Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Saint Yacobray, Rider of the Horse of Bone

The sight of a Clatterhorse should chill one to the bone. Sure enough, when Mosca surveyed the result of Welter Leap’s day of manic construction, she was struck dumb with a sense of acute dread and foreboding. However, this was not because it was an image of Death-in-a-bridle.

‘You sure it’ll even hold together?’ Mistress Leap prodded it doubtfully. Its jaw promptly fell open and then off, just to prove a point. The stuffed stag head had been painted in flour paste and charcoal to give it a skeletal look and its horns had been sawn away, but this had not been enough. It needed a jaw to snap, or nobody would mistake it for a Clatterhorse. So Welter had cunningly crafted hinged jaws of wood which clapped to when you pulled a string. Sadly, despite all his skill, it looked very little like a skeletal horse, and more like a deer that had got its head stuck in a xylophone. The bulging glass bottle-top eyes might have been a mistake as well, with hindsight.

‘It’ll look better in the moonlight,’ declared Mosca with more certainty than she felt. Welter gave his wife a baleful glare as he set about nailing the jaw back into place.

The body of the horse was a series of curved frames over which was thrown a mass of coal-stained blankets sewn together by Mistress Leap and studded with dry chicken and mutton bones. There was just enough room for three people to hide inside the main section, in single file. The rearmost portion of the horse was a separate cavity, and within this a large sack hung from the frame, so that stolen goods and tools for hasty repairs could be carried in it.

‘And what if we meet the real…?’ Mistress Leap could not muster the courage to complete the question.

‘We won’t.’ Mosca hoped she was right. ‘We’ll only be out on the streets a little while. B’sides, the Clatterhorse clatters as it goes, don’t it? We hear it coming, we skedaddle.’ The midwife seemed a good deal recovered but was still a little pale and fragile, so Mosca thought it best to sound as cheerful as possible.

As the first bugle sounded Mosca looked for Saracen to wish him farewell – a temporary farewell, she hoped. But during the night he had vanished into the furthest recesses of the room in search of new and inconvenient places to sleep, and despite a tug at her heart she knew there was no time to make a thorough search for him.

‘Hssst!’ Welter grimaced them all into silence. There came a silver jingle outside, then the slam and click of the false house facing being swung away and locked into its night-time position. All three of them held their breath, frozen into the hunch-shouldered, guilty posture reserved exclusively for those who are about to launch into forbidden streets with a fake spectral horse.

The jingling faded, and Mosca unlocked and unbolted the door, and opened it just enough to peer up and down the street.

Now! she mouthed. Her accomplices ducked into the horse through special flaps in the cloth cover, and Mosca threw the door wide. The newborn Clatterhorse shuddered, lifted slightly, whispered to itself furiously, then wobbled forward two feet and headbutted the door jamb.

‘Oh, pig on a spit! Left a bit! No, left! Here – this way!’ The dread Clatterhorse was guided out into the brilliantly moonlit street through tugs to the muzzle, then its green stable girl locked the front door behind it and crept inside its belly.

Even somebody watching the Clatterhorse’s jolting progress would not have guessed at the full extent of the confusion inside it. Welter had had the foresight to cut eyeholes in the cloth covering, but they were scattered at odd heights and let in very little light. Mistress Leap was foremost, holding up the front of the horse’s body frame, while her husband supported the back, so that the whole thing was raised from the ground and could be carried around. Mosca, in the middle, was on ‘clattering’ duty. She turned a wooden handle that somehow created a clicketing noise not completely unlike the galloping of bone hoofs. Mistress Leap quickly proved a somewhat skittish horse head, given to stopping or veering sideways without warning. In short, they were all trapped in a darkness full of trodden toes, sudden elbows, squawks, whispers and the smell of mouldy blanket.

Clicket-a-clicket-a-clicket. The rattle dinted the icy, motionless air. At the sound, householders who had stepped outside to tie up their tithe-vegetables scurried back inside again. Doors were slammed and shutters fastened by the time the Clatterhorse jogged unsteadily into view, deer head gently bobbing, glass goggle-eyes little mirrors of the perfect moon overhead.

It came to an uneasy halt just in front of a pawnbroker’s. Two small green hands emerged from a slit in its side just long enough to yank a hanging turnip from its string. The horse then wheeled about and lurched off back the way it came.

‘Here it is… stop… Ow! Stop!’ The horse halted by committee, and the green hands emerged again, this time to tie the turnip outside the Leaps’ front door. ‘Now – the counting house!’

Clicket-a-clicket-a-clicket. Every street was aglitter, sugared with frost as if some master chef had fashioned an entire candied town for the Clatterhorse’s snapping jaws. From the porticoes and icicle-fanged eaves hung beets and potatoes, cabbages and carrots. The Clatterhorse was evidently in two minds about these juicy trophies, and kept veering towards them, only to lurch away again.

Within the dread beast’s flanks, an ardent but whispered argument was taking place

‘No!’ The horse’s head was adamant. ‘We cannot steal our neighbours’ vegetables! It would be no better than murder!’

‘I think we can,’ murmured the animal’s rear. ‘I am almost certain it would be quite possible.’

‘Hush!’ hissed the horse’s stomach. ‘Listen! You hear that?’ She halted her handle-cranking, and for the first time the sound that had been drowned by their own clattering and whispering became audible to all of them.

Clacket-a-clack. Clacket-a-clack. A sound like Death drumming his fingers.

‘Oh no,’ breathed Mistress Leap. ‘It’s the real Clatterhorse! The Locksmiths!’

‘Quick!’ growled Welter. ‘Down that alley!’ The deer-headed Clatterhorse hoisted its skirts and sprinted. It reached the darkness of the alley with mere seconds to spare before another apparition turned the corner.

A shape lurched and twisted into view, its motion grotesquely playful despite its bulk. Moonlight creamed over the sheep’s skull at the crest of its long willow-pole neck. The red ribbons that fluttered from its eye sockets gave it a festive ghastliness. The body was a shaggy mass of fluttering rags, patches and ribbons that trailed right down to the ground.

The skull turned this way and that on its stick neck, as if the ‘horse’ was eyelessly scanning the icy street for prey. A slender rod tugged at its jaw so that it snapped with a clacket-a-clack, and Mosca had the uncomfortable feeling that it was tasting the air and would catch the flavour of their fear.

Everybody in the deer-horse held their breath. And then, just as it seemed they would escape detection, Welter released his breath in a wordless cry of anguish. Mosca turned and found that a spectral green-white something, curved like the spine of a harp, had risen out of the tool sack at the back of the horse, in which it had presumably been sleeping, and had seized Welter by the nose.

‘Aaag! Ged de blarmuggin bird off by nose!’

‘Saracen!’

There is an ideal time and a place for everything, particularly the discovery of unexpected homicidal geese. This moment of necessary stealth was not that time, and the confines of a fake horse not that place.

Clacket-a-clack. The sheep-skull’s jaw snap-snapped as it turned to gaze sightlessly towards their hiding place.

‘It’s heard us!’ commented Mosca, proving it was possible to screech under one’s breath. The next moment she was nearly knocked from her feet. Mistress Leap had taken to her heels down the alley, hauling the rest of the horse with her. They took a high speed left, bouncing slightly off the corner as they went, and then another.

‘Is it chasin’ us, Mr Leap?’

Gargling noises behind her suggested that Welter was still suffering from a goose-related speech impediment. Mosca could feel the rasp of busy wing feathers against the back of her neck. It was virtually impossible to see out now, the eyeholes jogging up and down too much to be useful. As they slowed for a second corner, Mosca pushed the entrance flap open a slit and dared a glance down the alley behind them. It was empty.

‘Mistress Leap, I don’t think it’s – aaarghh!’

In speaking to the midwife, she had turned her head to face forward again. Thus, when they turned the corner, she had an immediate eyeful of the solitary figure waiting ahead of them. It was the very monster they had just fled, standing squarely in their path, dark ribbons a-flutter. Mosca’s shrill shriek of surprise was matched by that of Mistress Leap, who brought the deer-head Clatterhorse to a jarring halt.

‘Back! Back!’ Mistress Leap yanked her end of the frame widdershins, so that the whole deer-horse was dragged head-about-tail to face the other way, and set off at an impressive gallop. Just as the entrance flap fell back into place and cut off her view of the street, Mosca had the strange impression that the other horse was also whirling around to depart in the opposite direction. Perhaps it was playing with them, slipping away to head them off again until they ran themselves into exhaustion.

Running, however, still seemed an excellent idea. After sprinting down several streets without pursuit, it became clear that Mistress Leap, true to her horsey role, had panicked, lost her wits and bolted, taking the rest of them with her.

‘They saw us,’ was all she would say when Mosca finally calmed her and persuaded her to slow. ‘Theysawusthey-sawustheysawus…’ Even Mistress Leap, who would dare murderer-infested streets every moonlit night, could apparently be reduced to twittering helplessness by fear of the Locksmiths.

‘We got unlucky.’ Mosca stifled the superstitious whispers in her own mind, and was glad that nobody could see her face in the darkness. ‘We rolled black dice, mistress, that’s all – but no matter, we got to roll those dice again. We got to go back for that gem. If we don’t grab it, somebody else will – maybe Skellow’s boys, maybe the Locksmiths, maybe both if they’re hand in glove. We got to race them all to that ransom, or we can say goodbye to Beamabeth Marlebourne and our own escape.’

By day, the mayor’s counting house was in a broad and fresh-faced street, favoured for promenades despite its steepness. By night it turned treacherous, bristling with sudden alleys, its slope snared with unseen ice.

A head gingerly emerged from one such alley and tilted to peer uphill towards the counting house. It was a smudgily painted deer’s head with no horns.

‘The radish is still there!’ came the word from Mistress Leap. ‘I can see it hanging from the lintel of the counting house!’

Mosca felt her spirits rocket. ‘Quick! Let’s grab it and -’

Clacket-a-clacket-a-clack.

Without warning, a shaggy shape barrelled up the street past their alleyway hiding place, paying them not the slightest notice. There was no mistaking the spindly neck, the sheep’s skull rattling at its crest. The other Clatterhorse was making a beeline for the counting house and its precious radish, ignoring all the other vegetables arrayed to tempt it.

‘Oh, frogspawn!’

‘What do we do?’

There was no time to do anything, or even to answer the question. It was scarcely out of Mistress Leap’s mouth before they heard another sound, this time from the uphill end of the street beyond the counting house.

Click. Clickclickclick. Clickclick.

Near the top of the street, something black had stepped out of the shadows with macabre grace. Something with the figure of a man, its arms and legs of spidery slenderness. Rising above its shoulders gleamed a ghastly hobby-horse head, its eye sockets hollow and its grimace charnel-white. From its shoulders hung a mantle of willow sticks, which dangled like finger bones and clicked against each other as it moved. It stirred every nightmare of beast-headed men who ate the hearts of children. It was a third Clatterhorse, and this one carried two long knives in its hands.

This did not, however, daunt the sheep-skull-headed horse, who continued its uphill charge towards the counting house even when the shadowy two-legged horse broke into a sprint to meet it. Sheep-Skull reached the counting house first, and Mosca saw its skeletal jaw close about the radish, biting clean through the string. Instead of making its own snatch at the prize, however, the shadowy Horse-Man flung itself at the main body of the Sheep-Skull horse. Its clenched fists plunged deep into the Sheep-Skull’s ragged coat, driving in its daggers with all the force of its charge.

There was a rough, tearing cry of pain and surprise. The Sheep-Skull kept its feet, but reeled. Its skeletal jaw fell open, spilling the radish on to the street. The Horse-Man aimed a snatch at the falling vegetable, but it rebounded off his knuckles and skipped away down the sloping street, slave to every quirk of the cobbles.

The occupants of the deer-headed Clatterhorse watched open-mouthed as the radish danced past their hiding place, then without need for discussion set off in pursuit.

The radish liked the central kennel ditch. Then it jolted off a boundary stone and found it liked the nearby breakneck flight of steps even better. Down and away it bounced, dwindling into darkness, its flourish of greenery trailing like a plume. After it scrambled the Deer-Horse, glass eyes a-goggle, then the Horse-Man, and finally the tottering Sheep-Skull.

Certainty of disaster filled Mosca’s head from the moment the ground gave out under her and she realized she was running down steps. She could barely see her own feet, and these steps had been worn into slapdash slopes by centuries of soles. It was too fast, then it was faster, and then the frame she was gripping lurched and tilted around her, throwing her off balance. Her falling foot caught a step edge and the next caught nothing. A wall clobbered her in the flank, then with a ghastly inevitability the Deer-Horse tipped headlong amid snapping and splintering, and the stone angles came up to bite.

Mosca lay in a heap of pain, smothered by the ‘horse hide’ blankets. Mistress Leap had broken part of her fall, but she had broken part of Welter’s fall, and her role as the filling in a Leap sandwich was crushing the breath out of her.

She wriggled her head and torso free and shook the blankets from her face so that she could breathe. The first thing she saw was the Horse-Man leaping over her head, his boot-sole nearly grazing her nose, and landing on the cobbles beyond.

The second thing she saw, looking back up the steps, was the ragged mass of the Sheep-Skull tearing down towards her with a haste born of lost balance. She was too terrified even to scream, but fortunately the Sheep-Skull’s occupants seemed to be devoting a fair bit of lung-power to that themselves.

Then the Sheep-Skull was upon them, plunging them into darkness filled with the thunder of un-horse-like boots. Mosca took a kick to the shoulder and felt a foot fall not an inch from her head. Damp ribbons and greasy wool trailed across her face. A moment later she had the moonlight back and was gasping air into her lungs. She prodded and tugged at the blanket around her until a head-and-shoulder-shaped bulge rose up on either side of her. With whimpers and sobs of pain, the Deer-Horse staggered unsteadily to its feet again, its wooden ribs jutting and its head quizzically tilted.

The radish, the radish! Nothing mattered but the radish.

The Horse-Man was running up and down the alley at a stoop, scanning every gutter, its lean body quivering with agitation. The Sheep Skull was also stumbling about the lane, no longer capering, twisting this way and that in search. The radish was nowhere to be seen.

And then the arctic silence of that realization was broken by a clear, crisp sound, like a mirror shattered by a bone knife.

Clatter-clack. Clatter-clack. Clatter-clatter-clack.

A clean, loud, hard sound that might chip the walls as it echoed off them. A sound the very hills would hear, and pull their forests about them for comfort. Suddenly the ‘horses’ in the street became figures in a mummers’ play, carnival games with a deer’s head and a child’s hobby horse and a sheep skull found by the roadside.

The clatter hushed for an instant as if somewhere a black theatre curtain was being drawn back, and then the real Clatterhorse rode into view, flames burning in the depths of its bone-rimmed eyes.