The Devil's Apprentice Read online

  Pen muttered something about patterns which no one heard.

  ‘You say someone is lost in there,’ Quorum went on. ‘I’m sure you’re right. Mr Pyewackett told me hundreds have been lost, maybe thousands. There’s nothing you can do. You are reckless and gallant and young, so young. Young lives are too easily thrown away. You’ve been lucky today – you’ve been lucky twice – but you can’t expect to be lucky again. Go back into that house and you may never return. Then what would I say to your grandmother – to Gavin’s mother?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Gavin said. ‘We’re not going back.’

  Pen nodded, resigned in the aftermath of horror, then said: ‘Yes. I mean, no. We won’t go back.’

  When Gavin was leaving she asked, suddenly shy: ‘Will I see you again?’

  They’d only known each other a few days, but it felt like a lifetime.

  (Not necessarily in a good way.)

  ‘Of course,’ he said, mildly astonished she should need to pose the question. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  But it was she who called him, later that evening in the privacy of her room. ‘I’ve got something,’ she announced. ‘I put it all on the computer, and I think I’ve got something.’

  ‘Is it catching?’

  Pen ignored that. ‘First of all, the prince. His name was Cesare Borgia. He lived in Italy in the fifteenth century. He was a sort of military and political genius – Machiavelli wrote a book about him – though pretty unscrupulous. He died when he was only thirty-one.’

  ‘Too late to do a rescue, then,’ Gavin said pragmatically.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Pen continued, a little damped. ‘I’ve found – I think I’ve found – the beginning of the pattern...’

  ‘There is no pattern. Quorum was right. Everything changes.’

  ‘Yes, but... there could be recurring factors. Like the broom cupboard.’

  ‘What about it?’ Gavin’s voice darkened at the memory.

  ‘Monsters,’ said Pen. ‘Both times, it was monsters. If we opened it again–’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just to look. Not go through. Just to be sure...’

  ‘I don’t want to be sure. Sure sounds like dead to me. Dead sure. I’m never opening that cupboard again, I’m never going into that house again, and if you’re so keen on getting me killed I never want to see you again either.’ He hung up, knowing he was being unfair. He was the one who’d insisted on going into the cave, out of some sort of misplaced bravado. Showing off, he thought reluctantly, kicking the thought under the table where he couldn’t see it. He definitely wouldn’t call Pen any more, at least for a couple of days. He would call... Josabeth Collins, in her pink skirt and her pink hair-tags, who was as pretty as a TV soap and about as predictable. With her, he would be safe.

  Bored, but safe.

  In 7A, Eve Harkness came back – yet again – too late to meet Gavin. When asked how they had spent the day, Pen said ‘just talking.’

  ‘You didn’t go into Number 7, did you?’ her grandmother said. ‘Quorum tells me it’s really unsafe. Something to do with the structure – rotten floorboards I suppose. If you fell through you could be badly hurt. I know you’re always so sensible, but...’

  ‘It’s kept locked,’ said Pen, tiptoeing round the truth. ‘I couldn’t get in without the key.’ She didn’t mention that she already had it.

  She thought of adding I wouldn’t do anything silly, but decided that was stretching a point. She still didn’t want to lie if she could avoid it, though she knew that was mere nit-picking. Omission had grown to concealment, concealment to deception – she felt as if she was trying to hide a blood-splattered corpse under a hankerchief. An Italian prince, a roc and a dragon had been added to the velociraptor, and all of them seemed to be crowding her mind, weighting her tongue. At school, she was known as someone who could stay silent under taunting or peer pressure, who kept her own counsel and never spread gossip. But she had always been open with her grandmother. Until now. It was as if she had given up not just frankness but an elusive security, a firewall of protection in her life. If this was maturity, she thought, why didn’t she feel strong and capable, as adults were meant to, instead of defenceless and scared?

  She said goodnight to her grandmother, and went slowly to bed.

  ‘Someone arranged those twigs next door,’ she said to herself, ‘and cleared up the broken vase. Someone lives there, whatever Mr Pyewackett said. I ought to find out who.’

  She wasn’t eager to explore any further – she’d been horribly frightened by the experiences of that day, and the mere idea of going there alone made her feel sick – but the urge to solve at least one little mystery hung on, an annoying niggle at the back of her thoughts.

  She went into the bathroom. There was a set of false teeth in a glass beside the basin which hadn’t been there before. They looked very white and shiny and faintly familiar.

  ‘Mr Pyewackett’s teeth,’ she said out loud. ‘What are they doing here? Surely they should have been cremated with the rest of him.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with us,’ said the teeth, in a voice alarmingly like that of Andrew Pyewackett himself. ‘Why should we burn? We’re good for a long trek yet. No point in wasting a decent set of teeth. Never know when you may need us.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Pen.

  The teeth were clacking up and down in the glass, just as they had rattled against Andrew Pyewackett’s crumbling jawbone. But she felt she had gone past being surprised at anything.

  ‘How did you get in here?’

  ‘Had a word with Quorum. He’s the butler, isn’t he? Obeys orders. Told him we needed to keep an eye on you.’

  ‘You haven’t got an eye,’ Pen pointed out. ‘Anyway, I won’t be kept an eye on in the bathroom, thank you. It’s private. I go to the loo in here.’

  ‘Hey,’ said the teeth, ‘we’re dentures. We don’t care about all this human modesty codswallop. Dentures don’t do embarrassment.’

  ‘I do,’ said Pen.

  She picked up the glass, carried it into the bedroom and placed it on the dressing table. After a moment’s consideration, she fetched a hankerchief from Mr Pyewackett’s old room and spread it over the top.

  ‘Take it off!’ clattered the teeth. ‘Take it off!’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Pen. ‘Go to sleep, or whatever it is teeth do at night. I’ll take it off in the morning – if you behave.’

  She heard the teeth grind together in frustration, and they seemed to be trying to leap out of the glass, pushing against the hankerchief, but eventually they subsided.

  It’s like having a parrot, Pen thought.

  Presently, Felinacious came into the room, eyed the shrouded glass for a moment, then thumped onto her bed, still licking its whiskers with the satisfaction of a cat who has had a substantial fish dinner intended for others.

  ‘No talking cats,’ said Pen. ‘Oh no. Just teeth.’ In the glass, the dentures muttered to themselves. Pen pulled the quilt over her head and did her best to go to sleep. Worn out with terror and time lag, excitement and emotion, she succeeded almost immediately.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Monster Mash

  London, twenty-first century

  PEN DREAMED.

  The boy was outside the house, trying to get in. He had to get in, though he couldn’t have said why – perhaps because the house had no door, and a house with no door was a house worth getting into. He wasn’t quite a stranger to getting into other people’s houses. He prowled round the garden, checking the ground floor windows, but they were all barred. Then he climbed the wall to the first storey.

  ‘This is him,’ Pen thought, in her dream. ‘This is the thief who broke in, and was lost.’

  She had thought about him, worried about him, and now her subconscious was turning worry into fantasy, showing her what might have happened. She knew she was dreaming, as you sometimes do, and she clung on to the dream, determined not to wake, eager to pursue her fancy through to the
end.

  She watched him cut out the pane of glass, propping it up on an external ledge. Then he reached through to find the catch, pushed the window open, and scrambled inside. She saw him clearly for the first time as he stood up, looking round the landing. Until then the dream had been following his line of vision, with only brief glimpses of the back of his head, but now she could see his face. An odd, tight, closed-in face with thin hard bones and a hard narrow mouth and eyes like dark slots. His hair was so fair it was almost white and his skin was paler than Pen’s, with the dense, opaque pallor of skin that can never blush, or tan, or warm itself even a semitone. He’s an albino, Pen guessed – there was one at her school, a girl a few years older, as white and delicate as porcelain – but the eyes were wrong, much too dark, brown and gleaming like polished stones. For an instant she saw him up close, and she thought: He’s young. My age – not much more. Quorum was right...

  In that moment his face shocked her, because it wasn’t like a face in a dream. It was too vividly delineated, too intense. And for all the hardness, she sensed this was someone who hurt. This was someone who hurt all the time. But whether he hurt himself, or others, or both, she couldn’t tell.

  She noticed his hair was too long and he wore flared jeans which flapped about his calves.

  She saw him go downstairs, and open a door (she thought it was the door through which she had seen the monk), stare into the room for a few seconds – just a few seconds – then close it again. Then he went to another door, one she was sure she hadn’t tried. This time, he was more hesitant, nudging it open a very little way, craning his neck to peer through the crack. But the door was tugged wide by somebody on the far side of it, and the boy fell forward. Pen had a brief glimpse of a crowded street – a street with shops and stalls, people in old-fashioned clothes, crooked houses leaning over it, grubby patches of sky between pointed roofs. A burly-looking man had hold of the boy and was saying: ‘Gotcha! I’ve had enough o’ you varmints, sneaking into the houses of honest folk to steal what don’t belong to you–’ But the boy wrenched himself free, and ran off down the street, dodging through the crowd, and the man cried: ‘Stop! Thief!’ and some turned to stare, and others joined the chase, though no one was sure who they were chasing, and a stall was knocked over, and confusion broke out in the boy’s wake like battle in the wake of a war-goddess. Then the door slammed shut, and that world was cut off, lost in the days of Long Ago, and the dream slipped away, blending with other dreams, carrying Pen on a gentle tide into oblivion...

  Beyond the Doors

  London, seventeenth century

  GHOST WOKE FROM the dream to the accustomed gloom of the loft and a sudden snort from one of the boys, shifting in his sleep. Nearby, Weasel twitched under his blanket like a dog shaking off a fly, perhaps lost in some nightmare of Mr Sheen’s wig. Snot snuggled against his brother, damp nose pressed into his side, invisible save for a clump of hair sprouting from beneath the bedding. Ratface and Pockface lay back to back, each curled in a position that mirrored the other. In slumber, all the sharpness and wariness and cunning was drained from the faces of the Lost Boys; they looked soft-cheeked and innocent as angels sleeping on a cloud, if rather dirtier. Only Ghost was always the same, asleep or awake. As a baby he had looked more like a gnome than an angel, with flaring ears on either side of a pale narrow head and puckered features. His heart was old before he was ten. Now, turned fourteen, the hardness had entered his very bones, and even sleep could not gentle it out of him. He moved amongst them like a cold, alien being – like the ghost they named him – knowing it was his differentness which made him their leader, which enabled him to protect them, if protection were possible, in the city jungle where only the strong survived.

  A rat which had been hunting for scraps scurried out of his way, running over Sly’s foot and disappearing into a crack in the wall. Ghost didn’t like to see rats in the garret, he said they were unhealthy, but One-Ear laughed and said how could they be, they were so fat and well-fed. He would share crusts with them sometimes – there was one in particular, with a bitten ear, he seemed to have a fellow-feeling for and called it Edwin, no one knew why, though Ghost suspected it was his real name. He couldn’t see if it was Edwin who ran away, the rat moved too fast, but his hard mouth grew harder at the sight of it. He knew there was a special reason not to have rats around, if only he could remember what it was.

  He opened the door without a creak and slipped through into the moonlight. At that hour the city was quiet, sleeping or feigning sleep. Sudden sounds carried a long way: a cat yowled, a latch clicked. A three-quarter moon shone across the rooftops, barring the world with deep shadows and pale slabs of light. But Ghost was a night creature, in his element in the dark. The click of the latch had drawn his attention: it came from somewhere close by. A door had been opened in the furtive way you open a door when you don’t want to be seen doing so. Ghost slid down the ladder and crossed the roofscape, a shadow among shadows. A few moments later he was looking down into Running Lane.

  He knew which door had been opened so furtively, he knew it in his gut. He was always listening for it, somewhere just below the level of conscious thought.

  The back door to Big Belinda’s place.

  It was perhaps two hours before dawn. The party must have wound down; what revellers there were had obviously already left. A thin slice of light issued from the door-crack, yellow against the monochrome night. A face poked out and withdrew. Then the light was cut off as two figures emerged, carrying something which looked like a long, dark bundle, sagging in the middle. Ghost knew what that bundle must be, though it was wrapped in a cloth and no details were visible. Only one thing was that size and shape, and would require such clandestine disposal. Someone else loomed briefly in the doorway, someone who could only be Big Belinda; he saw the lamplight shining through her false curls.

  ‘Get rid of it!’ She spoke very softly, but Ghost’s quick ears picked up every word. ‘No – not in the creek. Too close. Get the boat – take it out to the river, and make sure it’s weighted. We don’t want it popping up again, do we?’

  Two male voices grunted acquiescence. One face was half turned, catching the light before the door closed; Ghost recognised the scarred visage of Cullen. The scars of disease, he thought, not the marks of a fight. He couldn’t identify the other man with any certainty, but he guessed it must be the porter, a squat man with the build and intellectual capacity of a bulldog.

  They carried their burden along the lane and through a covered way to the creek. Ghost followed, moving from roof to roof, seeing them reappear at the water’s edge.

  One said: ‘We could just roll him in here. She wouldn’t know the difference.’ The porter.

  ‘No,’ said Cullen. ‘She’s right. Too much shit here already, and the water level’s falling. The river’s the place for him. We’ll take him to the boat. Watch your step!’

  The porter had slipped on mud or sewerage, almost falling into the creek. He swore graphically.

  ‘Shut your mouth! D’you want half the town turning up?’

  ‘We can’t lug ’im all that way – he’s a dead weight and there’s no footing here for anyone carrying a load–’

  ‘Of course he’s a dead weight, blockhead. He’s dead, ain’t he? If you weren’t so clumsy... You wait ’ere with ’im. I’ll fetch the boat along and we’ll row ’im the rest of the way.’

  ‘I ain’t waiting with a corpus! Not on my own I ain’t.’

  ‘You wasn’t scared o’ him when he was alive. What’s to scare you now he’s dead?’ Cullen’s voice – a dark grey voice with an edge like sandpaper – was scathing.

  ‘I heard o’ a dead man once, reached right out of ’is coffin to grab the cove what was burying ’im. They’re terrible strong, the dead. I ain’t staying ’ere to be a-strangled by a corpus.’

  ‘Lily-livered milksop! Big Bel didn’t hire you to whimper at ghost-stories! You can’t bring the boat – you’d run it aground for s
ure. All right, all right, we’ll leave ’im here and fetch it together. There’s no one about at this hour and he ain’t going nowhere. Get moving.’

  They deposited the bundle beside the creek and hurried off, the porter still slithering and splashing at the water’s edge. Ghost dropped noiselessly down from the roof and bent over the thing on the ground. The bundle had been lashed together with string, the knots too tight to be easily loosed. He pulled out his knife to cut through them, then hesitated, unwilling to leave any sign of investigation. The knife slid out of sight again and he fumbled with the folds of cloth at one end, tugging them apart to expose what was inside. His own shadow obscured his view, but when he moved aside the moon shone clearly down on the face of the corpse. Ghost did not recognise him, seeing only that he was wigless, his hair cropped, apparently dressed in little more than his shirt. Ghost opened the cloth at chest level, looking for a stab wound or some similar cause of death. But the stains on both shirt and cloth were not blood. He unfastened the buttons; the bare torso gleamed white in the moonlight, discoloured with indistinct blotches which might have been boils. Ghost drew back, his breathing suddenly shallow. He had been less than a year in the city, but he knew what those boils might mean. Quickly he pulled the cloth back over face and chest and shinned back up to the roof.

  Presently, he heard the sound of oars, sloshing through the thick water of the creek. The boat nudged into the bank and the two men got out, loading the body with some difficulty and much cursing. The additional weight grounded the dinghy too deep in the mud, and there were more oaths as they struggled to move it, and the porter lost his balance and sat down in the slime, and Ghost might have laughed to himself if he hadn’t been too disturbed by what he had discovered. He guessed the man must have been a gallant from the theatre, who had come home with one of the girls, the symptoms of his sickness passing for drunkenness. By the time they knew he was dying it would have been too late to throw him out. Presumably Big Belinda imagined that getting rid of the remains in this covert manner would somehow get rid of the problem: the girls wouldn’t take sick, and business would continue as usual. Stupid, thought Ghost, his upper lip thinning in something between a sneer and a snarl. The girls should be warned – Mags, Clarrie, French Sue – they should leave town now. But he knew already what Mags would say. Where would we go? How would we live? Our home is here – our livelihood...