Fever Crumb (11 page)

Ahead, the hill was silent. The ruins blanched and faded as the mist blew past them. It was hard to imagine that there was anyone there, let alone Kit Solent and his tame Scriven, or whatever she was. Charley wondered what would happen if they found nothing. He didn't know if he'd be disappointed or relieved.

***

And she knew the code. She stood there frozen, her fingers raised in front of the lock's keys, and just as surely as she knew that she was Fever Crumb, she knew that if she pressed the numbers 2519364085 in sequence, the door would slide up into the roof, and the door behind it would slide to the right, and the door behind that would slide to the left. The counterweights that moved the heavy doors would rattle, and the gears would make a noise like big dogs growling.

"Go on," said Kit, softly and kindly, but with something steely *hard beneath the kindness, an eagerness she had not heard before. "You know it, Fever, don't you? Open the door!"

Outlandish visions burst in Fever's brain. Battles and balls and ships at sea and Dr. Crumb kneeling before her on a tiled floor and a woman she knew but didn't know laughing in sunlight and the pools and lanterns and -- "Open it!" shouted Kit Solent.

Fever fled. She stumbled sideways, kicking the lantern over so that it went out, but she found her way easily through the darkness and her hand closed on the familiar ivory handle of the door that led outside.
Outside,
she thought. Fresh
air.
She could hear Kit behind her, calling out "Fever!" Up the stairs she went, and out through the door in the hillside, into mist.

"Fever!" Kit Solent was calling, down inside the hollow hill. "Fever, come back! It's all right! I didn't mean to shout!"

Fever still felt groggy, but she forced herself to move away from the door and climb the hill, going up from terrace to terrace the way she had the day before. She wanted to find somewhere where she could sit quietly alone for a while and think. What was happening to her? Was she ill? Was she going mad?

On the top of the hill the mist moved among old, burned timbers, between the fallen walls. Something splashed in the marshes -- a bird, Fever guessed. She walked through the roofless, ruined rooms and found she knew them. This one had been carpeted; this one had been tiled. In this corner had stood a fine teak bookcase, glass-fronted, whose silver handles she uncovered with a bit of scrabbling, little dirty blobs of pooled metal buried in grass and clinker underfoot.

I must have
been here before,
she reasoned.
I must
have
been here
when
I
was a tiny child.
But she knew that she could not have been more than a few months old when Nonesuch House burned. Surely a child that tiny would not know what a bookcase was, let alone remember it?

Along the hall she walked, through the arch where the grand front door had been, out onto the gravel drive, gone all to moss and nettles now, where the guests used to leave their sedan chairs. She hummed a dance tune from twenty years before, and it stirred up fresh memories. The ghosts of Scriven dancers moved around her, shadowy, the great dresses of the women rustling and sighing. But they were not real. They were in her head.
It's not the house that's
haunted,
she thought.
It's me
....

There, across the lawn, was the dear old summer house, its roof fallen in now, its walls thick-grown with ivy.... She walked toward it, and remembered walking toward it one warm evening, with music spilling from the house behind her and ahead of her in the night, a soft laugh, a sigh...

She stopped short, clutching her head, wincing at the pain that hammered there. When she opened her eyes again a boat had drawn up at the foot of the hill, and a man and a boy were climbing the overgrown lawns. For a moment, confused, Fever thought they were guests arriving late for the party. She started downhill to greet them, then realized her mistake. She would never have invited such a shabby pair to one of
her
parties....

It was the old man from Summertown and his ragged boy.

"Master Creech!" the boy shouted, looking up and seeing her standing there.

The old man came straight for her, and his pale eyes were shining, fixed upon her face. He stopped ten feet from her, facing her across one of the ponds. "What
are
you?" he asked again, in a hoarse voice. "
Who
are you?"

"I'm not sure," said Fever.

The boy came panting up the hill behind him, and stopped, and they stood side by side, staring at Fever.

"Lily Dismas was right," said the old man, more to himself than the boy. "Whatever she is, she ain't proper human."

Something hot touched Fever's lips. She tasted redness, put up a hand to her mouth, and took it away smeared with blood. Her nose was bleeding again. "Sorry," she mumbled, reaching for her handkerchief. When she looked at the old man again he had taken out a spindly gun and he was pointing it at her.

"This ain't personal," he said. "It's my reckoning that you must be some kind of Scriven half-breed, so I'm doing what's needful for the good of London and the human race...."

But the cough which had been building up inside Bagman Creech's chest while he was speaking burst out of him as he pulled the spring gun's trigger. He doubled over, blue-faced, hacking. The bolt whirred past Fever's cheek like a May bug and the sound seemed to jar something loose in her. She turned and started running.

***

Master Creech!" shouted Charley, as the girl spun about and set off into the mist. The old man was folded over, choking. He held one hand out, waggling the gun at Charley. "Get her, lad!" he managed to gasp, before another fit of coughing started.

Charley snatched the gun and hared after the girl. She was a white blob in the mist, turning a corner of the ruined house. He ran after her, and saw her bounding away from him down the steep terraces of the hillside, her arms outstretched for balance. As he started down his feet went from under him on the wet grass and he fell and slid, but he kept hold of Bagman's gun.

***

Halfway down the hill Fever stopped, lost, looking for the door. Mist hung in the bushes. The door was nowhere. Maybe she had come down the wrong side of the hill. "Help!" she shouted. But she doubted Kit could hear her. The boy was already scrambling down behind her, crashing through wet branches.

She ran on, plunging into the thick growth of scrub and alders that broke along the hill's foot like green surf.

***

And Charley followed her. He was Bagman's boy, and he wasn't going to lose sight of her. In among those trees the mist was thick and the light was dim, but the girl's white coat still showed, bobbing ahead of him. He was faster than her. He got closer, and saw that she was crossing a patch of green moss beyond some tall reeds up ahead. She glanced back at him, and she looked young and pretty and human. He wasn't sure he had it in him to shoot her with the spring gun, even if she was what Bagman had said she was. But he couldn't let the old man down.

He looked behind him, but there was no sign of the Skinner. He plunged through the reeds. The girl was on the far side of the moss, where birches in their ragged silver wrappers stood in the mist like wands. Following her, he slithered down a short, steep stair of tree roots and plunged into cold mud. That was why the girl had taken her time crossing; she had picked her way along the top of an old drowned wall that Charley in his hurry hadn't even seen. The moss he had stepped out onto was just a green rug laid over a pit brimful of watery stuff like cold, black soup.

It didn't suck him down like quicksand in a story; he simply sank, his mouth and nostrils filling with mud as he went under.

His hands alone stayed above the surface, clutching the precious gun. He thought of Bagman, nose-deep in the lagoons, hiding under his hat.

And Fever, on the far bank, unsnagging her coat skirts from the brambles there and readying herself to run, stopped short, startled by his choked-off scream. Crossing the moss she had fully hoped that the boy would miss his footing and plunge in. It had been a stratagem, and she'd been proud of it: He had a gun, but she had reason. Now, as she listened to him blurt and founder, she could think only of the chill black water forcing its way into his lungs.

She turned. A hand rose from the water, holding aloft the dripping gun, which glimmered green and silver in the light that came through the leaves above. Somehow the boy got his head above the surface. She thought for a moment that he was going to point the gun at her, but he was sinking again, and he turned and threw the weapon onto the bank behind him as he went down. "Help!" he gasped.

What harm could he do her, unarmed and half drowned? He was a pasty little thing, younger even than her. She grabbed up a fallen branch and held it out toward him.

"Take this!" she shouted.

Charley went under again, drinking more mud. When he came up the girl was still holding the branch out.

He grabbed it like she'd told him. He clung to it, and scrabbled along it, gasping and choking and whimpering. Struggling toward the girl, he met her eyes. They were odd colors, which scared him, but the thought of drowning scared him more. Was her helping him just a trick? Was she going to let him get almost to dry land and then let him sink while she looked on, giggling? He felt a hot, furious anger at her for playing with him. Like a cat with a mouse!

But all the time he went on scrabbling his way toward her, and she didn't let go, and when he was close enough she reached out and her hot hands caught hold of his and dragged him to firmer ground. He lay there gasping.

Fever backed away from him, but she didn't think he would still want to hurt her, not now that she had helped him. She said, "Why are you doing this? Why did you chase me?"

Charley's ears were still clogged with moss and mud. He looked up at the girl and he saw her mouth was moving, but all he could hear was his own heart pounding and whooshing. He thought how like a normal girl she was. Then she looked past him, scared, and he sat up so quick his ears popped and he could hear Bagman's voice shouting out his name.

Fever had forgotten the other man, the old one. She'd thought him too ill to follow her down the hill. But here he was, coming quick through the trees on the far side of the mud pool, long and black like an idea for a new punctuation mark. She started to move, and the brambles between the birch boles snagged her coat again.

And Bagman Creech was stooping to pick up the gun, then striding on across the moss like he was walking on water, his feet finding the hidden footholds under the surface without his even needing to look for them. His face was white and his pale eyes were the color of sunlight through fog. It was as if the sight of Fever had stripped twenty years off him and made him young and fit again. As he reached Charley's side of the moss he lifted the spring gun.

Fever saw it, and struggled harder, but it was rooty and brambly the way she was going, and she moved with nightmare slowness, her white coat catching on thorns and low branches.

Bagman grinned. He pushed his jaw forward, and the set of his long yellow teeth gave him the look of one of those dogs that, once it bites you, can't let go. He strode past Charley, and the skirts of his coat brushed Charley's face. The girl was trapped in the trees, struggling. She let out a moaning noise, and Charley wanted to shout out and tell Master Creech how she'd saved him from the mire, but he knew that wouldn't make any difference, 'cos she was still Scriven. She was looking at him with a white, woeful face as the Skinner moved sideways along the moss edge, seeking for a clean shot between the trees. And now something else was moving, away to the left, behind the mist.

Charley thought for a moment he must be wrong. It was just an old tree, surely, an old willow that had grown
twisted,
and the mist drifting past it made it look like it had moved. But then it stepped out of the mist, and it was a man, and he was holding a pocket pistol, aimed at Bagman Creech.

"Stop!" shouted Kit Solent.

Creech hesitated. In the silence, Kit made his way through the foliage until he was between Fever and the Skinner.

Bagman's long face twitched angrily. "Don't you go protecting her!" he warned. "Them as protects Scriven is worse than the Scriven themselves...."

"You don't understand a thing, old man," said Kit, his voice trembling slightly. "You don't know what she is. Put down your gun."

Creech scowled, ignoring him, and Fever saw his fingers whiten as he started to squeeze the trigger of his strange old weapon. "No!" shouted Kit again, warningly, and then, in a sort of angry grief, "No!"

There was a single sharp, high-pitched clap. Kit's pistol spewed sparks and smoke. Bagman Creech seemed to jump at the sound, and for a moment there was a look of absolute amazement on his face. His gun went off, punching its dart into the undergrowth ten feet away. He coughed quietly and fell over backward. The air was filled with tiny flakes of goose-down lining blasted out of his quilted coat. It looked like snow.

"Oh, Poskitt," Kit kept saying. "I didn't mean to -- I was aiming at his
arm....
" He had lowered his pistol. His face was nearly as white as the old man's.

Charley scrambled across the mud, shouting, "Master Creech!"

Bagman's white face flopped toward him. There was pink froth in the old man's mouth and it spilled out down his chin when he spoke. "Go! You are the last of us! Save yourself, so you can finish this!"

His head dropped back. Charley hesitated only a moment. Just long enough to snatch Bagman's hat out of the mire where it had fallen. Then he was off, finding his way along the wall-top easy this time and running away between the trees.

***