Beneath London by James P. Blaylock Page A

windows that led out onto a narrow balcony along the third floor and at the ledges and heavy moldings that decorated the wall beneath it – foot and handholds enough for a person leaving by one of the windows. He had never been happy playing the ape, not since he was a boy, but he still considered houses as places from which a person might find it necessary to leave in considerable haste.
    There was a clatter from within now, what sounded like a bolt banging open before the door was drawn back by a withered housemaid with a scraggle of hair and a long green gown with a tattered hem – Mrs. Skink, no doubt. Two men pushed out past her. Both of them stared at Beaumont for a moment, one of them with apparent ill intent, before they walked slowly in the wake of the grocer. The one who had given him the stink-eye was as bad a man as Beaumont could recollect, known along the river as Cobble, and was in the smothering lay, which paid well – better than the resurrection men were paid, the smothered corpses being still fresh and warm. Cobble had brought two of them to Narbondo one dark night at the old Shade House in the Cliffe Marsh near Egypt Bay.
    Beaumont noticed that Mrs. Skink was regarding him now, as if taking his measure. He bowed to her when she gestured him forward, and walked into the dim light inside. He smelled cooking odors and heard the noise of the nearby kitchen, and he watched as the woman shut the door. There was a Chubb lock with a twist latch set into the door a foot from the top. The latch clicked shut when the door stopped against the jamb, which meant it was always locked unless the lock was fixed open. She lowered a heavy bar across the door and padlocked the bar into place. What did
that
signify, he wondered, a door with locks meant both to keep the outside out and the inside in? – and him inside now.
    He saw that there was a closet in the wall with a black curtain across it, the curtain half open at the moment. Inside the closet stood a bed and a chair, the bedclothes tossed in a heap – Mrs. Skink’s cupboard, she being always on duty. The gaoler, he thought. He didn’t like the look of her, nor she of him, apparently. And there was something in the air of the house that wasn’t right – a smell of physic, perhaps, beneath the cooking odors, or the smell of death coming up through the floorboards. It was more than a mere
smell
– fresh ghosts, more like, troubled and unhappy. It was a house, he thought, that wanted to be burnt to the ground. He wondered now whether it was the sight of the man Cobble that had played on his mind, but his wondering was interrupted when the gangly man with the red hat appeared and said, “Come along, then.”
    They set out along a hallway toward a flight of stairs. Beaumont looked back and saw Mrs. Skink hide the padlock key inside a pitcher-pot that sat on a shelf near the door. A blind mouse could find it, which meant that they hadn’t had any troubles with blind mice, so to speak. She sat down on a stool against the wall, crossed her arms, and bowed her head as if to sleep.
    There was a maze of narrow corridors at the top of the stairs, and he memorized the left- and right-hand turns, noting the look of things in case he needed to find his way back out in a hurry. Dealing with the door locks would take some doing, especially since he mayn’t be tall enough to reach the pitcher that held the key to the padlock, nor the latch on the uppermost lock. He could use the doorkeeper’s stool, perhaps, which would make a handy weapon in a pinch.
    At the top of the stairs lay another hallway, this one broad and paneled, brightened with electric-lamps suspended from the ceiling and with rich, Turkey carpet running along the floor. Heavily framed portraits lined the walls on either side, dark and dim with age. A door opened ahead of them, apparently of its own accord, and red hat ushered him into a large room, scattered with upholstered chairs and settees and wooden