The Peculiar

by Stefan Bachman

  Dr. Harrow looked doubtful. “You say you do not know her at all?”

  “Oh, I don’t,” Mr. Jelliby assured him hurriedly. “I’d. . just like to ask her something, if that’s all right.”

  “And that is a gnome?” the doctor asked, pointing a thumb toward Bartholomew. “He will have to stay out. They are likely to plot together by magic.”

  Mr. Jelliby hadn’t thought of that. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll be back shortly, boy.”

  Dr. Harrow motioned for Mr. Jelliby to follow, and the two of them went out into a corridor and down a flight of metal stairs. At the foot of the stairs was another corridor, but this one was low and vaulted, with whitewashed walls and a green tile floor. Thick iron doors lined both sides. The smell of lye soap and carbolic soda hung in the air, so strong it burned in Mr. Jelliby’s nostrils, and yet even that wasn’t able to cover the stench of filthy humans and faeries.

  The doctor led him to one of the doors and motioned the guard who sat at the far end of the passage to unlock it.

  They were shown into a stark white room. It had no windows, no comforts at all. Its only furnishing was a plain wooden chair in the center of the floor. And seated on it, dark and still, was the lady in plum.

  The gloves had been pulled from her hands so that her fingerprints could be taken. Parts of her dress had been cut away. Her hat was still in place, though, hiding her eyes.

  “The faery inhabiting her is some sort of leeching faery,” the doctor explained, circling her. “A parasite. Such cases are extraordinary. Usually the parasite will take over the consciousness of an animal or a tree. That it should attach itself in such a way to a human is almost unheard of. According to Spense, once the parasite has infiltrated its host, it begins to slowly consume it. The leeching faery takes over the mind, worms into flesh and sinew. . ” He pulled aside the locks of hair at the back of her head, revealing the twisted, mangled face underneath. “Only the voice box is said to be impossible to control. So beware, should you ever cross paths with a silent cow.” The doctor tittered at his own joke.

  The face beneath the hair was the ugliest thing Mr. Jelliby had ever seen. Not human, barely fay, a sagging mass of teeth and tentacles and wrinkled skin. Its mouth hung open. Its eyes were shut, almost hidden under the swelling wound from Bartholomew’s cobblestone.

  “The faery is under a powerful sedative,” Dr. Harrow said, letting the hair fall back. “By the looks of things it has been inhabiting the lady for many months. It is rooted very deeply. Anything it eats or feels will to some extent affect her as well. She will be drowsy. I doubt she will be able to tell you anything useful.”

  Mr. Jelliby nodded. Kneeling down so that he could see under her hat, he said, “Miss? Miss, can you hear me?”

  There was no response. She sat there, a dark statue upon the chair, and did not stir.

  Mr. Jelliby looked over his shoulder at the doctor. “Consumed her, you say? Will she live? Can’t the faery be. . extricated somehow?”

  “Surgically perhaps,” Dr. Harrow answered coolly. “But I do not know if she will ever fully recover, if her mind will ever work on its own again, or her limbs follow her own directions. It is very doubtful.”

  Mr. Jelliby turned back to the lady, his face grave. “Melusine?” he said quietly.

  This time her eyelids flickered open. The eyes underneath were dead-black, glistening.

  He breathed in sharply. “Melusine, you asked for my help, do you remember?” The words came quickly and quietly. “I don’t know if I have helped you at all. I hope you will be safe here. But in truth I am the one in desperate need of your help. Do you remember anything of the past few months? Where you were? What you did? Melusine?”

  She continued to stare straight ahead.

  “I need you to remember,” he whispered. “Could you try?” Behind him the doctor was frowning, one hand on the alarm bell. “Anything! Anything at all!”

  Something shifted in her eyes then, a change behind the mask of her face. Her mouth opened. She sighed a long, drowsy sigh.

  “There was a hallway,” she said. It was so sudden it made Mr. Jelliby start. “A hallway into the Moon.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Mr. Jelliby thought he saw something. A mass of dark, swarming along the white wall.

  “I was hurrying down it,” the lady went on. “Searching for something. And there was someone behind me. . standing. . staring after me.”

  Mr. Jelliby glanced at the wall. Nothing there. He stood, turning his back on the lady. “That was me in the hallway,” he said quietly. “In Nonsuch House. It was not the moon.” Her mind was quite gone. She would be no help to him.

  “I’ll be going now,” he said, addressing Dr. Harrow. “My utmost gratitude for your time.”

  The bearded man gave a small bow. “Oh, not at all,” he said, and his blue eyes gleamed with a strange light. “Not. . at. . all.” With a flourish, he opened the door to the cell and held it for Mr. Jelliby to step through.

  Mr. Jelliby smiled weakly. He walked toward the door. But just as he was crossing the threshold, he spun. His fist flew up and he struck the doctor square between the eyes. Then he bolted down the corridor.

  “Boy?” he cried, knocking aside the guard and hurtling up the stairs. “Boy, get out of here!”

  Dr. Harrow’s lips: they hadn’t moved.

  CHAPTER XV

  Goblin Market

  Bartholomew thought he heard something in the depths of the building, a faint banging vibrating up through the water pipes and the walls. He looked over at the scowling secretary. The man was busy hammering away at a typewriter. He didn’t seem to have noticed anything.

  The noise was getting louder. Bartholomew could hear it even above the clatter of the keys. A heavy clang, like a metal door slamming. Then running feet, pounding somewhere in the depths of the building. Shouts. Someone was shouting at the top of his lungs, but Bartholomew couldn’t hear the words.

  The secretary’s fingers froze, hovering above the keys. He looked up sharply, black eyebrows bristling.

  The shouting came closer. Bartholomew didn’t dare move, but his ears were straining, trying to make out the cries. Just a little bit closer. .

  Both Bartholomew and the secretary caught the words at the same time. “Run, boy!” Mr. Jelliby was screaming. “Get out!”

  The secretary leaped. Sheaves of papers went sailing into the air as he scrambled across his desk, but Bartholomew was too quick. He ran out the door, slamming it behind him. He turned just in time to see Mr. Jelliby stumbling up out of a stairwell, eyes wild and frightened.

  “Run for the street! We’ll find each other outside!”

  The hallway of the police station was lined with dozens of walnut doors and all those doors seemed to open at once, revealing ruddy, curious faces and loose ties. A few officers ran out, struggling with the buckles on their weapons. Mr. Jelliby barged past them. Bartholomew wormed under them, and soon they were both out in the open again, limping and stumbling among the supports of the iron bridge.

  Mr. Jelliby glanced back over his shoulder. Dr. Harrow had reached the steps of the police station. He was walking jerkily, blood running from his nose where Mr. Jelliby had struck him. Behind him, police officers shouted and pushed, staring in confusion after the fleeing figures. Two blew their whistles and gave chase, but they were soon lost in the evening crowds as Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby hurried deeper into the city.

  Mr. Jelliby guessed right away why the police did not try harder to catch him. They knew who he was. A member of the Privy Council with a penchant for spying and violent outbreaks could not very well disappear. They would be wiring London right this very minute, telling the constabulary to send a patrol to the house on Belgrave Square, with orders to have him arrested as soon as he arrived.

  But Mr. Jelliby had no intention of returning to London. Not yet. There were two more addresses on that scrap of paper. Two lives he could possibly save. As long as Ophelia isn’t in London. .
He hoped she had gone to Cardiff. It would break her heart if she were in Belgrave Square when the police came.

  When they had slowed enough that they could breathe again, Bartholomew scurried forward.

  “What happened?” he asked, dodging a heap of wicker-bound casks to keep at Mr. Jelliby’s side. He didn’t really want to know. It would probably make him angry. They had wasted so many hours in there, and it was likely because the gentleman had done something foolish again and gotten in trouble for it. But Bartholomew thought he should try to say something to make up for being silent when the man had thanked him.

  “Melusine was a pawn,” Mr. Jelliby said, not even glancing at Bartholomew. He raised his hand, hailing a passing cab drawn by two giant wolves. The cab didn’t stop. The wolves loped on, yellow eyes dull and unseeing. Mr. Jelliby scowled after them. “It makes a bit of sense now, I suppose. The lady was controlled by a faery. Like a puppet on a string. And I’d wager my little finger that faery works for the Lord Chancellor. It’s why she tried to kill me, and now that she’s locked up with the Bath police the faery’s gone into the bearded chap. He looked a bit unsteady on his feet, though. It’ll buy us some time, I hope, before he’s after us again.”

  Mr. Jelliby hailed another cab. This one stopped, coal smoke belching from every seam, but it clacked away noisily when he told the driver where they wanted to go.

  Mr. Jelliby cursed and set off again, crossing a stone bridge that spanned a frothing little river. “We’ll need to buy provisions. Weapons, perhaps, and I want a hat. I have no idea what is waiting for us at the other coordinates, but I will be prepared.”

  “What coordinates?” Bartholomew asked. “I need to find my sister. Where are we going?”

  “North. I can’t tell you where your sister is, but I know where John Lickerish’s birds flew, and if she’s anywhere, she’s there. We must get to the faery city and find a train to Yorkshire. We’re going north.”

  Not fifteen minutes after they had fled the police station, they were both collapsed behind the red curtain of a rickshaw, jolting up the road into New Bath. The rickshaw was of the conventional sort, helmed by a large-wheeled bicycle and pedaled by a very tiny spryte, who gasped and strained against the pedals with all his might.

  The interior was dark. Mr. Jelliby sat sprawled across the bench, holding his aching head and moaning. Bartholomew had pressed himself into the farthest corner.

  When he was certain the gentleman wasn’t paying attention, he parted the curtain an inch and looked out in awe at the vertical city unfolding around him. Never in all his life had he entered New Bath. It was barely half a mile of narrow streets away from Old Crow Alley, but in Bartholomew’s world that was an impenetrable forest. You didn’t simply go places. It was unwise to leave the house, dangerous to go into the street, but it was mind-bogglingly foolish to venture out of the faery slums. Bartholomew had not needed to be mind-bogglingly foolish until very recently. Besides, Mother didn’t like New Bath. She had always told him it was a wicked, deadly place, even worse than the faery districts of the old city. New Bath, she had said, was where the Sidhe ran rampant, where the fay lived in all the wildness and lawlessness of their own country, and where not even the long arm of the Royal Police could reach. When Bartholomew was very small, she had gathered him into her lap and told him a tale about how New Bath was a living, breathing creature, and that one day it would grow legs and open its cloud-gray eyes and stalk away into the countryside, leaving the city behind it.

  Staring out from behind the curtain, Bartholomew almost believed Mother’s story. The rickshaw was creaking up a steep road made of stone and seemingly held aloft by the branches of a massive tree. Evening was approaching, and little yellow lights were springing up all about, lining the street and sprinkling the mass of odd buildings with droplets of gold.

  Bartholomew pulled his cloak tighter around him. It was all so very different from Old Bath. Everything was quieter, the shadows somehow deeper. Now and then he thought he heard a sad passage of music flitting in and out on the breeze, brushing against his ears like moth wings. He imagined it was the city’s thoughts escaping from its brain and dancing away through the air. There were no steam creatures here either, he noticed. No street trolleys, or automatons. No technology of any sort. Perhaps that was why it seemed so silent. The only engines in the whole place were those rattling in and out of the New Bath Train Terminal far below, near the roots of the city, and that was a relic from an age past, when the government had tried to connect the faery city with the rest of England. It was the only thing that connected the two. Those iron tracks. Nothing else.

  Spluttering and heaving, the poor spryte at the helm of the rickshaw steered them up the wide thoroughfare, past towers and hovels and houses hanging from chains, until they came to the edge of a vast open space at the heart of the city. It’s not so much like a monster, Bartholomew thought. It’s more like an apple. A huge, black, rotten apple with the core pulled out. The space extended from the structures on the ground, all the way to the clouds far above. Walkways wrapped around it, crisscrossing it on all the many levels-bridges and ladders and gangplanks trussed up with ropes, dangling, creaking, swaying. Thousands of small shops lined them, shacks, and carts, giant silk cocoons of the sort butterflies slip from, and colorful tents with fluttering awnings. Lanterns shone from every post and railing, turning the walkways into blazing ribbons.

  “We’ve arrived,” the spryte panted, collapsing against the handlebars. “The Goblin Market.”

  Mr. Jelliby pulled back the rickshaw’s curtain and stepped out, staring. Bartholomew followed cautiously.

  They stood at the end of the stone road, hundreds of feet up, and faeries swarmed everywhere. More faeries than he had ever seen in his life. Faeries of all shapes and sizes, some small and pale like Mrs. Buddelbinster, some brown and knobby like Mary Cloud, some enormously tall. There were leaf-green ones and silvery ones, ones that looked like they were made entirely of mist, and graceful nut-colored ones with dragonfly wings sprouting from their backs. They moved in a constant stream along the walkways, spinning and turning upward and downward. And yet the whole enormous space was eerily quiet. There was a sound in the air, but it was not the cacophony of shouts and clattering machines that filled the alleyways of Old Bath below. It was a steady, unbroken whisper, like a thousand dead leaves all rustling at once.

  Mr. Jelliby tossed the rickshaw driver a coin, and he and Bartholomew moved into the market. Dozens of black eyes turned to watch them as they passed. Voices, sharp and suspicious, poked at their backs. Bartholomew kept close behind Mr. Jelliby, head lowered, wishing his cloak was made of stone and brambles, wishing he could retreat into it as far as he liked. But the faeries weren’t even glancing at him. He realized it with a start. The faeries were staring at the gentleman.

  They pushed down the walkways for several minutes, and Bartholomew could tell by the way the man stuck out his chin and looked straight ahead that he was becoming nervous. Bartholomew felt an angry little glow in his chest. That’s what it’s like, he thought. Now you know, too. It was as if they had switched places going up the road in the rickshaw. Bartholomew almost belonged here in this strange place. He could do the same things everyone else did, and no one would drag him off for it. No one would even notice him. For once in his life it wasn’t he who was peculiar.

  Pushing back his hood, he peered in wonder at the shops surrounding him. One sold beautiful black bottles with labels like SORROW WINE or OCTOPUS INK or DISTILLATION OF HATE. Another sold coins, towers and heaps of them, but when Bartholomew passed close by and really looked at them, he saw only leaves and dirt. Another shop had row upon row of fat, bloodred flies stuck to a board with sewing pins.

  He spotted a stand laid out with an array of smooth gray humps and approached it curiously. An ancient crone sat behind the wares, dozing under a crimson hood. Bartholomew took a cautious breath. He reached out and touched one. It was so soft, a lovely roll of perfect, silky fur.
He wanted to bury his whole hand in it and-

  “Scrumptious-looking mouseys, aren’t they,” the crone said suddenly. She hadn’t been dozing. She had been watching him, eyes fixed on him from inside the darkness of her hood.

  Bartholomew jerked his hand away and backed into a troll. It grunted angrily. Then the gentleman was at his side, pulling him along.

  “Come on! No dilly-dallying. We don’t want to spend any more time here than we absolutely must.”

  They crossed a rope bridge, went along another walkway, climbed a knotted ladder, and then Mr. Jelliby scrunched his eyes closed and in a very strained voice told Bartholomew to be so kind and ask for directions. Bartholomew’s insides squirmed at that. The gentleman ought to do it himself. It wasn’t as if the faeries didn’t speak English. But Bartholomew didn’t want the man to think him a coward, either, so he went up to a lithe, scaly creature with webbed hands and glassy eyes and asked very quietly where he might buy a brace of pistols.

  The creature’s diaphanous eyelids slid once across its gaze as it took in Bartholomew’s small cloaked figure. Then it answered in the deepest, roughest English, “Right that way, past the fingernail seller and on seventy foot or so toward the Heartgivers’ booths. Turn left at Nell Curlicue’s candy shop. You’d ’ave to be blind to miss it.”

  Bartholomew nodded to the water faery and hurried after Mr. Jelliby, who had started walking at the words “fingernail seller.” At a candy shop with flavors of “starlight” and “hemlock” and “icicles,” they turned and eventually came to a garish little establishment with the word BAZAAR in colorfully painted letters above the door. Bartholomew waited until Mr. Jelliby had ducked in and then followed.

  The shop called BAZAAR was far larger inside than it looked from the walkway. It seemed to sell everything that ever existed. The front part of the shop had regular things like barrels of crackers and pickles, but the farther back one went the more mysterious the objects for sale became. While Mr. Jelliby haggled awkwardly over the price of a compass, Bartholomew wandered down the aisles, trying to look at everything at once. There were puppets in red-and-black patchwork that blinked at him as he passed, seeds purported to grow into massive beanstalks, and intricate rings and brooches that scuttled on insect legs under bell jars. At the end of one particularly long aisle, he came upon a wire cage that held what looked like a black parrot, wrapped in its wings. The wings were powerful, dark oily feathers sprouting from thick bone. They rose to a point over the creature’s head.