The Convicts Read online

  “Oh, it wouldn't do? said Worms. “Walker!”

  “Well, what have you brought?” snapped the doctor.

  “A good-looking boy,” said Worms. “Fresh as a daisy, and another besides.”

  My fingers brushed over slats and bars. Something moved, something rumbled, and the drawer lurched open. The boy's feet came out, white and sickly-looking. Beside them was the shovel, but I had no chance to take it.

  “Fetch them in,” the doctor said. “But hurry.”

  Worms came back at a run. Though large mid heavy, he came so quickly that he caught me with the shelf pulled open. He stood and stared down, then raised his eyes to me. “Do you want all the world to see?” he asked.

  He took the newly dead boy, my naked double, up on his shoulders, then pushed the drawer with his hip. It locked itself shut as Worms went off again at the same lumbering trot, with the dead boy riding him backward, slapping at his hips. Then, before he even reached the foot of the steps, a carriage came rumbling up the street behind me. It was the doctor's cab, a big four-wheeler pulled by gray horses.

  It startled old Peggy. She rapped her wooden leg on the street and tugged at the wagon. I didnt know if a three-legged horse could bolt, but I was afraid she would try. I ran up to her head and took hold of the bridle as the cab came to a stop just behind the wagon. Its door flung open, but I didn't see the man who stepped out. I didn't need to see him to know who it was.

  “Ahoy the house!” he shouted.

  Mr. Goodfellow. So Worms was right; his doctor friend did hobnob with the best. But what fate had brought him here, to the dingiest part of the city? I pressed myself against Peggy, thinking how much it would please Mr. Goodfellow to see me here, shoeless, minding a bone grubber's wagon.

  “Ahoy the house!” he shouted again. He passed the wagon; he passed the horse on its other side, then stood facing the door. “Kingsley!” he called. “Kingsley, you fool.”

  A second man spilled from the cab, laughing as though Mr. Goodfellow were the greatest wit. “You'll have to fetch him out, Goody,” he said. “Kingsley always keeps us waiting.”

  “Part of his charm.” Mr. Goodfellow cupped his hands to his mouth and bellowed, “Kingsley!”

  The pair had been into the gin, I could see. They wobbled their way across the street and down the steps. Just as they went in through the front, old Worms came scuttling from the back. He climbed onto the wagon and snatched up his reins.

  “Walker!” he grumbled. “Who does he think he is, that doctor? Blimey! Who does he think he is?” Worms shook his head. “‘Wait outside,’ he tells me. Well, dash it, Tom, there's other doctors. Peas in pods they may be, but there's one around the corner here.”

  I sat up beside him, and Peggy hauled us along. Her head shaking, her breath snorting, she lurched up the hill at her steady pace. We rolled along through a dreary slum, splashing our wheels in gutters that ran with sewage. It was late enough that the streets were empty, bright enough that I could see rats feasting on the bits of horse droppings the finders had missed. On either side stood the lowest of lodging houses, their long windows turned to grimy checkerboards by all the squares of paper and wood that filled the missing panes. Dismal homes of dismal people, they were die haunts of thieves and waifs and crossing sweepers, the sorts of places where I was doomed to land myself if Mr. Goodfellow had his way, if I couldn't recover my diamond.

  Suddenly, Worms looked around. “What was that?” he asked.

  I had heard nothing but our own squeaks and taps. But old Worms seemed frightened. “Listen,” he said.

  And I heard it then.

  Voices, high and eerie. They rose from my right, and then from my left, voices so faint and ghostly that the skin prickled on my neck. They came from behind and came from ahead, and a drumming began, like an army marching, as one of the arabs beat along dustbins. I saw others swirl into the street behind us, a mob of black in ragged clothes.

  “Worms,” I said. “Look!”

  He glanced back only once, only for an instant, then thrashed at his reins. “Gee up, Peggy!” he shouted. “Run, you blessed glue pot!”

  The poor old horse gave out a startled, strangled cry. Its breath came in a great puff-and-a wheeze, and the wooden leg tapped faster. I looked back and saw the street arabs running, more rushing in behind them, one with a torch that flickered a red flame on bare shoulders and chests, in the empty windows of the lodging houses.

  The wagon jolted over cobblestones. Peggy's leg tapped amid the clatter of her hoofs.

  “She can't pull us both,” said Worms, thrashing with the reins. “Get off, Tom!”

  He tried to push me from the seat, but I clung to my place. “Here!” he shouted. “Take your tuppence and go.”

  He wrestled the money from his pocket and shoved it at my side. He pushed hard, and violently, and I grabbed for his wrists to save myself. I caught him by the hand. But his fingers, slick and greasy, slipped through my fist. The pennies fell into my palm, and I went tumbling from the wagon.

  For an instant I thought that the wheel would crush my life away. But I bounced from the turning rim, and struck my head on the cobblestones.

  The dead boy came after me. Down the streets and through the alleys, his feet pattered on paving stones, on cobbles and bricks. His arms held out, his eyes wide open, he shambled behind me through gardens and graveyards. Every time I looked back he was closer. And finally, at the Hunger-ford Stairs, I felt his hand on my shoulder.

  I woke with a start from a terrible dream. With a gasp I sat bolt upright—just as the dead boy had sprung up in my nightmare. With my heart a-shudder I breathed deep breaths.

  There was a boy beside me. His hand had been on my shoulder, but now it flew off, and he cried out in alarm— “Oh, Jeminy!’—to see me come awake so suddenly.

  He was nearly as gruesome as die running corpse of my nightmare. His head was odd-shaped, his face rather twisted, his ears just lumps of flesh. He wore no shirt, only trousers that had frayed nearly to the knees, and just one suspender to hold them up. His ribs stuck out in turns and knobs, as though an old man's knuckled fingers clutched him below his skin.

  “Look at him now,” he said. “See there? Told you it's him.”

  “It ain't,” said a black-haired fellow. “That's his coat, Penny, sure as a gun, but it ain't the Smasher.”

  I touched the back of my head. There was a lump as big as my fist, an&it hurt like the devil. I thought I'd cracked my skull, as the voices of the boys seemed to echo in my head. But I soon saw that I'd been brought to a great, hollow chamber. Lit by guttering lamps, it smelled strongly of night soil, and hummed with a watery sound of drips and plops and ripples. I was in the sewers, I decided, deep below the buildings and the streets.

  The entrance was a round, black hole. The floor was strewn with bones of all sizes, from the hollow legs of birds to massive beef bones sucked of marrow. Along the walls ran a thick shelf, and upon it sat a dozen boys dressed in rags. There was one not more than five years old, his head resting on another's shoulder. They all watched me. Thin and pale, caked with dirt, they seemed like a colony of goblins, living in darkness, dressing in human clothes they didn't understand. They wore socks for gloves, stockings for caps; some of their coats had only one sleeve, and others none at all.

  One in particular put shivers of fear in my spine. Twice the size of any other, he alone had a full set of clothes, but all too small, as though he were exploding through them. His head was a troglodyte's, beetled and bumpy; his breaths went in like gusts of wind, and out like groaning bears.

  “When you're dead, you're dead, Penny,” said he, his voice surprisingly soft. “You don't come back.”

  “What do you know, Boggis?” said little Penny. Even his words were a bit twisted, as though his mouth wasn't quite right inside. “Body snatcher dug him up,;dead or not.” His hands had webs of skin between the fingers, and they held the coins that Worms had given me. They jingled in that webbed fist “Had theses d
idn't he? Came from his grave.”

  The black-haired boy only shrugged. He had a torn hat that he pushed back on his head. “The Darkey will know”

  With a grunt, tiie giant got up from the bench. He was enormous. His head would have touched the roof of the chamber if he had had a neck. But it sat squarely on his shoulders, like a bucket on a barrel. His arms were too long, his legs too short, and in his own way he was just as grotesque as dwarfed Penny. He took one lurching step, then another, and there he stopped with his great fists dangling down, his great chest heaving.

  “Prove it's him,” he said. ‘-Make him talk, then we'll know. Or look and see.”

  -Look for yourself, why don't you, Boggis?” said Penny. “Afraid to touohhim, ain't you?”

  I didn't want any of them to touch me, Boggis least of all. But I couldn't run away, and I dared not speak. All the boys had city accents, thick as the mud of the Thames, and whoever they thought I was must have been the same. The moment I opened my mouth they would know I wasn't him.

  Boggis came no closer. “We need the Daikey,” he said, and turned his bucket head toward the door.

  As thoughat his command, footsteps rang on the brick.

  They grewlouder mid closer. Every boy in the chamber turned to watch. Even the candles seemed to brighten, nod-ding their flames toward the entrance.

  A hope came to me—a silly, childish hope-nthat my father would storm through that black hole and carry me away. I gripped my coat, the dead boy's coat, to stop my hands from shaking.

  A shadow slid along the walk It leapt around the corner and soared to the height of the chamber. It was the shadow of a humpbacked ogre. But through the entrance came only a tousle-headed boy with a stick on his shoulder and a bundle hanging from its end, resting on his back. I knew the bundle at once; it had belonged to the blind man.

  The boy heaved the stick sideways from his shoulder. The bundle landed with a thump; the stick slipped from its knot and clattered on the brick among the scattered bones.

  “Found this at the river,” he said. “I did, or my name ain't Jack Skerritt. It was jammed in the stones at the Tower Stairs.”

  I knew that place, and it wasn't where I'd wrestled with the blind man. If I had fled up the Tower Stairs I would have come to the Great Tower Hill and the Tower itself, not the maze of alleys where I had met old Worms.

  But as Jack knelt down to open his bundle, a sudden dread came over me. If he had found it at the Tower Stairs, then the tide must have taken it there. And if the tide had done that, had it taken the blind man too? I heard his grunts and saw, again, the spittle flying from his mouth. Had I hit him hard enough to kill him? He had been groping for his stick and bag when I'd last looked back at him. But maybe he hadn't made it far and had finally collapsed in the mud. The dark river might have carried him and his bundle away.

  I would be found out. I was sure of it then. Sooner or later it would happen, and no one would believe my story. A judge would look down from a bench and ask what sort of monster would kill a helpless old blind man. There was no doubt that I would hang for what I had done.

  Jack was picking at the string that tied the bundle, telling the storyof his wonderful find, how he had thought at first that he had stumbled on a dead body. “Looked like a floater” he said. “But this is better. Just you wait and see.”

  Bending hichead, he bit into the string, then stopped. “By jabers, I found these, too” He turned out his feet, looking down at them, and I saw that he was wearing my shoes. “Tliak of the boy what had them. A little chickabiddy boy he must hive been, dancing in these fancy shoes. Wouldn't I have liked to wing his neck?”

  “Didn't you, then?” asked Boggis, standing above him.

  “No. They was tangled up in the bag and the stick,” said Jack, “Good shoes. A touch too small, but I fixed it, see”

  He turned his leg a bit farther, and! saw that he had sliced the toes open to make room for his feet. For some reason, that hurt me more than anything. After all my perils and my troubles, to see my fine shoes cut open for the big stupid feet of an urchin made a moan rise in my throat. Jack turned to look at me.

  “Christmas!” he said. “Is that the Smasher?”

  “Poz!” cried Penny. “Ain't you got eyes, Jack Skerritt?”

  “A spirit or a person?”

  The giant answered. “No one knows.”

  “Ill tell you soon enough.” Jack looked down at his stick, then up at the lamps. “Do you think a spirit burns?”

  There was one breath from all the boys. Water dripped and plopped, and the shadows moved as Jack Skerritt stood and took a laaip from the wall. The flame leapt in yellow wriggles.

  “Take it, Boggis,” he said, holding out the lamp. “Go on. Take it, Gaskin.”

  The giant's lips cracked open. His grunting breaths made the flame shiver and shrink, as though even a lamp cowered before him.

  “Take it,” whispered Jack, and the giant did. He carried it toward me, then dropped heavily at my side. “Who are you?” he grunted.

  The lamp moved toward my cheek. I felt the heat of its flame; I saw its fire leap and curl.

  What could I do but lie there? I wasn't a coward, but I wasn't a fighter either. I couldn't battle a giant and a roomful of boys; I couldn't even cry for help, I only watched the flame, and felt it touch hot fingers to my cheek.

  But then it drew away. The same booming and splashing that had brought Jack Skerritt started anew.

  “Here comes the Darkey,” said Gaskin Boggis.

  Water dripped and splashed. The shadows moved. I expected the Darkey to be huge and muscled, brown as chestnuts. But none of my imaginings could have prepared me for what came through the entrance.

  The Daikey was a woman. She was small, thin, as shiny as a pot erf boot blacking. She came into the chamber with golden hoops in her ears, in a dress of bright colors and a hat like none I'd seen. There was a bird atop it, a full peacock, dead and stuffed, with its feathers in a bright fan. In its dozens of eyes shimmered every color of the rainbow.

  “Hallo, beys,” she said.

  They greeted her like a mother. Most went swarming to her, and the smallest boys pressed themselves against her legs, clinging to the dress that billowed from her hips. Gaskin Boggis, though huge beside her, folded up like a little boy.

  Her hands were black on their tops and pale underneath, and they passed over the heads of the boys, along their shoulders and their arms.

  “Good morning, all my little ones.” Her voice was deep and her words came quickly, each distinct, ringing with a laughter underneath them. Her teeth flashed in a smile.

  But that faded when she saw me. Her lips drew over her teeth like dark curtains, and she scattered the boys, touching them away with white-sided hands that turned all to black as she pressed them together. Her nostrils fluttered in the broad flat of her nose.

  “He smells of the grave,” she said.

  She came down and looked at me, and the lamplight sparkled on her hoops. Her hair was as black as the threads in my mother's veils.

  “Where is it you found him?” she asked, not looking away from me.

  Penny answered. “In the body snatcher's wagon. Had these in his hands.”

  He held out the coins old Worms had given me. The Darkey plucked them from him; she tasted the metal. “Yes,” she said. “These have touched a dead boy's eyes.”

  If she was right, then Worms had lied to me. “I don't touch their rings or nothing” he'd said. But I believed the Darkey. I believed she knew all there was to know of death and life.

  Her fingers pressed my skin. They touched the part of my cheek that had been warmed by the giant's lamp. He was still holding it as the Darkey looked from me to him and somehow sensed what had happened.

  “A sly one you are, Gaskin. Plucky, too.” She laughed. “Playing temptations with a spirit.”

  “Is that what he is?” asked Boggis.

  “If not now, then soon enough.” Her white teeth flashed. “Ben
jamin Penny, you knew him best Come arid look, my

  He slid and shuffled through the bits of bone—now on ofteiiandand a hip, mm on his knee—scuttlingin quick little movements. The peacock tilted on the Darkey's hat as she bent toward me.“Hewatches us. He knows what goes about hiin” she said. “But he doesn't talk; why not?”

  Penny frowned, ‘It's a quiz, Darkey. He ain't quite right yet. Inside, I think.”

  “A long time it's been since the sisters took him in,” said. the woman. “You want him back, I know. But listen.” Her eamngs sparkled! “They rang the passing bell for him. Your Smasher died.”

  The black-haired boy leaned forward from the bench. “Darkey, why don't you look and see if—-”

  “I see all I need to see,” she said, “In the land where I was born they talk of this. They say it sometimes happens that the dead rise from their graves, and walk and talk again. But they are cold, those walking dead, and empty in their eyes. They do not watch and listen like this one. They do not look afraid like him “

  “Might be you what's scaring him,” said Penny.

  She laughed. The feathers quivered on the peacock, tibe countless eyes winking.

  “If our darling has come back, we will know it,” she said. “Remember how he was with his fists? If this is him he will be better tonight, for now he truly has no heart.”

  I shuddered at the thought of that. How could it be that a boy who had been my twin in body could be so different in hissoul?

  “Tonight you will see,” said the Darkey. “If it isn't him, then do not bring him back.”

  “What do we with him, Darkey?” asked the black-haired boy.

  “Let Jack decide. Let Jack do the thinking, and Boggis his bidding.”

  The Darkey looked once more at me, then turned her attention to Skerritt's black bundle. She sat in the shadows and laughed at the things he pulled out. There were bits of glass and bits of bone, rusted nails and lumps of coal. At the sight of each worthless thing, the Darkey laughed a little louder, and Skerritt grew a little redder in his anger. He hurled his finds around the chamber: more nails; more coal; an animal's tooth; and last of all, he pulled out the blind man's boots.