by Chris Ward
While they had talked on the balcony, the staircase had altered, and now it stretched down into darkness. Godfrey had to hurry to keep up, running one hand along the wall in case he were to trip and stumble forward, with only the Dark Man’s back a cushion for his fall.
They descended deep into the castle, deeper than Godfrey had ever gone. The walls closed in, and the hum of machinery surrounded him, as though they were entering a giant, subterranean engine.
Godfrey caught sight of scurrying and slithering creatures down side corridors. Like Boxy, many of them were reanimated objects: snakes made from electrical cable, heaps of rags that walked upright like men, chairs and stools and tables that shuffled along like crippled soldiers returned from war. He tried not to entertain the thought that disobeying the Dark Man might leave him like this—a remnant of a man, discarded and forgotten into the darkness at the very bottom of the Shifting Castle.
Finally the Dark Man paused in front of two wide doors.
‘Behold!’ he shouted, raising his arms above his head in the most animated way Godfrey had ever seen him. ‘The Paper Room!’
The doors burst open and a sound like a thousand fluttering newspapers filled Godfrey’s senses. The room glowed with a kind of half-light, and in its illumination, a cyclone of paper raged against the walls and the ceiling far above.
‘Come, boy, let me pack you into something that can help me.’
Godfrey shook his head, never having felt such an urge to run, and he turned on his heels to make his escape, only to find braids of paper encircling his ankles, pulling him back. He screamed as they dragged him into the maelstrom until there was nothing but a howling storm of scrap paper as it wrapped and formed around him.
As his body grew heavy and tired, he understood why the cyclone of paper had appeared to glow—it was damp with glue, and it now knitted around him, sticking close to his skin, reforming him into a papier-mâché monstrosity at the Dark Man’s command.
When finally he was put down onto ground and the maelstrom had died down, he peered at the Dark Man standing before him through a face that no longer felt like his own.
The Dark Man’s laughter was the only sound that remained. Godfrey turned his now-cumbersome body around and saw the paper piled in a heap that towered over his head.
‘Wonderful!’ the Dark Man cried. ‘Perfection itself! Would you like to see how you now look, boy? Behold.’
A great curtain slid down from the wall to reveal a huge mirror towering over him, and Godfrey screamed at the sight of the man staring back at him. Nothing remained of the boy—a rather a good-looking one at that, he thought, despite some whispers that he was quite sour-faced—he had been when he had entered the room.
‘It becomes easier with time,’ said the Dark Man, a towering shadow at his shoulder. ‘You must now be tasked with the intricacies and requirements of your new role. But first, it might serve you well to understand why I need to meet with Master Forrest as a matter of some urgency. Turn around. Look on my face.’
Godfrey wanted to do nothing less. He squeezed his eyes shut, only to be forced by invisible hands pushing his eyelids open and turning his body around. His head lifted without his intent, and he stared into the face of the Dark Man, just as the room was bathed in white light.
The Dark Man smiled, and finally Godfrey understood.
11
Basil
Benjamin leaned close to the floor and gave the wooden boards a heavy tap. Shiny with lacquer and toughened with age, they felt solid and immovable. He tapped again, then closed his eyes as the Grand Lord had taught him, concentrating, searching for a wisp of air and channeling his power through it. His mind felt for the boards beneath his fingers, and then they were loose, humming with reanimation as they easily slid to reveal a space large enough to crawl through. Benjamin glanced up the corridor to make sure he wasn’t being watched, then ducked down into the space and slid the boards back above his head. A little surge of his magic, and they were as firm again as if they had never been moved.
He was in a space barely high enough to sit up in, but a little farther along the dusty stone under the floor became a stairway and he was able to stand up straight. At the bottom of this short flight of steps stood a door upon which he gave a solid knock, using a code he had been taught some weeks ago.
The door swung open. ‘Welcome back to Underfloor, Benjamin,’ came the muffled voice of what looked like a cross between a bookshelf and a man—all protruding corners of wood and metal braces, yet with a vaguely human face carved into one end.
‘Steven,’ Benjamin greeted the shelf-man, a name he had chosen for the creature himself. The Underfloor reanimates had no use for names amongst themselves, taking on human shapes and forms only when they had to speak to a human from the school, communicating with each other in ways that even the teachers who knew of them didn’t understand. While ‘Steven Shelf’ was the name a lonely boy might have given to part of his surroundings, the shelf-man had rather liked it.
‘Sorry it’s been so long,’ Benjamin said, ‘but you know, schoolwork and all that.’
‘Even in a place like this, they dump algebra on you like a big, fat cat,’ Steven said, making Benjamin smile. Sometimes he felt the shelf-man had swallowed a few of the books he might have once held and liked to regurgitate lines in an apparently random order.
‘We have a test next week,’ Benjamin said. ‘I’ll probably score higher than Wilhelm, but that’s about it.’
‘The bottom five go to the Lockers?’
Benjamin grinned. ‘We get to keep each other company.’
‘Why can’t you be more like that Miranda? She’s such a good girl. Studies like a squirrel collecting acorns for the winter, at least that’s what Wilhelm said.’
Benjamin wasn’t quite sure Wilhelm would have put it that way, but Steven was Steven. ‘Is Moto around?’ he asked. ‘I want to ask him something.’
‘Sure. Head on in.’
Moto, a reanimated motorcycle who stood on one wheel and revolved the other to show a variety of facial expressions, was the unofficial leader of Underfloor. He had helped out Benjamin before, and they had become friends. While some of the teachers were aware of Underfloor, few had any contact with its inhabitants, many of whom had been roaming the hidden rooms and corridors for almost as long as the school had been in existence.
Feeling strangely comforted by the unfolding world within a world as he made his way through Underfloor’s warmly lit rooms, Benjamin tried to take a step back and appreciate the strangeness he saw wherever he looked. In one room, a group of shop mannequins sat around a bar, served by a table passing around glasses and ashtrays, its legs flexing and bending with the elasticity of human arms. That the glasses were empty and the ashtrays filled with sawdust from the sticks of wood the mannequins chewed on was one of the least unusual aspects of the scene. Far more bizarre was that they moved and gestured like real humans, without making any sound.
In another room, a variety of reanimates sat around a poker table, playing with water-damaged trump cards and betting with handfuls of ancient coins that rattled and scattered to the floor every time one moved an awkward limb to pull in a sizeable win.
In a third room, larger than the others, a band played on the stage, performing a discordant drone that did nothing for Benjamin but delighted the couple of dozen reanimates moving around to the rhythm. Their dancing was so fascinating, Benjamin wanted to stay and watch, but his housemaster, Gubbledon Longface, was up on the stage, playing a battered piano, and getting caught in Underfloor when he should have been in the dorms would be worth a punishment Benjamin didn’t want to think about.
He found Moto sitting in a library room, a kick-start lever Steven would probably say resembled a T-Rex’s puny forepaw in comparison to Moto’s size, flicking through pages of a tatty motorbike magazine.
‘Family album?’ Benjamin quipped, before suddenly wondering if the bike might be offended. ‘Sorry—’
Moto’s front wheel spun in a gesture that Benjamin knew meant amusement. ‘You’ve been hanging around Wilhelm too much,’ Moto said. ‘That joke was straight out of his stand-up routine.’
‘He tells them better than me,’ Benjamin said.
‘What brings you down here to Underfloor?’ Moto closed his magazine. ‘We haven’t seen you in a while.’
Benjamin shrugged. ‘Just schoolwork. And trying to stay out of trouble.’
‘Not easy with Wilhelm around?’
‘Impossible.’ Benjamin grinned. He considered telling Moto about Wilhelm’s plan to spy on Cuttlefur, but he didn’t feel as happy as he had tried to make out. ‘Moto … I was wondering if I could ask you a question. More of an opinion, really.’
‘Sure, anything.’ The bike’s front wheel cocked to the side. ‘Are you still thinking about how to get home?’
Benjamin sighed. ‘It’s all I think about. I try not to, but … it’s just … I don’t feel like I belong here. I can play the game for a while, but when I’m lying awake at night, I can’t stop thinking about home.’
‘It was different for you,’ Moto said. ‘Your brother was here for a time, too. That tie with home is not something most people have.’
Benjamin shrugged. ‘And that I feel my being here is putting the rest of Endinfinium in danger.’
‘I don’t think the Dark Man will be back for a while yet. He was soundly beaten, and his resources must be almost depleted.’
‘I still think it would be safer for everyone if I left.’
‘But it’s impossible.’
‘Is it? We got here, didn’t we? If you can walk in one direction, you can walk back again.’
‘Not if you go through a door that locks from the other side once you’ve passed through.’
Benjamin rubbed his chin. ‘I’m not so sure it’s locked.’
‘What do you mean? Do you think you know a way to leave?’
‘The river. We’re going on a school trip next week and we’ll be near the source. I want to see where that water comes from. I mean, water can come from the ground, but the rubbish it carries can’t. It has to come from somewhere.’ He pounded one fist into his other palm. ‘It has to.’
‘And how do you think I can help? I can’t go with you.’
‘I want to know if you have any memories of your time before. If you remember coming through whatever valve brings us into Endinfinium.’
‘I can’t have, I didn’t become … well, me, until I came through.’
‘Professor Eaves says that everything already had a soul before. It just took a little magic to wake it up.’
‘I’m not sure I could believe that.’
‘Can you tell me if there’s anything you remember? Anything at all.’
Moto’s head rolled. ‘I became aware of myself part of the way down the great junk river. My earliest memories are of swirling in dark water among thousands of other objects, some reanimated, some not. I was in the waters of the sea before I could move, but I was caught in a drift current and found myself on a shore.’ The bike’s handlebar-shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘And eventually I found myself here, in Underfloor.’
Benjamin nodded. Moto had told him similar before, but none of it helped to unravel the mystery. ‘How long have you been here? Were things different then?’
Moto’s head-wheel spun. ‘The world was smaller. The edge of the sea was no more than a mile offshore. I remember stories of people going out in boats to see it, only to never come back.’
‘They fell off the edge?’
‘Who knows? Maybe they found a way home. I wouldn’t chance it, though.’
‘And the river? The water has to come from somewhere.’
‘There are stories, of course. We’ve all heard about the kind of stories you had back in England. Folklore. We have some of that here, too.’
‘About the river?’
Moto’s wheel revolved to a smiling face. ‘The Great Junk River is the bringer of all life. That is what we believe.’
Benjamin wanted to jump up and down in frustration. ‘But where does it bring it from?’
Moto’s wheel revolved back to a sterner expression. ‘We here in Underfloor don’t like to think about it too much. We leave speculation up to humans. We have been granted this chance at life that only humans were once privy to. We are afraid that to question it too much will see it taken away.’
Benjamin opened his mouth, but Moto’s kick-start pedal lifted in a gesture that he hadn’t finished.
‘However,’ he added, ‘we have no control over what humans do. There’s a story of a man who tried to find out where the river came from. Have you heard it?’
‘Jeremiah Flowers.’
‘Yes! So you know of him?’
‘A librarian called Cleat told me a little about it. He escaped, didn’t he?’
Not exactly what Cleat had told him, and Benjamin wondered whether Moto might be holding something back. If it was dangerous to climb Source Mountain to see the culvert through which the water flowed, then his friend would obviously not want him to go. Yet Benjamin had been obsessing over it for days, and it was less a case of ‘if’ rather than ‘when.’
Moto rose up onto his back wheel, his full height a head taller than Benjamin. ‘Many residents of Endinfinium think that that story of Jeremiah Flowers is a myth. A folktale, a legend. It would make a good one, no?’
‘What do you think?’
Moto’s head-wheel spun. ‘It isn’t what I think, young Master Forrest, but what I know. Here in Underfloor, most of us might not care much for what you humans do upstairs, but that wasn’t always the case. In fact, at one point or another, most of us served some use.’ His kick-start lever waved. ‘Follow me.’
He led Benjamin down a series of stairwells and along several corridors, until the air was cold and damp and Benjamin felt like they were far under the earth now, perhaps lower than he had ever been. Eventually Moto stopped at a featureless wall, only for it to slide back at his touch of a hidden switch. They stepped out into a cold, stone corridor with boxes piled high on either side. Some were sealed shut, others had broken open and spilled out all manner of assorted, inanimate objects.
Down here, though, nothing moved. The school was as quiet as he had ever known it.
‘We’ve just left the main region of Underfloor,’ Moto said. ‘We’re near the very bottom of the school, but we’re not quite there yet. Like everything else, Underfloor has evolved, too, and over the years several sections have become separated from the rest. I’m taking you to one of them now.’
‘It’s so cold down here,’ Benjamin said. ‘And why isn’t anything reanimating?’
‘Even magic has a lifespan,’ Moto said with something like regret. ‘Just like when a tree dies, reanimates who have lost their magic tend to sink, just in different ways. More often than not, they get brought down here. Not everything is dead, though.’
‘Who’d want to live down here? It’s so creepy.’
‘People looking for peace and quiet,’ Moto replied. ‘Stay quiet now, Benjamin. He gets upset easily, and then he doesn’t want to speak.’
‘Who?’
Moto’s face revolved around to a smile. ‘You’ll see.’
Benjamin followed Moto up the corridor a short way, before Moto poked his kick-start into a tiny crack in the wall. With a plume of dust, a stone door slid open and inside were none of the dim candles hanging from the walls of the corridors, so Moto leaned one of his headlamps forward, switching it on.
The room had been piled high with dusty junk like someone had packed up their goods to move house, then never got around to unpacking them. Boxes were stacked high, although many of the stacks had collapsed, and in one corner, several collapsed stacks had formed a natural bowl.
‘Would you mind dipping your headlight? It’s quite a strain on eyes as old as mine, you know.’
Benjamin did a double take. Among the boxes, something shifted, and a strange spindly cr
eature appeared, sitting in the middle of the collapsed stack as if he were an old man enjoying his favorite recliner.
At first, Benjamin thought it was a giant butterfly, but as Moto’s light caught over lengths of flexing wood and a hard, fiberglass body, he realised that, while he was in the right vicinity, this creature was something else entirely.
It was an old, propeller-powered biplane.
‘Hey, Basil,’ Moto said. ‘Sorry to intrude like this, but I have someone here who would like to meet you.’
Yet to understand why Moto wanted him to meet something a museum could have thrown out, Benjamin forced an enthusiastic nod. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name is Benjamin Forrest.’
‘Basil,’ the plane said. ‘Not charmed. I was sleeping.’
‘You’re always sleeping,’ Moto said. ‘You should brush yourself off and go for a fly once in a while.’
The biplane shifted, and in Moto’s light, Benjamin saw how his wings dropped uselessly against his sides as if waterlogged. His propeller, too, had slumped into a drooping, tarnished chrome moustache in the centre of a painted-on face.
‘Not much use in these old wings,’ Basil said. ‘What do you want, boy? Quickly, now. I have little enough time left as it is. I don’t wish to waste any more precious seconds looking at your gaping mug.’
‘He wants to ask about Jeremiah,’ Moto said.
With a rustle of musty cardboard, Basil drew back into his box bed. ‘Does he, indeed?’
‘You knew Jeremiah?’
Basil coughed, and a dust plume tickled the air in Moto’s headlight. ‘We were friends, of a sort, me and him. Why do you want to know?’
‘I heard he went to a place called Source Mountain and disappeared. I want to know where he went, because … because I want to go there, too.’
Basil shook his head with a rustle. ‘He was a fool, that Jeremiah. He failed to appreciate what he had here in Endinfinium. He just wouldn’t give it up, and it was the death of him.’