‘He said he’d be back quickly,’ Chloe stated to her brother. ‘Where is he?’
‘Got held up, I suppose.’
‘By what?’
Neither of them wanted to guess.
In the middle of the night, Chloe was wakened by a sound. She leapt to her feet and shone the torch. There, trapped in its beam was a bat, hanging from a nearby rafter. There was a pile of rags near it which Chloe did not recall having seen before. However, to her astonishment the bat seemed to speak to her in clear English.
‘There’s a map, you know.’
‘What?’ whispered Chloe, anxious not to wake Alex and scare him half to death with talking bats. ‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a map of this place. It’ll have whatever it is you’re looking for. If you give me your treasure map I’ll tell you where it is.’
Chloe was puzzled.
‘I haven’t got a treasure map.’
‘Yes you have, in your pocket. I seen you take it out. You’re always looking at it.’
Chloe put her hand into her jeans pocket and found her list of favourite books. The sleepiness left her and her head began to clear. She realised that with a map there was a chance of discovering a place of watches. It was the best chance they had of finding Mr Grantham’s watch. And here was a creature who knew where there was a map of Attica.
‘Oh – oh, this map?’
‘We could swop. I’m always – I mean, my master is always – trading things for things. It’s how we get what we want. You want to find something. I can tell. And I want … well, never mind what I want. You haven’t got any, I can see. But you might know where other things are which can be swopped for the things that I – no, that my master – wants.’
‘I’m sure we could trade,’ said Chloe, who had been taught by an elderly aunt how to drive a bargain. ‘You tell me where the map is, and I’ll give you my map.’
The bat hummed to itself for a while, then spoke again.
‘I tell you what, lady. You give me your map and if it’s treasure, then I’ll tell you where my chart is.’
‘Chart?’
‘Chart, map, it doesn’t matter what you call it. You need charts to cross the seas. You need maps to cross the deserts. Chart-cum-map is what you want.’
‘Seas and deserts? Is the attic really that big?’ Chloe’s heart sank for a moment.
‘Really, really. Big and dreary!’
However, once she had absorbed the information – considered it was probably correct, for why would the bat lie? – Chloe remained firm. ‘My list – my map – only when you tell me where to find yours.’
The bat hummed louder now, in an annoyed fashion, but Chloe was not afraid. When adversity calls, people either crumple or they find courage within themselves to rise above it. Chloe was definitely of the latter kind. Hope surged within her soul and filled her every vein and muscle. She told herself that to fall on the floor and cry was nothing short of pathetic. To stand up and look adversity in the eye, show it you were not made of clay, was the only way to survive.
‘Listen, bat, or whatever you are, you have the choice. Tell me where to find the chart–map or get lost. And don’t think of lying to me. I’ll know whether you’re telling the truth or not. My grandmother was a witch. She passed on some of her skills to me.’
‘A witch?’ chirped the bat in a higher tone. ‘A proper witch?’
‘As proper as you’ll ever meet,’ fibbed Chloe.
There followed a short period in which the bat seemed to have a conversation with itself in low inaudible tones. Alex flopped on to his back and started snoring. Chloe carefully turned him on to his side again so the air stopped whistling out of his nose and mouth. Finally the bat called to her again and told her it was a deal.
‘The map,’ it said, ‘is to be found beyond the Jagged Mountain, in a writing bureau of lacquered gold of a most exquisite oriental design. However, the bureau is in the hands of ancient ink imps,’ added the bat with a sinister note entering its voice. ‘These imps, who live in the ink wells stored in the writing bureaux, are naturally very antagonistic towards humans. They have made weapons of pens with sharp brass nibs. The inks the imps come from were made in China a thousand years ago by sorcerers who dealt in magical texts. They are inks of many colours. The clerks of those old enchanters used them to draw maps of secret regions such as Xanadu, to sketch pictures of individual demons and devils, and to record their recipes of spells in characters unknown outside the books of the damned.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ laughed Chloe softly. ‘Ink imps?’
‘Ink imps, talking bats, scoff all you want, lady – just remember I told you they’re there. In this place—’
‘I call it Attica.’
‘Good name, lady. Well, let me warn you that in deepest Attica effigies have come to life. Those who were abused in the other world, where you come from, are naturally very mean and aggressive towards humans. Dolls, Guy Fawkes effigies, shop dummies, tatterdemalions, they’ll attack you if they get the chance. If you don’t want to believe me, I don’t care.’
‘Are you the one who wrote “Katerfelto” in the dust?’
‘Might have been,’ said the bat. ‘Could have been.’
‘What does it mean?’
The bat said, ‘It’s a name.’
‘Whose name?’
‘Katerfelto’s, of course. Ah, you want to know who he is? Katerfelto is the monster who lives on the Jagged Mountain. He’s made of bundles of shadows, tangled together like thick coarse hair. He can be as big and menacing as a thundercloud, or as small as a scuttling spider. If you face him he can do nothing but slink around and make menacing shapes, but if you run from him he’ll chase you down and overcome you with a darkness as thick as the suffocating quicksand of a swamp. If he catches you and enfolds you with his darkness, you will never again see the light.’
Chloe shuddered. ‘He sounds terrible.’
‘He is terrible. Katerfelto is the King of Gloom, the Prince of Terror. If you fail to meet his eye you will choke on your own fright. You will run until you fall gasping on to the boards and there you will shake yourself to death. But since he is made of nothing but darkness and fear, he is therefore hollow. Those who stand in his path and refuse to be intimidated will not be daunted. However, it’s not an easy thing to do, to look terror in the face, so don’t think it is. No matter how empty his form really is, he appears grotesque and formidable, ready to swallow all those who oppose him. Such a cold and evil presence you have never experienced before in your life. Not at all easy to ignore or face up to with courage.’
‘How did he come to be?’
‘He was formed from the basest materials of the human emotions known as hate and arrogance, mixed with love – a love of power, those dregs of feelings from which wars spring. This ugly concoction, drawn from the weapons soaked in such emotions, emerged and became Katerfelto.
‘Now,’ said the bat sounding weary, ‘where is my map?’
Chloe said, ‘A deal is a deal.’
‘Just put the map on the boards.’
She did as she was asked and the bat then gave her instructions on how to get to the place of the golden bureau.
‘… and now go back to sleep.’
Chloe closed her eyes and after a while feigned sleep. A little later she was alarmed to see a pile of clothes, topped by a wide-brimmed hat, sliding towards her. It stopped when it reached the piece of paper. A thin, white, bony arm shot out of the heap of rags and snatched the list, drawing it into the pile. Then the heap slid back again into the deep dark shadows at the edge of the village, under some low rafters. There was a muttering and a mumbling, as if the bat were talking to itself again, then finally a shriek which woke up her brother Alex, who sat bolt upright.
‘What is it?’ cried Alex. ‘Is that a ghost?’
‘It’s all right,’ replied Chloe, patting his back. ‘It’s only that pile of rags over there. The one with that funny mask on
top.’
‘Pile of rags?’ Alex’s eyes were wide and round. ‘What pile of rags?’
The bat fluttered in the rafters.
‘You – lady – you – cheated.’
‘No,’ replied Chloe calmly.
‘Yes, you cheated. This is no map.’
‘Oh yes it is. It’s a map to knowledge. It’s a map to other worlds, the worlds of fiction. It’s a map to great literature.’
‘Great literature?’ scoffed the bat. ‘Flat Stanley?’
‘Flat Stanley is highly original. It’s for younger readers than me, of course, but I loved it when I was little. I couldn’t have written it – could you?’
‘I couldn’t write a shopping list, but that doesn’t make this a map.’
‘It’s all I have.’
‘You’ll regret this, lady.’
The heap slid away into the darkness and the bat followed shortly afterwards.
‘Lady?’ repeated Alex. ‘What lady?’
‘It meant me,’ said Chloe. She hugged her knees. ‘And I’ve got some good news. I know where there’s a map of Attica.’
Alex yawned and shook his head. ‘Where?’
‘Over there,’ she replied vaguely, unwilling to tell her younger brother that there might be live and hostile ink imps waiting for them. Alex had an engineer’s brain and engineers were not the most imaginative of people. At least, they were good inventors, but not good at believing in fantastical creatures. ‘I’ll show you in the morning.’
‘Oh, all right, sis.’ He yawned again and lay down. ‘Did – did that bat really talk?’
But Chloe found she was too tired to answer and fell asleep.
The following morning a shaft of golden light struck Chloe in the face and she woke feeling dreadfully thirsty. Alex was already up and eating some of their stores. He offered her the bottle of water. She drank from it gratefully and then joined her brother at breakfast. They munched away, staring into the distance. There were slanted pillars of light all around them today, marching off like pylons into unknown regions. Obviously it was a very bright day in the outside world. Chinks and cracks in the roof also sent down smaller blade-like beams of light. It was as if Attica were a stage and the lighting manager had just arrived and turned on all the switches.
Chloe’s eyes searched the area for signs of the bat and the heap of clothes, but they were both gone. After the encounter last night she was now ready to accept that they were in some strange world, rather than in the rogue attic of an ordinary warehouse or palace. She didn’t know whether Alex would accept what she believed to be true, but she knew that it was best to let him come to his own conclusions in his own good time.
‘Makes you feel a bit better,’ she said, ‘when it’s sunny.’
‘Yup,’ agreed her brother. ‘It do.’
However, the Jagged Mountain (as the bat had called it) remained very much shrouded in darkness. Jordy was still nowhere to be seen. Chloe was worried about him but she knew him to be a resourceful person – annoying when it came to books, but quite resolute and tough – and she knew he was no wimp. However, she and Alex could not wait around for ever and if Jordy didn’t return before noon, she thought perhaps they ought to follow him.
Jordy did not return, despite anxious prayers from Chloe.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose we’d better go and look for him.’
‘What about Katerfelto?’ asked Alex, looking nervously at the distant mountain. ‘What shall we do about him?’
‘If we run into him, we’ll have to face up to him.’
Alex’s Indian cousins, some being Hindus, had spoken to him about Shiva, the Moon-god of the mountains. There was some thought in Alex’s head that perhaps this great god would protect them.
‘All right,’ he said to his sister. ‘If you can face him, so can I.’
The pair prepared for the journey. Chloe found another bag, a backpack through the straps of which she slipped her arms. It was much easier to carry that way and it held both the torches as well as food and water. Thus by noon they were ready to leave. One more quick glance around the floor to see that they had all the photos which had fallen out of the album, then they were off towards the first of the foothills.
Instead of heading towards a hill of footstools, as Jordy had done, Alex and Chloe decided to try a different route.
CHAPTER 6
Pursued by Mad Mannequins
A strange light was coming from the valley ahead of them. There was one thick sunbeam bearing down from a skylight in the roof which struck the centre of the Vale of Mirrors. But this was reflected back and forth over a thousand thousand times. It went from dazzling brilliance in the first mirror, to a silvery-dull echo of a gleam in the last. All the shades of light between these two extremes were to be found in the valley.
‘It’s a very bright scene,’ mused Alex. ‘I wonder how much candle-power is in there?’
Chloe said, ‘What candles?’
‘Candle-power is a measure of luminosity,’ replied Alex in a haughty tone, ‘whatever the light source is. Didn’t you know that?’
‘No, and you knew I didn’t, which was why you mentioned it.’
Alex smiled. ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t do that, sis. You know me …’
They entered the Vale of Mirrors, walking between two giant antique looking-glasses with ornate gilt frames. Even as they stepped into the gap that separated these two guardians of the valley Chloe realised this was no ordinary clutter of mirrors, which were there in a hundred varieties. Someone had collected these and brought them all to this place.
She said wondrously, ‘Look how many …’
There were mirrors from dressing-tables with wooden frames; from wardrobes; from retail clothes shops. There were bevelled mirrors with silver chains; spherical mirrors from ballrooms; hand mirrors, bathroom mirrors; fairground mirrors. There were huge mirrors from stately homes; tiny mirrors from musical boxes; long, lean mirrors, short, fat mirrors, mirrors with the quicksilver peeling away. There were mirrors from Turkey, from Samarkand, from Chad, from Fiji, from New England, Venice and Shanghai. There was every mirror, every looking-glass, from all the kingdoms and republics that the world has ever known. They stood, lay, were stacked, were scattered, were shattered, were placed in every position thinkable. There were mirror pools and mirror doors and mirror portholes. You could drown in mirrors, you could float in mirrors, you could lose your soul in their reflective surfaces, you could go stark – staring – mad.
The two giant mirrors which were the pillars of the valley entrance seemed to lock Chloe in a dual embrace. The trouble was, she hesitated and stared into the one on the right, and saw Chloes curving away into infinity. It made her dizzy to see millions of herself on both sides, sweeping off into a netherland of space, growing imperceptibly smaller until she disappeared. She turned away but the one on the left was even worse, for she was upside-down and arcing away on her head into a distant greyish otherworld.
She tore her eyes away, saying to Alex behind her, ‘Don’t look!’
But of course, he did.
Once they had entered the vale it was even worse. She was everywhere. Alex was everywhere. When they moved, a hundred other Chloes and Alexes moved, all in different directions. Some of these copies were fairground-mirror images and they warped and distorted the originals. They mocked the children with their willowy forms, or their fat, toadish, lumpy shapes.
Once out of the fairground cluster it was even worse, for at least she knew the right from the wrong Chloe in those undulating surfaces. In the clear mirrors she lost count of the times she bumped into herself, walking straight into a reflective surface and striking her face. It was utterly confusing to have so many altered images all moving at the same time, so she began to wonder which was the real Chloe and which were the fakes.
‘This is horrible,’ she said to Alex. ‘We have to get out of here.’
She turned to find Alex staring into a mirror which was not reflecting h
is form, but that of their living-room, back at the house. In this large mirror Dipa and Ben could be seen walking about, mouthing the names of the children, as if seeking them. When Alex let out a cry of anguish his parents looked out of the mirror at him, clearly not seeing him, but as if they had heard his yell and wondered where it came from.
‘Don’t stare at it,’ ordered Chloe. ‘It’s lying. Don’t let it fool you, Alex. There’s no one behind it.’
Alex tore himself away, just as Chloe confronted a looking-glass in which there was a scene of herself as a little girl picking daisies on a hillside. She remembered the picnic, which had been several years ago. Then coming up behind her was her father – her real father, not Ben – who was laughing and waving from a patch of bright-red poppies. There was her father, in the full flush of life, before he had died of his heart attack. His eyes were smiling, his skin was glowing in the sun and the wind, his hair flicking back and forth. His arms were stretched out to scoop her up, to cuddle her close to him.
‘Daddy?’ she yelled. ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’
Chloe became hysterical with a mixture of misery and joy. She ran towards the mirror, clawed to get inside its duplicitous surface, to touch its deceptive reflections. She felt if she tried hard enough she could enter the silver pool and join her father. Then she felt Alex pulling her jersey, yanking her back. He was in tears, calling for her to stop.
‘You told me not to look,’ he accused her, shaking her roughly. ‘Don’t you look either.’
And so they did their best, even though aircraft zoomed at them firing cannons and shooting rockets. Even though ships lurched out of fog banks and bore down on them with wicked-looking bows. Knights charged out of misty marshlands, lances pointing at their breasts. Eagles flew, talons hooked and beaks glinting, straight at their faces. Monsters stalked them on every side: monsters bearing shapes of which they had never dreamed, with open slavering jaws and hands with finger-claws as long and spindly as the legs of a crayfish. There were hideous mouths full of needle teeth. Spooks and ghouls came, rising from cruddy graveyard earth. Frightening corpses with the rotten flesh dripping from their bones. The mirrors tried every trick they knew to bend the children’s minds to their will.
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