Gobblers.
Everyone had thought they'd disappeared for ever long before I was born. It had been over thirty years since the last time. Children had disappeared. They were usually poor people's children, children who were left on their own a lot, who could be easily tempted by an offer of sweets, or an invitation to look at a new kitten, or to join a fix-up footy team. The sort of kids who were taken to school and back every day, who had nurses or governesses or tutors watching over them all the time; they were safe. It was just the poor people's kids who were in danger.
I was safe, of course. The old Gobblers had only taken children whose daemons hadn't settled in their final forms. My beautiful Viola had taken squirrel-form over two years ago.
Mistress was frantic over Emily, who was only ten. All the mothers in the neighbourhood set up special arrangements to watch over their children and escort them to and from school. I felt sorry for the kids – locked indoors, looking sadly out of the windows at the sunlit streets and parks outside, getting bored and fed up and being shouted at by all the anxious grownups. Mum told me that my baby brother Tom was running round the house driving everybody mad.
One Saturday in May I was climbing the stairs to the Professor's rooms when I met someone coming down towards me. He was a small dark man wearing a donkey-jacket and a cloth cap. He looked like a workman of some kind, and I wondered if he had been to Professor Belacqua's rooms to mend the plumbing, or put up a shelf or something like that. So I was very surprised when he put up his hand and stopped me.
'Is you Peter?'
'Yes, I am. What is it – what do you want?'
He ignored my questions. 'Peter, come down to the landing with us.' His magpie-daemon flapped down the hallway over our heads and settled on the sill of the window which gave light to the landing below.
'Why? I'm going to see Professor Belacqua. I can't stop now. I'll be late.'
The man looked at me. I saw that his eyes were an extraordinary colour – a deep blue-violet, like a baby's. 'Lyra is not well. Come down here and wait with us until she is feeling better.'
'No!' I pushed past him, outraged. This workman, or whatever he was, telling me what to do and calling the Professor by her Christian name! How dare he!
I ran up the stairs and crashed through the Professor's door, hardly stopping to knock. How I wish I hadn't.
Lyra – the Professor – was sitting at her desk, her head in her hands, weeping bitterly. She was sobbing, each sob shaking her bodily as she sat. Her daemon was wrapped around her neck, whispering in her ear. He looked up and glared at me. I looked around me wildly, hoping that the floor would swallow me up, or that magically the last ten seconds would un-happen. But they didn't.
The Professor lifted her head and smiled sadly. 'Hello Peter. I'm sorry, I'm not at my best today.'
At the door, the workman said, 'We is sorry, Lyra. We tried to stop him, but he wouldn't listen. Thinks he knows best, little sod.'
'What do you know?' I retorted, but the Professor lifted her hand and hushed me.
'It's all right, Peter. Mr Shire is an old friend of mine.
'Come back in Arthur, come in Sal.'
The man scowled at me, but pushed through the door and closed it tight shut behind him, his magpie-daemon following after.
'What we all need is a good cup of chai.' The Professor got up from her seat and crossed over to her little kitchen. Mr Shire stood in the doorway and I sat down in my usual place, feeling wretchedly uncomfortable. Why was Professor Belacqua crying? Was it something I'd done? (Such was my self-centredness.)
She returned with her usual tray and we drew up our chairs by the fireplace.
'I think we'd better tell him what's going on, don't you, Arthur?'
'Why? What's the point? It's nothing to do with him.' Mr Shire clearly didn't think much of me.
'Peter may be an alethiometrist one day. He'll have to ask difficult questions then; and face the answers too.
'It's the Gobblers, Peter. They've come back…'
'I know. They're keeping all the kids looked up indoors.'
'For their own good.'
'We thought it was all over. We thought they was never coming back…' Mr Shire's voice trailed away.
Professor Belacqua leaned over and put her hand on his shoulder. 'I know,' she said softly, her face full of pity.
'Arthur – Mr Shire – once lost someone very precious to the Gobblers.'
I looked at them both. There were things going one here – undercurrents – that I knew nothing of. I waited.
'We wants to… we wants to kill her.'
'Revenge won't work, Arthur. You may as well kill me. I told you all that before. Anyway, we don't know for sure that it is her.'
My puzzlement must have shown in my face. They were both talking in riddles. Something was becoming clear – they had both known each other for a long time; unlikely though it seemed that a Professor of Jordan College would have anything to do with a common labourer. I felt a brief flash of jealousy, and then had a sudden realisation.
'I've seen you before,' I said to the man. 'At Hythe Bridge Street, in January. I was looking at your boats. You told me to clear off!'
He looked at me more closely. 'So we did. What was you doing there, anyway?'
'I was looking. I grew up by the canal. I like boats.'
'Does you?' and he sat back. His magpie-daemon fixed a glinting eye on me, making me feel even more uncomfortable than ever.
The Professor passed me a biscuit and sat back too, looking up at the ceiling and speaking in a disconnected way, as if she didn't want to get too close to the subject in case it hurt her too much; as if the wounds had never properly healed and she had to be careful not to put the scars under too much tension.
She told me about the Gobblers – the first time they appeared, thirty or more years ago. How children had been stolen, as they were being stolen now, and been taken to a place in the far north where horrible experiments had been carried out on then. She used a word – intercision – which I had never heard before. I asked her what it meant, and she told me, and I gasped, and I thought I would stop breathing, possibly for ever. It was as if that nightmare I told you about – the one where Viola was left behind – had come to life, crawling out of its hiding place under the wardrobe and creeping towards me over the bedroom floor, razor-claws extended, ready to slash me, clutch me to its foul bosom, and take me to its den to devour me.
Mr Shire saw my horror and his hard face softened a little. He told me how he once lived in Limehouse, in London, and that his friend Maggie's (oh yes! The boats' names – Maggie and Jimmy!) younger brother Stan had been stolen by the Gobblers and taken to this awful Bolvangar place and he would have had his daemon intercised from him too, only that he and Maggie had gone there by Zeppelin and rescued him.
'Lyra was there, too,' he said. 'It was her that started the fire that burned the place down.'
'And it was gyptians like Arthur who rescued us.'
'And it was Maggie who disabled the chief Gobbler so we could all get away.'
I hardly dared ask the next question. 'What happened to Maggie?'
'She… died. The chief Gobbler killed her. It was her daemon did it.' A daemon killed a person?
I never know when to stop. 'Who was the chief Gobbler?'
The Professor looked at me, her face unreadable, holding Pan closely.
'She was my mother.'
They told me some, but I'm sure not all, of the rest of the story. I found out more of it later on, but at the time it was as if… as if the ground had shifted under my feet and all the fixed points – the landmarks – had moved, so that I was not sure of anything any more. Yes, I still worked for Master James, and read my study books, and kept an eye on Emily when Carrie wasn't looking after her, and I still made my weekly visits to the Professor. But there were days when all the solid buildings and streets and citizens of Oxford turned into ghosts, wispy and unreal and transparent, and I seemed to walk down a road that was crowded with spectres.
It was only few weeks later that the letter arrived at the shop, passed on to Master James by the greasy Mr Cholmondley.
'This'll interest you,' said my master, showing me the note. It read:
|
THE BOREAL FOUNDATION OXFORD |
||
|
James and James Shoe Lane Oxford
Dear Sir,
Re. Instrument repairs
Pursuant to your previous satisfactory work on the transvergence/attitude meter, we should be obliged if you would report to our Cropredy office at ten o'clock this Thursday 13th inst where you will receive further instructions.
Yours faithfully, E. Morley (Miss) |
And that was where our adventures began in earnest.
