The Peculiar

by Stefan Bachmann

  There have only been nine. . . . Those were the faery gentleman’s words; the ones he had spoken to the lady while Mr. Jelliby listened from the darkness of the cabinet. Child Number Ten was a changeling. Mr. Lickerish was going to kill another one.

  Mr. Jelliby glanced around him. It was late afternoon, and the coffeehouse was well attended. Several couples sat at the street-side tables, a handful of single gentlemen as well, and one of those modern, radical women who wear bloomers and go to cafés all by themselves. And they were all staring at him. Discreetly, they thought, from behind raised fans and newspapers, over the tops of sun spectacles, and under the brims of flowered hats. But staring nonetheless. Just to see what the handsome man with the dustpan would do next.

  Slowly, he turned back to the bird. For a second he wanted to run. To leave the bird and the coffeehouse, take a carriage back to Belgrave Square and drink brandy as if nothing had ever happened. Those people didn’t know. Nobody knew what he knew, and nobody would care if he didn’t do anything.

  But somewhere in the faery slums a child was waiting to die. He couldn’t drink brandy knowing that. It would make him gag. It would taste of blood and bones, and if his carriage should crash off a bridge the very next day, he didn’t suppose he would feel very sorry for himself lying in the black depths of the river. He was the only one who knew what was going to happen. And so he was the only one who could do anything to stop it.

  Taking a lacquered box from his coat pocket, he fitted a pair of reading glasses to his nose. He leaned down to study the bird more closely. Somewhere it should say where it was built. If he could only find it. . . . He squinted, turning the machine over in his hands. The bird felt very frail. He could feel the machinery shifting minutely under his fingertips, and for a second he was struck with the childish urge to crush it in his fist and feel how the springs and metal plates squelched out between his fingers. He didn’t, of course. He had gone through far too much trouble just to smash the bird. Besides, there were words on it. He saw them now. Tiny, tiny writing etched with a red-hot stylus into the bottom of one of the metal feathers.

  Mchn. Alch. it read.

  And then, in tinier letters still: X.Y.Z.

  The Mchn. Alch. part stood for mechanicalchemist. That much Mr. Jelliby knew. And X.Y.Z? Perhaps the initials of the shop, or the fabricator himself. But what strange initials they were. Mr. Jelliby would have to look them up in a directory when he got home. He hoped it was a manufacturer who advertised. A black-market mechanicalchemist toiling away in some hole in Limehouse would never be found, even if Mr. Jelliby searched a hundred years.

  Leaving the coffeehouse, he headed up Regent Street toward Mayfair, keeping his eyes peeled for a newspost. They tended to have shop listings nailed to them, somewhere among the layers and layers of handbills that fluttered endlessly like the petals of a dirty flower—handbills for music halls and circuses, pantomimes, operas, and phantasmagorias. But when he came to one, he found only two leaflets concerning mechanicalchemists and they were both frightfully prestigious ones in Grosvenor Street without a single X, Y, or Z between them.

  Mr. Jelliby took a cab back to Belgrave Square and tiptoed past the open door to the parlor. Ophelia was sitting in her favorite armchair, reading with rapt attention the latest issue of Spidersilk and Dewdrops: A Journal of Faerie Magic. She noticed him right away, but she didn’t stop him, and he went upstairs, locked himself in his study, and fell to scouring the adverts of his gentlemen’s newspapers with feverish haste. It took him all the rest of the day and much of the next morning to find what he was looking for. He forgot to come down to breakfast, forgot even to shave, and when he finally did find what he was looking for, it was something of a disappointment. The advertisement was small and plain, standing out starkly against the lavish illustrations of wigs and sardines and mechanical chambermaids. Three black lines declaring—still grandly enough for their humble looks—Mr. Zerubbabel’s Mechanical Marvels! Everything you can possibly dream of and a great many things you can’t, wrought in brass and clockwork, handmade, one-of-a-kind. Long-lasting faery batteries for flawless performance. Commissions only. Fair rates. And then the address: Fifth floor, Number 19, Stovepipe Road, Clerkenwell.

  Clerkenwell? Mr. Jelliby set down the newspaper. Clerkenwell was not a very fashionable neighborhood. In fact, it was downright inferior. And he had certainly never heard of an establishment called “Mr. Zerubbabel’s Mechanical Marvels.” One would think a gentleman of Mr. Lickerish’s standing would go to the finest mechanicalchemists in London for his wares. Not Clerkenwell. Unless the faery did not want the finest. Unless he wanted the quietest, the quickest, and the most secret.

  It was then that the doorbell had rung, Aunt Dorcas had sailed into the house, Ophelia had called him down to greet her and be polite, and he had asked his questions concerning Melusine.

  But he had escaped now. He went into the hall, snatching up his coat and hat from where they sat waiting to be brushed. Then he was out, hurrying across the rain-slick cobbles.

  Clerkenwell was a good distance from Belgrave Square. It would be easiest to climb the endless corkscrew stair to the elevated steam engine, he decided, and ride across London’s rooftops. Better, at least, than trying to find his way through the streets. He rarely ventured into the city north of Waterloo Bridge, never beyond Ludgate Hill, and to navigate the many dirty, dangerous neighborhoods that lay between his home and Clerkenwell was not something he wanted to do that day.

  When Mr. Jelliby arrived, breathless, at the top of the stair, an automaton that had no legs or eyes, that looked nothing at all like a human and yet was equipped with a curled brass moustache and top hat, held out a pincer hand to him. Mr. Jelliby put a shilling in it. The pincer hand and shilling were snatched back, folding into some hidden part of the automaton’s body. Then a brass bell tinged inside its belly and Mr. Jelliby was handed a green stub of ticket. The automaton waved him silently onto the platform.

  The steam train arrived in due time, and Mr. Jelliby sat himself down in one of the dark-paneled compartments of its passenger carriage. The train began to move. Smoke and weathervanes whirled past his window. Despite the brightness of the day, gas lamps fizzled on the walls, sucking the oxygen from the compartment. By the time he got out at King’s Cross station he had a splitting headache.

  Descending the stairs into the smoky, cavernous streets of Clerkenwell did little to help it. The air beneath the ramshackle tenements was vile. It filled his lungs like a bottle being stuffed with black cotton, made him gasp. At least the population looked less dangerous than the air. It was mostly women, and gnomes, and hollow-cheeked children. No doubt the thieves and hooligans are hard at work in more prosperous parts of the city, Mr. Jelliby thought.

  Stovepipe Road, Stovepipe Road. Heavens, were there no street signs in Clerkenwell? His eyes searched the filthy bricks, the peeling shop signs, and doorposts. He did find one, cracked and rusted, clinging by a shred of wire to the head of a lamppost, but he couldn’t make out what it said. Someone had painted over it in dripping red letters: Faeryland.

  He hurried up the street, saw nothing that looked like a mechanicalchemist’s, turned back when he thought no one was looking, and hurried down the street instead. He did this several times over before finally gathering the courage to ask directions from a toothless woman in scarlet petticoats. She pointed him to a dark alley that wormed into a mass of dilapidated buildings. He had passed that same alley at least five times already, and each time he had thought it far too suspicious-looking to risk entering.

  He stepped into it. The air was close here, viscous like tar. He looked up at the houses tilting overhead, and a great drop of sooty water splashed down toward him. He stepped aside, and it slapped the ground, echoing among the buildings. There were no signs in this alley either, not even shop-boards or tavern banners. Just leaning night-black houses and broken windows. Halfway down the alley, he spotted a gin-soaked hobgoblin sprawled across a doorstep and asked for
directions a second time.

  The goblin scowled out at him from under leafy eyebrows. “Right up there,” he rasped, waving a claw in the direction of a tall, thin house near the end of the alley. The building was just as dilapidated as the others. Certainly not a place Mr. Jelliby could imagine the Lord Chancellor visiting. Him, with his extravagant costumes and perfect white skin.

  Mr. Jelliby thanked the hobgoblin and approached the house uneasily. Looking up, he saw that it ended in a massive knot of chimneys and roiling fumes, like a head of wild black hair. He entered through a low door and began climbing some stairs, up and up, past leery-eyed lodgers and foul chambers until at last he came to the fifth floor. There he found a small hand-painted sign pointing to small hand-painted door on which was written quite simply Mr. Zerubbabel. No mechanical marvels.

  A collection of rusty bells jangled over the door as Mr. Jelliby entered. The room beyond was dark, low-ceilinged, and cramped, its actual shape difficult to make out for all the shelves and stacks of machinery towering throughout it. The metal skeletons of half-built automata sat slouched on crates, staring at nothing with dead eyes. Wires crisscrossed the ceiling, and on them, wheeling to and fro with soft creaking noises, were dozens of little tin men on monocycles, carrying in their hands screwdrivers and hammers and spouted cans of glistening oil.

  A metallic ting sounded from the far corner of the room, and Mr. Jelliby turned to see an old man hunched over a desk, adjusting the treads on a clockwork snail.

  Mr. Jelliby took a step toward him. “Sir?” he said. The word fell like a furry ball to the floor. The old man looked up. Wrinkling his nose, he peered at Mr. Jelliby through half-moon spectacles.

  “Yes, please?” he said, setting the snail down on the desk. It gave a contented whir and began turning circles around a mug of black grease.

  “Ah—do I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Zerubbabel?”

  “I am Mr. Zerubbabel, though whether you derive any pleasure from addressing me is entirely up to you.” The old man’s voice was clipped, educated, completely at odds with his jumbled little shop. On his head he wore a very tiny black hat. “Xerxes Yardley Zerubbabel, at your service.”

  Mr. Jelliby smiled gratefully. “I have a damaged piece of mechanics here that was constructed at your shop. It—it crashed through my attic window.” He had practiced what he was going to say all through breakfast while pretending to read the Times. It had been nothing like what he had just said. “If you would be so kind as to tell me where it was headed, I will be along right away to give it back to its owner.”

  “Oh, not necessary, I assure you. Not necessary at all. I have all my customers written up. Show me the machine, please.”

  Mr. Jelliby set to work extracting the bird from his pocket. A metal talon snagged on his trouser and tore off with a twang. The old man winced. While Mr. Jelliby struggled to undo the feathers from the stitchery on his waistcoat, the old man said, “Oh! The Sidhe’s bird. Thank you, I will see that it is returned to him myself.”

  “Oh . . .” Mr. Jelliby looked unhappy. “Well, would you tell me where it was flying anyway?”

  The little man’s brow darkened. When he spoke, his voice was wary. “No. No, I don’t suppose that I would.”

  Mr. Jelliby’s mouth twitched. He flicked at one of the bird’s springs. He shuffled his feet. Then he said, “All right, look here. I’m with the police, see, and the creature who bought this bird from you is a heinous criminal.”

  “He is a politician,” the old man said flatly.

  “But he is also a murderer! He’s been all around London and Bath killing poor innocents and leaving them hollow like dead trees, and you, as an upright Englishman, are required by honor to help me.”

  Mr. Zerubbabel grunted. “Firstly, I am not an Englishman. Secondly, that’s the dottiest tale I’ve ever heard. With the police, indeed. I don’t believe a word of it. And even if I did . . .” He sniffed and, eyebrows raised, set back to fiddling with the clockwork snail. “It’s none of my business.”

  Mr. Jelliby threw up his hands in exasperation. “How can you—what in—have you no . . .?” He dropped his hands. He opened his wallet and fished out two gleaming sovereigns, waving them under the old man’s nose. “Can I make it your business?”

  The old man eyed the coins. Snatching one, he bit it. Then he looked hard at Mr. Jelliby, stood on his tiptoes to look out the window in the shop door, and said gruffly, “Let me get my records.”

  Like an old rat, Mr. Zerubbabel retreated into a hole between two drooping shelves. Mr. Jelliby could see nothing inside but blackness. Some oaths issued from within, followed by a heavy crash that shook the towering house to its roots. A cascade of clockwork mosquitoes tumbled from a jar nearby. The old man popped his head out. “It has been eaten. One moment, if you please.” He disappeared back into the hole.

  There was another crash, what sounded like claws tapping, and fierce whispers, and the old man emerged again, this time with a map in his hands.

  “Now then!” he said, puffing. “Let’s see what we’ve got here, shall we?” He unfurled the map across a pile of debris and began poring over it, eyes darting like flies. Long lines had been drawn across it in red ink. Mr. Zerubbabel traced them with a wizened finger. “I have a captive faery-of-the-air to travel the distances and calculate safe routes, et cetera,” he explained. “It finds obstacles, measures the height from which my contraptions must launch.” He cast Mr. Jelliby a sideways glance. “So that they don’t crash through attic windows, you know.”

  Mr. Jelliby nodded wisely.

  Mr. Zerubbabel turned back to the map, frowning. He rapped his finger three times, in different places on the map. “Here are the points he gave me. Three birds. Each bird has its own route. Three birds for three routes. And all starting from different spots in London.” Mr. Zerubbabel looked thoughtful for a moment. “The one you picked up travels from Westminster Palace, it seems, on its way North. Yorkshire. It is launched toward the east to bypass the factory ash. The second one flies between Bath and a house on Blackfriars Bridge. And the third I never could understand. He had me calibrate it to fly in an upward line from a garret in Islington, three hundred feet into open sky. And when I sent Boniface—that’s my faery-of-the-air—up to see what was what, he found nothing. Just clouds and sky.”

  Mr. Jelliby wasn’t listening anymore. He had what he needed. “Thank you, sir, thank you so very much. Might you give me the marks, though? The longitudinal lines or whatever they’re called.” He held up another sovereign. “I’d be terribly grateful.”

  The old man pocketed the coin and scribbled a series of numbers on a yellowing scrap of paper. He passed it to Mr. Jelliby. “I don’t know what you’re up to. Trying to ruin the fellow like as not. Maybe a bit of blackmail? You are so alike really, you English and the faeries. So desperately far on either side that you can’t see anything in between. Ah, well. I’ll not talk. This part of London, nobody talks but the face on the coin, and as I said, it’s none of my business.”

  Mr. Jelliby thought that was not a very nice thing to say out loud. He was about to bid the man a cool farewell, when the bells above the door jangled again, and in ducked another customer.

  And who should it be but the Lord Chancellor John Wednesday Lickerish’s faery butler.

  Mr. Jelliby’s hand tightened around the bird. Slowly, slowly he began slipping it up his sleeve. The claw snagged his cuff. It wouldn’t go. Quite out of nowhere it struck him how very like a praying mantis the faery butler looked, like a deathly pale insect, with those long arms and fingers. The faery had to bend his head to the side in an odd way to keep it from knocking against the ceiling. The brass machinery around his face was stiff, unmoving.

  One step. One step to the right and Mr. Jelliby would be hidden behind the rivet-studded tentacles of a mechanical octopus. But it was too late. The faery butler turned, saw him.

  “Ooh!” he whined, lenses clicking across his one green eye as it focused on the
bird in Mr. Jelliby’s hand. “Fancy seeing you here. . . .”

  CHAPTER XI

  Child Number Ten

  THE goat tracks looped across the kitchen floor, from the door to the table to the beds and the potbellied stove under the drying herbs. Mother’s bulk rose and fell gently in sleep, the old bed creaking with each breath. Inside her cupboard, Hettie shifted a little, and sighed.

  Bartholomew let his breath out slowly. What has the faery come for? What does it want?

  If only he hadn’t invited it. If only he had listened to Mother and heeded her warnings. She had told him what might happen. She had practically begged him not to do it. But he had wanted a friend so badly. He wanted something to protect him, and talk with him, something that would make him feel he wasn’t just strange and ugly. Only it wasn’t going to be his friend. It wasn’t going to protect him, and it wasn’t going to wind up the wash-wringer either. All it did was slither about in the night and put nightmares in Hettie’s head. The number ten on the paper in the attic was another of its pranks, like as not. It was probably snickering into its sleeve right that very moment.

  Bartholomew bit his lip and followed the tracks to the flat door. It was still locked. He puts his finger into the keyholes, see, and the locks spring open, just like that. And spring closed again, too, it seemed. Slipping the key down off its peg, he unlocked the door. Then, careful not to make a sound, he tiptoed out into the passageway.

  The house was cool and dark. The floorboards, worn smooth by the years, gleamed dully in the feeble light from the window.

  The trail of ash led upstairs. It became fainter as he followed it, whispering away until it was only breaths against the wood. By the time Bartholomew reached the third floor it had almost disappeared. It didn’t matter. He knew where the faery had gone.

  Silent as the moon, he slipped up through the trapdoor and into the attic. Ducking under the first crossbeam, he crept forward, eyes darting, searching for a hint of where the faery might be hiding. He would kill it if he found it. The thought came to him with sudden violence. If he found the little monster, he would wring its neck. Wring it before it wrung Hettie’s, and Mother’s, and his.