Finding Serendipity

by Angelica Banks

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Cut the creature loose,’ Mothwood ordered.

  It took two men to control the snapping, growling Baxterr as he was freed from the fishing net. The sailors secured a rope around Baxterr’s neck, then pushed one of his paws through the noose and pulled tight to secure him. With a loop made out of a length of wire they muzzled him, twisting the ends until the wire cut into Baxterr’s lip.

  ‘No!’ cried Vivienne Small. ‘You’ll hurt him!’

  Tuesday, tears filling her eyes to see Baxterr treated this way, was nevertheless proud to see that Baxterr stood fiercely, snarling as best he could.

  Mothwood attempted to get up from where he sat upon the edge of the table. He dismissed the help of Finger and Phlegm on either side of him. With great concentration, clicking his broken bones into some semblance of structure, he managed to stand upright. If you hadn’t noticed that one of his feet and the knee above were both facing backwards, and that his head was on sidewards, you might have thought he was simply a man struggling with severe arthritis.

  ‘Well, what do we have here?’ he garbled quietly. ‘Surely … it can’t be … ?’

  Gaining control of one arm, he swung his hand out towards Baxterr, who growled even more fiercely. Mothwood placed his hand on the top of Baxterr’s head and stroked it.

  Tuesday felt every pore in her skin shrivel to see Mothwood laying his hands on her dog. Baxterr’s legs trembled. Mothwood’s legs also trembled, but for quite a different reason. Then Mothwood leaned over Baxterr a little further and felt along his sides and drew out the damaged wing. Baxterr whined.

  ‘So, Vivienne Small,’ he said, his head clicking towards his prisoner, who lay quietly in her bindings, ‘a Winged Dog. Even if it is a puny little one. Where did you find him?’

  Mothwood’s voice was clearly meant to sound menacing, but instead it sounded as if he was talking under water. Vivienne did not reply.

  ‘You know I’ve been searching for a Winged Dog for a very long time, Vivienne Small. It’s so very kind of you to bring me one. Tell me his name.’

  Vivienne said nothing though Mothwood lurched closer to her.

  ‘His name,’ he repeated.

  ‘I shall never tell you!’ said Vivienne defiantly. ‘Not as long as I live!’

  Mothwood gurgled, and Tuesday – in her hiding spot – realised he was attempting to laugh.

  ‘Oh, I think you will, Vivienne Small,’ Mothwood said. His voice was becoming clearer, as if he were getting used to the complexities of talking with a broken neck. ‘But if I am wrong, and you do not tell me, then you will die. Actually,’ he considered, ‘with you dead, the dog will be orphaned and in need of a master. And a Winged Dog cannot refuse a master, can it? Yes, much simpler. I think we might haul you up the mast and drop you to the deck, so you too can feel what it is like to have every limb in your body broken. Then I think you might have served your final purpose, Vivienne Small.Why, instead of this being my end, I do believe it’s yours.’

  Mothwood gurgled with laughter. Baxterr continued to growl and bristle with fury.

  ‘You’re wrong, Mothwood,’ Vivienne said loudly and clearly. ‘This isn’t The End. I’m sure at The End, there’d be help. Help that you would never guess at. If I could get there, I’d go as fast as I could and be back, quick as a wink, bringing that help with me. But as I can’t leave, I’ll just wait for help to come. As I am sure it will.’

  Tuesday, hearing this, was certain that Vivienne was telling her to flee, quickly, before Tuesday was discovered and was no use whatsoever to either Vivienne or Baxterr. But how? How could she possibly leave Baxterr here? Or Vivienne? Tuesday knew that if it were she, herself, captive on The Silverfish, then Baxterr and Vivienne would do anything in their power to rescue her. But, unlike them, she was neither a fearless dog, nor a girl with a thousand adventures under her belt. She was just plain Tuesday, who had never had an adventure before in her life, and who knew nothing about rescuing anyone from the likes of Carsten Mothwood and his crew. It was her mother who had adventures. Her mother would know what to do. And Vivienne was right! Serendipity was almost certainly at The End.

  Tuesday knew what she had to do. She snatched up the map cylinder from the deck and, with one parting glance to Baxterr and Vivienne, edged away from the wheelhouse and crept to the stern of The Silverfish. There was no time to lose.

  Never had she felt so entirely uncertain. Part of her wanted to run back, throw her arms about Baxterr and be willing to die to save him from Mothwood’s clutches. And the other part knew that if she did, and Mothwood killed her – and Vivienne too, no doubt – then Baxterr would be Mothwood’s dog forever. She could not let that happen. She had to rescue him. She had to save Vivienne. She had got everyone into this trouble. She had to be the one to fix it.

  The new day was announcing itself. Pink and red spears fanned up into the sky. For a single moment a golden sliver of light shot up from the horizon. Peering over the side of The Silverfish, Tuesday saw Vivacious was still there, bobbing on the sea, her sails furled. After capturing Baxterr, the pirates had left the little boat unguarded. A breeze sprang up, beckoning Tuesday to set sail.

  Quickly she clambered over the railing of The Silverfish and down the ladder. She stowed the maps and unhitched Vivacious from The Silverfish. Ever so quietly, she hoisted the mainsail and unfurled the jib. In no time Vivacious was skipping away across the waves, as if the boat knew that this was a grand and urgent escape. All the while, Tuesday dreaded a cry from the pirates as they noticed Vivacious sailing off. Or, worse, Tuesday dreaded hearing the cry of Vivienne being dropped from the tallest mast onto the deck below. But no cry came.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Hold on, Vivienne!’ Tuesday muttered. ‘I’ll be back as fast as I can. Oh, Baxterr, I hope you can forgive me for leaving you like this. But I’ll be back. I’ll be back with help.

  When she was some distance from The Silverfish, and there was no sign of the ship preparing to come after her, Tuesday swung Vivacious into the breeze and let the little boat drift on the brightening sea. She reached for the map cylinder and, pinning the tiller beneath her leg, she unscrewed the lid and drew out the roll of maps. As soon as she attempted to flatten them out, the breeze rippled their edges. The sails flapped and the boat rocked. The maps were large and detailed, and though Tuesday would have liked a table to lay them out upon, she had only her lap.

  Behind her, the dark distant silhouette of The Silverfish was just a tiny speck on the vivid morning horizon. Tuesday scoured the maps, peering at the lines so carefully drawn and words so beautifully written. There was a map that documented carefully the Peppermint Forest and the River Rythwyck as it made its way to the Restless Sea. Another tracked the many paths through the Golden Valley and into the Mountains of Margolov. There were several maps for navigating the complex archipelago of the Islands of Xanchu and the peaceful Straits of Lillith, and there were maps that traced the roads that lead to the five Cities of Luminosity. But nowhere could Tuesday find The End.

  Fear crept all over her skin. She was lost and alone.Without her dog.Without Vivienne. Adrift in a small boat on the open sea with no idea how to find her mother, and with maps that were seemingly useless. Tuesday looked up into the sky, trying to blink away the tears, and noticed that everything had changed.

  While Tuesday had been poring over the maps, Vivacious had drifted into a mist as colourless as sadness. The cliffs, the horizon, all her landmarks had disappeared. And there was no breeze. Not even a whisper to fill the sails. Everything had become very, very quiet. It was as if she had drifted right off any kind of map into a strange, misty nowhere. When haste was all that mattered, she was standing still.

  The sea was silken, molten silver-white. She trailed her hand through the water but, eerily, it gave no reflection. Tuesday jerked back her hand and tried to still her rising panic. The mist was close about her, sticking to her face, her hair, her clothes. It clung to the deck, too, and
beaded on the woodwork. Vivacious was drifting aimlessly. It was so quiet that when Tuesday pushed the tiller across, hoping to find a way to fill the sails, the noise of it made her jump.

  So began the longest day of Tuesday’s life. A day where hope seemed impossible to hold onto. A day where she could only drift in an endless world of frustration and silence, trying all the while to still the terrible images that kept forming in her mind: Mothwood sitting up from the table, suddenly alive again in that awful broken body; Baxterr muzzled with wire; Vivienne being hauled up and up, then dropped from the tallest mast to the deck below.

  Time and again Tuesday called out, hoping to be heard by someone on a nearby shore or perhaps another boat, but her voice only sounded small and strange. She tried talking to Baxterr in his absence, and then to her mother and father, but the conversations she was having were hardly helpful, so she gave it up. She counted in pairs to one hundred, practised her seven, eight and nine times tables, and thought through all the numbers with three in them counting back from one thousand. She unfurled Mothwood’s maps and went over them again, trying desperately to spot any clue that might help her when this mist finally lifted. She searched into her backpack and found a slightly bruised apple and half a bottle of water. She ate the apple and sipped at the water, unsure how long it might have to last. She thought longingly of watermelon, and once she thought of watermelon she thought of fresh pineapple and ripe mango. Then she thought of vanilla milkshakes and chicken pie, but that made her think of Baxterr, who loved pies of any sort.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it,’ she told herself. Her lips were stretched and dry, her mouth was furry with thirst. She sipped a little more from the bottle.

  ‘Water, water, everywhere nor, any drop to drink,’ she said, remembering it from a poem Denis had read to her. But now that she had thought of Baxterr again, her mind filled with images of him muzzled, snarling and afraid on the deck of The Silverfish. She wished she could summon up an entire army of warriors who would storm the ship and free Baxterr and Vivienne. She wished she could grow into a giant and crush Mothwood and his horrible crew with her own bare hands. She wished she could find Serendipity and hand the whole entire mess over to her, because it was too much for a girl, all alone, to manage. She wished she were at home, at the kitchen table, eating a huge plate of blueberry pancakes with Baxterr snoring at her feet. But wishing did nothing to change the fact that she was doing absolutely nothing. Her eyes burned with angry tears, but she rubbed them away with clenched fists.

  ‘Tears are hardly going to help,’ Tuesday told herself sternly. ‘But what is?’

  She tried to be logical. She needed help, but she didn’t have Vivienne and she didn’t have Baxterr. She didn’t have a book either. Maybe there was another book, she thought, one that could help her, but somehow Tuesday doubted that anyone had ever written a book called How to Rescue Your Friends from Pirates, with step-by-step instructions and a useful diagram or two. She sighed, but decided it was worth searching the little cupboard at the front of the boat again.

  She opened the hatch and felt all around, hoping for the greasy touch of oilcloth wrapping, but all she could feel were the waxy folds of a spare sail, and the rough weave of a coil of rope. At last, deep in the hatch, her hand came to rest on something else, something small and smooth and cool to the touch. She pulled it out and saw that it was a little metal container similar to a shoe-polish tin, though smaller. The container was hard to open, but once Tuesday had levered off the lid with her fingernails she found that it contained a cluster of rusty fishhooks, a book of matches, a silver whistle, a tiny fold-out pocketknife – by far the smallest she had ever seen – and a small grey-lead pencil.

  Tuesday looked at the fishhooks, but they were no use to her without a length of line. And anyway, she wasn’t sure what she would do with a fish, even if she did manage to catch one. She wondered what the whistle might call up. Perhaps a genie who would grant her three wishes? She blew it with all the breath she could muster, but nothing happened except a loud, bossy whistling sound that disappeared into the thick silver mist. Tuesday lit a match and held it in her fingertips until the flame was almost touching her skin, then blew it out; she unfolded the blade of the pocketknife, and although it was nice and sharp, she couldn’t think of a single way that it might help her. Last of all, she took the pencil out of the tin. It was only small, but it had been sharpened to a decent point.

  What was it that the Librarian had said? It doesn’t matter whether you write on a fancy laptop or an old typewriter, or, for that matter, with a pen on a paper napkin. Or even, Tuesday thought, with a tiny pencil on … She looked about. There was no paper of any kind except Mothwood’s maps. She unrolled one and placed it upside down on her lap. In the far left corner at the top of the huge page, she began.

  I know a girl who drifted on a colourless sea through a fog of nothingness, and this is the story of how she came to be there, she wrote. And then she wrote down everything that had happened since she sat at her mother’s typewriter and set her fingers upon the keys. She wrote and she wrote, filling up the white space with words that were neat in some places, and messy in others. Sometimes the words went from left to right, but other times they went up and down, or diagonally, or in big curly spirals. Whenever her pencil was worn blunt, Tuesday would sharpen it again using the miniature pocketknife. She wrote until the back of the map was entirely covered, and the pencil was almost too small to grasp in her fingers. And so, she wrote in the last spare corner of space, the girl had no way forwards, and no way back. No way down, and no way up.

  With that, she looked up and realised evening had come. A soft beam of light was illuminating her words. Not just illuminating them. The lines and loops and spirals of the words she had written were shimmering and trembling as if they were alive.

  ‘Oh,’ Tuesday breathed.

  Her written words remained printed on the paper, but their silvery shadows were merging into one long, glowing thread that rose up and up above her, finding a pathway through the mist. Tuesday waited for the thread to wrap itself around her, to lift her up and take her … where? To find her mother? Back to Baxterr and Vivienne? Home? But the thread did not touch her. It only continued up and up, until the trailing end of it was hovering in front of her. Tuesday reached out and grasped the thread. It began to thicken. Now it was not so much a strand of silver thread as a length of shining woven rope. It continued to change before her eyes, splitting apart and stretching, becoming wider, developing rungs, transforming itself into a ladder. A silvery ladder that stretched far up into the mist. It was as if Tuesday were expected to climb. But to where? The ladder, glowing softly in the moonlight, ascended into nothingness.

  Tuesday put a foot on one of the lower rungs. It felt quite safe. She gripped the ladder with both hands and still it held as strongly as if it were attached to a giant hook somewhere up above.

  ‘There’s no use being frightened now. You can save being frightened until later,’ she told herself.

  And with that, putting one foot above the other, and one hand above the other, she stepped off the deck of Vivacious and climbed. And climbed and climbed and climbed. Below, Vivacious became smaller and smaller.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ she called down to the boat.

  After a while Tuesday’s arms and legs began to shake with the effort. The mist closed in around her and she could no longer see Vivacious or the sea below. She rested for a moment, taking in a soft breath of wind that cooled her face. Above her the mist was thinning. Stars and a sliver of moon peeped from a far section of sky. She thought of her first flight from the window at Brown Street. Here she was, once more in darkness, holding on to something that might, or might not, bring her to safety.

  She continued to climb for what seemed like a very long time. She could see nothing below. Vivacious was long lost from sight; only the ladder swung below her. And then, without any announcement, the mist was gone, as if Tuesday had finally climbed above it.

/>   The ladder ended, and it wasn’t attached to a giant hook. It was attached to two giant hooks in the middle of what looked like a square of ceiling. It appeared to be simply there, in the middle of the sky, as if such things were completely normal. In the middle of this square was a large metal ring.

  ‘A trapdoor!’ Tuesday said out loud. She clambered up, grasped the metal ring and pulled. When it didn’t budge, she pushed. This time she felt the trapdoor give a little, so she pushed harder, and it opened smoothly without a creak or a groan. Tuesday slid her head and shoulders through the gap. There was hardly anything to see, just a tiny room with a very low ceiling and curtains for walls. It wasn’t even tall enough for her to stand up in, although it was easily long enough for her to lie down. What was this place? A cupboard, perhaps? Why was there a cupboard in the sky?

  Tuesday scrambled over the lip of the opening, crouching down so she didn’t bang her head on the low ceiling. She closed the trapdoor behind her, shutting out the dark sky and the gently swaying rope ladder. There was no sound. She put a hand out to touch one of the curtained walls of the tiny room, and found that it moved easily. Edging forwards, she lifted the fabric. Beyond, in the dim light, she could see chairs and table legs.

  ‘Could it really be?’ Tuesday breathed in disbelief.

  She crawled out and looked behind her. She had been beneath a buffet table with a white tablecloth. Beyond a stretch of tall windows was a balcony.

  Tuesday had found her way back to the Library.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Despite Tuesday’s relief at finding herself at the Library again, she dreaded running into the Librarian. She was sure that the Librarian would be very cross with her for disobeying orders and running off into the world of Vivienne Small. Probably, she would be angry enough to stop Tuesday from ever going back into that world. She might even send her straight home to Brown Street in disgrace, and Tuesday knew that she could not allow that to happen. Whatever came next, she would never, not ever, go home without Baxterr.