The Subtle Knife (3 page)

He discovered that he was still holding the bottle he’d taken from the café. He drank from it, and it tasted like what it was, ice-cold lemonade; and welcome, too, because the night air was hot.

He wandered along to the right, past hotels with awnings over brightly lit entrances and bougainvillea flowering beside them, until he came to the gardens on the little headland. The building in the trees with its ornate facade lit by floodlights might have been an opera house. There were paths leading here and there among the lamp-hung oleander trees, but not a sound of life could be heard: no night birds singing, no insects, nothing but Will’s own footsteps.

The only sound he could hear came from the regular, quiet breaking of delicate waves from the beach beyond the palm trees at the edge of the garden. Will made his way there. The tide was halfway in, or halfway out, and a row of pedal boats was drawn up on the soft white sand above the high-water line. Every few seconds a tiny wave folded itself over at the sea’s edge before sliding back neatly under the next. Fifty yards or so out on the calm water was a diving platform.

Will sat on the side of one of the pedal boats and kicked off his shoes, his cheap sneakers that were coming apart and cramping his hot feet. He dropped his socks beside them and pushed his toes deep into the sand. A few seconds later he had thrown off the rest of his clothes and was walking into the sea.

The water was deliciously between cool and warm. He splashed out to the diving platform and pulled himself up to sit on its weather-softened planking and look back at the city.

To his right the harbor lay enclosed by its breakwater. Beyond it a mile or so away stood a red-and-white-striped lighthouse. And beyond the lighthouse, distant cliffs rose dimly, and beyond them, those great wide rolling hills he’d seen from the place he’d first come through.

Closer at hand were the light-bearing trees of the casino gardens, and the streets of the city, and the waterfront with its hotels and cafés and warm-lit shops, all silent, all empty.

And all safe. No one could follow him here; the men who’d searched the house would never know; the police would never find him. He had a whole world to hide in.

For the first time since he’d run out of his front door that morning, Will began to feel secure.

He was thirsty again, and hungry too, because he’d last eaten in another world, after all. He slipped into the water and swam back more slowly to the beach, where he put on his underpants and carried the rest of his clothes and the tote bag. He dropped the empty bottle into the first rubbish bin he found and walked barefoot along the pavement toward the harbor.

When his skin had dried a little, he pulled on his jeans and looked for somewhere he’d be likely to find food. The hotels were too grand. He looked inside the first hotel, but it was so large that he felt uncomfortable, and he kept moving down the waterfront until he found a little café that looked like the right place. He couldn’t have said why; it was very similar to a dozen others, with its first-floor balcony laden with flowerpots and its tables and chairs on the pavement outside, but it welcomed him.

There was a bar with photographs of boxers on the wall, and a signed poster of a broadly smiling accordion player. There was a kitchen, and a door beside it that opened on to a narrow flight of stairs, carpeted in a bright floral pattern.

He climbed quietly up to the narrow landing and opened the first door he came to. It was the room at the front. The air was hot and stuffy, and Will opened the glass door onto the balcony to let in the night air. The room itself was small and furnished with things that were too big for it, and shabby, but it was clean and comfortable. Hospitable people lived here. There was a little shelf of books, a magazine on the table, a couple of photographs in frames.

Will left and looked in the other rooms: a little bathroom, a bedroom with a double bed.

Something made his skin prickle before he opened the last door. His heart raced. He wasn’t sure if he’d heard a sound from inside, but something told him that the room wasn’t empty. He thought how odd it was that this day had begun with someone outside a darkened room, and himself waiting inside; and now the positions were reversed—

And as he stood wondering, the door burst open and something came hurtling at him like a wild beast.

But his memory had warned him, and he wasn’t standing quite close enough to be knocked over. He fought hard: knee, head, fist, and the strength of his arms against it, him, her—

A girl about his own age, ferocious, snarling, with ragged dirty clothes and thin bare limbs.

She realized what he was at the same moment, and snatched herself away from his bare chest to crouch in the corner of the dark landing like a cat at bay. And there was a cat beside her, to his astonishment: a large wildcat, as tall as his knee, fur on end, teeth bared, tail erect.

She put her hand on the cat’s back and licked her dry lips, watching his every movement.

Will stood up slowly.

“Who are you?”

“Lyra Silvertongue,” she said.

“Do you live here?”

“No,” she said vehemently.

“Then what is this place? This city?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where do you come from?”

“From my world. It’s joined on. Where’s your dæmon?”

His eyes widened. Then he saw something extraordinary happen to the cat: it leaped into her arms, and when it got there, it changed shape. Now it was a red-brown stoat with a cream throat and belly, and it glared at him as ferociously as the girl herself. But then another shift in things took place, because he realized that they, both girl and stoat, were profoundly afraid of him, as much as if he’d been a ghost.

“I haven’t got a demon,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean.” Then, “Oh! Is that your demon?”

She stood up slowly. The stoat curled himself around her neck, and his dark eyes never left Will’s face.

“But you’re
alive,
” she said, half-disbelievingly. “You en’t . . . You en’t been . . . ”

“My name’s Will Parry,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean about demons. In my world
demon
means . . . it means devil, something evil.”

“In your world? You mean this en’t your world?”

“No. I just found . . . a way in. Like your world, I suppose. It must be joined on.”

She relaxed a little, but she still watched him intently, and he stayed calm and quiet as if she were a strange cat he was making friends with.

“Have you seen anyone else in this city?” he went on.

“No.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Dunno. A few days. I can’t remember.”

“So why did you come here?”

“I’m looking for Dust,” she said.

“Looking for dust? What, gold dust? What sort of dust?”

She narrowed her eyes and said nothing. He turned away to go downstairs.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “Is there any food in the kitchen?”

“I dunno,” she said, and followed, keeping her distance from him.

In the kitchen Will found the ingredients for a casserole of chicken and onions and peppers, but they hadn’t been cooked, and in the heat they were smelling bad. He swept them all into the dustbin.

“Haven’t you eaten anything?” he said, and opened the fridge.

Lyra came to look.

“I didn’t know this was here,” she said. “Oh! It’s cold.”

Her dæmon had changed again, and become a huge, brightly colored butterfly, which fluttered into the fridge briefly and out again at once to settle on her shoulder. The butterfly raised and lowered his wings slowly. Will felt he shouldn’t stare, though his head was ringing with the strangeness of it.

“Haven’t you seen a fridge before?” he said.

He found a can of cola and handed it to her before taking out a tray of eggs. She pressed the can between her palms with pleasure.

“Drink it, then,” he said.

She looked at it, frowning. She didn’t know how to open it. He snapped the lid for her, and the drink frothed out. She licked it suspiciously, and then her eyes opened wide.

“This is good?” she said, her voice half hoping and half fearful.

“Yeah. They have Coke in this world, obviously. Look, I’ll drink some to prove it isn’t poison.”

He opened another can. Once she saw him drink, she followed his example. She was obviously thirsty. She drank so quickly that the bubbles got up her nose, and she snorted and belched loudly, and scowled when he looked at her.

“I’m going to make an omelette,” he said. “D’you want some?”

“I don’t know what omelette is.”

“Well, watch and you’ll see. Or there’s a can of baked beans, if you’d like.”

“I don’t know baked beans.”

He showed her the can. She looked for the snap-open top like the one on the cola can.

“No, you have to use a can opener,” he said. “Don’t they have can openers in your world?”

“In my world servants do the cooking,” she said scornfully.

“Look in the drawer over there.”

She rummaged through the kitchen cutlery while he broke six eggs into a bowl and whisked them with a fork.

“That’s it,” he said, watching. “With the red handle. Bring it here.”

He pierced the lid and showed her how to open the can.

“Now get that little saucepan off the hook and tip them in,” he told her.

She sniffed the beans, and again an expression of pleasure and suspicion entered her eyes. She tipped the can into the saucepan and licked a finger, watching as Will shook salt and pepper into the eggs and cut a knob of butter from a package in the fridge into a cast-iron pan. He went into the bar to find some matches, and when he came back she was dipping her dirty finger in the bowl of beaten eggs and licking it greedily. Her dæmon, a cat again, was dipping his paw in it, too, but he backed away when Will came near.

“It’s not cooked yet,” Will said, taking it away. “When did you last have a meal?”

“At my father’s house on Svalbard,” she said. “Days and days ago. I don’t know. I found bread and stuff here and ate that.”

He lit the gas, melted the butter, poured in the eggs, and let them run all over the base of it. Her eyes followed everything greedily, watching him pull the eggs up into soft ridges in the center as they cooked and tilt the pan to let raw egg flow into the space. She watched him, too, looking at his face and his working hands and his bare shoulders and his feet.

When the omelette was cooked he folded it over and cut it in half with the spatula.

“Find a couple of plates,” he said, and Lyra obediently did so.

She seemed quite willing to take orders if she saw the sense of them, so he told her to go and clear a table in front of the café. He brought out the food and some knives and forks from a drawer, and they sat down together, a little awkwardly.

She ate hers in less than a minute, and then fidgeted, swinging back and forth on her chair and plucking at the plastic strips of the woven seat while he finished his. Her dæmon changed yet again, and became a goldfinch, pecking at invisible crumbs on the tabletop.

Will ate slowly. He’d given her most of the beans, but even so he took much longer than she did. The harbor in front of them, the lights along the empty boulevard, the stars in the dark sky above, all hung in the huge silence as if nothing else existed at all.

And all the time he was intensely aware of the girl. She was small and slight, but wiry, and she’d fought like a tiger; his fist had raised a bruise on her cheek, and she was ignoring it. Her expression was a mixture of the very young—when she first tasted the cola—and a kind of deep, sad wariness. Her eyes were pale blue, and her hair would be a darkish blond once it was washed; because she was filthy, and she smelled as if she hadn’t bathed for days.

“Laura? Lara?” Will said.

“Lyra.”

“Lyra . . . Silvertongue?”

“Yes.”

“Where is your world? How did you get here?”

She shrugged. “I walked,” she said. “It was all foggy. I didn’t know where I was going. At least, I knew I was going out of
my
world. But I couldn’t see this one till the fog cleared. Then I found myself here.”

“What did you say about dust?”

“Dust, yeah. I’m going to find out about it. But this world seems to be empty. There’s no one here to ask. I’ve been here for . . . I dunno, three days, maybe four. And there’s no one here.”

“But why do you want to find out about dust?”

“Special Dust,” she said shortly. “Not ordinary dust, obviously.”

The dæmon changed again. He did so in the flick of an eye, and from a goldfinch he became a rat, a powerful pitch-black rat with red eyes. Will looked at him with wide wary eyes, and the girl saw his glance.

“You
have
got a dæmon,” she said decisively. “Inside you.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“You have,” she went on. “You wouldn’t be human else. You’d be . . . half dead. We seen a kid with his dæmon cut away. You en’t like that. Even if you don’t know you’ve got a dæmon, you have. We was scared at first when we saw you. Like you was a night-ghast or something. But then we saw you weren’t like that at all.”

“We?”

“Me and Pantalaimon. Us. But you, your dæmon en’t s
eparate
from you. It’s you. A part of you. You’re part of each other. En’t there
anyone
in your world like us? Are they all like you, with their dæmons all hidden away?”

Will looked at the two of them, the skinny pale-eyed girl with her black rat dæmon now sitting in her arms, and felt profoundly alone.

“I’m tired. I’m going to bed,” he said. “Are you going to stay in this city?”

“Dunno. I’ve got to find out more about what I’m looking for. There must be some Scholars in this world. There must be someone who knows about it.”

“Maybe not in this world. But I came here out of a place called Oxford. There’s plenty of scholars there, if that’s what you want.”

“Oxford?” she cried. “That’s where I come from!”

“Is there an Oxford in your world, then? You never came from my world.”

“No,” she said decisively. “Different worlds. But in my world there’s an Oxford too. We’re both speaking English, en’t we? Stands to reason there’s other things the same. How did you get through? Is there a bridge, or what?”