Return of the Emerald Skull

by Paul Stewart

  From the counter Chung Lee nodded, his paper hat wobbling, and held out a hand for the professor's laundry receipt. Getting to my feet, I sheathed my sword and handed him the piece of paper – only for Mei Ling to snatch it from my fingers with another delightful giggle.

  ‘The laundry can wait,’ she told me. ‘Are you the tick-tock lad I saw eating his lunch on the roof?’

  I smiled. ‘The very same,’ I said. ‘Barnaby Grimes. Pleased to meet you.’

  I held out a hand, but Mei Ling ignored it.

  ‘And you want to know how I dealt with our unwelcome visitors just now?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You must promise me something in return,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, intrigued.

  ‘You must promise,’ she said with a tinkling laugh, ‘to tell me what you were eating … It looked absolutely delicious!’

  or the next few days I set about my tick-tock rounds with renewed purpose. Turning out the contents of my bureau, I went to work in a fresh shirt and waistcoat each day. As I highstacked all over town, delivering parcels and documents, I brushed past sooty chimneys at every opportunity, rolled across countless dusty rooftops and dined carelessly on wharfman's stew. Soon I had a suitably impressive bundle of laundry – and I knew just where to deliver it.

  Rising early three days later, I climbed out of my attic window and shinned up onto the roof, eager to renew my acquaintance with the beautiful young laundress.

  A watery, pale sun shone down through an early morning haze, and as I glanced up, I suddenly remembered the remarkable occurrence PB had been talking about excitedly all year. At the end of the summer there was to be an eclipse of the sun.

  ‘A full eclipse, Barnaby,’ he'd informed me, his eyes twinkling. ‘The first for ninety-eight years! Think about it, my boy. The sun completely extinguished. Day turned to night!’

  Gazing up at the sun that morning, I realized that Mei Ling had banished any thought of the eclipse from my head. And just about every other thought, for that matter. As I crossed the rooftops, I could hear the familiar cries of the street vendors and market spielers plying their trade on the roads below.

  ‘What do you lack? What do you lack?’ the words echoed up through the smoky air.

  ‘Fresh milk by the ladle! Penny a dip!’ ‘Orchard apples, ripe and cheap!’ I was above the corner of Pettigrew Street and Leinster Lane when I heard the cry I'd been listening out for. Leaping from the gutter I was perched upon, down to the jutting window ledge below me, I performed a move the great Tom Flint had taught me a few years earlier – the Flying Fox, it was called; a tricky manoeuvre which involved a flagpole, an unbuttoned coat and a steady nerve. Seconds later, I landed on the pavement beside a portly pieman, a tray of steaming pies and pasties around his neck.

  ‘Two Stover's Specials,’ I said, and dropped a couple of coppers into his outstretched hand.

  Back up on the rooftops, I paused briefly at the old Guildhall and surveyed the horizon before setting off once more. The bell at the top of the Corn Exchange was chiming seven o'clock as I crossed Bowery Road, which marked the northernmost boundary to Chinatown. Fifty yards ahead was the green roof of the Lotus Blossom Laundry, its glazed tiles glistening with raindrops from the previous night's downpour.

  The architecture of the building had been borrowed from the orient. Tall whitewashed walls were topped with a mansard roof, upswept eaves and undulating gables. Adjusting the bulging sack of laundry strapped to my back, I made my way across the rooftop, and was about to select a drainpipe for my descent when a mullioned window beneath the eaves opened and Mei Ling's head poked out.

  ‘Barnaby Grimes,’ she called over to me, her face breaking into a smile. ‘I've been expecting you. The water is just coming to the boil.’

  Expecting me? I wondered. Water coming to the boil? How on earth could she have known I would visit at that moment?

  My confusion must have shown on my face, for the next moment Mei Ling broke into a peal of laughter. ‘Come in, come in,’ she said. ‘And bring that bundle of laundry with you.’

  I jumped across the gap between the two buildings and swung down over the eaves onto the sill of Mei Ling's window. She stepped aside and motioned for me to enter. I took off my coalstack hat, clicked it flat and entered a richly furnished salon.

  The floor was of dark mahogany with intricate inlays of pale silver birch, and strewn with finely woven mats of seagrass. The walls were painted in white, red and gold, with emerald-green dragons writhing across their surface, and the huge attic room was divided into smaller sections with the aid of tall, double-hinged screens. Waist-high vases, each one elegantly painted, stood on either side of the window and at the top of the stairs on black varnished pedestals, their glazed gold and turquoise surfaces glowing in the light cast by the pink and orange paper lanterns overhead.

  I jumped across the gap between the two buildings

  Mei Ling reached towards me, her arms outstretched. I stepped forward somewhat awkwardly and was about to shake her hand when she giggled and slipped past me. With a touch lighter than a racecourse pickpocket, she plucked the laundry sack from my shoulders and my swordstick from my hand, spinning me round by the sleeve to face her once more.

  ‘This will be taken care of downstairs,’ she said, placing the sack to one side. ‘While this’ – Mei Ling held up my swordstick and flicked back the catch to reveal the blade – ‘this interests me.’

  ‘Careful, that blade's sharp,’ I warned her.

  ‘Do you have much cause to use this?’ Mei Ling asked, unsheathing the sword and holding it up to the light.

  ‘There have been occasions when I've had to defend myself …’ I said guardedly.

  ‘And this sword concealed within an innocent-looking walking stick has proved useful?’ Mei Ling said. ‘Show me.’

  She handed the sword to me and stepped back, her arms folded.

  ‘Show you? But how?’ I shrugged.

  ‘By touching me on the shoulder with the tip of your blade.’ Mei Ling smiled, her dark eyes glinting mischievously.

  ‘Just touch you on the shoulder?’ I said, making sure I'd understood.

  Mei Ling nodded.

  I raised my sword and was about to tap her right shoulder lightly when she stepped to one side. Spinning round, I tried again, only for Mei Ling to swerve elegantly past me, whispering in my ear as she did so.

  ‘Come on, Barnaby. Try harder …’

  I turned and feinted to my left, flicking my sword arm out at the last moment. Mei Ling leaped high to avoid the sword cut, only to land on the tip of the blade for an instant – her elegant slippered foot balanced on tiptoe – before somersaulting over my head. She tapped me on the shoulder, her beautiful face wreathed in smiles.

  ‘I'm sorry, Barnaby,’ she laughed. ‘I'm showing off. My grandfather says it is my worst trait.’

  I turned to her and sheathed my sword. ‘How do you do that?’ I asked, astonished at her acrobatics. ‘My old friend Tom Flint could balance on a rusty gutter two inches wide, but not on the tip of a sword …’

  Mei Ling motioned for me to sit at a low table by the window that had been laid for tea.

  Sitting down opposite me, she leaned forward and, with a charming frown of concentration, opened the cork stopper of a tall pot and put one wooden spoonful of the pale green powder it contained into each of the two handleless cups before us. As she did so, a sweet, mossy aroma filled my nostrils. Then, with the same calm attention to detail, she grasped the raffia handle of the bulbous copper teapot, which was steaming gently over a tea light, and poured boiling water into the cups, one after the other. The aroma grew more intense as a thin twist of steam rose up from the surface of the liquid. It was like no tea I had ever smelled before.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Green tea,’ she told me, without looking up. ‘Fortified with ginseng and scented with jasmine.’

  Having returned the teapot to the cradle above the flick
ering flame of the tea light, she picked up a small whisk, fashioned from wood and dried twine, and gently beat the liquid before laying the whisk to one side. I reached out to take the steaming cup of tea in front of me – only to be stilled by Mei Ling.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘First, look into the steam that rises from the tea. See how it twists and writhes … Really concentrate, Barnaby … Concentrate …’ Mei Ling's voice whispered hypnotically in my ear.

  I did what she said. As I stared at the ever-shifting column of dancing mist, something strange started to take place. It was as though the wisps of steam were taking on a certain solidity – like silken scarves, like dragonfly wings, like a fountain rising up into the air and disappearing.

  ‘Now, look into the spaces in the mist …’

  Sure enough, I found my gaze focusing on the spaces – like long tunnels opening up and spiralling away into the distance – between those twisting, writhing wisps of steam …

  ‘Barnaby …’ I heard my name filtering into my consciousness. ‘Barnaby …’ Mei Ling's voice was soft and melodic, and it was followed by the sound of hands lightly clapping. ‘Barnaby Grimes.’

  I looked up to see Mei Ling staring back at me, her eyes sparkling with amusement. She clapped her hands a second time, in that curious way of hers, as if wiping dust from her fingers.

  ‘M … Mei Ling,’ I said softly. I felt almost as though I was wakening from sleep.

  ‘That is your first lesson in yinchido.’ She smiled, handing me the teacup.

  ‘Yinchido?’ I said, taking a sip of the tea. It tasted as good as it smelled.

  ‘Yinchido,’ she repeated. ‘The Way of the Silver Mist. It is an ancient art that has been practised for centuries in the remote mountains of my homeland. The art of absence …’

  ‘I … I don't understand,’ I said.

  Mei Ling took a sip of her tea. ‘You have already glimpsed the principle of yinchido when you looked into the gaps in the steam.’

  I looked down at my gently steaming teacup.

  ‘You see, Barnaby,’ she went on, ‘we use our senses to detect sights, sounds, smells … But the world is more than that. It is also about what isn't there.’

  I frowned.

  ‘There is what we can see, but also what we cannot see. There are sounds, but there is also silence. There is touch,’ she said, reaching out and running the tip of a finger down my cheek. She smiled and pulled away. ‘But there is also the feeling of not being touched. To understand either properly, we must know both. Most people only experience what their senses tell them is there. Yinchido teaches us to appreciate what isn't there – the spaces.’

  My head spun as I tried to grasp exactly what she was saying.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘in a fight, you would step into the spaces to avoid an attacker? Just as you did to avoid my sword – and when those two great oafs attacked you the other day …’

  Mei Ling nodded.

  ‘But then you didn't just avoid their attacks,’ I pursued. ‘You seemed to control their minds …’

  Mei Ling looked intently into my eyes. ‘As I told you, Barnaby, yinchido is about using spaces,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘Physical spaces are one thing, but there are also mental spaces. I stepped into the mental spaces of those two bad men and filled them with my own wishes …’

  ‘You make it sound so simple,’ I said in awe.

  ‘The Way of the Silver Mist is a long path, Barnaby,’ she told me softly. ‘But if you wish to take it, I would be happy to be your guide.’

  I nodded enthusiastically and took another sip of the tea, only for my stomach to rumble with hunger.

  ‘I almost forgot, I brought you these,’ I laughed, reaching into my pockets and pulling out the Stover's pasties. ‘I find they're excellent at filling empty spaces!’

  An hour later, I climbed out of the attic window of the laundry with a bundle of crisp, pressed shirts and waistcoats, a jar of green tea and a set of instructions from my beautiful guide.

  Each morning I brewed my own tea and concentrated on the steam rising as it cooled. Each evening I sat on the rooftop of my attic rooms and practised the breathing exercises Mei Ling had given me, searching for pockets of silence lurking in amidst the noise of the city as I did so.

  Strange as it may seem, as that long hot summer passed, these simple techniques began to make a difference. My highstacking benefited for a start. I no longer seemed to take the tumbles and falls that every high-stacker must expect in the course of his rounds and, with the absence of cuts and bruises, I became more confident of even the trickier manoeuvres. My swordplay improved too, although I also found I could anticipate and avoid trouble far more easily as my powers of concentration grew. And finally, I was never without a stack of freshly laundered shirts.

  Mei Ling was so pleased with my progress that she began to teach me about the power of the mind and yinchido techniques to enhance it. It was fascinating stuff and I was looking forward to an enlightening autumn with my beautiful guide.

  Unfortunately, that was not to be. Dark forces were at work, an ancient evil was spreading, and I – for all my yinchido training – didn't see it coming.

  Turning the corner into Grevy Lane one morning late that summer, I walked into a shambling character hurrying in the opposite direction. He looked into my eyes, an expression of abject terror on his face, like a rat in a tuppenny trap.

  ‘It's you!’ I gasped.

  t was none other than the Major, the amiable gatekeeper from Grassington Hall — though until I'd looked into his eyes, I hadn't recognized him, so dramatically had he changed.

  He was unwashed, dishevelled and as pungent as a tomcat, and there were deep scratches on his head and hands. His once neat side-whiskers were matted and filthy, his waxed moustache now bristled like a scullery maid's broom, while his face was so haggard it looked as if he hadn't slept for a year. There were buttons missing from his jacket, and a tear in one of the knees of his breeches, the frayed tatters of cloth fringed with dried blood where he'd fallen and cut his leg.

  ‘Little horrors, little horrors, little horrors …’ he was muttering to himself as he brushed against my shoulder, and he would have passed me by if I hadn't grabbed the sleeve of his jacket with an outstretched arm.

  ‘You're the Major, from Grassington Hall, aren't you?’ I asked him.

  At the sound of my words, the poor man froze. He turned his head slowly towards me, until his terrified gaze was fixed on my own eyes. His gaunt face went as white as a pastry-cook's apron and the right side of his mouth began to twitch involuntarily.

  ‘The gatekeeper,’ I persisted. ‘At Grassington Hall?’

  The man looked stricken. He started back, fine beads of sweat on his forehead. ‘Y-you're not …’ he stammered. ‘You're not one of them, are you?’ His voice was low, tremulous, and so full of dread you'd have thought he'd just seen a ghost.

  ‘Them?’ I said.

  ‘I'm not going back there.’ He trembled, his eyes taking on a hunted, panic-stricken look. ‘Never, you hear me? Never …’ His voice was becoming hysterical. ‘And they can't make me …’

  With those words, he tore my hand from his sleeve and pushed past me. Out of the alley he clattered, his hobnail boots skidding on the cobbles as he ran, before darting out across the road – straight into the path of an oncoming coach-and-four which, at that exact moment, came thundering round the corner.

  ‘Watch out!’ I bellowed.

  But too late. A moment later, there was a thud, a crunch and an agonized scream, followed by panicked whinnying, and the sound of the coachman cracking his whip and bellowing for his rearing horses to calm down.

  ‘Easy there! Easy!’

  The stamping of hooves and rattle of the iron wheels came to an abrupt standstill. I looked across the pavement, my heart in my mouth, to see the gatekeeper lying motionless in the gutter, one arm twisted behind his head, his legs broken and crumpled beneath him, and a line of blood trickling from the corner o
f his mouth. Passers-by rushed over to see what could be done, but as I joined them, I already knew it was hopeless.

  I looked down into the gatekeeper's terror-filled eyes; his lips twitched as he struggled to speak.

  ‘Evil … Terrible evil …’ he rasped. ‘Beware …’

  His head jerked forward urgently, before falling to one side, and his eyes glazed over into a sightless stare as he breathed his last.

  A sizeable crowd had now gathered around the stricken gatekeeper, gawping and chattering. The coachman had climbed down from his seat and was telling anyone who would listen the same thing, over and over.

  ‘He just ran out in front of me. Just ran out, he did. There was nothing I could do. He just ran out in front of me …’

  Others took up the same refrain – an old woman with a basket; a dairymaid with a couple of buckets of milk yoked across her shoulders – everyone seemed in agreement. ‘Didn't look where he was going …’ ‘He just ran out in front of him …’ ‘Looked like a madman, poor soul …’ A police constable, red-faced and wheezing, barged his way through the milling crowd.

  ‘Mind your backs,’ he shouted as he elbowed onlookers aside. ‘Move along now, please. Nothing more to see.’ Standing over the dead body, he pulled a notebook and a pencil from his back pocket. ‘Now, can anyone tell me exactly what happened?’

  ‘He didn't look. Just ran out into the street …’ the dairymaid began.

  ‘There was nothing I could do,’ came the gruff voice of the coachman, repeating himself. ‘Just ran out, he did …’

  Slipping back into the crowd, I left them to it. One more crazy beggar coming to grief on the cobbles of Market Street, busiest thoroughfare in the great bustling city. ‘Carriage carrion’, such casualties were called, and this poor wretch was just one more of them. The difference was that a few weeks ago, this madman had been sane and rational and cheerfully tending the gate at a respectable private school.

  What had gone wrong?

  The incident had brought me down to earth with a bump. While I'd spent all summer with my head full of laundry tickets and Stover's pasties, mental gymnastics and sweet smiles, something had gone badly wrong at Grassington Hall. Of course, I had to find out what. But first I needed something to settle my nerves.