The Whatnot (2 page)

He ran until his breath rattled inside his ribcage. He ran until his muscles burned and his legs felt like bags of water. And when he finally raised his eyes from the cobbles, he found himself in a part of London he had never seen before.

He had gone in entirely the wrong direction. He must be miles from Spitalfields now, miles from the chemist's shop. Night was falling. The streets were emptying of the regular people, filling with the irregular, the debauched, the drunk, the gaudily dressed fops and hoop-skirted ladies painted up so heavily they resembled nightmarish clowns. Overhead, the streetlamps cast dim reddish halos. The flame faeries that had been inside the lamps before the Ban had been replaced by brimstone bulbs, and these produced an ugly, bloody-looking light, but at least there was no more knocking and spitting, no more glowing faery faces trying to get the attention of the people below. Pikey was glad for it.

Stupid faeries.
It served them right they had been sent away. He remembered how, a long time ago, Spitalfields had been swarming with them—faeries with spines, faeries with inky eyes and onion-white skin, with heads of barnacles and thorns, and so many fingers. You couldn't go anywhere without seeing one, and Pikey had lost count of all the times he had woken in his hole under the chemist's shop with his bootlaces knotted together, or with nettles wound into his hair. Well, now the faeries were being kicked out, and he hoped they all landed in bramble patches.

He continued to hurry, peering at everyone and wiping his nose. The pubs were bursting with light and riotous war songs. Some ways up ahead a door opened and a great fist punched out holding a filthy jabbering fool by the collar and depositing him in the green-tinged ice of a gutter. Closer, a street circus was setting up its hoops and props. An organ-grinder was playing a jangling, off-key tune. Pikey spotted a lady pulling a miniature hot-air balloon beside her, its basket filled with opera glasses and a fan and other necessaries. He saw someone wearing a pair of newfangled shoes, built of clockwork and powered by coal, that lifted your feet so that you didn't have to lift them yourself. The man who wore them was galumphing about like a two-ton elephant, and Pikey was careful to give him a wide berth.

He slowed to a walk, fishing in his pocket for the bread. His hand had dropped from his clouded eye, but he didn't care. He doubted he would be the first person noticed here. The streets were becoming wider. The crowds dwindled away and all went very quiet, the air somehow heavy, as if all the snow that was waiting to fall was pressing down on it, compacting it over the city. Only the occasional steam coach passed by now. Pikey looked up at the soaring stone buildings, with their spires and gables and wrought iron anti-faery gates.

He rounded a corner. He didn't know where he was, but it must have been a rich place. The houses here seemed absolutely bursting with light. It was almost as if there were no floors or walls inside them and they were simply great hollow shells, little suns burning within.

Traffic had picked up again. Well-bundled ladies and gentlemen were coming up the street, canes swinging, gowns whispering beneath heavy furs. Steam coaches and mechanical horse-and-fours rattled past, leaving swaths of coal smoke behind them. All were headed to the same destination—a great palace of a house, four floors and a green metal roof, and all of its windows, all the way to the roof, lit, punching golden holes in the night.

Pikey approached the house, gnawing at his bread. He watched from behind a lamppost as a great fat lady went up the steps to the door. She wore a delicate hat shaped like a fly and was practically dripping with diamonds. But she didn't look happy. In fact, she looked downright peeved. Pikey wondered how anyone could be peeved when they had so many diamonds. And going into such a bright, warm house. . . .

“Ah, the Wyndhammer War Ball,” said a droopy, tucked-up gentleman, passing close by the lamppost. A very tall lady walked at his side, and he was hurrying to keep up. “What a dashing good bash this will be, don't you think, dear? Don't you?”

After a while, Pikey spotted the telltale red-and-blue of a leadface and slipped behind a coach wheel, walking along with it as it rumbled over the cobbles. The coach wheel was taller than he was and hid him right to the top of his head. The leadface marched past. As soon as he was gone, Pikey hurried back to the huge house and swung over the iron railing, onto the steps that went down to the servants' entrance. He didn't want to leave yet. It was getting colder, but the lights from the windows were so cheery. They shone down onto his face and he imagined he could almost feel their warmth. The panes were fogged right over it was so hot inside.

He sat down on the fourth step from the top and bit away at his bread. It was hard as a rock and full of gritty kernels that probably weren't flour. Pikey liked it quite a lot. The last carriage left. Faintly the sound of an orchestra drifted into the street. He heard muffled laughter and loud, happy voices.

And then he heard a different sound from the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. A scuttling, scraping noise, like knives dragging swiftly over stone. He sat up.

Was it a rat?
The windows of the servants' hall were dark. No doubt everyone was in the kitchens, wiping and boiling and building towering platters of pork chops and hothouse fruits.

A steam coach turned onto the street, headlamps blazing. The light sliced through the railings, sending spokes of shadow spinning along the wall. In the blackness at the bottom of the steps, a pair of eyes glimmered. Two huge silver globes, there for a second, then gone.

Faery.

Pikey scooted up one step, muscles tense, ready to run. The noise came again, the sharp flutter, and this time it was accompanied by a weeping, thin and high, like a child crying.

Another steam coach coughed and sputtered up the street. The two globes lit again as the headlamps passed, then vanished into the dark. Whatever was at the bottom of the steps began to move.

It approached slowly, painfully, a pale slender thing dragging heavy black wings behind it like a cloak.

Pikey's heart skipped a beat.
That weren't no cobble spryte.

The wings were huge, ruffled with dark, spiny feathers, and the blue-lipped mouth was riddled with teeth. A black tongue flicked from it every few seconds. But when Pikey peered at the faery it didn't look as if it were about to gnaw his leg off. Rather, it looked as if it were about to drip into a puddle. One of its wings hung limp, the feathers smashed. The bone was bent at a hideous angle.

Pikey eyed the creature as it pulled itself up the stairs, keeping his bread safely behind his back. The faery might not
seem
dangerous, but faeries could look however they wanted to look if it suited their fancy. He wasn't about to fall for any hookem-snivey.

“Boy?”
it said in a high, whistling voice.
“Boy?”

Just like a baby,
Pikey thought. He frowned.

“Boy?”
It had reached the seventh step. It stretched a thin-fingered hand up toward Pikey, pleading.

“What d'you want?” Pikey asked gruffly. He shoved the bread into his pocket and glanced around to make sure no one was near. Fraternizing with faeries was dangerous. If anyone so much as smelled of spells or piskie herbs, it was off to Newgate, and Pikey had heard there was a kindly looking old man there in a butcher's apron, and he was always weeping, and he would weep and weep as he pulled your fingernails out, but he would interrogate you until you'd say anything. Then you'd be sent to a different prison. Or hanged. Whatever the case, you were in for it. Pikey had been in for it all day, and he'd had enough.

The faery continued up the steps, its round eyes locked on his.

“What?” Pikey snapped. “You can't have my bread if that's what you want. I ran a long way for it. Go away.”

“Boy,”
it said, yet again. “
Wing.”

“Yeh, looks broken to me. Rotten luck.” Some servant in the downstairs had probably caught it stealing and had smashed it with a frying pan. Served it right, too.

“Help.”
The faery was on the step below Pikey now, looking up at him with great mirror eyes that seemed to grow larger with every breath.

“I ain't helping you.” Pikey turned his face away. His gaze flickered back. He didn't want to be awful. But he wasn't about to put his neck out for a faery. Someone might be watching from one of those glowing windows. A street sweeper might pass just in that instant. Pikey couldn't be seen with it. It was hard enough staying alive with one eye looking like a puddle of rain.

“Please help?” The voice was so human now; it sent a little stab through Pikey's heart despite himself. The faery was just bones, a few thin sticks wrapped in papery skin. And it was hurting. He wouldn't leave a dog like that. He wouldn't even leave a leadface like that.

He frowned harder and joggled his knee. Then he leaned forward and took the damaged wing in his hand. The faery shied ever so slightly at his touch, but it did not pull away.

“Fine,” Pikey said. “But if someone sees, I'm going to shove you at 'em and get outta here, you hear me?”

The feathers felt smooth and oily between Pikey's fingers, strangely immaterial, like smoke. He felt gently along the bone. He didn't know a great deal about doctoring, but Bobby Blacktop, the old chemist's boy, had gotten run over by a gas trolley a year ago and had both his legs broken. Pikey had learned a few things from that.

Suddenly the faery sat up, ears twitching, as if picking up a sound only it could hear.
“Quickly,”
it hissed.
“Quickly!”

“Ow, aren't you one to make demands. What's the hurry, then? Where you gotta be?” Pikey's fingers found the joint, clicked it back in place. “It was just banged out o' the socket is all. Is that better? Does it work now?”

The faery's eyelids snapped, once, across its eyes. In a flash its wings unfurled, faster than Pikey would have thought possible. He jerked back. The faery peered at him a second longer, its tongue slithering between its teeth. Then it whirled, wrapping itself in its feathers. There was a brush of wind, a chorus of whispers, like many little voices calling to one another, and then the faery was gone.

It didn't exactly vanish. Pikey thought it might have, but it was more as if it had moved into a pocket, as if the stairs and the street and all of London were painted on the thinnest of veils and the faery had simply slipped behind it.

Pikey stared at the place where it had been. Then he stood quickly. Lights were coming on in the servants' hall below. He could hear voices raised in excitement, the clatter of metal. A hand began to fiddle with the lacy curtains over the window.

Time to go,
Pikey thought. He vaulted over the railing and set off briskly along the side of the street.

But he had only taken a few steps when a deep, skull-shivering shudder almost tossed him from his feet. He stumbled. The shudder grew in strength, pounding and stamping louder than all the steam engines of King's Cross station, all going at once.

Pikey turned. It was the house. Fissures were racing up the windows, splitting smaller and smaller. The walls shook and swelled, as if something were straining against them from inside. And then, with an almighty shriek, every window in the house burst outward. All those bright windows, exploding into the night in sprays of gold. The roof blew into the sky. Stone rained down, glass and green metal and shreds of colored silk. Pikey yelled and raced into the street, dodging the falling debris.

An oil trolley skidded around him. Steam coaches honked, belching fumes. Men leaned out of vehicles, ready to shout at Pikey, but their words stuck in their throats. All eyes turned to Wyndhammer House.

Piercing wails were coming from within, swooping down the winter street. There was another resounding
boom
. And then the house began to fall.

CHAPTER II

Hettie in the Land of Night

S
IX days and six nights Hettie and the faery butler had walked under the leafless branches of the Old Country, and still the cottage looked no closer than when they had first laid eyes on it.

Of course, Hettie didn't
know
if it had been six nights. It always felt like night in this place, or at least a gray sort of evening. The sky was always gloomy. The moon faded and grew, but it never went away. She trudged after the wool-jacketed faery, over roots and snowdrifts, and the little stone cottage remained in the distance, unreachable. A light burned in its window. The black trees formed a small clearing around it. Sometimes Hettie thought she saw smoke rising from the chimney, but whenever she really looked, there was nothing there.

“Where are we going?” she demanded, for the hundredth time since their arrival. She made her voice hard and flat so that the faery butler wouldn't think she was frightened. He better think she could smack him if she wanted to. He better.

The faery ignored her. He walked on, coattails flapping in the wind.

Hettie glared and kicked a spray of snow after him. Sometimes she wondered if he even knew. She suspected he didn't. She suspected that behind the clockwork that encased one side of his face, behind the cogs and the green glass goggle, he was just as lost and afraid as she was. But she didn't feel sorry for him.
Stupid faery.
It was his fault she was here. His fault she hadn't jumped when her brother Bartholomew had shouted for her. She might have leaped to safety that night in Wapping, leaped back into the warehouse and England. She might have gone home.

She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the red lines through the sleeves of her nightgown, feeling the imprints the faeries had put there so she could be a door.
Home.
The word made her want to cry. She pictured Mother sitting on her chair in their rooms in Old Crow Alley, head in her hands. She pictured Bartholomew, the coal scuttle, the cupboard bed. The herbs, drying above the potbellied stove. Pumpkin in her checkered dress.
Stupid faeries. Stupid butler and stupid Mr. Lickerish and stupid doorways that led into other places and didn't let you out again.

She paused to catch her breath and noticed she had been clamping her teeth shut so hard they hurt. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and looked up.

The cottage was still far away. The woods were very quiet. The faery butler barely made any sound at all as he walked, and when Hettie's own loud feet had stopped, the whole snowbound world seemed utterly silent.

She squinted, straining to make out the details of the cottage. There was something about it. Something not right. The light in the window did nothing to dispel the hollow, deserted look of the place. And the way the trees seemed to curl away from it . . . She closed her eyes, listening to her heartbeat and the whispering wind. She imagined walking forward under the trees, hurrying and spinning, gathering speed. Her back was to the cottage. Then she was facing it, and for an instant she was sure it was not a house at all, but a rusting, toothy mousetrap with a candle burning in it, winking, like a lure.

“Come
on.
” The faery butler was at her side, dragging her along. “We haven't got all of forever. Come on, I say!”

She stumbled after him. The cottage was normal again, silent and forbidding in its clearing.

“I can walk by myself,” Hettie snapped, jerking away her arm. But she was careful not to stray too far from his side. They really didn't have all of forever. In fact, Hettie wondered how much longer they could go on like this. They had nothing to eat but the powdery gray mushrooms that grew in the hollows of the trees, and even those were becoming scarcer as they went. There were no streams in this wood, so all they had to drink was the snow. They melted it in their hands and licked the icy water as it ran over their wrists. It tasted of earth and made Hettie's teeth chatter, but it was better than no water at all.

Hettie crossed another snarl of black roots, stomped over another stretch of crusty snow. She was so hungry. She was used to that from Bath, but there it was different. Her mother was in Bath, washing and scrubbing and making cabbage tea, and Hettie had always known that she'd never let her and Bartholomew starve. Hettie doubted the faery butler would care much if she starved to death. He didn't give her anything. He hadn't told her to eat the mushrooms or melt the snow. She had watched him and had stuck her nose up at him, and then she had gotten so hungry she'd
had
to copy him. But what would happen when there were no mushrooms left? What would happen when the snow all melted?

When she felt she couldn't walk another step, she stopped.

“I'm tired,” she said in the sharp, nettled voice that back home would have gotten her a pat on the head from Mother and a silly face from Barthy. “Let's stop. Let's stay here for tonight. We're not getting any closer to that dumpy old house and I want to sleep.”

The faery kept walking. He didn't even glance back.

She bounded after him. “You know, what if someone lives in that cottage? Have you thought about that? And what if they don't like us? What'll happen then?”

The faery kept his eyes locked straight ahead. “I suspect we'll die. Of boredom. I've heard tell there's a little girl in these woods, and she follows folk about and jabbers at them until their ears shrivel up and they go deaf.”

Hettie slowed, frowning at the faery's back. She hoped he would drown in a bog.

She thought about that for a while. If he did—drown in a bog—it would be frightening. He would lie under the water, and his long white face and white hands would be all that showed out of the murk. And perhaps his green eye, too, glowing even a thousand years after he was dead. She wouldn't want to see it, but she didn't suppose she would object much if it happened. This was his fault, after all.

Finally, when even the faery butler was breathless and dragging his feet, they stopped. Hettie collapsed in a heap in the snow. The faery butler sat against a tree. The woods were dead-dark now. On her first night in the Old Country, Hettie had slept against a tree, too, thinking that the roots might be warmer than the ground, trees being alive and all. She soon learned better. The trees here weren't like English trees. They weren't rough and mossy like the oak in Scattercopper Lane. They were cold and smooth as polished stone, and she had woken with the ghastly feeling that the roots had begun to wrap around her while she slept, as if to swallow her up.

The snow was cold, but at least she was not in danger of being eaten by a tree. She curled up for the seventh time and went to sleep.

 

The sound of footfalls woke her.

At first she thought the faery butler must be up again, pacing, but when she peered around the tree, she saw he was lying still. His gangly legs were propped up akimbo, long white hands limp in the snow. He made only very small sounds as he slept, little wheezing breaths that formed clouds in the air.

Hettie sat bolt upright. Something was moving through the trees, quickly and stealthily toward them.

Tap-tap, snick-snick.
Hard little feet on roots, then on snow, limping closer.

She remembered the faeries she had seen the day they had arrived in the Old Country, the wild, hungry ones with their round, bright eyes. They had all leaped and swarmed around her, poking and prodding until the faery butler had chased them off with a knife. For a few nights they had followed, slinking along at the edge of sight, darting around the trees and giggling, but after a while they had seemed to tire of the strangers and had vanished back into the woods.

Only the cottage remained.

Hettie crawled around the tree trunk. The faery butler was still asleep. She poked him in his ribs, hard.

He grunted. Slowly his face turned toward her, but his eye remained shut. The green-glass one was dull, tarnished lenses loose across its frame. Hettie shivered.

She looked back around the tree.

And found herself staring straight into the red-coal eyes of a gray and peeling face.

“Meshvilla getu?”
it said, and placed one long finger to its lips.

Hettie made a little noise in her throat. The skin of its cheeks curled like ash from a burned-up log. Its breath was cold, colder than the air. It blew against her, and she could feel it freezing in a slick sheen on her nose. It smelled rotten, wet, like a slimy gutter.

“Meshvilla?”

She wanted to run, to scream. Panic welled in her lungs. She couldn't tell if the gray thing's voice was threatening or wheedling, but it was without doubt a dark voice, a quiet, windy voice that prickled up her arms.

“No,” she squeaked, because back in Bath that had always been the right answer for changelings like her. “No, go away.”

The creature pushed closer, eyeing her. Then its horrid hands were feeling over her cheeks, running through the branches that grew from her head. Bone-cold fingers came to rest on her eyes.

Hettie screamed. She screamed louder than she had ever screamed in her life, but in that vast black forest it was just a little baby's wail. It was enough to wake the faery butler, though. He sat up with a start, green clockwork eye clicking to life. It swiveled once, focused on the gray-faced faery.

The faery butler jerked himself to his feet.
“Valentu! Ismeltik relisanyel?”

The gray face turned, its teeth bared. Hettie heard it hiss.
“Misalka,”
it said.
“
Englisher. Leave her. Leave her to me.”

Hettie began to shake. The long, cold fingers were pressing down. An ache sprang up behind her eyes. She knew she should fight, lash out with all her might, but she could not make herself move.

The faery butler had no such troubles. A knife dropped from inside his sleeve and he swung it in a brilliant arc toward the other faery, who let out a grunt of surprise. It was all Hettie needed. She threw herself to the ground and began to crawl desperately around the base of the tree. Once on the other side, she wrapped her arms around the trunk and peered in terror at the battling faeries.

They moved back and forth across the snow, swift and silent. The faery butler was fast. Faster than rain. She had seen him fight back in London, seen him use that cruel knife on Bartholomew, but right now she was glad for his skill. He moved his long limbs with grace, whirling and slashing, liquid in the moonlight. The blade spun, streaking down over and over again toward the other faery, who barely managed to get out of its path.

“No!” it screamed, in English. “You fool and traitor, what are you—?”

The knife grazed it. Bits of gray skin flew away on the wind. Hettie saw that underneath there was only black, like new coal.

She turned her face into the tree, squeezing her eyes shut. She heard a shriek, a dull thud. Then a whispering sound and a long, long breath fading away. After that, there was nothing.

 

It was a long time before Hettie dared peek around the trunk. She listened to the faery butler, pacing in the snow and panting. She wondered if she should say something to him, but she didn't dare do that either. He seemed suddenly frightening and dangerous. After a while she heard him lean against the tree, and after another while, his slow, whistling breaths. Only then did she inch from her hiding place.

The faery butler was still again, his green eye dark. The snow between the roots was trampled. At the faery's feet lay what looked like a heap of ashes and old clothes. Already they sparkled with frost.

She edged over to the heap. It didn't look like a faery anymore. It didn't look like anything, really. Nothing to be afraid of. She nudged the pile with her toe. It rustled and gave way, the jerkin and boots collapsing over a delicate shell of cinders.

She wondered what sort of creature it had been. She didn't know if it had been a woman-faery or a man-faery. She had never seen a faery like it in Bath, falling to ashes.

The moon was out like every night, and it shone through the branches, glinting on something in the clothes. Hettie knelt and shuffled about in the pile. Her fingers touched warmth. She jerked back, wiping her hand violently on her sleeve.
Blood? Was it blood?
But it couldn't be. If there was frost, the blood would have gone cold by now. She leaned in again, brushing away the rest of the ashes with the hem of her nightgown. Her hand closed around the warmth. She brought it up to her eye, examining it . . . and found herself looking into another eye—a wet, brown eye with a black pupil.

Hettie let out a muffled shriek. She almost dropped it. But it was only a necklace. The eye was some sort of stone, set into a pendant, a pockmarked disk on a frail chain. The pendant lay heavily in her palm, the warmth seeping into her fingers.

She stared at it. She hadn't felt anything warm in so long. She ran her thumb over the stone. It looked precisely like a human eye. There was even a spark in it, a knowing little light like the sort in a real person's eye. She couldn't tell what its expression was, because there were no eyebrows or face to go with it, but she thought it looked sad somehow. Lonely.

She peered even closer.

Behind her the faery butler shifted, white hands scraping over the snow. Somewhere in the woods, branches skittered.

Hettie tucked the pendant into the neck of her dress and darted back around the tree. She went to sleep then, and the eye kept her warm the whole night long.

 

The next morning, when she woke, the forest seemed to have lightened several shades, fading, like the pictures on coffee tins when they were left too long in the sun. The clouds no longer hung so low in the sky. The trees didn't look so close together. The cottage was still a hundred strides away, but when Hettie and the faery butler took their first step toward it, it was quite distinctly only ninety-nine. A short while later they were halfway there.