The Book of Dead Days Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  December 27 - The Day of the Clever Contributor

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  December 28 - The Day of Worst Fortune

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  December 29 - The Day of Unnatural Developments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  December 30 - The Day of Unfailing Coincidence

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  December 31–New year’s Eve - The Day of Absolute Promotion

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  End of Book One

  About the Author

  Also by Marcus Sedgwick

  Copyright Page

  For Julian and Isabel

  Author’s Note

  The Dead Days? Have you ever felt the stillness of that strange, quiet time between Christmas and the New Year?

  In ancient Egypt the calendar was made from 12 months of 30 days each, giving 360 days to the year. The Egyptians were smart enough to know there were actually around 365 days in each solar year. They reconciled this difference with a story in which Thoth, their ibis-headed god of wisdom, wins five extra days from the reigning gods in a game of dice and gives them to the goddess of the night, and thus to the people too. These days did not belong to any of the Egyptian months and were felt to be outside normal time. The Aztecs, using a similar calendrical system, also added five days, but feared them as days of bad omen and dubbed them Dead Days.

  Of course, these days bore no relation to Christmas, but I’ve always felt that the time between Christmas and New Year’s is outside the hurly-burly of the rest of the year, and so I fixed the Dead Days there. The dates of Christmas and New Year’s have varied widely through time and from culture to culture. A quick count will show you there are six days between the two modern feasts, though this story is set in the five culminating on New Year’s Eve.

  The time? Somewhere in the second half of the eighteenth century, with one foot in the superstitious ancient world and one in the rational modern one—when science was starting to become the rigorous discipline it is now, but when, to the uninitiated, early experiments with electricity and magnetism must have seemed more like magic than reality. And at a time when every day was still known as its own saint’s feast day.

  The place? An old city, once magnificent but now decaying, with echoes of many beautiful cities: Paris, with its miles of hidden catacombs; Bologna, with canals hidden under the modern city streets; and Krakow, with twisting alleys, crowded cemeteries and, at Christmas, lots and lots of snow.

  The Dead Days are waiting.

  I’d like to thank Wendy Lamb and her team, as well as the wonderful people at Orion, especially Fiona, whose help has been invaluable on more than one occasion.

  Marcus Sedgwick

  Horsham, West Sussex

  31 December 2002

  December 27

  The Day of the Clever Contributor

  1

  Darkness.

  Two hours to midnight. Boy sat crouched in the box.

  As usual, his legs were going to sleep under him, tucked up in the tiny dark space hidden inside the cabinet. Above him, he could hear Valerian going through his routine. Boy could only hear his voice as if from far off, and tried to work out where he had got to. It wouldn’t do to miss the cue; it wouldn’t do at all. But Boy knew he didn’t really need to worry. He used to try to count his way to it but had always got lost somewhere, and anyway, there was no need—the cue was obvious enough.

  Boy tried to shift his weight ever so slightly, attempting to get some feeling back in his legs. It was no good. The box had been designed specifically for him, and Valerian had seen to it that there was no more than half an inch to spare in any direction.

  Suddenly there was a solid thump on the top of the box: the first cue, which meant “Get ready, Boy.”

  Boy heard a noise from the audience, faintly. He couldn’t see them, but he knew what the noise meant. It was a murmur of expectation. Valerian had just stepped onto the cabinet and was even now whipping the crowd into greater excitement as he outlined the extraordinary nature of the sight they were about to see.

  Boy even caught some of Valerian’s words through the hefty oak panels of the cabinet.

  “. . . most miraculous . . . feat of obscure . . .”

  Oh-ho! thought Boy. That means we’re nearly there.

  “. . . the Man in Two Halves Illusion . . .”

  He readied himself, flexing his toes inside the boots, three sizes too big for him. Thump! Thump!

  The cue! Boy went to stamp his legs out through the hinged flap at the end of the box but was suddenly hit by a powerful cramp. His toes curled painfully under him and he instantly felt sick. If he were to ruin it . . .

  Desperately he tried to kick again. Still the cramp ate up his legs like a snake, biting, making him unable to move them.

  Thump! Thump!

  Valerian was getting cross. Boy shuddered as thoughts of what he might do to him passed through his mind. He made one last effort and shoved again. At last his legs responded and he stuck them out of the end of the box, wearing the huge boots identical to the ones Valerian was wearing.

  Now, straightened out, Boy waved his legs a little. He knew this would be safe, because he was supposed to wiggle them at this point, to show they were real. They were supposed to be Valerian’s, hence the matching boots.

  As Valerian had got into the front half of the box, Boy’s legs had not appeared where they should have done and the illusion must have been in danger. But Boy seemed to have got away with it. Now that his legs were sticking through the flap, the pain began to ease a bit. He got a little more air and could hear better too.

  Valerian shouted, “Behold!”

  Boy felt his box start to move stage left. He heard the audience gasp as they at last understood what was happening.

  “Look!” he heard someone cry. “He’s gone in half!”

  It was true. From where the audience sat, they could see Valerian’s head and shoulders projecting from one half of the box, while his legs moved away from him in the other part of the contraption. The single cabinet had become two boxes, running on metal tracks. There was a clear space between the two parts of his body, and the crowd went wild.

  “It’s true!” shouted a woman’s voice, somewhere near the front.

  Of course it was not true. It was an illusion. Although Boy knew full well what the audience were thinking as the halves of Valerian’s body went in opposite directions across the stage, he knew how it was done. He was, after all, in on the trick. Boy felt himself smile as the crowd began to applaud wildly. Then he remembered the fiasco with his legs, and the smile faded. What would Valerian say?

  Sober again, Boy prepared to pull himself back in at
the right time. He could sense the automatic mechanism of the contraption beginning to turn the heavy brass cogs in reverse as the two halves of the box drew back together. He felt the boxes bump gently. His cue. He panicked and whipped his legs back inside just as Valerian stepped out of the other half of the device. Boy timed it perfectly and now, cramped back in the box, breathed as deep a breath as he could. He felt the machine being trundled offstage. The stage was being cleared for the finale while Valerian took the applause of the crowd.

  Offstage, Boy pushed the lid of the cabinet up with his head until there was enough space to lift it with his hands.

  “Out you come, then,” said a stagehand.

  Boy took the man’s hand gratefully, his legs still not working properly. He climbed out and stood for a moment in the wings, rubbing his sore calves and watching as Valerian began his grand finale.

  The Fairyland Vanishing Illusion.

  Boy was not needed for this part of the act. He watched Valerian from the side of the stage.

  How many times has he done this? Boy wondered. He had forgotten how long he had been working for Valerian, but it was years. Boy could only guess at how many thousand times he had hidden in boxes, pulled levers, set off thunder flashes and opened trapdoors. He helped Valerian with trick after trick, week after week in the Great Theater, which was as much of a home as anywhere to Boy. In recent years he had probably spent as much time in the theater as he had in his room in Valerian’s house, known as the Yellow House, back in the Old Quarter.

  Boy decided to watch the grand finale from the front of the theater, but not with the audience. He had a special place, and he wanted to be as far away as he could when Valerian came offstage.

  He made his way past the painted canvas scenery drops and ropes and wires that cluttered the world just beyond the view of the public, pushing past hands and other performers. Briefly, he glanced at Snake-girl, who sat braiding her hair in a corner, then rounded a corner and bumped straight into someone.

  It was Willow, the girl who helped Madame Beauchance, a rather fat singer, into her costumes. Willow was just like her name, thin and wan. Madame had joined the theater about a year ago, and Willow had immediately been made her servant. Boy had only spoken to Willow properly once, though. Madame had been screaming for hot water in her dressing room, and Boy had given Willow a freshly boiled jug he was taking to Valerian. Afterward he didn’t know why he’d done it, and he’d got in trouble with Valerian over it too.

  “Can’t you look where you’re going?” Willow said, then saw who it was.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she added, and rushed past before Boy could say anything. Fetching something for Madame, no doubt. Her mistress was difficult, though nothing like Valerian was to him. No one was like Valerian.

  “Sorry,” said Boy, but she had gone.

  Boy moved on. He had other things to worry about. He knew something was going on. Something with his master. Valerian had always been erratic, sour-tempered and unpredictable. Violent.

  Now he was these things, but something else as well that Boy had never seen before. He couldn’t quite put it into words, but if he had really thought about it he might have realized that Valerian was preoccupied. Worried. Maybe even scared. But it would never have occurred to Boy that Valerian could be scared. It was Boy who did the being scared and the worrying—always waiting to get a hiding for any slight mistake he made.

  He headed for the stairs, where a group of musicians blocked the way.

  “You all done for tonight, Boy?” asked the violinist, an oldish man with a bent nose.

  Boy didn’t answer, but forced a smile and squeezed past.

  “Poor monkey,” he heard another of them say as he made his way to the secret gallery in the “gods” above the highest row of boxes. A tiny staircase led almost up to the roof space and opened onto a tiny corridor. He wasn’t really allowed in the box. No one was. It was a secret place that only Korp, the director of the Great Theater, was supposed to know about, though in fact everyone knew it was there.

  The door was locked, but Boy took a piece of metal from his pocket and flicked the three tumblers of the lock in no time at all. He had learned one or two things from Valerian in their time together. In fact, apart from what he’d picked up living on the streets, most of what Boy knew about anything had been taught him by Valerian.

  He dropped down the couple of feet into the box. There was the little stool covered in red velvet and the small hollow table inside which Boy knew was a bottle of the director’s favorite schnapps. In the front of the box was a small window. Boy carefully lifted the blind that covered the glassless hole, and peered forward. The glow from the footlights sparkled in his eyes.

  Boy knew a lot about Valerian’s tricks. He helped perform many of them and helped assemble others. But the grand finale was something very different. So spectacular was this illusion that Valerian was known throughout the whole City for it. It was probably for this trick alone that the Great Theater was still in business.

  The theater lay in the heart of what had once been the most glamorous part of the City, the Arts Quarter, now fallen into decadence and ruin. The other acts that performed there were by and large terrible. The crowds would eat and drink and talk and laugh throughout the evening, paying little or no attention to what passed onstage. They had come for one thing: the Fairyland Vanishing Illusion. Many came night after night. Others, new arrivals in town, travelers from distant parts, were about to see it for the first time.

  Boy knew nothing of the workings of this trick. He had seen it a thousand times, maybe more, and still marveled every time. He supposed that it was too valuable, too extraordinary or too complicated for Valerian to tell anyone how it worked.

  By the time Boy got up to the box, Valerian was already well into the piece. Boy craned his neck so that his nose was projecting a little through the view hole.

  The Illusion featured a short and frankly stupid play about a drunkard who stumbles across a gathering of pixies dancing on the mountainside. They disappear back to fairyland, but the man overhears their secret words and follows them. He captures one of the little people and brings him back to the human world, determined to make his fortune with the fairy.

  Valerian was reaching the climax of the show. He moved to the mouth of a cabinet built into a tree trunk, stage right. Stage left was an identical affair. He was acting without joy or passion. He knew he didn’t even have to try to inject any excitement into the audience. They were already beside themselves with anticipation.

  Boy watched him carefully. Something was wrong— Valerian seemed even more uninterested than usual. He was impatient, eager to get it done with. A note had been delivered to Valerian just before the show. Did his strange mood have anything to do with that? Valerian had grown somber as he’d read.

  Onstage, Valerian spoke the lines as he had many times before.

  “What did those little people say?” he asked, staring at the ceiling, addressing no one in particular. “Aha! I have it!”

  He stepped into the tree-trunk cabinet.

  “Ho! And away to fairyland!”

  And he vanished. No more than half a second later there was wisp of smoke from the second tree trunk and he reappeared, holding a tiny humanlike figure cupped in his hands. It seemed to be alive. It wriggled in his hands and you would swear you could hear a little voice coming from it. It appeared to be dressed in leaves and flowers. It could have been male or female, but it was certainly a fairy.

  Then, just as Valerian, playing the drunkard, appeared to have achieved his goal, there was a double flash of lightning, for a split second the fairy seemed to grow to the size of a man and then both the fairy and Valerian vanished, back to fairyland.

  The crowd erupted into huge cheers and shouts of delight.

  Boy sat back on the red velvet stool and felt something dig into his back. He looked round and jumped out of his skin. Valerian sat behind him, glowering.

  “You, Boy,” he said, �
��have let me down.”

  2

  “Name the five principles of Cavallo,” Valerian snapped.

  They hurried through the dark streets of the City—the vast, ancient City that sprawled away into the darkness around them in all its rotting magnificence, a tangled mess of grand streets and vulgar alleys, spent and decrepit. Fat houses squatted on either side of them like wild animals lurking in the gloom.

  The City. Once it had been the capital of a powerful empire, which now only existed in the peculiar mind of Frederick, the octagenarian Emperor, shut away somewhere behind the high walls of the Palace.

  The Emperor’s warped memories were utterly unknown to Boy. His world began and ended with Valerian. As the two of them made their way along a particularly horrid street called Cat’s End, the midnight bells began to strike. The twenty-seventh of December had begun.

  Valerian strode a pace ahead of Boy, but held his coattails to pull Boy half running, half stumbling along behind. And he was testing Boy in mind as well as body.

  “Well?” he barked.

  “Mystery,” Boy panted as they sped along. “Mystery and preparation and . . . sorry.”

  He stumbled on a cobblestone. Valerian dragged him, practically in the air, around a corner and into a side street. A shortcut home.

  “What?” yelled Valerian. “Mystery and preparation and what?”

  “Direction?”

  “Misdirection, you goat!”

  “Misdirection,” said Boy, and then before Valerian had a chance to shout again, “and practice and skill. Natural skill,” he added hurriedly.

  Valerian grunted in satisfaction, but didn’t slow the pace. Boy stumbled after him, pulled sideways by the tails of his coat.

  Up in the secret box after the show, Valerian had glared at Boy for a good long while, so there had been no doubt that Boy was in a great deal of trouble. Then he had dragged him out of the box, along the tiny passageway, down the stairs and out into the night without even bothering to collect the money for the performance. Boy had hardly had time to think, but a question was bothering him. Badly. It had taken him at least three minutes to get from the side of the stage up to the box. It had taken Valerian no more than a couple of seconds. At least, that was how it seemed, but Boy knew from experience not to trust anything he saw Valerian do. You could never be sure, not really.