turn up!”
“He’s young,” said a voice from the shadows of a very dark alley. “Doesn’t know anything. Please don’t kill him. His mother would give me hell.”
The young enforcer went for the gun on his hip, but Dead Boy was already moving. Being dead, his body wasn’t limited to normal human reaction times. He darted forward impossibly quickly, closing the distance between himself and the young enforcer in a moment. The punk actually got off two shots, and Dead Boy dodged both of them. He crashed into the young enforcer, ripped the gun out of his hand, and head-butted him in the face. He then examined the gun while the young man crumpled to the floor, before finally throwing it aside.
“I take it there won’t be any more opposition?” I said, to the general surroundings.
“Not from us,” said the voice from the shadows. “You do whatever you feel like doing, sir.”
“Thank you,” I said. “We will.”
I gathered up Dead Boy, and we continued down the street. There wasn’t a single soul to be seen anywhere, but I had no doubt we were still being surreptitiously observed. I raised my gift, opening up the inner eye in my mind, my private eye, to locate exactly where Julien Advent was hiding himself in all this hostile territory. I kept my Sight narrowed down to just the task at hand. I really didn’t want to See the kind of dark forces that moved unseen in a place like Rotten Row. I was also concerned that I’d recently been using my gift too much. My Enemies were always looking, to send their horror troops after me. I found Julien almost immediately, observing a firm called Dingley Dell from a place of concealment in a tenement building only a little further down the street. I shut down my gift, checked that all my mental barriers and safeguards were securely in place, and told Dead Boy what I’d learned.
“You are seriously spooky sometimes, you know that, John?” he said. “The way you know things. Still, I wouldn’t worry too much about these Enemies of yours. They probably won’t be able to locate you at all, what with Lilith and her pals on the rampage, jamming the mental aether.”
We walked on a while in silence. “Jamming the mental aether?” I said finally. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Dead Boy. “But you have to admit, it sounded really good there for a moment. Now then, Dingley Dell… Sounds almost unbearably twee. Probably makes lace doilies, or something…”
We came to a halt before the right building and studied the small cards tacked to the doorframe, beside the row of buzzers. The cards looked decidedly temporary, as though they had a tendency to change on a regular basis. The current occupiers of the three-storey building were Alf’s Button Emporium, Matchstick Girls, Miss Snavely’s Fashion House, Shrike Shoes, the Stuffed Fish Company, and Dingley Dell.
“Top floor,” Dead Boy said disgustedly. “Why do they always have to be on the top floor? And how are we supposed to get all the way up there, past all the other businesses, without anyone noticing us?”
“Firstly, it’s only three floors we’re talking about,” I said. “Undoubtedly because this entire shit heap would have collapsed if anyone had added a fourth floor. And secondly, while I doubt very much that a dump like this has a fire escape, you can bet good money that there’s a concealed exit round the back so company executives can make a swift departure unobserved if their creditors turn up unexpectedly. So, round the back.”
We made our way down a narrow side alley almost choked with garbage and general filth, and a couple of sleeping forms who didn’t even stir when we stepped over them. I found the back door without having to raise my gift again because it was exactly where I would have put it. (Having had occasion to dodge a few creditors myself, in my time.) Dead Boy checked the door out for magical alarms and booby-traps, which didn’t take long. He only had to look at them, and they malfunctioned.
“My being dead and alive at the same time confuses them,” he said happily.
“It’s always confused me,” I agreed.
Dead Boy went to smash the door in, but I restrained him. There could still be purely mechanical alarms in place that we hadn’t spotted, and I didn’t want to risk attracting attention and perhaps blowing Julien Advent’s stakeout. So I raised my gift for a moment, located the right spot on the door, directly above the lock, and hit it once with the heel of my hand. The lock disengaged, and the door swung open. Dead Boy averted his gaze so he wouldn’t have to see me looking smug, and we entered the tenement, quietly closing the door behind us.
There was hardly any light, and the place stank of poverty and misery and blocked drains. Every expense had been spared in the construction of this building, and everything about it screamed fire trap. We moved quietly down the gloomy corridor, alert for any sign that we’d been noticed, but the whole building seemed silent as a tomb. The stairway was so narrow we had to go up in single file, so I let Dead Boy go first, on the grounds that he could take a lot more damage than I. There were any number of magical alarms and booby-traps, but they all blew up in silent puffs of fluorescent smoke, rather than try to deal with Dead Boy’s presence. On the second-floor landing a monstrous face formed itself abruptly out of the cracks in the plaster wall, looked at us, mouthed the words Oh bugger, and disappeared again.
The next stairway was wide enough for us to walk side by side. I was starting to relax when a wooden step sank just a little too far under Dead Boy’s weight, followed by a slight but definite click, and I threw myself flat. A metal shaft shot out of a concealed hole in the wall, passed right over me, and speared Dead Boy through the left arm. He looked down at the spike transfixing his arm, sighed heavily, and carefully pulled his arm free. I got to my feet again, and we studied the metal spike.
“Why did this work when the others didn’t?” said Dead Boy.
“Purely mechanical,” I said. “Least there’s no harm done.”
“No harm? This is my good coat! Look at these two holes in the sleeve. Going to cost a small fortune to put those right. I’ve got this little fellow in Greek Street who does all my repairs (you’d be surprised how many outfits I go through), but they’re never the same afterwards. He calls it invisible mending, but I can always see it…”
“Do you think you could perhaps lower your voice a tad?” I said, quietly but urgently. “We are supposed to be sneaking in, remember?”
He sniffed sulkily a few times, and we continued up the rickety stairway to the third floor, and along the shadowy passage at the top of the building. Every room we passed was a different business, sub-let presumably, and we caught glimpses of shabby people slaving away, working silently in appalling conditions for nothing remotely like minimum wage. Whole families packed so tightly round rough wooden tables there was hardly any room to move. Fathers and mothers and children, all working intently in dim light in rooms with windows that wouldn’t open, making goods for pennies that would sell for pounds to their betters. None of them ever said anything, bent quietly over their work. The overseers might not be visible, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Trouble-makers didn’t tend to last long in sweatshops.
I’d never seen such blatant misery before. Capitalism, red in tooth and claw. It was one thing to know that such things still went on and another to see it with your own eyes. I felt like tearing the building down with my bare hands… but the sweatshop workers wouldn’t thank me for it. They needed the work, needed the lousy money and the protection that went with it, from whoever was looking for them… And I couldn’t risk blowing Julien Advent’s stakeout and getting him angry at me. I was going to need Julien.
Dead Boy really didn’t like sneaking around. It wasn’t his style. “When am I going to get to hit someone?” he kept asking.
“You’ll get your chance,” I said. “God, you’re like a big kid. You’ll be asking if we’re nearly there, next.”
We finally came to a closed door with a card tacked to it, saying Dingley Dell. I tried the door handle, slowly and very carefully, but it was locked. Dead Boy raised a boot to kick it in, and I pulled him away, shaking my head firmly. I listened, one ear pressed against the wood of the door, but I couldn’t hear anything. I straightened up, wincing as my back creaked, and looked around. And there at the end of the corridor was a spiral stairway, leading even higher. I led the way up the curving steps, Dead Boy pressing close behind like an impatient dog, and we ended up in a disused gallery, looking down onto the open room that was Dingley Dell. And there, at the end of the gallery, was the Timeslipped Victorian Adventurer himself, Julien Advent.
He was actually wearing his old opera cloak, the heavy dark material blending him smoothly into the gallery shadows. Dead Boy and I padded forward as silently as we could, but he still heard us coming. He spun round, ready to fight, and only relaxed a little as he recognised us. He gestured sharply for us to crouch beside him. He was tall, and still lithely muscular despite his years, with jet-black hair and eyes, and a face handsome as any movie star’s; only slightly undermined by his unswervingly serious gaze and grim smile.
Julien Advent was a hero, the real deal, and it showed. We’d worked together, on occasion. Sometimes he approved of me, and sometimes he didn’t. It made for an interesting relationship.
