The Land of Somewhere Safe Read online

  The Land of Somewhere Safe

  Hal Duncan

  NewCon Press

  England

  NewCon Press Novellas

  Set 1: (Cover art by Chris Moore)

  The Iron Tactician – Alastair Reynolds

  At the Speed of Light – Simon Morden

  The Enclave – Anne Charnock

  The Memoirist – Neil Williamson

  Set 2: (Cover art by Vincent Sammy)

  Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Bedevilled Poet – Simon Clark

  Cottingley – Alison Littlewood

  The Body in the Woods – Sarah Lotz

  The Wind – Jay Caselberg

  Set 3: The Martian Quartet (Cover art by Jim Burns)

  The Martian Job – Jaine Fenn

  Sherlock Holmes: The Martian Simulacra – Eric Brown

  Phosphorous: A Winterstrike Story – Liz Williams

  The Greatest Story Ever Told – Una McCormack

  Set 3: Strange Tales (Cover art by Ben Baldwin)

  Ghost Frequencies – Gary Gibson

  The Lake Boy – Adam Roberts

  Matryoshka – Ricardo Pinto

  The Land of Somewhere Safe – Gary Gibson

  First published in the UK by NewCon Press

  41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF

  September 2018

  NCP 165 (limited edition hardback)

  NCP 166 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Land of Somewhere Safe copyright © 2018 by Hal Duncan

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by Ben Baldwin

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  ISBN:

  978-1-910935-89-7 (hardback)

  978-1-910935-90-3 (softback)

  Cover art by Ben Baldwin

  Cover layout by Ian Whates

  Minor Editorial meddling by Ian Whates

  Book layout by Storm Constantine

  For Jack and Jaimee.

  Part One

  • 1

  – Will we be safe here? says the scamp.

  Slickspit Hamshankery, prentice fabbler, scruffles the nipper’s hair and tussles her into a hug – Don’t be daft, of course it’s safe – but his glance away has its own worry in it, eyes looking to his mentor for assurance. At the covered window, in the gloom, Gobfabbler Halyard-Dunkling, Esquire, turns from taping one last black bin bag into place, looks pointedly round at the gaggle of shivering scamps lit by mobile phones.

  – Now, Slick, he says. Don’t you be filling them nippers’ noggins with piffle. Does this feel bleedin safe to you?

  The lounge in this gutted cottage is a hollow of rotting floorboards and mould, grim as the moor Flashjack floored the minibus through to get here, dismal as the weather and looming hills, the desolate building with Jimmy the Beast spraypainted on one wall, visible from the winding road the scallywag stopped on only long enough for them to pile out, leg it round back: one scallywag, Quippersnap Rannigant, crowbar in hand to prise the board from a window; two scrags, Slickspit and Gobfabbler; someteen rucksacked scamps that they puntied in through broken glass, and followed.

  – I’ll give yer safe.

  He knew it wouldn’t be safe, just as Quip did, when the two of them decided to take Gob’s offer, to take the Stamp. They were warned. It might be safer for two runaways than today’s London streets, and for sure it’s safer being a Scruffian now, Gob’d said, than back when he had no choice about it. And having your soul, every intricacy of your essence, read and written in black on your chest, fixed forever and yourself Fixed with it... did have its perks. So said the imperishable urchin from before Queen Victoria. There’d been disappearances though. Raids.

  – But it’s maybes safe enough for now, says Gob. Quip?

  At the hall doorway, sortie over, Quippersnap nods: secure. Noggins turn from scallywag to scrag, peepers wide for cues from their biggers. Slick points the scamp in his arm at a rucksack: get your sleeping bag and – that’s it. As Gob settles himself to cross-legged before them, the scamps have their cue.

  – That’s right, says Gob. Blankies round yer. Cosy up. We can’t have a fire, but if yer all snuggles tight, maybes I can fabble yer summat to get us through the cold night, eh?

  And he begins:

  • 2

  See, as even yer icklest scamp or scrag will tell yer, as even yer daftest scallywag or scofflaw knows, ain’t nowheres in this world truly safe for any waif, least of all us Scruffians what any groanhuff as knows of would scrub in a jiffy. Why, if the Stamp hadn’t been secret, if the Trade weren’t off the books, oh, if they hadn’t swept our whole history under the rug for shame after we nicked that Stamp and burnt their bleeding Institute to ash, they’d be Fixing and selling waifs to this day, nippers. You mind how it were, eh?

  Safe? Fuck safe! Weren’t safe for Flashjack back in Georgy Porgy’s day, when he were tarting his fizzog for nonce’s fists down Moorfields molly market, thruppence for a thump. Weren’t safe for Puckerscruff plying the same rough trade when he weren’t even Fixed yet, taking punter’s slaps and stranglings, and him not springing back licketysplit like us. Weren’t safe for Foxtrot back forever ago, when’s he hadn’t yet tweaked his Stamp to sproing his cunt to a cock, so’s every miller or cobbler as owned him down the centuries, they’d say he was too a girl, and sod the truth!

  Weren’t safe for you scruffs, was it? Even you what’s joined us since, took the Stamp yerselves, Fixed by choice – maybe yer ain’t had the chains and chimneys and losing yer right foot to the mills five bleedin weeks in a row, but you ain’t here cause yer foster home was peachy, eh, Quippersnap? And maybe them stickmen ain’t around to scrobble and scrub us now, but of all us here, nippers, clear as the freckles Fixed in a squiggle, ain’t none of yer peepers don’t veritably projectify the savvy that it ain’t never safe nowheres.

  In this world anyways.

  See, you all’s heard the fabble of the Land of Nod, ain’t yer? Where’s Keen ended up after scrubbing Able... as the groanhuffs’ Holy Bollocks has it leastways. And yer knows the truth of that lie, eh, how both brothers scarpered to that dreamland, how Keen didn’t really scrub his brother’s Stamp, just tweaked it summat wild. Like as an urchin might tweak himself knucklespikes, Keen rewrote Able out of reality, into this hideyhole playground. And went in after him, to the land where every scruff plays safely now in their sleep.

  But that ain’t real, yer says?

  Think again.

  • 3

  Don’t you listen to them streak-of-piss scofflaws what says it’s just a fib for the scamps, bedtime bollocks so’s the brats won’t wake in a wet bed, screaming for a mam two centuries dead, dreaming they’s back in the Institute, getting their soul ripped out and wrote on their chest all over again. Some scofflaw cocks their snoot, sneers as how of course them littl’uns is Fixed in that moment so they blah blah blah...? You just tell em that’s what tweaking’s for – to snip such fears – so shut the fuck up.

  No. It ain’t just a fabble.

  Oh, it’s a wonderland, it is, scamps, every wonderland. The Land of Nod, we calls it when we fabbles Keen and Able, but just as Keen and Able, being veritable Scruffian gods, has other monickers, just as sometimes we calls them brothers Dinguses and Apple, or Baccy and Pillow, well, sometimes we calls that place Appleland or Turn-an-Knock or Mug Mall or Cuckooine. There’s so many fabbles of it, even the groanhuffs has names for it.

  But one name they’d never think to call it, but you might have heard it called, is the Land of Somewhere Safe.

  See, that’s where all em whatsits and whodjamaflips goes when yer says to yerself, I must put this Somewhere Safe. And then yer goes to g
et it, and it ain’t where yer thunk it was, and yer ain’t sure if yer just forgot where the fuck yer cunning hidey was – too fucking cunning, it was. Well, that’s Dinguses snaffling yer dinguses away in answer to yer wishes. He’s only taken it to the Land of Somewhere Safe for yer, innit!

  And you know how come we knows that’s true?

  Because it ain’t only in dreams some Scruffians have been there.

  See, it were during the Blitz, scamps, back when the doodlebugs was falling, and the East End being flattened, and one dark night, all the crib bosses from all across London was parlaying in Squirlet’s den, to conflab on how’s to keep the Stamp safe, and Foxtrot pipes up...

  – Gentlemen, says he, ladies, please!

  Cause they’s all babbling over each other, being Scruffians, and them as was bosses just the least bossable of the unbossable, really.

  – If we need to put it somewhere safe, says Foxtrot, we need to put it Somewhere Safe.

  And that night... a Plan were hatched.

  • 4

  1939 it were, and a dark time in London. Why, the goanhuffs had stockpiled coffins, circled the city with barrage balloons against the Zeppelins, even drawn up plans to evacuate all the kiddiwinks from the city. So when the war begun with the Blitz, a full fifty-seven days of doodlebugs dropping, and the East End them Nazis’ Target A –

  No, it were 1939, Slick, cause the Yanks hadn’t joined yet.

  No, they was too doodlebugs.

  I don’t care what Wikipedia says. They must’ve had em, else how could they have the Blitz?

  Well, the evacuation must’ve been 1940 then.

  So. When it were safe enough to come out of the shelters, them groanhuffs thinks to themselves, right ho, time to put their plan into action. Operation Pied Piper it were called. Eight hundred thousand nippers assembled at school gates and marched to train stations. Picture em, scamps! Luggage tags on lapels, gas masks in little box satchels, ration books in pockets, each humphing a suitcase and a brown paper bag with a tin of corned beef and buns, and all singing Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye, like as they was going on a grand adventure. Blimey!

  Now amongst all the kerfuffle of kiddiewinks at King’s Cross, scamps, there was two as didn’t know they acktcherly was in for a grand adventure. Peter Dearest and Lily Love we’ll calls em, cause that’s how they was called respectively by his doting mum and her proud father, right up until the sunny September Sunday when’s they both, by unhappy not-so-accident, lost the one parent they’d left to the bombs what independently blasted to smithereens Peter’s nice terraced redbrick on Earl’s Court Square and Lily’s lovely Georgian Chelsea townhouse. And their whole world with it, the poor orphans.

  Weren’t much they had in common beyond that, Lily and Peter, truth be told, cause for all’s they was both of that middling well-to-do hoity-poloity world of larders and dinner – never tea, how common! – she were the posher but like to see snoots cocked at her, while he were of humbler roots but prone to cock his snoot. Cause Lily’s long-lost mum were the brown Bombay bride of one of yer British Raj’s finest, while Peter’s yonks-popped dad were a grocer made good, so there was a fair old whack of... attitudinal distinction, let’s say.

  • 5

  If any scruff had been there to see them two orphans then, on that cold December day, so early in the morning it was still pitch black, if any Scruffian had been slipping through the crowds to swipe a ticker here, a leather there, or idling against a wall, say, and seen them two, as they doddered their way along the platform, deep in a mob of bairns and brats and still being jounced by the groanhuffs jostling through... well, they might have been forgiven for pegging Peter as a twerp and Lily as a stray straight off the bat.

  And that scruff wouldn’t have been wholly wrong, scamps, cause that Lily could be a right tiger; she’d seen more’n her fair share of snootcocking at her swarth... and at the punching of cocked snoots... by a girl! Yeah, she’d a scamp’s spirit, that tomboy tyke. But Peter, meanwhile, he were summat of a mouse, in truth, but if he sniffed a bit priggish at times... well, see, before yer scallywag’s gangly limbs and hormones befuddles em, yer scrag’s often sharper to what ain’t safe and what ain’t fair, and pricklier with it. And that’s the age Peter were at.

  Not that them two knowed scamps from scrags, or the strays what’s just waiting for the Stamp from the twerps what’s already a groanhuff cuntfucker inside. They hadn’t even heard of Scruffians, them kids. It were decades since we sank the last Waifaker General in the Thames, mind. Weren’t but a few unsprung scruffs by then, tucked away in the servants’ wings of yer stateliest homes, so yer had to be of a certain set to know what’s what. If they’d been Peter or Lily Fitzbastard-Fauntleroy-Smythe of Windsor, that’d be a whole other fabble. But they wasn’t, mate.

  So Lily wouln’t never notice some kitchen skivvy as looked oddly familiar and familiarly odd, never click how the oddness was that scrag staying a scrag as Lily sprouted. Peter wouldn’t never go off to school to the sight of a scallywag stableboy, and come back a decade later, as some pigfucking posh nob expelled from Eton in disgrace, to the exact same sight. So, as they passes that idling’s scruff’s lookout post, when Peter spots the graffiti – Chad peeping over a wall, long schnozz hanging down, Wot, no Scruffians? chalked above – he just wonders whatever on Earth that means.

  • 6

  So, barked aboard by groanhuffs with clipboards and clipped tones, flapped along the corridor by a flustery teacher, Miss Jessel – who’s to accompany them, ensuring their educative edification irregardless of evacuation, dear children – Lily and Peter finds themselves sardined into a train compartment, into the stramash of four other kids and Miss Jessel, all inching, pivoting and elbowy – excuse me; sorry; mind yer bonce; I do apologise – passing luggage every which way, to jam – here’s a space for yer; oh, thanks ever so much – the baggage rail full, until finally – whew! – they can all plonk down in the nearest seat.

  In this train compartment then, as outside a porter rings a bell – All aboard for Edinburgh! East Coast Main Line! Peterborough and Doncaster! York, Darlington and Durham! Newcastle, Berwick-Upon-Tweed and Edinburgh Waverley! – here’s Peter and Lily sat to the window side of Miss Jessel, looking across at two boys and two girls covering yer full range of scamp, scrag, scallywag and scofflaw, all in greatcoats and scarfs, schoolcaps and tanktops for the boys, cardigans and berets for the girls, looking almost as unremarkable as Peter and Lily themselves, but somehow managing to make that almost all that matters.

  See, eldest to icklest, the littl’un interduces em, respectively: Janie; Jack; Sylvia; and himself being Kit – at your service. Bastable, their name is, says he, why, their grandfather’s only Bastable of Arabia himself, disappeared in the Great War, alas, and their old man off now fighting in his father’s bootsteps. And maybe it’s the black hair curtaining quiet Janie’s face, or the pencil ’tache drawn on ickle Kit’s, both of which might be more at home in some Addams Family New Yorker cartoon our two hasn’t even heard of, but the impression what they gives is... well, definitely somewhat eccentric.

  Now Lily ain’t fussed. Being a tyke like Kit and tomboy to boot, that ’tache just tickles her as admirably willful, no more untoward than herself fancying stetson and sixguns over golliwogs and wendy houses. But Peter, he’s quite perturbed by these Bastables; why, both boys may be ginger, but Kit’s napper is dapper as his genteel Pleasure to meet you, dear chap, while’s Jack’s scruffy shock’s uncouth as his Wotcha, mate! Sylvia with her brusque Hello has a hint of Lily’s brown to her, while silent Janie’s pale as a ghost. Peter wouldn’t hardly think em siblings at all!

  • 7

  All the long way to Waverley on the Flying Scotsman, Peter finds it curioser and curiouser. Them Bastables all conks out like tommies in the trenches used to snatching kip through the shortest second’s peace; Miss Jessel is busying out the carriage as often as in, muttering about how they oughtn’t be bound so far as Edinburgh; and Lily just bur
ies her nose in a cowboy book; but Peter barely opens his American magazine with the spaceman on its cover, just gazes out the window at the countryside and stations slipping by, the skimmering of snow, all the while... wondering.

  It gets curiouser still when, at Waverley, an ’undred hours later, Waverley at last, they disembarks only for Miss Jessel to be hailed by a telegram boy: why, there’s been a mix-up; they’s to go to Glasgow now. Not another train! And in Glasgow, there she gets called to a telephone by a porter, comes back saying that ain’t right neither. Further north they’re bound, Fort bleeding William. And long past luncheon with packed lunches all eaten, Peter’s famished now, so when’s he rumpages in his pocket for money for a bun, what he finds is the purple pim!

  – I’ve been pickpocketed! he bleats.

  – I’ll lend you some tin, pipes up Lily aside him, but then: Oh! Me too!

  – Bugger, says a voice behind em: Jack, stood there in his plus fours and argylle socks, (him having outsprouted yer knee socks and school shorts of Peter and Kit, see,) Jack lighting a cigarette with a fingersnap, and puffing the flame out... only... Peter don’t see him pocket the lighter. Odd. But then Miss Jessel’s bundling em all on that Fort William train, and her fashing and flapping steamrollers all their laments, and it’s onward, onward, tsssschtycoo! tsssschtycoo! whoooo-whooooo!

  By the time they’s on another steam train from Fort William, chuffing over the Glenfinnan Viaduct in the gloaming, through the gloomiest hills and glens, why, Peter’s so hungry and tired, he couldn’t say if he’s coming or going, and he just wants to cry, just wants the mum he’s trying ever so hard not to think of, wibbly lipped. By the time they’s off that train and on the ferry crossing from Mallaig to Armadale, with the mist and dark descending, he’s so discombobblated and disconsolatrated, he don’t even notice till Lily says it: