The Hidden World (2 page)

‘It's coming after us. It's going to take us all.'

‘Who's after you?'

There was a faint, quick rustling sound, and then silence.

‘Who's after you?' Jessica repeated. ‘I can't help you if I don't know who you are and where you are and why they want to kill you.'

Again, silence.

Jessica waited and waited but she didn't hear the frightened voice again. She drew back the thick patchwork quilt on top of her bed and carefully swung her legs around. She switched on her bedside light, the one with the flower-fairies on the lampshade. Her right ankle, her good ankle, had a tight elastic bandage on it, and it was throbbing, as if she had sprained it. Her left ankle was the same as always, twisted to one side, with red scars all around it. She straightened her back and flexed her shoulders. She felt sore and bruised all over, the way she had felt after the car crash. She reached up and patted her head. She found that she was wearing a large turban of bandages, like the princess in
Ali Baba
. She stood up and limped over to the mirror; she was shocked by what she saw. Both of her eyes were surrounded by rainbow-colored circles and there were big black scabs on her lips. She was waxy pale and she looked even thinner than she usually did.

She was still staring at herself when the bedroom door opened and Grannie came in, all wild white hair and bright red hand-knitted sweater.

‘Jessica! Sweetheart! You're awake! Grandpa Willy, will you come quick! Jessica's woken up!'

Grannie put her arm around her and guided her back to her bed. ‘How are you feeling, sweetie-pie? Does your head hurt? How about your ankle? Oh my Lord, we've been so worried about you.'

‘I'm fine, I think,' Jessica told her. ‘I just feel like I fell downstairs or something.'

‘That's exactly what happened. You fell downstairs. You dropped your drawings at school and when you tried to pick them up you fell downstairs. You had a terrible concussion.'

Grandpa Willy came in, his hair just as wild and white as Grannie's, and he spread his arms wide to give her a hug. ‘I haven't been to bed in five days, fretting about you. Thank God you're OK.'

‘Five days? You mean I've been sleeping for five days?'

‘That's right. You were in the hospital for two of them, but you were showing all the signs of coming around and the doctor thought it would help you along if we brought you home. You gave yourself one hell of a crack on the bean there.'

Jessica said, ‘I don't really remember. I remember I was trying to pick up my drawings but that's all.'

‘It'll come back to you, sweetie-pie,' said Grannie, sandwiching Jessica's hand between hers. ‘Dr Leeming said that you might suffer a little short-term memory loss. I'm just so glad you're awake.'

‘Better get back into bed,' Grandpa Willy suggested. ‘Are you hungry at all? Dr Leeming said we could give you some soup when you woke up, if you had the taste for it.'

Jessica shook her head. ‘Maybe later. I still feel … strange.'

‘Of course you do, going to school on Wednesday and waking up the following Monday. Listen, you rest. How about watching TV for a while? I'll bring you up some warm milk.'

‘Thanks, Grannie.' Jessica didn't really want any warm milk, but she knew how much pleasure it gave her grandmother to mollycoddle her. In a small way, it helped to ease the pain of losing the girl whose photograph stood on the mantelpiece above the living-room fire. The girl who looked just like Jessica.

‘Grannie—' said Jessica, as she went to the door.

‘What is it, sweetie-pie?'

‘I don't know, maybe I dreamed it. I guess I probably did.'

Her grandmother came back and sat on the side of the bed. ‘What is it?' she asked. In the dim light from the beside lamp, her skin was as soft and wrinkled as ruched velvet, and face powder clung to the tiny hairs around her upper lip.

‘Is there anybody else living here? Apart from us?'

‘I don't understand what you mean.'

‘It doesn't matter. It must have been a dream.'

‘It wasn't a bad dream, was it?'

‘I'm not sure. But there aren't any children staying here, are there?'

‘Only you, sweetie-pie.'

She kissed Jessica on the forehead and went downstairs. Jessica sat up in bed, straining her ears. Once she thought she heard another furtive shuffle, and she jumped, but it was only a lump of thawing snow dropping off the roof into the garden below.

I
t was snowing like a thousand burst-open pillows as they crawled out of the city that afternoon. A truck had overturned on the Hutchinson Parkway and they had to take a three-mile detour. Even though it was only three o'clock, the sky was charcoal gray and everybody was driving with snow-clogged headlights.

‘We should have left an hour earlier,' said her mother.

‘We'll be OK,' said her father. ‘Once we get past White Plains, we'll be fine.'

‘You know how fussy my mother is about everybody being on time.'

‘So why don't you give her a call? Tell her we're just about to hit Danbury.'

‘We're miles from Danbury.'

‘I know we are. But once we get onto Route six-eighty-four I can really put my foot down.'

In the back of the Buick, on the warm red leather seats, Jessica was playing with two of her fairy figures, Queen Titania and Princess Fay. Oh, Princess Fay, the snow-beasts are flying at us from all sides, what shall we do? Never fear, I shall use my wand to make a wall of glass, and they will never harm us.

‘Hello, Mother? It's me. Yes, we're doing fine. We should be passing Danbury in five or ten minutes. Sure. Well, it's snowing here too. I hope you've got some of your hot fruit punch waiting for us!'

‘How did she sound?'

‘She believed me, if that's what you mean.'

Our magic sleigh will take us through the whirling snow-beasts to the Palace of the Old Ones, where we will be fed with many good things, jellies made from roses and rainwater, peacock pies, swans fashioned out of sugar. There will be music and dancing, and the blowing of many trumpets to salute us.

‘Look at this guy, he's weaving all over the road.'

They had caught up with a huge black tractor-trailer with
NORTH POLE REFRIGERATED DELIVERY
written on the back, and a picture of a penguin with a scarf on, giving them the thumbs-up. Even though it was traveling at less than 20 mph, the truck was swaying from one side of the carriageway to the other and churning up a filthy blizzard of slush and spray, so that her father had to switch his windshield wipers on to full. Jessica liked that, when they flapped really fast, whip whap, whip whap!

Her father flashed his headlights and blew his horn.

‘Come on, John, there's no point in getting impatient.'

‘All he has to do is pull over and let us pass. Is that too much to ask? Guy's drunk, by the way he's driving.'

More flashing, more horn-blowing. Jessica had the oddest feeling that the penguin was smiling only at her, and giving only her the thumbs-up. Don't worry, kid, you're going to be fine. We shall invite all the penguins and the polar bears to our banquet, Princess Fay, and we shall feed them on mackerel and mint ice-cream.

Her father suddenly put his foot down and swerved the car to the left, starting to overtake.

‘John! Don't! You can't see!'

‘It's OK, trust me. How well do I know this road? There's a left-hand curve here and if there was anything coming the other way we would have seen it.'

They drew up alongside the tractor-trailer and Jessica's window was filled with its huge sizzling wheels. Her father accelerated faster and faster but the truck seemed to go on forever; it felt as if they would take a week to get past it.

‘He's putting his foot down! What's the matter with him? Can't he see me?'

The windshield wipers flapped and flapped but there was so much spray coming from the truck's wheels that her father was practically driving blind.

‘John!' said her mother. ‘John, pull back, let him go!'

‘No way, not this bastard.' They edged forward little by little until they were neck-and-neck with the truck, and suddenly they were clear of the spray. That was when the interior of the Buick was abruptly flooded with brilliant light. Jessica heard her mother say, ‘Oh, God,' very quietly, as if she were talking only to herself.

The oncoming panel-van hit them head-on. Jessica could never remember hearing any noise, although there must have been. But she remembered the jolt of her seat-belt across her chest and her fairies flying through the car, and then a terrible bumpety-bumpety-bumpety as they careered down a steep graveled embankment and into a stand of pine trees. There was a bang that almost knocked her teeth out, but she didn't feel any pain, even though her mother's seat had been forced backward and downward by the impact and comprehensively crushed her foot.

She remembered the car door being opened, and a flashlight shining in her eyes. ‘Everybody OK?'

‘Call nine-one-one, Lance. Looks like these two have bought the farm.'

‘How about you, little lady? Are you OK?'

‘I've lost my fairies.'

‘OK, don't you worry, we'll find your fairies. Let's see if we can get you out of there.'

She stood by the bedroom window, looking out over the snowy garden. This morning Dr Leeming had called to examine her and had taken her turban off. Her hair had been shaved off in a triangular patch and there were seven stitches in her scalp. She still had to wear a dressing, but now she could cover her head with a red-and-yellow silk scarf that used to belong to her mother.

In the center of the garden stood a bronze statuette of Pan, with cloven hoofs, and horns, and a sly, untrustworthy smile. He was dancing and playing his pipes, even though there was a large blob of snow on top of his head.

She looked around her room. It was hard to believe that it was nearly eleven months since the car crash. Her room on East 86th Street had been airy and pale and very modern, even though the basketwork armchairs had been overpopulated with all of her various fairies and elves, and her painting-table had been cluttered with pencils, brushes, pots of water and squeezed-out tubes of paint.

Grandpa Willy had lived in this house since 1948, and even then it was already eighty-five years old. It stood about two miles out of New Milford, on the road to Allen's Corners, in six and a half acres of its own grounds. It had steeply sloping roofs and very tall brick chimneys and Jessica could never imagine why anybody would have wanted to build it, unless they had been wealthy and lonely and sad. Like every other bedroom, her own room was wallpapered with pasture roses and wild irises and blessed thistles. The wallpaper was faded now, and stained in places, but she supposed that Grannie and Grandpa Willy didn't notice things like that any more. Grandpa Willy had walked in this morning with dried egg yolk on his vest, and Grannie was always wearing odd socks.

On one side of the room loomed the large closet in which she kept all of her clothes. It was so tall that it almost reached to the ceiling, and it was veneered in walnut, which had knots that looked like eyes and dark jagged shapes that looked like animals' faces. On the other side, next to the brown-tiled fireplace, stood her dressing-table, which also had her computer on it and her carved-wood mirror. She talked to the girl in the mirror every day. The girl in the mirror didn't have any friends, either – even though, exactly like Jessica, she was skinny-waisted and pretty, with glossy brown shoulder-length hair and large dark eyes and a slightly elfin look. Grannie's mother had come from Norway, that's what Grannie said, and that's why Jessica looked like that. There were lots of elves in Norway, and they often married humans.

She decided to go downstairs. It was all very well being the fairy princess in the attic, but she was growing bored now, and hungry. She could smell ham boiling and cookies baking. Grannie may have fussed too much, but she was a wonderful cook.

‘Help us.'

She was reaching for her bathrobe, but she stopped, with her hand still raised. A cold feeling slowly crept down her back like a melting snowball.

‘Help us,' the voice repeated. It sounded weaker than it had before, but it was just as frightened. ‘It's coming closer. You have to help us.'

‘I can't—' Jessica began, but then she had to clear her throat. ‘I can't see you. How can I help you if I don't know who you are?'

‘Help us, there's a way.'

‘What way? I don't understand. I can't even see you – what can I do?'

‘You don't know what it's going to do to us. It's going to take us all, but it's going to do far worse than that.'

‘Where are you? Let me see you!'

‘We're here. We're here. Help us.'

The voice seemed to come from somewhere very close, only inches away from her ear, and yet it seemed to be all around her, too, like fifty people all whispering at once.

She looked toward the fireplace. The voice must be coming from there, that was why it echoed so much. Somebody was whispering into the fireplace in another room, and the sound carried through all the complicated chimneys until it came out here. Whether her grandmother knew it or not, there must be other children living in the house somewhere. Maybe they had run away from home. Or perhaps they were orphans, who had escaped from a local orphanage.

Whoever they were, Jessica decided that she had to find them. Whatever was after them, they were scared for their lives.

‘Tell me where you are,' she said, clearly. ‘Don't be frightened. Tell me what room you're in, and I'll come and rescue you.'

‘We're here. Help us.'

Jessica was about to ask the voice again when Grannie appeared, wearing an apron and a big, hot smile. ‘I thought I heard you calling, sweetie-pie. Do you want to come downstairs? There's chocolate muffins and pecan cookies and some of my lemon cake, if you're interested.'