The Lunatic's Curse (33 page)

‘We must go back,’urged Hildred. ‘If we stay here, we will either drown or succumb to the cold.’

We attempted to retrace our steps but then disaster struck: the lantern died.

‘We will have to feel our way,’ said Hildred, and she took my hand.

We had barely gone more than ten yards when Hildred stumbled and let go. I heard her scream, and then the most dreadful crunch, and I could not tell whether she was ten feet or a hundred feet
below me.

‘Hildred!’ I called to her uselessly in the dark, knowing that she could not hear me – she was deaf. I knew what had happened: she had fallen into a hole in the middle of the
pathway, a hole we had passed earlier when we had light. I could hear her moaning softly below and I could tell that she was in terrible pain. I went on to my stomach and felt my way in the dark to
the edge of the treacherous hole. I reached down and against all hope I touched her hand. Freezing water was seeping up through the rock.

‘I’m coming to get you,’ I said, and slipped down into the water. It was knee deep and my breath was taken away by the shock of the coldness. I was feeling all around as best
I could in the pitch blackness and then I touched her head and raised it out of the water. She coughed and took a deep breath. She was shivering violently.

‘I don’t think I can put my bones back together this time,’ she whispered.

She couldn’t stand, and every time I moved her she screamed. It took all my strength to drag her back up over the edge of the hole. Exhausted I sank down on to the rocky floor, her head
on my lap.

‘I’m sorry,’she murmured. ‘For doing this to you, for leading you into danger. I wanted so badly to help you with your father . . . I suppose because I never found out
about my own.’

‘You’re bleeding,’ I said. I couldn’t help myself. The smell of blood was powerful to me.

‘It’s not your fault,’ she whispered, and she brought my hand down to her face and I could feel that she was smiling. ‘If I die,’she whispered, ‘I will be
gone. What is left is no more than a shell. Save yourself.’

I thought she was rambling, from the knock on the head. ‘What are you saying? What do you mean?’ And then I understood and I was enraged. ‘I cannot, I would not!’ I
protested.

‘Let me feel your heart,’she said. ‘It is a good heart. It’s not your fault.’

She didn’t speak again.

I found out later that I sat with Hildred in the dark for nigh on fourteen days and nights. The waters crept higher and higher and I moved further back up the tunnel to avoid them.

I slaked my thirst easily enough but the hunger was almost unbearable.

On the fifteenth day I woke from an uneasy sleep. Something was different. The water was retreating and there was a strange blue glow just under the surface. I waded in and to my utter
astonishment I scooped up one of the blue lights from
Indagator.
Now I could see again! Then something brushed against my leg and when I looked down I saw bobbing on the surface my brazen
egg. I reached for it but it began to move away, as if of its own accord.

‘Could it be?’ I dared to wonder.

I laid poor Hildred’s remains in one of the cavities in the wall and vowed to come back and afford her a proper burial. Then, holding up the blue light, I followed the egg on its
purposeful journey.

The waters were subsiding quickly but the egg was following its own course, pulled by a force stronger than the water. My body was cold to the core but my heart was hopeful. I followed it
through the icy water until,
mirabile visu
, I saw up ahead the familiar blueness that heralded the underground chamber where I had built
Indagator.
No man can possibly imagine the
depths of my relief at the sight, for now I could make my way out of the maze.

I stepped into the chamber, only ankle deep in water, and watched the egg float across to a half-submerged metal box near the tunnel entrance and clang up against it. I knew now that the
Perambulating Submersible was destroyed – the wreckage was all around me. I recalled the many hours I had spent down here with Dr Velhildegildus, the thieving, murderous lunatic, constructing
Indagator.
I never did find out how the lunatic impostor got his hands on the plan, and I confess by the end I didn’t care. I was so utterly consumed by vengeful rage as I built it, at
his betrayal of me and my father’s work, that I can only think that I too lost my mind. It is the only way I can reconcile myself to the crime; it sickens me to think that I am no better
than Acantha.

And in my madness I used the brazen egg to sabotage the Re-breather, knowing that it would kill Tibor. How ironic then that ultimately my murderous act saved me; for it was the magnetic
Re-breather that attracted the egg back to it and led me out of the maze.

So I am alive and Dr Velhildegildus is dead. He sleeps now eternally but I – I have not slept a full night since . . .

Poor, poor Rex. Would it have been any comfort to him to know that it was not the Re-breather that killed Dr Velhildegildus, but the monstrous creature? But is intention
murder, or only the act itself? Rex’s burden was heavy enough without thinking that he was a murderer too.

And what a burden. Throughout history various cultures have believed that you can gain a man’s strength from eating his body, and that once tasted it is irresistible, but down the years
the practice has become a taboo. Rex knew what fate awaited him, the curse his father had talked of, for he had tasted Acantha’s stew. The stew wherein he found Chapelizod’s gold
tooth.

I have tried to find out more about ‘Andrew Faye’ and I have concluded that the name itself was a secret code between cannibals, a way for them to identify each other. Acantha
recognized Tibor Velhildegildus as soon as she met him, and he recognized her. He commented on her smell – a secret sign between androphagues, perhaps?

The fish,
Salpa salpa
, does exist and is a member of the bream family. Highly toxic, it causes terrible fevers and hallucinations if eaten. Even the monstrous creature was not wholly
immune. I do wonder if Mrs Runcible was feeding this very same bream to the warders Gerulphus had jailed down in the secret cell in the maze. That would explain the smell in the tunnels. I also
wonder if Rex ever did find Arthur Buttonquail. Perhaps it would have been better if he had not, for he said himself that he had nothing else to live for.

Let us hope that he got some relief when he finally made his confession to Joe Zabbidou. How interesting, too, that once again we arrive back at the village of Pagus Parvus and Joe Zabbidou and
Ludlow Fitch. If you wish to know more about Joe and his young assistant, you will find their story in
The Black Book of Secrets
. Gerulphus, of course, went off and met Lady Lysandra
Mandible. For his story read
The Eyeball Collector
. And if you wish to know more of Urbs Umida, the Sinister City, then you will find out just how vile a place it is in
The Bone
Magician
.

As for myself, the ever stranger world of Ubigentium, where all these tragic tales have taken place, is calling out once more and try as I might I cannot resist its call.

What further mysteries await I can hardly imagine, but rest assured, whatever they are, I will tell all . . .

F. E. Higgins

Opum Oppidulum

Rex’s Re-breather

Re-breathers have been around since the 1600s. Rex seems to have invented a fairly sophisticated machine and there is no doubt that if it
had worked, along with the Perambulating Submersible, it would have been much sought after.

Chapelizod’s GoldTooth

It was not uncommon in the past for people to have their initials engraved on gold teeth, a sort of primitive tracker system, I suppose, in
case they lost them.

Steganography and Histaeus

Steganography (Greek for ‘concealed writing’) is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and the
recipient are aware of its existence. Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, tells the story of Histaeus and his tattooed slave in his Histories. This story would have been familiar to any educated
child in Opum Oppidulum.

The Dunnets

And finally, I cannot finish without mentioning the Dunnet family (remember the quirt-wielding quadruplets from Rudy Idolice’s
Peregrinating Panopticon of Wonders?). Descendants of Billy and Rosalyn are alive and well in Kent. So pleased were they to find out about their talented ancestors that they made a very generous
donation to The Starlight Foundation as a mark of their gratitude.

When Ludlow Fitch suffers an unspeakable betrayal he runs from

the rotten, stinking City. On the night he enters Pagus Parvus a

second newcomer arrives at the remote village. Joe Zabbidou,

a mysterious pawnbroker who buys people’s deepest, darkest

secrets, is searching for new customers – and for an apprentice.

Shadowy Ludlow seems perfect for the job.

But as he begins his new life recording the villagers’

fiendish confessions, Ludlow’s own murky past threatens

to come to light . . .

Shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Award