“Their voice is clear and true, yet it is not breathed, nor carried upon the air. It echoes like thought inside the skull, speaking words where none are spoken.”
GABBLETY ROW WAS QUITE the most peculiar and ramshackle building in town. Its undulating walls, higgledy-piggledy red tiles and winding iron drainpipes all showed an utter disregard for straight lines. The frontage of four shops with three floors above rose in an astonishing disarray of red brick and dark brown beams, leaning here and lurching there until it reached the garret rooms at its top. These chambers teetered outwards on a forest of wooden brackets, such that they loomed over the pavement below in a manner quaint to behold from a distance, but utterly terrifying to those walking beneath.
The long passage of time had added to the chaos, bending beams and bowing walls to form a miraculous collection of angles, bulges and crannies. In recent years the entire structure had slumped sideways and backwards away from the two main roads that crossed at its corner, as if the whole building was shrinking from the incessant noise and pollution of the traffic. And yet, while it seemed to cower from the twenty-first century, Gabblety Row clung to the slick, hard edges of modern life like a barnacle to a rock. Years came and went, but Gabblety Row remained.
The terrace also had a curious way of settling into the hearts of all of its residents. Sylas Tate, for instance, was often woken by loud, unearthly groans that seemed to issue from every wall, floor and ceiling, as if the tired old structure was easing its great weight one more inch into the earth for a few hours of rest, or perhaps heaving one more straight line into crookedness. Being a boy of extraordinary imagination, Sylas loved these weird sounds. A creak of the building’s old joints would transport him to a swaying bough in the highest reaches of an ancient tree; the groan of a beam would take him to a hammock in a storm-weary galleon; and the sharp crack of a splitting timber would have him at the sights of a musket, firing into the massing ranks of some terrifying and brutal foe. And these moments of escape, these tricks of imagination, were now the happiest moments of his young life.
It was not only the noises that Sylas loved about Gabblety Row. He adored the baffling passageways that ran the length of the terrace above the shops, darting left and right and up and down for no apparent reason, leading to some doors that he’d never seen open and others behind which lived his only friends in the world.
And perhaps, most of all, he loved his room.
Like any good sanctuary, it was extremely difficult to reach. The only way to it was a narrow staircase that led upwards from an undersized door on the third-floor passageway to a creaky trapdoor that opened in the furthest, darkest corner of the room. As the old building had heaved and slumped over the years, so the door and the passageway had become both low and narrow, such that they were now almost impossible for an adult to negotiate. This meant that, in his room, he could be sure to be absolutely alone: a situation that suited him well, for he was not the most sociable boy. He mixed with people perfectly well when it was necessary, at school or on the bus, but kept himself to himself when it was not. Sylas’s uncle sometimes said that his mother’s death had turned him into a moody and melancholy boy – “far too serious for a twelve-year-old” – but Sylas didn’t agree: as far as he was concerned, he simply knew his own mind and found it company enough. Whatever the truth, Sylas was used to filling his life with his own kind of cheer.
This was just what Sylas was doing at four o’clock on that peculiar Friday afternoon. He was lying in his room turning his favourite kite over and over in his hands, imagining it thousands of feet in the air, carving its beautiful path above the distant hills at the edge of town, gliding over caves and waterfalls, forgotten bowers and crevices, great hollowed-out oaks and lakes carpeted with lilies. He pictured it among the great birds that he sometimes saw from his window soaring above the town – eagles, owls, falcons, ospreys – playing with the wind and surveying all the beauty of the world.
Suddenly the grating voice of his uncle brought him crashing back to earth.
“Sylas!” came the voice through the old trapdoor. “Mail!”
Sylas sighed, drawing himself reluctantly out of his daydream. He lowered the kite carefully to the floor and pushed himself up from the mattress.
“Coming!” he shouted.
He took down his tatty old rucksack from the shelf, walked to the corner of his room and, as was his habit, kissed his fingers and touched the smooth, worn edge of a photo frame suspended above the trapdoor before heaving it open and descending into the darkness below. As it fell closed, the old picture rocked on its nail, briefly animating his mother’s faded face, her warm, smiling eyes still bright beneath the glass.
The short, dark stairwell led to a not-quite-straight oblong of light in which Sylas could see the silhouette of his uncle.
Tobias Tate was an exceptionally tall man – a fact that was only made more apparent by his thinness. His legs and arms were so long and slight that one might fear for their safety as he swung them up and down the narrow staircases and passageways of Gabblety Row. Even his face was long and narrow, and his hair stood up on end in a manner that suggested that just as gravity pulled him down, some other invisible force tugged at his upper extremities. And yet, perhaps in an attempt to fight this upward tendency, Tobias Tate had developed a graceless stoop – an arching of the shoulders and a thrusting forward of his head – which gave him an ugly, almost predatory appearance. When he entered a room, it was his sharp nose that appeared first, followed by the black plumes of his eyebrows and his furrowed brow, then his long, sinewy neck. A bookkeeper by trade and passion, he spent most of his days in his study poring over piles of papers and tapping on his many computers, all of which made his stoop more pronounced, his face more pallid and gaunt, and his character more unutterably miserable.
“Tardy!” he barked. “Tardy, Sylas, that’s what you are – and if you don’t know what it means, look it up, because on account of your tardiness I don’t have time to explain.”
The voice was dry and expressionless, but Sylas could tell from the unusual length of his uncle’s sentence that he was in an especially irritable mood. A large, thin white hand thrust a pile of letters into Sylas’s chest.
“Sorry, uncle, I’ll post them straight away,” he said, pushing them into his rucksack. He stepped around and over his uncle’s stray limbs and into the corridor beyond.
“Tardy! Look it up!” Tobias Tate shouted after him.
Sylas walked quickly down the meandering grey passageway. Someone less experienced in the curious ways of Gabblety Row might trip over an unexpected rise in the floor or bruise themselves against a bulge in the wall, but these corridors were Sylas’s domain. Small of stature and deft of foot from his many errands, he moved with an assured ease past the many apartment doors on his left and right, until he turned on to the staircase. He took the stairs in twos – a feat of considerable skill given that each pair varied in height and angle – and soon bounded off the bottom step and through the large oak door.
It opened at the end of the terrace, directly opposite the Church of the Holy Trinity. The majestic spire soared above Gabblety Row as if trying to teach a lesson in uprightness, but that was perhaps the church’s last salute to the world: the main roof had fallen in and the grounds were now an overgrown jungle of trees, bushes, ivy and broken stone.
Sylas hesitated – he had not had a chance to lay flowers for his mother this week, and it was already Friday. He looked at his watch. There should be time after the post office.
Suddenly he was assailed by a blast of screeching, honking car horns, and the acrid smell of fumes as the lights on the corner changed to green. The two roads that met at the corner of Gabblety Row were the busiest in town, each four lanes across and jammed with steel and noise and agitated people. These were serious roads, roads that did not like to be interrupted, and they growled irritably at one another each time