Barnaby Grimes 2 – Return of the Emerald Skull

Paul Stewart's Return of the Emerald Skull is a gaslit horror mystery for 9 year olds about an errand boy who takes one delivery too many.

What happens

Barnaby Grimes fetches and carries for a living. The city calls that a tick-tock lad, or a clerk errant if you are being posh, and it means hauling parcels across a huge sooty Victorian city. The faster he goes, the more he gets paid.

So he does not use the streets. He goes over the rooftops. Highstacking, it is called. He is a bit sniffy about the tick-tock lads who stay down on the pavement (cobblestone-creepers, he calls them).

One bright afternoon he takes a pair of spectacles out to Grassington Hall School for the headmaster, who has broken his old ones and is currently, as the gatekeeper puts it, as blind as a corporal in a coal cellar.

The headmaster is delighted. He is also, it turns out, looking for somebody reliable to fetch things from the docks.

Then he shows Barnaby what sort of things.

A long private room upstairs, lined floor to ceiling with glass cases, and inside every case a bird. Hundreds of them. Macaws, flamingos, ostriches, hummingbirds, every one stuffed and mounted and dead. Barnaby thinks it is horrible. He needs the work, so he says they are beautiful.

The next shipment is due in a week. The headmaster says its name means the emerald messenger of darkness, and he says it the way other people talk about a holiday.

Barnaby tells all this like a man remembering, years on, and he does enjoy himself. He wanders off to explain how the girls of Enderby Court once defeated fifty staff using croquet mallets and feral cats, then wanders back as if nothing happened.

Before anything else, a word about the opening.

The book opens with two pages of nightmare. There is an eclipse. Figures in beaks and feathers stand round a stone slab. A man is roped to it, half starved, his ribs showing, begging. A knife is put into the narrator's hand and a voice in his skull tells him to cut out the man's heart.

It is not a bad dream that gets explained away on the next page. It is the first thing your reader meets, it is written to frighten, and it works.

For a child who likes being scared on purpose and knows when to stop, this is exactly the sort of thing they are after. For one who lies awake afterwards, leave it a year. The dead birds bother some children as much as the altar does.

What to read next

Curse of the Night Wolf is in the library for anyone who wants Barnaby back on those rooftops. Fair warning though, it opens with someone watching his own fingers turn into claws under a full moon, so it is not the softer option.