by Nadia Aguiar
She heard a dull, punching thump. From the corner of her eye she saw a whorl appear next to them, larger than the ones the monkeys had come from, a few feet off the ground, shining brightly.
Without a sound, Jebby’s hand was wrenched from her own, and Penny was jerked violently forward by the rope round her waist. She lost her balance and fell. She, Tabba and Jebby were being dragged at speed towards the whorl, as if someone on the other side was reeling in a line. Penny saw Tabba disappear into it. Immediately the rope went slack round Penny’s waist.
She and Jebby scrambled to their feet.
‘Tabba!’ he shouted frantically. ‘TABBA!’
There was no answer. The frayed end of the rope that had been tied to Tabba lay on the ground outside the whorl, which was glowing more intensely now, a blurred, quavering lens suspended just off the jungle floor.
Penny’s heart was beating so fast it felt like it was going to burst. Her legs felt like rubber. She tried to speak but no sound came out.
Jebby was still shouting for his sister when Penny felt herself yanked for the second time. This time she fought, clawing the earth, grasping at roots and stones too slippery to keep hold of. Whatever was pulling her was immensely powerful. She was no match.
Abruptly the rope snapped, releasing her.
Instantly everything went quiet.
Jebby had disappeared into the whorl after his sister.
Penny was alone.
Shakily, she stood up. The whorl glittered furiously. A single insect whirred near her ear. A bird shrilled a piercing alarm from high in the canopy, but otherwise the silence was oppressive. She felt a terrible squeezing in her chest, as if the atmosphere was so heavy that its weight was compressing her lungs. She expected to be seized at any moment, but her legs no longer felt like part of her body and she couldn’t make herself move. The rope slid down round her waist. She forced herself to step outside it, kick it off her ankles. She backed up a few steps. The whorl was almost too bright to look at. Panic surged, turning her body into a prison. She had to escape. She had to get out of the jungle. She needed air.
Penny turned and ran, crashing heedlessly through foliage. She lost one shoe. She lost the other. She tripped over rocks, stubbing her toes. Thorns slashed her arms. She didn’t know where she was going, but she didn’t stop. She had to be anywhere other than where she was.
She saw the whorl lodged between two trees for only a second, not long enough to stop herself before she ran straight into it.
CHAPTER TEN
Absolute Darkness ✵ Camouflage ✵ ‘World spilled limitlessly on to world’ ✵ Following the Bell ✵ Crossing Paths ✵ ‘We’re the only ones who can’ ✵ The Lake ✵ Doors Slam Shut
Penny had the brief sensation of being underwater. Then it passed and she felt only air on her skin.
She was in absolute darkness.
She stopped and stood completely still.
The world she had just come from, the dense, dim, humid jungle where she had been walking and talking with her friends, was gone – gone so completely that Penny wondered if it had ceased to exist altogether. She desperately wanted to be with Tabba and Jebby again, but she didn’t dare call out to them in case the mandrill heard her.
Giving in to fear would have made her situation unbearable, so through sheer will she forced herself to stay calm. She had stopped running as soon as she had realized she was going through the whorl. That meant it was still very near. It should be right behind her. All she had to do was back out of it. She reversed a few tentative steps, but nothing happened. She turned round, hands outstretched, and searched for it. She cringed at the thought that the mandrill could be right there with her and she wouldn’t know it. At any second her fingertips might touch fur. Her hands groped empty air. The whorl wasn’t there. There was nothing with which to orientate herself. She was in empty space.
A terrible, paralysing thought struck her: maybe she wasn’t anywhere. Maybe that’s what the whorls were – nothing and nowhere. She had stepped away from everyone and everything she knew into a void. She couldn’t see herself in the dark, and for a brief moment she wondered if she herself was even real any more. It felt as if her whole body was changing states, turning to liquid, about to drain away or to evaporate as steam.
She didn’t know what gave her the strength to reach out again, but she did, stretching her arms as far as she could in front of her as she took a small step forward.
Then another.
And another.
She could have been floating free in space, attached to nothing.
She reached out further.
She whimpered.
Her fingers had touched something.
A tree.
A real thing.
She stepped closer to it and pressed her palms against its reassuring solidity, felt the papery fibres of its bark, the soft dampness of mushrooms breaking off under her fingers.
She took a deep breath and fought off the nervous urge to laugh even as tears spilled down her face. She laid her cheek against the trunk. She was real. She wasn’t nowhere; she was in a real place. And maybe Tabba and Jebby were there, too.
Slowly her senses revived. She smelled a damp night-time smell. She circled the tree cautiously, feeling its knots and hollows. She jumped when something brushed her cheek. She reached up. Just a leaf. All the nerves in her body felt sharply alive. The trunk was thick. She kept walking. As she rounded it, she saw tiny pinpricks of lights bobbing and twinkling in the distance.
To reach them, she would have to leave the safety of the tree. It was the only thing she knew for certain was there with her. She hesitated – then she let go. She walked towards the little lights. They guttered and died, leaving her in pure darkness, before flaring to life again. She might have been deep underwater, seeing the cold flares of bioluminescent creatures drifting through some remote sunless zone. A light appeared suddenly beside her, revealing itself to be an insect, its body an incandescent bulb.
As she got closer to the swarm, the creatures emitted enough light for her to see that she was in a forest of giant, widely spaced trees. The canopy was so high and thick that it formed a vault of permanent night beneath it. She trod carefully, her feet silent in deep moss. Here and there the insects illumed pale clusters of buds gathered on vines, like the sea-foam of breakers catching the moonlight. The air smelled of rain and mud, of mushrooms and sodden bark and freshly snapped ginger, of rotting cane stalks and decay, a rich, overpowering, organic smell.
She did not hear her friends, or hear anyone. Nor did she sense that another being was near. She was alone.
Then, up ahead, in the light cast by the insects, she saw something that made her stop in her tracks.
A yellow flag was staked in the ground, its folds and falls illuminated by the bright insects. It waved in a languid draft.
Heart racing, Penny walked deliberately towards it.
She reached out and lifted a corner of the fabric. It was wrinkled and dirty, but in the middle was the frayed green stitching of the parrot, wings outstretched in flight. She recognized a small tear in the lower right corner. It was the first flag, the one she had left in Tontap.
She didn’t know how or why, but Helix had been here.
Carefully she unhooked the flag from the stick it was tied to. She squeezed it and held it to her chest. In the middle distance she saw the next one, rippling in a breeze as the insects passed. She glided, feet bare, through the darkness towards it. It was the one from Jaipa. She took it down. She waited and watched the insects. The swarm zigged and zagged in a slow, halting passage through the trees up ahead. After a few minutes they illuminated another yellow oblong, the third one, which she’d raised on the message pole in Santori just the night before.
As she added the final flag to the others, she saw a light in the distance that was too bright to be from the insects. She approached it. As she got closer, she saw that it was coming from a round and very bright whorl. It looked like a sun
radiating light into the dark emptiness of space.
This time Penny didn’t run.
She steadily approached it.
Its light was not the false warmth of bioluminescence or the cold brilliance of moonlight. It was sunlight that streamed in, making her blink, bathing her in afternoon heat as she came right up to the edge of the whorl.
She leaned in. When her eyes adjusted, she found herself gazing out across a long, sunny valley, at the foot of which nestled a seaside town. It was as if she was looking through a window. She instantly recognized the horseshoe amphitheatre Tabba and Jebby had described to her, and at its base she could just make out what must be the great stone dial that measured the time until the Bloom. Tremendous heaps of shells, like the ones the children had seen being hauled by the elephantine creatures, glistened in middens along the shoreline, ready to absorb the brunt of the wave. An intricate maze of trenches had been dug to divert the surge around the town, which was small, just a neat huddle of stone homes climbing up one side of the valley. Penny was looking down at Palmos.
The sea was still calm. It twinkled enticingly. A brisk breeze unfurled off it, briny and fresh. A procession of people was making its way into the town along a sun-baked white road, polished smooth by shoes and hooves and wheels whose scuffle and rumble Penny could hear, mingling with the strains of music that drifted up through the valley. She smelled the pulp of mangoes and the charred scent of meat roasting over campfires, and her mouth watered. Her feet were still in the damp muck of the jungle, but her face was in the warm, bright sunlight on the other side. Here was a way out of the gloom and fear and terrible isolation of the Gorgonne. She could step through the whorl and be among people again. She could run down to the sea and rinse off the mud of the jungle, scrub away the scent of dampness and rot, fill her lungs with the clean sea air. She could see Helix. How he had been in the Gorgonne, she didn’t know, but he had staked Granny Pearl’s flags in the darkness, like channel markers guiding her safely to shore, and he was down there now, in the town, waiting for her.
Safety, light, life, the comfort of other humans – all she had to do was step through.
But behind her, still in the darkness of the Gorgonne, were her friends, and the shell to capture the Bloom that both Kana and Granny Pearl so desperately needed.
Penny stepped back from the whorl.
It shivered and closed. Palmos was gone. The glowing insects that had lit her way had left. Again she was in pure darkness. She stood very still, waiting for her eyes to adjust. The panic she had felt earlier was gone and instead she felt a deep, electric calm.
Again there was nothing, only silence, then she heard a faint trill.
At first she didn’t know what it was, but after a moment she recognized the sound: it was the bell, the one from Bellamy’s bicycle, that Jebby had rescued from the tree, that they had kept to return to him after the trials were over. Hope spread like warmth through her.
She followed the sound blindly through the darkness. Unseen leaves brushed her shoulders; her feet made no sound in the soft earth.
She ended up at a small whorl, glimmering softly in the loop of a low-slung vine. The sound of the bell was louder on the breeze that blew through it. Tentatively Penny reached out to touch it. She drew her hand back quickly, fingers tingling.
The mandrill would be with Tabba and Jebby. He mustn’t know that she was coming. Penny looked down. She had lost her shoes during her frantic flight, and the mud of the Gorgonne squished up between her bare toes. She remembered what Helix had taught her long ago, during the boredom of a drowsy afternoon in the garden at home, and she knelt and painted her arms, legs and clothes with mud to mask her scent. The mud was cool and dank, and smelled like old leaves and earthworms. She wiped streaks of it across her face until slowly she blended in with the jungle.
When she had finished, she wiped her hands off on her shirt.
Her goggles hung round her neck. She reached up and briefly held them. They were her grandmother’s, the ones she had worn every day for years on her morning swim through the cove out to the anvil rock. After Granny Pearl had stopped swimming, Penny had taken them as her own. Neither her grandmother nor her parents had seemed to notice.
Penny lifted them up and put them over her eyes.
Taking a deep breath, she stepped into the whorl.
With a sensation that felt like passing from air to water, Penny was expunged from the night world and into the low light of the jungle, the spot where she had been when the mandrill had taken Tabba and Jebby. Everything was still the same, except that the whorl into which her friends had disappeared was gone. Penny saw the tattered net and the shuffle of footprints in the dirt from where the children had struggled. There was no sign of the mandrill’s footprints. He had never left the whorl – he had simply reached out and pulled the children in. Lying tattered and trampled on the ground nearby was the spiderpod silk net. They had thought they could catch him with a simple net – how childish an idea it had been!
Penny felt a moment of panic when she realized she could no longer hear the bell.
She closed her eyes and listened.
There it was, very faintly, coming from deeper in the jungle.
She followed the sound. There were no trails and she had to fight her way through the crunching undergrowth, pausing every now and then to listen. She traced the ringing to another whorl, this one cradled in the crook of a low branch.
She went through it, and to her surprise found herself in broad daylight on a hard mountain ledge. She caught her breath as she looked down over a sheer drop. She knew the rocks below must be boulders, but they were so far away they looked like pebbles. The atmosphere was thin and a chill breeze buffeted the sheer stone cliffs. She was quickly cold. Goosebumps rippled over her bare arms and legs. Far below bloomed the verdant jade roof of the canopy, but all that grew where she stood was a dry frost of pewter lichen, eating acidly into the rock. Higher up the mountain it was snowing; cold flakes drifted down and melted in her hair. Fearful that a gust would blow her off the ledge, she inched along with her back against the cliff until she saw the next whorl, mercifully near, nestled beneath a blunt, stony overhang. The wind carried the broken notes of the bell from it and whisked them out over the valley.
Penny reached the whorl and ducked quickly through. She felt a slight tingle over her skin, and then she was in another place once again. Warm, golden light dappled her limbs. A robin’s-egg-blue sky stretched as far as she could see. Marmalade-orange plains undulated to the horizon. Slow herds of animals grazed on it. Here and there shadows were anchored to the earth beneath umbrella-shaped trees. She noticed that a tree in the distance was on fire, slow flames flapping like silk cloths in a steady breeze, but to her amazement its leaves were not burning up, the bark on its slender limbs was not charred. The animals appeared unbothered by it.
Keeping an eye on the strange fire, Penny followed the sound of the bell out across the open field. A horse cocked its ears and lifted its head to watch her, still chewing the tough russety grass. The sun was so bright that she didn’t see the whorl until she was right in front of it. It was sitting on the ground, where it seemed to rock back and forth slightly, like a glassy tumbleweed that had yet to build the momentum to roll.
The horse watched her as she stepped through it and disappeared.
After that whorl, there was another and another. The newest, the ones the mandrill had opened most recently, pulsed gently, emitting a warped and dreamy glow brighter than older whorls, which lingered like ghostly morning moons. Penny didn’t know whether Tabba, Jebby and the mandrill were moving just ahead of her, or whether the sound of the bell was just echoing through the whorls, but she kept going, her exhilaration greater than her fear. She had never known such freedom. World spilled limitlessly on to world, but she always ended up back in different parts of the original jungle the children had first arrived in. This was the place the mandrill kept returning to – the real world – and then the
re were little side worlds off it. Geography was not a cumbersome thing in the Gorgonne. The whorls were like shortcuts: you could be in one place and then, in a split second, in another, miles away – it was like moving through memory. The Gorgonne was as rich and complicated as a mind, and Penny began to feel, in fact, that she was in the mandrill’s mind. She began to want to see this creature, this spinner of worlds.
Once she saw the tribe of yellow-eyed monkeys that had tormented them before. This time they leaped out of her way to observe her from a safe distance. Another time she thought she glimpsed the lumphur, riderless, its golden flanks disappearing into the jade gloom. Right after that she lost the sound of the bell. She traipsed in circles, searching for small, accidental signposts the mandrill had left – lichen scraped off a branch, a mushroom shattered underfoot – and followed them to a whorl at the foot of a tree with pale, marbled bark. But this time, instead of stepping neatly across a threshold, she found herself falling.
Penny landed with a thump on a dark, swampy patch of earth. She was in a jungle, but it was darker and muckier than anywhere she had been before. Gloomy curtains of epiphytes hung down from branches, obscuring the view. Mushrooms large as dinner plates squatted here and there. Pale ground mist cleared to reveal a smooth boulder, swirled with patterns of jade and gypsum, as cold and clammy as something unearthed from a cave. Penny started to walk and tripped over a knotty root hidden in the mist.
Suddenly she heard leaves swishing a short distance away. Something was approaching. She stopped and stood very still and watched the figure. He was going in circles, looking like someone searching for something he had lost.
Kal had not seen her yet. He was picking his way through rotting branches, unhooking thorns from his clothes. His legs were caked in mud, and blood was dried on his arms where branches had scratched him. Penny felt a brief flash of camaraderie with him – he might be the only other soul in the Gorgonne with her, and he was there by himself, too. She shifted and a twig snapped. He froze. She was surprised by how terrified he looked. Then he saw her.