Back To The Divide (2 page)

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all except for one -- Felix's vocabulary notes. The golden brazzle feather he kept there spiraled down to the floor.

"What's this?" said Snakeweed, peering at the entries. "Brazzle -- griffin. Wise-hoof--centaur. Brittlehorn -- umicorm."

"Unicorn."

"Your writing's atrocious. Flame-bird -- plonker. Or is it phoenix? Japegrin -- pixie. Is that what I'm called over here? A pixie?"

Felix nodded.

Snakeweed bent down and picked up the brazzle feather. He examined it, and then he laughed. "Oh, Felix," he said. "You've been
so
dim. You of all people ought to know how powerfully magical brazzle feathers are. Was this the one that was used to
temporarily
cure your heart defect?"

"No." Felix gritted his teeth again, determined not to rise to the bait. It hadn't been a
temporary
cure, it had been permanent. Snakeweed was just trying to scare him. He liked a joke, and he liked the cruel ones best.

"No matter. Look and learn." Snakeweed turned to the next blank page and brushed it with the feather. The writing gradually reappeared. He did the next page and the next.

Felix felt like a complete idiot. Why hadn't he realized that the only reason the vocabulary notes had been visible was because he had kept the feather between the pages? He watched as Snakeweed carried on stroking the pages, one

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by one, knowing he would get to the Divide spell eventually.

"Ah," said the japegrin. "Here we are. A long string of numbers. Dear oh dear, your writing is a total disgrace. What's this?"

"A four."

"And this?"

"A square root sign."

Snakeweed felt in his pocket and pulled out a personal organizer. "Love these little electronic gadgets," he said. "Copy it out in here, so I can actually read it. And don't make any mistakes, or I'll send Architrex back to rip your throat out." He snapped his fingers at Archie. The figure in white seemed to collapse in on himself and turn into a three-dimensional puddle. Then he re-formed himself as a hyena -- but one with extra-long fangs and a horribly intelligent expression.

Felix copied out the spell.

"I'm dreaming," said Felix's mother. "Yes, that's what this is. A nightmare." She looked at Archie. "I've seen you before. You were the hallucination I had last summer, in Costa Rica, when I had sunstroke."

Snakeweed snapped shut the organizer, put it back in his pocket, and smiled. "Right," he said. "We'll be off, then."

"If I'm dreaming," said Felix's mother, "I can do anything I want. I can pick up this cricket bat and hit you with it."

She picked up the bat and swung it. Snakeweed dodged

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the blow and slipped outside. Felix's mother followed him. The devil-hyena snarled; both he and Felix tried to get through the door at the same time and found themselves wedged together. The sinistrom stench filled Felix's nostrils, and he felt sick. Snakeweed fended off another swing of the bat and made that curious little movement with his hand. Then he started to mutter something under his breath. Oh no, thought Felix, struggling to push his way past the sinistrom's hairy body. Not my mom as well.

She had gone quite rigid, and the color was leaching away from her hair. By the time Felix made it to the lawn, Mrs. Sanders was a perfect marble replica of her former self.

"You promised!" shouted Felix. "You promised you'd turn my father back once you got the spell, and now you've petrified my mother, too!"

"You've got a short memory," said Snakeweed. "I never keep a promise. You ought to know that."

"You can't just leave them!"

"Watch me," said Snakeweed, and he and Architrex let themselves out of the side gate.

Felix ran after them. They had a Land Rover -- sprayed japegrin purple -- parked in front of the house. Snakeweed climbed into the driver's seat, and the sinistrom hopped in the back. Felix grabbed hold of the door handle, but Snakeweed had locked it. The japegrin started the engine and laughed. Then he accelerated away, and Felix had to let go or be dragged over the tarmac. He watched as the vehicle

18

sped off down the road, turned right, and disappeared. He wondered for a moment why Snakeweed hadn't turned
him
to stone, too -- but the answer was obvious. He hadn't been enough of a threat. He went back into the house, sat down in front of his father's statue, and despite valiant efforts to keep a grip on things, he burst into tears.

After a while he pulled himself together and tried to think logically about the situation. Snakeweed hadn't taken his notebook, he'd only taken the copy of the spell. Felix could now cross back over himself to look for the counter-charm -- if he could find a Divide to do it on. The Pennines were the closest range of mountains. There would be a Divide up there, of course there would. A watershed, where all the water on one side flowed to the North Sea and all the water on the other went to the Irish Sea. Was Snakeweed aiming for the Pennines, or did he think the spell only worked in Costa Rica? All Divides were magical places, but perhaps Snakeweed didn't know that.

Felix stood up and went out into the garden. His mother looked surprisingly graceful beneath the plum tree, shielded by the overhanging branches and standing there as white as chalk, with a faint sheen to her. The angle of the cricket bat suggested that she was about to hit a six, and her face was a furious picture of concentration. "Don't worry, Mom," said Felix. "I'll sort it out. I'll find Ironclaw; he'll know what to do. A brazzle is a powerful ally to have." A picture of his old friend flashed into his mind: half eagle, half lion, but three

19

times the size. Ironclaw should have been an imposing figure, but he was very careless about his appearance and he usually looked like a mess.

As Felix went to kiss his mother good-bye, a fly landed on her shoulder. Annoyed, he made a move to brush it off-- and stopped. The fly seemed frozen to the spot. As he watched, its color changed from black to white. When its transformation was complete, it fell to the ground. Felix bent down and looked at it. The fly was now solid marble. There were other marble creatures down there, as well. A couple of ants, a mosquito, and a wood louse. They were strangely beautiful, their tiny bodies white and lustrous. I ought to take one of them with me, thought Felix -- a sample, to show Ironclaw so that we can work out an antidote. He reached out, and just in time he realized that he, too, would turn to marble if he touched one of them. It would be a skin thing, he thought, lots of spells rely on skin-to-skin contact. Better test it, though. He picked a leaf from the plum tree and found a snail. Then he dropped the leaf onto his mother's marble shoe and placed the snail on top of it. The snail did nothing for a while and remained cream and brown. Then its head poked out and it moved off the leaf, leaving a silvery trail of slime behind it. After a few seconds it froze, and the same thing happened.

Right, thought Felix, as he went back into the house. He found some pliers and a matchbox, and he transferred the marble snail safely to the container. Just to be sure he

20

wrapped the box in insulating tape so that it couldn't open by accident. Then he packed a backpack with useful things like a flashlight and a compass and some spare clothes and a water bottle, canceled the milk, changed the answering machine message to "We've gone away for a few days," and set off for the bus station.

He had plenty of time to sit and think during the bus ride to the Pennines. Although he was desperately worried about his parents, he couldn't help feeling wildly excited as well. He'd never expected to be able to get back to the other world. Perhaps he would see Betony, the best friend he'd ever made. She was a tangle-child -- an elf -- and he did miss her. She was probably in Andria, a town by the sea, assisting Thornbeak in her historical research in the library. Thornbeak was a brazzle like Ironclaw, and although she was a bit intimidating, Felix would never have found his cure without her. She was as smart and decisive as Ironclaw was untidy and forgetful. Her golden feathers were always immaculately groomed, and her talons and her claws always shone.

His mind drifted back to the marble statues at home and the chain reaction they were causing. Supposing a bee landed on his mother and took off again really quickly? How far would it fly before it turned to stone? Would a fox investigate it and turn to marble itself? The domino effect could wipe out the entire wildlife population of the garden -- and not just the garden. There were cats to consider and cats'

21

owners. It wasn't too dissimilar to messing around with genes -- you could never predict all the results. The more he thought about it, the worse the possibilities became until he was considering the total annihilation of all life on earth. Was this ludicrously over the top? He didn't know. After all, a virus could travel on a breath of wind, as could a grain of pollen, and either of them could mutate into who knew what. It was quite clear that the sooner he found a counter-charm, the better.

When the bus finally reached the Pennines, Felix took another out of town and deep into the countryside. He knew he would have to hike the final part of his journey, and when he reached the last village he went into a shop and bought some bars of chocolate to give Betony, and a newspaper for Thornbeak. The brazzle would love to see something like that from Felix's world. Then he left the village and started to walk uphill.

He reached the peak he was aiming for at sunset. He had to wait for a couple of other hikers to leave, and in passing he asked them if they'd seen a purple Land Rover. They hadn't. Felix had mixed feelings about this -- he knew that if Snakeweed had gone to Costa Rica, it would give him plenty of opportunity to warn everyone about Snakeweed's return. But if Snakeweed was the only one who knew how to restore Felix's parents to normal, he needed the japegrin as quickly as possible.

When Felix had crossed back the previous time, Ironclaw

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had recited the spell for him. This time he had to do it himself. He checked that his backpack was securely fastened around his shoulders. Then he stood on the highest bit of rock he could find, opened his water bottle, and slowly started to pour the contents onto the ground. He was looking for the place where it only took the slightest movement of his hand to make the water trickle away in opposite directions -- one stream would be bound for the North Sea, the other stream for the Irish Sea.
He
couldn't be divided like that, so after a moment -- with the aid of the spell -- he would be sent into the other dimension. It was several minutes before he saw a droplet of water land on a tiny ridge, hesitate, then split itself in half. He had found the Divide.

He lay down across it, opened the notebook, took a deep breath, and read out the numbers. When he came to he'd be on Tromm Fell, the rocky peak that was Ironclaw's home. The old about-to-pass-out feeling that had once been so familiar returned and then ... blackness.

When Felix regained consciousness, the sun was just rising. He sat up, wondering how long he'd been out. He felt very cold and stiff, but otherwise perfectly OK. His backpack was still on his back, and the notebook was on the ground beside him. He packed it away and looked around.

The first shock was that he was not on Tromm Fell. He had never seen this place before in his life. He was on a ridge in the middle of some mountain range, and there were little

23

patches of snow here and there. It was a miracle that he wasn't suffering from hypothermia. Could hypothermia run in families? His uncle had died on an expedition to Mount Everest. It had happened before Felix was born, but nonetheless ...

The second shock was the track leading off downhill. It was similar to the one on Tromm Fell, but there was one huge difference. This one had tire marks on it. He swallowed. He must be in some other world entirely, one that had invented machines. Anything could happen, but he couldn't stop now. There was no cure for his parents in his own world; this one, wherever it was, had to be a better bet.

He headed off down the track. The fir trees didn't look quite like any he had seen before, and the birds were unfamiliar. There was a reassuring smell of pine in the air, though, and a faint trace of wood smoke. He suddenly felt incredibly
alive,
every sense drinking in the atmosphere, his mind working overtime as he wondered who might have lit the fire. He smiled suddenly. These days, he could allow himself to feel brave and intrepid and heroic; his body wasn't going to let him down the way it had in the past, was it? His smile vanished.

Snakeweed's comment about a temporary cure wouldn't quite go away, though. Supposing -- just supposing -- the cure reversed itself, once he recrossed the Divide? He made himself stop thinking about it and noticed as he carried on downhill that the smell of smoke grew stronger.

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After he'd been walking for about half an hour, the path divided. Felix decided to take the fork that didn't have tire tracks on it, and eventually he came to a valley. It was warmer here. A river meandered in a leisurely fashion through a meadow carpeted with purple flowers. There was a cliff with caves in it at one end, and a trickle of smoke was visible. Something obviously lived in one of the caves. Felix followed the path along the riverbank until he reached the cliff.

A semicircular lawn lay in front of one of the cave mouths, upon which a creature with a stripy fleece was tethered to a stake. It lifted its head briefly and looked at him. Felix felt a thrill run through him; this was no sheep or goat. It was an animal from another dimension, it had to be. As if to confirm this, the creature suddenly went cross-eyed, quacked like a duck, and waggled its ears. Then it went back to eating the grass.

The fire in front of the cave mouth had a spit above it, but the only thing hanging from it was a metal cooking pot, which was filled with steaming water. A piece of wood was propped against a rock, with the word
Turpsik
burned into it. Next to that was a pile of refuse: fish bones, vegetable peelings, scraps of paper, shards of broken pottery. Felix picked up one of the pieces of paper and looked at the writing. It was in English, which was a relief, but the handwriting was worse than his own. He thought -- and not for the first time -- how strange the whole language business was. Was