Author’s Note

The Dead Days? Have you ever felt the stillness of that strange, quiet time between Christmas and the New Year?

In ancient Egypt the calendar was made from 12 months of 30 days each, giving 360 days to the year. The Egyptians were smart enough to know there were actually around 365 days in each solar year. They reconciled this difference with a story in which Thoth, their ibis-headed god of wisdom, wins five extra days from the reigning gods in a game of dice and gives them to the goddess of the night, and thus to the people too. These days did not belong to any of the Egyptian months and were felt to be outside normal time. The Aztecs, using a similar calendrical system, also added five days, but feared them as days of bad omen and dubbed them Dead Days.

Of course, these days bore no relation to Christmas, but I’ve always felt that the time between Christmas and New Year’s is outside the hurly-burly of the rest of the year, and so I fixed the Dead Days there. The dates of Christmas and New Year’s have varied widely through time and from culture to culture. A quick count will show you there are six days between the two modern feasts, though this story is set in the five culminating on New Year’s Eve.

The time? Somewhere in the second half of the eighteenth century, with one foot in the superstitious ancient world and one in the rational modern one—when science was starting to become the rigorous discipline it is now, but when, to the uninitiated, early experiments with electricity and magnetism must have seemed more like magic than reality. And at a time when every day was still known as its own saint’s feast day.

The place? An old city, once magnificent but now decaying, with echoes of many beautiful cities: Paris, with its miles of hidden catacombs; Bologna, with canals hidden under the modern city streets; and Krakow, with twisting alleys, crowded cemeteries and, at Christmas, lots and lots of snow.

The Dead Days are waiting.

I’d like to thank Wendy Lamb and her team, as well as the wonderful people at Orion, especially Fiona, whose help has been invaluable on more than one occasion.

Marcus Sedgwick
Horsham, West Sussex
31 December 2002