The Chosen Ones

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘Yes.’

  Professor Quinn smiled. ‘I wish my friends were more like you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether you’re admirable or just stupid. But in any case you’d better come with me. I’ll take you as far as the wishing well. I can go into the university the back way, I suppose.’

  Maximilian followed Professor Quinn downhill along a winding path, past trees with thick dark trunks and ancient-looking bark. Soon they reached a bank covered with plants with shiny green leaves and purple flowers. There were also several bushes with blue berries on them.

  ‘Don’t eat the berries,’ said Professor Quinn cheerfully. ‘Unless you want to spend the rest of your life in hell, that is.’

  ‘OK,’ said Maximilian.

  ‘Don’t touch the leaves either.’

  ‘Are there monsters in the forest?’

  ‘Probably. There are a lot of monsters down here, although they usually stick to the cities. But they won’t bother you. It’s much safer here than in the Otherworld, despite what everyone says.’

  Maximilian realised he knew hardly anything about where he was. But in the very core of his soul he felt he belonged here.

  ‘Oh, there’s one now,’ said Professor Quinn.

  Maximilian saw a dark shape flash past and then disappear into the undergrowth. He shuddered, but Professor Quinn simply carried on walking.

  Soon they came to another clearing. There was a small white cottage with blue window-frames and a blue door, and a little blue fence around its simple cottage garden. Smoke was curling from its stout white chimney. All at once Maximilian recalled every fairy tale he’d ever read, and the experience gave him a powerful sensation that was equal parts fascination and fear. You could go into a cottage like that and be boiled alive for your bones, or eaten by a wolf, or turned into sweets to be fed to other children, or enslaved to a cruel master, or any number of other awful things.

  But it also felt comfortable, like coming home. In a cottage like that you could live happily ever after, telling stories by the fire, roasting marshmallows, dreaming of . . .

  ‘Don’t look at the cottage for too long,’ said Professor Quinn. ‘It’s quite a powerful one. Come on. We need to go to the woodshed.’

  Maximilian followed Professor Quinn around the back of the cottage. The sky seemed to dim and become more purple than before, although Maximilian didn’t think it was yet night-time here. Maybe this was what counted as ‘dusk’. Or maybe it was about to rain again.

  In the back garden was a shed, and in the shed was a man with a neat grey beard and round glasses. He was wearing a three-piece suit with a polka-dot tie and a silver watch chain. He was sitting at a wooden desk, and appeared to be correcting a long and complicated manuscript with a very short pencil stub. Pages were stacked up everywhere. The paper was yellow, and the ink was green. Each page seemed to have hundreds of corrections and lots of illegible notes, all in pencil. On the shed wall was a cross-stitch sampler that read ‘There are no mistakes’.

  ‘Guten Abend, doctor,’ said Professor Quinn.

  The man didn’t respond, so she said it again, a bit louder.

  Eventually he looked up. ‘Servus,’ he said, nodding formally. ‘Yew must place ze drimz in ze box and zen yew may proceed.’

  Professor Quinn took a purse out of her briefcase and from it withdrew a piece of paper that had been folded several times. She dropped it in a cardboard box just inside the shed. Apart from the box, the man and his manuscript, everything else in the shed was draped in thin white cobwebs.

  ‘I take it you haven’t brought any dreams?’ Professor Quinn said to Maximilian.

  ‘Dreams?’ Maximilian said, baffled.

  ‘You can try telling him one. He might accept it.’

  ‘Plizz put ze drimz in ze box,’ said the man again.

  ‘I don’t have any,’ said Maximilian.

  The man looked at him sternly over the round rims of his glasses. ‘Yew haff no drimz?’

  ‘I do have dreams, of course, but—’

  ‘Plizz tell me vun of zese drimz.’

  ‘Really?’ said Maximilian. ‘Well, OK. My last dream was about being late for school. My mother usually takes me in her car, but in my dream I had to get a bus. The bus was yellow and very old and kept breaking down. It kept going uphill for a long time. Then when I eventually got to school I realised I’d forgotten to get dressed and my teacher made me wear a dunce’s hat and sit in the corner in the nude while everyone laughed at me.’

  ‘Yew are naked and yew are late!’ The man with the beard chuckled. ‘Ziss iz a VERY good drim. Ze nakidness shows zat yew are vulnerable but also pure. Ze bus going uphill iz yore STRUGGLE threw life, because yew hav chozen yore own path. Ziss, also, leads to much laughter from uzzers. Here iz your change.’ He scrabbled in the cardboard box and handed Maximilian two folded pieces of paper. ‘Now you may enter ze garden and take ze vater, ze dipvater from ze vishing vell. Az mush as yew like. Will yew need a vial?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Professor Quinn, quickly. ‘He will. Thank you.’

  ‘Tek,’ said the doctor, nodding to another cardboard box. ‘It vill cost yew vun more drim.’

  Professor Quinn took one of the pieces of paper from Maximilian’s hand and dropped it in the first cardboard box. Then she leant down and pulled something out of the second box. She blew the dust and cobwebs off it and handed it to Maximilian. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Oh. It’s a nice one.’

  Maximilian took it. It was a beautiful little silver bottle on a chain.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Or I really am going to be late.’

  The doctor went back to correcting his manuscript with the stubby pencil, complaining to no one in particular that he wished someone he liked would give him a pen so his unconscious wouldn’t make him lose it.

  Maximilian followed Professor Quinn down the garden path until it bent around to the right. In the near distance he could see the dark outlines of buildings that probably belonged to the university. The evening sky now seemed full of strange neon shadows, puffs of steam, and the voices of the young. Some of the voices seemed particularly close, and Maximilian realised they were coming from inside the garden.

  ‘I wish we could use deepwater to top up our own M-currency,’ a girl was saying.

  A boy’s voice replied. ‘Yeah, but that’s not the point, is it?’

  ‘I don’t even know anyone who can use it.’

  ‘Me neither. But we’ll pass the test. That’s the main thing.’

  Then the wishing well came into view. It was round, and made of pale butter-yellow bricks. The two university students seemed now to be leaving the well by a path that headed towards the university, each holding a silver vial of their own.

  ‘You’ll want to take some deepwater back for your friend,’ said Professor Quinn to Maximilian. ‘I assume it’s the Truelove girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maximilian. ‘How did you know?’

  Professor Quinn didn’t answer. Instead she showed Maximilian how to draw up the water from the well in a little wooden bucket on a rope. She filled a vial of her own and put it in her briefcase. When Maximilian’s vial was full he put it around his neck. The deepwater was completely clear with a very slight blueness about it.

  ‘This will cure Effie, won’t it?’ he said.

  Professor Quinn nodded.

  ‘But the problem is how you get back,’ she said. ‘Perhaps . . .’ She frowned and appeared to be thinking hard. Maximilian looked at her, and before he knew it, he felt his mind drifting into, or rather being pulled into, a very complicated, dark, extraordinary place, where . . .

  He seemed to black out for a second, or maybe longer.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘I’ve passed on all I can. If you were a student you’d need to be expelled now, because I’ve essentially given you your whole first year through illegal means. But I too have been asked to look out for the young Truelove girl, and so this is my contribution.’


  ‘But—’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Professor Quinn, and, without looking back, she continued down the path towards the university.

  25

  Effie sat on her bed and started to examine the postcards that Lexy had brought from Miss Dora Wright’s apartment. There were exactly ten of them. Most of them did not have any text beyond the address, but one had a full paragraph. It was written in Rosian, which Effie could now read as easily as English. Effie had had no idea that her teacher had known anything about the Otherworld, or its languages. But Effie had known so little about anything back then.

  Dear G,

  I am sending this to myself as we agreed. I am inside, but I expect I will never come back. It is as we feared. I can’t say more. You must fight!

  With love and friendship,

  Dora Wright

  What did this mean? Effie cast her mind back to the beginning of the school year. They’d had almost a month of English classes with Miss Dora Wright and then she’d simply left. The official story was that she’d won a short story competition and part of the prize had been a publishing contract. Most of the children thought it completely reasonable that their nice, round-faced teacher would dump them unceremoniously for the chance to make trillions of pounds as an author. So most people had ignored the rumour that she’d actually been kidnapped by dark forces.

  Not for the first time, Effie deeply missed her grandfather. He’d obviously known quite a lot about where Dora Wright had gone. He must have been the ‘G’ to whom she had written. Why hadn’t he told Effie? Because at the time she was an eleven-year-old who didn’t know anything about magic, or the Diberi. Effie sighed as she remembered those days. Why hadn’t Griffin started preparing Effie sooner? He’d been in trouble with the Guild, Effie remembered, who had prevented him from doing magic for five years. But then suddenly he had taught her Rosian and Old Bastard English, and he’d got the Ring of the True Hero and . . . But Effie had only got the ring because he’d died.

  Not died. He was alive in the Otherworld. Effie was sure of that. And when she could get back to the Otherworld, and once she was strong enough, she was going to find him. Effie sighed again, and flicked through the postcards. She started to wonder . . . What if both stories about Dora Wright’s disappearance had been true? What if she had won a competition and then been kidnapped because of it?

  Effie realised that the message Dora was trying to convey with the postcards wasn’t in the text at all. It was in the images. One was a postcard of a factory from history with smoke pouring out of its chimneys. Another had an image of a ship docking in Liverpool a very long time ago. Another had a scene from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Several postcards had images of antique books on them. One of the books was Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Another was Gone with the Wind.

  If you put them together it was almost as if someone was trying to say that they were captive – a slave even – in a factory that had something to do with books.

  And then Effie noticed something else.

  They had all been sent from Walthamstow, the place where Skylurian Midzhar had her factory.

  The Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange had a small boarding house for its sixth-formers. The boarding house, which was said to have been condemned at some point in the last century, and was definitely haunted, had, for reasons unknown, originally been built to resemble Dublin Castle’s old clock tower. It was a red-brick and Bath-stone oblong with a classical balcony, a little cloister and, of course, a massive clock looming out of its roof. The clock had a turquoise dome plonked on top of it like an amusing hat.

  Dr Cloudburst was one of the three staff who lived-in, and his little study-bedroom was right at the top of the clock tower. When he’d first become a housemaster, he’d cheerfully taken his turn in dealing with all the nightmares, midnight feasts, apple-pie beds, wanderings, fights, floods, kidnap attempts, intruders, bullying, bloodshed and murders that happen after dark in any boarding school. But did he get any thanks? Of course not. The sixth-formers just thought he was a weirdo loser with no life – otherwise why on earth would he want to spend his entire existence looking after them?

  Lexy and Wolf found him in his ground-floor chemistry lab, marking student assignments by the light of a small lamp. Next to him was an empty coffee cup and a plate with a few crumbs on it. All around him were test-tubes filled with fluid in every possible shade of yellow, from buttercup to sunshine to custard. So much pee in one place was rather alarming, and Wolf and Lexy both tried not to look.

  ‘Children,’ said Dr Cloudburst. ‘I do hope you haven’t come to try tampering with Coach Bruce’s samples.’

  ‘No,’ said Lexy. ‘We need your help.’

  Effie had given them one of the golden capsules and kept two safely hidden. They’d taken the capsule first to Lexy’s Aunt Octavia in Mrs Bottle’s Bun Shop, but Octavia hadn’t been able to find anything out about it at all. She’d simply shaken her head and said she’d never seen anything like it.

  Wolf now held out the capsule to Dr Cloudburst.

  ‘We want you to do some tests on this,’ he said.

  ‘Oh you do, do you?’

  Dr Cloudburst had become increasingly less cheerful with every year of service as a housemaster and was now verging on bitter.

  ‘It’s very important,’ said Lexy.

  ‘Oh it is, is it?’ He sighed. At least these were nice children from the Lower School. They never tormented or abused him the way the sixth-formers did. And the girl was good at chemistry. ‘Well, give it here, then.’

  As soon as Dr Cloudburst looked properly at the capsule, his whole manner changed. He seemed fascinated by it, and a little in awe.

  ‘Now, you children aren’t planning to use this in any sporting fixture, are you?’ he said. ‘Because Coach Bruce would take a very dim view of that . . . Although I must say, it would probably do wonders for the tennis team in particular, and . . .’

  As he was talking, Dr Cloudburst was preparing his microscope. He held the capsule in a large pair of tweezers and then positioned it under the lens, turning it this way and that, making a range of different hmming sounds as he did so.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said again. ‘And where did you get this?’

  ‘We can’t say,’ said Wolf. ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘What do you think it is?’ asked Dr Cloudburst.

  ‘We think it’s some kind of liquid lifeforce,’ said Lexy. ‘But we don’t know where it came from, or whether there’s something sort of wrong with it. We just need to find out everything we can about it. It’s important, but we can’t say why exactly.’

  ‘Well, you’re right. It is liquid lifeforce,’ said Dr Cloudburst. ‘Which is rare enough to begin with. But this is the most potent example I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell you anything about its origins, except that I’m picking up traces of two strange substances mixed in with the lifeforce.’

  ‘What are they?’ said Wolf.

  ‘Paper,’ said Dr Cloudburst. ‘And sodium chloride.’

  ‘Salt?’ said Lexy.

  ‘Yes. Exactly the sort you get in human blood, sweat and tears,’ said Dr Cloudburst. ‘Someone’s gone to quite a lot of trouble to make these.’

  ‘Are they safe?’ asked Wolf.

  Dr Cloudburst shrugged. ‘Is anything safe?’ he asked, philosophically.

  ‘Would you take one of them?’ said Lexy.

  ‘Not if you paid me,’ said Dr Cloudburst. ‘They’ve got sadness in them. Not what you’d want mixed up with your lifeforce, I don’t think.’

  In the north of the city, in the Regency Hotel, Raven Wilde was wondering if she could escape. At the moment it didn’t look very likely. She and Skylurian had just been shown into the Presidential Suite, which had its own small, private restaurant in which they were shortly due to dine with Albion Freake. There were armed guards on every door. But even if Raven could get away, what would Skylurian then do to her mother? Raven would have to get to her f
irst.

  Skylurian was wearing what looked like a dress, but on closer inspection turned out to be a leopard-print leotard with a see-through black chiffon layer over it, which had been pulled together with a gold chain-link belt. On top of this she wore a vast chiffon garment with so many ostrich feathers on its edges that it was hard to tell if it was a cape or actually the largest feather boa in the world. She wore a black velvet choker with an enormous dark green jewel quivering at her throat, and carried an absurdly glamorous parasol made of ostrich feathers that matched her cape. On her feet she wore pointed black sling-back kitten heels tied around her ankles with large velvet ribbons.

  ‘Vintage Dior, darling,’ she’d said to Raven in the taxi when she’d caught her looking at them. ‘From long, long ago. Do as you’re told and I’ll give them to you as a gift. You could do with better shoes.’

  Raven was wearing black jodhpur boots, which didn’t quite go with her second-best evening gown: floor-length black silk with wizard sleeves. Her mother had bought the gown for her eleventh birthday just over a year ago, and it still fitted.

  Usually Raven enjoyed getting dressed up for her mother’s dinner parties and soirées. She hadn’t much enjoyed getting dressed this evening, of course, although the occasion was much more important than any dinner or soirée she’d ever attended before. She would have to convince Skylurian Midzhar that she meant to go along with whatever she said, while all the time looking for some way to escape, or send a message to her friends. The boots were in case she did manage to get out. And she thought they didn’t look bad, exactly. What was that thing from history again? Grunge? If anyone asked, she’d say it was that.

  The hotel suite was very elegant, but Albion Freake, sadly, was not. He was enormously fat, with several massive boils on his red face. He was wearing a shiny suit, today in gold. As he stood to welcome his guests Raven wondered if he was actually made of wax. His skin seemed to glow all over, but not in the way promised by all of Laurel Wilde’s moisturisers. It was as if he was sweating, but without there being any actual sweat. When he extended his hand to shake Raven’s, it was just like the time she’d touched a toad in the garden. She’d also expected that to be wet and slimy but had found it dry, and sort of uncanny.