The Whatnot (9 page)

She scooted toward it and found a crack in the stones, just a foot wide and smaller at the bottom than at the top. She squeezed through it into pitch blackness. The draft stirred her branches. She began to crawl. Suppose she could get out of the house this way? Suppose there were broken parts and she could just drop out of a hole and run away? She hoped she could. She hoped it wasn't true, what Piscaltine had said about the cakes, that it was just a lie and a joke.

On and on she went, through the dark, on hands and knees, into spaces so narrow she could hardly fit. And then, at last, she saw light below her. She dropped down. She wasn't outside. She was on a cold hearth, in a room made of mirrors. The floor was mirrors and so was the ceiling, and they all showed a little person in a little nightgown, who was utterly and completely black, her branches sticking up like a charred broom.

CHAPTER IX

The Pale Boy

O
N his twenty-seventh day in prison, Pikey started looking out the barred window again, and on the thirtieth, a pair of overshoes passed by belonging to a tall, pleasant-faced gentleman with curly golden hair that was turning gray over his ears. His arm was wrapped in a linen sling. Someone was walking at his side. Pikey couldn't see who it was, but he could see the boots—fine black boots, clotted with snow and mud. Like police boots, only small, with silver buckles up the sides wrought in the shapes of feathers.

“My dear boy, I understand you perfectly,” the gentleman was saying, his voice snatching at Pikey's ears. “But it won't do any good! I can assure you, anything this woman may have done is entirely . . .”

The gentleman's voice faded again. Other feet sloshed by, spattering Pikey's face with dirt and sludge. But when Pikey flattened himself to the wall and looked up through the bars, he could see that the two figures had halted at the door of the prison, only a few paces farther down the street. They were going to come in.

Minutes passed. Pikey heard hinges creaking, the prison keeper speaking in a loud, friendly voice, and then the jangle and scratch of keys as a door was opened.

Pikey scrabbled up to the bars. Three figures stood in the gloom. One was the curly-haired gentleman, hat in hand. The second was the prison keeper. The third was the one in the buckled boots. He wore a cloak and a hood that hid his face. He was barely four feet tall.

The three figures started up the passageway. They stopped in front of the madwoman's cell.

“Here she is, sirs, alive and kicking. Except for the kicking bit.” The prison keeper's voice was still cheerful, but his eyes kept darting from the gentleman to the hooded figure and back again.

Pikey was looking, too. He sat crouched on the ground, and so as the group passed him, Pikey glimpsed up under the short one's hood, saw pale skin and dark eyes. They were deep eyes, deep as a wishing well.

“Unlock the gate, please,” the hooded figure said. “Let me speak to her.”

Pikey held his breath. That wasn't a man's voice. It was soft and reedy. A boy's voice.

The hooded figure waited for the prison keeper to unlock the gate, then darted into the madwoman's cell. The curly-haired gentleman remained in the corridor, back straight, looking strikingly out of place in his embroidered waistcoat and red brocade cravat. He glanced about, at the low vaulted ceiling, the moss on the stones, and the puddles on the floor, pretending to find them very interesting. Pikey thought the gentleman was very bad at not looking suspicious.

“That's all, thank you,” the pale boy said, without looking at the prison keeper. “Wait for us at the end of the passage, please, at the door.”

The curly-haired gentleman stopped his examination of a puddle and looked up, startled. The prison keeper's reaction was much the same.

“Wait for us at the door, please,” the pale boy said again. “We'll be safe.”

The gentleman nodded uneasily, and the prison keeper lumbered off, shaking his head. The boy waited for him to reach the end of the corridor. Then he stooped quickly in front of the madwoman.

“Hello,” the boy said. He spoke so softly; Pikey had to strain to hear him. Pikey inched closer to the bars. The gentleman hadn't noticed him yet. If the pale boy had, he made no indication of it. “I've discovered from several reliable sources that you are in contact with faeries in the Old Country. I need to know if it's true. Do they come to you? Do they come through a door?”

The madwoman did not look up.

“Do they?” The boy's voice was still low, but it held an edge now, sharp as a leadface's sword.

The gentleman stopped shuffling. Water dripped in a distant hollow, but there was no other sound. Every lock and stone and lung seemed to be holding its breath.

Suddenly the madwoman snorted. “I'll not tell,” she said. “Johnny and Lucy and Black Jack Pudding said, ‘Don't tell, sweet lady, don't tell. It would be very bad for all of us.' So I'll not tell a soul.”

The pale boy let his breath out slowly. “I need to know,” he said. Pikey leaned his head against the rusting metal. He could hear the words clearly now. “I'm searching for a door into the Old Country. I know they exist. Little holes and passageways. Please, madam, I need your help.”

That was when the madwoman looked up. “Why?” she asked. It was a simple word, but she spoke it with a sort of smug malice, like the meow of a cat. Pikey wondered if the pale boy would slap her. When folks in the streets spoke that way they were usually slapped for it.

The pale boy remained perfectly still. “My sister's there. Years now. She's stuck there, and I need to get her back.”

The madwoman dropped her head again. “They said not to tell,” she said. “My little friends from the hedges and the hilltops. ‘Dangerous,' they said, ‘dangerous,' so I mustn't say. No, I mustn't say.”

“Then I'll wait,” the pale boy said. “I'll wait here and see for myself.”

The gentleman gave the boy a warning look. “Bartholomew,” he said quietly, reaching through the bars to lay a hand on the boy's arm. “You tried. This will get you nowhere. It's no use.”

The boy shook him off, but the madwoman sat up. “You should listen to that one. It
is
no use. My friends will not come if you are here. You will frighten them.
Changeling
.”

Pikey flinched at the word. Changeling. Half blood. A Peculiar, right here in London. The pale boy could thank his lucky stars the prison keeper didn't know. Or the leadfaces up in the street. He would be packed off to a faery prison before he counted to three.

And it was then that Pikey had an idea. The boy named Bartholomew was looking for his sister. Stuck in the faery world, he'd said. Pikey had seen something like that. A girl in a dark forest, not in London. Suppose he could use that? He had to do
something.
When the pauper's court came, no one would believe him when he told them a sylph had stolen all those things. They would think Pikey had, slipping into houses and vanishing again like a shadow.
Faery-touched,
they would say.
Just look at that eye. Wouldn't wonder if he can work all sorts of spells. Let's dip him in a pond and find out.

If Pikey stayed here, he was dead. One way or another. But if he could convince these folks that he could help them . . . He would have to be quick.

Bartholomew was half standing. The gentleman had him by the arm again and was whispering to him urgently. The madwoman was growling to herself, clawing the floor and spitting.

Pikey stood, gripped the bars of his cell with both hands, and shouted, “I've seen your sister!”

Bartholomew froze. The gentleman spun to look at Pikey.

“I've seen her,” Pikey said again, in a rush. “She's got branches for hair, don't she? And a sort of pointy face, all white and bony. I've seen her, sure as day.”

Slowly, Bartholomew turned. He approached Pikey's cell. “How?”

Pikey stole a quick look down the passage to make sure the prison keeper was still at the door. “My eye,” he said. “I saw it with my eye.” With quick fingers, he undid the sock that hid the empty gray eye.

Bartholomew stared at Pikey, his gaze dark and unreadable. Pikey stared back.
It'll be safe,
he thought. The pale boy was a changeling after all, half faery. That was a heap worse than being just a bit touched by one. But then, Pikey was a gutter boy, too. He imagined his ugly clouded eye and how he was no better now than a filthy cobble spryte, really, squeezing through the mud under the streets. He shuffled and looked down at his feet.

“What did you see?” Bartholomew said slowly.

He doesn't believe me.
Pikey knew it. And the gentleman was pulling at the boy's sleeve again, murmuring something.

Well, if Pikey were going to get out of London in anything but chains, he was going to have to
make
them believe. He looked up again.

“Just past Glockner's Inn,” he said firmly. “She was in the street, but she was also in a forest. It don't make much sense, but there was a snowy forest
in
the street, all grown with black trees, and this girl, she reached out her hand to me. That's all I seen, but I know it's her.”

Of course, he
didn't
know. He had no idea. There must be hundreds of changelings in England, hundreds of little girls with branch hair and sharp faces.

“A snowy forest,” Bartholomew said. A faraway look had come into his eyes. He was peering past Pikey, through him, as if he were made of glass. He began to pace. “A snowy forest and black trees. A cottage in the distance with a light burning in its window. Mr. Jelliby—” He whirled on the gentleman. “Mr. Jelliby, he's seen her. He's seen my sister.”

“Bartholomew, you don't know that.” The man spoke gently, a little wearily, as if he'd had to say the same thing a hundred times before. “He might have heard it somewhere. News got out all over the world after the door opened. So many stories . . .”

“It was years ago,” Bartholomew said, and his voice was sharp with pain. He turned back to Pikey. “How old are you? Do you remember the Lickerish Plot? Nine dead changelings and an airship over London?”

Pikey glanced from the gentleman to the changeling and back. He sensed a trap, but he couldn't see its teeth. “I— Well, I
heard
about it. But it was an awful long time ago. I'm twelve years of age, sir. Leastwise I think I am.”

“Twelve,” Bartholomew repeated. “Mr. Jelliby, we need to get him out. He can help us!”

The gentleman sighed. “But you don't
know.
You can't know if the boy is telling the truth, and even if he is, he—”

“I
am
telling the truth!” Pikey said desperately. “I saw her! Sure as day through this 'ere eye! You have to believe me! She has a sort of tattoo all up her arm, too, don't she? All red like she kicked a cat and it scratched her? Is that your sister?
Is it?
”

Now the gentleman was looking at him as well.

“And she has these enormous black eyes, so big you could drown in 'em. I saw her, I tell you, I saw her!”

Bartholomew stared at Pikey a moment longer. Then, very slowly, he brought his head up close to the bars. “And can you see her again? Could you tell me where she is and what she's doing?”

“I— Yes. I could, sir. I will, if you'll get me out.”

Bartholomew did not hesitate. “Good. You'll get out. You'll come with us. You'll tell us everything you know and everything you've seen. But if you're lying . . .” His voice went very low. “Well, you know what sort of people are out there and what they do to people like us. Just don't lie to me. Ever.”

Pikey wanted to growl at the boy, tell him he was nothing but an ugly Peculiar and in no better position than Pikey, but that wouldn't have helped him at all. He was getting out. That was what mattered. “Yes, sir,” he said.

The gentleman sighed one last time and spun on his heel. “Prison keeper!” he shouted, his voice echoing in the dank corridor. “Prison keeper, we're taking this one! Get your keys! As the Earl of Watership, knight to Her Majesty, the Queen, and member of the House of Lords, I
command
you to let him go.”

The prison keeper lurched down the corridor, looking somewhat startled. “Aye, m'lord,” he said, bowing and ducking. “Of course, m'lord.” He unlocked the cell with a toothy key. The bolt clanked back. And the instant it did, Pikey leaped out.

“Thank you, sirs. I'll help you. I swear I will, I'll help you find her.” He was almost sure the air smelled better out here. Really, it was just as foul and putrid as the fumes in his cell, but to him it was as pure as pump water.

The gentleman raised his eyebrows and stared straight ahead. Bartholomew gave him a sideways look.

Pikey took that as a sign of friendship and rushed to his side, lifting his shirtfront to rub the grime from his face. “I will, I'll—”

They were walking away. He hurried to catch up. But just as he was passing the madwoman's cell, a veined and wrinkled hand shot out and wrapped itself around his wrist. The madwoman. She had pressed herself to the bars, gasping and muttering, her head bowed.

“Good luck, boy,” she said, fingers wriggling up his skin. “Good luck from Johnny and Lucy and Black Jack Pudding. Don't let the Sly King see, they say. Don't let him see.”

And then she raised her head, and Pikey saw that one of her eyes was just like his, gray and empty, staring on and on into nothing.

CHAPTER X

The Hour of Melancholy

A
N old grandfather clock stood outside Hettie's sleeping closet, and it always told her when it was time to run.

It was almost like a regular grandfather clock. It had a pendulum, and two spiny hands, and carvings all around it made to look like thorns. Inside, a small spryte pedaled endlessly to keep the wheels turning, and there were many creaking gears and wooden pistons. But it wasn't
entirely
like a regular clock. It did not tell time in hours or minutes. It told it in moods. Instead of numbers on its burnished cheeks, it had four small brass faces. The first was grinning, the second sad, the third savage, and the last face Hettie had never quite understood, but she supposed it was asleep. Its eyes were closed and its mouth was pinched into a pinhole. The hands had never pointed to it, though, so she had never had reason to wonder on it further.

That night, one in a string of long, lonely nights in Piscaltine's house, the grandfather clock was striking the Hour of Melancholy. Both spiny hands snapped into place under the sad face. A deep, sad bell sounded in the clock's belly. And the instant Hettie heard it, she leaped from her little bed and began fiddling frantically with the locks and bolts on the peeling wooden door. Piscaltine did not like her to be late.

Hettie poked her head into the passage. She looked first up it, then down it. Then she slipped out and broke into a run. The sleeping closet she had found for herself (after several nights spent in window seats and rope heaps and on a dusty sofa sewn from peacock feathers) was on one of the uppermost stories, close under the roof. It was one of the few parts of the house that was solid and didn't move about, but it was no safer. The attics were known to be prowled by pity-faeries.

Run, run, run.
Her feet barely touched the ground as she flew toward the end of the passage. Pity-faeries had long limbs and small, evil faces, and they bounded on all fours like great corpse-white dogs. They were called pity-faeries because they had none. If one came at her now, she would never be able to outrun it. And if one appeared in front of her—

She skidded around the corner and down a steep flight of steps. One of the treads was held up by nothing but a bent old nail and would plunge anyone who stepped on it to a swampy death in the house's basement far below. Hettie skipped the step handily and ran on, twisting down and down.
Don't slow,
she thought
. Don't slow. You can catch your breath once you're safe.

She had never seen a pity-faery up close before, but she had glimpsed one once through the crack in her door, a blur of bony limbs and snapping teeth. It had been leaping after a tiny goblin woman, and Hettie had heard her shrieking, feet pattering down the passage, the sound almost swallowed by the hammering gait of the pity-faery. Not very long after, the shrieking had stopped.

Piscaltine kept the pity-faeries in cages usually, in her dining room in the Glass Wing, but sometimes, especially when the clock struck the Hour of Wrath, the faery lady would let them out with a toothy key and they would tear up the stairs and eat things. Goblins, mostly, and gnomes, and the weak little servant faeries who did not have the necessary spells to disguise themselves as candlesticks or tapestries. Piscaltine called it “weeding the house,” and Hettie suspected she enjoyed it. Sometimes she let them out during the Hour of Mirth. She had never let them out during the Hour of Melancholy before, but she might do it now.

Hettie came to the last step and began climbing down a ladder. The ladder was impossibly tall, disappearing into blackness. It creaked and wobbled under her. She never faltered. Below, she glimpsed the orange lamps of the reconstructionists, some bobbing solitary in the dark, others gathered like fireflies where rooms were being built. The rooms would be sad, she knew, purples and blues to match Piscaltine's mood. Piscaltine had been sad for nights now.

“Why did you spit it out?”
the faery lady had screamed when she had found Hettie again, hiding in the dusty dark on top of one of the rooms. Piscaltine had strapped herself into a reconstructionist harness and had looked utterly ridiculous.
“Don't you
want
to be my friend?
Don't
you?”

Hettie hadn't said anything, and she hadn't needed to. Piscaltine's face had seemed to freeze, perfect and pretty. Her black-pool eyes had glistened. Then she had swooped away, and later Hettie had woken to the
scritch-scritch
sound of hands, and the swish of clothes, and had peered over the edge of the room to see Florence La Bellina and four other Belusites crawling up the walls and the reconstruction chains, searching the tops of the rooms below her, searching as if they were certain they would find someone there. The next day Hettie had gone to Piscaltine and had sat down at her feet.

Stupid faery,
Hettie thought angrily, climbing down rung after rung into the dark. But Piscaltine wasn't stupid. Piscaltine had told on Hettie. It meant she knew Hettie was a Peculiar, and it meant she also knew that Florence La Bellina wanted Hettie for something, and it meant Piscaltine was going to use that knowledge for whatever pleased her, and there was nothing Hettie could do about it. She couldn't leave. She had tried, and each time the corridors had led in odd directions, or a panel had dropped out from under her and she had tumbled into a snarl of ropes or a kettle of faery washing. In the end Hettie and Piscaltine had settled into a sort of play-act: Hettie was Piscaltine's friend and Piscaltine was her benevolent mistress, and whenever she could be she was horrible to Hettie.

Hettie arrived at the head of the huge, crimson-carpeted staircase, which she had heard was called the Innard Stairs, after the giant who had supposedly been murdered on it and was responsible for its sumptuous coloring. She hurried down. Her feet echoed in the vast, silent space. Dust rose in plumes from the carpet under her feet. For all the servants and reconstructionists bustling in the darkness, the house was strangely dead and lonely.

Halfway to the bottom, she passed a gray, long-limbed faery with moth wings. It was going up. She waved. She didn't think she had been at Piscaltine's house very long, but she already knew that faery. Its name was Snell, and it was very quiet. It had gray eyes and gray skin and gray heather growing from its head. Usually Hettie didn't like the quiet faeries—they were far more dangerous than loud ones—but Snell never did anything to anyone. Snell never even spoke and so Hettie didn't know if its name was actually Snell, but she had decided it was a good name for it. It always looked so unbearably sad whenever she saw it. Granted, she rarely ventured out of the attics except during the Hour of Melancholy, and in that hour everyone
had
to look sad. But at least Snell didn't look like it would eat her.

At last Hettie arrived at the door to Piscaltine's chair room. She paused. She took a lungful of the cold, damp air. Then she pushed through the door and into the room.

It stretched out in front of her, dark and opulent. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling. Hettie hadn't noticed before, but the paintings were cracked and old now, barely paintings at all. Piscaltine sat in the high-backed chair, eating red berries with a silver spoon.

“Hello, Maud,” she called out as Hettie approached.

“Hello, Piscaltine.” Hettie slowed, wary. This was not normally how the faery lady sounded. Not during the Hour of Melancholy. She usually sounded sullen and wistful, and she would have Hettie play at her feet, or hold her hand and tell her nonsense about England and how the people there hung stones from their ears and built birds out of metal. But not today. Today the faery lady looked fearsome-pretty and pale, and there was something in the curve of her lips that made Hettie afraid.

Piscaltine fixed her eyes on Hettie and poked at the berries with the tip of her spoon. “You will never guess what glorious news I have just received,” she said.

Hettie went to the footstool and sat down at Piscaltine's feet. It was Hettie's own footstool. She had been made to embroider it with strands of kelpy hair, and since she hadn't known how to embroider, she'd had to learn, picking out the stitches over and over again until Piscaltine was pleased.

“Well,” Hettie began. She thought for a second. “The reconstructionists have been in the Mildew Wing for ages putting up a hall. I suppose there's going to be a masquerade.”

“Wrong. There is going to be a masquerade. Isn't that delightful?” Piscaltine rapped the spoon sharply against the edge of the dish. It made a little
ting.

Hettie flinched. “Oh, it sounds lovely.”

“It
is
lovely. It will be a very great event. And to think it was I who was picked to host it. Ah . . .” She sighed, and looked very self-satisfied for a moment. Then she fixed her gaze on Hettie. “And since I am so wonderful and forgiving, I have a surprise for you. On top of that.”

Hettie's heart did a horrible, squirming leap. The way Piscaltine said it. Not really like a surprise at all. More like a challenge. Whatever the surprise was, it would be bad.

“See this mask?” Piscaltine set the silver dish in her lap and held up a glistening black half mask. It was edged with feathers of the deepest, most vivid blue. Black silk ribbons dangled from its corners. “It is for you. For the masquerade.” The mask's eyes curved upward, mirroring the faery lady's own expression.

“For—for me?” Hettie frowned. “But I'm not—I'm not
going,
am I?”

The faery blinked at her and said nothing.

Hettie tried again. “I didn't think Whatnots were invited to masquerades.” Her hands were shaking. She hid them under her nightgown. It was the same nightgown she had worn when she had first come to the Old Country. Patched and re-patched and stitched and lengthened, but the old, gray fabric was still underneath. Piscaltine had said she was far too naughty to get new clothes.

“That depends on whose Whatnot it is,” said Piscaltine. “For example,
you
could never go. At least not the way you are. But you see, once you put on this mask no one will know who you are. They couldn't possibly. It is a fleshling mask. It makes you look like the creature that is your soul. Takes it from the inside and puts it on the out. I got it from the King of Coal when he asked me to marry him. He decided not to marry me in the end. . . .” Her eyes took on a faraway look. Then she smiled an angry little smile and pushed the mask into Hettie's hands. “Come now. Try it on. I'm perishing to see how your soul looks. I suspect it will be quite horrific. Twice as ugly as you are now. Perhaps an octopus or a particularly bristly boar.” She lifted another spoonful of berries to her mouth and chewed them expectantly.

Hollow head,
thought Hettie.
Idiot numbskull goblin-eater.
She thought it loudly, because what Piscaltine had said hurt her and she wished it didn't. She knew Piscaltine was just being awful, but somehow it didn't make it any better.

I
don't think I'm ugly,
Hettie thought. She would go to the masquerade looking like a bristly boar for all she cared. Everyone would laugh, and Piscaltine could feel very good about herself, but it wouldn't matter. Not really.

“All right,” Hettie said, and set the mask on her face.

She wiggled it so that she could see through the holes. They were much too far apart, made for faery eyes, but she could still see through them. She tied the ribbons behind her head. Then she dropped her hands and made a face. It didn't fit properly. It was made for delicate Sidhe faces, not her lumpy changeling skull.

She looked down. Her feet were still there, at least. No tentacles, or feelers, or anything else disagreeable. That was good. She looked at her hands. They were the same, too, ten fingers, ten nails. And the red tattoos . . . The lines were duller now than they had been, but they were still there, looping over her arms.

“My soul looks like me, I suppose.” She shrugged and returned to the footstool. “I can't go. Everyone will recognize me.”

But Piscaltine had stopped eating. She was staring at Hettie, silver spoon poised, one bloodred drop of juice suspended, quivering, from its tip. Her mouth had formed a perfect
O
.

Hettie glanced at her uncertainly. Then she hurried to one of the gilt mirrors that were nailed to the wall. What she saw there made her heart fairly die within her.

A tall, beautiful figure looked back at her from the glass. She was dressed in black, buttoned all the way up the neck. Her face was narrow, but her mouth was firm, and her hair was a tumble of copper-bright curls. There were no tattoos on her arms, no branches for hair or ugly black-pool eyes. This creature was proud and strong, and Hettie was almost afraid to look at her.

Hettie blinked, peering down at herself. She saw her hands again, her old nightgown. None of it looked any different. She swished back and forth, whirled. Then she lifted one finger and poked at her nose. The lady in the mirror did the same.

The beautiful creature in the mirror was her.

“Maud,” breathed Piscaltine. “Oh, Maud . . .”

And then the faery hurled the dish of berries to the floor and flew at Hettie, snatching the mask from her face. “Give that to me. Give it to me at
once.
”

Piscaltine inspected the mask, glaring. She spun it quickly in her hands. Her eyes snapped to Hettie. They were so black, so horribly black, like cold, dark stars.

Don't say anything,
Hettie hissed to herself.
You'll just make it worse.
She put her chin up and folded her hands behind her back, because it was the only thing she could think to do right then.

“Very well,” Piscaltine said. She was standing perfectly still, but somehow she seemed to be moving, trembling and crashing like waves. “Very well. Now look at
me
.” The mask was on her face. She tied the silk ribbons behind her head. When it was in place, a long shiver passed down her from the top of her head to the tips of her shoes. And then she had changed. She was made of wire now, like a dressmaker's mannequin. Inside was only air, and where her heart should have been there was a red cushion on which sat a monstrous ugly toad. There were tiny contraptions around it, bellows and pipes that shot bursts of water to keep it wet, and a padded mechanical hand that would pat it from time to time. But it had so many warts. And such droopy, mournful eyes. It opened its mouth and let out a croak.