vermin ventured here.
Shouldn't we be going up? Rossamund fretted.
Numps continued forward, and there, by an intersecting pipe, was a small door of corroding iron a few feet above the floor, reached by three large steps. He grinned at Rossamund, his geniality made ghastly by the play of seltzer light on his scars. Rossamund smiled back, alive to the immense trust the glimner was showing him, the secrets the man was revealing.
'Through here now, and up, up, up,' Numps said softly. He produced a key pulled from somewhere on his person, unlocked the rusty door and shone the seltzer light through. Beyond was the landing of a tight stairway of near-failing timbers, rising into shadows of architectural gloom.
Another furtigrade!
Unlike the one reached through the kitchens, this was not lit at all.
How often does he come here? Rossamund's whole sense of Winstermill shifted with the thought of the glimner wandering about beneath them as they labored, ate, even slept.
Numps stood by the door, waiting.
'Mister Numps?'
'I don't like to go up to the manse.' The glimner's face was drawn and gray, his eyes animated with deep troubles. 'I won't go any farther-oh dear no; I don't like it in the manse… never have.'
'Can I find my own way from here?' Rossamund asked.
The glimner clucked his tongue. 'Mister Rossamund can indeed go himself.'
'What more is ahead?' the prentice asked.
Numps looked to the furtigrade distractedly. 'Oh-oh, more tunnels, more stairs: just go up-up-up-up-do not stop at any doors until the very top and turn the bolt and slide the door, down the passage and through the hole and you shall come out on to the lectury floor.'
A start of panic knotted in Rossamund's innards. 'Are you sure?' he pressed.
Numps nodded emphatically. The glimner had led him a long and twisted way but now he must go ahead alone-to a place that might not lead anywhere. I could be lost or found out late! — between the stone and the sty, as Fransitart would say. I found my way to Winstermill and I can do this too.
Stepping onto the tiny landing, Rossamund looked up. He could see only a few flights above, beyond which darkness brooded. He listened: he could hear nothing but his own workings beating, lub-dub lub-dub.
'You must go gently-gently,' said the glimner. 'Some others are up here too, all a-wandering. I hear them sometimes down here but they don't hear me. Oh no.' He took something from his satchel and pressed it into Rossamund's hands. 'Here, Mister Rossamund, take this; it's too dark up there.' It was a small pewter box, like those in which pediteers carried their playing cards, but this had a thick leather strap attached and felt almost empty. The prentice did not know what to say.
'It's a moss-light,' Numps explained. 'Push-push at the top.'
Rossamund did as instructed.The top panel proved to be a lid that, when slid up, exposed a diffuse blue- green glow within.With a closer look he found the box was hollow with a glass top, and stuffed with a bizarre kind of plant, its tiny leaves radiant with that odd, natural effulgence like bloom.
'So you will find the way.' Numps blessed Rossamund with his crooked smile once more.
'Oh, thank you, Mister Numps.' Rossamund felt a small relief: at least he would see his way-even if he was not certain where that way would lead him.
'Go, go.' Numps bobbed his head bashfully. 'Up up to the top, slide the door, through the hole and off to bed just like me. Bye, bye…' Mumbling, he shuffled back along the reverse of his path.
By the eerie nimbus-light of Numps' gift, Rossamund began to climb the furtigrade. It was steep, of course, and so very cramped he was obliged to climb slowly. Heeding the warning that the glimner had given of others above, he worked hard to make his footfalls light and prevent the flimsy stair from creaking. Three flights and still the furtigrade went on. At the fourth the looming shadows resolved themselves into a doorway, but the stair went on. No stopping at any doors, Mister Numps said. Rossamund continued to climb. His ascent was soon foiled, however. Not more than another two flights higher he discovered to his great dismay that a part of the stair had collapsed, making a wreck of gray splinters that made the furtigrade impassable. He could go no farther. What now? His mind's cogs raced. I'll try the door I saw below.
Rossamund crept down to this door, the glow of the moss-light muffled against his chest, and listened: nothing but drips and the rush of his heart. He dared a little more light and peered gingerly beyond the doorway. The floor of the space was a mirror of the ceiling, a broad shallow drain that formed a vaulted junction with three other tunnels. Forward or back he was lost, he figured, but back meant certain discovery and the pillory while forward at least held a chance of undetected return. So forward it is…
He had heard somewhere-probably from Master Fransitart-that when caught in a maze you should always go left and eventually you would win free. Taking a deep breath he went left. If this did not work he would simply return and choose again.
Rossamund followed the leftward tunnel and it took him farther and farther from the junction, finally terminating in eight steps that led up to a brick wall. A dead end! But there, hammered into the mildewed bricks with corroded pegs of iron, was a crude ladder. Hanging the moss-light by its strap about his neck, the prentice scuttered up and pulled himself through into a deep tight valley in the masonry that smelled of century-settled dust and stillness. Brittle twig-weeds sprouted from any suggestion of a crack between floor and wall. How they managed to live at all down in this subterranean night he did not know.
Leftward was blocked by a wall, and so Rossamund went right. In the meager moss-light, he thought he could discern what looked like the blank sockets of windows high in the walls above. Soon this architectural chasm ended bluntly in a redbrick barrier fronted by yet another furtigrade going up and going down. Up was closer to Winstermill, he reasoned, so he began to wearily climb again.
The night was never going to end!
I should never have come this way. I should have knocked on the Sally door… or even the front door.
Becoming used to this creeping dark, he took the ascent a little more confidently, but the stair sooned reached its end. At its summit he was confronted with a wall into which was sunk an oblong trap-hole, about his height and nearly an arm's-length deep. It was blocked by a stained panel of dark rusted iron fixed with a corroded handle and barely held shut by a sliding bar of wood and iron. Rossamund tried it in hope, and the flaking metal resisted at first but then slid back with a loud crack. Maybe this is the door Numps was thinking of… He tugged, and the door did not shift. He shoved with hearty frustration, and in a small burst of rusting dust from its age-blackened hinges the portal bulged inward-just a little. Through this crack was a glimpse into blackness, and from it exhaled the foul odor of decay, so much like that far worse hint he had once detected in the hold of the Hogshead. In the bowels of the cromster it had been heavily masked with swine's lard, but here it was full and oppressively potent, smothering him in its dread stink.
A rever-man! he intuited, stepping away from the door. Down here? But how? He could not believe it.
There was a sound, some nondescript evidence of motion; a step, a shuffle-Rossamund could not tell, but he knew something moved behind that stubborn-hinged door.
I must try another way! He reached for the handle of the panel to shut it.
Some misshapen thing lurched at the space from the black within. Pallid hands, blotched and scabbed, gripped door and post and wrenched powerfully. Metal groaned, wood buckled and the door-gap widened. A pale head thrust through, craning and twisting right, then left, its spasmodic breath coming in a quivering wheeze. Its toothy, lipless mouth seeped saliva, at which it sucked almost as often as it breathed. The abominable creature twisted about and fixed its callous attention on him, pinning him with its morbid fascination.With a white flash of dread he realized this was a gudgeon. Here truly was a rever-man-uncaged, unfettered, dreadfully free.
Rossamund bit back a scream. His innards churned. His thoughts wailed. A rever-man! A rever-man here in Winstermill!
For a breath Rossamund's mind was overthrown as he tottered back, struggling to fathom what he saw.Yet with the cold, radiating dread that cried Run! Run! in a tiny, terrified voice within came a wholly unexpected rage. Faced now with a rever-man, a blasphemously made-thing, uncaged and visible, Rossamund's terror did not overcome him. His hand went instinctively to his salumanticum and found the Frazzard's powder.
The gudgeon shifted its grasp. Tiny little piggy eyes regarded him coldly-soulless, dead-as slowly, inexorably the panel-door was forced open. Large, furry, inhuman ears swiveled and twitched at either side of its long and
