Beyond Platform 13

by Sibéal Pounder

  Lina smiled. ‘I trust them.’

  ‘You can trust us too!’ came a muffled shout from inside Lina’s backpack.

  ‘Oh dear!’ Lina said. ‘I forgot about you two.’ She unzipped the backpack and freed Miss Witherspoon and Miss Brown.

  Odge gave the nod, and Aunt Maureen unbalded them. They flew up into the air and circled round Lina’s head.

  ‘Your backpack,’ Odge said, looping it over Lina’s shoulders. ‘Take care of it.’

  Lina threw herself into Odge’s arms. ‘I don’t want to go. I’ll miss you all too much.’

  ‘You must,’ Odge said sadly. ‘But we’ll meet again one day – I just know it.’

  ‘But I feel so at home here on Mist. What if I don’t feel at home in Vienna any more?’ Lina said.

  Odge hugged her tightly. ‘Lina, you can belong to more than one place. You don’t have to choose. Mist can be where your heart is, and another part of it can be in Vienna.’ She gave another nod, and the harpies grabbed hold of Lina’s backpack straps, lifting her high into the air.

  Everyone gathered and waved as Lina sailed off down the mountain. She looked back and saw Odge and Ben running fast after her, smiling and laughing and trying to catch up.

  ‘WE LOVE YOU, LINA!’ they cried.

  She wanted to shout something, something to show how much she cared. But every word got caught in her throat as she choked back tears. All she could do was wave.

  All across the Island, magical creatures spilt from gumps, happy to be home once again.

  Ben and Odge stopped when they reached the flower field and doubled over, out of breath. Lina waved as she watched them get smaller and smaller, her favourite hag and the human prince standing in a field, arm in arm in the moonlight.

  She had to run through the tunnel on her own because the harpies couldn’t fly down there.

  She could see the swirling portal slowly closing. And then she saw Hans, his cheese-coloured beard, dipping in and out of the gump.

  ‘Hans!’ she cried. ‘Come on! The gump is about to close! We stopped the harpies. Quick!’

  Hans shook his head and reached out a hand to help her through.

  ‘I stay in Vienna.’ He dropped a Vienna postcard on to the floor.

  Lina picked it up. It simply said:

  Odge,

  I decide to stay with my parents. They need me.

  See you soon.

  LOOK AFTER HANS-OME CHEESES

  Lina took his hand, and he pulled her through, with only a second to spare.

  ‘No!’ she said, as the gump fizzed and vanished. ‘I forgot to say goodbye to Ray!’

  Lina stared at the hotel bathroom where the gump had just been. It was as if it had never been there at all.

  Magdelena appeared with a pop. ‘Oh good! You’re right on time. Now, I must warn you, Miriam Hughes-Hughes visited your parents and told them everything. They have arrived to collect you. I’m glad you made it – I was steeling myself to break it to your parents that they might not see you for nine years. I can’t imagine that’s very comforting news to hear from a ghost rat.’

  Lina walked sadly towards the lifts, but Hans, having spotted what was in her backpack, couldn’t stop smiling.

  ‘What are you smiling at, Hans?’ Lina asked.

  ‘ODGE GAVE LINA VERY GOOD BIRTHDAY PRESENT.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE END

  Lina Lasky was bursting to tell her parents everything.

  ‘I know Miriam Hughes-Hughes has updated you, but it gets even better,’ Lina said to her parents as she climbed into bed.

  ‘You should sleep now,’ her father said. ‘In the morning, we’ll talk about everyth—’

  ‘I’ve been on Mist, saving the Island from some terrible harpies! I met a famous hag, and she became my friend. I ate a chocolate bar that a maggot vomited up. I disguised myself as a rock monster, went to London and met the world’s best balder, and the pearly mermaids, who showed me their sewer. I saw beetroots dancing and fell to what I thought was my death, but an unwanted troll table saved me. I told off an evil harpy and saved an island. I had the most magical birthday. I’m really truly sorry if I worried you. Next time I do something like that, I’ll tell you first.’

  ‘Oh, Lina! We’re just glad you’re home,’ her mother said.

  Miriam Hughes-Hughes popped her head through the door. ‘We’ve been having a great time! They fainted initially on seeing me, but we’ve had some wonderful conversations since.’

  ‘We … we now know that magic is real,’ her father said, sounding more than a little bewildered. ‘And we have confirmed with our new ghost friend that your aunt’s neighbour Mrs Frampton is, in fact, a witch. So … that’s nice.’

  ‘I’ve been educating them,’ Miriam Hughes-Hughes said with a wink.

  ‘Oh,’ Lina added. ‘And I opened my backpack when I got home and found my new friends had put Ray in there. Ray is a mistmaker and, as they said in their note, he’s old and in need of a retirement home. We bonded on Mist, and he’ll be living under my bed enjoying old age, and I might occasionally take him for walks in my backpack. Anyway, that’s all, and that’s the truth,’ she finished.

  Her parents said goodnight and slowly retreated, exchanging fast whispers.

  Once they were gone, Lina pulled a newspaper article out from under her pillow and smiled at the picture that accompanied it. It showed her standing next to Hans, who was towering over his two not-at-all-ogre-like parents. They looked overcome with joy to be with him again. She scooped Ray up from under the bed, letting him snuggle into the pillow.

  A MAGIC FEAST

  Vienna is abuzz this evening with the news that the little girl who disappeared from Vienna Central Station was found under a table in the Sacher Hotel where she had been eating torte. None of the staff had noticed her.

  Lina Lasky was found by a very kind and substantial local gentleman called Hans. He had been dining there with his elderly parents, with whom he was recently reunited after a long stint making cheese abroad.

  The hotel says Lina is welcome back any time.

  Lina carefully folded the newspaper and tucked it under her pillow.

  ‘Goodnight, Odge,’ she whispered.

  It would be nine long years before they would meet again, but what wonderful memories she had to keep her company until that day came. Lina pulled the duvet up under her chin and smiled. And somewhere, way out there beyond the gump, Odge did the same.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I first read The Secret of Platform 13 when I was nine years old and I fell in love with Eva Ibbotson’s world. To be allowed behind the scenes has been beyond magical for this grown-up superfan. Thank you to the wonderful Ibbotson family for trusting me with this project, and special thanks to Justin Ibbotson for his kind, confidence-boosting words, for inviting me to stop by for tea anytime, and for making me feel so welcome in his mother’s world. Eva made magical books and even more magical people and it has been such an honour to live in her worlds – both real and imagined – if only for a while. Thank you, I will never forget it.

  Thank you to the marvellous Lucy Pearse – it has been such a fun journey working on this book with someone so talented and passionate about Eva’s work. It is so fitting that Eva’s editor is as mighty as her very best characters.

  Thank you to my legendary agent and pal Gemma Cooper, who is at commemorative statue levels of excellence – thank you for always being so wonderful and hilarious and filling my diary with the most special projects.

  Clare Hall-Craggs, your magic knows no bounds, thank you for shouting about this book from every gump imaginable, and thank you to the gorgeous Kat McKenna for the magical proofs and genius marketing plans (and for saying I smelled nice that time I came in for a meeting after having dropped a tuna baguette on myself). Thank you to the fabulous Cate, Veronica, Sam, Nigel, Sue and everyone else at Macmillan who has worked so hard on this book and made every step so special.

  Thank y
ou to the wonderful booksellers across the country and beyond who are always so supportive and kind – you are the real magic ones! Thanks especially to Fiona and Holly for the very generous early reviews. Thank you also to the lovely Fiona Noble, as always. And to all the wonderful book bloggers who are so incredibly generous with their time and talent.

  Thank you to Ruari for letting me turn our honeymoon in Vienna into a research trip, and thank you to my family, especially my mum and dad, who kept my original copy of The Secret of Platform 13 all these years.

  Thank you to my wonderful writer friends, especially Team Cooper, and my lovely non-writer friends – special thanks to Tommy Seddon, for being my unofficial publicist from the very beginning. And thank you to my incomparable readers, the craziest kids in the country, who never fail to inspire me.

  Thank you to my favourite Frankie Cordall, who inspired the truly kind, courageous and magical new characters in this book.

  And thank you Eva, you filled my childhood with so much magic, and continue to do so for so many others. We are so lucky we get to keep your magic forever.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  SIBÉAL POUNDER

  Sibéal Pounder is the author of the bestselling Witch Wars and Bad Mermaids series, as well as the World Book Day mash-up, Bad Mermaids Meet the Witches. Before becoming a full-time author, Sibéal worked as a writer and researcher for the Financial Times, with other writing credits including Vogue and Glamour online magazines. Beyond Platform 13, the sequel to Eva Ibbotson’s classic The Secret of Platform 13, is Sibéal’s first standalone novel.

  EVA IBBOTSON

  Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna, but when the Nazis came to power her family fled to England and she was sent to boarding school. She became a writer while bringing up her four children, and her bestselling novels have been published around the world. Journey to the River Sea won the Nestlé Gold Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Some of her other young fiction titles include The Great Ghost Rescue, Which Witch? and Dial a Ghost. Eva died peacefully in October 2010 at the age of eighty-five.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  BEATRIZ CASTRO

  Beatriz Castro’s books have been published all over the world, her illustrations appearing in textbooks, picture books and on covers. She is also the illustrator of Jessica Townsend’s bestselling and Waterstones Prize-winning Nevermoor. Beatriz lives in Spain.

  Celebrate twenty-five years of Eva Ibbotson’s original classic with a brand-new anniversary edition, illustrated by Beatriz Castro.

  Turn the page to read the first chapter!

  If you went into a school nowadays and said to the children: ‘What is a gump?’ you would probably get some very silly answers.

  ‘It’s a person without a brain, like a chump,’ a child might say. Or:

  ‘It’s a camel whose hump has got stuck.’ Or even:

  ‘It’s a kind of chewing gum.’

  But once this wasn’t so. Once every child in the land could have told you that a gump was a special mound, a grassy bump on the earth, and that in this bump was a hidden door which opened every so often to reveal a tunnel which led to a completely different world.

  They would have known that every country has its own gump and that in Great Britain the gump was in a place called the Hill of the Cross of Kings not far from the River Thames. And the wise children, the ones that read the old stories and listened to the old tales, would have known more than that. They would have known that this particular gump opened for exactly nine days every nine years, and not one second longer, and that it was no good changing your mind about coming or going because nothing would open the door once the time was up.

  But the children forgot – everyone forgot – and perhaps you can’t blame them, yet the gump is still there. It is under platform thirteen of King’s Cross railway station, and the secret door is behind the wall of the old Gentlemen’s Cloakroom with its flappy posters saying ‘Trains Get You There’ and its chipped wooden benches and the dirty ashtrays in which the old gentlemen used to stub out their smelly cigarettes.

  No one uses the platform now. They have built newer, smarter platforms with rows of shiny luggage trolleys and slot machines that actually work and television screens which show you how late your train is going to be. But platform thirteen is different. The clock has stopped; spiders have spun their webs across the cloakroom door. There’s a Left Luggage Office with a notice saying not in use and inside it is an umbrella covered in mould which a lady left on the 5.25 from Doncaster the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The chocolate machines are rusty and lopsided and if you were foolish enough to put your money in one it would make a noise like ‘Harrumph’ and swallow it, and you could wait the rest of your life for the chocolate to come out.

  Yet when people tried to pull down that part of the station and redevelop it, something always went wrong. An architect who wanted to build shops there suddenly came out in awful boils and went to live in Spain and when they tried to relay the tracks for electricity, the surveyor said the ground wasn’t suitable and muttered something about subsidence and cracks. It was as though people knew something about platform thirteen, but they didn’t know what.

  But in every city there are those who have not forgotten the old days or the old stories. The ghosts, for example … Ernie Hobbs, the railway porter who’d spent all his life working at King’s Cross and still liked to haunt round the trains, he knew – and so did his friend, the ghost of a cleaning lady called Mrs Partridge who used to scrub out the parcels’ office on her hands and knees. The people who plodged about in the sewers under the city and came up occasionally through the manholes beside the station, they knew … and so in their own way did the pigeons.

  They knew that the gump was still there and they knew where it led. By a long, misty and mysterious tunnel to a secret cove where a ship waited to take those who wished it to an island so beautiful that it took the breath away.

  The people who lived on it just called it the Island, but it has had all sorts of names; Avalon, St Martin’s Land, the Place of the Sudden Mists. Years and years ago it was joined to the mainland, but then it broke off and floated away slowly westwards, just as Madagascar floated away from the continent of Africa. Islands do that every few million years; it is nothing to make a fuss about.

  With the floating island, of course, came the people who were living on it: sensible people mostly who understood that everyone did not have to have exactly two arms and legs, but might be different in shape and different in the way they thought. So they lived peacefully with ogres who had one eye or dragons (of whom there were a lot about in those days). They didn’t leap into the sea every time they saw a mermaid comb her hair on a rock, they simply said, ‘Good morning.’ They understood that Ellerwomen had hollow backs and hated to be looked at on a Saturday and that if trolls wanted to wear their beards so long that they stepped on them every time they walked, then that was entirely their own affair.

  They lived in peace with the animals too. There were a lot of interesting animals on the Island as well as ordinary sheep and cows and goats. Giant birds who had forgotten how to fly and laid eggs the size of kettle drums, and brollachans like blobs of jelly with dark red eyes, and sea horses with manes of silk which galloped and snorted in the waves.

  But it was the mistmakers that the people of the Island loved the most. These endearing animals are found nowhere else in the world. They are white and small with soft fur all over their bodies, rather like baby seals, but they don’t have flippers, they have short legs and big feet like the feet of puppies. Their black eyes are huge and moist, their noses are whiskery and cool, and they pant a little as they move because they look rather like small pillows and they don’t like going very fast.

  The mistmakers weren’t just nice, they were exceedingly important.

  Because as the years passed and newspapers were washed up on the shore
or refugees came through the gump with stories of the World Above, the Islanders became more and more determined to be left alone. Of course they knew that some modern inventions were good, like electric blankets to keep people’s feet warm in bed or fluoride to stop their teeth from rotting, but there were other things they didn’t like at all, like nuclear weapons or tower blocks at the tops of which old ladies shivered and shook because the lifts were bust, or battery hens stuffed two in a cage. And they dreaded being discovered by passing ships or aeroplanes flying too low.

  Which is where the mistmakers came in. These sensitive creatures, you see, absolutely adore music. When you play music to a mistmaker its eyes grow wide and it lets out its breath and gives a great sigh.

  ‘Aaah,’ it will sigh. ‘Aaah … aaah …’

  And each time it sighs, mist comes from its mouth: clean, thick white mist which smells of early morning and damp grass. There are hundreds and hundreds of mistmakers lolloping over the turf or along the shore of the Island and that means a lot of mist.

  So when a ship was sighted or a speck in the sky which might be an aeroplane, all the children ran out of school with their flutes and their trumpets and their recorders and started to play to the mistmakers … And the people who might have landed and poked and pried, saw only clouds of whiteness and went on their way.

  Though there were so many unusual creatures on the Island, the royal family was entirely human and always had been. They were royal in the proper sense – not greedy, not covered in jewels, but brave and fair. They saw themselves as servants of the people which is how all good rulers should think of themselves, but often don’t.

  The King and Queen didn’t live in a golden palace full of uncomfortable gilded thrones which stuck into people’s behinds when they sat down, nor did they fill the place with servants who fell over footstools from walking backwards from Their Majesties. They lived in a low white house on a curving beach of golden sand studded with cowrie shells – and always, day or night, they could hear the murmur and slap of the waves and the gentle soughing of the wind.