CHAPTER 25
MORE ADVENTURES,
FOR WHICH PHILO WAS WHOLLY UNPREPARED
‘Ah,’ said Mr Paxton. He was standing where Philo had left him, at the base of the midden heap, with his sword in one hand and his fire iron in the other. ‘You have a comrade, I see.’
‘This is Kit, your honour. Christopher Maltman.’ Looking around, Philo noticed that the tiny child was gone. ‘What became o’ the kid, sir? Did you scare her away?’
‘I sent her off with Simon’s neckerchief wrapped around her. I shall give him another, of course.’ Handing over the fire iron, Mr Paxton attached his scabbard to the strap at his waist and remarked, ‘A shawl would have answered better, but I had none. What is that noise, Master Grey?’
Philo turned his head. Sure enough, he could hear the muffled sound of raised voices coming from Dyott Street. ‘That’s our mob, your honour.’
‘The deuce! Already? Then we’d best show a leg.’
Philo nodded. ‘If you was to go in first, sir, there’s not a soul would challenge you, looking the way you do,’ he said. ‘Then you could give us the all clear, providing no one’s about.’
‘With pleasure,’ said Mr Paxton. A glance at the midden heap made him add with a crooked smile, ‘Nay – not with pleasure. But with enthusiasm, certainly. May I trouble you for a helping hand?’
Philo sprang forward to steady the surgeon, who found it hard to keep his balance as he scrambled up the midden heap. Rubble and manure kept sliding out from beneath Mr Paxton; Philo had to dodge several pieces of smashed crockery. But at last Mr Paxton reached the top, and hoisted himself from there onto the roof of the shed.
‘Take care, sir,’ Philo warned. ‘Test the joists before you put your full weight on ’em.’ He himself mounted the pile of rubbish without difficulty, and was soon perched behind Mr Paxton, staring at a window with no glass in it. Everything had gone except for the wooden frame, beyond which lay only blackness.
Mr Paxton started crawling towards it as Kit joined Philo.
‘Sir!’ Philo whispered. When the surgeon glanced back at him, Philo proffered the fire iron.
But Mr Paxton shook his head and pressed on, inching forward on his hands and knees until he reached the windowsill. Then he craned his neck to peer inside. Philo held his breath, braced for the sound of startled yell, or a pistol-shot – and was relieved when he heard neither.
Mr Paxton then rose to his feet and climbed into Rat’s Castle.
‘Come,’ Philo whispered to Kit. They both wriggled after the surgeon, keeping low as they tried to avoid loose slates and gaping holes. On arriving at the window, Philo lifted his head to look through it.
He saw a dimly lit room containing a bed, a pot, a candle and Simon Edy’s dog. Achilles was sitting on the bed, chewing his Turkish slipper. Mr Paxton stood on the other side of the room, cautiously pulling open a badly warped door.
After a moment, he beckoned to Philo.
Every creak of the floorboards made Philo wince as he and Kit crept over them. The room smelled bad. Its door opened into a long, dark passage, with a glimpse of stair-bannisters at one end, and a closed door – scarred with hatchet-wounds – at the other.
‘Follow me,’ Mr Paxton hissed, making for the stairs. He had to pass a lot of doors on the way, and every time he reached one he would stop and peer through it, his unsheathed sword at the ready. But the upstairs rooms were all deserted. What’s more, their occupants had left in a panic, to judge from the general disorder; Philo saw a puddle of sheets, a smashed plate, an overturned stool, a discarded stocking. He also saw holes punched in walls, suspicious red stains, crude charcoal sketches and scorch-marks on plaster. It was a battered, disturbing place, like a sacked fortress.
‘If there’s a well, it must be downstairs,’ he said under his breath.
Mr Paxton nodded. When he emerged from the passageway into the stairwell, he whipped his blade back and forth, as if to clear a path through dozens of converging enemies. But there were no enemies. There was no one at all. Illumined by a generous bank of leadlight windows (with many missing panes), the stairwell contained only a heavy oak staircase, which was richly carved and badly worm-eaten. Some of the stairs were missing their treads, and those that remained creaked and groaned beneath the slightest pressure.
Luckily, the noise of Philo’s descent was masked by the commotion outside. He could hear a man with an Irish accent haranguing the crowd, which was growing steadily more boisterous. Inside the house, silence reigned – and it was a silence that made Philo’s skin crawl. There was something about Rat’s Castle that chilled him. Perhaps it was the stale stench of tobacco and vomit. Or perhaps it was the knowledge that a dark spirit might be lurking nearby, not far from Susannah.
The staircase stopped at ground level, where the front entrance opened into a great hall with a coffered ceiling. At least a dozen oak panels had been torn off the walls. Cobwebs hung in fluttering curtains. The fireplace smelled like a privy.
‘Scamper Knaggs! Gugg Worris! Come out here or we’ll be coming in!’ Niall Donohoe bellowed from the other side of the front door. When he started to hammer on it, his blows shook the foundations.
‘This way,’ Philo hissed, heading for the back of the hall. He wanted to get out before someone else came in. There were three entrances (not counting the staircase), but only one stood open – for the simple reason that the door had been wrenched off its hinges. Philo doubted that Scamper’s crew would be skulking in a room without a door. And when he checked, he saw that he was right. The room behind the hall was empty.
It was a small room, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves and cupboards. A hatch in the floor told Philo that it had probably been built as a pantry or buttery, with a set of stairs down to the beer cellar. On seeing this hatch, Mr Paxton grunted.
‘The well . . .’ he breathed into Philo’s ear.
Philo gave a nod. If there was a well, it had to be in the cellar, since there was no trace of such a thing in the rear yard. He wished that he had his torch with him. The ground floor of Rat’s Castle was dingy enough on such a dull day, with its shuttered windows and black wood and mouldy plaster. But the hole in the floor looked as dark as a crypt – and he didn’t like the idea of blundering around down there without a light.
‘What’s that?’ Kit suddenly whispered. ‘Listen . . .’
Philo listened. At first he could hear nothing but the distant crowd. By concentrating hard, however, he finally caught the faint, muffled sound of somebody moaning – and his heart seemed to turn over in his chest.
‘Susannah?’ he hissed.
‘Shh!’ Mr Paxton flapped his hand, straining to make out where the noise was coming from. Philo realised that it wasn’t floating out of the hatchway. It was seeping from behind the door of a nearby cupboard.
‘Blood an’ ’ounds . . .’ he whimpered, horrified.
Kit threw himself at the doorhandle, which turned on a pivot. But no matter how furiously he tugged and twisted, the cupboard door wouldn’t open.
It had been locked.
Mr Paxton tapped on it. ‘Susannah?’ he said quietly. ‘Is that you?’
Though the muttered reply was impossible to understand, Philo heard enough to realise that he wasn’t listening to Susannah’s voice.
‘Who is that?’ Mr Paxton pressed his ear against the wood, keeping his own voice as low as possible. Philo, meanwhile, was gazing at Kit, his face twisted into a pleading expression. He knew that Kit had a passing acquaintance with the art of lock-picking – ‘dubbing’, as he called it. But Kit shook his head. With a couple of quick hand signals, he reminded Philo that he had no tools: no skeleton key, no centre-bit, no crowbar . . .
‘’Tis Jemmy Jukes!’ Mr Paxton suddenly spluttered. He turned to Philo, pale and wide-eyed. ‘In there, by damn! What’s to be done?’
Philo thought for a moment. He wasn’t about to delay his search for Susannah just because a ruffian like Jemmy Jukes needed help.
So he thrust the fire iron at Kit. ‘See what you can do with this,’ he ordered.
‘Philo—’
‘We’ll return directly.’ If Jemmy Jukes had been locked in a cupboard, there was no telling what might have been done to Susannah. Philo’s concern for her completely swamped his fear of the spriggan. He had to search the cellar. He had to find out what was going on.
But as he moved towards the hole in the floor, Mr Paxton caught his arm. ‘Wait,’ said the surgeon. He stepped in front of Philo, his sword-blade flashing. Then he began to descend the short, rickety staircase that hung from the lip of the hatchway, every muscle as taut as a bowstring.
Philo followed him. By this time Kit was already using the fire iron as a lever to open the cupboard door – and the noise made Philo sweat. He was convinced that someone in the cellar would hear, and would ambush Mr Paxton when he reached the bottom of the staircase. But Philo was wrong. There was no one at the bottom of the staircase. And the crack of splintered wood was nothing compared to the clinking and clanking that filled the cellar.
It wasn’t as dark down there as Philo had expected. Though the room in which he found himself was as murky as the Woodyard tunnels, he could see a much brighter room beyond it, through an open doorway in the distance. What’s more, the clatter of metal on metal was coming from this well-lit room. Philo quickly realised that someone was in there, with a lamp or a candle, and that he (or she) was too busy shifting objects around to notice the shuffle of approaching footsteps.
Mr Paxton gave Philo a nudge, then began to advance very slowly. Philo did the same, though his heart was pounding with such force that it made his whole body tremble. He was worried about the well. They were padding across a stone floor, which might easily have a well sunk into it. So he kept scanning the ground while Mr Paxton watched the doorway.
But they didn’t fall down any holes. All they encountered on their trip across the room was a series of stone pillars, which were holding up the low, vaulted ceiling. Mr Paxton used these pillars to shield himself, scampering from one to the other with his sword raised. Together he and Philo drew closer and closer to the light – until at last they both had a good view of what lay beyond the threshold ahead of them. A lantern was sitting on the floor, shedding a golden glow over a small, hexagonal room with a pillar in each corner. There was another door opposite, opening onto darkness. There was also a flintlock pistol lying on top of a sea-chest. And in the middle of the room, gleaming and glittering, there was a heap of gold and silver: silver plate, gold snuffboxes, jewelled swords, silver shoe-buckles, gold watches, candlesticks, saltcellars, gilded frames – every imaginable luxury. For a moment Philo was dazzled. He caught his breath in amazement.
But the treasure didn’t hold his attention for long. Because crouched over it, shovelling handfuls of plate into a jute sack, was a huge creature with a fur pelt, yellow fangs and a black, shiny, twisted face . . .
Philo clapped his hands over his mouth to stifle the scream that had bubbled up. He jerked back instinctively. Then, from the top of the stairs, came an urgent cry.
‘Hurry, damn you! They’ll be in here, directly!’
The voice didn’t belong to Kit Maltman. And the reply wasn’t an unearthly howl. Though thick and slurred, it was a perfectly comprehensible response – a tetchy man’s voice emerging from a monster. ‘I’ve two hands, not six,’ the spriggan growled. ‘Lend me one o’ yourn, if you’re so cursed anxious.’
At that instant, several thoughts flashed across Philo’s brain. He realised that the spriggan in the next room must be human, despite its terrifying appearance. He also realised that someone was coming down the stairs at a run, so it wouldn’t be long before he and Mr Paxton were spotted. And that raised the question: what had happened to Kit? The new arrival must have passed Kit on his way downstairs, yet Philo hadn’t heard a single cry or thump.
‘For the love o’ Christ, Davy, will you hark to that racket?’ the newcomer continued. ‘They’re like to flay us all!’ Then he froze on the bottom step, sensing, perhaps, that something was wrong. Philo recognised him instantly. Even in the dim light, that wall-eye was unmistakable.
It seemed that Cockeye McAuliffe was the man behind the spriggan ploy.
‘Haagh!’ Mr Paxton suddenly charged towards the staircase with a wild yell. Philo didn’t know what to do. Seeing Cockeye yank something from his waistband, Philo was about to rush after the surgeon when a shout from the next room stopped him. Whirling around, he spied the spriggan – Davy – lumbering through the doorway, a flintlock pistol in one hand. Davy was wearing what appeared to be a bearskin. His entire head was smeared with a black substance that made his pale eyes look like patches of clear sky in a thundercloud. He had no hair, no ears, no nose, and not much of a top lip. His teeth seemed permanently bared, long and yellow and sharpened to fearsome points.
He glared across the room at Mr Paxton, unaware that Philo was skulking in the shadows nearby.
Philo had to move fast. He pulled out his tinderbox and threw it as hard as he could. Though small, it had a sharp metal edge that cut Davy’s cheek. Davy roared and pivoted, waving his pistol. But Philo was already ducking past him, heading for the treasure in the next room.
Bang! Davy fired his pistol wildly into the darkness, missing Philo by a couple of feet. By the time the smoke cleared, Philo was already squatting near the lantern, extracting a gilded sword from the treasure-heap.
He was on his feet again, sword in hand, when Davy lunged at him with a furious bellow.
CHAPTER 26
WHAT PASSED
BETWEEN PHILO AND THE DEMON THIEF
Firing the flintlock again would have meant priming and reloading it, so Davy didn’t bother. He just hurled it at Philo’s head.
Philo ducked and darted away. Speed was his only advantage. Davy had a longer reach and a stronger arm, but Philo was quicker. He skipped backwards as Davy plucked a cutlass from the treasure-heap. Philo dodged the first slash of Davy’s blade, then the next, then the next – because Davy was heavy and slow, like a bullock. When he charged, his weight worked against him.
But Philo wasn’t a trained swordsman. He couldn’t lunge or parry, so he couldn’t risk being cornered. He had to keep moving. That was why he retreated towards the second door, even though a nasty smell was hanging over it. Mr Paxton wasn’t able to help; he was still busy with Cockeye McAuliffe. Philo could hear them shouting on the stairs.
Ping! Davy’s blade bounced off the wall next to Philo’s right ear. Then, as Philo dashed into the adjoining room, Davy paused to pick up his lantern. This gave Philo a three-second lead. He used it to cast around for another exit, squinting through the shadows in search of a door or window or staircase or ladder – anything that might help him escape. At first there wasn’t enough light to see by. But Davy’s approach brought the lantern closer, illuminating a double row of rotting wooden partitions that divided the room into stalls. Philo couldn’t tell what these stalls were for. Casks? Servants? Animals? Whatever their original purpose, they had become a place to dump rubbish. As he ran past stall after stall, Philo glimpsed piles of rags, a frayed basket, dirty straw, food scraps, an old shoe, a brazier, a tankard . . .
The smell grew worse and worse. It was the smell of smoke and brimstone. When Philo reached the end of the stalls, he could hardly breathe. But that wasn’t why he stopped. He stopped because there was nowhere else to go; in front of him was a blank stone wall, and behind him was Davy, who put down his lantern as Philo swung around to face him.
That was when Philo noticed the strange claw attached to the tip of Davy’s left forefinger. It was very long, with a point as sharp as a needle. The moment he laid eyes on it, Philo knew what it was.
He threw himself into the nearest stall, gasping with fear.
Davy’s blade clanged against the patch of floor where Philo had just been standing. Inside his stall, backed up against a partition, Philo looked around frantically for a hiding place – an escape
route – a shield. But he saw only a scattering of straw and a bellarmine jug. Even in the bad light Philo recognised this jug, though he didn’t have time to wonder why. He picked it up and hurled it at Davy.
The jug bounced off Davy’s skull, smashing against a wall.
‘The mob!’ Philo shrieked. ‘They’ll kill you if you kill me!’
Davy grinned. A few trickles of blood were carrying away some of the greasy, soot-black substance that was smeared across his skull. He had two dark holes where his nose should have been, and his eyes were lost in shadow. Looming over Philo, with his huge, furry shoulders and gleaming teeth, he looked so much like a monster that Philo’s strength almost failed him. There was only one way out, and that was between Davy’s legs. But Philo’s own legs had turned to water.
He slashed at Davy’s left hand – and missed. Twice. Then his sword clashed against Davy’s blade, and was flicked out of his grasp.
Philo screamed. He ducked and rolled. At the same instant, Davy dropped like a stone, clutching his right knee and howling in anguish.
‘Aaaargh!’
Davy fell on his side, his head thumping against a partition. Philo peered past his writhing, roaring shape and saw Mr Paxton behind it, sword in hand.
‘That was your medial collateral ligament,’ the surgeon croaked. Though he had discarded all of Simon’s hats and canisters, his clothes were so ragged and his hair so wild that he still looked more like a beggar than a surgeon. ‘’Tis not a fatal wound,’ he went on breathlessly, ‘but I’ll cut your throat if you move again.’
‘’Ware the claw!’ Philo yelped. ‘On his finger!’
‘I see it.’ Mr Paxton laid the edge of his blade against Davy’s wrist. ‘Take it off or I’ll slice it off.’
Though Davy had one hand clamped to his wound, he somehow managed to flick the curious attachment from his other hand. The sound it made when it hit the flagstones told Philo that it was a metal tube, hollow from base to tip.