The Book of Bones (11 page)

Waldo flicked through
Frankenstein
some more. Then shut it tight.

“Got a word?”

“Yes,” Waldo nodded.

“Remember the page.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Please write down the word on this piece of paper. Show no one what you've written.”

Waldo did as he was bid, folding the slip of paper and placing it face down on the table.

“Prepare to be astounded beyond your wildest dreams. For this child, this little girl with the amazing skull, will reveal the word Waldo Bell picked. Moreover she will tell you on which page the word resides. Yin—” the scientist turned to the Chinese girl—“this is your moment!”

But Yin was gazing vacantly at Waldo and seemed scarcely to have heard Dr. Billings.

“Yin!” Dr. Billings snapped.

I was gripped by the drama unfolding on stage but Isaac was restless. “I'm slipping out,” he said to me, and vanished down the side of the packed hall.

On stage the little Chinese girl seemed to have slipped into a waking trance and didn't respond to the doctor's promptings. Dr. Billings was not having this. He walked over and hissed in her ear while around the hall a few restless shuffles and mutterings broke out. This was not
the entertainment that these crusty old men had been promised. I believe I saw Dr. Billings's hand slip to Yin's arm and give her a cruel pinch. The girl started and turned toward her master.

“Yin, you will enlighten these eminent ladies and gentlemen who have come here today to see your amazing psychic powers in action. You will tell them what word Waldo Bell picked out of
Frankenstein
, and from which page.”

I was sitting bolt upright, my back pressing hard against the bench. I was frightened for Yin. For some reason I wanted her to get the answer right and not be humiliated before this audience.

Yin shuffled round on her trolley and now she was facing Waldo, her prominent eyes bulging at him.

“This is no trick, ladies and gents,” said Dr. Billings. “Yin will now demonstrate genuine powers.”

“You pick ‘alchemists' on page 175,” Yin said to Waldo. Her voice was high and clear and rang out throughout the hall.

Waldo handed the slip of paper to the other volunteer, who read out, “Alchemists, page 175.”

“How on earth did you know that?” gasped Waldo.

The hall had broken out into spontaneous applause and I myself was thunderstruck. How on earth had Yin known exactly which word on which page Waldo had
chosen? She'd scarcely been awake.

Yin seemed indifferent to the applause, though Dr. Billings was glowing with pride. She slumped back on her trolley, still apparently as drowsy as before. Now the scientist turned to the muscular volunteer and asked his name.

“Horatio Pyke,” the man answered in an oddly fluting voice for such a big man.

“Now, Mr. Pyke, I will ask you to write down on these slips of paper the names of ten living men. And the name of one dead man. These men must not be famous. Just relatives or friends or suchlike.”

Mr. Pyke did as he was bid, hurriedly scrawling names down on the slips that one of the assistants laid on the card table. When he had finished Dr. Billings directed Yin over to the table.

“Now, for an even more stupendous feat of psychic perception,” Dr. Billings announced, “Yin will tell us, just from looking at the names, which of these men is dead.”

Yin slouched by the table looking at the slips of paper. She was frowning. She finished reading the names then walked over to the volunteer. She was looking, really
seeing
, for the first time. The voice that came out of her mouth was high and whining. It recalled the shrill moan that had haunted my sleep on the
Mandalay
.

“Something wrong,” she shrilled.

“What is the matter, Yin?” Dr. Billings demanded.

“Dead man not on list. This is dead man.” She was standing right in front of Horatio Pyke.

“Pardon?” Mr. Pyke spluttered.

“
You die today
.” Yin wailed. “
When the clock is two
.”

Dr. Billings froze. This made no sense. Horatio Pyke was young and strong. Indignant voices began to hum. In the front row of the Jade Dragon Theater a lady with golden hair began to scream. Then suddenly I was engulfed in something smooth and slithery and my vision turned blood red. I too began to scream.

“It's all right, Kit.” Isaac was lifting something away from my eyes. “I've cut down the banner. Quick! We need to use the confusion to rescue Yin.”

I now saw that the banner that had hung over the roof of the hall had fallen like an ocean of silk over the crowd, engulfing them in swathes of bloody material. The three of us ran up to the stage, where we saw Waldo had gripped the volunteer, Horatio Pyke, in an armlock. They were struggling, the man kicking at my friend.

Dr. Billings and Yin had vanished.

“Hurry!” Waldo grunted, pushing the man to the floor. “The porters have taken Yin down there.”

We ran after Waldo, down into the footlights of the theater. It was crowded with props and gaslights, all sorts of bric-a-brac. Of Yin there was no sign. The volunteer,
convinced that we were villains, had come running after us. We ran down musty corridors and past foul-smelling chambers and then Isaac burst out into the street. There, right in front of us, we saw two coolies pushing Yin into a horse-drawn carriage. Dr. Billings was already seated. The driver was holding the reins, ready to flick the two mares with his whip. There was no way we could catch her. But I put on a burst of speed and tried my utmost to reach the carriage door and the slight figure I saw at the window.

Waldo and I reached the curb simultaneously, behind the volunteer, who was a fast runner. But the carriage had pulled away, the horses gaining on a cart filled with melons. We had failed. It had been a miracle to find Yin once in this noisy, crowded city. Now she was snatched away again.

We had failed. Failed.

As the horses cantered away I collapsed onto my knees in the middle of that busy road.

“Look sharp!” Isaac yelled, pulling me away from the road toward the safety of the pavement.

Just in time. Something was thundering toward me. A sleek black juggernaut, with screeching wheels. It was the carriage, which had somehow uncoupled from the horses. It rolled back at us, gaining speed as it came. But how had it broken loose?

“I did it, of course,” Isaac yelled, as I panted in his arms.

“Get Yin out!” I shouted to Isaac.

“I'm trying!”

Isaac and Waldo raced toward the carriage. The rudderless juggernaut rolled on, crashing into the pavement and overturning. There was the crash of breaking glass and splintering wood. Yin's head appeared at the window. She was bleeding from a cut above her eye. Isaac and Waldo frantically pulled her out till she lay in my friends' arms like a rag doll. Behind her was a moaning Dr. Billings. I began to help him out of the window—not an easy task as there was jagged glass everywhere.

“Leave him!” Waldo hissed, pushing my hands away. “Someone else will do it.”

It was true; already others had spilled out of the Jade Dragon Theater. Hands were extended to Dr. Billings, while Yin leaned against Rachel, limp and seemingly barely alive.

A figure was lying in the street beyond the wreck of wood and glass. Its hands were splayed out, its legs flung one on top of the other. It was the angle of the neck that told us everything. It was all wrong. There was no way that the volunteer, Horatio Pyke, could be alive. I turned away, bile rising in my throat. At the same instant I noticed the clock on the church opposite the theater.
Its hands pointed to five minutes past two. Mr. Pyke had died just as Yin had predicted. As the clock struck the hour. On the very second.

What kind of monster was Yin that she could foretell a strong young man's death?

I was in a daze, just standing there in the crowd, when Waldo caught me roughly by the arm.

“We've got to keep a hold of ourselves, Kit,” he growled. “Isaac's found another carriage.”

Waldo pulled me through the throng and out again, into the carriage that waited beyond. There was such confusion, such scurrying, with stretchers arriving for the dead man, that no one seemed to notice us melt away. As I sat opposite Yin in the carriage, as I looked into her odd eyes, I could see only one thing.

The handsome bronze clock, its hands inching past the Roman numeral II.

We were all quiet because I think we realized for the first time what a truly strange person Yin was. The thought exploded shrill into my mind. Had she caused that man's death? In predicting Horatio Pyke's demise had she somehow hastened it? What kind of creature
was
she? Of course we all felt sorry for her—I believed she had been held prisoner in the Bakers' castle and experimented on like a caged animal on the ship. Who knows what manner of torture she had undergone?

And yet, yet … what did we really know of her? She was sitting between Rachel and Waldo, slumped against his shoulder. A ghastly thing, with her shaved skull and her shrunken little face. Her cheeks were so angular that I could see the bones poking up through her flesh. She was pitiful, yes. But not just that; she had power too. An odd sort of force of a kind I had never met before. Those eyes, those milky, mismatched eyes, so enormous they seemed to dwarf the rest of her face. What had they foreseen? What misery could they cause?

Yin seemed to feel my gaze on her because she looked up at me—and I felt something searing right through me. Not fear—but it was as if she had examined me thoroughly with that one glance. A child, a little girl. Yet she had wrung me inside out. I felt exposed, ashamed and at the same time an awful foreboding gripped me.
We had it the wrong way round
. We weren't some gallant knights riding to the rescue of Yin. She wasn't some helpless damsel in distress. There was a dark power emanating from her. She was an unknown force—volatile and deadly. Now she had us in her coils. Did she wish us harm?

Her presence among us was unsettling. Waldo and Rachel were almost competing to protect her. They were acting like they had rescued a stray kitten. And poor Isaac, staring out of the window, was pale, blinking nervously through his glasses. He bore a heavy load of
guilt. He'd shown real initiative in spotting the doctor's carriage and sabotaging it so that we could rescue Yin. But now he believed he was the cause of a man's death.

I held Yin far more responsible for Horatio Pyke's death than Isaac.

Befuddlement gripped us all. None of us really understood what had just taken place at the Jade Dragon Theater. It had all happened so fast. It was a blur of fantastical events. Perhaps it was exhaustion or the poisoning, the long steamship journey or the confusion of being in this steamy foreign land. Whatever it was, for a second I had lost my bearings completely when I saw Yin stand up and begin to dismount from the carriage.

“We must go,” Yin said, looking back at us.

“Where?” asked Waldo, who looked as bewildered as I felt. Outside was a wide boulevard, those circular Chinese straw hats, the scent of salt and fish. Nothing I recognized.

“Our boarding house. Bubbling Well Road,” Yin replied. Calmly she dismounted and waited for us on the pavement.

We stumbled after her, disconcerted, as if we had been rescued by Yin rather than the other way round. How did she know where we were staying? None of us had told her the address of our boarding house.

My mistrust of Yin deepened as we took her up to our room and changed her into fresh linen belonging to Rachel, who is smaller than me. The Chinese girl looked comical in these clothes; they were far too big for her. I sat by the pillow, unable to keep my eyes off her pinched face. Formless suspicions were growing in my mind. Unease, dark clouds billowing. I shook my head, trying to shake off my fears.

She's just a child, I told myself fiercely. But … I couldn't forget that dead man. Horatio Pyke.
What kind of child drives a man to his death?

“Don't do that,” said Rachel, turning and noticing my stare. “The poor mite's half dead. Do you want drink?” she asked, miming drinking from a glass. “Oh, sweetheart. Look, she's trembling.”

It was true. Yin was shivering as if she had a high temperature. Thick on her lashes were crusty flakes. The numbered segments Dr. Billings had drawn crawled over her scalp like black spiders. Rachel poured her a cool
glass from the jug by the bed and tried to force it into her mouth. Yin's hand knocked against it, spilling the water. I don't know if she noticed the wet patch forming on the front of her dress.

I watched her coldly. There was something not quite human about her. Was this all an act to gain our sympathy? The child was as hard to know as a cat. Indeed there was something catlike, curving and sly, about her. Cats often had mismatched eyes.

“Maybe she's hungry?” Rachel suggested.

“We can get something from the kitchens, I suppose,” Waldo replied. “Rachel, can you—”

“Of course,” she muttered, disappearing out of the door.

We clustered around my bed. Every minute Yin seemed to grow hotter.

“Yin,” I said, mastering my distaste to take her burning fingers, “who are you?”

Abruptly the shaking stopped. She sat up. Looked around. Her hand reached for the glass and she took a few sips of water. Then she fell back in a daze, staring entranced at our kerosene light, which hung down low from a brass hook.

“Are you hot?”

Her eyes flickered to me for a moment and then back to the glowing lamp.

“Put a cold compress on her face,” Isaac suggested, as Rachel came back into the room with the news that there was no food available till dinner time. “Rachel, have you a handkerchief?”

Rachel hurriedly soaked one of her handkerchiefs in cold water from the jug and placed it on the girl's forehead. She seemed barely aware of it, lost in a swoon.