The Book of Dead Days Read online

  They moved on through the City, Valerian clutching Boy’s coattails, looking, from a distance, like some strange beast. They were in Gutter Street. Although there were no street signs in this part of the City (it was much too down-at-heel for refinements like that), nevertheless Boy knew where he was. They passed the Green Bird Inn. Boy had been hoping they might stop for Valerian to have a drink or two. Or more. Then he might have forgotten about Boy’s slipup. But he strode by without even a glance at the tavern. Boy gulped and staggered on.

  “All right then,” said Valerian. “And if you don’t observe the Five Principles you may as well just rely on luck, which is what you made us do tonight. Anyone half sober or with half a mind would have seen—”

  “I’m sorry,” said Boy.

  Valerian stopped suddenly and Boy ran into the back of him. He turned and looked down into Boy’s eyes.

  “Sorry.”

  “Well,” Valerian said, and his voice was suddenly quiet, “well, it’s not important. Really.”

  He dropped Boy’s coattails and began to head for home, still walking fast.

  Boy had been thrashed by Valerian before for much less than this. More confused than ever, he watched him go for a moment. Valerian’s tall figure, his longish gray hair flowing behind him, was about to disappear round another corner. Although Boy knew the area, he grew alarmed.

  Unpleasant things had been happening in the City recently. Even in the better areas, horror was not unknown. There had been a spate of terrible murders, and the inns, taverns, salons and courts were full of talk of these crimes. The murders were remarkable for their particularly gory nature: with the bodies sometimes drained of blood. There were rumors of the ghastly apparition responsible—“The Phantom.” There had also been a series of grave-robbings in some of the many cemeteries around the huge City. Many people thought the two were linked.

  “Hey!” Boy cried. “Wait for me!”

  It was deep into the night, and they were now in one of the worst parts of the City. Nearly home.

  3

  Korp, the director of the theater, began closing up. Half an hour ago he had finally managed to throw the last drunken idiot out, and before the man had even hit the mud of the alley Korp had slammed the door after him. He didn’t have to worry about being too nice to his customers. They would come night after night, as long as Valerian kept doing that thing about fairies.

  Director Korp sat for a while in his office, staring into space. He felt old and tired and fat, because he was. He daydreamed, remembering days when he had traveled the continent with the greatest show ever assembled. The show had included a giant, five midgets, a two-headed calf, a snake-woman, a disappearing lady, a levitating man, twin wild boys and many, many more. It was all far behind him, and though he missed the excitement of his youth, he had a theater to run now, and he would run it as best he could till the day he died.

  On the walls around him hung portraits of some of the stars who had appeared in his theater. Cavallo the Great, a legendary magician. There was Grolsch, a famous escapologist whose career had come to an untimely end one night when he failed to escape, and Bertrand Black, a bear-tamer who had had a similarly rapid demise on stage. But all the faces were from days long gone, when things had been different, more lucrative.

  Korp scratched his bald head for a minute or so, then, without looking down, put his hand into a drawer in the ornate desk at which he was sitting. He fumbled around, still without looking. He put his hand on his pistol, and shoved it aside. It wasn’t what he wanted.

  “Yeush!” he said, with a frown. “Where’s it gone?”

  Then he remembered the bottle he’d left in his “secret” box. Wearily he got to his feet and made his way down the darkened corridors backstage. As he passed one of the dressing rooms he noticed a light.

  “Who’s there?” he called.

  “Oh, Director,” said a voice from inside. “It is Madame.”

  He stuck his head around the door.

  “Ah!” he said. “Madame! Madame Beauchance! May I say how exquisitely you sang tonight!” He smiled a wide smile.

  Madame Beauchance appeared to ignore this compliment.

  “It will have to change,” she said.

  “Madame?”

  Now Korp noticed the girl, Beauchance’s assistant, kneeling at the singer’s feet and rubbing her ankles. The girl glanced up at him.

  “Madame means . . . ?” he began again.

  “I mean,” said Madame, not even looking at Korp, “that I will not continue to appear in an inferior position. To that prestidigitator.”

  Korp blinked.

  He felt tired. He wanted to be in bed with Lily curled up around his feet. Lily was his dog.

  “The magician,” whispered the girl, almost unheard.

  “Exactly!” cried Madame Beauchance.

  “Ah!” said Korp.

  Valerian.

  4

  A little after midnight.

  Boy had caught up with Valerian at the top of the next alley—a particularly nasty little gutter of a lane called Blind Man’s Stick, where the roof tiles of the buildings on either side were close enough to touch in places. Here and there it was possible to catch a glimpse of the night sky between them, but Boy was not interested in the stars. Not yet.

  He clung tightly to Valerian as they made their way quickly along the foul-smelling culvert. A minute later they emerged into a relatively wide street. An open drain ran down its middle. Valerian stepped across it in a single stride. Boy, small for his years, leapt the gap and slipped as he landed.

  He sat dazed in the stream, then, realizing where he was, leapt to his feet.

  “Oh!” he said. “Ugh!” His bottom half was covered in unnameable filth.

  “Ugh! Oh!”

  Valerian did not even glance back.

  Boy limped after him. They turned a corner and crossed a final street.

  Valerian stopped for a moment at a wrought-iron gate let into a high stone wall. He rattled one of the big keys from his pocket in the lock, and shoved the gate open. Only now did he look back long enough to be sure Boy had got through the gate with him; then he swung it shut and rattled its lock one more time.

  They were home.

  Boy stood dripping, trying not to smell himself as he waited in the small walled courtyard that lay between the iron gate and the front door.

  Valerian opened the door with another key from the huge bunch and went inside.

  The house seemed to tense as Valerian shut the door behind them both. He said nothing but stood absolutely still, as if waiting. Then he turned and looked at Boy.

  “What is that vile stench?” he barked.

  Boy shrugged.

  “I fell over . . .”

  “For God’s sake go and get clean! Then come to the tower.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Boy.

  He shuffled down one of the corridors that led off the hall.

  “And be quick. You have work to do!”

  5

  Boy ran along two corridors and then up three flights of rickety wooden stairs to his room. “Room” was perhaps something of an exaggeration. Room, or space, was one thing the place he slept in did not have. There was a mattress, which was actually quite comfortable though it was just a shame, thought Boy, that he did not get to spend more time on it. The smallest of openings (“window” would have been too grand a word for it) let in some light. This was in the sloping roof that made up one wall of his room. His bed lay against the single vertical wall, the entrance lurked in one of the triangular ends to the space, and in the opposite one was a tiny door behind which was an even tinier cupboard. Inside the cupboard were all Boy’s possessions. A spoon he’d found in the street and particularly liked. An old pair of boots that were too small and worn-out to wear anymore. A silk scarf he’d stolen from a rich lady but that was too nice to wear. Some small empty tins that nested inside each other and some pencils that Valerian had given him to practice his writing.
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  This was his room.

  The day Valerian had put him in it, Boy had come straight back down and eventually found Valerian sipping port in the library.

  “But I can’t stand up in it,” Boy had complained.

  “Then kneel down,” Valerian had said, and cuffed him round the ear.

  Boy was used to clambering about in small spaces. He seemed to spend his life doing it: onstage in coffinlike cabinets and offstage in the theater too, slithering along to Korp’s supposedly secret box.

  Small, cramped, dark spaces had filled Boy’s life. Long ago, he had even been hiding in one the day he was found by Valerian in an old church, St. Colette’s. Boy had crammed his narrow frame into a space at the top of a pillar in the nave.

  Since he had been working for Valerian he had not seen much daylight, never mind been allowed access to such private information as what time it was, or what day or month, for that matter. It was, in fact, March 6 when Valerian had found Boy, but only Valerian knew that.

  Valerian had probably chosen Boy, taken him on, because of his expertise at squeezing into ridiculously small spaces. Boy had forgotten much of that life; it was years ago, and unimportant compared to the business of every day. Every day, trying to avoid trouble, trying to avoid upsetting Valerian or getting something wrong and . . .

  He could remember one thing about the day they met. From the small gap made where the arch fluted away from the pillar, he had seen Valerian for the first time. He was deep in discussion with someone Boy now knew to be Korp, from the theater.

  Even then Valerian looked haggard and pale. His nose, long and fine, twitched in the dusty atmosphere of the old church. His skin was gray; so was his hair. He looked like a dead man walking. But his blue eyes were full of life, and his gaze roamed the dark spaces around him.

  Then Boy had heard his midnight rumble of a voice, so deep the stone he was clinging to shivered with it.

  “The doctor,” intoned Valerian, “pronounced me either dangerously sick or dead.”

  It was while trying to understand the strangeness of those words that Boy had lost his grip and plummeted to the flag floor of the church, where he lay looking up at Valerian, scratching his nose nervously, his short-cropped black hair sticking up at interesting angles the way it always did.

  “O-ho!” Valerian had said. “What have we here?”

  And so they had met.

  Now Boy pulled off his reeking clothes and stood naked in his dark space. He wondered what to do. The pile of clothes at his feet stank up at him. The bath was on the first floor. He had no other clothes, just a long winter overcoat.

  He sighed, picked up the pile of dirty clothes and the coat and crept back along the tube to the ladder.

  He dropped the clothes down to the third-floor landing, and followed them, shivering as he went.

  6

  Boy sat, scratching his nose. He was nervous because Valerian was pacing up and down the Tower room, crisscrossing the floor a dozen times, then pausing, staring into space for a short while before resuming his compulsive journey from the tall, narrow window in one of the sloping walls to the top of the spiral staircase, which was the only means of access by foot to the Tower. Large or heavy items had to be winched into the Tower through a trapdoor in the floor. Despite his nerves Boy noticed that, as usual, Valerian was perfectly happy to stride over the trapdoor. Boy knew the hatch was strong enough, but he would never walk over it, just in case. The trapdoor opened above the landing on the second floor; it was quite a drop.

  The rest of the Tower room was filled with clutter, paraphernalia, ephemera, equipment, things and mechanisms of all descriptions. Astrolabes, hourglasses, armillary spheres, sextants, alembics, retorts, reduction dishes, mortars with pestles, crystals, locks with and without keys, knives, daggers, wands of brass and wands of wood, pots, bottles and jars were just some of the odds and ends that lay scattered around the Tower.

  Boy knew what some of them were—things they used onstage. As for those he didn’t understand, Boy often wondered what they might be. Maybe they were more, and as yet untried, pieces of magical equipment for the act, though Boy had his doubts.

  There was the great leather armchair in which Valerian would sit, often in a pensive mood, brooding over Boy knew not what, and there were books. Piles and piles and piles of books of all shapes and sizes, leaning at precarious angles against walls and chairs, and, Boy assumed, about all sorts of things.

  Right in the middle of the Tower stood the machine. Boy always had trouble remembering what it was called. As he sat, waiting for Valerian to say or do something, he tried to remember its name. It had been designed and built by a man called Kepler, who was the closest thing Valerian had to a friend.

  Boy had never seen the machine working, but since it had been installed Valerian had spent even more time in the Tower. It had a strange Latin name, camera obscura.

  “Do you have no grasp of Latin at all?” Valerian had barked at him when the machine arrived. Boy had shaken his head.

  “Idiot boy! It means darkroom. Camera—room. Obscura—dark. See?”

  Boy had smiled nervously, pretending he understood.

  “Oh, why do I try to teach you anything!” Valerian had snapped, and sat back in his leather armchair.

  “Camera obscura.”

  Now Boy had remembered, he felt pleased with himself, and sat, wondering what on earth it was that the thing did.

  Valerian kept on walking. Boy sat in just his overcoat, scratching his nose harder.

  Then Valerian stopped.

  “I have a job for you,” he said.

  I was afraid you’d say that, thought Boy.

  “Yes,” said Boy. “Whatever I can do—”

  “You can be quiet!” Valerian snapped. “Just listen, then do. All right?”

  Oh, fine, thought Boy. He nodded.

  “I . . .” Valerian looked out of the window and across the nightscape of the City. “We . . . I . . . have a problem. Things are not what they were. Things . . . ,” he continued, “are . . . different now. Different. They have changed.”

  He stopped and looked at Boy.

  “Clear?” he barked.

  Boy nodded furiously.

  “Things have not happened as I had intended and now—and now time is not on our side. Far from it. We must act. Things have not gone . . . according to plan. So I have a job for you. Tonight.”

  “Tonight?” asked Boy, then shut his mouth quickly.

  “Yes. Tonight. The Trumpet. You know it?”

  Boy grimaced. The Trumpet was an inn about three miles away, near the river-docks. He had been there once, and on leaving had prayed that would be his last visit.

  “You must go and get something for me. Some information. Tonight. Good. Then go. Look for a big, ugly man. His name’s Green.”

  Boy nodded.

  “Say I sent you and tell him to give you the information. Then come back here. Do nothing else. Talk to no one else.”

  Boy hesitated. Did he dare risk a question? May as well.

  “Valerian,” he said carefully, “what is the information? How will I know what he tells me is right?”

  “You won’t!” snapped Valerian. “Just go! Be quick! And do not get it wrong!” he said coldly.

  Questions played across Boy’s face.

  “So what are you waiting for?” Valerian yelled.

  Boy jumped to his feet and fled down the stairs, scratching his nose.

  7

  By the time Korp got the fat singer out of his theater, and the girl too, it was late. There was no way he could move Valerian down the running order, but he had been pleased enough to get Madame from her previous permanent engagement in a foreign city. He sighed as he made his way up to his little loft. This was no mean feat, due to his considerable proportions and the narrowness of the passage.

  He made it to the door, and noticed immediately that it was not locked. Not only that, but the little door swung open on its concealed hinges.


  He cursed everyone in the Company, then collapsed into the box. Flicking the lid of the table with one foot, he sank his teeth into the cork of the bottle, removed it and then drank, long and deep.

  He sighed.

  Suddenly he heard a noise. It sounded like footsteps, coming from the stage. He leant forward, peering out through the view hole.

  Nothing. At least, it was too dark to see anything. He held his breath.

  Still nothing. Just as he had decided he was imagining it, he heard the sound again.

  He peered down into the gloom of the auditorium.

  His eyes grew wide.

  8

  Boy wasted half an hour while he wondered whether to risk asking Valerian what he should do about the fact that he had no dry clothes. No. Best not to bother him. Boy set out for the Trumpet dressed in his winter overcoat, with a piece of sacking for leggings, and his boots, which he had wiped as clean as he could.

  He left, slamming the door behind him. Boy was allowed no keys to the house, but Valerian had designed a special lock that operated automatically when the door was pulled shut. You needed no key to lock the door, just one to open it again. And this was not a lock that Boy could pick. He had tried. Shortly after Valerian had shown him how to pick simple locks with a twist of metal, Boy had found himself locked out.

  He had gone sneaking out one evening after the show, searching for an extra bite to eat. Food was never plentiful in the house—it didn’t interest Valerian greatly—and Boy was always trying to find more. Sometimes he could persuade one of the musicians from the theater to buy him a meal. This particular evening he’d dined thanks to the kindness of the old violinist. Hunger having driven him to the rendezvous, it was only upon his return that he realized he would not be able to get back into the house.

  Aha! Boy said to himself. Let’s see if I’ve got this right.

  He hunted round in his pockets for his lock-picking metal. It had once served as the artificial tendon in a metal hand that Valerian had dismantled. When he had grown bored with it, Boy had found it just right for the job of lock-picking.