The engine travelled from Heap House into London every morning, and came back at night, with the same horrible screaming and thumping that shook the entire house. The train stopped in the cellar and Grandfather was taken up into the house by a lift pulled by unhappy mules that lived down there in the darkness and never came up. There was a tunnel that ran from the house under the dirtheaps into the distant city.

My grandfather, Umbitt Iremonger, his birth object a silver cuspidor, a personal one, for Grandfather to aim his very own sputum into, ruled over us all. Grandfather came in and went out into the city to do his great service, and when he was out there was a sort of relief in the house, the longer the day wore on the more anxious we would become waiting for the house to scream again, waiting for the noise of his returning locomotive.

The scream fading, I went onwards again. I wandered through the leaking corridors, turning into small cubicles, smaller rooms brought in from here and from there. I often visited these hints of a greater world, for all I had ever known was Heap House. I had never been anywhere else, just Heap House and the heaps themselves.

I thought I should be safe up there, safe and alone, safe with the insects busy about, the rodents in the walls, and the odd maggoty seagull that had somehow found its way into the house but not back out. But up there, in a room originally belonging to a tobacconist’s from Hackney, I heard a hurried whispering that meant I was not alone.

‘Thomas Knapp.’

And then there was a sudden light, a lamp came into view and was shone in my face.

I Am Hunted

‘What are you doing there? Who is it? Come out into the light.’

Ingus Briggs, the underbutler, a distant relative of some sort, his birth object a tortoiseshell shoehorn (Thomas Knapp), was suddenly beside me. Mister Briggs had a great collection of pincushions in his sitting room (a girl he once loved had a pincushion birth object). He once showed me his pincushion collection while in a sociability fit, and even begged me to push pins into them, an activity which I believe he did every evening when his duties were finished. He pushed hundreds of pins and needles into materials of varying compliance and this gave him great comfort. Briggs was a small, shiny person; I think in his youth he must have been very highly polished by his parents. I think those old Briggses must have rubbed him night and day with brass rub or silver shine until they could see their own loving reflection in him.

‘What are you doing, Master Clod?’ he asked.

‘I am wandering the house,’ I admitted.

‘Do not let them catch you at it. For they do not like it, they will not have it.’