Max brushed the concrete dust from his sleeves. “They don’t need breathing holes, though, do they?” he asked. “If it’s a statue.”
The old woman stared at him. “Oh yes they do. Yes they absolutely do.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s my fancy, that’s why! If I want to play at something, if I want to imagine, then by golly gosh I’ll play at it, no matter what the ISPCBonkers has to say.” She thrust her arms at the obelisk. “Will you just LOOK at it? The very IDEA of such a thing! A statue, and this statue above all others, drowned in concrete? I won’t have it. This is more than just a sundial we’re dealing with. It’s an emblem. A symbol. This right here is the Censorship. So I say out with that idea and in with another. I SAY THIS STATUE NEEDS BREATHING HOLES! This isn’t just WHIMSY! This is WAR! This is—”
She stopped with her fists in the air.
The clouds had parted and the last light of day was shimmering over the Serpentine in a thousand glittering sparkles.
“My word,” she murmured. “What a light! What a lovely chance!”
She made a lifting movement with her hands. “Come on then!” she said briskly. “Up with you! Over here!”
Max felt the drill drop from his grip. He staggered backwards. Slipped. Fell on his bottom in the snow.
The sparkles obeyed her.
They lifted off the water and swarmed towards her. Then all the jewellery she wore was shimmering with light as the sparkles leapt from ring to necklace to earring.
Crooking a finger, she made kissing noises at a particularly bright sparkle that alighted on one of her rings.
“Hello my darling!” she cooed. “What a beautiful little Lord you are! I’ve a job for you, if you’ve a mind to help, your Eminence.”
The sparkle winked and turned somersaults of joy. It seemed delighted to meet the old woman.
“It’s not often Old Light shows itself in the World,” she said. “These days New Light is all the rage. You know the sort—that boisterous, electric-neon, fluorescent-light-bulb sort of trash. All it’s good for is advertising and seeing up noses.”
She turned back towards the sundial and lifted her finger. The King Sparkle seemed to frown at the concrete obelisk. It began to glint instead of sparkle, its joyous spinning becoming harder and more determined. The other sparkles flung themselves into it, and the King Sparkle grew until it was fat as the Koh-i-Noor diamond, twirling on its axis at the end of her finger, throwing off angry spikes.
Then, with slow, effortful steps, walking against a hidden force, the old woman moved towards the sundial.
“Stand clear!” she instructed. “She’s about to blow!”
As he got up and moved back, Max felt a voltage building, a humming in the air, as if a pipe organ was emitting a low, distant note.
“In the Olden Days Old Light was everywhere,” the old woman said, pushing herself forward step by step. “A fire in a hearth. A candle by a bed. A twinkle in an eye. A spark of courage. Now those lights have gone out, and Old Light is barely to be found.”
Max clenched his teeth and dug his nails into his palms. The hairs all over his body prickled. The soles of his feet tingled. He felt he was about to fly apart.
Still the old woman drove herself closer and closer to the sundial.
“New Light… destroys the imaginary,” she went on, gritting her teeth, turning her head sideways. “It… shines onto things. It only shows you the surface. Old Light shines into them. It shows you… what’s underneath!”
She jabbed her hand forwards.
The King Sparkle trembled and gave a leap. There was a blinding flash—a release that buckled Max at the knees—and a deafening detonation that reverberated across the park.
The old woman staggered backwards.
A blast of grit spattered Max’s goggles.
The sundial had been vaporized. In its place was a statue of a boy. He stood tall on a mound, a flute to his lips, his audience a gathering of mice, rabbits and fairies. The Old Light rushed over the statue’s surface, giving it a final polish, before glancing off and skittering back across the water.
Max tore the goggles from his head. “How’d you DO that?” he breathed.
The old woman herself seemed amazed. “Who knows? Even I shouldn’t be able to manipulate Old Light in the World, and I invented the stuff. We’re not in the Woods after all.”
In his shock he didn’t realize what she’d said. Then his mind doubled back.
“The Woods? You mean… the Beginning Woods?”
She turned slowly to face him.
“Name it so if you like!” she exclaimed. Then she drew nearer, her long, withered finger spiralling in a spell-like motion towards his eyes. “It’s had more names than you’ve had dreams. They called it the Never Land last time it drifted close and this boy broke through—but it was the Woods they meant. Now it’s happened again. Only this time the Woods and the World haven’t just drifted close. They’ve collided. Head-on. We’ve a car crash on our hands!”
She stopped abruptly and looked past Max, her mouth tightening in alarm. He turned round. Nothing was there, only a damp glow coming from one of the park lamps.
Her hand came down on his shoulder and he jerked in surprise. “You know, my boy,” she whispered. “All those years you World Ones thought the monsters come out at night. But that’s what we wanted you to think. It’s during the day we walk among you!”
BOOM!
Her umbrella opened with an explosion of colour.
“At night—we run for cover!”
Then she was off, galloping along the path, leaving her drill and everything else behind.
He stared after her, dumbfounded.
She was from the Beginning Woods.
She had to be.
Flinging the goggles into the bushes, he gave chase.
The old woman ran at a kind of hyper-drive. Fortunately the umbrella slowed her down a little, and he managed to keep her in sight.
She was on her way to the Woods.
She would lead him to his Forever Parents.
He pursued her east through Kensington Gardens, all the way to Marble Arch. When she reached the busy junction of Oxford Street and Park Lane she slowed down to weave between the headlights, twirling the umbrella from side to side like a shield against the oncoming traffic. Cars hooted and pedestrians pointed at the peculiar figure, but she escaped the commotion by disappearing into the narrow streets of Mayfair. There, she hugged the buildings and looped the street lamps, keeping to the shadows. She seemed to imagine herself under attack, because she continued to fling up her umbrella against unseen assailants.
By the time they crossed New Bond Street the sky was prickling with stars. Max fell back in the deserted street: if she turned, she’d spot him at once. But she seemed unaware she was being followed, and headed deeper into the gloom of Soho. The Vanishings had been busy here, and the buildings stood dark and derelict, the once bustling shops and cafés, pubs and theatres now abandoned. Drifts of litter clogged empty doorways, and FOR SALE signs, their fastenings rotted away, lay along the pavements. He stepped carefully round them to avoid their booming surfaces, taking his eyes off the old woman only for the tiniest moments.
The road ended at a corrugated iron barrier, nine or ten feet high, reaching from wall to wall. Trees pressed up against it from the other side, as though to break it down and escape into the city. Their roots snaked under the metal panels, coiling and twisting around each other, before burrowing into the tarmac, and curling down the drains. Their branches crackled against the sky.
Nothing else could be seen of what lay beyond.
He hid in a darkened doorway and watched the old woman go up to a bin and push her arm deep inside. After feeling about she took out an object that glinted in the moonlight. It was a lantern, one of those antique ones with a brass handle and a glass chimney.
Just like the ones in the Book House, Max realized.
She snapped her fingers—a
magnesium flare glared out, blinding him. When he could see again, the lantern was lit, and she was hunting along the barrier. Cat-quick, Max darted up to the bin and ducked behind it. The old woman’s fingers skittered along one of the metal panels—pulled it back—and she slipped through.
He crept up to the narrow gap she’d left behind. A tree had twisted the panel out of shape, snapping the bolts that held them in place.
Despite everything, he hesitated.
She’d really done it.
She’d broken into a No Zone.
THE NO ZONE
“Don’t go into the No Zones,” parents were always telling their children, “or the Vanishings will get you!”
They were places of peril where the forces that drove the Vanishings were said to linger in the air like radioactivity. Some No Zones were nothing more than a single building—a theatre, church or gallery. Others were whole networks of streets, chunks of cities that had been sectioned off and left to decay. The Charing Cross No Zone was one of the largest in the world. Now and again he had come up against it on his wanderings through the city. He’d never tried to sneak in though. He’d been looking for his Forever Parents. That meant being among people. There weren’t any people in the No Zones.
Just trees.
Steeling himself, he pulled back the loose panel and squeezed through, just in time to see long shadows leap against the buildings—thrown by the old woman’s lantern as it lit up the trees. They stood in the road and on the pavement, their roots crumbling cement and tarmac, their branches cracking masonry and smashing windowpanes. It had only been a few years since the Censorship, Max remembered—not long enough for trees this size. Something had pulled them out of the ground, some force had drawn them upwards, like beanstalks growing overnight.
Was it the work of the Woods?
He hurried after the old woman. As he went, he found himself passing over huge letters stencilled across the road in traffic paint:
KNOW WE HOW LONG THE PRESENT MUST ENDURE?
And then it became clear the old woman was not the only person breaking into the No Zone.
Everywhere he looked were words. Words written on every surface. Painted, drawn, chiselled, inked, burnt, chalked and even laid out in stone. Entire stories were scratched onto walls, hacked into trees with knives and painted on doors. There were riddles and jokes, religious-sounding phrases and quotations, long texts crushed into small spaces with tiny handwriting, and sentences expressing mysterious, philosophical ideas. His eyes darted from one to the other, catching at those the moon lit up for him.
The so-called living force, the vital sense of existence, without which no society can live and no land endure, is vanishing away, God knows where.
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
...nsvergessenheitseinsvergessen heitseinsvergessenheit seinsverge...
... ON THE SCARCELY BREATHING EARTH
A KILLING WIND FELL FROM THE NORTH,
BUT STILL WITHIN THE ELDER TREE
THE STRONG SAP ROSE, THOUGH NONE COULD SEE.
And it wasn’t just words. There were sketches and paintings too. Road signs had been altered to show silhouettes of gryphons instead of pedestrians and cars. Zombies clawed their way up from manholes. Tentacles slithered out of drains. In the window of one building a girl sat reading a book with her knees tucked under her chin—the whole scene a painting on a steel sheet. He passed a long wall painted to look like a shelf of books. Underneath someone had written with a stub of charcoal:
Down one side street he glimpsed a puppet of monstrous size held up by a street lamp, a sixteen-foot-tall giant, its arms and head hanging loose. In the middle of another road was the oblong shadow of a Punch and Judy show, its curtains closed, a cluster of knee-high primary school chairs waiting for the audience. Max passed a sign with a schedule of the evening’s performances:
By now they were far from the boundary of the No Zone. Candles, flickering yellow, appeared in the windows and music floated out into the night—a sailor’s jig on a violin, the honk and bray of a saxophone. There was a rattle and a sound of wheels—Max ducked into the shadows just as a man on a bicycle shot past, a long, Dragon-shaped kite flapping in the air behind him, his face alight with glee as he weaved between the trees.
“RUN!” screamed the man. “THE DRAGON IS COMING!”
Setting off again, he was almost knocked over by a person with an ass’s head who burst out of a doorway and galloped off, a lantern swinging in one fist. The spectral figure was pursued by a tall, queenly woman in a silk dressing gown. She was howling, her face distorted with fury: “OUT OF THIS WOOD DO NOT DESIRE TO GO: THOU SHALT REMAIN HERE, WHETHER THOU WILT OR NO! FOR I DO LOVE THEEEEEEEE!”
Then they were gone, round a corner and away.
The old woman moved through this world as if she herself had created it. On she went, on and on, deeper into the No Zone, moving closer and closer to the very heart of London—the long curve of Charing Cross Road that bent towards what had once been Trafalgar Square. Here there were no more people, no more words and no more pictures. The music tangled round itself and faded away, and the shouting became distant and full of echoes, merging with the creak and rattle of the trees.
Ahead, the pale shadow of the abandoned National Gallery rose up against the night sky.
Moving aside the branches that blocked her path, the old woman stopped before a dilapidated bookshop. Its name was still visible in peeling letters on the shop window:
Near the entrance was an oil drum filled with burning wooden boards. The light from its flames flickered over three armchairs, which had been dragged, Max guessed, from an empty hotel or pub. He hid himself behind a tree and watched as the old woman looked about and glanced at her watch. She muttered something, lifted a folded woollen blanket from one of the chairs, wrapped herself in it, then sat before the fire, shooing away the sparks that leapt out at her in eager greeting.
A few minutes later a man carrying a crowbar and a bundle of floorboards emerged from a doorway further up the street. He greeted the old woman, stuffed the planks into the fire, then turned and beckoned to Max.
Somehow unsurprised, he nodded at the Dark Man, came out from the shadows and took his seat before the fire.
“I’m sorry about the Mulgans,” the old woman began. “It’s always a sadness when the Vanishings claim another victim. Isn’t it, Boris?”
“It is,” said the Dark Man, not taking his eyes off Max for a second.
“But now they have Vanished,” the old woman went on, “we find an opportunity presents itself. To discover how the Vanishings started, and maybe even stop them for good.”
Max looked from one to the other. It was strange enough to hear the old woman suddenly talking about the Mulgans, as if she knew all about them. It was stranger still to learn the Dark Man had a name. But what did the Vanishings have to do with anything?
The Dark Man noticed his confusion and began to speak. He was a scientist from Western Siberia, he said. He’d met Mrs Jeffers twelve years ago in Paris. He was studying the Vanishings, and she was investigating a mystery of her own. They’d “joined forces” because of “certain connections”.
“Did the Mulgans ever speak to you?” the old woman interrupted suddenly. “About your real parents?”
Max didn’t move or even blink, but quite suddenly his heart was beating faster. This was it. He was about the learn the truth!
“They said I’d been abandoned. It wasn’t true, though. Was it?”
“They didn’t lie,” the Dark Man said, glancing at the old woman. “What they told you was… the official version of events. But you weren’t abandoned. Something else happened. Something… strange.”
He took a battered packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one restlessly.
“The thing is, Max—we’re not sure you have any parents.”
&nb
sp; There was a dreadful pause that seemed to go on for hours. Max felt something like a snake uncoiling in his stomach.
“You mean… you think they’re dead?”
“No. I mean—maybe you never had any. That’s why nobody knows who they are. That’s why, after twelve years of searching, we haven’t been able to find them. Maybe you never had parents in the first place.”
Max was about to smile, because that was just silly. But then Boris looked at him, and his expression was so serious the smile didn’t even get started.
“I must have had parents at some point,” he said. “Nobody just appears out of nowhere.”
“But what if that’s what did happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if you Appeared?” the Dark Man asked, his eyes glowing. “Suddenly. Out of nowhere.”
2
THE BOOKSHELF BOY
It was a busy day in Argand Books when it happened.
Busy because Charing Cross Road was not yet a No Zone. Busy because the terrible danger of dreams was yet to be proclaimed by Professor Courtz. Busy because the Vanishings had not yet begun.
But they were about to.
The unsuspecting customers—many of whom in a few years would be little more than puffs of smoke, or wisps of ether, or ghosts, or sub-atomic particles, or nothing at all, depending which theory was accepted—stood innocently browsing the shelves, happy to be sheltering from the sudden April shower lashing the asphalt, and blissfully unaware that reality was about to be torn apart and reinvented in such a way as to usher in, like a vaudeville act onto a Victorian stage, the Vanishings.
Argand Books was popular because of its eccentricity, which those coming in off the street attempted to emulate. Otherwise normal types would scuttle crab-like through the door, muttering under their breath and scratching their foreheads—something they would never do in the supermarket, at a bus stop or at work, because in those places all kinds of strangeness are expressly forbidden, whereas in a bookshop they are positively encouraged. Most of all, they tried to think up obscure titles that would force the notoriously foul-tempered owner to treat them as equals, as true scholars—which is how everyone wants to be treated in a bookshop: not only as a reader of books, but as a proper Nietzsche, someone with unique ideas that can set the world alight. This owner, a serpent-haired old woman, possessed the supernatural ability to point out the exact location of any book without a second’s hesitation. Among the Argand regulars it had become a sport to request a book the haughty owner could not spot. A pot of cash accrued through a sweepstake awaited the genius who could request a book that was not in stock. To date their efforts had been unsuccessful, and the prize-fund continued to swell. No matter how obscure the title, Argand Books came up with the goods.
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