Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times (7 page)

“To Mayfaer!” shouted Beth, skipping again. “Mayfaer and the Mayfaeries!”

Twenty minutes they walked, past the lake, through one park, across the avenue into the next. Beth kept carefully to the path, away from the grass still wet from the storm. So did Jack, his socks already quite wet enough. It was much faster this way, unhindered by the crush of carts and carriages that he’d been trapped in with Wilson and Mrs. Pond.

At Piccadilly—though whoever had written the street sign couldn’t spell, as it said
PICK-A-DILLY
, just like that—they stopped.

Or rather, Jack did. For the streets were not empty now.

Hulking motorcars slid through their own clouds of steam, the windows darkened so he couldn’t see inside. People bustled, all of them a curious mix of flesh and metal. A grille, a hand, a strange, deep
clank
when a few
gasped and shied from Jack. Goggles to protect against the new fog of soot, gathering again after the rain. A foot falling far too heavy within its shoe,
thunk
ing against greasy cobbles.

This was where Mr. Havelock had come. Not
here
,
possibly, but here. This place.

Something half as high as Jack’s knee poked him hard in the shin with a steel finger and ran away, cackling.

“Ow!”

Beth stopped, turned, a smile on her pretty doll’s face.

“What is
that
?” Jack demanded, rubbing his leg, staring down the street at the thing. Wings, it had, wings of steel and copper and oh, that was very strange, indeed.

She didn’t seem to think he was getting any cleverer. “Just a Mis-Chief, silly goose. Commanders of the Order of Daft, assistants to the Guild of Giddiness. It’s a sort of faery.”

The imaginary eels in Jack’s belly stirred and began to swim.

It looked just like a very ordinary street. Like Piccadilly. Like . . . London. Shops and merchants and people complaining about the price of things as they parted with their coins.

But at the same time, it did not. It was true he did not know London well, but he was sure nonetheless that none
of the shops there had an enormous copper dragon scale behind the plate glass, guaranteed lucky.

And there weren’t these clouds of soot falling low, folding themselves around everything they touched. Not like this. Not so very black and choking, billowing from the steam carriages, the motorcars, every chimney Jack could see if he squinted.

“Hurry,” Jack said, grasping Beth’s arm. They dodged across the road. From there it was only a short walk to where, in another place, Jack’s home sat.

He knew it wouldn’t be here. Knew before he saw the great, looming factory taking up the entire stretch of road where there should be neat houses, doorsteps freshly limed and gleaming. Mrs. Pond and her counterparts should be in humid kitchens while ladies took tea in velvet parlors.

No kitchens or parlors hid behind these walls. The ground shook. A rumble churned through the air, and huge mists plumed from gratings in the ground, turning Beth the fake girl into a real ghost, a hazy gray shape.

“There you go,” Beth said. “Don’t see what’s so special about it, why you were in such a rush to come here, but go inside if you must. Sure the foreman will box your ears for you at being gone.”

Jack shook his head. “I used to . . . This was my house.”

“Don’t look much like anybody’s house to me.”

“No,” Jack agreed.

“Where would you like to go next, then?”

“Er.”

Beth began to wander away, back in the direction of the busy street, so that Jack had to trot to catch up with her. “I came in through the clock,” he said, which didn’t make much sense when he said it out loud, but she didn’t appear to be listening anyway. And Jack didn’t want to go back to the clock, not just yet.

He supposed he should find Mr. Havelock at some point, if this churning, industrious place hadn’t swallowed him up whole, never to be seen again.

Mr. Havelock truly was a magician, and such a thing was even easier to believe here than it had been when Jack watched the flower die and come back to life, or the hairpin fly. Another faery scuttled by, pulling bootlaces loose on all the feet it passed.

“Anywhere,” Jack said to Beth. “Take me anywhere. I want to see everything.”

“I like you,” said Beth. “Right then! Adventure!”

“Are there just faeries here?” Jack asked as Beth turned the corner, ducking and dodging among the people. “Are they all made of metal? Is
everyone
?”

Beth shook her head, calling over her shoulder about dragons and unicorns as she led him to a wide, open square
packed with market stalls. “There’s a hundred kinds of faery, and they’re all right scamps. Lots of the other creatures is mechanical, too,” she said, “’cept for those folks eat cows and suchlike. And me, I’m mechanical, but I’m a bit special. Mostly people are like you, but with metal parts where’s they need them.”

And they needed them to breathe. Jack thought of the grille in the old man’s nose. Already his own chest was aching from running through the soupy gray air, but that was small concern compared to what was in front of him. The market was a riot of color, bright against dull brick and all the pale people doing their shopping. Jack spied the normal sorts of things—pies and cheeses—and plenty so abnormal he couldn’t begin to name them. One sold great woven tapestries showing a golden bird, the same as he’d seen on the walking stick, but that made sense now, if the birds here were metal, not bone. There were tables of strange clockwork devices, bowls of herbs he’d never seen in the garden at home, and an old woman telling fortunes she read in a pool of oil.

“How’d you come in through the clock?” Beth asked, pulling him from the market and down into an alley thin as a hair. “Not saying I believe you, but you are properly odd, and I like a good story much as anyone.”

She had already said he was too pink. Jack felt himself
go slightly pinker. “Well, see, I followed someone. A magician who had come to my home and wanted to take me away with him.” Mr. Havelock had wanted to bring Jack
here
, and for a moment Jack hated his mother afresh. He could have seen this days ago, and she’d stopped it. “I should find him, I think.”

“Oh.” Beth smiled. “That’s easy enough, if you’ll just tell me his name. I knows everyone from all my wandering. Drives the doctor mad. Who is this magician?”

“His name is Mr. Havelock,” Jack answered, thinking very hard. “Mr.
Lorcan
Havelock.”

Beth was pale, built that way, Jack was certain, and just as sure that she would have gone paler at the name if it were possible.

“But he’s a horrible man,” she said slowly, backing a few steps away from Jack on the cramped, cobbled street. “An evil, horrible man, and you don’t seem horrible. What’d you want him for?”

No. That couldn’t be. Mr. Havelock had been kind and polite and clever. He had wanted to teach Jack magic.

The same magic, perhaps, that made his eyes glow red as the devil’s in the parlor lamplight. The same that made the flower die at his touch.

“You’re not so pink now,” she said, as Jack’s knees knocked together. “I think we should see Dr. Snailwater.
Best doctor in all of Londinium. Fix anything, he will.”

Londinium.
Jack thought he must look afraid, but he wasn’t. He was far from home, surrounded by magic and clockwork, and surely this windup girl was wrong about Mr. Havelock.

This was
brilliant.

H
E HAD BEEN
right about the boxes of teeth. All laid out in rows on a long table, neat as chessmen.

It had taken nearly an hour to turn their backs on the market and walk through the streets Jack had seen from carriage windows with Mrs. Pond that morning.

Now that felt days before, and the streets were all different. He kept stopping to gape, fishlike, at more metal faeries, more people who were not entirely flesh and blood, but who smiled and shopped and worried as if they were. At the stinking, oily slime that coated the sky and everything below.

And now they were here. Even Jack, back home, had
heard of Harley Street. But here there was another
e
, to make it Harleye Street. He’d even come once when he’d taken ill and a white-coated man couldn’t pay a visit to the house. Beth had walked smartly up to a door like any other, set into dirty brown brick, windows either side hung red with curtains.

“Come in. Come in,” said the shaggy man who must be Dr. Snailwater. He looked like an old suit, wrinkled, frayed, and lumpy from mothballs, but his hair was a shock of white fluff, like a dandelion.

Shelves lined the walls, sagging under the weight of slimy things in jars. Strange machines dotted the floor, sat atop rickety benches. Steam hissed slowly from one in a far corner, creating a miasma of cloud at the ceiling, and the bloody tang of copper came at Jack from every direction.

“Well, well,” said Dr. Snailwater, walking in a circle around Beth. He lifted her fingers to inspect the hinges, bending them one by one. Beth stood perfectly still. He held open her eyelids, peering in, squinting himself until he nodded in satisfaction. “Some of my best work, you.” He crouched down and picked up her foot so her leg bent at the knee. “Not good enough though. Bit creaky, eh? You, boy, fetch that turnscrew.”

It wasn’t much of a help. Tools of all sizes littered every
surface not used by something else, but Dr. Snailwater waved a hand in the general direction and, after a few false starts, Jack found the right one.

Much as Jack wanted to watch, the moment Dr. Snailwater peeled Beth’s skin from a hidden seam at the joint, Jack turned, carefully fixing his eyes on what looked like a linen press, for taking the wrinkles from clothing, crossed with an octopus. If an octopus could be fashioned from steel.

The sound of the screws tightening was bad enough. Jack flinched at every click, but Beth was silent, and Jack took it from this that Dr. Snailwater wasn’t hurting her.

“Better,” said Dr. Snailwater, his own knees snapping as he stood. “And all wound up, too? Excellent.”

“I did that,” said Jack.

“Yes, and who might you be? Doesn’t take a genius to see that you’re an odd one, and I
am
a genius. From the country, are we? I’d say the mountains, but you don’t speak like one, and I know voices, lad. They’re a job to get right, I can say.”

“I’m Jack. Jack Foster.”

“Dr. Mephisto Snailwater. A pleasure. For you, naturally.”

“I think he’s lost,” Beth mused, inspecting a crimson marble she’d found on one of the many tables. “And he
says he doesn’t have any metal on him. Not inside, neither. And he knows Sir Lorcan.”

“I see. Is he a
friend
of Sir Lorcan’s?”

“Not exactly,” said Jack. The doctor’s expression told him this was the correct answer.

“Well, now. Lost? Youngsters knew how to read maps in my day.” He shook his head. “There’s one ’round here somewhere.”

“How do you do it?” Jack gazed around again at the boxes and bottles and jars. “You make
people
in here.”

The doctor’s eyes lit up. “I try. I try.”

“But how?”

“Aha,” said Dr. Snailwater. “It’s all in the measurements, you see.” Darting across the room, he plucked an eyeball from a glass bowl. “Bit under an inch. Good for your old lady who peers out through the curtains. Beady, you know. And here!”—he dug in a drawer, held up a fully formed hand cut off at the wrist—“nice and strong. Sturdy fingers. This one’s for the shipyards, I fear. Repairs every week after.”

Jack stared. The fingernails were dirty.

“Do you build everything?” Jack thought of the faery who had poked him in the shin, and said so.

Dr. Snailwater chuckled. “Magical creatures are a bit beyond my specialty, I’m afraid. The gods built the first
ones. Now they build each other. I study them, o’ course. Much to learn, much to learn.”

“And t-those?” he asked, pointing at the jars.

Dr. Snailwater’s face creased into a frown. “Always trying to perfect my art,” he said, shuffling over to pick one up. Something sloshed in the liquid inside. “Liver. Eight inches. Going to have a terrible sense of humor, this one, if I ever manage it. Not funny at all.” He hoisted another. “Spleen. Good for a temper, see.”

Jack didn’t know whether to be revolted or fascinated. He opened his mouth, caught the boxes of teeth from the corner of his eye, and closed it again. It was just dawning on him that, to a man who kept livers in jars, Jack himself was a collection of neatly packaged parts.

Dr. Snailwater laughed again. “You’re safe here, boy. I see you have many questions. The shape of your nostrils. Curious, yet willing to accept the strange. Upstairs with you, and I’ll answer the ones I can. Beth knows the way.”

She moved behind him, and Jack started. He’d almost forgotten she was there, that she’d brought him to this house. It was clear she was familiar with it, in the way she slid easily between tables and stepped over things on the floor. At the back of the room, a door led to a narrow, winding staircase, the carpet threadbare, coming loose in spots. Jack held the banister so as not to trip, but Beth swung her
arms at her sides, and her walk was smoother than before.