by Jan Siegel
‘He never leaves Number 7,’ the boy pointed out.
The purple-haired girl picked up a handful of ashes from the cold grate, rubbing them between her palms and muttering. There was a whoosh! of livid flame, livid not because it was magical but because it was half-hearted. By the time it escaped from the chimney it had fizzled to a thin jet of smoke that dispersed instantly on contact with the rain. The watcher drew back a little, eyeing it with a chilly mixture of disdain and amusement.
In the room below: ‘So,’ said the boy, ‘that was a lance of white-hot magical energy designed to vaporise anything that got in its way?’
‘I did my best.’ Irritably.
‘I thought it was good,’ said the other girl. ‘I mean, we couldn’t do that.’
‘We aren’t supposed to. She’s the witch – magic is her thing. When you ask me to cook, I don’t do Pot Noodle. Anyway, there’s nothing up there. False alarm. Hoover’s gone quiet again...’
The dog barked once, a deep-throated bark, plainly a warning.
To the spy.
The listening features flickered and changed, as if something of what he had heard disturbed or unsettled him. For a moment, the thing crouching by the chimney was no longer a night-winged phantom but a young man – a young man with a subtle, secretive face and red hair curling in the wet. Then the memory was gone. There was a whirl of shadow as he rose into the air and was swallowed up in rain.
In the room, Jinx said: ‘There was something there. I felt it too. Anyway, Hoover’s never wrong.’
For once, Gavin didn’t argue.
‘You watched them in your spellfire,’ Pen said, ‘and now they’re watching us.’
It’s part of the pattern, she thought. Not the kaleidoscope pattern of the space/time prism but a greater pattern, too big to see in its entirety, a pattern less glimpsed than felt – light and dark, good and evil, magic and reality, the living and the undead. A pattern of opposites woven together into a single design flowing through all the ages, intricate beyond imagining, simple beyond perception – so simple that even Pen could not quite make it out. It was like a tune on the edge of hearing, a name on the tip of her tongue...
‘Where can we go,’ said Gavin, ‘where they can’t watch us?’
There was only one answer.
‘Next door,’ said Jinx.
THE GOBLIN WASN’T there.
‘Stiltz!’ Pen called. ‘Where are you?’
‘Rumplestiltskin!’ from Gavin. ‘Crumpledforeskin!’
Pen and Jinx exchanged a look which said: Boys.
‘Can’t you summon him?’ Pen asked.
‘In here?’ Jinx grimaced, concealing private doubts about her summoning skills. ‘The space/time prism means reality is all bent and twisted. Any normal spell is liable to go pear-shaped. You could summon a goblin and get a three-toed sloth. It’s simpler to look for him – there’s nowhere much to hide.’
She glanced at the mirror for a minute or two and then said: ‘Come out.’
They could see him under the little table, hunched up and citrus-pale with nervousness, but only in the mirror. He slid out of the reflection through the frame and re-emerged behind them.
‘You want something,’ he said. ‘I see’t in your face. But I can’t help. I helped a mortal once, sithee, and now my spirit is forfeit. Werefolk shouldn’t mix with humankind. No good ever comes of it.’
‘Who said we wanted to do good?’ snapped Jinx.
‘Do you really have a wishing stone?’ Pen said.
‘So that’s it. Aye – gaffer gave it me, long agone, but he told me to keep it safe and gi’ it to no man. Wishing is vain, he said, unless you make it come true your own self, with the strength of your arm and the sweat of your brow. The good cobbler stitches his own shoon. You don’t want to go a-wishing, lessen you get what you wish for. Gaffer, he wished for–’
‘Yes, we know,’ said Jinx, cutting the lecture short before it was well under way. ‘You told us. But the wishing stone is our only chance of finding the people who’re lost in here. There’s some boy who disappeared about three decades ago, or so we think–’
‘Did you see him?’ Pen demanded, suddenly eager. ‘He broke in through the window upstairs.’
‘I saw him.’ Stiltz gave what might have been a shiver. ‘A skinny boy all white, even his lashes, save for his een. They were like little black holes. He was one of the doomed ones; you can allus tell. Summat in his aura. They come in like they’re after fool’s gold, all keen and feverish, but what they find you don’t want to know. One of ’em came back once, mebbe two hundred years agone – burst through the door on the landing and sat there blubbering till he was near sick. Happen he was your age but his hair was grey from t’ flaysome things he’d seen. The owd man found him, tried to get him out, but he wouldn’t go through any door agin.’
‘What happened to him?’ Pen said.
‘He died here,’ said the goblin. ‘Died of madness, or clemmed, or mebbe both. Wasn’t nothing to be done. The owd man brought food for him, but he wouldn’t eat. The doomed ones, you can’t help ’em. No one can help ’em. You don’t want to try.’
‘Yes we do,’ said Pen. ‘If you would lend us the stone–’
‘I dursn’t,’ said the goblin. ‘It would be death of you. I promised gaffer–’
He didn’t exactly disappear – they never saw the moment of his vanishing – but suddenly they were looking round and he was gone. Gavin swore and Pen called out, but the stillness of the house absorbed both curse and call like a fog and they didn’t persist. Pen sat down on the stairs, gazing intently at nothing very much. Gavin said: ‘Could we make him give it to us? I mean, I don’t want to, but we’re desperate, and the way I see it the stone isn’t properly his, and there are people going mad, or suffering hideous torments... And we’re only going to borrow it; we won’t even take it out of the house.’
‘Getting it from him by force would be like stealing,’ said Pen. ‘Also bullying. Double crime.’
‘Nothing wrong with bullying,’ said Jinx, deliberately nasty, ‘as long as you’re the bully. Besides, Stiltz is a goblin: the cobbler should never have trusted him with a genuine wishing stone, it’s far too powerful, and goblins aren’t trustworthy. Still... taking it by force isn’t a great idea. Bad karma. In magic, everything has consequences.’
‘The end justifies the means,’ said Gavin.
‘The means shapes the end,’ said Pen.
‘We don’t need bad karma,’ said Jinx. ‘We’ve got enough problems.’
They thought about the boy who got out, dying on the landing because he couldn’t bring himself to go through a door again. There was a moment when they all had a fleeting glimpse of what they were getting into – of a conspiracy as old as Time, of a Dark Lord in a Dark Tower, of the house shifting around them like a magician’s box, so you never knew what opened where – of their own smallness and futility in the face of immeasurable odds.
‘So... no force,’ said Gavin. ‘What can we try?’
‘Persuasion,’ said Jinx. ‘I knew a grinnock who would do anything for doningfuts.’
‘What’s a grinnock?’ said Gavin. ‘And... doningfuts?’
‘Kind of goblin,’ said Jinx. ‘Doughnuts. How good is your Yorkshire pudding?’
ON SUNDAY EVE took Pen, Gavin and Jinx out to lunch. They drove to a pub a little way in the country where Gavin could enjoy himself criticising the menu and Hoover could gnaw leftover bones. Jinx, who was uncomfortable around most adults, wrapped herself in an aura of sullenness and said little. Pen, who was uncomfortable with the daily deception in her life, found conversation an effort. Gavin said the mushrooms were unexpectedly good and disappeared into the kitchen to chat up the cook.
Hoover didn’t waste time gnawing; he simply crunched up the bones and swallowed them.
It wasn’t, Eve thought, a big success.
When Jasveer Patel arrived at 7A, around tea-time, they were all out.
He ha
d been feeling uneasy for some while. It was a relief to know that Andrew Pyewackett was not only dead but cremated, and therefore unlikely to be hanging around his previous address, but he felt guilty leaving a thirteen-year-old girl to deal with the ensuing situation, and conscious that, as a fellow executor, there were things he should have done, though he wasn’t sure what things, or how to do them. The legatee was still missing, and no one seemed to be trying to find him; Jas placed advertisements in appropriate newspapers and on the Internet but sensed in advance that it would be no use. Such methods had been essayed seven years before, without result. In a rare encounter with old Mr Hayle he broached the matter, purely on the basis of exhausting all possibilities, and was unnerved when he responded instantly: ‘Goodman? Yes of course. Called me last week – no, last month. Maybe last year. Called me, anyway. Some time ago. Polite sort of chap. Asked about the Will. I gave him the address.’
‘What address?’ asked Jas. ‘Temporal Crescent?’
‘Was it? Can’t say I recall. We talked about angel cakes. Nobody makes them any more. I used to like them – when I was a boy, of course.’
‘Did he come to the office?’ Jas said. ‘Did you speak to him again?’
‘No. Shame really. He said he had the original recipe.’
‘But – you took his contact details – phone number – e-mail?’
‘No – don’t do any of that. Always leave it to the secretary. Her job.’
Jas struggled for self-control. ‘Which secretary was handling calls that day?’
‘None of them. Lunch hour – all out. Call came straight to me.’ Mr Hayle looked faintly irritated. ‘Bit annoyed about that. Shouldn’t be taking my own calls, not at my time of life.’
Jas muttered under his breath in Hindi and retired to his own office to drop his head in his hands.
The senility of his superior wasn’t, he reasoned, Pen’s problem (after all, she was a minor with little authority in law) but in the end he decided to tell her – to see how she was getting on, if she needed assistance or advice, if normal service had been resumed... He’d been informed about her residence in 7A and chose a Sunday for his call because it felt somehow more casual, off the record – he was dropping in rather than making an official visit.
As it was, the only person there was Quorum.
‘I was hoping to see Miss Tudor,’ Jas explained.
‘So I should suppose.’ Quorum exuded austere disapproval. ‘It is, if I may say so, long overdue. For a girl of her tender age to have to cope with her present responsibilities seems most unsuitable. Not that she isn’t doing her best – and her best is very good – but it’s time an adult took over. I trust you have some news of Mr Goodman?’
‘In a way,’ said Jas, smarting inwardly. ‘Apparently he called my office, I’m not sure when, and got the details of the Will and this address. Unfortunately, he – er – he spoke to Mr Hayle, who’s elderly and gets... confused. He didn’t come here, did he? Goodman, I mean.’
‘No,’ said Quorum. ‘Had he done so, I would almost certainly have admitted him. Mr Pyewackett did not believe in answering the door.’
‘Why keep a butler and buttle yourself?’ said a voice in the background which was alarmingly familiar.
‘You’ve... you’ve got a parrot,’ Jas hazarded, gazing past Quorum into the hall. All he could see was a set of false teeth on a table, grinning horribly. They looked disturbingly like the teeth he had last seen clattering away in the mouth of the corpse.
‘Not at all,’ said Quorum. ‘Merely an echo.’
One of the talents of the true butler – of whom there are now very few – is the ability to lie with aplomb. Jas, though aware he was lying, could only back down. In any case, he really wanted to move himself from the vicinity of those teeth.
‘Tell Miss Tudor I called,’ he said, and fled down the steps.
Eve had just parked the car further down the street and Jinx, insisting Hoover needed a crap, had jumped out first and was walking along the pavement with the dog. She saw Jas departing from 7A and wondered who he was and why he was in such a hurry.
She didn’t see the car until it was too late.
The same car which had gone for her – afterwards she was sure of it – long and white and gleaming. It shot forward even as Jas stepped into the road – there was a thunk as the bonnet hit him full on. It tossed him into the air, flipping him over with a horrible rag-doll effect of flopping limbs and loosened neck. Even before he hit the tarmac, Jinx knew he was dead.
On a neighbouring rooftop a shadow shrank towards the chimney, and something like a bird took wing into the waiting clouds.
‘DO YOU THINK we should go to the funeral?’ Pen said, twenty-four hours later. She looked even paler than usual and somehow pinched, as if the fear had got inside her like a chill.
Eve, horrified by the accident they had all witnessed, had finally been persuaded to go into work and leave them to nurse their trauma in peace.
‘I expect he was a Hindu,’ said Jinx. ‘Don’t they have to expose their dead on top of those special towers so they can be eaten by vultures?’
‘Bloody difficult in England,’ said Gavin. ‘You’d have to make do with pigeons.’
‘That is a custom of the Parsees,’ Quorum interjected. ‘Hindus cremate. The funeral will be a matter for his relatives. I cannot imagine your attendance will be required.’
‘The question is,’ said Jinx, ‘why was he killed? Okay, so he was coming here to tell Pen that Barty had contacted someone at his office – but he told you that anyway, before the hit-and-run, so what was the point of killing him? Unless he was going to pass on something else...’
‘He Knew Too Much,’ Pen said wretchedly, in capital letters.
‘Are you sure it was the same car that hit you?’ Gavin asked Jinx.
‘Yeah. And no, I didn’t see the driver, or the licence plate. I tried to read the numbers, but they got jumbled up. It could’ve been some sort of confusion spell – I ought to’ve been able to see them.’
‘The police said it was joyriders,’ Quorum remarked.
The three teenagers plainly considered this too frivolous to be worthy of comment.
‘Now the guy’s dead,’ Jinx said to Pen after a pause, ‘does that mean you’re the only executor?’
‘Oh no,’ said Pen. ‘Jasveer Patel wasn’t named in Andrew Pyewackett’s Will; he was just the representative appointed by the firm. They’ll appoint someone else.’
‘Pity,’ said Jinx. ‘I was thinking if they killed him, and then you, that might be their way of getting hold of the house.’
‘Do you mind not killing me off so casually?’
‘You know what I mean.’
There was a silence filled with frowns, and concentration on nothing very much, and gloom.
‘We have to talk to Stiltz,’ said Pen.
‘Why?’ Gavin demanded.
‘Because there’s no one else.’
They equipped themselves for exploration. Quorum protested, but half-heartedly; he knew it wouldn’t do any good. At Jinx’s insistence they took the Teeth – ‘They’re familiars,’ she maintained. ‘Backup’ – though not Hoover as goblins can be afraid of dogs, and a Yorkshire pudding prepared by Gavin in a plastic lunchbox.
‘There’s bound to be something we haven’t got,’ Pen said, frowning.
‘There are loads of things we haven’t got,’ said Gavin. ‘Stun grenades, Kalashnikovs, dragon repellent. We haven’t got them and we can’t get them, so we’ll just have to do without.’
Jinx fiddled with a ring she always wore, a coiled serpent or dragon biting its own tail. Pen thought it was a mood ring: she had noticed the glass in its eyes changed colour from time to time. At the moment it was a pale sickly green.
‘I want a weapon,’ Jinx said. She went into the kitchen and helped herself to a small jar of cayenne pepper.
Then they were ready.
Like an expedition heading for the Himalayas, they f
iled into the utility room and opened the door to Bygone House.
SMELL IS THE sense most closely associated with memory. When Pen opened the lunchbox, feeling like an evil temptress luring Stiltz towards some unspecified doom, the smell of Yorkshire pudding came out, not so much wafting as invading. A homely, folksy, friendly smell, a smell to make your mouth water, or, in the case of Stiltz, your brain. Werefolk do not need to eat, and indeed may starve a hundred years without ill effect, but they enjoy eating, and can even – as Simmoleon did – become addicted to a particular food, like a drug. The wise among them, or those who call themselves wise, say eating makes you human, and should be avoided at any price. Food, friendship, and morality are the mortal sins: any who over-indulge in them will invariably be corrupted. Stiltz had known friendship; Jinx guessed he had shared meals with his former master. And the smell, even more than the taste, should reawaken the loyalties – and the weaknesses – he had learned.
‘Aye, I’ll lend ’ee the stone,’ he said at last. Goblins are low on resistance. ‘But ’tis agin my promise, agin my instinct, agin my gut. Even if it works for you, it’ll bring you no good. Once you pass a door the house will devour you, and there’ll be no coming back. I shall miss your bonny face, lass–’ he nodded to Pen ‘– and the shoon I nivver made you. But you mun go with your fate, whatever the end.’
The munching of Yorkshire pudding rather spoiled the dramatic impact of this speech.
‘We have passed a door,’ Pen pointed out. ‘In fact, we’ve passed several. Gavin and I have, anyway. And we came back.’ She turned to the other two. ‘I think the trick is to sort of pre-programme yourself. When I chased after Felinacious I came back because I knew I had to, I had to return to Gasparo – Gavin. It was, like, this huge imperative kind of pulling me on. If somebody always stays by the door, and we fix up to meet, that ought to work even if your head gets scrambled. Anyhow, we haven’t come up with anything else, and I think it’s worth a try.’
