Tall Tales From Pitch End

by Nigel McDowell

  Bruno said nothing. He felt shamed. Shamed at his surprise. What had he expected? What life did he think he’d have in the lighthouse? Think he’d be apart from Pitch End, isolated, alone but independent on the western headland, no longer answerable to the Elders? He realised that he’d never had a choice. Not until that moment.

  ‘Day after day,’ Pace was saying. ‘Turn upon turn just scribbling and—’

  ‘Enough,’ said Bruno. He waited, aware of Louise descending the steps then stopping, watching. Then he decided. Bruno let the book drop from his hand and said, ‘What do I need to do?’

  ‘Good on ye!’ shouted Louise. ‘Here,’ she said, and a satchel was flung to Bruno. ‘Ye can put the pocket watch and things in that. I’ll find ye some new shoes too, bound to be some of yer da’s here.’

  ‘We need to hit that Temperate where it hurts,’ said Pace, smiling. Bruno heard tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick … the Witherman’s heart as swift as a rabbit’s foot. ‘That Temperate might be acting like The Book of Black & White is the most indecent thing in Pitch End, but he needs it more than anyone. So we’re going to steal it.’

  ‘How?’ said Bruno. ‘It’s Curfew, there’ll be Sentries about everywhere.’

  ‘I’ll see to ’em!’ said Louise, searching again through the dresser. ‘I’ll do something rightly-stealthy to sort them out.’

  Bruno didn’t feel much consoled.

  ‘But what if I’m seen by someone else?’ he asked.

  ‘Ye won’t be,’ Pace whispered, still smiling.

  ‘Like I towl ye earlier on,’ said Louise, ‘if ye don’t want someone to see ye, they won’t. Ye see ye need to just—’

  Pace said, ‘No. Don’t be telling him. There’s some things ye can’t be just told. Some things ye need to be learning for yerself.’

  XIV

  Unseeable

  The moon a wound, a nick on the night sky; an absence of stars; lizard-tongue clouds licking up the little moonlight – the scene as Curfew seized Pitch End, townsfolk all home but Bruno Atlas not where he was supposed to be. On a darkway just off South Street, in an old pair of his father’s shoes they’d found in the lighthouse – which were two sizes too big – he was waiting with Pace-the-Witherman.

  ‘Alright and ready?’ asked Pace in a whisper.

  Bruno didn’t respond. He adjusted the satchel on his back, contents of the Owl-Sentry inside, listening to the slow clop of hoof on cobble. Then he saw the head of an Enforcer’s horse appear at the end of the alley, moving uphill towards the Clocktower.

  ‘Now or ye’ll never,’ said Pace. ‘Hurry or he’ll just pass … now.’

  And Bruno shut his eyes, trying to believe Pace, remembering what he’d told him to do and feel and think, and stepped out almost into the Enforcer’s path. He hoped some more –

  Bruno opened his eyes.

  The Enforcer moved on.

  Bruno watched the slow flick of the horse’s tail, its head half-turning for a moment as though it sensed. He stepped back into the darkway beside Pace.

  ‘Well done,’ said Pace in a fierce whisper.

  ‘I have Talent?’ muttered Bruno.

  ‘That’s the politest and most Elder-like word for it, but yeh,’ said Pace. ‘All Pitch Enders have it, if they would just learn to use it, learn to feel something. See, it’s all that energy – all that feeling – that comes to the surface when ye’re Coming-Of-Age. Emotion. Rage and pain, bitter stuff and happier stuff too. It all comes bursting out in a hundred different ways, and that’s what fuels a Talent. Learning then to master it is the difficult bit.’

  ‘The Temperate,’ said Bruno, ‘in the town hall, he was able make fire, like my teacher did once. He was able to move things and hold me back and …’ Bruno stopped, horrified not excited by the possibilities. ‘Can ye do anything with Talent?’ he asked Pace.

  ‘Well for some it’s different,’ replied Pace. ‘Some can just do silly tricks, others can make things move or jump about. Others can destroy things. Some people, rightly-special, can do all that and more besides. Some can even create. And yes, some can do whatever they can imagine if they’re controlling their feelings properly.’

  ‘How are we gonna stop Temperate Thomas if he can do anything he can think of?’ asked Bruno.

  Pace sighed. ‘Ye always ask the difficult questions, don’t ye?’

  Bruno felt he should shy, look away, but he didn’t.

  ‘Never mind that now,’ said Pace. ‘Just come back.’

  ‘What?’ asked Bruno.

  ‘I mean let me see ye again. Can’t keep talking to the wall, can I?’

  ‘How can I let ye see me?’ asked Bruno.

  ‘That’s up to yerself,’ said Pace. ‘Ye’re the one who chooses who ye want to see ye and who ye don’t. Ye have to choose how, and how much. But my advice – just imagine a person seeing ye, knowing ye, and they will.’

  Bruno let his thoughts unlatch, relent – strange, but it had been easier to make himself unseeable than to want to be seen again. Then he thought of not being seen by Pace, perhaps ever again. Of being alone, left behind, haunting Pitch End, unable to do anything –

  ‘There now,’ said Pace, suddenly. ‘Ye’re back with me. See, ye’ve got the hang of it rightly. A natural, just like yer dear da.’ A small, grim smile passed over the Witherman’s face, and then he said, ‘Right, let’s see what we can be seeing.’

  He leaned past Bruno and both looked out onto South Street; high on the slope, Enforcers surrounded the Clocktower and town hall, all on horseback, pale chill bursting from the animal’s nostrils. Every few moments, light reached across the sky from the west, passing above their heads like a roaming gaze. But the reappearance of this sudden signal from the lighthouse, the first in two turns, hadn’t drawn away many. Either that, or the number of Enforcers was more than Bruno had known. He counted ten, then another ten at least … then more. But probably even more again, hidden in darkways.

  Bruno’s own gaze wandered, landing on the town hall: unlit, pillars as close to one another as townsfolk passing gossip, a closed fist of a place with secrets clutched safe inside.

  ‘What’ll the Temperate be doing now?’ asked Bruno.

  ‘Planning and plotting,’ said Pace.

  ‘Worrying?’ asked Bruno, then thought it wrong.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Pace. ‘But not doing nothing, ye can bet on that.’

  ‘Why worry over one person?’ said Bruno, remembering the words of the Cinder-Folk. ‘Why bother so much about me? One person isn’t enough to bring back the Rebels.’

  ‘Well,’ said Pace, still peering around the corner of the alley, ‘that’s where ye’re wrong. Even a small whisper, a whimper of rebellion – that’s enough to make that Temperate as nervous as anything, and he’ll want to be silencing it quick-smart. He knows it only takes one and then it’ll start all over again, just like ten turn ago.’

  And then, as though in reply –

  ‘I saw the beam from the lighthouse indeed, Marshall – I thought I gave an Elder Order two turns ago for the thing to be darkened, permanently.’

  Bruno didn’t hear the Marshall’s reply to the Temperate.

  ‘What are ye at just loitering about here?’ Temperate Thomas shouted then, surely to the Enforcers. ‘The eastern fields need to be concentrated on, and the Marsh! Whatever’s going on in the lighthouse could be a rightly-devious ruse to lead us off like wild barnacle geese!’

  Bruno forced himself to lean out to look, though he clung close still to the shadows.

  ‘Temperate,’ said the Marshall, ‘I’ve decided to keep a strong presence of men here, and send some to the lighthouse to have a look. It was for protection as much as anything.’

  ‘Protection?’ said Temperate Thomas. ‘Thank you, Marshall, but neither myself nor the other Elders need protection. And specially not from some boy, Rebel or not. So, it’s decided,’ said the Temperate. ‘Be searching the windmills and the farmer’s cottages, checking for trapdoors. I’d s
ay be especially and rightly-suspicious of bookcases and the like (why would someone need such a thing!). Be as fly as a fox, Marshall. Imagine yerself as a serpent almost, or even worse: a cat. Because be certain of it – that’s how those Rebels will be thinking. I send the Temperate’s most blessed blessing with ye all. Long live Pitch End!’

  ‘And longer live the Elders!’ came the automatic reply.

  The Marshall cried, ‘This way, men!’

  Bruno and Pace retreated as Enforcers charged on to the shoreline and east, towards the fields. The tumult of their hoof beats still audible, Bruno returned to the edge of the darkway.

  ‘There,’ Pace told him, pointing. ‘He’s still there.’

  Temperate Thomas stood at the base of the Clocktower.

  Freed of cloud then, moonlight let them see clear: the Temperate, his focus on the face of the Clocktower, on its motionless hands. Bruno looked closer. In Temperate Thomas’s arms was something large, something black and white.

  ‘How are we ever gonna be getting that book?’ asked Bruno.

  Before an answer from Pace, the doors of the town hall opened and such dark figures were released that Bruno’s first guess was of Widows, his own mother. But no Widow would be treated with such cordiality by Temperate Thomas – Bruno watched him bow to each as they joined him. Bruno counted nine, then realised: the other Elders.

  Bruno took another step forwards, leaning out into South Street, but Pace grabbed his arm, hissing, ‘Stop!’

  Cloud returned to gorge, moonlight lost as Bruno saw the Elders come together, for a moment all drawing close to the base of the Clocktower. Words returned to him that he struggled, for a moment, to place; then he remembered Diamond Beach, the Day of Discovery, bright, hot, and an Elder’s awkward words to a collected child, ‘Tell me – would ye like to see what lies under the Clocktower in the town square?’

  Bruno heard a rough grind of stone, saw a darker opening in the stonework of the Clocktower, and the Temperate leading the Elders inside.

  ‘Where are they going?’ asked Bruno.

  The sound of closing stone as moonlight returned, but too late – the Elders had vanished.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Bruno, so keen to follow. But Pace still had his arm.

  ‘No,’ said the Witherman. ‘We wait for the signal, the plan.’

  Bruno looked all over South Street.

  ‘But it’s safe,’ he said. ‘I can’t see any Cat-Sentries.’

  ‘And they don’t see us,’ said Pace. ‘But it don’t mean we aren’t here, does it?’

  Bruno didn’t move.

  ‘Listen now,’ said Pace suddenly, ‘do ye hear it?’

  Bruno did listen: first nothing, then something … a high-pitched cry. And then he saw her – only a smear of emerald, an apparition, but without any doubt Louise as she rushed across the town square squealing for all the weary world to hear.

  ‘That’s the “rightly-stealthy” signal she was on about?’ said Bruno.

  Pace was laughing, in his own ragged way. ‘Keep watching,’ he managed to say.

  Cat-Sentries snapped into sight. Leaping from rooftops and out of chimney pots, squirming from drainpipes and uncoiling from gutters, from behind lampposts. They all moved swift towards Old Town, all in pursuit of Louise.

  ‘Well,’ said Pace. ‘She gets the job done. Come on.’

  The Witherman marched past Bruno, back hunched, legs struggling to take him up the slope of South Street. Bruno followed, still thinking himself unseeable, his own eyes watchful of the dark, of upstairs windows, doorways, darkways.

  ‘Must’ve used Gumbly’s one to get inside,’ muttered Pace as they reached the Clocktower. Then words to Bruno, holding his hand open and out – ‘Yer pocket watch.’

  Bruno didn’t tell Pace, but he’d taken with him not just his father’s pocket watch but all his secrets, all prized things: the scrap of greaseproof paper, tooth of shingle, shreds of Pitch End Journal, the muddy sepia pictograph of himself, his mother and his father, and the coal Conn had given him. All were saved in the satchel. He removed it to search.

  ‘Quick-smart now,’ said Pace.

  Bruno’s hand brought out the small, brass pocket watch. Pace took it in both hands with as much delicacy as he’d adopted for stitching Bruno’s wound. He turned it over and held it to his ear between few fingers, like something too hot or too cold to the touch, and listened. He grinned. His middle finger slid underneath the base. There was a click that carried too far in the quietness of the night, Bruno thought; a sharp twist, and the lid of the pocket watch split, flowered into four triangular sections, all folding back to reveal the face. Bruno moved in to see, finally: three pin-narrow hands allowed him to know the time – something he hadn’t for too many turns. And incredibly, at that moment both hands mirrored the stopped Clocktower: midnight.

  Bruno heard tick, tick, tick … and felt strengthened by it.

  Pace exhaled, the beat of his own clock-heart quickening.

  ‘Thank the mountains,’ he said. ‘She’s still working well.’

  Bruno felt a desire to snatch it back, examine it further, know it for himself, but Pace had shifted his feet and his intense, careful attention to the Clocktower. His fingertips pattered the surface like he was trying to detect some weak spot and he settled them in the end into a small gouge, a nip in the stone. Bruno looked closer, saw a circular gouge, something more deliberate than a nip – and with four extending, petal-shaped spaces.

  Pace laid the pocket watch, open, into this carefully carved absence in the stone. It fitted without flaw. He turned it. There was the same, slow grind of stone Bruno had heard minutes before and the same doorway opened, a tall slab of stone eased out by the darkest darkness behind. A breeze like a held breath, cold as iron, enwrapped him.

  ‘Go on now,’ said Pace. ‘Ye don’t have much time. They’ll be down there with that book.’

  ‘Me?’ said Bruno.

  ‘Ye think I’d be better?’ said Pace, the rapid tick of his clock-heart unnerving: tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick …

  So Bruno returned his satchel to his back, turned and treated the doorway like an opponent, squaring himself before it, one he didn’t know how to conquer.

  ‘This is the most important thing now,’ said Pace. ‘Everything depends on it. We need that book, or the Temperate, he’ll—’

  ‘He’ll what?’ asked Bruno.

  Pace didn’t answer, at first. ‘I want ye to see it for yerself,’ said Pace. He sighed. ‘Like I said before: some things ye have to see with yer own eyes, no use being told. Now go. I’ll be waiting for ye right here. I’m going nowhere.’

  Bruno knew to ask no more.

  Only one thought made him move forwards, carried him on inside: now’s the time to prove myself. Prove I’m not just all thoughts or all wrong words. Now for action, for doing something.

  Once more he heard the grind of stone as Pace edged the door shut on him, Bruno hoping himself unseeable, and hoping his newfound Talent wouldn’t fail him.

  XV

  Old Before Time

  Enough of an insecure structure from outside, inside the Clocktower Bruno looked to four walls bothered with cracks and felt he could’ve pressed fingers into them, pulled the place apart with little enough effort. Cracks that branched, spread upwards, reaching high into the gaze of the four faces of the clock – four hazy discs of moonlight. At the highest point of the tower, Bruno saw shadows like discarded morsels, shifting and turning and approaching one another at a hop, snapping and complaining and then retreating – the one-footed ravens, apparently as enthral to Curfew as any Pitch Ender.

  Bruno stepped forwards.

  Two staircases were in sight – first being a way up, clinging to the inside of the Clocktower, steps crumbling like soaked bread; second staircase the way down, a spiral thing with a smudge of light somewhere far beneath. Bruno kneeled by the second, fingers poised on the ground. He peered down, listened, but heard nothing.

  He too
k a breath, then began a slow descent, keeping his hand on the central spine, light brightening at the bottom like the opening of a lantern valve. And at each turn of the stair Bruno heaped his thoughts on his Talent, intoning: I am nothing. I am no one that anyone wants to see. Unseeable, nothing at all…

  And then the end. A long, long passageway.

  The light ahead was bright but inconstant, tucked around a final, distant turn.

  Bruno took a step, then stopped once more – the walls had eyes and ears. Cat-Sentries, from uneven floor to sloped ceiling, were settled in their own small niches, each one in a different state of repose and disrepair. Some looked like they could be made to work, Bruno thought, with some attention. He decided some might just be in hibernation, a faint throb of light in their eyes. But others were hopeless, had shed eyes, limbs, one ear or both, and had plenty of dust to adorn them. He counted quickly and calculated, adding rows and columns … the number seemed improbable, until he looked closer –

  Below each Sentry was a name, inked on paper and pinned – Horatio Crywolf, Morris Leadbeater, Elsa Hope, Pace-the-Witherman … this was where the words of the Pitch Enders had been stored. Turn upon turn of things spoken, private and public, held for the kind of event he’d been at the centre of earlier. Words that could be used to incriminate. Bruno’s hands became fists and he would’ve begun to take each Sentry and smash it, crush it underfoot, tear out its clockwork insides, if it weren’t for remembering why he was there, what his mission was. And for Temperate Thomas’s voice –

  ‘That’s it, my dear Elders,’ he was saying. ‘Let us see what we’ve been gifted by those so rightly-generous, rightly-pestilential Pitch Enders this week.’

  He laughed.

  And Bruno – ignoring the Cat-Sentries, hoping they were more dead than dormant – couldn’t go anywhere but onwards. His hearing strained to catch any word. But there were less words and more laughter, and the passageway echoed with the fall of coins…

  ‘My, my,’ he heard the Temperate say, more delight in his voice than Bruno would’ve conceived of, ‘Elder Brackett, that’s a rightly-valuable haul ye have there! And what about Elder Horrfrost, how’s the rheumatism these days? Well, ye’ve been a busy bee, there’s plenty of black pennies there. May the mountains protect ye. Elder Pester, how have the farmers been doing? Keeping to their agreement of quarter for them, three-quarters for the good of the town?’