On the Other Side

by N A Wedderburn

  Mr. Grimm froze in place, blinked, and then narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Mr. Hatter, what are you doing?” he demanded.

  “Just having some afternoon tea,” Raven responded, flourishing his hand at the fine pottery. “Would you like a cup?” He began reaching into his hat. As he did so, he noticed Sam entering the dining hall after Mr. Grimm, and his heart sank. “Actually,” he said, hastily getting to his feet with a clatter that caused Sam to pause for a second to glare at him. “I was just-” He attempted to pass Mr. Grimm in an attempt to get to the kitchen door before Sam. “Trying to-” Mr. Grimm stepped in his path no matter which way he went. “To…” Sam entered the kitchen. “Damn.”

  “Language, Mr. Hatter,” Mr. Grimm growled at him. “The final bell has rung. Unless you are currently serving detention, I suggest you go home.”

  “Yes sir,” Raven sighed, giving the kitchen door one final, anxious glance. He retrieved his belongings, stuffed them back into his hat, and hurried out of the room. His cat remained, fixing Mr. Grimm with an annoyed stare as he followed Raven out of the dining hall, oblivious to her presence.

  Max, meanwhile, was feeling too confused and disappointed to notice the kitchen door opening behind him, or that the pantry door was wide open. He was staring at the place where the body was. Or, had been. There was nothing there now. No sack, no hand, no blood. Nothing. Nothing to indicate a body had even been there in the first place.

  “And what do you think you’re doing in there?”

  Max jumped, closed his eyes, and turned slowly. “I…” he stammered, unable to come up with a believable excuse. What could he possibly say? Sam was glaring at him in a way that guaranteed he wouldn’t believe a word he said. Clumsily, he tried to hide the camera behind his back. “It…It was a prank,” he faltered, his hands trembling behind him. Between his fingers, he could feel the warm smoke rising from the mortal device, much thicker and faster than before.

  “What’s that?” Sam demanded. To Max’s horror, the smoke was rising above his head. He marched up to Max, grabbed him by the shoulder, and turned him roughly. Yanking the camera from the terrified boy’s hand, he glowered. “Just what were you intending to do?”

  Max didn’t know if it was a stroke of luck, or an inevitability, but the camera chose that moment to explode, filling the air with a much darker, foul smelling smoke, and momentarily blinding Sam. Nevertheless, he didn’t wait around for Sam to recover. Covering his face against the smoke, he bolted out of the room, almost tripping over Raven’s cat in his haste to leave the school.

  Chapter five

  “What do you mean it broke?!” Chariot demanded, her incredulous stare burning into Max, making him feel about three inches tall. “Did you at least pay the hag?”

  “With what?” Max said angrily. “I told you I didn’t have three greens! That thing was defective; it was going to break anyway. She conned us.”

  “Good luck telling that to a hag!” Chariot shouted, drawing the attention of a couple of students passing by. Raven’s cat was sat between them, watching them both with yellow, judging eyes. She had stayed with Max until now, having travelled home with him to make sure he was safe. Max guessed it was the least Raven could have done, after abandoning him. “She won’t care that it was broken. All she wanted was to be paid. And we made a deal. If we don’t follow up, she’ll hex us both!”

  “It’s your stupid fault for paying her!” Max yelled back. “And letting her use that necklace as collateral. It doesn’t look that special, anyway.”

  “Ugh!” Chariot looked as though she was going to hit him. But she composed herself. “I guess I have no choice,” she said through clenched teeth. “But just you wait. I’ll make you pay me back for this.” And she stormed off, doing a very good impression of Scarlet at her angriest.

  Max knew very well he hadn’t heard the last from her. He guessed he kind of deserved it. Still…

  He turned, still thinking of how he was going to make it up to Chariot, and walked right into Mr. Grimm. Of course, he hadn’t forgotten about what had happened the previous afternoon, and was anticipating the consequences. The only reason he had come into school that morning was because his grandmother hadn’t fallen for the fake measles spell he had put on himself. “Another day’s detention?” he guessed.

  He guessed wrong. He spent the next week staying after school, cleaning up the dining hall without the aid of magic. At least this time, Raven shared in the punishment. Every time he saw Sam, he was afraid something terrible would happen. What if Sam was the killer? But he kept eerily quiet on the matter, as though he knew just as well as Max did, that bringing it up would cause more trouble than it was worth. Max couldn’t do anything without evidence, and he didn’t even know who the body belonged to. Maybe, just maybe, Rob was a much better prankster than Max had thought.

  This wishful thinking faded half way into the third week of term. Rumours began to spread that a boy in the year above Max had gone missing. He hadn’t been seen since the first day of school after failing to return home that afternoon. Wizards could be seen scouring the island for any sign of him, and questioning people in relation to the case.

  “He probably ran away,” Scarlet said one morning, as she, Max and their grandmother made their way to the market to buy food. “Dib was always a weird one. He was always carrying around bottles of love potion, trying to pour it into girl’s food. He probably got turned down one too many times and ran away in shame. I’m surprised his family stopped obsessing over their involvement with all that mortal rubbish for long enough to care about his whereabouts, really.” Whether all she said about him was true or not, she received a stern telling off from their grandmother. Max usually would have found this amusing, but he couldn’t help thinking this was a horrible coincidence.

  “Did Sam ever catch him?” Max asked hesitantly.

  “A number of times,” Scarlet said with a shrug. “He just thought Dib was insulting his food, though.” She marched off towards a stall with cloves of garlic and roots of ginger strung up around the beams, and began plucking potatoes and carrots from the large barrels in front of it. Their grandmother had gone over to the other side of the market to buy fish and meat, leaving Max to get the eggs and milk.

  The market was bustling this morning, and he noticed there were a few wizards among the shoppers. He passed a stall cluttered with shimmering trinkets of glass and metals, which was playing a tinny, music box version of a nursery rhyme. The sound mingled eerily with the animated chatter of conversation and rustling of clothes. A stall to the left of the trinket stall sold everything from bags of powder, rainbows of precious gemstones and mirrors displaying views of unreachable universes, to heavy wooden chests with intricate inscriptions. Second hand stalls were littered with rusty cauldrons and piles of ancient, crumbling books, and clothes stalls were draped with cloaks, robes, dresses and gowns, with leather boots, corsets and bags arranged neatly below. Further down the market, his nose was greeted with the conflicting scents of lavender and cinnamon among many stranger, harder to identify herbs and flowers, strung decoratively around a stall painted pink. Stacked below was a pyramid of enchanted candles, emitting warm and welcoming light in the cold, hazy air. Here, he stopped. Chariot was standing in front of the stall, staring more in confusion than in interest. Max saw that she was no longer wearing her firefly necklace. Before he had a chance to feel guilty about this, she turned and looked at him, a slight frown on her face.

  Max so badly wanted to ask if she was lost.

  “This was where that hag’s stall was,” Chariot commented, sounding slightly uncertain. “Do you know what happened to it?”

  Max shrugged, looking at the shiny, sickly pink wood, and sickly sweet smelling flowers. He preferred the shabby, shady look of the stall before. The woman sat behind it now was doll-like and beautiful, the opposite of the hag, yet she had a mildly creepy air about her. Max didn’t feel li
ke asking her what had happened to the stall’s previous owner. “I was told on the day that stall opened,” he said, remembering what Gilda had said. “It probably wouldn’t last long.” He was about to say that he wasn’t surprised, after what had happened to the camera, but he decided against it.

  “What were you doing with that picture taking device?” Chariot asked, so suddenly that Max was certain she had read his mind. “Why did you only need it for one day?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me,” Max said gloomily.

  “Try me,” Chariot challenged, stepping in his way as he tried to make his way to the dairy stall.

  Max studied her face for a moment. She looked serious. “Alright,” he said sceptically. “I needed it to get evidence.”

  “Evidence?” Chariot repeated, frowning. The doll-like woman behind the stall had leaned in slightly to listen.

  “Oi, Max!” Scarlet’s voice interrupted rudely. “Are you going to make yourself useful or not?”

  Max looked at Chariot for a moment, then his sister. He found himself wondering whether the pixie really would believe him, and whether it would benefit him in any way to tell her what he saw. He had already decided to act like Rob and try pushing it to the back of his mind. But he was curious. “No,” he said dismissively, then beckoned Chariot to follow him.

  This time Raven answered the door to the Gingerbread house, wearing knitted blue pyjamas emblazoned with little yellow rabbits; they were a little too small for him. His hat was nowhere to be seen, and his hair fell in a messy mop on his head. He had clearly just woken up.

  Chariot eyed his pyjamas with mild amusement. “Wow, those are hideous,” she remarked, not particularly bothered about making a good first impression.

  “If you must know,” Raven said, feigning offense. “These are very important to me.”

  “Sure…” Chariot muttered, a sarcastic undertone entering her voice.

  “Max, who’s the fairy?”

  “Pixie!” Chariot corrected him firmly.

  Shrugging to indicate he didn’t really care, Raven stepped aside to let them in. “We’re open today,” he said as he led the way to the room of marshmellow chairs. “Are you two here to help out?”

  “I needed somewhere private to tell her about…that,” Max admitted, watching Hanson and Areta attempting to catch Bruno, who had decided he didn’t want to spend the day in his cage. They managed to corner him by a chocolate fountain, but, at the last moment, he chose to hop through it, splashing them both and trailing molten chocolate behind him as he leapt into the next room. Letting out a simultaneous cry of anguish, the twins raced after him. Max tried not to laugh. “Too many ears in the market.”

  Raven gave Chariot a doubtful look, as though he knew Max was wasting his time dragging the subject up again, but he didn’t stop him. He vanished half way into the story, returning shortly after wearing dungarees that matched his sibling’s. His cat kept herself out of the way, eyeing Bruno with apparent shame as Hanson and Areta dragged him out of the museum area. She sat still in an attempt to show him how to behave.

  “So, you think Dib is dead, Sam killed him and decided the kitchen was a good place to hide his body?” Chariot asked as Max finished his story. The Gingerbread house was about to open, and Max could hear muffled voices outside. “I won’t say it isn’t intriguing, but I don’t buy it. I got you that damn device because I thought you were going to use it in a prank…Now I’m just disappointed.” She sighed. “And now I’ll never see my fireflies again.”

  “Why was that necklace so important?” Max asked. He wasn’t surprised that she didn’t believe him, but he couldn’t say he wasn’t disappointed.

  “I’m not going to sit here and swap sob stories,” Chariot said shortly. A long pause fell between them as people began filing into the museum. Then, Chariot continued loudly. “You know what I don’t understand,” she said. “If Dib really was murdered by Sam, how are you not dead?” Max had to shush her, as a number of people stopped to look at them. Evidently, despite insisting that she didn’t believe him, Chariot wasn’t ready to drop the subject quite yet. “I mean, wouldn’t he want to silence you? You were snooping around where the body had been a day before. If I was him, I’d have got you there and then.”

  “The camera exploded in his face,” Max said quietly, trying to shush her again. “I ran while he was distracted.”

  “Then, why didn’t he get you later?” Chariot demanded.

  “How should I know?” Max asked.

  “Hmm…” Chariot said thoughtfully.

  “I know you don’t believe me, so you don’t have to pretend to humour me,” Max said bitterly.

  “Oh, I wasn’t-” Chariot started.

  A voice above them interrupted. “Oh, hello Max.” Gilda stood there, wearing a checkered blue dress over what must have been at least three petticoats. She smiled brightly at the two of them. “Touring the museum?”

  “Yes,” Max lied disinterestedly.

  “No, actually,” Chariot said. “We were discussing Dib. You know. The creep who went missing? Didn’t I see him harassing you on the first day of school with some dumb potion?”

  Gilda looked taken a back, but Max shot Chariot a look of disapproval.

  “Gilda, right?” Chariot went on sweetly. “Care to join us.”

  *

  Somehow, Max found himself explaining the whole ordeal to Gilda, but at least she seemed much more eager to believe him than Chariot.

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ve been following it too. Dib isn’t the only one who’s disappeared. I saw a lot of wizards at the market yesterday, and I heard the hag who owned that new stall went missing…I heard that from my mum, since she’s in charge of that stall now.”

  “That was your mother?” Max blurted out before he could stop himself. Well, it kind of made sense. They were both almost creepily sweet. He thought about this new information for a moment. He had never expected Gilda to be interested in this kind of thing. She had always seemed so shy and quiet.

  The three of them had been shooed off to Raven’s bedroom half an hour earlier. Raven’s father had emerged from his study upon remembering he was supposed to be working that day, and asked why there was a small meeting going on in the marshmellow room. They had contemplated helping themselves to the fresh plate of ginger bread biscuits Raven had left on his desk.

  Chariot, who had been sat in the corner, feeding Bruno a biscuit through the bars of his cage, turned abruptly. “The hag?” she repeated, her interest sparked. “What hap-“

  At that moment, a loud explosion erupted from the corridor outside, and a thick smoke began seeping through the hole in the wall. Gilda jumped to her feet, her hand clutched nervously around a small bag attached to her necklace. “Wh-what…?” she stammered.

  As the smoke reached their nostrils, they recoiled in disgust, and as they stepped out into the corridor, and down the stairs, they noticed people hurrying for the exit, scrambling over each other in an attempt to escape the smell. Amongst the running crowd, Max caught a glimpse of a devilish tail, and knew instantly that Rob Goblin was behind this.

  “That’s the day wasted,” Raven said calmly as his friends approached him, throwing open the nearest candy cane panelled window. “Max. You do know you’re supposed to behave while I’m working, right?”

  “It wasn’t me!” Max insisted. Evidently, Raven assumed he had been seeking revenge for the spiders. Hanson and Areta hurried past him, up the stairs, no doubt to rescue poor Bruno from the fumes.

  “We should get out of here,” Chariot suggested, looking as though she was going to throw up. It seemed neither her, nor Gilda were in any rush to defend Max. Everyone murmured their disgruntled agreement and began to follow the crowd outside. Max tried to get a glimpse of Rob, through the throng of angry people, all clambering for someone to blame. Right now, Raven and hi
s father were at the top of their list, and Raven’s father was doing everything he could to pacify them. To no avail.

  Shortly after he had finally got the loudest of the mob to lower their tone, Hanson and Areta came running out of the building. Something was wrong. Areta was screaming something; something difficult to understand. Her voice was heavily muffled, as though her face was buried in something, and heaving sobs punctuated her words.

  “…Dead!” was all Max heard, as he turned with the others to face the distressed children.

  In Areta’s arms was something large, with long white and brown fur. A cold chill ran down Max’s spine as he realized it was Bruno. The rabbit was not moving.

  Chapter six

  Max was no longer welcome at the Gingerbread House. Despite Chariot and Gilda’s insistence that he hadn’t been responsible for the prank that killed Bruno, Raven remained unconvinced. The explosion hadn’t come from the bedroom, but there was nothing to say he hadn’t planted something before going up there. And even Chariot and Gilda had to admit they hadn’t seen Rob, and that Max hadn’t been within their sight the entire time they were there. Max felt the entire situation was unfair. Bruno was an old rabbit anyway; there was no guarantee that the prank had actually killed him. No one else had keeled over from the smell.

  “He looked fine when I was with him,” Chariot said unhelpfully as Max expressed this complaint to her.

  “Thanks,” he grumbled.

  “I’m sure Raven won’t stay mad at you forever,” Gilda said, gently prodding the mouse on the table in front of her. It flopped over lazily as though demanding to be left alone. They were presently practicing spells and potions that supposedly cured blindness. Gilda had expressed great discomfort with the fact that they were testing the spells on mice. “I think I’m going to take this little guy home,” she decided, feeding the mouse a pumpkin seed. “Are you really going to use the spells on yours?”

  “They don’t seem to mind,” Chariot said, picking up her mouse and watching as it yawned and fell asleep. “But, whatever. Just don’t let Mr. Grimm see you.”