Tanglewreck (8 page)

Silver didn’t believe this was true, but she didn’t want to argue, and she was fascinated by this caught moment of Time. It was as though Time had got trapped here and couldn’t move on. She didn’t feel like she did when she went to a museum and saw lots of old things; she felt as though Time existed differently here. Even though the people had gone away and gone forward, Time itself was left here, or a piece of Time, anyway, as real and solid as the mattresses and tin mugs.

The dirty faded signs on the wall said ALDGATE WEST.

‘My work be to find supper,’ said Gabriel. ‘I may not return without our supper.’

‘Where are you going to find that?’ asked Silver, wondering why anyone ate supper in the early hours of the morning.

‘Here,’ said Gabriel, and he disappeared.

Now Silver was alone in the dark, listening to the rats and mice scurrying about their business. She shut her eyes and visualised her little room at Tanglewreck, with the fire lit, and whatever food she had been able to steal from under Mrs Rokabye’s selfish and sharp eyes. She supposed that Mrs Rokabye had arranged everything with Abel Darkwater, but did that mean she was really bad, or just greedy and stupid? Grown-ups were always worrying about money, she knew that, but what did you need if you could eat and sit in front of the fire and read books? That was what Silver would do with her money.

She wondered if the Throwbacks had any money …

Just then Gabriel reappeared, dragging a large sack.

‘Pizza,’ he said, ‘from the Pizza Hut.’

‘You’ve been to Pizza Hut?’ asked Silver disbelievingly.

‘My mother Eden be from the Kingdom of Italy. There be a Hut up a stretch from this place and at this hour a Short Wagon comes and two Updwellers bring these boxes to the Hut. It be a depot for food. Come.’

Dragging his sack, he hurried along the deserted platform and disappeared into the tunnel where the trains came through. Not wanting to be left behind, Silver ran after him.

It was now pitch black, and there were heavy dripping noises coming from above. Every five seconds, Silver felt
another cold drop slither down her neck or her nose. She was damp all over and beginning to shiver. All she wanted to do was sleep.

Something is following me
, she thought, and looked fearfully behind her into the solid darkness. There was nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard, except for scurrying and dripping, but she was sure that that there were more than two of them in the tunnel.

Suddenly, coming towards them, she saw a flare, then another and another, and Gabriel ran ahead, while she hesitated, and then a man appeared like an apparition out of the half-light. He was heavily built, like Gabriel, taller, though not much, and he wore a black fur coat. Gabriel said something to him, and he nodded, before striding up to Silver.

‘We greet you as a Stranger. Micah will hear your story, he will.’

‘You’ve got to help me,’ said Silver. ‘There’s a terrible man who …’

But she said no more because she fainted clean away.

When she came round she could hear low voices, and she sensed the low light on her eyelids. For a moment she didn’t open her eyes, because she wanted to be awake without anybody knowing.

She was warm. The air smelled of petrol and dogs. Someone was playing what sounded like a recorder.

She opened one eye just a little. A group of men, women and children were sitting round a fire dug into a shallow pit
and piled with old crates and pallets. Most were drinking something out of what looked like giant tin mugs. Some had mending, or knitting or carving on their knees.

The men were short and square with their hair tied back in brief ponytails. Silver knew better than to stare at their ears, but they all had ears the size of hands. The women were taller than the men, and slender, like shoots growing up towards the light. The children looked strong, and some of them were playing with the dogs, or riding round the edges of the chamber on the smallest ponies Silver had ever seen.

‘Bog ponies,’ said a voice by her ear. ‘The dogs be Jack Russells, the ponies be bog ponies, and my name be Micah, and I be the Leader of the Clan.’

Silver opened both her eyes and looked at the man who had come out of the shadows. The others were all dark haired, but Micah was blond. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a torn waistcoat embroidered with flowers, and a pair of blue seaman’s trousers. He had a long clay pipe in his hand, and on his fingers he wore gold rings three deep.

Silver sat up. She was feeling stronger but she was starving.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Gabriel rescued me. Can I have some food, please?’

‘Eden! Bring you food for the child?’

A woman came forward with a wooden dish. There was a piece of pizza in it, and some thick yellow soup. ‘
Eccola bambina bella!
’ said Eden. Silver didn’t care what it was, she ate and ate, and all the time Micah watched her.

Then Silver started to tell the whole story of her parents, and Mrs Rokabye, and Abel Darkwater, and the opium in the tomato sauce.

‘And what be the reason of all this doing?’ asked Micah.

‘It’s a clock called the Timekeeper, and a house called Tanglewreck.’

Micah’s face changed, but he did not say what it was that had caused his pale face to redden, and then turn paler than before. He knocked out his pipe and stared into the low fire.

Then he said, ‘We will help you, we will. We know the man Abel Darkwater.’

‘You know him?’

‘We did know him, we did, once upon a time, yea, and we know of his business.’

Micah clapped his hands and everyone stopped their work or their drinking, and the dogs stopped jumping over each other, and the ponies stood quietly at the back.

‘We have no traffic with Updwellers,’ said Micah, ‘but you be a child and a Stranger, and it be in our beliefs to help Strangers. All of us that you see here before you were Strangers once, so we were.’

And Micah, in his high singsong voice, began to tell of how it began that the Throwbacks had come to be.

‘There be a hospital called Bedlam – though not what you would call a hospital now in your own time, but a terrible tall torture of a place where a man or a woman might be tied to a chair for days at a time and fed no food but dead mice.

‘It was a Mad House. It was a place for the Insane, though many of us who went there had no insanity, no, none at all, but we were an offence to our masters. Many ways there be to get into Bedlam but only one way to get out. And that was the narrow way that all must take. Yea, Death.

‘I be in Bedlam myself in the year 1768 and that year the Warden minted the name of the Throwbacks for us, and hung the names round our necks in these medallions – yea, these medallions, look you here.’

Micah reached round his neck and took out a circular metal disc on a chain. On one side was his name, MICAH, and on the other side the word BEDLAM.

‘Throwbacks we be, and by his cruelty he called us after angels too, for our Christian names, to make the visitors laugh, for in those times visitors come to Bedlam and other Houses of the Mad, to laugh at us like wild beasts.

‘Strong I be, and clever too in my way, yea, and I see one day that there be a rusty door in a rusty cell, and I contrived to get time in there and I found it led out and away, if only we digged enough, and for three years long we digged enough, and we found a way to be free, and many of us escaped underground, and hid here.

‘When we were free we discovered a strange thing, yea, that underground we be not living and dying as Updwellers do, but that for us, Time moves more slow, creeps like darkness. We live long lives, not like to Updwellers, and we know not Time as you know Time.’

‘But how do you know Abel Darkwater?’ asked Silver.

‘He be that man,’ answered Micah. ‘He be that man who named us.’

‘What, in the Bedlam place?’

‘Yea, he be the Warder of Bedlam.’

‘But that was like two hundred and forty years ago, or something. He isn’t that old – I mean, he’s old, but he’s not, like two hundred and forty or whatever.’

‘I be as old as he.’

‘Nobody lives to two hundred and forty! Even Mrs Rokabye isn’t a hundred!’

‘In thy world I would be dead. In my world, I am alive.’

Silver fell silent. She didn’t know whether to believe him or not – she wanted to believe him, but how could he be so old? And Abel Darkwater too?

Micah put his hand on her shoulder and smiled. ‘You be young. Our story be strange to you. Rest now. Sleep.’

‘I left my shoes behind,’ said Silver, looking sadly at her torn socks and blistered feet.

Micah gestured to one of the women, who brought Silver what looked like a pair of clogs with shiny buckles. She gave them to her, and a pair of hand-knitted woollen socks. When she saw the state of poor Silver’s feet, all bleeding and sore, she went away and came back with a tin of something thick and yellow and nasty-smelling, and rubbed it all over Silver’s feet. It felt wonderful.

‘What’s that?’ said Silver.

‘Dog grease and cloves.’

‘Dog grease!’

‘When a dog of ours be dead, amen, we renders him in a cauldron, and we forms him into this good grease.’

‘You do that to your dogs?’

‘Yea, but not afore they be dead, amen. What do Updwellers make with their dogs that are dead?’

‘Um, we bury them or the vet takes them away.’

‘Wasteful,’ said the woman. ‘Wicked wasteful.’

Silver felt quite sick to be covered in boiled-down dog, but she didn’t dare say anything. She just pulled on her socks quickly and tried to forget about what was on her feet as she drank the delicious hot apple cider she had been given.

Soon she fell deeply asleep.

Mrs Rokabye was eating breakfast.

It was rather a good breakfast of kippers and toast and hot chocolate, and she was glad that no Silver had appeared to come and spoil everything. She had promised herself the last kipper, and she was eyeing it so greedily that Sniveller got up with a sigh and slapped it down on her plate.

‘If the child wants to sleep, she can’t expect breakfast,’ announced Mrs Rokabye.

‘Sleep she may, but not today,’ said Sniveller.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mrs Rokabye, who longed to be alone with her kipper.

‘She’s run away.’

Mrs Rokabye put down her knife and fork. ‘Run away? From here? From me?’ She bit the head off her kipper. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.’

‘Found a bone, have you?’ said Sniveller.

‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child,’ finished Mrs Rokabye, who only ever quoted the nastier bits of the Bible.

‘Last night, what a sight!’ said Sniveller. ‘Master blames me. You never said she didn’t eat tomato sauce.’

‘I have never given her any tomato sauce! Children should
not be indulged.’

‘Master hypnotised her, and –’ Before Sniveller could continue, the door to the dining room opened and in came Abel Darkwater in his outdoor clothes.

He sat down heavily, and motioned to Sniveller to fetch him coffee.

‘Have you found the child?’ asked Mrs Rokabye, who had no interest in Silver’s welfare, but every interest in her own get-rich-quick opportunity. Mrs Rokabye had slept soundly, not knowing she had been drugged, and she had awoken to find herself happy, in her own mean-minded way. Yes, happy at last, and now the wretched child had upset everything.

‘I have not found her but I know where she is,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘I know a number of things that I did not know until last night, oh yes.’

‘Was the hypnosis successful?’ asked Mrs Rokabye eagerly.

‘It was, and it was not,’ replied Darkwater opaquely.

‘Well, what are we to do now?’

‘Wait,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘and see.’

He got up and left the room. Mrs Rokabye had the distinct feeling that she was being left out of something important. She poured herself more hot chocolate and brooded.

As she brooded and sipped, and sipped and brooded, there was a horrible howling from the landing, and Sniveller came tumbling through the door, with blood pouring from his nose.

‘What on earth?’

‘He’s beating me again, oh, oh, oh, no, no, no.’ Sniveller
fell into a chair. ‘It’s the prophecy.’

‘What prophecy?’

‘You don’t think he wants the bloody clock, tick-tock to tell the time, do you?’

‘I have no idea why he wants it,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘All I know is that he will pay me a magnificent sum of money when he finds it.’

‘If he finds it. He’s been looking for it all his life and never had a wife.’

‘What nonsense you talk. Tell me in plain English why he wants this clock.’

Sniveller spat out a blood-stained sentence. It was all he could manage, and anyway, he didn’t rightly understand it all himself.

‘Whoever controls the Timekeeper controls Time.’

Mrs Rokabye pricked up her ears. If she could get it she would never have to wait for the bus again.

‘But only the Child with the Golden Face can bring the Clock to its Rightful Place.’

‘You can’t mean Silver?’

Sniveller nodded and mopped his face with his neckerchief. ‘And now we’ve lost her like a penny down the floorboards.’

‘But she has no idea where the Timekeeper is, I am quite sure of that.’

‘Yes, Master knows that now, but Master says …’ Sniveller lowered his voice. Mrs Rokabye’s eyes grew wide, but before Sniveller could finish his snivelling sentence, Abel
Darkwater had burst into the room, his round face excited.

‘It is of great importance that you stay in the house today, Mrs Rokabye. I can feel faint changes in the surface of the Earth. There is a Time Tornado approaching us.’

‘A Time Tornado!’

‘Yes indeed, oh yes indeed!’

‘I think I had better go back to Tanglewreck,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who never thought she would hear herself say such words. ‘This London living is very bad for my nerves.’

‘You cannot go anywhere,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘unless you want to run the risk of being swept up in Time and deposited who knows where?’

‘Why does no one here speak plain English?’