by Dave Butler
This time they both laughed, and it felt good.
Charlie borrowed Mr. Pondicherry’s John Bull, a short and flat-crowned top hat with its brim smartly curled up over the ears. As a last touch, because he had sometimes seen his father dress this way for important customers, he tied a short white cravat around his neck.
As he looked at himself in his father’s small dressing mirror, Charlie noticed his bap’s pipe. The sight of it brought a sob from Charlie. He took the pipe and looked at it closely. The pipe had a short stem, and its round bowl was painted a dark cherry color, with golden panthers chasing each other around in a ring. Charlie tucked the pipe into his jacket pocket.
He would find his father and give him back his pipe.
“You look like soft cheese.” Ollie cocked an eyebrow at Charlie when he emerged from the workroom. “I’ve got this urge to spread your face on a crumpet.”
“Naw, ’e looks a right toff, ’e does,” Bob disagreed. “With a very fair compression.”
“Complexion.”
“As I said.”
“You ever been outside before, Charlie?” Ollie asked.
“All the time,” Charlie lied. Soon he’d be strolling around Whitechapel like an ordinary boy. Not a boy at all, really: an adventurer. “I’m just sensitive to the sun, so I have to be a little careful.”
“I’m coming with you,” Mr. Clockswain said. He grabbed his lapels and puffed his chest out, which didn’t really make him look much bigger, especially since he immediately took to flicking wisps of lint off the front of his jacket. “You, ah, you’ll need adult supervision.”
“He didn’t think so much about adult supervision when he was taking our money,” Ollie observed to Bob.
“I mean Charlie.” The kobold blinked. “I have a responsibility to Charlie and to his father.”
Charlie took his father’s spare key from the nail beside the door.
“Don’t worry,” he said to Queen Victoria as he straightened her. “I’ll get Bap back.”
They left. Charlie locked the front door and hung the key around his neck.
Ollie led the four of them down the Gullet. The pale blue sky above showed that dawn was imminent. Charlie squeezed his eyes shut as they passed through Lucky Wu’s steam cloud, and when he opened them again, he couldn’t stop staring.
There were people on foot, opening shutters and sweeping refuse away from their doors. There were stern-faced buildings that steamed and clanked and smelled bad. There were shops of small tradesmen, where farriers or blacksmiths or velocipede men cranked up their fires, hammered on their anvils, and inflated their India rubber as they prepared to open for the day’s customers. At the end of the lane, an immense iron-and-wood frame snaked through the sky over the roofs of buildings and baffled Charlie for a minute. Then he heard a shrill whistle and a grungy chug-chug and he saw a train pull into sight, and he realized that he was looking at Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s famous Sky Trestle, the railroad whose tracks went over the rooftops.
Above that, tiny and dusty in a vast field of blue, Charlie saw zeppelins. They looked like whales swimming across the sky.
And there were elephants—two of them, like big gray leathery walls with legs. Each was hitched to the front end of an enormous wagon piled high with casks and barrels. The wagons stood at rest in front of a tavern whose signboard read SEVEN LEAGUES under a pair of red boots. Four men unloaded the barrels and rolled them down an open hatch into the tavern’s cellar. The elephants swished their tails and looked bored.
Charlie stopped to stare, but Bob dragged at his elbow.
“Come on, mate. Think of your old dad an’ stay concentric.”
“Concentrated,” suggested Mr. Clockswain.
“ ’E knew what I meant.”
Whitechapel whirled past in too many colors and smells to remember, and then Ollie stopped in front of a two-story building on a short cul-de-sac.
The sun shone against the tops of the walls now, pale but warm. It basted an egg-yolk glow over the top of a huge red-painted wooden front door and wide glass windows with shades drawn shut. Behind the window shades the building was dark. A steel nameplate on the door identified the occupant in bold copperplate type as GRIM GRUMBLESSON, LAWSPEAKER.
“It’s him you want, right?” Ollie asked. “Only troll in Tumblewain Close I know of.”
“Yes.” A pull-rope hung down in front of the door, and Charlie tugged on it. Inside, he heard the deep clang-ng-ng of a bell.
“It isn’t too late,” Henry Clockswain said. He rubbed his fingers together so much Charlie thought he might tie them in knots. “Bishopsgate is five minutes’ walk. There’s a police station there, and we can, er, ask for their help.”
“Hmmph!” Ollie disagreed.
There was no answer. Charlie pulled the rope again.
Clang-ng-ng.
Mr. Clockswain arched his eyebrows.
“Nothing,” Bob observed.
“Maybe he ain’t home,” Ollie suggested.
Annoyed, Charlie reached out to grab the pull-rope again, and seized Grim Grumblesson by the front of his long, frilly yellow nightshirt.
The troll was yawning deeply. He smelled sour and meaty, and his eyes were half shut with sleep. “Told you,” he rumbled, “I don’t take milk.”
“Mr. Grumblesson,” Charlie said, “my father is Rajesh Pondicherry, of Pondicherry’s Clockwork Invention and Repair.”
The hulder forced one eye open. “The eyepiece,” he grumped. “The Close-Reading Spectacles. It’s early, isn’t it?”
“He needs your help,” Charlie said.
The hulder lawspeaker scratched his belly and turned to amble back into the building. Charlie followed. “Happy to help a respected local tradesman,” the troll said, craning his neck and rolling back his shoulders with a loud crack, “but I don’t know what Mr. Pondicherry can possibly need from me.”
Charlie passed a huge coatrack and an open doorway to an office space full of books and tables. He found himself standing in a long, high-ceilinged hallway. He saw various shut doors and a staircase leading up. The hall was deep in clutter. Muddy boots lay against the wall, and there were teacups and saucers stacked on the bottom steps, next to an empty wine bottle.
“Are you married?” Charlie asked. He knew it wasn’t polite even as he said it, but he couldn’t help it. “I mean, do you live alone?” He couldn’t imagine anyone tolerating this much mess.
The hulder spun around and glared at Charlie. “Eh?” he growled.
Charlie staggered back under the hammer of those sparkling blue eyes. “I…I…”
“That it?” Grim Grumblesson demanded in a loud growl. “Your father want to marry a hulder woman? Who? Who is it, the little traitor?” He towered over Charlie, his face red and rough and angry. He smelled of animal. Charlie cowered.
The pixie clerk suddenly appeared between them. Her breeches and tricorn hat were gone; she wore a red dress with swirls of gold stitched into it, and red slippers.
Charlie hadn’t seen her coming, and he stumbled back.
“ ’Tis time I left you, Grim,” she piped in her melodious voice. “Sore subject,” she whispered, winking at Charlie.
“No!” Charlie squeaked. “Nothing like that!”
Grim Grumblesson settled back and scratched himself again. “You look better than I feel,” he harrumphed to the pixie.
“Aye. I drank less,” the pixie explained.
“Don’t congratulate yourself for being tiny.” The troll disappeared through a big door. Charlie heard shuffling and scraping noises and thought the hulder might be getting dressed. “Very well,” Grim Grumblesson called out, and then he grunted. “I have some business with Miss de Minimis here. When I return, in an hour or two, I’ll come to your father’s shop and we can see what help he needs. And I’ll pick up the spectacles, as agreed.”
The troll reappeared in the doorway. He had tucked his nightshirt into red trousers and pulled enormous brown boots over his fee
t. Charlie now saw that the hulder had a bull’s tail to match his ears and horns.
Grim grabbed his yellow coat off the rack in the hall and shrugged into it.
“My father’s been kidnapped,” Charlie said.
Grim Grumblesson rubbed his chin. “Have you tried the bobbies?”
“It was trolls that did it,” Ollie said.
“Odin’s eyeball!” the hulder barked.
“And the spectacles?” Natalie de Minimis wanted to know.
“Taken as well,” Charlie said.
The troll looked carefully at Charlie. “What other family do you have in London?”
“None,” he said. “I have no other family in the whole world. Not that I know of.”
“I…I’ve already suggested the police,” Henry Clockswain said.
The hulder frowned. He pulled his thick, matted hair back from his forehead and settled his top hat down over it. “I can’t cancel with Gnat,” he decreed, “so you’ll have to come with me. This won’t take long; we’ll look for your father immediately after, and on the way you can tell me everything you know.”
“Why the delay?” Henry Clockswain’s eyes blinked. “There is a police station just around the corner, and time is wasting!”
“In loco parentis,” Grim Grumblesson said.
“Is that Hulder?” Ollie asked.
“It’s Latin!” the troll snapped.
“What’s it mean, then?” Bob asked.
“It means I’m dad now,” the troll explained, “and we’ll do as I say. You want to talk to the coppers, kobold, it’s your choice. I’m not waiting around.”
With strides five feet long, the hulder headed for the door.
Clicking his tongue against his teeth, Henry Clockswain followed.
They walked, and Charlie told the hulder everything he had seen and heard: the Sinister Man, and the Iron Cog, and the Anti-Human League, and his father being called Dr. Singh, and THIS ISN’T JUST A HAT, MY GOOD MAN. IT’S A CAVENDISH, and the men with cutlasses who said they were policemen, and the two hulders, one of whom smoked. Henry Clockswain listened closely and watched with rapidly blinking eyes, and Charlie realized he hadn’t taken the time to tell the story to the kobold.
“Scentless tobacco, hmm?” the hulder rumbled.
“Do you know him?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Grim Grumblesson said, “but I’m not a smoker. Don’t worry; there just aren’t that many hulders in London. We’ll find him.”
“Maybe we should go around to all the tobacconists,” Mr. Clockswain suggested.
“We’ll help you,” Natalie de Minimis promised.
“It’ll be very ’elpful to ’ave someone as can fly.” Bob kept his eyes on the pixie’s wings as they walked. “Parks an’ rooftops an’ such.”
“Natalie de Minimis will be the next Baroness of Underthames,” the hulder guffawed. “Considerably more useful than just for searching parks and rooftops.”
“My mother’s not dead yet,” the pixie objected. “And besides, you can’t know if I’ll be baroness next or not; the people of Underthames will choose.”
“Do you mean it’s something like an election?” Charlie asked. “Like Parliament?” He remembered that the Almanack had been a little vague on this exact point, and had used words that Charlie didn’t quite understand, such as acclamation and charismatic leadership.
“Something like that,” she said.
“Nothing like that!” the hulder roared. A passing cart driver nearly fell out of his seat. “Parliament is secret ballots and whiskey barrels for the voters and political parties and platforms and greasy backroom deals! The passing of the barony is the clatter of spear on shield by the warrior throng; it’s the cry of favor of the crowd for its chosen leader!”
Charlie could almost hear the cry of the warrior throng as Grim told it. “That sounds exciting.”
“Sounds barbaric.” Ollie scratched his armpit vigorously. “Sounds like something Americans might do.”
“My people follow very old traditions,” Natalie de Minimis said. “We’re here.”
Charlie had been so absorbed in the conversation, he hadn’t paid any attention to his surroundings. Now he found that he was in a cobbled courtyard closed in by windowless brick walls. A narrow alley led into the yard, and a single large storm drain let rainwater flow out, down, and away.
Charlie had read a lot about the sewers. There were rats down there, and worse. Ghouls haunted the empty places just at the edge of cities so they could eat other folks’ garbage and their corpses and, Bap had suggested more than once, their lost children.
And sometimes the ghouls went down into the sewers.
“Where is here?” Ollie asked.
“One of the many doors to Underthames,” Mr. Clockswain said. “It’s signposted, if you know how to read the signs.”
“It is?” Bob asked.
“Pixie gates aren’t secret,” the kobold explained. “They’re just guarded.”
The pixie floated over the storm drain and pointed down at it. “We’ve come by this gate so that you’ll all fit.”
Charlie looked at the storm drain. It was covered by a rack of iron bars, six inches apart. “I don’t see how.”
The troll cracked the knuckles of both hands, bent over, and grabbed the bars. “Stand away,” he grunted, and heaved.
The grate came up from the ground, and Grim hoisted it over his head, with its surrounding wreath of cobbles. It left a hole in the earth at the troll’s feet, neat and rectangular, like the trapdoor opening to a tavern’s cellar. Charlie squinted to get a closer look. He saw stairs, and something else.
“The walls,” he said. “They’re glowing.”
“ ’Tis gloom-moss,” Natalie de Minimis explained. “We see perfectly well in absolute dark, but other folk don’t, and this is a big-folk gate.”
Charlie didn’t remember any mention of gloom-moss in the Almanack.
“Shall we discuss the technical details later?” grunted the troll, who was still holding the slab of iron and stone over his head.
Charlie went first, with the pixie.
The kobold followed, and then, after some muttering and scuffing of feet, Heaven-Bound Bob, with Ollie the Snake on his heels.
Thud!
“Ouch,” muttered the troll.
“Duck, Grim,” the pixie called out.
Charlie heard wordless grumbling, the heavy boots of the hulder on the stairs, and the whoomph! of the gate being replaced.
The passage’s rough walls and ceiling were covered with thick gloom-moss. The glow it gave off was a dull yellow, which seemed to come from inside the moss and shine through its surface like the glow of a lamp behind a lampshade. The gloom-moss glistened as if it were wet, but when Charlie touched it, he found it dry. He stepped carefully over a culvert that crossed the steps to carry any water flow down a red-brick-lined drain big enough to walk in. That must be the sewer. Charlie heard chittering and scratching noises from the sewer and wondered what could be making them.
Hopefully rats. He’d choose rats over ghouls any day.
Among the steady drips of water and with his companions’ footfalls behind him, Charlie followed the pixie down. Centipedes the size of his fingers and roaches the size of his thumbs scuttled out from under his feet as he walked.
“That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing,” he offered.
“Aye, thank you,” she agreed. “I’m coming home after a long time gone, and I’d like to impress my folk.”
“How long was your grand tour?” Charlie asked.
“Two years,” the pixie said. “That’s standard. ’Twasn’t really a grand tour, though. That’s a custom of wealthy English families, and ’tis Grim’s little joke to call it that. There’s a Pixie word for it, but ’tis no use me telling you, since you can’t speak Pixie without wings, and half of spoken Pixie’s too high-pitched for human ears to hear anyway.”
He hadn’t read this in the Almanack either. “Li
ke dogs and whistles, Miss de Minimis?”
She laughed, a very pretty sound like the tinkling of falling water. “That’s not flattering, but aye. Don’t you go whistling on me now. And please, call me Gnat.”
“But you’re the Baroness of Underthames!” It seemed outrageous to call a baroness just Gnat. “Or you will be.”
Gnat shrugged. “No one here’s a baroness yet. The best word in English for what I’ve done is a walkabout. That means a journey taken by the young natives of Australia to see the outside world. Sometimes in English pixies will call it the tithe, too, because a pixie goes when she’s twenty, for two years of her life, which is a tenth. And then, tithe sounds a bit like the Pixie word for a journey.”
“I’m on my walkabout now,” Charlie said. “I didn’t really mean it to happen, but it did.”
“I did my tithe working for Grim. Two years without going back. Two years of no contact with my home, even though I was but a mile away. I learned a lot about humans and hulders, and Whitechapel and London, and folk and the law. Hopefully all that learning, and a wee bit of experience, will add up to wisdom someday.”
“Aye,” Charlie said, and then he felt a little bit silly, but Gnat laughed and that made it okay.
“Hold!” cried a silvery voice below them. Charlie looked ahead and saw that they had come to a closed door without lock, handle, or knob. The door was large and set inside an arch of carved stones. Each stone was an ugly gargoyle face twisted into an expression of rage or hunger or menace. Each gargoyle’s mouth was open, and into each stone tongue was carved a different rune. Charlie had never seen anything like it, even in books.
Eight pixies floated in front of the door, armed with shields and spears. The one in front pointed his spear in the new arrivals’ direction.
“Hold, I said!”
“Hold, yourself, Cousin Hezekiah!” Gnat cried back. “I’m come home to my own mother’s house after a full and successful tithe, and is this the welcome I get?”
Mr. Clockswain, the chimney sweeps, and Grim Grumblesson caught up to Charlie and the pixie and stopped.
