The Hidden World (11 page)

She stopped, and listened. She still could hear the river, but only faintly now, and every now and then the soft dropping sound of a fallen hat. More than anything else, she could hear her own blood rushing in her ears,
whoosh, whoosh, whoosh
.

It's the roses, she thought. It's the roses, because they're mean and they're spiteful and they know that I can't run very fast because of my limp. She continued to walk toward the treeline, feeling irritated rather than scared, but then she heard a
crackle-crackle-crackle
and she could sense that something really big was rushing up behind her and she turned, and screamed. A huge jagged shape was running toward her, making a noise like chairs and tables being smashed up with half a dozen axes. She saw four blazing red eyes and two stretched-open mouths, and rows and rows of sharply pointed teeth. The thing let out a deafening roar and it was only because she tripped and fell over sideways that it missed her. All the same, one of its claws caught against the sleeve of her sleep-T and ripped it.

She found herself on all fours, scrambling across the forest floor, her hands and knees prickled not by pine needles but by thousands of glittering hatpins. With a harsh growl, the thing came running back around the hat-stands, and now Jessica could begin to see what it was: a wolf-like creature, except that it wasn't made of flesh and blood, but varnished wood, broken into sharp pointed pieces, with splinters instead of fur. It had two faces, one the right way up and the other, immediately below it, upside-down. Four eyes, two muzzles, two mouths crammed with teeth. It was the walnut veneer on her closet, come to life. It had two faces because the door panel had been made from the same section of wood, cut in half and fitted with one half facing up and the matching piece facing down.

It had always frightened her, especially at night when she was lying in bed, trying to sleep. It seemed to stare at her with all four eyes as if it had only one purpose in life and that was to eat her. But here, in the woods, circling toward her, making that crackling noise with every step, it was so terrifying that she couldn't stop herself from whimpering.

She managed to stand up, balancing herself against one of the hat-stands. The wooden wolf lowered its head and growled at her with both of its mouths. It had charged at her wildly before, but now it had obviously realized how weak she was, and how scared, and it walked toward her slowly, one seven-clawed paw in front of the other, as if it were relishing the smell of her fear with each of its four flared nostrils.

Jessica backed away, reaching out blindly for the hat-stand right behind her. Six or seven hats dropped onto the forest floor – a black silk opera hat, a priest's biretta, a huge Edwardian confection of black eagle's feathers; then a sudden tumble of trilbies and a deerstalker. The wooden wolf kept on coming after her, every sinew of its body creaking and squeaking.

Oh please God don't let it hurt me, Jessica prayed. If it's going to kill me, please let it kill me quickly. She knew enough about pain from the time when she was recovering from her parents' car crash. The kind of pain that the roses had been talking about: the pain that made you feel as if something was eating you alive.

Now the wooden wolf was only a few paces away. It could have easily sprung at her and knocked her down with one jump, but she could hear it breathing her in, breathing her in. It must have been waiting for this moment for over a year – ever since it had first seen her enter her bedroom and stared at her, mute but hungry, from her closet door.

She stumbled backward, and the next hat-stand swayed, so that more hats fell down. She took hold of the hat-stand and swung it around so that it toppled over. It fell against another hat-stand, and that in turn knocked another one over. Jessica limped back faster and faster, knocking over every hat-stand she came to. It started a chain reaction all the way through the forest, until hat-stands were clattering down everywhere and thousands of hats were pattering onto the ground like soft applause.

The wooden wolf managed to jump over the first few tangles of hat-stands, but as Jessica pushed more and more of them over, they formed a criss-cross barrier that stopped it in its tracks. It roared at her in fury and frustration, and began to circle quickly around to the left, so that it could outflank her, but she ducked down onto her hands and knees and crawled underneath a tunnel of fallen hat-stands until she was only a few metres away from the edge of the forest. She had hatpins sticking in her hands and knees, but she didn't care. The wooden wolf was still running around the heaps of hats, hungry for her flesh and thirsty for her blood.

She reached the gorse bushes and began to limp uphill. It was night-time now, and up above the windy hilltop she could see millions and millions of stars, all forming the pattern of Grannie's best lace curtains. She quickly turned her head to see if the wooden wolf were still coming after her, but between the gorse bushes it was too dark for her to see. She kept limping upward, gasping for breath, and trying not to think of the lines she had learned at school: ‘Like one that on a lonesome road/doth walk in fear and dread/because he knows a fearful fiend doth close behind him tread.'

She crested the hill, and now – no more than a hundred metres away – she could make out the tangled garden where she had first entered the wall. But as she started on the last stretch, hobbling through the dry grass from her geography book, she heard the clattering of claws up the gully behind her and they were coming very, very fast. She turned to look, even though she didn't really want to, and just as she did, the wooden wolf appeared, its four eyes burning like the narrow grilles in a hot coke furnace, its lips drawn back to reveal crowds of broken and ragged teeth.

Then – worse – Jessica heard an answering snarl from not far off to her right, and more sharp crackling noises. At first she couldn't see what it was, but then she glimpsed the gleam of varnished wood in the darkness. Another wooden wolf was coming after her, and she realized that, no matter how much she hurried, she wasn't going to be able to reach the garden before at least one of the wolves was upon her.

S
he tried to run faster, but her ankle was so weak that she kept twisting it and falling onto her knees. Again and again she managed to pick herself up and keep on hobbling forward, but now the first wooden wolf was only a few bounds behind her and she knew with a rising feeling of desperation that she couldn't escape it. Its voracious breathing sounded like somebody sawing furiously at a table leg, and she could almost feel its teeth tearing into her back muscles.

Out of the corner of her eye she could see the second wooden wolf already keeping pace with her, still fifteen or twenty metres away but gaining on her all the time.

She wrenched her ankle yet again, really badly this time, and fell sideways. She tried to crawl away but it was no use. The first wolf came circling around her, panting, and the second wolf quickly came up to join it.

‘You're not real!' Jessica shouted at them, almost screaming. ‘You're part of my dream, that's all! You're doors! You're nothing but doors! You can't be wolves!'

But she knew it was futile. She had never had a dream in which she could feel the wind in her face, and the grass under her knees, and such an agonizing pain in her ankle.

The wooden wolves creaked closer and closer. They were so near now that she could even smell their breath: vinegary, like the inside of old cupboards.

‘Don't hurt me,' she begged. ‘Please don't hurt me.' But how could a wolf understand what she was saying, let alone a wolf made out of nothing but splintered wood?

Just as she thought the wooden wolves were going to jump on her, though, the fields all around them were abruptly lit up by a blinding white light. It was still night, but the grass all around her was illuminated as bright as day. The wooden wolves swiveled their hideous heads around, this way and that, and one of them started to back away nervously.

Jessica shielded her eyes with her hand. Peering between her fingers, she saw what looked like a thousand-watt electric lightbulb slowly bobbing its way toward her. The wooden wolves obviously found it frightening, because the second one backed away too, and then both of them turned and crackled off toward the brow of the hill. In only a few moments they had disappeared.

The dazzling light came nearer, and when Jessica tried to look at it she saw dozens of green blobs floating in front of her eyes. It stopped only a few feet away, wavering slightly.

‘You can get up now,' said a voice. ‘They've gone now, and they won't dare to come back for you while I'm here.' The voice was high-pitched, with a metallic, pinging quality to it, more like a music box than a voice.

Jessica slowly lowered her hand, although she still had to keep her eyes squinted against the brilliance. Gradually she began to make out what the light was. A slender, transparent creature that floated in the air – a creature made of glass, with crystal wings and a shining glass globe for a head. Inside the globe, Jessica could see a face that was formed out of filaments of pure light – sly, elfin eyes, a spiky nose, and a mouth that was pursed up in self-satisfaction and amusement.

‘What are you?' asked Jessica.

‘You're the one who's supposed to know all about fairies,' the creature retorted.

‘You can't be a fairy. There are no such things.'

‘There are no such things as wolves made out of closet doors, either; or trees that grow hats; or rivers made of silk.'

‘There are. I've seen them.'

‘Seen them or dreamed them?'

‘This isn't a dream. This is real.'

‘If this is real, then I'm a real fairy, aren't I? Fairies aren't all butterfly wings and sparkly wands and ballet skirts. Fairies come in all shapes and disguises, most of them ugly and some of them highly dangerous and all of them as spiteful as monkeys. The very word “fairy” means fate.'

As the creature spoke, another light came floating toward them across the grass, and then another, until the slope was so brightly lit that Jessica felt as if the whole world had become an over-exposed photograph.

‘These are the best friends that anybody could ever have,' said the creature. ‘The fairies of light and brilliance. These are the fairies who illuminate your room at night and turn the monsters back into bathrobes and the skulls back into table lamps. Without them, the darkness would be swarming with all kinds of demons and misshapen creatures. But they keep their distance, mostly, because they fear reality, you see, and truth; and most of all they fear being seen for what they really are.'

The light-fairies clustered around Jessica and escorted her slowly down the slope, not hurrying her, treating her almost as if she were royal, or very precious to them anyway, dipping and curtseying as they went.

‘You're safe now,' said the creature as they crossed the overgrown garden and reached the pattern of Jessica's bedroom wallpaper.

‘I have to come back,' said Jessica. ‘I know it's asking a lot, but will you help me again, if I do?'

‘Oh no, you shouldn't come back. Stay on your own side of the wall, where it's safer.'

‘But there are children here who need me to save them. They've been begging me.'

‘There are many people here who beg for this and beg for that. Some beg for chocolate cake, or puppies. Some beg to differ, and some beg to die.'

‘But the girl I saw – Phoebe – she wants me to come back and rescue her. She said that something called the Stain is coming to get her.'

‘The Stain will get us all in the end. There's nothing that one lame girl can do about it. Fate, remember!'

‘What is it, the Stain?'

‘The Stain is what makes the world frightening and the dark dark. The Stain is all the horror you could ever think of, and even more horror that you couldn't. The very best thing that you can do now is forget all about Phoebe and everything you've seen on this side of the wall, and go back to where it's cozy, and if you ever think about what you saw here, persuade yourself that you once had a nightmare, and this was it.'

‘I can't leave those children. They're so scared.'

‘Of course they're scared. They have every reason to be. And you have every reason not to return.'

Jessica looked back toward the brow of the faraway hill. It was already beginning to grow light, and she could see the silhouettes of storks flying high above the trees, except the storks were the patterns on her grandmother's spoon handles, and the trees were the lace curtains halfway down the stairs.

The light-fairies were gradually dimming, and one by one they switched themselves off, leaving only the first one, who had saved her from the wooden wolves. There was a smell of burning leaves in the air, and somebody in the distance was playing a whistle, the kind of regretful lament that makes you stop, and listen, and wonder why you feel so sad.

‘Don't come back,' said the creature gently. ‘Some people are destined for some worlds, and others are destined for different worlds altogether. This world – this isn't yours.'

Jessica reached out to touch the creature, but its glass head was much too hot, like a real lightbulb. ‘Thank you,' she said. ‘I don't know what would have happened to me if you hadn't chased those wolves away.'

‘Better not to think about it. Blood, you know; and having your lunchpipes torn out.'

Jessica turned to face the wallpaper pattern. But she hesitated and said, ‘Supposing I can't get through? What then?'

‘Oh, you can get through,' the creature reassured her. ‘You are one of those who will always get through.'

Jessica closed her eyes, took a deep breath and stepped smartly forward. Just as before, she felt for one panicky moment as if she were battling her way through a sheet hanging on a washing-line. For a few suffocating seconds she was all tangled up, and then suddenly she was clear of it, and standing on the rug in the middle of her bedroom.