Stefan Bachman - The Peculiar

His eyelids had gone heavy as lead. Inky spots bloomed across his vision. The last thing he remembered before his eye fell away from the keyhole and he slid to the floor was seeing the door to Hettie’s cupboard bed open a bit more. A dark and gnarled hand curled around from inside. Then Bartholomew’s head hit the floor like a stone and he was asleep.

It was the door that woke Bartholomew the next morning. Mother came into the room with a heap of yarn ends, and the worm-eaten wood knocked soundly against his head. He leaped up with a cry.

“Bartholomew Kettle, what are you doing on the floor ? Larks and stage lights, what’s your bed for? Why, I’ve got half a mind to-”

He didn’t stay to hear what exactly she had half a mind for. He was already running, out the door and up the stairs toward the attic, his legs pumping. Please be answered, please be answered . He had a creeping dread that the faery would just ignore him and he would find everything exactly the way he had left it.

But this time nothing was the way he had left it. His breath caught in his throat as he crawled under the gable. It looked as if a storm had blown through. His treasure box lay open, its contents strewn across the floor. The string of glass had been tied into a great knot so tight and complicated-looking that he knew he would never be able to undo it. The straw inside the mat had been torn out and stuffed between the tiles overhead. It sifted down now, gentle and golden in the light from the window. As for the faery dwelling, it was in ruins. The twigs he had spent so many months gathering had been trampled into the cracks in the floorboards. The cherries were gone. So was the spoon.

He took a few steps forward, his mind numb. Something crinkled underfoot. It was his letter, half hidden under a tangle of ivy. He knelt down and unfolded it shakily.

There was his writing, so crooked and bad he was ashamed of it now, and around it, little dirty fingerprints like those of a small child. On the other side, bleeding into the creamy paper like a stain, was a number. A single number. .

10

And that was all.

He stared at it, the straw drifting around him, and his mother’s words came unbidden into his mind. The words she had said that day, weeks ago, when the lady in plum had first swept into the shadows of Old Crow Alley and he had begged Mother to let him invite a faery.

And what if you get a bad one.

Twenty minutes after the faery gentleman prodded Melusine from the room like a mangy goat, Mr. Jelliby was still huddled inside the cabinet, eyes closed, blood thumping a tattoo inside his head. He felt he was going mad. His brain ached. He was almost certain it would come sliding out of his nose at any moment, and wriggle away across the floor on tentacle feet.

The lady in plum had seen him. She had looked straight into his eyes and she had not cried out, or alerted Mr. Lickerish to his presence as one would have expected from the henchwoman of a dreadful murderer. No, she had implored Mr. Jelliby for help. He could still see her lips forming the two words, the desperation in those bright and shining eyes.

Help me. She may as well have screamed it. But help her how? Who was she?

Slowly, cautiously, Mr. Jelliby opened the cabinet door and peeked out. The room looked ridiculously pleasant. Sunlight shone warmly through the windowpanes, making a pattern on the floor. All the gloom and darkness seemed to have gone out with the faery and the lady in plum.

Mr. Jelliby stepped down from the cabinet. His legs very nearly collapsed under him, and he had to cling to the woodwork for support, his knees all at angles.

He didn’t understand any of it. He didn’t understand where that leafy voice had come from, or all its talk of rose hips and numbers. But he couldn’t very well do nothing. After all, hadn’t the lady kept Mr. Lickerish from discovering him? He owed it to her to do something. He supposed he could rescue her. Very subtly, of course. There was no need to be all valiant about it. Ophelia would not approve of him gallivanting after foreign ladies in dirty dresses.

He took a few unsteady steps to get rid of the needles in his legs and then made for the door.

Melusine. What a strange, shadowy sort of name. Was it French? No, that was Melisande. He would have to look it up when he got home. Or ask Aunt Dorcas. She would know. She knew everything. Aunt Dorcas was his father’s sister, was married to a clerk, and lived in three rented rooms in Fitzrovia; because she was not nearly as well-to-do as she would have liked, she consoled herself by knowing all about everyone who was. For all practical purposes, Aunt Dorcas was an encyclopaedia of society in a frock. If there was a lady of any importance at all by the name of Melusine, Aunt Dorcas was sure to know.

Putting his head out the door, Mr. Jelliby looked first up the hall, then down the hall, then slipped out and hurried stiffly away. Drat, he thought miserably. Drat, bang, and smash it all. The Privy Council. It would have started ages ago. There was no chance of his entering unnoticed now.

He retraced his steps down the echoing corridors until he was back in the wing of the building where the council chamber was. The hall was bare of people now. He laid his hand on the brass handle, putting his head against the cool wood of the door. The droning voice of the Speaker sounded from the other side. One sentence. A pause. Three sentences and another pause. A chair creaked resoundingly. No fighting or arguing. Everyone was probably bored out of their minds. And wouldn’t it be an exciting diversion if that Arthur Jelliby fellow came in right now, late of course, probably having been detained by some dastardly bit of spying.

He couldn’t open that door. He couldn’t possibly. He would go to a coffeehouse and wait an hour behind a newspaper, and then he would go home and. . Ophelia would be unhappy with him. She would ask him how it had gone, and he would have to lie endlessly. But lying seemed vastly easier than this. He simply did not have the courage to open that door and walk past all those curious eyes. Besides, Mr. Lickerish would be there. How Mr. Jelliby could ever again sit coolly in the company of that villainous creature, he did not know.

An elegant gentleman wearing a hat made out of a giant toadstool turned into the hall, instantly cutting Mr. Jelliby’s conflict short. Without another thought, he walked away in the opposite direction.

Once free of Westminster’s walls, out in the whirling smoke and the sunshine, with the noise of the city all around, Mr. Jelliby felt almost weightless. He took a few deep breaths of the foul air. Then he headed up Whitehall, his fingers toying with the watch chain at his side.

He would need a plan if he were to find Melusine. She might have been abducted. Or become a victim of blackmail. Aunt Dorcas would definitely know of her then. Likely she would know either way, as the lady in plum had obviously been wealthy once. Not so long ago that velvet dress had been a marvelous sight, tailored to turn heads and slacken jaws. It must have cost a fortune.

He wandered into the labyrinth of shop stalls in Charing Cross, letting the vendors swarm around him. He barely noticed their trays of wind-up toys, their pretzels and sticky apples and hand mirrors that made you look prettier than you really were. People jostled him from all sides. Dirty faces blared up close and then fell away again, lost among the coattails. A very tiny faery woman with flowing green hair like river grass materialized in front of him. Strapped to her back was what looked like a bundle of canes.