Phyllis Wong and the Return of the Conjuror

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  ‘Yeah,’ said Phyllis. ‘A real picnic.’

  ‘I just had to hold on tight to your coat, that’s all,’ Clement said. ‘Or else I’d be blown away!’

  She remembered she’d been aware that her coat had been buffeted and pulled from behind. ‘So you were what I could feel behind me the last few times I’ve Transited. You.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Then she asked him, ‘So how about when you Transited with me on this trip? I didn’t leave the key in the elevator before we came here. How’d you get down to the basement then?’

  ‘Ah. Well, Phyllis Wong, I made a little discovery of my own.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said, frowning.

  ‘Well, where I was hiding, behind that big pot plant—I betcha didn’t know that there’s a door there.’

  Phyllis’s brows came together as she listened.

  ‘Yep,’ said Clement. ‘You don’t really see it when you walk through the lobby; it’s the same dark wood as the rest of the panelling all around the walls, and that lobby’s always really dim, and the door’s behind the plants, like I said. So a few days later I opened it and found out there were stairs behind it. And guess where the stairs lead?’

  ‘To the basement,’ Phyllis said.

  ‘Correct. They come out through a door underneath the other big stairs down there, below the elevator. The door’s hidden behind that huge pile of old crates and baskets and stuff.’

  Phyllis felt miffed. She had no idea there was another entrance to her basement. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you’ve been spying on me?’

  ‘Well . . . not spying . . .’

  ‘Yes, spying!’

  At the sound of Phyllis’s raised voice, Daisy gave her hand a quick, placating lick.

  Clement took off his glasses and wiped them on his coat. ‘I . . . I just wanted to know . . .’

  ‘Wanted to know what, Clement?’

  He sighed. ‘I just wanted to know that you were okay. That’s all.’ He put his glasses back on and fiddled with the rubber on the half-bald wig in his lap.

  Phyllis regarded him for several long minutes. Then a faint smile appeared on her lips. ‘You promise me another thing.’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘You are never, I repeat never, to tell anyone about what I do. About my Transiting. No one, not even Dad, knows about this. If you tell a single soul, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. But whatever it is, it won’t be friendly.’

  He looked up through his false red bushy eyebrows at her. ‘I promise, Phyllis Wong. I fully promise that I’ll never tell anyone about this.’ He smiled, and he felt a warmth deep inside himself.

  Phyllis smiled back. Then she said, ‘What on Earth made you decide to dress up like that? You look like a reject from The Hobbit!’

  ‘I think it’s very good, actually,’ said Clement. ‘Evangeline said it suits me.’

  ‘Evangeline?’

  ‘Miss Hipwinkle, to you.’

  Phyllis shook her head slowly.

  ‘She said that the half-bald wig and the bushy beard and moustache and eyebrows give me a rakish air. She said I looked debonair, and that no one would ever recognise me.’

  ‘Boy, she saw you coming a mile off!’

  Just then a sharp, pungent smell wafted from across the river, and Clement screwed up his nose.

  ‘Ergh! There’s that stink again! I smelt it when I was following you to the theatre. What is it? It reminds me of Leizel Cunbrus!’

  Phyllis caught it, too, and she put her hand to her nostrils. ‘It’s worse than Leizel Cunbrus,’ she said. ‘It’s from the tanneries on the other side of the Thames. They use a certain something to soften all the leather. I read about it on the net.’

  ‘A certain something?’ Clement was scrunching his face so much his moustache popped off, and his beard was sticking out at weird angles. ‘What? It smells like—’

  ‘Believe me, you don’t want to know,’ said Phyllis.

  Clement opened up his backpack and took out his phone. ‘Boy, Mum’s gonna kill me. That was a not-yet-released webPad 7 I left with those bozos at the theatre. She’ll go nuts when she finds out I’ve lost it.’ He turned on his phone, and his eyes lit up. ‘Hey, Phyll, look at this!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look what’s happening on my phone. Man, it’s crazy!’

  He showed her the phone’s screen. There before them was a changing image—an amorphous, blob-like amalgam of bright gold swirls that were transforming into red spirals, and then purple threads, and then into glowing white tendrils. All of the colours and shapes were slowly corkscrewing into each other, getting smaller and smaller and then bigger again, and continually shrinking and expanding.

  The patterns reminded Phyllis of something she had once found in W.W.’s and her basement; something that had mesmerised her and had crept into her thoughts often.

  ‘That’s the only signal we can get here,’ Clem said. ‘Not bad for . . . what Time is it?’

  ‘Sixteen twelve,’ she answered in a faraway tone.

  He turned the phone off and Phyllis shivered.

  Clement picked up his moustache from off the ground. ‘Hey, you can answer me a question now: what’s all that stuff about Card . . . Cardamom . . . what was it?’

  ‘Cardenio,’ Phyllis said. ‘It’s the reason I’ve come back. We’ve come back, I should say. And it’s the reason we have to go back.’ She stood, picking up Daisy and putting her into the shoulder bag.

  Clement scrambled to his feet. ‘Huh?’ He shoved his half-bald wig and moustache into his backpack. ‘Go back? Gee, for someone smart, you sometimes have the dumbest ideas. We can’t show our faces there again . . . I don’t like the look of that Ralph guy one little bit!’

  Phyllis’s eyes narrowed. ‘We’ve got to get back into that theatre. We just have to.’

  ‘But they won’t let you in! Or, they will, but just to lock us up!’

  As Phyllis was thinking, she looked over Clem’s shoulder at a poster that had been pasted to the wall of the laneway: an audition poster for the Globe. An idea began coming to her. They mightn’t let girls on their stages, she thought, but there are other ways . . .

  ‘I think I know how we can do it,’ she said, starting to hurry away. ‘C’mon, Clem, we have to get back.’

  ‘Hey, wait up!’ Clement called, sliding his phone into his coat pocket and not noticing it falling out onto the street as he tried to catch up to his determined best friend.

  Inveigling the Inspector

  ‘You want me to what?’

  Chief Inspector Barry Inglis was standing with Phyllis at the foot of the stairs in the basement of the Wallace Wong Building.

  ‘When I say the word, just run up the stairs with me,’ Phyllis repeated. She held Daisy in her arms, and Daisy, too, was listening intently, a slightly quizzical expression on her little face.

  Barry shook his head. He looked at Phyllis, then all around the vast, crammed basement—he had never been down here before. In fact, he had never, up until this point, even remembered there was a basement to the building, and he’d been living in the Wallace Wong Building for nearly fourteen years.

  ‘Just . . . run up the stairs with you,’ he said slowly. ‘Miss Wong, are you intending to prank me or something?’ Warily, he looked around for any cameras.

  ‘No, Chief Inspector. This is important.’

  He frowned. ‘How can running up the stairs be important? Look, Miss Wong, I came down here because you said there was something urgent you had to show me. And now you’re asking me to run up the stairs with you. I fail to see—’

  ‘Trust me. Please. It is important.’

  He sighed. ‘You know full well that I have the greatest respect for you. Why, without you, there’d still be a case open and unsolved on the Squad files. But, good lord, I really have more important things to do with my afternoon. I should be at headquarters. I’ve got enquiries to make regarding the Shakespeare play, then I’ve got to go to the laund
romat and then shopping for groceries and then watching the baseball game on TV, not to mention the—’

  ‘This is all to do with the Shakespeare play,’ Phyllis said urgently.

  He stopped speaking when she said that. He looked at her, then he looked up the stairs. He was trying to work out how a set of stairs could be connected to the almost legendary Shakespeare manuscript when he was startled by a loud voice on the other side of the stairs’ handrail.

  ‘Hi, Chief Inspector!’

  ‘Oh, my stars!’ Barry Inglis jumped at the sight of the strange, short person with a hooked nose, thick grey sideburns, a very hairy handlebar moustache and a dreadful-looking scar above his left eye. ‘Who the—what the—?’

  ‘Clem!’ said Phyllis. ‘I told you, no disguises this time!’

  ‘Huh?’ he said. ‘Oh, c’mon, this is hardly anything.’

  Barry said to Phyllis, ‘Is that really Clement?’

  ‘Mm-hm. He’s taken a new interest. Spurred on by his friend Miss Hipwinkle.’

  Now Barry looked really confused.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘Hey, Chief Inspector,’ said Clement heartily. ‘I heard that all the toilets at the police station were stolen last night.’

  Barry gave him a sideways look. ‘Really?’ he asked in a dubious tone.

  ‘Yeah. It’s a real mystery. The police have nothing to go on.’

  Barry regarded him for several long moments, during which the silence was heavy. Then he turned to Phyllis. ‘Miss Wong, you said that this—these stairs—have something to do with the lost Shakespeare. Would you care to elaborate?’

  ‘I could explain it all, but you’d never believe me,’ she said. ‘Look, this way you’ll find out exactly what I mean. Just humour me and—’

  ‘Miss Wong, I really don’t have time to be—’

  ‘What have you got to lose, Chief Inspector? All I’m asking is for you to run up the stairs with me—’

  ‘Us,’ Clement butted in.

  ‘Us,’ said Phyllis, giving Clem a stop butting in look. ‘He has to do it too,’ she told Barry.

  ‘Yeah, we’re a team,’ Clement said.

  ‘Take off the whiskers,’ Phyllis told him.

  Grumbling quietly, Clement started pulling off his hairy trimmings and stuffing them into his backpack.

  Barry Inglis sighed. What is going on? he wondered. How has the world shifted so much that I am standing here with a couple of kids—one of them one of the most intelligent people I know, admittedly—being persuaded to run up the stairs?

  ‘Go on,’ Phyllis urged. ‘Run up the stairs with us!’

  Barry sighed again. ‘Oh, all right, Miss Wong. Anything for a bit of peace!’

  Phyllis beamed at him. ‘Thanks, Chief Inspector.’ Then, for a moment, she had a small qualm about revealing the secrets of Transiting and the TimePockets to him, almost like a pang of guilt. But she remembered what W.W. had written to her in his letter: that if she did decide to share the knowledge, then her good judgement must be paramount. She knew, deep down, that this was the best thing to do, and that Chief Inspector Barry Inglis was the best person to share the knowledge with. And that now it was necessary to do so.

  ‘Yeah, thanks, Baz,’ said Clement.

  Barry gave him another silent look.

  ‘I mean, Chief Inspector,’ Clem said.

  Phyllis said to Barry, ‘I promise, I’ll explain what this is all about when we get there. But for now, this is very important: you have to hold onto my coat really tightly. And don’t, under any circumstances, let go, not for a single second. Got it?’

  The Chief Inspector’s face was a hurdy-gurdy of confusion. ‘Get where? Where are we going? What do you—?’

  Phyllis raised a finger to her lips as she squinted at a point towards the top of the staircase. ‘Shhh!’ She gave Daisy a quick snuggle, then slid her into the change bag slung across her shoulder. With her other hand she took out the piece of metal type from her coat pocket and held it tightly in her fist. Then she moved forward so she was on the step above Barry.

  Clement came around the side of the banister and stood next to Barry, giving him a quick wink.

  Barry did not wink back.

  ‘Okay,’ Phyllis said. ‘It’s there. Hold onto my coat now.’

  Clem grabbed the left corner of the back of her coat. Barry shook his head, then, slowly, he took hold of the right corner.

  ‘Now,’ whispered Phyllis, ‘at the count of three, we run like the blazes!’

  ‘Like the blazes?’ repeated Barry.

  ‘You heard the conjuror,’ Clement said.

  Barry sighed. ‘Like the blazes,’ he mumbled.

  ‘One,’ said Phyllis, grasping the strap of her bag tightly against her shoulder.

  ‘One,’ repeated Clement.

  ‘Two,’ Phyllis counted, steadying herself and squinting hard at the shimmering green outline of the Andruseon Pocket above them.

  ‘Two,’ repeated Clement, his heart starting to race.

  Barry shut his eyes, waiting for this to be over.

  ‘THREE!’ shouted Phyllis. And she was off, racing up the stairs two at a time, towards the Pocket.

  Like a couple of human caravans being towed, Barry and Clement ran behind her, holding firmly onto the back of her coat.

  Suddenly Phyllis was there. She didn’t slow down a fraction; as she felt the buffeting wind, she took a deep breath and plunged headlong into the Andruseon, taking her friends rapidly along with her.

  In Mistress Colley’s suite at the Millennium Hotel, a pair of wheellock pistols lay on the dressing table, gleaming in the lamplight. Vesta Colley beheld their handles, decorated (to her instructions) in delicate mother-of-pearl, brass and stag horn, their long barrels finely embellished with gold engravings of her initials. And she smiled.

  Next to them, Glory was nibbling on a small wedge of blue-vein cheese which she held in her pink paws.

  ‘Whatever it takes,’ Vesta said quietly to the rat. ‘I am tired of this Transiting, Glory. In one fell swoop, we will take the greatest prize and wreak our destruction, and retire to a new life of total power and ownership and domination. And no one will thwart me, ever again.’

  ‘Squeeeetch,’ squeaked Glory, between bites.

  Vesta Colley picked up one of the pistols and a silk cloth. Gently, almost lovingly, she began polishing the handle.

  She Transited with these guns whenever she needed to go back to the seventeenth century. Although she would have preferred a modern pistol, which could fire off many rounds at the touch of a hair-trigger, she had to take these particular pistols. She didn’t know why, but there was something about Transiting that meant that only weaponry that originally came from the era to which she Transited would work in that era. It was something she had discovered through bitter experience. To her knowledge, no other Transiter knew about this strange rule of the Pockets.

  (She had found this out when she was trying to purloin a casket of rare rubies from an Indian maharajah in 1864. She had gone there equipped with a pistol she had acquired in 2009. When she had found herself cornered by the maharajah’s guards in a building she had fled to, she had tried to shoot her way out, only to find to her eternal horror that the gun had exploded in her hand, causing her nasty burns and injuries to her fingers and wrists and to her eye. But she had also been fortunate on that occasion, because she was attempting her shoot-out at the base of a grand, sweeping marble staircase. She had stumbled upwards, the pain screaming through her, to find an Anvugheon, and she’d been able to escape instantaneously, plunging headlong into the dark hurricane-like void beyond. Her injuries, apart from those to her eye, had gradually healed after her Transiting back to the twenty-first century.*)

  These two wheellock pistols would see her right. She’d had them made in 1607. She liked them, even if they could only fire a single shot before having to be re-loaded. They were French, lighter than the German wheellocks, and more elegant. She admired the
ir elegance and their hint of prettiness. And she was happy with the way she could carry them by sliding them down into her boots where they sat snugly, comfortingly, against her legs. They Transited safely, these wheellocks.

  As she polished the mother-of-pearl inlaid pattern on the handle, a creeping anger started welling up inside her. ‘We must find the right Pocket, Glory. I have to get Cardenio to the auction house no later than two days from now. They have scheduled their auction for next week, and they must have the play to authenticate it. The fools need to be sure . . . the safe-witted, cautionary, no-risks-for-us fools . . .’

  ‘Squeeeetch,’ squeaked the rat.

  Vesta put down the pistol and took up the other. ‘I need the Pocket,’ she muttered to Glory as she buffed the gold on the barrel. ‘I must find it. We must go and search again. Why am I being obstructed in my quest for it? Is our path to the past becoming crowded with rubbish? Congested by others who selfishly take up the routes that do not belong to them? Cluttered up by abecedarian blow-ins? I do not need such interferers on my journeys . . . I do not need such hindrances athwart me as I traverse Time . . .’

  Vesta Colley’s anger and frustration was nibbling away at her, much like Glory was nibbling away at the cheese. She buffed harder and harder against the pistol until the barrel was almost hot through the silk cloth.

  With a fierce gleam in her one good eye, she put down the cloth and looked at herself in the mirror. She slowly pushed one of her dark, luxurious curls away from her forehead as she stared at her reflection. Then, raising the pistol, she pointed it directly at her face in the mirror.

  ‘Whatever it takes,’ she whispered. ‘Mistress Vesta Colley will stop at nothing.’

  ‘Squeeeeeeetch.’

  * The stairs, in the Taj Mahal, now closed to the general public, are still known to some as the Disappearing Staircase.

  Secret and sudden arrival

  It was raining gently as Phyllis, Daisy, Clement and Barry stumbled into the old city via some stairs near London Bridge.

  They had all arrived without any major disruptions, apart from Barry being totally gobsmacked by what had just happened to him. His hair was sticking out at crazy angles and his ears were still ringing from the wind. His stomach was still trying to sort itself out after all the flipflops it had gone through during the Transiting. And he didn’t know it, but his eyes were pulsating greenly as he emerged into the city.