Tall Tales From Pitch End

by Nigel McDowell

  Bruno powered on, legs lifting higher, trees surely closer, aware that his track through the mud – faltering, gouging footsteps – was as clear on the mountainside as the wake of a fishing boat on a placid sea. But total darkness was near enough, the leaves frantic in the wind.

  Then an explosion –

  Heat felt first, sound later, Bruno was catapulting upwards and forwards, slope rushing towards him. The landing was soft. Soft to the point of yielding to the point of swallowing; as soon as he landed he tried to keep moving, lift himself clear of the mud, but the ground embraced hands, his fingers splayed and already submerged to the wrists.

  ‘Follow the track in the mud! Just like the Temperate said!’

  They were stupid, Bruno decided then. Nothing but stupid. And he’d feel even more stupidity in himself if he was caught by them. Why hadn’t he taken another route? Skulked by the wall and waited till they’d left?

  He’d stopped struggling, was sinking slower but still sinking. Then more pain – his scalp! Bruno looked up and saw a figure with hand outstretched, tugging on his hair, trying to pull him from the mud. He couldn’t see a face. Bruno offered his hand as a better option and whoever it was released the hair and took the hand. From below, Bruno thought this figure looked no taller than himself (someone about to Come-Of-Age?) but he had as much strength as a man and freed Bruno from the mud with a great heave and a churning squelch.

  Lantern light skimmed the ground, touching on Bruno.

  He froze like a spooked hare.

  An Enforcer cried, ‘This way! Track’s towards the trees now!’

  ‘Do ye have the book?’ said the voice of whoever had pulled Bruno to safety. A boy, thought Bruno but, like Louise at first, the boy wasn’t entirely, decidedly there.

  Bruno nodded.

  ‘Well do ye?’ asked the voice again, giving Bruno a dig in the side with something sharp.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Good.’ And then the boy became clear, as seeable as anyone could be in the dark. ‘Those Enforcers better not be coming into our wood,’ the boy said. ‘They’ll be regretting that, I can tell ye now. Let’s go. Quick-smart.’

  The boy dragged Bruno on. By the hand thankfully, not the hair. On the mud, the boy didn’t slip or falter once. But Bruno could see a problem in this boy –

  ‘They’ll see ye!’ Bruno told him desperately.

  ‘They won’t,’ the boy said right back. ‘I’m unseeable to them. We’ve all the Talent – all the Rebels. I’m just letting ye see me now. Understand?’

  Bruno understood but didn’t reply, just kept going; struggling, still falling more than advancing.

  ‘Take em off,’ the boy said. ‘Those big oul shoes of yers!’

  ‘No,’ Bruno said, then added, meaning it – ‘I need them.’

  ‘Ye’d be surprised what ye don’t need when ye get rid of it,’ said the boy. ‘Suppose ye’ll be needing them rightly though when ye’re walking to see the Temperate. Ye’ll look rightly-presentable.’

  Bruno sighed. He balanced with one hand against a tree, tugging at the laces in turn and letting his father’s old shoes fall away. Once again he was just in socks in mud and rain and night.

  ‘Don’t just be leaving them!’ said the boy, who ducked for Bruno’s shoes, tied the laces together and flung them into the air like a slingshot. They thudded far off. The attention of most Enforcers followed.

  ‘Good job,’ the boy told himself, watching lantern light veer away.

  They didn’t move. Bruno could see no expression on the boy’s face, had only a sense of two wide, watchful eyes overhung with thick, curled hair.

  They waited.

  ‘Go!’ cried the boy suddenly, loud as a gunshot, pushing Bruno on as though this were all an entertainment, that being caught would mean only bringing the end of the game. And a pair of Enforcers of course heard, saw and (‘This way here!’) followed.

  Bruno found it only a bit easier in his sock-soles to negotiate the slope, the boy still leading him by the hand; the Enforcers in the forest now, cracking branches. Bruno imagined what they must be seeing, following: the boughs ahead being swept aside of their own volition.

  ‘Up here,’ said the boy, a little quieter.

  He cupped his hands, laced his fingers together and took Bruno’s socked foot in the sudden stirrup, heaving him up towards a low-hanging branch. Bruno remembered his climbing attempts in Old Town and tried to do better. But his fingers only clawed, legs pedalling like a dozing dog, and he just about dangled and no more. The branch was a lucky choice though, strong enough to hold his scrambling body. The boy’s support vanished suddenly from beneath him as he scaled the tree too, though more expertly than Bruno – grasping a branch with both hands and slipping feet first and upside down into the tangle of branches and coming to rest, flat, just as Bruno managed to achieve something like stability.

  The Enforcers ran out of trail just below. Neither Enforcer spoke, just directed their rifles ahead, lantern beams stabbing the dark. They stood, waiting for a clue to visit them.

  A few moments passed.

  Bruno could hear other Enforcers, somewhere else –

  ‘Any sign? Any sound?’

  Rain leaked from above, one branch to another, touching Bruno’s hair, ears, toes. His foot jerked, the branch beneath him creaked and the Enforcers shared a look with one another, infinitesimal, before aiming upwards and firing off a shot each. The first struck high into the tree, scattering birds, and the second snapped against the branch supporting Bruno who couldn’t help but cry out as it gave way. He fell, landing and rolling across the mud –

  ‘What’s doing that?’ said one of the Enforcers, eyes wide, seeing nothing but the long graze caused by Bruno’s unseeable body.

  ‘Some kinda phantasm,’ replied the other. ‘I knew these woods were rightly-haunted. Just shoot at it!’

  Bruno willed himself to be seen, even held up his hands like it would do any good but the boy who’d pulled him free of the mud acted first –

  He leapt, unseen by anyone but Bruno but surely heard as he gave a guttering war cry and pulled a dagger with a warped blade from his belt. No delay, no time for the Enforcers to react, he wrapped his forearm around one of their necks and dragged the blade across – a snap, a jerk in the dark.

  Bruno looked away.

  The second Enforcer took off, lantern falling and blinking out, his rifle rattling useless at his side, abandoning his comrade without hesitation. Bruno knew they wouldn’t have long before more came. He still didn’t look. He’d seen death before, murder even, but that had been ten turns ago. He couldn’t rid himself of the vision of the blade, scoring his sight – the tug of the boy’s arm, the flash across the neck, something about it so easy, perfunctory.

  ‘Ye’re just gonna lie about in the muck then, are ye?’ said the boy, his bare foot falling beside Bruno’s face, looking inhuman, like a slab of compacted mud. ‘Hardly Michael Atlas’s son, if ye’re gonna be a cowardly boat-jumper when things get tough.’ He offered his hand. ‘We’ve not got a whole bag of time, ye know!’

  Sure enough, the alarm had been raised – more Enforcers were penetrating the forest, would soon find the body. Bruno took the boy’s hand against any good judgement and was dizzied by the abrupt wrench to his feet. He wanted badly to puke, but didn’t have time; like after he’d punched Sabitha, he felt contaminated by violence.

  ‘I know a place,’ the boy told him. ‘It’s safe enough. Before that though…’

  He left Bruno’s hand to hover, ducking down to the dark heap of the Enforcer. He undid buttons, forced his hand into the Enforcer’s tunic and came away with a small box.

  ‘We’ll need these for later, calm the oul nerves,’ he told Bruno, and on they went.

  More lantern light, casting shadows like lightning rods, and Bruno saw the boy’s hand – he’d stolen a pack of cigarettes. He felt closer to retching.

  Not much farther on there was a fresh sound – the scrambl
e of paws and pant and growl of hounds, joining the chase.

  ‘They want ye right badly. In here,’ said the boy suddenly, and he pointed to the base of a tree. Bruno stopped, reaching out, feeling a deep knot in the trunk.

  ‘In!’ the boy insisted.

  Bruno, willed by the boy’s hands, pushed on, finding the knot ready to stretch, to accommodate, and he slipped – pointed hands and bowed head, legs, ankles, socked feet and all, satchel catching a bit – into a tunnel that bored downwards like a fall, through cold and wet, roots snatching at his clothes, into the heart of the mountain. The tunnel left his sides and he braced his arms across his face just as he collided with hard ground, forehead taking the brunt of the landing. Not a tick later, the boy landed beside-almost-on-top of him, though he managed to find his feet quicker.

  The boy cried out again, the same holler of elation as above when he’d leapt on the Enforcer. ‘Now that’s the way to get round an Enforcer!’ he shouted.

  Bruno emptied his stomach finally, easily.

  When he was done, he concentrated only on breathing, fingers searching his face for any wound. But he was so saturated with rain he couldn’t tell what might’ve been blood. He needed to know where he was but couldn’t see anything. Listened, but there was nothing much to hear except his own breathing and a steady dripping sound, like he was surrounded by dribbling taps. He sneezed and heard an echo.

  There was a spark of light so close Bruno whimpered. It was the boy striking a match, lighting one of his stolen cigarettes. He sucked on it, its light giving a brief impression of a face; Bruno registered again a ragged mass of curls, then a glitter of stubble on the chin and two eyes dominating – even by the temporary light, Bruno knew they were bright blue.

  ‘Is Louise safe?’ the boy asked.

  ‘I think so,’ said Bruno, still not getting to his feet. To his own ears his voice sounded too big for his battered body. ‘She gave me the key to the Passing Gate, then I got out. And I think—’

  ‘Ye think?’ said the boy. ‘Well, good thing she can take care of herself.’

  ‘She told me to leave,’ said Bruno, feeling the need to explain. ‘I didn’t just run off.’

  ‘I know ye didn’t,’ said the boy. ‘She can be pushy at the best of times. And what about Pace-the-Witherman, how was he when ye left him?’

  Bruno could say nothing. How could he explain it? Explain what he’d seen, what he’d felt at what he’d seen. His silence said too much.

  ‘So that’s one less on our side,’ said the boy.

  ‘He didn’t give in,’ said Bruno, feeling again he needed to make clear. ‘Even at the end, he wasn’t for just giving in to the Temperate.’

  ‘Stood by and just watched, did ye?’ said the boy. He hadn’t returned to the cigarette. ‘Again – not a bit like yer father.’

  ‘Ye knew him?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘I did indeed,’ said the boy. He sucked again on the cigarette, finally, the light conjuring the same view – hair, stubble, wide eyes…

  ‘Then ye know who I am,’ said Bruno, trying to make it sound a statement, not a hopeful question.

  ‘I do indeed,’ said the boy. ‘Thing is – do ye know me?’

  Bruno felt something squirm at the back of his mind, something close to memory, but closer still to experience. Truth was, he felt as though he should know who this boy was. But the knowledge didn’t arrive with him.

  ‘No,’ he had to say. ‘Except that ye’re one of the Rebels?’

  Another drag – slow this time.

  ‘Indeed I am,’ said the boy, varying his response only the slightest. ‘Son of a Rebel, now a Rebel meself. Just like you.’ He took the deepest drag yet. This time the light swelled to reveal something of the ground: crude formations – rock, mud? – surrounded them, things that Bruno’s imagination was keen to interpret as crouching animals or cowering children, his eyes darting from shape to shape, trying to take them all in. Then gone. The cigarette fell and its light was squeezed under the boy’s bare foot.

  Dark again, and the impression of unknown space all around.

  ‘Here.’

  Something soft struck Bruno’s face.

  ‘Lie on that there,’ said the boy. ‘Ye look like ye haven’t slept in a long while. I’ll wake ye when it’s time to head on up the mountain. There’s some food in there, a match too, case ye need some light.’

  ‘I’m not afeared of the dark,’ said Bruno.

  ‘Didn’t say ye were,’ said the boy. ‘I was thinking more if ye needed to take a piss or something.’

  The boy’s last words receded. Bruno listened and heard the faint peel and slap of bare feet on stone, moving away.

  ‘What’s yer name?’ Bruno called, standing up at last, needing something certain before he could rest or sleep, neither of which seemed probable.

  In the wake of his question he felt a tension like the tautening of a fiddle string – a connecting line between himself and the boy, long-established, now winding tight. The boy’s footsteps stopped. Then he spoke, proud and unhurried: ‘I am Nicholas M. Delby Junior. And my da was the man who, so they’ve always been saying in Pitch End, murdered yer father.’

  XVIII

  Cavern of the Forgotten

  It was a familiar nightmare for him: Bruno screaming but no one hearing, no sound even coming out. In the Discussion Chamber he was crying for justice, raging against the Temperate but with no one who cared. All the faces of the Pitch Enders watched. And where their eyes should’ve been were mouths, toothless, contorting, keenly condemning. And where their mouths should’ve been were pocket watches running backwards at sickening speed. Their legs were deep-rooted … then roots proper that squirmed for purchase, inching forwards for him with fingers dark twigs, nails dull needles, scalps disgorging boughs like the broken roofs of Old Town, their mouths widening to shriek, a righteous roar,

  deafening –

  Bruno woke and sat up, gasping, rapping his elbow against stone. Sweat beetled down his back. Stone, not mattress? It took him a few moments to remember where he was, who he was with, and what he had stolen. He rubbed his eyes and looked about.

  The place he’d slept in was lighter, perhaps. Morning must’ve arrived, he thought, and somehow managed to enter even this place, allowing less than a total dark. The stone shapes he’d glimpsed the night before were clearer, slimed with moisture, hunched like boils on skin and not so much resembling things from life above.

  ‘Awake, are we?’

  Bruno turned, breath catching, inhaling and coughing on a serpent of blueish cigarette smoke; Nicholas M. Delby Junior was leaning against the wall of the cavern, watching.

  The son of the man they say murdered my father, remembered Bruno.

  ‘Ye could have that food now,’ said Nicholas.

  Bruno didn’t want to do just as directed, but he was hungry. He dragged his legs closer to his chest, found the package and opened it. Inside was a fist of hearth bread, a small and flat, sweet-smelling griddle cake, a fawn-coloured apple and the remains of a catfish. He cracked the bread against rock, ripped and tried to eat, but could hardly swallow it was so tough. He switched to fish, discovering bones with each nibble, dragging them from between his teeth. And all the time Bruno examined Nicholas in sideways looks, trying to work him out.

  The boy’s face was so engrained with filth it looked as though it’d been tattooed there. A shift – a threadbare vest stitched and re-stitched, mended with wool and thread across the chest and under the arms – was all he wore for a top, a pair of torn trousers on his lower half. Then back to the eyes – blue, as Bruno had thought the night before, and brimful with whatever he was thinking, like two flooded saucers. Now he looked only calm and watchful. And despite the wildness of his appearance, Nicholas didn’t seem remotely abashed. One hand remained fixed around the hilt of a dagger that was fastened to his belt, the warped blade clean of what it had recently done. There were other things alongside the blade, but it was still too dim for Brun
o to be sure what they were, except that they all had a burnished look that declined light.

  Finished with what he could of the fish, Bruno got up, adding the apple to his pocket. He only realised then that (apart from the one nightmare he’d woken from) he’d probably had his most undisturbed night of sleep in many months, countless turns.

  Nicholas took another drag, smoked the cigarette as though it were an entitlement. He offered the box to Bruno, who shook his head.

  ‘Are we going on?’ said Bruno. He settled the hearth bread and griddle cake in the blanket he’d been given and folded it up. Then he said, felt he should add, ‘Nicholas.’

  ‘Nic,’ came the reply. ‘Call me Nic. Ye’ll be the odd one out if ye don’t.’

  ‘Right,’ replied Bruno.

  He kept his back to Nic as he unfastened the flap of his satchel, briefly, to check on the book, the pocket watch – still there. He buckled it tightly and lifted it onto his shoulders.

  ‘Ye have yer father’s pocket watch,’ said Nic.

  Bruno didn’t turn.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bruno. ‘Why?’

  ‘And tell me this,’ said Nic, ‘does the Temperate have Pace’s pocket watch?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bruno. He felt that Nic already knew the answer. ‘And Gumbly-the-Witherman’s was taken out so he—’

  ‘Has all the Withermen’s pocket watches now,’ Nic finished.

  Bruno turned, and saw that Nic held a pocket watch of his own on his palm.

  ‘Me da’s,’ said Nic. ‘Left it to me, same as yer father left his to you.’ A click, a sombre whirr, and the lid of Nic’s pocket watch flowered. He allowed Bruno to see: not a clock face beneath, instead the full, gaping face of the moon, a pale coin of light in Nic’s hand. ‘That Temperate has been searching ever since the end of the Single Season War for all eight pocket watches.’

  ‘That’s why he did it,’ said Bruno suddenly, voice echoing, realisation sending a shiver through his words. ‘All the clocks and everything – that’s why he Elder-Ordered to collect them all ten turns ago?’

  But Nic didn’t seem to see a point in answering. Instead, pocket watch refastened to his belt, more questions of his own – ‘What else do ye know about the Elders? About that book ye’re carrying on yer back?’