Larklight

by Philip Reeve

  I undid my straps and crept to the tiny stern-window. From there I had what I felt certain would be my last glimpse of home. Larklight was by then no more than a knobbly white parcel of cobwebs hanging in space, attached by skeins of spider silk to a strange, spiny, black ship which hung in the aether beside it.

  I don’t know if you have ever been aboard a lifeboat. The best I can say for it is that it is more comfortable than being trapped in a cobweb-entombed house full of hungry space spiders. There is little else to recommend it. The accommodation is cramped, the view dull, and since there is no room aboard such a tiny vessel for a chamber where the chemical wedding can occur, you are propelled through the aether by nothing but the impetus of your launching spring.

  ‘What will happen to us now?’ asked Myrtle.

  ‘We must wait until someone picks us up,’ I told her.

  ‘And how long will that take?’

  ‘Several hours, I expect.’ But even as I spoke I had a most disagreeable thought. There had not been time to set off any emergency flares before we left Larklight. There was no way that anyone could know we were adrift out here. It was quite possible that we would perish from starvation and thirst, and our lifeless bodies tumble on for ever in the lifeboat!

  I checked in the supply locker and found little comfort there: only a keg of water, a case of fortified biscuits and a copy of the Holy Bible. But I did not want Myrtle to see how grim our prospects were, so I said, ‘I am sure someone must have noticed that great black ship approaching Larklight. I dare say the Royal Navy will despatch a gunboat to investigate. I expect they are already on their way.’

  It soon began to grow stuffy inside our tiny barrel, for although we had a small supply of comet ice aboard and a device for transmuting it into air, I did not wish to use it until the air we had started out with was quite exhausted. It seemed to me that it might be many days, or even weeks, before we were sighted by a passing ship.

  It was also far too hot. We were tumbling in the full glare of the Sun, whose light came dazzling in at us through the windows. There were tinted goggles aboard, which we put on to preserve our eyes against the blinding rays, but we could do little about the heat. I took off my Norfolk jacket and unbuttoned my shirt, but Myrtle did not think it would be proper to remove her brown serge dress, and she grew hotter and hotter and more and more irritable as the long day wore on. At last she fell asleep, and I was able to think about some of the questions which had been troubling me ever since we left Larklight.

  First, where had those great spiders come from? I had never seen anything like them in my schoolbooks, nor in the great thick encyclopaedias in Father’s library. And how had their black ship arrived at Larklight? For everyone knows that only our Royal College of Alchemists possesses the secret of the process called the chemical wedding, which drives our aether-ships from world to world. Of course, Frenchmen and Russians and rebel Americans have all tried to steal it over the years and have even built a few shabby aether-ships of their own, but it is hundreds of centuries since any of the unearthly races were capable of sailing between the worlds.

  It made me think of the legends which Captain Cook and other early spacefarers heard from the natives on Mars and Io; stories about great extra-solar ships, called Starjammers, with aether-wings as wide and white as moons, which cruise endlessly through the Milky Way and visit the worlds of our own dear Sun every millennium or so. Was it possible that our spiders had come from such a vessel as that? Were they the advance guard of some dread invasion from beyond the stars? Why, the whole Solar System might already be swathed in their webs for aught I knew!

  I told myself to keep calm, and not to entertain such silly notions. The Astronomer Royal, in his observatory on Europa, would certainly have spotted a Starjammer long before it crossed the orbits of the outermost worlds, and the Royal Navy would take a firm line with any invasion fleet. Anyway, Father had told me that those old stories were a foolish superstition; the Martian and Ionian civilisations were both in a sorry state of decline, and had invented tales of travellers from other stars to explain the ruins which their own great ancestors had left behind.

  It was much more likely, I decided, that the black aether-ship had belonged to the real Mr Webster, the gentleman whom we had been expecting, and that it had been attacked and overtaken by the spiders en route to Larklight. I shuddered to think of the awful fate which must have befallen poor Mr Webster and his crew at the hands (or rather claws) of the spider which had taken his name. I vowed that the first thing I would do when we were saved was to inform the authorities.

  That decided, I soon grew drowsy, and fell, like Myrtle, into a troubled sleep, where great spindly shadows scuttled never-endingly through my dreams.

  I was awoken by my sister poking me in the ribs. She pointed at the forward window, which I sleepily noticed was no longer filled with the star fields of the open aether, but with a lot of spiky white mountains which appeared to be drawing closer and closer.

  ‘Art!’ said Myrtle urgently, shaking me to try and rattle the sleep out of my head. ‘I insist that you wake up and do something! I believe that we are about to fall upon the Moon!’

  Chapter Four

  How We Came to the Moon, and What Befell Us There.

  All through the history of the world, people have looked up at the Moon and wondered what secrets it held. All sorts of phantasies and theories were woven about its shining seas and gleaming mountains, and the wise and wonderful people who might dwell among them. But in 1703 when the experimental aether-ship Mercury made first moonfall in Queen Anne’s Bay, and Captain Frobisher and his merry band stepped out to plant the British flag in those white sands, they found that it was actually a bit of a dump. The seas, which had looked so enticing when viewed through telescopes from far-off England, were salt and drear. The only plants were pallid mushrooms which tasted like cardboard and grew in vast, silent groves. And the people were mushrooms too, though of a different type; they lived in the empty shells of giant lunar snails, and were so primitive that they showed no interest whatsoever in the new arrivals.

  Since then, things have improved somewhat upon the Moon. Some useful mines have been dug in the hills west of Port George, and at nearby Mount Ghastly a colony for convicts has been established. These villains, transported from England for sheep-stealing and machine-breaking, soon see the error of their ways after a few years’ hard work in the thin air, and their descendants may one day populate the entire Moon.

  Unfortunately, apart from miners, mushrooms and convicts, nobody of any note chooses to live upon the Moon, or even visit it, and so great swathes of it lie unexplored. It was into one of these regions that Myrtle and I plummeted, bounding down a steep and rugged mountainside in our lifeboat and coming to rest upon the floor of a deep crater, filled with fine white sand.

  Luckily, the gravity on the Moon is so gentle that we were not hurt. But when I opened the lifeboat’s hatch and looked out, I saw that our adventures were not yet at an end. Indeed, they might be only just beginning.

  We had landed somewhere on the margin between the light and dark sides of the Moon. When I looked in one direction I could see the Sun shining brightly on a range of step white hills, while in the other all was sombre night. The crater in which our lifeboat had come to rest lay in a perpetual twilight.

  We gathered up Myrtle’s carpet-bag and all that we could carry of our small stock of food and water, and began walking towards the sunlight, although we both knew that there might be no human habitation for hundreds of miles.

  The thin air made it hard to fill our lungs, so we did not speak much; and the sand underfoot was difficult to walk on – like walking through snow, according to Myrtle, who had once paid a visit to our great-aunt Euphemia on Earth, and never stops going on about it.

  Luckily, the kindly gravity – about one-sixth British Standard – allowed us to travel some twenty feet with each step we took, which made the going somewhat easier.

  Occasiona
lly we passed through groves of spindly white fungi, like the ghosts of immense parasols. On the shady sides of rocks grew clumps of lunar puffballs, and I warned Myrtle to give them a wide berth, having read of how they had burst in the faces of luckless explorers and filled their heads with spores, which took root in their brains and sprouted new puffballs out of their eyes and ears. (‘That is perfectly disgusting and I do not believe a word of it,’ said Myrtle, but I noticed she took long detours around the puffball clumps after that.)

  We had been bounding along for about an hour when we saw something moving on a hilltop ahead and, drawing nearer, recognised a gaggle of the great lunar snails. They were oozing along in a sort of flock, their big mauve shells jostling and scraping one against another, and they were accompanied by a mushroom, who seemed to be acting as their shepherd – or rather as their snail herd, I suppose.

  Myrtle, being the eldest, decided to take charge. She bounced up to the snailherd and said loudly and clearly, ‘Excuse me, my good fungus, we have been shipwrecked on your horrid planet. Please direct us to the residence of the British Governor.’

  The mushroom tilted his broad, spotted cap at her, and two sad, black eyes blinked out from beneath his gills. He made a bobbing motion, and said something in the whispery, sighing speech of the Moon.

  ‘How perfectly vexing!’ said Myrtle crossly. ‘He does not speak English. He has probably never seen a human being before. I – oh, eek!’

  She jumped backwards, covering a good forty feet of ground. The mushroom-man had reached out one of his powdery little hands to touch her locket, which he must have noticed glinting in the sunlight. ‘He clearly understands the value of gold, though!’ cried Myrtle, gathering herself up and brushing sand from her skirts. ‘Did you see that, Art? He tried to rob me!’

  ‘I think he was just curious,’ I said. I felt sorry for the mushroom-man, who had been so startled by my sister’s shrieks that he had turned pale blue and pulled his cap down tight like a folded-up umbrella. He peeked out at me after a while, and started to make little sweeping gestures with his hands, shushing and soughing at me all the time in his own strange language. It seemed almost as if he were trying to warn me of something, but I could not understand what it might be. Myrtle was already striding off haughtily towards the sunlit hills, and I knew I had to follow her. ‘Sorry!’ I told the mushroom.

  I looked back at him as I went bounding after Myrtle. He was still motioning with his hands, pressing them against his stalk at a point where his throat would have been if he had had one. I thought he looked sad.

  When I caught up with my sister she had stopped at the top of a jagged outcropping of moon rock.

  ‘That was very rude,’ I told her. ‘Father always says we must be polite to all sentient creatures, even if they are only mushrooms. He says a gentleman is without prejudice …’

  ‘Look!’ was all that Myrtle said.

  I looked, and saw at once why she had halted here. Beyond the outcrop we were standing on there stretched a plain dotted with tall towers of wind-worn rock, and between the towers, piled higgledy-piggledy one atop the next, there lay an enormous number of large, white jars. Each jar was taller than Myrtle, and roughly spherical in shape. And every single one was broken; either split completely in half, with shards and fragments littered all about, or simply pierced by a small, dark hole near the top. Broken pieces crunched under our feet as we walked down the slope, looking about us in wonderment at the mounds of jars. There must have been ten thousand of them. Who had made them? Whence came they? I forgot how tired and scared I was and began imagining how my name would become known for this great discovery: Arthur Mumby, first explorer of the Plain of Jars!

  ‘Oh, look!’ cried Myrtle, pointing.

  In the bottom of one of the nearby jars, which had been so shattered that only a sort of pale bowl remained, lay a litter of white bones.

  ‘It must be a funerary urn,’ I said. ‘I expect in years gone by the dead of some great, vanished, lunar race were laid to rest in these containers. I wonder who they were? Not the ancestors of our mushroom-friend, that’s for sure. Mushrooms don’t have bones.’

  ‘They don’t have buttons either,’ said Myrtle nervously. She pointed at something lying among the bones, and I reached down and picked it up. She was right; it was a brass button with a raised design in the shape of an anchor with a coiled rope.

  ‘The MacCallister expedition!’ I gasped. ‘They set out from Port George to explore the dark side of the Moon back in seventeen hundred and eighty-something. They never returned, and no one ever knew what had become of them. One of them must have ended up here …’ But even as I spoke I had that slidy feeling which comes to you when a pet theory begins to collapse, for how would one of Captain MacCallister’s men have become interred in an antique funerary urn of unknown design?

  ‘Not just one of them,’ whispered Myrtle, horror-struck. ‘There are bones in this jar too!’

  I checked another urn, and then another. More bones, more buttons, and a rusting sword. The urns themselves were made of some material which I could not identify; neither porcelain nor clay, but just as hard and shiny. In some there were no bones at all. In one I found the crumbling shell of a young lunar snail.

  ‘Oh, Art,’ said Myrtle, fingering the bright locket at her throat, which flashed in the sunlight. ‘What is this dreadful place?’

  There came a whirring, whirling sound; a rustling. I looked up. Nothing moved. The stars hung bright and cold above my Plain of Jars, and the lunar wind blew little flags of dust from the summits of the rock towers. I turned back to Myrtle, meaning to tell her that we should hurry on. But Myrtle had gone.

  ‘Myrtle!’ I said loudly. I did not understand where she could have vanished to, since I had looked away only for an instant. I hunted for her among the nearer jars, and even checked inside a few, but I found only bones. I started to run, calling out as I went, ‘Myrtle! Myrtle!’ You can run a long way quite quickly on the Moon. Each time I pushed myself off I travelled twenty yards; each time I came down I shattered an urn to dust and fragments. In one I saw a skeleton that was fresher than the rest, with shreds of flesh and cloth still clinging to the bones. Its ankles were chained together with rusty shackles. The poor fellow must have been an escaped convict from the colony at Mount Ghastly – but however had he ended up in an urn?

  The answer came down at me from above, in a great flapping and purring of grey wings. I had a glimpse of a huge, furry body, prism eyes, a tongue that uncurled like the spring of a broken watch. Then something stung the side of my neck, and I fell down into darkness.

  Chapter Five

  In Which We Find Ourselves Imprisoned on the Plain of Jars and Contemplate a Ghastly Fate (Again).

  When I came to my senses I was still in darkness, and I could not move. I lay on some hard, uncomfortable surface which seemed to curve up past my face, and curved beneath me too, like a bowl, or …

  With a terrible lurch of understanding I realised that I was inside one of the urns on the Plain of Jars! Someone or something must have mistaken me for dead, and I had been sealed within one of those unearthly vases, where my lonely bones would lie and whiten just like those of the poor men whose mortal remains Myrtle and I had stumbled across earlier!

  ‘Myrtle!’ I tried to shout, but my mouth would not work.

  And then, down in the dark beside my feet, something moved. I was not alone in my jar. I felt the weight of a heavy body creep across my paralysed legs. I was so afraid that I finally managed to force out a sort of noise (‘Eeep!’, it went) and I felt the thing flinch and heard it growl, or rather sort of warble. It began to tug at my boot.

  I tried desperately to move my legs, hoping to kick my way out of this prison. But they lay as heavy and lifeless as wet ropes. I strove to move my hands then, thinking that if I could only reach into my pocket I might at least find my matchbox and strike a lucifer, by whose light I might see what it was that I had been entombed with. But no effort of
mine would move them. The thing which had stung me, the thing with the wings and the glittering, prismatic eyes, must have injected me with a paralysing draught! It had looked, in the brief glimpse I had had of it, like a huge moth. I had expected it to eat me, not to seal me in a jar. Why should a moth wish to seal people up in jars?

  And then I understood. I was not to be food for the moth, but for its young! That thing which I could feel gnawing and nibbling at my boot must be some sort of caterpillar! The moth had made this jar out of spittle and moon dust and the chewed-up mulch of mushroom-trees and laid an egg inside, and left me in there along with it, to provide food for the hungry larva when it hatched!

  Among my mother’s books I had once discovered a volume of stories by a gentleman named Mr Poe, who lives in Her Majesty’s American colonies. There was one, The Premature Burial, which gave me nightmares for weeks after I read it, and I remember thinking that there could be no fate more horrible than to be buried alive, and wondering what type of deranged and sickly mind could have invented such a tale. But as I lay there immobilised in a jar on the wrong side of the Moon with only a ravening caterpillar for company I realised that Mr Poe was actually quite a cheery, light-hearted sort of chap, and that his story had been touchingly optimistic.