‘Is this who we’re—’
Arlo didn’t get to finish his sentence, because Piwi had turned back and was glaring at him.
‘No questions! No talking at all. Two more bends in the track, and then you’ll see.’
‘See wh—’ Arlo stopped himself, scared Piwi might explode in rage.
‘I will hide in the bushes and wait for you,’ said Piwi.
‘Can I ask one question, please? It’s just, I don’t understand why you can’t…’
But Piwi had scurried off along the path. Arlo followed, both nervous and excited. After two more bends, just as Piwi had promised, the source of the music came into view.
ARLO STARED WITH unblinking eyes at a scene he could not believe. He had seen carts fly and sticks hover and held a conversation with a bird, but all of that, he had somehow been able to fit inside his head. It didn’t match the world as he knew it, but it was still of that world. It was still familiar to his imagination. The scene before him was different. He looked down on a valley and at its base was a clearing. All around its edge were tiny white cottages, so small that had he stood beside them, Arlo would have been able to rest his chin on their tops. Each was perfectly finished, with its own miniature sets of windows and delicately thatched roof. Thin spirals of smoke curled from the chimneys. But it was the colour of it all that most captivated him. The roofs and walls, windowsills, paths and flower beds, teemed with hues that he could not place in a rainbow. And the air around appeared to hum and sparkle in a swirling kaleidoscope of bright patterns and colours. They dissolved as soon as he looked at them and then, once his gaze shifted even a little, sprang back to life at the edges of his vision. He felt new emotions wash over him, emotions that did not fit with any of the words he was used to, not happiness or excitement or contentment or relief. It was like tasting a strange new food for the first time and not knowing how to describe it. But they were warm, these new feelings, he knew that much. Comforting.
And then there was the music, the weaving together of hundreds of small voices, for all around, beneath the swirl of colour, they worked. Human in their appearance, but not their size. All moving purposefully through the village, singing. Some worked at a furnace, using tiny hammers to beat metal into various shapes. Others stirred large copper cauldrons over fires with sticks as thick as their arms. Another group moved in and out of the woods in a long line, carrying buckets to the cauldrons, where they emptied the contents into the bubbling liquid, before swinging their empty pails freely as they skipped back into the forest. Children scampered, impossibly small dogs barked, men and women swept the immaculate paths and weeded the village’s colourful gardens. The villagers appeared to be dressed the same way: men and women both. All went shoeless, with tights the colour of tree trunks, and green jackets, unbuttoned and flapping, their tiny round bellies open to the breeze. They all wore the widest of smiles, as if this were the happiest settlement on the face of whatever planet this strange land of magic belonged to. And they were joined in their single song, which rose and fell in cycles and did not end.
‘What place is this?’ Arlo whispered, but there was no reply. He looked around for Piwi but the bird had disappeared. Arlo knew there was no going back. The bird had led him here for a reason. He strode forward, looking more confident than he felt, suddenly aware of his size and with it his inevitable clumsiness.
‘Hello! I say, hello!’ Arlo called, and waved his hand above his head in what he hoped was a friendly manner.
In an instant, the singing stopped and the colour fell from the sky, tinkling like rain, bubbling when it hit the surface and then popping into nothing. Every small head turned his way, their strange faces full of the same awe Arlo had felt only moments before looking at them. Now that he was closer he could make out their features. Their eyes were large and their ears protruded at right angles from their heads. Arlo smiled his most friendly smile. It felt strange, having others fear him because of his size. Usually it was the other way around. He hesitated for a moment and then, because he didn’t know what else to do, walked slowly towards the village.
The little people murmured as he approached, backing away so that a path opened up for him, drawing him in. Standing before him as if she had expected this gigantic intrusion, was an old woman. She leaned on what might have been a walking stick, although beside her was a cauldron, so Arlo may just have interrupted her stirring. He stopped at what he hoped was a respectful distance and slowly lowered himself until he was kneeling, bum on heels, his head tucked into his shoulders, making himself as small as he could. ‘I’m very sorry to disturb you,’ he said.
‘It is a great honour to have you visit us, Arlo,’ the old woman answered. Her voice was warm and kindly. As she spoke, the air around her shimmered with bright and elusive hues, as if her words danced as colours in the air.
It took Arlo a moment to process what she had said. But then the sentence fell into place and he realised that she knew his name. A crowd gathered around him, close and curious. The woman struck her stick firmly on the ground, and the little people halted their approach and sat in a semicircle around their visitor.
‘How did you know my name?’ Arlo asked.
‘The tui told us,’ the woman replied. ‘Such noisy birds, there’s nothing you can do to stop them talking.’
‘Oh,’ Arlo said. ‘And did they also tell you why I am here?’
‘Oh no.’ The woman smiled, and the air between them turned golden. ‘You don’t even know that yourself.’
Laughter rippled, first as sound and then as waves of light, breaking over one another before rising high in a rainbow cloud of happiness. It made Arlo feel braver, and he spoke again.
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘You may ask me three,’ she replied, and Arlo smiled before he realised it wasn’t a joke. ‘But don’t go wasting any of them on niceties. My name is Joan, you needn’t ask that.’
‘Hello Joan.’ Arlo bowed further to the ground, as if addressing royalty.
Joan nodded, as if this were the expected procedure. ‘Three questions and a deal,’ she said. ‘For no one gets something for nothing, not in this world or any other.’
‘What sort of deal?’ Arlo asked.
‘A small thing really. I just need you to promise me something’
Arlo tightened. He should have known this would get more complicated. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘Nothing much. Just that you will listen to what I tell, and not let a single detail slip from your mind until you have returned safely to your own world. If I am to speak to you, I need to be sure it is worth the risk I am taking. Does that sound fair to you?’
Arlo watched her words bubble overhead, spheres of swirling colour. He wondered whether these creatures could read the colours, that the sight of the words carried messages the sounds could not.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I promise.’ He could not imagine ever forgetting this, even if he wanted to.
‘Good,’ Joan said. ‘Three questions then. I may not always be able to answer, but I will do my best.’
The audience chuckled as one and this time their laughter bubbled and burst, falling as mist all around them.
Arlo thought carefully. ‘If it’s not a rude question,’ he started. ‘What are you?’
Silence fell and Arlo couldn’t read it. Had he offended them, surprised them? Did they simply find his question stupid?
Joan’s eyes narrowed, as if trying to focus the image of the boy before her, distill it.
‘An interesting question,’ she finally said. Her voice was carefully flattened and no colours accompanied it. ‘Some might see it as a wasted question, but I am guessing you consider it important to know who you are dealing with.’
Arlo nodded. That was part of it. The rest was simply curiosity, and the fact that under pressure he had not been able to think of a better question. He wished Alice was here. She would have been good at this.
‘Fair enough. Well then, we are pix
ies. We have always been here, in the forest, and few of your kind know of our existence. We have powers that humans do not, although you have a magic about you that is far stronger than you realise. It shimmers all about you, plain to see for anyone who looks carefully. There you are, one question answered. Ask another.’
Arlo tried to slow his thinking and concentrate on what these magical creatures might know that could help him. He thought of Stefan and the danger he was putting himself in. What if they were better off not trying to help Jackie. What if they knew they would fail?
‘If we attempt to free Jackie,’ Arlo asked, ‘will we succeed?’
This time Joan’s face screwed up in distaste, her mouth puckered and for a moment Arlo was afraid he might be spat upon.
‘That is a stupid question!’ she exclaimed, and all around the little people murmured their agreement. ‘We travel to the future the same way you do, riding at time’s pleasure, the passing seconds filling our sails. If I could tell you what would happen tomorrow, you would not be able to change that would you, you would be quite powerless. And then you would be no being at all. You might as well be a log in a field, or a stone by a river. One more question, and it had better be a good one.’
She stood as tall as nature allowed and appeared to billow out as she spoke.
Arlo swallowed hard. He considered his options. He could ask what it was the animals weren’t telling him, but he knew that was to ask too many things at once. He wondered if he should ask her if there was someone he shouldn’t trust? But again, what if there were many people? Or she told him not to trust anybody, not even her? And then she would mock him again, for being so slow. Every question seemed to be caught wriggling in its own trap. And so, rather than thinking, he simply trusted his intuition, or maybe it was his magic, and said the next thing to pop into his head.
‘Who is Haven?’
Joan controlled her reaction, but many of the others did not. There were audible gasps, and small squeaks of horror. The air sparked blue and silver, like little bursts of electricity. Joan raised her hands and the sparking died down. Her brow furrowed and she breathed in slowly and let out a long low whistle through the gaps in her tiny teeth.
‘A fair question. A dangerous question. I wish you had worded it differently, but time has passed and there it will stay and so we must deal with the words the way they were spoken. We want to help you Arlo, you see, we all want to help you, but a deal is a deal.’
Arlo realised then what his first question should have been not What are you? but Can I trust you? For on that he was suddenly no longer certain. If Joan wanted to help him she would not have restricted him to three questions.
‘So, Haven.’ Joan spoke the word as if handling it with careful respect. The sound of it formed a pure white cloud, soft as spun sugar. ‘Haven is our past.’
At first Arlo thought he had been tricked, that that was as all she was going to say, but she was simply pausing.
‘Lean back, Arlo, and make yourself comfortable, for this question cannot be answered quickly.’
Arlo rearranged himself, careful not to cause great damage to a pixie or one of their houses. All around him the pixies settled too, like an audience of young children ready for story time.
‘You have come here from another world, through a tunnel you still can’t quite believe is real, but it is. What you do not know is that these two worlds, a long, long time ago, were one. We share an ancient history, my world and yours, and many of the tales you think of as fanciful stories, tales of magic and adventure, are the echoes of memories long faded.
‘The land was different then, magic was common and lives were lived simply. People talked to animals, and although we pixies have always preferred to live in the forest, we could walk freely into the townships and were at times invited into human homes. It was not a perfect time. There were fallings-out and misunderstandings, there always are, but our ancestors, yours and mine, found ways to live peacefully together. The magic helped. Magic is not just a way of making things happen, it is a way of understanding the world. If you stay here long enough, you will come to understand this. Perhaps you are already beginning to.’
It struck Arlo from the way Joan talked that she carried a memory of this time. How long did pixies live? He had no idea, and he had used up all his questions.
‘But then came a great rift in the human population. Clever people began to turn their minds to new ways of doing things, tricks for making the world bend more easily to their will. Today we call it technology, but back then the first sparks of invention were too new to have acquired a name. While everyone marvelled at the great viaducts and the clever uses of wheels and pulleys, some people began to see not just the possibilities, but the dangers too. They wondered what would happen to the magic, in a world where it was no longer required. Why should children work hard to learn the ways of love and kindness and understanding when technology could get things done more easily? Others called them cowards, and argued that magic and technology could live side by side, each enhancing the other.
‘The arguments turned vicious, as arguments often do. Towns split, families turned on one another. It was not an outright war, but it grew ugly and violent, and people were killed. Worst of all, it provided an opportunity for those with the darkest motives to gain influence, and the darkest of them all was Haven. He was powerfully magical, violent and extremely clever. He did not care for one side of the argumentor the other. All he saw was an opportunity to rise to power. He recruited the angry, promising them that if they followed him he would help them destroy their enemies. He fed off their fear and their uncertainty, and very soon he had built up a dangerous army. People saw the threat, but they realised that fighting him would only make him stronger. Instead they proposed a compromise, a plan to create a lasting peace, the kind of peace that would rob Haven of his followers.’
Arlo remembered the figure in the cellar, its burning red eyes and strange, compelling voice. The way it had vanished into the air. He shivered at the memory of it. Was it possible that was Haven? He longed to ask, but he had used all his questions.
‘Rather than fight over the nature of their future,’ Joan continued, ‘the leaders decided to create two futures, two identical worlds, one free to pursue new technologies, the other left to continue with the ways of magic. In the new world, your world, our spells and magic have no influence and, in the same way, your technology has not reached us.
‘The new world was created and a tunnel to it opened up. The magic required for this tunnel was extremely strong and it was decreed the tunnel would be open for exactly one night, at the next full moon. Anyone who wished to travel through it could, and then the tunnel would be closed and never again would there be contact between the worlds.
‘So a single great migration took place beneath the light of a fat full moon. It went exactly to plan. The people moved into a new world, identical to their own, the world that would in time become yours, Arlo, and then the tunnel was closed. That should have been the end of it.
‘But magic is fickle. In the old world every child was born an identical twin. That was just the way it was, and nobody ever imagined it might be other. Until the new world was created. From that moment forth, all children were born as singletons. But you will have already observed enough to guess the truth—every child does still have an identical twin, but one is born in your world, the other here. This is why you keep thinking you see people that you know. You are seeing their twins. Occasionally, a pair of twins is so tightly entwined that their spirits will not separate, and both remain in your world, but never in ours. Those twins often carry great potential for magic. But if anyone sees you and your brother together, they will know you are not from here.’
‘Like with Jackie and Alice,’ Arlo muttered.
‘Jackie and Alice are not your question,’ Joan said, ‘and so I cannot speak of them. You asked about Haven. The compromise was not to his liking, for what he wanted was not peace, but power. He
had arranged for some of his supporters to go through the tunnel while he remained in this world, plotting its destruction. His plan was to build a secret tunnel of his own, and then make use of technology as it was developed, smuggling in newly invented weapons and using them to take power. He might have succeeded; he’d built his first tunnel by the time he was caught. Some wanted to execute him, others argued killing was an uncivilised act, even of such a criminal, and he should be imprisoned for life.
‘And here the story grows murky, I am afraid,’ Joan said, shrugging in apology. ‘Some of the stories say he was executed, others that he remains trapped by an unbreakable spell that robs him of sleep and power, others that he died of old age in a comfortable prison. But then there are the tales that say he never died at all, that he is in hiding, plotting. He still has followers who worship him in secret, waiting for his return. And not long ago, as you know, a new tunnel opened and twin girls slipped through. One was caught, one escaped. The authorities found the tunnel and now they are doing all they can to close it. It is a long and difficult process. They must dismantle it rock by rock, taking great care to remove the magic from each one. You have seen the entrance, where the great tent now stands. They have told the people it is a gold mine, because if word got out that Haven was still alive and operating it would cause mayhem.
‘Closing the tunnel requires the strongest magic in the land, and that is why the Royal Guards must work there. It is also the reason the girl is held prisoner in the mine, so that they can watch over her. And because there is a second tunnel, isn’t there?’
The Tunnel of Dreams Page 9