The Book of Dead Days Read Free Page B

comfortable though it was just a shame, thought Boy, that he did not get to spend more time on it. The smallest of openings (“window” would have been too grand a word for it) let in some light. This was in the sloping roof that made up one wall of his room. His bed lay against the single vertical wall, the entrance lurked in one of the triangular ends to the space, and in the opposite one was a tiny door behind which was an even tinier cupboard. Inside the cupboard were all Boy’s possessions. A spoon he’d found in the street and particularly liked. An old pair of boots that were too small and worn-out to wear anymore. A silk scarf he’d stolen from a rich lady but that was too nice to wear. Some small empty tins that nested inside each other and some pencils that Valerian had given him to practice his writing.
    This was his room.
    The day Valerian had put him in it, Boy had come straight back down and eventually found Valerian sipping port in the library.
    “But I can’t stand up in it,” Boy had complained.
    “Then kneel down,” Valerian had said, and cuffed him round the ear.
    Boy was used to clambering about in small spaces. He seemed to spend his life doing it: onstage in coffinlike cabinets and offstage in the theater too, slithering along to Korp’s supposedly secret box.
    Small, cramped, dark spaces had filled Boy’s life. Long ago, he had even been hiding in one the day he was found by Valerian in an old church, St. Colette’s. Boy had crammed his narrow frame into a space at the top of a pillar in the nave.
    Since he had been working for Valerian he had not seen much daylight, never mind been allowed access to such private information as what time it was, or what day or month, for that matter. It was, in fact, March 6 when Valerian had found Boy, but only Valerian knew that.
    Valerian had probably chosen Boy, taken him on, because of his expertise at squeezing into ridiculously small spaces. Boy had forgotten much of that life; it was years ago, and unimportant compared to the business of every day. Every day, trying to avoid trouble, trying to avoid upsetting Valerian or getting something wrong and…
    He could remember one thing about the day they met. From the small gap made where the arch fluted away from the pillar, he had seen Valerian for the first time. He was deep in discussion with someone Boy now knew to be Korp, from the theater.
    Even then Valerian looked haggard and pale. His nose, long and fine, twitched in the dusty atmosphere of the old church. His skin was gray; so was his hair. He looked like a dead man walking. But his blue eyes were full of life, and his gaze roamed the dark spaces around him.
    Then Boy had heard his midnight rumble of a voice, so deep the stone he was clinging to shivered with it.
    “The doctor,” intoned Valerian, “pronounced me either dangerously sick or dead.”
    It was while trying to understand the strangeness of those words that Boy had lost his grip and plummeted to the flag floor of the church, where he lay looking up at Valerian, scratching his nose nervously, his short-cropped black hair sticking up at interesting angles the way it always did.
    “O-ho!” Valerian had said. “What have we here?”
    And so they had met.
    Now Boy pulled off his reeking clothes and stood naked in his dark space. He wondered what to do. The pile of clothes at his feet stank up at him. The bath was on the first floor. He had no other clothes, just a long winter overcoat.
    He sighed, picked up the pile of dirty clothes and the coat and crept back along the tube to the ladder.
    He dropped the clothes down to the third-floor landing, and followed them, shivering as he went.

6
    Boy sat, scratching his nose. He was nervous because Valerian was pacing up and down the Tower room, crisscrossing the floor a dozen times, then pausing, staring into space for a short while before resuming his compulsive journey from the tall, narrow window in one of the sloping walls to the top