The Hidden World (10 page)

‘I didn't like to. I thought it would only make it worse. Besides, what with your heart and everything, I didn't want to stress you out.'

‘Sweetheart, I'm an old man now, and I'd be lying to you if I said I was in peak condition, but since you lost your mom and dad it's up to me to take care of you, no matter what the stresses and strains. It's my job.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Hey, come on, you don't have to be sorry. Your granny and me, we both love you to pieces. And Renko promised that he's going to take care of you when you're at school. He's a good boy, that one.'

Grandpa Willy kissed her on the forehead and then he left, but he left the door open a few inches like he always did. She lay back on her pillow and heard him shuffle his way downstairs.

Then, ‘Your hot chocolate's cold now, where have you been?'

‘Tucking in Jessica.'

‘She's nearly seventeen, she doesn't need tucking in! Your hot chocolate's cold!'

‘I didn't even ask you for any hot chocolate.'

‘That's fine! Don't worry about it! I'll pour it down the sink!'

‘Did you hear me say I wanted hot chocolate?'

‘You always have hot chocolate!'

And so on, and so on. They were still bickering an hour later, when Jessica began to close her eyes.

A breeze blew across her face, very softly at first, and then more stiffly. At last she sat up in bed, looked around her and realized that the breeze was coming out of the wall. She raised her hand and she could feel it. She could even smell it, too. It smelled of flowers, and grass, and distant rain.

‘Please, help us,' whispered a voice, and she could almost feel the breath against her ear.

Jessica closed her eyes. She hesitated for a moment and then she spoke quite loudly. ‘I don't know how to help you. You'll have to tell me.'

‘It's easy. Come and save us. It will take us, if you don't.'

‘What is it?'

‘The Stain … it's going to take us all.'

‘The Stain? What's that?'

‘Come find us, we're begging you … Come and save us …'

Jessica opened her eyes. The wallpaper was glowing, as if there was a dim light shining behind it, and the roses, irises and blessed thistles were all in silhouette. She pushed back her comforter and knelt close to the wall. The breeze made her long dark hair fly up.

‘This is a dream,' she said.

But the voice whispered, ‘There are no dreams, Jessica. Only different places to be.'

She stood up, balancing herself on her bed. The light from the wallpaper grew brighter and brighter, until it was so intense that she had to shield her eyes with her hand. She took one unsteady step forward, and then another. She reached the wall, and it didn't feel like a wall at all, more like a stiff damp sheet on a winter washing-line. She pushed it and it gave way, just like a sheet, and then she was battling her way through it, and suddenly it fell away behind her. She was standing barefoot in a tangle of prickly briars and thistles, in an overgrown garden, on a brilliantly sunlit day.

Above her, the sky was primrose-colored, the same as her wallpaper, and cloudless, although she could see flocks of birds wheeling in the distance. At least they looked like flocks of birds, but when they flew closer she saw that they were nothing but the blue V-shaped patterns from her bedroom carpet.

She turned. Behind her, she could still dimly distinguish her bed, nightstand and dressing-table, but they were separated from her by a patterned screen of flowers: all the roses and irises and blessed thistles, but plain white, because she was seeing them from the other side, their unprinted side.

‘You have to help us,' whispered the voice, as if it were concerned that she might turn back.

‘I will if I can,' said Jessica. ‘But I can't see you. I don't know who you are.'

‘Follow the flowers.'

‘What?'

‘Follow the flowers, and you can find us.'

‘What flowers?'

Through the tangled garden, with the stilted gait of praying mantises, came seven or eight roses. They approached Jessica and stood around her, with spindly arms and legs and thorny claws. It was their faces that frightened her the most, however. The folds of their petals had taken the shape of vindictive little eyes and tight, disapproving mouths. For all of their beauty as flowers, their expressions were mean and threatening.

‘This is a dream,' she repeated, although she didn't think she sounded very convincing.

One of the roses came closer than the rest, and stood with its face ruffled in the breeze. ‘Have you ever suffered pain?' it asked her. Its voice was extraordinary – thin and fluting, but horribly suggestive too, as if it would really enjoy seeing her hurt.

‘I hurt my foot once,' she said, lifting it up a little so that the rose could see her scars.

‘You think that was painful? Has anything really awful ever gnawed at you in the night? Has anything ever come surging up from the bottom of your bed like a Great White shark and seized you in its teeth, right up to your waist? Have you ever felt the skin being torn off your ribs, and your nerves being stripped bare, and your lungs collapsing?'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Oh, but you will,' said the rose. ‘I'm talking about the Stain. I'm talking about the most terrible thing that lives in this world or any other world. I'm talking about something that will make your heart stop just to look at it. Do we frighten you? A few flowers out of your nightmares? You wait till you see the Stain.'

‘That's if she ever does,' put in one of the meaner-looking roses. ‘It's a long path and it's a very difficult path, and it's terribly easy to lose your way.'

‘Who am I supposed to be saving?' asked Jessica. ‘I can't save anybody if I don't even know who they are.'

‘You mean you want to go back?'

‘I didn't say that. I mean I want to know who's been calling for help, and why, and where they are.'

‘Their names are written.'

‘What do you mean? Their names are written where?'

The rose could scarcely conceal its thorny contempt. ‘Where do you think? Where the gray woman in the green cloak stands and weeps.'

‘And where's that?'

‘Please!' whispered a voice. ‘There isn't much time. Please.'

‘Are you coming?' demanded the rose.

Jessica glanced back at the gloomy outline of her bedroom. High above her head, a thin swirl of clouds had formed, in the same pattern as her curtains; and the V-shaped birds were flying across it as if they were migrating far away, to somewhere sane.

This is complete and utter madness, she thought. Talk about people who need locking up in asylums. But the roses started to mantis-walk away from her, with an irritating claw-like rustle, and after only a moment's hesitation she went after them.

T
he roses led her down a wide, windy hill. At first she thought that they were walking through dry, knee-high grass, scattered with brown poppies; but when she looked down she realized that it was the pattern from the cover that she had stuck on her geography workbook.

Not only was the sky growing darker, but the wind was rising, so that Jessica's sleep-T billowed and leaves came whirling through the air, as well as fragments of all kinds of decorations and patterns. She saw the curlicues from her grandmother's lacy tablecloth, and the leaves and stars that were embossed around the edge of Grandpa Willy's leather-topped desk. She saw spots and dots and feathers and flowers, and even the horseshoes, clubs and four-leaf clovers from the Lucky Charms cereal box.

‘Hurry!' demanded the roses. ‘We don't have all day!'

They reached the foot of the hill and began to make their way down a narrow, winding gully. The grass from Jessica's geography book lashed at their ankles. The wind had lifted to a soft, morbid scream, and it was filled with a blizzard of carpet patterns, dress designs and fragments of curtain material. Jessica was lashed on the cheek by a bramble from the wallpaper in Grannie's sewing-room. She lost her balance, stumbled, and fell down on one knee, but the roses came ripping back and shrieked at her, ‘Up! Up! We haven't far to go, and it's much too dangerous!'

This is a dream, Jessica tried to persuade herself, but now she was quite sure that it wasn't a dream at all, that she was living every moment of it, and it was real. No matter how hard she tried to wake up, she was still slithering down the gully with the roses and she knew that there was only one way for her to get back to her bedroom, and that was to turn around and run there, on her own.

As they neared the foot of the gully they began to run into gorse bushes and scrub, which snagged at Jessica's T-shirt and caught in her hair. The gorse grew thicker and higher, and soon they were entering a gloomy wood filled with hundreds of slender trees with shining dark-brown trunks and curled-up branches – except that they weren't trees at all, but hat-stands, and what had seemed at first sight to be overshadowing foliage was thousands of hats, both men's and women's, trilbies and fedoras and black funeral hats with ostrich feathers.

‘Faster,' insisted the roses.

It was so shadowy in the woods that Jessica could only just make out their spindly arms and legs, and underneath the heaps of overhanging hats the air was suffocating, like hiding in a closet filled with your grandparents' old clothes, wishing that your party guests would hurry up and find you.

They emerged at last on the banks of a wide, iridescent river. The light was failing fast, and Jessica began to realize that the hours behind the wall seemed to pass much more urgently, as if time itself were in a panic.

The river was fifty or sixty feet wide, and the water wasn't water but rippling moiré silk of the iciest blue. On the far side stood a landing-stage constructed of yellow majolica tiles, and behind the landing-stage rose trees so dark that they almost looked black – yet sparkling, all of them, with millions and millions of tiny lights. They reminded her of the trees she had seen in her fairy books, Arthur Rackham trees with twisted trunks and hollows where hobgoblins secreted themselves, and whose upper branches were clouded with fairies.

Already the day had grown so dusky that it was a moment or two before Jessica realized that somebody was standing on the landing-stage. It was a child, a girl of nine or ten, wearing a simple white nightgown with long sleeves, and a white surgical mask that completely covered her nose and mouth. She stood looking at Jessica across the endlessly rippling river, her hair occasionally lifted by the evening wind. She was juggling five differently colored balls, quite nonchalantly, as if she had been juggling all her life.

‘You came,' she whispered, and even though she was so far away Jessica could hear her quite distinctly, almost as if she were right inside her head.

‘Who are you?' Jessica called out. ‘What do you want me to do?'

‘I'm Phoebe. I'm supposed to be the naughty one. I'm the one who teased the cat. I'm the one who spooned the strawberry jelly into Uncle Richard's hat.'

‘I still don't understand.'

‘You have to find the Stain. You have to wash it away forever.'

‘I don't know where it is. I don't even know
what
it is.'

‘It's growing and it's spreading and soon it's going to catch us. Three days and three nights, tickety-tock, that's all we have left.'

‘Where do I look for it? I just don't know what you want me to do!'

Behind the girl, the sparkling in the fairy-trees grew more intense, and Jessica saw wisps of smoke. The trees weren't sparkling with fairies, they were actually on fire. She could smell burning on the wind, and hear the popping of twigs.

‘I have to go,' said the girl. ‘Please look for the Stain. Please, or it's going to take us all, forever. No more juggling. No more games.' Suddenly, she tossed all of her juggling-balls into the air and they weren't juggling-balls at all but brightly colored spots from the laundry-room wallpaper, and they were blown away into the wind and out of sight.

‘When will I see you again?' asked Jessica.

‘Meet me tomorrow by the sea.'

‘Where's that? How do I get there?'

‘The roses will show you … Now, I have to go. No more time for pepper in the sugar bowl. No more apple-pie beds. No more childhood, not for us.'

Jessica turned around to talk to the roses, but they had all hurried away into the gathering shadows; and when she looked back across the river Phoebe had disappeared too, and the yellow-tiled landing-stage was empty. Jessica was alone on the riverbank in the strangest of worlds, with dark falling fast and the wind howling even more eerily, as if it wasn't a wind at all but the sobbing of people in serious pain.

She left the river behind her and began to climb back uphill, into the stuffy hat-covered forest. It was even gloomier than it had been just a few minutes before, and even more suffocating, and she prayed that she wouldn't get lost. What would happen if you went into the wall and couldn't find out how to get back again? Nobody would ever know you were there, and they would never think of sending a search party into your wallpaper to find you, would they? She tried to keep herself calm, but she began to limp faster, almost breaking into a run, anxious to get out of the woods and back to the top of the hill before it grew totally dark.

At last, panting, she saw the faint violet light of the evening sky through the hat-stands. She slowed down a little, because now she was sure that she was going the right way. As she did so, however, she thought she heard a crackling noise quite close behind her, and off to her left. Probably those horrible roses, following her and trying to frighten her. But then she heard another crackle, and a complicated splintering, and this was far too loud to be a few malevolent flowers.