Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (10 page)

None of them gave a second glance to Jack, though several doffed their caps at the doctor, and one or two made quick, jerky bows to Beth. Many wore large masks over their mouths and noses, screened with silks or fine mesh.

Jack wished he could see everything at once. He raised his heavy head and promptly jumped.

“What is that?”

“Hmmm?” Dr. Snailwater turned his head about until he caught what Jack was on about. “Yes, yes, shameful. Have some decency, you filthy layabout.” The gargoyle grinned through steely lips, waved a bottle of brown liquor from its perch above a door, and belched out a cloud of steam. “Fascinating creatures, lots to learn, curious dimensions, of course, but they’re often guilty of brandy. Mixed
with oil, of course, and then they just loll around making the place look untidy.”

Jack kept it in his sight as long as he could, so he was nearly walking backward. He’d seen gargoyles before, but they’d been of stone, not smooth metal, and statues shouldn’t move like that. . . .

Along the high street they went. Jack strained to see inside shop windows, filled with bundles of herbs he couldn’t pronounce, a cage of clockwork imps, each tall and thin, a foot high, hopping on bandy copper legs. A sign promised each to be good at household chores and unfailingly loyal.

He felt dizzy. The strain of the goggles and squinting through them made his head ache, but he couldn’t stop looking, not for all the shillings in the country.

“To the Underground!” cried Dr. Snailwater, leading them to a flight of stairs set into the pavement.

This, Jack knew of. They had it in his London, but Mother had never let him travel on it. It was filthy, she said, and full of rats.

He followed Beth and the doctor, grinning. Wherever he was being taken didn’t matter. He knew the secret of the clock, and he would never tell, and he would stay here forever, sleeping in the goggles and smearing his pink face with soot if he must.

Down they went, into the station where Dr. Snailwater put coins into a hissing, spitting machine until a pair of gates parted. Down again, to a platform littered here and there with people who paid them no mind.

But Jack watched them from behind the heavy glass. Tried to guess which parts of them were not made of flesh and bone.

“Stay close.” A deep rumble shook the floor, a whistle sounded, and the doctor had to shout to be heard. Steam filled the platform so Jack could not even see his hand before his face when he lifted it to try. Bodies brushed past his, and a momentary pang of fear shot through him.

Beth took his arm and led him onto the train. Inside, the air was almost clear, and he could see as Dr. Snailwater led them to a compartment exactly like those Jack rode in to and from school. Rough cloth lined the seats, and lamps burned on the walls. Beth made herself comfortable—though Jack didn’t know if she could be
un
comfortable—on a bench and folded her hands in her lap. He sat beside her, the doctor on the other side.

The compartment door slid shut, the whistle blew again, and slowly they began to move.

“How far does it go?”

Beth stared out the window, though beyond there was nothing but darkness. “The train?”

“The Empire.”

Dr. Snailwater tilted his shaggy head to one side. “How far does
yours
go?” he asked, in that way that usually means the person doesn’t expect an answer.

Across the oceans, to lands for which Jack had only seen maps, heard tales of savages and gentlemen. He wiped a film of soot from his goggles and asked no more questions.

He thought of the miniature train in the parlor and wondered if perhaps he was in a model of a city, laid out on a giant’s table. Likely not, but it didn’t seem so much of a fantastic idea as it once would have.

It turned out they were going only a few stops. Soon they were fighting their way through the steam again, nearly blind until they reached stairs to take them back up to the street.

Jack’s heart sputtered. Above the rooftops loomed the clock tower.

“Don’t dawdle, lad.”

Beth quickened her steps, and Jack had little choice but to do likewise. He could slow, slip away down an alley and lose them, but the Empire of Clouds seemed a much brighter adventure with Beth and the doctor to help, to feed him and give him a warm bed at night.

Lorcan might not, if Jack could find him, and he was the only other person Jack knew in this place. If he was as mean as they said . . .

He simply had to hope he was right about the clock.

It looked precisely the same. The whole Palace of Westminster did. The same as the one Jack had approached, following Mr. Havelock the magician, who was Sir Lorcan here. The same as the one he had left in a storm, as yet unaware and running to find Mrs. Pond.

It was not raining now, and the people and the faeries and the slurring gargoyles were out, hurrying along the streets and waiting for the motorcars to pass.

“Doctor?”

He looked indulgently at Beth. “Yes, my dear?”

“What time is it?”

And she had called
him
stupid. There was an enormous clock right overhead, but as Jack looked up and opened his mouth, he could see why she had asked.

It was most certainly not eighteen minutes past seven, morning or eve.

“Thing has a mind of its own,” said Dr. Snailwater, pulling out a pocket watch. “Always has. Half past one, Beth. Let’s go.”

They crossed to the iron gates surrounding the palace. It felt much longer than a day since Jack had been here last. Suddenly he wasn’t so sure. Merely hoping.

“All right there, lad?”

He nodded slowly.

“Well, in you go, then. Let’s try it.”

Their eyes on his back, Jack walked through the gates and up to the wall where the door had appeared for Lorcan, and for him. With nothing but the clattering noises of the city now, he put his hand to the stone.

And waited. In his mind, he imagined the cracks growing, splitting to form a door. He’d had the magic to make it appear the first time. Did he have magic to make it stay away if he didn’t want it?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Nothing happened.

“I’m not surprised.” Dr. Snailwater frowned at the tower and at Jack, as if they’d both displeased him. Possibly they had. But Beth clapped her hands together; there was a noise like ringing bells, not like the great one with the silly name, but of the type cabbies hung on horses at Christmas.

Jack tried to hide his smile.

•  •  •

They did not linger at the tower. The doctor seemed to think it was a good idea to leave in a hurry, dash back to the Underground. But they didn’t return to Harleye Street. Instead, they boarded a train, just like the first, headed east out of the city’s heart.

This train didn’t stay underground. It rose with a jolt,
up, up to run beside the river. Rain began to fall, clearing the fog and spattering the windows in long drops. Jack pressed his goggles to the window, desperate to see everything.

The train slowed to a stop, but Jack paid no attention to the passengers boarding and disembarking. Beyond the window, a tall stone column rose from the ground—the Monument he’d once climbed with Mrs. Pond, except that it wasn’t the same one, really. And something about it wasn’t right at all.

“It’s wrong,” he said to Beth and the doctor. “The top’s all different. It’s not s’posed to be like that. At home it’s an urn, not a—”

“Shush!” said the doctor. A wrinkled man eyed them curiously, and Jack felt the blood drain from his face, beneath the goggles that were meant to disguise him. “Addled,” said Dr. Snailwater to the man. “Lad doesn’t know what he’s saying half the time. I’m his doctor, escorting him to the asylum.”

Jack opened his mouth, but said nothing.

“Indeed,” rasped the man through dry lips, peering at Jack. “Do you know what they’ll do to you at the asylum, boy? Oh, there’s no fixing you. No, no. Tie you up in straps and leave you to rot. Oh, yes, they will, just like you deserve.” He grasped his case and fled through the
compartment door, presumably in search of more desirable company.

“I’m not mad,” said Jack.

Dr. Snailwater shook his head. “Better mad than discovered, lad.”

They passed the rest of the journey in silence, finally alighting in the East End. Here the streets were darker even in what passed for daylight, busier, the buildings even more worn. If the center of the city was a grand lady, bejeweled and gowned in silk, the slums were an old pantomime dame, greasepaint smeared, paste rubies falling from her shoes to run like blood in the gutters.

Here the men reeked of sweat, and ladies’ dresses were old and torn. Jack saw a fellow, arm ending at the elbow, no coin to replace it with one of Dr. Snailwater’s clever metal hands. Children, bone-thin and dressed in rags, ran barefoot to cadge a mug of water from an old, toothless woman seated behind a rusted bucket. One sat at the curb, nursing a cut leg.

Her veins ran black.

Dr. Snailwater stopped, knelt by the girl, and reached into his fat leather bag for a bandage. It took him only a minute or two; then he gave her a penny and sent her on her way.

“Stay close,” he ordered Jack and Beth. Jack had no
intention of doing otherwise as they burrowed deeper into the knot of crooked, rank streets. Tables spilled from a public house onto the cobbles, crowded with broken souls and covered with glasses of beer and lemonade and sour milk.
THE FOWLE
&
FYRE
, read a cracked sign above a faded painting of a golden bird in a wreath of flame. Drunken men, half flesh, half rusted metal, stumbled from the door and away into the maze of narrow lanes.

Even in his London, Jack would never have been taken to such a place. There were no feathers here, no gilt chandeliers and conservatories tinkling with the rainfall of piano keys. No housekeepers to bake cake every day, no sons sent off to prepare for careers in Parliament or the Crown or to take over the family business.

They turned into an alley so narrow they had to walk one behind another, the doctor leading with his quick, snappy steps, Beth skipping at Jack’s back. Cracked walls loomed, blocking out even the ash-blackened sky. Sunlight would have no hope.

It seemed to Jack nothing here had a hope. He found it strange that a man as fine—if slightly eccentric—as Dr. Snailwater would have even a passing acquaintance with anyone in this horrible, dismal, fascinating place, but the doctor moved quickly and surely.

“He has a pistol in his satchel,” Beth whispered.

That, thought Jack, was useful only if he knew how to use it.

A slime-covered archway sat at the end of the alley. Mushrooms shaped like mouths bit at them on their way through, a long, dewy tongue catching Jack’s cheek. He wiped it with the back of his hand, and both spots began to tingle.

“Not poisonous,” assured Dr. Snailwater. He frowned. “For the most part, at any rate.” He led the way through an overgrown courtyard, the air humid enough to drink. In the corner, a faery stomped on a lone flower and laughed a sound like broken glass. The house, if it could be called that, looked assembled from whatever scraps of steel and brick could be filched, and the door had no knocker, no number, no name. It was not a place to be happened upon by chance.

Splinters flew from the wood with each rap from the doctor’s metal hand. Jack doubted anyone was home, was sure they must have come all this way for nothing, rather than whatever the
something
was that the doctor wouldn’t reveal. Five minutes they stood there, making the most frightful racket, but neither the doctor nor Beth grew disheartened, though Jack conceded that with Beth, at least, it might be difficult to tell.

“Xenocrates! Visitors! Stop being rude and let us in,” called the doctor.

A floorboard creaked within. The doorknob turned, and slowly the rotting plank swung open. “You
are
persistent,” said a voice. A man stepped from the gloom into the slightly-less-gloom of the doorway. Jack edged behind Beth. Bulging eyes, one brown glass, one blue with a deep crack down the middle, bubbled from scaly, sickly skin. Where there
was
skin. It ended at his cheeks, melting into a brass jaw studded with ivory teeth. The skin reappeared just above his grubby collar.

He caught Jack staring. “The last gent who tried to give me a walloping regretted it. Who’s this, then?” he asked Dr. Snailwater, who laughed.

“Stop provoking them, old friend. Jack, meet Xenocrates Fink. Xeno, meet Jack Foster. He is in need of your assistance.”

T
HE RAMSHACKLE HOUSE
was cleaner inside than Jack had expected, though Mrs. Pond would have fainted at the cobwebs in the corners and half-empty teacups on the tables.

Books lined all of the walls. The sitting room smelled of snow and ink, of will-o’-the-wisps and moonlight. A tailless cat slept on an armchair. Tiny vials of oily, jewel-colored liquids hung from a burning lamp. A faery flew in a broken window to drink from a violet one. A globe spun of its own accord on a wooden stand, but it bore almost no resemblance to ones Jack had seen back home.