But then Crafty had a thought; surely it was possible that she wasn’t dead after all! Hope threw caution to the winds.
‘Mother? Mother! Is that you? It is me. It’s your son, Crafty!’
‘Oh, I thought it was you, Crafty!’ came the reply. ‘It’s so good to hear your voice again.’
‘But why are you hiding? Please come out and talk to me.’
Crafty reached towards the cupboard door, but at the last second remembered the warning from his brothers. He forced his hand down to his side.
The voice spoke again.
‘I’ve changed, Crafty. I’m still your mother and you’re my son and I love you, but I daren’t risk coming out to talk to you face to face.’ The voice paused, and then sounded even more hoarse. ‘I’m … I’m not what I was. We can’t get too close.’
The blood froze in Crafty’s veins; he began to shiver violently and tears came to his eyes. How had the Shole changed his poor mother? And why was he no longer safe talking to her? Bertha seemed able to talk to him without putting him in danger – what was so wrong with his mother that she couldn’t?
But before he could ask, his mother had a question of her own.
‘Why did you come back here, Crafty?’
‘Father’s missing. I came here to get his pipe. It’s the only thing I’ve got left of him and it’ll help me to find him.’
The voice became more urgent. ‘If you find him, Crafty, don’t bring him here. Whatever you do, don’t ever bring him here. This is my refuge and I want to be left alone. He can’t see me like this. Do you promise?’
Tears began to run down his cheeks and he struggled to speak. ‘I promise, Mother.’
‘You too, Crafty. Don’t you ever come back. I’ve changed so much that even your poor dead brothers don’t know me. Even they are afraid of me. Go now, while you still can. I’ll always remember you.’
And with that, Crafty fled from the cellar. Still crying, he raced up the steps, through the door, then up to the kitchen door. There he blew out the candle and stuffed it into his pocket next to the lucifers, the hammer and his father’s pipe. He might need it again soon, he thought.
Before leaving the kitchen, he wiped his eyes as best he could and tried to control himself. He had to be strong now. There was no turning back. He had to rescue his father.
Once outside the back door, Crafty was overjoyed to see the blue circle of the gate. Relief flooded through him. Lick hadn’t let him down. He could see her staring anxiously through at him from only twenty paces away, on the very edge of the bog. Crafty sprinted towards it and quickly clambered through.
As he turned to face Lick, he saw that her eyes were blazing with anger. She came right up to him.
‘You idiot!’ she shouted, literally spitting the words in his face. ‘If I tell the Chief Mancer what you’ve done, you’ll be dismissed. I’ve a good mind to do it too. What on earth possessed you? Why did you go back to your house?’
‘I had to go down to the cellar,’ Crafty told her calmly.
‘The cellar? That’s probably the most dangerous place now! Something terrible could have taken up residence – it could have been waiting down there!’
What could be more terrible than a mother who had been changed? Crafty thought. What could be more terrible than a mother who never wanted to see you again?
But he didn’t say that. He just pulled his father’s pipe out of his pocket and showed it to Lick.
‘I went to get this!’ he told her. ‘It’s my father’s pipe. We’ve finally got something that belonged to him – it’ll take me to him, wherever he is. I’m sure of it.’
Then, before she could stop him, Crafty sat down in the chair and stared at the silver gate, concentrating as hard as he could.
This had been his father’s favourite pipe, but after the loss of his wife, for some reason he’d never smoked it again. Crafty had happy memories of watching them sitting together in the garden. His father used to put his left arm around Crafty’s mother, holding the pipe in his right hand. In summer they sometimes stayed out until after dark. You could hear them murmuring together, and see the glow of the pipe. Sometimes Crafty thought they kissed, but it was too dark to be sure. He knew that they had loved each other very much.
When he was smoking, his father had put the stem of the pipe into his mouth and tamped the tobacco down into the bowl with his thumb. Crafty could practically see him doing it now.
Now that he had the pipe, it had to work. It had to take the gate to him!
And it did.
The swirling clouds cleared, and Crafty found himself staring at a narrow cobbled street. At the end was a grim-looking stone building. In front of this was a metal gate with a sign:
MOUNT STREET ORPHANAGE
He knew that this was a very dangerous place; it was where the Chief Mancer had brought him to snatch the feral, changed child; it was where Crafty had pushed Viper out through the silver gate.
There’s something tying me to this place, he thought.
Beyond the gate he could see the wooden door to the orphanage hanging off its hinges. It was very gloomy and nothing was moving.
Nothing that he could see.
But his father was somewhere inside that building.
Lick tried to stop him.
Crafty couldn’t blame her. As far as she was concerned, it was madness to go into that dark building.
But his father was in there. It had to be done.
Lick was strong. She grabbed hold of his clothes and his limbs – and finally even his hair – as he fought to free himself and scramble through the gate.
And as they grappled, she kept saying the same things over and over again:
‘Please! Please! Don’t do it or you’ll die! Please, Crafty! Please! You’ll die!’
But at last he gave her one hard shove, and then he was through and away. He staggered three paces, then turned back and stared at her through the gate, and saw that her eyes were wild.
He’d half hoped that she might wait there until he’d rescued his father. They were in Preston, deep inside the Shole. The walk back to Lancaster was fraught with danger, the chances of survival slim. How else would he get back to the castle?
But the blue circle winked out almost immediately. Crafty waited a few seconds to see if it would reappear elsewhere, as it had done by the bog, but there was no sign of it. Lick had left him to his fate.
He couldn’t deny that this abandonment hurt. But he put it out of his mind; after all, he was here with a purpose – he was going to find his father. He turned and walked slowly towards that open door, listening for danger.
Hours still remained before sunset, but already the gloom was deepening. It would be very dark inside that building, with its thin narrow windows. No doubt there would be other creatures inside, similar to the one he’d snatched. Crafty remembered the hungry mouth and that triple row of sharp fangs. He prayed that such aberrations would still be sleeping.
At the entrance he took the candle out of his pocket and lit it. Then, with one hand on his dagger, he stepped inside, broken glass crunching underfoot.
The candle illuminated a large panelled hallway. There were corridors to left and right, a wide staircase leading upwards and, directly ahead, a pair of very big, dark-stained doors.
And there were cobwebs everywhere. Huge cobwebs.
They hung in drapes from the ceiling and covered the walls, undulating like grey waves on a turbulent sea. What was causing them to move like that? The air was chilly but very still. Crafty could see nothing that might cause it.
Then a terrible thought crossed his mind. Spiders!
He’d been alert to the threat from the feral children, but there might be other, even more dangerous aberrations here. Maybe huge spiders lay hidden within the webs!
Crafty hated spiders. He sometimes had nightmares about them. He’d find himself struggling to get free of a sticky web while a monstrous spider scuttled down, heading straight towards him
.
The creatures that had spun those webs must have been a lot bigger than your average Daylight World spider. He glanced around nervously and tried not to imagine how the Shole might have made them bigger and more savage – with a need for blood and raw flesh.
He concentrated instead on locating his father. The pipe should have brought Crafty close to him but, as he knew from previous experience, gates were not always very precise. Sometimes they took you to within a few yards of your target; on other occasions they were much further away – his father could be in any of the rooms off these corridors. Or he could be up on the upper floors.
Should he go upstairs or try the corridors? Crafty wondered. Or was his father on the other side of those big wooden doors?
Some kind of intuition prickled at his neck, and he suddenly felt certain that this was where he was. He stepped forward and turned the left-hand door handle, trying to be as quiet as possible. But when he leaned his shoulder against the door and tried to push it open, it didn’t yield an inch.
He tried again, this time setting his shoulder against it. The heavy door eventually yielded to the pressure, and he opened it just wide enough to squeeze through. Once inside Crafty lifted his candle high.
It was a scene from his worst nightmares.
A huge spiral web covered the whole of the wall directly in front of him and, hanging within it, head down, were three figures, each dressed in the greatcoat of a courier. He could see at a glance that one of them was dead. But which one?
Crafty crept slowly across the large room, prepared for the worst, hardly daring to hope that his father had survived. With his left hand he held the candle up to the web while gripping the dagger with his right.
The sight of the dead courier appalled him. All that remained was a dry husk: the blood and moisture had been drained from his body, making a mummified corpse of him.
Crafty knew what spiders did to insects. Once the insect was stuck to their sticky web, they injected them with venom to paralyse them. They became living food stored in the spider’s larder, and whenever the creature was hungry it would feed on its prey, eventually sucking it dry. The same was happening here. But here the victims were human.
His gaze now turned to the other two figures tangled in the web. He saw immediately that his father was one of them! He and the other courier were still breathing – just – but their eyes were closed and they looked horribly thin. A lump came into Crafty’s throat. Perhaps the spider had already sucked out some of their blood and fluids? Maybe the effects of the spider venom were irreversible and they were simply dying very slowly? Even if he could get them free, they might never wake up.
Another thought struck him: how was he going to get them out of the Shole now that Lick had gone? Such big men too. He’d have to drag them … two of them … He would have to deal with them one at a time, and might get only one out of the building before he was attacked. He felt a pang of guilt as he realized that he would free his father first.
Crafty pushed his worries to the back of his mind. Concentrate! Take one step at a time, he told himself.
He summoned up his courage and prepared to cut his father free of the web – maybe he could cut both men free and drag them outside, he thought suddenly in a flood of optimism. Maybe Lick would even have forgiven him and returned –
Then, out of the corner of his right eye, he glimpsed something moving. One of the changed children was watching him; the boy was standing close to a side door and, as Crafty watched, another came through the doorway, his movements jerky and unnatural. Then another.
This wasn’t looking good. No doubt there were a pack of them; they would surely attack him and tear the flesh from his bones.
Crafty prepared to make the first cut into the web. He knew that this would bring fresh danger. If some big spider was lurking above in the darkness, the twitching of the web would warn it of his presence. It would be upon him in seconds – just as it had been in his nightmare.
He set the candle down on the floor and, keeping one eye on the changed children, began cutting the strands with sweating, trembling hands. He started with those closest to his father. They were sticky and kept attaching themselves to his hands and coat, but his blade sliced through them easily enough. Fear lent him speed. Within moments he’d cut his father’s upper body free and dragged him to the floor.
He looked at him briefly, but was not reassured by what he saw. Apart from the slight rise and fall of his chest, his father was completely inert. And he was so thin, his face painfully gaunt.
Hardly able to bear the sight, Crafty worked away furiously, slashing at the strands still attached to his father’s legs.
He decided to free both men before dragging them outside one at a time, and had just started on the other courier when the whole web began to vibrate. Crafty glanced up, expecting to see some huge, fierce spider.
The good news was that the spider wasn’t as big as he’d feared.
The bad news was that there was more than one.
Each of the spiders’ bodies was about the size of an adult human head, the span of the legs at least three times that. They were covered in thick, glossy black hair and their faces … Their faces were like something out of a nightmare so awful that the terror would stop your heart. The eyes were big, bulbous and disturbingly human, and the wide mouths were full of sharp fangs pointing in all directions.
The creatures didn’t move. They just waited there, staring at Crafty.
He was frozen in position as if paralysed, like a rabbit transfixed by the stare of a stoat. But then he heard a sudden noise behind him – a heavy bang, and then the boom of the door closing. It had been shut to prevent his escape. Next he sensed something moving. Fear clutching at his stomach, Crafty turned his head.
The hungry-looking children had edged round between him and the double doors, and were now slowly advancing towards him. There were three ranks, gathered into a rough crescent, and he saw that they weren’t all the same size. The ones in the front were as small as the child he’d snatched. The ones to the rear were much taller, some even larger than adults. Perhaps the larger ones were the staff who’d once been in charge of the orphanage.
But one certainly wasn’t. Crafty recognized him because he was still wearing his blood-splattered white shirt.
It was Viper.
When Crafty pushed Viper through the gate, he’d been desperate. He hadn’t been thinking about what might happen to the mancer – he was only concerned with saving his own life.
Afterwards, although Viper had always been in the back of his mind, he hadn’t dwelled on his fate. He hadn’t expected him to change and survive. Crafty had assumed he’d either been killed by the Shole or eaten by the aberrations. But now he was one of their number.
Viper looked like the others – vaguely human, with a torso, a head and four limbs. But it wasn’t just the twitchy walk and bestial faces – particularly those wide, drooling mouths with the rows of sharp teeth – that marked them out as no longer human. It was their eyes, with those vertical, elongated pupils. They were hungry eyes, desperate for blood and raw meat.
But there were no other thoughts going on behind those eyes. The souls of these creatures had departed.
Crafty glanced at Viper again – and realized with a shock that he was different. His face was similarly distorted and bestial, but his eyes showed awareness. As Crafty stared at him, Viper’s face twisted into a gloating smile. Somehow, he still knew who he was and remembered what Crafty had done to him. Now he sought revenge.
Crafty’s attention was suddenly distracted by a more immediate threat. The front line of children was edging closer, and in the web above him he could sense the spiders creeping down. Nearer and nearer they came.
Crafty was surrounded, cut off from any hope of escape. Above him were the spiders. Now, as he turned, in front of him and blocking the double doors, the nightmare children were closing in, saliva dripping from their open mouths.
He
glanced at his father on the floor; then back at the other courier, still trapped in the web. How could he get them to safety? It seemed hopeless. They were all going to die here.
Then, all at once, he heard something banging on the double doors as if demanding admittance. There was a thunderous fury to the blows.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Crafty could see the huge doors bulging inwards with each rhythmical pounding. It had to be some truly terrible thing, an entity grown to monstrous proportions. Looking round, he realized that he wasn’t the only one terrified by the sound. The spiders were no longer inching downwards. The children had turned their backs on Crafty and were staring at those doors. Did they know what was on the other side? he wondered.
Another boom! – louder than ever – and suddenly the doors exploded into the room as if struck by a giant’s fist. They slammed back against the walls, bringing down a shower of plaster and dust.
Then a bright light flared, hurting Crafty’s eyes and illuminating the room, and something stepped forward, silhouetted in the light, striking fear into his heart. It looked huge, and cast a giant shadow against the walls. As it entered the room, though, he realized that it was smaller than he’d first thought, and human in shape. In its left hand it gripped a long spear, the haft resting on the ground, the sharp tear-shaped blade much taller than the creature that wielded it. In its right hand hung a chain that coiled at its feet, attached to something huge and round and covered in sharp spikes.
Then the source of the light, a small orb, moved forward and floated in front of the figure, illuminating it fully.
It was a moment before Crafty recognized her. It was the Bog Queen – though she looked very different to the kindly figure who’d visited the cellar to befriend Crafty and his brothers. She was so fierce, so terrible to behold.
Her scowling face was daubed with streaks of blue, and she had a ring in each ear and two through her lower lip. She still wore her crown, but there was now a green torc encircling her throat; below that was a vest and skirt of armour.