by Nadia Aguiar
They stared at each other.
‘Oh,’ he said in surprise. ‘It’s you.’
‘Hi,’ Penny said awkwardly.
Kal stepped over a fallen tree trunk and made his way towards her.
‘Where are Tabba and Jebby?’ he asked.
‘The mandrill took them,’ said Penny. ‘A whorl opened suddenly and he grabbed them.’
Kal stiffened when he heard the news.
‘But they’re still in here somewhere,’ Penny said. ‘I’ve been tracking them through whorls. Jebby’s been ringing the bell, the one from Bellamy’s bike …’ She trailed off, remembering that Kal’s treachery was the reason they had the bicycle bell with them in the first place. She thought of the parts of the bicycle, swinging in the breeze back in the jungle near Hopper. Had that really just been yesterday? It felt like so long ago.
‘If they’re ringing the bell, they’re OK,’ said Kal. ‘Don’t you think?’
Penny was surprised that he was trying to be reassuring. ‘They’re OK,’ she said. ‘They have to be.’ She paused. ‘Have you seen any of the other teams?’
‘Lamlo,’ said Kal. He climbed over a rotting log and stopped in front of her. ‘We had just run into each other in here when the same thing happened – a whorl opened and the mandrill reached out and grabbed him and dragged him in. I saw it happen. I hid, but later I peeked through the whorl – it went to somewhere outside the Gorgonne. What about you? Have you seen anyone else?’
‘No, but before we even reached the Gorgonne we heard that Grasshopper Boy and the Dorado brothers had been kicked out,’ said Penny. ‘They gave up and headed to Palmos.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Where’s Seagrape?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Kal after a moment. ‘I really don’t. I’m sorry. I opened that whorl so quickly I don’t know where it went. But there are whorls all over the place. She can go through them … She can find her way back. If I could bring her back myself, I would – really.’
Penny studied his face. She exhaled. She believed he was telling her the truth. Now she had to stop thinking about Seagrape before she got too upset. Kal was right; the parrot was probably making her way back this very moment. Relieved to have the company of another person – even if it was Kal – she was eager to talk. He seemed to feel the same.
‘I’ve been following the bell through the whorls, into all these strange places,’ she said. ‘Have you been in them, too – these other places? What are they?’
‘The mandrill made them,’ said Kal. ‘Whatever he imagines, he can make real. I think that outside the Gorgonne he can only open whorls before the Bloom. But in here he’s free to open them whenever he wants.’
‘But how does he do it?’ asked Penny, taking a tentative step closer to Kal. ‘Are they real places?’
‘You’ve been in them – they seem real, don’t they?’ said Kal. ‘But I think they’re the way he pictures things, or remembers them, or wants them to be; that’s why they’re so strange. I don’t know how he does it. I just know that if he imagines somewhere – if it’s in his thoughts – and he wants it to be there, it’s there.’
‘And the whorls are like doorways between them,’ said Penny.
‘Yeah,’ said Kal. ‘Sometimes between places he’s imagined or remembered, and sometimes he opens whorls to actual places – like when he shows up around Kana.’
‘Is that how you found the Molmer egg and the Zamzee beetle and got back to the next towns so fast?’ asked Penny. ‘You were going through whorls?’
‘I opened one straight to a Blue Pit to get the Molmer,’ said Kal proudly. ‘And the Zamzee – I just imagined a place where they were coming out of the ground. That’s the only time I’ve been able to do that – to imagine a whole new place. They were all alive, flying all over the place, and it was hard to catch one – that’s how I got stung. But I caught it and got back to Santori quickly. No one would have believed anyone could have found a beetle that fast, so I had to hide outside the town for a while.’
Penny was quiet, absorbing what he had told her. Insects ticked over dead leaves. The grey light faded in the distance and the jungle pressed around them.
‘Why hasn’t he kicked us out?’ she asked at last. ‘He’s got all the others, so why are we still here?’
‘Don’t you know why?’
Penny shook her head.
‘Because we can make whorls,’ said Kal. ‘We’re the only ones who can.’
‘Not me,’ said Penny quickly, in surprise. ‘I can’t.’
‘I didn’t open that whorl at the Line,’ Kal told her.
Penny stared at him, confused.
‘I figured it out,’ he said. ‘We can do it because we don’t belong. The mandrill doesn’t. I don’t. And neither do you. That’s why we’re the only ones who can.’
For a moment Kal looked like he was going to say something else, then his face hardened and he seemed to remember that they were competitors.
‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I have to find the shell.’
‘Wait!’ Penny cried.
But Kal opened a whorl and disappeared into it. It closed behind him. He was gone.
Penny was still standing there, her thoughts reeling, when she heard another whorl pop open in the trees nearby. A stick cracked and leaves rustled. Something was there. Something large.
She looked anxiously around and noticed a whorl next to her, hidden beneath a plant with broad, spatula-like leaves. The whorl wasn’t quite like any she’d seen before. It emitted a sickly, jaundiced light. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. But whatever was in the jungle was getting closer, so she ducked through into it to hide. She found herself alone in a small, sandy burrow. Instantly and unmistakably, she sensed Kal and knew that she was in a whorl that he had made. He must have been in this same spot sometime earlier. Perhaps he had hidden from the same thing that was out there now. The ceiling was so low she had to crouch. The sand was softly, continuously collapsing round the edges. The only light came through from the jungle outside. The dank, foetid stench of decay hung in the air. It was a place made by a fearful mind, and Penny wanted to get out, but through the whorl she could hear the thing in the undergrowth coming closer. Whether it was human or animal, she wasn’t sure.
Suddenly the inside of the burrow began to dim. Penny could no longer see or hear anything on the other side of the whorl. In alarm she realized that it was weak and fading; it was going to close. If she didn’t get out now, she’d be trapped. The sand at the edges began falling faster. Penny tried to leave the way she had come in, but it was like some invisible, impermeable shield was sealing the way. In desperation she hurled herself at it and tumbled out. She was back in the murky, humid jungle again. She looked around, but she was alone. She smelled ginger leaves, heard the tick of insects. A spider observed her from its thick yellow web.
She turned back to the whorl, which faded before her eyes.
The mandrill’s worlds were vibrant, alive, strong and healthy. Kal’s was a stunted, lifeless hollow. Not a fully realized world, but a place made in haste by a frightened, hunted mind. It had reeked of fear and desperation. What had he been so afraid of?
Then Penny looked down and saw a footprint.
A long heel, five toes, just like Tabba had described from that day the mandrill had appeared in Tontap. He had been here. Penny’s heart began to pound.
She crouched and touched it, then drew her hand back sharply. The footprint was warm.
The mud cooled beneath her hand.
And then, horribly, she knew.
She turned round very slowly.
She looked at the same patch of foliage twice before she saw him, sitting there on his haunches, watching her.
She knew that, by the time you saw a predator, the predator had seen you long ago.
He observed her, but nothing in his posture suggested he was preparing to attack. He was alert but relaxed. Tabba and Jebby were not with him.
Penny remain
ed very still.
Like every creature in Tamarind, he was a few degrees off from the animals she knew on the Outside, from a divergent branch of the same tree. He was the size of a small human man, and his head, larger than any human head, rested on a thick block of shoulders. His fur was dark, twilit blue, frosted here and there with white. He was so deft and agile as he moved through the whorls that she was surprised to find that he wasn’t a young animal. But it was his face that captivated her. Its hairless skin was brightly pigmented. Oblongs and streaks of colour – bright yellow, royal blue, deep green, vivid red – like a gaudy oil-paint mask. Deep blue grooves and ridges carved his cheeks. His long, pendulous nose was bright red. Blonde plumes of thick long hair – like a lion’s mane – flowed on either side of his face.
As she watched him, she felt a curious kinship with the beast, solitary and misunderstood. No one in Kana knew all the rich and wonderful things in his mind, how he created these places, and how alone he was in them. And he was magnificent, with his showy colours and his deep velvety fur, his body built for speed and stealth. She respected him, admired him, even. A crazy thought went through her mind – she could just walk out in front of him, talk to him, explain her case, befriend him. But, just as she was thinking this, the mandrill grimaced and his face transformed: his lips drew back and his thick, yellowed fangs lengthened. His broad oval nostrils quivered. His fearsome mask darkened. He walked forward a few paces on his knuckles. His burly warrior back was broad, his curt devilish beard orange as a flame, and his steely hands could surely snap her neck like it was a matchstick. She began to sweat. The mud she had painted on her skin ran down in rivulets, but it didn’t matter. The mud, like the net and the natal plums, had been futile.
She expected him to attack her, but, inexplicably, he turned and walked off on all fours into the foliage.
Penny stood there trembling, unsure if he was leading her into a trap or taking her to the others – or if that was one and the same. Feeling she had no choice but to follow him, she slowly picked her way through the foliage. She maintained a respectful distance but kept sight of his silvery-blue back through the leaves. He didn’t seem to object to her presence. She half wondered if he was happy for some company.
He walked into a deep fernbed. Penny pushed soft, wet ferns out of her way and followed him. The damp fronds soaked her clothes and her feet sank into the mulchy ground. Dewy spiderwebs broke against her shoulders and the rich, rooty smell of mud rose through the low light.
Suddenly she could no longer see or hear him ahead of her.
She hurried to catch up and find the whorl she was sure he had gone through.
Mud sucked at her feet as she tramped around, peering between the thick green arches. If a whorl was there, it was hidden.
Just as she was starting to feel desperate, Penny stumbled upon it, concealed beneath the feathery bridge of a tall, stooped frond.
She stepped lightly through.
She looked down to see that her feet were no longer in mud but on sunny, stony ground, scattered with what looked like shattered glass.
Lizards basked on rocks, their puffy orange throats catching like flames. The dim, suffocating canopy was gone, and above her was a hot blue sky studded with clouds. In the jungle the foliage had been so dense that it had been impossible to see any great distance, but now her view was broken only by low scrub and, in the middle distance, a tall range of jet-black rocks. Whorls hung in the leaden sky above it. Only a lone, discordant frond, the one she had ducked beneath, stood behind her, leaning in the scrap of shade afforded by a stray boulder. She stepped out of the path of a snapping terrapin and her feet left damp tracks on the dry ground.
She noticed that the clouds in the sky were all coming from the same place, rising from behind the range of black rocks, as if a steam engine was chugging along behind them, pumping puffy white clouds in its wake. She winced as she took a step closer and her bare foot crunched on glassy shards. She heard a low growl and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She looked up and saw the mandrill sitting on his haunches near the opening to the break in the rocks.
Quickly Penny crouched in the shadow of the boulder and peered round it.
The mandrill was eating something. She squinted and saw that it was some kind of shellfish, its shell a clear, swirled flute. Her pulse quickened. She looked down. The fragments she had stepped on weren’t glass; they were broken shells. A breeze picked up, parting the steam clouds, and in a chasm between the rocks Penny glimpsed light reflecting off water. The lake – it was right here!
The breeze blew towards her, and an acrid whiff of sulphur stung her nostrils. Penny thought the lake must be some type of hot springs. Then she heard the bell trilling, clearer and closer than ever before. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere out on the water. Tabba and Jebby were here. Penny glimpsed a small stone island in the middle of the water. Her friends were there. She had found them.
But there was no way past the mandrill. She noticed that his tracks went back and forth in front of the chasm. He was patrolling the area, guarding it. Why was he keeping them prisoner instead of expelling them like he had the other teams? Was he laying a trap for Penny? Why? She could hear him slurp as he sucked out the meat and cast the empy shell to land with a tinkle among others strewn around him. She glanced behind her, to see if she could retreat then approach from another angle, outside his range of vision, but beyond the protection of the boulder it was all open ground. The whorl she had come through weakened and sputtered out.
There was no way back and no way forward.
Penny was trapped.
Steam hissed softly from the lake.
She needed a way to get to the lake. What she needed was a whorl. She thought about what Kal had said and wondered if he could possibly be right. She remembered back to the foggy morning she had woken in the rowing-boat, how she had been thinking so strongly of Tamarind right before the whorl had opened.
She closed her eyes and imagined being on the other side of the black rocks.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, but when she opened her eyes she was still there, on the hot earth beside the boulder. She frowned. Kal had seemed so sure.
The idea came to her, suddenly and easily, as though she had reflexively reached out and caught a ball someone had thrown to her. Penny needed to be in another place, and she needed a way to get there. A whorl was like a door or a window between places – a sort of portal.
Penny would imagine the only portal between places she could – a real one.
She closed her eyes and imagined a place she knew inside and out, a place she knew every detail of by heart.
When she opened them, there in front of her, in the side of the boulder, was a whorl. It glowed gently and promisingly in the bright day, inviting her closer. She leaned in and saw one of the Pamela Jane’s portholes, fogged with steam. Penny smiled. She pushed it open and wriggled inside.
Inside the cabin of the Pamela Jane, it was dark: the dark of a deeply overcast day. The portholes were thick with steam, but Penny could see that she was on the other side of the black rocks, out in the middle of the lake. Through her bare feet, she could feel heat emanating through the hull. She opened the hatch and climbed on to the deck. A blast of heat almost overwhelmed her. The air smelled powerfully of sulphur.
The boat was not the real Pamela Jane, but a version from Penny’s own mind, amplified and altered by memory. The portholes were larger than they really were; their brass sparkled as they had not in years. The mast was taller in her imagination than it was in real life, the deck broader, its warp gone. The pure white mainsail was raised, set at a broad reach.
The lake was so hot that it bubbled softly. Steam clouds lingered over its surface, reducing the world to tones of grey. Around the shore was a seamless, glittering band – a multitude of shellfish clinging to the rocks, thriving just out of reach of the simmering water. The mandrill had been prising them free, feasting on t
he creatures that lived inside, and discarding the empty shells, which now sparkled in heaps on narrow strands of black sand beaches. One of these shells would capture the Bloom. Penny might even have a chance to get one before she reached her friends.
On the shores and in the sky all around the lake were dozens of whorls the mandrill had made each time he had come there. They were densely clustered, some nearly transparent, others strong and bright. They looked like a cosmic sweep of galaxies, fixed in the firmament. Breezes emanated from them, and it was on these that the Pamela Jane was sailing.
Through the steam she heard the bicycle bell trilling invisibly. Not wanting to shout and attract the mandrill’s attention, Penny stood at the wheel and turned the Pamela Jane to sail towards it. She tacked out of one breeze and glided blindly along until the next one caught her. The winds through the whorls were scattered and unpredictable, coming from every which way. It was tricky to make progress and almost impossible to keep on course. All she could do was turn her face to feel where the next breeze was coming from. The steam obscured her view, and she expected to crash at any moment. She abandoned the idea of getting a shell before rescuing Tabba and Jebby.
A gust cleared the air long enough for her to glimpse a bare stone island, bleached white by heat, in the centre of the lake. She spotted Tabba and Jebby on its barren shore. They were not tied up; they were free and unharmed, but stranded with no way to cross the boiling water. Seeing her, Jebby stopped ringing the bell for a second before quickly resuming. They waved silently and urgently to her. Penny turned the boat towards them.
Perhaps the mandrill was alerted by the pause in the ringing, perhaps he had just returned to dine on more shells, but he appeared on the far shore, his face a colourful blot against the grey.
He saw the boat.
He stood up to his full height.
He roared.
He paced back and forth a few times, then leaped into the air.