"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 bulging skull. Swathes of filthy bandages and even a rope were wrapped about its trunk, keeping its heaving chest and stitch-grafted abdomen together. What struck Rossamund most was the utter absence of any threwd about the thing. A threwdless monster: how could you ever tell it was coming? Indeed, it was devoid of even a flicker of real vitality: a man-made thing, a dead thing.Yet its full and putrid reek, unmasked by swine's lard, was potent. The gudgeon opened its slavering mouth and a long tongue like a lizard's lolled obscenely, flicking in the dusty air. Even as Rossamund stumbled backward onto the furtigrade and down the way he had come, the abomination stared with hungry curiosity as the crack between door and wall grew ineluctably wider.
"Hmm," it seethed, licking at the gap between it and the prentice, "yooouuu mmmake mmeee huuunnngreee…"
With one powerful spring, the made-monster flung itself through the gap, viper-quick, at Rossamund, slamming into the balustrade as it made pursuit.
Tripping, nearly falling, Rossamund blundered down the stair. The gudgeon staggered and turned with a dry, rattling hiss. On the lower landing Rossamund twisted and flung the potive at it as it pounced at him from on high. His aim was as true at a natural throw as it was off with a firelock. The Frazzard's powder burst against the creature's neck and shoulder with a flash of bluish sparks and a series of tight detonations that sounded like the popping of corks.
"Aaiieeee!" The creature hit the wooden steps with a crash and tumbled into Rossamund as it fell. A thousand stars erupting across his senses, the prentice was crushed over and over between wooden step and rever-man. Together they toppled a whole other flight, then another, striking the banister rail on the lower landing hard, causing it to crack dangerously.
The gudgeon was on him in an instant, pressing him down, its whelming stench all about him, teeth snapping clack! clack! seeking to nip at exposed flesh: fingers, knees, cheeks. In white, blind terror Rossamund heaved the abominable creature off and shoved it-almost threw it though it was twice his size-across the tiny landing. Free of its imprisoning bulk, he sprang up the stairs he had just descended so painfully, pointlessly crying, "Help! Help!"