Lungdon , livre ebook

Deliciously unsettling stories don t get much weirder.
- School Library Journal (starred review, Heap House )
LUNGDON
written and illustrated by
EDWARD CAREY
70 BLACK WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
T he Iremongers are at large in London, the ruins of Foulsham left burning behind them. They need a new home and they intend to find one. Londoners are beginning to notice bizarre happenings in their city-loved ones disappearing, strange objects appearing and a creeping darkness that seems to swallow up the daylight. The Police have summoned help, but is their cure more deadly than the feared Iremongers? What role will Clod play: returning son or rebel? Heartbroken child or hero? And where are all the rats coming from?
The interlocking fates of the odd and marvelous Iremonger family are now to be unraveled and disclosed in the thrilling conclusion to the Iremonger trilogy. Will servant girl Lucy Pennant and young Clod Iremonger be reunited? Will the Heaps, their ramshackle ancestral home, continue to stand? Will their birth objects, discarded items-a door knob, a tea strainer, a bath tub plug, a match box, what-have-you-given to them at birth with lives and histories of their own, continue to exert their uncanny pull? All will be revealed about Clod and his dark world in Lungdon .

A LSO BY E DWARD C AREY:
Heap House (Iremonger Book 1)
Foulsham (Iremonger Book 2)
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com ,
or write us at the above address.
Text and Illustrations copyright 2015 by Edward Carey
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1292-8
Contents
Also by Edward Carey
Copyright
Dedication
Curtain Up
Part One: Outside Looking In
1: Report From a Bedroom Window
2: London Gazette I
3: Observations From a Perambulation
4: London Gazette II
5: The House Across The Street
Part Two: Inside Looking Out
6: An Iremonger in London
7: Botton?
8: Blood
9: Sharp As
10: An Aunt Called Night
11: In The Dark
Part Three: Inside Out
12: Water
13: Secrets of a Room
14: Buried in Filth
15: Her Majesty s Ratcatcher
16: Moving Streetlamps
17: Amongst New Companions
18: The Factory of Light
Part Four: Outside In
19: John Smith Un-Iremonger
20: Under The Cloche
21: Long Line of Londoners
22: Counting Objects
23: Following The Trail
24: He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
25: The Tale of a Common Rivet
26: The Very Latest Piece of London Statuary
27: The Boy Who Talked To Objects
28: A Conference of Lights
29: A Cry The Night Before a Battle
Part Five: Upside Down
30: London Gazette III
31: The Parties Assemble
32: 8th February 1876
33: How The Iremongers Opened Parliament
Curtain Down
Acknowledgements
About the Author
For Matilda
This common seat of cruelty, this dirty city, this earth of stone, this sty of men, this un-Eden, un-paradise, this fortress built by men to kill men with infection and foul deed, this unhappy populace, this little people, this stone of coal set in a suffocating stench, this cursed plot, this city, this slum, this Lungdon.
Oylum Iremonger, 1825
To look down upon the whole of London as the birds of the air look down upon it, and see it dwindled to a mere rubbish heap.
Henry Mayhew, 1852
I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?
Charlotte Bront , 1853
London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
Henry James, 1909

CURTAIN UP
I Saw a Little Woman
Statement of a London Photographic Man, 31st January 1876
There is evil come to my city.
I saw it yesterday morning. I took a picture of it. And here it is.
I m often perched at my balcony in Onslow Square. I like to take a picture of my surroundings, of the people who live here, of general London life. Commonly the people are something of a blur when I take them down in pictures, because people will keep moving. In truth - in so many ways - I prefer the taking down of objects than people, so much more reliable you might say - but people, oh people they are always moving, so that when I take them with my machine and commit them to a plate, oftentimes they appear foggy, like a ghost of themselves. Well then, that s to explain my picture somewhat, when I saw the evil.
It was morning, I do swear it - there was sunlight, weak but present. More than enough for me to see clear. I had my apparatus up and ready on its tripod and all was primed. I was about to take a picture of the square before me, only I became distracted by a loud clacking noise, coming nearer and gaining in volume. It was, I ascertained after a time of listening, the noise of feet, of hard shoes clacking upon the cobbles, making a terrible din. The smacking noise came, as I say, ever closer, and then at last comes into view the source of the perturbation. It was a woman, an uncommonly small woman, not a child though, certainly a woman, and this little woman wore tough black boots and was otherwise quite attired in black and she marched like she had a purpose into the square and stood by the railing somewhere between the pavement and the garden, all business and determination. She was dressed, as I say, all in black and she was little, as I also say - undersized, strangely so, like there was something quite wrong about her from the start. She looked about her briskly.
And then did I see it.
The evil, I say.
The woman put her head back. Her jaw seemed to snap right open in a most unnatural way, so that the little woman s mouth was stretched uncommonly wide. Her jaw it clicked open like the jaw of some strange creature, and there was the sound of a great snap that echoed around the square. Then, you see, I had all about me and let my camera fire, there was a burst of phosphorescence as I let my camera use its eye and take it all down. And though the picture is a little blurred you can still see it, I say, especially when the pertinent part is blown up after developing. The awful truth. For then, oh then, from the wide-open mouth of this little woman in her sharp boots, came from somewhere deep in her throat a blackness, a great blackness, more and more blackness. A darkness, like a strange small weather grown out of a single human, getting bigger and bigger, like Aladdin s djinn out of the lamp. Soon the whole square was dark as night, and all further streets quite blackened with it.
Soon I could not even see my hands in front of my face.
Soon all was so thorough and complete dark.
Like every candle in all the world had been put out of a sudden.
Then I heard her again, the boots, the sharp boots, the click and the clack of her walking, of her feet hitting the cobbles and she was going further and further away. And all the darkness was left behind.
But I have this picture.
Of a little woman spewing out the night.
Of this evil come to my city.
Part One
Outside Looking In


Miss Eleanor Cranwell and a Music Stand
1
REPORT FROM A BEDROOM WINDOW
From the Journal of Eleanor Cranwell, aged thirteen, 23 Connaught Place, London W
3rd February 1876
There has been no light. Not for days now. We all live in darkness and pretend it is the most natural thing.
I admit very readily that there were days before when no light ever broke through onto London, but this darkness has been longer, and it has been darker. The gas is lit on the street at all hours, but it fails to illuminate much of anything. The only way to see what is before you is to set a candle to it, and always you are aware of the thick darkness all around that wants to put it out. It has been like this ever since the new family moved into the house across the street.
No children play in the street, not since they came. And even adults rush from the place as if they fear it terribly, as if the street itself is damned.
Well perhaps it is.
I think I m the only one at the window these days, all the other glass up and down the street is shuttered up or the curtains have been drawn and remain so. It s as if the eyes of the street are closed, and no one else is watching.
But I m watching. I m watching that house. I shan t ever stop.
Our street, our Connaught Place, is not the grandest address by any means. The best perhaps that can be said about it is that beyond the thickness of our south walls lies the great expanse of Hyde Park and space and green, though the whole park has been covered in a thick black fog for some time now, and, so Nanny says, it is so dark that it is as if the world has ended at the Bayswater Road.
It has been so ever since they came. It is colder and harsher, the weather itself feels unkind, all the walls are frigid to the touch and they drip at times, so that much of the wallpaper through the house has grown blisters. And all of it, all of it, since they came.
It is a very secret family that arrived here on the night that Foulsham - the borough of rubbish - caught fire and was burnt to the ground. That fire was so fierce that it smoulders still. How many people were killed that night I do not know. It must have been so terrible to be there, but somehow the papers never talk of how many died. That was the night the family moved in, when a whole borough was wiped out and all that was left were ashes. Who mourns for them,