The Jade Boy Read online

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “The Eye of Ra is an ancient symbol of protection,” Ann replied. “I found it in one of my grandmother’s books.”

  The coach lurched sharply as it came to a standstill. Ann’s mouse nose quivered.

  “We’re here. Tapwick’s gone to open the stable gate, but he’ll be back in a moment.

  “Quickly, hide me in your pocket so that we can go into the house together. I need to be back in my room before Tapwick comes to check on me.”

  “What about Cazalon, won’t he know you’re missing?”

  The mouse appeared to sneeze again, but Jem realised that this was really a chuckle.

  “That’s the one good thing. He despises me so much that he only ever bothers to visit me once a week – and then only to speak to my mother. He… came to me two days ago…”

  The mouse quivered, then added more certainly, “I won’t see him again for some time now. I am sure of it. And there is one more thing you should know, Jem…” The mouse stared up at him intently, “Every time he makes the blood bridge, my guardian takes a terrible risk. It leaves him exhausted. Over the last few months he seems to have aged terribly. Tolly says he sometimes sleeps for days. I think he is growing weaker. Perhaps we can use that?”

  Jem nodded slowly. “But if he can read my mind he’ll always be one step ahead of us.”

  The mouse flicked her tail. “Well, now that you are protected, he won’t be…” The coach rumbled forward again. “Quick! Hide me!’

  Jem scooped Ann into his pocket.

  “Jem, when we are inside, you must give me to Tolly,” said Ann, her voice muffled now. “And be on your guard. You must take great care when you are with my guardian. Remember what I said about food and clothing. Be sure not to kneel to him either. You must not give him more power over you.”

  The door jerked open and Tapwick’s hatless head leaned into the compartment.

  “You! Out! Master’s waiting.”

  The man’s bristle-packed nose wrinkled and his sightless eyes rolled from side to side as he inhaled the air inside the carriage.

  “Must do something about those damned mice,” he muttered to himself.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tapwick led the way from a crumbling stable block round to the courtyard in front of Malfurneaux Place. Despite the sunshine, the silent monument-lined courtyard was filled with shadows. As they passed under the broken arch into the smaller yard directly in front of the house, Jem experienced the same unnerving feeling as he had on his previous visit – that the building itself was alive. And watching him. Tapwick scuttled up four broad steps to the huge double doors and fumbled in the pocket of his tattered coat. The key he produced resembled the odd design painted on the side of Cazalon’s coach – a sort of cross with a looped head.

  Jem looked up and shuddered when he saw that in the centre of each door the wood was carved to form the shape of a woman’s head. He hadn’t seen her last time. The woman’s mouth was open wide, exposing the savage points of finely carved teeth. Instead of hair, her face was surrounded by a mane of snakes, each one separate, expertly executed and twisting in a different direction.

  “Medusa!” he gasped, remembering a book from the duke’s library that included the legend of Perseus. No wonder just one look at this hideous creature could turn a man to stone.

  “Pretty, ain’t she?” Tapwick snickered, reaching up to stroke the points of the woman’s teeth as he fitted the key in the lock.

  The face split in two and the door swung into the blackness of the hallway.

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting some light, then? Ptolemy! Here!”

  A light appeared at the far end of a corridor to the left. A short time later, Tolly arrived, carrying a long candle. He smiled, but Jem noticed that his friend’s right eye was swollen and inflamed – the injury clearly visible, even though he wore his red turban low on his forehead. Cazalon had obviously beaten him for his disobedience yesterday.

  “Give him the candle and be off,” said Tapwick.

  Jem took the candle and gently placed the little white mouse into his friend’s hands, mouthing the word ‘Ann’ as he did so. He made a questioning face and indicated the injured eye. Tolly nodded, then tried to give an encouraging smile before he stepped back into the darkness.

  “Be careful, Jem.” The words were spoken softly into his mind.

  “Now boy,” Tapwick pushed Jem towards a huge carved staircase in the middle of the hall. “The master is waiting. You are to climb the stairs. You’ll know when you’ve got there. Up!’

  The steward spun on his heels and scuttled across the hallway until the sound of his clacking footsteps faded to nothing. Jem swallowed hard and looked up. It was the same staircase, and was in the same place as his previous visit, but now there were no landings, no galleries and no crossings like last time, just hundreds and hundreds of stairs marching up into the black.

  He began to climb.

  Every thirty steps or so, the stairposts were topped by towering oak statues. The figures – male and female – were clad in robes or armour. All of them were blindfolded… but Jem sensed that, somehow, they knew he was there.

  A rustling noise in the darkness beyond the heavy balustrade to the left made him stop dead. He raised his candle.

  “Wh– who’s there?” he whispered. “Tolly…?”

  Silence.

  Jem took a deep gulp of musty air and carried on. He had climbed another fifty steps when he heard the shuffling again, much nearer this time. He froze.

  Now he could hear hoarse, rasping breaths directly behind him. Brandishing the candle like a dagger, he whirled round.

  There was no one there.

  The candle flame wavered and Jem caught sight of something glistening on one of the dark bulbous spindles of the staircase. As he looked around he realised with horror that all of the spindles above and below were now moving and glinting. Sheeny black snakes as thick as a man’s arm curled around every one of them, making it look as if the whole staircase was undulating and moving steadily upwards of its own accord.

  Jem turned very slowly and raised the candle higher. The air was instantly filled with a dry rustling sound as if thousands of scales scraped and rubbed against each other.

  For a moment he was paralysed, then Jem remembered Ann’s words when the carpet of insects was swarming around Tapwick’s feet.

  “The house is playing tricks on us. If we truly believe they are not there, they won’t be.”

  He gritted his teeth, held the candle at arm’s length in front of him, so that light illuminated even more of the writhing bodies, and stepped upwards.

  Immediately there was a hissing noise.

  “There is nothing here,” he said out loud. “I– I don’t believe in you.”

  He took another step upwards.

  “You do not exist!” he called out again, surprised that his voice sounded much more brave and certain than he felt. It was only the slightest shaking of the candle in his hand that gave the game away. As he spoke, dollops of wax spattered across the stair, one of them catching the flicking tip of a serpent’s tail.

  There was a sizzling noise, then a terrible echoing shriek and Jem was alone once more in silence.

  His heart was pounding, but he felt a small sense of victory. He had outwitted Malfurneaux Place.

  Taking care to stay at the centre of the stairs, just in case, he started to climb again, concentrating hard on the flame to block out the thought of anything following behind him in the darkness.

  After a minute he came to a step that was much broader and deeper than the others. The stairs ahead carried on upwards, but to the right there was an arched door… and it was open.

  Jem raised the candle and peered in. He was confused – should he keep going up or was this where he was supposed to stop?

  What had Tapwick said? “You’ll know when you’ve got there…”

  Jem took a deep breath, pushed his ha
ir back from his eyes and stepped into the room.

  It was dark and smelled very like a rotting pork carcass that Pig Face had once thrown out of the larder. As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he noticed that the deserted chamber had a high ceiling crossed by tapering arches that fanned out above his head like skeletal fingers.

  He held the candle higher and the bobbing flame was instantly reflected in hundreds of glass jars that squatted on rows of shelves, lining the entire wall to the left of the door.

  Cautiously, Jem moved closer for a better look. As he did so, the wooden floorboards groaned beneath his feet. The first jar he came to appeared to be filled with something rounded and grey. The thing was suspended in a yellowy liquid – its surface glistened where the light picked out dimpled folds of fat or flesh. Jem couldn’t make out what it was.

  He held the candle to the next jar and was immediately revolted to see that it contained a pale knotted jumble of limbs and hoofs. It was a tiny lamb. Its waxy skin was mottled and wrinkled, but that wasn’t what then made Jem step back in shock.

  The creature in the jar had two heads. One of them had its mouth open and Jem saw a long black tongue protruding into the liquid in which the dead animal was suspended.

  Moving along the shelves, he realised that every jar contained a lifeless creature – creatures that seemed to be wrong or distorted in some horrible, pitiable way. A featherless bird the size of a cat appeared to have three sets of bony wing stumps erupting down its back. A naked rat with a grotesquely over-sized head seemed to scrabble in desperation at the glass walls encasing its lifeless body. At the end of the row, a domed jar contained the head of a calf. Dead-white flesh frayed from the animal’s skull and peeled upwards into the cloudy liquid around it. Jem was revolted to see that the calf had been born without eyes – or even a space for them.

  He heard a clinking noise behind and spun around.

  At first he thought nothing had changed, but then he noticed that the first jar he’d looked at seemed to have shifted. Now it was balanced precariously over the edge of the shelf. He moved along the row and held the candle close to the glass. Suddenly, the lumpy grey mass seemed to ripple. In the middle of the jar, the flesh puckered tight and then something round and dark like a mouth, with rows and rows of sharp, tiny teeth, opened and closed.

  Jem bit back a yelp of disgust and backed away.

  The house was playing with him, again.

  Every fibre of Jem’s being was yelling at him to get out, to get away, but a small, insistent voice in his head reminded him of his vow to find out as much about Cazalon as he could. He was hesitating, when he heard another faint sound from the other end of the room – not clinking this time, but something soft and regular.

  He stepped cautiously towards the sound. Soon the weak light from the candle revealed two large wooden chests against the far wall. The noise seemed to come from the chest on the left.

  Jem slowly lifted its lid and looked down into the open box. At first he couldn’t understand what he saw.

  In the middle of the chest a large, shaggy hound was suspended on a network of metal spikes and pins. Glass tubes connected to the animal’s body snaked out to a series of flasks and vials that were balanced on a ledge running around the inside of the chest. The tubes were full of moving liquid.

  As Jem looked he realised with horror that the hound’s skull had been opened like a box. Something like a large, moist, lumpy walnut was positioned on a small glass tray just above the gaping wound and this grey object was also connected to the creature by a second, finer array of glass tubes and pipes. Jem felt as if he was going to be sick.

  The soft rhythmic noise came from the right of the box. Now Jem saw that the creature’s heart had also been removed from its body. The organ was still twitching and beating on a second glass tray.

  This was appalling. The poor, poor creature.

  Jem’s hand began to shake so much that he dropped the candle into the chest. The flame sputtered and dimmed and Jem knew that he had to retrieve it before it died and left him in total darkness.

  Fighting back his revulsion, he reached carefully into the chest. As he caught hold of the candle his hand brushed against some of the liquid-filled tubes connected to the animal’s body. Immediately the hound shuddered and whimpered in pain.

  Jem felt tears pricking his eyes.

  ‘The master’s toys’ – that’s what Tapwick had called the poor mutilated creatures he’d seen on his first visit to Malfurneaux Place. But these were not toys and this was certainly not a game that Jem wanted to play. Rubbing his hand roughly over his eyes, Jem raised the candle over the second box. This time he saw a cat.

  The animal appeared to be curled up and asleep, and there were no organs removed, but as he looked closer he realised that it was dead. Its fur was matted and patchy, and maggots wriggled in the rotting flesh. The cat was the source of the vile smell in the room.

  Jem wondered what Cazalon had done to this poor creature. His hand trembled again, but this time, instead of dropping the candle, he managed to hold tight.

  A few drops of hot wax fell onto the little corpse below.

  The cat opened its eyes and stared up at Jem. It blinked twice, and continued to stare.

  Jem reeled away and bent double as his stomach lurched and heaved. He dropped the candle and it rolled across the floor, guttering and spluttering as wax flicked across the boards. He had never seen anything so cruel. What kind of a man could be capable of such brutality?

  “Ah, here you are, Jeremy.”

  The count stood in the open doorway, casting a shadow across the room that reached the tips of Jem’s shoes.

  “You have kept me waiting so long that I decided to come and find you. I see that you are admiring my… experiments.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Cazalon leaned heavily on his black staff and took a halting step forward. His long black robe rustled and Jem now saw that the blue plait that grew from the centre of the man’s shaven head was so long that it trailed across the threshold behind him.

  The count smiled.

  “They say that sorcery is dead, Jeremy. In these enlightened days science is the new magic – and as I have such a thirst for knowledge, how could I resist the opportunity to make some scientific enquiries of my own?”

  Cazalon gestured at the boxes. The room was stifling, but he still wore gloves. “My particular interest, Jeremy, is the nature of life itself. More specifically I am fascinated by the existence of the soul. Where do you think it resides? In the brain… or in the heart?”

  Jem didn’t answer, but he thought about the poor hound in the first of the count’s chests. So that’s what he was trying to do!

  Cazalon sighed. “It has been a most disappointing test, to be frank. But the other one, the little cat there, is much more interesting. I managed to hypnotise the creature on the very point of death, Jeremy. Imagine that? Now its soul, its spirit, its ba – as I believe some ancients might have called it – is captured in that rotting carcass. It cannot depart – I have created a sort of immortality. I think you will agree that it is quite an achievement?”

  He paused for a moment and stared intently at Jem. His slanted eyes narrowed. “In fact, the cat has been such a success that I am hoping to perform my next experiment on a higher animal… possibly a monkey, or perhaps a mute?”

  Jem’s stomach churned again. It was all he could do to stop himself from actually throwing up.

  Cazalon smiled more broadly than ever. His red lips stretched and curved across his angular face and the chalk-white paint on his skin crackled. “Enough of this. Come!”

  He swept from the room and although Jem tried to resist, he felt compelled to follow. It was as if the count were drawing him along on an invisible leash.

  Beyond the door a broad passage now led from the opposite side of the step. Jem was certain it hadn’t been there before.

  The passage glowed with light from hundreds of red candles caught i
n clawlike hands that sprouted from the walls. Between the twisted hands, the walls were lined with paintings. Men and women dressed in the most fantastic costumes stared down at him. Although he tried not to look too closely at any of them, Jem couldn’t help pausing in front of a huge portrait of a woman in a dress made from glittering black material that looked like thousands of beetle wings stitched together.

  Jem’s gaze was drawn to the woman’s face. Her left eye was covered by a jewelled patch with delicate ribbon ties that crossed her forehead and disappeared into a mane of russet hair. Her right eye was golden and oddly alive. She was beautiful, but this wasn’t the soft, fair beauty of his mother. This woman was proud and triumphant. Jem felt as if a cold draught had blown on the nape of his neck, but he couldn’t help staring at her.

  Folds of glinting fabric swirled at the woman’s feet and, fascinated, Jem felt that if he put out a hand he would be able to feel each brittle fibre of material. He was just reaching out when he noticed that the woman’s foot was revealed by a parting in her skirts. The foot was the gnarled and blackened talon of a huge bird.

  Jem sprang back in shock. Tearing his eyes from the picture, he forced himself to carry on along the corridor, almost certain that behind him he could hear the sound of laughter.

  At the far end, the passage turned sharply to the right. A little way ahead of him Cazalon was leaning back against the wall and staring up at another painting.

  “Come and stand by me, Jeremy.”

  The count continued to contemplate the portrait. Jem looked up and immediately recognised Ann. She was dressed entirely in silver with a thick curl of her luminous white hair caught up in a jewel shaped like a crescent moon. In her left hand she carried a pair of fine gloves and, when Jem looked more closely, he noticed that the cuffs were embroidered with a coiled serpent.

  Cazalon turned to look at him.

  “What do you think of her?” The count’s eyes seemed to be boring into him.