Barnaby Grimes 3 – Legion of the Dead

Paul Stewart's Barnaby Grimes: Legion of the Dead is a Victorian horror adventure for 11 year olds, told by an errand boy who gets about by running over the rooftops.

What happens

It starts at the worst possible moment. Barnaby is pressed against a marble tomb in a fog-filled graveyard with a terrified old doctor beside him, and the dead are forming up around them in neat military ranks. Four soldiers in red jackets stand on a flat tomb above the crowd. One of them lifts a flagpole with a regimental banner on it and gives the order to advance.

Then the story goes back a few days and tells you how he got there.

The trade is called tick-tock lad. Barnaby delivers things, anything, all over the city, and he does it across the roofs because the streets are too slow. Time is money. He has names for all of it. A Striding Edge along a parapet. A Running Grapple up a wall. A Flying Fox across a gap he really should not attempt with a three-step run-up.

That morning's job is a box of small brass links for a finger-chain. If that means nothing to you, it meant a great deal in his city. People were frightened of waking up in their own coffin, so a chain ran from the dead person's finger, up through the earth, to a bell above ground.

The chainsmith lives in a tenement that everyone else has abandoned. She mentions, cheerfully, that there have been hauntings in the graveyard nearby. Phantoms in red coats.

The voice is half the pleasure. Barnaby talks to you like an old man telling a story he has told before, with the slang of his trade and a lovely dry line in understatement. The rooftop chases are brilliant and you can feel exactly how high up he is.

He is also extremely specific about corpses, and this is the bit to think about. In the first few pages you get an eyeball hanging out on a thread, a skull caved in by a horse's hoof, an axe still buried in another skull and the rope mark on a strangled neck. Later there is dried blood on padded walls. It is gleeful rather than grim, but it does not look away, and nor does the horror the whole plot rests on, which is waking up under six feet of earth.

A child who finds that sort of detail sickening should give this one a miss. A child who loves being properly frightened will devour it.

What to read next

Barnaby has other cases in the library. In Curse of the Night Wolf someone wakes under a full moon with claws where their fingers were, in a padded room with blood already on the quilting.