The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  Behind her the gas went ssssssssss, and above her the organ went, tinkle clang tinkle, and Tate shuffled and whined, and in her bedroom, Sissy Smith tossed and dreamt of . . .

  Clowns with painted faces, dancing monkeys and white stallions, creatures with long noses and necks as tall as houses, strange spotted cats that growl from behind bars, swinging acrobats and sweet smelling delights of . . . smelling of . . . of . . .

  . . . once upon a time there was a boy who ran away to the circus . . .

  And at the door of Sissy Smith’s bedroom a man with a smile painted in huge red lines across his face, eased back the door to look in, saw the child sleeping and, as all clowns must when they see anything that pleases, giggled. Because that’s what clowns do. Behind him, the shadow of a boy dressed in a shirt ten years too big for him rose up, outlined in darkness against a shimmering oil lamp, a poker in his right hand.

  Upstairs, a man, a clown, his face all smiling red laughter, giggling, dressed in a lion skin and a pair of warping white trousers looked up from the bed where Sissy Smith lay and said, ‘Did you hear summat?’

  The organ grinder kept on grinding his organ.

  The monkey kept on dancing on his stand.

  Sissy Smith kept on sleeping.

  Just like it was meant to be.

  In the cellar below the basement, Tess looked at the great black pipes on the wall, holding up her thin light and pressing her ear to each length of metal to listen to the rumbling of the hot gases within. She had always gone out of her way to pretend not to listen when Lyle explained the way the pipes worked, explained why this valve led to that joint, but even she had known, as they’d stood in the darkness of this old vault, that it was important.

  To one side of the pipes, a great panel of pumps and pistons had been crudely thrown together by a man for whom ‘finishing touches’ were a trivial extra. The only female touch to this ragtag assemblage of metal and levers was a note nailed into the roof above, on which Tess’s rough hand proclaimed:

  DANJER. SMELS.

  She tore the note down and looked at another one beneath it.

  This said, in Lyle’s most careful handwriting: ‘Wear a mask.’

  She felt the smelly leather thing over her face, wondered how strange it must look to anyone who could see, and then ran her hands down over the pipes and pulleys. She found a handle, turned it hard to one side, heard something heavy and metallic clunk, like a heavy railway track shifting its course, heard another clang from overhead, and then heard the ssssss of the leaking gas from the lanterns upstairs suddenly stop, their supply cut off.

  The clown eased towards Sissy Smith, reached out for the pillow on which she rested her head, smiling to think of her pretty little face all warm and sleepy beneath the feathers of the pillow.

  At the back of the dark cellar that stank of things no house should ever stink of, Tess climbed up onto a chest of drawers, fumbled among the shelves, stuck her hand deep into a pile of jars and boxes. She’d heard of houses where, if you pulled out a certain book, whole shelves would swing inwards to reveal a secret compartment. Lyle hadn’t liked this idea at all - too easy, he’d said, too clean, too . . . Just too eighteenth century. Therefore, in order to open the secret doorway in Lyle’s laboratory, he’d gone for a solution far more likely to deter any concealed door hunters, and hidden the switch at the bottom of a jar of pickled eggs.

  The clown looked down at Sissy Smith, smiled, said, ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful little princess, but she was sleepy and couldn’t wake up until the handsome prince . . . No, wait, that’s not how it goes. Um . . .’

  And then, eyes focused somewhere a very long way away, as if he didn’t even notice what he did, he pushed the pillow over Sissy’s face, held it down tight, whistling a distant tune between his jagged smiling teeth as he did so.

  A voice behind him said, ‘Oh, I say . . . um . . . No, really?’

  He half turned.

  The poker in Thomas’s hand bounced off his skull, and that was the last thing the clown saw for a while.

  In the basement, Tess flicked the switch.

  She tried to remember what Lyle had said. The usual refrain of ‘Never, ever ever, ever, I mean ever, unless someone is actually trying to kill you and, even then, I would rather you consulted me first, circumstances allowing’ was all that she could hear, repeating itself in her mind over and over again. There had been something more, as well, something like, ‘It’ll be big, it’ll be violent, it’ll be amazing - if it works.’

  There was a little clattering of glass, as the sharpened end of something small and internal punctured the top of something heavy and overfilled. There was the uncomfortable sound of two liquids that didn’t want to be friends, mingling, somewhere behind the walls. Tess hopped down off the shelf where she stood, pulled open the nearest cupboard door, tipped out a pile of stained old tea towels, until she found a pair of bellows, the nose embedded in the wall. She started to pump. Somewhere inside the walls, clear liquid met foggy liquid, the two began to change, to spin and dance around each other. Tess squatted down and pulled back the last piece of the contraption, eased open the valve, smelt the gas rise and carefully, shielding her face with one hand, struck a spark to the valve.

  The gas, very gently, went whumph.

  The flame sputtered up, greenish yellow, foul-smelling, it crawled up from the valve in the floor and was sucked up immediately towards the great black pipes. Simultaneously, a vent opened behind the two glass tubes, which were now bubbling and smoking. An iron pipe descended over them as with a little snap! glass broke under the pressure of liquid and air and gas within, liquid and smoke pouring out of the vials. The flames rose, encasing vials, pipes, all. Tess backed away as the heat of the fire began to burn through her thick mask, wrapping every pipe with loving flames until the metal ticked and the contents began to scream.

  In Sissy Smith’s bedroom, Thomas looked down uncertainly at the unconscious clown at his feet and said, ‘Oh . . . um . . . well, you see . . .’

  And wondered why, even asleep, the clown was still smiling.

  Then a voice behind him said, ‘Naughty boys go to bed without any supper.’

  He spun on the spot, and looked up into the great, bearded and twirly-moustached face of a knife-thrower who was holding a knife in one hand. It was long, curved, polished steel, and didn’t look like it was designed with safety in mind.

  Thomas dropped the poker, backed away, half tripped over the clown and sprawled unevenly over the end of the bed, rolled off it and kept on backing as the knife-thrower advanced, a strange, distant smile on his face, as if the man in purple couldn’t understand the boy’s fear.

  He blurted out, ‘Now, look here,’ and for a moment wondered why he tried so hard to sound like his father, ‘I am Thomas Edward Elwick,’ he added quickly. ‘My family is extremely important and if you so much as presume to . . . to . . . uh . . .’

  ‘Naughty boys,’ said the knife-thrower kindly, ‘go to bed without any stories.’

  Then a moment of doubt passed across the man’s face. He half looked up, twitching the end of his nose like a startled animal, head on one side. He said, like a bewildered child confused by something new, ‘Can you smell something funny?’

  And something fast, ginger-blond, limping from a bloody ankle and accompanied by an enthusiastically supportive, without ever risking danger, dog, exploded through the door of the bedroom. Thomas reflected for a moment that it was a vaguely Horatio Lyle shaped something, and that, as it grabbed the knife-thrower by the back of the head and kicked him hard in the soft part of the bend of his knees, that it was very, very angry.

  A woman watches Lyle’s house.

  She’s been doing this for a while, longer, in fact, than she would care to admit in any sort of society, particularly that of her peers. It is not considered healthy for one of her disposition to take an interest in such uncivilised sorts as Mister Horatio Lyle.

  Tonight, however, her interest is
paying off.

  Tonight, she has witnessed a carriage full of clowns, knife throwers, strong men, organ-grinders, bear baiters and general all-purpose figures from the entertainment industry, disembark before Lyle’s front door and promptly proceed to break it down. She has observed various figures running, scuffling and being unusually and excitingly electrocuted by a number of ingenious traps and scientific devices spread round the house. She is now interested to note that along with the pungent smell of cat’s piss starting to emanate from the basement, a great fat cloud of dense green smoke is pouring from every gas fixture in the ceilings and walls, pressing up against the windows and flooding through the halls of the house, pouring under doors and through cracks in the stone.

  It is, she reflects, unusual behaviour for any gas fixture to pour out dense greenish-grey smoke.

  But then again, perhaps not in Mister Lyle’s house.

  Tess fell to her knees and coughed. She coughed and choked and spluttered and tore at her throat and thought, If it works. Men!

  She’d done pretty well, she thought, as every gas lamp in the house, everything that had ever been connected to a pipe, every hole and plug, every lantern began to pump the thick greenish-grey fog into the air. She’d managed to divert both water and gas from their usual routes and replace them with the noxious chemical compounds smashed together in their two little vials. She’d succeeded in heating the resulting compound to such an extent that, under extreme thermal pressure, every inch of the house was now flooding with the stuff. She’d even remembered to wear a mask, to cover her face in case of burning, in case of choking, in case, just in case, something went wrong.

  What she’d forgotten to do, she realised, as the world began to fade to black behind the tide of rising darkness filling every stair, every room, every corner of Lyle’s house, was pick up something else to breathe.

  CHAPTER 10

  Ether

  Thomas wheezed.

  He wheezed for a number of reasons.

  Primary among the causes, he suspected, and going back to first principals, was the simple truth that gentlemen of his class and lifestyle were used to being carried across town by horses, horse-drawn vehicles or, in dire circumstances, sedan chairs drawn by muscular gentlemen paid for their physical well-being. In other words, he wasn’t used to much physical exertion unless it was being conducted from on top of a horse.

  His secondary concern was this: that his tactful offer of, ‘I say, sir, do you need assistance?’ in response to seeing what he could only describe as Horatio Lyle crossed with an angry ginger weasel single-handedly attempting to tackle a purple-caped knife-thrower in Sissy Smith’s bedroom had been met with a string of obscenities followed by a loud crack.

  The crack had been the sound of Lyle hitting the knife-thrower over the head with a frying pan.

  Thomas had been rather surprised to see Lyle fight. For a start, he’d never quite known that Lyle had the berserker spirit in him, but now he reflected upon it, his father always said it was the quiet ones who were the least reliable. Moreover, he’d been more than a little shocked by some of the tactics Lyle had deployed - he swore he could see teeth going where teeth should not, and as for the ferociousness of Lyle’s right knee, he didn’t want to consider the anatomical consequences of some of those strikes.

  Then Lyle had been by him, grabbing him by the shoulders, shaking him.

  ‘Are you all right? Boy! Look at me! Are you all right?’

  ‘They . . . they tried to kill Sissy Smith. The men put a pillow over her mouth and . . .’

  Thomas stopped talking. There was something in Lyle’s face that had passed beyond words and out the other side, that sat on a hot puddle of boiling rage and found it tepid compared to the fury inside the soul.

  ‘The smoke . . .’ whimpered Thomas as the room began to fade behind the great stinking clouds tumbling out of every fixture in the wall. ‘Good God,’ he breathed, as realisation hit him. ‘These people are from the circus. They’re all from the circus.’

  ‘Remarkable deduction,’ grunted Lyle, pulling at his sleeve and tearing the stained white fabric into long pieces that he started to wrap round his nose and mouth. ‘Listen to me. The smoke coming out of the house is a chloroform derivative mixed with a lot of steam, and a nitrous compound to help deliver a concentrated effect. It’s pumped out through the same pipes as the gas. Breathe it for a few seconds and you get light-headed; breathe it for a few minutes and you pass out entirely; breathe it for more than five without any protection and your skin will burn and your lips will blister and anything inhaled after that . . . Look, I’ve never tested it, it was just that after the last time when the Tseiqin broke into my house . . . If it’s too heavily concentrated, it’s also extremely flammable and extremely explosive. Only Tess and I know how to pump it into the house. You need to listen to me and do exactly what I say. The controls for the pump are downstairs in the cellar below my laboratory. That’s where Tess is. I’m going to find her. The house is crawling with . . . with people that are . . . with people from the circus. But they’ll be feeling the effects too, they’ll pass out if they breathe too deeply. We just have to keep awake. You’ve got to get Sissy out and, ideally, you’ve got to do it without breathing. There’s only a limited supply of catalyst to trigger the reaction, so the air will clear of its own accord eventually. But listen! If Tess is down there breathing it for too long she’ll be hurt, and so will you. Get Sissy out and get safe, that’s all that ma—That’s all I want. Can you do this?’

  Thomas nodded, feeling his chin bounce off the inside of his stomach as he did.

  ‘Good. Try very, very hard not to breathe. Go!’

  So here he was.

  Wheezing.

  In the unfortunate position of trying to (1) Carry an unconscious girl down a flight of stairs while at no point violating their respective dignities and (2) do all this while a strange and unexpected substance was flooding out of every gas fixture in the house, sending tears to his eyes and fire to his lungs.

  It wasn’t smoke.

  It was much, much more than smoke.

  Thomas put his hand against the wall and counted the steps. He couldn’t see. It wasn’t just that the air was too thick to see through, but that when he opened his eyes and tried to peer through the smoke and billowing darkness, they immediately filled with burning tears that blinded him as well as a moonless night.

  So he walked, blind, shuffling without lifting his feet off the ground, reciting: ‘Ten steps door living room five steps stair down two three five steps turn corner study down again four five six seven whoops! bottom step and . . .’

  . . . and all Thomas can hear is the ssssss of gas and smoke tumbling out of the lanterns, out of kitchen pipes and drains, rushing out of windows and stinging, biting at his skin. How long had Lyle said you could be in this stuff without getting burnt? A few minutes? More than five? Less than five? Count steps, count seconds, don’t breathe, because—His foot stumped against something soft and warm, fallen across his path and he breathed, a sharp intake through his sleeve and his thoughts were suddenly: Oh God oh God oh God . . .

  He realised that fear was the colour blue and made of fur, that the wall his father had built at the end of the garden was just for the squirrels to play in, that the sky was falling and the earth would soon fly and once upon a time in a land where the . . .

  He reached the bottom stair.

  Sissy Smith was a thousand-ton weight in his arms.

  His head was a saucepan in which thick soup full of lumps bubbled and boiled.

  His lungs had been filled with boiling water.

  His eyes were full of tears.

  He could see the shattered remnants of the front door a few steps ahead.

  He could hear the sound of an organ, turning, turning, turning, Alas my love. Somewhere someone was playing an organ. There was a man on the floor, kneeling on the floor, an old man with a scraggly beard and a pair of swollen red eyes, turning the handle of th
e organ strapped to his belly. No, wait, not strapped, strapped implied it was separate, but this was more, this instrument was part of his belly, it was part of him, the straps were part of his clothes, his clothes were part of his skin and as he turned the handle of the organ, face streaming with tears and throat crackling with every breath, he looked straight at Thomas and whispered, ‘Don’t leave me, Daddy.’