The Chosen Ones

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘And do you know someone called Albion Freake? He might be a friend of Skylurian’s.’

  Terrence frowned. Albion Freake. The name sounded vaguely familiar. Ought he to be jealous? Was this another author? Or a love rival! He wasn’t sure which was worse.

  ‘A friend, you say?’

  ‘Or maybe a business associate?’

  ‘No, little flower. I’ve never heard of him. I’m sure he’s utterly insignificant. Probably just some pathetic nobody.’

  ‘I think he might be a famous billionaire,’ said Effie.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Money, little flower, is not everything.’

  But Terrence felt troubled as they continued down the cobbled street to the taxi rank. He’d never heard of any famous people because he was only really concerned with his own fame. Just the idea of another famous person upset him greatly.

  When Terrence imagined this Albion Freake – stupid flipping name, that – he saw him as a vast cliff-face of a man, fair and rugged and strong. But after some minutes of using the advanced visualisation techniques that his therapist had taught him, he was able to reduce this Freake to a tiny, timid librarian with dandruff. Terrence clearly had no idea how dangerous librarians can be, but that is a story for another time. For now, he felt better.

  He had unfortunately forgotten that he was supposed to be finding out about Effie’s life. But it is always so pleasant to talk about oneself, after all, and the girl was certainly good at asking questions. Terrence had never acquired the useful social skill of asking questions back, and so had not asked Effie when she had epiphanised, or how, indeed, she travelled to other worlds. It was only once they were in the taxi that he remembered his flipping mission at all. Would Skylurian be angry with him? But there was still time. He would wine and dine the family and then . . . What? He would wait and see.

  18

  ‘What on earth is that revolting smell?’ said Orwell Bookend, without looking up from his prize crossword.

  He was sitting in his favourite armchair with a small fire burning in the grate and a candle-lamp flickering on the table beside him. Baby Luna was in her playpen reading – which actually meant chewing – an old board-book about a witch and her cat that she’d brought home from nursery. All should have been well. However, there were at least two major things missing from Orwell Bookend’s life. He felt a faint longing for something, but couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was . . .

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ said Effie. ‘We’ve brought dinner.’

  That was it. Dinner! That was what he had been longing for. Had his daughter actually done something useful for a change? But what was the other thing . . .

  ‘Who are you?’ said Orwell, looking up at Terrence suspiciously. He had recently decided that his family was going to be ordinary. More like the common man and less like, well, themselves. This did not look like an ordinary visitor. His turquoise shirt was, frankly, ridiculous. No one in this part of town wore a fur gilet. And that hair. And, of course, the smell. Which wasn’t actually that bad, now that Orwell realised it might be dinner.

  ‘He’s a famous author, Dad. Terrence Deer-Hart.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Well, he’s bought you some very expensive wine. And some liver sausage. And some cheese and . . .’

  ‘Liver sausage, eh? Why ever didn’t you say?’

  ‘Perhaps I should not bother your father with my thirty-year-old bottle of Margaux,’ said Terrence, huffily. ‘He seems rather busy. Perhaps I should go and find someone who has heard of me with whom to share my Stinking Bishop.’

  ‘Wait. Margaux, you say?’ said Orwell. ‘I’ll go and get the best glasses. Of course I’ve heard of you,’ he said smoothly to Terrence, with a slightly reptilian smile. ‘I was joking. My daughter will attest to my wonderful sense of humour. Euphemia? Some help in the kitchen, please. The extremely famous Mr Deer-Stalker will not mind watching the baby for a few moments, I’m sure.’

  ‘Deer-Hart,’ said Terrence.

  ‘He’s still joking,’ said Effie. ‘Aren’t you, Dad?’

  ‘What? Yes. Of course.’

  Effie followed her father into the kitchen, carrying a candle-lamp. Orwell unlocked a wooden cabinet and took out two crystal wine glasses and began to dust one of them off with a tea towel. He gave the other one to Effie with a second tea towel.

  ‘Well?’ said Orwell. ‘What’s he doing here?’

  ‘I won a competition at school,’ said Effie.

  ‘What, you won your very own author? What was the second prize? Two authors?’

  ‘Very funny, Dad. He’s going to write about me. About my life. Anyway, never mind him. I’ve got something for you,’ Effie said. ‘The book you wanted. The Chosen Ones.’

  Orwell Bookend narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Where did you get it? It said on the news that copies are now virtually impossible to find. And they have become extraordinarily expensive.’

  ‘Well, you said you wanted it and so I . . .’

  ‘Did you get it from him? Deer-Stalker?’

  Effie sighed. ‘Dad, if you want the wine he’s brought you, should probably try and get his name right.’

  ‘All right. Point taken. But Deer-Hart? What sort of a name is that? He sounds like something from The Magic Roundabout. Or the war scenes in Tolstoy when they’re all hallucinating from exhaustion.’ Orwell started fake-swooning. ‘Alas, dear heart, I have lost all the cannonballs . . .’

  ‘Dad, what are you talking about?’

  Orwell sighed. ‘No one ever gets my jokes. Well, where did he find it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The wine. It certainly looked expensive.’

  ‘The Esoteric Emporium.’

  ‘What on earth were you doing at the Esoteric Emporium? It’s on the other side of town.’

  ‘On my way home from a tennis match. We won, by the way.’

  ‘Oh, congratulations,’ Orwell said, insincerely. ‘I’m sure your sports teacher is terribly pleased. And your little tennis chums. Just don’t forget that sport withers the mind. Anyway, all this is trivial. You say you have my book.’

  ‘Yes. But we made a deal, remember.’

  ‘A deal?’

  ‘Yes. You were going to give me back my box.’

  ‘Your box?’ Orwell feigned ignorance. ‘Alas, dear heart, I . . .’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Oh, all right. But . . .’ Orwell made a face as if something was troubling him. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing dangerous in that box? I don’t want you dabbling any more than necessary in so-called magic and getting yourself in trouble. Don’t forget what happened to your grandfather. And your mother, for that matter.’

  As if Effie was likely to forget. Although of course she still didn’t understand exactly what had happened to either of them. Effie knew that her grandfather had been attacked by a powerful Diberi. He had died in this world but had possibly been resurrected in a far-off location in the Otherworld. Effie didn’t know for sure, and there was no one who could really tell her, except for Cosmo Truelove, and she’d need to get back to the Otherworld to talk to him.

  As for Effie’s mother, Orwell had first said she was dead, then said she’d run off with another man – which, he’d declared, was as good as being dead anyway – then he said she was dead after all. It had happened on the night of the worldquake. Aurelia had read Effie her bedtime story – a chapter from one of the Laurel Wilde books, which she had loved so much she always ignored Orwell’s attempts to confiscate or ban them – dimmed the lights and kissed her goodnight. Effie had noticed her mother putting on a silk cape and slipping a book into her large brown handbag that looked a bit like a briefcase.

  Then she had put her finger to her lips and climbed out of Effie’s bedroom window. It hadn’t been the first time Aurelia had secretly left the house using Effie’s window. But something had felt different on that night. Effie’d had no idea that she would never see her mother again, of c
ourse; but there had been a strange atmosphere left in the room, like the memory of a bad dream.

  The next day, while Orwell had stormed around the house shouting and phoning people, Effie had found something under her bed. It was a slim, brown hardback book with gold lettering. It was written in a language she didn’t know and had pictures of strange creatures she had never seen before. She had taken it to her father and asked him what it was. He’d grabbed it from her angrily and sent her back to her room. Effie had always had a feeling the book had something to do with her mother’s disappearance, but she didn’t know what. And she had never seen it again after that, even though she had asked and asked.

  ‘Well?’ said Orwell now.

  ‘There’s nothing dangerous in the box,’ said Effie. ‘I promise.’

  Of course Orwell didn’t believe her.

  Effie and Orwell stared at each other with the same dark, jewel-like eyes. And suddenly, in the moment that followed, both had complete understanding of the other. They didn’t need to speak. Effie knew that if she asked for the box, Orwell would demand the book first. He knew that if he asked for the book, she would demand the box first. Each of them suddenly admired the other’s stubbornness. Orwell also found he admired his daughter’s determination and resourcefulness. Everything they most despised about each other turned, briefly, to a reason for love. In that short moment, both father and daughter felt that although they would continue to fight against one another, each would fiercely protect the other from any outsider who threatened them.

  Wordlessly, Orwell went upstairs to get the box.

  Maximilian was tucking in to his third coffee cream while he searched the archive of The Liminal for information about Albion Freake. It wasn’t going that well. Maximilian had got no matches for the words Albion and Freake at all. He was only allowed another half an hour of electricity, and so he had to get on with it. There must be something. All magical people usually showed up in The Liminal at least once. Now he was going through matches for Skylurian and Midzhar and hoping to find a connection that way. But so far there was nothing. Skylurian Midzhar had done well to keep herself off The Liminal’s radar. In fact, there were only three results for her name.

  The first was in connection with a business venture with Leonard Levar, whose name had once appeared all over The Liminal. Another was simply a brief mention of Skylurian in connection with Laurel Wilde, about whom The Liminal’s chief arts correspondent had written a rather sniffy piece outlining all the major ways that her novels had brought magic into disrepute. The third was a short gossip piece about a young and attractive male Otherworld witch called Pelham Longfellow who occasionally appeared in The Liminal and had attended a cocktail party with Skylurian back in September.

  In the olden days of the internet, searching for information had been easy. But technology was so slow these days. On the dim web, which was a crudely cobbled together amalgam of what was left of the dark web and the original worldwide web, there was no longer any such thing as a ‘search engine’ or a ‘website’. There were simply the Bulletin Board Systems, crudely pixelated, that you needed advanced computer skills even to see. It was like 1992 all over again. And it was, literally, dim, a bit like everything else in this world now. Computer screens didn’t have very powerful lights behind them, and they were usually in rooms lit by candle-lamps.

  The archive of The Liminal was searchable, in theory, but relied on a tired old algorithm which was further hampered by a good deal of human error. Then there were all the spells and curses and hexes and so forth that people had used to prevent them being found. Cloaking spells were simple, after all.

  Tired and disappointed, Maximilian gave up. Instead, he got out his new boon. At least, he thought it was a boon. It must be a boon. It was what he’d been given on exiting the book The Initiation. He stroked the silver card gently as candle-light danced over it.. Pathétique. What did it mean? The word wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to him. He had seen it somewhere recently, but where? However hard he tried to search his newly ordered mind, he couldn’t find it. He’d tried the Spectacles of Knowledge on it, but they knew nothing at all about it.

  Or maybe they did, and they just weren’t telling him. The Spectacles of Knowledge had been in a bit of a huff with Maximilian ever since he had discovered that his true kharakter was mage, rather than scholar, which had been downgraded to his art. The spectacles seemed to think that Maximilian should spend just as much time honing his scholarly skills as he did reading people’s minds and running around trying to find the Underworld. They certainly were not going to help him with that. It was too dangerous, and involved far too much action for the spectacles’ liking. They had been designed to work best with studious, careful people who don’t move around very much, not intrepid boys set on visiting the dark side. Also, boons did not much like being used on other boons. It was just one of those things, like two wrong ends of a magnet not liking to touch.

  All the ways Maximilian usually found out information were not working. He was going to have to try something else. But what? And then there was the other thing that kept bothering him. The Initiation. Should he destroy it, or leave it alone? Destroying it would make him a Book Eater, and, given that he was also a dark mage, if he was going to do that he may as well just say goodbye to all his friends now and go and join the Diberi. But what if he didn’t destroy it? What if someone else read it? Would he lose his knowledge and his boon? But surely if someone else was going to read the book, Maximilian couldn’t have been its Last Reader. It was all very confusing.

  The door slammed and a cold wind briefly felt its way around the hallway of Effie’s house. Cait was home.

  ‘I’ve brought chips,’ she called. Then: ‘What’s that smell?’

  This was the second thing that Orwell Bookend had been longing for. The return of his wife. He’d completely forgotten that she’d gone out for chips. But how glorious that she had! What an unexpectedly nice evening this was turning out to be. Orwell, Terrence, Effie and Cait soon found themselves enjoying an impromptu feast. Someone had found a baguette in the back of the freezer and put it in the oven. Another glass had been dusted for Cait. The grown-ups all drank wine and Effie had a cup of chamomile tea while they ate hot chips with gooey, smelly cheese, some bright pink sauerkraut made from red cabbage, and rather a lot of tiny silver cocktail onions. The grown-ups had liver sausage too, which Effie didn’t like.

  The warm feelings that Effie and her father had shared in the kitchen had lingered, and Cait had started wondering what was wrong with them both. Normally they could not be in a room together for more than two minutes without some kind of world war starting. Instead, the two of them ended up working together on Orwell’s crossword – something they had not done for a very long time, and certainly not while Cait had been living with them.

  While they were doing that, Cait talked to Terrence.

  Cait could not believe that one of her favourite authors was actually in their house. She had long been a fan of Terrence Deer-Hart’s work. She’d first discovered him when she had been a PhD student suffering from stress and someone had suggested reading children’s fiction to cheer herself up. Terrence’s books were, of course, not the cheeriest in the world. They contained no magic, no travel to other lands, no mythical creatures and no exciting action scenes. Instead, there were a lot of swear-words and miserable children. But for some reason Cait had found that reading about miserable children made her feel a lot better. She now told Terrence all about how his books had changed her life.

  This, along with a lot of cocktail onions and an extra-large helping of Stinking Bishop, had cheered Terrence up no end. At last, someone who had actually read his books! Someone who appreciated him! The only problem was that the gloomy husband suddenly looked up from his crossword and seemed intent on quizzing her about it.

  ‘You’ve really read his books?’

  ‘Yes, I just said.’

  ‘But they’re for children!’

 
‘Lots of adults read children’s fiction.’

  ‘Doesn’t it stunt your mind?’

  ‘Orwell!’

  ‘Mind you, anything’s better than those romances you were reading last month. Can you believe,’ said Orwell to Terrence, ‘that an intelligent woman like this, Dr Ransom-Bookend no less, went through a phase of reading anything Sellotaped to a plastic tub?’

  ‘I did them for the competitions!’ Cait said.

  It was something of a fad, introduced by Matchstick Press. The thin romance novels were given away free with tubs of diet milkshake powder. If you finished one of the books and returned it to the Matchstick Press with your name and address filled out on the form on the inside back cover, you could win something, unfortunately usually another book with a picture of a nurse swooning in the arms of a doctor, or a woman in a short skirt tied to a tree. But there was the occasional big cash prize too, and the odd holiday.

  Terrence didn’t like to admit that he himself had written several of those romances when he had been at a low ebb early in his career. Skylurian had paid him quite a lot of money to go and sit with a bunch of other writers in an old factory in Walthamstow where a man with a megaphone shouted at them to go faster. There was a prize each day for the person who had written the most words. Terrence had got a funny feeling when he was there that he was about to be taken prisoner – imagine! – and not be paid any money at all. Then one of his books had got into the bestseller chart and dear Skylurian had come to rescue him in a taxi.

  Terrence asked Cait to tell him the thing she had liked most about each of his novels. Each time she came up with something, Terrence poured her another glass of the dark, syrupy Tokaj dessert wine. Meanwhile, Effie and her father finished the prize crossword. Effie felt somehow sharper than usual. Ever since the tennis match she’d just felt as if she somehow understood more things. And of course there’d been that business with the umpire’s chair and Tabitha’s sports bag. Effie had been able to read a language she didn’t even know.