Marcus Sedgwick - The Book of Dead Days

© 2003

The Dead Days? Have you ever felt the stillness of that strange, quiet time between Christmas and the New Year?

In ancient Egypt the calendar was made from 12 months of 30 days each, giving 360 days to the year. The Egyptians were smart enough to know there were actually around 365 days in each solar year. They reconciled this difference with a story in which Thoth, their ibis-headed god of wisdom, wins five extra days from the reigning gods in a game of dice and gives them to the goddess of the night, and thus to the people too. These days did not belong to any of the Egyptian months and were felt to be outside normal time. The Aztecs, using a similar calendrical system, also added five days, but feared them as days of bad omen and dubbed them Dead Days.

Of course, these days bore no relation to Christmas, but I’ve always felt that the time between Christmas and New Year’s is outside the hurly-burly of the rest of the year, and so I fixed the Dead Days there. The dates of Christmas and New Year’s have varied widely through time and from culture to culture. A quick count will show you there are six days between the two modern feasts, though this story is set in the five culminating on New Year’s Eve.

The time? Somewhere in the second half of the eighteenth century, with one foot in the superstitious ancient world and one in the rational modern one-when science was starting to become the rigorous discipline it is now, but when, to the uninitiated, early experiments with electricity and magnetism must have seemed more like magic than reality. And at a time when every day was still known as its own saint’s feast day.

The place? An old city, once magnificent but now decaying, with echoes of many beautiful cities: Paris, with its miles of hidden catacombs; Bologna, with canals hidden under the modern city streets; and Krakow, with twisting alleys, crowded cemeteries and, at Christmas, lots and lots of snow.

The Dead Days are waiting.

I’d like to thank Wendy Lamb and her team, as well as the wonderful people at Orion, especially Fiona, whose help has been invaluable on more than one occasion.

Marcus Sedgwick

Horsham, West Sussex

31 December 2002

Darkness.

Two hours to midnight. Boy sat crouched in the box.

As usual, his legs were going to sleep under him, tucked up in the tiny dark space hidden inside the cabinet. Above him, he could hear Valerian going through his routine. Boy could only hear his voice as if from far off, and tried to work out where he had got to. It wouldn’t do to miss the cue; it wouldn’t do at all. But Boy knew he didn’t really need to worry. He used to try to count his way to it but had always got lost somewhere, and anyway, there was no need-the cue was obvious enough.

Boy tried to shift his weight ever so slightly, attempting to get some feeling back in his legs. It was no good. The box had been designed specifically for him, and Valerian had seen to it that there was no more than half an inch to spare in any direction.

Suddenly there was a solid thump on the top of the box: the first cue, which meant “Get ready, Boy.”

Boy heard a noise from the audience, faintly. He couldn’t see them, but he knew what the noise meant. It was a murmur of expectation. Valerian had just stepped onto the cabinet and was even now whipping the crowd into greater excitement as he outlined the extraordinary nature of the sight they were about to see.

Boy even caught some of Valerian’s words through the hefty oak panels of the cabinet.

“… most miraculous… feat of obscure…”

Oh-ho! thought Boy. That means we’re nearly there.

“… the Man in Two Halves Illusion…”

He readied himself, flexing his toes inside the boots, three sizes too big for him. Thump! Thump!

The cue! Boy went to stamp his legs out through the hinged flap at the end of the box but was suddenly hit by a powerful cramp. His toes curled painfully under him and he instantly felt sick. If he were to ruin it…

Desperately he tried to kick again. Still the cramp ate up his legs like a snake, biting, making him unable to move them.

Thump! Thump!

Valerian was getting cross. Boy shuddered as thoughts of what he might do to him passed through his mind. He made one last effort and shoved again. At last his legs responded and he stuck them out of the end of the box, wearing the huge boots identical to the ones Valerian was wearing.

Now, straightened out, Boy waved his legs a little. He knew this would be safe, because he was supposed to wiggle them at this point, to show they were real. They were supposed to be Valerian’s, hence the matching boots.

As Valerian had got into the front half of the box, Boy’s legs had not appeared where they should have done and the illusion must have been in danger. But Boy seemed to have got away with it. Now that his legs were sticking through the flap, the pain began to ease a bit. He got a little more air and could hear better too.

Valerian shouted, “Behold!”

Boy felt his box start to move stage left. He heard the audience gasp as they at last understood what was happening.

“Look!” he heard someone cry. “He’s gone in half!”

It was true. From where the audience sat, they could see Valerian’s head and shoulders projecting from one half of the box, while his legs moved away from him in the other part of the contraption. The single cabinet had become two boxes, running on metal tracks. There was a clear space between the two parts of his body, and the crowd went wild.

“It’s true!” shouted a woman’s voice, somewhere near the front.

Of course it was not true. It was an illusion. Although Boy knew full well what the audience were thinking as the halves of Valerian’s body went in opposite directions across the stage, he knew how it was done. He was, after all, in on the trick. Boy felt himself smile as the crowd began to applaud wildly. Then he remembered the fiasco with his legs, and the smile faded. What would Valerian say?

Sober again, Boy prepared to pull himself back in at the right time. He could sense the automatic mechanism of the contraption beginning to turn the heavy brass cogs in reverse as the two halves of the box drew back together. He felt the boxes bump gently. His cue. He panicked and whipped his legs back inside just as Valerian stepped out of the other half of the device. Boy timed it perfectly and now, cramped back in the box, breathed as deep a breath as he could. He felt the machine being trundled offstage. The stage was being cleared for the finale while Valerian took the applause of the crowd.

Offstage, Boy pushed the lid of the cabinet up with his head until there was enough space to lift it with his hands.

“Out you come, then,” said a stagehand.

Boy took the man’s hand gratefully, his legs still not working properly. He climbed out and stood for a moment in the wings, rubbing his sore calves and watching as Valerian began his grand finale.

The Fairyland Vanishing Illusion.

Boy was not needed for this part of the act. He watched Valerian from the side of the stage.

How many times has he done this? Boy wondered. He had forgotten how long he had been working for Valerian, but it was years. Boy could only guess at how many thousand times he had hidden in boxes, pulled levers, set off thunder flashes and opened trapdoors. He helped Valerian with trick after trick, week after week in the Great Theater, which was as much of a home as anywhere to Boy. In recent years he had probably spent as much time in the theater as he had in his room in Valerian’s house, known as the Yellow House, back in the Old Quarter.