by J. R. Wallis
Jones closed his mouth. Even though he was desperate to know more he knew he had no way of breaking the charm on the gun.
Furiously, he started working his way round Maitland’s study, searching in drawers, pulling books from their shelves, desperate to find out more about what he’d remembered. But he found nothing.
Jones raced upstairs into Maitland’s bedroom and looked beneath the mattress of the brass bed, and then he dropped to his knees and felt around for any loose floorboards that might be concealing something beneath them. Still nothing.
Remembering that Maitland’s book had said the effect of the fruit would gradually wear off, he sat on the floor of his dead Master’s bedroom, trying to see the memory again, hoping to spot any clues about where his parents might have lived. Eventually, after watching it through twice more, he found one. As Maitland reached the end of the street in which Jones’s parents’ house stood, Jones saw a wrought-iron street sign screwed to a low wall that was about the same height as Maitland’s knees. Black letters on a white painted background read:
He found a pen and a piece of paper and wrote down this information. Then he went downstairs and let himself out into the driveway where the VW camper van was parked. Sliding back the main door, he clambered in and pulled out a pile of road atlases stashed in a locker and started looking through them until he found the one he wanted: The Postcode Atlas of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the past, he and Maitland had used postcodes to find particular places on a hunt, so he knew exactly how to find the postcode he’d seen in the memory.
NW3, he discovered, was a postcode district in north London in an area called Hampstead. On the map, it was boundaried with a bold red line and shaped like a tiny landlocked country. To Jones, it seemed like he’d discovered the country of his birth. Eager to find out more, the boy put away the atlas and looked up Chesterford Gardens in an A–Z street map of London. He smiled when he found it, recalling how the street had looked in his memory, and the brief glimpse of his parents’ house. But his excitement soon faded as he thought about the lie Maitland had told him.
After putting away the map, Jones returned to the study and knelt beside the gun. ‘I’ll find them,’ he whispered. ‘I know where they lived when Maitland stole me. London. In a place called Hampstead. I even know what street it was. So I’m going to find my parents and be a normal boy again like I was supposed to be all along. I’m going to go to school. Have friends. Watch television. And I won’t have to hunt in the Badlands ever again cos I won’t have to be Jones, the boy who was never loved by no one, not even Maitland who lied to him.’
‘London!’ scoffed the gun. ‘You know full well you won’t last there long on your own. Maitland taught you it’s dangerous, full of creatures and people who aren’t always what they seem. You should leave it well alone, boy!’
Jones turned out the light and left the gun lying on the floor, ignoring its pleas to forget about the past and focus instead on what Maitland had wanted him to do, to use the key and Commence.
As he got ready for bed, he heard a soft silver voice calling his name. It was the key in his pocket, repeating what the gun had told him to do.
‘I ain’t never using you,’ he growled back. He hid the key away so it wouldn’t disturb him, deciding to dispose of it properly in the morning when he’d worked out the best way to do it.
After the boy had climbed into bed, he lay in the dark, listening to the ticking and grumbling of the house. Then, without any warning, Jones started crying, and he rolled over and buried his face in his cold pillow, trying to stop all the hate and pain and anger coming out of his mouth and his eyes.
Jones had no idea that, down in the dark study, there was something listening to the gun muttering about Jones and his plans. It was the skull with sharp black teeth that had been on Maitland’s desk, and which was now lying on the floor in a corner. Jones had hurled it there in a rage as he’d searched the study, which was why he hadn’t noticed the fine covering of hair on the scalp or even the tiny eyes staring out. And not even the beginnings of a tongue that was sprouting like a tiny pink bulb. As it lay there in the dark, the thin red flesh of its slowly forming lips managed a vague smile.
SEVEN
As the early morning sun tried to peek round the curtains, Ruby crept into Jones’s bedroom. She watched his face twitching as he slept and wondered what horrors he might be seeing in his dreams.
The boy’s clothes from the day before were heaped on a chair and Ruby checked them, turning out the pockets of his trousers. But she didn’t find what she was looking for.
She looked on top of the dresser but there was only a wooden hairbrush, nail clippers and a pair of black socks rolled into a ball. She tried the drawers, opening and closing each one as quietly as she could, but found only some clean underwear, shirts and trousers. There was no sign of the key on the boy’s bedside table either.
Ruby began to panic as she wondered if Jones had disposed of it already. But then, in the silence, she heard a tiny voice she recognized calling her name in a silvery-sounding whisper. Jones rolled over in his sleep, threatening to wake up, as Ruby listened for it again.
Hearing her name a second time, she looked down. The voice seemed to be coming from underneath her feet. When it called to her once more, she realized it was definitely coming from beneath the wooden floor and knelt down. Seeing a hole, where a knot of wood might once have been, she hooked her finger in and pulled, lifting up a piece of floorboard. Resting on two dusty copper pipes was a blue woollen sock. The voice called her name again, telling her what she knew already, that it was the key, hidden in the sock. Frightened Jones might wake up, she grabbed it and stuffed it into the front pocket of the hoodie she was wearing, and suddenly the voice went quiet. As the boy moved again in his sleep and Ruby watched him, she told herself not to feel guilty about what she was doing. Jones may have saved her life, but if he wasn’t interested in doing magic then she most certainly was, so why let the opportunity go to waste? Ruby clicked the floorboard back down and crept towards the door, hoping the key would tell her what to do next as Jones had said it would for him, because she had no idea at all how to use it.
Standing on the landing, she popped the key out of the sock into her hand. Urgently, it began telling her exactly where she needed to go and what to do. Ruby made for the stairs as quietly and as quickly as she could, her heart pounding, excited that, finally, she was going to do something to make her life better.
When she arrived in front of a door downstairs, Ruby took a deep breath before opening it. Stretching out in front of her was a long room with a red carpet. Early morning daylight was streaming in through a large bay window at the far end. And below the windowsill stood a large wooden chest.
Through the window, Ruby could see a large piece of lawn glistening with dew and she knew it was going to be a bright, sunny day. A perfect day for a new beginning, she thought as she started walking towards the wooden chest, the key gripped tight in her hand.
Stuffed animals were mounted on the left-hand wall in glass boxes. Some she recognized. Foxes. Rabbits. Squirrels. But other creatures looked like a strange mixture of different sorts of animal and were not familiar to her at all. Some had fur and others had thick brown scales, while some had both, and a pair of wings too. Every animal seemed to be watching as Ruby made her way down the red carpet towards the chest.
Even at a distance she could tell it was old, made from silvery-looking oak. The metal studding around the edge of the lid was orange and brown with rust. Ruby thought it looked like a sea chest plundered from a shipwreck. As she approached it, she remembered the caution in Jones’s voice from the night before, warning her about magic and what it could do to people and their minds. But her footsteps didn’t falter. She knew she didn’t want to be the same old Ruby Jenkins any more.
‘It’s a fair swap,’ she announced to the animals in their glass boxes as she knelt down in front of the chest. ‘My mum and dad are drunks who
never wanted me. I’ve been shipped all over the place, from one foster parent to another. So why shouldn’t I do something to make my life better? I’ll help Jones get what he wants too, I promise.’ Ruby heard the key agreeing, whispering it was her destiny to Commence. Adults would never be able to tell her what to do again, it said. Not if she knew magic.
Ruby slotted the silver key into the iron lock. Before she’d decided which way to turn it, the key rotated clockwise of its own accord, completing a full circle, and was then swallowed into the lock.
Ruby wondered what was going to happen next. She didn’t feel any different. After a moment or two, she tried opening the chest but it was shut tight.
She jerked back, stifling a scream, when a man’s tiny face suddenly appeared on the lid and blinked at her. She saw bloodshot eyes and sharp teeth. And then the face vanished back into the wood as if it had never been there.
Ruby raised a shaky hand and tucked a lock of black hair behind her ear, waiting for something else to happen. When it did, she flinched so hard she almost bit her tongue.
A ball of wood about the size of a fist shot up out of the lid, leaving a crater, and landed on the floor in the shape of a tiny crouching man who stood up and grinned. He was only a few centimetres tall with a head of wild brown hair. Most of his body was covered with a soft, curly pelt the same colour too. Before Ruby had time to ask anything, more identical men began bursting free from the chest, like popcorn jumping out of a pan, and kicking themselves upright like acrobats as they landed feet first on the floor. Quickly, they started making a line down the centre of the room along the red carpet.
In a matter of moments, the chest had disappeared and a line of small, wild-looking, hairy men stretched almost to the door. They said nothing to Ruby, whose mouth was still open in utter amazement. Then the nearest man pointed at something behind her.
Below the windowsill, where the chest had stood, was a small black book lying on the floor. The leather was supple and worn, and the spine was cracked. It looked like an old prayer book Ruby had been given in church once, when one of her foster families had dragged her along to a service.
Eager to find out what might be inside the book, she picked it up and read the title written in gold lettering.
Lak Djyd Dl Qcfaxql Unfrtuspmb
She squinted to try and make sense of it, but that didn’t work. So instead she flicked through the gold-edged pages, scanning paragraphs of text broken up with diagrams and pictures. But, like the title, none of the words made sense at all. In fact, as Ruby stared harder, she realized the letters on each page were moving, jumbling around constantly, making it impossible to understand anything. Her heart began to pound as she wondered if she’d done something wrong.
‘What happens now?’ she asked, looking up. But the long line of little men had almost disappeared. As the last few sprinted out of the door, Ruby slapped the book shut and ran after them.
As she reached the door, Ruby heard a low chuckle coming from somewhere she couldn’t see. It was the same voice that had belonged to the key. She knew what it was now. It was the voice of magic itself and she knew it had tricked her as she began to realize the men had gone to find Jones when she heard tiny feet starting to scamper up the stairs. Ruby cursed as she ran as fast as she could to Maitland’s study. The Commencement was not going as she’d planned at all.
The gun was asleep on the floor, snoring loudly, with books and papers strewn around it, but Ruby didn’t bother to stop and ask why. She just picked it up and headed straight back out into the hallway, the gun spluttering awake, asking what was going on.
But, if Ruby had paused and bothered to look, she would have noticed something else lying on the floor too, hidden behind the desk in a corner.
Visible in the morning light was a bald head and the fully formed torso of a naked man, his skin a creamy, pale white, and his black teeth sharpened into what looked like large pencil points.
He licked his lips and shuddered before levering himself up with his arms to sit against the wall as the tiny stumps of his legs carried on growing.
EIGHT
Jones woke with a jolt. A loud, scratchy noise on the other side of his bedroom door made him sit up, and then he heard the scrabbling sound again.
Slowly, the doorknob started to turn.
‘Ruby? Is that you? Do you want something?’ As Jones clambered out of bed, the door flew open and a ladder of hairy men balanced on each other’s tiny shoulders broke apart and tumbled to the ground.
Jones stumbled back as they flowed across the wooden floor, his rapidly waking brain frantically warning him they were Woodwose as the door slammed shut. He kicked out at the first ones to reach him, but others leapt onto his pyjama legs and began climbing. The ones he managed to dislodge hit the floor with tiny oomphs and sat up, rubbing their heads.
Jones yelled and cursed as other Woodwose started punching and biting his feet. When he kicked out again, tiny hands swarmed around the ankle of his standing foot and pushed, and Jones came crashing down.
Before he could get up, his arms were pinned to his sides, and then he was being rolled across the floor. When he stopped, he realized he’d been wrapped up in the large brown rug that usually lay at the foot of his bed. He was trapped. Rolled up tight like the meat in a sausage roll.
The Woodwose began to chatter excitedly as a small group of them cornered one of their own and when they fell upon him he disappeared in the scrum of bodies. When a hairy, severed arm appeared in the hands of one tiny Woodwose, Jones choked back the urge to be sick. He watched in horror as the creature began using the bloody arm like an oversized pen, drawing something on the floor. More Woodwose started doing the same with other body parts. Symbols and runes, none of which Jones recognized, started to appear on the floorboards. More men were pounced upon and disappeared screaming under the weight of bodies.
‘Jones!’ shouted Ruby from the other side of the door. ‘Jones! Are you all right?’
‘Whatch du you fink?’ shouted Jones angrily back through a swollen lip.
‘Jones, I’ll help you, okay? I promise. I didn’t know this was going to happen. I shouldn’t have taken the key. I’m sorry. The magic tricked me.’
When Ruby opened the door, a group of Woodwose rushed to close it. Ruby pushed, and the men pushed back. As Jones watched the door see-sawing back and forth, he understood what was happening now. Ruby had stolen the key and opened the chest. His Commencement was underway.
‘I schould neverrr ’ve ’elped ewwwe,’ shouted Jones. ‘Neverrr.’ Tears slicked down his face. ‘I should’ve lefft uu tooo Arkellll.’
The harder Ruby pushed the door, the harder it was shoved back.
‘What do I do?’ she shouted at the gun in her hand. ‘How do I stop them?’
But the gun just laughed. ‘You can’t. You’ve gone and done Jones a favour. You’ll see. You can’t stop those Woodwose now they’ve been set free. They’re wild men born deep in the forests of England, hatched from the earth by magic. Unstoppable by the likes of you.’
Ruby poked the gun through the small gap between the door and the door frame, aiming it at some of the men, but when she pulled the trigger nothing happened.
‘You can’t make me fire if I don’t want to,’ shouted the gun. ‘And this is what Maitland wanted so I’m not going to interfere!’
‘But this isn’t what Jones wanted,’ said Ruby. ‘I can’t let this happen to him. Not after he saved my life last night.’
But the gun just laughed. ‘Then you shouldn’t have meddled in things you don’t understand, girl. You should never have taken that key.’
Deep down, Ruby knew the gun was right, but she put it all to the back of her mind as she looked around frantically for something else to help her. A cupboard further along the landing was ajar and she could see an old upright vacuum cleaner standing in the dark. It looked defunct, like an old tractor left to rot in a barn. But an idea, however preposterous, welled up inside her.
/> The black book from downstairs was in the big front pocket of her hoodie. Taking it out, she opened it and wedged half of the book into the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor. Slowly, she stood up, letting the door lurch forward and then jam on the book so it remained open.
Ruby ran to the cupboard along the landing. Ignoring the gun’s cries as she dumped it on a dark shelf, she hauled out the vacuum cleaner and ran back with the machine, pausing when she realized there was no cord or plug. Remembering how the lights had all come on without electricity, Ruby pressed the red ‘on’ switch, hoping the vacuum might be charmed too. The machine roared into life, the upright bag creaking as it swelled out, and Ruby pushed it as fast as she could back to the door.
And she was just in time. The men had removed the black book, but Ruby managed to jam the vacuum cleaner against the door before it was slammed shut. Ruby pushed the metal nozzle of the hose through the gap between the door and the door frame and wiggled her arm. She heard a cry and felt something bump up inside the tube, and then she saw the outline of a tiny face pressed against the inside of the vacuum cleaner’s bag.
‘YES!’ she cried, her heart doing a little fist pump. ‘Unstoppable by a girl like me, are they?’ she shouted back at the gun in the cupboard as she started to vacuum up more of the men on the other side of the door.
Jones was unceremoniously unrolled out of the rug into the middle of the bedroom and then kicked and pushed and prodded, forcing him to cover up into a ball. As soon as he was able to, he jumped to his feet, intending to run for the door, but stopped when he was surrounded by what looked like a shimmery heat haze rising up off the floor. It was even above him too. Touching it, he discovered it was solid like glass. He had the curious sensation of being caught like the bugs he used to trap in upturned jam jars when he’d been a very little boy, before ever going hunting with Maitland.