Alan Bradley - I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

The fuses were now just below me at shoe level. With any luck, just one click would do the trick.

I ducked down and squeezed the spring handle.

Click!

And nothing more.

Too late now. My attacker was already clawing at the ledge like a maddened animal, preparing to haul itself up beside me. If that happened I was finished.

I swung at its goggled face with the torch—and missed!

The torch slipped out of my hand and fell, as if in slow motion, tumbling end over end down onto the roof, where it lay half buried in a snowdrift, shooting a crazily angled beam up into my attacker’s eyes, half blinding it.

I didn’t waste a single instant. I ducked down and flicked the igniter again.

Click! … Click! … Click! … Click! …

Infuriating! I should have coated the fuses with candle wax, but one can’t think of everything. Obviously, they had become damp.

The clutching gloves were coming uncomfortably closer. It was only a matter of time before they managed to seize my ankle and drag me down onto the roof.

With that disturbing thought in mind, I shimmied a little higher up the clay chimney pot, again working my way, as I climbed, fully round to the east side of the structure.

On the roof, my attacker followed me around, perhaps half expecting me to slip and fall. High above its horribly helmeted head, my every breath visible on the cold air, I clung like a limpet to the upper section of the chimney.

A moment passed—and then another.

I became aware of a growing warmness. Had the wind let up, or had summer suddenly come? Perhaps I was running a fever.

I thought of the thousand warnings of Mrs. Mullet.

“Sudden chills fills the ’ills,” she never tired of telling me. “The ’ills meanin’ them little ’ills in the churchyard, of course. Dress up warm, dear, if you want to get your ’undred years birthday letter from the king.”

I clutched my cardigan closed beneath my chin.

Below me, the figure had turned abruptly and was walking off towards the battlements of the west wing. It seemed like a peculiar thing to do, but almost instantly I saw the reason.

At a point on the roof directly above the drawing room, the aerial for our wireless was stretched between a pair of slender vertical bamboo poles.

Seizing the closest pole with its gauntlets, my attacker put a boot against the socketed base and gave a sharp tug. Perhaps more than anything because of the cold, the bamboo snapped off as easily as if it had been a matchstick. It was now attached only to the copper wire. A quick twist of the wrist and that, too, had broken away, leaving my assailant holding a bamboo pole with two wickedly jagged ends. From one of these dangled a white china insulator that had somehow remained attached by a twist of wire.

Again I found myself staring straight down into the upturned face of my assailant. If only I could reach out and rip the goggles from that face—but I couldn’t.

Those mad eyes stared up me through the green goggles in cold dead hatred, and a shiver shook my frame—a kind of shiver I had never known before.

Those eyes, I realized, with a sudden sickening jolt, were not ringed by their usual horn-rimmed glasses. My attacker was not Val Lampman.

“Marion Trodd is killing me!” I heard my own voice screaming, and the realization must have surprised her as much as it surprised me.

It might have been less frightening if she’d said something, but she didn’t. She stood there in the silence of the drifting snow, still glaring up at me with that look of quite impersonal hatred.

And then, as if taking a bow at the end of a play, she lifted the goggles, and slowly removed the flier’s helmet.

“It was you,” I gasped. “You and Val Lampman.”

She made a little hiss of contempt, rather like a snake. Without a word, she extended the pole and, placing it in the middle of my chest, gave a vicious shove.

I let out a cry of pain, but somehow managed to twist my body in the direction of the thrust. At the same time I dragged myself a little higher.

But I might as well have saved the effort. The end of the stick with its dangling insulator was now hovering directly in front of my face. I simply couldn’t allow her to poke me in the eyes, or to catch the corner of my mouth with the wire, like a hooked fish.

Almost without thinking I seized the end of the pole and slammed it hard against the chimney. At the shock, Marion let go of the handle, and the pole fell away silently into the snow.

Now, suddenly infuriated, as if wanting to tear me apart personally with her bare hands, she launched herself directly at me, this time managing to get a firm grip on the bricks of the ledge. She had already pulled herself halfway up when she seemed to lurch, then suddenly stall in midair like a partridge hit on the wing.

A muffled curse came to my ears.

The birdlime! The birdlime! Oh, joy—the birdlime!

I had given the downwind ledge of the drawing room chimney pot an extra slathering of the stuff on the theory that Father Christmas would choose the sheltered side to climb out of his sleigh.

Marion Trodd was tugging away fiercely, trying to rip her hands free of the stuck gloves, but the more she struggled, the more she became entangled with her riding boots and long coat.

I had wondered, idly, while preparing the stuff, if my glue would be weakened by the cold, but it was obvious that it had not. If anything, it had become stronger and stickier, and it was becoming more evident by the minute that only by undressing completely could Marion hope to escape.

I seized the moment and bent to the fuse again:

Click! Click! Click!

Curses and counter-curses! The blasted thing refused to ignite.

In the ghastly silence that followed, as Marion Trodd tried in vain to free herself, her movements becoming ever more restricted, the sound of singing came floating to my ears:

“The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in thee tonight.”

I don’t know why, but the words bit at my bones.

“Dogger!” I shouted, my voice hoarse and broken in the cold air. “Dogger! Help me!”

But I knew in my heart that with everyone singing about Bethlehem, they couldn’t possibly have heard me. Besides, it was too far from the roof to the foyer—too many of Buckshaw’s bricks and timbers lay between us.

The wind had torn the words from my mouth and whipped them uselessly out and away, across the frozen countryside.

And it was then that I realized there was nothing keeping me from escape. All I had to do was leap clear of Marion Trodd, and run for the stairs.

It was almost certain that she had left the door open. Otherwise, how could she have returned to the house after finishing me off?

She bared her teeth and grimaced as I jumped, but she could not free herself enough to make a grab at me as I sailed over her shoulder. My knees buckled as I landed in a snowdrift.

I wished I had thought of a noble, defiant taunt to hurl into her snarling face, but I did not. Fear and the bitter cold had left me little more than a crouching, shivering bundle.

And then, in an instant, I was on my feet again, running across the roof as if all the hounds of hell were at my heels.

I was in luck. As I had supposed it would be, the door to the stairs stood open. Yellow light poured out onto the snow in a warm and welcoming rectangle.

Six feet to safety , I told myself.

But suddenly a black silhouette filled the doorway, blocking the light—and my escape.

I recognized it at once as Val Lampman.

I slid to a stop and tried to reverse myself, my feet slipping and sliding as if I were on skates.

I fled back across the roof, not daring to look behind me as I reached the drawing room chimney and pulled myself back up onto the first ledge. If Val Lampman was overtaking me, I didn’t want to know about it.