by Valija Zinck
Fish-Eyes bent over the well with a snake-like movement. He froze.
‘Gardener?! Where . . . ? Where . . . ?’
Penelope counted in the silence. The guy could look down for ten seconds, and not a second longer, otherwise it would all be over. One, two, three, four . . .
‘Aaaaalaaaaarm! Serge! Alarm!’ Seller turned on his heel and hurried to the house. The second he had passed Penelope, she raced out of her hiding place. Quick as lightning, she knotted one end of the long creeper corm root on to the winch, throwing the other end down to her father. She snatched up the bottle of hay-water and poured the liquid carefully on to the creeper corm root. She hoped the road really had been speaking literally when she said it would explo—
Boom! Boom! Kra-woom!
The road hadn’t been exaggerating! One corm after another swelled and ballooned until they hung in the darkness like a chain of fat coconuts, right down to the floor of Leo’s prison, a sort of knitted ladder with oval rungs.
‘Can you climb up?’ Penelope called down.
A strange wordless whisper was all that came from her father, but Penelope wasn’t worried: after all, he’d just pressed the Anti-Eye.
The creeper corms barely moved as Leo Gardener scrambled up to the surface. How skinny he is, thought Penelope, feeling sad and oddly shy. His bristly hair was dull, and his jeans and shirt were filthy and tattered, but he was definitely, one hundred per cent her father, and a grin spread over her face, unbidden.
‘It’s true, Serge! Damn and blast! He’s gone. Will you just come here?!’
The roars of the fish-eyed man were getting nearer.
‘Go on, then, do it! He can’t be far away!’
Quick as a flash, Penelope untied the creeper corm root from the winch and threw it into the cellar.
‘Simon Tschakerno,’ called Leo Gardener in a whisper. He placed his hand on the edge of the hatch, and the cellar spider crawled on to it. But as he leant over the hatch, the Anti-Eye slipped out of Leo’s breast pocket and plummeted down the shaft, right into the middle of the creeper corms.
‘Come on!’ hissed Penelope. They couldn’t afford to worry about the Anti-Eye now! Together, they stumbled behind the hedge and threw themselves flat on the ground – and not a second too soon, as the two men now raced round the side of the house and towards the cellar hatch.
‘What in the name of sanity is all this?!’ Seller’s face was white. ‘W-what is all this? Those things weren’t there before – the well was empty – you’ve got to believe me, Serge!’
Tractor Man ran his hand over his oily hair. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Seller. Gardener can’t have gone anywhere – I can feel him, clear as day. Go on! Climb down! Go and find out what that thing is – I’ll keep watch up here.’
‘Me? Why me? Why don’t you climb down?’
‘What’s the problem?’ hissed Tractor Man. He rubbed his patent-leather shoe on his trousers and moved closer to Seller. ‘You’re the one who wanted him to do that job tomorrow. You’re the one who let him grow his hair, and you measured it yesterday! You said he wasn’t powerful enough to float! If I’ve known you’d stuffed it up, I wouldn’t have left the hatch open today by as much as a crack.’
‘How dare you suggest I stuffed up! I did it exactly the same way I’ve always done it!’ Seller shouted indignantly, but he took a few steps away from Tractor Man.
‘Then how come Gardener’s nowhere to be seen and instead there’s a mountain of roots as big as my head lying down there, eh? How come? His hair’s too long, there’s no other explanation for it. We let him get too much power back, and now he’s having a bit of fun with us.’ Tractor Man stepped closer to Seller. ‘You get down there and I’ll guard the gates – it’s the only way out. Quickly!’
Seller said nothing. He looked down again at the creeper corms and narrowed his fish-eyes. After a moment, he tapped a code into his phone and an extendable ladder rattled from the top of the well down into its depths.
Tractor Man ran off towards the big steel gate.
Hurriedly, Seller climbed down towards the giant tubers. He shivered as he reached the bottom of the well; it was freezing down here. He took a step toward the still-growing roots and picked them up. Thump! The Anti-Eye fell between his feet.
‘Well, well, what have we here?’ he said, grabbing the small tin box. ‘Hmm, this is really . . . Serge! Serge! Come quickly, I’ve found something!’
A hint of enthusiasm passed over Seller’s usually expressionless face. He had a passion for anything technology-related. For a moment he forgot why he was there, and only had eyes for the silvery gadget in his hand. Without thinking, he pressed his finger down on the rusty button on top of the tin box . . .
‘What have you found, Seller?’ Tractor Man came back over the lawn and looked down the well. ‘Seller, where the hell—?’ He glanced around in confusion.
Keep your hair on, Serge, I’m still down here, Seller tried to shout, but all that came from his lips was a soft Sssspppt noise. He pressed the button a few times, trying to make himself visible again, but that didn’t work, of course. Stupid piece of scrap metal! he whispered soundlessly, and started to climb back up the ladder.
‘Selleeeeeeerrr?! Damn it, man, what’s going on here?’ Tractor Man looked all around him in panic, then jumped a foot in the air as his invisible, voiceless sidekick touched him on the arm.
The impact with the floor of the well had got the Anti-Eye working properly again – well, almost. The invisibility was working the way the box’s creator had intended. It now made a person invisible for half an hour – and they returned in pieces: first the head, then the feet, with the rest of the body following afterwards. But as Seller had pressed the Anti-Eye several times, he would remain invisible for several hours – and voiceless, too, as that was the only thing that hadn’t corrected itself.
35
InFlight
Penelope and her father stood pressed against a column at the far end of the garden, hardly daring to breathe – they couldn’t hear the sounds of commotion and struggle any longer and Penelope was worried that the two men had started searching for her father in earnest. A gentle breeze made the trailing ivy rustle over the high garden wall.
‘We need to get over that,’ Leo whispered. He scanned the wall with his eyes, checking for protruding stones that might serve as footholds, even though the top of the wall was a trap of barbed wire and broken glass. He was desperate – but Penelope knew it was too dangerous. She turned her attention to the gravel drive leading towards the steel gate. We’ll have to go out that way, she thought. But the gate was locked. Her eyes wandered over the lawn, over the moss, glided over the stone figures, before resting on the angel with the large wings. A blurry image swam through her head, a faded memory of a story. No, not a story – a dream – the dream she’d had that morning! The one where she was crawling through a park with a red-headed man . . . what was it that the man had asked her?
How do you know that the key is under the angel? Or something like that?
And Penelope had replied: I dreamt it.
Penelope glanced around the garden. Finding no sign of pursuit, she sprinted to the marble angel and reached instinctively into a narrow gap at the foot of the pedestal. A key on a black band. Bingo.
‘Come on, Dad,’ she called to him softly.
He was gazing at her wonderingly. ‘How did you . . . ?’
‘Never mind – come on!’
Together, they ran for the gate. The key slid into the lock, Penelope turned it, the lock clicked, she pushed the gate open. She slipped through, her father following wide-eyed, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was real. She locked the gate, and together they raced down Rose Street, across the village square, past the town hall, past the post office and the shop, where people shot curious glances at the girl and the man tearing through their village. On and on they ran, over the narrow dirt road, up the embankment and into the forest.
Comp
letely exhausted, Penelope and her father stopped in a clearing full of blueberry bushes and gasped for air. Penelope felt heavier than ever, and her father was very weak, of course. They were lucky to have made it so far.
‘We could slow down a bit now. They won’t be able to sense us from this far away, and the trees will hide us, too,’ said Leo Gardener, gasping for breath.
The Blackslough church clock struck three.
‘No, we can’t slow down.’ Penelope started running again. ‘The last train to Senborough leaves at quarter past three. We need to be on it!’
She was in such a hurry that she stumbled and fell. Her father offered her a hand, helping her to her feet – it felt funny and a little bit nice, holding her father’s hand. And then they were off again, weaving through the trees and sprinting over the stubble field, along the dusty roads and past the gardens with the chain-link fences. As they reached the station, the train was already there and they jumped into a jam-packed carriage. The doors closed, and they were away.
Penelope and her dad stood very close together, back to back, squeezed between strangers who couldn’t escape their sweaty bodies but shot them plenty of disapproving glances. The train was as full this afternoon as it had been empty this morning; it wasn’t even possible to turn around. They couldn’t even look at each other! Even so, Penelope kept thinking My dad is right there! and kept trying to glance at him over her shoulder. At least no conductor would be able to squeeze through this jam of people to check their non-existent tickets!
As they were boarding the bus in Senborough, Penelope held her monthly ticket up like a protective shield and said to her dad, ‘Let me talk to the driver. I know him a little. Maybe he’ll let you ride for free.’ She shot the driver a friendly smile, trying as best she could to cover up her dirty and ragged father as she did so. But the driver was looking over her shoulder, his eyes wide.
‘Leo? Is that you?’ he whispered, looking like he’d seen a ghost. ‘But . . . but . . . how . . . ? You’re . . . I mean, I thought, errm, I thought you’d been dead for years?’
‘Hello, Fred, nice to see you,’ said Mr Gardener calmly. ‘No, I’m not dead. I’m very much alive, and I’d like to travel on your bus, if you’d be so kind.’
The driver opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. Her father continued: ‘Fred, as soon as I have time I will tell you what happened to me. But for today I’m asking you if you’ll do me a favour and let me ride this bus, even though I don’t have any money for the fare.’
The driver blinked, then sat up decisively. ‘Of course you can, Leo.’ He printed a ticket for Mr Gardener. ‘Of course you can. What a question. As if I wouldn’t give a lift to the best goalie our football team ever had.’
Penelope looked up at her dad wonderingly as Mr Gardener took the ticket, smiling. A group of teenagers rushed into the bus, and Penelope and her father were pushed towards the seats at the back. Jerkily the bus pulled away.
Penelope thought that if she wasn’t already sitting down, she probably would’ve fallen over. She couldn’t quite believe her father was here with her. She looked at him again, afraid he might dissolve into thin air at any second, like a dream in the morning. It simply couldn’t be true, that he was actually sitting next to her on the bus!
36
Leo Tells All
‘Dead? Why would I be dead?’ Mr Gardener wondered aloud. ‘Where would Fred get an idea like that?’
Penelope winced. She hadn’t wanted to admit that her mother had been telling everyone – even Penelope! – that he was dead, for a long time now. Her father looked so wretched as it was; he didn’t need to hear that on top of everything else.
‘It’ll take Seller and Platell less than two days to reach our house,’ Leo broke into Penelope’s reflections. ‘But as soon as Coco is with me, they won’t stand a chance.’
‘What’s Coco got to do with this? Why do you keep going on about Coco?’ asked Penelope, a little irritably. She was the one that had rescued him, after all!
‘Coco is my battery cat.’
‘Your what?’
‘My battery cat.’ Leo laughed quietly. ‘Well, that’s what I call her for fun, anyway. You know, I used to dye my hair with the ash paste – but I couldn’t bear how heavy it made me feel. That stuff doesn’t just make us undetectable to our kind, you know – I always found that it made me feel sluggish too. I couldn’t even fly with the ash paste on my hair. I couldn’t stand feeling that way – so unlike the way I usually felt. So before I put the paste on my hair, I always transferred a big chunk of my powers on to Coco, so that she could give them back to me as and when I needed them – whenever I stroked her, in fact. That’s why I call her my battery cat, although Coco’s never really liked that name.’
The bus stopped in a new housing development, and quite a few of the teenagers got off. Penelope gazed through the window without really seeing them; she was too busy thinking about what her father had just said. How had she never realized that Coco was loaded with her father’s power? It was so obvious, now that she knew. Whenever she stroked the cat, she always felt stronger, clearer and calmer. And that very morning, at the bus stop, Coco had drawn the heaviness out of her limbs.
‘The day I disappeared,’ said Leo, ‘Coco followed me into the forest, but I shooed her away. Perhaps that was stupid of me . . . perhaps none of it would have happened, if I hadn’t done that. All I remember is looking up into the crown of a tree . . . and then nothing. I don’t remember anything after that. Something must’ve fallen on my head, something heavy – because when I came round, my head hurt so much that I was sick. It was dark around me – the ground I was lying on was hard, and I was freezing. Especially my head, because I was bald – I didn’t have a single hair left.’
Her father fell silent. He seemed to be fighting tears, Penelope thought, and he looked as though he might topple from his seat at any moment. She had to do something, say something . . .
‘Mum will be happy to have you back,’ she whispered.
Her father’s face relaxed a little, and a warm glow came into his eyes.
‘Lucia, my Lucia,’ he said softly. But then he frowned, returning to his story. ‘I don’t know how long they kept me prisoner before they talked to me. I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know what was going on. Seller turned up at some point. He said if I used my powers to make money for him and Serge Platell, eventually he’d let me go. I didn’t really have any choice but to comply. I’d known them both for a while, and I knew that they could hardly do anything themselves, but that they were quite violent. They waited until my hair had grown long enough again that I had the strength to carry out a job for them.’
Penelope swallowed. She thought about how angry she’d been with her father, and she felt ashamed. ‘But they had powers too, didn’t they? Why didn’t they just do all this themselves?’
‘Everyone who is like us has a different type of power, Penelope – and not everyone is as strong as me. When I was young, getting into people’s heads was my speciality. I thought it was funny to annoy people with it, and I could almost do it in my sleep. It didn’t take much of my power at all,’ he said, with quite a bit of pride, but then his voice grew serious again. ‘They used me to influence business deals to their advantage. It was really clever. They grew rich and it looked entirely legitimate – but whatever money I helped them make, it was never enough. They threatened to harm you and Lucia if I didn’t agree to their demands. So I agreed – but I persuaded them to at least let Lucia know I was alive and send money to the two of you every month, to cover your essentials.’
Yes, and how charmingly they went about that, thought Penelope, sliding around restlessly in her seat. They’d sent her mother a forged letter . . . and this year they’d put her in hospital too.
‘But they knocked Mum down with their tractor!’ she whispered.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Leo bitterly. ‘My head visit in April didn’t make them as much money as they wanted. The a
ccident was their way of getting their own back.’
‘But if you had the power to get into other people’s heads, why didn’t you have enough power to free yourself?’
‘Seller and Platell have known me since I was fourteen, since I took my first training course with Alpha Regius. We were never friends, but when you train together you get to know each other very well. When I would meet with people like me, it was with them, among others – and we would share everything about our powers. So they knew exactly how long my hair needed to be for me to infiltrate someone else’s head. They measured it regularly, and never let it grow too long between jobs. Besides, to really get into someone’s mind, you have to look them in the eye very carefully. Or you need one of their possessions, something that’s very important to them, something they like. Of course, Seller and Platell never looked me in the eye, and I didn’t have anything that was important to them – maybe that’s because nothing is important to them, except money.’
The bus stopped again, this time in a village Penelope recognized. They weren’t far from home now.
Leo took up the story again. ‘But a year ago I started to plan my escape.’
‘A year ago? What was so different about a year ago? Did they forget to cut your hair?’
‘No, of course not. They’re not that stupid. But something changed: A cellar spider fell into my otherwise sterile prison. He was called Simon Tschakerno. I had to take good care that Seller and Platell didn’t stumble across him.’ He took the grey and yellow cellar spider out of his pocket and gazed at him fondly on the palm of his hand. The creature waggled its front legs at Penelope as if to say hello. ‘It wasn’t easy getting into the little fellow’s mind, but after a few weeks I managed it. He let me a little way in, so I politely asked him if he could walk to my house to bring me something you loved. He went off, and came back after a few weeks with your blue shoelace.’
‘My blue shoelace? But I haven’t got any blue shoelaces. I never have had!’ exclaimed Penelope.