Strangeworlds Travel Agency

by L. D. Lapinski

  She reached out with her spoon, and then stopped dead.

  Don’t eat or drink anything they give you echoed in her head.

  Flick squinted at the food. Ignoring her stomach, she poked at the glistening jelly in front of her. It wobbled to and fro, making a noise like a deflating balloon. Flick sat back. Food didn’t generally make the sort of noises it did in cartoons. There was something not quite right about it. Where was it cooked, for starters? Where did it come from?

  Was it even real?

  Around her, the children were loading their plates up, and even Jonathan was choosing things, while answering the occasional question from the small child next to him. While not actually eating the food, he was doing a wonderful job of spooning things up and twirling his knife and fork, and he was even being artistic about it. Flick saw that he had made a face on his plate, cutting a tomato in half to use as a nose under the spaghetti he’d arranged like hair.

  Oh…

  Flick’s eyes went wide as she realized. He’s not eating, he’s playing! He’s doing things kids do with their food. So they don’t notice anything!

  Flick gripped her spoon. She’d played this game herself before, when her mom would put a load of fish pie or something else disgusting in front of her and she’d sit and stir it around her plate and look busy so she wouldn’t get told off for not eating. It was all a distraction.

  She scooped up a huge mound of mashed potato, and began to sculpt it into a snowman, adding some grated cheese for mortar.

  There was a huge BANG from one end of the table.

  Flick jumped, accidentally squashing her snowman flat.

  Tam was standing up on his seat, holding a cup that looked like an immense beer tankard, though it was revealed (after he waved it around too enthusiastically) to contain banana milkshake. “Shut up, everyone!”

  Everyone shut up.

  “I welcome to our table the guests we captured in our net trap.” Tam beamed. “The girl Flick, and the Mercator, who is now a grown-up.”

  There was applause, and the smash of cutlery on plates.

  Jonathan smiled mildly and Flick gave a nervous wave.

  “We only take kids to our Home,” Tam said, stepping into a bowl of custard. “Usually. Grown-ups come now and again, but we don’t like them to stay here, in our place. But…” He grinned. “I think it’s different if we knew them when they were kids, too. This is the best place for them, I think. They can stay here. And they will!”

  The children nodded, as if this made perfect sense.

  They will? Flick gawped at Jonathan in barely disguised horror. Jonathan’s wan expression had frozen into something resembling dread.

  “We wouldn’t want to impose,” he said, sounding slightly strangled.

  Tam took a swig from his tankard. “ ’S’not a bother. Always room for more. And we can show you how to play again. Maybe you’ll even be young again!” He grinned, and the other children made a lot of noise.

  Flick was glad she couldn’t see her own face. She knew her teeth were showing, but it wasn’t in the smile she’d put on when Tam first started speaking. She couldn’t stay here; this was insane.

  Tam was rounding off his speech with some threats. “So don’t give our guests any bother, you lot. Now, eat your dinner or you’ll go straight to bed.” He sat back down. Mayhem resumed.

  Flick jumped as Jonathan cleared his throat at her, and stared deliberately at her unmoving hands.

  She stared at the pancake snowman. He needed sculpting again. And also some eyes. She wondered how far she would get if she abandoned Jonathan and ran for it. Probably not far enough. And besides, where would she go? Under the cover of reaching for a green pea in the center of the table, she hissed at Jonathan, “What are we going to do? I’m not staying here!”

  “We simply need to get away without causing alarm,” he murmured back, swirling tomato sauce for rosy cheeks on his plate-face. “They never insisted I stayed before. I don’t know if the rules of this place have changed, or if the man with the gun has made them nervous, but they do seem rather keen for us to stay this time.”

  “Keen? Tam seems to think we’ve agreed to it already.” She scowled at her spoon. “I know there are a lot of them, but they’re small. Can we fight them off, if we have to?”

  Jonathan shook his head. “This is their world, so they will always win, no matter the opponent. And we don’t want to offend them. We might need to come here again.”

  “You are far too calm about this.”

  “I’ve faced worse odds.” He shrugged. “Getting away as part of a game would be the best option.”

  “A game?”

  “Hide-and-seek, perhaps?”

  “But everyone’s eating,” Flick pointed out, waving her spoon. A clump of rice pudding flicked off the end, smashing like a cricket ball into a boy’s soup.

  There was a horrible silence.

  “Oi!” the boy yelled, brushing the soup stains from his front.

  Flick couldn’t remember how to speak. Her spoon dripped pudding onto the tablecloth. “Um.”

  The boy she’d hit was screwing up his face like he was preparing to unleash a howl of Freddy-like proportions.

  Tam looked up from his slab of cake, frowning down the table. He raised a hand in the direction of his stick.

  Flick didn’t know what made her do it. She grabbed her spoon, scooped up what was left of her ramshackle snowman, looked once to take aim—

  —and launched the potato straight at Jonathan.

  It hit him between the eyes, and he fell comically backward off the suitcase with a yell. He managed to flip his own plate in Flick’s direction as he went, and the spaghetti and tomato and scrambled eggs splattered down her front and showered the girl next to her as well. The girl let out a bleat like an angry goat and flung her spoonful of chocolate ice cream so it scattered over the squealing eaters across from her.

  A small boy grabbed a handful of baked beans and mashed them down the back of Flick’s neck.

  Flick shrieked and squirted the ketchup bottle at him, missing and catching the girl next to him in the ear, who howled and chucked her bowl of chips up into the air so it came down like confetti.

  The game spread along the table like chicken pox at an indoor playground.

  Food was thrown, soup was spilled, crockery was smashed and icing was rubbed into the tabletop like varnish. The screams grew louder and happier with every passing moment.

  Jonathan grabbed Flick’s arm and yanked her over the table. “Come on!” he snarled, dragging her through what was left of the feast. Flick staggered upright, snatching up the suitcase and running like mad. The two of them ran down the length of the table, past Tam (who didn’t notice them leaving as he was busy using a thick breadstick as a sword) and under one of the swinging rope-bridges where a boy was throwing popcorn like flowers down onto his play-fighting friends.

  Flick ducked behind one of the smaller houses. “Jonathan! Over here!” she hissed. Jonathan skidded around the corner and Flick unclasped the suitcase. The lid sprang open, and the familiar, warm smell of the travel agency hit them in the face. “Let’s go.”

  Flick scrambled into the suitcase, still covered in food, the vertigo hitting her again as she climbed up out of this world and back down into her own.

  They staggered out in a tangle. Flick caught herself on the desk as Jonathan stumbled to get his balance and almost fell into the fireplace.

  The smell and feel of the travel agency wrapped around them like a hug, welcoming them back, though it felt rather stern—as if it was rather annoyed they had dared to venture out in the first place.

  Flick caught sight of herself in the mirror that hung over the mantelpiece. “My clothes!” she wailed, looking down at the mess of pasta, peas, and pie down her front. “And my hair.”

  Jonathan beamed. “You did excellently well there, I must say. Credit where it’s due, and all that. I know I said it would be a quiet one, but adventure called,
and you rose to the occasion wonderfully. Well done. Well done, indeed.” The effect of his praise was rather spoiled by the fact he had ketchup and mashed potato smeared over his glasses and down his face.

  Flick tapped her chin. “Er… you’ve got a bit of something…”

  “Yes, we both look slightly worse for wear.” Jonathan checked himself over. “You can have a shower upstairs if you want.”

  “A comb would be a start.” She sighed. “I don’t know if there’s any saving my T-shirt.” A blob of something orange slid down the front of it and plopped onto the floorboards.

  “I might have something. Wait here.” While Jonathan disappeared upstairs, Flick started trying to pick food from her hair with a damp bit of tissue.

  “Here.” Jonathan was back quickly, handing her a very fine comb with several teeth missing. “I think it’s an old nit comb. And there’s this.” He held out a pink T-shirt. “It might be a bit big. Sorry. The bathroom’s all yours.”

  “Thanks.” Flick took the T-shirt and went through the tiny kitchen to the stairs.

  She’d never been upstairs at Strangeworlds. It felt off-limits, somehow.

  The stairs were narrow—barely an adult’s shoulders wide—and they rose sharply. The sides of the stairway lacked a handrail and were instead trimmed with picture frames of various ages and sizes, the inhabitants within staring out with somber faces.

  Flick stared at a couple in Victorian dress—the man had a suitcase in one hand. Then the same couple, with another man, the three of them now laughing—the photographer must have said something funny at just the right moment.

  She continued climbing the stairs. The pictures drew a map of years, as the people in them aged. Sometimes they stood outside the shop, and sometimes the subjects sat in a parlor. A lot of them were the image of Jonathan. The same curly dark hair, the same white face and the same outward look of both pride and responsibility. One photo was obviously taken at a wedding, with a bride in a white dress and a beaming groom in a turban and a long embroidered shirt that went down to his knees. Flick liked him—he was obviously having the best day of his life.

  Gradually, the pictures allowed color to drip into their frames, and without warning, Flick found herself looking at Jonathan’s double.

  She stared at the picture, her fingertips brushing the wall to steady herself as she stood, one foot up on the next step.

  A boy grinned out of the frame, his top front teeth missing, drowned in a too-big school uniform. It looked a bit like the uniform for Byron Hall—tie, knee socks, school cap, and everything Flick had laughed at when the uniform brochure had arrived, right up until she saw the prices. The boy in the photo had Jonathan’s curly hair, or else Jonathan had his, and although Flick had never seen Jonathan grin with such carefree happiness, she knew that if he did, he would look almost exactly like that.

  She realized that the boy in the picture had to be Jonathan’s dad.

  “Are you all right?” Jonathan called.

  “Yeah, sorry,” she called back, taking the last few steps quickly. The last picture, at the top, was of a couple (the man with Jonathan’s dark curls, the woman with long brown hair and a motherly smile) looking down at a baby wrapped in a white blanket. She didn’t need to ask who the baby was.

  In the bathroom, she stripped off her top and filled the sink, picking off the biggest bits of muck before letting her T-shirt soak. She noted that Jonathan’s organized attitude to how the travel agency should function did not extend to his bathroom, where there were empty shampoo bottles stacked next to full ones, tiny slivers of soap congregating in the dish, and a razor waiting rather hazardously in the same jam jar as his toothbrush.

  She picked up one of the combs on the side of the sink, wondering why there were so many hair products when Jonathan’s hair gave the impression he was dragged backward through a hedge on a daily basis.

  Flick’s hair got fluffier and more ragged with every stroke of the comb. At least the mashed potato was working its way out. She rinsed it as much as she could and rubbed a towel on her head before pulling the dry T-shirt on. It smelled old, as if it had been sitting in a drawer for years, and it was a bit too big, but it was better than nothing.

  Pausing on the landing, she noted a room with the door shut, which she assumed was where Jonathan slept, and another that had no door at all, but seemed to be a sort of walk-in wardrobe crossed with a rummage sale. There were clothes of all kinds hanging on racks, folded in piles, or heaped on the floor. Flick saw a massive wet suit, some funny-looking goggles, a brightly colored scarf that looked like something her mom would wear, and even a couple of onesies.

  She trotted down the stairs, the noise making Jonathan look up from filling the tin kettle at the sink. He’d changed his shirt and had the sleeves of the new one rolled up. “All okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” She leaned against the countertop. It felt incredibly surreal to be back in the quiet travel agency; surreal and almost… boring. Flick wanted to start planning their next trip immediately—her fingers itched to pull cases out of the wall in the front room. She tapped the countertop, instead. “So, is it always like that? Running, and escaping? Is there always adventure? Is it always”—she tried to think of a word that was somewhere between “dangerous” and “fun”—“like that?”

  Jonathan looked at her for a good half minute. The silence was so heavy it could have turned a bus into an oven tray. But then a real smile crept onto his face and settled there, almost invisible unless you knew what you were looking for. “Yes. It is.”

  Flick grinned back.

  * * *

  An hour later, Flick’s T-shirt was drying in front of the fire and she had just finished off a sticky bun. Jonathan was writing in one of the thick books on the desk, a cold cup of tea next to him as he scribbled. Flick’s own report in the guidebook had been much shorter.

  “I really can’t understand Tam’s determination to have us stay,” Jonathan said without looking up. “You’d think a frightening encounter with an adult would have made the lot of them keen to be rid of us. It was as though they needed us to stay. Very strange indeed.”

  Flick hummed in agreement. She spun Jonathan’s magnifying glass in her fingers and looked through it. Once again, the suitcase they had traveled through was glowing and glittering with magic, much more than the others slotted into the wall.

  “Having fun?” Jonathan asked. He snapped shut the book and turned to find a place for it on the bookshelves.

  “Sort of.” She smiled, wafting a hand through the clinging magic. “Just thinking, really.” She lowered the magnifier. “I guess the case glows because it’s been used, right?”

  Jonathan, still browsing the bookcase, paused.

  “The suitcase we used to get to Tam’s forest.” Flick pointed at it. “It’s glowing. So’s the crystal forest one, and the… lighthouse one.” She blushed. “It’s because they’ve been used, right?”

  Jonathan didn’t reply. He was still staring at the bookcase, holding the book he’d been writing in.

  Flick shook her head at him and peered through the magnifying glass again. The magic swirled, as if greeting her, and a warm feeling spread through her chest down to her fingertips. “I love this. Seeing all this hidden stuff. Makes me feel like I really belong in the Strangeworlds Society. Like… this is what it’s all about.”

  Jonathan shoved the book in between two novels. “Yes,” he said vaguely.

  Flick lowered the magnifying glass and stroked a finger down the handle affectionately. She really didn’t want to let go of it. “You said there’s always adventure,” she said. “Jonathan, are you listening?”

  Jonathan shook his head slightly as if dislodging something. “What? Yes, I am listening.” He turned and made a focused face. “I’m always listening to you.”

  She sighed, before softening her tone. “I know we’re meant to be looking for him, but, Jonathan, are you sure your dad wants to be found? Or that he’s…?” She pulled a
sympathetic face.

  Jonathan tapped the desk as if trying to concentrate. “If he’s out there, I shall find him. Custodians do not relinquish their duties lightly, even in the face of danger.”

  “Danger?” Flick sat up.

  Jonathan shrugged. He sat down in the desk chair, and absentmindedly tapped a finger on the polished desk surface. “You’ll never have an adventure by being overly cautious all the time. I’ve seen people return from their world of choice looking as though they regret coming back. Some, I think, would choose to stay.”

  “Is that possible?” Flick asked, thinking of how readily her brain had rejected the idea of staying in Tam’s forest. The wrongness of it had felt all-encompassing. But that didn’t mean that someone else wouldn’t think differently. “Could you stay in another world? If you wanted?”

  “I’ve never known anyone to stay in another world by choice. But that’s why I tell my customers not to lose their luggage. Don’t ever lose your luggage. It’s your only way back.” He adjusted his glasses.

  “On the other hand, there are whole worlds for you to hide in,” Flick said. “If you didn’t want to be found.”

  Jonathan straightened a few loose papers on the desk. “It would be very difficult to live in a world you weren’t born in.”

  “Why?” Flick asked curiously.

  Jonathan leaned forward on his elbows. “You’re born with a limited amount of life-force inside you. It’s a sort of magic of your own. Living in your own world makes it tick away, day by day, year by year, until eventually you run out. It’s what gives you your time in this world.”

  For a moment Flick thought she could feel her life ticking away to the cacophony of clocks on the mantelpiece. She didn’t like it. “And when you’re in other worlds?”

  “Living in a world you don’t belong to drains your life-force away. At first you simply feel tired, then ill, and, eventually, it’s thought that you would die long before your time. Your only hope is to return home. If the spark of your life normally burns away one match at a time, then becoming trapped in a world where you’re not meant to be… would be like lighting a bonfire.”