Will didn't know what Cal was talking about until he saw the entrance by the other boy's side: It was a passage barely more than shoulder-width. Cal slipped in, with Will reluctantly following behind. It was dark and claustrophobic, and the sulfurous stench of old sewage hung in the air. Their feet splashed through unseen puddles of unidentifiable liquids. He was careful not to touch the walls, which were running with a dark, greasy slime.
Will was grateful they finally emerged into the dim light, but then he gasped as he beheld a scene that was straight out of Victorian London. Buildings loomed on either side of the narrow alleyway, slanting inward at such precarious angles that their upper stories almost met. They were timber-framed and in a terrible state of disrepair. Most of their windows were either broken or boarded up.
Although he couldn't tell where they originated, Will heard the sound of voices and cries and laughter coming from all around. There were odd snatches of music, as if scales were being played on a strangled zither. Somewhere a baby was wailing persistently and dogs were barking. As they strode quickly past the badly deteriorated facades, Will caught whiffs of charcoal and tobacco smoke and, through the open doorways, glimpsed people huddled at tables. Men is shirtsleeves hung out of windows, staring at the ground listlessly as they smoked their pipes. There was an open channel in the middle of the alley, down which a sluggish trickle of sewage ran through vegetable waste and other filth and detritus. Will nearly blundered into it, but stepped sharply to the edge of the alleyway to avoid it.
"No! Watch yourself!" Cal warned quickly. "Keep away from the sides!"
As they hurried along Will hardly let himself blink as he feasted his eyes on everything he saw around him. He was murmuring, "Just fantastic," over and over again to himself, living history, when his attention was caught by something else. There were people in the narrow passageways that branched off on either side. Mysterious shadowy outlines were stirring within them, and he heard hushed voices, snatches of hysterical muttering, and even, at one point, the far-off sound of someone screaming in agony.
From one of these passageways a dark figure lurched. It was a man with a black shawl over his head, which he hoisted up to reveal his gnarled face. It was covered with a sickly layer of sweat, and his skin was the color of old bone. He grabbed at Will's arm with his hand, his rheumy yellow eyes looking deep into the startled boy's.
"Ah, what is it you're after, my sweet thing?" he wheezed asthmatically, his lopsided smile revealing a row of jagged brown stumps for teeth. Bartleby snarled as Cal hurriedly pushed himself between Will and the man, yanking Will from the man's grasp and not letting go of him through several twists and turns of the alley until at last they were out and back onto a well-lit street again. Will breathed a sigh of relief.
"What was that place?"
"The rookeries. It's where the paupers live. And you only saw the outskirts — you really wouldn't want to find yourself in the middle of it," Cal said, dashing ahead so quickly that Will had to work to keep up. He was still feeling the aftereffects of the ordeal in the Hold; his chest ached and his legs were leaden. But he wasn't about to let Cal see any weakness, and forced himself on.
While the cat bounded ahead into the distance, Will doggedly followed Cal 's lead as he leaped over the larger pools of water and skirted around the occasional gushing downpour. Falling from the shadows of the cavern roof above, these torrents seemed to spring from nowhere, like upturned geysers.
They wound their way through a series of broad streets jam-packed with narrow terraced houses until, in the distance, Will spotted the lights of a tavern at the apex of a sharp corner where two roads met. People thronged outside it in various states of intoxication, laughing raucously and shouting, and from somewhere a woman's voice was singing shrilly. As he got closer, Will could make out the painted sign, The Buttock amp; File, with a picture of the weirdest-looking locomotive he had ever seen, which had, it appeared, an archetypal devil as its driver, scarlet-skinned and replete with horns, trident, and arrow-tipped tail.
The frontage and even the windows of the tavern were painted black and covered in a film of gray soot. People were so tightly packed in that they were overflowing onto the sidewalk outside. To a man, they were drinking from dented pewter tankards, while a number smoke either long clay pipes or turnip-shaped objects, which Will didn't recognize but which reeked of chronically soiled diapers.
As he stuck close behind Cal, they passed a top-hatted man standing at a small folding table. He was calling, "Find the painted lady? Find the painted lady!" to a couple of interested onlookers as he deftly cut a pack of cards using only a single hand. "My good sir," the man proclaimed as one of the onlookers stepped up and slapped a coin down on the green baize of the table. The cards were dealt, and Will was sorry not to see the outcome of the game, but there was absolutely no way he was going to become separated from his brother as they pushed deeper into the midst of the throng. Surrounded by all these people he felt very vulnerable, and was just debating whether he could persuade Cal to take him home when a friendly voice boomed out.
" Cal! Bring Wil over here!"
There was an immediate lull in the chatter around them, and in the silence all heads turned toward Will. Uncle Tam emerged from a group of people and extravagantly waved over the two boys. The faces in the crowd outside the tavern were varied: curious, grinning, blank — but for the most part sneering with unbridled hostility. Tam seemed not the slightest bit bothered by this. He threw his thick arms around the boys' shouders and turned his head to face the crowd, staring back at them in mute defiance.
The cacophony continued inside the tavern, only serving to make the yawning silence outside, and the rising tension that accompanied it, even more intense. This horrible hush filled Will's ears, crashing and swelling and drowning everything out.
Then an earsplitting belch, the longest and loudest Will had ever heard, ripped from someone in the crowd. As the last echoes rang back from the neighborhood buildings, the spell was broken, and the whole crowd exploded into peals of harsh laughter, intermingled with cheers and the random wolf whistle.
It wasn't long before all this merriment subsided and people settled down again, the chatter resuming as a small man was widely congratulated and patted on the back so forcibly that he had to cover his drink with his hand to prevent it from slopping onto the pavement.
Still acutely self-conscious, Will kept his head bowed. He couldn't help noticing when Bartleby, stretched out under the bench where the men sat, jerked suddenly, as if some parasite or other had bitten him. Doubling up, the cat began to lick his nether regions with a hind leg pointing heavenward, looking remarkably like a badly plucked turkey.
"Now that you've met the great unwashed," Uncle Tam said, his eyes briefly flicking back over the crowd, "let me introduce you to royalty, the crиme de la crиme. This is Joe Waites," he said, maneuvering Will face to face with a wizened old man. His head was topped with a tightly fitting skullcap that seemed to compress the upper half of his face, making his eyes bulge out and hoisting his cheeks up into an involuntary grin. A solitary tooth protruded from his top jaw like an ivory tusk. He proffered his hand to Will, who shook it reluctantly, somewhat surprised to find it warm and dry.
"And this" — Tam inclined his head to a dapper man sporting a tawdry checkered three-piece suit and black-rimmed glasses — "is Jesse Shingles." The man bowed gracefully and then chuckled, raising his thick eyebrows.
"And, not least, the one and only Imago Freebone." A man with long, dank hair plaited into a biker's ponytail shot out a mittened hand, his voluminous leather coat flapping open to reveal his immense deep-chested barrel of a body. Will was so intimidated by the sheer mass of the man, he almost took a step back.