Stefan Bachmann - The Whatnot

He was just turning the corner at Glockner’s Inn, shuffling along the edge of the gutter, when he saw the girl.

His heart stopped, just like that, as if it had frozen stiff.

She was standing about ten feet away, staring at him. But she was not in the street. Not with the cobbles under her feet and the houses and blackened chimneys of London at her back. Behind her were trees and snow. Moonlight.

“Wot the—” Pikey breathed. In all the time he’d had the clouded eye, he had only ever seen three things through it: a long wooden staircase with a guttering light at its top; a gray-and-peeling face, leaning close, leering with red-coal eyes; and snowy woods. There had never been a girl before. Never a child in only a nightgown, standing barefoot in the snow as if it were nothing.

The girl took a step toward him.

Pikey’s brain made an odd, twisting lurch as it tried to grasp what was happening. She seemed to be above him, and he on the ground, looking up. For a second he was not sure if he was standing or falling.

He leaned against the inn’s wall, head down, gasping lungsful of frigid air. When he looked up she was hurrying toward him, her nightgown flapping. She was so pale. She seemed to glow in the darkness. One of her nightgown sleeves was crumpled and pulled up her arm, and Pikey saw that the skin underneath was twined with red lines, like tattoos. He jerked back. She stooped down.

It made him sick all over again. His stomach lurched, and he shut his eyes as hard as he could. When he opened them, she was so close he could see every pore and vessel in her papery skin. She lifted one finger and brushed it over his clouded eye.

He tried to dodge her, scraping his back on the rough stones. He tried to swat her, to tell her to keep her bleeming fingers to herself, but his hand only swept the smoky air of the street.

She was just a child, he saw, even younger than he was. She had twigs for hair, and eyes so large and black they looked like drops of ink, and—

Oh no.

He knew what she was. Not a human child.

“Get out of here,” he said, his voice strangled. “Shove off, before—”

Please, please don’t let a leadface come now. …

The girl reached for him again. He could actually feel her thumb this time, flat against his eye. He lurched forward, fists swinging.

Her hand was still on his eye, but she was not there, not in London. She did not flinch at his onslaught, and though he moved forward several steps she was still in front of him. He gritted his teeth, shouldered toward her, tried to push her. She didn’t even blink.

Then, somewhere behind her in the dark wood, Pikey saw movement, a silent rushing. The girl’s face wrinkled with fear. Her other hand came up, little fingers reaching straight for his eye.

The moon vanished. So did the trees. He was alone again in a dark and empty street.

Pikey ran all the way back to the chemist’s alley, ignoring the pain in his legs. He crawled into his hole and wrapped himself in his old blankets. The air was cold enough to freeze the skin off his cheeks, but he barely felt it. He lay in the dark, shivering and worrying. When he could bear to, he opened his clouded eye and looked out.

The girl wasn’t there anymore. Neither were the woods. All he saw was blackness and the occasional slash of light. He put his hand over the eye again and tried to think of stoves and hams and happy, smiling faces.

Finally he slept.

A sound in the alley woke him. For an instant a deep pit opened in his stomach and he was hearing the feet again, tap-tap, tap-tap , limping toward him across the cobbles. He smelled the frost and the moss and the haunting burned-sugar scent of caramel apples. He saw the blood. …

He shook himself and sat up an inch, careful not to knock his head on the boards. It was still night. He couldn’t have been asleep more than an hour. Keeping his blanket around his ears, he peeked out of the hole. He slept in his clothes of course, in his cap and jacket and three pairs of socks. But he had been cold before he had even woken up. Now he was freezing. All the warm, foul-smelling air slipped from under his bedding in a flicker of steam.

He scanned the alley, shivering. The cobbles were slick with ice, the air clear and frozen. He waited, straining to see what might have woken him.

Suddenly the dark lantern swung over the chemist’s door.

Pikey started. Something was there. Not slow and limping, but quick, moving in bursts of speed, a ragged shadow on the wall, then closer, at the newel stone of the shop.

He jerked himself back into his hole. He opened his mouth, ready to shout for the chemist, his wife, the lock picker up the lane, everyone in Spitalfields. But then he saw it.

It was the faery. The faery from Wyndhammer House. It came swooping up to the entrance of Pikey’s hole, inky feathers flowing behind it. It paused, its head snapping to and fro, sniffing. Then it focused on Pikey, and its mouth opened in a smile that was all needle teeth and sickly black tongue.

Pikey sat bolt upright, and this time he did knock his head against the ceiling.

“Boy,” it said. Not a question anymore. A confirmation. It had found him.

“What is it you want ?” Pikey hissed, shooting a look at the chemist’s door. The orange light was gone from around it. That meant the fire was out. That meant it was well past four in the morning. The chemist would be waking soon.

“Go away!” Pikey flapped his hands at the creature. “ Shoo! If someone sees you here, I’m dead. We’re both dead, and it’ll be your fault.”

He thought of the leadfaces. The chemist with his blunderbuss, and the faery hunters with their mouths full of spikes. A horrid panic began to tighten around his lungs.

The faery didn’t move. It stood in the entrance to the hole, still smiling that ghastly, uneven smile.

“Look,” Pikey whispered, backing up into his blankets. “I helped you at that big house and that’s all fine now, all right? No debts. You don’t have to be visiting.” He lowered his voice even further. “A faery hunter’ll come. If someone sees you, he’ll come, and he’ll put you through a meat grinder. Faeries are banned in London. Banned!”

The faery cocked its head, still smiling. Then it opened one thin-fingered hand and held something out to Pikey.

It was pitch-black in Pikey’s hole. The lantern above the shop door had long gone out, but he didn’t need it. Because the faery held in its hand a gem, large as a goose’s egg, and it seemed to fill the freezing space with its own cold, gray light. Tendrils of silver filigree wrapped around it. Its insides were deep purple, veined and splintered. Its outside was smooth as glass.

Pikey stared at the gem. Oh, that’s worth a dozen pounds, that gleamer is. Or a hundred. He could buy a caramel apple with it. He could buy a bushel of caramel apples. He could march right up to one of those pretty painted carts with the steam curling off it and the apples behind the glass, and he could buy the whole thing, aprons and all.

Pikey reached out and ran a finger over the stone.

“Boy,” the faery said again, and this time it took Pikey’s hand and wrapped it around the gem. Pikey looked from stone to faery and back again. His heart was making odd little bumps against his ribs.

“It’s for me?” he breathed. He could already see it all: running away, finding someplace good, someplace where there were thick warm socks and a stove and people who didn’t only kick at him and shoo him away when he walked too close, and—

Coach wheels rattled in Bell Lane. Iron horseshoes hammered the cobbles. The faery’s smile vanished. It looked at Pikey an instant longer, its mirror-eyes wide and limpid. Then it whirled, black wings sweeping, and disappeared down the alley.