Strangeworlds Travel Agency

by L. D. Lapinski

  When she finally got a day to herself, she ran down the street as though she could fly.

  Jonathan didn’t waste any time. As soon as he saw her he took down a very battered brown case with a tree painted on the side. “You’re lucky it’s been a busy few days. I nearly hopped into this one by myself.”

  “The next one on your dad’s list?”

  “Yes. And I’ve got rather a soft spot for this one. My dad took me here when I was a couple of years older than you. I would have liked to be able to hop in and out every weekend, but…” He shrugged. “He was very protective.”

  “What’s in it?” Flick asked, excited.

  “A forest. An enchanted one, naturally.” Jonathan undid the catches, and the smell of pine filled the room. He left it open while he went to lock the shop door, flipping the sign to CLOSED. He shoved the dead bolt across the door.

  A thought popped into Flick’s head. “Wait—what if one of the other cases needs you?”

  “There’s no one scheduled to make a return today,” Jonathan said. “It will be fine to be gone for a few hours. Time moves faster, where we are going.”

  “Is it a safe place?”

  “Mostly harmless. It’s fine, so long as you don’t wander too far into the trees.”

  Flick frowned. “Why? What’s in the trees?”

  “Oh, nothing too deadly,” Jonathan said. “Spiders, bugs… that sort of thing.”

  “I’m not a fan of anything with more than seven eyes,” said Flick, thinking of the plate-sized spiders the packing had unearthed in the old flat.

  “Then stick to the open spaces.” Jonathan stepped back from the case. “Want to go first?”

  “You’ll be right behind me?”

  “I certainly will. Got your guidebook?”

  Flick patted the back pocket of her jeans, shook out her hands, and took a deliberate step into the case. This time she didn’t pause, even when it felt like there were two of her—she kept on going, walking with a less-than-graceful stumble, but then she was out, and standing…

  … standing on a carpet of brown leaves and pine needles, thin bits of green grass pushing valiantly through. The sky was wide open above her, blown-glass blue with scars of clouds streaking through it. Green assaulted the corners of her vision, from above and below, and her ears were hit with silence.

  Not the total silence of the lighthouse world. A more natural silence—one that still had the voice of the wind in it.

  The sky was a dome of blue; Flick felt like a bug trapped in a glass. The sheer flat of the green and brown beneath Flick’s sneakers was like the piece of card slid underneath to trap her, and she realized that although this place looked like a vast world, there were edges to it.

  She squinted up, trying to see the curve of the sky.

  There was a horizon, but—Flick couldn’t say for sure how she knew this, but she did—the world ended there. It was the same way when you’re in a greenhouse, you know you’re inside, even if there are clever plants and temperature controls that make you think you’re somewhere tropical. Jonathan was right: some worlds were indeed very small.

  Jonathan himself stepped elegantly out of the case then, dusted off his jacket, and quickly pulled the case through after him.

  “This place is tiny, isn’t it?” Flick asked.

  “Yes, it’s…” Jonathan frowned and peered around. “Can you hear that?”

  “No, I can’t. Just how small is this world?”

  “Felicity, shush.”

  “It’s got to be about the size of a shopping center, and not even a very big—”

  “Shh!”

  “Don’t shush me!” Flick said indignantly.

  Jonathan held a hand up. “We can discuss its size later. But right now, I’d appreciate it if you could stop prattling and concentrate on what’s actually important.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “What can you hear?”

  They both listened.

  “Nothing,” Flick said softly. “It’s quiet.”

  “Yes.” Jonathan’s grip on the case tightened. “No birds singing. Barely any wind. No animals.”

  “What does that mean?” Flick whispered, her confusion immediately crushed by a heap of nerves.

  “I think it means we are being watched,” Jonathan said. “Perhaps we should—”

  But whatever Jonathan had been going to say remained a mystery. At that moment, a large woven net dropped from the trees and landed on the two travelers. It knocked them to the ground as joyous whoops of triumph filled their ears.

  Flick groaned, every rib in her chest complaining in pain. She managed to turn her head in time to see what looked like a herd of small, hairy, Ewok-like beings rush out of the undergrowth, brandishing sticks and bellowing at the tops of their lungs.

  “How dare you?!” Jonathan yelled at them, his face in the pine needles, glasses smeared with soil. “Release us immediately, you absolute degenerates!”

  “What’s the password?” one of the beings crowed in perfect, albeit slightly snotty, English. Flick could see that the fur covering them was actually a sort of hairy onesie with a hood.

  “How could you possibly expect me to know that?”

  “Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!” The hairy beasts started up a chant. “Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong—”

  “What are they?” Flick yelped, trying to get to her hands and knees and failing.

  “They’re children.” Jonathan coughed. “I’ve not seen them for… I don’t know, years…”

  “You’ve not seen us before, mister,” the apparent ringleader (for he had the biggest and most obnoxious-looking sharpened stick) shouted. “We don’t remember you one bit. No grown-ups come here by order of me.”

  “I wasn’t a grown-up when I was here last.” Jonathan spat out a pine needle.

  “And you’re not a grown-up now,” Flick said.

  “Oh, that’s hardly the… look. I used to come here when I was little. Little-er.”

  “No, you never did.”

  “I did.”

  The leader pulled his furry hood down, revealing the face of a boy about nine years old. He had blue and black paint streaked down his face and hair that looked as though it was last washed on the day he was born. He leaned down to squint at Jonathan.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mercator.”

  The boy straightened up. “Oh. And what about her?”

  “I’m Flick,” Flick said quickly, trying not to sound as panicky as she felt. “I’m just—just a kid. We’re not enemies.”

  The boy nodded. “Oh, all right. Set them free.”

  There were disappointed groans, but the rest of the children lifted the net off the ground, and Flick crawled out, Jonathan following. They stood, rather embarrassed, covered in dirt and leaves. Flick brushed some dead grass off her sleeves, thankful for once in her life that she was the one who did the laundry, so there’d be no questions about the stains.

  Jonathan rubbed his glasses against his shirt to clean them.

  “You know what? I do remember you. You look… different,” the leader boy sniffed at Jonathan.

  “Of course I do.” Jonathan replaced his glasses and glowered down at him, looking absolutely murderous. “It’s been years since I saw you last. Why haven’t you grown up, Tam?”

  The boy, Tam, shrugged, and pulled a face a gargoyle would be proud of. “Don’t grow up here, do we? That’d be boring.”

  “No one’s arguing with that,” Flick said, before she could stop herself.

  Tam gave her a grin, showing teeth with a big gap at the front, before looking back at Jonathan. “Where’d you go, anyway, Mercator?”

  “I grew up,” Jonathan said.

  “Did you miss us?”

  “A little.”

  “Not a lot, then.” There was muttering, of the sort that gets your nerves up. Even more so when it’s accompanied by the clattering of sharpened branches. Flick swallowed.

&nbs
p; Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Tam, I only wanted to show my friend your home.”

  Flick’s brain tripped over the word “friend” and came to a halt. She felt unexpectedly pleased. She would have expected Jonathan to call them “acquaintances,” if anything. Friends seemed as good a label as any. She bit back a smile at the realization that the first new friend she’d made in Little Wyverns was an eccentric teenager with a penchant for old suits and a travel agency full of magic.

  Jonathan was still talking. “I remember your home, you know, Tam. How lovely it is. And how peaceful.” He gave the boy’s rudimentary spear a deliberate look.

  “Peaceful is boring!” Tam yelled. The other children crowed loudly, and two of them punched each other on the side of the head.

  “Well, it was peaceful the last time I came here,” Jonathan said, over the din. “I came before I left for school, and I thought you’d all grown up, or left. It was nothing but me and the birds.”

  Tam sniffed. “Nah, we weren’t gone. We didn’t want to bother you. We didn’t mind you coming and reading. You were too big to really play properly, so we left you alone. And after that you didn’t come anymore. But then, someone else started coming.”

  “Who? Was it my dad?” Jonathan’s eyes went wide.

  Flick felt a jolt of anticipation.

  “No, not him.” Tam shook his head. Jonathan’s face fell, and so did Flick’s hopes. “Some other man. He had gray hair and he wore a big hat, and he was wide.” He tapped his shoulders. “And strong-looking, he was. He looked like he could rip a tree in half.”

  “And he was loud,” a girl interjected. “Used to stomp around like a giant, he did.”

  Jonathan frowned. “And you’re certain he wasn’t from here?”

  “He had one of them.” Tam pointed at the suitcase.

  “A suitcase?” Flick asked. She turned to Jonathan. “Then he must have come from Strangeworlds, mustn’t he?”

  Jonathan didn’t answer. “He had a shooter,” one of the other kids piped up. She had half a thorn bush in her hair, and she held her stick like a rifle, to demonstrate. “He shooted it at the rabbits.”

  “And the deers.”

  “And the birds.”

  “A gun?” Jonathan’s eyes were wide. “Look, this isn’t a game, is it? You honestly saw this man?”

  Tam nodded. “That’s why we did the net. We said we’d catch him good and proper, next time. But he stopped coming. Took the poor dead rabbits and went back into the suitcase he carried.”

  “Good he did,” someone snorted, “else we’d’ve done for him.”

  “Him and ten like him!”

  Flick’s insides felt quite trembly. She didn’t like this story of the man with the gun one bit. “Jonathan,” she whispered. “Could it have been a customer? A Society member?”

  “I suppose.” Jonathan frowned. “But Dad wouldn’t have let anyone through here with a gun. I’m sure of it.”

  “Unless he didn’t know he had it. He could have hidden it. Or…” Or threatened your dad, she thought. She put a lid on that possibility. She didn’t know Jonathan’s dad, but the idea of anything like that happening in Strangeworlds made her feel sick.

  “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation.” Jonathan bit his lip, then turned back to Tam. “If this man did come through Strangeworlds, then I do apologize.”

  Tam wiped his nose with the back of his hand, which seemed to mean he accepted the apology. “It’s okay. He stopped coming.”

  “All right,” Jonathan brushed at his suit and put on a falsely cheery expression. “Well, we had better be off.”

  “No.” Tam shook his head. “You’ve got to come back and see the House! You’ve not seen it in so long—I bet you never even seen the third level!”

  “Really, Tam, I don’t know if—”

  Tam glared.

  “All right,” Jonathan said, relenting. “We’ll come and see. Just for a bit.”

  The children cheered and banged their sticks together, howling at the sky as they turned to lead the way.

  “Follow them, but be careful,” Jonathan hissed in Flick’s ear. “They’re not what they seem. Don’t eat or drink anything they give you. Don’t promise them anything or say you will stay longer. And don’t tell them your real name.”

  “I already told them!” Flick squeaked in horror.

  “No, you said ‘Flick.’ That’s fine. Do not tell them your full name. Understood?”

  “But they know your name? From before?”

  “They know a name.” Jonathan sighed. “Not my first name. Trust me, I’ll be all right.”

  They were pushed apart by a boy with bright ginger hair, who enthusiastically handed them both a stick.

  Flick took it and allowed herself to be led deeper and deeper into the forest.

  There are several rules that must be obeyed if you are going to cavort with fae, or beings that have fae-like properties, such as Tam’s gang of forever-children. If Flick had taken the time to consult the guidebook in her pocket, she would have found a page toward the back with a set of rules:

  WHEN DEALING WITH FAE, OR FAE-LIKE BEINGS

  Eat nothing offered to you by the fae.

  Tell them not your true name.

  Do not sleep!

  Do not stray from the path.

  Remember—they can only tell the truth.

  It can be difficult to be sure whether or not your hosts are members of the fae family; however, there are some signs to look out for:

  A childishness and desire to play.

  Agelessness.

  A delight in songs, games and performance.

  Untraceable Magic—for example, making objects appear out of thin air, vanishing, or shape-shifting without using spells or bottled magic.

  As always, treat your hosts with respect, but abide by the above terms.

  Flick stepped carefully as the children led them through the woodland. The forest was not like the ones Flick was familiar with back home. The forest of scrubby trees and bracken not too far from the new house was all cut through with paths made of tarmac and brick. In Tam’s forest, there were trees, and there was dusty ground to walk on, but no real path at all. If they hadn’t had the children to follow, Flick knew they would be lost, and quickly. Bright toadstools, unnatural fire-engine red with white spots, grew in twos and threes at the bases of the trees. Occasionally, out of the corner of her eye, she would see something scuttle away on more legs than she felt was necessary.

  “This forest has… things in it,” she said.

  Jonathan nodded. “Yes. Don’t wander off.”

  They were quickly herded down a small hill, where the trees spread out into a perfect circle around a clearing filled with wooden tree houses and slides and rope bridges and swings and hammocks.

  Flick stopped walking. Of course she was probably way too old for playgrounds now, and since Freddy was born she’d had to push him on the baby swings and do nothing else, but this… She wanted to pelt down the hill and climb up the first ladder and never stop until she ran out of breath. “That is like… it’s like the best adventure playground ever,” she said, her mouth hanging open.

  Jonathan gave her an expression that was one blink away from murder. “Don’t you dare,” he said quietly. “I’m not leaving you here, so don’t you even start liking this place. Don’t. You absolutely mustn’t take a liking to it.” There was a soft sort of desperation in his voice.

  “Why?” Flick tore her gaze away from the playground.

  “Because if you like it enough, then you might want to stay,” he said, hefting the suitcase from one hand to another. “You’re not too old to get yourself stuck here. And we have to leave, preferably before too long.” He pulled his sleeve down to look at his watch. The three hands were spinning in both directions (and a few new ones), so there was no way to tell the time. “Oh, hell. Time’s gone all askew. I can’t tell how fast it’s moving.”

  Fear exploded like a grenade in Flick’s
stomach. “We’re not going to get home and find everyone’s gotten old, are we?”

  “I doubt it,” said Jonathan. “We have a few hours before anyone would miss us, I think. Maybe a little less—this is time governed by children, remember. Enjoyable things always seem to pass very quickly, and dull moments seem to take forever, yes? Well, here, they quite literally do.” He leaned in. “Remember what I told you—they must not know your name. Eat nothing they offer. And promise them nothing.”

  They reached the bottom of the slope, the tiny warrior children all but dragging them through their playground village like prizes. More children poured out of the dens and huts to cheer and whoop and yell to one another.

  It was a mash-up of every playground Flick had been to in her life. But it wasn’t designed how an adult would make it—this was a playground as designed by a child. There was no soft padding on the ground, but there were hammocks and rope swings and the bridges that stretched off into the sky. Flick grinned as she watched a small girl use one of the slides, whizzing down it so fast she must have defied several laws of physics. Ladders were nailed onto the highest sides of the buildings and there were holes in the ground here and there that led to tunnels.

  In the center of the wooden playground was a thin table, tree-stump seats lined up on its longer sides. The table itself was stacked high with food. The children thundered toward it, dragging their visitors with them.

  Jonathan didn’t appear to have any reservations about sitting. He swept over to the table like a dignitary and rolled one of the tree stumps out of the way, choosing to sit on the suitcase, instead. He picked up a plate and began to fill it immediately, copying the children either side of him, who were grabbing handfuls of macaroni cheese and orange crisps and blue cake. Some of it even made it onto the plates in front of them.

  Flick was shoved down onto a stool opposite Jonathan, a plate and spoon thrust into her hands. Surprisingly, the plates and cutlery were ceramic and metal, as if from a fine china service, or a grown-up’s cupboard. She stared at the mountains of junk food in front of her. Flick didn’t usually like food that was neon, but something inside her was delighted at the prospect of getting to taste all these colors that didn’t occur in nature and her stomach snarled in impatience.