Poison Read online

  “Really? How exciting!”

  Poison gave her a look that was meant to convey the seriousness of her task, but Peppercorn merely smiled sweetly, uncomprehending. A moment later, the black tomcat slunk back into the room and wound itself around Peppercorn’s legs.

  “Andersen!” she cried, squatting down and making a fuss of him. The cat threw a reproachful glance at Poison before surrendering himself to pleasure, as if to say: there, I saved your neck, the things I have to do for some people. . .

  Poison allowed herself to calm down for a few minutes, making small chat while she got over the shock of her brush with the Bone Witch and the bizarre meeting with this happy young girl and her cat in the midst of a house of horrors.

  “Can I hide here?” she asked at length.

  “Ooh, better not,” said Peppercorn, straightening. Andersen, disappointed at no longer being stroked, slid up on to the chest of drawers and began to lick his forepaw, with an occasional glance up to see if anyone was paying attention to him.

  “Why not?”

  “She’ll come back eventually. She’s very sly. If she thinks you’re in here, a bit of perfume won’t keep her away for long. And she’ll bring the dogs. They can’t smell a thing, but they can see and hear.”

  Poison cursed under her breath. “Is there somewhere else I can hide?”

  “Oh, the house is full of hidey-holes,” Peppercorn said brightly. “But once she’s on your trail, you’d better be a good hider! Most of the people who get out of here are the ones Maeb doesn’t know about. She’s after you now.”

  “She caught me out after dark,” Poison replied.

  Peppercorn nodded in sympathy. “The days go very fast here, but the nights are very slow. That’s why I only burn one candle at a time. Can’t waste candles, you see.”

  Poison thought for a moment. “How many people have come through here?”

  Peppercorn resumed her tidying. “A few. I’ve got a calendar over there.” She pointed vaguely. Poison went over to where a calendar hung on the wall, but with the candle on the other side of the room it was too dark to see anything. She decided not to bother, and sat back down on the bed.

  “Maeb says this is one of the only bridges between the Realm of Man and the Realm of Phaerie,” Peppercorn chattered. “That’s why the Phaeries put her here to guard it. Some people are trying to escape the Phaerie Realm, some people are trying to get into it. Either way she’s supposed to stop them. Phaeries don’t like humans, you know. Except to eat.”

  “Do many make it out?”

  “One or two,” she replied. “Andersen comes and tells me if they do. It’s not good if Maeb catches me with them; she gets really mad.”

  “The cat tells you?”

  Peppercorn gave her an odd look. “Yes, the cat,” she said, clearly unable to see why Poison was surprised.

  Poison shrugged inwardly. “Doesn’t it. . .” She paused, then decided she would finish for the sake of curiosity. “Doesn’t it concern you that you’re the housemaid for a creature that eats people like you and me?”

  Peppercorn looked back over her shoulder, and her face in the candlelight was one of terrible sorrow. “There isn’t anything else,” she said. “Do you think I like living here, with only Andersen for company? Everyone I meet only stays for a night or two, then they’re eaten or they go. There isn’t anything else.”

  “No, that’s not right,” Poison said, getting to her feet. “I was like that, before. I lived in a tiny village, and I never left it. I dreamed of faraway places, and I scorned everybody for being stuck in that horrible swamp and never wanting to leave. But I was trapped, just like them, and for all that I talked about it, I might never have gone away if it weren’t for my sister being kidnapped. I might have stayed there, always meaning to go but always putting it off, and every year something would come along that made it harder for me to leave until one day I would realize that I was old, and I couldn’t leave any more.”

  Peppercorn came over to her, bringing the candle closer. “Weren’t you scared?”

  “Terrified,” Poison said. “And I’m still terrified. But I wouldn’t go back home now for a thousand sovereigns. I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s out here, and I can never again be content with that tiny world.”

  “Oh, you’re lucky,” Peppercorn said, her eyes shining. “I would love to go and see the world! The people who come through here tell me such stories. . .”

  “Then what’s stopping you? You can just walk out of here!”

  “I’m not strong enough,” Peppercorn said. “I’m only a girl.”

  “So am I,” Poison pointed out.

  “What would I do? Where would I go?” Peppercorn bleated.

  “That you can decide as you go along,” Poison replied. “That’s the beauty of it. Now I have to leave. I don’t want to be here if she comes back.”

  “Good luck!” Peppercorn said, brightening again. “Come back in the daytime; I can fix you something to eat when Maeb’s asleep.”

  Poison bade her farewell and left, going down the short staircase to where another door led on to the corridor. She listened, but she could hear nothing now. Half of her wanted to go back and beg the girl to let her stay, to hide under her bed till morning; but what Peppercorn had said made sense. The Bone Witch would not be gone for long, and when she came back there would be nowhere to hide. Besides, there was something faintly disturbing about the cheery way Peppercorn went about her business, living by candlelight in a house of death with a monstrous bone-gnawing witch as a mother figure. Poison would not have been surprised if she was more than a little mad. She certainly seemed to believe her cat could talk to her.

  She peered out into the corridor, but it was empty. The fear began to grow in her again, made worse now that she knew what it was that hunted her. The Bone Witch was either too far away to be heard, or she had stopped her screeching. The dogs, similarly, were silent. That was perhaps worse than when she could hear them; at least she knew where they were then.

  She crept down the corridor, back towards the room with the cauldron. After listening once again, she slipped out on to the balcony. Waves of heat washed up to her, and the room seemed to shift in the light of the fire beneath the great iron cauldron. She looked over with horror at the bone broth that bubbled away below, and at the macabre chandelier that hung above it; but they only served to remind her of what might happen if she was caught, and she dismissed them from her thoughts. There was no sign of witch or dog. She slipped down the wooden stairs to the floor of the room, and peered down the corridor that stood between her and the cellar.

  Nobody was there. The house seemed to breathe quietly.

  She had already decided that it was far too dangerous to go looking for new hiding-places while the witch was on the prowl, so she had determined to head back to the cellar. True enough, the sacks of flour and coal were not good places to hide, but she still had the coal chute. She could climb into it and wedge a few boards back into place. The slant was shallow enough for her to sit there until morning, and even through to the next night, when she could escape. She could smear herself in coal or flour to mask her scent.

  She wished she had thought of that before she decided to go exploring.

  It took her a while to build up the courage to make the dash from the cauldron room to the cellar door, but though she feared that something would spring out at any moment, nothing did. She raced down the shadowy corridor, her way lit by the feeble moonlight from the window at the end of the corridor. She peeped down into the cellar, and her heart sank.

  There was one thing she had forgotten. The sun had set. It was pitch dark down there.

  She gazed down into the blackness. The thin slots of grimed glass high up on the cellar walls were barely adequate in full sunlight; by night, they let in next to no illumination. She could hardly even make out the heaps of sacks t
hat lay down there.

  There was a growl from the end of the corridor, accompanied by a rhythmic thumping. Her eyes widened in terror. One of the dogs was coming downstairs, and would turn into the corridor any moment.

  There was no time to deliberate. She slipped into the cellar and closed the door quietly, leaning her back against it. Her breath came in trembling shudders. Somewhere ahead of her, massive steps plunged down to the stone floor, but she could see nothing of them. Her vision had been extinguished. Everything was dark.

  She heard the dog as it loped into the corridor. The absence of light seemed to sharpen her hearing; or perhaps it was the size of the thing that prowled nearer, for she could hear the heavy panting of its breath, the click of its claws as it walked. She dared not move, in case it heard her; but it seemed that her heart was hammering loud enough to shake the door she leaned against.

  It loped up to the cellar door, and there it stopped.

  Poison held her breath. She waited for what seemed like for ever, and then breathed out again. It still had not moved.

  Suddenly there came a lurch that almost sent her tumbling down the stairs. She pushed back against the door instinctively, enough to stop it coming open. The dog had butted it with its head. She got her foot under a crack in the stone and wedged herself against the door, feeling chill sweat prickle under her hairline. The dog butted again, harder this time; but she was ready for it, and the door did not give.

  Go away, there’s nothing here. . . she thought, willing the words into the dog’s head.

  Again, harder still; but Poison was well braced now.

  There was a puzzled whine from outside, and then silence. Poison squeezed her eyes shut, praying that the dog would give up and move on.

  Amazingly, it did. She could barely credit her luck as she heard the receding click of the dog’s claws, heading towards the cauldron room. She waited for a few minutes to see if it came back, but silence had fallen on the house once again. Finally, she allowed herself to believe the danger had passed.

  By now her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, and while it was little better than being totally blind, she could almost make out vague shapes in the room. Gingerly, she felt her way down the stairs, into the deep black of the cellar. It was chill down here, and she began to shiver a little, though whether out of fear or the cold she could not tell. Nobody liked the dark, and in a place like this it was awful. She edged out across the cellar, heading for where she imagined the coal chute would be. If she could just make it there, she could feel a little safer. Taking tiny steps across the room, without a wall at her back, she felt like something would grab hold of her at any moment. The sensation of being watched was overwhelming, so much so that she had to stop for a moment to calm herself. She listened to the silence, to the soft, sinister breath of the house all around her.

  No, not all around her. Behind her.

  “I can smell you, little pretty,” the Bone Witch crooned softly from the dark, and Poison screamed as a sack went over her head and she was bundled up like a rabbit.

  Dawn came to the house of the Bone Witch, but it was a strange dawn, the sky an odd clash of amber and purple that did not look quite natural. A mist seemed to have come down, cloaking everything outside the bone fence but not straying inside its perimeter. Shadows shifted within, beneath the dull bruise of the sun, but whether they were the movements of the mist or something altogether worse, Poison could not tell.

  She sat in a rusting iron cage, her head hanging and her long black hair falling over her face. The cage was suspended by a chain from the ceiling of the cauldron room, high above the stove. Beneath her were Maeb’s collection of mysterious ingredients, great clay pots full of all sorts of powders, leaves and pastes. The chandelier of skulls grinned at her from across the room. Through the doorway, she could see down the corridor to a single window by which she marked the time. The cauldron was still bubbling as ever, a fresh collection of bones boiling within. The room was sweltering, even more so up near the ceiling where the heat gathered.

  Poison sat in the midst of despair.

  She had tried everything: squeezing through the bars, picking the lock with a flake of metal, even calling for help. It was all useless. She could not break out of the cage. And even if she could, there was still the matter of the dog that was the size of a horse, curled up on the floor and gnawing noisily on a shin bone in the firelight.

  She watched it for a time, studying its long, lean grey body and wide-muzzled face. It looked remarkably normal apart from its size; so did its twin, whom she had also seen in the latter hours of the night while hanging in her cage. Yet when she observed its lips skinning back, exposing yellowed fangs as it crunched and chewed on the bone in its jaws, she reminded herself of what Lamprey had said: that they could tear her limb from limb if they got hold of her.

  The night had been an ordeal of fraying nerves. She had watched as Maeb fished bones out of the cauldron and chewed on them herself, or fed them to the dogs. Mostly she had been left alone, ignored, wondering at her fate. The Bone Witch had stuffed her in the cage without a word, and left her hanging in sight of the bubbling cauldron until just before dawn, when she came back and prodded Poison through the bars.

  “We’ll have all that nasty flesh off you, my dear,” she said. “Come tonight, you’ll be for the pot.” She smacked her lips and grinned her shark-tooth grin. “You’ll make a tasty nibble.”

  With that, she hobbled off to bed, and left Poison there to contemplate the following night, which would come all too soon. What Peppercorn had told her was right. Here, the nights were long, but the days were awfully short.

  The morning was brightening distressingly fast, the light growing at the end of the corridor, when she heard the sound of the balcony door opening and in came Peppercorn. Poison had lapsed into a drowse, for she had not slept since the night before last, but she sprang awake at the noise. The dog looked up too, though once it established that it was Peppercorn it lost interest and went back to its bone.

  “Have you seen my cat?” Peppercorn called to Poison.

  “Your cat?” Poison cried. “Help me out of here!”

  Peppercorn twiddled her blonde curls anxiously, looking around the room. “I haven’t seen him since last night,” she said. “He disappeared just after you left.”

  “Peppercorn, please! You have to let me down from here!” Poison urged. “There’s a chain over there, see? See where it’s hooked through that big iron eyelet? Just unhook it and run it through slowly; you can do it!”

  Peppercorn’s gaze went to the chain. It ran from the top of the cage through three similar eyelets: on the ceiling, the wall and one on the floor where it was secured. “But I can’t find my cat!” she wailed.

  “I’ll help you find your cat!” Poison lied, putting on her most encouraging tone. “We can find him together!”

  Peppercorn chewed her lip, thinking this over. “I can’t,” she said uncertainly.

  Poison wanted to scream. “You can!” she said. “If you leave me here, Maeb will eat me! Is that what you want?”

  “No,” Peppercorn said, shuffling her feet and evidently wishing she were somewhere else. “But I can’t let you out. Maeb would know. Then she’d be really mad. She might eat me!”

  “Then we’ll get out together! I know a way!”

  “I can’t leave!” Peppercorn said. “I’ve never left this house!”

  “I’ll look after you,” said Poison. “Didn’t you say you wanted to go and see the world? Don’t you want to see the Realm of Phaerie?”

  “Well, I do, but—”

  “Do you want to spend the rest of your days looking after that old witch, living of fear of being put in the pot, watching new friends come and get eaten or leave and never return?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then let me down!”

  “What abou
t the dog?”

  “I’ll worry about the dog!” Poison said, though she really had no idea how she would deal with it. Just to get out of the cage would be a start, and it was more hope than she had a few minutes ago.

  Peppercorn seemed caught in indecision; and making decisions, as Poison had ascertained by now, was not her strong suit.

  “I daren’t!” she bleated at length. “We can’t leave the house until midnight! Otherwise the things in the mist will get us. She’ll be awake by then, and she’ll see you’ve gone. She’ll catch us and eat us both!”

  “We can hide!” Poison cried desperately. “Please!”

  But whether Peppercorn might have been persuaded or not, Poison never got to find out. For at that moment, they heard a loud miaow from the doorway to the corridor, and there was Andersen. The dog leaped up in an instant with a deafening bark, and the cat turned tail and ran with the dog thundering after it.

  “Andersen!” Peppercorn squeaked, and ran down the stairs from the balcony and off in pursuit, ignoring Poison’s cries for help. The sounds of the chase faded, and Poison was left alone.

  She slumped down to the floor of her cage, and wanted to cry.

  “Poison?” called a voice softly. “Are you up there?”

  A smile of disbelief spread across her face, and she sprang up and grabbed the bars of the cage.

  “Bram?” she cried.

  Her ears had not deceived her. There he stood by the doorway, in his heavy hide coat with his thick gloves and wide-brimmed hat. He grunted at her and waved a meaty hand.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Saving your neck, apparently,” he said. “I must be mad.”

  “There’s a chain over there,” she urged. “Untie it and let me down. Slowly!”

  He did so. The iron eyelets took some of the weight of the cage, so he was able to play the chain through gradually; but even so, it was a strain. The chain clanked noisily through the eyelets, each link scraping so loudly that Poison was sure it would bring one of the awful guardians of this place. Agonizing minutes passed, punctuated by the periodic sound of clattering metal, until with a thump the cage was down. Bram hurried over to her.