“Wake up, Johnny Lamb. Wake the hell up, Johnny Lamb.”
Someone was speaking softly to Jonathan, who was no longer dead asleep in a bed on the second floor of Dr. Lambshead’s mansion.
The voice was hard to hear amid a terrible din … of birdsong?
Opening his eyes Jonathan saw a shocking number of birdhouses hanging from the ceiling high above. No less than a dozen birds were availing themselves of the accommodations—accommodations that he was fairly sure had not been there the night before. He watched the darting shapes of larks, starlings, blackbirds, and wrens—all of them cackling, jeering, warbling, and chirping. It was too much motion and noise for first thing, not with everything else wobbling around in his head.
Dr. Lambshead had thoughtfully put in some feeders as well, and some cuckoo clocks just to confuse things further. He must have also put in a hole somewhere in the ceiling large enough for birds to plunge through. It was a wonder the whole mansion wasn’t full of birds.
Was that a small duck up there, among the darting others?
Bang. Bang bang.
Now something was slamming against the frame of Jonathan’s bed.
Battering ram? Hammer of the gods? Or just an annoying friend named Rack?
“Wake the hell up, Johnny Lambshead. Are you having a Personality Crisis? Are you on a Sad Vacation?”
Nothing muffled about that, although cryptic if you didn’t know Rack’s obsession with Johnny Thunders.
Jonathan buried his head under the covers. That deep, comforting space where he could just hug the pillow and not face any of the things he had to do. “How did you get up here? How’d you even find me in this maze?” His mother’s wariness had descended over him, and even these ordinary questions meant to hide secrets now.
“I flew, mate! Like I always do. Like the birds, Johnny, the birds above your scary, too-long horse head. No, I lie—I just followed the smell of an unwashed, vile Poxforth second year.”
“Rack” for short. Otherwise, Dirk Wulf Rackham. It always sounded to Jonathan like a list of items required before putting together furniture or someone introducing three different people: “These are my friends Dirk, Wulf, Rackham. Barristers at large.” We are housed for your convenience within a single body, along with a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
If Rack was here that meant his sister, Danny, had arrived as well. What to do now? Send Rack and Danny packing, out of danger, or pretend like nothing was wrong while he tried to make sense of what he’d found behind door number one?
“Do you not see that there are too many birds in this room and that I might need … a moment?” Heaven help him—were these the “bird-children” Dr. Lambshead had referred to in his letter? Because if so, he wasn’t feeling very charitable toward them.
“Help. I’m in a death chair. Save me, Lamby. You must save me from this contraption before it kills me.”
A new ploy, in such an insistent voice, a tad nasal but also oddly deep. A voice that served as a fearsome weapon in debate competition or urging his fellow oarsmen on, and not to be denied.
“It’s not a death chair. It’s a one-person mobile tank for all your personal protection needs. You pedal whilst wearing an iron helmet. Antique. Prussian. Never used in combat.”
Last night Jonathan had brought it upstairs on a whim, felt it might be valuable. As if he were now the proprietor of an antiques roadshow. But he didn’t really know its origins.
Said Rack, “It’s offensive that it’s a wheelchair with offensive capabilities. I love it. But I’m also uninterested in getting shat upon this morning.”
It hadn’t occurred to Jonathan that he was lying beneath an aerial bombardment. It should have. Dr. Lambshead had even left a cryptic note about the birds on the bedside table. A fact about birds, rather.
Did you know that a woodpecker’s tongue is so long it curls around the inside of its skull? Remember that.
But why?
Jonathan sat up in bed, defeated.
Rack stared at him, not without affection, from beneath a wide and unexpected black umbrella.
Jonathan couldn’t suppress a jagged laugh at the sight. A figure with the build of a bulldog slouched in the one-person Prussian tank/wheelchair wearing his usual outfit: a dark blue suit, with threads that sparkled dull in the light from the windows, along with a flamboyant blue-red-green-all-the-colors dress shirt that the uncouth might call psychedelic and the unwashed might envy.
That broad face and strong jutting chin, beneath unruly black hair that grew long and unmanageable when he was immersed in his studies. “Danish Korean” was how Rack explained his heritage, “so I must like bitter cabbage and rotted fish, right?” Daring anyone to confirm that. Despite his upbringing and last name screaming “English, So Very Very Very English!” Rack was a terror in the pubs when accosted by the drunken small-minded. Adopted, or as he sometimes said, “adapted.”
Dark, bright eyes that glittered or gleamed depending on whether he was irritated or elated. Dull when bored, almost glazed over as if he’d been turned off and was waiting for someone to flip a switch. But really it was his expressive mouth and sardonic eyebrows that gave away the game. Jonathan loved to play poker with him because he was crap at it.
Rack had a brain on him like no one Jonathan knew. He also found catalogs and lists exciting, which was a plus in the current context. His main vice was pocket squares, especially crimson ones with gold embroidery at the corners. But they seemed intended as distraction from an ensemble of the same three dress shirts, two pairs of trousers, and two blazers, well preserved but beginning to lean toward the status of “relics.” Tatty. Jonathan feared the family’s old money was getting too old. Otherwise why would he, after some fake dithering, accept the fee Jonathan had offered for the help?
“Couldn’t you have waited downstairs like a normal or abnormal person until I got dressed, Rack?”
“It’s after nine a.m. We’ve been here since seven. We rang and rang. We knocked. We pounded. We pleaded. You never answered the doorbell—”
“Doesn’t work. Hasn’t worked in ages, I fear.”
“—so we broke in through a window, no apologies for that, and we took some bread from the cupboard like a couple of country mice and begged some milk from the fridge, no thanks to you. We’d driven all the way up here since the taint of dawn and needed a bite to eat and some shelter and some honest human company who is not my sister and probably isn’t you, either. And you still can’t be bothered to sit up. Are you depressed or something? Do I need to take extreme measures? Shall I set the bed on fire? Because I’ll do it. I’ll do it, by god, and then you’ll have to choose between roasting and being shat upon by birds. And either way the stench will be fantastic.”
“I feel I need to point out that that’s not your personal wheelchair. It is part of my estate.”
“I believe I already expressed an affection for the spikes jutting from the wheels and the rails for twin machine guns,” Rack said. “But, mostly, I like that I can sit down in it while wreaking havoc.”
Rack had a prosthetic left leg below the knee and a damaged right foot housed in a special orthopedic shoe that bothered him no matter how far the technology advanced. Sometimes the wear and tear meant he used a cane or, for brief periods, a wheelchair.
“Why are there so many damn birds in here?”
Jonathan slumped a little in the bed. Dr. Lambshead’s letter had been clear that he had to sleep in this accursed room as a condition of his inheritance, but he would have to fib to Stimply and move immediately.
“You’re already like a beaten old man, old bean. Ancient bean. Maybe you should break the window next to the one we broke. You know, just to make yourself feel alive.”
“I’ll show you the basement after I have some breakfast,” Jonathan said, ignoring him. “And we can get started.”
Rack laughed, a deep, rollicking sound that Jonathan was fond of; there was a weight behind it, like a man with his shoulder braced against a buckling door.
“What? You thought we needed a map and a torch and a pickax? Do you think we can’t find our arses with both hands, either? We’re already in the basement. We’re already sorting all the flotsam and jetsam down there. You know my sister—I might’ve wished for a leisurely egg and a cup of tea, but not her.”
“She’s competent, you mean.”
“Yes. Quite. That. Never really got the hang of that.”
Danielle Rackham. Never had a middle name, seemed to think it an oversight on her father’s part that could be remedied by becoming the most complete athlete Jonathan had ever seen, most fearsome in a rugby scrum, and a double-major in sociology and cryptobiology.
She was the only friend he’d made by the lake at Poxforth who was actually doing relentless laps in the muddy, reed-choked water when he met her, Rack coming along in due time from some French club extravaganza. Some at Poxforth called them “R & D,” as in Research & Development; Rack would come up with some harebrained scheme and Danny would make it real.
The three of them had bonded for some reason, perhaps because Danny was easy to talk to. Perhaps because, in a more boisterous way than Jonathan but similar nonetheless, Danny couldn’t stand people “rabbiting on.”
The second time Jonathan had met the Rackhams was at a party at Poxforth to celebrate something silly, like physics majors who were also on the rowing team. The third time, which had cemented their friendship, he’d taken them on a tour of Robin Hood’s Bay and, in a local pub he knew Sarah had liked, fell afoul of a folk band called Monkey’s Knuckle when Danny got the giggles over the words “monkey’s knuckle.”
Jonathan had only known them a year and a half, but it felt much longer, as with friends you could always pick back up with, no adjustment period needed.
“Perhaps you could guide yourself outside for just a bit while I put on some clothes?”
“Nothing I haven’t seen about two hundred times before, young feller me lad.” That probably wasn’t too far from the truth, despite the old-duffer syntax.
Rack had never divulged how he’d lost his leg, damaged his foot—always told people different versions of the story, left it to them to sort through. Which was all Rack’s way of saying it was none of their business.
“From birth.”
“Car accident.”
“Boat mishap.”
“Maniac attacked me.”
“Chased by a cow feetfirst into a thresher back on the family farm.”
“Bear mauling. Now we’re friends.”
“Family that adopted me first liked me even less than I thought.”
Only Danny knew how Rack had lost his leg and his foot. She’d never offered up the information, and Jonathan had never asked. As the months went on and he saw what Rack had to put up with, he thought he’d passed a test by not asking.
Jonathan found it charming that, sometimes, their friendship was based on the things they did not share with each other. That R & D knew some questions, too, were off the table, and that was okay.
Except, overnight, the questions had multiplied, become more sinister.
For example, Jonathan now knew that Dr. Lambshead had died not from natural causes, but instead from spectacularly unnatural ones. Stimply had lied to him. The evidence in the basement pointed to a conclusion Jonathan had been trying to deny.
Most likely, someone or some thing had attacked and killed his grandfather.
Beyond the first door the night before, Jonathan’s first step into oblivion had been more banal than he’d thought, anticipation of falling replaced by a fight to keep his balance, and landing rough on his knees.
Jonathan had, somehow, returned to the mansion—that was his first thought. Except now it was suffused with a blue misty light that made him think of the moon. A kind of haunted version. The temperature had plunged and he shivered. There was a fresh if frozen smell to the air.
Behind him, the door had still been open, thankfully. There was enough light to see by, so he had placed his flashlight in the crack so it couldn’t close and walked forward.
What lay before him Jonathan recognized as the long hallway on the first floor, not the basement at all. The corridor that led south to the pantry and study, and north to the kitchen proper, with a confusion of other rooms between.
Except that confusion was minimal here, and this is how Jonathan grasped that he was in a copy or imitation of his grandfather’s mansion. Some version. The corridor walls had been stripped bare of paintings and the suits of armor and side tables and bookcases had all been removed.
Every door along that path, north and south, was closed. All that remained of clutter came in the form of birdhouses and feeders, which here, in this place, hung from every ceiling, sometimes in the most unlikely ways. And even then, they were empty. There were no birds. There was no sound at all. The air as he moved forward smelled faintly of spent sparklers and wintergreen.
He soon came out into a circular space not at all like the real mansion. More doors lined the outer wall—ten of them—and in the middle a large clock tower, more like what one would find in a train station than inside a mansion. The contraption atop the silver pole etched with a vine pattern was both intricate, with gold filigree and hands inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and faintly ridiculous. Around the clock tower was arranged a circular sofa, in two parts, which seemed not well thought-out. The edges didn’t quite reach, and the cream plastic finish didn’t match the clock at all.
Something had gone wrong with the sky as seen through the long row of windows in Dr. Lambshead’s downstairs study. Or, rather, this spectral version of the study. The strange blue-tinged light spoke of frost and winter, but clearly the sun shone in quite the normal way and any chill Jonathan felt came from inside.
The problem, or one of the problems, was that the moon hung in the sky next to the sun, and the lawn, the pond, the surrounding trees could be said to experience night and day at the same time. Or, rather, that the moon had been brought close and the sun kept far.
This was not the worst thing about that space.
For come to a chaotic halt in front of one of the ten doors, a claw-sharp hand or paw reaching out endlessly for sanctuary, lay a creature made of riven metal and fallen-in flesh, its hindquarters a mess of wire and bone, the shoulders blackened by flame. Someone had drawn in thick red chalk on the floor around it—a dotted outline with odd symbols inside the rough circle. Not so much like a crime scene outline as a containment of something infernal.
Something dark, like dried blood, coated those claws.
The strangled look upon the broad yet wolflike face as Jonathan sidled round to look closer was unsettlingly human and full of pain. The eyes were dead flashlights. Spreading out from the flesh-and-metal body had spilled an exodus of smaller creatures, now mummified and dead.
The creature looked imprisoned by the facts of its own body. Unwilling. Still feral. Pitiable and damned. There was no smell. There was no sense of life. This had happened months or years ago. There was not even the husklike quality Jonathan knew from encountering long-dead possums or raccoons in the Florida wilderness.
Why had it been left here? In a place that otherwise would have been almost preternatural in antiseptic cleanliness.
He would have welcomed the presence of Lady Insult or even a tricky marmot, as something more familiar than this lost creature.
Yet, back in the corridor, creature safely distant, Jonathan paused, took stock. The hallway doors were different, more normal, and each had initials stenciled on them. Unevenly. As if Dr. Lambshead had done the job himself while taking a tipple.
One door Jonathan had noticed bore the initials “RHB,” and he thought that this one, at least, he could chance. Like following one fork in an unknown hiking trail, he could still easily find his way back. If “RHB” meant what he thought it did.
Yet how could it? The absurd idea occurred that behind the door he would find a tunnel leading all the way to Yorkshire, populated by the occasional earthworm, vole, and badger.
At the last second, he hedged his bets and held on to the doorknob, swung out into that darkness, planted a foot on the other side and stood there between two places, staring out at a night sky flushed with an outpouring of glittering stars, a seashore against which the dull white of waves crashed in the shadow of massive cliffs. In the distance inland, a cluster of familiar lights. The lights from the cricket fields of Poxforth Academy.
It was Robin Hood’s Bay, as observed from some hidden grotto or ruined tower or light station high in the cliffs. He was staring out at the coast of north England. He was hovering between the haunted mansion, from Dr. Lambshead’s ancestral home, and a place over two hundred miles away.
For a flickering second, a moment of vertigo, Jonathan wasn’t sixteen. He was a little kid at Robin Hood’s Bay, sneaking off to the rocky stretch of coast to the south of their cottage. There, along the empty beach, except when disturbed by a rare tourist or two, Jonathan could pick a natural alcove in the stone cliffs for shelter, looking out across the bay, and in its cool, smooth embrace fill his composition book with short essays or blunt poems (“Oh, how I love the sea.”), or anything else the bright, bold day might bring to him. Barnacles on a sea wall. A curious gull peeking in at him. The way the surge of water would begin to warn him of high tide and a sad early end to adventuring.
Now he knew for certain what Sarah had meant when she had told him, more than once, “It’s okay not to be here all the time. But just know when you’re not. Know when you’re not here but somewhere else.”
With a pointed look, as if she understood those moments of reverie in the wilderness where he wasn’t sure, where the animals began to speak to him, those cliffs and caves and black water places where when he turned the corner he no longer knew for sure where he was.
Could have been anywhere, even another world.
When Dr. Lambshead had died, Jonathan had felt a need to talk, had let R & D console him. But he hadn’t wanted to talk about Dr. Lambshead; he’d wanted to talk about Sarah, one loss dislodging the grief of another.
Danny had asked him what Sarah had been like. That rare probing question, but he hadn’t minded. Just … where to start?
“I mean, what did you like about her? And didn’t like, maybe?”
“Didn’t like?”
“Well, she was a person, wasn’t she?”
What he couldn’t say: That Sarah had been too secretive, not open enough, in his opinion. That she’d forced him to grow up too fast in some ways, and not enough in others.
What he did say: That he liked that she was deadly because she was so smart. And fiercely protective. And terse. And didn’t suffer fools. Which maybe all sounded like bad things, but they weren’t. And that she could be demonstrative, loving, and very funny. But, he realized now, just couldn’t afford to be most of the time, because most of the time she’d been on her guard.
For that reason, he knew there were no easy answers here. Whether he followed the intent of Dr. Lambshead’s letter or stepped away, spent a month or a day in the mansion, he could not get free of this.
From this door, Dr. Lambshead or Sarah would have been able to check in on him with ease. Perhaps that had been the plan before she had disappeared and Dr. Lambshead had been attacked. From this door, perhaps, too, someone or something could have been let in. It implicated Poxforth Academy and Robin Hood’s Bay both in a larger mystery.
There was such a wider world out there as well. He was just starting to see that, even as he still didn’t know what Sarah had truly thought about him being out in it.
The vastness of his discoveries felt like a weight on his back, but also an exhilarating, liberating relief.