by Dave Butler
“You hear me?” Mickey demanded. “I was talking to you.”
“Yes,” Charlie agreed, “but you weren’t saying anything.”
Mickey hefted the rock. “Do I have to hurt you again?”
Charlie thought of the treacherous Elisabel, of Scabies and his rats, of Cavendish Hats, of Egil One-Arm, of the ghouls beneath Waterloo Station, and of his fight inside Big Ben. He laughed out loud. “You can’t.” He unlocked the door.
“Get him, Broo,” Mickey ordered.
Charlie turned to face Bruiser. “Don’t do it. Just stop and leave me alone, or you’ll be sorry.”
Bruiser grabbed him by his shirt.
Charlie brushed Bruiser’s hands off easily. A look of stupid astonishment filled the boy’s face. Charlie pushed Bruiser into the dirt.
“Ha-ha…what?”
Skip stumbled backward, but Mickey raised his rock over his head. “That was lucky.”
Charlie shook his head. “Try it. Please.”
Whack!
Mickey hit him with the rock. The cobblestone struck Charlie on the side of the head and bounced off. It hurt, but not very much. Not as much as getting shot, or bitten by ghouls.
Charlie turned to face Mickey, and he grinned. Mickey shifted from foot to foot and rubbed his hands together.
“The thing is,” Charlie said to Mickey, speaking slowly and very carefully, “I’m not like you.”
He grabbed Mickey’s belt with both hands and lifted the other boy into the air. Skip’s shuffling steps now turned into full-blown flight, and Bruiser covered his eyes. Mickey slapped at Charlie’s face and shoulders. Charlie shook it off.
“Put me down!”
Charlie shrugged. “If you like.” Unfortunately, the work of the Royal Magical Society’s weather wizards had dried up all the Gullet’s mud, or he would have sunk Mickey in the biggest puddle he could find.
Instead he just tossed him aside.
“Ooomph!” Mickey bounced.
Charlie’s friends strode out of the steam. Grim Grumblesson came first, cleaned up and impressive in a yellow frock coat and black top hat. He carried a heavy ax that looked small in his hand. At his side marched Ingrid, with her club. Buzzing at Grim’s cowlike ear flew Gnat, who still held the spear she had found beneath Waterloo Station, though she again wore breeches and a tricorn hat. Behind them trailed Bob and Ollie, carrying between them a collapsible canvas crate that held the flyer.
Mickey stared. He climbed slowly to his feet.
“Trouble, Charlie?” Ingrid hoisted her club onto her shoulder. She towered over every other person in the alley except Grim, who just lurked behind her and growled.
“I don’t think so. Do we have trouble here, Mickey?”
Mickey backed away slowly. Skip was already out of sight, and Bruiser stumbled to his feet to follow. “No trouble,” Mickey agreed. “No trouble at all.”
He turned and pelted away down the Gullet as fast as he could go.
The inside of the shop was a bigger mess than Charlie remembered. There was plaster everywhere. He nodded a quick greeting to Queen Victoria on the wall, and she seemed to wink in reply.
Charlie and Bob moved methodically through the workroom, looking at every cog, wheel, and piston one by one, until Bob opened a small, unmarked wooden crate that she found high on a shelf and called out, “ ’ere it is!”
Charlie joined her, and together they looked at neat rows of very fine-toothed cogs, rods, and other brass components.
“How do you know this is it?” Charlie asked.
The others had lugged the flyer up the stairs and were making loud chopping and crashing noises in the attic.
“Because, my fine china,” Bob replied, “I ’ave felt around inside your guts, an’ they felt just like this.”
“China?”
“China plate, mate,” Bob explained.
Charlie took the box; it was light. He also took the small stack of cash his father kept on hand and tucked it into his pocket. Bob filled the pockets of her peacoat with small pliers, spanners, and other tools. They were turning to climb the stairs when Charlie heard a voice.
“You mold-encrusted ball of monkey dung!”
It was Wu. He stood in the reception room with his arms crossed over his bright green waistcoat, next to a basket of clean and folded clothes.
Bob looked the laundry owner up and down, then looked at Charlie. “You got this, mate?”
Charlie nodded. Bob went upstairs.
“Go away,” Charlie said to Wu. “I’m busy right now.” He didn’t talk to his own feet this time, and he didn’t mumble.
Wu spat on the floor. “You think I care that you and your father live like wild donkeys?” He snapped his head as he gestured around at the mess, so it looked like his long, black, dancing braid was pointing, too. “I don’t care. I don’t care if you sleep with pigs and eat their filth! You are not civilized people, and I gave up all my expectations long ago!”
“So did I.” Charlie wanted to say more, but he held back and turned to go up the stairs.
Wu followed. “My shirt presses are not calibrated!” He jabbed at the air between him and Charlie with long fingers, stabbing it to death. “You gave me baskets of clothing so dirty I think it must have been worn by water buffalo! I cleaned it all; I pressed it! Now, when will your stinking, lazy father fix my shirt presses?”
Charlie almost punched Wu.
Almost, but he didn’t. Wu didn’t matter anymore either. He wasn’t a threat to Charlie. Charlie would happily have suffered Wu’s abuse forever if it would have brought back his father.
“Never,” Charlie said softly.
“What?” Lucky Wu shrieked.
Charlie pulled the key from around his neck and tossed it to Wu. “My father’s dead, Mr. Wu,” he told the laundry owner. “He was on the London Eye when it exploded.”
Wu waved the key excitedly. “Who will fix my presses?”
Charlie shrugged and started up the stairs. “I don’t know. The shop is all yours. Maybe you can figure out how to fix the presses yourself. Just leave me alone.”
“You scrofulous hamster!” Wu hollered. “You insolent hippopotamus fart! You bad boy!”
“You’ve got me wrong,” Charlie said. “I’m none of those things.”
Then he was up the stairs and in the attic. Wu didn’t follow.
It was only when he was at the top of the stairs that, purely by accident, Charlie put his hand in his coat pocket and touched his bap’s little round-bowled pipe. What he felt broke his heart.
The pipe was in two pieces, the stem neatly snapped off from the bowl.
Charlie took out the two halves and held them in his hand. They looked weak and lonely, detached from each other. The pipe was useless, and Charlie told himself he should throw it away.
But he didn’t.
Instead he put the snapped pipe back in his pocket and looked around to see what his friends had done to his bap’s attic.
Grim and Ingrid had smashed a hole through the ceiling where it sloped low, and late afternoon sun poured in. Through the new opening, Charlie saw the flyer. It was fully assembled, and Bob was buckling the straps on her harness. Gnat flew slow circles around the aeronaut.
“I’ve got a question,” Bob said to the pixie as Charlie joined them. “I can’t ’elp but notice you’re dressed as a lad.”
Gnat laughed. “Nay, not quite.” She took off her tricorn and waved it about. “This is clothing for being out among big folk. Our men wear it, aye, but so do we women. It hides from outsiders who the baroness might be, you see. ’Tis what I wore on my tithe.”
“You’re still on your tithe, then?” Charlie asked.
“In a manner of speaking, aye. And also, I only had the one dress at Grim’s place. I kept it for two years, looking forward to wearing it on my return to Underthames. And after all we’ve been through in the last few days, it just has a few too many holes in it.” The pixie turned to Bob. “ ’Twon’t both
er you that I dress in this fashion, will it?”
“Dress ’ow you like,” Bob said, focusing very closely on the last of her buckles.
“Guess this is good-bye,” Grim said to Charlie. “Will you ever come back?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie confessed. “My bap told me to go see a man in Wales. He was my father’s friend, and I have to go warn him that the Iron Cog knows how to find him.” Charlie didn’t mention his secret hope that Caradog Pritchard, whoever the man really was, might be able to help him.
“I’m looking forward to meeting ’im myself,” Bob added.
Charlie nodded. “The Iron Cog may already be on its way.”
“And then?” Ingrid asked.
Charlie shrugged. He looked at the attic around him. Its shelves were knocked over and its books scattered about the floor. Ollie was browsing through the library by turning volumes over with his toe and glancing at the covers. “I kind of wish I could bring some books. A little Walter Scott, maybe, or Dickens.”
“What do you need to read adventure stories for now?” Grim chuckled. “You’re an adventurer yourself, Charlie.”
“You could take the Almanack,” Ingrid suggested, fishing a copy out of the chaos.
“I’ll look for a copy of the first edition.” Charlie smiled. “If you and Grim don’t mind.”
Grim nodded. “Yes, well, who’s to say we were right to pressure poor Smythson? Hiding uncomfortable facts didn’t make them go away.”
Ingrid only smiled.
“I’ll be back, for one,” Gnat said, “when I’ve slain my three great beasts.”
“There are beasts in London you could slay,” Grim said.
“Aye,” Gnat agreed, “but nothing heroic enough. Just rats and ghouls and hulders and the like. Little things.”
Grim laughed out loud, and then bent over to gently kiss Gnat on the back of her hand. “Far as I’m concerned,” he declared, “you’re the Baroness of Underthames already.”
Charlie hugged Grim, sort of enjoying the cow smell. He hugged Ingrid, too; she smelled much nicer, and her tail swished back and forth as they embraced.
“You’ll have to be your own in loco parentis now,” Grim told him. The big hulder looked a little sad.
“You were a great dad for a while,” Charlie said. “Just when I needed one.”
Grim smiled at him gently. “The only dad you ever needed was your own bap. You’re a very special boy, Charlie Pondicherry.”
Charlie looked at his feet and shrugged. He knew he’d done some unusual things, even amazing things, but nothing he’d done had saved his bap. And Grim’s comment reminded him of something else. “I think my father’s real name was Singh.”
“Will you change your name, then?” Gnat asked.
Charlie shook his head. “My father named me Charlie Pondicherry, and he called me his son. That’s who I want to be.”
They climbed out onto the rooftop together. Other roofs surrounded them, some above and some below, stretching out to the horizon in every direction. Vapor curled up from the Gullet in front of Lucky Wu’s Earth Dragon Laundry.
Charlie strapped himself into the front of the flyer.
“Don’t drop me.” Ollie gave himself a good long scratch under both arms. Bamf! He turned himself into a snake and nestled his coiled, scaly body around Charlie’s neck, smelling faintly of rotten eggs.
“Fly all the way to Wales without stopping?” Grim asked.
“We’ve the sunshine for it,” Gnat piped cheerfully. “I don’t want to get rained on, you know.”
“An’ Charlie can spell me off if ’e ’as to,” Bob added. She flapped her wings once. “But my arm’s feeling peachy now. I reckon we’ll make it in a day or two.”
“God speed you,” Grim rumbled. Charlie thought he saw a tear in the troll’s eye.
“And you, Grim Grumblesson,” he returned. “And Ingrid.”
“Right,” Bob said. “ ’Ere we go!”
They ran down the roof, and she launched the flyer into Wu’s cloud of steam. With a single flap of Bob’s arms they rose above the vapor and then turned, still rising, over Irongrate Lane. Below, steam-carriages and hansoms and riding animals of all sorts continued on their paths, unaware of the flying machine above them.
The buildings fell away as they climbed. Charlie saw the river first, and then all of London was at his feet, gnarled and dirty and crawling with millions of people. The farther they rose, the prettier the city became. He saw Brunel’s Sky Trestle like a web ensnaring all of London. He saw Waterloo Station, the stump of the London Eye still smoldering. He saw the clock tower with its shattered panes like a broken eye. He saw Buckingham Palace, and he hoped the real queen and her important guests were enjoying her Jubilee garden party.
Would he ever see the queen again? She had called him a hero, but Charlie didn’t feel like a hero. He didn’t want to be a hero—not anymore.
He wanted to be a boy. Just a normal, flesh-and-blood boy, his father’s true son. He didn’t know if that was even possible, but he hoped the man Caradog Pritchard might be able to help. But Pritchard could do nothing unless Charlie first saved him from the murderous agents of the Iron Cog.
Bob turned the flyer to follow the sun west, to Wales and the future.
Dave Butler lives in an old house and works in a study where one of the biggest bestsellers of the twentieth century was written. He has kept the room’s original shag carpet and wood-veneer walls. He likes games, guitars, languages, and most of all, his family. Dave lives in Provo, Utah. You can find him on the Web at davidjohnbutler.com.
