Mariah Mundi (24 page)

The shopkeeper showered a cascade of the whitest of powders across the room. It dowsed Grimm and Grendel in a fine sticky dust and billowed in bright clouds in the lamplight. Grimm spat with dissatisfaction as the sherbet covered the glowing footprints he had followed with his spectacles. Quadlibett got quickly to his feet and purposefully tipped even more of the sherbet tin across the floor and down the front of Grimm’s stained trousers.

‘Fool – nincompoop – miscreant – imbecile – Sisyphus!’ screamed Grimm. He was steeped in sherbet crusted like snow upon a winter roof. ‘How can I see where they have gone if this is what happens?’ he moaned as Grendel wiped his sleeve with his finger and licked the sherbet from it.

‘I’ve always loved sherbet,’ Grendel said piggishly as he scooped a handful of the powder from the floor, attempting to fill his pockets.

‘Gentlemen, what an unfortunate travesty of my complete inebriation. How can I apologise?’ Quadlibett said remorsefully as he turned the key, opened the door and in one movement managed to usher them both from his bazaar without them noticing what had been done.

‘Which train?’ Grendel asked as the door was shut and locked in his face.

‘We are deceived. There is no train and he knows more than he will tell,’ Grimm scoffed.

‘And we are on the wrong side of the door.’ Grendel shook the dust from his coat and wiped the powder from his long thin nose.

‘Then we will wait – there has to be no other way from this place. It is built like a castle with a portcullis for a door and a high tower for us to keep our watch,’ Grimm said as he brushed the sherbet from his silk hat.

Quadlibett smiled to himself as he double bolted the door and dimmed the light. As he pulled the blind on the windows he watched Grimm and Grendel waddle into the darkness of the arcade.

Turning about, he crossed the shop, his feet patterning the spilt sherbet. He smiled as he rubbed his hands together. ‘A job well done, well done,’ he said out loud. ‘You can come out – the way is clear. Mrs Sachavell has stolen all of my string and Grimm and Grendel are showered in sherbet.’

All was quiet. From the far corner of the shop, beneath the counter, came the scurrying of a rat. Lifting the door veil to one side, Mister Quadlibett pushed the false shelves back into place and looked into the storeroom. He walked three paces and slid the cases of gin across the hatch. Then he took an old silver condiment and sprinkled the floor with a thick grey dust. With one breath he blew the dust into the corner of the room.

‘There … Dust is dust, nothing more, nothing less, all that we are – and all we will become. Then we’ll be worn on the bottom of a man’s shoe,’ he said to himself with great satisfaction. ‘It’s as if they have never been.’

T
HE sewer smelt like a charnel house on a hot summer’s day. It twisted and turned as it steeply descended to the harbour. Sacha carried a small lamp she had taken from the shelf in Mister Quadlibett’s storeroom. It lit her feet so that she could see the large brown rats that scattered this way and that as she squelched through the drain. Mariah trailed behind, holding his nose and trying not to bring back the half-digested frog’s legs that now jumped in his stomach as the fragrance of the pit turned his guts. He vainly attempted not to touch the walls of the culvert. They dripped with green slime that formed itself into sparkling mercurial stalactites hanging from the roof in small clusters. Every few yards he could see a shadowy opening cut into the side of the culvert and packed with boxes and barrels. Every casket was char-branded in black and carried the shape of a small bird, its head turned against the full moon. Some were covered in thick horse blankets, others tipped end on end and left to bob in the pools of cess that formed against the brick dams.

Sacha walked on, ignoring all that lay about her as if she had no business to look. She was bold with every step, sure-footed,
keeping to the high ground and leaving Mariah to wade through the dirt. At one point the roof above had given way, washed by some heavy storm that had cleansed the sewer of every rat and barnacle, spewing them into the sea. Now, several months later, the rats and smugglers had returned, the collapsed roof and the contents of the Saint Sepulchre crypt lying scattered before them.

Hanging like a high seat in the Royal Opera, an open black coffin dangled from the roof. It was snagged by a single piece of wood that pierced the soil. Sacha said nothing. Briefly she lighted it with the lantern and then walked by, not turning.

Mariah stared at the cadaver as he passed by. It shivered him coldly, standing the hairs on his neck and giving further life to the frog’s legs that swirled inside him. He tasted each one again as they leapt in his throat, burning like caustic bile.

‘Happy to see you,’ he said to the corpse, as if to allay his own fear of death and make light of his circumstances. The corpse stared back, covered in thick webs, bone separated from bone and teeth dropping from its jaw.

Sacha bid him be silent, signing with her finger to tighten his lips and say no more. She pointed above to a string of metal grates that allowed the fleeting daylight to shadow momentarily upon his face.

‘Princess Street, corner of Tuthill,’ she whispered, her words running the length of the sewer and back again. ‘Soon be at the harbour.’

‘And then?’ Mariah asked as they walked on.

‘Then we can find Charity and get Felix,’ she said.

‘You say his name as if he were a beau,’ Mariah replied as he looked at the dirt on his shoes.

‘
Friend
,’ she scorned. ‘More to life than a beau, rather throw stones in the sea than hold hands and canoodle.’ Sacha smiled for the first time in many hours. In the lamplight it added an
extra radiance, showing her face abundant in joy and hope. She looked at Mariah. ‘Do you believe in yourself?’

‘If I knew what you meant I could tell you,’ he replied.

‘Do you believe we’ll get out of this?’ she pressed him again.

Mariah couldn’t reply. His mind raced. In an instant he had thought of Otto Luger, the waxworks, Grimm and Grendel, the corpse that stared at him through empty sockets. Everything brought his wits to wretchedness. His mind took him uncontrollably from mayhem to misery.

Sacha butted into his thoughts. ‘You have to believe. It’s a state of heart. Think we’re done for and we are. Drop your head to the ground and we’ll end up in the dirt.’

‘If life were so simple,’ he muttered to himself as he looked to a shaft of bright sunlight streaming through the drain overhead, ‘then I would have done with this sack of despair that I carry all these days.’

‘Then we go on?’ Sacha asked, prodding him in the arm. ‘Take this to the end and find Felix and the others?’

‘It is all I have to do – there is nothing else,’ Mariah replied.

‘My grandfather said that if a people don’t have a vision then they will perish. He said it was the same in life. If we don’t have a dream then we fritter away our lives with nothing. Our days are like grass, one day green and fresh, the next dry and ready to be burnt in the fire. I don’t want to live a life like that.’ Sacha stood in front of him, her faced flushed with indignation. ‘We can make a difference – set them free – put an end to Luger …’

‘Get caught by Grendel and Grimm and end up in the oyster prison, or have Isambard Black catch us?’ Mariah replied as he bathed his face in the sunlight.

‘You can change the way you think, Mariah. It’s here and now – no future, no past. This is where we live.’

‘In a sewer, running from two madmen and into the arms of another?’ he asked.

There was a heavy thud that resounded through the tunnel from far away. It was as if the earth had shivered and trembled. The coffin fell from its hanging place, splashing in the pool of stagnant cess and floating slowly towards them. The thud came again as another iron drain cover was picked up and then dropped to its place. One by one the loud thuds sent billows of dust and soot-filled webs into the sewer.

‘Here, Grendel, here!’ came Grimm’s voice, half-heard and far away. ‘It comes as a vapour. I can see it clearly. This way – they must be in the sewer.’

Two streets away, Grendel pulled on another cold black-iron sewer flap. Grimm adjusted his spectacles, turning the dial until the lenses glowed bright blue. He stared at something only he could see. Rising from the drain was a red mist telling him of their presence far below. He looked into the distance, beyond the steeple-house of Saint Sepulchre, to the small square of houses that lined the cobbles. Like the crimson breath of a sleeping beast, the vapour rose from the ground. ‘Leave it, Grendel,’ he shouted, his words echoing far below. ‘They are ahead, far ahead, down beyond the square.’

Grendel looked up, hoping to see what Grimm perceived. ‘Where?’ he asked.

‘I can see them and that is all that matters. By the beer house – quickly …’

His words carried far below as a feeble echo spoken from another world.

‘They’re tracking us – they can see us,’ Mariah said.

Sacha stepped from the light of the drain back into the shadows. ‘They have to use the street. We can get to the harbour before them and across the beach to the Golden Kipper. They won’t take on Captain Jack, not if we tell him what they’ve
done.’ She made off along the thin ledge of bricks that flanked the pools of dirt-filled water and then down a flight of narrow steps that stank of stale beer.

‘I’ll show him the hand,’ Mariah said, dragging behind in the blackness as Sacha strode on ahead with the lamp. He looked at the outlines of the brick above him and pictured so many feet clambering through life, and there came to him a memory of the boy wrapped in a thin blanket and pushed away from the fire. The feebleness of life, the fleeting of each breath … ‘What does it matter?’ he thought out loud as he pushed the waxen hand deeper into his coat. ‘I cannot change what life has done to me.’

‘Not far,’ Sacha said as the sound of lapping water filled the sewer. ‘One more flight and –’ All she could see was the sewer tunnel disappearing into the black water. ‘High tide. We won’t get out for hours,’ she said as she held the lamp above her head to light as far as she could.

‘There’s another way,’ Mariah said as he saw a tunnel at the far side of the sewer vault, a thin plank of wood crossing the bubbling mire of sludge backed up against the swirling tide.

‘It’s from the castle – we never go up there – nothing’s ever hidden in that tunnel.’

‘We have to get out of here before Grimm comes and gets us,’ Mariah snapped.

‘But not that way, not now.’

‘Don’t tell me you get scared?’ he asked.

‘I’d go anywhere but up there … Please.’

‘A ghost-demon, or just another story to keep the nosey away from your smuggling?’ Mariah asked. ‘Don’t want me to see what’s hidden so I can’t tell?’

‘Let’s just wait for the tide and then we’ll be out.’

‘And don’t you think they’ll be waiting for us with some story of how we’ve robbed Otto Luger? And me with a pistol in
my pocket – they’ll have us in irons and clinked before you can call your father.’

‘Not much of a pistol without any bullets, is it?’

‘And you with a roll of notes bigger than a gypsy wad.’

‘We could go back,’ she said. ‘Sneak back to the Emporium.’

‘You know what, Sacha? I had a vision … back there in the dark with Grimm shouting above my head. A thousand feet busying themselves in life and running back and forth for bread and fish. All these years I have worried about life and know now it could be snapped away in an instant. In a stinking sewer amongst the filth and the rats I found out that it doesn’t matter. Life … Life … more than bread and running after a ball of string. My parents are dead and I’ll find out why before I leave this earth.’ Mariah took her face in the palms of his hands and felt her soft skin. He smiled at her. ‘I’m going to the castle and I’ll take whatever comes my way.’

‘Then I’ll come too,’ Sacha said, and together they precariously walked the plank.

As they climbed the steps that ran beside the dry sewer floor, Mariah could hear the distant chiming of a musical box. He picked out its shrill notes against the sloshing of the water far behind. They sounded like the plucking of metal fingernails dancing on thick wire. The sound came again and again, and as they drew closer a sung whisper followed each note with a faint, wailing voice.

‘It’s coming from in there,’ Mariah said cautiously as they saw a gap in the wall where the bricks had been pulled away. ‘Smugglers?’ he asked warily.

‘Not here, not now,’ she whispered back as she dimmed the lamp with the cover of her hand. ‘Hasn’t been a boat in this last week – not one until tomorrow.’

‘Then who?’ he asked in a murmur as he crept slowly to the side of the entrance and tried to look beyond the shadows.

Sitting by a small fire of broken fish boxes and holding his head in the cups of his hands was the Kraken. He wailed as he wound the handle of the music box time and again. Pressing his eyes into his palms, the Kraken sang a tedious refrain over and over in words they couldn’t understand.

Mariah edged closer, Sacha pulling against his coat-tails and wanting to run. He knew he had to see the creature again, that it wasn’t to be feared. He stepped into the dark shadow and climbed the rubble.

It was then that the midden on which he walked collapsed beneath his feet. Mariah fell into the room and the Kraken leapt up and thrust a three-blade knife towards him.

‘No!’ Mariah shouted as he held out his hand. ‘We won’t do you harm.’

The Kraken lowered the knife and looked at Mariah, understanding not his words but only the look in the lad’s eyes. He stepped back and sniffed the air, pointing to the light in the sewer beyond.

‘He knows you’re there,’ Mariah said as Sacha hid. ‘It’s safe … Come in.’

Sacha stepped into the chamber. It was warm and dry and lined with Persian carpets and swathes of fine cloth. Hanging from the roof was a silver cage which imprisoned a pure white bird the size of a sea hawk. A flickering silver candelabrum rested upon a walnut table by the figurehead of a ship. The figurehead was cut from a single piece of oak into the shape of a smiling sea maiden, her parlour pink hands outstretched in welcome.

‘Elvira … The figurehead is Elvira … She went missing from the Three Mariners. Been there for years and then disappeared.’ Sacha stepped towards it. ‘He had it all along and he’s nothing but a sad old man.’

She looked scornfully at the Kraken with his bent neck and
frail old bones. He tried a half-smile as he coughed and held his chest.

‘He’s sick, dying most like,’ Mariah said.

‘And that’s what we were fritten of?’ Sacha said as she looked at the Kraken, his old eyes bulging in his head, his hair hanging in loose patches between pockmarked lumps of flesh. ‘Just a legend … When you see the real thing it couldn’t harm you.’

The Kraken slumped to the small leather chair on which he had sat. He rubbed his face with his blistered hands and flakes of salt-dried skin fell to the floor. He pulled his coat together, snuggling in the folds to keep warm.

‘He needs a doctor,’ Mariah said as he went to the creature. He picked a stretch of sailcloth from the floor and wrapped it across the Kraken’s bony back.

‘They say he slaughtered people,’ Sacha said.

‘I don’t think it was him. Thief, yes. But no murderer.’

The Kraken looked at him and tried to speak. ‘Scratty …’ he said in a voice choked of all moisture. ‘Scratty?’

‘He’s talks of Old Scratty, he wants the doll,’ Mariah said.

‘From the look of this place he wants everything,’ Sacha replied. ‘Kraken’s been a-stealing. These are from a ship that set sail to France a month ago,’ she said as she pointed to the Persian rugs strewn across the floor. ‘So is the music box – saw ’em go on myself. It sunk on Brigg Rocks, not a soul saved.’

‘Caladrius …’ The Kraken spoke again in a feeble burnt voice as he showed Mariah his parched hands, then held them to his blue and blistered lips. He stood up and fumbled with the minute lock of the silver cage, his fingers too swollen to turn the key. The white bird sat perfectly still, its head folded under its wing. ‘Caladrius,’ the Kraken said again as he slumped to his chair and held his head in his hands. Fading in heart and mind, he looked to the bird, pointing with a long leprous finger. ‘Caladrius …’

‘He wants to free the bird,’ Sacha said. ‘He can’t turn the key.’

Mariah reached to the cage and turned the key. The door opened by itself as the Kraken wound the musical box, bringing the notes to life and letting the tune dance. He slumped back against the worn leather, resting his head against the highwinged chair back. He swayed his hand back and forth with the chimes of the music, hoping that the bird would fly from the cage. But it sat motionless and then, in time to the music, as if it too were part of the machine, slowly unfurled its long neck.