Her Perilous Mansion

by Sean Williams

  Fire.

  There was no turning back now, Etta thought, her heart in her throat.

  As the conservatory went up with a whoosh, Elsie followed a prearranged path through the manor. Around her, one by one, the ghosts began to talk to her about the spell, or try to – Madame Iris in the bell-pulls, Ugo from the chimneys, Olive from the heating pipes, Lord Nigel as she raced by the study, Lady Simone in the Yellow Room, Doctor Mithily from the phone in the attic … All of them testing the spell, seeing if they could break its hold on the house and grounds.

  As Elsie raced past the scullery, panting for breath, Etta managed to force out ‘ … spell! … loosening!’ but then another voice drowned her out. It was Mr Packer calling through the walls of the house.

  ‘The fire – look!’

  Etta left Elsie and raced to the conservatory, where the night was full of the sound of glass panes smashing. Flames leapt high into the air, escaping through the empty window frames and licking with great tongues at the eaves of the nearby North Wing. Already, the paint on the outer wall of the house was turning black. It wouldn’t be long, Etta saw with alarm, before the house itself was ablaze.

  Come on, spell, she wanted to shout. What are you waiting for?

  In the cellar Almanac had made it as far as the mushroom maze only to be stricken with vertigo so powerful he could barely stand. Dropping the tools and lamp, it was all he could do to stop himself from dry-retching while waiting for the attack to pass. If it passed. He had no way of knowing what was happening upstairs, for Olive’s tapping came only sporadically and he was too dizzy to translate anyway.

  Then suddenly the spell was gone, and he lurched free, gasping for breath. Snatching up the lamp and tools, he hurried on. This was his chance to reach the end.

  Fire, tapped Olive, out of control!

  That was bad news. The house was now threatened, so he really had to hurry. At any moment, the cellar could fill with smoke or the spell might return, rendering him powerless. Only after he had found and read the source would he be able to help Elsie deal with the inferno upstairs.

  The end of the mushroom maze was exactly as he had left it, a rough circle of empty stone in the middle of a sea of refuse, with the shovel lying abandoned nearby.

  A dead-end.

  Of course it was. The spell didn’t want to be undone, so it was working against him, turning Isaac’s clues into a wild goose chase. At some point, the real clues must have stopped and fake ones taken over.

  Almanac thought he knew where that had happened. Picking up the shovel, he backtracked to the bellows, the last item on the list before the mushroom maze began, and began to dig there. Bellows … below. Soon, he had reached stone again, but this time there was a difference.

  Two arrows were scratched into the stone. One pointing left, one pointing right.

  Right is right when no left is left.

  Grinning triumphantly, Almanac turned right and began to exhume in earnest.

  Elsie skidded to a halt in the gaming room, staring in alarm through the window. The flames stretched as high as the attic now and they had even set some of the closest trees alight.

  ‘What do I do?’ she asked, knowing the ghosts were watching her.

  Etta conferred with the others and they came to the same opinion as Elsie.

  ‘Go to the lobby,’ Ugo told the girl from the fireplace. ‘Doctor Mithily will call you on the telephone. If she falls silent, you will know it is time to leave.’

  ‘What about you? Where will you go?’

  ‘Do not worry about us,’ Ugo told her. ‘Run now!’

  Already the windowpanes were blackening from the smoke and heat outside. It wouldn’t be long before they shattered and the fire came inside.

  Elsie gulped and did as she was told.

  ‘Where will we go?’ asked Lady Simone in a breathless voice.

  ‘The fireplaces,’ said Etta. ‘They’re always left standing when a house burns down. Ugo lives there just fine, doesn’t he?’

  ‘It is not comfortable, but—’

  Before he could finish the sentence, a great roaring drowned him out. Fierce wind had whipped up outside the house, making the trees sway and the fire whip nastily in defiance. A spiral of smoke and flames formed above the conservatory, like a tornado. Etta covered her ears as the roar intensified.

  ‘The spell is trying to blow out the fire!’ Lord Nigel shouted. ‘The young fellow was right!’

  Etta nodded, hoping this was giving Almanac the chance he needed to find the source, while at the same time feeling relief that she wasn’t going to have to test her theory about the fireplaces.

  The fire tornado grew brighter and slimmer, shot through with thin tendrils of black smoke. Slowly, black came to dominate, and within minutes the fire was out, suffocated of the air it needed to thrive.

  Immediately, the smell of magic disappeared.

  ‘Olive,’ called Etta through the walls, ‘what’s Almanac doing? Has he found it yet?’

  ‘No!’ came the distant reply, echoing up from the cellars. ‘He needs longer!’

  ‘All right. Doctor Mithily, tell Elsie that we need another fire, quickly.’

  ‘She says she’ll light one in the Yellow Room,’ Doctor Mithily told Etta, after a quick discussion with Elsie over the telephone. She continued without pause. ‘Now we know the spell will defend the house, Elsie thinks she can proceed with a fire indoors.’

  ‘Oh, dear me,’ said Lady Simone weakly, ‘I really do feel a spasm coming on.’

  Etta ignored her, hurrying to the Yellow Room in time to see Elsie grabbing an armful of elegant clothes from the wardrobe and throwing them into the adjoining bathroom. Armful after armful of dresses, chemises and petticoats followed until the wardrobe was empty and the bathroom full. Picking up the can of oil she had left in the doorway, Elsie began the same drizzling process she had employed in the conservatory, her tongue poking out one side of her mouth in concentration.

  Another match flicked. More fire bloomed. Elsie dove out of the way, kicking the door to the bathroom closed behind her.

  ‘Good girl!’ Etta cried, even though Elsie couldn’t hear her.

  Instantly, however, the smell of magic returned, and with it a faint sense of becoming thinner than before. She looked down at her hands. Could she see more clearly through them, or was that her imagination?

  ‘Flee,’ Ugo shouted to Elsie down the Yellow Room’s fireplace. ‘In case the spell blows you away also!’

  In the cellar, Almanac blinked out of the tornado spinning in his head. He lay sprawled on his side, full-length across the stone. He had followed the arrows right and then left, as per the clues, until he reached a spot marked simply with an X. He had tapped it with his toe, and it had shifted, revealing that it was a roughly circular piece of stone, rather than naked bedrock. Like a lid covering something beneath. Which might be nothing but dirt … or something else entirely.

  Putting the lantern to one side so it would cast a steady light over his labours, he had raised the crowbar, wedged the narrow end into a crack between the lid and the stone surrounding it, and pushed with all his might. Groaning, one hair’s-width at a time, the stone had begun to shift.

  That was when the spell had struck, temporarily blinding him to anything but his own disorientation.

  Now, his resolve returned a hundredfold. Clearing the last dizzying fog from his mind, he used the crowbar as a lever to shift the lid inch by inch out of its hole. He wished for Josh’s strength, or for Josh himself: the two of them would make short work of this chore, that was certain! But Josh was far away and probably wouldn’t have believed him anyway, even if Almanac could have told him about what he was doing. Almanac would have to rely on his own strength, his own determination, with the rest of his new friends helping in their own ways. Afterwards, if they were successful, he could one day tell the story to his old friend.

  Grunting, he slid the slab of rock far enough to one side so he could see properly ben
eath it.

  Dirt. Just dirt. There was no sign that it had been disturbed since the old cellar had been built.

  For a moment, he felt dismay on top of exhaustion. Why couldn’t anything be easy?

  Then he reached for the shovel and stabbed its blade into the earth.

  Upstairs, there was no wind this time, no hurricane. Etta didn’t know what was going on until she slipped into the walls of the bathroom, expecting to confront a wall of flame.

  Instead, it was raining, and the fire was going out.

  Looking up, she saw the ceiling puckered and blistered, dripping in a steady stream. A water tank was leaking.

  ‘Halibut!’ she cursed. ‘We need a bigger fire – something the spell can’t put out so easily.’

  ‘Elsie is already preparing one,’ said Doctor Mithily, appearing in the nearest wall. She was definitely fainter, which was definitely worrying. What was the spell doing to them? ‘I believe we have a budding pyromaniac on our hands.’

  On the ground floor, Elsie was running along the corridors, black-eyed and unbeaten, oil sloshing from the cans she held in each hand. A glistening trail stretched behind her, spreading across carpets, floorboards and parquetry. One spark would set the whole lot ablaze.

  If the spell didn’t stop the fire this time, that would definitely mean the end of the house.

  But if Almanac broke the spell, then there was no way magic would stop the fire. And there was no way they could either.

  ‘Wait – how’s Almanac doing?’ Etta asked, halted in her tracks by this new problem.

  ‘He’s okay,’ Olive said. ‘The spell isn’t troubling him at the moment.’

  ‘Hackett must be having some success, then. Tell Elsie to hold off for now, Doctor Mithily. If the house goes up, Almanac could be trapped in the cellar … the roof could cave in on him!’

  ‘I can’t get Elsie’s attention. She has left the telephone off the hook.’

  ‘Can anyone?’

  Ugo tried, and so did Madame Iris, but Elsie was so busy careening around the house that she didn’t hear their soft voices over the gurgling of oil. Running to the lobby, she threw the empty cans aside with a clatter and reached for the matches. Fumes caught at the first spark, causing an explosion that blew her backwards through the open door and sent blue flames snaking across the floor, deep into the heart of the house.

  Almanac dug down with the shovel, then paused.

  ‘I can smell smoke,’ he said. ‘What’s happening up there, Olive?’

  The plan, she urgently tapped back. Keep digging!

  He did, through occasional spikes of disorientation. The spell was clearly very busy elsewhere, but it hadn’t completely taken its eye off him. He felt indecision in the way it came and went, and knew the plan was working.

  The spell was fighting battles on too many fronts. All he had to do was win the war.

  His shovel hit something unyielding. Dropping to his knees in the hole he had dug, he cleared earth away from the obstacle with his hands. At first, he was disappointed. All he had found was a tree root, probably sent under the house by one of the walnut trees crowding around it. Nothing special.

  When he tugged at the root, however, he noticed something wrapped tightly around it. Something white. With a collar. Possibly linen.

  A man’s shirt, once fine but now filthy and torn.

  Reaching for his shovel, Almanac stabbed until the root and the shirt parted way for him. Below was another root, this one entwined around a black dress. He kept chopping with the metal blade, hacking through roots and clothes alike, tossing the latter aside to join the rest of the rubbish … until he found something that stopped him cold.

  A knot of grey fabric that had been patched many times, with belt loops worn thin from rough string and cuffs so threadbare they were hardly there at all.

  Almanac lifted the bundle out of the earth and shook it back into shape, revealing pants suitable for a small-ish boy of ambiguous age, but not a rich one by any means.

  These were his pants, the ones that had gone missing the day he arrived.

  Turning on the spot, he rummaged through the other clothes he had liberated from the dirt until he produced a stained green dress.

  Might this be the frock Etta had worn the day they met?

  But how had they come to be here, of all places?

  Magic, undoubtedly. Bringing chaos to an ordered world.

  Forgetting the clothes, knowing that he must be very close now, he dug with something approaching fury. The spell had trapped him, stolen from him, and robbed him not only of the chance to live a proper life outside the orphanage, but of the orderly life of the orphanage as well. Instead of employment, confusion. Instead of security, uncertainty. If he failed now, he would be trapped here until the day he died. He would not fail, and so he chopped and dug, dug and chopped, until at last the shovel blade met metal.

  Panting for air, he threw the shovel away. The air was so thick with smoke now that he sneezed three times before he had what he hoped was the source of the spell in his hands.

  The tin was rectangular in shape and about two handspans across, with a painted pattern that was now too faded to discern. It rattled as he shifted it in his hands, as though it contained marbles or pencils, or some other small, tumbling things of that nature. There was a catch on one side.

  Almanac’s hands shook just a little as he opened the catch and raised the lid.

  The tin contained an eclectic assortment of trinkets, including a small magnifying glass, a tie-clasp, a painted miniature of a young woman, several rings, a silver pendant with the initials ‘PS’, a tin badge, a precious hairpin … and a soapstone pendant engraved with Almanac.

  Next to this collection was a scroll of age-browned paper wrapped in a ribbon.

  With trembling fingers, Almanac slipped the pendant and hairpin into his pocket and reached for the spell.

  At that moment, the dizziness returned much worse than it had ever been before, sending him groaning into the hole, the tin dropping next to him with a clatter. The return of the magic was accompanied by a terrible sound of something rending, as though the house was collapsing in on itself, above him. He fought off the vertigo as best he could, opening his eyes and looking up at what he hoped was the ceiling, seriously expecting it to fall in on him, but seeing only spinning bricks and stone.

  Olive drummed, Watch out!

  Almanac firmly closed his eyes and then opened them again. The bricks and stone hadn’t stopped spinning, but now he realised that wasn’t the fault of his dizziness. They really were moving, parting, forming a long tunnel that led upward into the black-shrouded sky.

  This was new and alarming. No one had ever told Almanac that the spell could do anything like this before.

  Remembering the scroll, he scrabbled for it in the dirt, not immediately finding it under the tin, amongst the trinkets. If he read the spell in time, it might all go away.

  Something thudded heavily into the rubbish behind him. He wouldn’t look up until he had found the scroll, and even then, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. His fingers touched paper and he clutched at the scroll, pulling it to his chest with one hand and tearing at the ribbon with the other.

  He glanced to his left and right as, with two lighter thuds to either side of him, Elsie and Hackett dropped into the dirt – one smoke-blackened and coughing, the other gaping upwards at something that stood over them, babbling in alarm.

  Almanac didn’t look up. He couldn’t fail now!

  The scroll unrolled. His gaze swept across the words within, feeling a thrill of power in every pen-stroke, every sentence. As he read, the spell shivered around him and his dizziness eased.

  But he frowned, not immediately understanding how such a thing could be a spell.

  Perhaps that was why some of the spell’s power remained, even after he had read it.

  Before he could read it a second time, to make completely certain, something grasped the scruff of his neck and pulled him
like a kitten from the hole. Helpless in its grip, he was turned around in midair and brought face-to-face with a vision of magical power.

  Fully ten feet tall, the giant was dressed in armour etched all over in an alphabet he didn’t recognise. A crimson cape swirled around it. Strangest of all, though, was that the vast figure had no head. On the shelf of its broad shoulders sat a giant crow, which regarded him through black eyes that gleamed with uncanny intelligence.

  The crow croaked, ‘Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?’

  The moment Almanac read the spell, Etta felt the magic tying her to the stone ease just enough for her to break free. Stepping out of the cellar walls, still glowing but more translucent than ever, she ran to warn Almanac about the sorcerer behind him. Or monster. For the moment, she was undecided. The giant crow-head was coming closer and closer to him, and when it snatched him up with one gloved hand, she screamed in despair.

  Almanac stared up at the monstrous figure – surely the author of the spell, a mighty sorcerer – in shock, and no wonder. He could have no idea how it had descended from the sky with a thunderclap, bearing Hackett and Elsie in its arms as though they weighed nothing. Magic swirled around it, snuffing out the flames just beginning to sink their teeth into the ground floor, and opening up a pathway through the house itself, into the cellar, past the roof, beams, joists and upper foundations. Nothing could stand between it and its terrible purpose.

  To save the spell.

  But it didn’t kill Almanac straight away.

  ‘Pick on someone your own size!’ Etta said, kicking at its giant-booted feet, only to find that her leg went right through it. She might be free of the wall, but she was still a ghost, and therefore unable to do anything to save Almanac from the terrible fate awaiting him.

  To her surprise and relief, the crow’s head turned away from Almanac and looked down at her. ‘What are you, pray tell?’

  Etta gaped up into those obsidian eyes and retreated instinctively back to a safe distance. ‘You heard me? I mean, take your hands off him and go away! This is our house, not yours.’