The Bone Magician (17 page)
Authors: F. E. Higgins
The Nimble Finger Inn was packed to the rafters with revellers. Huddled in alcoves and niches men and women made deals
of a dubious nature. Such was the nodding and winking and nudging that it was like watching a flock of birds jostling on a roof ridge. Bizarre entertainments were underway, weevil racing being the preferred choice this week, and of course, gambling. As
ever, the air was punctuated with laughter and shouts of triumph and cries of despair when money was won and lost. It was only a matter of time before chairs would be thrown, drinks poured over heads and fighting would break out.
Pin, trailing Juno, watched as a man, dressed rather grandly compared to his companions, wiped sweat from
his furrowed brow. He looked as if he might hail from outside the city walls. In his hand he held a pair of cards.
Pin sniffed the air. You are losing, he thought, and badly.
At that moment the man groaned loudly and buried his face in his hands.
‘Pay up, Mr Ratchet,’ snarled his one-eyed opponent. He was undoubtedly a sailor, with his grimy headscarf and hooped
earring. The hilt of his curved blade just showed above his belt. Ratchet dug deep into his pockets and began to tip the contents on to the table but not quickly enough. In a flash the sailor had his knife held against his throat. It certainly impressed
upon his companion the need for haste. The sailor caught Pin’s eye and a slow smile spread across his weatherbeaten face. Pin ducked his head and hurried after Juno. If Ratchet smelt scared, the sailor smelt unpredictable.
At the far end of the tavern they came upon Rudy Idolice slumped on his chair. He smelled strongly of unwashed armpits. He opened one
eye, managed a black-gummed smile and held out his hand.
‘That’ll be sixpence apiece,’ he mumbled. ‘Your eyes will pop out of your heads,’ he claimed gruffly as
his
trembling fingers closed over the money. ‘I can guarantee you will never have seen the like of what you see in here.’ His voice tailed off, the monetary flicker of enthusiasm gone. The Gluttonous Beast
sold itself.
Rudy briefly indicated the warning notice from Betty Peggotty with one finger and pulled back the curtain with another. Then he
practically pushed the two of them down the stairs.
The Beast sat, or lay – it was hard to tell which on account of the dark – in his cage, behind thick iron
bars just wide enough apart for a man to fit his hand through. At the front of his cage, just inside the bars, the damp earthen floor was strewn with sawdust and hay and the remains of what looked like a pig. Flies circled and landed on the rotten meat
and sightless maggots could be seen moving on the torn surface. In the far corner there was a bed of straw tightly packed as if a great weight had been pressed upon it. Beside it stood a trough half filled with brackish water and covered in green mould.
Outside the cage the surface of the floor was worn smooth by the feet that stood and shuffled and scraped all day. And the damp stone walls
echoed the gasps and sighs of those who came to stare and to consider and to
pronounce on the creature within.
Juno and Pin stood behind the small crowd gathered in front of the cage. The Beast, however, had turned his broad hairy back on his
audience and remained resolutely unmoving despite their cries of ‘Hey, Beast’ or ‘You there, with the hair’ and other greetings in a similar vein.
‘Perhaps he’s asleep,’ ventured one, a small chap with a large hat.
‘Or sulking,’ said another and he tossed a carrot through the bars which hit the creature on the shoulder. He barely
flinched.
‘I don’t think he eats vegetables,’ said the man with the hat. He had just identified the rotting flesh in the
cage.
‘Well, I’ve paid good money for this,’ said a third and he picked up a long stick, sharpened at one end, which was
lying conveniently on the ground (one wonders if it was not placed there for this very purpose) and, to the enthusiastic cries of his male companions, and the gasps of his female, he slid it through the bars and jabbed at the Beast’s considerable
rear with the pointed end. There was a slight twitch, and a fly was heard to buzz, but nothing more.
‘Again,
Charlie,’ urged his friends. ‘Give him another poke.’ Each member of the party secretly
wished that he had been the one to find the stick but was also glad in a way that he hadn’t. Charlie, now strongly aware that he must not disappoint his friends, reached in once more and poked the creature so hard that he had trouble retracting the
stick. The effect was immediate.
‘AAAARRRGH,’ roared the Beast. In an instant he leaped up, twisted around and threw himself against the bars, causing the
entire room to reverberate with the force of the impact. Charlie and his friends jumped back together, screaming and yelling, then scattered to run up the stairs. All social graces were cast aside and men and women – they were certainly not ladies
and gentlemen – pushed and shoved their way to the top, dragging Juno and Pin along with them in the melee.
The Gluttonous Beast drew himself up to his full height, some seven feet five inches, and gripped the bars with his fists and shook
them. He roared again, showing a mouthful of yellow teeth and four long brown canines. Saliva pooled behind his lower teeth, ran over and dripped out of his mouth in long sticky strings.
But now he was alone again in his stinking prison. His
audience was gone with hardly a trace, only
the scuff marks of their fleeing boots and heels. On the ground lay a small lace handkerchief. The creature contemplated it for a while and then pushed his forearm quite easily through the bars and picked it up. He brought it to his nose and sniffed it
and within its creases he detected the faint remains of lavender. He sat down heavily, landing with a resounding thud, and stared vacantly ahead. Lavender had grown on the mountain in the springtime.
A sudden movement from the darkness under the stairs caught the Beast’s eye and he growled lowly. A shadowy figure came
fearlessly right up to the cage and stood leaning against the cool iron whispering softly, monotonously, to the creature. Whether the Beast listened or not was difficult to ascertain. He certainly gave no sign of it. Then the figure walked away, ascended
the stairs and was gone. All was quiet once more except for the high-pitched drone of a fly and the rumbling of the Beast’s innards.
Out on the street Pin and Juno caught their breath. In the short time they had been in the Nimble Finger, a thick mist
had rolled off the Foedus and was spreading over the entire city, creeping slyly around corners and staying low to the ground. Juno looked at Pin anxiously and touched him on the arm.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked softly.
Pin nodded, burying his hands under his armpits. ‘I didn’t think he would be so dreadful.’
‘Did you see the fellow hiding under the stairs?’
‘I did,’ replied Pin through chattering teeth. ‘Perhaps he looks after him.’
‘Who knows?’ said Juno. She wrapped her cloak tightly
around herself, but the cold was
numbing her bones. ‘I’m freezing,’ she said miserably. ‘Let’s get back.’
Pin agreed. He had suffered many winters in Urbs Umida, but none as harsh as this. They walked briskly for a short while. Soon the fog
was almost tangible in its thickness. When he looked down Pin could no longer see his feet.
‘If we can find the river, we can follow it,’ he said, stopping and turning slowly on the spot.
‘Can you not smell it?’ asked Juno. She was, as usual, a few steps ahead. ‘I thought you could smell
anything.’
‘Of course I can smell it,’ snapped Pin. He was annoyed with himself. He should have been able to get them back to the
Foedus at the very least. ‘But when the smell is all around, it’s difficult to tell which way to go. Anyway, it’s not so strong tonight.’
And then the creaking began.
‘What’s that?’ asked Juno uneasily.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never heard anything like it.’
It was a sort of groaning sound, almost human but not quite.
‘I think it’s coming from this direction,’ said Juno. Her voice sounded faint.
Pin was
concentrating hard. ‘Shh,’ he said. He stood and listened and sniffed. ‘I think this might be
the way,’ he said finally. Juno was silent.
‘Juno?’ he said. Then, with irritation, ‘Juno?’
But Juno was gone.
Pin smelled them first, their stale, human stink of rotting flesh and pus; then he heard their breathing, rattling,
consumptive, harsh inhalations. He stood where he was, blinded by the mist. Suddenly, from right beside him, a malformed hand reached out of the fog and grabbed him by the arm. In a panic he kicked out and heard a yelp, but then six, eight, maybe ten,
hands had him in their grip.
‘Ah, what have we here?’ croaked someone in his ear.
‘I’m just trying to get home,’ spluttered Pin, praying that Juno was far away. A stooped man, with a face like that
of a person just risen from the grave, stepped in front of him.
‘Oh,’ he laughed and revealed at the same time five teeth, three above and two below.
Pin waved away the fog in front of his face and he could see that he was tightly encircled by a rag-tag bunch of
desperate street beggars with nothing to lose and everything to gain. Their clothes were tatters, their faces pock-marked from the pox, their sunken eyes weeping and they stank. Lord, how they stank. Tonight the fog was
their friend.
‘I have nothing for you,’ said Pin, turning out his pockets.
‘No money?’ snarled the stooped man.
Pin shook his head. ‘Truthfully, I spent it all at the Nimble Finger, to see the Beast.’
‘Hear that, Zeke?’ said another beggar, equally repulsive in appearance and aroma, addressing the stooped man. ‘He
likes monsters.’
‘Well, ain’t that lucky for you, lad,’ Zeke sneered. ‘You see, it’s a terrible thing to be judged on how
you look. We may be ugly on the outside, but on the inside –’ he paused and came so close that his and Pin’s nose were almost touching – ‘we’re even uglier!’
The beggars closed in, drooling and salivating and laughing. Pin started to struggle, but their wiry arms were like vices around his
wrists and arms and ankles.
‘Take him to the lair,’ spat Zeke. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Stop!’
The voice,
a man’s, came from behind them. They did stop, but when they saw for whom, they laughed even louder
for the speaker was not a man of any great substance and, to Pin’s dismay, he leaned on a cane.
‘A lame duck,’ said Zeke. ‘Go home or we’ll have to roast you too!’
‘Don’t turn your back on me,’ said the man. His voice was hard.
‘Why not? What are you going to do?’
There was a whirring and a clicking and without warning the stranger darted forward and poked the beggar with his cane. There was a
crackling noise, a puff of smoke and Zeke screeched and fell to the ground. The beggars stood motionless and open-mouthed for a second then scattered. A moment later Zeke himself came to and crawled away, moaning, into the fog.
Pin was shaking as he turned to the stranger. ‘You saved my life.’
‘Not at all,’ said the man.
‘How can I ever thank you?’
‘Never mind that,’ said the stranger. ‘I’m going to the Bridge. Is that any help to you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Pin
gratefully. ‘I know my way from there.’
‘It’s closer than you think,’ said the man. ‘I know this city well, fog or no fog.’ He took off quickly,
leaving a trail of holes in the snow with his cane.
‘I thought
I
knew the City too,’ murmured Pin ruefully.
‘I believe you saw the Beast tonight,’ said the man, though not conversationally, more to confirm what he already
knew.
‘Yes, I did,’ replied Pin, somewhat surprised. ‘How did you know?’
Pin supposed he mustn’t have heard for he did not reply. They walked along briskly, their crunching footsteps accompanied by the
strange groaning and creaking noises that echoed in the streets. The fog seemed to be thinning at last and Pin realized that the bright spots he could now see were from the street lights and taverns on the Bridge. They had reached the Foedus. Pin began
to feel safe again.
‘I know my way from here,’ said Pin with audible relief. He stood on the bank, his back to the river. ‘Let me thank
you again.’ He went to offer his hand but was suddenly distracted. The groaning sounds had stopped as
suddenly as they had started and the whole atmosphere was lighter.
‘Listen!’ he said. ‘The groaning noise has stopped.’ But the stranger was preoccupied, fiddling with his
cane.
‘Tell me,’ said Pin curiously, ‘what was it you did with that cane?’
The man looked up and took a step towards him. Pin concluded from his odour that he didn’t wash as often as he should.
‘Well,’ came the reply, ‘it’s a real shame you saw that.’
‘Why?’ Suddenly Pin’s confidence in this odd saviour wavered.
‘Because it’s my little secret.’
‘I can keep a secret,’ said Pin, backing away slowly until his heels came up against the wall that ran along the
riverbank.
‘I am sure you can.’
Without warning the man ran forward and shoved his hand roughly into Pin’s pocket.
‘Hey,’ protested Pin, but before he could say anything more there was a whirring and a clicking and he felt an explosive
impact on his chest followed by a shock like a lightning strike. He jerked backwards and flipped over the
wall. He felt himself falling. Time slowed. It seemed such a long way down to the river.
‘I can’t smell the Foedus any more,’ he realized just before everything went black.