Alistair Grim's Odditorium (2 page)

“Shut your trap,” Mrs. Smears would say. “He’ll find himself doing no such thing.”

Upon which her husband would just shake his head and say:

“Bah!”

Mrs. Smears was the only person I ever saw get away with talking to Mr. Smears like that, but she died when I was six or thereabouts. I never had the courage to ask Mr. Smears what from, but I
remember how old I was because Mr. Smears was very upset.

After the funeral, he knocked me down on the cottage floor and growled:

“Six years of feeding and clothing you, and what have I got to show for it? A dead wife in the ground and a useless worm what ain’t fit for nothing but the workhouse!”

The workhouse was a black, brooding building located near the coal mines on the south edge of town. It had tall iron gates that were always locked and too many windows for me to count. Worst of
all were the stories Mr. Smears used to tell about the children who worked there—how they were often beaten, how they had no playtime and very little to eat. Needless to say, I didn’t
have to be told much else to know that the workhouse was a place from which I wanted to stay as far away as possible.

“Oh please don’t send me to the workhouse!” I cried. “I’ll make you a good apprentice. I swear it, Mr. Smears!”

“Bah!” was all he said, and knocked me down again. Then he threw himself on his bed and began sobbing into his shirtsleeves.

I picked myself up and, remembering how gentle he was around his wife, poured him a beer from the cupboard as I’d seen Mrs. Smears do a thousand times.

“Don’t cry, Mr. Smears,” I said, offering him the mug.

Mr. Smears looked up at me sideways, his eyes red and narrow. And after a moment he sniffled, took the mug, and gulped it down. He motioned for me to pour him another and then gulped that one
down too. And after he’d gulped down yet a third, he dragged his shirtsleeve across his mouth and said:

“All right, then, Grubb. I suppose you’re old enough now. But mind you carry your weight, or so help me it’s off to the workhouse with you!”

And so I carried my weight for Mr. Smears—up and down the chimneys, that is. Mr. Smears called me his “chummy” and told everyone I was his apprentice, but all he was good for
was sitting down below and barking orders up to me. Sometimes he’d sweep the soot into bags, but most often he left that part of the job for me to do too.

I have to admit that all that climbing in the dark was scary work at first. The flues were so narrow and everything was pitch-black—save for the little squares of light at the top and
bottom. And sometimes the chimneys were so high and crooked that I lost sight of those lights altogether. It was difficult to breathe, and the climbing was very painful until my knees and elbows
toughened up.

Eventually, however, I became quite the expert chummy. But sometimes when we arrived back at the cottage, Mr. Smears would knock me down and say:

“Job well done, Grubb.”

“Well done, you say? Then why’d you knock me down, Mr. Smears?”

“So you’ll remember what’s what when a job
ain’t
well done!”

There were lots of chimneys in our town for me to sweep back then, and I always did my best, but life with Mr. Smears was hard, and many times I went to bed hungry because, according to Mr.
Smears, it wasn’t sensible to feed me.

“After all,” he’d say, “what good’s a grub what’s too fat to fit in his hole?”

Oftentimes I’d lie awake at night, praying for the Yellow Fairy to take me away. “Please, Miss Gwendolyn,” I’d whisper in the dark. “If only you’d leave me a
little dust, just enough to sprinkle on my head so I can fly away, I’d be forever grateful.”

Mr. Smears made me sleep in the back of the cart in the stable. I was too dirty to be let inside the cottage, he said, and what use was there washing me when I would only get dirty again
tomorrow? There was a small stove in the stable for Old Joe, Mr. Smears’s donkey, but on some of the chillier nights, when Mr. Smears neglected to give us enough coal, Old Joe and I would
sleep huddled together in his stall.

Of course, many times over the years I thought about running off, but if I did run, where would I run to? I’d only ever been as far as the country manors on jobs with Mr. Smears, and since
I knew no trade other than chimney sweeping, what was left for me besides the workhouse?

I suppose things weren’t all bad. Every third Saturday Mr. Smears would allow me to wash at the public pump and sleep on the floor in the cottage. The following Sunday we’d dress in
our proper clothes and attend service like proper folk. After that, we’d stop in the churchyard to pay our respects to Mrs. Smears. Sometimes Mr. Smears would sniffle a bit, but I would
pretend not to notice so as not to catch a beating. Then we’d arrive back at the cottage, whereupon I’d pour him some beer and keep his mug full until he was pleasant enough to allow me
outside to play.

For six years or so things went on that way, until one day I blundered into a stranger who changed my life forever. Indeed, we chimney sweeps have a saying that goes, “A blunder in the
gloom leads a lad to daylight or to doom.”

I just never expected to find either inside a lamb.

O
n a cool autumn Sunday when I was twelve or thereabouts, Mr. Smears and I returned from the churchyard to find a note pinned to the cottage
door.

“What’s this?” Mr. Smears grumbled. He tore off the note and opened it. “Well, well, well,” he said, scratching his scar. “A bit of pretty luck this is,
Grubb.”

Mr. Smears couldn’t read, so I was surprised he understood the note until he handed it to me. “You know what this means?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said, my heart sinking.

On the piece of paper was a drawing of a lamb inside a square. This, I knew, stood for the sign at the Lamb’s Inn. Next to the lamb was a crude drawing of a sun and an arrow pointing
upward. This meant that Mr. Smears and I were to report to the Lamb’s Inn at sunrise the following morning.

“Ha!” said Mr. Smears, smacking me on the back. “Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us, Grubb. But also a handsome profit if we play it right.”

What Mr. Smears really meant was that
I
had my work cut out for
me
. I’d worked the Lamb’s Inn before, and not only did I know there were lots of chimneys to be swept, I
also knew that Mr. Smears would spend most of the day drinking up his wages in the tavern with the inn’s proprietor, Mr. Crumbsby.

Mr. Crumbsby was a round man with a bald head and thick, red whiskers below his ears. He had a jolly, friendly air about him, but I knew him to be a liar and cheat, and at the end of the day he
would waffle on about how much of Mr. Smears’s drink was to be deducted from his wages. Then he would trick Mr. Smears into thinking that he was actually getting the better of him.

That’s not what bothered me, however, for no matter how many chimneys I swept, my wages were always the same—a half plate of food and a swig of beer, if I was lucky. No, what sent my
heart sinking was the thought of Mr. Crumbsby’s twins, Tom and Terrance.

The Crumbsby twins were the same age as me, but they were fat, redheaded devils like their father, and together their weight added up to one sizable brawler. I’d had my share of run-ins
with them over the years, and the bruises to show for it, but most of the time Tom and Terrance were much too slow to ever catch me.

And so the next morning, Mr. Smears and I set out for the Lamb’s Inn just before daybreak—me in the back of the cart with the empty soot bags and brushes, Mr. Smears up front in the
driver’s seat handling Old Joe. It was only a short distance through the center of town, over the bridge, and up the High Road. And when next I poked my head out from the cart, I spied the
outline of the Lamb up ahead of us in the gloom.

Whitewashed, with a stone wall that ran around the entire property, the Lamb’s Inn cut an imposing presence against the thick North Country forests that spread out behind it. The inn stood
three stories high and rambled out in every direction just as wide. A hanging sign out front bore a lamb, while coach-and-horse signs at each end advertised its stables.

The inn itself was said to be over two hundred years old, but it had burned down and been rebuilt a few times with more and more rooms. I only mention this because that meant the flues had been
rebuilt too, resulting in a confusing maze of narrow passages that twisted and turned into one another so randomly that even an expert chummy like myself could get lost up there in the dark.

Indeed, I had just begun to imagine the grueling day ahead of me, when all of a sudden, farther up the road, a shadowy figure stepped out from the trees. It appeared to be a man in a long black
cloak, but before I could get a good look at him, he dashed across the road and disappeared behind the Lamb’s stone wall.

Nevertheless, with my heart pounding, I waited for Mr. Smears to say something. Surely, I thought, he must have seen the man too. But Mr. Smears mentioned nothing about it, and as he steered Old
Joe for the Lamb’s stables, I dismissed the black-cloaked figure as a trick of the early morning shadows.

“Well, what do we have here?” said Mr. Smears, and he pulled to a stop alongside an elegant black coach. Its driver’s seat was flanked by a pair of large lanterns, and on its
door was emblazoned an ornate letter
G
. The horses had already been unharnessed and bedded in the stable, which meant that the owner of the coach (a Mr. G, I assumed) had spent the night at
the Lamb.

“Looks like old Crumbsby’s got himself a fancy pants,” said Mr. Smears, jerking his chin at the coach. “I’ll have to remember that at the end of the day when the
devil tries to chisel me for my drink. Ask him for how much he took the fancy pants, I will. That’ll soften him up when he starts waffling on about being strapped for cash.”

Mr. Smears chuckled to himself and scratched his scar.

“Shall I unhitch Old Joe, sir?” I asked. I wanted to have a look inside the stables, for certainly Mr. G’s horses must be a breed apart to pull so fine a coach.

“Bah,” replied Mr. Smears, climbing down after me. “Let Crumbsby’s man do that. It’s only right, us coming here on such short notice.”

Mr. Smears and I crossed the yard to the Lamb’s back entrance. But before Mr. Smears could knock, Mr. Crumbsby opened the door and gave my master’s arm a hearty shake.

“I thought I heard you, Smears,” said Mr. Crumbsby, smiling wide. His eyes were puffy with sleep, and his waistcoat was still unbuttoned. “Good of you to come. Business has
been slow of late, so I thought it an opportune time to secure your services.”

“Business been slow, eh?” Mr. Smears said suspiciously, and he jerked his thumb toward the fancy black coach. “Looks like you’ve taken up collecting coaches, then, eh,
Crumbsby?”

“A late arrival yesterday afternoon,” Mr. Crumbsby said, then he lowered his voice. “An odd fellow that one is, too,” he added secretively. “Him and his coachman.
Like something out of the Black Forest, I tell you, what with their pale faces and gloomy dispositions.”

“As long as their money ain’t gloomy,” said Mr. Smears, then he smiled knowingly and lowered his voice too. “And nothing gloomy about the price of lodging going up, I
wager. A fine gentleman he is for inconveniencing you during your cleaning season—or some excuse like that you must’ve given him, eh, Crumbsby?”