The Peculiar Read online

  “And I need to live!” the faery woman wailed. “I’m just an old greenwitch and nobody wants my help anymore. Faeries come once in a while out of the big cities when their young ’uns cough blood, but they can’t pay much. And I had to sell poor Dolly for glue, so there was no more traveling the circuits. I need to live, you know!” A strange spark came into her eyes. “The Lord Chancellor sends me gold.”

  “Does he,” Mr. Jelliby said coldly. “And did you know he’s been killing changelings? Or does he pay you so well that you don’t care? I will thank you to tell us now what this is all about. In honest words. What is the Lord Chancellor planning?”

  The greenwitch looked about to cry; Bartholomew suspected it was more because of the disapproval in Mr. Jelliby’s voice than because of any of his actual words. “You don’t know?” she said. “You’re trying to stop him, aren’t you? That’s why you’re here. And you don’t even know what you’re trying to stop?”

  Mr. Jelliby gulped at his tea. He didn’t know. All he had was fragments and pieces-the bird, the message, the conversation in Westminster-but they didn’t really add up to anything.

  The old faery scooted her chair a little closer to him. “He is going to open another faery door, of course.”

  Mr. Jelliby blinked at her from over the rim of his teacup. Bartholomew made a little sound in his throat, partway between a gasp and cough.

  “You didn’t know that?” She giggled, scraped even closer. “Yes. The faery door. He’s going to open another one. Very soon, I think. Tomorrow. The last one happened by itself, see. A natural phenomenon brought about by a lot of unfortunate coincidences. There have always been cracks between the worlds. Things have always been slipping back and forth, and there are many tales of humans who have found themselves in the Old Country quite by accident. But this new door won’t be a crack. It won’t be an accident. John Lickerish is engineering it. Commanding it into existence. A massive gateway in the middle of London. In the middle of the night.”

  Mr. Jelliby set down his teacup sharply. “But it’ll be carnage!” he exclaimed, aghast. “Ophelia, and Brahms, and- It’ll be Bath all over again!”

  “It’ll be worse,” the faery said, and her face split into a smile then, so bright and toothy it made Mr. Jelliby’s skin crawl.

  “It won’t work,” he said, looking studiously at a braid of garlic above the faery’s head. “The bells. The bells will stop it. They’re always ringing. Every five minutes. Mr. Lickerish won’t be able to get a spell in edgewise.”

  “Ooh. The bells.” The faery continued to grin. “Bath had bells. Bath had iron and salt, and not a few clocks and it was still blown six miles north of the moon. Bells don’t help against magic like that. They might stop a pisky from giving you a wart or muddle a minor enchantment, but they won’t keep a faery door from opening. Not a road to the Old Country.”

  “Then what do we do?” Mr. Jelliby almost shouted it. “We can’t just sit here! How do we stop it?”

  “I don’t know.” She was so close now. Mr. Jelliby was certain he could smell her-flowers and smoke and sour milk. “It’s a complicated process, opening a faery door. I don’t understand it. I don’t want to understand it. All I know is that Mr. Lickerish needs a concoction. Plants and animal parts. I give it to him. It’s a binding potion, that concoction is. It lures a sort of faery called the penumbral sylph, can pattern whole flocks of them and make them do what someone tells them to. But I don’t know what he needs sylphs for. I’m just a tiny thread, see. A tiny thread in a great big spider’s web.” She made a scuttling motion with her fingers.

  “He sends me his notes in a mechanical bird. A bird out of metal, did you ever hear of such a thing? And I do what they tell me. But those changelings. .” Her grin fell from her face, and she shrank back into her chair. She looked suddenly frightened and sad again. “I don’t know what they’re for. Poor, poor creatures. I don’t know why he’s killing them. I’ve sent nine bottles to London. A lot of little ones as well. Little bottles. So little. And. . and last I heard there had been nine deaths. You are from London, yes? I saw it from the dirt on your shoes. Perhaps he’s been trying over and over again to open that door. Nine times over. Nine times you could have died in your bed and were spared.” Her gaze turned to the window. “I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt. I didn’t, truly. And when I heard about the changelings in the river, I knew right away it was him. But, oh, don’t make me think about it. I couldn’t do anything. What could I have done?” She asked it almost pleadingly.

  Bartholomew looked up from his boots. He was glaring. “What d’ you mean, what could you have done?” The greenwitch turned to him in surprise. He hadn’t spoken in hours and his voice was rough. “You could have done nothing, that’s what you could have done. You could have stopped helping him. He has my sister now, did you know that? She’s next, and it’s your fault. It’s your fault as much as anybody’s.”

  The old faery stared at him a moment. The firelight danced in her eyes. When she spoke her voice was soft. “It wasn’t my fault. Oh, it wasn’t. Mr. Lickerish was the one doing the killing. All I did was stir my little pot in my little clearing. Won’t think about it. Won’t think about it!”

  Mr. Jelliby started to rise. The greenwitch jerked around to face him. She smiled again. “But in the end I suppose it is my fault, isn’t it. Oh, I am sorry. Do you know? When I first learned of John Lickerish’s plan, I thought, ‘Why not?’ Why should I care what happens to London? It’s about time the faeries broke free, about time the English learned their lesson. But I changed my mind. Would you like some more tea? I decided that Mr. Lickerish was not doing it for the faeries. He’s not doing it for anyone, really. No one but himself. He says he doesn’t like walls and chains, but he really does. As long as he builds the walls and makes the chains. Because you see, when the faery door is opened he isn’t just going to let it go. He’s going to guard it like a great watchdog, and it will be his. It will always be open, but he’ll decide what goes in and what comes out.”

  Bartholomew stared at her. What is wrong with her? It was as if her mind were twisting and shoving and telling itself lies. She kept gazing at Mr. Jelliby, little twitches under her eye and in her fingers, that ghastly smile on her face.

  “A great many creatures will die when it opens,” she said. “Humans and faeries, all dead in their beds. Twenty thousand perished in Bath. A hundred thousand in the aftermath. Do you remember the Smiling War? Tar Hill and the Drowning Days? Of course you don’t. You’re too young, and too well fed. But I remember. Years and years after the door opened, and there was still nothing but confusion and bloodshed. It’ll all happen again. New faeries will come, and they’ll be wild and free, and they’ll dance in the guts of the people and the silly, tired, English faeries. Because the faeries who are already here won’t know what to do. They don’t remember how they once were. I think they’ll all die, don’t you? Die along with everyone else. And Mr. Lickerish will watch it all from some safe place.” She looked at Mr. Jelliby adoringly. “But you’ll stop him, won’t you. . ”

  Mr. Jelliby pushed aside his teacup. “I don’t know,” he said shortly, and took from his waistcoat pocket the scrap of paper Mr. Zerubbabel had given him. “I have one more address from Mr. Lickerish’s messenger bird. The address is in London somewhere. It’s the place, isn’t it? Has he told you? I believe the messenger birds connect Mr. Lickerish to all the points of his scheme-Bath and the changelings, you. Then back to London.”

  The old faery’s smile turned sly. “Oh, you are clever. So clever and tall. How did you get your hands on the Lord Chancellor’s messenger bird, hmm? If he ever finds out he’ll have you killed.”

  He already tried, Mr. Jelliby thought, but he said, “Look madam, we haven’t time for nonsense. Tell us what the door looks like and where we’ll find it, and we’ll leave you be.”

  “Oh, but I don’t want you to leave me be! Don’t go! I can’t tell you those things. I can’t, it would be bad, so
bad. Or perhaps I could. Perhaps a little. My memories of the last one are very dim, that’s all. So dim and faraway. I woke in my bed in the crown of a tree, and. .” The greenwitch’s eyes clouded over. “Mama. Mama was packing bags. She was telling us to hurry because there was a great wonder under way by the City of Black Laughter. And I remember walking, walking. I was very young then. It seemed to me we walked a hundred nights, but it couldn’t have been long at all. And then there was a door in the air. It was like a rip in the sky and its edges were black wings flapping. Feathers fell around us. We went through it, but I don’t remember how it looked from the other side. I didn’t look back, you see. Not once. Not until it was too late. The door could have been huge or it could have been tiny. Thousands of us fit through it at a time, but it was all magic, that door; it might have been no bigger than my nose.” She wiggled her nose. “The London door could be anything. Anywhere. It could be a mouse hole or a cupboard. It could be the marble arch in Park Lane.”

  She smiled, wistful, her thumb rubbing the chip in the rim of her teacup. “I want to go back, you know. To the Old Country. Home.” She looked at Bartholomew, her blue eyes faint and watery. Then she set down her cup and put her hands to her ears. “Best not to think of it. Best not. Won’t think about it! Nothing good will come of Mr. Lickerish’s plans. Not for me. Not for me, and not for anyone.”

  The wagon was silent for a minute. The fire crackled inside the little stove. Outside in the trees, an owl hooted mournfully.

  Then Mr. Jelliby stood. “Indeed. We’ll be leaving now. Thank you for the tea.”

  The greenwitch began to speak again, stumbling out of her chair, trying to keep them a little longer, but Mr. Jelliby was already unlatching the door. He stepped out into the night. Bartholomew followed, pulling his hood down low.

  Out in the clearing, Mr. Jelliby took a deep breath. He turned to Bartholomew. “Cracked as an egg, that one. Let’s be off then, if we’re to save the world.”

  They trudged out of the circle of warmth from the wagon, out into the heavy damp of the wood.

  “I don’t care about the world,” Bartholomew said under his breath. “All I want is Hettie.”

  The old faery climbed down from her wagon and watched them go, gazing after them until long after they had been swallowed by the night.

  Hours passed. She stood so still she might almost have been mistaken for a tree herself. Finally a clockwork sparrow swooped down into the clearing and alighted on the dewy grass by her feet. She scooped it up. Cradling it in her palm, she undid the brass capsule from its leg and took out a message.

  Rejoice, sister, it read, in Mr. Lickerish’s familiar, spidery handwriting. Child Number Eleven is everything. Everything we hoped her to be. Prepare the potion. Make it your strongest yet and send it to the Moon. The door will not fail this time. In two days’ time, when the sun rises, she will stand tall and proud over the ruins of London, a herald to our glorious new age.

  And a symbol of the fall of man.

  The sun will not rise for them.

  The Age of Smoke is over.

  The old faery’s face split into that wide, wide grin. Slowly, she rolled the note back into the capsule. Then she took a gun from under her apron. It was new, Goblin Market-bought, one of a pair. The other was in the wagon, hidden quickly behind the stove. She raised the gun, pointing it at the place where the two figures had disappeared into the woods.

  Boom, she mouthed, and giggled a little.

  CHAPTER XVII

  The Cloud That Hides the Moon

  “Mi Sathir, they have her!” A small bearded man stood in front of Mr. Lickerish’s desk. The man’s nose was bandaged and his face was paper white, but he looked otherwise quite calm, completely at odds with the ragged, desperate voice that had spoken. “They have my Melusine!”

  Mr. Lickerish did not answer at once. He had a game of chess laid out in front of him and was carefully touching black paint onto the ivory pieces with a little brush.

  “Who?” he asked at length, barely glancing at the faery’s new guise.

  “The police. They caught us. We-”

  “They caught her. You, apparently, have escaped. That is good. Is the other half-blood dead? Our little visitor?”

  The faery inside Dr. Harrow’s skull hesitated. For a full minute the only sound in the room was the ever-present thrumming noise and the faint scritch-scritch of Mr. Lickerish’s brush bristles against the chess piece.

  “No,” he said at last. “No, Child Number Ten is still alive. And so is Arthur Jelliby.”

  Mr. Lickerish dropped the chess piece. It fell to the desktop with a sharp clack and rolled away, leaving a pattern of black paint across the wine-colored leather.

  “What?” The word was uttered with startling force, a savage, guttural sound like the snarl of a wolf. Mr. Lickerish’s face cracked into a mask of wrinkles and white lines and he stared at the bearded man, his eyes glittering, furious. “Turn around and look at me, you coward. What happened?”

  The doctor turned slowly, revealing the dark and shriveled face on the back of his bald head. “He escaped. I don’t know how. I don’t know how it could have happened, but it’s not my fault. He survived the magic and escaped, and now Melusine-”

  “Arthur Jelliby cannot be alive,” Mr. Lickerish said, rising from his chair. His long white fingers were shaking, rattling like bones against the wood of the armrests. “He will compromise us! He knows too much. Too much. He cannot be alive,” he said, as if trying to convince himself.

  “It’s not my fault!”

  The faery politician spun on the bearded man. “Oh, Jack Box, believe me, it is your fault. You were to kill him. I told you to kill him!”

  “I thought I had. I couldn’t have known he would survive. Sathir, I did everything you asked of me. I brought you the new child, did I not? I cast the spell on the house on Belgrave Square, and went back for Child Number Ten. You must help me! Melusine must get out!”

  “Melusine.” Mr. Lickerish’s voice was dark with contempt. “I don’t care a bat’s eye what happens to Melusine. Whether she lives or dies will be entirely up to you. She will stay in prison. She will not go anywhere until you have done what I ordered you to do. And if it takes you a thousand years, she will rot there.”

  Jack Box took a trembling breath, and something very like tears sparkled in the corners of his eyes. “No,” he said. “No, you can’t leave her there. She won’t survive without me. She’s dying! Send a letter. Wire them. They will let her out the instant you say so!”

  “But I won’t say so.”

  Jack Box stared at Mr. Lickerish. Mr. Lickerish stared back coldly. Then he cocked an eyebrow and picked up the fallen chess piece with pale fingers.

  “Child Number Ten. That is what you called our little visitor, was it not? You will find him. You will find them both, Arthur Jelliby and the half-blood. And since it appears you are an utterly useless and woebegone faery if ever I saw one, you will bring them to me alive. I will deal with them myself.”

  Much to Mr. Jelliby’s bewilderment, London looked the same on the eve of its destruction as it always had. He had expected to see some change on its last day as the greatest city on earth. People running in the streets, perhaps, dragging their trunks and silver plate. Flames pouring out of windows. Panic in the air so thick you could taste it. But as Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby rode along the Strand in a carriage, the only thing in the air was the oily black smoke pouring out of the eye socket of a badly rusted cross-sweeper, and as for running people, there weren’t many of those, either. The sea of top hats bobbed along Fleet Street as unbroken as ever. Trams and omnibuses steamed just as grubbily toward the factories and quays. Coach-and-fours rumbled just as solemnly, letting off their well-dressed passengers just as steadily into the elegant cafes and shops. None of them knew how close it all was to ending, how soon the houses would be ruins, the streets empty, and the coaches on their sides, wheels turning in the wind.

  Mr. Jelliby let
the blind fall back over the window and slumped against the glossy leather headboard. He and Bartholomew had arrived in Leeds early that morning, wet and cold and very miserable. They had caught the seven o’clock train to London, and pulled into the capital just as their socks were beginning to dry. A carriage had been secured on the bustling curb at Paddington Station. Mr. Jelliby had discovered his pistols were gone, but he had greater worries just then. He ordered the driver to take them to Belgrave Square at once.

  He hadn’t told Bartholomew where they were going, and he hadn’t wanted to. He was relieved when the first slow breaths of sleep sounded from the corner of the carriage.

  At the very edge of the square Mr. Jelliby signaled a stop. He peeked out again. There was his house-tall, grand, and white, only thirty feet away. The heavy winter drapes had been drawn across the windows. The first-floor shutters were closed. And parked at the gate for all the world to see was a shiny black steam carriage, its door emblazoned with the silver markings of the London police.

  One of the curtains stirred in an upstairs window. A face appeared at it-Ophelia’s, looking out. Her skin was very pale. Her hand was at her throat. The last time Mr. Jelliby had seen her doing this was when the letter had come that told her her father was dead.

  Mr. Jelliby swore and buried his head in his hands. She hadn’t gone. She must be so angry at him, sick with worry and confused. Everyone in Belgrave Square would be making up their own reasons why the police were at the Jellibys’ doorstep, and none of them would be right.

  What do you suppose Mr. Jelliby has done this time, dear Jemima? I think he’s probably murdered someone. With a knife.