Shadowghast

by Thomas Taylor

  “I’ve always known,” I reply. “I’ve known from the day I first became Lost-and-Founder. I could hardly miss it, could I? Like I said, they say there are secret doors in the cellars of many of the oldest buildings in town, and the hotel is one of the oldest.”

  “But why cover it up?” asks Vi. “Weren’t you curious to see what was on the other side?”

  “Curious?” I goggle at Violet. “I knew what was on the other side—darkness and mystery and danger, and all just a doorknob away. I know you’ll find this hard to understand, Vi, but I spent two whole days dragging that wardrobe in front of this door, and I’ve been doing my best not to think about it ever since.”

  “Well, fortunately for us, someone did think about it,” Violet replies, kissing Erwin on the head and putting him on the ground. She turns to face the door with her hands on her hips. “Because this is our way out of here.”

  The lock of the Netherways door is so fused with age that it takes a lot of oiling from my oilcan to get the key to turn. But turn it does with a heavy SLUNK of ancient metal parts. I give the hinges a good oiling, too.

  Violet climbs into the wardrobe, places her hands on the metal door, and pushes with all her might. It swings squealingly open, and an even greater rush of chill air ripples the moth-eaten fur coats and invades my cozy home.

  “OK, let’s go!” says Vi, turning up her collar.

  “Wait!” I cry. “We can’t just . . . I mean, are you sure we should? After what happened last time? What if we get lost again?”

  “How can we get lost when we have an expert guide with us?” Violet replies, gesturing toward Erwin. The cat—sitting smartly in a narrow beam of moonlight that has slipped in the window past the garbage can—closes his eyes at me and purrs.

  “I bet you know all the Netherways, don’t you, puss?” says Vi. “You could lead us anywhere.”

  Erwin opens one eye and looks twitchy.

  “Ne-ow,” he says after a moment, as if embarrassed to admit he doesn’t.

  “But you know a lot of them?” Violet continues. “A magical cat like you.”

  Erwin tips his head to one side and peers up at Violet as if to say “I know a few, OK? And you’re lucky I know those!”

  “How about the bookshop?” Violet asks. “Is there a Netherways door in the cellar of the book dispensary?”

  Erwin rumbles an affirmative purr as he gives one big nod of the head.

  “OK, but still wait,” I butt in. “Violet, the last time we took the Netherways, we saw . . . well, you know what we saw, and it nearly got us!”

  “But it didn’t,” Vi says, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world, “did it?”

  And I can’t answer this, can I? My mouth opens and closes a few times, but in the end all I can do is shrug.

  Violet frowns at me. Then she smiles. Considering we were at each other’s throats a few minutes ago, it’s nice to get a smile like that. She puts her hand on my shoulder.

  “I get it, Herbie,” she says. “I really do. You were on your own with all the eeriness of Eerie-on-Sea for such a long time. You must have been terrified when you found what this door was. I’m sure I would have been the same, if I’d washed up in this weird town and been sent to live in a strange cellar all on my own. I bet I would have blocked that Netherways door with an old wardrobe, too.”

  I look at Violet disbelievingly, but she has nothing but honesty in her eyes.

  “But that was the old Herbie,” she continues. “Not the brave, more adventurous new Herbie I see before me now—the Herbie who faced the malamander and survived Gargantis. Surely we’ve been on enough adventures for you to see that we’re a winning team when we stick together.”

  I do a lopsided grin. Brave and more adventurous are definitely words I like hearing in the same sentence as Herbie.

  “Are we a team, though?” I ask. “I mean, don’t teams agree on everything? Seems to me as though you’ve already made up your mind about Caliastra, Vi. And I haven’t!”

  “I know.” Violet looks as if she’s making an effort not to get angry again. “I know. But whatever the truth is about the magician and why she is here, I think we can both agree that the Shadowghast is a danger to everyone. We have to stop that Ghastly Night show tomorrow, Herbie, or the whole town will be snatched. Agreed?”

  She holds out her hand.

  I sigh. Violet’s right—we have to do something.

  I shake her hand.

  “Agreed,” I say. “We’re not going through that door, though, until we’re good and ready. And that means finding a new flashlight, Vi. And winding Clermit up thoroughly. And finding gloves and scarves, and maybe some string to mark the way. And . . .”

  “OK, Herbie, OK.” Violet holds up her hands to stop me. “And while you’re sorting that stuff out, I’m going to get something, too. . . .”

  With this she heads back into the main part of my Lost-and-Foundery and starts rummaging around on my repair desk. After I have gathered our supplies she comes back, twisting a thing in her hands with the help of some pliers.

  “You’re not serious!” I say when I see what it is.

  “Of course I am,” Violet replies, finishing with a few last turns.

  In her hand is a tall candle. Violet has spiraled a length of wire around it, which extends up from the top. Hastily, but surprisingly artfully, given the stubbiness of the pliers, she has twisted and folded the top part of the wire to form the shape of a creeping man.

  “A manglewick candle!”

  I’m impressed.

  “It’s not as good as one of Mrs. Fossil’s,” Violet admits, “but it should light our way.”

  And she takes a match, strikes it, and sets it to the wick. The flame flares up, and a creeping shadow dances into life on the wall of my Lost-and-Foundery.

  “It’s part of the legend of the Shadowghast that a manglewick candle gives you protection,” Violet reminds me. “Well, if other parts of the legend are true, why not this part, too?”

  “I’m still taking a flashlight, though,” I say.

  “Good,” Violet replies. “Between us, we’ll be ready for tomorrow’s Ghastly Night show, whatever happens.”

  “It’s not tomorrow’s show anymore,” I say, pointing at the clock. Its hands have just crept past midnight. “Technically, it’s Halloween now. The Ghastly Night show is tonight.”

  The flame of the candle flickers in the cold breeze, as if the shadow man on the wall is delighted to hear this news.

  Then, one by one—with Erwin in the lead—we step up into the wardrobe, push through the scraggy old fur coats, and emerge into the icy cold beyond.

  We heave the iron door closed behind us with a CLANG, and I turn the key in the lock.

  Once again my little home is as secure as a fortress. It’s just that now I’m on the outside of it! I slip the key into my pocket and turn to face the rocky passageway we find ourselves in. Holding out the flashlight like a magic wand, I click it on and illuminate . . . nothing very much. The darkness ahead devours the flashlight, and I gulp.

  So much for the newer, braver Herbie!

  Then I see Violet do something surprising.

  She hands me her candle, rummages in her huge coat pockets, and pulls out a stump of chalk. In the flickering light, she draws something on the pitted black iron of my Netherways door:

  “That’s the bell from my desk!” I cry. “Up in my cubbyhole. The one people ring when they’ve lost something.”

  “Exactly,” says Vi, dropping the chalk back in her pocket. “So we will recognize this door again. And I’ll mark other things, too, on the way. Just because no one has ever mapped the Netherways before, Herbie, is no reason we shouldn’t start now.”

  “Prrp,” says Erwin, and he sets off down the passageway. Side by side, Violet and I follow him into the dark.

  The first thing I notice about the passageway is that it starts to tilt upward. There are even a few places where rough, uneven steps have been cut into the ro
ck floor. As we walk, we see other ways, too—tunnels that branch off left or right, with curtains of cobwebs billowing in the breeze. Some passages drop down into the depths of Eerie Rock at alarming angles, but Erwin leads us ever upward.

  “It makes sense,” Violet gasps, her breath catching from the climb. “The Eerie Book Dispensary is higher up than the hotel, so we have to gain some height, even underground.”

  The troglodytic dark seems to get darker still as we deepen into the maze. Violet and I draw closer together as we go, huddling around the candle in her hand, picking our way in the echoes and drips and silence. And always, at the edge of our little pool of flickering light, the dancing shadow cast by the manglewick keeps us strange company.

  “I’m glad we have a guide,” I whisper eventually, when I can stand the silence no longer. Erwin keeps just a few steps ahead of us, frequently pausing to let us catch up. “We’ve already turned more times than I can remember, Vi. I don’t think I could find the way back now.”

  “That’s why I’ve been drawing these,” Violet replies, stopping for a moment to scratch a double-headed arrow onto the wall with her lump of chalk. “If we learn only one route through the Netherways, Herbie, then it should be the one joining my home with yours. Don’t you think?”

  I nod. That particular route could certainly prove useful in future adventures. If, that is, I stay in Eerie-on-Sea. But I don’t say that part to Violet. Besides, the longer we stay in the tunnels—the longer we’re steeped in the darkness and eeriness of the subterranean here-and-now—the harder it is to think of any sort of past or future at all.

  “I just want to get out of here, Vi,” I whisper.

  We hurry on, following Erwin as he scampers ahead. And I’ve never been more grateful to see a cat’s bottom, I can tell you! But then he stops, at a particularly twisty junction, and sniffs one way, before peering quizzically down another. His tail starts to swish with frustration, exactly as if whatever cat nav he uses to get around the Netherways is suddenly on the blink. I’m just about to say something rude to the hesitant feline, when Violet says something else instead that shuts me up completely.

  “I’m scared, Herbie,”

  It’s not the sort of thing I’m used to hearing from Violet.

  “I’m sure Erwin’s just got his whiskers in a twist,” I reply, hoping I’m right.

  “I don’t mean that,” Vi says. “I mean I’m scared about what’s happening, scared about Jenny—scared we may never find her. What if we can’t stop what’s happening in Eerie-on-Sea? What if Caliastra gets what she wants and takes you away, too?”

  I say nothing. In the endless dark I see the two points of reflected candlelight in Violet’s eyes as she stares at me.

  “Herbie,” she continues, “I don’t want you to leave. I . . . I don’t want to be left alone. Not again.”

  By now the silence from me must be deafening.

  “But,” Violet says then, holding her voice steady, “but, I promise you, if at the end of all this you are right—if Caliastra is not the villain after all, then I . . . I won’t stand in your way. I’ll even manage to be happy for you, Herbert Lemon, for finding your family before I found mine. I just hope you won’t forget me, that’s all.”

  I stare back at Violet. These words from her, this admission that she is scared, is so unlike anything the Violet who first came to town would have said, that I suddenly see I’m not the only one who has been changed by our friendship. We really are a team, no matter what happens next.

  “And I,” I reply, “I swear on my Lost-and-Founder’s cap that I won’t leave Eerie-on-Sea till I know you’re OK, Violet Parma. And until Jenny has been found again, and Mrs. Fossil, too. And everything’s been fixed. And that is a Herbie promise.”

  “Prp,” comes a small sound of impatience, and we look over to see Erwin waiting beside one of the passages, exactly as if he’s known where to go all along.

  “Come on, Herbie,” says Violet briskly, but with a smile in her voice. “The book dispensary must be close.”

  She makes her chalk mark on the archway, and we follow Erwin again down a particularly tumbledown brick passage.

  “Have you ever seen a strange doorway in the bookshop cellar?” I ask. “That could be a Netherways door?”

  “Actually, I have.” replies Violet. “I’ve often wondered where it leads, but Jenny just told me to forget about it. Now I know why.”

  Then, a couple of cat-turns later, we’re standing in a low natural cave, dodging between sparkling stalactites that poke our heads and shoulders and looking at the warped boards of a small, round wooden door.

  “It’s tiny,” I say. “Like it was made for hobbits.”

  Erwin approaches the door and slips through a gap beneath it.

  “Er, we can’t get in like that,” I say.

  Violet grabs the tarnished brass door handle and twists it.

  “Locked!” she declares. “Now what?”

  “Looks like the key’s in the other side,” I say, peering through the keyhole.

  “But we can’t turn it from here,” Vi replies. “And Erwin doesn’t have enough thumbs to do that.”

  “No,” I agree, “but I know someone who doesn’t need thumbs.”

  And I take Clermit out from beneath my cap, give him three good windings-up, and place him on the ground.

  “Please, could you open this door for us?” I say. “It’s for important Lost-and-Founder business.”

  Clermit stands on his metal legs and snips a salute. Then he scuttles under the door. We hear a scraping, whirring sound and then a screeching of metal against metal, as if an antique mechanism that hasn’t been turned for a hundred years is being turned now with a CLUNK. We push at the little round wooden door, and it creaks open.

  “The Eerie Book Dispensary!” Violet cries, seeing crates of books beyond. “We did it, Herbie!”

  “Wow!” says Erwin, who is sitting watching us archly from a barrel.

  “With your help, of course, puss,” Vi adds. “And, to say thank you . . .”

  Violet takes the chalk from her pocket, and on the honey-colored lintel stone above the little round door, she draws a picture of Erwin the cat.

  Then we duck into the cellar beneath Eerie-on-Sea’s peculiar bookshop and pull the door closed behind us.

  It’s only when we get up into the bookshop proper that we realize how very late it is. The main room of the dispensary is cold and dark, and the books are asleep on their shelves. There’s nothing but night in the windows, and silence from the town beyond, and that tingling sense of secrecy that comes from still being up when everyone else is in bed.

  The mermonkey sits in the gloom, its hairy back to us, its wide eyes and toothsome leer dimly reflected in the glass of the window. It’ll be a relief to take our candle upstairs. But before we can do that, Erwin runs to the shop counter and jumps on it.

  “Me-ow,” he says in a significant way.

  “What it is?” Violet asks, approaching him and holding up the candle.

  Erwin reaches out a paw and shoves a yellow-jacketed book toward us. It’s The Subtle Mask—the book the mermonkey dispensed for Caliastra—which is still sitting where she left it on the counter.

  “He was fussing over that before, remember?” I say.

  “Yes,” Vi replies with a yawn. She picks up the book and slips it in her coat pocket. “But right now, Herbie, we need to get some sleep. We have to be at the museum early, to warn Dr. Thalassi.”

  “We do?” I ask.

  “Have you forgotten he said he was going to go to see Caliastra first thing tomorrow?” Vi replies. “You know what he’s like when he spots something historical. He’ll want to examine the Shadowghast lantern, and something tells me that when he does, he’ll go missing, too.”

  And she leads the way upstairs.

  Jenny Hanniver’s flat is in the attic above her shop. It’s a cozy apartment of swirly throws, scented candles, and skylight windows, and its walls are lined wi
th—yes, you’ve guessed it—books. The Eerie Book Dispensary has always offered a room for the night to travelers who have come from afar to consult the mermonkey, but Violet’s room isn’t one of those. When Jenny invited Vi to live with her, she offered a small bedroom of her own in Jenny’s private flat. I wasn’t there when the arrangement was made, and I don’t know what was said, but Jenny Hanniver is Violet’s guardian now, in all but name.

  In Violet’s room, I place my cap—Clermit nestling inside—on the windowsill. Violet climbs into bed, while I crawl into a large, dusty closet to fight some big cushions into something bed-like. Then Vi blows out the manglewick candle, and I’m happy to see the little creeping shadowman who has followed us through the Netherways all this way finally wink out of existence.

  “Good night, Herbie.”

  “G’night,” I reply.

  It takes me a long time to get to sleep after all that’s happened. But I must eventually, because a vision of Caliastra’s smiling face blazes in my mind’s eye, looking darker and more crafty than ever, and that can only be a dream, can’t it?

  Something tickles my nose.

  I swipe it away.

  Something tickles my nose again, and I swipe harder, punching myself in the face.

  “Ow!”

  I sit up to discover that the tickly something is probably Erwin’s whiskers, since the bookshop cat is staring at me nose-to-nose, looking annoyed.

  “What time is it?” comes a groggy voice from across the room, and I see Violet emerging from her duvet.

  “Ne-ow,” says Erwin, jumping up onto the windowsill.

  “What!”

  Violet leaps out of bed and throws the curtains of her dormer window wide open.

  “Herbie, get up! We’ve overslept!”

  “Have we?” I groan, emerging from the closet and trying to scratch away that uncomfortable feeling of having slept in my clothes. I look out the window at the sight of the sun playing across the surface of a thick sea mist that fills the town. Only the rooftops and chimney stacks are visible, poking up like geometric islands in a cloudy sea. Then I add, with a yawn, “Are you sure we haven’t underslept?”