PRAISE FOR FINDING SERENDIPITY
‘This is a beguiling tale that celebrates the power of the creative spirit. The pace is brisk and the characters appealing … The story is a delight.’ — Magpies
‘A middle-grade fantasy about the magic in writing stories … An original, wholehearted affirmation of the written word and the imagination.’ — Kirkus Reviews
‘This enchanting story (which may remind readers of the fully imagined worlds created by Edith Nesbit) celebrates the imagination and the connection writers feel with their stories.’ – Booklist
‘With cinematic imagery and keen wit, the authors construct an inventive novel that raises intriguing questions about the relationship between authors and their characters, and reaches “The End” all too soon.’ — Publishers Weekly
‘Tuesday McGillycuddy is a wonderful heroine – brave, clever, quirky and full of energy.’ — Kids Book Review
‘A fantastic adventure story brimming with imagination … Finding Serendipity has pirates, sailing ships and oodles of magic … You’ll never read a book in quite the same way again!’ — My Book Corner
‘I loved this book because it was adventurous, exciting, descriptive, and a mysterious story.’ — Lilian, age 9
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
First published in 2015
Copyright © Heather Rose & Danielle Wood writing as Angelica Banks, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 76011 037 6
eISBN 978 1 92526 720 4
Author photo: © The Mercury, Hobart
Cover & text design by Design by Committee
Cover illustration: Josh Durham
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
For BAFFIX
May your ideas be your wings
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY–TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY–THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY–FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY–FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY–SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY–SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY–EIGHT
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chapter One
Vivienne Small lived in a tree house. It was quite new, her previous tree house having been destroyed by pirates, as some of you may remember. The new house had beautiful canvas awnings and a deep verandah. Through the verandah’s carved railings, Vivienne had trained a length of pikwan vine.
A pikwan is something like a mango crossed with a horse chestnut, and one morning as the forest came to life in shimmering shades of green, Vivienne plucked a ripe one from the vine. She split open the hard spiky shell with her pocketknife, but before she had even managed one bite of the sweet flesh on the inside, she heard a ferocious cracking, rushing, breaking noise from above. She dropped the pikwan in alarm and its two halves rolled off the verandah, falling a very, very long way to the ground.
Vivienne looked up to see a huge brown blur hurtling towards her through the forest’s canopy. She flared her wings and made a desperate flying lunge to get clear of it. She wrapped her arms around a branch and hung on tightly as whatever it was crashed into one side of her tree house, taking with it her canvas awnings, a large part of the verandah, the kitchen wall and a dresser full of crockery and cutlery. Vivienne was left clinging to the branch – her feet dangling above the ruins of her house – as a thunderous noise rose up from the forest floor. She watched in dismay as her remaining furniture, her books and ornaments, vibrated with the impact, then settled untidily back to their respective places in the ravaged tree house.
Vivienne fluttered down on outspread wings to land on what was left of her verandah. Above her, where there should have been branches of all sizes, and leaves of infinite shades of green, with only tiny pinpricks of sunshine and sky peeping through, there was a huge hole, and Vivienne found herself staring up into a pinkish dawn. Far, far below her, in the deep gloom of the forest, she could just make out the shape of the thing that had caused all this damage. For the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to feel heartbroken and cross about the devastation of her beautiful new home. Then her thoughts turned to questions.
What on earth was that thing? And had it really been furry?
Gliding down branch by branch through the layers of the forest to its floor, Vivienne landed deftly beside what was, indeed, an animal. It was a dog, but not like most of us are used to. This was a gigantic dog, bigger than any you have ever seen. Also, it had wings.
Once, and not all that long ago, Winged Dogs had been a common sight in the skies above the Peppermint Forest. Vivienne remembered the days when dogs such as these had lived in their packs in the Winged Mountains, making dens in the highest of the mountain caves, flying above towering waterfalls, and fledging their pups from craggy outcrops. Vivienne had loved to watch the parent dogs hover as their little ones practised the use of their wings. Sometimes the puppies would fall into the lakes below and face a long dog paddle back to shore. Then they would shake themselves off, and their parents would urge them up into the sky to try again.
Those days were gone: the Winged Dogs had vanished. Not one by one, as is so often the case when rare creatures leave the world, but all at once, and quite mysteriously. Vivienne had heard it said – though she didn’t know whether or not it was true – that all of the Winged Dogs had flown right out of her world and into another.
And yet, here was a Winged Dog, its fur glowing in the bright shaft of light that shone into the deep green of the forest. Its head had come to rest between two giant tree trunks. Its body crushed an entire stand of enormous ferns. One of the dog’s wings was wedged in a myrtle tree, while the other was pinned awkwardly beneath its body. All around and underneath the creature were shreds of canvas and shards of railings and floorboards. Vivienne also saw two of her chairs (now broken) and several plates and cups.
The dog’s breathing was slow and shallow. Blood dripped from one of its nostrils, and its tongue lolled – huge and pink and wet – on the ground. Making soft crooning noises, Vivienne reached out and stroked the dog’s face. Carefully, she
pulled back one of the dog’s eyelids. The pupil did not contract. As she inspected the length of the animal’s huge body, she found what appeared to be claw marks on its underbelly. There were deep wounds on the dog’s sides, too, and blood-stains on its thick pelt.
A white crescent moon marked the fur between the dog’s huge eyes. And when Vivienne checked more closely, she saw by the narrowness of the muzzle that this was a female, and quite an old girl, judging by the silvering around her eyes. If only Vivienne knew the dog’s name, she might be able to call her back to consciousness.
‘Moonthread?’ she guessed. ‘Moonborn? Crescent Moon? White Moon?’
The dog did not stir. Her breathing was slowing still further. Vivienne thought more widely.
‘Windseeker? Weathereye? Stormwing?’ Vivienne said, but the dog lay silent and unmoving. Vivienne’s brow furrowed. ‘What kind of creature has done this to you?’
Vivienne knew of beasts that were large, and beasts that were vicious, but she knew of no creature that was both large and vicious enough to inflict such terrible wounds on a Winged Dog. Even if two Winged Dogs were to clash, which was unheard of, their claws were not sharp enough to make the awful gashes this dog had suffered.
Vivienne studied the place, high above, where the falling dog had torn a hole in the forest’s leafy ceiling. She shuddered as if a cold breeze had suddenly blown, although none had. What was out there? She had to know.
With the ease and speed of someone who has flown through forests her whole life, Vivienne spread her small blue, leathery wings and made a series of flying leaps up, up, up, past her broken tree house and into the tree’s very highest branches. From where she stood, sharing her weight between two leafy limbs, she saw two salt eagles flying north and a flock of derry birds down on the shore. Wrens and swallows darted about. Otherwise, the sky was empty. Whatever creature had savaged the Winged Dog, and caused it to fall, was no longer in sight.
Vivienne sighed, and felt troubled. In the distance, the morning sea was the colour of the inside of an oyster shell. To the east, a bright sun was climbing into the day. Beams of light threaded in and out of long slender clouds. Vivienne also spied the wide mouth of the River of Rythwyck emerging from the depths of the Peppermint Forest. To the south, as she twisted around, she saw the snow-capped ridgeline of the Mountains of Margalov, bright against the horizon. But no, she didn’t. Vivienne rubbed her eyes. Although she could see the slopes of the Mountains of Margalov, she could not see their jagged peaks. The mountains had … grown.
‘Not possible,’ Vivienne murmured to herself.
Was this a trick of the light? Vivienne blinked several times, and looked again. Still the mountains blocked out the entire southern sky. And with a shiver that went all the way out to the tips of her wings, she saw that at their very tops, the mountains seemed to pierce the firmament itself. The sky puckered and folded around the shoulders of the mountains as if they were outgrowing the world itself.
Vivienne’s adventures had taken her high into the Mountains of Margalov on several occasions, through foothills tangled with lush jungle, and into the upper reaches, where the trees and plants grew stunted and sideways in the constant wind. She had ventured up past the snowline, where the air thinned and nothing green grew, and she remembered how it felt to stand at the top of the very highest peak and see the entire world stretched out at her feet. The Mountains of Margalov that Vivienne knew were immense. So, how had they become larger still?
Vivienne’s heart raced. She realised she was experiencing a very rare thing: she was afraid.
Chapter Two
A very long way from the Peppermint Forest, Denis McGillycuddy was in his tartan dressing-gown making pancakes. It was Sunday morning and the McGillycuddy house, the tallest and narrowest house on Brown Street, was in the special variety of chaos that only comes at the end of the summer holidays. The fridge was papered with sticky notes on which had been scribbled potential names for characters (Lydia Bottle, Maple Hartigan, Volker Fink). On the windowsill was a procession of shells and fossilised sea stars (banded trochus, purple linckia, marbled fromia) and other mysterious maritime objects that Denis had shaken out of pockets and bags while unpacking from the family’s three-week escape to a faraway island with palm trees and warm, aqua-blue water.
Since the McGillycuddys’ return to Brown Street, meals had been taken at erratic hours, and in all parts of the house, so that cups and plates and forks and spoons had migrated to bookshelves, chairs, mantelpieces and even the bathtub. Abandoned board games and half-finished crossword puzzles cluttered every surface in the kitchen, while striped beach towels and gritty bathers languished in the laundry. No matter how many times Denis swept, he couldn’t get rid of the crunch of fine-grained tropical sand on the floor.
It was a quarter to eleven, and although Denis could hear no movement from the upper floors of the house, he was not surprised. Last night on his way to bed, when he had looked in on his daughter, Tuesday, he had found her still sitting up at her desk tapping away on the keys of her baby blue typewriter. It had been nearly midnight. Tuesday was working on a story, the same one that she had been working on for every spare minute of her holidays. During the weeks they had spent on the remote island, Tuesday had barely been separated from her typewriter. She had written while sitting on the beach, while drifting in a kayak and while lying under a mosquito net. She had written while sipping coconut milk and while hermit crabs crawled over her toes. And then, after returning to Brown Street, Tuesday had written at her desk in her bedroom, and under a tree in City Park, in the local library, and at the kitchen table before and after (but never during) breakfast, lunch and dinner. Very late nights had become something of a habit.
But while Tuesday was sleeping in, the other writer in the house had risen early, roused by the sound of a summer rainstorm on the roof. Since before dawn, Serendipity had been in her writing room on the top floor of the house, sometimes rapping urgently on the keys of her typewriter and other times simply sitting with a blanket about her, her elbows on her desk, staring out through an open window at the morning clouds. Serendipity had once told Denis that it was hard to say which was more important, making words on a page or staring out the window having ideas. Both were essential for a writer.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Denis set his pancake mixture aside to rest, checked the clock again, and resolved to give Tuesday and Serendipity until eleven o’clock before disturbing them for breakfast. To fill the time, he folded a load of clean washing, rustled up Tuesday’s school uniform from the bottom of the ironing basket in readiness for Monday morning, and then went to fetch the Sunday paper from where it had landed on the front steps.
He shook the newspaper open quite casually, but what he read on the front page made him sit down on the top step that was wet from the rain, stand up again, turn around, and turn around again. Then Denis did something very unusual, something quite unprecedented, in fact. He burst back through the front door and ran noisily up four flights of stairs and barrelled into Serendipity’s writing room. She sat at her desk wearing the vague expression she always wore when she was daydreaming.
‘Thank goodness!’ Denis said, but his relief was only fleeting.
He swooped past Serendipity, his dressing-gown billowing out behind him, and pulled the window shut, banging the clasp in place rather more forcefully than was necessary. And then, as if to be doubly cautious, he hastily drew the curtains, dimming the room almost entirely.
‘You have to stop immediately!’ Denis said. ‘No writing! No thinking! No imagining! You have to stop it right now.’
Serendipity blinked and flicked on her desk lamp and stared at Denis who, breathing hard from having run up the stairs so quickly, was waving a newspaper around. She appeared to observe his unusual behaviour as though from a long way off until at last her eyes focused and she took in the panicked expression on Denis’s face.
‘Darling, what on earth is going on?’ Serendipity asked.
‘Here, here!’ he said, thrusting the newspaper at her.
The headline read: EXCLUSIVE! SEVEN WRITERS ABDUCTED.
‘Abducted?’ Serendipity asked.
‘So the story goes. For now, at least.’
Serendipity read the article aloud: ‘Crime might be her career, but JD Jones, one of the world’s most admired writers, never imagined she would be part of a real-life global mystery. Jones was found wandering in the streets of Abu Dhabi last night. She is reported to have no memory of how she came to be there, or how she sustained a broken arm. Jones is not alone. In the past five days, six other famous writers have been abducted from their homes, only to reappear in distant locations with no memory of how they got there or of their kidnappers. There have been no demands for ransom. Police are seeking any information that might indicate a motive for these increasingly bizarre disappearances.’
Serendipity stared in alarm at the photographs of the writers who had turned up in all manner of places. One from France had turned up in Alaska. Another from Sydney had been found in Cape Town. Two British writers had been discovered in the Midwest of the United States and a Chinese writer had been rescued from high altitude in the mountains of Argentina. All of them claimed they had gone to bed, and when they had woken up, they had found themselves half a world away from home without money or a passport and no way of making contact with their loved ones. Some had broken bones, others had suffered burns, cuts and bruises.
All the colour drained out of Serendipity’s face.
‘Denis,’ she said, ‘where is Tuesday?’
‘Asleep, I imagine. She was still writing at midnight so I thought I’d let her sleep as long …’
‘Midnight? But where is she now? Denis!’ Serendipity grasped her husband by his elbows.
He said, ‘You don’t think … surely not? These are published writers, famous writers. Tuesday’s just …’
‘Denis, was she writing? When you checked on her? What was she doing?’
Before Denis could reply, Serendipity had flown past him, out the door and down the stairs to Tuesday’s room.
A Week without Tuesday Page 1