The Devil's Apprentice Page 6

  ‘Listen,’ Ghost said, and his voice went soft, and the blade came out, sudden and sharp, a-gleam in the candlelight. ‘Listen carefully. This is only a small knife, and your heart might be hard to find in all that jelly – always supposing you have one – but you try this again and I’ll go looking for it. Do you hear me?’

  Big Belinda went white under the French rouge and the lead powder, white with fear and then red again with anger, but she tottered down the stairs without another word.

  ‘Tomkin’ll have to stay here for a few days,’ Ghost said when she’d gone.

  They cut down the stairs on his orders, since Big Belinda would never get up the ladder, and for nearly a week Tomkin was safe, until the day they returned to find the loft empty. There was blood on one of the beams where he had clung onto it in desperation, and his fingers had been smashed to make him let go. He didn’t understand what use he could be to Big Belinda, but he wanted to stay with the gang.

  ‘So they took him anyway,’ Cherub said. ‘We didn’t get twenty-five shilling, neither.’

  ‘Don’t ever say that again,’ Ghost said. He didn’t bunch his fist or draw his knife: he didn’t have to. He was their leader because, secretly, each of them was a little afraid of him.

  Cherub never said it again.

  Ghost climbed back down the ladder with One-Ear, and in Groper’s Alley they found Mags. ‘The Duke’s men took ’im,’ she said. ‘He was crying something pitiful. Big Bel told ’em where to go. I wanted to warn you, but you was out.’

  The knife slipped from Ghost’s sleeve with a wicked little glint, even in the dark of the alley.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Mags. ‘She’s watchin’ for you. She told us what you said. Laughed about it, she did, but she was scared underneath. She’s hired a couple of bruisers to take care o’ her.’

  ‘We’ll take them too,’ said One-Ear.

  Mags shook her head, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘She’s got important friends, Big Bel. Not just the Duke – others, too. They’d send the constables arter you, mebbe even the army. You’d be strung up for sure. It ain’t worth it.’

  One-Ear started to speak, but Ghost silenced him. ‘We can wait,’ he said.

  The next week in the meat market he stole a capon. The boys watched in awe as he roasted it slowly, slowly, in a big pot of herbs and wine over their small hearth. He opened up a rat, and added the blood and the guts, and water from the creek, and some of Snot’s snot, and a collection of pustules he bought off a beggar who’d never thought to sell his boils before. Then he spiced it, and peppered it, and pee’d in it, all the while stirring and stirring, and the steam was still smelling of wine and herbs and chicken for all the muck that had gone into it.

  ‘Can we try it?’ asked Weasel, sniffing, and the twins nodded eagerly.

  ‘It’ll kill you,’ said Ghost.

  He covered the pot, which was pinched from an eatery and looked grand enough, and when it was ready he paid a little black boy from the waterfront to take it round to the gate in Running Lane, saying it was from the Duke.

  ‘Big Bel ate the lot,’ Mags confided the following morning. ‘I told the girls not to touch it, like you said, but she wouldn’t share. She had a bottle o’ gin on the side and went to bed, and I ain’t seen her since.’

  ‘Let me know how she’s feeling,’ said Ghost.

  But Big Belinda had lived all her life in the city, with the dirt and the diseases, and she rose at noon not a whit the worse, without even a flux to show for it. Ghost went back to the loft, and sat there sharpening his knife, silent, and thoughtful, and patient as the grave.

  Eade, twenty-first century

  IT LOOKED LIKE a gingerbread house in a fairy story. There were gabled roofs with drooping eaves, like icing running off a cake, crooked beams dark as chocolate, tiny latticed windows sunk deep into marzipan walls. The wood huddled around it, barren twigs and evergreen leaves scratching and rustling faintly in a mute wind. The ‘For Sale’ notice beside the front gate leaned sideways as if slightly drunk.

  The boy stared at the notice with a sinking feeling inside. It had taken him so long to find the address, poring over culinary histories in second-hand bookshops, coming across that lucky mention of the family home, Thornyhill Manor, bought from the original Thorns when their last heirs died out. And now here it was, less a manor than a rambling, overgrown cottage deep in the whispering woods, a gingerbread house fit for a witch – or a cook. For Sale. Of course, it might not be empty, but it looked empty, hiding under its drooping eaves like a teenager under a hoodie, its closed door and lightless windows telling no secrets. The witch was in the Aga, the children had run away, nothing had been cooked here in a long, long time. The boy opened the gate, which creaked, like a gate that hasn’t been opened in a while, and went up the path to the front door, but he knew already that he was too late. There was nobody home any more.

  Gavin Lester was on a quest. Not the kind where you have to destroy a magic ring, or retrieve the Holy Grail, or even rescue a damsel in distress. At fifteen, Gavin was naturally interested in damsels, but he preferred them not to be too distressed. His quest was to find the greatest cook in the world – or at least, the man he believed might deserve that title – a cook and descendant of cooks, a man who had never hosted a TV show or penned a recipe book, an éminence grise of the kitchen, a repository of gourmet mysteries as ancient as the da Vinci code, and much more useful. The family name was Goodman, though sometimes it appeared translated into different languages, as Bonhomme, or Guterman. But in one form or another it featured in various tattered volumes which Gavin had unearthed among the vintage bookstores in Charing Cross Road, a name flickering through the life histories of nearly all the great chefs over the centuries: Savarin and Navarin, Carême and Béchamel, Escoffier and Ranhofer. The chefs were the heroes, fêted in their own day and immortalised all through time in the annals of haute cuisine, but always, somewhere in the background, was a Goodman with a finger in the pie. Gavin wanted to be a cook, not a celebrity chef or a TV star but a real cook whose sole aim in life was to make wonderful food, and he had decided that if he could only locate the Goodman of today, he could become his pupil and absorb the gastronomic wisdom of the ages.

  He knew the first name would be Bartlemy because it always was – or some variation of it. Bartholomew, Barthe, Bartolème...

  And now, having reached his goal, he saw the elusive Goodman slipping away from him again. He knocked, and tugged the old-fashioned bell-pull, but no one came. The trees shuffled in the wind like restless watchers, and the house appeared to hunker down between them, but the occupant had gone. Gavin got the number off the ‘For Sale’ board and called the estate agent, only to be told that Mr Goodman had died or departed, deeding the house to his niece, who lived locally. With the air of someone pursuing a forlorn hope to the bitter end Gavin walked into the nearby village, asked in two or three shops, traced the niece to a second-hand bookstore.

  She wasn’t really Bartlemy’s niece, she explained, just a close friend. He had gone nearly a year ago, nobody knew where; she didn’t think he was coming back.

  Yes, he was a good cook.

  Just a good cook? thought Gavin, slightly shocked, but he didn’t say any more.

  ‘Funny thing,’ she said. ‘You aren’t the only person who’s been asking. There was someone a while back, I think he was a lawyer, or he worked for some lawyers; I can’t recall his name but I wrote down the firm and their number.’ After a brief search, she found it. Whitbread Tudor Hayle.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Gavin.

  Back home in Clapham he accessed their website. Under Wills, he came across a small advertisement requesting Bartlemy Goodman to contact them concerning a legacy from one Andrew Mortimer Pyewackett. Gavin co-opted his younger brother, the Lester computer genius, and finally brought up the Will on screen. And there was the address – another address – the end of the quest or just a further pitstop on a road going nowhere...

  Numbe
r 7, Temporal Crescent.

  London, twenty-first century

  IT WAS SATURDAY. Mrs Harkness had gone home and Quorum was out doing his weekly shop and finding out how to arrange a wireless connection for the computer – something he could have done by telephone, only Pen didn’t tell him so. She wanted him out of the way for as long as possible.

  When she heard him leave she went to the utility room, moved the coats, and, after some fiddling, inserted the right key in the lock. A click, and the door opened.

  As 7A was against the garden wall she had been more than half expecting to find herself looking at grass and flower-beds. It’s one thing to be told about a spatial interface (whatever that was), quite another to find yourself confronting one. There was no grass, no garden. She was looking at what must clearly be the entrance hall of Number 7. It was very similar to 7A, only larger. There was a parquet floor, Persian rugs, a couple of unremarkable pictures, a tall vase on a small table containing a spray of what she thought was Honesty. Pale cream walls, soft pale daylight, dimmed by the muslin curtains on the windows, a flight of stairs to an upper floor... And the doors. Lots of doors, all closed. Too many doors, Pen thought, until she realised there was a full-length mirror on one wall, doubling the number, making the hall appear bigger than it was. It’s really very ordinary, she told herself. And clean. The parquet gleamed. There was no dust on the table. Someone, presumably Quorum, must come in to vacuum and flick round with a duster. Except she had the only key...

  It was very quiet. She couldn’t even hear the faint traffic-murmur which always lies in the background of city life. And there was a smell, or something like a smell. Long after, when she tried to describe it, she said it was the smell of something about to happen.

  She went over to one of the doors, closed her fingers round the handle. She was only going to look – just to look. History will absorb you, Quorum had said, but she had no intention of being absorbed. She would open the door a little way, see what lay beyond, close the door again. History couldn’t absorb her if she didn’t pass through. She turned the handle part way... then let it slip back. No hurry. After all, for the moment at least, it was her house. The sensible thing would be to have a good look around first. Pen prided herself on always doing the sensible thing. She released the handle and made her way upstairs.

  There was a landing, passages which must stretch the length of the house, more doors. And a draught. It was very slight but she felt it at once, the faint chill of cooler air on her cheek. To her left was a single window, closed but not shuttered; she walked over to it to check the latch. And saw the pane cut out – a single pane, sheared cleanly from the frame as if by someone who knew what they were doing. She opened the window and looked down. Quite a long way down. There was a drainpipe, a climbing plant, a couple of ledges. A monkey could do it, but surely not a human. But a monkey wouldn’t know how to cut out a pane of glass. Someone got in, Pen concluded. Someone who came to steal, at a guess: it was a big house in an upmarket residential area, and it must appear temptingly unoccupied. Someone got in, but there was no sign they ever got out...

  Pen suppressed a shiver. Whoever it was could have left the way they entered, by the window – although would they have bothered to close and latch it behind them? Had someone else shut the latch? She wondered when it had happened, for how long that pane of glass had been missing. When she pressed a cautious finger against the broken edge, it didn’t feel sharp, as new-broken glass should. And below the window the parquet seemed faded, as if rain or sun or both had eroded the polish and bleached the wood beneath. That could take years, she thought – perhaps decades. She must find out when Andrew Pyewackett last went inside Number 7, if Quorum knew – who did the cleaning – whether the house had a name, instead of just a number. A house like this should have a name, a title that told you something about the contents, a clue to its secrets. Bygone House, a house of doors into the past. That would be a good name.

  She descended the stairs, slowly, thinking serious thoughts. In the entrance hall, she stopped. She knew she wasn’t ready to explore more thoroughly – she needed some sort of safety device, to block the history absorption factor – the evidence of a clandestine intruder who had never left worried her. But she couldn’t go back to 7A without doing anything. It was all very well being sensible but when you are psyched up for adventure, then an adventure of some sort has to happen, even if it is only a very small one. Not that Pen used the word ‘adventure’ anywhere in her conscious mind. It was simply that she had come there to do something, and something had to be done. She was a lawyer, and lawyers didn’t run away from their duty. And there might not be that many occasions when her grandmother was out of the way.

  Under the stairs was a door which, in 7A, opened on a broom cupboard. There couldn’t be anything very dangerous in a broom cupboard. (It was too long since Mrs Harkness read her any children’s stories, and she had forgotten about wardrobes.) She turned the handle, very gingerly, half way, all the way. Tried pulling the door towards her, but, unusually for a cupboard, it opened inward. She pushed it open a crack. Then pushed it wider...

  She was looking out over a green jungly landscape that went all the way to the sky. There was a wide space of grass, like a watermeadow, stretching away until it vanished under a wall of trees – gigantic palms and monstrous shrubs with thick rubbery leaves and trees with multiple trunks and netted branches supporting great towers of foliage. Beyond, the sunrise – she was almost sure she was facing east – turned the sky to apricot gold, with a couple of curled feather-clouds hanging above it, perfectly positioned to catch the light in their filaments. A sudden ray found its way through the far-off canopy, blinking into her eye, so that for a few seconds she was dazzled and almost blinded. That was why she didn’t see the creature until it charged.

  She had been leaning through the gap to see better, one foot over the threshold, peering into the past – whatever past it was – and the predator, already close, must have spotted her, stalked, picked its moment to spring. Instinctively she jumped back, pulling the door shut, but it was too late. A hand or paw came round the edge, with four short claws and one long one, a curved slashing claw like a kris. It hooked itself round the door and tugged experimentally. Pen tugged back, adrenaline giving her extra strength, but the creature was far stronger. A second set of claws joined the first and the door left her control, wrenched back into the broom cupboard world. She let go, stumbled against the little table, knocked over the vase of Honesty. It shattered on the parquet, eggshell-fragments of china spraying in all directions. But Pen wasn’t noticing. She was staring at the thing peering through the door.

  It was as tall as a tall man, serpent-necked, lizard-skinned, striding on powerful hind legs like a huge flightless bird. Its forelimbs were short, supple as arms, tipped with the scissor-claws. Its head was half way between reptile and vulture, beak-like jaws parted in a grin full of teeth – gnawing teeth and ripping teeth and tearing-your-throat-out teeth. It looked round the hall, faintly bewildered, saw Pen. Saw dinner.

  Bewilderment no longer mattered.

  Pen knew what it was even though it had looked slightly different on film. She’d seen Jurassic Park on the television. She hadn’t thought much of it.

  ‘The science isn’t sound,’ she’d said. ‘It’s just an excuse for the dinosaurs. It’s not believable.’

  It was believable now. She bolted back into 7A, slamming the door behind her. Something hurled itself against the panels – the door shook – there was a sound of tearing wood. She pictured those curved claws sawing through the barrier, perhaps in a matter of minutes. Or less.

  In 7A, the doorbell rang.

  Pen raced to open it, forgetting the butler had a key. ‘Quorum –’

  A boy she had never seen before was standing on the steps. She took in very little about his appearance except that he was black, a year or two older than her, and wore a red-and-white striped rugger shirt. From the back of the house she could hea
r the unmistakable sound of a door being forced open. The horror must have showed on her face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘There’s a velociraptor –’

  ‘There’s a what??’

  ‘– in the utility room!’

  The boy – reckless, curious, or merely incredulous – entered the hall from the front just as the dinosaur entered it from the back. The animal was confused by its unfamiliar surroundings, the alien smells, the strange prey with its oddly-coloured hide. It paused for an instant, head swaying from side to side, getting its bearings, checking out Pen’s position and that of the newcomer. The boy returned its stare with a dropped jaw. Then the velociraptor began to advance.

  As long as she lived – if she lived – Pen knew she would never forget what happened next.

  The boy stepped between her and the monster. He took something out of his pocket, tried to ward off the slashing claw with one arm, reached out... There was a flash, and a buzzing noise. The dinosaur collapsed with a crash.

  Felinacious emerged belatedly from the sitting room and hissed at it.

  Pen said: ‘Is that a stun-gun?’

  ‘Yeah.’ They were both panting, breathless with the aftermath of fear.

  ‘How come you’ve got a stun-gun?’

  ‘My nan got it. She’s afraid of being raped.’

  ‘Your nan is afraid of being raped?’ Under the circumstances, it was trivial, but the remark popped out before Pen could stop herself.

  ‘Look, ever since she lost weight she thinks she’s Beyoncé, okay? She says she’s got a stalker. Then she gave it to me. She says my mate Derren’s in a gang.’

  ‘Stun-guns are illegal.’ It wasn’t what she wanted to say, but habit took over.

  ‘You complaining?’