by Caro King
The thing Strood had found clutched in his hand after he’d drunk the potion was …
‘The Maug!’ murmured Nin. ‘Mr Strood’s death!’
What the Deathweave had done was exactly what Strood had written in his ballad. It had separated Strood’s death from Strood’s life. Which was why Mr Strood couldn’t die.
‘I used to keep it in a jar on the mantelpiece until it got too big,’ said a soft voice behind her. Nin spun around.
‘It didn’t need to eat, of course. But I gave it flies and wasps and small things and it enjoyed taking the lives so much I gave it more.’ Strood spoke affectionately. ‘Mice and rats first, then cats. And the more it fed, the more it grew.’ He smiled at her. ‘And now I give it children. It will eat any Quick, but it likes the young ones best.’
Strood wandered over to the large chair in the corner and sat down.
‘I … um … was just dusting …’
‘Don’t even bother to try,’ said Strood softly. ‘I know you, Ninevah Redstone.’
Nin shut her eyes. For a moment there, just one moment, she had thought she might get away with it, but it seemed her luck had run out after all.
‘Um,’ Nin croaked nervously to the vast guard who had tucked her under one arm and was carrying her down the corridor, ‘I kind of noticed, we’re going to Mr Strood’s laboratory, aren’t we?’
‘Tha’s it,’ said the guard. ‘Though I dunno why, cos ’e’s already got a kiddie fer the Eyes experiment. Perhaps ’e’s jus’ gonna distil ya. Ours not to reason why, eh? Tha’s what my mate Stanley always says.’ Floyd pushed open a plain white door and marched her up to a cage standing against the wall. In it was a kid.
‘’ere we are then,’ said Floyd as kindly as he could. He held her still with one hand – Nin could no more move than if she had been wrapped in steel – and pulled out a key with the other.
Inside the cage the kid stopped being a scrunched-up bundle in the corner and uncurled to look at Nin.
Who felt as if her heart had stopped.
When Floyd shoved her in and locked the door again, she didn’t resist at all. Because the kid in the cage was Toby.
Skerridge shooed away one of Mr Strood’s pet tigers that had come to have a look at him. It gave a short, barking growl, so Skerridge treated it to a blast of fire-breath that singed its paws, but didn’t do any real harm. The tiger bounded away, its gold-and-black blending into the dappled darkness of the attic.
This part of the loft was scattered with earth and had many small, unglazed windows through which beams of light shafted down. To make the tigers feel at home, trees and exotic plants grew in giant pots placed close together, their fallen leaves carpeting the floor and partly burying the skeletal remains of those unfortunates who had annoyed Mr Strood. Through the centre of the vast space, water ran along a narrow trough, its gentle trickling filling the air. And everywhere, piled against the walls, in between the trees and scattered at random along the banks of the trough river, were packing cases and old trunks.
When Strood had taken over the House from Gan Mafig, all of the apothecary’s personal belongings had been crated up and shoved here in the attic – the tigers had been added later.
Skerridge was ready to bet that Seraphine’s things were here too.
The day after the Final Gathering, when Gan Mafig finally came out of his study to discover that Seraphine had gone, he searched Sea View from top to bottom, but all he found was his daughter’s favourite pendant. He never told anyone where he found it exactly and the general view was that she had dropped it somehow in her haste to get away.
But the more Skerridge thought about it the odder it seemed. Like the way Seraphine always wore the pendant, even though it wasn’t very pretty. So his big idea was this. Maybe Seraphine hadn’t dropped it. Maybe she had left it behind, like she didn’t need it any more. Or like somebody else might. In fact, maybe Seraphine’s pendant was more than just a necklace.
So, hidden in all of this stored bric-a-brac was the thing that Nin would need to get out of the Terrible House of Strood. She didn’t know she needed it yet, but she would soon enough. And when she found out, Skerridge would be there. It might make up, in some tiny, infinitesimal way, for the harm he had done in the past.
He was just ripping open his fourth crate when the attic door slammed open. A guard appeared, carrying a thick club and blinking in the dim light. He peered at the scene before him, turned pale when he spotted the culprit, and then tried desperately to look stern.
‘Oy,’ he yelled, only it was more of a croak, ‘Bogeyman Skerridge, whadda ya think yore …’
Toby scrabbled over the floor of the cage and bundled up against Nin. She put her arms around him and hugged, rubbing her chin against his head. His blond hair was longer and he was thinner, but he was still the same Toby. He smelt the same and felt the same and sounded the same when he said, ‘I knew it was you! I pushed Monkey out so’s you’d see him and come to find me.’
He stuck his arm out to show her a bruise in the crook of his elbow. ‘Mr Strood stuck a pin in me then he went all quiet and said, “That girl is still alive,” then he went away and I knew it was you.’
Nin kissed his head, hardly able to believe that when she thought her luck had run out it had really been better than ever. She had been so close to Toby all this time, but she would never have thought of the laboratory. And if she hadn’t been caught at exactly that moment, then by now Toby wouldn’t be Toby any more.
Nervously, she looked around the room. Floyd was still watching over them, but there was no sign of Mr Strood. In a second cage was the most amazing spider she had ever seen, sitting in a knock-kneed jumble of legs up against the bars, watching her nervously.
The laboratory door slammed open and Strood stalked in. He was angry, Nin could see that at once. Behind him hurried a man who looked like a walking ruler. Or at least half a ruler because he was not tall enough to be a whole one. He had a pinched face, which was mostly nose, and grey eyes. He was wearing pinstripe trousers, a frock coat with a spotless white shirt and a large bow tie.
‘Go on, Scribbins,’ snapped Mr Strood.
‘Then he … um … nailed the guard into a packing case, sir,’ gasped Scribbins. ‘Only we can’t get Guard Stanley out again because one of the tigers has fallen asleep on top of it. The other BMs won’t come out to help because it’s daylight …’
Mr Strood froze. ‘But you said it was a bogeyman that was in the tiger’s attic?’
Scribbins closed his eyes. He was twitching all over with nerves.
‘W-we th-think … it’s B-Bogeyman Skerridge, Mr Strood, sir.’
Strood hissed.
Scribbins flinched and whimpered.
‘But he’s my BEST bogeyman. My champion kidcatcher!’ Mr Strood fell silent for a moment and then snarled. His eyes settled on Nin.
‘It’s all to do with you, isn’t it? You’ve turned him rogue!’
Nin shrugged. ‘You can’t blame me,’ she said. ‘He’s his own bogeyman, you know.’
Strood ignored her. He walked over to a bottle of cloudy pink fluid sitting on the work surface. Something about it made Nin nervous.
‘Excuse me,’ she said loudly. ‘What’s that?’
Strood turned and looked at her. He smiled.
‘That,’ he said warmly, ‘is Gan Mafig’s Fusion. It’s an interesting concoction of crowsmorte, powdered goat intestines and neat vodka. Of course, Mafig had to use holipine, but crowsmorte gives a far more … interesting result. It’s slower and more agonising, and you get a purer end product too.’
‘And that is?’
‘In this case, about half a beaker of liquid essence of Ninevah Redstone. Oh, and some physical leftovers.’ He waved a hand airily.
‘You’re going to kill me?’
‘Naturally, though it will take a little while for you to die. After all, I can’t have people just escaping, you know. Undermining me. Giving people hope. There have to be consequen
ces.’
He selected a beaker from the shelf and began looking along his collection of bottles and jars for the right ingredients, humming contentedly.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Making up another batch of Fusion. It has to be left to ferment for a while, you see. So it can be brewing while you are distilling, then as soon as you’re done I can get on with the Eyes experiment.’
‘Efficient.’
‘Naturally.’
‘Um – what exactly is the Eyes experiment?’
Strood smiled at her. It was almost friendly.
‘My Eyes are dying,’ he said, ‘and unfortunately there are no imps left so I cannot make any more. But I do have,’ he waved a hand at the shelves of bottles, ‘some essence of imp. My plan is to use the small child here,’ he waved a hand at Toby, ‘as a base. I picked him because he is a nice size and reasonably bright. I will distil the spider into him to give him speed and night-vision, then add some essence of imp to provide the element of magic. Finally I will replace his blood with crowsmorte, which, along with the essence of imp and a drop of my own blood, will allow me to see through his eyes. No guarantees of course, but I think it will work.’ Strood beamed. ‘I do like a good experiment, don’t you?’
Nin stared at him in horror and held Toby all the more tightly. While Strood got on with measuring and mixing, she looked hopefully at the door. From the howl that she had heard last night she knew that Jonas – and probably Jik too – had followed her. Which meant that any minute now, someone would be here to rescue them. She knew it. Any minute now.
‘I … um … really enjoyed your ballads.’
Strood ignored her and went on measuring out the powdered goat’s intestines and adding it to the mixture. He was humming to himself as he worked.
‘It must be rewarding, writing stories like that.’
He selected a thin crystal rod from a drawer and began to stir the Fusion carefully. Nin frowned. She could feel eight purple eyes and two deep-blue ones watching her. She needed to buy time, just in case Jonas and Jik got delayed. Which they wouldn’t. Trouble was, Mr Strood wasn’t playing. She took a deep breath and tried something else.
‘It was awful, what they did to you.’
Strood stiffened. The rod chinked in the beaker. He set it down on the work surface and came over towards her. Crouching, he brought his face close to hers. Nin noticed that even his eyeballs had scars.
‘And it’ll be worse,’ he said softly, ‘what I do to you.’ He stood up and went back to work.
35
Any Second Now …
in gave up trying to get him talking. If any part of Arafin Strood had ever been a normal person, it had long since gone completely and utterly insane. She looked at the laboratory door again. Any second now, she thought anxiously. She didn’t have any minutes left.
‘Put the girl in the machine,’ ordered Strood, without looking up from his mixing.
Floyd sighed and moved towards the cage, feeling sad that the story of Ninevah Redstone had to end like this. Toby tightened his grip on Nin, who was still watching the door. Any second … right … now? Please?
Opening the cage, the guard reached in. By now Toby was sobbing.
‘Shut him up,’ snarled Strood.
‘Toby, be quiet now,’ Nin told him firmly. ‘Everything will be OK.’
Toby looked at her and went quiet. She hated the way he trusted her so much. She thought it would upset him more if she struggled, so she went quietly.
Once she was safely in the Distillation Machine, Floyd secured her arm in a kind of sling. She was trying to keep one eye fixed on the door. Jik and Jonas had better get a move on.
Strood took hold of the needle at the end of the tube attached to the bottle and stuck it in her arm.
‘OW!’
‘Believe me, as soon as the first drop of Fusion reaches your blood, you won’t notice the physical pain.’
For the second time that morning, Strood undid the clip that stopped the fluid from the bottle running down the tube. The first drop set out on its way.
The spider was scrabbling madly in its cage. Toby was still silent, watching. Suddenly he piped up, ‘When’s it going to be all right?’
Nin shut her eyes. ‘Any …’
Many floors below, surrounded by the ashes of yesterday’s rubbish, Jik was hammering on the furnace door. He had been hammering for hours, and had made some good dents in the hatch, but couldn’t get it open.
He paused. There was movement outside. Maybe the boilerman had come to stoke up the furnace? There was a grinding of metal bolts being drawn. The hatch swung open.
Jik had no time to say thank you, but he took care not to knock the man over as he flew out of the furnace and dived into the walls. He tore through the earth like a shark might tear through water and the Land drew back to let him go. He swam on, speeding up past the cemetery and the floor with the empty room and its tortured captive. Past the gardens and living quarters and storerooms towards the centre of the House.
‘… second …’
He was in the untouched ground now, the foundations of the House where Strood’s servants had been forbidden to dig. Pushing aside stones and smashing through layers of shale and rock, Jik moved on with increasing ease, until …
‘… NOW!’ she finished, and opened her eyes again. She looked at the door and her heart sank as it stayed shut. She barely noticed the rumbling that came from beneath their feet.
Strood had moved to stand next to the work surface. As the rumbling began, he switched his gaze from Nin to the ground, a puzzled frown gathering on his face. Floyd, positioned between Toby’s cage and Nin so as to block the poor kid’s view of what was about to happen to his sister, shuffled backward as the floor began to tremble. Perched on a stool at one end of the work surface, Scribbins turned pale. The rumbling grew fast to a sound that shook the room.
Toby yelled as the floor erupted sending tiles and mud flying through the air. Something rose up through it. Something angry with eyes that glowed like beacons.
Safe behind the glass door of the Distillation Machine, a shocked Nin watched as fragments of tile rained down everywhere. In their cages by the wall, Toby and Hss got the least of it. On the lower shelves, bottles and jars exploded as tiles smashed into them, scattering their contents everywhere. A stone ricocheted off a sealed bottle marked ‘LETHAL’ high on a shelf above the work surface. The bottle didn’t break, but there was a cracking sound that nobody heard amid all the yelling. A chunk of broken tile got Mr Strood in the face, cutting a line from cheek to chin. Blood spattered on to his white coat.
‘Jik!’ screamed Nin and the mudman charged through the debris towards her. Floyd could have stopped him, but had just breathed in a lungful of powdered goat intestines and was too busy coughing horribly. Red in the face, eyes bulging, he collapsed to his knees just as Jik reached Nin and pulled the tube from her arm. The first drop of Mafig’s fusion dripped harmlessly to the floor to be followed by the rest, leaving Nin giggling with relief.
Rigid with fury, Strood pointed a finger that trembled with rage in Jik’s direction. Already the slash on his face was healing, the edges pulling themselves together, the scar blending in with the others.
‘Rip it apart,’ he snarled.
The guard and the secretary leapt to obey. At least, Floyd staggered to his feet, still struggling to breathe, and Scribbins tumbled off his stool to run on wobbling legs towards the target. Floyd launched himself into a rugby tackle intended to crush the mudman to dust, but Jik did a neat somersault out of the guard’s grip, landed in front of the glass door and yanked it open. Scribbins got there a second later, but Jik had already gone, leaping at the wall, bouncing off it and grabbing the key ring from its hook as he went. Trying to follow, Floyd spun dizzily, lurched to a halt, bent over and made a loud whooping noise followed by a horrible retching one.
‘I said rip it apart not puke it to death, you pea-brained moron!’ howled Strood.
He was white with fury and the scars on his face stood out in livid red. ‘If you can’t manage that lump of earth, at least GET THE GIRL!’
White with terror, Scribbins turned to grab Nin as she pulled her arm free of the sling and tumbled out of the machine. She shrieked and pushed him hard in the chest. He staggered, slipped in the puddle of sick and fell, bashing his head on the half-open glass door.
As she ran, Nin caught a glance from the doubled-up Floyd. He was pale and sweaty, but his eyes were focused and she was sure, really sure, that if he had tried he could have got her.
‘Thank you,’ she breathed and kept moving.
Strood had given up on his underlings. By now, Jik had unlocked the cages, pulled out Toby and the spider and the three of them, followed by Nin, were headed for the way out. Over the other side of the room, Strood was too far away to grab Nin before she reached the door. Instead, he spun towards the cabinet behind him, throwing it open to reveal rows of neatly labelled drawers. As the door slammed back on its hinges, hitting the shelves next to it, the already damaged bottle high above Strood’s head exploded sending perfumed, green liquid spattering over half the laboratory.
A splash skated across the top of Floyd’s massive leather boots as he leaned against the work surface. Another splash sailed over Nin’s head, hit the wall and slithered down it leaving a melted groove in the tiles. Barely back on his feet, Scribbins began to scream and pull off his clothes as a dollop of the stuff ate rapidly through them.
But most of the fluid went over Mr Strood, who had just found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open. The stuff ran down the left side of his face and body. The perfume was replaced by a horrible smell of barbecue. Strood froze.
‘That,’ he hissed, ‘was the last ever bottle of distilled faerie venom. The LAST EVER, do you understand!’ He spun around, clutching something in one hand that looked like a metal star
