Attica

by Kilworth, Garry

  ‘Don’t worry, Alex,’ said Chloe, gripping her younger brother’s hand and pulling him along with her, ‘we’ll get out safe.’

  ‘Someone’s watching us,’ he replied, looking round. ‘I know they are. Someone’s here.’

  ‘No, you’re imagining it – it’s just us – and reflections of us.’

  Alex was convinced there was someone there. Someone hiding at the backs of the mirrors, following them.

  The way through was bewildering, being a path of mirror tiles on the ground and walls of mirrors for their avenues. They did not know whether they were going out or coming in, or walking in circles, or running mad. Several times they came across Atticans who looked as if they had been in the Vale of Mirrors for years. The faces of these distressed souls were locked in madness. Clearly their reason had flown long ago, for they simply wandered in and out of mirrored lanes and alleys, stumbling over their feet, seemingly hardly aware of where they were or what they did.

  And of course these corridors of mirrors on either side of them continued to produce a multitude of images that sent both children spinning away in their minds, into a swirling whirlpool of Chloes and Alexes on a descent into the same kind of insanity which bedevilled other unwilling lost occupants of the Vale of Mirrors.

  ‘My head’s spinning,’ said Alex. ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘So do I. You have to fight it.’

  Finally Chloe looked up and found salvation.

  ‘Alex,’ she said. ‘Look up there!’

  Alex followed her gaze but could only see, high above them, a single rafter running the length of the heavens.

  ‘What of it?’ he said.

  ‘Keep your eyes on that rafter, Alex, and just follow it. Don’t worry if you bump into a mirror, don’t look at it, just feel your way round it. So long as we stare at that rafter we won’t be looking at reflections of ourselves. Walk carefully and slowly, so you don’t hurt yourself. When you’re aware of an obstacle in front of you, slide round it, but keep going in the direction of the rafter. Eventually it must lead us to the edge of the valley.’

  This they did and blessedly found themselves out of the Vale of Mirrors and at the foot of Typewriter Hill.

  Chloe felt immense relief wash through her.

  ‘We’re out. That was horrible, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It wasn’t the best time I’ve had. Where are we now?’ Alex looked around him. ‘Oh, this should make you happy. Word machines.’

  A great jumble of typewriters faced them. They were mostly old, heavy-looking instruments, but a few were portables. The latter were in light cases and had smarter-looking keys than the standard desk typewriters. Some machines had pages stuck under the platen roller, with their typewritten words still legible. Chloe read one or two of them.

  Dear Mr Glubb,

  You will note by the enclosed that your bank statement shows a deficit of seventeen pounds. We would greatly appreciate

  Boring!

  Hi Roger,

  Bet you didn’t expect to hear from me again! Well, here I am. Are you still going out with Jill, because I have no commitments at the moment. I know we had some bad

  Intriguing, but the letter stopped after the word bad.

  The next sheet Chloe read was the most fascinating of all. Like the two letter writers, the typist had simply stopped typing. The page remained in the machine and, like the others, the machine must have been put up in the loft without anyone having the interest to bother to remove the piece of typing paper. It seemed to be the start of a story.

  Chapter One

  The night sky was full of stars. Suddenly one dropped, then another, and then two, three, five more, until stars were showering on the Earth, falling, falling like glittering hail (rain?). Walter Smelton (Smileton? Smuggleton?) looked up and a falling star struck him blind in his right (left?) eye

  ‘Now that might have been a best seller,’ murmured Chloe. ‘I wonder what happened to the writer? Maybe she was attacked by a rival, just as she was about to astound the literary world.’

  ‘How’d you know it was a she?’ grumbled Alex. ‘Could’ve been a bloke.’

  ‘Blokes aren’t sensitive enough to write about falling stars,’ replied Chloe. ‘You have to be a woman to appreciate beauty.’

  ‘Load of tosh if you ask me.’

  ‘I rest my case,’ she said.

  The pair of them began to climb the typewriters. It was not as easy as it had looked from the base of the hill. There were footholds and handgrips, sure, but there were also hollows which grabbed at their feet, clinging on to them with keys like fingers. Their bare hands were scratched and cut by the rough edges of the metal frames. Their clothes snagged on hooks. While the typewriters were locked fairly tightly together there was the odd landslip and when it did occur it was quite dangerous. If one of those heavy instruments had struck either Chloe or her brother it would have bowled them off their feet and sent them hurtling down to the ground below.

  ‘Are we getting there?’ gasped Alex, clawing at the typewriters, heaving himself upwards. ‘It’s getting steeper.’

  Chloe turned her attention back to the hill. They were almost at the top now. She looked up, expecting to see the roof closer to them, but it was still miles above their heads.

  Chloe offered Alex a drink of water, which he took gratefully.

  She then had a drink herself.

  Alex grinned.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘You don’t wipe the bottle any more. Whenever Jordy or me took a drink before, you used to make a face and wipe the bottle before you drank from it yourself.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, sighing, ‘that was when I was civilised.’

  ‘What are you now? A savage?’

  ‘Wild, like the animals,’ she said.

  ‘Wild and trapped, that’s what we are. Animals in a zoo.’

  Chloe agreed. ‘Yes, and now we’ve got to get out.’

  She began to descend the far side of Typewriter Hill, with Alex following her. It was more difficult going down than it had been going up. Any climber could have told her that would happen. It was all in the knees. The knees suffered on a descent. And that was usually when the climber was most fatigued, the muscles giving out, the legs wobbling.

  However, they made it to the bottom and rested again.

  Studying the great mountain ahead of them, Chloe was aware that there was still no sign of Jordy. Jordy had been gone now for quite a while. She knew that, while he was not the most sensitive boy in the world, he would not deliberately cause her anxiety. Wherever he was she was certain he would be trying to get back to her and Alex, knowing they would be getting frantic.

  ‘I think I need a bit of a sleep now,’ said her younger brother.

  ‘Good idea,’ replied Chloe, intending to stay wide awake. ‘We need to get our strength back.’

  Alex curled up on the bare boards and was soon asleep.

  Chloe remained sitting upright, but soon her eyelids began to feel very heavy. Alex’s steady breathing did nothing to help her stay awake. Soon she too was slumbering peacefully at the foot of Typewriter Hill.

  Alex woke to find Chloe slumped over and snoring lightly. He smiled grimly, intending to tell her when she woke that she too made noises while she was asleep. But he realised his sister must have been quite tired to sleep so soundly, so he tip-toed away from her, intending to explore the surrounding area.

  He soon found some cardboard boxes which looked worth investigating. Alex went to them and studied them for a while. He was not foolhardy enough to open them immediately. He had been in Attica long enough now to know that some unpleasant surprises were to be had for those who did not approach unopened boxes cautiously. However, after going around them he found the words Camping Equipment scrawled in permanent ink on the side of one of the boxes.

  What a find! he thought to himself excitedly. They could use camping equipment all right.

  Still he opened the first box with the thought in mind th
at a monster might leap out at him. He was ready to run at the first sign of danger. But he was pleased when nothing of the kind occurred. In fact, to his great delight the box was full of maps with a few compasses. Compasses! He took three. Now they could navigate their direction. No more looking up for rafters to guide them through rotten vales of mirrors. Now they would know north, south, east and west, and all the little points between.

  The maps weren’t much good. They were of places like the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, Scotland and Wales.

  The next box, a much larger one, had in it three sleeping bags and a grubby tent. He didn’t see a lot of use for tents. Sure, when it rained outside it dripped through the roof in places, but not badly enough to warrant the fag of erecting tents everywhere they went. The sleeping bags might be useful but they would have to carry them. There was a hiker’s backpack in the same box, which Alex was happy to find and claim for his own.

  The third and last one contained odds and ends. There was a pair of binoculars, brass ones, probably once belonging to a naval man. He kept those. There was a Swiss Army knife with lots of gadgets, such as a bottle opener, a pair of scissors and a tiny saw. He kept that also, hooking it to an old Boy Scout’s belt which he looped around his waist. Finally, there was a small cooking stove with a solid fuel canister attached and a box of long-stemmed matches, the sort which go with such a stove.

  ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘One cup of tea, coming up.’ He paused before adding ruefully, ‘If only we had some teabags.’

  When he straightened up, with all his new equipment packed away in his new backpack, he found himself curiously surrounded.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ he said aloud. ‘I didn’t see them.’

  Alex was referring to a group of mannequins – shop dummies – which were standing in different poses around him.

  ‘Did you do that, Clo?’ he called, laughing. ‘Did you put these here while I was packing?’

  No answer.

  ‘Clo?’

  One of the mannequins moved in a jerky fashion towards Alex. Startled, Alex ran forward and pushed it over. It fell to the floor, kicking and jerking its arms. It made no sound, for indeed it had no mouth. It was probably also blind, for it had no eyes either. It was a blank dummy without clothes: a nasty pale pink colour. (There were others of darker hue and some of pure white alabaster.) This one’s joints were on swivels and when it fell to the boards it bounced and knocked its head the wrong way round.

  Before he could gather his senses the other mannequins grabbed at Alex and held him fast in their stiff hands.

  ‘Hey!’ he cried, frightened out of his wits. ‘Let me go.’

  They ignored him. Their grim countenances stared blankly at him as if they could sense rather than see him. Their heads moved from side to side in a jerky fashion. Their arms and legs worked in the same way. But they held on to him with surprising strength. One of them helped the fallen comrade to its feet, then the mannequins marched their prisoner away, into the shadows beyond the place where Alex had found the boxes.

  When Alex recovered his composure he found himself tied to one of those sturdy pillars which held up the roof. Around him were shoe boxes stacked neatly into walls and racks of clothes that acted as screens between what appeared to be private areas where the mannequins lived.

  They came out of their dwellings to see the captured castaway: most were whole but there were some with missing limbs or, even more bizarre, missing heads. All of them, without exception, were as bald as billiard balls. They kept fingering Alex’s mop of thick black hair, running their cold hard fingers through the curls.

  ‘You leave me alone,’ he cried. ‘You’ll be sorry.’

  They stared at him silently. Here was one of those who had kept them as slaves when they had been shop dummies. In those far-off days they had been forced to wear clothes they detested and made to stand in windows while they were ogled and gawped at by humans. Now when they caught one of those mortals they made them suffer the same kind of humiliation. They dressed them in hideous fashion garments, designed by people with flyaway minds, and made of uncomfortable fabrics. The colours were flamboyant, the buttons, zips, hooks and eyes, next to bare flesh. They put on them shoes that were either too big, or too small. They arranged them in unlikely groups, so they looked like a bunch of badly dressed fools on an outing.

  Alex struggled wildly as they forced him into such clothes.

  ‘You – rotten – beggars!’ he yelled. ‘You wait until my sister gets here. She’ll kick your backsides for you, you – dummies.’

  He grabbed an arm and, without meaning to, wrenched it from its socket. Everyone stopped, seemingly shocked by his action. Alex stood there in a floppy hat with a ribbon and wearing a loose ankle-length frock with a price tag dangling from the collar. He was holding the lone detached arm. After a few minutes of stunned silence he offered it to the owner, who snatched it back with their other limb. There were a few awkward moments while mannequins crowded round and assisted in getting the arm back into its owner’s socket, then they started on Alex once more.

  Once he was dressed, Alex was again strapped to the support pillar in the middle of the village. The mannequins paraded round him, pointing and jeering silently. He could tell by their gestures that they were making fun of him, even though their expressions never changed and no sound came from them. There was something about their blank faces which was rather horrifying. They were in human form but did they have feelings? Alex decided that a creature without emotions was more dangerous than a creature full of hate and malice. Yet, he finally decided, if they wanted to humiliate him it was because they felt they had been mistreated themselves. Therefore they did feel.

  ‘You can laugh all you want,’ he said to them, as they walked around him, pointing at the price tags on his clothes and shaking their heads vigorously. ‘Well – actually you can’t laugh out loud, because you don’t have the equipment. But you’re laughing inside, I can tell. And I don’t care. I’ll stand here all you want for now. But you can’t keep me for ever.’

  He said the last sentence with a conviction that he did not really feel inside. They continued to mock him with their presence, though Alex noticed that every so often the mannequins froze, as a group. Quite without warning they simply stopped in their tracks, remained motionless for about five seconds, then came to life again. It was as if they could not quite throw off their previous occupation when they had stood as still as statues. Locked within them was a remnant of their old existence: in those days the only time they altered their pose was when a human did it for them.

  ‘Must be in their genes,’ muttered Alex to himself, dismissing the laws of science and reason in this otherworld. ‘Next time they do it, I’ll undo this strap and make a dash for it.’

  But it wasn’t long enough, five seconds, for him to get a head start. Especially all togged up in the clobber they’d dressed him in. They always managed to run him down. And when they did they poked him around, making his eyes water. Then they showed him a pair of barber’s scissors and pointed to his hair. They snipped the air in a taunting way with the scissors, making Alex quite aware what they intended to do.

  ‘You’ll be sorry if you do,’ he snarled at them after the third time. ‘I’ll knock your blocks off when I get help.’

  But help, it seemed, was a long way away.

  CHAPTER 7

  On the Mountain of Shadows

  Now Chloe was all alone. Alex was nowhere to be seen and her calls for him had gone unanswered. Jordy was somewhere out on or beyond the Jagged Mountain. It was as if the attic had a plan from the start, to divide the three children, to separate them, and then to deal with them in its own manner.

  ‘Alex?’ Chloe yelled, desperate for an answer. ‘Alex, where are you?’

  A mocking draught blew down from Jagged Mountain.

  Alex and Jordy: both lost somewhere. Chloe wondered whether this was retribution for her tricking the bat. The bat had thought it was
getting a map and all it got was a list of books.

  ‘Those stupid boys,’ growled Chloe, clenching her fists in frustration. ‘How do they manage to get lost?’

  Yet, even as she said the words, Chloe realised that in fact neither of them might be lost. They could have been abducted by someone. Or some thing. Still, at least she hadn’t been kidnapped. It was now up to her to find her brothers. If they were lost, she would find them. If they had been taken, she would free them.

  She decided to start from where she last saw Alex and roam outwards in ever increasing circles until she came upon a clue. That seemed the most sensible plan, though she realised it might take some time.

  ‘What is it?’ asks the bat.

  Looks like they’ve captured one of the visitors.

  ‘Which one?’

  Who knows, you’ve seen one young person, you’ve seen them all.

  ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

  Why should I do anything? They tricked me with that piece of paper they gave you. All it had on it was words. I know what a map looks like. It’s got squiggly lines and arrows and things. It shows you where to go. This isn’t a map at all.

  The board-comber waves Chloe’s book list under the nose of the bat hanging from his ear.

  ‘So, you don’t like people, but you don’t like mannequins either. They always chase you away with brooms and mops. You could help the boy escape. You know you could.’

  I’m still angry with the visitors.

  ‘It wasn’t that one who gave you the list.’

  I suppose not. It was the one with long hair.

  The board-comber crawls closer to the mannequins’ village, the chin of his ceramic Venetian carnival mask scraping on the floorboards. Alex is wilting like a flower without water. Flowers, like humans, are remembered things which the board-comber has not seen for decades. The board-comber wonders if he should feel sorry for the boy. One thing is certain, young people were good at rooting out treasure, and where there’s treasure there’s trade. The board-comber is ever desperate to increase his collection of Inuit carvings: his heart beats faster at the thought of a new one.