by Jan Siegel
‘I daresay,’ said Pen, ‘but we have to stop him.’ She was texting Gavin for the fifth time that morning. He was meant to be doing a holiday job in a restaurant near his home, cleaning the tables and stacking the dishwasher during the lunch period, but Pen thought in his present state of mind he might not be able to face it. Either he wasn’t answering because he was at work, she deduced, or he wasn’t answering because he didn’t want to answer.
Pen hoped it was the former.
There was a long pause while Quorum washed up the bowl and Pen waited in vain for a reply and Jinx returned to frowning meditation.
Pen went to put the phone in her pocket and then remembered the Teeth had taken up residence there and were in the process of chewing their way through the lining.
‘Actually,’ Jinx said at last, ‘I’m not certain Cesare could get in, even if he found a way. I was forgetting – Number 7 may be a space/time prism, but it’s also a house. The ancient rules apply – at least I think so. Werefolk can’t enter a house uninvited. Cesare may be part mortal, but he’s also part demon now. I don’t know how it works, but somehow he’d be barred from getting in.’
‘Stiltz did,’ Pen pointed out.
‘He came through one of the inner doors,’ Jinx said. ‘In a way, he was already inside. No – I think Cesare hopes to see in, not be in. Remember, Azmordis said it was nearly time for the would-be apprentices to reappear. Quorum... do people often open the doors from the other side?’
‘Not since I came here,’ the butler said. ‘Nor during Mr Pyewackett’s tenure. However, he did tell me there had been instances, long before. He used to worry about it sometimes. If the doors could be opened from beyond, you see, anything could come through. Anything at all.’
The two girls stared at each other.
‘That’s how most of the apprentices got there,’ Pen said. ‘They came in through one door and went out through another. Like that boy Stiltz talked about. All we have to do is wait.’
‘And watch,’ said Jinx.
She added: ‘It could be a very long watch...’
Beyond the Doors
London, seventeenth century
CHERUB HAD AGREED in the end, but reluctantly.
‘Big Bel won’t believe it,’ he said. ‘She won’t believe I’d go willing. I’m too smart for that.’
‘Tell her your friends are all dead,’ said Ghost. ‘Tell her you’re lonely, and hungry, and you want a soft bed and a full stomach. Tell her there’s another gang moving in from the docks, ready to kill anyone who gets in their way. Let her think you’re scared. Tell her you’ve seen the plague stalking the streets like a skeleton in a tattered shroud, pointing a bloody finger at the next person to die.’
‘That’s good,’ Cherub said appreciatively. ‘I like that. Only... if it was a skeleton, there wouldn’t be any blood. The blood ’ld be all gone.’
‘Whatever.’
Ghost didn’t think Big Belinda would need much convincing. She wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, except to check the perfection of its teeth.
Mags took Cherub through the back door into the house. Ghost waited, crouching on a ledge above Running Lane. Some time later, Big Belinda emerged, wearing a cloak though the evening was warm, with a broad hood pulled over her false curls. The smile on her face reminded Ghost of a toad which has just swallowed a particularly juicy fly. He slid off the ledge into the shadows and prepared to follow her.
But she only went as far as Porkpie Street, apparently passing a message to someone Ghost couldn’t see and then, after a moment’s hesitation, returning to her lair. For a few seconds, Ghost feared he was trapped. If he reached for the ledge, she would see him climb; if he ran, his retreating figure would give him away. But there was a gate on his left into a tiny yard and he slipped through, pausing at another door, hand on the knob, pulling it open a fraction in case he needed a further escape route...
He heard the tap-tap of her heels along the lane, glimpsed the shadow of her cloak outside the gate. Then she was gone. He let himself breathe again and turned, glancing through the doorway to see if he was observed...
There was a girl standing there watching him.
His first thought was that she looked very clean. Her face was as smooth and pale as an egg-shell and the straight fall of her hair had a silken gleam unlike any girl’s hair that he knew. She wore odd clothes, too: very long breeches of some blue grainy material and a bulky jacket with the sleeves turned up which didn’t seem to fit anywhere. There was a boy behind her whom he couldn’t see clearly because his skin was so dark.
It was still daylight in the city, but the room beyond the door looked dim with the grey dimness of early evening. Like the girl, it was clean: he glimpsed pale walls and closed doors, the corner of a carpet, a segment of picture. There was something familiar about the interior, though he knew he couldn’t have seen it before. A hallway with doors, many doors. Closed doors waiting to be opened...
He drew back, suddenly and horribly afraid.
The girl had been frozen in shock or surprise, but now she moved towards him. ‘You’re the one, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re the boy who’s lost.’
He didn’t answer, springing back, trying to shut the door, but the dark-skinned youth wrenched it away from him.
‘Don’t do that!’ the girl said urgently. ‘You mustn’t do that. Whatever happens, you mustn’t close the door.’
Her desperation sounded ludicrous, even insane, but on some deeper level he understood. The door was a way of escape, and these people – whoever they might be – were the guardians, bizarre otherworldly beings sent to save him, or to destroy him. The clean twilit interior looked like a haven, yet something about it brought him to the edge of panic.
The boy took a rectangular object out of his pocket, slate-thin and shining like dull silver. He flipped the lid up as if it was a box, only it wasn’t a box, just two flat surfaces hinged together. On the inside there were numbers and letters in clusters, which clearly had some occult significance, and a few cabbalistic signs. The boy pressed or rubbed something, and a section of the surface began to glow, though there was no discernible light source – to glow like a wishing stone, like a crystal ball, with strange colours and patterns moving through the glow like ripples on water. Then the boy spoke, as if addressing the box: ‘Jinx? Get over here – quickly. Never mind supper: you can have that later. We need you. Now.’
The box spoke back.
‘Okay. Coming.’
Ghost stared.
‘Magic,’ he said. ‘Black magic.’
‘No,’ said the boy. ‘Just technology. You’ll get the hang of it.’
‘Come on,’ said the girl, holding out her hand. ‘It’s all right, really it is. We’ll look after you.’
‘We will?’ said the boy, evidently taken aback.
‘Of course we will!’
‘Only... I don’t think–’
‘I can’t come,’ said Ghost. ‘Not now.’ Somehow, he knew that if he passed that door there would be no returning. ‘I have... unfinished business. The plague took nearly all the Lost Boys, but I have to save them, the ones that are left. Cherub, and Tomkin – yes, and Mags. I promised. I promised... myself.’
‘The Lost Boys?’ said the girl, plainly confused. ‘Like in Peter Pan?’
‘That was my name for them,’ Ghost explained. ‘The gang. My gang.’
‘Plague?’ said the boy. His hands closed on the girl’s shoulders, drawing her back into the shadows of the hallway.
‘I’ve had it,’ said Ghost. And: ‘You couldn’t get it. You’re too clean.’
There was a sound of footsteps, barely audible to Ghost – noise didn’t travel easily from that other place – and another girl appeared, with a dog. At least, he thought it was a girl, though she looked more like a fairground freak. There were metal rings through her ears, her eyebrows, her nose, even her lip. Her eyes were more heavily painted than any of Big Belinda’s girls and h
er short hair was dyed a purplish bronze and stuck out like a broom in a fright.
She didn’t seem anything like as clean as the other two.
The dog who accompanied her was big and shaggy and friendly-looking.
‘This is him,’ said the first girl. ‘This is the one.’
‘Has he murdered anybody yet?’ asked the newcomer. Ghost recognised her voice and thought: She’s the one the dark boy spoke to. The genie of the box.
Somehow, he hadn’t expected a genie to look quite like that.
‘Not yet,’ said the boy. ‘He’s been too busy having the plague.’
‘Plague?’ The genie sounded apprehensive.
‘It isn’t that easy to catch,’ said the first girl. ‘Not if you’re well nourished and have a strong immune system.’
‘I’m not well nourished,’ said the genie. ‘You interrupted my supper.’
The first girl turned back to Ghost, ignoring her. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘we’re meant to help you.’ (‘Sez who?’ said the genie.) ‘If there are people you have to save, then I’m coming too. We can’t lose you now.’
‘Are you crazy?’ This was the boy. ‘You heard what he said–’
‘It doesn’t matter. Sometimes you have to take a little risk. Anyway, I’m going.’
The boy clenched up his anger and let it go in a sigh of resignation. ‘I wish you would stop being so obstinate,’ he said. ‘A little risk! What the hell. If you’re going, I’m going. Jinx can watch the door.’
‘If you get the plague,’ said the genie, ‘and come back, and give it to me, there will be serious trouble.’
‘Too right,’ said the boy.
For all its horror, the word plague had an old-fashioned ring which none of those beyond the door could quite believe in.
‘You can’t come with me,’ said Ghost, appalled. ‘Not here. The city isn’t a place for people like you.’
Clean people.
The girl stepped through to his side of the door. ‘I’m Penelope Tudor,’ she said. Not just asserting her identity but holding onto it. ‘My friends call me Pen.’
‘Ghost,’ said Ghost. The girl offered her hand but he didn’t take it. He was afraid of what might rub off on him.
‘Is that what your friends call you?’ asked the boy, following her. If there was a note of irony in his voice, Ghost missed it.
‘I don’t have friends.’
Now they were here, standing in the yard, in his world. Strangers, aliens, guardian angels.
He didn’t need guardian angels.
The city air seemed to smear them with a hint of grime, a breath of dust, making them look more normal, blending them in. They were foreigners, he realised, just off a boat from somewhere far away, the spice islands or the Isles of Gold, exotic kingdoms beyond the ocean’s edge. They wanted to take him with them, to a remote unimaginable country, magical as Avalon, distant as the moon, where the memories would soften and the scars would heal and he would grow up into a different person, though whether good or bad he did not know.
But first, he had things to do...
Behind them, the genie wedged something under the door to hold it open, and she and the dog sat down in the gap to wait.
IN THE LOFT, Mags said: ‘Who are they?’
‘They’re with us,’ Ghost said. ‘That’s all you need to know. What happened with Cherub?’
‘Big Bel’s sent a message to the Duke. She was that pleased when he came, she was sweating roses. You’d think she’d be worried about him having the plague, but she says like you do, if he ain’t got it now, he won’t never get it. There’s a few what just don’t. Us lucky ones.’
A rat ran across the floor of the loft. Ghost threw a boot at it – an old boot which had belonged to One-Ear – and it scurried into a corner, gnawing on a piece of pie-crust from a stolen dinner, watching them beadily.
‘I hate rats,’ he said.
‘They’re plague-carriers,’ said Pen. ‘That’s how it got here. The rats brought it.’
‘Rats don’t get sick,’ said Mags. ‘Leastways, I never saw one what did.’
‘You don’t have to get sick to bring sickness,’ Pen explained, with all the conviction of one who has absorbed a higher wisdom. This city might be strange to her but she was used to strange places; she thought she had been on the move all her life. ‘My father’s a doctor. He’s travelled all over the world studying diseases. He says plague travels too, riding on the rats. It starts in some country a long way away, and the rats go on ships and take it with them.’
Mags looked unconvinced, but Ghost said: ‘I knew it was rats.’
He went on: ‘I daresay that’s why the Duke don’t get the plague. His house is locked up so tight, he even keeps the vermin out.’
And, to Mags: ‘When he gives Big Bel the word, you let me know. I’ll go wait in Close Shave Alley. Maybe I’ll take him a brace of dead rats, just to pretty the place up.’
‘You’ll have to be quick, to catch them,’ Gavin said.
Ghost’s knife flicked out, faster than the eye could follow, cutting the air with a lethal gleam, pinning the rat to the wall. ‘That quick?’ he said.
When Mags had gone they waited. Pen peered through a casement, watching the raindrops puncture the mud soup in the creek below. Gavin took the Pan-pipes from his side pocket and fiddled with them, blowing experimentally, eliciting only a tuneless whistle.
‘Can I try?’ Ghost asked after a few minutes. ‘I used to play... something. It was metal, and you blew on it, and sucked on it, and music came out. I’ve forgotten what it was called. A monica... something like that.’
‘These are meant to be magic,’ said Gavin, his mind filling with unfamiliar recollection. ‘I got them in... in a souk. The man sold flying carpets too, but they didn’t fly.’
A little reluctantly, he handed Ghost the pipes.
Another rat appeared from a hole in the wall, stealing the pie crust from its dead friend.
Ghost remembered Tomkin warbling his ballads for pennies, while the gang stole the sixpences and shillings that remained behind. The memory gave him a strange twisty pain inside, because most of the Lost Boys were gone, and Tomkin was singing for the Duke now, in a cold grand house full of servants and strangers. It was said the Duke did not sleep, haunted by dark deeds from his past, though no one knew what they were, nor had he ever shown even the glimmer of a conscience. But nightmares were generally supposed to torment the wicked, and only the lullabyes of the pure and innocent might cast them out.
Ghost had never sung, not even when he was happy, and the notes he had drawn from the monica had not been of a purity to ward off demons. But the pipes were different. They might even have been formed of hollow reeds, like the original pipes which the great god Pan had made in the legend. Ghost didn’t know if they looked magical or not, but the thought of Tomkin made him want to play.
He put the pipes to his lips, and blew. A trill of sound emerged, uncertain but very clear, pure and sweet as the warble of a bird. He was staring at the rat as he blew, with the fixed, brooding stare he always reserved for rodents.
He paused for a minute, then tried again.
Pen and Gavin looked at Ghost. Then they looked at the rat.
It had stopped nibbling the stale pastry and was standing on its hind legs, watching Ghost. A second rat came out of the wall, then a third. And they all just stood there, watching the piper with unblinking eyes.
‘LOOK AFTER THE girls,’ Ghost said to Gavin. ‘I’ll be back.’
‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’ said Mags. ‘You won’t go sticking the Duke with that chive?’
Ghost smiled. He didn’t smile very often, if at all, and the smile was awkward, stiff from lack of use. It made a tiny crease in his cheek which hadn’t been there before.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t.’
The crease vanished as if it had never been.
‘I’ll be back.’
He disappeared down the ladder, into
the dark where he belonged.
IN THE SHOP in Close Shave Alley Ghost sat in the old barber’s chair, stroking the pipes. He had never learned to play, but he remembered he had been good with the monica, long ago in the Home. The other kids had listened, and asked him for their favourite tunes, until one of the grownups took it away. But back in the loft, with the pipes at his lips, all he had done was blow. The pipes had been playing him, taking his breath, his thought, and turning them into those few clear notes – a trill, a thrill, a warble, a babble – a fleeting cadenza of magical sound. The pipes of Pan, the goat-legged god of wildness and madness, the devil-god who came before Christ. Ghost had read about Pan, though he couldn’t recall where. For tonight, he would be Pan, Pan the devil-god, blowing the pipes till the rats came dancing across the floor, their paws drumming to the rhythm of the spell...
Follow the piper who calls the tune...
by twilight and starlight and light of the moon
dance on a pinhead and spit in a spoon
a sword-dance, a fire-dance, a dance-till-you-swoon...
The door to the cellar stood ajar. Big Belinda had gone that way; soon, she must return. Ghost sat in the dark, needing neither lamp nor candle. He might not hear the bolts withdrawn but the door to the passage would heave and creak as it opened, and he would see the torchlight running ahead of them up the stair.
He waited.
In the loft, Mags and Gavin and Pen waited, listening to the rain start and stop, playing cards with a pack once the property of Mr Sheen, from which Sly had pinched all the aces...
At another door, Jinx waited, with Hoover, wishing she’d brought her iPod, forced to start thinking in order to fill up the time...
Ghost caught the noise from the cellar, saw the torch-glow leap along the wall. He blew on the pipes, softly, softly, heard the rustle of sound in the deserted shop – microscopic movements, fairy-footed, the tittupping of tiny paws... And from the stairs, heavy footsteps. The mute came in, Big Belinda following, billowing shape blending into billowing shadow. She was holding a bag which chinked with the muffled chink of coins.
