Phyllis Wong and the Return of the Conjuror

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The foul papers. The original drafts, penned by Mr Shakespeare in his own handwriting. No, Mr Shakespeare guarded those foul papers, those handwritten scripts, with his life—he never let them out of his sight, even when they were being copied by a member of his company. You see, they made copies of his originals and gave ’em out to all the actors, and they were the scripts used for performing. It was these script versions that we’ve used to put together what you call the First Folios.’

  ‘I see. And how does someone buy one of your First Folios?’ Phyllis asked.

  ‘Well, they usually go and see the bookseller. Edward Blount is his name. We’ve printed the First Folios in association with him. He comes and collects them from us—they’re not bound in covers or anything when he collects them; they’re just the pages sewn together, and when a customer buys their copy of the First Folio from Mr Blount, the customer usually goes away and has the pages bound in leather or calfskin or vellum or however they want them bound. Ed Blount has a stall in the churchyard of St Paul’s.’

  ‘Where all the booksellers are,’ said Phyllis, recalling what the old stranger had told her earlier.

  ‘Aye, that be correct.’ Isaac Jaggard stopped and scratched his beard, as he remembered something. ‘But, now that you ask, not everyone buys that way. We have one customer who comes to us direct. She’s bought not one First Folio, but . . . oooh . . . let me think . . .’ He scratched his beard some more, then called out to the younger man: ‘Indigo? How many copies of the big Shakespeare have we sold to Mistress Colley?’

  Mistress Colley, Phyllis noted in her mind.

  ‘Ooh, must be close to a dozen, as I’d recall, Mr Jaggard,’ called the younger man from the back of the shop.

  ‘Aye, you be not far off the mark, Indigo,’ Jaggard called to him. ‘Yes, Phyllis Wong, this woman, Mistress Colley, she comes in here every now and then—sometimes several times in the space of a few weeks, other times we don’t get a visit from her for a year or longer—and buys a First Folio. Sometimes she buys more’n one on the same occasion. She is a most . . . individual sort of woman, wouldn’t you say, Indigo?’

  Indigo looked up and gave a wry smile. ‘You could put it like that, Mr Jaggard.’

  ‘Aye. She’s very forthright, no nonsense about her. Almost demanding. And she dresses like a man, too. Every time we’ve seen her she be wearing britches and long boots and a gentleman’s cloak.’

  ‘And she be keeping company with a rat,’ added Indigo, shaking his head.

  Isaac Jaggard nodded. ‘We think she does indeed. Indigo saw a thing scurrying around her shoulders on one of her visits.’

  Phyllis shuddered.

  ‘But she’s a good customer. The big Shakespeares don’t sell cheap, and she always has the money.’

  ‘How much does a First Folio cost?’ asked Phyllis.

  ‘Well, if we sell direct—and we only sell direct to her—they cost one pound each. That be more than most people around here could afford in half a year of wages, Phyllis Wong. Ed Blount charges the same across at St Paul’s, but he doesn’t include binding the sheets in the cost. People have to pay for their own binding if they buy from him.’

  ‘And do you bind the copies you sell to this Mistress Colley?’

  ‘Aye. She’s always most particular about how she wants the Shakespeares bound. She always requests—no, she always demands—that each First Folio be bound in a deep, dark-red calf leather. And then the bound book has to be wrapped carefully in a soft vellum covering—that’s the skin of a young goat, is vellum. And the vellum covering always has to be dyed green, a dark green. She’s most fussy about all of that, isn’t she, Indigo?’

  ‘Fussiest customer we ever did see,’ Indigo responded as he stacked the leather. ‘She and her rodent.’

  ‘And she’s the only customer who comes in here and buys the First Folios directly from you?’ asked Phyllis.

  ‘She is,’ replied Isaac Jaggard. ‘I once asked her why she didn’t just pop over to see Ed Blount and buy her copies from him. She said she wanted to get them from us because it would save on any wear and tear. She said she wanted her books in the most perfect condition possible, and she had a better chance of getting them like that if she bought them directly from us, with no extra handling involved.’

  Phyllis nodded. ‘Mr Jaggard, why does she buy so many copies, do you think?’

  ‘Ah. I enquired that of her myself, not so long ago. She wouldn’t answer me. Just paid for the book that day, said goodbye and off she went, her cloak billowing about her like there was a gale blowing. Oh, I remember that day only too well . . . her eyes were strange, they were. Like they were glowing—greenish, as the eyes of a cat on a dark night. Well, her good eye was, at least. Just like a cat’s . . .’

  No, not the eyes of a cat, Phyllis thought. The eyes of a Transiter.

  ‘Very strange it were,’ said Jaggard. ‘Never have I seen eyes like that before or since.’

  ‘She be a very strange woman completely,’ said Indigo with a grimace. ‘And nasty. Oh, yes, nasty, indeed. I remember the first time she bought one of the Folios. She were just leavin’ the shop here and she’d stepped out onto the street, and lo and behold someone emptied a pot o’ slops from a window above, all a-splatter on the ground right next to Mistress Colley’s boots. Mistress Colley wasted not a moment—she dashed up the stairs o’ the house and the next thing I see, when I ran outside the shop, was a man bein’ dangled by his ankles from the third-storey window. Mistress Colley was holdin’ him there and shoutin’ the worst cusses I ever did hear from a woman’s lips. The poor fellow was terrified, beggin’ her to stop and to let him back inside. Then, just as a crowd was gatherin’, a peddler came past with his cart and when he was in front of the house, Mistress Colley let go of the poor man’s ankles and he dropped like a metal sinker, BANG into the cart. Luckily it were full of cabbages, but even so, cabbages can be most injurious.’

  ‘That be true,’ said Isaac Jaggard. ‘The unfortunate man broke his shoulder and both arms in the fall. ’Twere a miracle he didn’t get killed by them cabbages.’

  Phyllis felt a sense of creeping dread growing inside her, as she was finding out more about this woman, Colley. She shook her head, and returned to the question of the First Folios. ‘Does she always pay you cash when she gets a new Folio?’ she asked Jaggard.

  ‘Every time. She never buys on credit. And every time I always give her the proper receipt.’

  Phyllis frowned. She’d found the information she needed—that Colley was buying the First Folios, and not stealing them. But still, Phyllis felt unsatisfied . . . it didn’t seem right, what this woman was doing . . .

  ‘Would you like to buy a copy yeself?’ asked Isaac Jaggard.

  ‘I’d love to,’ Phyllis said. ‘But . . . I haven’t the money.’

  ‘No, it is a huge amount, aye. Never you mind. But, Phyllis Wong, I’d like you to have something. To remember your visit to Isaac Jaggard’s.’

  He went back to a tall rack of shelving behind the printing press. From one of the shelves there he took out a small piece of black metal type, nearly an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide. He came back and handed it to Phyllis.

  ‘A little keepsake, if you like. A little piece of what we use to set the Shakespeares.’

  ‘Wow! Thank you.’ She turned the block of type over in the palm of her hand. On the top of it, mirror-reversed, was a raised letter: P.

  Isaac Jaggard smiled as he watched her examining it.

  ‘Mr Jaggard, how old is this?’

  ‘Hmm. Well it’s not new. I bought all the type from an old printer a few years ago. And I doubt it were quite new even then. Oh, let me think . . .’ He scratched his beard again . . . ‘Maybe it’s ten years old. Maybe older. I could not be sure.’ He stopped scratching his beard and regarded her. ‘You’re a curious young girl, if thou don’t mind me saying such.’

  She beamed at him. ‘I don’t mind you s
aying that at all,’ she told him. ‘I’d rather be curious than ordinary.’

  ‘Aye, well you’ll go far with that attitude, Phyllis Wong. You’ll go far indeed.’ Suddenly he looked over her shoulder, through the front window of the shop. ‘Egads! I live and breathe!’

  Phyllis turned and she too looked out the front window. She saw passers-by, but nothing out of the usual. She turned back to Isaac Jaggard. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Ha. He’s gone now.’

  ‘Who’s gone?’

  ‘A most strange fellow. A dwarf. A dwarf with a long red beard. Looking into the shop for a moment. Now, one don’t see many like that around. Sometimes the King has one in his court, a dwarf I mean, but they are few and far between in London . . .’

  ‘It seems to me that London’s full of strange things,’ Phyllis commented.

  ‘That it is,’ said Jaggard. ‘That it truly is. And now, I have work to be returning to. Many pages to print before suppertime tonight, Phyllis Wong.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Jaggard. And thank you.’

  ‘Thou art most welcome,’ he said, giving her a wink.

  She held her opened palm up to him and showed him her block of type. Then, as smoothly as silk being slid away, she passed her other hand over the type.

  Isaac Jaggard’s eyes became huge as he saw that her palm was now completely empty. She turned her other hand over to show him that it, too, was empty. His eyes became huger.

  ‘Disappeared!’ he gasped. ‘Heigh-ho! How can you do such a thing?’

  ‘Magic,’ replied Phyllis, smiling.

  ‘Ordinary you are definitely not, Phyllis Wong,’ said the printer, shaking his head.

  She picked up her bag and, with a cheery wave, she left him.

  When Phyllis left Isaac Jaggard’s shop, she realised that she’d become a bit disoriented; she had no idea from which direction she’d come to get there. Even with the instructions from the old man which she’d written in her journal, she’d managed to become lost.

  She spent nearly two hours wandering the streets and alleys, pausing whenever she came to any stairs and peering intensely up them, hoping to find a TimePocket. She hoped that if she stayed still when she was doing this, controlling her breathing until it slowed down and clearing her mind of as much as she could clear, then she might be able to see the glimmer or the faint presence of an Anamygduleon or an Andruseon or Anvugheon or Anaumbryon.

  Although there would have been lots of staircases inside buildings to check, she felt it was safer to remain where there were more people coming and going. And that meant staying outside. Most of the staircases she came across were littered with rotting vegetables or broken bottles or cats having kittens (that had only been on one of the staircases, and it had given Phyllis a little shock); others were crowded with people rushing up them or down them as they set about their business.

  But then, rounding a corner near a noisy tavern, she found what she’d been looking for. In front of her, leading up to a street that was higher than the one in which she was standing, was a ramshackle staircase that gave her a strange feeling.

  She stopped, slowed her breathing and let her mind empty. She half-closed her eyes and looked to the upper reaches of the crooked stone stairs. And she saw it almost immediately.

  This Pocket was different to the ones she’d already Transited through. It was shaped like a large almond and instead of a pale green light around its edges, the edges of this one shone with a bright orange glow before fading away and shining again. And what lay inside it—a dark blue-black, like the colour of W.W.’s midnight-blue tuxedo—seemed denser, thicker . . .

  But it was a Pocket! Let’s go, she told herself. She pulled her bag firmly across her shoulder, patted her coat pockets to make sure she had all her things (including her piece of metal type and the corner of the First Folio page) and then, from the pocket of her jeans, she took out one of the small, red, spangly balls she used for her cups-and-balls routines. This she clutched tightly in her left hand. This was her passport home.

  Holding her head high, she ran up the stairs towards the Pocket, her heart beating faster.

  And, unseen by anyone from that Time, she was gone!

  The journey home was wild and bumpy; this time she seemed to be pulled almost ferociously into the Pocket, and the darkness smothered her straightaway. The wind was fierce; she shut her eyes as hard as she could, but the air currents still found a way to prise open her eyes at the corners, and she couldn’t help the teardrops escaping—not tears of pain, but tears from the air pressure. Her cheeks ballooned out and her coat and bag buffeted and blew behind her. She felt like she was Transiting at an angle, leaning forward into the darkness, being propelled like a paper plane along the rapidity of the cosmos.

  As the darkness came into lightness, she tried not to think about her stomach—it felt like someone had reached down her throat and grabbed the insides of her tummy and was trying to pull it up through her mouth. Think of something else, she told herself. Think of Daisy and her cold wet snout and the way she licks her paws when she grooms herself and the way her little tail wags . . .

  She heard the soft, high-pitched humming of the air around her, and then the wind started to fade and the light began growing brighter. There were the molecules of brightness ahead, those small, twinkling baubles that she’d seen at the entrance to the TimePocket when she’d left the magic basement.

  With a mighty lurch forward, Phyllis stumbled out of the Pocket so fast that she tripped and, unable to get her balance, tumbled down the stairs, her legs going over her head and her arms buckling under her.

  ‘Oooooof!’ she gasped as the breath was knocked out of her and she kept on rolling down, down, down . . .

  She came to a hard stop on the floor. And moaned loudly.

  She waited a few moments to see if she was hurt. Luckily she couldn’t feel any sharp pain—just the discomfort of having been knocked about on the hard stairs. She knew she’d have some bruises coming up very soon.

  She lay there, waiting for her head and her stomach to settle. Her eyes were throbbing and she felt as if she were an accordion—and that some invisible musician had just played some wild sort of tune on her, pulling and squeezing her through the centuries.

  In this semi-dazed state, she didn’t notice the elevator’s doors above her. They opened and closed and then the elevator rose up towards the lobby. Phyllis was too zonked to hear it depart.

  Eventually she rolled over and rubbed an elbow. Slowly she got to her feet, steadying herself against the stair’s banister. That was some trip, she thought. I’ve really got to work on my re-entry if I’m not going to end up a permanent bundle of bruises.

  Then she heard the juddering full-stop of the elevator as it landed again in the basement. She looked up the stairs, past the Anamygduleon she’d just Transited through, and saw the elevator doors vibrating.

  ‘Huh?’ she wondered aloud. ‘How come that’s come down again? I’m sure I took my key out of it before I left. No one can operate that without the key . . .’

  She went up the stairs, opened the elevator doors and went inside. There was a key, sitting in the basement lock in the control panel. Phyllis frowned. She took the key out, then quickly checked her pockets and her bag to see if this was her key or her dad’s—maybe her dad was home; he was the only other person with a key to the basement of the Wallace Wong Building.

  She couldn’t find her key anywhere. She looked at the key in her hand. This is screwy, she thought. This is my key. But I took it out before I left, and put it in my . . . She put her hand to her mouth as she realised something. The Time must be different! She must have returned here to a time before she had left! She must have come back a few minutes before she had Transited to London . . . That would account for the elevator behaving strangely earlier, too . . .

  Phyllis’s heart was beating fast. Her first solo journey and the discombobulations and the pressure of the Transitaciousness (as W.W. had put it) were
making her dizzy. She needed a good dose of normal right now.

  She inserted her key into the control panel, turned it and pressed the button for the third floor, to her apartment. She needed to play with her Daisy.

  Heads-up headline

  Two days later, after Phyllis had settled back into the modern world and spent some happy time with Daisy, and after she had written down the details of her journey to Isaac Jaggard’s so she wouldn’t forget all the things that he had said to her, she still couldn’t help but feel unsatisfied.

  She felt that things weren’t really right. She knew that the woman whom Isaac Jaggard had called Mistress Colley was not stealing the First Folios; she was buying them, and then selling them for a huge profit. That wasn’t illegal, her dad had said, to buy and sell like that, but to Phyllis it didn’t seem fair.

  She thought it seemed underhanded.

  Because that Colley woman wasn’t breaking any law, Phyllis couldn’t see what could be done to stop her. Phyllis was becoming exasperated about the situation. How would it look, after all, if she went and told Chief Inspector Barry Inglis about what she’d discovered? He’d listen to her, all right—he always listened to her and treated her like she was a worthwhile person, and she always liked that—but even he would think she was crackers. He’d probably ring up her dad and suggest she spend a bit of time with some doctor with a nice soft couch and a soothing manner.

  Maybe, Phyllis considered, that’s what the world’s like. Maybe the world is a place where people can get away with things that aren’t really right while at the same time not breaking the law.

  Phyllis didn’t like that idea at all. It seemed selfish and ugly and unfair. Perhaps it’s a question of how people see things, she thought. All sorts of situations can be seen in different ways. Look what happened with Leizel Cunbrus. Phyllis felt that she herself hadn’t done anything wrong, but people thought she had. Leizel had seen to that, with the way she’d carried on, even though she hadn’t really got burnt at all.