The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  Time passed.

  In Drury Lane, the crowds began to push and shove for the theatres and the music halls. Down in Bermondsey a warehouse was burning, to the great joy of most passers-by with time to spare. In Wapping the whistle blew for the change of shift; at Mile End the church bells began to toll across the newly-dug foundations of homes for working men. Sails and rigging creaked in the over-crowded quays. The city’s great sewer-pumping stations groaned under the weight of their never-ending task.

  In her kitchen in Hampstead, Milly Lyle, a woman for whom the world would never be big enough, finally heard Lyle’s description of events in full. Then she said; ‘And on top of all this, you have a circus clown tied up in my privy. You know, Horatio, dear, this is why you’re never invited to visit the cousins. Is there anything else I should know?’

  Lyle was silent. Then he said, ‘The organ-grinder. When Tess released the gas into the house, he was caught in it too. It knocked him unconscious. By the time I came round, he’d vanished, along with all the others from the circus. But he kept playing the organ, all the time. Round and round and round, just - playing. And he was unconscious.’

  ‘You’re not making the best of—’

  ‘He was unconscious, Ma. Even when knocked out by the gas, he kept on playing the organ. I looked at his hand and . . . and his skin was fused to the handle as though it had been burnt there. Like in a fire. I could see it sticking to the handle. All bloody. He kept on grinding the organ, winding the handle round and round even when he was asleep.’

  ‘Well,’ said Milly at length. ‘I’ve heard enough of the cases you take, to find this a possibility. The question is how. Perhaps some kind of hypnotic—’

  ‘And the strong man? He was like a child. A numb child. And he said something, something that Tess says when she’s in trouble. “Didn’t mean nothin’!” And the poison that’s knocked out Sissy Smith - I don’t know what it is! I always know what the poison is, but this . . . She’s going to die, Ma. I was doing an experiment on a piece of cake Tess stole from the circus, trying to find the toxic substance, then Tate bit me and I woke up and . . .’ he hesitated, ‘and there was a reaction. I remember. I was a bit occupied at the time, what with a bleeding ankle and people trying to kill me, but I remember looking at the beaker on the way out and there was some sort of precipitate. Something in the glass. Something in the cake. After all, what child would say no to pudding? And then there’s the clown.’

  ‘The one tied up in my privy?’

  ‘Yes. Have you looked at his face?’

  ‘In detail? No.’

  ‘I had a quick gander. I think you should see this.’

  ‘What will the neighbours say?’ Milly Lyle sighed.

  The two Lyles, mother and son, stood in front of the little privy shed in Milly’s back garden. Lyle was holding a poker, just in case.

  They eased back the door.

  Inside, the clown giggled.

  Because that’s what clowns do.

  Milly Lyle would be the first to admit that tying a clown up in her privy was not the ideal arrangement. On the other hand - where else was he to go in a civilised home?

  She said, ‘The clown just giggled.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That’s an unusual and extraordinary reaction to my privy.’

  ‘Do you know, according to Mrs Bontoft’s Practical Advice, the maintenance of a privy should actually be the man’s work, so that the woman doesn’t become sullied by contact with—’

  ‘Why on earth are you reading that absurd book?’

  ‘Well, you know . . .’ Lyle made a random gesture unconnected with any kind of appropriate answer. ‘Look.’ He leant forward, until his nose was a few inches from the clown’s face. The clown’s fake wig was gone, fallen off and trampled underfoot in the chaotic interior of Lyle’s house. He looked older and sadder, a little bald smiling man in a silly shirt, grinning despite his captivity. Lyle said, ‘My name is Horatio Lyle. What’s your name?’

  Another giggle. ‘Billy the Button!’

  ‘What’s your real name, Billy the Button?’ The clown hesitated. A look of confusion flickered in his eyes, though his lips stayed stretched into a wide smile. ‘Me Horatio,’ intoned Lyle. ‘That’s my ma.’

  A giggle, less sure of itself than before. ‘Would you like to hear a joke?’ asked Billy.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a child who ran away to the circus . . .’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Billy the Bu—’

  ‘What’s your real name? Listen, mister, you’re in trouble. Children missing, poisoned, attacked, people hurt, my front door inconveniently smashed in, my house full of smoke and noxious compounds that are going to make everything smell, and I’m talking cats’ piss smelly. I mean, you are in serious trouble. What’s going on at the circus?’

  ‘Once upon a time . . .’

  Lyle reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a stained and rumpled handkerchief. He spat into it and vigorously set to, cleaning Billy the Button’s face. The clown grunted and grumbled as Lyle rubbed at his make-up for nearly a minute, before standing back to admire his handiwork.

  The clown’s face was unchanged: white skin with a painted smile.

  Milly leant in, sniffing. ‘Curious,’ she said at last. ‘Maybe a white lead derivative, injected straight into the skin?’

  She reached out and carefully prodded and tugged at the clown’s face. He giggled. ‘Ticklish!’ he said.

  She pulled and poked, pushed up his chin and examined the perfect whiteness of his neck and hands, and rubbed at the giant red smile on his face. Then with a murmur of disbelief she pulled down the soft white collar of his shirt, and said, ‘Horatio?’

  He followed her gaze.

  The painted whiteness of the clown’s skin extended below his neck, across his chest and shoulders, up his arms and beyond his wrists. It covered, without failure or pause, every inch of his body.

  Lyle said, ‘We need a bigger bath.’

  They tried the bath.

  Hot water and soap didn’t remove it.

  They tried water and ethyl alcohol soaked in cotton, and that didn’t shift it. The cotton wasn’t even stained. Then Lyle got out his magnifying glass and leant right in close to the clown’s skin, under the white burning light of a magnesium glow, and sniffed and hummed and hemmed and finally announced, ‘It’s his skin.’

  ‘Interesting,’ murmured Milly Lyle.

  ‘I mean, his skin really is that colour.’

  ‘Yes, I thought that’s what you meant.’

  ‘And the painted smile is also his skin. And the painted eyes. It’s all . . . natural.’

  ‘Well, dear, I feel that might depend on your semantic definition of “natural”.’

  Billy the Button giggled. ‘Three children visit the circus—’ ‘Shut up!’ snapped Lyle.

  ‘Shutting up, guv’nor. Like a clam.’

  ‘How long have you been like this?’

  ‘Like what, guv’nor?’

  ‘A clown?’

  ‘You gotta be born a clown, to be a clown. Gotta be born to be funny.’

  ‘How long have you been at the circus?’

  ‘Seen lotsa circuses, guv’nor.’

  ‘How long have you been at Mr Majestic’s Marvellous Electric Circus?’

  Billy hesitated, then he giggled. ‘Once upon a time . . .’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Don’t know nothin’, guv’nor.’

  ‘Tell me!’ snapped Lyle, and then felt a soft hand fall on his arm.

  Milly smiled and stepped forward. She knelt down in front of Billy the Button, put her hand over his and murmured, very gently, ‘Lad, I’m Mother Lyle. You may call me Milly.’

  ‘Hello, Mo . . . Mo . . . Hello.’

  And then, because Mrs Lyle knew a thing or two about eccentrics, she made a breakthrough. ‘Tell me, Billy,’ she said softly, ‘have you been a good boy?�
�

  Later, Lyle would blame it on a mother’s instinct, something no amount of Practical Advice could supply him with.

  Billy the Button whimpered, ‘I . . . I fink so, m’m.’

  And suddenly, though he was still grinning, it was a little, childish voice that crept out from his painted mouth, and he framed each word as if it were a new, uncomfortable thing.

  ‘And do you love your mother?’ asked Milly.

  ‘Ma—’ began Lyle.

  ‘Shush! My son Horatio, now, he’s not always a good boy,’ crooned Milly, and Billy held her gaze, hypnotised by a pair of kindly grey eyes. ‘You would not believe the efforts he went to as a child to avoid eating cauliflower; and, as for girls, oh, you would not believe the trouble it’s been, trying to find him a suitable woman. I’ve quite given up on grandchildren, you know. At least those who aren’t descended from green-eyed, knife-wielding demon-people.’

  ‘Ma!’ growled Lyle.

  ‘I thought maybe Miss Chaste, a vicar’s daughter, kind and loyal - but what did Horatio say? “She thinks ammonia and ammonium are the same thing.” As if a man who finds the height of entertainment in applying pressure to carbonated products can be picky about his prospects. Where’s your mother, Billy?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said the clown.

  ‘Where’s your father?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Do you have any brothers?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Dunno. Ran away to the circus.’

  ‘Did you run away to the circus, Billy?’ Milly’s face was a picture of slow-witted innocence, blazoned with kindness.

  ‘Course. You gotta run away to the circus.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because . . . because . . . because . . . Once upon a time there was—’

  ‘Why do you have to run away to the circus?’

  ‘Once upon a time there was . . .’

  ‘Billy? Why did you try to kill Sissy Smith?’

  Sweat started to rise up from the unnatural white of Billy’s skin. ‘Once upon a time there was . . .’

  ‘You tried to kill a child.’

  ‘. . . a lovely little girl who was beaten by an evil schoolmaster . . .’

  ‘You tried to kill a child, Billy. What would your father say to that?’

  ‘. . . an’ . . . an’ . . . an’ they said that . . . an’ . . .’

  ‘Didn’t your mother tell you to be nice to girls?’

  Billy’s eyes widened. His mouth opened into a perfect ‘O’ of surprise and then, to Lyle’s bewilderment and horror, he raised his face to the low privy ceiling and wailed, ‘Mama! I want my mama!’

  Night settled across London, slipping into its old familiar corners where it knew that, even during the day, the sun would never get a look in. It nestled among its favourite shadows in the deep dark tunnels below the city, oozed through the old memories of the covered Fleet Ditch, slid down into the crypt beneath the ancient church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, smothered the lamps burning in the veterans’ hospital and the factory wards, shrivelled down the sounds of the music halls, silenced the bleating sheep waiting for the Smithfield slaughterman, and turned out the reflected glow in the dead eyes of the fish heads strewn across the market floor of Billingsgate.

  It stretched the shadows over Sissy Smith’s bed, and over the huddled shape of Tess, slumbering on the floor at her feet. Tess guards Sissy, Tate guards Tess, and secretly, at the door, wrapped up in Lyle’s father’s old dressing gown smelling of dust and care, Thomas guards them all, because it is his duty, as the oldest of them, and the man to boot, to keep the nightmares from knocking on their door.

  Lyle sits in his father’s old chair and does not sleep.

  Open on the floor of his still-smoky house, down towards the river, the Practical Advice declares, unread and unloved:Story-telling to children is for the most part a frivolous and unnecessary activity that encourages nothing better than the idling of thoughts, the distraction of unreasonable imaginings and a separation of mind from reality. He who coined the phrase ‘once upon a time’ was a jestering rogue who knew that, when all reckonings are made, fantastical tales of princes and princesses are nothing more than fictitious lies to comfort away the very natural and sensible concerns of this world. A child is deceived in pictures of ‘heroes’, of ‘good’ doing battle with ‘evil’, and should have no greater need to find such a figure than in the hero that is his father.

  Horatio Lyle thinks of old Harry Lyle, and wishes he’d had a chance to show him some of the things he’s done.

  And on the other side of the city, where the buzz of urban life begins to decay into the mish-mash of the ever-growing suburbs, the lights are still shining in one special place, which even now, is humming and tinkling with activity and life. After all, the lights never really go out at Mr Majestic’s Marvellous Electric Circus. As the ringmaster loves to say, ‘If the lights go out, how will the children know where to find us?’

  CHAPTER 12

  Hospital

  Next morning began at the breakfast table, where Tess learnt, without much surprise, that Horatio Lyle had developed his weak appreciation of cooking from a mother who regarded breakfast as nothing more than an excuse to eat oats.

  ‘Oats?!’ she wailed. ‘What am I s’posed to do with oats?’

  ‘You’re supposed to eat them, dear,’ explained Milly. ‘They’re very good for all sorts of things.’

  ‘Name one!’

  ‘A glossy mane,’ muttered Lyle sourly from his corner of the table.

  ‘Horatio!’ exclaimed Milly. ‘I heard that!’

  Thomas felt it was his duty to show that, despite being used to having his breakfast served by two butlers and an under-chef, he could still eat the food of . . . well, ordinary people. Carefully, he took a mouthful of porridge. His body, which had spent most of the night in distress being a frame not used to exercise, nearly convulsed at this new outrage, and he could feel his stomach clench as if to say, ‘Try eating another mouthful - go on, just you try it, if you dare. I’ll show you what peristalsis is really all about.’

  He put down his spoon and took a sip of something that Milly claimed to be tea. He could feel both Lyle and Tess studying him, waiting for something spectacular and digestive to happen. At his feet, Tate pawed a trouser leg plaintively. He did not appreciate Milly Lyle’s breakfasts either.

  When his mother’s back was turned, Lyle made a flurry of gestures. They seemed to indicate, in so many convulsions of his elbows, that he entirely understood if his young companions didn’t want to eat their breakfast and that frankly he could think of few worse fates and that if they looked under the table they might find a convenient ledge where he had once hidden many an ancient piece of cauliflower. His eyes met Tess’s. Her face was bright and her eyes beamed with excitement at this new, semilarcenous streak manifesting itself in Lyle’s nature. His hands stopped waving about, and with a deep voice that he would have liked to call ‘booming and firm’ but which to Thomas’s ears sounded like the beginning of a long yawn, he proclaimed, ‘Eat your food, children!’

  ‘Dr Morris is calling by later,’ said Milly brightly, seemingly oblivious to the culinary debate going on behind her, ‘to pick up Billy the Button. He’s clearly not in a correct frame of mind, but perhaps, with the right remedies . . .’

  ‘Ohohohoh!’ Tess bounced in her seat. ‘They gonna drill holes in his head? Or zap him with zapping electric voltage or . . . or stick him in ice baths?’

  ‘Well, no. Dr Morris’s approach to mental instability is rather different.’

  Tess’s face fell. ‘Oh. What’s he do?’

  ‘He seems to favour talking to the patient.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘Talks to them.’

  ‘Whatsa pointa that?’ demanded Tess. ‘They’re cracked - what’s talkin’ gonna do?’

  ‘Billy might have been drugged,’ suggested Lyle. ‘There was a smell on his breath, simila
r to that we found with Sissy. It is conceivable that he too has been poisoned with the exact same concoction that has affected Sissy and which was most likely in the cake being served at the circus. Perhaps in the adult frame it induces a reduction to a child-like state as we can observe in Billy and some of the other denizens of the circus; perhaps in children it induces something worse. It needs more study, we need to gather more information, we need to go back to the . . .’