Budding Star (7 page)

Following the path indicated on the map, we made our way out of the trees into a sparkling rain-washed world.

Reuben was enchanted. “This is like a dream.”

“So pure angels do dream, then?” This was something I was always meaning to ask.

“It’s a phrase, Beeby!”

“Sorry! I forgot you guys don’t actually need to sleep!”

Reuben was looking down at the ground with a perplexed expression. “This should be killing our feet,” he said. “There are stones and all sorts in this mud.”

“Maybe Limbo feet are tougher?” I suggested.

I felt heaps tougher in general. It was getting really hot and the air was loads more humid than I’m used to, yet I was twinkling over the ground like Tinkerbell.

In flooded fields beside the road girls were planting seedlings. Wading knee-deep in the muddy water, they sang as they worked, a truly heartrending melody. Reuben reckoned they were singing in medieval Japanese. This could be true, but I couldn’t seem to get past their strong country accents.

“They’re asking the god of rice to come down and bless their seedlings, so they’ll get a good harvest,” he explained.

“Think we can spare minutes to send them vibes?” I asked.

Discreetly as possible, we beamed uplifting vibes at the waterlogged fields. I didn’t think the girls had noticed us, but as we walked away, a few waved rather wearily, and one called out what sounded like, “Hope you find her!”

“Was there something weird about that?” asked Reuben, after we’d gone past.

“Yeah, like, how did she know?”

He shook his head. “Not that. Didn’t you get the feeling if you were to come by tomorrow, those girls would be doing exactly the same thing?”

“I see what you mean,” I said slowly, “like they were just there for local colour, or whatever. Do you think they stopped singing once we were out of sight?

“Or stopped
existing
,” he suggested.

I shivered. “That’s not funny.”

Jessica had constantly warned us: “Limbo is a world of traps and tricks. Never trust anything or anyone.”

“When I think about it,” I admitted, “they didn’t seem exactly real. Not
real
real.”

“And the birds are wrong,” he said suddenly. “They sound right, but they fly all wrong.”

I burst out laughing. “What’s
that
supposed to mean? Like, they’re going backwards!”

“Don’t snigger, Beeby,” he said sternly. “Just look and learn.”

Spinning me around, my buddy pointed me at a patch of sky. After a few seconds a line of wild geese, or it could have been swans, flew out of some trees and disappeared towards a line of hills, making their sad honking cry.

I rolled my eyes. “And this is interesting because?”

“Keep watching and you’ll find out.”

Reuben started counting under his breath. He got as far as twenty.

“Bingo!” he said triumphantly.

An identical line of long-necked birds flew out of the same cluster of trees and disappeared towards the same line of hills, with the same eerie cries.

“And they always fly right to left, never left to right,” he said.

“They’re probably migrating,” I suggested vaguely.

“In sevens? I don’t think so! There are always exactly seven birds. Not five or six or eight.
Seven
, exactly. Every time.”

I didn’t share Reuben’s fascination with local bird behaviour, but he’s my mate, after all, so we hung around for a bit to test his theory. And actually it was quite spooky. Every twenty seconds on the dot, exactly seven birds flew out of the trees and vanished at exactly the same point between the hills.

“They’re like robot geese,” Reuben said in a baffled voice. “Same number of wing beats, same number of cries. I don’t get it.”

“Me neither,” I sighed. “But I think we’d better get going.”

A wicker carriage rattled past, drawn by two sweating horses. A lady was peeping shyly out of the window, half hiding her face with her fan.

At first, Reubs and I were genuinely charmed by the sights we saw on the road. Then we discovered that all these charming scenes and characters invariably popped up again further down the road, which rather took the shine off. After a few hours, we were like, oh right, another shrine, and yet more atmospheric temple bells. Oh, and another coy lady riding by in a quaint wicker carriage, and yet another travelling musician carrying some sort of Japanese stringed instrument on his back. Super.

We continually consulted the map as we walked to see if we were any closer to Tsubomi. But the blue butterfly seemed as far away as ever.

Reuben had been unusually quiet. I assumed he was still puzzling over the Riddle of the Birds, when he suddenly blurted out, “So is this like some old-time version of Japan or what?”

“It’s definitely old-time Japanese-ish,” I agreed.

We trudged along in silence for a few minutes.

“If you had to sum up the feeling in this world, in one word,” my buddy asked in an earnest voice. “What would it be?”

“Reuben, it’s a
world
. Worlds are full of zillions of different feelings.”

He shook his head. “Think about the people we saw earlier. Singing peasant girls, carriage ladies, harp players. Seriously, what vibe did you

get?”

“You mean, like ‘beautiful but basically weird’?”

“Beautiful and weird, for sure. But aren’t you getting any flashes of something
underneath
beautiful and weird?”

I frowned. “I’m not sure. Probably I’m not as sensitive as you, Sweetpea.”

We were passing a shrine to some local god. It was the spitting image of all the other shrines we’d passed, but for the first time I found myself taking a closer look. People had left offerings to the god; flowers and bowls of rice. A few had left toys and baby clothes. Local people had written prayers on scraps of paper, and tied them to tree branches. They fluttered in the breeze like tiny flags. I don’t know what it was, but something about that little prayer tree suddenly made me want to cry.

I thought about the beautiful carriage ladies, with their white, mask-like make-up. I remembered how each one had turned at the last minute, to gaze at us pleadingly over her fan.

And that last harp player, sitting down in the middle of nowhere, plucking those haunting, desolate chords…

“Sad,” I realised. “This place feels unbearably sad.”

Reuben nodded. “Have you ever been anywhere before where there’s just one overwhelming vibe?”

I shook my head. “Never.”

“Me neither.”

After that last musician, we didn’t see a soul for over an hour. So it was quite an event when we passed the hermit sitting by his fire.

The old man had been living out in the wilds so long, he’d become a bit wild and woolly himself. His robes were dirty and torn, and his hair had grown so long it was practically down to his waist. He patiently fed pieces of broken bamboo into the flames, to keep the fire going under an old cooking pot. He peered out through his straggly hair, calling a friendly greeting.

Remembering Jessica’s warnings, we weren’t sure if we should talk to him.

“It’d be good if he could tell us where we are,” I whispered.

The spirit map was fabulous on rivers and mountains and aerial views but it didn’t seem nearly so fussed about fiddly details like names!

“He’s probably OK,” Reuben decided.

So we said hi, and then we all did a lot of polite Japanese bowing.

The hermit invited us to drink tea with him but Jessica had warned us of the dangers of accepting food or drink.

“Oh, that’s OK,” I said awkwardly. “We wouldn’t want to put you to so much trouble.”

“I can see you’re not from this world!” The hermit’s smile seemed surprisingly young in such a wrinkled old face.

I’d been hoping we just blended in, but obviously our rustic peasant outfits hadn’t fooled him one bit. He broke off a new piece of bamboo from a plant growing beside the road, bent over his pot and began whisking its boiling contents into a bright green froth.

“I know who you seek,” he said calmly. “And I know the trials that lie in wait, if you refuse to turn back.”

I gulped. Did EVERYONE in this world know what we were up to? Did we have, like, a big sign: “Soul-retrieval in Progress”?

“Thanks,” Reuben said gruffly. “But turning back is not exactly an option.”

The hermit carefully poured the scalding green liquid into an earthenware cup. It looked suspiciously herbal to me. I wondered if this old man was some kind of Limbo wizard. Maybe we’d interrupted him just before he flung in the eyes of newts and dead man’s toenails?

He gave me an amused look. “This is a strange world to you, child; a strange, baffling, perilous world.”

I felt myself going red. The old hermit had virtually read my thoughts!

“You are strangers here,” he said gravely. “Without a guide, it is unlikely you will reach your destination, and no local will venture where you need to go. I advise you to leave while you still can!”

“We’ve got a job to do,” said Reuben stubbornly. “Perils or no perils, guide or no guide, we’re not leaving till it’s done.”

“You’re already too late!” the hermit said to my dismay. “The dark lord already has your friend in his power.”

“There’s a dark lord! Are you sure?” I gasped. “How-what did he do?”

“Do such trivial details matter, child? He used his power! Didn’t your teacher tell you the Dark Forces are more powerful in dimensions such as these?”

“Yes, she did, actually,” I said defensively.

“And did she tell you they have almost driven out the ancient gods who once dwelled here?”

“No,” I admitted. “But it was just a weekend course. Look, I’m really sorry about the nice gods baling out of your world, but we just have to save Tsubomi.” I was close to tears. “We have to.”

The hermit frowned. “Why do you care about her so much? She’s no kin to you.”

“So? Rellies aren’t always all that,” I told him. “But you can meet a total stranger and immediately you know they’re your family. Like, if Reuben here ever needed me, I’d just drop everything and go.”

“Ditto, Beeby,” Reuben murmured.

The hermit’s voice softened. “And that’s how you feel about this girl?”

“She needed us,” I explained huskily. “So we came.”

The old man shook his head. “If you want to save this girl’s soul, you must walk the Demon Road.”

That’s just a name, I told myself quickly. It’s not used by real demons.

“The road will lead you to the Palace of Endless Night. That is where the girl you seek is held captive. I would take you myself, but unfortunately I have business elsewhere. My blessings on your mission.”

“But how do we—”

He’d gone. No shimmer, no puff of smoke. Just gone.

“…find the Demon Road?” I asked the empty space. I almost stamped. “Can you believe that! He was a wizard after all! This world is just TOO scary.”

“I don’t think he was your average hermit,” Reuben agreed.

“Jessica said PODS can cloak their vibes in Limbo, and I totally forgot. He could have been a Dark agent deliberately leading us away from Tsubomi.”

Reuben shook his head. “He gave us his blessing. No PODS would do that.”

I folded my arms. “So if he wasn’t PODS and he wasn’t a wizard, what was he brewing in that manky pot?”

Reuben investigated the pan still steaming beside the fire, turning back to me with a grin. “Smells like tea.”

We unrolled the map so we could check our progress.

Reuben blinked. “Now where did that come from?”

A glimmering green line had appeared to the left of the first track. The butterfly pulsed meaningfully over the new road.

I stared at it. “How come it didn’t show up till now?”

“I have no idea,” Reuben admitted. “But as you see, the butterfly has spoken. A more useful question might be, are we up for this?”

“Totally!” I said brightly. “I want to go back to school and tell everyone we walked the Demon Road all the way to the Palace of Endless Night!”

“Psst,” I added in a whisper. “That was my angel talking before. My legs are pure jelly, how about yours?”

“Pure and utter jelly!” he admitted.

“We’ll do it on three!” I told him. “One, two, THREE.”

We both made a wild synchronised leap to the left.

We’d been walking through a summer world of birds and flowers and sweet-earth smells; old-time Japan at its sunny best. The instant we set foot on the Demon Road, this changed. It was the same landscape, yet now it felt hideous and ominous. Even the air was hideous - heavy and clammy, making it hard to breathe. And the chirping of summer insects that I had barely noticed previously, now sounded like a v. v. disturbing track on one of Brice’s Astral Garbage CDs.

You know on a sunny day, when a cloud unexpectedly covers the sun, how all the world’s colours suddenly look deeply wrong? It was like that. Even the shrines felt wrong, with icky dark stains splattered on nearby tree roots and surrounding stones.

I could feel myself getting more and more twitchy. When absolutely everything feels creepy, it’s hard to know if something’s normal creepy, or, you know, creepy. All at once everything, even the Astral Garbage insects, went silent. At the same moment I realised the sun was starting to set.

Was I tempted to turn back? Duh! Was I ever!! But we had come to save Tsubomi, so we just kept going.

In the fading light, the Demon Road had acquired a green glimmer that made me think of poisonous slime. Maybe it was psychological, but I was suddenly aware of an icky gluey sensation under my bare tootsies.

We’d been climbing steadily for over an hour. It was inevitable we’d have to go down at some point. Suddenly the slime trail veered off sharply downhill through a most unpleasant-looking grove of trees.

“I guess it’s onwards and downwards to the Palace of Unending Night then?” I said bravely.

“I think you’ll find that’s actually the Palace of Endless Night, Beeby,” Reubs corrected, taking off a girl from our class.

“Imagine having to deliver parcels to that address!” I giggled. “Care of The Dark Lord, Palace of Endless Night, beside the Demon Road.”