Читать книгу The Raven’s Knot - Robin Jarvis - Страница 6

Over the East End of London a bright moon gleamed down upon the many spires of the strange, ugly building known as The Wyrd Museum. But below the sombre structure’s many roofs, its cramped concrete-covered yard was illuminated by a harsher, more livid light.

Bathed in glorious bursts of intense purple flame, the enclosed area flared and flickered. With every spark and pulse, the high brick walls leapt in and out of the shadows and everything within danced with vibrant colour.

Lovingly arranged around a broken drinking-fountain, a new tribute of withered flowers appeared to take on new life once more as the unnatural, shimmering barrage painted them with vivid hues of violet and amethyst.

Yet behind the first floor windows, the source of the lustrous display was already waning as the last traces of a fiery portal guttered and crackled until, finally, the room beyond was left in darkness. Then a child’s voice began to wail and a light was snapped on.

The Separate Collection and everything it had housed were almost completely destroyed. Vicious smouldering scars scored the oak panelling of the walls, blasted and ripped by blistering bolts of energy that had shot from the centre of the whirling gateway.

Yet, from those sizzling wounds, living branches had sprouted and now the room resembled a clearing in a forest, for a canopy of new green leaves sheltered those below from the harsh electric glare of the lights and dappled them in a pleasant verdant shade.

Neil Chapman was drained and weary. His mind was still crowded with images of the past and the frightening events he had witnessed there.

Together with a teddy bear in whose furry form resided the soul of an American airman, he had been sent back to the time of the Second World War to recapture Belial – a demon that had escaped from the museum. This harrowing task they had eventually achieved, but Ted had not returned to the present and the boy didn’t know what had happened to him.

Now, all he wanted to do was leave this peculiar, forbidding room and surround himself with ordinary and familiar objects. To be back in his small bedroom that was covered in football posters and sleep in a comfortable bed was what he craved above anything, and to forget forever the drone of enemy aircraft and the boom of exploding bombs.

His thoughts stirred briefly from the dark time of the Second World War to the present again, as his young brother’s cries pushed out all other considerations and both he and Brian Chapman tried to comfort him.

‘Blood and sand!’ Neil’s father spluttered, unable to wrench his eyes from the bizarre scene around him. ‘What’s been going on? Blood and sand... blood and sand.’

Standing apart from the Chapman family, Miss Ursula Webster, eldest of the three sisters who owned The Wyrd Museum, eyed the destruction with her glittering eyes, the nostrils of her long thin nose twitching as she contained her anger.

Arching her elegant eyebrows, the woman examined the wreckage that surrounded her. All the precious exhibits were strewn over the floor, jettisoned from their splintered display cabinets, and she sucked the air in sharply between her mottled teeth.

‘So many valuable artefacts,’ her clipped, crisp voice declared. ‘It is an outrage to see them unhoused and vandalised in such a fashion.’

Turning, with glass crunching beneath her slippered heel, she clapped her hands for attention and pointed an imperious finger at Neil’s father.

‘Mr Chapman,’ she began. ‘You must begin the restoration of this collection as soon as possible. Such treasures as these must not be left lying around in this disgraceful manner. I charge you to save all you can of them, for you cannot guess their worth. My sisters and I are their custodians for a limited period only, they enjoy such shelter and guardianship as this building can offer and what slight protection our wisdom can afford.’

With a quick, bird-like movement, she turned her head to observe her two wizened sisters who were stooping and fussing over a young girl, then returned her glance to Neil’s father.

‘Mine is a grave responsibility,’ she informed him. ‘See to it that you obey me in this. When you have cleared away the rubble and removed this ridiculous foliage from the walls, throw nothing away. I must inspect everything prior to that, do you understand? We cannot afford to make another mistake.’

Brian Chapman nodded and the elderly woman gave him a curt, dismissive nod before returning to her sisters.

Miss Celandine Webster, with her straw-coloured hair hanging in two great plaits on either side of her over-ripe apple face, was grinning her toothiest smile. At her side Miss Veronica was trilling happily, her normally white-powdered countenance a startling waxy sight, covered as it was by a thick layer of beauty cream.

Edie Dorkins, the small girl brought from the time of the Blitz to the present by the power of the Websters, took little notice of them or the Chapmans. She was staring at a large piece of broken glass propped against the wall and gazing at her reflection. Upon her head the green woollen pixie-hood, a gift from the sisters, sparkled as the light caught the strands of silver tinsel woven into the stitches and she preened herself with haughty vanity.

‘Doesn’t she look heavenly?’ Miss Celandine cooed in delight. ‘And there was I worrying about the size – why it’s perfect! It is, it is!’

Leaning upon her walking cane, Miss Veronica bent forward to touch the woollen hood and sighed dreamily. ‘Now there are four of us. It’s been so long, so very, very long.’

‘Edith!’

Miss Ursula’s commanding voice rapped so sharply that the girl stopped admiring herself and fixed her almond-shaped eyes upon the eldest of the Websters.

Picking her way through the debris, Miss Ursula took the youngster’s grubby hand in her own.

‘I have said that you are to be our daughter, Edith, dear, the offspring which was denied to us and you have accepted. But do you comprehend the nature of the burden you have yoked upon your shoulders?’

An impudent grin curved over the child’s face as she stared up at Miss Ursula. ‘Reckon I do,’ she stated flatly.

The fragment of a smile flitted across the woman’s pinched features but her bony fingers gripped Edie’s hand a little tighter and when she next spoke her voice was edged with scorn.

‘Wild infant of the rambling wastes!’ she cried. ‘Akin to us you may be and many draughts of the sacred water have you drunk, but do not think you know us yet, nor the tale of all our histories.’

But Edie was not cowed by the vehemence of the old woman’s words and, baring her teeth, snapped back. ‘So teach me ’em! Tell me about the sun, the moon an’ the name of everything what grows. What has been – an’ all of whatever will be.’

Miss Ursula loosened her grip and her eyelids fluttered closed as she breathed deeply. ‘Well answered Edith, my dear – tomorrow we shall begin your instruction.’

‘No,’ the girl insisted. ‘Start now!’

Miss Ursula studied her, then gave a grim laugh. ‘Come with me!’ she cried. ‘As this is the hour of your joining with us, it is only fitting that you are shown our greatest treasure at once.’

With her gown billowing around her, Miss Ursula strode swiftly from The Separate Collection and Edie Dorkins, her eyes dancing with an excited light, ran after her.

‘Where is Ursula taking our new sister?’ Miss Veronica asked in bewilderment. ‘There’s jam and pancakes upstairs, I prepared them myself. You don’t think they’ll eat them all do you, Celandine? Do you suppose they’ll leave some for me? I love them so dearly.’

Miss Celandine’s nut-brown face crinkled with impatience as she stared after the figures of Miss Ursula and the girl as they disappeared into the darkness of the rooms beyond.

‘You and your pancakes!’ she snorted petulantly. ‘I’m certain little Edith can eat as many as she likes of them – and most welcome she is too...’ Her chirruping voice faded as her rambling mind suddenly realised where the others were going and she threw her hands in the air in an exclamation of joy and wonder.

‘Of course!’ she sang, hopping up and down, her plaits swinging wildly about her head. ‘Ursula will take her there! She will! She will – I know it – I do, I do! Oh, you must hurry, Veronica, or we may be too late.’

And so, bouncing in front of her infirm sister like an absurd rabbit, Miss Celandine scampered from the room and Miss Veronica hobbled after.

Alone with his sons, the dumbfounded Mr Chapman pinched the bridge of his nose and gazed around forlornly.

‘I... I don’t understand,’ he murmured, staring up at the spreading branches overhead. ‘I want to, but I don’t. Neil – what happened here?’

The boy pulled away from him, but he was too exhausted to explain. ‘It’s over now, Dad,’ he mumbled wearily. ‘That’s all that matters. Josh and me are safe. We’re back.’

‘Back from where? Who was that scruffy kid? She looked like some kind of refugee.’

But if Brian Chapman was expecting any answers to his questions he quickly saw that none were forthcoming. Neil’s face was haggard and his eyelids were drooping. Remembering that it was past three in the morning, the caretaker of The Wyrd Museum grunted in resignation and lifted Josh into his arms.

‘I’d best get the pair of you to bed,’ he said. ‘You can tell me in the morning.’

Neil shambled to the doorway but paused before leaving. Casting his drowse-filled eyes over the scattered debris of The Separate Collection, he whispered faintly ‘Goodbye Ted, I’ll miss you.’

Down the stairs Miss Ursula led Edie, down past a great square window through which a shaft of silver moonlight came slanting into the building, illuminating the two rushing figures.

‘Are you ready Edith, my dear?’ the elderly woman asked, her voice trembling with anticipation when they reached the claustrophobic hallway at the foot of the staircase. ‘Are you prepared for what you are about to see?’

The girl nodded briskly and whisked her head from left to right as she looked about her in the dim gloom.

The panelling of the hall was crowded with dingy watercolours. A spindly weeping fig dominated one corner, whilst in another an incomplete suit of armour leaned precariously upon a rusted spear.

‘Here... here we are,’ Miss Ursula murmured, a little out of breath. ‘At the beginning of your new life. The way lies before you, let us unlock the barrier and step down into the distant ages – to a time beyond memory or record.’

Solemnly, she stepped over to one of the panels and rapped her knuckles upon it three times.

‘I used to have to recite a string of ludicrous words in the old days,’ she explained. ‘But eventually a trio of knocks seemed to suffice. This place and I know one another too well to tolerate that variety of nursery rhyme nonsense.’

Striding back to Edie, she turned her to face the far wall then placed her hands upon the young girl’s shoulders and whispered sombrely in her ear. ‘Watch.’

Edie stared at the moonlit panels and waited expectantly as, gradually, she became aware of a faint clicking noise which steadily grew louder behind the wainscoting. Out into the hallway the staccato sound reverberated until it abruptly changed into a grinding whirr and, with an awkward juddering motion, a section of the wall began to shift and slide into a hidden recess.

‘The mechanism is worn and ancient,’ Miss Ursula confessed, eyeing the painfully slow, jarring movements. ‘In the last hundred years I have used it only seldom. Come, you must see what it has revealed.’

Edie darted forward and gazed into the shadowy space that had been concealed behind the panel.

The dusty tatters of old, abandoned cobwebs were strung across it but in a moment she had cleared them away and, with filaments of grimy gossamer still clinging to her fingers, she found herself looking at a low archway set into an ancient wall.

Tilting her head to one side and half closing her eyes, Edie thought it resembled the entrance to an enchanted castle and tenderly ran her hands over the surface of the roughly hewn stone.

‘Here is the oldest part of the museum,’ Miss Ursula’s hushed voice informed her. ‘About this doorway, whilst my sisters and I withered with age – enduring the creeping passage of time, the rest of the building burgeoned and grew. This was the earliest shrine to house the wondrous treasure of the three Fates. We are very near now, very near indeed. What can you sense, Edith? Tell me, does it call to you?’

The girl stood back and studied the wooden door that was framed by the arch. Its stout timbers were black with age and although they were pitted and scarred by generations of long dead woodworm, they were as solid as the stone which surrounded them. Into the now steel-hard grain, iron studs had once been embedded, but most of them had flaked away with the centuries, leaving only sunken craters behind. The hinges, however, were still in place and Edie’s exploring fingertips began to trace the curling fronds of their intricate design, until her hands finally came to rest upon a large, round bronze handle.

At the bottom of the door there was a wide crack where the timbers had shrunk away from the floor and a draught of cold, musty air blew about the child’s stockinged legs – stirring the shreds of web that were still attached to her.

Edie wrinkled her nose when the stale air wafted up to her nostrils, but the sour expression gradually faded from her puckish face and she took a step backwards as the faint, mouldering scent entwined around her.

The smell was not entirely unpleasant, there was a compelling sweetness and poignancy to it, and she was reminded of the roses that had been left to grow tall and wild in the gardens of bombed-out houses – their blooms rotting on the stem.

She had adored the wilderness of the bombsites. In the time of the Blitz, the shattered wasteland had been her realm and of all the fragrances which threaded their way over the rubble, the spectral perfume of spoiling roses had been her favourite.

The tinsel threads woven into her pixie-hood glittered for a moment as the haunting odour captivated her and, watching her reactions, Miss Ursula smiled with approval.

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘I see that you do sense it. Nirinel is aware of you, Edith, and is calling. If I needed any further proof that you were indeed one of us, then it has been provided.’

Crossing to the corner where the armour leaned against the panels, she lit an oil lamp which stood upon a small table and returned with it to Edie. Within the fluted glass of the lamp’s shade, the wick burned merrily and its soft radiance shone out over the elderly woman’s gaunt features, divulging the fact that she was just as excited as the child.

Then, with her free hand, Miss Ursula took from a fine chain about her neck a delicate silver key but, before turning it in the lock, she hesitated.

‘Now,’ she uttered gravely, ‘you will learn the secret which my sisters and I have kept and guarded these countless years, the same burdensome years that robbed us of our youth and which harvested their wits.

‘No one except we three have ever set foot beyond this entrance. Prepare yourself, Edith, once you have beheld this wonder there can be no returning. No mortal may gaze upon the secret of the Fates. Your destiny will be bound unto it forever.’

Without taking her silvery blue eyes from the doorway, the girl said simply, ‘Open it.’ Then she held her breath as Miss Ursula grasped the handle and pushed.

There came a rasping crunch of rusted iron as slowly, inch by inch, the ancient door swung inwards.

At once the stale air grew more pungent, yet Edie revelled in it. Holding the lamp aloft, Miss Ursula ducked beneath the low archway.

The darkness beyond dispersed before the gentle flame, revealing a narrow stone passageway which was just tall enough to allow the elderly woman to stand.

‘Have a care, Edith,’ Miss Ursula warned. She lowered her hand so that the light illuminated the ground and showed it to be the topmost step of a steep flight which plunged down into a consumate blackness.

‘This stair is treacherous,’ she continued, her voice echoing faintly as she began to descend. ‘The unnumbered footfalls of my sisters and I have rendered each step murderously smooth. In places they are worn completely and have become a slippery, polished slope.’

Down the plummeting tunnel Miss Ursula went, the cheering flame of the lamp bobbing before her and, keeping her cautious eyes trained upon the floor, Edie Dorkins followed closely behind.

Deep into the earth the stairway delved, twisting a spiralling path beneath the foundations of The Wyrd Museum. Occasionally, the stonework was punctuated by large slabs of granite.

At one point a length of copper pipe, encrusted with verdigris, projected across the tunnel and Miss Ursula was compelled to stoop beneath it.

‘So do the roots of the modern world reach down to the past,’ she remarked. ‘Yet, since the well was drained, no water flows from the drinking-fountain above.’

Pressing ever downwards, she did not utter another sound until she paused unexpectedly – causing Edie to bump into her.

‘At this place the outside presses its very closest to that which we keep hidden,’ she said, bringing the lamp close to the wall until the young girl could see that large cracks had appeared in the stones.

‘A few feet beyond this spot lies one of their tunnels. A brash and noisome worm-boring, a filthy conduit to ferry people from one place to another like so many cattle. Perilously near did their excavations come to finding us. Now, when the carriages hurtle through that blind, squalid hole, this stairway shakes as though Woden himself had returned with his armies to do battle one last time.’

Miss Ursula’s voice choked a little when she said this. Edie looked up at her in surprise but the elderly woman recovered quickly.

‘It is most inconvenient,’ her normal clipped tones added. ‘Thus far they have not discovered us, yet a day may come perhaps when these steps are finally unearthed by their over-zealous probing. What hope then for the unhappy world? If man were to know of the terrors which wait to seize control of his domain he would undoubtedly destroy it himself in his madness. That is what we must save them from, Edith. They must never know of us and our guardianship.’

Her doom-laden words hung on the cold air as she turned to proceed.

‘Still,’ she commented dryly, ‘at least at this hour of the night there are no engines to rumble by and impede our progress.’

Further down they travelled, until Edie lost all sense of time and could not begin to measure the distance they had come. Eventually the motion of her descent, joined with the dancing flame, caused her to imagine that she was following a glimmering ember down the throat of a gigantic, slumbering dragon. Down towards its belly she was marching, to bake and broil in the scarlet heats of its rib-encased furnace. A delighted grin split the fey girl’s face.

‘Pay extra heed here,’ Miss Ursula cautioned abruptly, her voice cutting through the child’s imaginings. ‘The steps are about to end.’

As she spoke, the echo altered dramatically, soaring high into a much greater space and Edie found herself standing at the foot of the immense stairway by the mouth of a large, vaulted chamber carved out of solid rock.

Miss Ursula strode inside and Edie saw that the curved walls of the cave were decorated with primitive paintings of figures and animals.

‘Stay by my side, Edith,’ Miss Ursula told her. ‘This is but the first in a series of chambers and catacombs, do not let your inquisitiveness permit you to stray. It might take days before you were found.’

Edie toyed with the exciting notion of wandering around in the complete subterranean darkness but was too anxious to see where she was being led to contemplate the idea for long.

Into a second cavern they went and again the echoes altered, for here great drapes of black cloth hung from the ceiling, soaking up the sound of their footsteps.

‘Gold and silver were those tapestries once,’ Miss Ursula commented, not bothering to glance at them. ‘Very grand we were back then. Several of the chambers were completely gilded from top to bottom, there were shimmering pathways of precious stones and crystal fountains used to fill the air with a sweet tinkling music. There was even a garden down here lit with diamond lanterns and replete with fragrant flowers and fruit trees, in which tame birds sang for our delight.’

The elderly woman pursed her lips contemptuously as she proceeded to guide Edie through the maze of tunnels and caves.

‘However,’ she resumed, ‘the passage of time eventually stripped the pleasure of those decorous diversions from our eyes. Weary of them at last, we allowed the hangings to rot with mould, the jewels we gave back to the earth and the garden was neglected until the bird song ceased. For us there was only one great treasure and we ministered to it daily. Now, Edith, we are here at last.’

They had come to a large gateway which was wrought and hammered from some tarnished yellow metal. Raised in relief across its surface was the stylised image of a great tree nourished by three long roots and Miss Ursula bowed her head respectfully as she reached out her hand to touch it with her fingertips.

‘Behind this barrier is a most hallowed thing,’ she murmured with reverence. ‘Throughout the lonely ages my sisters and I have served it with consummate devotion and now you too shall share the burden. Behold, Edith – the Chamber of Nirinel.’