Читать книгу The Whatnot - Stefan Bachmann - Страница 9

N a shadowy castle at the edge of a sounding sea, a figure sat in a chair where four halls met. Water and starlight splashed through unglazed windows, but none of it touched him. The chair was high, and its back was turned so that you could not see the figure sitting in it unless you stood on tiptoe and peeked around its edge.

Nettles and Grout would not have dared peek around its edge for anything in England or the Old Country. They waited nervously, shuffling their feet, and all they saw of the figure were his long, pale fingers, toying with something glinting like glass.

“Mi Sathir?” said Nettles at last. “Mi Sathir, we did as you told us. The illusion in Wyndhammer House? All done, just the way you wanted it.”

The pale hands fell still.

“Yessir,” said Grout, trying to sound brave. He nudged Nettles in the ribs. “Very satisfactrilly, too, if I daresay. There weren’t a fellow in the room what weren’t afraid of his own shadow. And all them generals and lieutenants in Her Majesty’s Army …” He spoke the words with exaggerated contempt. “All standing there gawping. Oh, they’ll make a sight on the battlefield. They’ll be too frightened to lift a gun against you, Sathir. Won’t be much of a fight.”

The figure in the chair laughed, a high, clear sound, like a bell. Then he spoke, his voice soft and lively. “No. It won’t be, will it. They will not fight because half of them are dead, yes? You killed them when you let my little Milkblood open her door under Wyndhammer House. She’s dead, too, by the way. The leadfaces found her body under the rubble.” The figure laughed again, quietly, to himself.

The goblins exchanged looks, and if their bark-brown skin could go pallid, it did. Nettles tried to say something, choked.

“Sathir,” he stammered. “Sathir, we didn’t, we—”

“You were supposed to frighten the English,” the figure in the chair said. “That is what I told you to do. A parlor trick to give them a taste of what was to come. I did not tell you to fuel the patriotic fires of the entire country by blowing up half their aristocracy. You’ve rather ruined everything.”

He sounded as if he were smiling, as if he found it all unbearably droll.

Grout’s eyes darted to Nettles. Then he began to jabber. “No, Sathir, oh no, we didn’t fuel no fires! Leastaways, I didn’t. It was Nettles here as did. He was being horrid to the old Peculiar, called her all sorts of awful names. Oh, Sathir, it weren’t me, I swear it weren’t!”

“Go away.” The figure in the chair laughed, and the sound echoed down the four halls, chilly and gray. “Go away, I’ve heard enough.”

His long fingers snapped together. At the end of one of the halls, two women materialized, richly dressed and wearing beaked masks. One had six pale arms. The other had a key protruding from her back. They glided forward without a sound.

“What shall we do with them, Sathir?” they said, and the voices that came from behind the masks crackled like sparks.

Another laugh. One slender white hand lifted the glass object again, spinning it idly. “I don’t know. What does one do these days with people one doesn’t like? Something ghastly, I hope. Something truly ghastly.”

Hettie and the faery butler stayed in the cottage for what felt like a very long time. Hettie couldn’t decide exactly how long. There were no clocks in the Old Country, or train schedules, and even if there had been, Hettie suspected they wouldn’t have made any sense. Time in these woods seemed to run a different path. Every night Hettie would go to sleep, and every night she would wake up and wander through the house, and watch the sky go from black to very black, but it didn’t really feel like days were going by. Outside in the forest, the seasons never changed. The snow was always on the ground, and no new snow ever fell. Hettie could still see their tracks whenever she looked out a lead-paned window. The labyrinth of tracks going round and round to nowhere.

Ever since the fight with the gray-faced creature, the faery butler had become very silent. The first day they had set foot in the cottage he had propped himself up against the wall just inside the door. He had barely stirred since. To begin with, Hettie had stayed with him, close to his knife and his pale sinewy arms. But as the days went by and all he did was creep out to drink snow and eat the gray mushrooms from the cracks in the trees, Hettie decided she ought to do something else. Bartholomew would come for her eventually, but until he did she thought it would be better to be busy. And she might as well be busy exploring the cottage. The thing that had lived here was dead, after all. It was a heap of ash a hundred steps away and perhaps already completely carried off by the wind. There was nothing to be afraid of.

So one morning, while the faery butler was outside, Hettie went to the end of the passage. It was beam-and-plaster of the sort one would find in a regular cottage. At the end were two doors and a steep wooden staircase leading up. One door was painted blue. The other was painted red.

She tried the blue door first. It opened into a little room that probably ought to have been a kitchen but was utterly bare. There was a stone fireplace, which explained the chimney, and nothing else. The floor was perfectly swept. The walls, though cracked and pitted, were whitewashed. Not even the flat Hettie had lived in back in England had been so bare. At least there had been things in it, bottles and bowls and Mother’s wash wringer and Mother. Even just a spiderweb in a corner. But not here. Hettie hadn’t seen a spider since the day she had arrived. Not even a beetle. Not even a bird in the iron gray sky.

Why would such an ugly faery have such a very neat house? Hettie wondered what it had done for a living.

She walked around the room several times, looked out the window, peered up the chimney, and satisfied that it really was a bare, empty room, went back into the passage. She tried the red door next. It opened into a low, filthy room, as black as the inside of a chimney. Rubbish lay heaped in the corners. The light that forced its way through the grimy window barely penetrated the dark at all, and the air was close and foul. It smelled of moss and brackish water.

She took a few steps in. She could dimly make out a wooden chair in the middle of the room, in front of a wooden table. She took a few more steps, and looked back over her shoulder to make sure the door was still open. It seemed suddenly very far away. She approached the table. Tools covered it, and it dripped with what looked like seaweed. Hettie’s eyes narrowed. There were hammers and pliers and odd hooked instruments, and many pieces of thick, wrinkled old paper. A gust came through the door suddenly, rustling the papers, and Hettie saw that they were scrawled with writing and pictures. Pictures of eyes, eyes from all angles, whirls of ink, the veins and nerves like gnarled branches. They seemed to watch her, frowning and glaring and weeping. Hettie shivered and pushed all the papers into a heap and fled, closing the red door tightly behind her.

She didn’t go into that room after that. She would have gone into the blue room often. She asked the faery butler to come in and build a fire. He didn’t. She sat down next to him in the passage and told him he might build some chairs and a table, too, but he never answered.

Hettie didn’t mind. As long as the red door stayed closed, she was all right on her own. The necklace she had picked from the gray face’s remains was always inside her nightgown, flat against her skin, and it reminded her that the thing that had lived here was gone and would not appear suddenly in a corner or hurry down the shadowy staircase. Sometimes, when the cottage felt particularly lonely and the faery butler wouldn’t say a word, or even look at her, she took to clutching the pendant to keep from being frightened.

The metal was always cold to the touch, but the stone … It was always warm.

Hettie found the light when she went to the top of the stairs. At least, she felt fairly certain it was the light she had seen. She had first spotted it in London, in the warehouse. The light had been twinkling in the cottage’s front window then, only a few feet above the ground. Now it was at the top of a long, winding stair, in a window that looked down onto the forest from what seemed like a hundred feet up. The light had come from a candle and something had blown it out.

The candle was yellow and greasy looking. Reddish veins ran just under its surface. Hettie wondered what would happen if she lit it again. She thought of having the candle downstairs to keep the night away.

She reached out to touch it.

And then she heard a sound. Bells. Bells, ringing in the woods.

Her eyes went wide as teacups. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered. And in a wink she was running for the stairs, down, down into the cottage.

“Someone’s coming!” she shouted, leaping the last five steps. The faery butler was still propped against the wall. He didn’t move at the sound of her voice. She barreled past him.

Barthy. It has to be Barthy. He’s had weeks and weeks to find me. …

The bells were nearer now, almost in the clearing. She heard the sound of hooves, crunching through snow, and voices, and high and windy laughter. She slid back the bolt and opened the door a crack.

Not Bartholomew’s voice.

She peeked out.

Not Bartholomew.

A company of riders was coming through the trees toward the cottage. They looked all black-and-white at first—black riders on white steeds, or white riders on black steeds—and with the dark branches interlacing behind them and the snow beneath their hooves, it was as if they were a living extension of the forest itself, like stitchery in a pillowcase.

Hettie hadn’t seen much during her short life in Old Crow Alley, but she knew how horses were supposed to look, and it was not like that. These steeds had four legs and long necks, almost like horses, but their bones were more delicate and their faces sharper, and their manes and tails seemed to be made of water or seaweed or molten glass.

Pale, pointy-faced people sat on their backs. Some were tall and lean like the faery butler. Some were small like Mr. Lickerish, the wicked Sidhe gentleman who had turned her into a door back in London.

The men wore black waistcoats and black overcoats just like English gentlemen did. The ladies wore gowns of dewdrops, or dresses made of open, flutter-paged books. One, a wizened old woman, was wrapped in so many swaths of black that she looked nearly swallowed up. Her head was bent and her hands were knotted tightly through the mane of her steed.

At the head of the company sat a small faery lady with a strange smile on her face. It was not a happy smile, but it was very wide. The lady wore a dress of fish bones, sewn together with what looked like spiderwebs, and as the riders came into the clearing and halted to dismount, Hettie was a little bit afraid all the threads in the lady’s dress would snap and the whole costume would unravel at her feet.

Nothing like that happened.

The faery lady did not dismount. Instead, her steed shrank beneath her, bones grinding and re-jointing, until in its place stood a tall, mischievous-looking youth with sharply slanted eyes. He held the lady in his arms and then placed her daintily on the snow. The other steeds did the same.

The lady in the fish-bone dress looked about briefly, chin tilted to a haughty angle. Then she strode toward the cottage.

Hettie spun away from the door. “They’re coming here,” she whispered, hurrying back to the faery butler. “Get your knife! Get your knife, do something, they’re coming!”

Still the butler did not move. For a moment Hettie thought he was pondering something, but then she saw his face. His skin was stretched and ashen. Little muscles twitched in his cheek, and his green eye was wide and dull. He wasn’t going to move, Hettie realized, and her heart dropped. He was frightened out of his wits.

She glanced back at the door. Through the crack, she could see the hem of the faery lady’s dress sweeping forward across the frozen earth. She gave the butler one last angry shake. Then she slipped down the corridor and up the stairs.

She heard the faery lady knock on the open door, three sharp raps. “Belusite Number 14!” the faery called. “We come to collect.” The hinges protested.

Hettie ran, up, up toward the window and the candle. Below, feet tramped. She could hear voices everywhere suddenly, under the wooden treads, floating up the stairs after her. Doors slammed. After a few seconds the voices turned to angry shouts.

They wanted the person who lived here. And the person was not here.

At last Hettie came to the high window and scrambled up onto the sill. She looked down through the black branches at the scene below.

The faery lady had come out of the cottage and was swirling here and there, as if she were at a garden party and not in the middle of a vast, dead forest. Three gentleman-faeries were standing behind her, all in a line, not moving, and as far as Hettie could tell, not speaking. The old, old woman in her shawls and wraps was hunched against the roots of a tree.

And the faery butler …? Two horse-people had him by the jacket and were dragging him out of the cottage, his long legs trailing in the snow.

Hettie gasped. Why didn’t you run? she thought desperately. You could have hidden! You could have hidden somewhere!

The horse-people threw him to the ground. One held him in the snow with a bony, sharp-toed foot, and the other kicked him, right in the stomach. Hettie heard the scream, saw blood spatter the whiteness.

She didn’t wait to see more. Whirling, she ran from the window and down the stairs. The treads flew by beneath her feet. She didn’t like the faery butler. Usually she hated him. But he was the only thing she had left of England and home, and she wasn’t going to let him die. She reached the beam-and-plaster passageway. She crashed through the front door.

“Stop!” she shouted, leaping out into the clearing. “Stop, leave him be!”

Twelve pairs of black eyes turned to stare at her. She froze. The faery butler lifted his head. A flicker of green, almost like surprise, passed behind his clockwork eye. Then the lady in the fish-bone dress strode up to Hettie and looked her in the face. She was only a bit taller than Hettie, and she resembled a pompous little child.

“English.” It was a statement, spoken with a faint, precise accent that no English person would ever use.

“Yes,” Hettie said, her boldness fading a little. Her hands went to her nightgown, and she looked down, suddenly shy.

“Are you an accomplice to this faery?”

“I—No. But I don’t want you to hurt him. What are you going to do with him?”

“This faery”—the lady said, waving a hand in the butler’s direction—“has been found guilty of murdering one of His Majesty the Sly King’s most valued servants. He will be put to death, of course. Drowned in a bog, I think.”

“Oh,” breathed Hettie.

“And you?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Who are you?” The lady punctuated the are with one sharply raised eyebrow.

“I’m not anybody.”

“Yes, I can see that, but what sort of nobody? You are the strangest-looking faery I’ve ever seen. And no hair, or I’d think you simply a particularly ugly human.”

Hettie knew better than to tell her she was a changeling. The daughter of a human mother and a faery father. Something in-between. English people didn’t like changelings, but she had always been told faeries liked them even less.

“Oh, I am a faery, miss. Only … See, I come from England and I’ve lived there my whole life, and—well, I s’pose I picked up a bit of their looks.”

Twelve pairs of eyes met across her head. There was a long pause in which the frosty air seemed to fill up and become heavy with all sorts of unspoken words and laughter.

Then the lady in the fish-bone dress let out a high, musical laugh that set everyone else to laughing, too, and the horse-people laughed, and the old woman laughed, and even the silver bells seem to tinkle with their own merry notes.

“She is so exquisitely funny,” the faery lady said.

“Ex-quisitely,” one of the horse-people mimicked, and that set them all to laughing again.

The fish-bone lady’s mouth twitched. Her eyes went a little blacker, and her brows seemed to become even sharper. Then she laughed again, too, louder than anyone.

“John?” she said, turning to a horse-person with white hair and white skin that glittered as if with frost. “John, let her ride upon you. We shall take her with us.”

“What?” The creature named John looked perfectly horrified. “That thing? On me?”

“Oh, no, I—” Panic gripped Hettie. It wrapped around her throat, made her breath escape in little gasps. “Please, I mustn’t—”

They were all staring at her, all those black eyes, sparks of amusement in their depths, sparks of malice. She couldn’t go with them. She couldn’t be taken away from these woods, or the cottage. This was where the door had opened and where she had arrived, and this was where Bartholomew would find her when he came for her. But what will he do if I’m not here?

The thought made her sick.

“Please, miss,” she said, taking a step toward the faery lady. “Please don’t make me leave.”

The faery lady did not even look at her. “You must. You will be my Whatnot. Or I will snip out your tongue. Don’t be tiresome.”

Hettie closed her mouth with a plop.

“Now,” said the faery lady, whirling away. “Vizalia? Send a dispatch to the King. One of his Belusites has been killed. The wrongdoer has been dealt with. Nothing was found. You needn’t say anything of my little bauble.”

And the next thing Hettie knew, she was on the back of a white horse with hair like wisps of snowy wind. Everything was confusion, stomping hooves and whispering cloaks. Her steed began to gallop, away into the woods. The faery butler. Hettie looked frantically at the other riders. Where is he? He isn’t here! With a little shiver, she glanced back over her shoulder.

Three figures had stayed behind in front of the cottage. The faery butler was on the ground, kneeling, his chin on his chest. Two horse-people stood over him, their faces strangely thin and hungry. And just before the company went over a rise and the cottage was lost from view, Hettie saw the horse-people begin to change again and their teeth grow long as needles and their eyes glow red as they looked down on the faery butler. Then Hettie was over the hill, riding away into the shadows and the snow.