Stefan Bachman - The Peculiar

If Bartholomew lived long enough, he would tell her father. He would find him and tell him how much Melusine had loved him in her last days, how much she had wanted to be home again.

Bartholomew knelt down next to Jack Box. He almost reached out and touched him. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. He knotted his fist, and said, “You don’t have to listen to Mr. Lickerish anymore. You don’t have to hurt people. Do you know where my sister is? Could you take me to her? Please, sir. Please help me save her?”

For a moment Jack Box said nothing. His face was lost in the seething mass of hides and tails. The rats seemed to sense something was wrong. They were crawling over each other, eyes rolling back in their heads, yellow teeth chattering. For a moment Jack Box said nothing. Then, his voice muffled, “Why should I help you? Why should I help anyone now?”

Bartholomew dug his nails into his palms. “Because. .” he stammered, but he didn’t have an answer. Not then. All he could think of was Hettie, and her hand in his, and her stupid, unsnippable branches. “Just please help me? Please, please won’t you help?”

A clank sounded in the hall and the hatch in the floor began to open, tearing a gaping hole in the warmth. Wind flew into the room, whistling around Bartholomew’s ears. Then a door opened and closed in the corridor above. Footsteps beat the carpet.

Someone is coming. Bartholomew half rose, ready to run. We have to leave. We have to leave now.

But the rat faery only sat up a little and stared at Bartholomew, his black eyes pleading.

“You have to help me!” Bartholomew repeated desperately. “I don’t know why, you just have to ! My sister is going to die! Please won’t you help? ”

Jack Box looked away. The rats were stirring into a frenzy, but the faery’s face had gone very still, almost calm.

“No,” he said. The little word dropped like stone from his mouth. And then, dragging himself to the edge of the hatch, he slipped over it into the night. Bartholomew did not watch him fall. He stopped his ears against the cries of the rats and turned his face to the wall.

Mr. Lickerish had finished his apple. He set the core down and began picking out the seeds, placing them in a neat row on top of his desk. When he had completed the task to his satisfaction, he rang a servant’s bell and ordered a glass of milk from the hunchbacked gnome. The milk arrived in due time, but instead of drinking it, Mr. Lickerish swept the apple seeds into his palm and dropped them into the glass. Then he went to the window and looked out, black satin cuffs crossed behind his back.

A faint tinkling made him turn. The room was empty. A clockwork bird stared out at nothing with its beady eyes. In the cup, a film had formed on top of the milk the way it always does when milk is mildly fresh. As Mr. Lickerish watched, the film turned into a skin. The skin grew thicker. And all of a sudden the glass tipped over and a blue-white gobbet of milk plopped out onto the smooth top of the desk. It jiggled toward the edge. Mr. Lickerish caught it in his hand and held it up to his face. His mouth stretched across his sharp teeth in a gleaming smile. Faintly he could see the apple seeds in the center of the milk, little veins and lungs and a heart all sprouting out from them. Then two seeds popped forward as its eyes, and it tottered up on a pair of stemlike legs. It had a huge mouth that hung open, wide and bare and empty.

“Charming,” Mr. Lickerish said, still smiling. “You will be my eyes for a little while, imp. Hurry down to the warehouse and keep watch. Whatever you see, I will see, and whatever I say, you are to say. Do you understand that?”

The gobbet of milk stared at Mr. Lickerish, its apple-seed eyes somewhat mournful. It nodded slowly. Then it hopped down from the faery’s hand and wobbled off across the floorboards toward the door.

Mr. Jelliby found Bartholomew in the airship’s hall, trying to hide himself under the carpets. The hatch was open. It was a clear, cold night, and the city spread away forever. The streets made a glowing spider’s web, Mayfair and High Holborn bright with the fierce lights of flame faeries, while the poorer streets were only gaslit threads, dim and flickering, or not lit at all. The river cut it all in half, sluggish and black, broken only by the occasional lantern of a corpse boat.

“Bartholomew! What are you doing? Get away from the edge!” Mr. Jelliby hissed, tiptoeing across the hall. “The faery butler is with Mr. Lickerish as we speak. He has your sister, and he’s getting the potion and he’s going to take her down in the elevator.”

Bartholomew sat bolt upright. “Hettie? You saw her?”

“Yes! With my own eyes! But we must hurry.” He ran to the edge of the floor and reached out for the elevator, looking it over rapidly.

“There. See those metal bars underneath? We can squeeze down there, I think, and then leap out when the butler’s alone in the warehouse. Quick now! In with you.”

Without another word, Bartholomew scooted off the edge of the floor and onto the metal bars. The warmth of the hall was gone in an instant. Wind and frozen ash blew around him freely, but he barely noticed. Mr. Jelliby has found her. She is here and she is alive.

The space under the elevator was barely a foot high and utterly open. Only the widely set bars kept him from falling into the dark. It’s the luggage rack, he thought. It was where the trunks and hatboxes would have been packed had the dirigible been used for anything ordinary.

Mr. Jelliby dragged at the cable, and the elevator sank a foot. The luggage rack dropped below the lip of the hatch, hidden. Then he, too, swung down.

Not a moment too soon. Mr. Jelliby barely had time to arrange his arms and legs before the first tread of feet sounded on the stairs.

“Come on !” the faery butler’s whine drifted into the hall. “By stone, you are the most tiresome creature! The other nine weren’t half as bad.”

There was a scuffling sound as he pulled Hettie along and she hurried to match his pace. Then the elevator swayed as they stepped aboard. Bartholomew could see a little through the metal grille of the floor. He could just make out the shadows of Hettie’s bare feet, the great long soles of the faery butler’s shoes. And there was something else, too. Something small and round that never stayed still, and made an odd sound like water in a jug.

Bartholomew held his breath. Hettie was so close. Inches above him. He wanted to climb up and grab her, and tell her that he had found her and they’d be going home soon. Only a little longer. .

The elevator began to descend, creaking down through the night. The only light came from the faery butler’s green eye. Mr. Jelliby prayed he wouldn’t look down. He would see them instantly if he did, lying there under the floor. His mechanical eye would pierce metal and darkness and-

The faery lifted his nose and sniffed the air. Mr. Jelliby stiffened.

“I smell rain,” the faery said, looking at Hettie curiously. “Rain and mud.”

Hettie said nothing.

The faery butler tapped his fingers against the railing. “It has not rained in London for days.”

For several heartbeats the only sound was the wind. Then, without warning, a jagged blade descended from the faery butler’s sleeve, and he slashed it down through the air, driving it through the floor. Its tip came to a halt, ringing, inches from Bartholomew’s eye. He screamed.

“Barthy?” Hettie cried, pressing her face to the grating.

Mr. Jelliby dragged himself off the bars and hung from them, legs flailing forty feet above the ground. “Get out! Get out, Bartholomew, he’ll kill you!”