.”

  But that posed another question.

  “What . . . is this?” was the best way she could put it.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. I rather fear it means my friend has gone mad.”

  Willow saw one more thing.

  On the far wall, across the other side of the watery maze, was a blank space, not hidden by electrical paraphernalia.

  Some words had been painted hastily on it with a thick brush. Willow recognized them as more Latin. “What does that say?”

  “The ramblings of a madman,” said Valerian sadly. “ ‘The miller sees not all the water that goes by his mill.’ ”

  Valerian stood staring at the nonsense on the floor and on the wall in front of them, and would say no more.

  Willow sat down and put her head in her hands. She had been carried into something she did not understand. It was easy to be swept along by Valerian when he was strong, but now he was weak and broken. He needed Willow, but she had no strength left. It was she who needed someone to guide her, and her only friend was running about the City miles away, on another crazy errand for his master.

  They sat in the gloom of the cellar until finally the clocks in the house began to chime midnight.

  As the chimes died away one by one, Willow looked up at Valerian, who shook his head slowly.

  “December twenty-eight is done,” he said.

  December 29

  The Day of Unnatural Developments

  1

  They sat in the Tower, drinking tea and brandy, chewing on stale bread. All three were lost in their own thoughts, and the mood was grim.

  It had been about two o’clock in the morning when Valerian and Willow got home. Boy, who had been back for hours, practically throttled Willow when he saw her. Hugging her hard, he hadn’t let go of her until she’d made a small squeaking sound.

  “How touching.” Valerian had said.

  He looked terrible, and as far as Boy could tell, nothing had been done to his arm.

  “Wasn’t Kepler there?” Boy had asked.

  Neither Willow nor Valerian replied, and that was answer enough.

  “Did you succeed, Boy?” Valerian replied.

  Boy’s face fell. He stared at the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  “What?” spluttered Valerian.

  “I couldn’t even get past the door.”

  “And you told them my name?” Valerian thundered.

  “I said, I couldn’t even get past the woman at the door.”

  “Damnation!” shouted Valerian, and strode away across the room, kicking over a pile of books, heedless of his damaged arm. He stood with his back to them, his shoulders rising and falling, staring at the floor. Finally he turned round, but he was no longer angry.

  “Well, it was Childermass,” he said.

  They looked at him blankly.

  “The unluckiest day of the year.”

  They thought about the graveyard, and the burial, and Valerian’s arm and their fruitless trips across the City, and despite themselves, they all smiled.

  “Fetch us food and drink,” Valerian had said, and Boy had found what he could, and taken it up to the other two in the Tower room.

  When he got there he found Valerian and Willow standing by the table, above which was suspended the camera obscura.

  “Come and look at this,” whispered Willow.

  Valerian turned to him. “Haven’t you seen this before?”

  “No,” he said. “You’ve never shown me what it does.”

  “Come and see,” Valerian said.

  There were two parts to it. On the floor of the room stood a round table with a clear white circle set in its surface. Above it hung some large pieces of equipment, made up of wooden boxes and tubes of brass.

  On the white surface of the table was an image of the City immediately outside the house. It was as if viewed from the very summit of the Tower, but slightly distorted; lines that should have been straight, like the sides of buildings, were gently curved, warped by the seeing-eye of the camera. But nevertheless it was an extraordinary image of the world outside, viewed from within.

  And it was a moving image.

  Boy watched, his mouth open, as they saw lights flickering in windows along the street, and smoke whispering out of chimneys and up into the night sky.

  There was a long wooden lever that seemed to control the camera, and as Valerian moved it, the picture swung so that a different view from the roof of the house was shown on the tabletop. They watched tiny figures scurry across the white circle like ants.

  “It’s so . . . ,” said Boy.

  “Isn’t it,” said Valerian, nearly smiling. “Unfortunately, despite its beauty, it illustrates the precarious nature of my current predicament.”

  “What?” asked Boy, not really listening. He gazed at the moving picture in front of him, trying hard to tell himself it was real, that it truly was what was happening that very moment down in the streets beneath the Tower. As Boy watched the ant-people hurry along, he felt a sense of power.

  “I had it built to see danger,” Valerian said. “I keep watch here, night after night.”

  Boy looked up. Valerian’s fear was there between them, almost tangible.

  “What for?” asked Boy. “What are you watching for?”

  Valerian’s voice was clear and calm and full of the promise of death.

  “The end,” he said. “Him. It. Kepler said I was stupid to have this built. That it would do me no good even if I did see something coming for me. Maybe he was right, but at least this way I might get a little warning.”

  Willow and Boy moved closer together and stared at Valerian, who turned his gaze back to the table. He moved the handle this way and that with his good arm, until he had scanned right around the Yellow House, checking all the streets and alleys.

  Finally he pulled his eyes away.

  “Did you find some food, Boy?” he asked.

  They sat down to eat and the camera kept playing its dim but very real image of the outside world into the inner space of the Tower.

  Valerian ate just a few mouthfuls and then fell silent, brooding in his great leather chair.

  Boy looked at his master.

  “You must eat,” said Willow, following Boy’s gaze.

  So should we, thought Boy. Valerian said nothing.

  “How’s your arm?” asked Boy. Then, getting no answer, “You didn’t tell me. What happened? Where’s Dr. Kepler?”

  When Valerian still showed no sign of talking, Boy looked at Willow.

  “Willow,” he said, “where is Kepler?”

  “I—he—” began Willow, glancing at Valerian. “It seems—”

  “It seems!” cried Valerian. “It appears! No! It is the case that Kepler has disappeared, and from the peculiar rantings in his cellar I think he has probably gone mad. My arm grows more painful, and I am running out of these.”

  He waved a nearly empty vial at them.

  “And then?” he barked, leaping to his feet. “And then? Who knows! By the new year I shall be pieces of flesh strewn around this room!”

  He stopped, aware that he was shouting. Boy and Willow stared at him, clinging to each other.

  Boy felt panic slip up his back and squeeze his throat. He wanted to be sick.

  But Valerian had regained his composure and sat back down, as if resolved to his fate.

  From his pocket he pulled another bottle of the drug. As he did so, a piece of paper fell to the floor. It was the paper that Willow had seen Valerian take from Kepler’s study.

  Boy looked at Willow, her eyes wide. Valerian took a long swig of his drug, then rinsed it down with a few mouthfuls of brandy. It was early morning, and as he slumped back in his seat he immediately fell fast asleep, snoring like an old, old man.

  2

  At dawn the camera played them a beautiful vision of the waking winter city, but they were all asleep, and the vision went unseen. Across the roofs and tow
ers flooded a soft pink light that presaged snow, without doubt. Yet still it would not come and the City froze in its filth.

  The Tower room had grown cold, and Willow lifted her head from the cushion on the floor. Her movement woke Boy. It was very early still, but they were soon wide awake. Boy felt awful. His arms were like wires, his legs like metal trunks, his neck like an iron bar. All he did was live, it seemed—live like one of Valerian’s machines, with a heart-machine that pushed acid round his veins until they screamed in fear of what might be.

  Boy had not slept well. Nightmares had ridden through his mind while he lay huddled on the floor. Unwanted thoughts returned to him again; those questions that Willow had been asking nagged at him. Who were his parents? Maybe it was important to know. Did he need to know, to know who he himself was? He was no longer sure.

  He got up and walked around the room, stretching his legs. He found himself standing by the camera obscura table, staring at the moving image of the City waking up, coming to life.

  Seeing that Valerian was still asleep, he dared to touch the handle that rotated the image. Willow came to stand by him and watched as Boy moved the lens around to view different scenes.

  As he did so, a patch of light moved from the table and fell on the floor, illuminating the paper that Valerian had dropped.

  Willow picked up the paper.

  “What is it?” asked Boy.

  Willow shook her head. “I don’t know. Look.”

  She held it for him to see.

  Boy was not very good at reading, and the paper was covered in many symbols and signs that he knew were not words or letters at all.

  But there was one word at the top of the paper that he could easily read.

  BOY.

  Valerian began to stir. Boy dropped the paper onto the table.

  “We cannot stay here long,” Valerian said, rubbing his eyes with his good hand. That same hand began to search impatiently for another of the little bottles that took away his pain. “The Watchmen will be looking for you. I have no doubt. Perhaps we should move to Kepler’s house—it may be a little safer there. . . .”