The Book of Dead Days (8 page)

“I don’t know. He’s just got a habit of finding unpleasant places to be.”

“Boy,” said Willow, “if you don’t ask him, I will.”

Boy looked at her, wondering if she’d learnt nothing from her recent experience of Valerian’s moods.

Valerian stood a few paces away, trying to get his bearings in the endless death-field.

“I mean it,” Willow said.

“All right!” he said. “All right.”

Boy approached slowly. Gingerly he tugged at the tall man’s sleeve.

“Valerian,” he said.

“Ah! Boy!” Valerian said. “Good. Now, take these.”

He pulled two candles from his pocket and couple of large matches.

“There’s not too much wind-we won’t need lamps. I can almost smell it now! This
must
be the one.”

“Valerian.” Boy was firmer this time.

Valerian looked down at him distractedly.

“Yes, Boy, what is it?”

“What are we doing here?”

A shadow swept across Valerian’s face, a flicker of rage.

“I don’t have time to debate it, Boy! Don’t you understand? Time is running out. Today is the twenty-eighth. Don’t you understand?”

“No, I don’t understand,” shouted Boy, “because you never tell me anything!”

Valerian clapped his hand across Boy’s mouth and held it there.

Willow ran over, then stopped, seeing that Boy was not actually being harmed.

“How many times do I-” Valerian hissed. Willow stared at him. She saw the anger slip from his face.

“No,” he said quietly, and took his hand from Boy’s mouth. Willow stepped to Boy’s side and held his arm.

“No,” said Valerian again. “You are right, Boy. I should tell you.”

Boy looked at him intently, waiting.

“I will tell you, but not now. No time now. First we must find it.”

“But what?” asked Boy.

“The grave. The grave of Gad Beebe. Isn’t that obvious?”

No, it isn’t,
Boy thought, but he nodded. He smiled.

“That was what the music box told us?” asked Willow. “To come here?”

“Yes,” said Valerian. “Well, no, not exactly. I was looking for a grave, and now I have a name. We are looking for the grave of Gad Beebe, and this is the biggest cemetery in the City. We have to start somewhere!”

“And what then? When we find it? Why is it so important?”

“Later. We’re running out of time. We’ll find the grave first and then-Damn!”

“What?” asked Boy.

“A spade. I forgot to bring a spade.”

Valerian stamped his foot and swore at the sky.

“Why do we need a spade?” asked Willow, but she and Boy had a terrible feeling they knew why.

“To dig up his grave, of course. Never mind, there must be a sexton’s hut here somewhere. The first thing is to find it. Now, let’s get these candles alight…”

A succession of thoughts swept through Boy’s mind, all of them ghastly. The news that was rife in the City about the Phantom and grave-robbers sprang to his mind. He looked at Valerian. Was it possible that he was the one who had been breaking into people’s graves? Could Valerian be capable of such a thing?

Of course he could.

“No,” Boy said, “I won’t do it!”

Willow looked at Boy, surprised. Valerian too.

“What now?” he asked. “Can’t you see we must get on?”

“You can get on without me,” said Boy. “I won’t do it. I’ve done a lot of terrible things for you, but I won’t do this.”

“Do what?” asked Valerian, the beginnings of a smile on his face.

“I won’t steal people’s bodies. People’s… dead bodies.”

Valerian gave a short bark of a laugh. Then he shot a glance around him, and was silent.

“But, Boy”-he smiled-“we’re not looking for a body! We’re looking for a book.”

“Right. To save time, we’ll split up. Here, take a candle, each of you. Now, Boy, you go along this wall and work inward, row by row. Work systematically and do not miss one out. Not one. You, Girl-”

“My name’s Willow,” she said, then remembered that terrible look he had given her, “sir.”

But Valerian was too busy thinking to care.

“Willow, go along the other wall. Do the same as Boy. Do not miss one out. I will go up this central avenue and work outward. It’s nearly the third hour after midnight. Meet back here in an hour. And remember-Gad Beebe. Inside his grave we will find the book, and then…”

His voice tailed off. He pulled a third candle from his pocket, and as much to amuse himself as to impress Boy and Willow, he pulled it out already alight.

“Can you teach me to do that?” asked Willow, but Valerian did not bother to reply.

Valerian went up the stony path that led into the dark heart of the cemetery, his small candle flickering in his hand, casting weak but unnerving shadows on the stones around him.

Boy and Willow looked at each other, then looked down the separate routes they were supposed to take, leading off into the pitch-black night.

“Book?” asked Willow. “What’s so important about a book?”

Boy shrugged. “He’s always going on about books, how important they are and why I have to learn to read better.”

“Maybe, but that’s not enough of a reason to dig them up from graves, is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but then I never do. I just do what Valerian tells me. Life’s easier that way.”

Willow looked at him sadly; then she glanced down the rows of elaborate, ornamented graves, and shivered.

“Supposing,” said Boy, “we do half an hour my way and then half an hour your way? That would be about the same thing, wouldn’t it?”

No,
thought Willow,
it wouldn’t.

“Near enough,” she said, trying to sound bright. “Anyway, if one of us holds the candles and the other does the reading, we’ll be faster.”

“Yes,” said Boy. “Especially if you do the reading,” he added, shuffling slightly where he stood.

Willow smiled.

“Which way first?” she said.

Boy looked at the options.

“This way,” he said.

“Why?”

“No idea. Willow?”

“What?”

“How will we know when an hour has passed?”

“It’s about as long as one of Madame’s performances and one of Valerian’s put together, but you know how time moves differently when you’re doing… difficult things.”

“Yes,” agreed Boy.

He had a feeling this was going to be a very long hour.

Elsewhere in the cemetery, Valerian was thinking about time too. In his eyes, time was speeding up, every day, every hour. It seemed to him that every second lasted half as long as the one before, as if time was accelerating toward the end of the year. The end of the year, and the end…

He pushed the thought from his mind as he bent down to peer at the seventy-third gravestone he had looked at.

Trying to stay calm, he noted the name. Gad Beebe? No.

Gad Beebe? What kind of name was that? An important one. For Valerian it was a very important one.

What was today?

The twenty-eighth. Just three days left after today. Three days to find an answer, and so much depended on Kepler. Once, many years ago, he had trusted him completely, but things had changed. But he had always respected his learning, and now-now he needed all the help he could get.

Seventy-fourth.
No.

Kepler. The camera obscura worked like a dream. It had cost everything Valerian had earnt from the theater for the last year, but it was worth it. Kepler had laughed at him when he’d first asked him to make it. “What is the use?” Kepler had scoffed. “It will be of no use to you, at the end. It will not save you to see Fate approaching!”

Seventy-fifth.
No.

But then, when Valerian had persisted, he had changed his mind. “Very well,” he had said. “Very well, I will waste your money. It will be expensive. I only make the best pieces of optical equipment.”

Seventy-sixth.
No.

And so they had agreed, and Valerian had slogged away at that stupid act for another year until the camera was built. Kepler had called him delusional. Delusional? He’d be delusional himself, thought Valerian, if
his
time was running out. If something was coming for
him
he’d damn well be delusional too!

Seventy-seventh
. No.

Valerian straightened and moved on to the next stone, beginning to doubt he was going about this the right way. He knew there had to be a better answer. But just as an idea came into his head, his attention was caught by something up ahead.

A light.

There was a weak light flickering in the darkness ahead of him.

“That boy can’t get anything right!” he cursed under his breath. “I told him to stick to the wall.”

Valerian plucked another candle from his pocket and lit it from the one he was holding. No tricks this time. Pushing the candle into the earth of number seventy-eight to mark his place, he strode off to see what his boy was up to.

As he approached the source of the light, his eyes widened with surprise.

“Well! Hello, Valerian,” said a high, cracked voice.

Valerian turned to run, but a blow to the back of his head had him out cold before he even hit the ground.

“What?” whispered Boy.

“What?” replied Willow.

“What did you say?” Boy asked.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said.

They were hunched over a grave. Yet another grave. They had been searching stone after stone, until the carved names had become a blur. Nowhere had there been a trace of anyone with a name even vaguely resembling that of Gad Beebe.

“What was that noise?”

“You’re imagining things,” said Willow, as much to convince herself as anything.

“Isn’t that an hour yet?” asked Boy.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it must be. Come on, let’s go back.”

“You are sure it’s an hour?” Boy asked. “I mean, we don’t want to-”

At that moment there was another noise, the click of metal on metal.

They froze.

“The candles!” Willow warned.

Boy blew the candles out. Utter blackness surrounded them. After a few moments they began to see a little as their eyes widened to catch as much light as possible. In the vague, gray shadow world, they suddenly both saw the same thing-a flicker of yellow light away to their left, in the heart of the cemetery.

“It must be Valerian,” said Willow.

“Why?”

“Well, who else would be out here?”

Boy didn’t want to even think about the answer to that question.

“Yes,” he said, “Come on. We may as well meet him there.”

They set off in the darkness and immediately Boy walked into a gravestone. The moonlight had vanished behind a bank of cloud, and with no light to guide them the gray stones were as good as invisible. He picked himself up, silently cursing Valerian.

“Boy!” whispered Willow. “Here’s the path. Come on. When you get your feet on it you can follow the stones.”

She was right. By the feel and the sound of the grit underfoot they made their way more quickly toward the light. Boy found that by looking straight ahead rather than at his feet, he could see the faint gray ghost of the path better.

As they got near, something started to worry Boy. “Willow?” he said quietly.

She ignored him.

“Willow?” He stopped in his tracks.

She turned.

“What is it now? I just want to go home.”

“I don’t think that’s Valerian.”

“Don’t be difficult,” she said. “Who else could it be?”

Her voice tailed off as she realized the implication of her words.

“And,” said Boy, “Valerian went that way.”

Willow couldn’t see the arm he waved in the darkness, but she understood.

For a long time they paused, uncertain what to do. The light was no more than a hundred feet away now and they could hear vague sounds coming to them across the stones.

“What if it
is
him?” Boy said.

“We’ll have to go and see,” Willow said.

Boy pulled a face in the darkness.

“All right,” he said, “but let’s be careful. Please.”

Getting down on their hands and knees, they crawled the rest of the way between them and the light, leaving the path and cutting across the rows.

Boy could feel the damp of the scraggy grass begin to soak through to his knees. His hands pushed into patches of mud, cold but not yet frozen, as it soon would be once the winter hardened.

After a few minutes he could no longer feel his fingers; a little further and his hands had gone numb.

Still they pressed on, and as they neared the light and sound they saw they were right to have been cautious. It was obvious even from a distance that they were not the only ones working in the cemetery that night.

They came to a large tomb, and decided to hide behind it. Peeping around the side of the grave, they had a clear view of an unholy scene.

Three men were hard at work in a grave. A small glass lantern propped against a gravestone illuminated the scene. The shadows it cast were long and grim. Around them lay various tools, and beside them a mound of earth spoil was piled onto a large sheet of canvas. There was a spare shovel and an iron bar with a hooked end. And there was a large canvas bag with a lump inside it-a large, disturbing lump.

“Grave-robbers!” whispered Willow in alarm.

Boy nodded.

There was no sign of Valerian.

“Come on,” said Boy.

Willow ignored him, trying to work out what was wrong with the scene.

The figures in front of them were shoveling earth back into the grave. It was obvious what was in the large sack next to them on the grass.

“Wait,” said Willow. “They’re going. Let’s wait.”