Stefan Bachman - The Peculiar

The next alley was wider. Bartholomew had the briefest impression of people stopping their business to stare at them, a casement banging open, a butcher shop with offal running black into the gutter. Then they were out in the open again, out among the rattling trams and the crowds. Washing blew in the breeze overhead. The air was full of smoke and voices. Bartholomew thought he smelled boiled turnips, just like in the upstairs of their house in Old Crow Alley.

“We have to get to the train station!” Mr. Jelliby shouted, shoving his way between a peppermint-water seller and a faery with mouths where its eyes should have been. “Keep watch for a rickshaw, boy. There should be a blue chap somewhere hereabouts.”

Bartholomew peered out from between the strips of fabric. All around he saw nothing but legs. Legs in suits, legs in rags, legs in cotton, gray and dove colors, hurrying in every direction. So many people. The thought was accompanied by a stab of panic. Don’t get yourself noticed. Don’t let them see. They were all around, fingers and eyes so close and dangerous. And then, among the legs, he spotted a flicker of purple; plum-colored velvet clutched in a midnight-blue hand.

“She’s here,” Bartholomew hissed to Mr. Jelliby.

Mr. Jelliby stole a glance over his shoulder. Sure enough, there was the lady in plum, advancing steadily through the crowds. She stood a head above the endless flow of drab coats and hats, her shadowed face fixed. Stiff as a marionette she walked, no more than twenty paces behind them, and the gap was closing swiftly.

Without a word Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby slipped into a doorway and down a gray stone passage that looked out over a vegetable garden. The passage led into a bustling kitchen and then out again into a narrow shop-lined street. They paused to get their bearings.

“Why does she want to kill me?” Mr. Jelliby said, halfway between a whisper and a shout. He was turning circles on the cobbles, running his fingers through his hair. “She asked for my help! My help, for goodness’ sake! And now that I’ve finally found her she very well near murders me!”

Birds croaked along the roof gutter. Bartholomew was trying to find a way to lace up his boots.

“She asked for your help, did she?”

It was not Bartholomew who had spoken. Mr. Jelliby spun. There, not six steps away, stood the lady in plum, lips unmoving in her face. Slowly, she began to turn. The second face came into view, leering out at them through a curtain of hair. Black liquid dribbled down its chin from a horrid gash across its mouth.

“Melusine, you little traitor.” The voice was sickly sweet, but it shook, a razor thread close to snapping.

Mr. Jelliby gaped at the face. It stared back, cracked lips trembling, little black eyes twitching like beetles.

Bartholomew saw his chance. Sidestepping into the kitchen, he began to run again.

Mr. Jelliby watched him go, and his heart sank. There’s the gratitude for my charity, he thought bitterly. The little devil boy’s abandoned me. And then the lady in plum lifted a dainty finger, and Mr. Jelliby was swept off his feet and hurled across the street.

He smashed through a shoemaker’s window into the closed-up shop behind it. For an instant he floated in the center of the room, surrounded by boots and darkness. Then he was dragged out again, back across the street, smashing into a door so hard the metal studs split his skin.

Something snagged the fabric of his coat and rent it side to side. A shard of glass caught him in the hand. He saw the droplets of blood fly down through the air, ruby-red and glistening.

This was the end, then. The thought came to him idly as his head rapped against a painted signboard. This was the end. He would die now.

But something was happening in the street below. He heard commotion, a flurry of feet on the cobbles, followed by the desperate shout of, “There she is! Help him! Help him, she’s going to murder him!”

Boy? He forced himself to open his eyes. He was about eight feet above the ground, tangled in the metalwork of a blacksmith’s sign. Below, two uniformed officers stood, looking from him to the lady in plum and back again with the most befuddled expressions on their mustached faces. Their confusion seemed to last an eternity. Then they ran at the lady, arms outstretched, prepared to snatch her up like a child.

The lady in plum did not even flinch. Still holding Mr. Jelliby suspended with one hand, she swept the other one about and pointed it, palm outward, at one of the policemen. His face flattened, as if against glass, and he reeled back, clutching his nose. The other one was almost upon her when he too stopped short. He began marching like a wind-up soldier and walked straight into a wall.

Mr. Jelliby was airborne again. Something had pulled him from the sign, and he was flying, the howl of wings and wind filling his ears. He was dragged as high as the rooftops, then dropped, then snatched up again inches before he smashed to the cobbles. He swooped past the lady. His fingers brushed hair and shriveled skin.

He had only a split second. A split second to think and even less to strike, but he did. His fist caught the little face in the mouth. The lady in plum went reeling forward, and suddenly nothing was holding Mr. Jelliby anymore and he plummeted.

A frightful, pain-filled wheezing filled the alley. Mr. Jelliby collapsed into the gutter, and the wheezing went on and on, scratching at the inside of his bones. The lady began to whirl like a dancer on a stage. The edges of her skirt and the tips of her fingers were turning to black feathers, glistening and sparkling in the light. Then the officer with the bloody nose leaped toward her and seized her. The two figures struggled, black wings pouring around them. The lady shrieked and thrashed, but it was no use. The flapping weakened. And all in an instant it was over. The wings were gone. The rushing wind as well. The street became utterly still.

Bartholomew, the lady, the officers, all stood as if turned to stone. Then the noise of the city enveloped them. Shouts and steam horns-warm, familiar sounds.

The police were the first to move. They clapped metal cuffs across the lady’s wrists, and one of them began leading her away.

Mr. Jelliby crawled out of the gutter, aching and winded. Bartholomew made a move to disappear down the stone passageway, back into the close-packed crowds of the wider street, but the other officer caught him by the hood of his cloak.

“We’re not finished with you, hobgoblin. And I’m afraid with you neither, sir. It looks like we’ll all be taking a pleasant jaunt down to the station.”

The Bath Police of precinct eight were established in a squat brick building directly below the smoke and falling sparks of an iron bridge that vaulted up into the new city. The windows were sooty, the floors unswept, and everything from the file cabinets to the lampshades smelled strongly of opium.

Bartholomew and Mr. Jelliby were made to sit down in a cold little office, in the presence of an incessantly scowling secretary. Mr. Jelliby’s head flopped about now and again, and Bartholomew was afraid he might tip forward onto the floor. After a long while, a young woman in a red-and-white cap came in and bound up all Mr. Jelliby’s various wounds in clean gauze. She was cheerful enough to him, but she looked at Bartholomew nervously and always pulled her apron a little tighter around herself when she moved within reach, as if she were afraid Bartholomew was going to pluck at it. After a time, she left again. They waited another age. The secretary scowled at them. An old metal clock hung on the wall, and its clacking hands seemed to slow time down rather than count it.