The Whatnot (19 page)

Pikey and Bartholomew scrambled over spikes and iron garters, swept along in the tide of faeries. They launched themselves off a beam, down onto mud and crushed grass. And then they were out from under the globe, climbing up out of some great ditch. When they got to the top, all they could do was stop and stare.

The Birmingham Faery Prison was stuck in a huge slash in the earth, a ditch forty feet deep and five hundred feet long. Great, steam-driven shovel machines stood at the ditch's edge, silent and deserted, their engines dashed to pieces. In the distance, London was a smudge against the snowy sky. Three other globes had fallen into the ditch as well, Pikey saw. Eight more caught in trenches farther back. Regiments of red-and-blue-coated troops dashed everywhere, shooting, fighting. Guns bombarded the globes, but they might as well have been firing flowers. The bullets pinged off the metal, harmless. Faeries poured out of the prisons. English soldiers walked among them, black-eyed, with leech-faeries clinging to their heads. They carried spades, plates, anything to dig with.

Pikey turned to Bartholomew, but neither of them said anything. The faeries were going to dig the prisons out. It would take days. The globes would have to ease up the slope of the ditch little by little. But eventually they would be free. And when they were, London was done for.

“Let's go!” Bartholomew shouted above the din, and they set off across the wintry fields, leaving twelve globes and one hundred thousand faeries clawing their way out of the mud behind them.

 

“Now, my little Whatnot,” the Sly King said, pulling Hettie into a doorway and up a winding stair. “Now we send you home.”

“You don't know where my home is,” Hettie said. “You don't know anything about me.”

“My dear, I know everything about you. Your home is England, Bath, Old Crow Alley, and there's a face in the front door, and a round window in the roof, and your mother gathers washing in a green-painted wheelbarrow. You have a checkered handkerchief that you carry around with you, and you speak to it as if it can hear you.”

Up, up they went, the spiral so tight it made Hettie dizzy. Before they had begun the climb, the Sly King had snapped his fingers and her eyelids had fallen shut, as if there were lead weights hanging from them. She still couldn't open them. She couldn't see where she was, or where she was being dragged. All she knew was that she was in a tower and the steps were wet under her feet.

“You're lying,” she snapped, trying to wriggle out of his grasp. “You're
lying
!”

It was a trick. It had to be a trick. Why would he send her home? All faeries ever wanted was to keep her and lock her up and tell her she was useless.

“Oh, I'm not lying. In fact, I've not said so many truthful things in a row in some time.” He laughed again, a soft, hissing laugh. He seemed always to be smiling or laughing, as if everything were funny.

Hettie tripped on the slick steps, pulled herself up again.

“You are the London Door,” the Sly King went on. “Our great success. Or almost. Mr. Lickerish very nearly had you work all those years ago, in Wapping. Until
someone
had to ruin everything.”

Hettie saw it all again, snipped in black-and-white behind her eyelids.
Wings like shreds of night, wind, and a shrieking fit to tear the world in two. A door opening around her, swirling, destroying. Barthy shouting, yelling for her to jump. His hand stretched toward her. Couldn't reach. Couldn't reach his fingers, and the tears in her eyes, and the wind in her face, and the faery butler's hand on her shoulder, pulling her away, away into the Old Country. . . .

“Ah well. It was for the best, I think,” said the King. “Now is the proper time. Now when there is war, and England is truly ready to fall. You will be the end of one age and the beginning of another.”

And then there were no more steps under Hettie's feet, and the Sly King tossed her to the ground like a little soggy bundle.

“When you next open your eyes, you will be in London, and her river will be running through your toes, and her houses will be lying at your feet in shatters and shards. And everyone will be screaming and weeping at you, saying, ‘Oh, Hettie, Hettie, look what you have done. Look what devastation you have wrought.'” The Sly King laughed. “What a sight it will be. What a new and wonderful sight.”

 

Once inside the city, Bartholomew and Pikey took a smoke-spewing trolley down Farringdon Road, past Holborn, and on toward the prisons at Newgate. No one else was on the trolley. No pilot sat behind the gears and dials up front. The little paint-and-iron contraption simply went, traveling its rounds through the frozen, desolate city though there was no one left to use it.

London was deserted. The streets were empty, newspapers flitting like ghosts over the snow. Shutters were bolted, doors shut tight, and in the poorer neighborhoods there were signs of looting. Shopfronts had been smashed in. Streetlamps had been sawed down. On one long brick wall, someone had written in huge dripping letters:
Fly far from here, ye wicked birds. Death Comes.

At Newgate, Pikey and Bartholomew leaped off the trolley and hurried up the street toward the prison. The trolley trundled on and was lost around the bend. A cold wind flew in Pikey's face. It smelled dreadful.
Rotting fish, that is,
he thought.
Rotting everything.

The prison was not at all the way Pikey remembered it. It was nothing but a leaning old house with bars over the windows. He didn't know why he had ever been afraid of it. It was nothing compared to wars and faery prisons and a million birds.

They hammered on the door. It was bolted, but not locked, and it slipped off its hook under their fists. They stepped in and went down a short flight of steps into the sunken passageway.

The prison keeper sat sprawled on his chair, seemingly fast asleep.

“Let's just take the keys,” Pikey whispered. “Let's not wake him.” He dashed forward, but Bartholomew caught him and pulled him back.
Wait,
Bartholomew mouthed, and pointed a finger at the prison keeper's open eyes. “He's not asleep. He's ill.”

Sure enough, the prison keeper's cheeks were growing with a strange sort of fungus, and his eyes were dull, the whites gone yellow as old paper. He looked at them blankly as they approached.

“Sir?” Bartholomew said, leaning down a bit. “Sir, thank goodness we've found you. We were here several weeks ago with Lord Arthur Jelliby and we need to speak to one of your inmates again. Edith Hutcherson is her name. It's very urgent.”

“Hm? What?” The prison keeper stirred, snorting, and sat up in his chair. “What's that noise?”

“Edith Hutcherson!” Bartholomew said, louder this time. “We need to speak to her.”

The prison keeper started to stand, his fists grinding at his eyes. He was unshaven and stank like a sewer. Bartholomew took a step back. Pikey didn't bother, and he didn't need to because the prison keeper collapsed again a second later, so hard the iron nibs on the bottom of the chair's legs squealed against the floor.

“Edith . . .” he said. “Who is Edith . . . ?”

“The madwoman!” Pikey practically shouted. “The one who was being fed by the faeries! Is she still here?”

“Madwoman.” The prison keeper seemed already falling back into his stupor. “Faery-fed.” His eyes blinked open.

“Look, just give us the keys and we'll leave you alone.”

“She's not here.” His voice was soft, his gaze faraway. “She's not been here a while. They took her to the Magdalene Hospital, they did. . . . Weeks ago.”

“To the hospital?” Bartholomew gripped the man's arm. “Why to the hospital?
Tell us!
”

The prison keeper's head drooped. His eyes slid shut. “She was starving,” he said.

 

Pikey and Bartholomew stood before the great wooden desk of the Sister Orderly in the Hospital of the Holy Magdalene on Dowd Street, shuffling and fidgeting.

She eyed them sharply over the top of her spectacles. “Family, you say?” She had the clipped, high voice of an aristocrat, and it echoed up the walls and slithered across the ceiling. Night was falling outside. Only one lamp was lit, a tiny island in the darkness, casting shadows up onto the Sister Orderly's face. Whitewashed halls and glimmering floors led away into pits of blackness.

“Yes,” said Bartholomew from inside his hood. “Nephews. On her husband's side. It's really awfully important. She's still here, isn't she? She hasn't—she hasn't died?” The last part was spoken in a whisper.

The Sister Orderly blinked. “No. No, she hasn't. But Edith Hutcherson is in a strange and unnatural state. You may speak to her, but do not expect her to answer. She has had no human company for far too long. It seems she has forgotten what human voices sound like.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Bartholomew said. “Thank you, we'll be very quick.”

“Room three hundred and four. And no need to be quick. Everyone has left who wants to live.”

Pikey stared at her, but Bartholomew was already hurrying down a hall.

“The faeries will be here before the morning, they say,” the Sister Orderly went on matter-of-factly. “The hospital's empty. The patients are all gone home, those that have one. I'll be here to the end.”

Pikey gaped at her a second longer. Then he turned and raced after Bartholomew. The Sister Orderly's voice seemed to fill the hall behind him.
I'll be here to the end. To the end, end, end . . .

They found Room 304. The door was already ajar. All the doors in the hall were. The Sisters must have opened them before they fled.

The room was dark. Only the faintest squares of blue light fell through the window, illuminating a washstand and an iron bedstead. The madwoman lay on the bed, covered by a single sheet. Her limbs were thin as sticks. Her face was haggard and her eyes had sunk deep inside her skull.

“Edith Hutcherson?” Bartholomew stepped toward the bed. “Can you hear me?”

She did not turn her head. “Mr. Pudding.” Her voice was just a rasp, creeping out of her throat. “Dear Jack Pudding, is that you?” Strands of hair puffed away from her mouth as she spoke.

“No, it's Bartholomew Kettle. I need your help.” Somewhere outside, a siren began to wail. Any other night it would have been answered by the clanging of a fire-carriage bell, the squeak of rubber on cobbles, but not tonight. The siren turned off. The city was silent again.

“Help,” the madwoman said. Still she did not look at them. Her eyes, one sky-blue, one cloud-gray, were fixed on the ceiling. “Help's all gone. They left, my little friends. They left me to starve.”

“I'm very sorry,” said Bartholomew, kneeling down next to the bed. “I was— Well, we were told you know the way in. Into the Old Country. We were told you had been there. Please tell us? Please?”

“The way. The way to gray roads and black woods and death.”

“Yes, how do we get in? Is there a door? A door in London?”

“The boy knows,” she whispered, and then, without even looking at Pikey, she pointed a thin, trembling finger at him.

Pikey flinched. “What?”

“Ask him,” she said, somewhat louder. “Ask him, he knows.”

Bartholomew turned to Pikey. “What is she talking about?” His voice was a little bit flat.

“I don't know! She's mad!” Pikey said. “She's mad as a hatter, I—”

But then an image formed in his mind.
A tall, thin figure standing in the shadows of a storeroom. A cold hand. Flying through the city on a winter wind. Where did we land? Where were we?
He felt himself walking backward through the passageways of his brain.
Where, where, where?
And then he saw it, looming in front of him as if he were there right now.
A tree. A tree in Spitalfields called the Gallows Tree.

He looked at Bartholomew. His eyes were wide, like a rabbit in a snare.

“What? Pikey, if you know something, tell me. Tell me how to get to my sister!”

“I'd forgot,” Pikey stammered. “I didn't remember, I'm sorry—”

“What?”
Bartholomew almost shouted. “What did you forget?”

Pikey looked away sharply. “A tree,” he said. “There's a tree in Spitalfields, and it opens.”

Bartholomew practically flew from the room. Pikey heard his feet pelting away down the hallway. He hurried after him. At the door, he looked back at Edith Hutcherson, one last time. She still lay like a stone under the sheet. But she had turned her head, turned it to watch them go. “Run,” she said. “Run, Pikey Thomas.”

 

They found the tree within the hour. It was a huge, black, gnarled thing, standing in a ring of cobbles in a small court behind a butcher's. The tree was dead. Its whole trunk was hollow, eaten out by insects. There was a hole at the tree's base, very small, worming into the roots. Only a child could ever fit in it. Or a Peculiar.

“He said something,” Pikey mumbled as they circled it. “He said a word to make it open, I don't remember what. . . .”

Bartholomew wasn't listening to him. He dropped to his knees and stuck his head into the hole. Pikey shut up. He'd had the answer all along. He could have been a hundred times more important than he had been, a million times. And now they had found the way, and it was too late to make everything right. Hettie might be dead. Bartholomew would hate Pikey forever, because he was a filthy liar. Or Hettie might be alive. She would have her brother back, and they would be happy, but they wouldn't need Pikey. Pikey would be alone again.

Bartholomew's head was all the way in now, then his neck and his shoulders. A second later his silver-buckled boots had disappeared down the hole.

Pikey glanced about. The court was so quiet.